by Celia Rees
“I like to cook. Did Adie say?”
“Yes, she did.” Edith sipped her whisky.
“I do like to cook.” He smiled and swirled his drink, the ice tinkling against the crystal. “We have that in common.” He boosted himself out of his chair in one fluid movement. “Care to give me a hand?”
Edith followed him into the kitchen. “What are you cooking?”
“Ham. This Bavarian ham is so good. Seems a shame not to take advantage. And red cabbage. That’s in the oven. Creamed potatoes. Also in the oven keeping warm, and apple and horseradish sauce.”
He began cutting onions, very fine, with quick, even strokes of the knife.
He tipped the onions into the foaming butter and turned down the heat.
“Look at that.” He held up a thick slice of ham. Dark-pink flesh with a layer of opalescent fat and a thin, deep-brown rind. “Isn’t that perfect?”
He parted the frying onions carefully and nestled each slice into the pan. He looked at his watch.
“Five minutes each side. Then I’ll add the wine.”
Tom moved round the kitchen with an exuberant delight, like a child playing with the grown-up things, while his cook, housekeeper, or whatever she was, had the night off. If they bothered at all, men cooked differently from women. Less instinct and more precision. They approached it as they would any hobby, making model airplanes, running train sets. Everything was arranged. All the ingredients chopped, measured, and weighed. Nothing else in sight.
“I don’t often have the chance to do this,” he said as if sensing her thought. “Helga doesn’t let me in the kitchen.”
“Does she not?” There was always a Helga, or a wife, to do the day-to-day mundane stuff.
“And the food here is such good quality.”
“You don’t see a lot of it about.”
“And whose fault is that? There’s plenty out there. Ham, sausage, butter, cheese, potatoes—all hoarded for the black market.” He passed a hand over his head. The light picked out reddish glints in his chaff-colored hair. “We need to get a proper currency. You can’t have a country run on cigarettes. Just a splash of wine and we’ll leave it to simmer.” He dipped a spoon into the sauce and invited Edith to taste. “More pepper?”
“Perfect as it is.”
He laid out the thick slices of ham on fine china plates, pouring the sauce over them.
“Edith, can you take these in? I need to open the wine. Should have done it earlier. Given it time to breathe.”
He was opening a bottle of Chateau Lafite. Another of the spoils of war.
They sat down at the table and Tom poured the wine. He passed Edith the dish of creamed potato and the red cabbage.
“What do you think of the Kartoffelpuree?”
“Very good.”
Edith was saying very little. Dori had told her to let him do the talking.
“Cream and a grate of nutmeg. How do you like the red cabbage? It’s my Swedish grandma’s recipe.”
Edith took a forkful. “Sweeter than the German version. Less pungent. I like it.”
“And the ham?”
“Delicious,” Edith answered with a smile, going along with the deliberately elliptical pattern of the conversation.
He smiled back, satisfied. “Cypriot recipe, believe it or not. Greek boy gave it to me. Had his head blown off on a beach near Salerno. We buried him next to the temple of Poseidon. Ancient Greek town, Paestum. It’s nice there. I mean to go back one day.” He paused for a moment before going on in his falsely bright way. “Now we have Peach Cobbler and cream.”
“Sounds wonderful.”
“What d’you think?” he asked as they were finishing the pudding. “Good?”
“Excellent.”
“My ma’s recipe. Hine?” McHale offered after he’d cleared away the dishes. He picked up a bottle off the sideboard and read the label. “Reserve. There were some very fine cellars out here. Amazing what the Russians overlooked. Couldn’t drink it all, I guess.”
“I won’t, thanks.”
He took out a cigar, cut the end, and reached into his pocket for a lighter. “We found humidors as well.” He rolled the Zippo. “Senior Nazis didn’t stint.” He puffed on the cigar once or twice, then examined the glowing tip to see if it was evenly alight. “So, Edith, let’s get down to business. What do you want from me?” He took another draw, exhaling aromatic blue smoke.
“Who says I want something?”
“Now, Edith.” He grinned. “Come on!”
“On the contrary. I’m here to offer you something.”
“Like what?”
“I can give you Kurt von Stavenow.”
This was where she delivered what Dori called “the payoff.” And it worked. She resisted an impulse to smile as McHale almost choked on his cigar. Those wide-apart, pale-blue eyes were on her now, engaged and expectant. With something else there she hadn’t seen before. A kind of respect.
“Really? His wife too?”
There was an urgency to his tone, as though they wanted her, specifically. Why would that be?
“Her, too. That’s guaranteed.”
“What do you want in return?”
“He’s in the Russian Zone. You have to get him out of there and on his way out of the country. I know that you can do that.”
He looked slightly disconcerted. He had to be careful now. That was not for public consumption. He drew on his cigar while he framed his reply.
“Let’s say that we do help people.” He gave a small smile and carefully nudged off a column of accumulating ash. “Let’s say he is of interest. There are hundreds like him. Thousands. We can’t put them all on trial. That would be pointless. We have to move on. We’ve got the main culprits. The trials are set. If some of the smaller fish get away—” he made a swift swimming motion, “—so be it. Truth is, we don’t want them here. The big guys are already in the States. The rest? Some may have their uses, and maybe your Kurt is one of those. Otherwise, they can go to South America, or somewhere, play at being Nazis, dream of the Fourth Reich, whatever it is they want. They’re a spent force. Dreaming is all it will ever be. There’s a new war starting. A new enemy. We have to turn our minds to that now.”
“Move from the old war to the cold war?”
“You’ve got it exactly.”
“So you will help get him out?”
“Well, he’s no use to anyone except the Russians where he is now. That’s enough of a reason.” He masked his eagerness in a show of indifference. “I’ll see what I can do.” He proffered the bottle of Hine. “Sure I can’t tempt you?”
“Quite sure.”
He poured himself another finger or two and swirled the rich burnt-sienna liquid around his glass.
“What do you want?” he asked. “What’s in it for you? And Dori. What’s in it for her?”
Edith half wished she hadn’t refused that brandy.
“I don’t want to go into details,” she answered, deliberately evading his question. “I’m not privy to Dori’s thinking.”
“Best guess then?”
“I’d say . . .” She thought hard, sensing snares all around her. “I’d say she thinks he knows something about the fate of the SOE agents she’s seeking. A chance to question him could be part of the deal.”
“Uh-huh.” Tom nodded, eyes half closed against the smoke from his cigar. “And them? The von Stavenows? What do they want, d’you think?”
“They want to get out of Germany, Europe preferably but . . .” She stopped. She had to be careful, very careful now. Keep her face straight, expressionless, show him nothing. “Most of all . . .” she heard herself say. She was finding it hard to breathe. The message to meet, the letter on his desk, the photographs. It suddenly all clicked. It was so obvious, why had she not seen it? Elisabeth didn’t want a divorce. They hadn’t parted on “bad terms,” as Kurt had put it. “Most of all,” she began again, “they want to be together. That’s what they’ve always wanted.”
She tried to gain control. “That’s what this is all about, and he won’t go without her.” She took more air. “I do know that.”
“Are you okay?” Tom was out of his chair.
“Asthma,” Edith managed to say. “Your cigar.”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry.” He mashed the remaining rolled tobacco into the gray ash. “I had no idea.” A bell sounded out in the hallway. “Ah, there’s Adeline,” he said, with something like relief.
“Hey! Are you okay?”
“I wouldn’t say that exactly.”
“Did he fall for it?” Adeline asked.
Edith didn’t answer. She just stared out into the darkness.
“Doesn’t matter.” Adeline started the car. “If you said Dori wants to get von Stavenow to Italy to throw rocks at him, Tom wouldn’t care. He’s planning the double cross already. The point is he wants von Stavenow and Frau, and you’re delivering them all tied up with a bow. I managed to get those photos blown up at the Press Agency,” she went on. “Musette bag on the back seat.”
Edith unwound the ribbon that sealed the cardboard file. The now enlarged photograph showed the summer party in detail. Glasses on the table, ashtrays, champagne in an ice bucket. Elisabeth at the center of the group with Kurt behind her, his hand on her shoulder. No mistaking her and no mistaking the gesture.
“Max at the Press Agency recognized the mystery men,” Adeline was saying. “The weasely-looking Gestapo guy? Horst Kopkow. Heydrich’s protégé, Senior Counterespionage Officer. The Wehrmacht guy, balding with the big ears? Reinhart Gehlen. Chief of the FHO, Military Intelligence on the Eastern Front. Classy company. There’s a little date in the corner, see?”
1943. According to her account, Elisabeth had left Berlin by then, but of course she hadn’t, that was just another lie. Edith let the photograph fall back onto her lap and wound down the window, short of breath again. The betrayal was vast, spreading out and out.
“Say, are you okay? Do you want me to stop the car?”
Edith shook her head. “No, I just needed some air. Have you told Dori?” she asked, hoping to move her mind onto something else.
“Just left her now. It’s my guess Elisabeth worked for one of those guys.”
“Worked for them?” Edith turned. “She’s never worked in her life!”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. I find the women interesting. What were they doing? They couldn’t just be Kinder, Küche, Kirche. To begin with, maybe, but not after they started losing in ’43. With so many men called up, they’d have to join the workforce. To run that kind of bureaucracy, all that minute taking and typing, women would do that, surely? Behind-the-scenes work, routine administration.” She leaned forward, brows furrowed, eyes on the road. “The young guys, the junior guys who might have been doing it before would be needed to fight. Who’s going to take their places? Women. I bet Elisabeth stepped right up to the plate. She was in Berlin. As a good Nazi, she’d want to do her bit. She’d be right at the heart of government. And you know what they say? If you want to know anything, don’t ask the boss, ask his P.A.”
Edith’s eyes went back to the image lying on her lap. Love’s veiling glamour can be hard to dispel, but here was Elisabeth’s duplicity in enlarged black and white. Of course, parts of Elisabeth’s story had never added up. Not just how she’d spent the war, but before. Kurt’s line of work as an SS doctor. How could she not have known? I do not like this life, she’d said on the terrace at Steinhoff. She seemed to be enjoying it in these photographs.
Some things Elisabeth said had never made proper sense. That’s why she’d been so furious with Roz, with Luka. She glanced away from the photograph and back again. Kurt’s hand on her shoulder. The closeness clear to see. Edith’s feelings for Kurt had made her easy to deceive, but the affection that she’d developed for Elisabeth made the betrayal much deeper.
“I was hoping that it might be somehow—innocent,” she said, almost to herself. She looked over at Adeline. “But it doesn’t look that way, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t.” Adeline continued to stare out into the fragile cone the headlights cast into the looming blackness. “One time, I was with the 82nd, April ’45, pushing deep into Germany. We came to this town. White flags everywhere, white sheets hanging from the windows, but nobody was throwing roses. People just standing in the streets looking puzzled, as if they couldn’t believe this was happening. The surrender was recent. I went with a patrol to secure the town hall. First thing I noticed was how quiet it was, just the rat-tat of gunfire in the distance, like rice falling on a kid’s drum. As we went up the stairs, the silence seemed to grow, thicken. We took a long corridor to the right. Door at the end of the passage. A heavy door in some dark wood. One of our guys pushed it open with his gun and we stepped inside. First thing we saw was a man at the desk; head down in a pool of blood. Then a woman slumped in a chair, a streak of blood dried by the side of her mouth. We turned around to see a girl. Very young and quite beautiful, dressed in some kind of uniform, lying on a leather sofa, head back, mouth slightly open, eyes glassy. A fine layer of dust covered everything: the furniture, the man’s shoulders, the pool of blood in front of him, the eyes of the girl on the sofa. The mayor and his family. All dead by their own hands.” She paused. “What I’m thinking is, what about the ones who didn’t kill themselves? What are they doing now?”
Adeline fell into silence, as if still in that room with the dead girl and her parents. Out of the window, the lake flashed silver between the dark bars of the pines. Elisabeth had told her about just such incidents at that first meeting. Edith remembered her saying: Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that . . . I had to survive. For my daughter. Then Luka hinting that the child wasn’t hers. Was that another lie? Was it all lies? Spun to work on Edith’s regard? Gain her sympathy? Edith glanced again at the woman smiling out of the photograph. So charming, so plausible. So beautiful. She’d thrown her glamour over Edith, caught her in the web of her story. Edith’s feelings of being duped were receding. She felt the first deep stirrings of anger. No one liked being taken for a fool.
“I’ll find out what Elisabeth was involved in,” Adeline was saying as they entered the broken outer rim of the city. “You and Dori work on what she’s up to now.”
Harry was in the hotel bar sitting in a booth by himself. He didn’t seem to notice her, and Edith had to fight a desire to walk straight past. She had a feeling that this meeting would be goodbye, that he was going back to Palestine, and she didn’t know how much more she could take. The day had been so long, she barely remembered the morning, and the encounter with McHale, the revelations about Elisabeth, had left her drained. At that moment, he looked up, and she felt some of the burden of the day begin to lift away.
“Edith! Where have you been? Do you want a drink?” He was already signaling the waiter. “Whisky and soda?”
“I’ve been around.” Edith’s shrug was vague. “We must have just kept missing each other.”
“You look tired. What have you been up to?” He finished his drink as the waiter brought another. “Aren’t you going to tell me? What’s kept you so busy, kept you away from me?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” The whisky was cheap, diluted. She put the glass aside.
“I hope it’s not anything to do with Kurt von Stavenow.”
Edith looked up at him, too tired for dissembling.
“How did you know?”
“I met Dori. She said you’d seen him. Here in Berlin. She also told me that he’s in the Russian Zone, which means he’ll want to get out, and that you were having dinner with McHale.” He leaned forward. “Keep out of it, Edith.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s dangerous! A murky business, getting murkier by the minute. Ratlines. That’s what the Americans call them. Aptly named. Stretching from here to South America, a conduit for Nazi vermin, organized either by the SS old comrades or the Americans. I can’t think of a more ruthless pairing. And then there’s the Catholic Chur
ch lending a helping hand. You’d be mad to get mixed up in it. Leave it to—”
“The professionals? They are the ones smuggling them out!”
He shrugged. Touché. “Why are you so involved, anyway? Why do you want to get him out?”
“I don’t.” She shook her head. “It’s not about that.”
“What is it about?”
“I can’t really tell you but it’s not what you think. What he did was heinous,” she said quietly. “He shouldn’t be allowed to get away scot-free. You aren’t the only people to think that way.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t—”
“Think I’d be interested?” he finished her sentence for her. “Not at the top of our dance card? Why not? The Jewish wards were the first to be emptied, you can be certain of that. And what they learned from the Euthanasia Project allowed them to kill with ever greater efficiency. T4 set up the extermination camps at Sobibór, Treblinka. Hundreds of thousands of Jews died there. Millions, probably. We’re interested, all right. What about Dori? What’s she got to do with it?”
“She’s been working with Vera Atkins. Something to do with their agents being executed at a place called Natzweiler.”
Harry sat forward. “Natzweiler-Struthof?”
“You know this place?”
“Oh, yes.” Harry’s thin fingers knotted together. “Jews were taken there from Auschwitz. They were gassed, their corpses defleshed to add to the Jewish skeleton collection. What was von Stavenow’s role? Do you know?”
“Dori thought he might have been present when the agents were killed.”
“What about Leo? Where’s he in all this?”
“Nowhere, as far as I know.”
“But they want him, don’t they? This von Stavenow. You told me so yourself.”
“Yes, but Leo’s not involved, not directly . . .”
“So it’s Dori and Vera on a solo hunting trip?”
“No, they’re working with War Crimes.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about Leo. He’ll be in it somewhere.” He looked at her, trying to read her face. “There’s less and less appetite for bringing these people to justice. Too time-consuming and expensive. The new policy seems to be to use them against the Russians or let them slither away. All this War Crimes stuff is being ‘discouraged.’”
