by Celia Rees
“Who’s Miss Esterhazy?”
“In charge of the Lübeck office. Useful little body. You’ll be fine in the Atlantic,” he added. “All the brass stay there.”
She looked out of the window. It was six o’clock in the morning, still dark, but already a few people were moving about; impossible to tell if they were men or women, just shapeless bundles, wrapped against the cold, one or two pulling little trolleys.
“Trying to stop themselves freezing to death,” the driver commented. They slowed at a halt sign. A hunched figure shambled past them, head swathed, shoulders white with frost. “Looking for work, grub, coal, firewood, anything they can sell or barter. Early birds, like. You see ’em going about everywhere lugging them little carts.”
“Are you from the Black Country?” Edith asked.
“Arr.” He grinned, broadening his accent. “Where you from, then?”
“Coventry.” Edith smiled. She liked his accent. Something familiar.
“Got a cousin down there. Works in the Standard. Had it bad, didn’t you? Not as bad as Brum, mind. Or these poor buggers.” He turned one corner, then another. “Some of it looks quite normal, especially in the dark, but them rows is just facades, nowt behind ’em. Other places? Just nowt.” He wove down a narrow path zigzagging between hills of bricks, the headlights picking out the glitter of glass. “I can give you a bit of a tour later, if you’d like.”
“I’ve seen ruined cities.”
“Not like this one.” The car turned another corner. “Here we are.”
They drew up in front of a tall porticoed entrance, doorman already coming down the wide steps. There was no damage here. The Atlantic stood just as it had always done, an imposing presence. Its white stuccoed façade swept the length of a city block, banks of balconied windows faced a wide expanse of water, the Außenalster.
“You look done in. I’d get some kip and some grub, if I was you,” Hunter said as he got her case from the trunk. “I got orders to pick you up at 1100 hours.”
“Oh, from whom?”
“Captain Adams. Intelligence. Your company is requested. Lunch at the Club.” He touched his cap in salute and turned back to the car.
Her contact. It had started. She felt an uncomfortable flutter at the name, but she was too tired to think about any of that now.
Edith was checked in by a charming German girl. An elderly porter conducted her to a pleasant room overlooking the Außenalster. She hung Dori’s coat in the wardrobe, kicked off her shoes, ran a bath. The water was hot, scented soap provided. She filled the tub and let herself float, soaking off the grime of the journey. She wrapped herself in a toweling robe and lay down on the bed.
She woke suddenly with no idea of the time or place. It took moments for the high-ceilinged room, the whiteness of the light, the thick quilt she lay under to make sense.
She ordered breakfast. Omelette. Rolls and coffee. The waiter set the tray down on the low table in front of the windows. The omelette (real eggs) lapped the sides of the plate. Edith buttered a warm white roll and poured coffee from the silver pot. Outside, the frozen Außenalster showed black through the bare lindens. The scene was monochrome, veiled by steady snowfall; it was like viewing an early film.
She was just thinking about dressing when there was a knock at the door.
“Adeline!”
Edith stood back to let her into the room. Melted snow spangled Adie’s woolen hat and bulky, padded jacket. She smelled of cold air and smoke.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m doing a piece on the destruction of the German cities. Thought I’d better take a look at Hamburg. I just arrived on the sleeper from Nuremberg. Saw you’d checked in but thought you could do with a sleep.”
“How did you know? I’d be here, I mean.”
“Lucky guess.” Adeline grinned. “No, not really. I called your office. Spoke to a Miss Esterhazy? She said you were booked in for the weekend. I was coming up anyway, so thought I’d look you up.” She shrugged off her coat and took one of the chairs set by the window. “Nice view. I could use some coffee.”
Edith poured a cup while Adeline told her about the trials in Nuremberg, the judges and lawyers, the prisoners in the dock, her fellow pressmen and women.
“But they might as well be show trials, given this Paperclip business. Your guys must be doing the same kind of thing?”
“Yes. They are. They call it Haystack.”
“Very appropriate. This from Leo?”
“No. He hasn’t said more than he said before. Just keep an eye out for Kurt and his wife, Elisabeth, and anyone else I might happen upon.”
“And if you do find anything?”
“I report to a Captain Adams. I’m meeting him for lunch. I’m being picked up at eleven.” She looked at her travel alarm. “I better get a move on. It’s half past ten now.”
“So, who told you about Haystack?” Adeline asked as Edith began to dress.
“Will this do for lunch?” Edith took a light-gray costume and peach silk blouse out of her suitcase.
“Very smart. So, if not Leo . . .” Adeline prompted.
“Dori and Vera Atkins.” Edith wriggled into the skirt. “Is this too tight, d’you think?”
“No, looks fine. I don’t understand where Dori and Vera Atkins come into this.”
“They will be working together, for War Crimes,” Edith buttoned her blouse. “Hunting down Nazis to bring them to justice. Didn’t Dori tell you?”
“Uh-uh.” Adeline shook her head and lit a cigarette.
“Oh . . .” Edith faltered. Maybe she shouldn’t be telling Adeline this either, but it wasn’t exactly a secret. Was it? “They’ve asked me to help them.”
“OK.” Adeline sat back in her chair. “Let me get this straight. You will be working for Leo, presumably through Adams, who is not interested in bringing these men to justice. In fact, the opposite. While at the same time helping Vera Atkins and Dori who are working for an entirely different outfit and who want them brought to account.” She looked up at Edith, enquiring. “How are you going to stop Leo and co from knowing what you are really doing? There must be some kind of censorship going on here.”
“We’ve developed a code based on a cookery book,” Edith said, as she went to the mirror to put on her makeup.
“And how does that work?”
Adeline never made notes. She didn’t need to. She could recall conversations verbatim, like some kind of recording machine. She never forgot anything, slotting it all away to be checked, cross-referenced, and followed up later. When she was listening like that, she had a certain look: hazel eyes wide and expectant, head on one side, curly locks twirling between her fingers. She was looking that way now.
Edith broke off from applying her makeup. “Why do you want to know?”
“I’m interested, that’s all. And concerned.” She spread her hands. “It’s good you have a system. You never know who else might be taking a look.”
“Like who?” Edith resumed applying mascara.
“Us, for a start. Russians, even.”
“Russians!” Edith stopped, mascara brush poised. She looked at herself, startled in the mirror, one eye larger than the other.
“Well, yeah. If we’re setting up networks in their zone, and you can bet we are, they will be doing the same, and Lübeck is practically on the border.”
“No one said anything about Russians.”
“That’s because they don’t want you to know . . .”
Adeline stood up suddenly and went to the window. For a long moment, she stared out at the Außenalster, the graphite surface scarred with whorls and scribbled scorings although there were no skaters out today.
“I can’t do this,” she said as if to herself.
“What can’t you do?”
Edith finished her mascara while Adeline continued to stare at skaters who weren’t there. She appeared to be weighing something in her mind.
“You know what?”
she said finally. “Fuck it.” She turned back to Edith. “He can send me back. I don’t care.”
“Who? Send you back to where?”
“Tom. McHale. To Poughkeepsie. To the Women’s Interest pages of the Eagle. He can do it, too.” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that.”
“What? But why would he want to do that?”
“He’s not going to. He’s threatening to. Unless . . .”
“Unless . . . What?”
Adeline sighed. “Unless I find things out from you.”
In the depth of her sigh, Edith sensed that she was caught between the relief of telling and disgust at her own vulnerability.
“Things like what? What does he want to know?” Edith asked again.
Adeline laughed. “Anything. Everything. Knowledge is power. Who said that?” Adeline didn’t wait for an answer. “He must have heard more than we thought at Dori’s, and what you were saying chimed with his new baby. His new area of interest, or one of them. He collared me after court yesterday, said if I don’t find out what you are up to for the Brits, he’ll have me back in the States before I can sneeze.”
“Oh, Adie.” Edith made a move toward her, but Adeline gave a brisk shake of the head. Edith hesitated, then asked, “So what is his new area of interest?”
“Scientists. Doctors. Involved in all kinds of nasty stuff—poison gas, biological weapons and the effects thereof. Up to now, these guys haven’t been a priority. FDR didn’t like that kind of warfare, but he’s not there anymore. They sure as hell don’t want the Russians getting their hands on them.” She paused. “Or the British, for that matter.”
“So they might want Kurt?”
Adeline nodded slowly.
“What will you tell him?”
“I’ll stall him.” She shrugged, hands in pockets. “Say you don’t know anything.”
“Well, it’s the truth isn’t it?” Edith’s laugh had a nervous edge to it. What would happen if, and when, she did?
Adeline caught her sudden apprehension. “This is a dangerous game, Edith, but you don’t have to get mixed up in it. You don’t want to be caught in the middle. You can walk away from Leo. Dori. Me. Go to Lübeck, get the schools going. That’s enough.”
“Well, I am, aren’t I?” Edith said quietly. “Caught up in it, I mean. I can’t see how I can back out of it now.”
No suitable job for a woman, isn’t that what they said? Adeline had taken no notice; she’d fought them all. Now, all she’d worked so hard for, all she’d achieved, could be undone in an instant, tossed aside as if it had no worth, and she’d be packed off back to where she belonged, reporting on fashion and flower shows. Edith couldn’t be responsible for that. Besides, Adeline’s reports gave a voice to those who would otherwise have no voice at all. She’d added names and faces to the bald, bloody statistics of war. She would do the same to the aftermath. Expose the venal weakness, cowardice, and culpability of the men in the dock at Nuremberg. Tell the stories of the vanquished Germans and how they lived now.
“We’ll work something out.” Edith took Adeline’s arm. “Throw him a bone, every now and again, like Dori says.”
They laughed. Nevertheless, the sudden shrilling of the telephone made them both jump. Edith picked up the receiver, half expecting some sinister voice, British, American, even Russian.
“Frau Graham?” The voice was German, light and female—the receptionist. “Your driver is here.”
8
British Officers’ Club, Hamburg
5th January 1946
Officers’ Club Lunch
Windsor Soup
Roast Beef
Roast Potatoes
Red Cabbage
Albemarle Pudding
Cheese and Biscuits
Coffee
British but not. Roasted potatoes sprinkled with salt and caraway seed. Braised red cabbage. A small jug of mahogany gravy, the juice from the meat, augmented with red wine, reduced, made shiny with butter and horseradish, but not as we know it. My Officer companion enjoyed his beef “bloody.”
Under Meat--Roasting. For RARE--Regulo 8 for 12 minutes to the lb, then Regulo 9 for 12 minutes then rest for 25 minutes.
Jack Hunter was waiting for them in the foyer. He’d swapped his uniform for a double-breasted gray suit with wide lapels, a blue shirt and regimental tie. He looked quite imposing, very tall, with a big, fine head, high, broad cheekbones, and strong features. His black hair was cut short at the sides, a few waves already escaping the Brylcreem into oily curls. His mouth turned up slightly, and his bright-blue eyes crinkled at the corners as if he was enjoying some private joke, very probably at your expense.
“Sergeant? This is Adeline.”
Adeline sketched a wave.
Jack nodded. “How do?”
“Adeline is an American journalist. She’s writing about German cities. Maybe you can give us that tour you mentioned. If it’s not too out of our way?”
Adeline was the only person she knew here. Edith didn’t want to say goodbye to her just yet.
“I’m here to serve.” He gave a mock bow. His look of vague amusement turned into a genuine grin. “Be glad to. Snow’s stopped. Clearing from the North. Nippy, mind. You’ll need your coats.”
He escorted them to the car and drove down to the river. He stopped at various places so Adeline might take photographs: a ship half-submerged in the docks, another, lying on its side, water lapping into the funnels, yet more, or perhaps they were submarines, in dry dock, their sides open, the metal peeled back, as if by an enormous can opener. Everywhere an incomprehensible tangle of rusting metal: fallen cranes, toppled and crushed like discarded Meccano; splayed steel beams reaching out like fingers spread in warning, or to ward off a blow.
“We did that lot,” Hunter commented. “And I don’t mean in the war. Blew it all up, useful or not. Crying shame. Perfectly good gear.”
He turned away from the Elbe into a vast wasteland. The roads were clear. Straight lines in a gridded pattern divided the flattened landscape. It went on for what seemed to be miles on either side of them, the perimeter defined by a serrated curtain wall of ruined apartment blocks.
“See that there.” He pointed out crosses painted on toppled pillars, lumps of masonry. “That means bodies.” Farther along the road a withered wreath lay on the low, fretted remains of a smoke-blackened wall. Everything was frozen, snow lay in the hollows of the uneven surfaces. “God knows how many are still underneath it. Good thing it’s cold,” he added. “It’ll be ponging to high heaven come summer. See that?” A trickle of yellowish gray smoke seeped out from a mound of rubble. “That’s how they’re living. In the cellars.”
More stops. More photographs.
They went on. Tall ruins of apartments loomed nearer, gaining dimensions. All the roofs were missing. From above, it would look like a honeycomb with the protective wax sliced away to reveal the naked, vulnerable cells of the hive. Rubble rose either side of the road to the height of at least two stories. It spread away in peaks and troughs. Edith was reminded of something, not natural, but not human built either. Trümmerfrauen, rubble women, stood in lines that followed the contours, passing pieces of broken masonry hand over hand with ant-like industry. In some final, ratcheted twist of irony, they looked like people passing buckets to put out a fire.
“Three thousand planes, over eight days and nights,” Hunter continued his commentary. “Our boys and the Yanks. I’ve got a pal who was on the raids. Said he’d never seen anything like it. Like flying over a volcano. Great column of smoke rising up to about 20,000 feet, and the ground just a sea of fire. Horizon to horizon. Heat that great, they could feel it, smell the burning in the plane. 40,000 dead, so they reckon. Probably more’n that. No one rightly knows. There was this great firestorm, that’s what did for most of them. Swept through the city like a hurricane. Winds up to 170 m.p.h.; temperatures hot enough to heat a furnace. I met this chap. Been a POW in Dresden. Lived through the same thing there. Had t
o help clear up after. Sights he saw . . .”
He went on with a tour guide’s practiced ease, recounting the facts and figures, death and destruction: an inventory of horror alternating between gruesome anecdote and the bald statistics of a debriefing session. Adeline was paying close attention, but Edith was no longer listening. She had walked to work the day after the bombing of Coventry to find out how many pupils she had left. She had picked her way through the center of the city, a basin filled with bricks and mortar with the smoke still rising, the ruins hissing in the falling drizzle. She’d seen the temporary mortuary filled edge to edge with bodies. She remembered the scorched wool, charred wood, burned meat stink of it. She knew what fire did to people, rendering them unrecognizable as people at all, turning them into something naked and desiccated, like disrobed mummies, not human, shrunken and distorted, like fetish dolls fashioned from tufts of hair, wood, and rag. Strange what the flames consumed and what they left. The sleeve of a green woollen blazer, barely singed, the embroidered badge still intact. The raid had begun early that evening, catching children out playing, some still in their uniforms. From one moment to the next, it must have seemed, their city had been turned into a cauldron of fire. A second’s hesitation, a moment’s disorientation was all that lay between death and safety. How many had died on that night in November? 500, 600? It had seemed an unbearable number. But this? This was of an entirely different order.
He swung around toward the lake. As they drove through what was left of the center, they passed an ugly, modern building that took up a whole city block. The lights blazed out, although all the buildings around were unlit.
“Victory Club. Glorified NAAFI. You can get anything in there. They got plans to make it even bigger by pulling that lot down.” He indicated the buildings around it.
“But those look perfectly sound.” Adeline frowned.
“You got it exact. Welcome to the British Zone.”
They left the ruined city behind them. The destruction had not been absolute. The random patterning of the bombing had left pockets of the city relatively undamaged. They returned to Außenalster, driving around the western edge. The road was broad and tree lined. Jack nodded to the left-hand side. Grand houses in their own grounds studded the rising slope.
