Night Crossing

by Robert Ryan

  The red light flicked on. Uli had seen something even in Schuller’s stony face. She was in the old dressing room next door, spying through an apparently opaque glass panel inserted into the door. She would signal to the interrogators whenever she felt that there was deception or obfuscation—the red light—or economy with the truth, which was the amber bulb on the signal box. Inspector Ross raised an eyebrow to draw his father’s attention to it. He had still not said a word. Blow hot, blow cold.

  Colonel Ross began to read from a report, a growing fury in his voice as he recited the facts. ‘As we understand it, the commandant of Rome, General Kurt Malzer, went berserk. He ordered the arrest of everyone on the street and in the surrounding area. Hitler, on hearing of the bombing, immediately ordered that thirty Italians were to be shot for every policeman killed.’

  ‘Ten,’ corrected Schuller quietly. ‘It was later reduced to ten.’

  Ross suddenly knew where he had met Schuller before. As a policeman in Berlin. The alley in Neuköln where Draper had been killed. God, the man had only been a kid back then.

  His father continued. ‘We have in command a certain SS-Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler. The morning after the bomb, he supervised the transporting of three hundred and thirty-five people to the caves on the Via Ardeatina. Statements from locals say that the shooting began at three-thirty in the afternoon. Most agreed that it had ended by eight p.m. Three hundred and thirty-five people shot in the back of the head, one after another. Four and a half hours it took to reach the last one. Can you imagine that? Awaiting your turn as bullet after bullet was fired into your friends and neighbours.’

  ‘Why do you bring this up now?’

  The old man laughed. ‘Because—’ There was the briefest of pauses. It was strange, but Ross could now detect when his father’s brain slipped out of gear, when his creeping dementia took its temporary grip, and he quickly leant forward and took over.

  ‘You won’t recall, but we have met before, Schuller. Berlin. Nineteen thirty-eight.’ There was no reaction. ‘You were just an Anwärter. A lad. You’ve done well. An Obersturmführer in five years. Couldn’t get promotion like that in peacetime, eh?’ The man shrugged. He wasn’t going to respond to that. ‘Mass reprisals are against the rules of war.’

  Ross was taken aback by the fury of Schuller’s reply. ‘What rules of war? Did anyone bother to tell the Russians the rules, or the Czechs? Or the cowards who planted that bomb in Rome?’

  ‘Were you involved in the executions?’ asked Ross.

  ‘No.’

  Red light. ‘I doubt if Kappler could have done it by himself. In four and a half hours. He would have needed help. A lot of help.’

  ‘I wasn’t in the caves.’

  Red light.

  The Colonel recovered and picked up the questioning again. ‘I must warn you, Obersturmführer Schuller, that our report will be forwarded to the Joint Allied War Crimes Investigation Unit.’

  ‘You want to talk about war crimes? I suggest you look at the record of the American 45th. Thunderbird, I think it is called. At Comise airfield in Sicily, they machine-gunned forty-two uniformed Germans. Later the same day, sixty Italians. At Buttera airfield, a US Captain of the 45th lined up his forty-three prisoners against a wall and machine-gunned them to death. We have our own records, our own investigations. These men will be brought to trial.’

  ‘If what you say is true, they will be brought to trial by the US Army.’

  Schuller shook his head, as if such a thing were inconceivable. ‘I think you consider the outcome of this war a foregone conclusion. Germany is not finished yet.’

  ‘Germany has been finished for two years. It is just taking a while to sink in.’

  There was a flat crump from the east and the windows rattled. A flying bomb, one of the ‘doodlebugs’ that had been falling on London since just after the invasion of Normandy in June, had landed close by. Schuller smiled.

  ‘I was not in the caves.’ Red light. ‘I do not approve of such actions.’ Red light. ‘I am not being obstructive.’ Red light.

  ‘Very well, Obersturmführer. I would like you to write out a statement of your policing actions in Rome during the month of March. Then we will see how closely it fits the facts.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  Ross’s father answered. ‘It’s going to be a long stay at the London Cage for you, Schuller. A very long stay.’ The Colonel stood and leant across the desk, resting on his knuckles. ‘And if I’m not mistaken, you can’t wait to get back among your own kind, can you? Do you think Germany can still win the war?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

  Green light.

  It was hard and gruelling work, far harder than Uli had imagined. The scale of rumour and accusation was vast. More often than not they had to recommend that an investigation team should be sent out to French villages to gather statements, or that witnesses should be found and brought over for identification purposes. And they were only dealing with Western Europe—most of those who had committed atrocities in Eastern Europe were in the hands of the Russians. Or, more likely, already dead.

  Today it had been a barn packed with women and children and then burned down. There was a Commando unit rounded up and summarily shot. News of a crashed aircrew bayoneted to death. Jewish hostages had been liquidated in reprisals. The day before she had heard of Czech women and girls raped repeatedly, executed and then nailed to barn doors so that their corpses could be used for target practice. On and on it went. In the evening, Ross and Uli would retire to the pub on the corner for a few drinks to try and purge the memory of the day’s sins. Her country’s sins, as they were constantly reminded by Colonel Ross.

  They usually sat in a corner seat, partitioned off from the body of the bar by frosted glass, and the ageing bottle-boy fetched them their drinks and refills for a tanner tip. Uli sipped her gin and tonic, without lemon—pubs hadn’t seen the citrus fruit in years—and asked: ‘Did Schuller make his statement?’

  ‘Yes. Pack of lies. Wasn’t there, didn’t see it.’

  ‘What will happen to him?’

  ‘Oh, some corroborating evidence will surface. He’s being moved from the Cage to Stanhope so we can keep him close at hand for when it does.’

  ‘He’s one of the ones who give me the creeps,’ Uli said.

  Ross took a large gulp of his half-and-half. ‘Why?’

  ‘He still believes.’

  ‘That’s just bravado.’

  ‘No, no. He genuinely believes that Germany can rise from this. He is convinced that everything he has done is justified. He has to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because otherwise he would have to face up to the fact that he is nothing short of a monster.’ She shuddered, downed her drink and signalled the bottle-boy for two more.

  ‘You think that Schuller is a monster? Some other species?’

  ‘Well, I tell myself that,’ she said. ‘I have to. I’m a German, Ross. Do you want me to say that it’s some fault in our make-up? That we are a whole nation of deviants?’

  Ross sighed. ‘It’s about war, not nations. I made some inquiries about the American 45th. Schuller might be right. About the summary executions of prisoners.’

  ‘Somehow that doesn’t make me feel better.’

  Ross tried to lift their spirits. ‘Look, would you like to go to the cinema? Abbott and Costello are on at the Electric.’

  ‘I don’t understand Abbott and Costello,’ she said. ‘They aren’t funny.’ Another cultural difference to chalk up.

  ‘They are an acquired taste, I’ll grant you. Like the Three Stooges—’

  ‘Please,’ Uli said, wrinkling her nose in disgust.

  ‘What about National Velvet? They say that’s rather good. Horses, plucky girl, happy ending. Take your mind off things.’

  ‘No, thanks, Ross. I’m going to go back and have a long soak and then to bed with a good book.’

  ‘Dinner?’

  She took the f
resh gin from the bottle-boy and shook her head. ‘Don’t crowd me, Cameron. Please.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Uli smiled at him sympathetically. It was difficult for him, she realised. She wondered how he would feel if he knew that she was spending many of her tea and lunch breaks scanning the lists of captured Germans that were being logged at the London Cage, hoping to find the name Erich Hinkel—alive and well and safe.

  Twenty-Nine

  IT ONLY TOOK forty-eight hours at Stanhope camp for Erich to realise that he was going to go insane if he didn’t work, no matter what the Geneva Convention said. The routine programmed into his soul by the years on U-40 demanded it. The thought of endless games of cards, chess or draughts, interspersed with ‘improving’ lectures, appalled him.

  Dietrich turned out to be an asset, rather than a pain in the arse. That puppy-dog enthusiasm could be harnessed, Erich discovered, to help plead his case with the British. Dietrich was on good terms both with the otherwise aloof Carlisle, the camp’s Intelligence Officer, and Roebuck, the commandant.

  Once German prisoners had finished repairing the tennis courts, Erich was given permission to erect a recreation centre. Rather than having the men crammed in their individual huts, they could then mingle in one communal building. It would have card tables, a billiard table—a refurbished one from the mansion house—and a small library. The timber came from the old tied cottages on the estate that had fallen into disrepair over the past thirty years—one of them also provided a small stove that could be used to heat the place. It was still summer when they started, but there had already been some strong easterlies, chilling the workers, making hands numb and faces throb, a foretaste of what winter would deliver.

  As they laid the foundations, their work was always checked by Carlisle or one of his staff, in case the whole project was a cover for something more devious.

  While they dug into the earth, Erich often stopped to marvel at the US bombers that seemed to fly daily from nearby bases. The silvery B-17s and B-24s lumbered into the air at first light, returning as the sun started to dip, often singly, many of them with feathered props on one or two engines, perhaps streaming smoke or glycol.

  Sometimes they saw Flying Fortresses that had absorbed savage punishment from flak and fighters, the nose cone shattered from full-frontal attacks, the sides raked by cannon from the new German jet fighters, the dying plane skimming the hedgerows, trailing debris as the airframe broke up, the pilot looking for somewhere to put her down. On those occasions, to Erich’s shame, some prisoners stood to applaud and cheer the damage inflicted by the defenders back home. The U-boat arm never gloated over a stricken enemy like that.

  After they had seen one such plane crash, and watched the column of black smoke dissipate across the sky, Dietrich had said: ‘Maybe there is hope yet. They can’t keep losing men and planes like that.’

  Erich threw down the roof supports he had taken from one of the cottages and picked splinters from his hands. There was too much rot in the wood for it to be useful. ‘And tomorrow morning, what do you think we will find climbing into the same sky?’

  Dietrich nodded. ‘More planes? More men?’

  Erich nodded. ‘It happened at sea. You think there can’t be another tanker left on God’s Earth …’

  ‘I know. They keep on coming. I saw it too.’ Dietrich had been captured in Sicily by the Americans, and had been passed along the line, through Egypt and then the Straits of Gibraltar by PoW transport and finally to England. He had been a regular Wehrmacht soldier, promoted as his battalion was mauled and the soldiers were replaced by kids and foreign conscripts. He had been in the Hitler Youth, but only because everyone else had. Erich felt that, unlike him, Dietrich had never actually swallowed all the master-race shit.

  ‘If we get these uprights in here,’ said Erich, getting back to work, ‘and just hold them in place with a few nails, we can get the opposite walls up. Then if we put a panel—What’s that?’

  Dietrich had heard it too. They both stopped what they were doing and turned. Somewhere a group of men was singing an old marching song. Erich felt the hairs on his neck stand up. One of the Luftwaffe pilots came across to them, shaking his head.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Erich.

  They could see them now, striding down the driveway, the crunch of their hobnailed boots audible beneath the chorus.

  ‘Oh, we’re going to be all right now,’ said the pilot sardonically. ‘The SS are here.’

  A weekend in Brighton might have been a rather obvious ploy, but Ross was fairly sure that Uli had no idea the place was infamous for its Mr and Mrs Smith hotels. They both needed a break from the job and from the doodlebugs, which were landing across London and Kent. The Blitz mentality—a mixture of defiance and fear—was reappearing. Even evacuation had returned as an option. So on Friday he made sure that they finished their work early and then caught the train from Victoria.

  They registered at Boyce’s Boarding House in Kemp Town and went for a walk along the front, strolling along Madeira Drive, dilapidated, neglected beach huts on the left, the ornate Victorian arches to their right. The beach was still disfigured and out of bounds—rusted, sagging barbed wire barring the way—but they zigzagged between the concrete tank traps on the promenade and marvelled at the two piers, mutilated to prevent them being used as landing jetties, with substantial chunks removed from the superstructures.

  ‘I used to go to shows there when I was a kid,’ said Ross, pointing at the theatre sitting forlorn and adrift at the end of the West Pier. ‘When we were in England, that was.’

  ‘Such a shame,’ Uli said, looking at the missing section. ‘To have to do that to such an elegant thing.’

  ‘Did you know that the German 9th Army was meant to storm the beaches here and bring the Panzers with them? Paratroopers were to land on the Downs and join up with them, and head for Portsmouth.’

  ‘I know. You father reminds me of the invasion plans every day, as if I’d had a hand in drawing them up.’

  ‘My father likes to intimidate people.’

  ‘He’s very good at it.’

  ‘Not as good as he used to be. He’s sick,’ Ross found himself saying defensively. ‘And without him, you’d still be in Canada.’ And perhaps without him she might never have gone in the first place, he thought. His father had finally admitted that part of his campaign to keep them apart had included intercepting their letters.

  ‘Can we have a drink? Somewhere warm?’ she asked suddenly. ‘I’m getting cold.’

  They walked north, past some light bomb damage and rows of boarding houses that had closed, and chose a pub near the Hippodrome. It was raucous with sailors and soldiers and thick with smoke, but they found space in the snug among the old ladies. Uli took his hand. Hers were freezing and he rubbed each in turn.

  ‘The things we hear from Europe. The world is going to hate the Germans when it all comes out.’

  Ross nodded. ‘And I think we’ve hardly scratched the surface.’

  ‘Who will want to admit to being German now?’

  ‘I think those people who can show the world that it wasn’t every German who was like that. People like you.’

  She sipped her drink, a rum-and-blackcurrant. ‘Like me? There I am, helping to interrogate my fellow countrymen, which makes me feel like a dirty traitor. And I have a British boyfriend. Yet the British still think I am suspect. Guilty whichever way I turn.’

  Boyfriend? Ross thought. Hardly, not in the current usage of the word. ‘It’ll be over one day soon. We can get on with making the world whole again.’

  She laughed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Making the world whole? That’s rather grandiose, isn’t it?’

  ‘But it’s what I feel,’ he said with as much passion as he could muster. ‘Otherwise we’ll just tear ourselves apart again. There has to be a reckoning, on both sides, and then some kind of, I don’t know, reconciliation.’

  ‘I don’t know how we�
��ll reconcile anyone to those execution pits the Hungarian described yest—’

  He moved over and kissed her without warning. She pulled away after a few seconds. ‘Oh. Cam.’

  ‘Sorry. Only way I could shut you up. No more thinking of all that. Not for forty-eight hours. We’ll have a meal, see a show at the Links, stop our minds churning over those horrors. You can’t talk about it again. Not until we are back in London. I forbid you, as your commanding officer.’

  Uli went quiet and played with her drink. He feared that he had offended her, that one of them would be getting a lonely slow train back to London. Eventually she said: ‘Cam?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How many rooms did you book us with Mister Boyce?’

  Ross thought of what Emma had said all that time ago about having to wait for ever for him to make a move. He turned his face away as he told the lie. ‘One.’ He turned back. ‘If that is OK? I don’t want to crowd you,’ he added with a smirk.

  This time she kissed him and his whole body tingled. She was tired of analysing things, of battling with her emotions, her remorse about Erich, her concern that her feelings for Cameron were hopelessly entangled with gratitude for getting her back to her father. She was going to have some fun while she could, and she would sort out the mess later.

  ‘Perfect,’ she said.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Erich turned and found himself facing a quartet of the newly arrived SS. There had been trouble almost immediately. The dozen SS-Polizei and a few Waffen-SS had taken over Hut Nine, throwing out the pilots and soldiers who were already there. Erich and Dietrich had kept their heads down and carried on with building their hut.

  ‘It’s a new recreation—’ began Dietrich.

  ‘I asked him,’ snapped the leader of the four.

  Erich carefully put down his hammer and removed the nails that he’d been holding between his teeth. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Obersturmführer Axel Schuller of the SS-Polizei Regiment ‘Bozen’. These are Untersturmführer Bauert, Kroll and Hetz. I have assumed command of the officers’ section of this camp.’