The Nero Decree

by Greg Williams

  As Dieter was carried from the back of the vehicle he felt a cool breeze on his face and saw the familiar building looming above his stretcher. The air in the ambulance had been fetid but, strangely, he could smell blossoms in the air now. Could he possibly be in Berlin? And was that rustling noise leaves blowing in the wind? The legions of civilians desperate for firewood last winter hadn’t killed off every bit of flora in the city. Even in 1945 there would be a spring.

  He remembered back to when he had last been in a vehicle. They had been driving west for what felt like days. The three of them. Lehman, with his terrible flatulence, was at the wheel. Ostermann sat in the back, being obsequious. Dieter had had the orders only a month before, once the Russians had rolled across the Baltic states. After Bucharest fell in mid-February, rumors were rife that Vienna was next. Cities and regions began to crumble, and with them the state’s darkest secrets.

  Dieter had been given a Kübelwagen and a couple of flunkeys and told that no one was to know their mission. Officially they didn’t exist. They drove clear across Poland in one mad dash, before zigzagging back through that cursed country from Majdanek to Auschwitz. The Ivans were never that far behind; he would look in the rearview mirror some nights and see the sky behind him illuminated with flares.

  After they had collected the information from each camp they would leave their windows open to drive the stench from the vehicle as it strained along the buckled back roads. The noise from the air-cooled engine in the back meant that their ears rang for hours even after they’d come to a halt. They kept moving at night, taking turns to drive.

  The briefcase rested on his lap at all times. He had locked and chained it to his wrist. He would return the microfilm to the propaganda ministry for “management,” as his orders had been phrased, at the earliest opportunity, or he would die in the attempt. They rarely stopped, but one night, as they were driving through dense forest toward Frankfurt an der Oder, he had opened a window and smelled the freshness of the vegetation. He was worn-out and even the fresh air pouring through the window wasn’t enough to rouse him. He needed to rest, even if it was for a few hours.

  Then he saw it: a small farmhouse nestled at the top of a lane in a clearing. In the next three minutes there would be a frantic encounter with a farmer that Dieter barely recalled. He had noticed that the man was holding something in his right hand. It was hard and metallic. The farmer had thrown down his pitchfork in anger. Dieter began to raise his pistol, but he knew that he had seen the danger too late.

  Everything went white. It was like the sun had exploded.

  He was inside now—voices all around him. Orderlies, doctors, nurses, patients babbling. He was catching fragments of conversation, a different tempo and kinds of words to the military imperatives and banter he had delivered and been subject to for the last decade. Ten years of service. Of rank climbing and order following, of score settling, ass licking, and backstabbing. He had been a good soldier. He believed in the cause. He believed in the Führer. He believed in wronging Versailles’s injustices to the fatherland. He loathed communism. The Soviets could do what they liked when they arrived; his heart would always beat with a burning belief in the rightness of the cause and what he had done to further it.

  He was wheeled to a large ward with high windows covered in protective tape that contained dozens of beds. The room housed injured military personnel as well as civilians. The difference between the patients was age—the military were the sons of the civilians. There were a couple of quizzical looks in his direction, but most of the men just lay still, silently contemplating their injuries.

  He was rolled into a bed—Christ, it hurt—and left to stare at the ceiling. He shifted himself so that he could at least get a view of the nurses as they passed. Moments later he fell asleep.

  He was woken by two men standing above him. Wolfgang Pfeiffer and Ulrich Vogt. His friends! Both of them Sturmbannführer. They had not abandoned him. They would see this thing through together.

  “The doctor said that he’s doing well,” Pfeiffer said.

  “He’s a tough old bastard,” replied Vogt. “It will take more than a few burns to stop him.”

  Yes, yes, Dieter thought. I am a tough old bastard.

  Suddenly it was as if thunder had boomed overhead, shocking him with its power.

  Thomas! Or Johann, as he now called himself.

  Good God! Why hadn’t this occurred to him sooner? When they were bringing him to the bed why had he not recalled that Johann had intended to inject him with some poison? Was it lost to him that his half brother had whispered in the darkness in that disgusting field hospital that he was revenging Nicolas? That he had killed Ostermann?

  He tried to sit up and signal for help.

  “Look!” Pfeiffer said. “He’s moving!”

  The two men leaned over Dieter.

  “Hello, old friend,” Vogt said. “Glad to have you back in Berlin.”

  “Welcome home, Dieter,” Pfeiffer said, striking the bed with excitement. “We knew you’d make it back safely.”

  “I’d better let a nurse know,” Vogt said, disappearing.

  Dieter beckoned Pfeiffer with his head. Pfeiffer moved in close, examining Dieter’s face for clues. The injured man moved his lips—they were trembling. Opening his jaw was acutely painful.

  “What is it, Dieter?” Pfeiffer asked, realizing that he was being told something. Dieter made a slight gurgling sound before finding that he was able to produce a noise that was closer to speech.

  “You should rest, Dieter,” Pfeiffer said.

  Dieter opened his mouth again.

  “Jo…,” he said, his voice fragile and faint.

  “Try again,” Pfeiffer said, realizing the urgency of what Dieter was trying to communicate.

  “Johann…”

  “Johann,” Pfeiffer repeated.

  Dieter nodded, exhausted but pleased.

  “Who is Johann?” Pfeiffer asked. “Someone in your unit?”

  Dieter shook his head. He tried to speak again, but his mouth was dry. He couldn’t form the words. Dieter rested for a moment. He would try again.

  “Sch…,” he started, but Pfeiffer hadn’t heard. Vogt had returned with a nurse.

  “Gentlemen, please,” the middle-aged woman said, pushing past Pfeiffer. “The patient needs to rest.”

  Dieter summoned all his energy, and opened his mouth again. He would spit it out this time. He would make “Johann” pay.

  “Uuuugh…”

  “He’s in a lot of pain,” the nurse said, examining Dieter’s file, which was attached to a clipboard. She wasn’t even looking at Dieter.

  “Schhhhuuu…,” Dieter slurred.

  “What did he say?” Pfeiffer asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Vogt replied.

  Dieter closed his eyes, trying to regain his strength. He thought about his half brother. Where had he been all this time?

  A couple of years after Johann’s disappearance, once Dieter had developed more influence he had friends in the Party investigate the archives and the public records. Nothing. The trail stopped in June 1934. There were records for the dead and those packed away to camps, so why nothing for Thomas Meier? It made absolutely no sense. He had not withdrawn a library book since 1934, had finished school the day after Nicolas was taken away, and had no military records.

  The state was fastidious about recording every aspect of an individual’s life. It was unthinkable that a person could just remove himself from the bureaucratic apparatus. There was no record of Thomas’s death or his whereabouts. And not knowing was what drove Dieter over the next decade, for he knew that Thomas had the key, and with it the riches.

  He could hear Pfeiffer and Vogt talking. He tried, once again, to tell them about Johann. They must hunt him down at the field hospital and bring him to Prinz-Albrecht-Straße.

  He tried to move his mouth, but his lips weren’t doing what he asked.

  “His war is over, anyway,” Pfeiffer sai
d. “He won’t be going back to the front.”

  “The front is coming to him,” Vogt replied. “He doesn’t need to leave his bed. What was he doing with only a couple of junior officers near the Oder, anyway?”

  “You didn’t hear?” Pfeiffer said. “A major operation. Clandestine. Huge problem. Everyone’s scrambling to fix it. Someone has taken…”

  Dieter kept running over the details as best as he could remember them. Their mission had been to collect the film and enforce the Führer’s executive order. It had gone wrong.… It had gone so terribly wrong.… There was to be a meeting at a farmhouse with another group from the Reich Main Security Office.… My God… Where was the briefcase? Who had the briefcase? His heart skipped, as if it had received a jolt. If central command had discovered it was missing he would surely be shot. Thousands and thousands of records… The whole business… If it were to fall into enemy hands…

  He had heard Ostermann saying that he was placing the briefcase under his bed. But Ostermann was dead. And that dolt Lehman couldn’t be trusted to tie up his own bootlaces. There had been someone else in the room that night who could have come across it… Dieter began to lose consciousness as the figures above him began to blur and turn to shadows. Before his mind went into neutral he had a singular realization: To find the briefcase he must find the man who was most likely to have it. The man who had attempted to kill him and had murdered Ostermann: He would hunt down his half brother, the traitor Thomas Meier.

  Dieter forced himself to sit up, rising so dramatically that the nurse dropped the clipboard on his chest.

  Of course.

  Through a narcotic haze, Dieter grabbed the clipboard and rifled through the pages, fighting the pain of his injuries.

  There it was in black ink—a doctor’s notes in a careful hand that he recognized.

  Dieter slammed his index finger onto the paperwork, prompting Pfeiffer and Vogt to lean forward and examine what Dieter was gesturing to. There, before them, was the name “Johann Schultz.”

  “Murder,” Dieter croaked, his finger still resting on his half brother’s name.

  8

  Anja, like many Berliners, went to bed with the radio semiaudible: The broadcast would be interrupted with news of an impending attack. It came an hour after she had fallen into an uneasy slumber. The music faded and a staccato voice snapped at her. The British planes were over Hanover: They had no more than twenty minutes to reach the shelter.

  For the first time that day she had felt warm, and now she was pulling her clothes over her nightdress in the freezing room, her breath visible as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She called to Nadine to ready herself. The wail of the sirens would begin soon.

  Nadine was already at the front door of the apartment when Anja came out of her room. Their routine was well practiced: They left a bag with basic provisions—a flashlight, some food, their Volksgasmasken (she had found the money for the more expensive VM40 version), a flask of water, some candles and matches—by the front door and collected it on their way out. Nadine hugged Flöhchen and instructed him to hide. The last thing Anja did before they left—even in winter—was to open all the windows to protect them from the blasts.

  In the early days of the war there had been a sort of novelty about the city being in total darkness at night. Luminous arrows had been painted on the walls, directing people to the nearest air-raid shelters. Anja remembered looking up and wondering at the stars: She had never seen the night sky above the city in such a way, masked as it usually was by the dirty haze of streetlights.

  Early on she had detected a we’re-all-in-this-together spirit—even from those who, like her, had dreaded being at war ever since she had first heard the ominous news of the German attack on Poland in September 1939. She remembered trying hard to imagine that it wasn’t true, that somehow the conflict would be resolved and quickly forgotten. But then, two days later, she had been doing some sewing and listening to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 1 on the radio when the broadcast had been interrupted with an announcement that Germany was at war with England. The news was being blared over loudspeakers in the street. Suddenly a deep dread, worse than anything she had felt before, filled every part of Anja’s being. The air-raid sirens that she had heard on September 1, the ration cards, the piles of sand that had suddenly appeared on the street with burlap sacks that were to be filled by local residents, the appointment of a detested Blockwart—a functionary who served as the eyes and ears of the Party on every block.

  In the years of darkness—literal and figurative—since then, the bombing raids from the west had become incessant. It now felt inconceivable that, fewer than five years before, Hitler had returned from Paris and was driven from Anhalter station to the Reich Chancellery on a carpet of flowers. Anja had seen it with her own eyes, one of many to skulk, uncheering, at the back of the crowd. They were there just to bear witness. Nowadays it was more likely that those Berliners would scoop up the flowers from the road and make soup from them.

  As Anja and Nadine hurried through the darkness, they were directed by wardens toward what they called the “railway bunker” on the corner of Albrechtstraße and Reinhardstraße. It was a Hochbunker, a five-story structure of thick concrete built aboveground—a testament to Berlin’s sandy soil, which made deep excavation difficult. Sometimes they would head for the U-Bahn station at Friedrichstraße.

  Nadine hugged Anja’s elbow as the two of them progressed through the darkness, aware that other people were close by but not entirely sure of their whereabouts. Anja had made this journey so many times that she knew every inch of the pavement, every broken curbstone, the edge of each building wall. She could make this journey in daytime with her eyes closed, if she needed to.

  They heard the first boom of explosions above the sound of the sirens and the flak coming from the antiaircraft towers—one at the Zoo, the other on Friedenstraße—as they filed through the doorway, which had been widened to allow a greater flow of people. The flak towers were supposed to be manned by girls not much older than Nadine now. Anja glanced up at the formidable building that had been constructed to much fanfare at the beginning of the war. What a tomb it would make: a poured-concrete sarcophagus. The building famously had walls that were more than two meters thick and a reinforced concrete roof, which was designed to survive—and had survived—a direct hit. There were a series of rooms, perhaps forty of them, each about ten meters square equipped with wooden benches for people to sit. Many were already lying on the floor in makeshift beds; others were squatting on suitcases that had been filled with essentials and mementos in case they were unable to return home.

  There were lamps on the walls of each room that had been fitted with blue bulbs. The light was eerie: The inhabitants—elderly people, women with young children, soldiers on leave, guest workers from France, Holland, Italy, and Yugoslavia—were made to look spectral. Anja and Nadine walked through several rooms before finding a place to sit next to a woman with two young children, who, exhausted, were curled up on the bench beside her. The place was stifling. There were no windows—instead, overhead fans were supposed to extract the humid air. Condensation dripped from the ceiling onto those below.

  “Are you hungry?” Anja asked Nadine once they were settled, raising her voice above the droning of the ventilation system. The girl shook her head.

  “I’m worried about Flöhchen.”

  “He’s underneath the sofa,” Anja said. “He’ll be fine.”

  Nadine looked around—even children were self-conscious enough to know that they must watch their words—and whispered, “Do you think Onkel Johann will come?”

  Anja smiled in the gloom and moved a strand of hair that had fallen over the girl’s face.

  “When can we leave?” Nadine persisted.

  “When Onkel comes.”

  Nadine’s face lit up.

  “When, Auntie, when?”

  “Soon, I hope. He will try. Now shush. Let’s talk about this later.”
>
  Anja knew that Johann would do his best to reach them, but she wondered if it was really possible for him to travel—what was it?—the eighty or one hundred kilometers to Berlin from where she had last known he was.

  All the same, she had made it her business to find out if the trains were still running from the main stations. Some were too badly damaged by the bombing to be safe to operate. She had heard that there were trains running from the central station, Lehrter Bahnhof. For the time being it was still operating, but in order to prevent mass flight from the city only those with the proper documentation were allowed to travel. Anja had no idea how she might get the right papers; they were only available to those with Party connections.

  An incendiary device exploded only a few streets away, shaking the building. The woman next to them on the bench was hugging her children tight as if by her own strength of will she could prevent them from being harmed.

  Anja looked at Nadine and realized that if she had to, she would carry the girl to the American lines.

  “We will leave when the time is right,” Anja said to her niece quietly.

  Johann had made her promise that she would flee the city even if he was unable to reach her. As much as it pained her, she would do what she needed to get Nadine away from Berlin once the final battle had begun. They would not be trapped amid the inevitable horror.

  That night, with death falling again from the sky, Anja knew what it was like to be utterly powerless. But she determined one thing: She would protect her niece with every ounce of strength and cunning she had left—she would find meaning and purpose amid the chaos.