by Celia Rees
“Das klingt schön,” Edith said. “Und Kaffee bitte.”
The lady went into the café. Adeline lit a cigarette and stared across the street. Jack carried on peering into the engine, muttering to himself and playing with various wrenches. Of course they had been in touch with each other. It had been in Kurt’s eyes when he’d asked about her . . .
The proprietress came out with coffee and cakes on a tray, a plate for them and one for Jack. He wiped his hands on an oily rag and leaned against the side of the Jeep.
“Ta, love.” He took a swig of coffee and scarfed his cakes in two bites each. He made a thumbs-up sign. “Sehr gut!”
The cakes were warm. Edith bit into one. The filling was a surprise.
“Rhubarb?”
The woman beamed. “Yes, growing in the garden.”
“It’s very good. I haven’t come across that before.”
“English?” The woman looked from one to the other. “American?”
“I’m English.” Edith pointed to herself. “My friend is American.”
“Pleased to meet you.” She spoke in English. “That is correct?”
Edith nodded.
“I like to practice. We don’t see so many of you here. I am Frau Becke.” She laughed. “Named for my trade. I know.”
“Can I have the recipe?” Edith asked.
“Of course!” Frau Becke’s small, lined face creased with pleasure at Edith’s interest. She patted her pockets. “I write it for you.”
“No need.” Edith smiled back. “You can tell it to me. That’s fine.”
Edith took out notebook and pen to write down the recipe; it would go in the cookery book she’d told Harry she was going to write. Louisa would like it. Something else to do with rhubarb. And it would stop her mind from ranging back and forth looking for clues, following a breadcrumb trail of duplicity across this whole new hinterland of deception that had suddenly appeared.
She forced her attention back to Frau Becke, who was running through the recipe, indicating the dry ingredients with her hands, from cupped palms to a pinch. The table became her worktop as she mimed mixing, rolling, spreading on filling, rolling again, and cutting. Edith jotted down each stage. The recipes were like a diary, fixing times and places, people and faces. She would pair this with the Pfannkuchen. Her time in Berlin.
“Sprinkle on the streusel. Heat the oven medium hot and bake the rhubarb snails—”
“Snails.” Edith looked up.
“It is not the right word?”
Edith thought of the fat little coiled buns as she wrote schnecke. “Yes, it’s perfect.”
“Bake five and twenty minutes.”
“Thank you.”
Edith shut her notebook. She took out Reichsmarks and a packet of cigarettes and put them on the table. She could be wrong, of course. There could be some other explanation. Edith took temporary refuge in that thought. It stopped the creeping feeling that she’d been completely fooled.
They all looked up at the sound of a car slowing down to cruise past them. The car stopped. Two men in civilian clothes, hats and long overcoats, got out.
“Polizei.” Frau Becke muttered. “Gestapo. Same as before.”
She scooped up the money and the cigarettes and disappeared inside.
Just at that moment, Dori came out of the house. She turned smartly to the right and set off walking.
The two policemen stepped toward Jack.
“Oi! Mate!” Jack shouted in English. “Can you g’is a hand? Gib mir hilfe?” He nodded toward the engine. “Ist kaput.”
The men stopped and took a look. They bent over the open hood examining the innards of the Jeep with reluctant curiosity. Jack got into the driver’s seat.
“Hold that down while I try it. That’s it. What do you know? Started first time. Verschliessen?” One of them released the catch. The hood fell down with a slam. “Thanks, mate. Danke.” He was revving the engine hard now. “Hop in, girls.”
Jack executed a neat U-turn and roared off toward Friedrichstrasse. He slowed when he reached Dori, stopping long enough for her to jump in.
“Think we’ve got away with it,” he said.
Edith turned around. The long, green, shiny snout of the German car was just visible, nosing out of a side street, chrome grill glinting.
“I wouldn’t be so sure.”
Jack looked in the mirror. “OK. Hang on to yer hats.”
Jack drew alongside a green-and-cream tramcar, pulling past it. He turned the wheel sharply, crossing the lines then cutting sharp right into a street narrowed by heaps of bricks and rubble spilled across the potholed surface like intersecting mounds of scree.
“Still behind us?”
Edith and Adeline turned, trying to see through the dust thrown up by the Jeep without losing their grip on the sides.
Edith caught a glint of glass. “Yes, they are.”
Jack took a left and tucked the car behind the fallen frontage of a half-destroyed building. The wall ran at a fractured diagonal, starting high up and descending in a series of jagged steps.
“At least it ain’t a Tiger tank,” Jack whispered.
Nevertheless, they all crouched instinctively at the sound of the car approaching, nosing along cautiously, like a predator seeking out its prey. Edith felt the sharp prickings of fear as she listened to the low growl of the engine, the wheels bumping over the detritus that littered the road. The thin skin of bricks seemed flimsy protection. Then the engine noise changed as the car reversed sharply and left in a skidding crunch of tires.
Jack waited until the sound had gone altogether before reversing the Jeep and turning toward the road. He pulled out cautiously. The coast was clear.
“Phew! That was—”
“Don’t speak too soon.” Dori nudged his arm. The German car was coming up fast, getting ready to overtake the slow-moving Jeep.
“Right!” Jack shouted. “If that’s the way they want it.”
He jerked the wheel, pulling the car into a side street that had been only partially cleared. The piles of rubble practically met in the middle.
“We’ll never get through there!” Adeline grabbed Edith’s arm.
“They won’t, that’s for sure. Hold on tight.” Jack used the sloping rubble as a ramp and took the Jeep up on two wheels to get through the smallest of gaps. For one frightful moment, it felt as though they were going to overturn, then the Jeep bounced down onto the road again. “That should fix ’em.” Jack laughed. “I haven’t had this much fun since I was bombing around Normandy in a scout car.”
He waved two fingers and roared away.
“Reckon I know where we are now,” Jack said. “There should be a crossing point. Bridge over the Spree.” He nodded toward the oily, slow-moving river. “Full of bodies, so they say.”
“They say that about everywhere, Jack.” Dori stared down at the black, turbid waters choked with all kinds of wreckage.
The crossing point back to the British Sector was on a bridge. The Russian soldier frowned down at the various documents while Dori spoke to him in rapid Russian. She offered him a cigarette. He took the packet, inspected the rolled cylinders of notes packed inside, and raised the barrier. The British checkpoint waved them through after a cursory glance at their papers. It was Sunday afternoon, and the guard was eager to get back to a fresh pot of tea and his game of cards.
Jack dropped them off at the hotel. There was a message from Harry. Delayed. Sorry. See you later. She folded the note and put it in her pocket, glad that she had other things to occupy her.
“Did you find anything?”
Dori had hardly spoken except to get them through the checkpoints.
“Research papers. My guess is he’s been back to the Charité to get them. Gives him something to trade.” Dori dug into her pocket and took out a tiny cassette of film. “It’s all on here. I’ll pass it on to War Crimes.” She took out a miniature camera, gave it to Adeline. “There’s more in this.”
; “A Minox,” Adeline took the tiny silver lozenge of a camera and turned it over. “Where did you get it?”
Dori shrugged, hands in pockets. “We were issued with all kinds of kit during the war. Some didn’t make it back to the stores. Can you develop it?”
“I guess. Might take a while.”
Adeline had converted the adjacent bathroom into a temporary darkroom. She’d tacked Out of Order to the door. Such inconveniences were not uncommon, to be met with a shrug and a trip to the next floor.
Dori stared out of the window, distant and abstracted, still in her coat, arms wrapped close, as if she was cold.
Some of Adeline’s latest photographs lay on the table. Trümmerfrauen passing rubble hand to hand; women standing in line, waiting outside shops, waiting for trams, just waiting; a young woman stretched on a sunlit bench, eyes closed, in winter coat and hat; an older woman in a head scarf, pushing a pram, her feet wrapped in rags; a couple pulling a cart between them, yoked like mules; a woman pegging washing across a space where a fourth wall should be, her apartment now a balcony. Children at play. A boy had made a slide out of a steel girder. Two others were turning a tank tread into a car. Two little girls piled up stones in some arcane game. How resilient these children were, she thought, how inventive. They had lost everything. Homes. Fathers. Mothers. Their young lives had been shattered like their surroundings by a war that was no fault of theirs, but they still managed to conjure a playground out of a bombsite. If this country had a future, it lay with them.
There was a darker side. Photographs of graffiti scrawled on walls that showed the things the children sometimes drew in the classroom, especially those from the east: soldiers with guns, bodies on the ground, men hanging from lampposts, crude depictions of rape. The things these children had experienced, the things that they had seen, they would carry those images the rest of their lives. Sometimes it was hard to keep hope alive. Only real security, good food, warm clothes, comfortable homes, proper education would turn this black tide of horror, and they were very far from providing any of these things.
Edith picked up another photo. Two girls, a few years older. Dressed in polka-dot halter tops, sitting with GIs, the men’s presence shown by a trouser cuff, a cap on the table, a uniformed arm. The girls nursed bottles of Coca-Cola, their eyes hidden behind dark glasses, their pale faces puffy, Pan-Cake makeup covering skin eruptions. Telltale signs of bad diet. The puffiness and makeup made them look older, but Edith placed them in their early teens. Bodies barely pubescent; painted fingernails bitten to the quick.
A quick scrawl in china pencil: Germany As It Is Now.
Dori turned, as if she’d made her mind up about something.
“I found something else. It was on his desk.” She held up an opened envelope. Basildon Bond notepaper. The address written in Elisabeth’s large, distinctive, European cursive. “How much do you trust her now?”
Before Edith could reply, Adeline stepped into the room.
“Are you ready? I think you should both come see what Dori found.”
34
Bauhaus Apartment, Wannsee, Berlin
27th April 1946
Smoked Ham McHale
Thinly sliced onions melted with a generous amount of butter in a skillet. Two thick slices of uncooked, smoked ham then cooked quickly--five minutes or so. Half a bottle of red wine added with a shake or two of pepper. Cooked for another twenty minutes until wine reduced. Served with red cabbage and creamed potatoes.
Edith followed Dori into Adeline’s improvised darkroom. It smelled of developing fluid and perfume.
“What did it say? In the letter?”
“There was no letter. Just the envelope, but it proves that they’ve been in touch.”
“This is as good as I can get.” Adeline pointed to a printed reel, still wet, pegged on a line between the nylons and silk stockings. “I need a proper darkroom to enlarge them.”
Various groups of men in uniforms, high-ranking SS officers, standing around, hands in pockets, smoking cigarettes, smiling, laughing, their women in evening dress or fur coats and hats. Dori pointed to one photograph with a crimson fingernail, isolating it from its fellows. A group sitting around a table at what looked like a summer evening garden party.
“The man standing is von Stavenow.”
Edith moved close.
“And this woman, seated in front of him. Is that Elisabeth?”
Edith peered closer, until the image blurred. Yes, Elisabeth was there, in the fall of her hair, the tilt of her head, the way her eyes challenged the camera, the way she held her cigarette.
“Yes, I think so. There could be some innocent explanation, though . . .”
“Oh, yes? Look who she’s with! See him?” Dori pointed to a heavyset man, sitting sideways to the camera, heavily brilliantined hair catching the light. “See his collar patches? Oak-leaf clusters. That makes him a General. See him?” She moved her finger to the younger man at his side. “High-ranking Gestapo. And this one.” She pointed to a fourth man sitting on her left, his hand on the arm of her chair. “Wehrmacht. The von Stavenows kept big-shot company.”
“I know him.” Adeline picked up a hand lens. “That’s Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Chief of the RSHA, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Himmler’s outfit, Reich Security Main Office, sister organization to the Gestapo. He’s in the dock at Nuremberg. I’ve been staring at his ugly mug, day in day out.”
“Do you know the others?” Dori asked, her dark eyes searching, hopeful that she might.
Adeline shook her head. “Should be able to tell more when we’ve got decent-size prints.” She turned to a distant ringing. “’Scuse me, that’s our phone.”
“We have to identify them.” Dori continued to stare at the still-wet image as if it might give up its secrets. “Establish Elisabeth’s connection.”
Edith peered at the miniature woman in the tiny print. “What if it’s just a social occasion?”
Part of Edith wanted to be mistaken, didn’t want to think this of her. She could perhaps understand that Elisabeth might have been in touch with Kurt for some reason. Maybe her letter had been full of accusation, maybe she couldn’t resist the temptation to pour out all her bitterness and recrimination, but to see her laughing and smiling, surrounded by a bunch of high-ranking Nazis? That was a suspicion of a different order.
“You said she was never in Berlin.” Dori turned on Edith.
“I didn’t say that,” she snapped back. “She was his wife! She had to be there. It was expected. I just said she wasn’t there all the time!”
Dori sighed her frustration. “I can’t believe how far you’re prepared to go to make excuses for her!”
“I’m not making excuses!” Edith glared. “I think we just need to be sure!”
“No point in arguing.” Adeline came back, holding her hands up. “Edith, you need to get ready to see McHale. That was him on the phone. He wants to see you and not anyone else.”
“Why?” Edith was genuinely mystified and not a little alarmed.
Adeline shrugged. “Just get ready. That’s the way he is. If we want von Stavenow out and on his way south, you better get out to Wannsee. I’ll run you over there.”
“What am I supposed to say to him?” Edith felt panic mounting.
“I’ll come to your room with you.” Dori linked arms, all her annoyance seemingly forgotten. “We’ll have a little chat and a stiff gin to steady the nerves, then we’ll pick out the right thing to wear.”
Tom McHale’s apartment was in a modernist building overlooking the Wannsee.
“Nice spot.” He looked out of the large window. “Right by the lake. Impressive, don’t you think?” He turned back, inviting her agreement. “Bauhaus. Belonged to some high-ranking Nazi. The normal thing for the Nazis. Declare Bauhaus degenerate, ungerman, and whatever else, while keeping it for themselves.” He gestured round the white-painted room with its polished oak floor, glass-topped table, leather, bentwood and metal furniture. “Who
ever lived here had taste. Some of this was his. The rest I’ve collected.”
He stroked the curve of one of the chairs, his touch covetous. The walls were hung with Braque, Matisse, Picasso, Chagall. Presumably, also collected along the way. Maybe he was looking after them until the owners could be located, although Edith doubted it. He would likely have the whole lot crated up and shipped back to the US. He wasn’t alone in this. Truckloads of furniture, china, silverware, carpets had been shipped back to the Home Counties. It was a temptation that many felt unable to resist. As they saw it, they were only looting the looters.
“But we’re not here to discuss architecture and furniture design, are we?” He turned away from the window. “Too bad Adie couldn’t stay. Had to file copy.” McHale gave her that disconcerting smile of his, open and wide, while his eyes stayed the same, ice on a sunny day. “But that’s Adie. Always on the job.” He stretched, arms above his head, showing off his lithe, athletic build. “Hope you’re hungry, Edith. You’re interested in food, recipes?”
Edith looked at him sharply. “That’s right. How do you know?”
“I have an excellent memory. “He tapped the side of his head. “Hash with beets. What did you call it? Bubble and Squeak? There’s a great kitchen here. It even has a refrigerator. You want a drink? I’ve got scotch or bourbon.”
“Bourbon would be fine.”
“Ice?”
“Not for me.”
“I’ll be right back.” He was already disappearing out of the door.
He returned carrying two glasses, the liquor trickling through the ice. He was wearing loose-fitting gabardine trousers, a striped polo shirt, unlaced tennis shoes with no socks, boy’s clothes that made him look scarcely out of his teens. He threw himself into the chair opposite her, sprawling like an adolescent, his long, loose frame making the steel and leather look almost comfortable.
