The Berlin Girl

by Mandy Robotham

  ‘I will not have anyone tell me what’s good for me,’ she blazed. ‘I am fully aware of the dangers, but that’s for me to decide, and no one else. It’s my life. And my fate, if it comes to it.’

  The two men at the table almost bent to the wind of her wrath, eyes wide.

  Speech over, she sipped the non-existent dregs of her coffee, just for something to do in the hole that had been sucked out of the kitchen. Max and Rubin each took a breath.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Rubin muttered, sad eyes on her. ‘It’s just that I – Sara and I – we care for you. Our children are safe, thanks to you, and I want the same for your parents.’ She believed him, wanted to hug Rubin tightly like she would her own father – for his kindness, and to draw on him for her own courage too. Instead, she put a hand on his, squeezed his big, rough knuckles with affection.

  ‘I understand,’ Georgie said, a sudden and inconvenient lump growing in her throat. ‘And I’m not angry with either of you. But we have one opportunity left to find the root of a solid story – something Max and I can get out there, for the public to see. Hitler has, by degrees, broken law upon law, treaty upon treaty. But he’s never been exposed as a murderer. If we can show it, prove it, who knows what the world might think of him then? It has to be worth a try.’

  The only discussion then was how and when to engineer it. It would be for Georgie to write a reminder to Kasper – a jaunty ‘how are you? Let’s meet soon’ type of note – and see what came of it. There was every chance he was too busy with his new spiral of success to see her, the hope being that his vanity outweighed the demands of his diary.

  In the meantime, they pored over the messages from Elias, some of which Rubin had shielded from Sara out of concern for her already fractured heart. The resulting guilt he purged on the two reporters; as much as Georgie hated women being kept in the dark, for any reason, she understood Rubin’s motives. He was willing to own the anxiety, as a means of protecting his beloved wife from the pain of her own imagination.

  In his scrawl, Elias vividly painted conditions in the camp. In his first message smuggled out, he’d described how the prisoners were categorised with triangles sewn onto their shabby clothes – yellow for Jew, red for political prisoner, green for criminal, pink for homosexual. Elias had both red and yellow, the red inverted triangle placed over the yellow to create the shape of a star and presumably for his role as a former journalist. It was cramped in all the huts, he added, the death rate high from disease; over the winter temperatures had fallen to below zero, and daily he helped the medics in amputating prisoners’ frozen limbs. While horrific, being in the infirmary kept him employed, and more than likely alive. The fate of the amputees – from infection or disability – he didn’t elaborate on.

  Now, Elias’s second dispatch was ever darker. The three-tier bunks in the long wooden huts teemed with lice, he wrote, food was a watery soup of old turnips and potatoes infested with weevils, reflected in the lines of bony and haggard faces. The punishments were illustrated in sketches – that trestle table with a prisoner’s bare back uppermost and SS guards ready to wield the whip. Beside it, he’d scribbled ‘25 lashes’. In another, he’d drawn a collection of prisoners squatting under the sun, hands stretched out – Georgie felt the burn on her thighs at having to hold such a pose even for a few minutes in gym classes. There was an arrow pointing and ‘three hours’ beside it, along with its given name: ‘Saxon greeting’. Exercise morphed into torture. It made her visibly wince.

  ‘Is there any way we can get this into a story? Into the wider world?’ Rubin asked out of desperation. Facing them, his heart was breaking.

  Max and Georgie swapped looks. They would try, of course they would. But each knew that both the Chronicle and the Telegraph needed more than doodles or scribblings as evidence for running such an inflammatory piece, accusing the Nazis of outright torture in such a political climate. In her ‘postcards’, Georgie had hinted heavily at the oppression in Berlin, but always played carefully with her words.

  The Chronicle especially liked photo spreads as a way of drawing in their readers – but how on earth would they smuggle a camera in and out of the camp? Asking Herr Bauer for access was futile; even if he agreed, any press trip would be sanitised, prisoners scrubbed and smiling, on their best behaviour. Rubin understood their caution – with his previous experience, he knew any self-respecting editor would demand proof before going out on a limb. But as a man, and a brother-in-law, he clutched at every straw he could.

  47

  Weaving the Truth

  20th June 1939

  The reaction was as they thought. Over the phone line to London, Henry was sympathetic but not encouraging. ‘I can’t go to the editor without strong evidence, and you know that the features pages will demand pictures.’ He paused. ‘Sadly, I think the British public will view it as unpalatable,’ he added.

  ‘It is unpalatable, Henry!’ Georgie almost shouted into the phone, looking around her for anyone listening. She was in a public booth in a small hotel off Friedrichstrasse, not chancing a call from the office – the sensation of being watched had intensified the closer they hurtled towards war.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, George,’ Henry placated her. ‘But there is plenty for you to do. All eyes are on Hitler now. On Germany.’

  ‘Yes, they are. So what about my replacement?’ If she had some help in covering the routine diary jobs, she could focus more on the story that felt far more important.

  ‘We’re still working on it,’ Henry sighed. ‘We’re using a lot of resources in Europe – Prague, Paris, Warsaw. We’re spread thin. I’m sorry.’

  She knew Henry meant it. As a man who’d covered the Great War in France from the trenches, he valued reporters on the ground, seeing events with their own eyes. Shame he didn’t hold the purse strings.

  George flopped onto the chair in the hotel bar with a heavy sigh. The city heat was rising, and she was hot with nature and frustration.

  ‘No luck?’ Max pushed a cold glass of beer towards her.

  ‘They want it pinned down before they consider publishing,’ she said. ‘Something concrete.’

  ‘Same here,’ he said. ‘No one wants to know unless the facts are watertight. My editor says it could easily start a new war rather than stop one in its tracks.’

  ‘They could be right.’ She took a long gulp of the beer – tart and strong, so much better than warm London ale. It sank into her stomach and delivered a spark. Georgie sat upright. ‘Well, we’ll just have to get that proof from our Herr Vortsch, won’t we? By hook or by crook.’

  Max didn’t move. He eyed her from across the bar, brow puckered.

  ‘Max, you know it’s the only avenue we have left, unless we want to break into the Haas clinic in the dead of night. And I for one don’t want to end up as a guest of the Gestapo.’

  ‘Nor do I. But I don’t like the thought of …’

  ‘Like I’ve said before, not your decision. Besides, Kasper’s already replied – and he seems keen for another date.’ The attaché’s usual upbeat reply had arrived a week earlier, saying yes, he was sorry for any delay and that he owed her a ‘very good night out’ for his prior behaviours. He planned yet another ‘surprise’ – which swiftly became another source of anxiety that Georgie had neatly pushed to the back of her mind.

  She looked pointedly at Max and drained her beer. ‘Come on, we’ve got work to do. The very least we can do is try and knock this Sachsenhausen piece into shape. If they want “concrete”, let’s give it to them.’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant Major. Reporting for reporting duty.’

  They did try – sitting side by side in Max’s office with the titbits of prisoners’ messages, pooling them into one person’s narrative, the experience of an unnamed captive ‘direct from inside a Nazi concentration camp’. The drama wasn’t false, just a tool to attract press and reader attention, to put the human spotlight on what was happening behind those high walls and the Nazi shield of diplomacy. The h
ard, harrowing facts were entirely true.

  And Henry was true to his word – he fought for the half-page in the Chronicle, the insider ‘exclusive’ from their correspondent, about the conditions and the assault on humanity. The Adlon crowd were full of praise, Rubin awash with gratitude. But like everything else they’d reported so far, Georgie could only wonder at the response. Would it make any real difference?

  48

  A Hot Date

  5th August 1939

  Sweat pooled at the base of her neck, slinking uncomfortably down her back, and Georgie almost convinced herself it was the stifling heat of a Berlin summer creating her inner furnace. Almost. Every window in Frida’s flat had been flung open, shades pulled down where the late-afternoon sun beat through mercilessly, but it remained a sauna. Georgie pulled the plug on the cool water of her bath, flapping the towel around her body to beat away the moisture forming as fast as she dried. This was a cruel trick from Mother Nature, she thought irritably – the temperature and her evening’s destination. How on earth was she to contend with both?

  She lay on the sofa in her lightest cotton robe, picked up a magazine as a makeshift fan and shut her eyes. In the past week, she’d tried to play down her date with Kasper, to Rubin, and to Max especially. But as the day loomed closer, her nerves had reared and triumphed; she’d been more short-tempered around the flat, even rejecting drinks at La Taverne in favour of a good book – the whimsy of Dickens being light years away from the Berlin outside her door, rumbling towards personal and worldwide conflict.

  Now, the day had come and the plan – if they could call it that – was in place. Max and Rubin would be tailing in another anonymised car, to wherever she and Kasper spent the evening. Georgie’s part was to persuade Kasper back to Frida’s flat after his inevitable slide into drunkenness, steering the conversation around to his work. It was a scheme of sorts. The flat would be empty, aside from Max listening from the confines of Frida’s room, nearest to the living room.

  ‘You mean, you’re going to leap to my aid, as if I’m some kind of damsel in distress?’ she had only half-joked. It wasn’t how Georgie chose to picture herself, and yet when she thought of Kasper and his capabilities, she was grateful Max planned to be there.

  ‘I’ve never thought of you as either a damsel, or distressed,’ he’d replied, throwing her a weak smile. ‘I just want you to be all right.’

  ‘Then let’s hope I’ve absorbed a little of Margot’s talent. It will save you the bother of shining your armour.’

  Georgie finally climbed into her dress at half past six, before Kasper’s allotted arrival at seven. She spent a while in the mirror applying her make-up, perfecting more of an ‘English’ look – slightly more conservative on the lipstick, using slides to tease her hair into a style from a magazine her mother had sent. ‘Will that do?’ She blew out her cheeks into the mirror’s reflection, hoping the result was subtle rather than contrived. The angst she could do little about, praying it would fall away as the evening got into full swing. Please let us go somewhere public – the echo playing over and over inside her head. She flinched when she heard a loud ringing, realising quickly it was not the doorbell, but a sudden ring of the phone.

  ‘All okay?’ Max’s voice had a slightly breathless quality.

  ‘Yes, fine. Just waiting. Where are you?’ She had a sudden panic that he and Rubin weren’t already stationed outside the flat.

  ‘I’m in a booth around the corner, three minutes away. Just checking in.’

  ‘Good. Thanks.’

  He paused. ‘And I wanted to say good luck.’

  The butterflies in her gut were still dormant, readying for flight, but the fact he said it grounded them a minute or so longer. A tiny respite.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. Then desperate to lighten the moment: ‘I’ll see you on the other side?’

  ‘You can be sure of it,’ he replied and hung up.

  The butterflies took full and furious flight at a resounding knock on the door. Deep breaths, Georgie. Don’t think about it. Just do it.

  Kasper was all smiles, a large posy of creamy white roses set against the lead grey of his uniform and the black of his highly polished boots. In his other hand, he clutched a sizeable leather wallet, the type used to hold letters and bound with a leather strap.

  ‘Evening, Fraulein Young, a little something for you,’ he said, offering the bouquet.

  ‘Oh, they’re beautiful.’ She beamed, turning to lead him into the living room. I’m still his English rose. ‘I’ll just put these into some water. Would you like a drink? A Martini, perhaps?’

  ‘Thank you, but no,’ he said, perching on the sofa, the wallet held firmly against his body. ‘I’m determined not to repeat my behaviour of old – I’m afraid I drank rather too much on our last meeting.’ He oozed a new confidence, seeming to have aged or matured – gone was the boyish look, his jaw was more pronounced and his chest broader. He had grown into his rank.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she trilled, panic rising inside at the prospect of a sober Kasper throughout the evening. ‘You were a perfect gentleman. I’m quite partial to a tipple. Surely, you won’t make me drink alone?’

  ‘Well, perhaps when we’re having dinner. Shall we go?’

  They stepped into a gleaming staff car, the door opened by a well-dressed driver – at each meeting he seemed to be afforded a newer and better vehicle – and Georgie glimpsed Rubin’s car a short way down the street. Awash with trepidation, yes – but she was not alone. They slid into the back seat, Kasper moving the leather file to one side and edging closer to Georgie, cosier than his manners had ever allowed before.

  ‘Surely not another balloon ride tonight, or a trip out into the countryside – not in this heat?’ She was pumping for any indication, while driving flirtation into her voice. Kasper smiled, clearly pleased at her allusion to their previous dates. Perhaps fuelled by it, he placed a hand on Georgie’s thigh, looking directly for her reaction. She giggled and slid her own hand on his. A bead of sweat broke free from the nape of her neck and crawled downward, though the icicles inside held firm.

  Kasper was in an ebullient mood, talking openly about his new position as a senior attaché to Major Schenk and how he was enjoying some travel.

  She gasped, eyes wide. ‘You’ve been abroad? Anywhere nice?’ She reminded herself then not to go overboard with the flirtation. It wasn’t ‘in character’ for what Kasper already knew of her. And you are no Mata Hari, girl.

  ‘Nothing too exotic at the moment,’ he said. ‘I’ve been lucky enough to see a lot of our beautiful country, with one or two trips across the borders.’

  And what borders are those? Georgie mused bitterly. The moveable ones, that the Nazis shift on a whim? But her smile remained fixed, her attention centred entirely on Kasper.

  Flicking her gaze out of the window at opportune moments, Georgie tracked the route; it was still light so she was able to log the city’s landmarks as they skirted the scorched green of the Tiergarten. But there was no need – the driver pulled up within a short time, in one of Berlin’s elegant districts and just a stone’s throw from La Taverne.

  ‘It’s not in the least original but I wondered if you wouldn’t mind our evening to be here?’ Kasper said, and he looked up at the ornate stature of the Hotel Eden, its shape like the prow of an ocean liner amid Berlin’s stoical architecture. ‘I have an early morning meeting and so a trip out of the city is not possible tonight.’

  Georgie’s delight was not entirely forced – the Eden was among Berlin’s most fashionable of hotels, and she’d never had money or reason to set foot through its doors. Its clientele was famously cosmopolitan, a blend of European socialites and wealthy Americans attracted by the live band music and the aptly named American Bar. The Eden was also notorious for its exquisite afternoon tea in the palm court, after which guests could play a round of mini golf on the terrace. Alongside the Resi, it was a rival playground for the rich.

  ‘It’s per
fect, Kasper.’ Georgie beamed. ‘Is there music tonight? Can we dance?’

  Her obvious pleasure blended with relief that her prayers had been answered – the Eden was very public and its cocktails famously strong. And she was unlikely to meet anyone from press circles. They might – just might – pull this off.

  Georgie eyed Kasper as he climbed from the car, still clutching his leather wallet, and she caught a glimpse of Rubin and Max parked on the opposite side of the street. She chanced a smile in their direction: everything’s fine. She expected Kasper might hand the folder to his driver for safe keeping, but he clasped it firmly in one hand. She glanced at it, cautiously: There’s something in there. Something I would like to see.

  Kasper guided her inside, head up and shoulders back, his free palm planted into her back. He was showboating for sure; she was his date, his Aryan – though non-German – catch, and he was a man to be reckoned with. It was there in every stride he took, in the way he guided her to the American Bar, the stance that sent the waiter scurrying to find a good table. And still, he kept the wallet with him, never out of sight, declining to check it into the cloakroom, or even the hotel safe when the maître d’ offered up the service.

  The place was buzzing – a mist of cigarette smoke and fusion of languages hung above the tables, some uniforms of SS and high-ranking Wehrmacht, with the silken dance music of Oskar Joost and his band in the background. Outside, military vehicles patrolled the streets and distrust clogged the air, but up on high at Hotel Eden, life appeared to be untouched. Before she could even begin to relax, Georgie scanned the bar for anyone she might know, or who was likely to approach and introduce themselves – thankfully, most of her acquaintances were too poor to frequent the Eden. Kasper’s, though, were not – before they could sit, he toured several tables, either saluting or shaking hands and introducing Georgie as ‘Fraulein Young, from England’, the wallet tucked under his arm and that hand always securely on her. Possession, it said firmly. My own English devotee.