Midnight in Berlin (22 page)

“He tried to escape. He almost got over the wire. They beat him badly and then put him up against a wall.”

“Is that how he died?”

“Yeah, they shot him. Unusual. They don't usually waste bullets.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, I wasn't there, was I? But the informant is reliable.”

“Damn!” said Macrae.

“This is a bit out of your territory, isn't it?”

“Yes, but it's useful info.”

“As in …?”

Macrae shook his head. He rather enjoyed his colleague's curiosity. “As in useful info.”

“Come on,” said Halliday. “Fair exchange; what's this kid to you? There are thousands like him in the camps and they're dying every week.”

“I'd rather not say. Sorry.”

“Your choice – but you owe me, right?”

“Right.”

Without prompting, Halliday began talking about Stalin's purge of his army. Tens of thousands of officers had been arrested and shot after summary trials lasting only a few minutes.

“So that's where you've been – Moscow?”

“Maybe.”

“Why?”

Halliday laughed. He slapped Macrae on the back and refilled their glasses.

“You were a cat in your last life. Too damn curious. Anyway, for your ears only: Heydrich set the whole thing up. He was contacted by a couple of Russian generals who wanted to stage a coup and asked for German help. Big mistake. Heydrich betrayed them to Stalin, exaggerated their support and, bang!, that's the end of the Soviet officer class. Thirty thousand at the last count.”

“I don't get it. Why were you involved?”

“Tried to tell them it was a set-up, a German trap. We need a strong Russian army. They wouldn't listen.”

They finished their drinks and Halliday shambled to the door, claiming the need for an early night.

“By the way, they're beautiful creatures, aren't they?”

“Who? What?”

“Those Siberian tigers. G'night.”

Macrae watched him go. He was glad Halliday was on their side. It was ten o'clock. He should also go home, but what to? An empty house and a cold bed. Joy, she had said, and that is what she would be doing tonight, this very minute, enjoying herself. Perhaps even now she was … He let the thought burn briefly in his mind, then extinguished it. He would go to the Salon and tell Sara tonight. Get it over with. Commiserate with her, help her through the pain.

This time the woman on the door seemed to recognise him and pressed the bell without saying a word. The door swung open and Macrae stepped inside. A violinist and a pianist
were playing. He saw Sara immediately, sitting at the far end of the bar. She smiled and watched him as he was led to a table for two at the back of the room.

Service in the Salon was always efficient. His coat was taken and a menu placed in his hands before he had sat down. He glanced at it. He had hardly eaten. He would have a steak, perhaps a decent glass of claret.

“May I join you?” she said.

He looked up and gestured to the empty chair with the menu. “Of course.”

“You've been away,” she said.

She was quite calm, her face expressionless beneath the same pale powdered make-up.

He ordered a bottle of red wine and a steak, rare, with a green salad on the side. She turned her head and looked around the room, and he followed suit. The restaurant was full, the bar stools and tables all taken with drinkers and diners. He knew nobody. She would know almost everybody, of course, and could tell who were the businessmen, the party officials and the occasional foreign dignitaries. Some, the important ones, she would have taken through the fanlight door to one of the rooms. Maybe even that night she had been playing her role, acting out her part under the camera eyes of the Gestapo. They would watch every turn and twist of her body, just as they would be watching him in the club right now. There were always Gestapo in the club.

She turned back to him. “Do you remember what we talked about in the Tiergarten?”

A waitress arrived with the wine and poured two glasses. Macrae had been trying to find the right words to answer the question he knew was coming.

“About your brother?”

“Joseph. Yes.”

Macrae took a deep breath, drank a little wine and was about to speak when she said, “He's dead, isn't he?”

“I'm afraid so.”

The muscles of her face flexed in a ripple of pain. It was like watching a sudden wind ruffle calm water. She put her glass down, bent her head and clenched her fists on the white tablecloth.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

He told her what little he knew. She finished the wine and he refilled her glass. His steak arrived but he sent it back to the kitchen to be kept warm. She repeated questions he could answer only in vague terms, the where and when and how of her brother's death. He told her he had been put up against a wall and shot after a second escape attempt. It would have been a quick death, if that was any comfort, he said.

He reached for her hand across the table and took it gently. “I'm sorry.”

For several minutes they said nothing. The waitress reappeared with his steak and he accepted it. He wanted to eat as quickly as possible. He wanted to leave, get away from the pain printed on the face of the young woman opposite him. She watched him eat. When he finished, he sat back, dabbing his mouth with a napkin.

“They want me to take you to a room,” she said.

He gave a snorting laugh. “They, whoever they are, must know I am not that stupid.”

“They've given me something to put in your drink.”

She took a small bottle of pills from her handbag, held it concealed in her fist and put her hand on the table. She opened and closed her hand quickly. Macrae could see the bottle. It might have been aspirin, for all he knew. Macrae
looked around and reached for his glass. He was about to drink when he put the glass down.

“Don't worry,” she said. “The wine is fine. But you should be careful. They're watching you.”

“No more than I would expect. I'm really sorry to have brought such bad news. I must go.”

“I need help.”

She spoke the words without looking at him in a low monotone as if to ask for another glass of wine.

“I've done all I can.”

“You don't understand. I'm free now.”

“What?”

“He's set me free – Joseph.” She leant across the table. “Don't you see? I can get out of here now. Will you help me?”

“I've told you, I've done all I can. I'm sorry about your brother, but …”

She wasn't listening to him. She was looking at him with eyes that sparkled with anger. She had aged in the short time they had been together at the table.

“I need papers, travel papers,” she said. “And remember, I have information.”

It was midnight when they met at the same place in the Tiergarten. He could hear a church clock strike the hour, the chimes ringing loud and clear on a summer night that clung to the warmth of the day. He heard the footsteps and saw the shadowy figure emerge from the darkness, led by the glowing end of a cigarette, a firefly in the night.

He wanted a cigarette badly and knew she would give him hers, allow him a few deep breaths, then take it back, smoke herself and jettison the stub in the darkness. Then he knew
she would kiss him, pushing him back against the tree, and he knew that was what he wanted, what he desired most of all, Sara Sternschein, her body leaning against his, her hands lifting his shirt and sliding fingers up his back, her crotch pressing into his, hardening him, and all the while kissing him.

He knew too that somehow – against the tree, on the bench or maybe lying on the dry hard earth beneath the bushes, with his raincoat beneath them – they would make love, and he would clamp a hand over her mouth as she cried out, because there would be other lovers in the Tiergarten that night. They would not be alone. He knew, too, that he would help her.

They lay together afterwards, her head resting on the crook of his arm, her clothes clumped beside her, both breathing hard, feeling their hearts beating fast and the sweat cooling on their skin. She lit a cigarette and passed it to him.

“Will you?” she said.

“Yes, I will.”

The plane seemed to skim the line of hills south of London, the houses and gardens rising beneath the silver wings of the twin-engined aircraft and then falling away again as they cleared the ridge and began the descent into Croydon airport. Below, the fields and gardens were burnt sere by a long drought. It was early August and there was still no sign of rain.

Macrae was excited and nervous, a curious feeling that clenched his stomach. He'd wanted a drink on the plane, but it had been a bumpy flight from Berlin and even the stewardesses had remained strapped to their seats. Anyway, it would not do to spill drink on the full dress uniform of a lieutenant colonel in the British army. And it was hardly the occasion for a drink. He would be met at the airport by an official car and driven straight to the War Office in Whitehall. There, he was to brief the chiefs of staff on the likelihood of a military coup in Germany should Hitler invade Czechoslovakia. Later he would repeat his briefing for the prime minister and at a full meeting of the cabinet, where he would be cross-examined by ministers.

He could hardly believe that the government had finally woken up to the fact that an army-led coup against the Nazi regime was a real possibility. Over the last three months his coded reports to the War Office had been carefully phrased so as not to allow the accusation of exaggeration or wishful thinking.

Initially, the ambassador had been copied in on the cables, but his attempts to change the emphasis of their message and cast doubt on their meaning had led to a short and unpleasant exchange, during which Macrae announced that the minister himself would be informed of any further attempt to censor the reports of his military attaché. Sir Nevile Henderson had not spoken to him since. Macrae was sure that it wouldn't be long before Daisy Wellesley let him know that a further attempt had been made to have him posted away from Berlin.

The relationship between the two men became even worse when Sir Nevile was told that his military attaché had been invited to brief both the prime minister and cabinet on the accelerating German rearmament programme and the disaffection within the German army.

Sir Nevile Henderson had summoned him for a briefing.

“I don't know how this has come about, and I want you to know I am not happy. However, if this is what Number 10 and the War Office want, so be it. But I insist that we at least agree on what you will say.”

Macrae had wearily repeated the outline of a conspiracy he had already reported, but without mentioning names. The ambassador dismissed the reports as at best the work of a few isolated provocateurs and at worst a Gestapo attempt at entrapment.

“I want names,” said the ambassador. “You can't take woolly conspiracy theories to London without hard facts, and that means names.”

The ambassador was glaring at him. The cloak of diplomatic courtesy and ambiguously crafted language had dropped, revealing the naked fury of a man in high office who had been defied by an insolent subordinate.

Macrae needed to remain in post in Berlin. He needed to retain at least the semblance of a formal relationship with this difficult, narrow-minded man. The ambassador could not dismiss him, but he could make life very difficult. It was within his power to exclude him from all meetings and the reports of the political and commercial officers.

“General Beck is leading,” he said.

Sir Nevile Henderson sat down, his face registering not anger but shock. “Beck? The chief of the General Staff?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“And how far have things got?”

“As I will tell the prime minister, Ambassador, if we, that is Britain and France, stand up to Hitler, draw a line at Czechoslovakia and threaten armed intervention, the army will move against their Führer.”

“Suppose Hitler takes fright and backs down – has anyone thought of that?”

“Hitler will call what he thinks is the West's bluff – his pattern of behaviour until now tells us that, as I am sure you will agree. But even if not, he has marched his soldiers up the hill. He has told his generals he is going to smash Czechoslovakia – there are four armoured divisions within thirty minutes of the border, ready and waiting. If he backed down now, the humiliation would be so great, the army would move anyway.”

“Well, I hope you know what you're talking about,” said the ambassador, “because I am not sure I do.”

He glanced at his watch. It was lunchtime, time for a civilised conversation with his American counterpart. Enough of this nonsense. Macrae would make a fool of himself in London with this talk. The prime minister would not believe a word of it. It might even help to get Macrae removed and sent elsewhere. The ambassador allowed himself the pleasure of deciding where in the world he would send his errant military attaché if it lay within his power to do so. A dominion posting, South Africa maybe? No, far too comfortable. Gibraltar, that was it. The bloody boring Rock, with all those ghastly fish-and-chip shops and people with that hideous lower-class way of talking, all serviettes, toilets and having dinner at lunchtime. Macrae and that frosty wife of his would enjoy a few years there. Much cheered by this fantasy, Sir Nevile Henderson got into his car, to be driven to the American embassy for lunch.

Primrose, for once, had been impressed by news of his mission and had wanted to come too.

“I could do some shopping while you get on with all your frightfully important briefings with the ministers, and then in the evening we could have dinner somewhere really nice – Sheekey's – why not?”

It wasn't possible, as Macrae kept explaining. It was to be a very quick and secret trip. He would be returning the next day.