by Jack Ludlow
He was sad that he dare not say hello, because he did not have a clue what had happened when he left; Lette might know and, if she still worked in the local party HQ, would be finished by now. She had an apartment in Trommelstra?e, not a place with a telephone and not a good address, but one with neighbours who looked after her kids when she was working.
It was not easy to call without everyone knowing — it certainly had not been in the past, and many was the time he had been ribbed when he came of a night, doubly so if he was spotted by the old lady scrubbing the stone steps as he left in the morning, and in a sense he was breaking an agreed rule: she had always known if he went it would be sudden, he had an unspoken order that the break should be final.
It’s damned difficult to be on the wrong side of a door when you worry about what might happen when you knock. Lette was a beautiful widow, good company, and there might be a new man in her life, which made Cal wish he could pretend to be some kind of door-to-door salesperson. That there was someone home, he knew — the radio was playing dance music.
He raised his hand to knock, then hesitated, thinking to walk away. This was all wrong, it went against the grain of everything he advised others to do, everything he thought right about how to behave — you cut the cord when it was life and death. Just then a neighbour came out to use the communal toilet and he had to hit the door to avoid suspicion.
It was heart-stopping the way the music diminished, the sound being turned down, and his heart was in his mouth as he waited, listening to the farting coming from the toilet. When the door was opened it was by Lette’s daughter, Inge, no longer the gauche twelve-year-old he remembered, but a promising fourteen and looking like the beginnings of a real woman.
‘Uncle Cal,’ she cried, her eyes wide open with glad surprise; then she flung herself at him and her shout brought the two boys running. Christian and Gunter, both younger than their sister. They were around his legs within seconds, shouting his name. Having ruffled their hair and said their names he looked up and there was Lette, in an apron and looking tired, in what passed for a hall; was she drying her hands, or was that hand-wringing fear?
‘Hey,’ was his feeble greeting.
She came forward, maternal in the way she shuffled the children inside so she could shut the door, this while he was subjected to a stream of questions asking where he had been, and as children do, the boys were telling him about what had happened to them in between now and the last time he had seen them, gabbling away in near incoherence.
She was clever, Lette, the way she shooed the children away so she herself could give him a kissed greeting, in truth the chance to whisper in his ear that he should say nothing incriminating, that the boys, particularly, could not be trusted.
‘Say you have been at sea.’ Then she turned and began to take off her apron. ‘You take care of Uncle Cal, while I go and see if Old Ma Pieffer can look after you.’
Moans and groans ensued, the selfish cries of the boys contrasted with the self-possession of Inge as he was dragged to the table, covered in an oilskin cloth that had seen better times, to tell stories of South America, Spain, of creatures too fabulous to be real and to indulge in that visitor pastime, giving the children money.
‘Are you coming back to stay, Uncle Cal?’
When he looked at Inge then, it nearly broke his heart; he knew she saw him like a parent and had done so from the very first day they had met. They had bonded as if it were predestined, she trusting him, he good with her, and if leaving Lette had been hard, leaving Inge, whom he thought of as a daughter, was worse.
‘Boys, you have your bank still?’ The yeses were larded with anticipation — he had always been generous, and Cal obliged by emptying his pockets of pfennigs and the odd mark, passing them over. Then they dashed into the only bedroom where, no doubt, they would boast one was richer than the other.
‘Are you here to stay?’
He could not answer, but then he did not have to; his silence was sufficient. Looking at her, bonny but not yet fully formed, he wanted to take her in his arms and hold her as he had once done, maybe tell her the stories he had loved inventing. Somehow she was beyond that. It was a relief that Lette returned with the news that Old Ma Pieffer was on her way down.
‘I can’t, little one.’
Inge nodded and he knew that when he was gone she would cry. Lette had her coat on and was keen to get out of the door and there was just a flash of jealousy in Inge’s eyes that her mother spotted and smothered with a kiss; if Cal was close to Inge, her mother was closer still. Then they were out on the landing, his nose twitching at the odour of the neighbour’s noisy evacuation, down the stone stairs and into the street.
‘What do you mean “We can’t talk”?’
The laugh was hollow. ‘What do you think will happen when Christian and Gunter go to school tomorrow? Once they have sung a hymn to the damned Fuhrer they will be asked if anything strange has happened and they will say Uncle Cal came back. Their good National Socialist teacher will ask who Uncle Cal is.’
‘For the sake of Christ.’
‘You do not know what they will say, what they will be asked, or the consequences, and that, my lost love, is life in the Third Reich; I cannot even talk in front of my own children, because if I do they will be encouraged to denounce me. So, do you think we could have talked in there about why you had to leave and the phone call I made to give you a chance to flee?’
‘Is there somewhere we can go?’
‘Cal, this is St Pauli, there are a hundred places we can go.’
‘Am I allowed to say, Lette,’ Cal said, leaning over her and looking down into her eyes, ‘you look tired?’
‘Two years nearly I don’t see you and that is what you want to tell me? I have three children, a job I hate, surrounded by foul-mouthed bigots who should be taken out to sea and thrown overboard, and no one to tell.’
‘Inge?’
‘I cannot burden her.’
‘I miss telling her stories.’
‘She misses you more than she misses the stories.’
‘What happened to the money I left for you?’
‘It is still in the account you opened, I haven’t touched it, and do I have to tell you why?’
‘Questions would be asked if you were suddenly flush. But the idea was you could get a better apartment, one where Inge can have some privacy. She’s of an age when she needs it.’
‘I think we might have to use that money one day for something more serious than another bedroom.’
‘I thought you might have found another man.’
‘If I can find one I can trust, and who knows how to treat me right, then maybe I will, but all I meet are beery shits.’
The one thing never discussed, the reason she was trusted to work in the local Nazi party office, was her late husband, a rabid National Socialist who had been killed in street fighting prior to the 1932 elections. To the men she mixed with every day, Brownshirt thugs, he was a hero; to her a bully and wife beater she was glad was dead.
He had met Lette when out running — she was an ex-hundred-metre sprinter, and with no knowledge of her background they had begun to stop and chat while catching breath. She found release in talking to him, a man who hated the Nazis as much as she did, and said so, as well as being active in getting Jews out of Germany. Lette had become his lover; only later did he discover where she worked and how many times she had used her position to save those under threat herself.
It was no wonder she was tired, never mind the children and the job; she was living a double life, cursing Jews as diseased rats one minute, trying to warn them of the danger they were in without getting caught the next. He had suggested she get out before; Lette had refused while there was good to be done. When it came to being brave, Cal thought her ten times the person he was.
‘Anyway, you have not told me why you came back.’
‘It might have been for you.’
She punched him in the balls then
, which given he was naked, had him out of the bed and hopping. ‘Why did you do that?’
‘You are a liar.’
Still rubbing hard, he acknowledged the truth. ‘I know, and not a good one with you.’
It had been a strange relationship: he was fond of her without being in love, she, determined never to have another man rule her life. If there was sex between them, and there had just been that, and very enjoyable too, then it was based on deep friendship rather than passion, and if she knew that she was being used, it was a situation that troubled her not at all.
‘Two years without a man in my life,’ she said, her voice deep as she tugged him back into the bed. ‘I hope you have not been too wounded — by that punch.’
She was asleep when he left, and when she awoke she found a thick wad of high-denomination Reichsmarks on the table and a one-line note, which read, ‘For Inge’s new clothes. Invent a rich relative XXX.’
He was down at the docks before the line of railway trucks arrived, having used the papers he had to get through the main gate into the free port area and make sure the SS Barhill was at its berth, then getting back to the main gate to await the arrival. The way they took him was so professional that he did not see it coming at all: the van drew alongside, men in working gear appeared from nowhere, he was hit just hard enough to be stunned and then bundled into the back, thrown onto the metal floor with a knee digging into his back.
The command to stay still was backed up by a slap to the head and he knew his hands were being tied. He was thinking this did not make sense, unless Goring had had a change of mind; but why would he do that, because MCG in Athens would not get paid? Had there been a leak, with so many — far too many — people in on what was planned? There was nothing he could do but lie still and speculate.
The hollow sound when the van stopped told him he was in some kind of garage; there was the squeak of the door opening and he was hauled out, one man on each elbow hurrying him along through a doorway, then a couple of corridors, so he had trouble keeping his feet. He was taken into a bare room with a single chair in the middle, the sinister single light bulb above, then sat and tied down, realising as he moved that the legs were fixed to the floor. Then he saw the battered table against the wall with the rubber truncheons on it.
And then he was alone, but not for long, and the smiling blond fellow who entered gave him a shock, which he was not able to hide; this was bad, very bad, worse than Goring reneging. The last time he had seen Gottlieb Resnick had been on a Black Sea dockside, and the German had wanted to just shoot him then; he would want more now.
‘Mr Jardine,’ Resnick said in his accented, horribly ungrammatical English, ‘you did not me believe when auf Wiedersehen I said, but here are we, once more with each other in company.’
‘Are you still an Obersturmbannfuhrer or did you get busted to Gefreiter for that cock-up in Constanta?’
‘It had on me no effect, but when you to hell get there is waiting a very damaged Romanian colonel to greet you.’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Painfully so, but before he expired finally he express did the wish that you would as he did suffer.’
‘Something you are looking forward to carrying out.’
‘Tut, tut, Jardine. My rank allows that I watch others pain inflict, though in case yours I might an exception make, the payment for a fool making me look.’
‘You really ought to do something about your English, it’s bloody awful.’
Resnick came close and bent low, so his nose was nearly touching Jardine’s.
‘You joke now, but beg to die you will and listen I will not. If these walls could speak maybe Yiddish you would hear the voices of those before you gone, the shits who think that the Reich they can cheat and take elsewhere their stolen money.’
The laugh was more chilling than the words. ‘They all think they their loot will keep hidden — that is the word, is it not? — but they tell, maybe when they have seen raped and sodomised their wife before their eyes by criminals diseased from the Hamburg jail, then to lie on the floor forced and clean Aryan piss drink. Even then some hold out, but when their pizzle is electric fried they talk.’
How long had they known he was in Hamburg? Did they know about Lette? Was there any point in even thinking about that?
‘I have been away from Hamburg too long; anything I can tell you is long cold.’
‘I from you want nothing of information. This is for my pleasure alone. You have out of me a fool made, I will make a wreck of you and maybe see how to die long it takes you.’
‘I don’t think I’m in a position to stop you, but there are people who know I am here in Hamburg.’
‘But not in this room! First, a little bubble I puncture. You will wonder how you in Germany I know.’ He went to the table and brought back a folder. ‘When a certain fellow you approached, he was not sure if you were who you said, so he contacted German embassy.’
Resnick produce two photos, one showing blurred figures and spots of light. ‘Hard to get right in dark, but in morning light, look at this.’
The second picture was as clear as day, not surprising given it had been taken at dawn. It showed him smiling and waving at the taxi in which MCG’s wife, Elena, was departing the Grande Bretagne Hotel.
‘Makes a whore of his wife, does he?’
‘She is not his wife, just secretary, and for extra pay, she plays a part.’
Clever little bastard, Cal thought, I certainly underestimated him. How the hell had he managed it so smoothly?
The door opened and the two men who came in looked like what they were: inflictors of pain, thick-necked, hairy forearms, muscles to spare and faces only a mother could love. One had a knuckleduster which he was keen Cal should see him play with, the other a long spike which he knew was soon going to be inside him and twisted.
You never know if you can stand this, all you can do is hope that somehow you keep a bit of your dignity. He had made a right chump out of Resnick in Romania and had enjoyed rubbing a little salt into his open wound. Positives? No mention or show of Lette or her children; she would have been bad enough, but if they started on Inge?
Was it better to plead for mercy quickly — appear to break early, scream and plead? Resnick was not after information but personal satisfaction. Too early and it would not work — maybe once they had his teeth out with that knuckleduster and had broken a few bones. Or was it the wires on his cock?
That the door burst open was not remarkable; that Colonel Brauschitz was standing there, looking as elegant as he had previously, seemed extraordinary. He held up a paper with a very large eagle on it.
‘Resnick, I have an order here from the deputy Fuhrer. This man is to be released immediately.’
‘No.’
Brauschitz shook his head and gave a wan smile. ‘You have a choice, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer. You can either obey this order, or rest assured you will yourself be tied to that chair before the day is out.’
Unable to obey, Resnick just stormed out.
‘Be thankful we tap the telephones of those we do not trust, and also that General Goring has the power to frighten a man like Resnick.’
As well as having, Cal thought, the certain knowledge that without me there would be no payment.
‘The railway trucks.’
‘Are at the quayside.’ Brauschitz looked at his watch. ‘Nearly unloaded by now, I should think. The telephone connection has been set up in the harbour master’s office, so you may make your call to Athens.’
‘The arrangement was when she weighs.’
‘If you wish to wait till that ship departs without you …’
The rest was left hanging in the air. Hamburg right now was not a good place to be left behind in.
‘Harbour master’s office it is.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
There was no feeling of relief even when the SS Barhill closed her hatches then cleared her berth. It was a long way to the mouth of the
River Elbe and the North Sea, and even then, with the string of inshore islands that lined the coast, it took a request to the captain to get the ship directly out to sea, instead of hugging the shore, so Jardine could get out of German territorial waters. Even then he was not sure he was beyond the reach of the likes of Resnick — the Nazi state was a criminal enterprise and no respecter of anyone’s laws.
It took time for him to calm down and stop his nerves jumping; facing death was one thing, what he had faced in that barren room was likely to be a recurring nightmare, but as of now, the sea air and the motion of the boat got to him, and after the tensions of the last few weeks, he fell into a long and deep slumber. From then on the days melded into a week in which he was in limbo.
On the high seas they were safe, it was when they came inshore that the trouble would surface. The master had to get the ship through the Straits without too deep an inspection and they were patrolled by the Royal Navy, a subject he was obliged to raise with the long-time seaman who, prior to a good dinner, poured him what he called a ‘stiff one’.
‘Are you aware, sir, of my instructions?’
‘No. I was not party to the arrangements.’
‘I have a manifest that says I am carrying agricultural machinery to Greece, but we both know that is not the case. My concern is for myself and my crew, for if we are caught breaking the embargo, as my destination suggests we will, then we will be in real trouble.’
‘So?’
‘So I need you to take full responsibility, as does the owner of the ship. With that in mind, I have a false manifest, naming you as the agent and shipper, a contract of hire for the vessel as well as a bill for same, and I need you to sign these papers so that I can, in all innocence, say I have been duped if we are subjected to a search.’
The folder was passed over and Cal opened it, and even if it did not make him happy, he had to admit the way it had been arranged was classy. These were things he had grown up surrounded by, shipping for profit being his father’s business. There was headed notepaper for Jardine amp; Sons — oddly his old man had hoped for that at one time — several items of correspondence setting up the whole shipment, bills of lading naming the supposed cargo in detail, with quotes for prices as well as the invoice; everything, in fact, that got the ship owner, his master and crew off the hook and dumped any trouble squarely on him.
