The Burning Sky rtw-1

by Jack Ludlow

  His suspicions were heightened by the way they failed to respond, it being a mark of polite behaviour for Germans to do so, while the impression of faces too bland was fleeting, of hands a bit too white and teeth that seemed too even. Likewise the clothing had none of the wear that came from doing a lousy job for low pay. The hairs were standing on the back of his neck when he passed the cab, yet he dare not look back to see if they were watching him.

  In such building-created canyons, sound travels, and though he could not see it, he heard the distant start of a car engine, as well as that particular whining noise one makes when reversing. As he came to the first junction, to a road running away from the dockside, he looked along it to observe it was empty; had the car been there and so obviously official-looking it had needed to be withdrawn? How many bodies did they have on this job?

  His heart jumped when the lorry engine started, a deep throbbing note as it idled, then the pitch of the engine rising as it revved and moved, that mixing with the crack of his heels on the pavement. Gears and engine pitch changed twice, then the noise became a diminishing echo, fading eventually till his shoes were making the only audible sound. The combination of that car noise and a lorry, hitherto stationary too long, indicated they were either police or Gestapo. It made no odds which, they had moved because of him and that had to mean he was being tailed; good for his refugees, not so hot for him, given he had no idea of the resources they had employed for the task.

  The street being long and straight, he saw the Auto Union coupe, hood up, coming towards him at quite a distance, moving slowly on the cobbles, which made it buck and sway, the jarring of its body as the springs failed to cushion it properly indicating the car was carrying too heavy a load. The first clue to it being the Ephraim family was the sight, in the driver’s seat, of the man Lanchester had called his blue-eyed boy, both hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead, while alongside him sat the father with a worker’s cap pulled well down, hiding his grey hair.

  Jardine saw blue-eyed boy’s lips move and guessed it was an admonishment not to look in his direction, the coincidence of their arriving as he was departing as good a way as any to let them know of possible danger. As the car passed, it being natural for him to glance in its direction, he saw five people crowded in the rear, the daughter and youngest son sat on laps, then the suitcases strapped onto the jump seat, too many to his mind, which produced a flash of irritation which grew as he crossed the road behind it, halting at a bus stop and able to look back the way he had come and see the vehicle drive on past the doorway from which he had emerged.

  That luggage rankled: it was always a problem to get people to leave things behind, items they had probably not even noticed for years suddenly taking on huge sentimental importance. Valuables he could comprehend; it would be a fair bet that Papa Ephraim had stuff on his lap and all around his feet, old master and modern art paintings in leather tubes, a case of precious objects that had to include heirlooms and, inevitably, a solid-silver seven-branch candlestick for Friday night prayers. It did not matter what he made of the car and it being overloaded — it only mattered if those on his tail, and they had to be there even if he could not see them in the gathering gloom, were made curious.

  Blue-eyed boy would not stop until he was out of sight: the ship was not due to sail until first light, so a way would have to be contrived to get the family into that tunnel entrance in the dark. It was no longer his problem; he just had to keep the watchers watching him and then he had to get clear and out of Hamburg and Germany by a different route, the first stage of that to get on the approaching bus.

  Jardine knew with night coming his best chance was to return to St Pauli, though not to the bar in which Lanchester had found him — the red-light district was busy in the hours of darkness and there were streets there that would make it near impossible for anyone to follow. Once in his old stamping ground, his way out he already knew, the only problem he had was of being picked up before he could get there.

  Many times throughout his life Callum Jardine had been in a position of danger in which he could do nothing to alleviate it; people now saw the last campaign of the Great War as a walkover, the German army retreating and the Allies dogging their heels. It was nothing like that: in retreat the Kaiser’s army made the advancing Allies fight for every pre-prepared trench system and they had been constructed in advance and in depth.

  The only way to take them, tanks rarely being available, was by infantry attack, and if the tactics had improved since the bloodbaths of Verdun and the Somme, it was still hard pounding, while to that was added the feeling, with things hopefully coming to the end, that no one wanted to be the last one to stop a bullet.

  Sitting on the first bus, which took him to the Hauptbahnhof, followed by another from the main railway station to St Pauli, Jardine was aware that he was sat in well-lit seats and easily observed, a bit like a target in a shooting gallery. That feeling did not diminish when he was finally on foot and he had to remind himself of those times, the occasions when, as a soldier in battle, you come to terms with the possibility of death, allied to the knowledge it is not in your hands to avoid it. The hardest part was to keep his watchers feeling he was unaware of their presence: never spin round, don’t do that stopping-to-look-in-a-window trick so you can see if anyone else halts too — let them think they are secure and potentially you are unknowingly leading them to something significant.

  The Reeperbahn was, by the time he got there, its usual Friday night self, full of locals drinking in the bars, of sailors and visitors from more straight-laced communities come to sample the liberal streets of the famous red-light district. In the many iffy places Cal Jardine had been since he left the army he had learnt that setting up a way out was of paramount importance, one of the first things to be worked out before indulging in any activity, and Hamburg was no different — it was just easier than most.

  He suspected his tail knew they were in trouble when, after talking to a streetwalker, he dived into the Herbertstra?e: first they lost sight of him because of the high metal panels that shut off the street from public view. When they, too, pushed their way through the unlicensed whores who congregated at each end of the street, passing the big sign saying ‘Women Prohibited’, they entered a narrow, crowded and garishly lit alleyway, full of men either just staring, or bargaining with the scantily clad women sitting in the brightly lit windows.

  The narrow alley Jardine made for had more than just a raised window beside a doorway; it was an apparent dead end, but a special one, and as he entered he spied Gretl, the woman who worked there, deep in discussion with a drunken, noisy quartet who, by their colouring and dress, looked to be seamen and Dutch. Jardine had passed several windows in which sat young and attractive women, scantily clad and available for business; this was a different kind of establishment altogether and the way Gretl was dressed underlined that.

  A big lady in every respect, tall and far from young, she had on red lederhosen, a waistcoat of similar leather material which hardly managed, so tight was it laced, to contain her huge bosom, and on her head a horned helmet that barely contained her brassy fair hair. This outfit was set off with a pair of black, shiny thigh boots with spiked heels, while in her hand she held a riding whip.

  Gretl had worked the Herbertstra?e for decades to become a feature of the place. Most of the window girls came for a few years and many from country towns and villages, not Hamburg. They saved up the money they made from selling their bodies, overseen and kept medically clean by the municipality, then retired back to their locality, no doubt without their neighbours being aware of their past, to set up a shop or some kind of business, or merely to become a marriageable catch with their nest egg — in some senses a more morally upright bunch than those they served.

  As he approached, walking at speed, Gretl turned to look at him and he was presented with quite a sight: her eyes were picked out in thick kohl, her cheeks caked with deep make-up and her lips a bright-red slash
on her lined face. She was in the midst of a stream of German invective that told those with whom she was negotiating that the price they wanted to pay for her services was very far from sufficient. When Gretl looked like that, the customers who got into her inner sanctum paid a high price for their parsimonious temerity. It would be painful, but that was before she eased their soreness with the other skills she had honed over the years.

  Sighting Jardine she smiled, exposing large, yellowing teeth, then enquired in a deep guttural voice if he had finally come for a treatment, which made the Dutchmen, for in their protested responses they established that was their nationality, look and act aggrieved. All she got was a quick peck on the cheeks, leaving Jardine with the taste of pancake on his lips as he slipped past her. The last thing he heard was Gretl reassuring her putative clients that he was only passing through.

  There was no way of knowing if his tail had seen him come in to Gretl’s little cul-de-sac. If they had, she would delay them and be damned ferocious with it, but all it would take to shut her up would be the production of an identity card: no one feared the police more than those who lived and worked the Reeperbahn; if a customer complained to the Polizei, they always took their side — the reputation of the district came before right and wrong. If it was the Gestapo, that was ten times worse.

  The room Gretl used was lit in red, with couchettes, a bed and various instruments of torture on the walls, manacles and harness. Behind a curtain was a door to the back alley — every establishment had them, gloomily lit by the moon and barely wide enough for two people to pass, but, like the street it served, cut off by high barriers at both ends, these locked. Once through, Jardine dropped his bag and took out his Mauser, waiting: if they were coming they would do so immediately.

  After half a minute, when nothing happened, he opened the bag, well aware he had a limited amount of time, trying to assess the probable actions of those pursuing him. If he worked it right, that would allow him to get clear; getting it wrong probably meant incarceration in somewhere like Dachau, being subjected to repeated beatings and torture as the SS sought information on his Jewish contacts so he would take some of them with him as he died to avoid that.

  Since they did not follow they could not have seen him disappear and thus had no idea where he was: he could be in any number of the rooms behind an empty prostitute’s window, so the only way to collar him was to shut off the Herbertstra?e at either end and that would take time — time to get to a phone and get a message to whoever was overseeing the pursuit, time to get the manpower in place — and he calculated he had up to ten minutes before such precautions could be brought in to play, a period he cut in half for safety.

  Off came his trench coat and out of the bag came a sailor’s reefer jacket, a cap and a duffle bag, as well as the scarf he had taken from Lanchester and that was wrapped around his neck. The pistol was transferred, as well as a wallet containing his British passport, also the few possessions he wanted, a change of shirt and socks, his washbag and a money belt containing some US dollars, British pounds and a thick bundle of German marks, several of which he extracted before concealing the belt under his shirt. His German papers, bearing a false name, he kept handy, as well as the discharge book he had, which identified him as a Czech sailor.

  The Gladstone he left by a wall in the middle of the alley so as to protect Gretl — they would question every whore in the street, and since none would admit to knowledge he had to suppose they could not finger anyone, which should lead to an impasse: not even the Gestapo could shut down the Herbertstra?e without causing a riot in the city of Hamburg. He went back through Gretl’s parlour to find her in full flow, beating on the bare buttocks of one of her Dutchmen while his three companions, bottles of very pricey beer in their hands, noisily egged her on.

  Jardine didn’t stop and neither did Gretl, she was too professional, even when in passing he stuck a rolled up bundle of marks into her ample cleavage. Within seconds he was out in the crowded street, heading for the barrier, his heart in his mouth as he joined the throng and slipped between the two overlapping metal plates, to be immediately accosted by one of the unlicensed street girls. Engaging in conversation with her allowed him to assess the risks he faced, relieved that all he could see was one anxious-looking fellow in a long leather coat and fedora, less at ease given the sound of approaching sirens, added to the attention he was getting from the whores.

  To disappear was easy; all he had to do was walk off with his whore. Who was going to stop a man dressed like a sailor doing that?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘I hope you got your money’s worth from the lady of the night, old boy.’

  Peter Lanchester said that as he poured Jardine a small glass of Chateau d’Yquem, the wine with which he was washing down his bread-and-butter pudding. All around them was the buzz of conversations, the Army amp; Navy Club being full of lunching officers, both serving and retired, careful of their manners under the basilisk portrait gazes of senior commanders of the past, in red coats and blue, as well as great paintings of land and sea battles in which Britannia had been triumphant.

  The mere fact of Lanchester being present testified to the success of getting the Ephraims out of danger and he had been decent enough to accompany them all the way to Harwich. They were now happily ensconced in St John’s Wood, where they were to stay with their well-heeled fellow-Jewish sponsors.

  ‘As they say in certain of our newspapers, Peter, having paid her I made my excuses and left. It is not a good idea to get into bed with the Hamburg streetwalkers.’

  ‘Diseased are they?’

  ‘Unregulated will do and that’s before their pimps try to cosh and rob you. The window girls are not only pimp-free but are taken out of circulation if they have picked up anything untoward, which in itself is too commonplace in such a busy international port.’

  ‘I shall remember that if I am ever again in Hamburg. I must say your girl Gretl sounds like a real card, not that I am much taken with the idea of the treatment she metes out.’

  ‘I’d like to see her dealing with Goebbels — she hates the Nazis, as an awful lot of Germans do.’

  ‘Then why did they vote for the buggers?’ Lanchester snapped, in a rare flash of real passion.

  That was said in too loud a manner and it attracted a degree of attention, especially from the older members: balding, grey-haired men with the broken-veined faces of the serious port drinker and the watery eyes of their years and endemic disapproval. They reminded Jardine of every officers’ mess he had ever been in, both at home and abroad, which always had its quota of elderly majors going nowhere, men whose sole joy in life seemed to be making existence hell for the newly commissioned subalterns, while simultaneously blocking the road to promotion for everyone else.

  ‘Hamburg didn’t vote for Hitler, Peter, nor did Berlin and they loathe him in the Ruhr, but when you’ve been humiliated in war, had hyperinflation twice in twenty years, suffered massive unemployment and witnessed an old dodderer like Hindenburg running the show and favouring his fellow Prussian landowners with the few coins left in the coffers, anyone who promises you security, a bit of national pride, a job and change has a certain cachet. There are, of course, no elections anymore, just the Fuhrer of the German Volk.’

  ‘Apologies and thank you for the history lesson, Cal, but I seem to have sidetracked you when you were regaling me with how you got out of Hunland. Sharp thinking to head inwards rather than out when the borders were being watched. I take it you did not linger long in Berlin.’

  ‘I went straight from the railway station to the passenger barges that run down to Prague.’

  ‘And your forged papers stood up to scrutiny?’

  There was no need to say they had been checked, and more than once, in a country in the grip of deep paranoia layered on top of an endemic and historic love of bureaucracy. Travelling without papers was impossible and you could not even stay with a relative in Germany for more than two weeks without reg
istering your presence at the police station. Every mode of transport had roving officials checking documents and that included Elbe barges. It was thus a good job those he carried had been supplied by members of the Hamburg underworld and were of a high standard.

  ‘Being foreign gets a lot of scrutiny, but I pretended to be a Sudetenlander.’

  ‘And what, pray, is that when it’s out and about?’

  ‘German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, one that Hitler wants to be incorporated back into the Reich, like all the bits that were hived off by the Treaty of Versailles. I said you should read Mein Kampf. Anyway, being an ethnic German, sadly cut off from my Volk, and I played that up a lot, got me a certain amount of sympathy. Accent’s a bit tricky, mind, bit like speaking Welsh.’

  ‘Welsh as an accent and German, so doubly damned, poor sods,’ Lanchester opined, picking up the wine bottle to ensure it was empty. ‘Is it not odd, though, the way we never think of other nations having accents? Port?’

  ‘Not at luncheon, Peter, and not when I suspect I might need a very clear head.’

  Lanchester signalled to the waiter, told him to serve them coffee in the library, a quiet place to which they retired, taking up seats in the far corner, away from the door. ‘You know what we are after already, up to a point.’

  ‘I do not know the “we”, and while you said money was available, I would need to know how much and where it came from to be sure I can trade in the places I need to. That is one area in which all must be secure. Nothing is more likely to get one into trouble than trading for arms, then coming up short with the lolly. Then I would want to know precisely where you fit in.’

  Lanchester looked around the book-lined room, empty except for one very old gent sound asleep in an armchair, probably a victim of an early luncheon, yet even then, in this bastion of the British upper crust, he spoke in a whisper.