Early One Morning (32 page)

‘Uh, no. Scotch?’

‘Perfect.’

‘Coming up. Make yourself at home.’

Eve slipped off her jacket, draped it over a sofa and began to walk around admiring the furnishings.

‘Music?’ asked Neumann rhetorically. ‘Strauss. “One Thousand and One Nights”. You like Strauss?’ She nodded. ‘Good. I can see we are going to get on brilliantly.’

‘Joachim. Do you mind if I take a bath first?’

The thought of Eve in a tub made him flush and he said, ‘If you leave the door open for me.’

‘Of course.’ He watched appreciatively as she went in to the big marble space, bent over the bath and began running the water. ‘My God, it’s so hot,’ she shouted over the gushings. ‘I haven’t seen such hot water since … since before you people came.’

‘Well, you should have spent more time with us people.’ He clinked ice in the glasses but hesitated while she unbuttoned her dress and let it drop, revealing underwear that had seen too many washes. He would do something about that. The drawers of the apartment were stuffed full of enough lace and silk to cause a riot along Avenue Montaigne.

‘Can I have it in here?’ she asked, snapping him out of a daydream of Eve in the finest of lace camisole tops.

He picked up the glasses and hurried across to her, not wanting to miss the final moment of the striptease. Her smile faded as he stepped across the threshold, and he thought perhaps she was frightened or modest but then he felt the metal snout of the Welrod against his temple and heard the hiss of the bullet as it brushed through the silencer baffles on its way to his brain.

The bullet exploded out of his temple, punching slivers of bone and eye socket out, leaving the eye itself dangling crazily in its ruined housing. The whisky hit the floor in a fury of glass and ice and Neumann buckled at the knees.

Rose Miller waited for him to fall, wishing the Welrod came with a second shot, reaching for another round when Neumann slumped into Eve, his head lolling to one side, slowly sliding down her, leaving a trail of bloody gristle down her front, until he lay curled at her feet, the last of life leaving him in two quick, powerful spasms.

Eve opened her mouth to scream but managed to suppress the urge and muttered a heartfelt: ‘Jesus.’

Rose rolled the body to one side, turned the bath faucet off, pulled two towels off the neat stack on the shelf, laid them across the smashed tumblers and said: ‘Mind the glass.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Eve slightly hysterically, ‘wouldn’t want to get blood on the towels.’

Rose looked at the gore congealing on Eve’s body. ‘We’d best get you cleaned up. There’s a shower in the master bedroom.’

Sensing the numbness enveloping Eve, Rose took her by the hand, led her away from the gruesome body, through to the big glass cubicle in the bedroom, pulled off the remains of her underwear and pushed her under the wonderfully hot stream coming from the enormous shower head. She soaped the blood and bone and brain specks from Eve’s neck and shoulders.

‘What animals,’ said Eve flatly.

Rose stripped off and climbed in. ‘Us or them?’

‘Both. God.’

‘Well, the alternative was a piece of German sausage up your fanny.’

Eve looked shocked. ‘I’m not saying … I just …’

Rose raised a hand. ‘Neumann was becoming a threat. He’d begun to use his brain as well as his brawn.’

‘At least he got Will and Robert out as POWs.’

Rose just nodded, as if she believed this were true. Keppler at least had some intention of keeping his invidious deals. With Neumann, she wasn’t so sure. For the next few minutes there was only the hissing of water and the squelch of soap.

‘Listen, Eve,’ said Rose eventually. ‘I know you wondered. About Williams. And me. In London. Nothing happened.’

‘Something happened to him there. He wasn’t quite the same person.’

‘Something has happened to all of us. You weren’t the same. France wasn’t the same. He loves you. Did then, does now.’

‘Then I owe him an apology.’

To her own surprise Rose took Eve’s face in her hands and kissed her on the lips, feeling for all the world at that moment like a protective mother to the older woman. ‘The wardrobes out there are full of Fortuny, Balenciaga, Molyneux, Lelong, Paquin. Help yourself. When you see Williams, you can apologise in style.’

Eve turned off the water, stepped out and quickly wrapped a towel around herself, flustered and embarrassed. ‘What now?’

‘You go to Normandy. Stay out of Paris. I go back.’

‘And then?’

‘Then we wait. Wait for the Allies and Russians to meet up in Berlin.’

Eve nodded. ‘And pray he lives that long.’

Rose accepted a towel from Eve and touched her face lightly. ‘Let’s pray they both do.’

M
ARCH
–A
PRIL
1945

T
HE WIND SLICED
through the coarse, blue-striped uniform and straight into Williams’ bones. Not that there was much flesh to act as a barrier, that had progressively fallen away over the last ten months since his arrival at this place. Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg. May its name be spat upon for years to come, he thought.

Unusually, six of them from the officers’ detention block had been assigned to repair a broken water pipe, and they hacked their way into the frozen earth still not touched by the spring thaw. At least he hoped it was a repair detail. Williams had seen many, many men digging their own final resting places over the last few weeks. But none this close to the elaborate main entrance. He stopped for a second and looked up at the guard and his three Lagerschutz—trusties—in charge of this bedraggled Kommando. One swing with the spade and he could take the German’s head off. Robert would.

He thought about Robert a lot. He’d last seen him at Gare de l’Est, chained with other officers, being herded into a train, dozens of them into small carriages built for eight or ten. He himself had boarded a different train, for a different destination. Even the opportunity to die together had been denied them.

After Robert’s arrogant rebuttal of Keppler, the Sturmbannführer had washed his hands of them. There were beatings, solitary confinement, the usual casual brutality, withdrawal of rations and finally a ten-day transportation to Germany, during which any remaining valuables they had managed to cling on to were looted. They had been packed into a tiny hut on arrival before sorting into various groups, being shaved, showered and given the hideous uniforms and the chafing clogs. There had been nineteen of them in his shipment to Sachsenhausen. There were four left now. Some executed, some lost through illness, a few victims of the internecine fighting between rival groups of inmates, mostly over the dwindling food supply. But he’d survived.

He still had that picture in his head, the one of the faces at the cattle-truck doorway at St Just. And now he knew why it had seared its way into his visual cortex. To keep him alive. Those people, they had already crossed over. They had been through Drancy and the Velo and other tortures and they had accepted that they were simply on a long, slow road to death. And whenever he remembered those stares, the vacant, let’s-get-it-over-with gazes, they jerked him back every time he felt like curling up and dying. Not yet. Not yet, damn you. Those people, he owed them a lot, they’d given him a touchstone for life. Had Robert got it, too?

One of the trustees motioned to continue digging. Had he been a Jew or a Russian such a pause would have caused Williams to have been shot there and then. But the group kept in the big concrete block that housed him were different. Commandos, spies, politicals, some with
N&N
on them, true, others, like Williams, just with a letter displaying their nationality.

He went back to scraping at the earth, trying to minimise the jarring effect of permafrost on his shoulders and elbows. He had noticed three loose teeth that morning. His body had held up well, but unless it got better food soon it would start to digest itself, he knew, to the point of no return. Again, he’d seen that. Men locked in cages in the courtyard, weakening every day as the
Apells
, the roll calls, came and went, allowed to rot in full view as some kind of warning. As if anyone needed reminding just what a tenuous hold they all had on life.

Sachsenhausen was not one camp, but forty-four separate units, including satellites at the Heinkel factory and the grenade manufacturers a few kilometres down the road. Stories reached them from the latter of prisoners purposefully detonating explosives and taking guards with them. Now only trustees were allowed to do the final assembly.

A late flurry of snow began, bleakly beautiful swirls, dancing through the Breughelian landscape, mocking the grey-fleshed inmates with their dazzling purity. Williams’ teeth started to chatter, loosening them further, no doubt. He could taste blood, too, where his gums had started to bleed. And still, he had to count himself lucky. All around him were the field of low, wooden huts, the various sections of the camps for Jews, and Russians and Gypsies and anyone else the Reich despised.

The Russians had always been killed on a savage scale, casually, brutally. Some went to the block known as Station Z, ostensibly for medical examination, actually for a bullet in the head, others were herded into the underground chamber on the corner opposite his cell window, where they were gassed. The smell of burning bodies was so all-pervading that few of them noticed the once-nauseating stench any longer.

Since the beginning of February, when a high-ranking Gestapo man called Müller had visited Commandant Kaindl, the killings had increased to a frenzy. A mobile gibbet had been constructed, which Jewish trustees had to wheel from end to end of the camp, hanging four inmates at a time and then moving on to their next appointment, like some grotesque telegram service. The guards had invented the ‘hat’ game, snatching prisoners’ hats and throwing them over the do-not-cross line in front of the wire fences. Not going to get the hat, you were shot for disobeying orders. Stepping over the line to get it, you were shot for attempting to escape.

They were trying to empty the camp, to kill them all. He knew that now. There was another volley of shots from somewhere over in the Russian section. Firing squad. One every twenty, thirty minutes throughout the day. There were thirty or forty thousand prisoners, Williams had estimated. They were killing two or three hundred a day, perhaps more. The sheer scale of the undertaking was demoralising the guards, who seemed to be making hardly a dent in the morning and evening roll-calls, despite their best, murderous efforts.

Planes flew high over head, their frozen exhaust plumes vivid in the ice-blue sky. USAF planes probably, and perhaps up among them the new Nazi secret weapons the guards sometimes boasted about. They knew they were planes of some sort, fast and lethal, but could offer no more details. But, V-weapons or not, still the Flying Fortresses and the Superfortresses and the Lancasters came on, day after day, sometimes bombing the Sachsenhausen satellite factories, more often than not trying to find a target left untouched in Berlin.

The gates opened and a dilapidated truck limped in, its canvas sides ripped and torn, one wheel on the rear double axle flat, floundering on its rim. Williams realised it had been strafed, casually sideswiped by a Mustang or a Typhoon or one of the other tank busters skimming the countryside like marauding bandits seeking prey. The tailgate came down and half a dozen bodies were thrown on to the hard ground with sickening casualness. The survivors stepped slowly down, hurried by impatient German guards, as if there was something worth rushing to, anything to achieve in Sachsenhausen other than your early death.

The men looked about as fit as he did, scrawny and bony, in the emaciated condition of most camp inmates that stripped away individuality, made it hard to recognise one human being from another. It was more like a medical syndrome than the mere result of starvation, all united in the same stance, the stoop, the slack jaw, all with the dull stares of men who had seen more horror than they could ever communicate. More than they would ever want to.

Then a pair of eyes that didn’t look glazed or drugged. A pair that flashed and pierced and told you to go and fuck yourself. The frame was shrunken, how could it not be, but Robert was as straight backed and defiant as ever.

Williams dropped the pick and stood, stepping out of the shallow trench, aware of the guns swivelling to point at him, knowing he was taking a hell of a risk.

‘Robert,’ his voice felt weak, underpowered, smaller than he remembered. Years of whispering had left his vocal chords stiff and useless. He cleared his throat. A gun barrel was in his stomach.

‘Robert.’ The yell finally carried, flapping slowly across the yard, hitting Robert as he was about to pick up one of his dead companions to take to the crematorium. Benoist let go of the arm which flopped back to earth, straightened and stepped forward. A grin split his face when he recognised the voice, if not, yet, its owner. He took two fingers and raised them to his lips in a kiss and blew it across just as the rifle butt hit the side of his head and he spun down on to the bodies.

At the same time Williams was struck in his shrunken stomach, the blow punching straight through to his spine, causing him to fall to his knees in coughing agony. He heard a bolt pulled back on a machine pistol.

‘Stop.’ A voice rang out as a man stepped down from the cab of the truck and straightened the jacket of his SS Untersturmführer uniform. The guards froze, not used to being halted in the middle of their work. The newcomer looked at Robert, snapped his fingers and told him, in French, to get up. He waved the guard away. Then he strode across towards Williams, who was slowly unfolding himself from the bent double position. He looked up and the man said in English: ‘Get up, Williams. I need you alive.’

Lock. Arthur Lock.

Except now, they discovered, he was Heinrich Locke, the new identity a reward for loyal service to Keppler at Avenue Foch. Along with Virginia and a few other traitors, Lock had managed to avoid the transports and had skipped Paris just before Liberation, to carry on the good work in Germany. Which meant camps, and more camps.