Midnight in Berlin (42 page)

The man and the woman were kind, polite, but very insistent. They wanted to know every detail of her life and especially her time at the Salon. When she begged and pleaded for information about her brother, they said that
would come later. They wanted to know about Reinhard Heydrich, Joachim Bonner and the Salon's other customers, as they politely called them. She was careful not to mention Macrae, although they never asked whether any of the Salon's guests were English. They seemed obsessed with Heydrich, his personal habits, what he asked her to do in the rooms, how he ran the brothel and what happened to the films and the tapes.

The interrogators showed no emotion as they probed every detail of her life. She gave them a full account of her time growing up in Hamburg and how her brother had been drawn into the resistance. Their only interest in Joseph was how he had been used to blackmail her into working at the Salon. When questions arose about the sexual practices she had been required to perform, the man left the room and the woman wrote down the details. Sara noticed her hand shook slightly as she did so.

When she casually mentioned the Russian special guest at the Salon, they became particularly interested. They took details of his appearance and later asked her to look at a series of grainy, badly focused photographs. They showed a succession of Russian military men, bulky figures in ill-fitting uniforms with peaked caps, all facing the camera in rows. She quickly picked him out, and they seemed happy. She had asked them who he was but was told not to worry about it.

It was not until late on the first day that she told them she had murdered Bonner. That surprised them. They looked at each other in shock. She liked that. It gave her back a semblance of the control that she had lost when they took her away from the café. They asked endless questions about the murder and could not understand how she had used an hourglass to kill him.

It was on the second day of questioning that Sara heard someone else in the room answering for her. The voice was clear and the answers absolutely accurate. She looked around but there was no one there. She felt as if she was looking into a goldfish bowl and seeing herself swimming inside. She turned to her interrogators and asked who else had been in the room. They told her gently that the voice had been her own.

She began to cry and shake, and did not stop until a nurse in the hospital gave her an injection. Her nightmares collided with each other, each one replacing the last, until they merged into a kaleidoscope of fearful images: Joseph spread-eagled against the barbed wire of a camp fence, his head garlanded with a crown of thorns; Bonner smiling at her, then vomiting sand from his mouth; Joseph and Bonner together; and then Heydrich, thin lips twisted into a smile, the whip in his hand, beckoning to her.

They told her later that she had screamed in her sleep. She had slept for thirty-six hours.

They took her from the hospital to the house by the river and there she discovered what had been denied her all her life – the kindness of strangers. The same woman who had first looked after her turned out to be the mother of two teenage children. Her husband was a government official. Christmas was only a few days away and the house was decorated with coloured paper chains and balls of fluffy cotton wool stuck to every window. She ate with the family and quickly got to know the two children, a boy and girl of thirteen and fourteen.

Their mother took Sara shopping for clothes and personal items at a large department store in Sloane Square on her first
Saturday morning. That afternoon, she was taken to see some of the sights of London: Trafalgar Square, Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace. It was Christmas Eve and the tour ended with lunch at a tearoom called Lyons Corner House. Sara wrote the name down, just as she recorded everything she saw and did, in a diary. It wasn't a real diary, just a notebook in which she used a page a day to describe her life in London. She was given books and magazines to read and treats like bars of chocolate. The kindness of these people felt like a warm bed on a cold night.

There were eight for drinks but only seven for dinner at the Macraes' house on Christmas Eve. Halliday had arrived first, apologising for the fact that he could not stay for dinner but knowing perfectly well that his invitation had been couched in such a way as to make it clear he was not expected do so. He didn't mind. He was tired. He had arrived back from London that morning and wanted nothing more than the comfort of his own apartment, a decent coal fire and a bottle of whisky. The brim of his hat was thick with snow and the white raincoat looked soaked through. Macrae took him to the drawing room, deliberately not asking about the sudden trip to London.

David and Amanda Buckland arrived next with a babble of Christmas greetings and remarks about the terrible weather and the snow and the lack of taxis and how they missed Christmas at home. Macrae guided them upstairs, where Halliday was standing in front of the fire with a balloon of brandy in his hand.

No sooner had he given the Bucklands flutes of champagne than the doorbell rang again. Primrose shouted something from the kitchen. Macrae went down to open the door to William and Theresa Shirer.

They were all standing around the fire when Primrose appeared, wearing a white apron and carrying plates of olives and crackers spread generously with pâté. She took off her apron and greeted everyone with little kisses on the cheek.

“Sorry, dinner is going to be late – what have you all been talking about?” she said.

“The weather,” said Buckland.

“They say it is going to snow for another week,” said his wife.

“It is worse in Vienna,” said Theresa. “Twelve inches at the airport.”

Primrose took a glass of champagne and laughed.

“Well, there's a surprise. It's snowing at Christmas in Berlin.” She turned to Shirer. “William, you know everything; tell us what's really happening; not the boring old stuff in the papers. Rumour, intrigue dark secrets – something to make us draw closer to the fire.”

Shirer sipped his champagne and looked at Halliday, who looked back and smiled. He would know, thought Shirer.

“I hear, and this is only a rumour but my sources are confident of the information, that a senior Gestapo officer has been found murdered in the Salon,” he said.

There was a pause as everyone looked at the American.

“What is the Salon?” asked Primrose.

“A Venus trap,” said Halliday, “run by the Nazis for the pleasure of their High Command and unwary foreigners.”

“I thought a Venus trap was a nasty flower that caught insects?” said Primrose, her eyebrows arching.

“A perfect description of the establishment,” said Halliday. “The Salon is a brothel masquerading as a high-class bar and restaurant. And you say there has been a murder there?”

Halliday had turned to Shirer. Yes, he definitely knows, thought the American. It would be strange if he didn't.

“Apparently. A few days ago. The place is closed.”

“What's happened to the girls there?” Macrae said. “I mean, was one of them involved?”

He had recovered himself, but only just. Halliday saw Primrose glance at her husband with a slight frown. He had decided not to tell Macrae, but it was going to be very difficult.

“I am told the girls vanished, as you might expect,” he said. “It was a Gestapo brothel and they would not have looked kindly on the murder of one of their own there.”

“You know the whole story, then?” asked Shirer.

“I have heard what you have, and probably from the same source. But it seems to be true.”

“It hardly matters. I can't touch it. I'd never get it past the censor,” said Shirer.

“Who was he, do we know?” asked Amanda Buckland.

“Very senior. One of Reinhard Heydrich's top men,” said Halliday.

Shirer looked at him admiringly. He knew the whole story and probably had the name of the victim. That was what you paid spooks for.

“You haven't got his name, have you?” asked Shirer.

“He is right at the top. Or was.”

“And?” said Shirer.

“And it's Christmas. I think I can allow myself another glass of whisky,” said Halliday.

“So what will they do, the Gestapo, I mean?” asked Macrae.

“They won't do anything,” said Halliday. “Goebbels is involved and he is going to hush the whole thing up. They are not even going to announce the death. It is a huge embarrassment. But Goebbels loves it because he can get one up on Heydrich. They hate each other.”

Primrose came over to Halliday and put her arm through his.

“You are a very clever man, Mr Halliday, and I don't think you have anywhere half as entertaining to go tonight. Won't you stay for dinner – please?”

Later that night, when the guests had left and Primrose had gone to bed, Macrae poured Halliday a nightcap. His colleague walked to the French windows and opened them, stepping onto the balcony. It had stopped snowing. Macrae joined him.

“It's warmer by the fire,” he said.

“Safer out here,” said Halliday.

They looked out at the lights of the city filtering through the leafless branches of the trees.

“It's her, isn't it?” said Macrae.

“Yes,” said Halliday.

Halliday told him how he had been at the Ostbahnhof early in the morning to meet a colleague arriving on an overnight Moscow train. He had seen a woman hurrying to catch a train. She only had a handbag and no luggage, which he thought odd for a passenger on a long-distance train. Then he remembered that he had seen her the night before with Bonner in the Salon. He had given her a strange gift, a coloured hourglass. It was just a hunch that made him follow her. He had no idea that she was trying to leave the country until they reached Duisburg, when he realised that she must be the woman with the temporary British travel permit.

He was intrigued and had stayed on her all the way to the Hook of Holland. He had almost given up there, because there was little point following a runaway whore across the North Sea to England. But something about her, the way she kept looking around, the fact that she was obviously terrified of pursuit, made him buy a boat ticket.

Once in London, in a greasy station café, she had told him the whole story. She was obviously telling the truth; Halliday could see that. She was now in a safe house under interrogation.

“The whole story?” asked Macrae.

“Yes,” said Halliday. “For an intelligent man, you've been remarkably stupid. It's freezing out here. Shall we go in?”

Sir Nevile Henderson returned to Berlin in mid-February after treatment for what he told Daisy Wellesley had been diagnosed as throat cancer. She was surprised that such a reserved figure had revealed this personal information. It was because he was lonely, she decided. A single middle-aged man had no one to talk to about a diagnosis that probably meant early death. So he had turned to her and told her in that casual, stiff-upper-lip manner that had probably been beaten into him at one of those appalling English public schools.

He had not wanted to talk to her further about his illness and he asked her not to tell the staff. It was as if he had mentioned an item for his official diary.

At the first staff meeting, it was noticed that he looked much older than his fifty-six years and that his voice had become hoarse and husky. The doctors in London had been cautious about his illness, telling him that with the right treatment its progress could be delayed, maybe for years.

Sir Nevile had chosen to believe them. It was not a difficult choice, since he had been convinced that his posting to Berlin as ambassador in 1937 was an act of Providence. It
was recognised as the most difficult job in the Foreign Service. He had accepted the posting because he told himself that he had been selected with the divine mission of preserving the peace of the world.

He had talked at length with the prime minister in London, and Neville Chamberlain had agreed with him that despite the despicable treatment of the Jews and Germany's rapid rearmament programme, the mission remained to secure a peace deal with Hitler. The prime minister had admiringly quoted Sir Nevile's own words, which he had sent to the Foreign Office in a cable a few days earlier: “‘If we handle Hitler right, my belief is that he will become gradually more pacific, but if we treat him like a pariah or mad dog, we shall turn him finally and irrevocably into one.'”

Chamberlain agreed with this analysis wholeheartedly and the two men had got down to the practicalities of drawing Hitler into fresh negotiations. The tactic was to call a European disarmament conference that would embrace Italy, France, Poland and Britain in a pact to reduce arms production every year over the forthcoming five years. The stick was international supervision by the League of Nations, but the carrot was increased economic productivity and growth.

This was the major initiative that Sir Nevile intended to discuss first with Göring, with whom he had established a good friendship. Hitler would listen to Göring. The military would accept, both because they were far ahead in terms of their military inventory and also because they did not want war.

This logic had looked very credible in London, and Chamberlain had had little difficulty in convincing the foreign secretary to go along with the plan. Back in Berlin, however, the idea of trying to explain the initiative to his own staff on yet another bleak morning did not look quite so appealing.

For a start, Halliday had decided to attend and the man was bound to make trouble. Henderson had done his best to persuade the prime minister to sack the agent but he had been turned down. Even the British prime minister did not interfere with the Secret Intelligence Service at that level.

Then there was Macrae. In his absence, the military attaché had become totally unreliable. Henderson had read his cables to the War Office. Macrae had argued that not only was war inevitable but the sooner it happened the better. With every passing month, the German military was increasing its superiority in manpower and weaponry over the combined forces of Britain and France. The navy was the only area in which the British could still hope for superiority. In terms of airpower, the RAF was outnumbered by the Luftwaffe's combat aircraft. However, the early prototypes of the Spitfire fighter plane had proved successful in trial flights and showed that, in time, the plane might outfly the German Me 109 in combat.