The Age of Treachery

by Gavin Scott

  “Du Maurier didn’t suit me,” said Maxwell, who now sounded as if he’d been to Eton. “I tried ‘Jones’ for a while, but that wasn’t right either. My commanding officer suggested Maxwell because it sounded Scottish.”

  “Ah,” said Forrester. “But your real name is…?”

  “Hoch, Ján Hoch,” said Maxwell, shaking hands. “Penniless Czech refugee in 1940, now an officer in the British Army, husband to the beautiful daughter of a French industrialist, and proud holder of the Military Cross.” Forrester registered that he was duly impressed, which he was. It was quite a transformation. “So,” said Maxwell without missing a beat, “about those typewriters?”

  With some difficulty Forrester managed to disabuse Captain Maxwell of the notion that he could provide him with anything for Der Telegraf, the paper he’d been assigned to oversee, but by the time he’d managed it he’d realised two things: that Maxwell was a force of nature who was going to come out of the ruins of Berlin considerably better off than when he’d entered them, and that he himself was now on the young ex-Czech’s list of people who would at some point be useful to him, if not now, then later.

  He decided, therefore, to get in first, and as they demolished their full English breakfasts and swilled down several more mugs of tea, he got Maxwell to tell him what he knew about Walter Schellenberg, the man whom Greta Rilke had seen with Dorfmann at that distant Press Club Ball.

  “Schellenberg’s a real operator,” said Maxwell, with what was clearly the respect of a fellow operator. “Came out of law school in the middle of the Depression, couldn’t get a job for love or money and joined the SS. Heydrich put him in their counter-intelligence department.”

  “The Sicherheitsdienst,” said Forrester, automatically.

  “Exactly,” said Maxwell. “Then Himmler spotted him and made him not just his personal aide but a Sonderbevollmächtigter. What’s the translation?”

  “Special Plenipotentiary,” said Forrester.

  “It was Schellenberg who dreamt up the Venlo Affair,” said Maxwell. In 1939, a certain “Captain Schämmel” had contacted British spies in Holland, claiming to be disaffected with Hitler. He arranged a meeting with the British near the border at a Dutch town called Venlo. But instead of revealing German secrets, Schämmel dragged the British agents over the border into Germany. With the information the Gestapo got out of them the Nazis were able to roll up spy networks all over Europe, particularly in Czechoslovakia.

  “Captain Schämmel’s real name was Walter Schellenberg,” said Maxwell. “Later on he tried to kidnap the Duke of Windsor so he could set him up as the King of England.”

  “I see what you mean about him being an operator,” said Forrester.

  “He set up a brothel with a recording studio in the basement,” Maxwell went on enthusiastically, “and then had the girls entertain all the top Nazis so he could blackmail them. He had a machine gun built into his desk so he could cut people in two at the touch of a button.”

  Schellenberg had clearly caught Maxwell’s imagination.

  “Where is he now?” asked Forrester.

  “Spandau,” said Maxwell briefly. “He was arrested in Denmark trying to negotiate a separate peace with Churchill. He isn’t a man for half measures.”

  “I wonder if there’s any chance I might be able to get in to see him,” said Forrester.

  “What for?” asked Maxwell. Forrester hesitated.

  “This is confidential,” he said.

  “Of course,” said Maxwell, but was unable to suppress the glint in his eyes, which suggested that he would make whatever use of the information suited him. Forrester, however, did not really care.

  “It’s about a man named Peter Dorfmann,” he said. “He’s being groomed for power in the new democratic Germany and as far as the Control Commission is concerned he was no more than a conscientious Professor of Literature while the Nazis were in power. I’ve found someone who claims to have seen him with Walter Schellenberg.”

  “Schellenberg was a cultured man,” said Maxwell. “He could have been discussing literature.”

  “He was also one of the most powerful figures in German intelligence,” said Forrester. “Could Dorfmann have been one of his informants?”

  “Informants on what?” asked Maxwell. “Tittle-tattle about university politics? Not likely. Schellenberg was involved in bigger things than that.”

  “My informant said there was an admiral with them. I’m wondering if it could have been Canaris.” Admiral Canaris had been the head of the Abwehr, the intelligence service of the German Army, but, appalled by German atrocities in Poland, had begun to work secretly for the downfall of Hitler. Ultimately he’d been found out and hanged.

  “I’m afraid if you’re looking for something damaging against Dorfmann a connection with Canaris isn’t going to get you far,” said Maxwell. “He was practically on our side.”

  “But Schellenberg’s a different matter,” said Forrester.

  “Well, it’s worth a try,” Maxwell said, “but getting to him will mean you have to cut enough red tape to wrap round all Berlin. And I don’t see why Schellenberg should help you. He’s got his own neck to think of, when they start trying the big Nazis.”

  “That might just make him co-operative,” said Forrester.

  “Possibly,” said Maxwell, wiping the last vestiges of egg and ketchup from his plate with a slice of bread. “But if I hear anything that might help, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks,” said Forrester. “And I’ll keep my eyes open for spare typewriters.”

  * * *

  Forrester spent the rest of the morning driving from office to office trying to get clearance to visit Walter Schellenberg at Spandau. In the afternoon he gained admittance to the former boiler factory where the surviving records of the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst and the Abwehr were being slowly put in order by teams of young soldiers under the command of a sardonic American major named Elliot, who looked as if he would be more at home on a football field, and prowled the towering aisles of his paper kingdom muttering to himself as if searching for a way out.

  But the soldier-clerks who, surrounded by so much paper, had already taken on the demeanour of medieval librarians, moved slowly and methodically around the vast shell of a building, typing up labels, sliding paperclips carefully into place, sighing before they pressed down on a staple gun to reattach stacks of often violently separated papers.

  Most of them had been too young to take part in the fighting, and now the enemy was defeated, all their country required them to do was plough through this paperwork. Forrester himself felt a sinking of his spirits at the sheer scale of what lay before him, but remembering Gordon in the prison cell in Oxford, and Margaret waiting for whatever news he could bring, he began, with the aid of one of the clerks, to search for any reference to Peter Dorfmann.

  Three hours later he had achieved nothing except a thundering headache and the conviction he was getting nowhere. Even if Dorfmann had worked with the Sicherheitsdienst or indeed the Abwehr, he’d almost inevitably been referred to by a code name. He was about to give up and return to his efforts to arrange the interview with Schellenberg when a single phrase caught his eye: “with the aid of the saga”.

  The document was an internal report from one department of the German intelligence services to another; which one wasn’t clear because the first page was missing. But the second ended with a paragraph beginning:

  with the aid of the saga Erik has been able to maintain a constant flow of coded contact with Saint, whose position appears unassailable. Saint’s information on the Murmansk convoys has been proved accurate time and time again, and what he has been able to glean about Soviet intentions has been invaluable, particularly as regards Stalingrad. And though he refuses, citing security concerns, to recruit any sub-agents, he also refuses any payment, insisting his commitment to our cause is purely ideological, and based on his loathing of the Bolshevik threat. I therefore recommend

&n
bsp; Forrester turned the page eagerly – and found himself reading about an intelligence operation in Rumania. He looked at the page number: it was a hundred pages on from the page with the saga reference. He called the clerk over.

  “There’s something missing,” he said.

  The clerk, a slow-talking youth from Ohio, shifted the gum in his mouth and examined the pages. “It’s not even the same file,” he said. “Some dope’s smooshed a whole bunch of pages together. Again.”

  Forrester restrained his impatience. “So I wonder where the page would be that follows this?”

  “Yeah,” said the clerk. “I wonder about that too.” He looked around the boiler factory: the shelves of files seemed to go on for ever, disappearing into the gloom. “One of these days somebody’ll find ’em. But you know something, Dr. Forrester? I bet we’ll both be long gone by then.”

  Forrester knew he was right, but he looked anyway, drafting an impatient Major Elliot into the search and refusing to give up. But by the time it was dark and the place was about to close for the night, he’d found nothing, despite the best efforts of the youth from Ohio.

  “Sorry about that, Dr. Forrester,” said the clerk as he prepared to leave. “Looked kind of interesting, too.”

  Interesting, thought Forrester. Interesting indeed if he could prove that “Erik” was Dorfmann, and even more interesting if he could discover the identity of “Saint” and what role the “saga” had played in their communications. He was certain the saga was the manuscript Greta Rilke had described, the one that Dorfmann had been so protective of. But where had Saint been based? Russia, by the sound of it. Somewhere, certainly, he had been in a position to know about both the Murmansk convoys and Soviet plans for Stalingrad.

  Suddenly he remembered his conversation with Haraldson about secrets encrypted in the saga. What if the encrypted secrets had not been about the dark arts, but about the Murmansk convoys?

  He called the Control Commission, but there was no news on his request to see Schellenberg. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up, either,” said the official. “There’s a long queue ahead of you wanting to talk to that gentleman.”

  19

  UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE

  That night Forrester went to Colonel Tulpanov’s Goethe evening and stood at the back of a ruined hall near the Gendarmenmarkt to hear Professor Schopen talk to a packed house. It was freezing cold; every member of the audience was bundled up in overcoats. Most of them – apart from the Russians – were patched and ragged; their breath condensed in the freezing air. But they listened intently.

  “There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight,” said Schopen. “But to the person with a firm purpose all things are servants.”

  Forrester recognised Colonel Tulpanov up on the platform, nodding sagely. He looked like a military Sydney Greenstreet, as hard as nails. Forrester was convinced the Russian had singled him out among the audience, and was fixing him with the kind of stare he would normally have given people he was interrogating. Even across a crowded hall, and without being held down in a chair by a couple of NKVD thugs, it was intimidating.

  “Be generous with kindly words, especially about those who are absent,” said the professor. “What is uttered from the heart alone will win the hearts of others, and as soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” The audience nodded thoughtfully, as if this was a question they had been pondering for years.

  There was a reception afterwards, with the Russians taking pride in the professor as if he were a performing bear, and the audience devouring the sandwiches and tea as if they hadn’t eaten for days, which quite a lot of them, Forrester thought, probably hadn’t.

  “We should be doing this,” said an American voice beside him. Forrester looked around to see Major Elliot surveying the scene gloomily.

  “Winning hearts and minds with Goethe?” said Forrester. “Or sandwiches?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said the major, who seemed even more disaffected than he had at the records office. “We can’t let these bastards win them. And they will, unless we stop them.”

  “They are still our allies,” said Forrester.

  “For how long?” said Elliot. “We have to start fighting the next war now. We have to get in the first lick before those bastards do.”

  “A bit soon, surely?” said Forrester. “Isn’t everybody rather sick of fighting?”

  The big American didn’t seem to hear him. “Hitler had some things right,” he said. “He knew the communists were the real enemy. Now he’s been cleared out of the way we’re going to see how right he was.”

  “The Russians are as exhausted as we are,” said Forrester. “Twenty million dead. Most of their industry wrecked.”

  “Hasn’t stopped them taking over half of Europe already, has it?” said Elliot. “And if you don’t think they also want the other half, you’re suffering from terminal naivety.”

  “Sounds like a terrible condition,” said Forrester, seeing a gap around Professor Schopen. “But I suppose chaps like you are the cure.” And he darted away before Elliot could reply.

  “A wonderful lecture, Herr Professor,” he said, and then, before the kindly old man could unleash another swarm of Goethe quotes, got to the point. “There’ve been several references to Peter Dorfmann having an important book, a Norse manuscript I believe, that he often carried with him to important meetings. I know it must seem an absurd enquiry, but were you ever aware of a particular manuscript, perhaps a Nordic saga, that seemed particularly important to him?”

  Light glinted off Schopen’s ravaged spectacles as he turned towards Forrester, and Forrester was certain he detected in the old man’s eyes a sudden wariness he hadn’t seen before. “As you say, Herr Forrester, I could hardly be expected to take particular notice of a book held by a colleague. Especially in a literature department.” And he began to turn away. Forrester was about to follow him when he felt a heavy hand on his arm, and found himself looking into the blank, pebble-like eyes of Colonel Tulpanov.

  “The professor is tired, my friend. Perhaps you could continue your conversation when the British organise a literary evening of their own?”

  And by the time Forrester had disengaged himself, Schopen was gone. He buttoned his coat and left the hall, his mind racing.

  * * *

  He’d given Flint the evening off and his footsteps rang on the frosted pavements as he walked back towards Fasanenstraße, the moonlight pale on the ruins. He remembered Tolkien’s words: “During the thirties your own Master made his name with his brilliant reconstruction of the lost books of the Heimskringla… Stories of the Norwegian kings. There’s a particularly dramatic passage about the sacking of Konungahella, which has survived. I often recite it to my students.”

  But there was nothing to suggest that the Norse manuscript on which Dorfmann had placed such value was the Heimskringla, let alone that it had had anything to do with the manuscript that Lyall had brought back from Norway. And even if it had, in what way would it help Gordon Clark escape the hangman?

  After a while Forrester realised he was making no progress in solving these questions and was merely repeating them like a mantra. The second thing he realised was that he hadn’t been taking any notice of where he was walking: when he looked around he had no idea where he was. And the third thing he realised was that someone was following him.

  Unlike his, their shoes made no noise on the pavement, and they kept well back – but he was now aware of long shadows appearing and then disappearing on the fallen bricks and pitted roadway, and felt a sudden shiver of disquiet. He acted on it instantly, as he had learnt to do, stepping sideways into the darkness, and as he did so a brick in the wall beside which he stood exploded. Instinctively he reached for his gun – and realised he had no gun, no weapon of any kind. He had put those days behind him when peace was declared – or so he thought.

  His enemy fired again, and Forrester melted into the ruins, but he couldn’t run. Fallen bricks lay
everywhere, and there were potholes at every turn; with nothing but the moonlight to guide him he was almost certain to either twist an ankle or break a leg.

  He heard his assailant coming after him, stepping quietly, and heard too, the crunch of glass off to his left as a second person closed in. Of course there would be a second: whoever they were, they weren’t amateurs. And then with a sharp crack his foot went through a broken board and as he pulled it free he knew he had no option: he had to run, regardless of the risks.

  There was liberation in flight, exhilaration even, despite the dangers, and suddenly, bizarrely, he was running up a carpeted staircase with a wallpapered wall on his left and wooden banisters on his right – and he was halfway up before he realised he’d run right into one of the houses that had been blasted open by the bombing. “House” was putting it too strongly: all that remained of the building was the angled corner of two walls – and the staircase that ran up them.

  How far up the staircase went he had no idea; the remaining walls blocked out the moonlight. The stairs themselves could end at any second, and he’d be plunging down into the darkness like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  On the other hand, if he stopped he was dead, because one of his pursuers was coming up the stairs after him, firing as he came, the bullets splintering the banisters and sending puffs of plaster out of the walls. Dorfmann, he thought, dispassionately. Dorfmann was behind this and Dorfmann wanted him dead because of the manuscript. Suddenly he knew there was no point hanging around in Berlin, being shot at, while he waited for permission to see Walter Schellenberg – he had to go much farther north, to where the manuscript had come from. As he swung himself around the corner of the next flight of stairs he dropped flat against the treads, and his pursuer ran blindly over him, stumbled at the unexpected obstacle and then cried out in pain as Forrester took the gunman’s arm and used it as a lever to tip him over the banisters into the blackness below.