‘This Swiss,’ Eugene murmured.
Hoffmann had more news. He cleared his throat. ‘Elisabeth and her friend have been passed on to the judiciary. They’ll go on trial within the next few days.’
Eugene gasped, and his lips worked in a brief spasm. Watching him, the major knew that this couldn’t have been a surprise, nonetheless was a terrible shock.
‘Judge Freisler?’ Eugene said, after a few moments of trying to speak.
Hoffmann nodded. Eugene shuddered. The judge’s name virtually guaranteed conviction. And execution.
Hoffmann said, ’Yesterday, Frau Huber and her husband were killed trying to cross the Swiss frontier.’
Eugene sank back on the pillow Grim-faced, Hoffmann thought that bad news was accumulating like the relentless onslaught of the American boxer, Louis, in his defeat of Max von Schmeling; an image engraved on his boxer’s mind.
His haggard, handsome face a blur against the pillow, Eugene gazed across the room absorbing the litany of disaster. He whispered, ‘The doctor must be brought to account.’
Hoffmann nodded. ‘First, we must put him to use. The moment I have the documentation from England, I’ll interview him.’
Startling Hoffmann with its vigour, Eugene’s hand shot out and grasped his arm. ‘No! You’ve already taken too many risks. The main project comes before all else.’
Hoffmann was silent. ‘Then how —?’
‘Herr Schmidt must do it. He was the one who suggested it.’
Hoffmann blanched and sat back. ‘Would he do it? Is he capable of bringing it off?’
Eugene’s face burned with conviction. ‘There’s more going on with that auditor than we know of. Schmidt’s a devious and capable individual. You must see that.’
Hoffmann said doubtfully, ‘If that’s so, he might be involved in something that could be equally jeopardised.’
However, Eugene had made up his mind.
When he left the clinic, Hoffmann knew that he should go home to grab a few hours sleep. In the next twenty-four hours, he’d be juggling too many balls in the air not to be at his best. Could they really trust Schmidt?
~ * ~
32
T
HE GOLD FROM ZURICH had arrived at the Reichsbank overnight, and Deputy Auditor Gott had checked it into the vaults. Glancing at him, Schmidt saw evidence of irritated pressure and a hasty shave. It was 8.00 am and, overcoated, they were in the freezing vaults. Schmidt ran his eye over the new pyramid of bars, each embossed with the National Bank for Bohemia and Moravia’s insignia. Freda Brandt and two subordinates from her department stood apart, engrossed in discussion. At last, the head of the precious metals department crossed the chamber to the chief auditor.
‘Well, Herr Schmidt, a good night’s work for the Reich.’
Schmidt nodded, said quietly, ‘My congratulations.’
She flushed with annoyance at his low-key reaction. ‘You don’t seem so delighted.’
Schmidt gave a faint smile. ‘I assure you that I am.’
The tall woman appeared especially statuesque this morning. It was as if she’d grown centimetres in height. She cast him a sharp look of disbelief. ‘The president’s delighted.’
Schmidt watched the efficiently articulating lips which, three nights ago, had performed the sexual act on him. He wondered if she’d banished it from her mind. She turned and, beckoning officiously to her people, strode out.
Schmidt watched her go. His stocks had fallen further. Dr Funk wasn’t publicising Freda Brandt’s role. He’d gleaned from Frau Heyer that he was telling Party high-ups that his personal intervention had been the clinching factor.
Ten minutes later, at her desk, Frau Heyer said, ‘The president will be returning to us within a few days. Yesterday he told me his work at the ministry’s nearly done.’
Schmidt nodded. ‘That is good.’
In the inner sanctum, seated at the side-table, he processed the inward cables and letters, high-level but mainly commonplace. The president received an extraordinary number of invitations to speak to various institutions. This morning The Party School for Orators begged his attendance at its annual dinner.
However, another item was of more interest: a cablegram from the Governor of the Bank of England. It simply said: Raffles. Schmidt puzzled over this. A kind of code. He put it in the file for the president’s attention.
Time was running out, the blueprint wouldn’t be residing in the safe overnight for much longer. Schmidt felt his heart beating.
Back in his office, smoothing down his tension, he sorted through his own in-file. Already Gott’s report on the gold’s arrival was there, and a query as to whether the Czech insignia on the bars should be replaced with the Reichsbank’s. Schmidt sucked at his lips. Fräulein Brandt would have that in hand.
He shifted his vision left to the Fuehrer’s photograph. Another day for Anna to be cooped up in his flat. Being as quiet as a mouse, as dearest Trudi, in days past, would say to him. The chief danger lay with block informers. He didn’t think there was one in his small building. Anna’s arrival must have been unobserved, otherwise an officious rapping on his door would’ve come by now.
Would Rubinstein get the passport to him today? If not? The Fuehrer’s cold eyes offered Schmidt no comfort on the question.
He lunched in the canteen amid the reduced numbers present on a Saturday. He realised he was at the table where he’d rescued Anna from the late Rossbach.
Freda Brandt entered and, to his surprise, brought her tray over to join him.
‘The president telephoned me from the ministry with his personal congratulations,’ she gasped.
Ah, the man isn’t a fool. He’d wish to keep good instruments sharp and useful. So thought Schmidt.
She sat down and began to hungrily spoon up soup. ‘We’re all working hard, aren’t we? The dear Fuehrer yearns for peace. We must do our best to help him.’ She tore apart a piece of bread, checked their privacy, said, ‘The dinner at my flat didn’t have a fully satisfying conclusion, Franz, did it?’ She grinned at him — a conspiracy between her lips and eyes. ‘So . . .’
Schmidt gazed down at his boiled meat and potatoes. Abruptly, he put his knife and fork together, excused himself and went out to the corridor. Wild horses wouldn’t get him into her flat a second time. Did she really believe that slogan about yearning for peace? She did, he decided. Amazing. He shed these thoughts and his mind moved ahead. Tonight he must have the key to the safe.
Watching Schmidt leave, Freda Brandt thought: Yes, run off, but I’ll have you, you little bastard. Then I’ll rip off your mask.
~ * ~
Sturmbannfuehrer Sack, revived from his few hours sleep, sipped coffee in his office and regarded the memo. The official in the Central Security Office, an unconscious humorist, had headed it: The Tea-Party Conspiracy. Sack had been astonished. Certainly, it was a storm in a teacup. The interrogations had opened no new doors, exposed no major subversive network dangerous to the regime. It was low-level dissent and intrigue against the Party. Even the countess’s husband, von Dreisler, was only a mid-level diplomat. However, to the Reich Minister, nothing was low-level; every such thing must be rooted out with even-handed zeal.
He’d sent the teacher and her hausfrau associate on to the judiciary, which would deal with them quickly and finally. Sack didn’t dwell on that; it was beyond his responsibility.
He rested his chin on his thin hands. If they could arrest von Schnelling and the Beck woman it would all be tied up. Getting hold of the Reichsbank secretary’s Abwehr cousin could be the key to it but, like her, the fellow had vanished.
Yesterday agents had checked her family home and questioned the caretaker. Nothing there. Similarly with the captain. They’d contacted the Bavarian clinic in case he’d returned to it, and the Berlin hospital to which he’d been admitted on Tuesday night. More blanks. Sack suspected that higher influence might be at work shielding these people.
Aristocrats! Even some o
f the Nazi elite were still dazzled by them. They said that one-fifth of the senior ranks of the SS were filled by the titled nobility. He shook his head. Yesterday he’d made a discreet inquiry of the Abwehr about the captain. They’d no knowledge of his whereabouts; tersely reiterated he was on sick leave. No doubt he was ill. Before he’d taken his fall, Sack had watched the haemorrhaging man being put into the taxi.
He’d found out that the captain’s chief colleague in the Abwehr was a Major Hoffmann. That fellow might know something. But how should he play that? The Abwehr were sensitive and protective of their own.
Sack grimaced. It could be a minefield. The SD were angry; one of their agents had been beaten to death in the street on Thursday night. The man had phoned from a café to say he was following two suspicious men - civilian clothes but military types. There were many minefields out there. Now Freda wanted him to go south to this auditor’s home town and delve into his past; this enigmatic protégé of the shadowy von Streck. Perhaps he would. He drew his diary toward him and checked the days ahead.
Buhle stood in the door.
‘Yes?’
‘Sturmbannfuehrer Strasser was querying why you’d authorised the release of the women to the judiciary.’ He didn’t say that Strasser had said with his vulgar sarcasm, ‘What’s Herr Goebbels junior up to now?’
Sack remained calm. ‘Was he? What did you tell him?’
‘That you’d decided not to waste more time on it. We had got all there was to get.’
‘Very good.’ It was near enough to Sack’s own reasoning.
Buhle saluted and left.
Sack cursed under his breath. Strasser had blustered his way out of the pitfall Sack had set up. He’d received only a mild reprimand. Sack had been disgusted. Someone above, almost certainly, was looking after the brutal and incompetent bastard. Always there were shadows behind the actors and sometimes, he believed, shadows behind the shadows. He grunted and began to read and sign memoranda and forms. The bureaucracy he lived in was frightening in its fecundity. Every day, he signed his name a hundred or more times.
~ * ~
There was a chill around his heart as Schmidt sat in the homeward-bound tramcar. Rubinstein hadn’t appeared. The auditor wondered if the less crowded Saturday street was the reason. ‘It’s too early yet,’ he told himself. ‘It’s the same with Hoffmann.’ There was no need to alarm himself or Anna with this.
Sleet cut into the faces of the disembarking passengers as they scurried across the platz. Schmidt removed and wiped his spectacles, replaced them and peered ahead at the windows of his flat. Dark. He’d picked up his shadow: a small, bespectacled fellow, a wide-brimmed hat pulled over his brow, buried in a newspaper. The man had alighted at Savigny Platz.
As on the previous evening, Schmidt paused at his door and looked down the stairs to the entrance. Nothing. The fellow was keeping his distance. He let himself in. The darkly varnished wainscoting gleamed with the candlelight from the study. The air felt heavy and stale.
A flat packet was in the mailbox. Schmidt removed the wrapper and opened a box. The newly-cut brass key gleamed in the reflected candlelight. He slipped it into his suit coat pocket.
When he turned toward the study Anna was standing in the doorway, backlit by the flickering light. He switched on the hall light and blinked. A different woman. Her long hair was pinned up in a roll — identical to the photograph he’d given Rubinstein. And tonight she’d used a pink lipstick. His heart seemed to turn over.
Emphatically, Schmidt nodded his approval. ‘Very good . . . I’ve brought some food for supper.’
Almost like husband and wife, Schmidt thought, as they cleaned up in the kitchen after the meal. Although he and Helga had had a maid.
Tonight he left the electric light off in the study. He should try to make conversation, take her mind off their fearful situation. But for several moments, only the sibilant hissing of the fire intruded on their thoughts. The auditor sipped coffee. Thank heavens he hadn’t engaged a cleaner.
Sitting across from her at the kitchen table, he’d concluded that the hairstyle made her look younger, more glamorous. He’d had to tear his eyes away so as not to embarrass her.
Breaking the silence, she said, ’Franz, these past days, I feel as if I’ve stepped out of the world.’
Schmidt nodded, and told her that the Czech gold had arrived overnight.
She shook her head sadly. ‘Poor Herr Fischer.’
Carefully, Schmidt set down his cup. It seemed amazing that two such beautiful, yet dramatically different women, were at the centre of his life. One from the sphere of decency and enlightenment, the other from the dark and bogus realm of the Third Reich. He tightened his lips. Freda Brandt had played on his sexual frustration with all the skill of a virtuoso.
He shrugged, shaking himself out of that memory.
Later, after Anna had retired in the darkened other bedroom, he stood in his own lit window, gazing across the platz. The lights on the far side resembled an opposite shore seen over a lake.
He wanted to be seen standing alone. He hoped the bespectacled agent was down there frozen to the bone, his aching eyes on the single figure at the window.
The Swiss doctor came hard and cold into his thoughts. He’d never set eyes on the man, so couldn’t visualise his face; the betrayer of this small group of idealistic souls yearning for a just world. Of Anna. Criminality, inhumanity, was being exhaled into the air all around them, as potent as the petrol fumes from the military convoys.
He felt in his coat for the two capsules von Streck had given him. Should he offer one to Anna? He pondered this, hearing the plenipotentiary’s voice: ‘Schmidt, the Gestapo always want answers. And they’re never satisfied by the ones they receive. These can be the greatest godsend.’
Tomorrow was Sunday — the day Trudi was to sing with her class in Dresden. After the letter delivered by the other Herr Fischer he’d decided to go; to watch from afar. That was impossible now, with the Reichsbank secretary in his flat and matters poised on a knife-edge.
He turned away from the window to undress. Later that night he dreamed of his daughter, the way she’d been when he’d last seen her three months ago - of her voice, with the others, soaring in the gilded cathedral heights like doves set free.
~ * ~
33
S
CHMIDT WALKED the third-floor corridors heading for the stairs. It was 8.28 am. On Saturday, Frau Heyer had said the president’s special project was nearing its end. He was ready. The key to the safe was in his pocket, the camera and equipment locked in his desk drawer. He drew in a long breath of corridor-cold air to help with his tension.
Since the eventful night out at Wannsee, he hadn’t seen or spoken to the president. However, each morning written instructions awaited him in the inner sanctum to follow up on this or that matter.
He was briefed by Frau Heyer on the president’s movements and, by Funk’s appointments book, which he’d access to. Each night about 9.00 pm the president returned to peruse the important matters - and to lock the brown satchel in the safe. Each morning at 7.00 am, on the way to the ministry, he returned to collect it.
Yesterday Anna had prepared a meal at midday and then Schmidt had taken a long walk. As he’d trudged along the snowy Sunday streets Trudi, singing her little heart out in Dresden, had been with him, with Helga’s proud face glowing in the candlelit cathedral. He’d felt sick at heart. But if he’d actually been there he didn’t know how he’d have reacted; whether he’d have been able to keep out of sight. Two quick hugs! Stupid thought.
It was far better that he hadn’t gone.
Pausing outside the anteroom door, he considered the photographic dimensions of the task ahead; whether it would require more than a single visit to the safe. He’d no idea of this. He settled his nerves down and went in.
Thirty minutes later he walked back to his office. Passing familiar faces, he nodded at them. His face was serious, befitting his profession, m
atching the austere surroundings. The staff were deferential to this persona, to his rank and Party badge.
How long did the president spend in the room each evening? One hour at most. Dr Funk should be finished by ten. Today there’d been nothing especially noteworthy to detain him. He’d go to the inner sanctum after ten. He’d be cautious, with an excuse ready. Keys to both anteroom and inner sanctum had been issued to him.
He opened his own door and stopped dead. A strong scent suffused the room. Freda Brandt’s! He rushed to his desk and checked the drawer. Still locked. He let out an involuntary gasp of relief.
The Iron Heart - [Franz Schmidt 02] Page 26
