Read Flight from Berlin Online
Authors: David John
‘Tell me, Friedl, who actually knows
what’s
in the List Dossier—I mean not just that it exists, but what it contains.’
‘Everything in it? Only Jakob and Kurt. But most of the officers in the network read a copy of the Mend Protocol.’
‘And the Sicherheitsdienst, the SD. They’ve never
seen
it?’
‘No.’
‘So how much would they really know about it?’
‘Depends what they learned from interrogating that officer. That it concerns Hitler’s war record and missing years. Probably no more than that. They would have been wary of learning the details until they’d informed Hitler . . .’
‘That fits. I certainly got the impression that Rausch, who interrogated me, did not know.’
‘I suppose only Hitler himself would be able to fill in the whole picture,’ Friedl said.
‘Yes, but he would have to confide in
someone
, wouldn’t he? If he were to impress upon them the seriousness of the matter? Even tell them some of the truth.’
‘Who knows? Maybe one or two very senior SD.’
‘Such as Heydrich?’
‘It’s possible . . .’
‘But the SD men tracking it down will know from him how urgent and serious this is—even if they don’t know why.’
‘Without a doubt.’
‘They will know it is imperative that they recover it. For him.’
‘You know that very well yourself.’
‘So if, again for argument’s sake, we arrange to give
a
dossier to, say, Rausch . . .’
Friedl closed his eyes. ‘Richard . . . where is this going?’
‘Rausch is not going to know for certain if it’s not
the
dossier.’
‘No, I suppose not . . .’
Denham clasped his hands together and turned to Eleanor. ‘I think we’ll call on our Nazi friends.’
T
he German embassy on Carlton House Terrace was being redecorated. Denham dodged the ladders and paint buckets en route to the visitors’ desk and handed over a manila envelope.
‘This needs to go in your diplomatic pouch on this evening’s flight,’ he said.
The young male official grimaced, looked at the name and address, and took the envelope by the corner, as if it might contain rat poison.
‘We will need to know what’s in this.’
‘You could open it and take a look if you like, but Obergruppenführer Heydrich will have you killed.’
The man looked sharply up.
‘My name is Denham.
D-E-N-H-A-M
. I will return tomorrow afternoon to speak by telephone to the person named on that envelope. He will be most interested to hear from me.’
W
hen Denham got home, Friedl showed him a manuscript he’d been working on during his months in hiding. There were almost a hundred pages of
No Parts for Stella
, an experimental novel. It was the story of a high-minded Berlin actress who loses all integrity in her bid for fame. In a series of increasingly dire compromises she slips further down a moral slope, so that by the time she’s a star, she’s a monster. It wasn’t a bad read. It explored the perils of ambition and notions of personal worth, but the lurid, uncompromising style was both its strength and its failing.
‘Any good?’ Friedl asked, when he was near the end.
‘Ye-es,’ Denham said, ‘but I think it’s ahead of its time. It’ll need a rewrite if you want to show it to a publisher.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, for one thing, you’ve written a scene where she sleeps with all the male extras in
Frederick the Great . . .’
T
hat evening Eleanor took them to hear Ambrose and His Orchestra at the Café de Paris. In the gilded red interior Denham could tell the boys thought it all very high hat: a dinner-jacketed set treating platinum blondes to champagne and eggs Benedict. Eleanor led them into the ballroom, gliding down the semicircle stairs and between tables lit by amber lamps. She’d waved her hair, powdered her face, and wore a new glossy lipstick called Havana Dusk.
‘Violins,’ Nat said, as though he meant
spittoons.
They found their table with a banquette of red upholstery. ‘Two trumpets and only
one sax
!’
‘Kid, you wouldn’t know class if it kicked you in the nuts,’ Eleanor said. ‘Let’s dance.’ The orchestra had begun a pepped-up arrangement of ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’
A waiter brought an ice bucket and poured their flutes with a flourish while Denham watched the odd spectacle of an elegant American woman being twirled around by a shock-haired, spotty youth who wouldn’t have looked amiss on the Petrograd Soviet. Nat made one attempt to swing her over his hip, but Eleanor was far stronger than he was.
Denham’s mind wandered.
He pictured Rausch sitting in his office on the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin tomorrow morning. Perhaps a corner office looking onto that pillared courtyard where the supercharged Mercedes cars pull in with pennants on the hubcaps, bringing the high SS to work. Leather coat hanging from a hatstand; his desk with two telephones, one for the outside world, one internal—for his parallel world, the vast police spiderwebs of the Reich. He sees the envelope marked
Poste Diplomatique
, the one his secretary has not opened. Curious, he tears the flap with his honour dagger, and removes a single drawing, the very one Denham saw when he’d first opened the dossier—the lad with the charcoal freckles and the clear cold eyes. Something in the fullness of the young man’s lips faintly suggests a kiss, a mocking kiss, and a man of Rausch’s urbanity sees it.
He is perplexed, but then his gaze falls to the signature, which burns into his eyes. The appalling secret pouting up at him. Now he is nervous. He reads the typed note attached with a paper clip: Denham’s offer to exchange the complete List Dossier in return for the safe passage from Germany of Jakob, Ilse, and Hannah Liebermann. There follows an instruction to communicate with him by telephone at the German embassy in London tomorrow at 16:00 Greenwich Mean Time. Rausch flattens the drawing on the desk, dagger upright in his hand, and stares at nothing. His nerves give way to incredulity, then to rage.
Denham had retrieved the drawing and a handful of others that morning from the bank vault. The rest of the dossier, including his finished translation of Forster’s notes, he left in the vault ready to give to Evans. For the plan to work, the
fake
dossier, the one he would give Rausch, would contain . . .
what?
Suddenly he felt the full danger of what they were doing. An insane risk that could end in their deaths. Even if it all went as planned, he couldn’t shake off a fear that these marvellous months with Eleanor—the happiest of his life—were about to end.
‘What’s up, buster? You’re as sad as a map.’
She was leaning over him, radiant, and she brushed his cheek with a kiss. Taking his hand she led him to the dance floor, where the orchestra was playing a gentle rumba. A dark-skinned woman balancing an arrangement of fruit on her head stepped up to the microphone, accompanied by three crooners in white tuxedos.
He took Eleanor’s fingers in his own and put his other arm low around her waist, breathing in her perfume. Gently he moved his hips with hers.
‘A penny for your filthy thoughts,’ she said.
‘My darling . . .’
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know . . . I’ve a feeling things can’t carry on . . .’
She looked at him quickly with hurt and fear in her eyes.
‘ . . . the way they were. Once we’ve gone through with this. Somehow, it will change us. I just want you to be ready for that.’
She lay her head on his shoulder as they moved to the rhythm.
‘Regret over doing nothing will change us far more,’ she said.
He smiled at her, though she couldn’t see his face. The melody enveloped them in its sweet cadence.
When she looked up at him again, a tear was making a track down her powdered cheek.
They stopped still in the centre of the floor, held each other close, and kissed long and deeply, oblivious to the couples shuffling in circles around them. They kissed as though they were about to part for a long time, or forever.
T
he young official at the embassy main desk sprang to his feet when he saw Denham, as though he’d been waiting for him all day, then looked confused when he saw Eleanor. He ushered both of them upstairs regardless.
The embassy’s new interior seemed designed to intimidate the visitor and flatter the vanity of the incumbent, von Ribbentrop, who had impressed Hitler with his smooth hauteur, and with his ability to speak French and English, skills he’d learned from his years as a travelling wine salesman. His pompous portrait hung in the entrance hall. The oversized staircase lined with bronze torches gave onto a pilastered landing, where a bust of the Führer was garlanded with sprigs of oak and pine, like some psychotic god of Yule.
The official showed them into a large salon overlooking St James’s Park, where the chestnut trees were budding with bright green leaves, and asked them to wait. When he’d gone they were too nervous to sit and paced the edge of the carpet towards the far wall, on which was hung a
KRAFT DURCH FREUDE
picture calendar for 1937. A family of four waved ecstatically from their Volkswagen.
The door opened and a fat man in a dark suit entered. There was a Party pin in his buttonhole. He resembled a grossly grown-up doll. He gave them a supercilious stare.
SD,
Denham thought.
‘Mr Denham?’ he said in English. ‘I have orders to arrange a telephone call to Berlin for you at four p.m.’ He turned to Eleanor with a quizzical look.
‘She’s with me,’ Denham said.
The man gestured to a telephone on a gilded table under the window. ‘You can take the call there in a moment. I’ve been keeping the connection open.’ He left the room.
Seconds later the telephone rang. Eleanor squeezed Denham’s hand. He walked towards it. It rang again, and he picked it up.
‘Hello, Rausch, this is Richard Denham.’
A brief pause filled with static before a thin, high voice said, ‘This is Reinhard Heydrich.’
Denham’s mouth opened, but words had fled. ‘I see,’ was all he managed at last, clutching the receiver very tightly.
A quiet, high-pitched bray came down the line. ‘You’ve won some admirers here, you know. After three days working you over my boys were convinced you knew nothing of that dossier.’ The voice had the offhand easiness of power. ‘You even had Rausch fooled. Either you’ve got nerves of steel, or he’s going soft.’
Under his shirt Denham felt a bead of sweat roll from his armpit down to his belt. He thought of the long pale face in the photograph on the wall of that SD torture room. The tiny eyes deeply set, slanted, bright, and cruel.
Recovering himself he said, ‘Well, I didn’t want to make it easy for you. No fun in that, is there?’
The soft braying laugh again. ‘You’re making us a marvellous offer, Herr Denham. The dossier in exchange for three inconvenient Jews? How could we say no?’
Denham felt a dizzying surge of adrenaline. ‘There are two conditions.’
‘Go on.’
‘Rausch, and no one else, is to bring the Liebermanns in a single car to the town of Venhoven, on the Dutch border, at five p.m. next Friday. There’s a small hotel called Hotel Mertens, about five hundred yards from the German frontier. I’ll be there with the dossier. Second, Jakob Liebermann keeps his fortune. He’s not to be robbed by the Reich.’
A long pause.
‘Agreed,’ Heydrich said finally, ‘with the exception of the location. The handover is to take place at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin . . .’
‘No.’
‘See it from our point of view,’ Heydrich said, sounding positively reasonable. ‘You are handing over property that belongs to the Reich. It is appropriate that you do so on German soil, where we can be certain of no outside interference.’
‘No.’
‘Really, Herr Denham, I’m a fencer myself, you know. I’m honour bound to act with chivalry.’
‘We stick to my terms or . . . I go straight to the British Foreign Office with what I have in my possession.’
Another silence on the line. Behind the static Denham sensed the Obergruppenführer’s mood souring.
‘But who will believe any of it?’ he said.
The Führer is not married
.
Denham did not rise to it. ‘I’ll expect Rausch at Venhoven with the Liebermanns, alive and well, and no one else. At five p.m. on Friday.’
The pulse in his neck was pounding. Three, four, five seconds more of hissing silence on the line. He was about to hang up, when the thin voice spoke again.
‘I was really too hasty in signing the order for your release.’ And then: ‘Very well then, we go with your plan. But now I must warn you.’ His voice dropped. ‘Try to cheat us over this and we will hunt you down. Do you understand?’
Denham placed the phone down onto its cradle. He turned to face Eleanor and she ran towards him. His hands trembled, and his shirt was soaked through.
T
he old town of Venhoven on the River Maas was a little over five miles from the German border. Denham knew it from a driving trip he’d made with his father to Germany years ago. It had been their halfway stop for the night. The country along the frontier to the east, where the hotel was located, was undulating, wide open farmland, the strategic sweep into the Low Countries that had made it the scene of countless battles. Without the cover of trees or buildings, he thought, it would be harder for the SD to pull any tricks.
It was a tiring day-and-a-half’s journey, driving from London to Harwich, waiting for the car to be winched onto the ferry, and sailing to the Hook of Holland. He drove through the night with Friedl sitting next to him, having eaten a light meal on the crossing.
‘Hope Nat’s all right looking after the cat,’ Denham said, to break the silence.