Night Crossing

by Robert Ryan

  ‘That makes deafness an enviable disability. If you have to have one in this day and age.’

  Canaris raised an eyebrow and smiled. ‘Unless it’s a club-foot. Club-feet are also very fashionable, I hear.’ Ross didn’t reply. It was a dig at Goebbels. ‘Look, a man can serve two countries, Inspector Ross, if the aim is to make sure that those two countries don’t go to war. If a man was to have assurances that what he gave would go no further.’ The blue eyes stared at him. ‘Not to the Wehrmacht or the Luftwaffe or the navy. To here.’ He pointed back at the Abwehr town houses.

  ‘Assurances?’ asked Ross. ‘What kind of assurances?’

  Canaris lifted his battered trilby and swept back his hair. ‘I don’t suppose my word would count for much?’

  Ross looked the former U-boat commander up and down and tried to read the vast script lurking between the lines. ‘It might. What do I get in return?’

  Canaris tutted and shook his head, as if to indicate a trifle. ‘Why, what was in the tube, of course.’

  Ross shrugged with feigned dismissiveness. ‘Is that all?’

  The Admiral fell silent, and Ross feared that he had somehow overstepped the mark. However, he knew that his father would never accept the first offer on the table, so he too refrained from speaking. After a few minutes Canaris said softly: ‘Seven, seven, zero, nine, S for sugar. Can you repeat?’ Ross did so. ‘Barclays Bank, London. Should you activate the account, then I will know we are speaking the same language.’

  ‘If not?’

  ‘It will close at the end of November. A missed opportunity.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘For all of us.’

  Canaris took out a pack of cigarettes and offered Ross one. He refused. ‘Forgive me, Admiral, but you haven’t really told me what you want me to do.’

  Canaris signalled to the dog and they began the walk back to his office. He waited a while before he said, smiling slyly and with a note of disappointment in his voice, ‘Oh, Inspector Ross, I think you understand me only too well.’ Canaris picked up the dog to carry it the last few hundred yards. ‘If you have any doubts, you can always ask your father.’

  Ross knew he was being goaded. ‘As you said, my father doesn’t share my views on Germany.’

  ‘No, but he is a very pragmatic man. He’ll understand. Good day, Inspector Ross. Give the Colonel my regards when you report back.’

  Canaris disappeared into the Tirpitzufer complex, leaving Ross alone on the street, feeling as if he had just been played like an old fiddle.

  Back at the Adlon, Ross was patched through by the continental trunks to London. The duty officer answered and Ross said very simply, for the benefit of the SD’s listeners, ‘Can you tell the Chief Superintendent that I’m coming back early? Yes, case closed, all tickety-boo.’

  No, it bloody well wasn’t. Canaris had as good as told him that the death of Ronald Draper in that Neuköln alley was an execution disguised as a murder. That the Kripo had then used it as an excuse to behead a third party—someone they needed a trumped-up charge to dispose of—thus avoiding a diplomatic incident in the immediate aftermath of Munich. However, they had failed to find whatever it was that Draper had hidden up his arse. His father had told him that, according to his travel expenses, Draper had been to Bremen, Kiel and Hamburg as part of his ICI business. What had he picked up there? Ross had no way of even guessing.

  So what about the offer from Canaris? If he promised to start a tit-for-tat trade, Ross would get the document that had been in the tube. But what would Canaris want? His head was pounding. Catching criminals for A Division was so much easier than this. He was doubly glad to have disappointed his father by becoming a copper, rather than a professional sneak, one of his ‘casuals’ spying for Churchill and Dansey on the QT.

  Still, he had to keep up appearances, to act the outraged policeman, so he caught a cab to the Alex to protest about the execution, but, unsurprisingly, nobody of rank was available to see him. Certainly not the lugubrious Herr Doktor Pohl. He left a strongly worded note and walked down to the Tietz department store. Opposite was a perfumery, one of the few Jewish businesses on the street that hadn’t been Aryanised. All around the little shop, signs that had once said ‘Kochmann’ and ‘Rosenberg’ had been torn down or painted over. Alone along the block was Max Goldschmidt. Max was safe because nobody could replace him—no Aryan could do his job so well—and SS officers used him to supply their wives and mistresses with his exquisite bottles of perfume. Nazis could be very pragmatic in their pogroms.

  The shop was filled with dark wood shelves, holding stoppered bottles of liquids, some vividly iridescent, others merely tinted by whatever mysterious ingredient lay within. Behind the counter the walls were hung with boxes studded with tiny compartments, each one holding a miniature bottle of crystal or powder. Elsewhere, glass-fronted cabinets contained rows of brown bottles with thick yellow-ish labels, the contents named in a cursive script that had faded to an almost illegible beige. It all suggested a last bastion of alchemy.

  ‘A bespoke scent?’ asked Max, an etiolated man with perpetually flaring nostrils that made him look as if he was picking up millions of odours that mere mortals were unable to detect. ‘Of course. I have a backlog, however. A week, ten days.’

  ‘I’d like it express,’ said Ross, using the Berlin shorthand for paying over the odds for swift service.

  ‘How express?’

  ‘This afternoon.’

  The perfumer made a noise as if this were an insult to his art.

  ‘Why the rush?’

  ‘I have to leave the country.’

  ‘Don’t we all?’ Max said with a heartfelt sigh. ‘So. Tell me about her. I will see what I can do.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘If it is bespoke, I need to know about her character, so I can match the components to her personality. I suppose bringing her here is out of the question?’

  ‘It’s meant to be a surprise.’

  Max fetched his pad, placed a pair of glasses on the end of his twitching nose, took down Ross’s name and contact details and then said: ‘Go ahead.’

  For ten minutes Ross stuttered through a description of Ulrike, trying to pin down the qualities that he had deduced from one meeting: the sparky, teasing sprite, the hint of inner steeliness tinged with sadness, possibly guilt, whenever she spoke of her father, the strange unblinking eyes that seemed to peer deep inside your head, the unfeigned love of music, despite what she had done to herself, the odd and unsettling intuitive-ness she displayed. A Duchenne. He must find out more to see if he’d been had. He wouldn’t put it past her.

  ‘Is that enough?’ asked Ross at last.

  ‘It might be,’ said the perfumer as he scribbled down some options to try.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘What do I think?’ Max Goldschmidt laughed, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘I think, Herr Ross, that you are in love with this lady.’

  Five

  WINTER WAS ALREADY biting deeply on the German coast. The four towering sheds of Krupp’s Germania Werft shipyards in Kiel shook as the bitter north wind whistled through the corrugated iron sides and steel girders, eddying around the quartet of conning towers within. The noise of the gale was accompanied by a steady tattoo of hammering, punctuated by the crackle of welding or the sudden whirr of a drill. Twenty-four hours they were working now, round the clock to get the boats off the slipway and out into the waters of the Baltic and, after that, into the Atlantic, where they belonged.

  Oberleutnant zur See Günther Prinz pulled his greatcoat collar around his neck and patted the cold steel hull in front of him. Of the four U-boats being assembled at the yards, his was by far the most advanced. They had even reached the stage of bolting the 88 deck-gun in position. True, the boat still looked scabby and rusty in places, oddly naked without insignia or radio wires; even the ‘asparagus’, the periscope, was missing, but the end was in sight.

  The boat had been laid down in February 19
37, eighteen months previously, and it was but a few weeks away from completion. Already Lutz, Prinz’s Chief Engineer, and his team had done their Baubelehrung—the familiarisation tour—making sure that the boat was bolted together to their satisfaction. Prinz wanted to do his own personal inspection before the crew arrived in Kiel over the next month or so. He had only thirty of the boat’s complement of forty-eight confirmed. Volunteers for the undersea boats, it seemed, were in short supply. Just the thought of the steel tube gave many regular sailors the Blechkoller, the chest-constricting fear experienced only by U-boat crews. Conscription and callow youths too stupid to know any better than to volunteer would be needed to fill up these hulls, he knew, and that would make the commander’s job—his job—trickier, at least until he won their trust and respect.

  Prinz turned to Hans Schepke, the yard’s chief designer, and, using the slang for torpedoes, asked, ‘How many eels?’

  ‘Fourteen,’ said Schepke proudly. ‘Four bow tubes and one stern. Same as your old one.’

  Prinz had served on a VIIA boat during the Spanish Civil War, one of several subs used for reconnaissance, minelaying and blockades in that conflict. This was the ‘B’ version, incorporating what they had learned from the experiences. He nodded. ‘What type of eel?’

  ‘The G7a.’

  Prinz tutted, disappointed. It was the model of torpedo that left a trail of tell-tale bubbles all the way to the target. A sharp-eyed enemy lookout just might save the day. It wasn’t good enough.

  ‘But by the time she is commissioned,’ said Schepke, seeing the look of displeasure, ‘the next generation will be on trial. No bubbles. And there will be magnetic detonators, not impact ones. A proximity explosion is far more effective.’

  Prinz thought about it. ‘So the ship’s metal makes the torpedo explode a few metres beneath the keel?’

  ‘Exactly. You will see other changes in these boats. More fuel in the saddle tanks—thirty-three tons more. More powerful engines. Here, look. Twin rudders for manoeuvrability. Top speed on the surface will be eighteen knots.’

  ‘And submerged?’

  ‘Eight. Perhaps nine. Trust me, you will like this boat.’

  ‘I’d better, or else I’ll be back,’ said Prinz, flashing a wry smile. They both knew why this boat had to be as perfect as possible, and why Prinz’s Chief Engineer had spent hours looking at every rivet and weld and bulkhead—very few submariners got the chance to return home and complain about shoddy goods.

  ‘You want to go on board?’

  Prinz hesitated, savouring the moment when he would see the cocoon of his own command. He could smell the diesel and sweat already, even though the engines hadn’t run and it still possessed a well-ventilated interior. Within its first week at sea, though, it would stink like every other U-boat, a stench at once nauseating and oddly comforting.

  ‘When will she be commissioned?’

  Schepke looked at his clipboard. ‘By the end of November. It has to be—we need the space to build the next one.’ The designer couldn’t keep the glee of a bulging order book from his voice. Both Kiel and the Bremen yards were working to full capacity turning out the Type VII U-boats.

  ‘And does the boat have a number yet?’ asked Prinz, knowing full well that it should have by now.

  ‘Oh yes, they all have numbers, from when they are just a rack of steel plate and a box of rivets. Werk number five-eight-two.’ That wasn’t what Prinz meant and Schepke knew it and held up a hand to show that he was joking. He indicated the ladder leading to the deck hatch just aft of the gun ring. ‘Oberleutnant zur See Prinz. Would you like to step aboard U-40?’

  The letter from the RMK, the Reichs Musik Kammer, was in a thick, embossed envelope. Ulrike’s hands shook as she lifted it off the tray and dismissed the maid. Her mouth was dry. Should she wait until her father got home? No. It was her idea, her venue, her choice of programme. She had written the application, had pleaded, rather eloquently she thought, that much of this music deserved to be heard. Furtwängler had got away with conducting The Magic Flute, had even won praise from the Führer, when a year previously it had been frowned upon. And most importantly Georg Kulenkampff had played the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic within recent memory. Surely it was time to reconsider some of the decisions made in the past, those spurious distinctions between Aryan and degenerate music? It wasn’t as if she was asking for Stravinsky or Hindemith or Egk.

  Ulrike walked into the main music salon and tossed the letter on the piano, where it skidded along the lid, its raised eagle eyeing her menacingly. She knew her request to the RMK might have gone as far as Goebbels before a decision had been made. It was a shame that Richard Strauss was no longer at the RMK—at least he had shown some leniency. After all, one of his librettists had been Jewish.

  Ulrike took a deep breath, snatched up the letter, ripped open the flap and pulled the single sheet out. She looked at the signature first. Paul Gräner, a man whose musical career was booming under Hider, had scrawled his name across the bottom. The letter was curt and to the point. Schumann, Liszt, yes. Schoenberg, definitely not. But yes, a big loud yes, to Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto.

  She let out her breath in a long sigh, feeling her eyes fill with tears, reading and rereading the line that after much consideration the RMK had decided to allow the performance, even though she must announce at the start of the piece that this was a Jew who had simply stolen Protestant church music and turned it into a sickly mélange.

  For the first time since it had happened, Ulrike felt regret about her ‘accident’. She would be cutting a disc in the wings of the small hall, monitoring the levels of the microphones, and not playing on stage, not bowing the Allegro molto appassionato, fully aware that she would be able to steer it away from the schmaltz it sometimes became, to bring out the lyricism. Her deformed left hand was automatically making shapes and she thrust away the shroud of melancholy. She had made her choice, and her choice had been to thwart her father and to regain her freedom, to have the suffocating shackles of practice day in, day out, removed.

  She had also rediscovered the joy of listening, without over-analysis, and the pleasure in recording music so others could hear her father’s piano-playing, her cousin’s singing, Franz Haug’s violin, the Müller quintet, their little circle of dedicated performers, as clear as it had been the night she switched on the cumbersome disc-cutter.

  This time she might not have to use that monster. Erich’s father worked for AEG and he had promised her the use of a Magnetophon, which could record a whole twenty minutes on tape, as opposed to the five she could get on a disc. Twenty minutes! And, so he said, the sound quality was wonderful.

  She thought of Erich, of their future together, pre-ordained, it seemed, since the cradle. How long was an engagement meant to last in these troubled times? Both families were still irritatingly vague. When you’re ready, her father said. Ready for what? She was probably as ready for Erich as she’d ever be. Was he ready for her? He was a good-looking lad, and if he had been turned into a blinkered philistine, he was hardly alone. Once he grew out of uniforms, parades, hero-worship and … submarines. She remembered with a jolt that he was going off to serve in some horrible tin can under the ocean. She stamped her foot in irritation. She must discover when he was due to leave.

  Ulrike heard the front door slam. Father. Careful not to skid on the polished floors, she rushed to tell him the good news.

  The weather had finally turned. Rain spattered down on the pavements around him as Ross leaned into a sharp headwind, pushing himself up the hill to Ulrike’s house, wondering with each step if the gale was trying to prevent him making a fool of himself. In love? Him? He had no idea what that felt like. He knew what it wasn’t, thanks to the near misses with girls when he’d been in his twenties, edging slowly towards betrothal because it was expected, then veering away at the last minute when the full implications dawned on him, the realisation that a couple of happy summer picnic
s were not the best preparation for a life together. His father claimed to have decided on marrying his mother within an hour of meeting her. Ross was sure that this was in rose-tinted retrospect. Since the Spanish-flu epidemic of the post-war years had carried her off, the Colonel had eulogised the woman whom he felt so guilty about surviving.

  Ross had to admit to himself that he didn’t have too many problems meeting women. One of his near misses had told him that if he grew a moustache and slicked his hair back he could double for the actor Ronald Colman. It was meant to be a compliment. Meeting was one thing, marrying another.

  Max must be wrong. He wasn’t in love, surely? This was just a gift for a young girl who’d patched him up after a foolish escapade in the park. One with whom he’d spent a strange but pleasant evening until it got dark and cold and the café had closed up around them, while she had explained to him why the National Socialists couldn’t make their minds up about whether to ban Goethe or not. She told the story of them decapitating his statue in the park, and the hue and cry to find the head again when he was rehabilitated a month later. She insisted that, even though she couldn’t play music any longer, she still got pleasure from singing, even if her voice was mediocre. And she sat there and had done her best to impersonate a hundred and fifty voices roaring out Bach’s Mass in B minor, oblivious of the stares of tired waiters waiting to go home, and then had lowered her voice and offered him an intimate snatch of a Hugo Wolf lied.

  This didn’t make it love, even though Ross could still hear the poetry of Mörike ringing in his ears, still feel the shudder of pleasure as she half-sang and half-whispered the lyrics at him. None of his English girls had ever managed anything like that, none of them would even have heard of the Austrian composer and the poetry that he set to music. Mind you, nor would they have explained in quite such detail how venereal disease eventually took his mind.