A Night of Long Knives (Hannah Vogel)

by Cantrell, Rebecca

  “Weeks?” I thought of being separated from Anton for weeks. My stomach clenched. I wiped sweaty palms on my dress. “I am claiming the body of Ernst Röhm. Surely—”

  “Ernst Röhm?” For an instant she was shocked out of her routine. Her surprised eyes settled on me. I held my breath, worried about her reaction.

  I had no choice but to soldier on. I set the forms on her desk and handed her the letter. “His mother authorized me to petition for the return of his remains.”

  She nodded and pulled the paper close to her face, squinting. “You are Hannah Vogel?”

  I nodded and gave her my passport, hoping that Röhm had obtained it legally, or from a good forger. She examined it closely.

  “It will still take a few weeks.” She handed me my passport and returned to her writing.

  The chair squeaked when I leaned forward. My rib hurt, and I shifted again. “Is there no way to expedite it, especially in view of Captain Röhm’s position?”

  She leaned forward and tapped a long fingernail on the top of my forms. “His position is dead. That pederast has been removed from authority. If he hadn’t been so debauched, perhaps no moral cleansing would have been necessary.”

  So it had already come down to talk of a moral cleansing, and Röhm dead less than a day. I suppressed a sigh and wiped sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand.

  “How many men were . . . cleansed?” I struggled to keep distaste out of my voice. She was a source, like any other source. I had interviewed murderers and rapists. I could keep calm.

  “As many as needed to be.”

  “Were there trials?” There had been no time for trials, but someone should remind her how justice was usually done.

  “The Führer doesn’t need trials.” Her eyes widened in shock that I had suggested such a thing. “He is the supreme judge.”

  Focus on what a great quote that is, I told myself. Not the content. “But whom will he judge next?”

  “Only those who deserve it.”

  I bit my lower lip. I should not start a political argument with her. She worked for the SS. The least she would do was lose my form. I shuddered to think what she might do if I really provoked her. “I see.” And I did. I tapped the papers on the desk to square the corners.

  “Thank you for your assistance.” I forced out a polite phrase. “I imagine you have had a trying day.”

  “I have. Some of these women are indescribably rude.”

  I bit my lip again. “Indeed,” I said, although the effort to be polite cost me.

  I tucked the forms into my satchel and left.

  Cooler and fresher air greeted me in the corridor. Even though still in the SS building, I leaned my notebook against the wall and wrote every word she had said, hand shaking with anger.

  The notebook was filling up fast. I slipped it into my satchel. Carrying the information with me was practically a suicide note. Yet keeping it in my head, unwritten, was unthinkable.

  12

  I hitched my satchel up on my shoulder and stepped out of the massive arched entrance into the late afternoon sun. The line of women still stretched off to my left. Nearly five. I suspected most would not have the pleasure of seeing Frau Doppelgänger today. They would have to return tomorrow and wait again.

  I had just started down the stairs when someone touched my arm from behind. I whirled, reaching into my satchel for my notebook, making certain it was out of sight.

  “Hannah?” said a surprised voice with a hint of a British accent.

  “Sefton?” Relief flooded my voice. Sefton was a British correspondent. Tall but portly, he was not an attractive man, but what he did with the written word would leave any woman weak at the knees. He was a good man and a good reporter, honest and tough. We had all been part of the same crowd in the twenties, and I reminded myself to ask him how things had really been for Ulli since the Post closed.

  “Hannah!” He pulled me into a bear hug. My cheek scraped against the wool of his tweed jacket. He smelled of pipe tobacco. Grateful to see someone from my old life, the life I had before I met Anton and lived on the run, I hugged him hard, ignoring the pain in my rib.

  Stepping back, I looked him up and down. He had gained a few pounds, and a double chin rested under his once-square jaw. His cleft chin still looked strangely out of place, and pouches under his eyes testified to his habit of long nights, shortchanging himself on sleep. Still Sefton, though, and only a little the worse for wear. I grinned at him like an idiot.

  “I thought it might be you. Some women in the queue said that a gorgeous blond reporter was asking questions, taking notes.” He stepped back and wriggled his eyebrows, thick and bushy like Groucho Marx’s. But Sefton was no funny man, and a bolt of panic shot down my spine.

  “Nice line, but I doubt they would call me gorgeous,” I answered, voice light. That he had wormed my description and activities out of the women in line so easily frightened me. If he could, so could others.

  We strolled across the courtyard toward the sentinels and tall iron gates. “I quote ’em like I hear ’em, Gorgeous.”

  It had been too many years. “I thought you went to Paris.”

  “Back for the occasion.” He waved his arms at the empty square. “Daily Express thinks all this worth covering.”

  And they probably had few reporters as fluent in German, or as knowledgeable about German politics, as Sefton.

  “I wish we could cover it here.” I thought of Ulli taking notes in his apartment, and of my own notes. Neither of those stories would see the light of day in Germany until after the Nazis lost power. I had a feeling that would be a long time.

  “I asked around about you.” He steered us past the giant stone sentries with their rifles pointing to the clear blue sky. “You’ve been a ghost for the past three years.”

  “I was fired as Peter Weill.” I checked behind us, to see if we were being followed. No one that I could see. “I took another job.”

  “Where?” His eyes were curious. My disappearance had caused at least a ripple in the small world of the Berlin press.

  “None of your business, you nosy bastard.” I raised my voice over the rumble of passing cars.

  “Fairly spoken.” He draped a heavy arm over my shoulders. “Dinner, the Adlon? My treat.”

  “How extravagant.” The Adlon was the most luxurious hotel in Berlin. The royalty of Europe had stayed there, even the kaiser and the tsar. Sefton had a deep expense account and a good salary, a popular combination in a reporter.

  “Anything for a long-lost friend.” He smiled the gracious smile that hid his innermost feelings.

  “What I think you mean,” I said, “is anything your expense account covers for a long-lost friend with a notebook full of potential source material.”

  “You wound me.” With the ease of a member of the lower British aristocracy, he gestured to a waiting taxi and installed us in the back. I was grateful that I had worn a hat today. It would not do to show up at the Adlon with a sunburn.

  The taxi drove through Lichterfelde and onto the wide streets of Unter den Linden. Only someone of Sefton’s resources could afford such a long taxi ride. I took off my hat, leaned back, and let wind blow through my hair, comfortable for the first time since I said good-bye to Boris that morning.

  Tall, leafy linden trees shaded broad sidewalks. This part of Berlin felt quite apart from Lichterfelde. The taxi slowed as we neared the tall columns of the grand city gate of Brandenburg. The bronze quadriga decorated the top again. Napoleon had looted it in 1806, stealing Berlin’s winged Victory with her four horses and chariot. After his defeat, she returned with much pomp and an Iron Cross replaced her olive wreath, the symbol for peace changing to the one for war. I wondered what the Nazis would do to her.

  Sefton paid the exorbitant fare, plus a generous tip. His prodigious tips often led him to stories, but I think he did it more out of a sense of noblesse oblige than out of expectation of return. Still, he received the best service of
any newspaperman I knew.

  “Why don’t you have an automobile here?” He could probably buy one many times over with what he spent on taxi fare.

  “At the shop. I love taxis. You never know what you will learn from the drivers. Do you drive?”

  “A bit.” I had learned to drive in South America and could not imagine doing without it.

  He proffered his arm. “Into the breach, my dear?”

  I wrapped my fingers around his arm, and we stepped onto the sidewalk near the hotel. The clean stone façade loomed six stories overhead, topped by a dusty-green copper roof.

  A liveried doorman swept open the doors and ushered us into the lobby. The plastered ceiling swooped up in graceful curves, a church that worshipped sophisticated dining instead of God and sacrifice. Bright frescoes on the ceiling evoked the pastoral good life for which denizens of a giant city liked to cultivate nostalgia. The famous staircase beckoned one to climb to the rooms on the second floor, like a scene from the American movie Grand Hotel; not surprisingly, since the movie was based on Vicki Baum’s book set here. A strong sense of unreality permeated the air. I stopped walking; I did not belong.

  Sefton put his hand on the small of my back and steered me toward the dining room while I tried not to stare at the lavishly dressed and bejeweled women. I was underdressed and underlineaged. But the Adlon cared more about your pocketbook than about your history, and Sefton was paying.

  Sefton knew his way around a menu, so I let him order for both of us. Just like old times, during the golden twenties. Life was quite civilized for almost five years after the Reichsmark was introduced and before the world economic collapse.

  The food tasted excellent, and the wine lived up to the exceptional reputation of the renowned wine cellars, said to contain over a million bottles. The wine cellars were among the largest in Europe, and ended in a tunnel that led to a building across the street. Hotel guests had used it to escape after the gunfire started during the Spartacist uprising in 1919.

  We did not talk about politics, or the contents of my notebook, while eating. Instead I caught up on what my colleagues had been doing for the past three years. Ulli had fallen mostly out of sight, although rumor had it that he had started to drink.

  My friend Paul had been fired from the newspaper where we used to work together, the Berliner Tageblatt, in October 1933, when the Editor’s Law decreed that no Jews could work for newspapers. Sefton did not know where he was. My nemesis Maria was still Peter Weill, although the Nazis only let her write about Jewish criminals. She probably took it in stride, although she had been dating Paul when I left Germany three years ago. But Maria was not one to let sentiment cloud her chances of advancement.

  As at all major newspapers, a Nazi fact-checker had been installed at the Tageblatt. The Mosse family, the Jewish owners of the paper, fled to Britain after Hitler became chancellor. Surprisingly, my old editor, Herr Neumann, fought the Nazi fact-checker until he himself was let go. I had not expected that kind of backbone from him.

  I drank too much wine during the long dinner. Intoxicating talking to a friend, someone who knew me by my true name and identity; knew my history, if not my present. It had been so many years, and I had resigned myself to never meeting anyone from my old life, except Boris. But he did not have the depth of mutual friendships and career that I shared with Sefton. The Adlon’s dining room felt like a world out of time, where I could visit my old life.

  “Now, my dear,” he said when the plates were cleared away. “Tell me true how you’ve been amusing yourself since you cut out.”

  I sobered. As charming as he was, he was still a newspaperman. “This and that.”

  “Last I heard, you were wanted by the police for questioning about the murder of a Herr Lehmann and a Herr von Reiche.” He swirled wine around in his glass, voice light but broad face serious. “And Ernst Röhm claims that you stole his son.”

  “Quite a list of allegations.” Behind him a white-coated waiter cleared the neighboring table with the bounce of the truly young in his step. We had dawdled so long over our meal that we sat alone in the room. Even the idle rich had more interesting places to be.

  “The latter was hushed up so quickly, I imagine it must have been true.” Sefton sipped his wine, eyes never leaving mine. “Would be bad for Himmler and his SS men to have their moral outrage tempered by physical proof that Röhm slept with a woman, at least once. The boy would be a useful pawn for someone.”

  “Your sources are fascinating.” I swallowed the water, chilled at the thought of someone using Anton as a pawn. “But are they accurate?”

  He waited until the waiter carried away the empty wine bottle. “Why are you back now, when Röhm is supposedly dead?”

  “Do you think I killed him?” I controlled my voice, careful not to give emotion away. I trusted Sefton to get the best story he could and publish it. It made him a wonderful reporter and a friend with whom one must be on guard.

  His deep chuckle rolled across the table. “I don’t think you killed him. But you know more than you are telling.”

  “I am a reporter.” I smiled. “I always know more than I tell. As do you.”

  His gaze roved around the empty dining room before he spoke. “I could take a story out, if you gave me one.”

  We stared into each other’s eyes. Fear was in his, and mine. I wanted the women’s story to see the light of day, but the consequences if it were traced back to me were dire. I could do nothing until Anton and I were out of Germany. Too risky. I shook my head.

  “Hannah?” He covered my hand with his. “You were the only one with the courage to talk to those women.”

  I pulled my hand back and sipped my wine. We both knew that he was correct. No German reporter would have risked it. And no foreign reporters either, until he arrived. I alone had recorded the women’s stories. Why hadn’t he?

  The waiter came by our table. With his olive skin and dark eyes he looked Italian, as out of place here as I. “Will there be anything else?”

  Sefton’s face looked impassive, but I suspected he was angry at being interrupted. “Charge it to my room.”

  He signed the check without checking the amount. Even with the sale of my brother’s jewelry, and the knowledge that I had two of his valuable rubies tucked away in Switzerland, I had never done that. Sefton, I must remember, was different from me. And always would be.

  The waiter bowed and hurried across the room. He glimpsed the clock and smiled: a boy at the end of a school day. Free for an evening of fun. With the random violence of the Nazis, it could just as easily have been him in front of the firing squad, or me.

  “Do you want their stories to die along with their men?” Sefton’s voice was still low, as if the waiter were not the only one we needed to be careful around.

  “No.” I folded my hands in my lap, twisting my thick linen napkin. The young men deserved to have their story told. Bad enough that they had been killed, worse still to die unremarked and forgotten, like my brother, Ernst.

  But the risk.

  He leaned forward on his tweedy elbows, once handsome face intent. “It’s bigger than a single one of us, you know. That’s why I came back. The world needs to look at Berlin and see what’s happening before it’s too late.”

  “I know.” I thought of Anton, one small boy, alone among strangers. “But I am in the middle of something personal.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  I shrugged. “I have certain . . . responsibilities, and I cannot take risks as if I did not.”

  I hated saying those words. We both knew that I wanted that story to get out, had wanted it from the moment I wrote my first note.

  “I could make sure it couldn’t be traced back to you. Which is better than what will happen if the SS get that notebook you were using back at Lichterfelde.”

  So he knew or surmised about the notebook. I clenched my hands under the table to keep calm. “You were thorough while talking to your sources.”

&nb
sp; He raised his thick eyebrows. “I am always thorough. It’s why you can trust me.”

  Was it? Could I trust him? I thought of all I knew about him, the years we spent together hating the Nazis. I did trust him, and I hoped that I was not wrong.

  We sat in silence. His sipped his wine with impeccable manners and grooming, at ease in his surroundings. He did not need to be here. He could be home in Britain, in some other luxurious hotel, sipping tea and wondering about cricket scores. But he had placed himself here on purpose, knowing the risk.

  He pulled an artfully gnarled pipe out of his jacket pocket. A white dot shone on the side of the polished black stem. A Dunhill, expensive and British, of course. He tamped tobacco in it and lit up, forgetting to ask me if I minded, a rare oversight.

  “And if you were caught, would you lead them back to me?”

  “I would do my best not to, of course.” He puffed to start his pipe drawing. The smell of high-quality tobacco wafted across the table. “But if they tortured me, I’d probably give in eventually. Stiff upper lip and all that, but a man’s only human.”

  I laughed. He was honest.

  “Come up to my room.” He wriggled his eyebrows. “I have a typewriter.”

  “You old rake,” I said, but I gathered up my satchel and followed him to the elevators.

  He smoked silently as we waited for the elevator, as if afraid that a single word might change my mind. I stood next to him, mouth dry. I suppressed an urge to run out of the lobby and folded my sweaty hands. I would do this. The dead men and grieving women deserved it. I would not let the Nazis silence them.

  “This is a one-time affair,” I told Sefton, my voice high with nervousness. “I cannot be involved again.”

  He put his hand on my arm, as if to keep me from bolting.

  “I’ll take a one-night stand over nothing at all.” The elevator doors opened. The elevator operator suppressed a fleeting smile, and I shot Sefton a poisonous glance before stepping into the elevator cage.

  Sefton shrugged in mock innocence and gave the operator his floor number.