by Iles, Greg
“Well, there was, in fact. Detective Schneider found a card outside. In the snow near the walkway. It didn’t have anything on it but a number. A telephone number.”
Luhr’s eyes narrowed. “Where is this card now?”
“I don’t know. If it’s still here, Schneider would have it. He’s in the back.”
As Luhr stepped down onto the small stone terrasse, a bearish man wearing a hat and a rumpled raincoat waded into the pool of yellow light thrown off by a dim spotlight above the glass doors. The man stopped when he saw Luhr, taking in the silver lieutenant’s bars, starched-flat uniform, and gleaming boots.
“What can I do for you, Lieutenant?” he asked warily.
“Detective Schneider, I presume?”
The big man nodded.
“I am here as the unofficial representative of the prefect. He has expressed an interest in this case As the murdered man apparently has some tie to the East German government, the prefect fears that there might be … repercussions. You understand?”
Detective Schneider waited for the lieutenant to ask what he had come outside to ask. He didn’t like the way Luhr’s arrogant little mouth softened his classic Nordic face. Or the eyes, he thought. Rapist’s eyes.
“The photographer tells me that you discovered a card on the premises. A card with only a telephone number. Where is this card now?”
“I didn’t actually find it,” Schneider said, slipping his right hand into his trouser pocket. “Patrolman Ebert did.”
Schneider fingered the white card and watched Luhr’s face. “I’m not sure where it is now. I had it, but I think Officer Beck asked me for it. He’s still here, I believe.”
“What have you got in your pocket?” Luhr asked sharply.
Schneider slowly withdrew his hand. He held the brass gorget plate and chain that identified him as a Kripo detective. With a hiss of frustration Luhr went in search of Officer Beck. As soon as he disappeared, Schneider pulled a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and copied the number from the card onto the palm of his hand. Then he followed Luhr into the house.
“Lieutenant?” he called. “Herr Lieutenant!”
Luhr barrelled back through the front door, his face flushed with anger.
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant.” Schneider shook his head as if he were a fool and knew it. “That card was in my coat pocket all the time. I could have sworn I gave it to Beck. Here you are.”
Luhr snatched the card. “Officer Beck says he never asked you for the card!”
Schneider continued shaking his head. “Must have been somebody else. I tell you, past midnight and my mind just goes.”
“I suggest, Detective,” Luhr said acidly, “that you either get more sleep or look for a new line of work. Have you had anyone trace this number yet?”
“No, sir. Not yet.”
“I’ll handle it, then.”
While Luhr stalked out to his unmarked Audi, Schneider stood in the foyer and scratched his large head. Something had felt wrong about this case from the moment he walked in the door. While everyone else had gone on about the sloppiness of the murder, Schneider had kept silent. Twenty minutes later the nameless card had turned up. And now this Nazi-looking lieutenant had appeared—the prefect’s aide, no less—to spirit that card away. Schneider couldn’t remember ever having seen Luhr at a crime scene before. That bothered him. He hurried past the few technicians left outside the house and climbed into his battered Opel Kadett.
“Telephone,” he murmured as he cranked the old car.
Jürgen Luhr had beat him to it. As Schneider rounded the corner of Levetzow and Bachstrasse, he spied the prefect’s aide standing at a corner call box. Schneider slowed, then drove on, maddeningly shut out of the conversation passing through the wires just over his head.
“Frau Funk?” Luhr asked, when a woman answered. “I’m sorry to disturb you so late. This is Jürgen Luhr. Could I speak with the prefect, please? … But he was leaving the station—” Luhr broke the connection and punched in the number of Abschnitt 53. “Berlin-Two,” he snapped. “The prefect, immediately.”
A full minute passed before Funk came on the line, his voice smug and unruffled in contrast to, its earlier panic. “Yes, Jürgen?”
“I’ve found something odd at the Tiergarten house. A card with nothing but a phone number on it. We should trace it immediately. The crime looked very suspicious. Evidence of automatic weapons fire, conflicting signs of amateurishness and professionalism. I think our brothers in uniform may have, been there.”
“How interesting,” said Funk. “Why don’t you come back to the station and we’ll discuss your theory.”
“What’s the matter? Is someone with you?”
A pause. “There was someone here, Jürgen. Sergeant Ross just took her downstairs to her new accommodations.”
“Her? Who are you talking about?”
“The wife of one of our ‘brothers in uniform,’ as you put it. A Frau Ilse Apfel. She walked into the station just after you left. She had a most interesting story to tell.”
“What? The sergeant’s wife?”
“That’s right. I understand the situation much better after talking to her. I suggest you get back here, Jürgen, if you want to be in on this at all. I’ve already spoken to Pretoria. I received some very interesting orders, and they involve YOU.”
Luhr left the receiver dangling from the call box and dashed to his car. He squealed down the Bachstrasse in a rage. “Damn that imbecile! How could he be so lucky?” He screeched around a curve. “It’s all right,” he assured himself, calming a little. “He hasn’t found Hauer or Apfel yet. Or the Spandau papers. And that’s what Phoenix wants— what he’s frightened of. And that distinction will be mine.”
In his fury, Luhr failed to notice the burly figure of Detective Julius Schneider standing at a yellow call box four blocks from the one he had used to place his own call. Unlike Luhr, Schneider wasn’t about to try to trace the mysterious phone number through normal channels. An inquiry in his own name might draw unpleasant attention, possibly even the prefect’s, and Schneider didn’t need that. Besides, he had always believed in taking the shortest route between two points. Reading the telephone number off the palm of his hand, he lifted the receiver and punched in the digits. He heard five rings, then a click followed by the familiar hiss and crackle of an automated answering machine.
“This is Harry Richardson,” said a metallic voice. “I’m out. Friends can leave a message at the tone. If you’re a salesperson, don’t call back. If it’s a military matter, call my office. The previous message will be repeated in German. Thank you.”
Schneider waited until the German version of the message had finished, then hung up. His pulse, normally as steady as a hibernating bear’s, was racing. Schneider knew who Harry Richardson was. He’d even met him once. American intelligence officers who took the time to cultivate investigators of the Kriminalpolizei were rare enough to remember. Schneider doubted if Richardson would remember him, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that an American army officer was somehow involved in what was fast shaping up to be an explosive murder case. Schneider took several deep breaths and forced himself to think slowly. He’d found Richardson’s card outside the victim’s house, but there had been blood all around it. What did that mean? And what should he do? He thought of the prefect’s insolent aide, and the overly officious manner that in Schneider’s experience spelled coverup.
With sudden insight Schneider realized that he now stood at one of those crossroads that can change a man’s life forever. He could get into his car and go home to his wife and his warm bed—a course of action almost any sane German would choose—or he could make the call that he suspected would pluck him from his old life like the wind sweeps a seed from the ground. “God,” he murmured. “Godfrey Rose.”
Schneider jumped into his car and fired the engine. Thirty minutes ago he had been mildly intrigued by the night’s events. Now his mind ran wild with specul
ation, electrified by the smell of the kind of chase he had become a detective for in the first place. Squealing away from the curb, he made an illegal U-turn and headed east on the Budapest Strasse, making for the Tiergarten station. He hoped his English was up to the task.
CHAPTER TWELVE
12.30 a.m. Veipke, FRG. Near the East German Border
Professor Natterman swung the rattling Audi back toward the frontier and pushed the old sedan to 130 kilometres per hour. Now that the end of his harrowing journey approached, he could not keep from rushing. The speed was exhilarating; the protesting whine of the tires as he leaned the car into the curves kept his fatigued mind alert. Thank God for old friends, he thought. A boyhood churn had come through for him tonight, providing the Audi with no questions asked.
Thankfully, the mysterious Englishman who had “accidentally” stumbled into his compartment had disappeared. Natterman hadn’t seen him again on the train, nor at Helmstedt when the few passengers disembarked. A few times during the last hour he had caught sight of headlights in the blackness far behind him, but they came and went so frequently that he wrote them off to nervousness.
As the Audi jounced over the railroad linking Gardelegan to Wolfsburg, the professor spied the eerie, never-dimming glow of the sprawling factory city to the west. The sight startled him still. When he was a boy, Wolfsburg had been a tiny village of less than a hundred, its few houses scattered hodgepodge around the old feudal castle. But when the Volkswagen works came there in 1938, the village had been transformed almost overnight into an industrial metropolis. He could scarcely believe his father’s tiny cabin still remained in the quiet forest northeast of the city. It had been eleven months since he last visited the cabin, but he knew that Karl Riemeck, a local laborer and old family retainer, would have both the grounds and the house in fine shape. The thought of spending some time in the old place had almost blotted out the wild theories whirling through Natterman’s weary brain. Almost.
As he roared down the narrow road cut through the deep forest, visions of notorious and celebrated faces from the past flickered in his mind like pitted newsreels. Hitler and Churchill … the Duke of Windsor … Stalin … Joseph P Kennedy, the American ambassador to war-torn Britain, a Nazi appeaser and father of a future U. S. President … Lord Halifax, the nerveless British foreign secretary and secret foe of Churchill … Those smiling faces now seemed to conceal uncharted worlds of deception, worlds waiting to be mapped by an intrepid explorer. The thrill of impending discovery coursed through the old historian’s veins like a powerful narcotic, infusing him with youthful vigour.
He eased off the gas as he crossed the Mittelland Canal bridge. Again he had arrived at the impenetrable core of the mystery: what were the British hiding? If Hess’s double had flown to Britain to play a diversionary role, what was he diverting attention from? Why had the real Hess flown to Britain? To meet Englishmen, of course, his mind answered. But which Englishmen? With a pang of professional jealousy Natterman thought of the Oxford historians who were documenting the pro-Nazi sympathies of over thirty members of the wartime British Parliament whom they believed had known about Hess’s flight beforehand. The gossip in academic circles was that the Oxford men believed these MPs were Nazi appeasers, enemies of Churchill whom Hess had flown secretly to Britain to meet. Natterman wasn’t so sure.
He had no doubt that an apparently pro-Hitler clique of upper-class Englishmen existed in 1941. The real question was, did those men really intend to betray their country by forging an unholy alliance with Adolf Hitler? Or was there a deeper, more noble motive for their behaviour?
The answer to this lay in Hitler’s war plans. The Führer’s ultimate goal had always been the conquest of Russia—the acquisition of Lebensraum for the German people—which made him very popular with certain elements of British society. For despite being at war with Germany, many Englishmen saw the Nazi state as an ideal buffer against the spread of communism. Similarly, the Führer had visions of Germany and England united in an Aryan front against communist Russia. Hitler had never really believed that the English would fight him. Yet when Winston Churchill refused to accept the inevitable surrender to and alliance with Germany, the Führer got angry. And there, Natterman believed, lay the basis of Rudolf Hess’s mission.
Hitler had assigned himself a very strict timetable for Barbarossa—his invasion of the Soviet Union. He believed that if he did not invade Russia by 1941, Stalin’s Red Army would gain an overwhelming superiority over him in men and materiel. That meant that to be successful, his invasion armies had to jump off eastward by May of 1941 at the latest, before the snows melted and made the effective use of tanks impossible. And the British, Natterman remembered, had known this. An RAF group captain named F. W. Winterbotham had worked it out in 1938. And this knowledge, correctly exploited, could have given the British a peculiar kind of advantage. For the longer they could fool Hitler into believing they wanted a negotiated peace, the longer they could stave off an invasion of Britain. And the nearer would draw the date when Hitler would have to redeploy the bulk of his armies eastward. If Hitler could be fooled long enough, England would be spared.
But had those “pro-Nazi” Englishmen understood that in 1941? Natterman wondered. Were they altruistic patriots who had lured Rudolf Hess to Britain on a fool’s errand, and thus saved their homeland from the Nazis? Or were they traitors who had decided Adolf Hitler was a man they could deal with—a bit of a boor, perhaps, but with sound policies vis-a-vis the communists and Jews? The answer seemed simple enough: If a group of powerful Englishmen had merely pretended to treat with Hitler in order to save Britain, they would be heroes and would require no protection from public scrutiny, especially fifty years after the fact. However, the well-documented efforts of the British government to suppress the details of the Hess case tended to reinforce the opposite theory: that those Englishmen really had been admirers of Hitler and fascism.
The variable that confused this logic was a human wild card—Edward VÜI, Duke of Windsor, former Prince of Wales and abdicated King of England. The duke’s pro-German sympathies and contact with the Nazis—both before and during the war—were documented and very embarrassing facts. At the very least Windsor had made a fool of himself by visiting Hitler and all the top Nazis in Germany, then trumpeting the Führer’s “achievements” to a shocked world. At worst he had committed treason against the country he was born to rule. After his stormy abdication, the duke, living in neutral Spain, had pined away for the throne he had so lightly abandoned.
Startling evidence unearthed in 1983 indicated that in July of 1940 Windsor had slipped secretly into neutral Lisbon to meet a top Nazi, where they explored the option of Windsor’s return to the English throne. And that, Natterman thought excitedly, was the core of it all! Because, according to British historian Peter Allen, the Nazi whom Windsor had sneaked into Portugal to meet had been none other than Rudolf Hess!
Natterman gripped the wheel tighter. A clear picture had begun to emerge from the blurred background of speculation. He could see it now: while Hitler’s “British sympathizers” may have been feigning sympathy for the Nazis in order to save England, the Duke of Windsor most definitely was not. And if Windsor had committed treason, or even come close, that was the kind of royal “peccadillo” that the British secret service would be forced to conceal, suppressing the entire Hess story, the heroism as well as the treason.
Natterman felt his heart thump. A fourth and stunning possibility had just occurred to him. What if the British “traitors” really were pro-Nazi, but had been allowed to pursue their treachery by an even more devious British Intelligence? That way the Nazis could not possibly have picked up on any deception, because the conspirators themselves would not have been aware that they were part of one! Natterman’s mind reeled at the implications. He tried to focus on that uncertain time—the spring of 1941—but his memories seemed foggy, misted at the edges somehow. His brain contained so many fragments of history that he was
no longer sure what he had merely read about and what he had actually lived through. He had lived through so much.
More books, he thought. That’s what I need now. Documentation. I’ll have Ilse stop at the university library on her way here. I’ll make a list as soon as I get to the house. Churchill’s memoirs, Speer’s book, copies of Reich documents, a sample of Hess’s handwriting … I’ll need all that for even a preliminary study of the document. And eventually the ink, the paper itself… Natterman hit the brakes, bringing the Audi to a sliding stop. He had reached the cabin. He turned slowly onto the narrow, snow-packed lane that wound through the forest to the cabin. When the familiar flicker of a lantern appeared in the darkness ahead, he smiled and watched it wink in and out of sight as he negotiated the last few curves. As he pulled the car into the small turnaround beside the cabin, he decided to invite Karl Riemeck up for a schnapps tomorrow. The old caretaker had obviously taken the trouble to drive out here and light a lamp for him, and Natterman suspected he would also find a good supply of firewood laid by for his convenience. Deciding to retrieve his suitcase later, he halted his heavy book satchel over his shoulder and climbed out of the Audi. The cold practically pushed him up onto the cabin porch, where he found a week’s supply of oak logs stacked on a low iron rack.
“Thank you, Karl,” he murmured; “This is no night for old men like us to go without heat.” On impulse he tried the knob; the door swung open soundlessly. “You think of everything, old friend,” he said, shivering. “I come to the door with a burden, and must I search for my key? No. All, is prepared for me.” Switching on the electric lights—which the cabin had done without until 1982—he saw that the main room looked just as it always had. Not too small, but cozy, lived in. Natterman’s father had liked it that way. No false opulence, just rough comfort in the old ways. Built of birch and native oak, the cabin felt more solid today than it had when Natterman was a boy. He tossed his satchel on a worn leather chair and walked back out to the porch. Adjusting his eyes to the darkness, he stared out through the& forest, up the dark access road, searching for the glimmer of headlights, but he saw none.
