Midnight in Berlin (11 page)

Macrae picked up the coffee, drank it in one gulp and put the cup down.

“You know this for sure?”

“The Germans monitor our cable traffic to London, but they don't have the codebook used for the ambassador's communications.”

“And you do?”

“Let's just say my own masters are very interested in the private views of the ambassador,” he said, smiling.

“I see. What do you suggest I do?”

“Nothing. Keep on doing exactly what you're doing. And I wouldn't mind a copy of that memo when you've finished.”

He closed the door quietly. A second later the door opened again and his head reappeared.

“When you've finished trying to change British foreign policy, may I suggest a prelunch drink at the Adlon?”

Macrae looked at his watch. It was eleven thirty.

“Give me an hour,” he said.

The Adlon bar was busy when Macrae arrived. He perched on a stool and placed his coat on the one next to him to reserve it. At the far end of the bar a middle-aged man was deep in conversation with a dark-haired woman whose face was obscured. The journalists were in their usual place. Businessmen were scanning menus over glasses of what looked to Macrae like gin and tonic.

He could do with one of those. He ordered a large measure for himself and asked the barman to pour the tonic to the brim of a long glass. He began to relax for the first time in almost two days. He had completed the memorandum, noting disparities of equipment right down to the marked difference between British and German shortwave radio sets and the quantity of ammunition held in reserves.

It probably wouldn't do any good, because he was only telling his own government what they secretly knew but refused to admit publicly. The one encouraging thought was that he had sent the memo directly to the secretary of state for war. Leslie Hore-Belisha was an unusual choice for the post. He was Jewish and as such subject to the anti-Semitism so prevalent among the English upper classes – or so Macrae had heard. Hore-Belisha was a believer in rearmament, but the prime minister had already rebuffed his plans for the introduction of conscription and turned down a proposal to increase weapons manufacture.

The cable had been sent in code to the secretary of state, copied to Sir Nevile. There had been a little difficulty with the cable clerk, because all such communications to London were supposed to be signed off by the ambassador. Luckily, Sir Nevile was out of town and Macrae was able to plead the urgency of the information.

There would be a hell of a row. Macrae realised he might well prove to be the most short-lived military attaché in the history of the diplomatic service. He didn't care. He turned as Halliday slipped onto the stool beside him, pointed to his glass and said to the barman, “Same again for him and likewise for me.”

The barman placed the drinks in front of them and began polishing the counter. Halliday barked something at him in German that Macrae didn't understand. To make the point, he banged his fist on the bar. The barman sulkily moved away.

“That was a bit rough,” said Macrae.

“He's Gestapo. They all are here. So, have you calmed down yet?”

At the far end of the bar, the man and woman had left their seats and seemed to be about to leave.

Macrae nodded. “I'm going to sit here all afternoon and quietly get very drunk.”

“You're right about what's going on in Vienna. Worse than anything here. Nazis have been going to the railway stations and pushing those trying to leave onto the tracks. Especially the women. It drives the men mad, and then there's a fight and out come the truncheons. Up on the Czech border they're abandoning cars and trying to cross through the woods at night. It's freezing up there and they're dying, whole families together.”

“We won't give them visas, I suppose?”

“Nope. Our embassy has closed all its consular offices there. Orders from London. They're like rats in a trap.”

“I see you've come here to cheer me up.”

Macrae noticed that the man had persuaded the woman to have another drink. They had moved up the bar, closer to where he was sitting. The man was smartly dressed in an expensive striped suit with a white handkerchief peeping from the breast pocket and a golden clasp across a purple tie. A businessman maybe, thought Macrae. The woman was dressed in a fashionable red-and-white-striped skirt that broke into pleats and dropped to her ankles. Around her neck she wore a thin silk scarf that matched her skirt and spilled over a flowing white blouse. She might have been a minor member of the aristocracy, except that her dark sultry looks and the clothes suggested a fashion model.

“I have come to congratulate you on a good job,” said Halliday. “Don't so anything silly like resigning. No one is going to fire you. There are people in London – especially my people – who know we need someone like you here right now.”

“Trouble is, I don't want to be here. I can't stand the place. It's evil.”

“I'll drink to that,” said Halliday. “You have to hand it to the Nazis. The quality of evil here is exceptional. It's pure, unadulterated, and clear and cold as a mountain stream. You won't find evil like this anywhere else in the world. Genghis Khan, Nero, Caligula, they've got nothing on these fellows. They specialise in evil in this town and they're very creative, they turn it into theatre, so count yourself lucky – you're getting a front-row seat.”

He finished his gin and tonic and slid from the stool.

“I wouldn't go back to the office today if I were you,” he said. He gave Macrae a pat on the back and walked off. The barman moved in the moment Halliday left.

“Another one?” he said.

“Please, and a glass of water on the side.”

Macrae lit a cigarette and turned to look at the room. The corner where the journalists camped out was empty. He looked at his watch. It was lunchtime. He didn't feel like eating. He felt like getting drunk, and that was exactly what he was going to do.

“Has your friend left?” said a voice.

He looked at the woman in the red-and-white-striped skirt, who was now two bar stools away.

“Yes,” he said. “He's gone back to the office. Which is where I should be.”

“My friend too,” she said.

He tried to place the accent. It sounded north German. It would be good to talk to someone normal for a change.

“What does he do, your friend?” he asked.

“He runs a restaurant here in Berlin. The food is French. He hires his chefs in Paris. And you – what do you do?” She asked the question with a smile and moved a seat closer. “Do you mind if I join you?”

“Please do. Would you like a drink?”

“I would love another of these.” She held up a wineglass. “Dry white from the Tyrol. You should try it.”

“I think I'll stick to gin.”

He ordered drinks. The barman placed them on the bar and began polishing the counter. Macrae tried to remember what it was that Halliday had said to him. He was feeling hazy and waved the man away, before turning back to the woman.

“Cheers,” he said.

“Bottoms up,” she said, speaking this time in accented English.

“Ah! You speak English?”

“I try.”

“So what do you do?” he asked.

“I asked first,” she said.

Macrae drank his gin, enjoying the intoxicating taste of juniper and cane spirit mingled with the knowledge that a strange and very attractive woman had suddenly started talking to him. Was she a prostitute? Unlikely, dressed like that, and in the Adlon, where the Gestapo had eyes everywhere. A businesswoman? Possibly, but more likely a journalist. The German press had been neutered by the Nazis, but the reporters were still on the prowl for stories that might suit the regime.

“Import and export,” he said. He had no wish to reveal his business in Berlin to a stranger.

“How interesting. What line?”

“‘Line'?”

“Yes – what do you import and export?”

“You haven't answered my question yet.”

She laughed, sipped her drink, looking at him over the rim of the glass, and said, “I manage a restaurant and bar here. That man is the owner. He takes me out for a special lunch every so often, then makes the usual suggestion. I say no and he goes off in a temper. He'll probably fire me tomorrow.”

He laughed. “I think I'm going to be fired tomorrow as well.”

“What? Your company is going to fire you?”

Macrae realised his mistake.

“No, my wife is going to fire me. Let's have another drink.”

They drank and talked, and every now and then Macrae shooed the barman away. She said her name was Ruth and she came from Hamburg. She talked in a dreamy way of her summer holidays in England in a seaside village called West
Wittering, and how her parents had made her and her brother speak English. Then she looked at her watch and said she must go.

“I should get back too,” he said, and checked his watch. It was four in the afternoon. He slid unsteadily from the stool.

“Nice to meet you,” he said.

She opened her bag, took out a business card and gave it to him.

“Drop in some time. The food is excellent.”

He looked at the card.

They shook hands and he watched her leave. He sensed she was lying and wondered if she felt the same about him. The double deception made the conversation bizarre, thought Macrae. But he was drunk enough not to care.

He walked unsteadily along the Charlottenburger Chaussee. The intense cold tightened its grip as he passed the Brandenburg Gate and headed into the long avenue through the Tiergarten. The cold cleared his head. He had not eaten any lunch and had drunk, well, how much exactly? Six or seven large gins and then a couple more with that woman, maybe half a bottle, maybe more.

Headlights from passing cars swept over the trees, creating a ghostly throng of monsters that watched his unsteady progress and reached out misshapen arms as he passed. He admired their courage, standing stripped bare of all elements
of life with only a cloak of bark against the bitter cold. The ground was frozen to a depth of three feet or so, yet somehow these creatures – and trees were definitely creatures, thought Macrae – somehow they tapped long tubular roots deep into the earth below the crust of frost and ice, drawing moisture and nutrients during the winter months.

It was almost six o'clock when he reached the house and fumbled in his coat pockets for the key. The door swung open. Primrose stood there wearing a fur coat over an evening dress. He noticed the gold teardrop earrings he had given her as a wedding-anniversary present.

“Where on earth have you been?”

“Had a difficult day,” he said, slowly raising an arm to the door jamb to steady himself.

“You're drunk.”

“Possibly,” he said simply. “It's been a …”

“A difficult day?”

Her eyebrows arched with displeasure. Behind him a vehicle drew up and he turned to see a taxi.

“Do you realise we've been looking for you all afternoon?” she said. “The office called. No one had any idea where you were.”

“Adlon,” he said, and lurched into the house.

“I'm going out. There's some soup in the kitchen.”

“Where?” he said, but the door had closed. He heard the clackety-clack of her shoes on the steps as she hurried to the taxi.

Behind the fanlight and lion-headed door-knocker of 10 Downing Street a long corridor led through a red baize-covered door to the Cabinet Room. The narrow, high-ceilinged meeting place of the British head of government and his ministers was dominated by a table some twenty-five feet in length surrounded by leather upholstered chairs. Black leather blotters worn with age and a carafe of water and a glass lay in front of every chair. A portrait of Sir Robert Walpole, the first and longest-serving prime minister, hung over a marble fireplace, in front of which the prime minister's chair marked the centre of the table.

Two clocks stood on the mantelpiece on either side of the portrait. Tall windows looked out over the garden wall of Number 10 through plane trees onto Horse Guards Parade and St James's Park.

There were in all twenty-one ministers of cabinet rank in the government of Neville Chamberlain and on Monday, 14 March, nineteen of them trooped into Number 10 and walked the long corridor to the Cabinet Room, taking their seats in carefully arranged order of seniority – of the post not
the person. On either side of the prime minister sat Sir John Simon, the chancellor of the exchequer, and Sir Samuel Hoare, the home secretary, while Lord Halifax, the new foreign secretary, took his place opposite him.

This was an unusual gathering, in that such meetings were normally held on Tuesdays, but the prime minister had summoned his ministers to decide what might usefully be done about the German annexation of Austria two days earlier. Those were his very words in telephone conversations with his ministers over the weekend and they carried the unspoken codicil that the most useful thing to do would be nothing at all. The ministers understood that the response of elegant inaction would be high on the agenda, even if it did not appear as a written item on the briefing papers that lay on their blotters – and most were disposed to agree.

Chamberlain led the discussion by suggesting strongly that the government should not condemn the action that Hitler had undertaken but merely the methods he had used to achieve complete control of the Austrian government. The brutal suppression of dissent and the mob violence that had been unleashed in Vienna against opponents of the Nazis had been widely reported in the British press that morning, especially in the
Daily Telegraph.
This was to be condemned in a statement issued by the Foreign Office. The Anschluss itself was to go unremarked by the government.