by Philip Kerr
“There are going to be as many as ten thousand people on that ship, Gunther,” said Hennig. “Civilians. Women and children. Wounded German soldiers. The Russians might not care for them. But they would never attack if they thought by doing so they’d be destroying the famous Amber Room.”
“Is it them you’re worried about?” I asked. “Or these priceless bits of tree resin?”
“That’s a little unfair,” said Hennig. “This is, by any definition of the word, a great historical treasure.”
“Then it beats me why you don’t just give an order to our Marine War Office commanders in Kiel and have them put out a signal.”
“For the simple reason that they’re in Kiel,” said Koch, “and more than seven hundred and fifty kilometers away from my authority.”
“Besides,” added Hennig, “if the Russians were to intercept an unencrypted naval communication from Kiel they’d assume it was some kind of trap. On the other hand if it comes from a small and, let’s face it, unimportant naval station here in Königsberg, they’ll conclude it’s not been authorized by the Marine War Office and then be inclined to take it more seriously. That the person sending the message is someone desperate to prevent the loss of thousands of lives.”
“And what happens if this cultural blackmail of yours doesn’t work? What if the Russians aren’t as keen on amber as you are, sir? What if they’re not interested in preserving a national treasure? Let’s face it, they haven’t shown a great deal of care for anything else in this damn war. Haven’t you heard of Stalin’s math? If there are ten Russians and one German left alive at the end of this war he will consider it to have been won. They now own the international patent on scorched earth.”
“Nonsense,” said Koch. “Of course they don’t want to lose the Amber Room. It was the fucking Ivans who disassembled it for transport to some Siberian shithole in the first place. They must think it’s valuable. Our men got there only just in time to prevent that and shipped it back here to Königsberg instead.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry gentlemen. But I won’t do it.”
“What the fuck do you mean, you won’t do it?” said Captain Hennig.
“I won’t. It’s a monstrous thing to ask of a girl like that.”
“Says who? You? Fuck you, Gunther. This isn’t just any beer cellar Fritz who’s asking you for a favor, this is the governor of East Prussia.”
“She’s only twenty-three years old, for Christ’s sake. You can’t ask a girl like that to disobey strict orders and take a risk not just with her own life but with the lives of thousands of people.”
“You dumb idiot,” said Hennig. “Call yourself an intelligence officer? I’ve seen scum in my toilet that’s more intelligent than you.”
“It’s all right, Harold,” said Koch calmly. “It’s all right. Let’s be civil here. Is that your final word, Gunther?”
Suddenly I felt tired—too tired to care much what happened to me now; it might have been the schnapps; then again the whole war felt like a lamppost that had been tied around my neck. Only, maybe it would be my neck tied to the lamppost.
“Yes it is, sir. I’m sorry. But I simply can’t ask her to do this.”
Koch sighed and pulled a face. “Then it looks as if you’re not going to be a captain again, after all.”
“I suppose I really don’t care what happens to me.”
Hennig sneered. “It also looks as if you’re walking back to town.”
“Gentlemen? After what I just heard? I could certainly do with some fresh air.”
—
I didn’t tell Irmela what had happened. I thought it best not to worry her. It’s not every day in Nazi Germany you turn down a man as powerful as Erich Koch, and part of me expected that I might be arrested at any time and thrown into the concentration camp at Stutthof. They hadn’t threatened me, exactly, and, more important, they hadn’t threatened her, but I hardly thought they would just give up. Somehow I had to think of a way of preventing them from intimidating Irmela, and soon, too.
“Do you have to go to work tomorrow?” I asked her that night.
“Why?”
“I’m just asking, that’s all. I was thinking maybe we could spend the time here together, alone.”
“I’m on duty. You know that. I can’t not just turn up. This is the naval auxiliary we’re talking about here, not a Salamander shoe shop. Besides, they’re relying on me. In case you had forgotten, there’s a lot happening right now in the Baltic Sea.”
We were in bed at the time, and sharing the cigarette now lying in the cheap imitation amber ashtray that was balanced on my chest.
“I understand.”
“It’s not that I don’t like spending time with you, my darling snail. I do. These moments we have here are very precious to me. Shall I tell you why? Because I never thought I would have them. When you showed up in my life I had more or less reconciled to myself to ending my life here without ever having known the real love of a man.”
“What about Christoph? The fellow who died at Stalingrad.”
“We were lovers. But we weren’t in love. There’s a difference. Besides, he was just a boy.”
“Nothing wrong with that if you’re just a girl.”
“I know you think that. And maybe that’s what I was before. But I’m a woman now. You made that happen. Without you I’d still be giggling in cinemas. You treat me like something precious. Like I matter to you. You listen to what I have to say like you genuinely care. I can’t tell you what that means to a woman. That’s all I ever wanted. To be heard by the man I love.”
I was silent for a few moments after that. There’s nothing quite like a few loving words from a woman to make a man quiet.
“Look,” I said, “if anyone ever threatens me as a way of trying to get to you, then please tell them to go to hell. I’ll take my chances. In this life and the next.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m just saying. I’m not the one who’s important here. You are.”
“Yes, but why are you saying it?”
“There’s a war on. People say all kinds of strange things when there’s a war on.”
“All right. I understand all that. Look, has this got anything to do with Captain Hennig?”
“No,” I lied. “Nothing to do with him at all. As a matter of fact I don’t think I’ve seen him since that night in Spätenbrau, on the day we were married.”
“I couldn’t let anything happen to you, Bernie,” she said. “Not now. You’re such a sweet man, do you know that? You’ve given me my life.”
“Nonsense. It was yours from the beginning.”
“It’s true. No one was ever as kind to me as you’ve been. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“You have to think of the baby now. Not me. Do you understand? I’m not in the least bit important beside you and the child.”
“I don’t understand. Why are you talking like this?”
“All I’m saying is that I want you to be careful, Irmela.”
“We’re surrounded by the Red Army, by Russian fighters, there’s no fuel and not much food, there are no secret weapons to rescue us, our homes are defended by the Father and Son Brigade, and you want me to be careful? You’re ridiculous, do you know that? If I didn’t love you so much I’d say you were going crazy.”
“Maybe I’m just crazy about you? Did you consider that possibility? That’s right. I’m mad about you.”
“Well, that makes two of us who are mad. It’s infectious, obviously. Give me another cigarette.”
“In my tunic.”
I hadn’t intended to give her the amber necklace but she found it when she was going through my pockets looking for cigarettes and I hadn’t the heart to tell her that it had been given to me by Erich Koch.
“It’s beautiful,�
� she said. “For me?”
“No, I was rather thinking I might wear it myself.”
“I absolutely love it,” she said, putting on the amber necklace immediately and bounding across her bedroom to look at herself in the cheval mirror. “What do you think?” she asked, turning to face me.
I had to admit it suited her very well, a conclusion that was made easier for me by the fact that she was entirely naked at the time.
“Yes, it looks good on you.”
“You really think so?”
I smiled. “Yesterday’s newspaper would look good on you, Irmela.”
“It must have been very expensive,” she said.
Once again I felt a little awkward when I failed to admit that it had been a gift from Erich Koch and very soon afterward I started to regret I hadn’t told her the truth about the necklace, fearing Harold Hennig would do it for me and spoil things. There was no doubt about it. I had started to care for Irmela very deeply, much more than I could have imagined was even possible for a man of my age. I had no right to the love of a nice girl of twenty-three. I was almost fifty, after all; fifty years of fuckups and disappointments, which means that when you think you only have a few months of life ahead of you every minute seems to count, and every feeling becomes magnified, massively. I’d have done anything to protect her and the baby she was carrying, but it’s odd how inadequate anything like that can begin to feel. The best part of me was probably gone forever, but I could still hope to look after her.
—
The next day, when I walked down to Paradeplatz as usual, I found myself tailed by a black Audi. With so few cars on the snow-covered, cratered roads it was easily noticed, like a large and shiny spot of ink on a white sheet of paper. It stayed about ten meters behind me, which was another reason to notice it. I’m a fast walker. There were three men in it I didn’t recognize, but I knew that wouldn’t last. An introduction was coming whether I wanted one or not. I just hoped the freemason’s handshake wouldn’t be too painful. I kept walking in the hope that the longer I kept walking the farther away I was taking them from Irmela’s building but after another hundred meters I saw the futility of it, turned, slipped on the ice, almost falling over, and walked back to the car with as much dignity as I could muster. When I leaned down to the driver’s window I almost fell again. One of the men in the car sniggered. I knew they were Gestapo even before he flashed his brass identity disk in the palm of his hand. Only the friends of Koch and the Gestapo could get that kind of joke or, for that matter, the petrol.
“You Gunther?”
“Yes.”
“Get in,” said the man with the disk.
I didn’t argue. His wooden face had been argued with many times before, to no avail, and at least it was just me they were arresting. So I sat in the back of the Audi, lit a cigarette, listened patiently as their leather coats creaked against the car seats, and tried to think of all the other times I’d been picked up by the Gestapo and managed to talk my way out of it. Of course, things were very different now the war was almost lost. The Gestapo had always been good listeners but since July ’44 and Count Stauffenberg, they’d stopped listening to anything very much except the sound of tightly strung piano wire.
To my surprise we didn’t go to the Police Praesidium on Stresemannstrasse, behind the North Railway station. Instead we drove a little farther east and stopped in front of the Erich Koch Institute on the corner of Tragheimer and Gartenstrasse, which was one of the last buildings in Königsberg still displaying Nazi flags. It added a nice touch of color to a city that had gone prematurely gray with fear and worry. Absurdly, some bandbox guards came to attention as the car drew up; they must have figured the only cars with petrol contained people who were important. The Gestapo even opened the car door for me and two of them escorted me through the cliff-high doors and up the marble double stairway, where a man was carefully fitting long, brass stair rods. At the top stood a tall plinth with a bronze of Erich Koch staring over the balustrade, like a satrap surveying his empire. Or maybe he was just checking that the stair-rods were being fitted correctly. Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling as if in imitation of the freezing weather outside, which made the blasts of warm air blowing from the vents in shiny new ceramic stoves all the more surprising. The institute was noisy with hundreds of foreign workers hammering and painting and redecorating, which seemed a little premature as the Red Army hadn’t yet said which color they’d have preferred for 1945.
I was ushered along a corridor as big as a bowling alley where thick, new blue carpet was being laid and, for a moment, I wondered if I was actually in the East Prussian School for the Blind in Luisenallee. It was the only possible explanation for so little foresight and so much obvious reluctance to face the truth. Amid the ignorant confusion of it all Harold Hennig was standing with his hands in his breeches pockets, his gray tunic open, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, and quite probably he didn’t. Every time I saw him I knew he wasn’t ever going to be one of the unlucky ones without a comfortable chair when Ivan stopped the balalaika music. Seeing me he beckoned me forward and led the way into an office already carpeted but without much furniture, just a lot of fluff on the floor, a couple of chairs and a half-size desk on which lay his greatcoat and cap. A large portrait of a very pink-faced Adolf Hitler was hanging on the wall. Wearing a gray greatcoat with the collar turned fashionably up and a peaked hat, the leader was looking off into the middle distance as if trying to decide if the blue of the carpet matched the blue of his eyes. He needn’t have been concerned. It was a cold blue with an affinity for black and a degree of darkness that Goethe understood only too well, and an excellent color match.
“Here’s me thinking this is East Prussia,” I said, “when the true state we’re living in turns out to be Denial.”
Hennig snorted with contempt, put his hand on my shoulder, which I didn’t much like, and walked me over to the fireplace, where a log the size of a wild boar was sizzling quietly, just like my temper. From the mantelpiece he took down an amber box and flipped it open.
“Smoke a cigarette, Bernie,” he said quietly. “Take the edge off your tongue.”
I took one, lit it, and tried to stay inside myself for a few minutes longer.
He smoked one, too. I even lit the match for him. For a while all we did was blow smoke at each other. It was beginning to look as if we could get along really well.
“When the pathologists examine your dead body,” said Hennig, “they’ll probably find you had an enlarged mouth.” He sighed wearily. “Nineteen forty-five, and you still haven’t learned that you should talk only when words are safer than silence.”
“I’m not going to change my mind about my girl,” I said.
“You don’t have a mind. Not to speak of. For a Fritz in intelligence, you’re very fucking dumb. I thought the same back in thirty-eight. You were dumb to get mixed up in that business with von Fritsch. You must have known how it would all play out. Sure you did. An idiot could have seen how that was going to end. Himmler himself gave the orders to frame that fucking general. You were dumb to take that case.”
“I took it because Captain von Frisch was my commanding officer in the Great War. And because I loved him.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. You were dumb. Principles are for people who can afford to have them, not for you and me. You were lucky to walk away from that case with your fingernails.”
“Maybe. But I’m still not going to help you now.”
“Yes, you are,” he said. “And here’s why, dumbhead.”
He collected a file off the desk and handed it to me—a thin blue file on the cover of which was the official stamp of the Saint Elizabeth Hospital on Ziegelstrasse, and the name of Irmela Louise Schaper. I didn’t have to open it. I already knew what was in it.
“One of the benefits of being the governor of East Prussia is that no one has
any secrets from you. No, not the smallest thing. Not this small thing, certainly. Even doctors don’t dare plead the usual code of patient confidentiality in Königsberg. And not when the Gestapo tell them otherwise. So. Your girlfriend is going to have a baby. Congratulations. I presume you’re the father. Although some of those naval girls like to set sail with a big crew on board, if you know what I mean. And I do wonder what your poor wife will say when she finds out.”
“You bastard,” I muttered.
“Not me. But the baby, yes, almost certainly. Anyway, time will tell. Which—let’s be honest here—is short. No, please don’t talk, for once just listen, Gunther. Because this is no longer really about you, is it? Not anymore. To be frank, I only need you in case your girlfriend is sufficiently principled not to understand what’s good for her. And her baby, of course. Let’s not forget that little twinkle from your eye.”
He fished a piece of grayish paper out of his breeches pocket and showed it to me. The paper was headed Identity Pass for the MS Wilhelm Gustloff. Irmela’s name was printed on the bottom of the pass.
“Thanks to the generosity and understanding of the governor, all of the women in the women’s naval auxiliary are to be given one of these. It’s a special pass, printed on the Wilhelm Gustloff’s own printing press. They’ve got everything on that ship; a swimming pool, movie theater, three restaurants, and, most important of all, the real prospect of seeing Germany again. Even now those auxiliary women are being told that they’re the lucky ones. That they’re to be evacuated from Königsberg. Today. Already they’re breathing a sigh of relief. The good-looking ones at any rate. I should think many of them have already left the city by now since boarding commences on January twenty-fifth. Which is tomorrow. I say all of the women but as you can see this particular pass has yet to be signed by the governor. Or I. And until it is, it simply isn’t valid.
“As soon as it is signed, both Miss Schaper and her unborn child, of course, can board the ship. But not until then. You see where I’m going with this, Gunther. Either she agrees to send the unencrypted signal—which I will supply, of course—and on an open channel, or she’ll be the last naval auxiliary left in the city when the Russians turn up. After which I don’t give much for her chances or the baby’s. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you of all people what the Russians are doing to our women. It was you who wrote the report on Nemmersdorf, wasn’t it? How many women was it they violated? The Russian soldier seems to regard the rape of German women as a patriotic duty. I mean, they fuck like they’re using a bayonet. So, I wonder how many Ivans she could take on before she lost that baby.”
