Mexico Set

by Len Deighton

  ‘I thought you worked in Mexico City.’

  ‘Und guten Tag, gnädige Frau,’ he said to Lisl, who had been wrinkling her brow as she concentrated enough to understand this sudden onslaught of English. Henry Tiptree bent over to kiss the bejewelled hand which she lifted for him. Then he bowed again and smiled at her with that sort of sinister charm that baritones show in Hollywood musicals about old Vienna. He turned to me. ‘You thought I worked in Mexico City. And so did I. Haw haw. But when you’ve worked in the diplomatic service for a few years, you start to know that the chap you last heard of doing the Korean language course in Seoul will next be seen working as an information officer in the embassy in Paris.’ He scratched the side of his nose reflectively. ‘No, some guru in the Personnel Department considered that my schoolboy German was just what was needed for me to be attached to you chaps for an undecided period of time. No explanation, no apologies, no time to get ready. Wham, bam, and here I am. Haw haw.’

  ‘Quite a surprise,’ I said. ‘I believe we’re playing cards together this evening.’

  ‘I’m so pleased you’re joining us,’ said Henry, and seemed genuinely pleased. ‘This is what I call the real Berlin, what? The beautiful and cultured Frau Hennig here, and this wonderful chap Koch whom she’s told me all about. These are the people one wants to meet, not the free-loading john-nies who come knocking at the door of your average embassy.’

  Lisl was smiling; she understood enough English to know that she was beautiful and cultured. She tapped my arm. ‘And wear a jacket and a tie, will you, Leibchen? Just to make your old Lisl happy. Just for once wear a nice suit, the one you always wear to see Frank Harrington.’ Lisl knew how to make me look a bloody fool. I looked at Tiptree; he smiled.

  We played cards in Lisl’s study, a small room crammed with her treasures. This was where she did the accounts and collected the money from her guests. She kept her bottle of sherry here in a cupboard otherwise filled with china ornaments. And here, with its prancing angels and winged dragons, was the grotesque ormolu mantel clock that could sometimes be heard throughout the house chiming away the small hours. There was a picture of Kaiser Wilhelm over the fireplace; around it a slight brightness of the wallpaper showed it was the place where a larger signed photo of Adolf Hitler had hung for a decade that had ended with the family home becoming this hotel.

  ‘I think the cards need a good shuffle,’ said Lisl plaintively as she arranged in front of her the few remaining counters for which we gave fifty pfennigs each. Lisl’s losses could not possibly come to more than the price of the bottle of sherry that between us we’d almost consumed, but she didn’t like losing. In that respect and many others she was very berlinerisch.

  The four of us were arranged round the circular-topped mahogany tripod table, at which Lisl usually sat to take her breakfast. The four chairs were also mahogany; superbly carved with Venetian-style figure-of-eight backs, they were all that was left of the sixteen dining chairs that her mother had so cherished. Lisl had been talking about the European royal families and the social activities of their surviving members. She was devoted to royalty and convinced of the divine right of kings, despite her frequently proclaimed agnosticism.

  But now Lothar Koch had started one of his long stories. ‘So what was I saying?’ said Koch, who was incapable of shuffling cards and talking at the same time.

  ‘You were telling us about this most interesting secret report on the Dutch riots,’ prompted Henry.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. Lothar Koch was a small motheaten man, with dark-ringed troubled eyes and a nose far too large for his small sunken face. Mr Koch had a large gold Rolex wrist-watch and liked to wear spotted bow-ties in the evening. But his expensive-looking suits were far too big for him. Lisl said that they fitted him before he lost weight, and now he refused to buy any more clothes. I’m far too old to buy new suits, he’d told Lisl when he celebrated his seventieth birthday in a suit that was already too baggy. Now he was eighty-five, still shrinking, and he still hadn’t bought any new clothes. Lisl said he stopped buying over-coats when he was sixty. ‘Ja, ja, ja. There had been riots in Amsterdam. That was the start of it. That was 1941. Brandt came into my office soon after the riots…’

  ‘Rudolf Brandt,’ explained Lisl. ‘Heinrich Himmler’s secretary.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Koch. He looked at me to be sure I was listening. He knew I’d heard all his stories before and that my attention was apt to wander.

  ‘Rudolf Brandt,’ I confirmed. ‘Heinrich Himmler’s secretary. Yes, of course.’

  Having confirmed that I was paying attention, Koch said, ‘I remember it as if it was yesterday. Brandt dumped on to my desk this report. It had a yellow front cover and consisted of forty-three typewritten pages. Look what that fool Bormann has come up with now, he said. He meant Hitler, but it was customary to blame Bormann for such things. It’s true Bormann had countersigned each page, but he was just the Head of the Party Chancellery, he had no political power. This was obviously the Führer. What is it? I asked. I had enough paperwork of my own to read; I wasn’t looking for another report to occupy my evening. Brandt said, the whole population of Holland is to be resettled in Poland.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Henry. He took a minuscule sip of his sherry and then wiped his lips with a paper napkin advertising König Pilsener. Lisl got them free. Tiptree had changed his clothes. Perhaps in response to Lisl’s sartorial demands of me, he was wearing a white shirt, old school tie and a dark grey worsted suit of the type that is issued to really sincere employees by some secret department of the Foreign Office.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lisl loyally. She’d heard the story more times than I had.

  ‘Eight and half million people. The first three million would include “irreconcilables”, which was Nazi jargon for anyone who wasn’t a Nazi and not likely to become one. Also there would be market-garden workers, farmers and anyone with agricultural training or experience. They would be sent to Polish Galicia and there create a basic economy to support the rest of the Dutch, who would arrive later.’

  ‘So what did you tell him?’ said Henry. He pinched the knot of his tie between finger and thumb, and shook it as if trying to remove a small striped animal that had him by the throat.

  Mr Koch looked at me. He realized that I was the ‘irreconcilable’ part of his audience. ‘So what did you say, Mr Koch?’ I asked.

  He looked away. My display of intense interest had not convinced him I was listening, but he continued anyway. ‘How can we put this impossible strain upon the Reichsbahn? I asked him. It was useless to appeal to these people on moral grounds, you understand.’

  ‘That was clever,’ said Henry.

  ‘And the Wehrmacht was preparing for the attack on the USSR,’ said Mr Koch. ‘The work that involved was terrible…especially train schedules, factory deliveries and so on. I went across to see Kersten that afternoon. It was showery and I went out without coat or umbrella. I remember it clearly. There was a lot of traffic on Friedrichstrasse and I was drenched by the time I got back to my office.’

  ‘Felix Kersten was the personal medical adviser to Heinrich Himmler,’ explained Lisl.

  Koch said, ‘Kersten was a Finnish citizen, born in Estonia. He wasn’t a doctor but he was an exceptionally skilled masseur. He’d lived in Holland before the war and had treated the Dutch royal family. Himmler thought he was a medical genius. Kersten was especially sympathetic to the Dutch and I knew he’d listen to me.’

  ‘Why don’t you deal the cards,’ I suggested. Koch looked at me and nodded. We both knew that if he tried to do it while continuing his story he would get his counting hope-lessly muddled.

  ‘It’s a fascinating story,’ said Henry. ‘What did Kersten say?’

  ‘He listened but didn’t comment,’ said Koch, tapping the edges of the pack against the table-top. ‘But afterwards his memoirs claimed that it was his personal intervention that saved the Dutch. Himmler suffered bad stomach cramps and Kersten warned him that such
a vast scheme as reset-tling the entire population of Holland would not only be beyond the capabilities of the German railways but, since it would be Himmler’s responsibility, it could mean a break-down in his health.’

  ‘They dropped it?’ said Henry. He was a wonderful audience, and Mr Koch basked in the attention Henry was providing.

  Koch riffled the cards so that they made a sound like a short burst of fire from a distant MG 42. He smiled and said, ‘Himmler persuaded Hitler to postpone it until after the war. By this time, you see, our armies were fighting in Yugoslavia and Greece. I knew there was no chance of it ever happening.’

  ‘I say, that’s extraordinary,’ said Henry. ‘You should have got some sort of medal.’

  ‘He did get a medal,’ I said. ‘You did get a medal, didn’t you, Herr Koch?’

  Koch riffled the cards again and murmured assent.

  ‘Mr Koch got the Dienstauszeichnung, didn’t you, Mr Koch?’

  Mr Koch gave me a fixed mirthless smile. ‘Yes, I did, Bernd.’ To Henry he said, ‘Bernd thinks it amusing that I was given the Nazi long-service award for ten years in the Nazi Party. But as he also knows…’ A finger was raised and waggled at me. ‘…my job and my grade in the Ministry of the Interior made it absolutely necessary that I joined the Party. I was never an active Party worker, everyone knows that.’

  ‘Herr Koch was an irreconcilable,’ I said.

  ‘You are a trouble-maker, Bernd,’ said Mr Koch. ‘If I hadn’t been such a close friend of your father I would get very angry at some of the things you say.’

  ‘Only kidding, Lothar,’ I said. In fact I remained convinced that old Lothar Koch was an irredeemable Nazi who read a chapter from Mein Kampf every night before going to sleep. But he always showed a remarkable ami-ability in the face of my remarks and I admired him for that.

  ‘What’s all this “Bernd” nonsense, Samson?’ said Henry with a puzzled frown on his peeling red forehead. ‘You’re not a German, are you?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘I feel I almost am.’

  ‘This woman should have a medal,’ said Koch suddenly. He indicated Lisl Hennig. ‘She hid a family of Jews upstairs. She hid them for three years. Do you know what would have happened if the Gestapo had found them – echhh.’ Mr Koch ran his index finger across his throat. ‘She would have gone into a concentration camp. You were a mad fool, Lisl, my dear.’

  ‘We were all mad fools in one way or another,’ said Lisl. ‘It was a time of mad foolishness.’

  ‘Didn’t your neighbours know you were hiding them?’ asked Tiptree.

  ‘The whole street knew,’ said Koch. ‘The mother of the hidden family was her cook.’

  ‘Once we had to push her into the refrigerator,’ said Lisl. ‘She was so frightened that she struggled. I’ll suffocate, she shouted, I’ll suffocate. But the kitchen maid – a huge woman, long since dead, God bless her – helped me, and we put all the food on the table and pushed Mrs Volkmann inside.’

  ‘The Gestapo men were here, searching the house,’ said Mr Koch.

  ‘Just three of them,’ said Lisl. ‘Jumped-up little men. I took them to the bar. That is as far as they wanted to search.’

  ‘And the woman in the refrigerator?’ said Henry.

  ‘When the level of the schnapps went half-way down the bottle we decided it would be safe to get her out. She was all right. We gave her a hot-water bottle and put her to bed.’

  ‘That was Werner’s mother,’ said Lisl to me.

  ‘I know, Lisl,’ I said. ‘You were very brave.’

  Often after such bridge games Lisl had provided a ‘nightcap’ on the house, but this time she let us pay for our own drinks. I think she was still smarting because my inexpert bridge had won me five marks while she ended up losing three. She was in one of her petulant moods and complained about everything from the pain in her knees to the tax on alcohol. I was thankful that Lisl decided to go early to bed. I knew she wouldn’t sleep. She’d read newspapers and perhaps play her old records until the small hours. But we said our good-nights to her and soon after that Lothar Koch phoned for a taxi and departed.

  Henry Tiptree seemed anxious to prolong the evening, and with a bottle of brandy on the table in front of us I was happy to answer his questions. ‘What an extraordinary old man,’ said Henry, after Koch said goodnight and tottered off down the stairs to his waiting taxi.

  ‘He saw it all,’ I said.

  ‘Did he really have to become a Nazi because he worked in the Ministry?’

  ‘It was because he was a Nazi that he got a job in the Ministry. Prior to 1933 he was working at the reception desk of the Kaiserhof. That was a hotel that Hitler used a great deal. Lothar knew most of the Nazi big-shots. Some of them came in with their girlfriends, and the word soon went round that if you needed to rent a room by the hour then Lothar – the one with the Party badge on the lapel of his coat – was the right clerk to see.’

  ‘And for that he got a job in the Ministry of the Interior?’

  ‘I don’t know that that was the only reason, but he got the job. It wasn’t, of course, the high-ranking post that Lothar now likes to remember. But he was there and he kept his ears open. And he closed his eyes to such things as Lisl hiding Werner’s parents.’

  ‘And are his stories true?’

  ‘The stories are true. But Lothar is prone to change the cast so that the understudy plays leading man now and again.’

  Henry studied me earnestly before deciding to laugh. ‘Haw haw,’ he said. ‘This is the real Berlin. Gosh. The office wanted to put me into the Kempinski or that magnificent new Steigenberger Hotel but your friend Harrington told me to instal myself in here. This is the real Berlin, he said. And, by gosh, he’s right.’

  ‘Mind if I pour myself a little more of that brandy?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I say. Let me.’ He poured me a generous measure while taking only a small tot for himself.

  ‘And I guess you’re here for some damned cloak-and-dagger job with Dicky?’

  ‘Wrong twice,’ I said. ‘Dicky is safely tucked up in bed in London and I am only here to collect a bag of documents to carry back to London. It’s a courier’s job really, but we’re short of people.’

  ‘Damn,’ said Henry. ‘And I was persuading myself that the worried look on your brow all evening was you fretting about some poor devil out there cutting his way through the barbed wire, what?’ He laughed and drank some brandy. From Lisl’s room I heard one of her favourite records playing. It was scratchy and muffled.

  …No one here can love and understand me, Oh what hard-luck stories they all hand me…

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ I said.

  ‘Couldn’t we compromise?’ said Henry cheerfully. ‘Couldn’t you tell me that there is at least one James Bond johnny out there risking his neck among the Russkies?’

  ‘There probably is,’ I said. ‘But no one has told me about him.’

  ‘Haw haw,’ said Henry, and drank some brandy. At first he’d been drinking very sparingly but now he abandoned some of that caution.

  ‘Tell me what you’re doing here,’ I said.

  ‘What am I doing here? Yes, what indeed. It’s a long story, my dear chap.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’ I looked at my watch. It was late. I wondered where Werner had phoned from. He was in a car with East German registration. That always made it more complicated; he wouldn’t bring that car into the West. He’d planned to return through the Russian Zone and on to the autobahn that comes from Helmstedt. I’d never liked that method; the autobahns were regularly patrolled to prevent East Germans meeting West German transients at the roadside. I’d arranged for someone to be at the right place at the scheduled time this morning. Now I had no idea where he was, and I could do nothing to help him. Lisl’s record started again.

  Pack up all my cares and woe.

  Here I go, singing low,

  Bye-bye, blackbird…

  ‘Do you have time to hear my boring life stor
y?’ said Henry. He chuckled. We both knew that Henry Tiptree was not the sort of man who confided his life story to anyone. Never complain, never explain, is the public-school canon.

  ‘I have the time,’ I said, ‘and you have the brandy.’

  ‘I thought you were going to say: I have the time if you have the inclination, as Big Ben said to the leaning tower of Pisa. What? Haw haw.’

  ‘If you’re working on something secret…’ I said.

  He waved away any such suggestion. His hand knocked against his glass and spilled some of his drink, so he poured more. ‘My immediate boss is working on one of those interminable reports that will be called something like “Western Negotiating Policy and Soviet Military Power”. He will have his name on the front and get promoted on the strength of it. I’m just the chap who, after doing all the legwork, will wind up with my name lost in a long list of acknowledgements.’ This thought prompted him to drink more seriously.

  ‘And what will it say, your long study?’

  ‘I say, you are polite. You know what it will say, Samson. It will say all those things we all know only too well but that politicians are desperately keen we should forget.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘That eighty per cent of all armaments established in Central Europe since 1965 belong to the Warsaw Pact countries. It will say that between 1968 and 1978 American military spending was cut by forty per cent, and during the same period Soviet military spending increased by seventy-five per cent. It will record how Western military strength was cut by fifty thousand men, while during the same period the East increased its forces by one hundred and fifty thousand men. It will tell you nothing that you don’t already know.’