by Philip Kerr
“Go on.”
“It was Morell’s opinion that this was tabes dorsalis, also known as locomotor ataxia.” Kersten lit a cigarette and stared grimly at the glowing tip. “A tertiary syphilitic infection of the nerves.”
“Holy Christ!” exclaimed Schellenberg. “Are you saying that the Führer has syphilis?”
“Not me, for God’s sake. Not me. Morell. And this was only a suspicion. Not a complete diagnosis. For that there would have to be blood tests and an examination of Hitler’s private parts.”
“But if it’s true?”
Kersten sighed loudly. “If it’s true, then it’s possible that, periodically at least, Germany may be led by someone suffering from acute paranoia.”
“Periodically.”
“Hitler might appear rational for most of the time, with bouts of insanity.”
“Just like Nietzsche.”
“Exactly so.”
“Except that Nietzsche was in an asylum.”
“Actually, no. He was committed to an asylum but was released into the care of his own family and eventually died at home.”
“Raving.”
“Yes. Raving.”
“That sounds familiar.”
Schellenberg collected his overnight bag off the bed and emptied the contents into the quilt. “Then let us hope that when he wrote these letters to each of the Big Three he was in a rational phase.”
“So that’s why you’re here.”
“Yes. Himmler wants you to deliver them to the appropriate government representatives.”
Kersten picked up one of the three letters and turned it over in his pudgy hands as if it had been something written in Goethe’s own handwriting. “To bear such a huge responsibility,” he muttered. “Incredible.”
Schellenberg shrugged and looked away. That Germany’s future should be entrusted to the hands of a forty-five-year-old Finnish masseur seemed no less incredible to him.
“Hewitt, I suppose, for the letter to Roosevelt,” said Kersten.
Schellenberg nodded vaguely; could any of the Big Three possibly treat such a bizarre overture with any seriousness?
“Madame de Kollontay, for the Soviets, of course.”
He liked Kersten and had the greatest respect for him as a therapist, and yet he could not help but think that this kind of back-door diplomacy—no, asylum-door diplomacy was more like it—was doomed to fail.
“I’m not sure about the British,” murmured Kersten. “I haven’t had a great deal to do with the British. Henry Denham, perhaps. Now, he is a spy, I think.”
All of which left Schellenberg angry with Himmler. What on earth was he thinking? Was Himmler any less insane than Hitler?
“I’ll ask Hewitt when I see him later this afternoon,” continued Kersten. “He’s a patient of mine, you know. His back pain provides a useful cover for our meetings.”
How dare he, thought Schellenberg. How dare Himmler charge this simple man, of limited intellectual ability, with a mission like this and describe Schellenberg’s own idea as sounding like something out of Der Pimpf ?
Schellenberg could now see no alternative. He was going to have to try again to sell Himmler on his plan to assassinate the Big Three. And perhaps there was something in Nietzsche that might help. He was no philosopher, but he remembered enough of what he had read of Nietzsche to know that Himmler would appreciate his florid tone. There was a phrase in Nietzsche’s book about morals that seemed appropriate. About how only rare superior individuals—the noble ones, the Übermenschen, yes, Himmler loved that particular word—could rise above all moral distinctions to achieve a heroic life of truly human worth. Something like that, perhaps, might help sell Himmler on his plan. And after Himmler, Hitler, too. Hitler would be easy. Himmler was the harder sell. After Himmler, Hitler would be a piece of cake.
VII
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1943,
WASHINGTON, D.C.
I PULLED THE LAST PAGE off the typewriter carriage, separated it from the carbon copy, added it to the pile of typewritten pages, and then read the report through from start to finish. Satisfied with what I had written, I stapled the sheets together and placed them in an envelope. It was just after eleven o’clock. I thought that if I took the report straight over to the White House first thing in the morning, the president might add it to his next evening’s reading. And going into the hallway I placed the envelope containing the report inside my briefcase.
A moment or two later Diana came through the front door using the key I had given her to do exactly that. She had her own place up in Chevy Chase to which I had a key, and this arrangement made us feel like a really modern couple with a healthy sex life and a pet dog. I just hadn’t gotten around to buying the pet dog yet. Mostly she came to my place because it was a little nearer the center of Washington, such as it is.
She shook out her umbrella and set it in the hall stand. She was wearing a navy blue suit with gold buttons and a white blouse inside it that was low enough to remind me of one of the reasons I was attracted to her. I was grown up enough to understand the principle behind this kind of adolescent fascination. I just didn’t know why I was still such a sucker for it. Her blond hair made her look like a minor goddess, and on it she wore a broad-brimmed hat that might have been stolen from a Catholic priest, always assuming they’d gone over to wearing pink hats instead of red ones that season. I pitied the people behind her in the movie theater. That was, if she really had been to a movie. She smelled of cigarettes and perfume and alcohol, which is a combination my nose found almost irresistible. But it hardly seemed appropriate for someone who had spent her evening with Don Ameche. Unless she really had spent her evening with Don Ameche. Which might have explained everything.
“How was the movie?” I enquired.
She took a couple of Grand Inquistor’s pins out of her hat and placed them and it on the hall table.
“You’d have hated it.”
“I don’t know. I like Gene Tierney.”
“Hell looked nice.”
“Somehow I’ve always thought it would.”
She walked into the drawing room and helped herself to a cigarette from a silver box.
“Where’s it playing?” I asked. “Maybe I’ll go and see it.”
“I told you. You’d have hated it.”
“And I said I liked Gene Tierney. So maybe I’ll go and see it.”
She lit her cigarette irritably and walked over to a chair where the Post had been tossed earlier that evening. “It’s in there somewhere,” she said.
“Actually, I know where it’s playing. I just wanted to see if you did.”
“What are you driving at?”
“Only that you don’t look or smell like someone who’s been to a movie with some girlfriends.”
“All right. I didn’t go to the movies. Satisfied?”
I smiled. “Perfectly.” I picked up my empty glass, took it into the kitchen, washed and dried it, came back into the drawing room, and put it away in the cabinet. I think I even managed to whistle a few bars of some jaunty Irish air. Diana hadn’t budged. She was still standing there, arms folded across her chest and, but for the cigarette in her well-manicured hand, she looked like the school principal awaiting an explanation. That was what impressed me. The speed with which she managed to turn things around so that I was the one who was at fault.
Diana gave me another irritated glance. “Aren’t you going to ask me who I was with?”
“No.”
“So you’re not bothered who I was with.”
“Maybe I just don’t want to know.” I hadn’t meant to start anything. I wasn’t exactly a model of fidelity myself.
“I guess that’s what bothers me the most. That you’re not bothered.” She smiled bitterly and shook her head, as if disappointed in me.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t bothered. I said I didn’t want to know. Look, it’s okay. Forget I ever mentioned it. Let’s go to bed.” I took her hand. But she took it back.
“If you cared for me, you’d at least act as if you were jealous, even if you weren’t.”
That’s the true genius of women. Most of them could give Sun Tzu an object lesson in how attack is the best form of defense. I had caught her out in a lie and already I was the one who was being made to feel I had let her down.
“I do care for you. Of course I care for you. Only I thought we were beyond acting like a couple of characters in a play by Shakespeare. Jealousy is just the pain of injured pride.”
“It always comes back to you, doesn’t it?” She shook her head. “You’re a clever man, Will, but you’re wrong. That’s not what jealousy is at all. It’s not the pain of injured pride. It’s the pain of injured love. There’s a big difference. Only, for you I think pride and love are one and the same. Because you couldn’t ever love a woman more than you love yourself.”
She leaned forward to kiss me and for a moment I thought that everything was going to be all right. But then the kiss landed, chastely on my cheek, and it was as if she were saying good-bye. The next moment she was back in the hall, collecting her umbrella, and her pins, and her hat. That was the first time, when she walked out the door, leaving the key on the hall table, that I realized I loved her.
VIII
MONDAY, OCTOBER 18, 1943,
RASTENBURG, EAST PRUSSIA
THE ROAD TOOK THEM through an area of small lakes and thick forest. It was here, in 1915, that Hindenburg had dealt the Russian army a crushing blow, killing 56,000 men and capturing 100,000 in a winter battle from which the tsar’s army never recovered. Before 1939, the area had been a favorite destination for boating enthusiasts; by 1943 there was no sign of any activity on the lakes.
Walter Schellenberg leaned back in the rear seat of the speeding open-topped, armor-plated Mercedes and shifted his gaze from the back of Oberleutnant Ulrich Wagner’s head to the tightly woven canopy of trees overhead. Even on a bright October’s afternoon like this one the forest made the road as dark as something out of the Brothers Grimm; and that protected the Wolfschanze from being seen from the air. Which was the reason the Führer had chosen to locate his Wolf’s Lair headquarters in this godforsaken place. And yet, despite the continued pretense that the area concealed nothing more important than a chemical plant, it seemed not only certain that the Allies knew of the Lair’s existence but also that their bombers had the range to attack it. As recently as October 9, 352 heavy bombers of the USAAF had struck at targets just 150 kilometers away that included the Arado plants at Anklam, the Focke Wulf airframe plant at Marienburg, and the U-boat yards at Danzig. Was it actually possible, Schellenberg asked himself, that the Allies could no more contemplate killing Hitler than Himmler could?
The Reichsführer-SS, sitting next to Schellenberg, removed his glasses and, cleaning them with a monogrammed cloth, took a deep and lusty breath of the forest air. “You can’t beat this East Prussian air,” he said.
Schellenberg smiled thinly. After a three-hour flight from Berlin, during which they had been buzzed by an RAF Mosquito and bounced around like a shuttlecock by some turbulence over Landsberg, his appreciation of East Prussian air was less than wholehearted. Thinking that he might improve the hollow feeling in his stomach if he ate something—so close to a meeting with the Führer, he didn’t dare to touch the flask of schnapps he had in his briefcase—Schellenberg removed a packet of cheese sandwiches from his coat pocket and offered one to Himmler, who seemed on the verge of taking it, then thought better of it. Schellenberg had to look away for a moment for fear the Reichsführer would see him smiling and know that he was recalling an occasion, years before, during the invasion of Poland, when Himmler and Wolff, having helped themselves to several of Schellenberg’s sandwiches, had discovered, too late, that they were moldy. His fledgling career in the SD had almost ended right then and there as, between roadside retches, Himmler and his aide had accused the junior officer of trying to poison them.
Himmler’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know why you’re eating those now,” he said. “There will be lunch at the Wolfschanze.”
“Perhaps, but I’m always too nervous to eat when I’m with the Führer.”
“I can understand that,” conceded Himmler. “It’s quite a thing to sit beside the most remarkable man in the world. It’s easy to forget something as mundane as food when you’re listening to the Führer.”
Schellenberg might have added that his own appetite was also curbed by the Führer’s revolting table manners, for unlike most people, who lifted their cutlery to their mouths, the Führer kept the arm which held his spoon or fork flat on the table and brought his mouth down to his plate. He even drank tea from a saucer, like a dog.
“I need to pee,” said Himmler. “Stop the car.”
The big Mercedes drew to the side of the road, and the car following behind, carrying Himmler’s secretary, Dr. Brandt, and his adjutant, von Dem Bach, drew up alongside.
“Is anything the matter, Herr Reichsführer?” Brandt enquired of his boss, who was already marching through the trees and fiddling with the fly buttons of his riding breeches.
“Nothing’s the matter,” said Himmler. “I need to pee, that’s all.”
Schellenberg stepped out of the car, lit a cigarette, and then offered one to von Dem Bach’s aide.
“Where are you from, Oberleutnant?” he asked, walking in vaguely the same direction as Himmler.
“From Bonn, sir,” said Wagner.
“Oh? I was at Bonn University.”
“Really, sir? I didn’t know.” Von Dem Bach’s aide took a long drag on his cigarette. “I was at Ludwig-Maximilians University, in Munich.”
“And you studied law, I suppose.”
“Yes, sir, how did you know?”
Schellenberg smiled. “Same as me. I wanted to be a lawyer for one of those big companies in the Ruhr. I suppose I rather fancied myself as a big-shot industrialist. Instead I was recruited into the SD by two of my professors. The SD has been my life. I was in the SD before I was even a party member.”
They came closer to Himmler, who seemed to be having a problem undoing his last fly button, and Schellenberg turned back to the car, with Wagner following.
The gunshot, almost deafening in the woods, felled Oberleutnant Wagner as if his bones had turned to jelly. Instinctively Schellenberg took one pace away and then another as Himmler advanced on Wagner. Staring down at his victim with forensic interest, his chinless face trembled with a mixture of horror and excitement. To Schellenberg’s disgust, the Walther PPK in the Reichsführer’s hand was made of gold, and as Himmler held it at arm’s length once again to deliver the coup de grâce, he could see Himmler’s name inscribed on the slide.
“I took no pleasure in that,” Himmler said. “But he betrayed me. He betrayed you, Walter.”
Almost casually, Brandt and von Dem Bach walked over to inspect Wagner’s body. Himmler started to holster his weapon. “I took no pleasure in that,” he repeated. “But it had to be done.”
“Wait, Herr Reichsführer,” Schellenberg called out, for it was plain Himmler was trying to holster a weapon that was cocked and ready to fire. He took hold of Himmler’s trembling, clammy hand and removed the pistol from his grip. “You need to lower your hammer—thus, sir.” And holding his thumb over the hammer, Schellenberg squeezed the trigger lightly and then eased the hammer forward against the firing pin, before working the safety catch. “To make your pistol safe. Otherwise you might blow your toe off, sir. I’ve seen it happen.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Thank you, Schellenberg.” Himmler swallowed uncomfortably. “I never shot anyone before.”
“No, Herr Reichsführer,” said Schellenberg. “It’s not a pleasant thing to have to do.”
He glanced down at Wagner, shook his head, and lit another cigarette, reflecting that there were many worse ways to get it if you had been stupid enough to incur the wrath of Heinrich Himmler. When you had seen Russian POWs doing hard labor in the quarry at Mauthausen you kn
ew that for a fact. Following the attempt on Schellenberg’s life in Himmler’s private plane, a discreet investigation had revealed Ulrich Wagner had been the only one who could have telephoned Hoffmann at Tempelhof Airport and alerted him that there was something in Schellenberg’s briefcase that had a bearing on the secret peace negotiations being conducted by Felix Kersten. As soon as Wagner had seen the Swedish currency on the cashier’s desk in the Ministry of the Interior, he would have known Schellenberg’s destination. And then there was the fact that before joining Himmler’s personal staff, Wagner had worked in Munich for the Criminal Police Council at a time when the senior police counselor had been Heinrich Müller, now chief of the Gestapo. It seemed that Ulrich Wagner had been Müller’s spy on Himmler’s personal staff for years. Not that there was any real proof of Müller’s direct involvement. Besides, Himmler had no wish to bring formal charges against the Gestapo chief; that would be to risk exposing the complete history of Kersten’s peace negotiations, about which the Führer was, perhaps, still unaware.
“What shall we do with the body?” asked Brandt.
“Leave it,” said Himmler. “Let the beasts of the forest have him. We shall see if Müller’s Gestapo is equal to the task of finding him here.”
“So close to the Wolfschanze?” Schellenberg asked. “It’s probably the last place they’ll think of looking.”
“So much the better,” sneered Himmler, and led the way back to the car.
They drove on and reached a turnpike barrier across the road. It was manned by four SS men. All four recognized the Reichsführer but went through the motions of checking his identity, asking for SS paybooks and Führer visitor chits. Their papers were examined again at a second checkpoint, and the duty officer in the guardhouse telephoned ahead and then told Himmler that his party would be met by the Führer’s ADC at the Tea House. Waving the car through into Security Zone 2, the officer smiled politely and administered his usual warning before giving the Hitler salute.
“If your car breaks down, sound the horn and we’ll come and get you. Above all else, stay with the car and don’t ever leave the road. This whole area is mined and observed by hidden marksmen who have strict orders to shoot anyone who strays from the road.”
