The Brightest Day

by Christopher Nicole

  “I think I have. But don’t ask me what it’s for.”

  “Tungsten, my dearest girl, is a basic component of armour plate, or armour-piercing ammunition. No modern army can fight without armour, and no armour can be made without tungsten. Now, Germany does not have any natural wolfram. They used to get their supplies from Portugal, but that source is drying up, thanks to our diplomatic efforts. So they have had to look elsewhere, and it so happens that there are quite a few small wolfram mines in France, including a relatively big one quite close to the Massif. My orders are to locate Liane, activate her people and have them destroy that mine.”

  “Shit! Then that’s the end of you. Oh, James… you’ll be betrayed.”

  “Now, who is going to do that? As you mentioned this morning, Monterre is dead. And no one is going to lure me across the border.” He grinned. “Simply because there is no border any more. What’s this?” He picked up the sheet of paper.

  “A news transcript I thought might interest you.”

  He scanned it. “Poor old Madeleine.”

  “You had something going for her once, didn’t you?”

  “Once. Before I met Liane. I really never thought of her as a widow.”

  “Helsingen isn’t dead.”

  “From this report,” James said, “he could as well be.”

  *

  As the train pulled into the station, the band struck up the national anthem and at the same moment, Adolf Hitler marched on to the platform, preceded by his black-uniformed guards and followed by his entourage of generals and party officials. The Fuehrer went straight up to a group of women that was already waiting, but he had a greeting for only one.

  “Frau von Helsingen,” he said. “Madeleine.”

  He stretched out his hands and Madeleine de Gruchy took them, giving a little bob of a curtsey. The tallest of the sisters, at twenty-seven, six years younger than Liane and five older than Amalie, she was handsome rather than beautiful, but her full figure, her splendid long, wavy brown hair, her expensive clothes, and the air of chic she exuded combined to make her a striking woman. Hitler’s lips brushed her gloved knuckles. “I am told the injuries are not life-threatening.”

  “I do not believe so, my Fuehrer.” Madeleine’s voice was low.

  “And they were suffered defending the Reich, eh?” He stared into her eyes as he spoke; even he, with his capacity for self-deception, could understand that it was difficult to claim a man was defending the Fatherland when he was several hundred miles away in a foreign country.

  But Madeleine merely said, “Yes, my Fuehrer.”

  The train was stopping and doors were opening. The conductors, having been forewarned, hastily stopped anyone leaving the train until their most important passenger had been disembarked. Now four medical orderlies lifted the stretcher from its compartment, followed immediately by two doctors. A trolley had been wheeled forward and the stretcher was placed on this. Frederick von Helsingen was all but invisible, his head wreathed in bandages, his body lost beneath the blankets, but his eyes were open and only slightly drowsy. He could recognize the face leaning over him.

  “My Fuehrer,” he muttered and tried to move his arm. “Heil Hitler!”

  “Do not exert yourself, my dear Frederick,” Hitler said. “I congratulate you. You are in good hands now. I will see you when you are well.”

  He stepped back. Madeleine made to go forward but was brushed aside as Herr von Helsingen stepped in front of her. She waited while her husband spoke with his father, then it was her turn.

  “Oh, my darling,” he said. “I am so sorry.”

  “Just to have you home is a treat.” She looked above him at the doctor.

  “He must go to the hospital first,” the doctor said.

  “But he will be coming home?”

  “Of course.”

  Madeleine made to squeeze Frederick’s hand but could not find it. “I will see you soon,” he said.

  The trolley was wheeled away. Madeleine looked left and right at the people milling about, at the other wounded soldiers being greeted by their loved ones… and had her arm grasped by those powerful fingers she knew so well.

  “I think I had better see you home,” Joanna Jonsson said.

  *

  “There was no hand,” Madeleine whispered. “My God, there was no hand!”

  “You just couldn’t find it,” Joanna suggested.

  Madeleine glanced at her. While she, personally, had never liked the Swedish-American woman, she knew that Joanna was Liane’s oldest and dearest friend and was prepared to accept that they had been lovers at finishing school in Switzerland, from which they had both been expelled when discovered in bed together. But they also shared a terrifying secret. Of everyone in Germany, only she knew that Joanna was a double agent. Her problem was that she did not know which side Joanna rated higher. But as Joanna knew all of Madeleine’s secrets, including the fact that she had more than once aided her sisters, who were the two most wanted female terrorists – in German eyes – in France, there was nothing she could do save accept Joanna as she came. Besides, she was such an overwhelming personality. Quite apart from being the daughter of an American millionairess and a Swedish diplomat, she was nearly six feet of flowing blonde sexuality, her yellow hair cascading as always past her shoulders. If her features were perhaps a shade too bold for beauty, her body might have been sculpted by some Norse god, which clearly made her the more compelling to those with the Nazi Aryan ideology at heart. In the course of her tortuous activities, Joanna had worked her way through those, until arriving at very nearly the top.

  “I didn’t see Heinrich at the station,” Madeleine remarked as they drove back to her apartment in Joanna’s car. They sat in the back and there was a glass partition shutting off the chauffeur’s ears.

  “He is a very busy man.”

  “Busier than the Fuehrer?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “Do you sleep with him?”

  “Wheren he requires it.”

  “He is such a slimy character. I don’t see how you can.”

  “You need to remember that Heinrich controls the entire police force, secret and public.”

  “And you enjoy prostituting yourself? Are you still going to marry Franz Hoeppner?”

  “Wherenever he next has leave, yes.”

  “You had better hope that he doesn’t come home like Freddie. Or in a wooden box. Does he know about Himmler?”

  “He knows that I work for Heinrich, as I once worked for Oskar Weber. He understands what that involves.”

  “And he accepts it?”

  “He is a realist, and he loves me.” The car stopped outside the Helsingens’ apartment block. “Would you like me to come up?”

  “Thank you, no. I’m quite all right.”

  “Then listen. Freddie is coming home?”

  “Of course he is. As soon as he has been checked out.”

  “Well, when he does come home, I want you to ask him what conditions are really like in Russia.”

  “You are up to your old tricks. Doesn’t Himmler tell you what’s going on?”

  “He tells me the same as Goebbels tells everybody else: that Stalingrad was just a clever plan to lure all the Soviet forces away from Moscow and bleed them white; that this coming summer the Reich will launch the greatest armoured assault in history, which will smash Stalin for ever. I want to know what the soldier on the ground feels about it.”

  “And you want me to ask my husband to betray his country?”

  “I am asking you to get you husband to tell you the truth. The truth can never be a betrayal. I’ll be in touch.”

  *

  The door closed. Joanna tapped on the glass panel, which promptly opened. “The Albert.”

  “Herr Himmler left instructions that when you were finished at the station you were to be taken to his office, Fraulein.”

  “Oh? Well, in that case, take me to Gestapo Headquarters.”

  Sh
e leant back on the cushions, feeling pleasantly anticipatory. Hers had been an exciting but often pleasant war, if one overlooked the first few traumatic days of the German invasion of France when, no doubt relying too heavily on her American neutrality, she had drifted into the immediate war zone and watched her much loved half-brother cut to pieces by the bullets of a strafing Messerschmitt, and with her friend Liane de Gruchy had had to submit to gang rape by a party of German deserters. Both women had been shattered by the experience but, while Liane had instantly determined on revenge, she had only wanted to get away from it all, back to the safety of the States.

  It had been while she had been waiting in London for the ship that would hopefully carry her across the Atlantic that had come that chance meeting with James Barron, a man she had only previously met at Amalie’s wedding to Henri Burstein, and whom she had not really liked, because he had so obviously had something going for Liane… and Liane was equally obviously responding. But she had known he was in Military Intelligence, without quite knowing what, and she had suddenly wanted to pour out her heart to him. James had immediately recognized her potential, possessing both an American and a Swedish passport, well known in the social whirl of Europe, and especially that of Berlin, where she had worked as a gossip columnist for an American newspaper. And she was a willing subject, aware that she was going back to nothing in the States, and suddenly realizing that she could fight beside Liane, even if at a distance.

  Thus had begun that frenetic but beguiling life, living in Berlin but travelling to England, via Sweden, as and when she chose, with whatever information she had been able to glean. It should have ended with the entry of America into the war, now nearly eighteen months ago. James had wanted to pull her out immediately, but she had preferred to continue with her mission, and the only way she could do that was to allow herself to be “turned” by Oskar Weber, the German spymaster. That had launched her on another dizzy merry-go-round; to the world – and particularly the American world – a despicable traitor; to the Gestapo an invaluable courier who, using her Swedish passport, could enter and leave England at will; and to James Barron, despite the doubts of his superiors, an even more destructive mechanism in the very heart of the German secret service.

  Where would it end? She had come close to catastrophe more than once before, not least when rescuing James’ side-kick Rachel Cartwright from the Gestapo. But she had survived, by both her looks and her femininity. She had even survived Weber’s fall from power, as his master, Heinrich Himmler, had appropriated her for his own “Secretary”. And she was engaged to be married to one of the nicest men she had ever met; the fact that Franz Hoeppner wore the uniform of a German officer did not mean that he was a Nazi, but the fact that he was a career soldier who put duty above everything, and was now serving in Russia, meant that she had no idea when, or if ever, she would see him again. She had just seen what could happen, in the shattered body of his best friend, Frederick von Helsingen.

  The car stopped in the so familiar courtyard. Sentries clicked to attention as Joanna strode past them; they all knew who she was.

  “The Reichsfuehrer said you were to go straight up, Fraulein,” said an adjutant.

  Joanna nodded and went up the stairs. A secretary opened the double doors for her, and she stepped into the large, beautifully furnished office she knew so well, pausing to throw her right arm out in front of herself. “Heil Hitler!”

  “Joanna!” Himmler beamed at her as he greeted her as if he had not seen her for at least a week instead of the previous night. He was, as always, flawlessly dressed in a black uniform with death’s head shoulder badges, waist and cross belts highly polished, as were his boots, with his somewhat bland features rendered positively gentle by the rimless glasses he wore. The odd thing about him was that Joanna knew he genuinely believed he had a gentle nature; that on the occasion, he had personally witnessed the execution of several hundred Jewish men and women in Russia he had been physically sick; but that he had signed an order for the next batch of executions without a moment’s hesitation, steeling himself for what he considered to be his duty. She supposed any criminal psychiatrist would find him a fascinating study; the catastrophe lay in the fact that a man who definitely needed psychiatric help controlled the lives, and deaths, of millions of human beings. And as she had confessed to Madeleine, she slept with him whenever he summoned her to his bed. “You’ll never guess who has come to visit.”

  His voice was as mild as his appearance, but Joanna turned her head sharply to look at the other man in the room, standing to one side. He also wore a black uniform and was a small man with lank dark hair and a toothbrush moustache, obviously worn in imitation of his fuehrer.

  “Fraulein! I trust you are well?”

  His eyes gleamed at her. Joanna was aware that there were a great many people in Germany, at least in the corridors of power, who disliked and distrusted her, either because they disliked traitors as a matter of principle, or they disliked her flamboyant looks that seemed able to bewitch so many men who should have known better. But as far as she knew, Johann Roess was the only one who actively hated her. They had clashed often in the past, and she knew that Roess – who had succeeded Oskar Weber as commandant of the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, the secret department within the Gestapo that wielded absolute power subject only to Himmler’s overrule – dreamt of her eventually being delivered into his hands. He had achieved his goal last autumn, when she had seemed to share in his predecessor’s disgrace, had actually had her in his cells awaiting the torture he called interrogation, and had been interrupted by Himmler himself. She had not laid eyes on him since that never-to-be-forgotten day. Now she forced a smile but, even forced, Joanna Jonsson’s smile suggested a world of untold pleasure.

  “I am very well, Colonel Roess. And yourself?”

  “I am as well as can be expected, Fraulein.”

  “Of course you had that bump on the head, given you by…” She paused, staring at him, her mouth open, as if she had forgotten.

  “Given me by that bitch Liane de Gruchy,” Roess almost snarled.

  “Colonel, please,” Himmler said. “There is a lady present.” It was Roess’ turn to stare with his mouth open, and his surprise was genuine. But he was not going to question his boss’s opinion. “Why don’t you both sit down?” Himmler said. “This meeting is about this female.” Himmler opened the file on his desk. Joanna sank into the chair in front of his desk, hoping that the sudden colour she could feel in her cheeks was not giving her away.

  “This woman has been a thorn in the side of the Reich since July 1940, when she murdered a German officer. I understand you knew her then, Joanna.”

  “I was friends with her before the War, Herr Reichsfuehrer. You know that.”

  “You were her lover,” Roess snapped. Himmler raised his eyebrows.

  “We were… friends, at school,” Joanna said.

  “And you were with her in the first days of the invasion, when you claim to have been assaulted by German soldiers.”

  “I was in France to attend the wedding of Mademoiselle de Gruchy’s sister and—”

  “You mean Frau von Helsingen?” Himmler interrupted. “No, sir. This was her other sister.”

  “Who is also guilty of murdering a German officer,” Roess interjected.

  “What a family,” Himmler commented. “But you say you and this woman were assaulted by German soldiers?”

  “We were raped, Herr General. Repeatedly.”

  “My word. How did this happen?”

  “We had taken shelter in a deserted house and were found there by these men. I understand they were deserters.”

  “Were these people ever caught?”

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  “And what happened to them?”

  “They were hanged, sir. By order of General Rommel, who was commanding that district at the time.”

  “Oh, Rommel. Poor fellow.”

  “Sir?” Joanna had only met the general on tha
t one occasion, but she had liked him.

  “Well, he is being pushed from pillar to post in North Africa. His great days are behind him.”

  “Ahem,” Roess said. “Fraulein Jonsson has not explained what she was doing in the company of Fraulein de Gruchy, north of Paris, if they were no longer close friends.”

  “As I have said, sir, I was attending the wedding of Amalie de Gruchy when the invasion took place. There were several officers at the ceremony, and they all had to rejoin their regiments as rapidly as possible. The transport situation was very bad, and so Liane offered to drive them up to the Belgian border. I accompanied her.”

  “Why? These men were going to fight against the Reich.”

  “I knew that, and I also knew they would be beaten. But as you may remember, sir, at that time I was working as a journalist, and I thought there might be a story in it.”

  “Of course. There you are, Roess. We have drifted away from the point, which is that this woman has eluded capture for three years, while committing God alone knows how many crimes against the Reich. I really had supposed that once we took over Vichy she would fall into our hands. We knew she was using there as a base. But this has not happened.”

  “Until now, sir,” Roess said.

  Joanna’s head jerked. “You have captured her?”

  “Not yet. But we know where she is to be found.” Joanna waited, scarce able to breathe. Roess smiled. “We have information that she has returned to her original haunt, the Massif Central. You know the Massif well, do you not, Fraulein?”

  “Explain,” Himmler said.

  “Fraulein Jonsson was a member of the task force we sent into Vichy in the autumn of 1941, to destroy the de Gruchy gang. It was reportedly a success. The gang was wiped out, so it was claimed. Liane de Gruchy was killed. So it was claimed. These claims were made by Fraulein Jonsson.”

  Himmler again looked at Joanna. But she had got her nerves back under control. “The assault was commanded by Colonel Weber. The guerillas were hiding in a cave. We penetrated the cave, and there was a violent battle. It was dark and very difficult to tell friend from foe. But Liane de Gruchy was there. I saw her and I shot her, seconds after she had shot Colonel Weber. I knew she went down. But I was concerned about the colonel, who was very badly hurt. Also, we had used up most of the time we had been allowed before our planes would have to take off again; General Heydrich, who had devised the operation, was most insistent that we should not delay long enough to become engaged with any Vichy police who might approach the scene. At that time, as you may recall, Herr Reichsfuehrer, the Fuehrer was most anxious to preserve good relations with Vichy. So Captain Karlovy and I determined to abort and get out, with Colonel Weber. I was certain Liane de Gruchy was dead. I was apparently mistaken. I am sorry.”