Flight From Berlin: A Novel

by David John

  Gestapo. Both men wore grey suits and black, snap-brimmed trilbies.

  ‘May I make a telephone call?’ Denham said. He felt a strange calm come over him, as if he’d expected them. Somehow, in his heart, he’d known it would come to this.

  ‘You’ll be back in the morning,’ the man said, stubbing his cigarette out on the rug. ‘You can telephone then.’

  That, Denham knew, was a gross lie, but he wasn’t going to argue.

  They escorted him downstairs, one in front and one behind.

  A storm of applause was breaking across the speech on Reinacher’s radio as the speaker’s voice moved into high gear. ‘As for those seduced by the international Jewish press into doubting the Führer’s desire for peace . . . I say this: . . . let them come to Berlin! . . . Let them come to Berlin! . . .’

  Frau Stumpf’s door was shut.

  Outside, a grey Horch waited. The back door was held open; Denham got in and sat next to one of the Gestapo men while the other drove. How brisk and businesslike they were. No handcuffs, none needed. Such fear did these men inspire that citizens meekly did as they were told.

  The smell of the car’s seat leather mingled with a faint odour of vomit.

  ‘I thought you boys only came at night,’ Denham said.

  Neither answered.

  The roads around Belle-Alliance-Platz were clogged with traffic as the evening rush approached, and the Horch was caught in a crawl behind a line of cars and yellow double-deckers. Neither Gestapo man seemed the least frustrated at their lack of progress. He wondered how long they’d been in his apartment. Both wound down their windows to smoke, but neither offered him a cigarette.

  They turned onto the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, plunged in shadow as the sun moved into the west. Göring’s new Air Ministry passed by on the right, wall after wall of granite, the city’s latest pharaonic monstrosity. The car slowed to a halt, and the gates of the darkened Gestapo building swung inward without a sound.

  The mild-spoken Gallico had to raise his voice to be heard over the laughter, piano music, and clinking glasses in the Adlon’s upstairs bar. Reporters from every newspaper, radio station, and wire service in the world seemed to be drinking there this afternoon. He hadn’t touched his beer.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ he said, leaning towards her. ‘You go hiding in a rosebush and overhear a private conversation between—’

  ‘I wasn’t hiding.’ Eleanor was looking over the rail next to their table. She could see right down into the lobby, where a couple of army officers were lounging on wicker chairs near the pagoda fountain, their laughter becoming more boisterous with each toast of schnapps. ‘I went to apologise to Brundage, followed him in there, but lost him in the dark; next thing I knew there were these men’s voices . . .’

  She quickly told him the rest.

  Gallico gave a slow whistle.

  ‘Bad, huh?’ she said.

  ‘Throwing the Jews off the relay team in case they win and embarrass Hitler? Well, it doesn’t cast old Avery in the best light . . .’ He looked down into the lobby with a face that suggested several thoughts playing across his mind at the same time. A hearty laugh came from one of the officers at the fountain.

  ‘You’re not thinking I made this up to get back at that jerk?’ Eleanor asked.

  ‘No . . . I’m thinking of the politics. The UP boys have generally supported US participation in these Olympics. Now that our athletes are here in Berlin and winning medals, it could look, well, unpatriotic if we break this story now. And, sweetheart, I’m just wondering what they’ll say back home. The sour grapes between you and Brundage means you won’t be seen as the most impartial witness . . .’

  ‘Then you break the story.’

  ‘But I’ll need more proof.’

  ‘Confront him with it, Paul, and see how he reacts.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  The noise of teleprinter machines filled the corridor from behind closed doors. Beneath the wire-meshed electric lights rows of hunched figures waited on benches and lowered their eyes as the sergeant passed. Pushed along without shoelaces or belt, Denham walked in a rapid shuffle. They’d taken his tie, too. I go to my doom looking a man who sleeps in his clothes. The sergeant stopped outside a door marked HAECKEL, knocked twice, opened it for Denham, and closed it behind him.

  Inspector Haeckel was a heavy man, with a grey moustache, a boxer’s jaw, and thinning hair. He had on the full black uniform: Sam Browne belt, shoulder strap, boots, gun holster, and an array of police decorations.

  A minute passed as he scribbled away at his desk, dotting i’s, crossing t’s, not acknowledging his prisoner. Denham looked around, seeing a chair, which he was not being offered, and dark stains on the floor that made his stomach clench. On a cabinet to the right stood a row of trophies awarded for dog handling, except for one, which displayed two spent bullets suspended like grubs in a block of glass. On its base were engraved the names RÖHM and HEINES.

  After a while the inspector selected a rubber stamp from a small rack, thumped a document, closed the file, and took another from his tray. Denham’s passport was inside, on top of what looked like a hand-filled surveillance sheet.

  ‘Richard Arthur Denham,’ he said, examining the passport, then glancing up for the first time. ‘As you are certainly aware, there is a press injunction on speaking to Hannah Liebermann. So would you mind telling me what you were doing at her home today?’ He had the gravel voice of a man accustomed to shouting.

  Sound honest, Denham thought. No clever remarks. ‘I’m a reporter, Inspector, and she’s one of the best-known athletes at the Games. I wanted a few quotes for some copy, that’s all. Frankly, what reporter wouldn’t?’

  Haeckel seemed uninterested and leaned back in his chair.

  ‘I’m not wasting time with you because you’re not my case, or not yet anyway. You see, the oddest thing just happened, Herr Denham, and maybe you could explain it to me.’

  He stood up, not as tall as Denham expected, with a solid, rounded gut, and walked to the back of his chair to stretch his legs. Boots, belt, and strap creaked and groaned.

  ‘The minute my boys turned up at your apartment I get an urgent call from the SD, who send over this file on you.’

  The SD?

  ‘That’s right. I’m to hold you until a certain SD officer gets here to interrogate you.’ He leaned over the chair and picked up a sheet from the file. ‘One, espionage of new German Zeppelin technology on board the Luftschiff Hindenburg . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘ . . . two, using an identity not your own to infiltrate Reichsminister Goebbels’s reception on the Pfaueninsel; three, attending an illegal music event convened by antisocials known to the police’—the inspector closed the file—‘and this in the course of a few days’ surveillance . . .’

  ‘The espionage charge is nonsense.’

  ‘Is it?’ He picked up the paper again. ‘It says here that you breached a military regulation by taking a camera on board and gave your guide the slip in a restricted area. So what were you up to?’

  He waved his hand, not interested in an answer, and sat down again to a fugue of leathery creaks and squeaks.

  ‘I’m a British subject, Inspector, and can’t be held—’

  ‘Your passport won’t save you from an espionage charge.’ He gave a quiet, hissing laugh. ‘Annoying as this is, the SD have done me a favour here. With an espionage charge we keep you as long as we like. But the SD want you unspoilt’—his eyebrows rose at this veiled slur on his professionalism—‘and that order comes from the top. So I’m curious, Herr Denham. What is this really about? Mm?’

  Denham had absolutely no idea. The SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, was the state’s intelligence service, a cadre within the SS. That’s about all he knew. It was known to be a cut above the sadists in the Gestapo, attracting educated recruits.

  ‘You seem to know more than I do, Inspector.’

  Haeckel picked up a rubber stamp and be
gan twirling it between his fingers, still observing Denham, eyes narrowed like gun slits.

  ‘The SD don’t bother with lists of stocking-fillers like these. That is the type of donkey-work they leave to me. As for the espionage, an explosive bag of gas like the Hindenburg has the technological value of my mother-in-law’s arse. So they’re keeping me in the dark about something. What makes you special, eh?’

  Denham gave a shrug, and Haeckel suddenly hurled the stamp towards his head. He flinched, and it struck the door with a clack.

  ‘A British agent, are we?’ he barked. ‘Or spying for the NKVD?’

  Denham’s brain was spinning, and his face must have shown it. ‘I’m just a reporter.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Haeckel said, stroking his moustache and seeming to have remembered in time his orders not to harm the prisoner. His face was crimson. ‘It will all come out in the end . . . makes no difference to me.’ He picked up the telephone and summoned the sergeant. Then he said, ‘When the SD are done with you, sir, you and I will go over every single thing said between you and that Liebermann woman. For as long as it takes . . .’

  Eleanor rang the bell next to the ornate door of Kopischstrasse 5 and put her face to the glass. A small woman with trailing wisps of hair and a long shawl clutched to her chest shuffled out from a ground-floor apartment and opened it for her.

  ‘Uh, Richard Denham? Is he here?’ she said, hoping to aid communication with smiles and hand gestures.

  At the mention of Denham’s name, fear animated the old woman’s face. She shook her head, dissembling away in German to Eleanor’s bewilderment, and retreated quickly back to her apartment. Her door closed, but Eleanor sensed the rheumy blue eyes watching through the pattern in the frosted glass.

  The name on the first-floor apartment was Reinacher, from whose door came the sound of a radio playing military band music; she continued to the second floor with a mounting sense that something was wrong. She found Denham’s door and knocked. It swung inwards with a quiet moan on its hinges.

  The place had been worked over so thoroughly it looked like a grenade had exploded, and two cigarette butts had been stubbed into the rug, leaving burn marks. She tiptoed into the mess of smashed record discs, overturned drawers, and opened books. On the floor a yellow telegram slip caught her eye. So his son had not been found. What was going on? She stood still for a moment, mystified, and a flat voice startled her.

  ‘Kann ich Ihnen helfen?’

  A tall, fat-headed man was standing in the doorway, holding a collection tin with a swastika on it.

  He gestured to the mess in the room, speaking in a droning voice. Only the word Gestapo was clear to her among the alien words and made itself understood.

  His rumbling stomach told him roughly what the hour was, but he knew he’d soon lose track of time. An electric light hummed behind a wire grill. He didn’t imagine they ever turned it off. In the next-door cell a man moaned.

  Every thought that came to him swirled around and slipped away. The fears of never seeing Tom again mixed with his dread of what the SD had in store. He drew his feet up and buried his nose between his knees, struggling to imagine why he could possibly be here.

  The espionage charge was a trumped-up ploy to stop the embassy from getting him released in a hurry. He was fairly sure of that. The other charges were trivial except for one—speaking to Hannah—which the inspector seemed to think was a Gestapo matter. But who knows what turf wars were fought in the dark labyrinths of the Nazi state. Maybe the matter was too serious for Haeckel.

  But why had they been watching him before he’d even made contact with Hannah? They knew about his trip on the Hindenburg; they knew he was at the reception on the Pfaueninsel, and of his night at the Nollendorfplatz Theatre.

  What did they want?

  Hours passed, and he fell into a nervous stupor, too edgy to sleep, too drained to move. When footsteps echoed in the corridor outside, he jumped. An eye appeared in the peephole, a bolt was drawn back, and the door opened. A man in a dark suit stepped into the cell.

  ‘Herr Denham?’ he said with an interested smile. ‘I am Hauptsturmführer Udo Rausch. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Two guards with the SD flash on their sleeves led Denham from the cell. The man in the suit, Hauptsturmführer Rausch, was perhaps a year or two younger than Denham, and looked as though he’d dined well somewhere. He greeted the sergeant and asked after his wife, joked with the orderlies smoking in the darkening courtyard, and walked with his hand on Denham’s shoulder, almost friendly, as though they were professors between lectures. A new BMW, its engine idling, was waiting. Before they got in, Rausch lit a Murad and offered one to Denham.

  ‘No, thanks. Turkish isn’t my brand.’

  ‘They’re not to everyone’s taste,’ he agreed. ‘I picked up the habit in Ankara. Served there with the German Foreign Ministry for two years.’

  That solves one puzzle, Denham thought. The hempy aroma filling the car was the same he’d smelt in his apartment.

  A minute’s drive and the car turned into a garden courtyard off the Wilhelmstrasse, stopping outside the covered portico of an elegant classical building. Inside was a marble hallway of columns and red drapes. The uniformed woman on the front desk, blond hair plaited into pretzels, beamed at Rausch; young men in suits passed on their way out, bidding him a good evening. Denham followed him up a marble staircase overhung by an enormous chandelier, making slow progress without shoelaces. The guards were two steps behind.

  ‘This was a summer palace of the Hohenzollerns,’ Rausch said over his shoulder. ‘Designed by Schinkel. A refinement that’s rather lost on our Gestapo cousins.’

  They passed down a long carpeted corridor, and climbed another flight to a narrow service corridor in what seemed like an old servants’ quarter. At the far end Denham was shown into a room with bright overhead lights and a small barred window, and was asked to sit on a chair in the centre of the room. The only other furnishings were a table with a telephone on it, a row of wooden chairs, and a portrait photograph of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD, peering from the wall.

  Heydrich, the Blond Beast. The man’s Nordic nose was so long it almost put the rest of his face out of focus, but the tiny, deep-set eyes were as bright as pins. Heydrich the Pitiless. Heydrich the Hangman. Thirty-two years old and one of the most powerful men in Europe.

  Denham’s suspicion that his captor’s genial manner was part of some technique was borne out immediately.

  ‘I’ve always felt that interrogation is more art than science where an intelligent detainee is concerned,’ Rausch began, taking a seat. ‘Especially one who’s a war veteran. In such cases incentive can be fruitful where intimidation is not. Perhaps not something a brute like Haeckel would understand, although I daresay he gets to the bottom of everything in his inimitable way. Chips fly when you have to chop wood.’ The German gave a small, satisfied laugh.

  He had a groomed, cultured appearance, tailored clothes, and a sombre tie. The German upper class, relaxed with rank. Brown hair combed back from his forehead, high cheekbones, full lips that suggested a taste for the finer things, features that might be found pleasing but for the eyes, which had an unnerving directness. Denham felt sure, too, that he hadn’t risen to the rank of Hauptsturmführer in the SS on the back of good table manners and a white smile.

  ‘Your arrest caught us on the back foot. When the Gestapo went to collect you, they forced our hand. We’ve been letting you run around on a loose lead, Herr Denham, waiting to see where you’ll take us. But we’d have come for you shortly anyway. Your landlady reported the latest telegram from your ex-wife, and we wouldn’t want you leaving the country, especially not now, would we?’

  Poor Frau Stumpf. How the old bird must have lost it when the men in leather turned up.

  ‘Please let’s understand each other right away, Herr Denham, there’s an espionage charge against you . . .’


  ‘Which you know is false.’

  He shrugged. ‘Be that as it may. It’s a serious charge. At the very least it means prison; at worst, a stretch in a KZ, a concentration camp. If you come out alive your health will be ruined and you won’t work again. Do I need to elaborate?’

  Denham looked at him sullenly, sensing a deal on offer.

  ‘However,’ Rausch went on, spreading his hands over the table, ‘I’m certain we can spare you that in return for your cooperation with the main matter. What do you say?’

  Denham sighed. ‘Does she upset you so much? I won’t be the last reporter who tries interviewing Hannah Liebermann.’

  ‘Hannah Liebermann?’ Rausch seemed amused. ‘No fooling please, Herr Denham. Do you think we’re interested in some Jew girl telling tales?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘We’re interested in you. Because you’re going to tell us where it is.’

  ‘Where what is?’

  Rausch stared at him, waiting, the smile on his lips cooling.

  ‘You’ll have to help me here,’ Denham said. ‘Where what is?’ Fatigue, hunger, and hours of incarceration were beginning to take their effect.

  The interrogator sat back in his chair with the look of a schoolmaster given a dim answer by his best pupil. ‘You know precisely what.’

  ‘I assure you I don’t—’

  ‘Herr Denham. I will not play games. I am speaking of the dossier.’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong man,’ Denham said, but before the words were out he’d remembered. What that man Evans had mentioned in the back of the Humber.

  A dossier which we believed had been lost or destroyed . . .

  He chose his next words with care. ‘There’s been a rumour going round that a foreign correspondent will be handed a secret dossier of some sort. We’ve all heard it. So what. It wasn’t me.’

  ‘But it was you, of course. It was always going to be you—the reporter they would contact.’

  ‘Now there’s a they. Who are they?’