by Philip Kerr
“So how does it work? Tell me.”
But I could not. After the wine and the brandy, it was beyond my powers of speech to explain to her the sense of foreboding I had about seeing Harold Hennig again. For her to have understood how I felt about Hennig it would probably have been necessary for her to have returned with me to 1938 and seen poor Captain von Frisch’s battered body lying in a pool of blood and urine on a cell floor. Looking back on it now I might have said it was like that picture by Pieter Bruegel popularly known as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: I imagined an ordinary day in Königsberg—if such a thing was even possible; Irmela and me walking by the sea, hand in hand, enjoying the view and looking at the ships with innocent smiles on our windswept faces, but as oblivious to what is really going on in the picture as Bruegel’s plowman or the lumpish shepherd staring up at the now empty gray sky. Meanwhile, somewhere in the corner of the canvas a tragedy unfolds, unnoticed by almost everyone. Hubris knocks us from the sky and we are both drowned in the freezing northern sea.
That’s the thing about blackmail. You don’t understand how it could ever happen to you until it does.
—
Winter came early that year. Snow filled the gray December air like fragments of torn-up hope as the Russians tightened their cold, iron grip on the miserable, beleaguered city. Water froze in the bedroom ewers and condensation became ice on the inside of windowpanes. Some mornings I woke up and the bottom of the iron bedstead I shared with Irmela looked like the edge of the roof outside, there were so many icicles hanging off it. Defeat was staring us in the face like the inscription on a new headstone. Christmas came and went, the thermometer dropped to an unheard-of level and I more or less forgot about Captain Harold Hennig. Matters affecting our survival demanded more attention. Fuel and food ran short, as did ammunition and patience. The general opinion was that we could last for another three or four more months at most. Unfortunately, this opinion was not shared by the great optimist who had quit his wolf’s lair in Rastenburg and was now safely back in Berlin. But Irmela and I had other things on our minds than mere survival, not least the fact that she was pregnant. I was delighted, and when she saw my own reaction so was Irmela. I promised, faithfully, that if by some miracle I survived the war I would divorce my wife in Berlin and marry her; and if I didn’t survive, then something of me might, which would be some consolation at least for a life cut short, if not tragically—I could hardly claim that—then for a life that had been cut short of meaning. Yes, that was how I thought about the prospect of having finally fathered a child. Something of me would remain after the war. Which is all part of the butt-fuck that is life’s grotesque comedy.
Then, one day in late January, and quite out of the blue, Captain Hennig arrived in a government car with an order for me to report to Gauleiter Koch on his estate in Friedrichsberg and neither I nor my senior officers in the FHO had any option but to comply since the order was signed by Erich Koch himself. Not that I was in any way indispensable to my superiors. Only the most dimwitted intelligence officer could have failed to notice that the Russians were winning. But no one at FHO HQ ever looked at me the same way again; it was assumed among my fellow officers, not unreasonably, that I was another of Koch’s larval spies.
We drove west out of the city, on the Holsteiner Damm, along the northern shore of the Pregel River and, after about seven miles, where the black river flowed into the even blacker Vistula Lagoon, we saw the house, which bordered one or two other palaces of lesser grandeur. Hennig had not told me why I had been summoned there by the gauleiter, about that he remained infuriatingly silent, but usefully he did explain that the house had been built by King Frederick III of Prussia in 1690 as a lodge for elk hunting, although as soon as I caught my first sight of it I formed the conclusion that a place of that size might more plausibly have been used as the base for a yearlong expedition to hunt woolly mammoths or saber-toothed tigers. Prince Bismarck would have scorned the place as too grand and, perhaps, too Prussian, but judging by the pretensions of Gross Friedrichsberg, I expect it was just right for the eldest son of Frederick the Great—who must have been justifiably worried how else he was going to live up to the enormous reputation of his father—and Erich Koch, of course. Given that the place was the size of Potsdamer Platz station, I imagine Koch must have thought it was the perfect house for a former railway employee like him.
Immediately prior to my leaving FHO headquarters with Hennig I’d been told that the Schloss Gross Friedrichsberg, as it was known to all who worked there—and it was indeed a huge estate, being several hundred hectares—was now owned by the East Prussia Land Company, lest there be any suggestion that Koch was enriching himself at the expense of the German people; the fact that Koch was owner of the East Prussia Land Company was probably just an unfortunate coincidence.
An immaculate butler ushered us through the front door and straight into the castle library, where Koch was waiting beside a coal fire that could have powered a class 52 steam locomotive for the DRG. To be fair, it was a very large room and it probably needed a big blaze in the grate to prevent the glacier ice from encroaching past the farthest sections of the bookshelves. The gauleiter was seated in a Louis XV–style gilt wingback chair that was as tall as a giraffe and only served to make him even smaller than he certainly was. With his toothbrush mustache and smart party tunic, Koch looked like a ration-book Adolf Hitler, and meeting him in the flesh, it was difficult to take seriously his very public assertions in the Völkischer Beobachter that the lowliest German worker was racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than any Russian. I’d seen smaller Nazis but only in the Hitler Youth. And he looked about as racially valuable as the onanistic contents of a schoolboy’s handkerchief. He stood up but not noticeably and then we saluted each other in the time-honored way.
“Thank you for driving out here,” he said.
I shrugged and looked at Hennig. “Hennig did the driving, sir. I just admired the view. It’s a nice place you have here.”
Koch smiled sweetly. “No. It’s not mine, you know. Would that it were. The East Prussia Land Company owns this lovely house. I just rent it from them. God knows why. These old Prussian houses cost a fortune to heat in winter, you know. I’ll probably bankrupt myself merely trying to keep this place warm.” Koch waved at a drinks tray. “Would you like a drink, Captain Gunther?”
“I’ve not often been heard to say no to a glass of schnapps,” I said. “And it’s Lieutenant Gunther now.”
“Yes, of course, you had a difference of opinion with Dr. Goebbels, didn’t you?”
“I was wrong about something. Made a mistake. I’m probably quite lucky to be a lieutenant, sir.”
“That’s all right.” Koch grinned and poured us a glass of schnapps. “The doctor and I have never exactly seen things eye to eye. Prior to my appointment as the East Prussian governor I’m afraid he rather suspected me of having been implicated in the publication of a newspaper article that made fun of his physical handicaps.”
There was only one handicap that I recalled, but it seemed foolish to disagree when all I really wanted was to get out of that place as soon as possible. The last thing I wanted was to be drawn into a twilight rivalry between these two little men. I tasted the schnapps, which was enough to promote an emaciated smile.
“How would you like to be a captain again?”
At that stage in the war, it was better to be the lowliest kind of officer there was. Being a general seemed like a responsibility that no one would have wished for. But I shrugged with an indifference that I felt could reasonably have been interpreted as modesty. Koch wasn’t concerned with my feelings in the matter, however, and had already assumed that, like him, I was keen to advance in life and to profit wherever and whenever possible, and probably however, too.
“And you will be,” he said. “I need only call your commanding officer, General Lasch, to make that happen.”
/>
“It’s kind of you. But I wouldn’t trouble yourself on my behalf. I’ve long ceased to believe that my future lies in the army.”
“Oh, it’s no trouble. I’m always glad to help someone who’s fallen foul of Joey the Crip. Isn’t that so, Harold?”
“Yes, sir,” said Captain Hennig. “We don’t like the doctor very much.”
“Harold tells me that you were a policeman in Berlin before the war. A commissar, no less.”
I finished the schnapps and let him pour me another, the way I like it, right to the brim, before putting that one down the tube, too.
“That’s right.” I was pleased to change the subject. Or so I thought. “But my maternal grandparents were from Königsberg. I used to visit here a lot when I was a boy. I always liked coming to the old Prussian capital. You might almost say that for me this is a home from home.”
“I feel much the same. I’m from Elberfeld, near Wuppertal. But this is where my heart now lies. In East Prussia. I love it out here.”
I glanced around the library. All those books were making it easy for me to understand why he had such a foolish, sentimental attachment to the place. Books are precious. They can almost make you feel at home. In any other home but that one they’d have been used as fuel.
“When you came here as a boy, I bet you visited the old Amber Museum.”
“Oh, yes sir. Prussian gold, they used to call it.”
“Indeed. The world’s major source of amber is the Samland. And Palmnicken, in particular. We’ve had Jews—mostly women—surface mining the stuff for the last few years. Tell me, do you like amber?”
I didn’t, as it happened. To me, amber had always looked like nature’s plastic, not in the least bit precious and no more than a curiosity at best. I couldn’t ever understand why some people seemed to prize the stuff so highly. But since I felt we were now, perhaps, finally coming to the point of my being there, I nodded politely and said, “Yes, I suppose so. I never really thought much about the stuff.”
“What else do you know about it?”
“Only that it’s expensive. Which is where I stop knowing about anything very much. There’s usually a tight hand brake on my thinking when there’s a lot of money involved.”
“As there is for everyone these days. We’re all of us having to make sacrifices in this terrible war that was forced upon us by our ideological enemies. But Harold tells me that you are not without diversions in Königsberg. That there is a lovely girl in the naval auxiliary you’ve been seeing. What’s her name?”
“Irmela. Irmela Schaper.”
“Good. I’m glad about that. A soldier should always have a sweetheart. Don’t you agree, Harold?”
“I do indeed, sir. Especially now that I’ve seen the girl. She’s as sweet as a sweetheart gets.”
“Before she stops being a sweetheart and becomes a wife, eh?”
Koch laughed at his own joke. But it was too near to being true for me to join him in a smile.
He went over to a desk as big as a Tiger tank and pulled open an enormous drawer. “Come over here, Captain,” he said. “Come and see.”
The drawer was full of amber objects—necklaces, brooches, earrings, cigarette holders, animal carvings; it looked like one of the many market stalls near the museum I’d seen when I was a boy.
“Please, pick something out for your sweetheart.”
“I couldn’t, sir. Really, it’s very kind of you, but—”
“Nonsense,” said Koch. “Whatever you think she’d like. A nice necklace, or perhaps a brooch. Or for yourself, if that’s what you’d really prefer. Harold has a very handsome antique cigarette case. Not to mention a beautiful pair of cuff links that were originally made for Arthur Schopenhauer.”
I’d have much preferred to have taken nothing; the idea of being in Koch’s debt was horrible to me, especially now that I’d learned how some of the stuff was mined. And I couldn’t help but think that much of what I was looking at had been stolen from someone else—from Jews, probably. But finally I could see I had no choice in the matter. I picked up a gold necklace that contained a large teardrop piece of amber and, holding it up in front of my eyes, let the firelight illuminate the perfectly preserved insect it contained.
“Oh yes,” said Koch. “Good choice. That’s a Wilhelmine piece from before the Great War. Fascinating, isn’t it? The way an insect from thousands of years ago should have become trapped by some sticky tree resin which then fossilized.”
“Perhaps it will remind her of me,” I said.
Koch took the necklace from my hand, wrapped it in a sheet of tissue paper from the same drawer like a local shopkeeper—evidently he’d done this kind of thing before—and then placed the object in my tunic pocket, as if he would brook no argument against his gift.
“Do you feel trapped, Captain Gunther?” he asked. “Like that insect?”
“A little, sometimes,” I said carefully. I hadn’t forgotten Hennig’s words of caution about defeatism and the gauleiter’s predilection for hanging defeatists from the city’s lampposts. “Who doesn’t? But I’m sure it’s just temporary, sir. We’ll break out of this encirclement before very long. Everyone thinks so.”
“Exactly. Before the light there must first be the darkness. Is it not so? And now let me show you something else.”
Koch led the way out of the library and into the hall, which seemed to have more antlers on display than a Saxon deer park—not to mention the whole arsenal of musketry that had probably put them there. As we walked across a marble checkerboard floor I felt as if I were a pawn about to make a move with which I strongly disagreed. I ought to have walked through the front door and all the way back to Paradeplatz. Instead I followed Koch to a door where a suit of Gothic armor stared at me with slit-eyed, steely disapproval. I should have been used to that, having once worked for General Heydrich.
We went down two flights to the basement and into an enormous darkened room where he struggled to find the light switch.
“Here, sir,” said Hennig, “let me.”
A few seconds later I was looking at a series of decorative panels, each of them half a meter in height, that were arranged along the room’s walls. Some of these panels had imperial crowns and a large letter R on them, while others depicted hunting scenes; there were also ornate carvings—entwined imperial eagles, classical warriors, more imperial crowns, and mermen holding dolphins; and all of them made of amber. Frankly, there was a little too much amber in there for my taste; about a ton of the stuff. It was like being inside an enormous beer bottle.
“Tell me, Captain Gunther, have you heard of the Amber Room?”
“No, sir.”
“Really? The famous Amber Room that was a gift from King Frederick William the First to his then ally, Tsar Peter the Great?”
I shrugged, hardly caring if Erich Koch thought me ignorant. I thought he was an outrageous crook who probably deserved to hang, and his opinion on anything—least of all my knowledge of amber and Russian history—mattered not in the least.
“Russians weren’t so bad then, I guess,” I said.
“That was before Communism,” said Koch, as if I were the one German who might have forgotten 1917.
“Yes, it was.”
“Well then, let’s see. In 1701 Peter installed these magnificent panels in a special room in the Catherine Palace near present-day Leningrad, where they stayed until we liberated them a few years ago and brought them here to Gross Friedrichsberg. When it was still at the palace, the room was often described as the Eighth Wonder of the World.”
I tried to look impressed, although my own opinion was that this wide-eyed, lazy description of the Amber Room must have been given by people who didn’t get out very much. I was getting a little tired of Koch’s reverence for the orange stuff, so I decided to hurry things along.
“Sir, mig
ht I ask what all this has to do with me?”
“You’re going to help us get these priceless artifacts back to Berlin, where they belong.”
“Me? How? I don’t understand.”
“Don’t worry,” said Koch. “We weren’t thinking of making you hide them under your coat, Captain. No, we had something else in mind. Didn’t we, Harold? Something a little more sophisticated.”
“We’re going to load them on a refugee ship that’s due to leave the port of Gotenhafen in a few days’ time,” said Hennig. “The MS Wilhelm Gustloff. As you probably know, many of those ships are frequently targets for Russian submarines from the Baltic fleet operating out of the Finnish port of Hangoe. We thought it might help to guarantee the safety of both passengers and panels if the Russian navy was informed that one of their most important national treasures—which we may have to trade back one day—is on board that same ship.”
“They might be rather less inclined to sink it,” said Koch, as if I might have failed to understand.
“Informed? How? By postcard? Or would you like me to drive to the front and give them a letter?”
Hennig smiled. “Well, that would be one way. But we were rather hoping you might persuade that sweetheart of yours—the little lightning maid—to put out an unencrypted signal on an open frequency informing the Russians, indirectly, of the presence of the Amber Room on board the Wilhelm Gustloff.”
“Really,” said Koch, “when you stop and think about it, this would be to the advantage of everyone.”
“Persuade her? How? What am I supposed to tell her?”
“Only what we’ve told you.”
“Need I remind you both that putting out a signal without encoding it using a Scherbius Enigma machine would be a court-martial offense? For which she could easily be shot as a spy. Or worse. You’re asking her to break the very first rule of being a signals auxiliary.”
“No, no, no,” said Koch. “My authority as Prussian gauleiter supersedes all local military and naval codes and protocols. There would be no chance of this even getting near a court-martial.”
