by Alex Gerlis
That suited Rolf fine. He carried on working at the bank and Katharina at the hospital. Once a week they’d go and visit Leitner in the basement under the apartment building in Leopoldstadt. The visit would usually be on either a Saturday or a Sunday, depending on Katharina’s shifts at the hospital. They always took a different route, travelling together until they crossed the canal then splitting up so that one could watch the other. They took it in turns for one of them to go into the apartment block, while the other kept watch outside. Then they’d follow the same procedure when they headed back to Ungargasse, one following the other, switching between who’d walk in front then joining up once they crossed the canal.
The main purpose of the visits was to ensure Leitner was safe and that Frau Egger and her son Otto had no problems and enough money.
To all outward appearances, Gerd and Anna Schuster were a normal married couple. Had any of them been asked, their neighbours would have described them as polite and unassuming, but then they’d no doubt have said the same about most of the people in their block. Even in the privacy of their apartment they’d assumed the life of a married couple in most respects. They chatted happily about holidays they’d been on and other innocent matters. Any conversation that strayed into more personal matters was quickly shut down. Katharina was astute enough to realise Rolf’s feelings for Frieda weren’t too far below the surface and she struggled to know how best to handle this. Should she gently broach the subject so he could get it off his chest, or was it best to ignore? Once or twice she did start to talk about Frieda, but soon stopped when she saw the pain in his eyes.
It was safer to discuss each other’s days at work, laugh at the gossip and share titbits of information they’d heard about the war. They avoided listening to foreign broadcasts on their radio – that would be an unnecessary risk – but they enjoyed sitting together in the evenings to listen to concerts. When it came to going to bed, there’d be an awkward pause, one that lasted only a second or two but one that both were increasingly aware of. Katharina would then give Rolf a quick kiss on the cheek and go to bed, while he arranged the sofa to sleep on.
But everything changed in December.
It was Tuesday 12th December, and Katharina was on a late shift at the hospital that she wasn’t due to finish until close to midnight. On such days Rolf tended not to hurry back to the apartment after work, preferring to walk through the Innere Stadt, and perhaps find a bar that had some electricity and maybe something to eat. On this particular evening he was wandering in and out of the side streets around Schelling Gasse when he found a bar at the bottom of a steep flight of steps. It was almost empty and cold so he decided to leave after one drink; but, before doing so, he went to the toilet, which was at the back, through the small kitchen. And it was in the kitchen he saw her.
***
Franzi Landauer and Frieda Brauner had enjoyed the kind of close friendship Rolf had come to realise was exclusive to women; intimate and trusting, they’d been confidantes with no secrets or ambition coming between them. They’d been friends since university, so when Rolf first met Frieda, Franzi was part of her life. For a while she and Frieda shared the same apartment and, even when Frieda moved into her own flat in Brigittenau, Franzi was always around. As with so many close friendships, the two women appeared to have little in common. Frieda was tall, with short hair and would be described as handsome rather than beautiful. She was a dentist, from a village in the west of Austria, a practising communist and a decidedly non-practising Catholic. Franzi, by contrast, was shorter than her friend, but with long dark hair and a beauty that ensured she never went unnoticed. She worked in her family’s fashion business; she wasn’t interested in politics and was Jewish.
But despite their differences, or possibly because of them, they were the closest of friends. The last Rolf had heard of her was that she’d fled to Paris, but the woman in the small kitchen was unquestionably Franzi. Her once long hair was now much shorter and she was wearing a pair of heavy spectacles. She stared at him in disbelief and fear.
‘Franzi! What are you doing here?’
She pushed past him and shut the door leading to the bar, then checked the other door was closed too. ‘Please leave Rolf. Never, ever call me Franzi. Please, I beg you. My name’s Anna Wagner.’ Her voice trembled and she gripped the edge of a worktop.
‘But I thought you were in Paris?’
‘I never went… Look Rolf, we can’t talk now. The owner will leave soon and I’ll be on my own here for the last hour. Let’s talk then. Hardly anyone comes in these days.’
An hour later Rolf stood at the bar with Franzi behind it. The last customer had left a few minutes before and the place was now deserted. They both spoke softly, leaning close to each other: anyone wandering in would assume he was another customer trying his luck with a barmaid.
‘I never made it to Paris. I left it too late, Rolf.’
‘You’ll need to call me Gerd.’
‘Gerd? You don’t look like a Gerd – you don’t look too much like Rolf either,’ she said. ‘We all have these different identities in this mad place, it’s crazy! My parents and my younger brothers went to Paris just after the Anschluss. I was going to go later in April. The idea was I’d close down the business and arrange for my parents’ house to be looked after, but the man who was going to buy the business – at a much reduced price – reneged on the deal. Of course, looking back, I should have just left and forgotten about the money, but I thought I was smart and I’d be able to sort something. But it turned into a nightmare. The man went to the authorities and said he had a deal and I’d cheated him – and you can guess who they chose to believe. Because of this trouble, I was denied an exit visa. Here Rol… Gerd… have another drink, it doesn’t look good if you have an empty glass.’
She poured him a tall glass of beer and placed a schnapps alongside it.
‘Even then, I could probably have got out; it was just me after all. But I’d moved back into my parents’ house in Alsergrund and was trying to sort that out. It was a nice house, you know, a very smart area. But when they tried to confiscate it, I resisted and I was arrested. By the time I was released, everything had been taken from us. They even took our cats, you know? Jews aren’t allowed to own pets. Sip some of your beer; it looks better if it’s not a full glass.’
‘So you were released?’
‘Yes, but I had to report back a week later – and this time to the Gestapo in Morzinplatz. As soon as I realised we’d lost everything, I went into hiding. I decided not to risk trying to escape: what would I have done, climbed over the mountains? I thought I’d have a better chance in the city. I changed my identity and now I live here in the basement; the owner lets me in return for working for nothing. Otherwise he couldn’t afford to keep this place open.’
‘So you’ve been in Vienna all this time?’
She nodded, picking up a cloth and polishing a few glasses.
‘When did you last see Frieda?’
She stopped polishing the glass and leaned back, staring long and hard at Rolf.
‘Frieda?’
‘Yes, you must know where she is, tell me…’
She put the glass down on the bar and placed one of her hands over his.
‘Oh my God, Rolf… You mean you don’t know?’
***
Franzi had no idea what to do with Rolf. He swayed slowly, looking at her as if he couldn’t believe what she was saying. ‘Where are you living? You must go home quickly – soon it’ll be too late,’ she said.
He ignored her, his only movement was the tears welling in his eyes. Franzi was now seriously worried someone would walk in and wonder what was going on. She came out from behind the bar and shepherded Rolf into the kitchen, where she sat him down and made him a strong coffee while she closed up the bar. When she returned, the coffee was untouched and Rolf was gazing into space, his face expressionless but tears streaming down his cheeks. Even if he decided to leave, he was in no fit stat
e to go anywhere. She couldn’t risk him being stopped.
He spent that night in the basement with her, a freezing cold room with a dirty mattress, a few blankets, a couple of candles, and little else beside a suitcase and a few rats. Franzi slept fitfully: every time she awoke Rolf was in the same sitting position, his eyes sometimes half-closed and once or twice the flickering light of the candle caught the beginnings of what could be a faint smile on his face. Around 6.00 in the morning she woke to see that the candle had gone out but Rolf was asleep on the mattress next to her. She covered him with her blankets and went upstairs. The owner would arrive around 11.00, in time for lunch – the only time the bar was busy these days. She’d send Rolf away before he arrived.
Franzi cleaned the bar and the kitchen, and got everything ready for opening later that morning. She went back to the basement at 10.15, but even in the gloom she could tell Rolf wasn’t there. When she lit a candle there was no sign of him, no note, nothing.
Franzi allowed herself the luxury of just one minute in which to think. In the state Rolf was in the previous night he was dangerous: he could say anything to anyone, which meant she was no longer safe. She’d never regarded her situation in the bar as being ideal, but it had meant she’d survived far longer than she’d expected. She’d have to leave immediately.
As for Rolf, he’d disappeared.
Chapter 21
Vienna and London, December 1944
Katharina tried to remain calm that night and think of a plausible reason why Rolf hadn’t been there when she’d arrived back at their apartment. As far as she could tell, he hadn’t returned after work; everything was exactly as it had been when she left for her shift some 11 hours earlier. The sofa wasn’t made up, the basins in the bathroom and the kitchen were bone-dry, and his shoes weren’t in the hall. The loaf of black bread on the table was untouched, as was the cheese beside it. Those were the first things Rolf would have headed for when he returned to the apartment.
The most obvious explanation was he’d been arrested, but how come they hadn’t been waiting for her? If he had been arrested, she decided, somehow they hadn’t found his papers and he was refusing to reveal anything. This also seemed unlikely: there was no reason why he wouldn’t have had any papers with him. But whatever had happened, she knew what she ought to do. She should leave: their instructions were very clear – if one of them was caught, they’d hold out for as long as possible, giving the other person an opportunity to disappear.
She packed a small bag with essentials but decided to wait until the morning and telephone the bank first. Maybe Herr Plaschke would have a good explanation.
Before she managed to ask Plaschke a question he had one for her. Where is Gerd? We haven’t seen him this morning. She paused for a few seconds, just long enough to come up with what she hoped sounded like a plausible answer. ‘That’s why I am calling you, Herr Plaschke. He’s terribly unwell, I’m afraid. He was fine last night when he went to bed, then this morning, well – would you believe it – he woke with a terrible fever and he has lost his voice completely, otherwise he’d have telephoned himself.’
Plaschke hesitated just long to make it clear he was somewhat inconvenienced, then asked her to pass on his best wishes to Gerd for a speedy recovery – with a pointed emphasis on the word ‘speedy’.
Katharina was on another late shift that evening. Before she left the apartment in the afternoon she carefully arranged a few strands of dark-brown cotton thread along the width of the carpet in the hall, as Basil Remington-Barber had shown her. When she returned in the early hours of the following evening the strands were all in place: no one had been in the apartment. She did sleep a bit that night, but woke early and lay in bed thinking. It did briefly cross her mind that Rolf’s disappearance could have something to do with Frieda, but she couldn’t think what could have happened and realised she needed to do something. She could either leave Vienna and somehow try and get back into Switzerland or remain where she was. Either way, she’d need to get word to London.
***
‘I’ll get Herr Plaschke for you, Frau Schuster,’ said the woman behind the counter at Bank Leu, looking Katharina up and down in a ‘so this is what you look like’ manner. ‘Please take a seat.’
Five minutes later she was in Plaschke’s office. The manager was holding the sheet of paper she’d handed to him. ‘And you say this is urgent?’
‘Yes, Herr Plaschke: you can see it’s my husband’s handwriting. He remembered last night he needed to send this urgent message to Herr Hedinger at the head office in Zürich. He’d planned to do it yesterday morning but, with his fever, he totally forgot. He asked I gave it to you personally.’
Plaschke held the sheet of paper in front of him and furrowed his brow. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Apparently it will to Herr Hedinger. My husband says if the message could be sent as soon as possible then Herr Hedinger will no doubt appreciate it.’
For the second time, Plaschke read the message out loud.
Second transfer of last week needs to be reviewed. Please ensure proper audit and recalculation. Will advise further in due course.
Plaschke shook his head. ‘As I say, it doesn’t make sense to me, but if you insist… Ah well, I’ll have it cabled this morning. When do you expect your husband to be back at work?’
‘Hopefully by the end of the week,’ she replied, allowing an especially friendly smile to cross her lips before hurrying off to the hospital. The sheet of paper was one of several Rolf had prepared when they arrived in Vienna to be sent to London in the event of an emergency like this. The gist of this one was that Rolf himself had gone missing and there was no news as to where he was.
***
‘I knew it,’ said Christopher Porter. He was pacing around his office, red-faced and furious. Edgar was standing with his back to the window.
‘Knew what sir?’
‘That Rolf couldn’t be trusted. Look, this message came in over the weekend: Hedinger got it to Basil and he sent it on overnight. Read the bloody thing.’
Edgar looked at it carefully. ‘It says Rolf has gone missing and Katharina has no idea where he is, but she’s safe.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But why does it make you think Rolf isn’t to be trusted?’
‘Think about it, Edgar. Oh this bloody thing… my secretary…’ Porter swept away a small row of paper ribbons that had been hung across the front of his desk. Christmas was just a week away.
‘At this rate, Christmas will be cancelled, which will be a merciful release in my case I can assure you,’ said Porter. ‘I dread the in-laws coming to stay – absolutely dread it. If I have to listen again to my father-in-law’s theories on how to win the war… Christ, you know he actually brought a map along with him last year? I wouldn’t mind, but he knows as much about warfare as I do about golf, which is his one other topic of conversation. Look Edgar, it’s perfectly clear: Rolf has gone missing and if Katharina is safe that means he hasn’t been arrested by the Gestapo: correct?’
‘So it would seem, but…’
‘… No buts, he’s disappeared. Absent Without Leave. Heaven knows what he’s up to, but my money’s on him going off with the Russians. After all, he and that woman have been in Vienna for how long, eight… nine months now? And what was he meant to be doing there? Contact Leitner and see what the bloody Soviets are up to. Well, it took them the best part of three months to contact Leitner and we’ve not yet heard so much as a whisper about the Soviets – not a bloody whisper, if you’ll excuse my language. Sir Roland will be absolutely bloody furious and I don’t even want to think what Winston…’
‘Hang on, sir, you’re rather jumping to conclusions aren’t you? He’s missing, that’s all we know.’
‘What about Whitlock?’
‘Poor George has been dead since June, sir.’
‘I know that you fool,’ said Porter. ‘But remind me what he said about Rolf… And be honest Edgar. Did he sa
y anything that could, with hindsight, point to him being a Soviet agent?’
Edgar thought carefully. What Porter was saying was a bit hasty but not completely ridiculous. The fact Katharina had managed to get the message out meant that she was safe and it did imply Rolf wasn’t in the hands of the Gestapo.
‘I asked George whether he recruited Rolf or whether he recruited us.’
‘And…?’
‘And it wasn’t entirely clear, I told you as much in June,’ said Edgar. ‘He wasn’t a walk-in, but then the Soviets are always much more sophisticated than that – the Nazis used to use that kind of ploy. But nor was it a straightforward case of us recruiting him. He could have been very, very clever and made sure he was in the right place at the right time. Plus, his fiancée was a member of the KPO, so it’s not impossible. What do you want to do?’
Porter had calmed down now, probably helped by the prospect of an in-law-free Christmas. ‘There’s not a lot we can do, other than contemplate that we may have been used by the Soviets,’ he said. ‘Rolf’s most likely being feted in the Kremlin, for all we know. We can’t get a message to Katharina, far too risky. If I remember correctly, isn’t the plan she contacts us in another week to let us know what’s going on?’
‘Correct, sir. In the meantime, let’s keep our fingers crossed that he’s not going to lead Viktor to Leitner’s lair.’
***
That very same day Katharina had some time off in Vienna, having worked two long shifts that weekend. She telephoned the bank to say that unfortunately her husband was still unwell then went shopping – or queuing to more accurately describe it. She had some lunch, pottered around the apartment, and began to feel quite alone and frightened. For the first time since Rolf disappeared she was neither at work nor exhausted, which allowed her time to think. She was fast coming to the realisation that she couldn’t carry on doing nothing for much longer. It was still possible the Gestapo would turn up – then she had to think about Leitner. Would it be safe if she went to check he was still in Leopoldstadt and, if he was, should she try and escape with him to Switzerland?
