by John Lawton
The ambulance arrived only minutes before a second squad car. They were loading Stahl onto a stretcher when two more cops walked in, a man in his late thirties and a younger one, younger even than Troy, who ran to the stairs and vomited at the sight of Reininger. Over the sound of his retching, the older man said, ‘Miss Stilton, isn’t it? Inspector Henrey, Murder Squad’-and turning to Cal-‘And you are?’
Cal told him, made the briefest of explanations, then Henrey said, ‘I’m awfully sorry, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to lock you up.’
§ 84
Cal told him a version of everything-everything except Troy’s part in it all. They sat in an office at Scotland Yard until it was nearly light. When Henrey asked him how ‘Miss Stilton’, as he insisted on calling Kitty, came to be at ‘the scene of the crime’, he was able to give his first wholly honest answer, ‘I don’t know.’ Eventually Henrey said ‘Is there anyone at the embassy I should contact in connection with this?’ Cal said ‘I don’t know’ again, and then Henrey really did lock him up and he crashed like a felled redwood. It was a different regime. In the morning they brought him a bowl of warm water, a razor and a cup of tea, then they brought him breakfast of toast with butter and that shredded orange jelly the English were so fond of and then, when he asked for coffee, they brought him coffee. Afterwards he lay on the cot all morning reading
The Times and the Manchester Guardian-Scotland Yard could not run to a copy of the Herald-Tribune. The Luftwaffe had bombed Dublin last night. The first raid in weeks and they’d missed by miles. He was beginning to think he could spend the rest of his life in jail and let the war go to hell above his head, they could let him out in six or seven years-in the meantime he could finish Moby Dick-never had managed that feat as a teenager-when the door opened and another, completely different cop strode in, shook his hand, introduced himself as Major Something-or-other ‘of the Branch’, and said, ‘I contacted your man as soon as I heard.’
‘My man?’ said Cal. ‘Who the heck is my man?’
‘I am, old boy!’
And Reggie Ruthven-Greene stuck his head round the door.
§ 85
On the way out Cal caught sight of Kitty. He wanted to stop and talk to her. He wanted to stop and put his arms around her, but she was being escorted-steered-across the courtyard by two policemen.
Out on the Embankment Reggie had his hand up for a cab.
‘Where are we going, Reggie?’
A cab pulled up.
‘I rather thought after a night in jail that you’d fancy a spot of lunch.’ Then he opened the door for Cal, leaned down to the cabman and said ‘Dorchester’.
After a sodden night the day had cleared beautifully, the sun shone. It was, Cal realised, the 1st of June and the prospect of summer preoccupied Reggie’s chat inanely all the way to Park Lane. There were questions Cal would have put to Reggie, but he knew he’d never answer them in the back of a cab.
‘My treat,’ Reggie said, as they were seated at the Dorchester. ‘Do you know, one can still get Krug ‘20 here. Amazing, isn’t it?’
Cal’s heart sank. He’d known as soon as he heard the word Dorchester that Reggie meant to splash out-but champagne? It was dry sherry and smoked salmon among the ruins all over again.
‘Are you ready?’ Reggie asked over the top of the menu.
‘Don’t wait for me,’ Cal said.
Reggie rattled off his order. ‘I think… yes… the foie gras, the Dover sole, the roast pigeon and a nice garlicky salad… and a bottle of Krug ‘20.’
He looked at Cal. Cal looked at the waiter.
‘Do you have any Brown Windsor soup?’
The waiter looked nonplussed. ‘Brown Windsor, sir?’
‘Yes, Brown Windsor. This is England. We are in a restaurant. We are in a restaurant in England. You must have Brown Windsor.’
‘Would you give us a minute,’ Reggie said to the waiter. To Cal, he said, ‘There’s something wrong?’
‘There’s everything wrong. There’s a fucking war on.’
Reggie looked quickly around. ‘If we’re going to have a swearing contest, could you keep your voice down?’
‘Reggie, if you don’t stop talking about the weather, and ordering vintage champagne and goose liver and pretending there isn’t a fucking war on, I’ll run the entire gamut of obscenity. Tell me what the fuck is going on. So far, all you’ve done since I got to England is string me out with more tall tales and half-truths than Fibber McGee.’
Reggie did not look Crestfallen or apologetic. He looked cornered. The waiter chose this moment to return.
‘We’ve changed our minds,’ Cal said to him. ‘Brown Windsor for two, and we’ll save the champagne for another time.’ And to Reggie, ‘Do I have your attention now?’
‘It was meant as a treat for you. An apology, if you like.’
‘An apology for dumping me?’
Reggie nodded.
‘Jesus Christ, Reggie, you can’t apologise enough for that. While you were gone four men died. Reggie, you can’t buy me off by spending a week’s wages for the average Londoner on an off-the-ration meal that makes me feel I’m cheating the English-that makes me feel any Englishman with money cheats his fellow English. For fuck’s sake, Reggie, looking around this room, would you even know there’s a war on? Do you think these people know what’s in a Woolton pie? Have you ever had to eat Woolton pie?’
‘Like humble pie, is it?’
‘Yes-that’s exactly what it’s like. The self-imposed humility of the English as they tighten their belts and pull together. Now-why don’t you tighten your conscience and tell me the truth? And the truth is that you dumped me on Walter Stilton when you got a crack at Hess. It was Hess, wasn’t it? Don’t answer. I know. Hess was a bigger fish than Stahl. Hess knows almost as much as Hitler. So you grilled Hess and got what you wanted and now you don’t need Stahl. So here I am, four dead men later, being kissed off in a classy restaurant with a bottle of Krug ‘20. Reggie-fuck you.’
‘No,’ said Reggie.
‘No? No what?’
‘No, I didn’t get what I wanted out of Hess. In fact, as you might put it, I got fuck all. That’s why I’m back. We need Stahl. We really do need Stahl.’
The waiter brought two bowls of Brown Windsor. Cal was not partial to it, but he was damn certain Reggie hated it, and if the only way to ensure Reggie ate it was to eat it himself-and if they were going to work together again, destroying his taste buds was about the least penance Reggie could do-then so be it. He picked up his napkin and said, ‘Tuck in, you sonovabitch.’
Reggie pulled a face as though he were sucking on a ripe lemon. When they’d both finished the course in silence, Cal summoned the waiter and told him his friend would have seconds. Cal let him get halfway through it and said, ‘Stahl.’
‘Quite,’ said Reggie. ‘Stahl.’
‘Where’ve you got him?’
‘Got him’ isn’t quite the phrase. He’s not a POW. He’s in a private room at the Queen Alexandra Military Hospital on Millbank. In fact, he’s got rather a nice view of the river.’
‘A fine bullshit, Reggie. You mean you don’t have half a dozen of your guys guarding the door?’
‘Well, of course he’s guarded-a couple of London bobbies, as a matter of fact.’
‘And how is Stahl?’
‘Came round late last night. He was in the London Hospital in the East End then. I had him moved this morning, just before I came to see you. I haven’t seen him, but I gather he’s going to be fine. Nothing more than mild concussion. A couple of stitches to the scalp and an aspirin.’
‘Asking for me?’
Reggie sucked on the lemon.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Will you come, or do I have to suffer three helpings of this Cherry Blossom boot polish gruel?’
§ 86
Stahl rubbed the side of his head. He could feel the ridge of torn, stitched flesh beneath the dressing. It was his own fault. Whoever the man behind
the door was, he should have kept firing bullets into him till he heard the body fall. He must have been tall-Stahl had been aiming for his heart, and his last memory was of seeing a blurred figure clutching his belly with one hand and a gun with the other. Then the night went green, and green became black. The black became light and light was day and nurses with incomprehensible London accents were chattering at him. And a young British bobby, so cleanly shaven his skin shone pink as a washed baby, called him sir and asked if he felt ‘OK’. An hour or so later a doctor had examined him-speaking to him all the time in fluent if accented German-and had pronounced him fit to travel. Then they’d bundled him into an ambulance, driven him, he thought, three or four miles across London and put him here-in his own room, in a hospital that must be the preserve of some sort of ruling class. It reminded him of those he had had access to in Berlin, where party members could be pampered back to good health.
A new doctor examined his wound, then said, ‘I never thought I’d see the day I’d be treating a German here.’
‘Austrian,’ said Stahl, the first word he had spoken.
‘Difference is there?’
‘What do you think the Anschluss was? A day trip?’
This had shut the man up-and Stahl had not privileged him with the truth, that he had been in the Fuhrer’s entourage as they swept into Austria and that his people-Stahl’s as well as Hitler’s-had lined the streets and cheered and cheered at their own conquest. Days later, in Vienna, when the new regime had begun to make its mark, he found Storm Troopers standing over a group of Jews in the street. They were scrubbing the paving stones with brushes. Other
Austrians stood around and watched. Stahl had looked for faces he knew among the crowd and found none. Then one of the Jews had looked up from the gutter and he and Stahl had recognised one another.
Now, Stahl looked up and recognised Captain Cormack.
‘I must be slipping. I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘You’re among friends, for the first time in years. Maybe you can afford to relax,’ Cormack said.
Stahl eased himself up on the pillows to be more level with Cormack, who had propped himself against the mattress at the foot of the bed.
‘Who was he?’ he asked.
‘One of ours, I’m afraid. You were right about that. Frank Reininger, a colonel in US Intelligence at our embassy here. I’m as surprised as you are. He was pretty close to being the last person I suspected. Known the man since I was a teenager.’
‘We’re both speaking of him in the past tense. Is he dead?’
‘Yes. I know it might have been useful to get him alive. But I can see why you didn’t take chances. That last shot to the head killed him outright. If it hadn’t, who knows-it could be both of us stretched out in the morgue.’
Stahl said nothing. He hadn’t fired to the head. He hadn’t had the chance. Cormack said, ‘The British are waiting. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Of course. Let me wash and eat something and then I’m theirs. After all, I’m their prisoner.’
‘They’re calling you their guest.’
‘And Hitler called the Anschluss a “reunification”. We’re in a war of words. Meaning was the first casualty.’
‘A couple of hours?’ said Cormack.
‘Yes. I’ll be ready.’
§ 87
Stahl acknowledged Reggie’s introduction of ‘Brigadefuhrer, I’m Reggie,’ with a terse ‘Colonel’.
‘Oh… so you know me?’
‘Born Edinburgh, February 1900. Expelled from your private school over an incident with marijuana. Sandhurst 1919. Commissioned in the Royal Welch Fusiliers 1921. Recruited to Military Intelligence 1926. Married twice, a daughter by each marriage. Despite a playboy image, your grasp of German language and history is said to be excellent. Christened Alistair, always known as Reggie.’
‘Ah,’ said Reggie. ‘And what do I call you?’
‘Stahl, Wolfgang, anything but Brigadefuhrer. The Brigadefuhrer died in Berlin on April 17th.’
‘I see,’ said Reggie, looking ticked off. ‘Stahl it is.’
Stahl lay on the bed in slippers, pyjamas and a dressing gown. With his receding hairline, his salt and pepper colouring and the clipped, dark, moustache, he could easily have been the British officer recuperating from wounds who might ordinarily have occupied a room such as this. There was only one chair. Reggie took it. Cal stood, wondering if there was anything symbolic in Reggie’s brusque assumption of command.
‘It’s… er… not too soon for you?’ Reggie asked.
‘No. Now is as good a time as any. Ask me whatever you want.’
‘Well,’ said Reggie. ‘There was one thing in particular.’
‘Russia,’ Stahl said.
Reggie glanced quickly at Cal, and said, ‘Oh, you know?’
‘What else could be quite so urgent? You had Hess. Hess told you nothing, so you come to me. Fine. I know more than Hess.’
‘You do?’
‘Hess is “the heart of the Party”-not the brains. It’s been a while since he had that level of confidence placed in him. Russia is very much Heydrich’s dream, and what he knows I know.’
‘Oh. Jolly good. Where shall we start?’
‘Why don’t we start with you getting me a blackboard?’
‘A blackboard?’
‘They’re bound to have one somewhere or do your hospitals teach nothing? And while you’re at it, some chalk. Four different colours of chalk.’
‘I see,’ said Reggie, not seeing. ‘Chalk.’
‘I have a visual memory-let me visualise the battle plan for you, and everything else will fall into place.’
‘He’s right, Reggie,’ said Cal. ‘This is the way we’ve always done things. Wolf thinks in images. He remembers text as images.’
Ten minutes later two hospital orderlies staggered in with an easel and a blackboard and set it up. Stahl swung his legs off the bed and picked up a stick of white chalk.
Cal had seen the results of so much of the work of Stahl’s photographic memory. Lists and charts that he had reconstructed from the eidetic snapshots of the mind and forwarded to him. Once, in a rare face-to-face meeting he had roughed out a scheme for some troop manoeuvre on a single sheet of foolscap. Before he began to draw, he said, he could not have described it. Once drawn, he had burnt the sketch in an ashtray and recited the battle plan to him. It was, Cal thought, an odd relationship between image and language, a mental short-circuit, a cognitive loophole-but it worked. Undeniably it worked.
He watched as Stahl roughed in the boundaries-the Bug River, the current front line between the Axis and the USSR-the Baltic coastline-a jagged set of inverted Vs to mark the Urals-a scoop of the Black Sea at the bottom of the board. All of which amounted to a steel wall of armament around Eastern Poland, Byelorussia, the Ukraine and the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia-now earmarked as a new circle in hell.
Stahl switched to green chalk.
‘Let us start with Army Group North.’
He drew a box up near the Baltic Sea and wrote in the name von Leeb. Reggie finally seemed to have caught on. He took a tiny notebook from his inside pocket, unscrewed the top of his fountain pen and started to jot down notes. Under von Leeb’s name Stahl began to chalk in the formation of battle-the 18th and 16th German Armies under von Kuchler and Busch, the 4th Panzer Army under Hoepner-11 divisions of Infantry, supporting 10 Tank divisions… Reinhardt… von Manstein… the Panzer Army Reserve SS Totenkopf. Cal saw Reggie reach for his glasses as the chalk names got smaller and smaller with each sub-division Stahl made.
Stahl switched to the red chalk-von Bock’s Army Group Centre… his hands began to fly across the board, sometimes writing in the horizontal, sometimes the vertical as though he thought or saw in two planes at once… 32 Infantry divisions… Guderian’s Panzers. Often gaps would appear as he skipped over some name or number, only to double back seconds later, scrawling furiously, chalk snapping off and flying a
cross the room with the speed of bullets. To blue chalk. Army Group South under von Runstedt… another 24 Infantry divisions, 15 divisions of Panzers and the Axis partners-troops from Hungary, Italy and Rumania. Reggie could scarcely keep up. His head bobbed like a doll’s on a coiled spring, up and down from the paper, weaving right and left as he peered around Stahl to the multi-coloured jigsaw now assembling itself in front of his eyes.
Then Stahl began shooting arrows across the board. Green arrows aiming at Leningrad, red arrows forking across central Poland to reunite at Smolensk in a push for Moscow, and blue arrows driving across Kiev to the Volga and Stalingrad.
It took more than quarter of an hour.
‘What’re those last two at the bottom there?’ The first words Reggie had spoken in what seemed to Cal to be an age. He’d never known the man to shut up for so long.
‘More Waffen SS regiments,’ Stahl said. ‘The Adolf Hitler and the Viking.’ Stahl no longer looked at the board-he turned his back on it. Cal was staring at it, overawed, chilled by the magnitude of it, the sheer power of what it stood for. Reggie was smiling. Not pleasure, not smugness, he thought, more like a schoolboy thrilled to have finally got what he wanted.
Cal moved closer to the board while Reggie scribbled and said, ‘Will it work? Will anything so colossal hold up once you get it off the drawing board?’
‘It’s perfect country,’ said Stahl. ‘The flat plains that stretch from Prussia to Moscow. Perfect Panzer country. The tanks will simply throttle up and roll-and when they’ve cleared a way through, there are more than three million men in uniform to follow on. Hitler thinks it will be over before winter sets in-although it might be more accurate to say that he prays it will over by then. These men have not been issued with winter uniforms. There aren’t even orders placed with the factories for any winter uniforms.’
‘Air power?’
