by David John
‘Violins,’ Nat said, as though he meant spittoons. They found their table with a banquette of red upholstery. ‘Two trumpets and only one sax!’
‘Kid, you wouldn’t know class if it kicked you in the nuts,’ Eleanor said. ‘Let’s dance.’ The orchestra had begun a pepped-up arrangement of ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’
A waiter brought an ice bucket and poured their flutes with a flourish while Denham watched the odd spectacle of an elegant American woman being twirled around by a shock-haired, spotty youth who wouldn’t have looked amiss on the Petrograd Soviet. Nat made one attempt to swing her over his hip, but Eleanor was far stronger than he was.
Denham’s mind wandered.
He pictured Rausch sitting in his office on the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin tomorrow morning. Perhaps a corner office looking onto that pillared courtyard where the supercharged Mercedes cars pull in with pennants on the hubcaps, bringing the high SS to work. Leather coat hanging from a hatstand; his desk with two telephones, one for the outside world, one internal—for his parallel world, the vast police spiderwebs of the Reich. He sees the envelope marked Poste Diplomatique, the one his secretary has not opened. Curious, he tears the flap with his honour dagger, and removes a single drawing, the very one Denham saw when he’d first opened the dossier—the lad with the charcoal freckles and the clear cold eyes. Something in the fullness of the young man’s lips faintly suggests a kiss, a mocking kiss, and a man of Rausch’s urbanity sees it.
He is perplexed, but then his gaze falls to the signature, which burns into his eyes. The appalling secret pouting up at him. Now he is nervous. He reads the typed note attached with a paper clip: Denham’s offer to exchange the complete List Dossier in return for the safe passage from Germany of Jakob, Ilse, and Hannah Liebermann. There follows an instruction to communicate with him by telephone at the German embassy in London tomorrow at 16:00 Greenwich Mean Time. Rausch flattens the drawing on the desk, dagger upright in his hand, and stares at nothing. His nerves give way to incredulity, then to rage.
Denham had retrieved the drawing and a handful of others that morning from the bank vault. The rest of the dossier, including his finished translation of Forster’s notes, he left in the vault ready to give to Evans. For the plan to work, the fake dossier, the one he would give Rausch, would contain . . . what?
Suddenly he felt the full danger of what they were doing. An insane risk that could end in their deaths. Even if it all went as planned, he couldn’t shake off a fear that these marvellous months with Eleanor—the happiest of his life—were about to end.
‘What’s up, buster? You’re as sad as a map.’
She was leaning over him, radiant, and she brushed his cheek with a kiss. Taking his hand she led him to the dance floor, where the orchestra was playing a gentle rumba. A dark-skinned woman balancing an arrangement of fruit on her head stepped up to the microphone, accompanied by three crooners in white tuxedos.
He took Eleanor’s fingers in his own and put his other arm low around her waist, breathing in her perfume. Gently he moved his hips with hers.
‘A penny for your filthy thoughts,’ she said.
‘My darling . . .’
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know . . . I’ve a feeling things can’t carry on . . .’
She looked at him quickly with hurt and fear in her eyes.
‘ . . . the way they were. Once we’ve gone through with this. Somehow, it will change us. I just want you to be ready for that.’
She lay her head on his shoulder as they moved to the rhythm.
‘Regret over doing nothing will change us far more,’ she said.
He smiled at her, though she couldn’t see his face. The melody enveloped them in its sweet cadence.
When she looked up at him again, a tear was making a track down her powdered cheek.
They stopped still in the centre of the floor, held each other close, and kissed long and deeply, oblivious to the couples shuffling in circles around them. They kissed as though they were about to part for a long time, or forever.
Chapter Forty-three
The young official at the embassy main desk sprang to his feet when he saw Denham, as though he’d been waiting for him all day, then looked confused when he saw Eleanor. He ushered both of them upstairs regardless.
The embassy’s new interior seemed designed to intimidate the visitor and flatter the vanity of the incumbent, von Ribbentrop, who had impressed Hitler with his smooth hauteur, and with his ability to speak French and English, skills he’d learned from his years as a travelling wine salesman. His pompous portrait hung in the entrance hall. The oversized staircase lined with bronze torches gave onto a pilastered landing, where a bust of the Führer was garlanded with sprigs of oak and pine, like some psychotic god of Yule.
The official showed them into a large salon overlooking St James’s Park, where the chestnut trees were budding with bright green leaves, and asked them to wait. When he’d gone they were too nervous to sit and paced the edge of the carpet towards the far wall, on which was hung a KRAFT DURCH FREUDE picture calendar for 1937. A family of four waved ecstatically from their Volkswagen.
The door opened and a fat man in a dark suit entered. There was a Party pin in his buttonhole. He resembled a grossly grown-up doll. He gave them a supercilious stare. SD, Denham thought.
‘Mr Denham?’ he said in English. ‘I have orders to arrange a telephone call to Berlin for you at four p.m.’ He turned to Eleanor with a quizzical look.
‘She’s with me,’ Denham said.
The man gestured to a telephone on a gilded table under the window. ‘You can take the call there in a moment. I’ve been keeping the connection open.’ He left the room.
Seconds later the telephone rang. Eleanor squeezed Denham’s hand. He walked towards it. It rang again, and he picked it up.
‘Hello, Rausch, this is Richard Denham.’
A brief pause filled with static before a thin, high voice said, ‘This is Reinhard Heydrich.’
Denham’s mouth opened, but words had fled. ‘I see,’ was all he managed at last, clutching the receiver very tightly.
A quiet, high-pitched bray came down the line. ‘You’ve won some admirers here, you know. After three days working you over my boys were convinced you knew nothing of that dossier.’ The voice had the offhand easiness of power. ‘You even had Rausch fooled. Either you’ve got nerves of steel, or he’s going soft.’
Under his shirt Denham felt a bead of sweat roll from his armpit down to his belt. He thought of the long pale face in the photograph on the wall of that SD torture room. The tiny eyes deeply set, slanted, bright, and cruel.
Recovering himself he said, ‘Well, I didn’t want to make it easy for you. No fun in that, is there?’
The soft braying laugh again. ‘You’re making us a marvellous offer, Herr Denham. The dossier in exchange for three inconvenient Jews? How could we say no?’
Denham felt a dizzying surge of adrenaline. ‘There are two conditions.’
‘Go on.’
‘Rausch, and no one else, is to bring the Liebermanns in a single car to the town of Venhoven, on the Dutch border, at five p.m. next Friday. There’s a small hotel called Hotel Mertens, about five hundred yards from the German frontier. I’ll be there with the dossier. Second, Jakob Liebermann keeps his fortune. He’s not to be robbed by the Reich.’
A long pause.
‘Agreed,’ Heydrich said finally, ‘with the exception of the location. The handover is to take place at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin . . .’
‘No.’
‘See it from our point of view,’ Heydrich said, sounding positively reasonable. ‘You are handing over property that belongs to the Reich. It is appropriate that you do so on German soil, where we can be certain of no outside interference.’
‘No.’
‘Really, Herr Denham, I’m a fencer myself, you know. I’m honour bound to act with chivalry.’
‘We stick to my terms or
. . . I go straight to the British Foreign Office with what I have in my possession.’
Another silence on the line. Behind the static Denham sensed the Obergruppenführer’s mood souring.
‘But who will believe any of it?’ he said.
The Führer is not married.
Denham did not rise to it. ‘I’ll expect Rausch at Venhoven with the Liebermanns, alive and well, and no one else. At five p.m. on Friday.’
The pulse in his neck was pounding. Three, four, five seconds more of hissing silence on the line. He was about to hang up, when the thin voice spoke again.
‘I was really too hasty in signing the order for your release.’ And then: ‘Very well then, we go with your plan. But now I must warn you.’ His voice dropped. ‘Try to cheat us over this and we will hunt you down. Do you understand?’
Denham placed the phone down onto its cradle. He turned to face Eleanor and she ran towards him. His hands trembled, and his shirt was soaked through.
Part III
Chapter Forty-four
The old town of Venhoven on the River Maas was a little over five miles from the German border. Denham knew it from a driving trip he’d made with his father to Germany years ago. It had been their halfway stop for the night. The country along the frontier to the east, where the hotel was located, was undulating, wide open farmland, the strategic sweep into the Low Countries that had made it the scene of countless battles. Without the cover of trees or buildings, he thought, it would be harder for the SD to pull any tricks.
It was a tiring day-and-a-half’s journey, driving from London to Harwich, waiting for the car to be winched onto the ferry, and sailing to the Hook of Holland. He drove through the night with Friedl sitting next to him, having eaten a light meal on the crossing.
‘Hope Nat’s all right looking after the cat,’ Denham said, to break the silence.
‘He’ll manage.’
Friedl was watching the suburban lights of Rotterdam passing in the darkness. Denham had spotted at least four cars with German number plates behind them for long stretches of the road but told himself there was nothing odd about that. They were heading east after all.
It was a leaden, dim morning with a sharp wind picking up when they pulled into the forecourt of the Hotel Mertens at 7:00 a.m. on the Thursday. They had more than a day and a half to spare before the handover. Plenty of time to notice if there were any suspicious comings or goings.
Friedl had been eager to accompany him, but on the strictest understanding that no part of the plan involved crossing into the Reich. He seemed determined to share the danger, Denham thought, perhaps to atone for his unwitting role in Denham’s arrest and torture. But for Denham’s part, he was thankful for an extra pair of eyes and ears.
He absolutely did not trust Heydrich. A hundred times in his head he went over that telephone conversation. The man had agreed to the deal too easily. And the more Denham thought about it, the harder he found it to believe that Heydrich would simply comply.
The most exposed and dangerous part of the plan lay in the journey itself. Heydrich’s men might easily have shadows on them as soon as they arrived in the Hook of Holland. If they could do that, then they could ambush the car anywhere along the way and simply take the dossier. True, all they’d get was a bogus dossier, containing a handful of genuine drawings from the bank vault wrapped around a sheaf of worthless papers. But Denham, too, would be cheated if he didn’t get the Liebermanns. So if SD agents did stop the car, the safest thing was to make sure they found no dossier at all, bogus or otherwise. Then there was still at least a chance of holding them to their word.
After a long discussion in Chamberlain Street, Eleanor had come up with a precautionary plan. She would send the bogus dossier by parcel courier from the US embassy in London to arrive at the hotel the same day as Richard.
Then she would take a flight to Berlin.
Richard, preoccupied with practicalities, was slow to absorb this last part.
‘What?’
‘As a precaution,’ Eleanor said, ‘to make sure the Germans are honouring the deal. I want to know for certain that they’ve told the Liebermanns of their impending release . . .’
Denham was incredulous. ‘How? Jakob and Ilse are under house arrest.’
‘I’ll get a message to them . . .’
Denham flatly refused to go along with it.
‘That’s absolutely insane. The Germans know you’re involved in this. The Gestapo probably have a file on you. You publicly humiliated Willi Greiser for Christ’s sake. You can’t just fly into Berlin pretending you’re on a weekend’s vacation. They’ll be suspicious, my love.’
‘And if I were there officially, invited by the embassy?’
Denham looked at her blankly.
She reached into her handbag and handed him a folded page of newspaper, which he opened out on the kitchen table, puzzled. It was torn from a week-old New York Times.
‘FBI closes in on Alvin “Creepy” Karpis . . .’
‘Bottom left,’ she said.
Near the foot of the page was the heading U.S. AMBASSADOR'S DAUGHTER TO WED SOVIET DIPLOMAT with a head shot of a laughing Martha Dodd.
‘Good God,’ Richard said, holding the page closer.
Ambassador Dodd, it seemed, had surprised the State Department by announcing his daughter’s engagement to a Mr Boris Vinogradov, thirty-four, press attaché at the Russian embassy, Berlin . . .
‘The intelligence services will have her for breakfast,’ he said.
‘And look who’s got herself invited to the engagement party.’
Eleanor was holding up an embossed invitation with her name inscribed across the top in a girlish hand. ‘May first, US embassy, Berlin. The invitation arrived this morning. I’m staying with the Dodds.’
‘You’re not going.’
Denham spent the rest of the evening trying to talk her out of it, listing every risk she was running. But her mind was set firm.
They went to bed that night without talking. The next morning, when he saw that no words he could ever say would make her change her mind, he insisted she take Rex’s telephone number in Berlin in case something went wrong. ‘But remember he’s a reporter, so his phone may be tapped.’
After a breakfast with Tom over which they assured him they’d be back in a few days from a driving trip, Eleanor said her goodbyes to Denham and Friedl and watched the Morris Oxford depart Chamberlain Street. Then she gave the keys of the house to Nat and left to enact the next part of the plan—the delivery of the genuine List Dossier from the vault of the Zavi-Landau Bank to the hands of David Wyn Evans. After that, she would hurry by taxi to Croydon Airfield for her flight to Berlin.
Denham had telephoned Evans two days before leaving to arrange the details of the handover. At 9:00 a.m. Evans would be waiting in his car outside the bank on Idol Lane while Eleanor retrieved the dossier from the vault. She would hand it to him inside the car.
Denham had described Evans to her, even imitating his Valleys accent. She was warned to expect Bowler Hat Man at the wheel. Partly as a joke for the diffident Welshman, whom he’d grown to like, he’d suggested a double password, more as a dig at Evans’s profession than anything cloak-and-dagger. ‘No password, no dossier,’ Denham said. They agreed on: ‘Will I see you at Biarritz this season?’ to which the response had to be, ‘No, I vacation in Rhyl,’ a North Wales seaside town for which the words drab and tawdry fell someway short.
A sombre rush-hour crowd on the Tube. She stood swaying among men in black bowlers, drawing their glances when they thought she wasn’t looking. A valise over her shoulder contained an embassy diplomatic pouch where she’d concealed five hundred reichsmarks for any unseen eventuality; between her feet a small, lightish case contained her clothes, and a single gown. It had been a headache to pack so little, but she would be back in three days, all going well. And in time for the coronation on the thirteenth. Her eyes moved between the headlines in the newspapers open around h
er. BASQUE TOWN NOW HEAP OF RUINS. Four hours of bombing. GERMAN PLANES ATTACK IN RELAYS. Escaping villagers machine-gunned from the air. Dear God. Why?
A mood of resignation pervaded London. Not surprising when the papers were filled daily with aggression and atrocity.
A smaller piece in the same papers baffled her but was, in its way, as depressing as the bombs. She had to squint as the carriage shook. LORD LONDONDERRY IN FRIENDSHIP TALKS WITH HITLER. On another: LORD LONDONDERRY LEADS ANGLO-GERMAN UNITY TALKS.
The silver key in her purse. Had she and Richard the means to change all this?
She arrived several minutes early at the bank and was obliged to wait ten long minutes to be shown down to the vault. She was back outside on the lane, with the dossier inside her valise, within sixteen minutes.
No sign of a car.
She glanced at her watch. Her flight was at 11:00 a.m. Not much time. It was cold here in the shade. Maybe the lane was too narrow for the car to wait. Yes, that must be it. Following the kerb to the end she turned the corner and gave a small shriek.
A broad man in a bowler hat was walking quickly towards her. He stopped when he saw her, said, ‘This way, please,’ and beckoned with a pair of leather driving gloves.
On a wider street at a right angle to the lane, parked alongside a wall in the sun, was a gleaming automobile with whitewall tyres. A Humber, Richard had said. Bowler Hat Man opened the back door, and she stooped to climb in, lifting her case in front of her.
‘Mrs Eleanor Emerson?’
Inside, a man was offering his hand. Pinkish face, waxed moustache, and a tepid smile that said fair play. A folded Times on his lap. Tailored chalk-stripe suit, brown suede shoes, and carnation boutonnière. Definitely. Not. Evans.
‘Where is he?’ she said.
A small, surprised laugh. ‘My name’s Channing. Evans asked me to meet you.’
‘Why?’
The man raised his eyebrows.
‘If you must know,’ he said, moving the newspaper to the seat beside him and brushing a pastry crumb from a fold in his trousers, ‘he now works in another department.’
