Two can play the history game, thought Macrae, who had abandoned the tactic of deferential agreement.
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? Frederick the Great loved war and Bismarck said you could do anything with bayonets but sit on them.”
“We and the French lost over a million men in the last war. We cannot afford another one.”
“But not peace at any price, Sir Nevile?”
“There is always a price to pay for peace,” said the ambassador. “Now, let’s rejoin the others, shall we?”
The two men stood up. Macrae finished his brandy. The ambassador paused at the door.
“One more thing. Just a bit of advice I give all new staff.”
Macrae waited while Sir Nevile weighed his words. Finally, he turned and looked him straight in the eyes.
“Stay away from the Adlon.”
“The hotel?”
“Yes.”
“Why? It’s the best in Berlin, isn’t it?”
“It was once. Now it’s full of journalists and racketeers.”
“Racketeers?”
“Arms salesmen, conmen of every stripe. The journalists are the worst, though. The Gestapo bug the place. Hardly surprising, really. Best avoided.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” said Macrae.
They tried to celebrate their first night in their new home. Macrae lit the fire in the dining room and opened a bottle of champagne. Primrose found some tinned pâté and prosciutto in the fridge and served it on crispbread. The house remained chilly despite the fire. She wore a thick jersey over her dress.
“I am sorry,” he said.
“It’s not your fault. Ghastly lunches come with the job, don’t they?”
“No, I mean I’m sorry we had to come here. I know you didn’t want to.”
“We must play the cards we have in our hand, mustn’t we – that’s what father used to say.”
She got up, brushed crumbs from her dress and walked through to the kitchen. They had met at a summer ball in Surrey while he was on leave from France during the war. It was 1917 and almost every friend he had made at school had been killed or wounded. Primrose had lost her brother too, near Mons, in the final horrific day of that battle.
They had slipped out of the ballroom, walked into the welcoming semi-darkness of the garden and sat on a bench, sipping champagne and smoking. She was just twenty and was wearing a long white dress with a silver headband and a black armband. Most of the girls wore similar armbands, all mourning brothers, fathers, uncles lost in the carnage of the trenches.
“I feel the world is coming to an end,” she said.
“I know. I hardly have a friend from school left.”
They smoked in silence, watching the dancers move like marionettes in the well-lit ballroom. The band was playing waltz after waltz and the music drifted into the garden through open French windows.
“Come on,” she said suddenly.
She got up, took his hand and led him into the darkness at the end of the garden.
She threw away her cigarette. “Hold this,” she said, and handed him the fluted glass.
She knelt down and unbuttoned his trousers. He was so surprised that he did nothing but gawp down at her, watching the silver headband move rhythmically back and forth. No girl had ever done this to him before, although he was not a virgin. There had been that girl, a cousin, when he visited an aunt in Maidenhead. He looked back at the blaze of light from the house and saw dancers in the ballroom still moving to the same music. He felt he must be one of them and that there was someone else here in the darkness, that this must be a dream.
She paused, breathing hard.
“Give me my glass,” she said.
She gulped the champagne, tossed the glass to one side and resumed. He came quickly, with a gasp, and felt his legs buckle. She stood up, walked to the bushes and spat noisily.
“Let’s go back,” she said.
He caught her arm.
“Primrose, have you had boyfriends before?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Forgive me, but –”
“But girls like me are not supposed to do things like that?”
“Well, yes.”
“I wanted to try it – the taste of a man.”
She bent down and picked up her glass.
“Do yourself up,” she said. “I need a drink.”
He had proposed to her two weeks later at the end of his leave. He was twenty-eight years old, a second lieutenant in the Seaforth Highlanders, a regiment that was moving to the front line near Arras. She had refused, saying she was not going to become a war widow.
Three months later, he was posted to the staff college at Quetta in India. Lieutenant Noel Macrae had been marked out as a man with a future. He had twice been mentioned in dispatches, not for his skill as a sniper, but because he had gone into no man’s land at night under fire to guide a patrol back to safety through a minefield.
His brother officers liked him and, unusually, so did the men, although he never led them over the top. That was the beauty of being a sniper. You did your killing from a distance. Most of the officers in his regiment were dead now or had been shipped home with wounds that would never heal and memories that left them screaming in the night.
He had survived because of his skill with the Lee–Enfield rifle. He had not asked to be a sniper; in fact, it was an army rule that you could not volunteer. He had been selected after a series of high scores at the rifle range in Aldershot.
A sniper’s life was lonely and dangerous. But he proved a natural hunter of men, with a high kill record that brought him praise and promotion from lieutenant to captain.
He worked with an observer who used a telescope, but usually he found his own targets: an officer shaving in a rear trench, a pair of binoculars quickly raised for a view over no man’s land. These were his chances and he took them. As a sniper, you learn that humans are creatures of habit. The same officer will take his binoculars to peer over the trench line at the same place and at the same time every morning. He will be wearing a peaked cap with the emblem of his regiment. The insignia will be shiny enough to catch the eye and make a perfect target.
He had seen those heads fall backwards or sometimes simply explode, scattering blood and skull fragments. Usually the range was too long for a certain hit. At eight hundred yards, the sniper version of the Lee–Enfield was at its outside range. Then the sniper needed to calculate the strength and direction of the wind; even a strong breeze could make a difference over half a mile of open ground. And all the time the sniper knew he too was being stalked by enemy marksmen. You fired a single shot, then ducked down to seek a new camouflaged position.
He had enjoyed the job. The killing was easy, and his reports were praised for their meticulous attention to detail. He recorded long-range shots at periscopes raised in second-line trenches, because he had a theory that the shattered glass would be driven into the eyes of those peering into the bottom half. That report had been well received and circulated to other units on the Western Front. It was ghoulish, unfair and not at all sportsmanlike, but, as Macrae told himself, there was nothing fair or sportsmanlike about life in the trenches. He also knew that he would never become a prisoner of war. If the Germans captured a sniper, they shot him out of hand.
Primrose’s family had reluctantly assented to the match. They were wealthy landowners in Somerset and she was their only daughter. He was a doctor’s son from St Andrews in Scotland. But there were few eligible bachelors after the slaughter in France, and in any case Primrose quietly told her parents she would never speak to them again if they withheld their consent. The wedding took place in London early in 1918. The honeymoon was spent on the ship to India, sailing via the Suez Canal and Aden. This was his new posting and, as he told his bride, a miraculous chance to escape the slaughter in Flanders and start a new life.
That was twenty years ago, since when he had returned from India to command a field battery unit at Al
dershot. He had been promoted to major and then again to lieutenant colonel when he was made a military attaché, a hybrid role reporting to both the ambassador and his military masters in London.
His first posting had been to Budapest, then Vienna. Primrose had put up with the rigours of life as a soldier’s wife. But the further they travelled, the more distant she became. She grew tired of the circle of wives in India and even more so back home in the regimental world of Aldershot. The impetuous sexual adventurer Macrae had met in the darkness of a Surrey garden became a bored housewife whose indifference to her marriage slowly turned into resentment.
Macrae had finally suggested they sit down and discuss their problems. He had just come out of the bathroom into the bedroom and was towelling himself dry. She was sitting in front of the dressing table wearing a black petticoat. Black was her favourite colour. The portrait of her brother by her side of the bed was framed in black. Her dog, a Labrador, had been chosen for its colour. They were going that night to what she called another BBDP – bloody boring dinner party. It was always the same people, the same gossip, the same under-the-table grope from some senior officer, and the same food, she used to say. The Foreign Office must issue their diplomatic wives with a menu card limited to smoked salmon and lamb chops.
“I want you to have an affair,” she had said without looking round from the dressing table.
He sat on the bed in shock.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Don’t look so surprised. I’m going to, so you might as well too. It could improve things, don’t you think?”
“And who exactly are you going to have an affair with?”
She stood up and turned to face him. “I don’t know. Does it matter?” She went into the bathroom.
He had briefly wondered if his wife was going mad. It happened a lot to Foreign Service wives when they got back from India, it was said. They were given a lot of strange pills and quietly sent to rest homes in the Home Counties.
“Do you want a divorce?” he had said when she reappeared.
“Don’t be silly. What would be the point? Men are all the same. You’re a bit hopeless but you’re still my husband – and always will be.” Then she had kissed him, a full-throated, passionate kiss.
The memory made him smile. There was a clatter of plates from the kitchen, a crash and a muffled curse.
“I’m going for a walk,” he said. “Do you want to come?” It was half past four and dark outside. The temperature in Berlin would be falling below zero soon.
She popped her head out of the kitchen.
“It’s bloody freezing out there. I’m going to unpack.”
Macrae walked up the Charlottenburger Chaussee under the glare of street lamps and the lights from a stream of traffic. On the far side of the Brandenburg Gate he could see the illuminated outline of the Hotel Adlon.
He had been to Berlin just once before and then only for a day-long meeting at the embassy for military attachés in the region, those from Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Warsaw. To save money, he had arrived from Vienna that morning by train and returned on the last train at night. He had learnt nothing at the meeting he did not know and seen nothing of the city. He had tried to return, but Colonel Watson was possessive about what he called his patch and had declined to arrange a meeting. Now Macrae was going to explore the secrets of a city that had surrendered the chaotically creative pleasures of the Weimar Republic to the joyless diktat of the National Socialist Party. A cocktail at the Adlon would be a good start.
Two doormen in dove-grey uniforms and top hats stood by the red-carpeted steps to the entrance of the hotel. Two sets of doors opened onto a large lobby flanked on one side by a gleaming mahogany reception counter and concierge desk. Three heads came up to observe Macrae as he looked around for the way to the bar.
“The bar is through here, sir,” said the concierge in perfect English.
He hurried forward to usher Macrae into a richly carpeted room, framed by four marble pillars, that stretched the entire width of the hotel. Elegant palms rose from large urns at the foot of each pillar. A long bar stretched down one side of the room, with leather-topped bar stools. At one end, a large spray of pink and white long-stemmed flowers added a splash of colour to the room.
Macrae seated himself at the bar and looked at a long menu of drinks handed him by one of three barmen.
“Evening, sir. What will it be?”
The barman had an American accent. Macrae wondered if all the hotel staff spoke English. Maybe it was a requirement of the job.
“A gimlet, bitte.”
“Gordon’s or Plymouth?”
“Plymouth.”
“Coming up.”
Hollywood B movies were very popular in Germany and every barman in Berlin seemed to have studied the dialogue in the inevitable bar scenes.
The barman mixed the drink, made a theatrical gesture of polishing the bar in front of Macrae, placed a small drink mat down and set the glass upon it. Macrae put a twenty-mark note on the counter, which was accepted with a nod.
He sipped the drink and looked around the room.
“New in town?” said the barman.
“Yes.”
“Business?”
“Sort of.”
The barman laughed.
“If you are a journalist, they’re all over there,” he said, nodding to a group of men on the far side of the room.
Macrae looked over at half a dozen middle-aged men, their heads bent forward over a coffee table, talking quietly and nodding to each other as if to prevent anyone hearing their conversation. Occasionally they sat back, laughed, raised their glasses, drank, lit cigarettes and then leant forward again. They looked like a flock of birds feeding in a field.
“Who are they?” said Macrae.
“Americans, British, all the big names. They’re here every evening.”
“You know them?”
“Sure, I know them, and I know what they like to drink.”
He began to recite a list of names and cocktails.
“Shirer likes a whisky sour; he’s CBS. Then there’s the Times man from London; he’s straight whisky on the rocks.”
“And who’s that group over there?” said Macrae, cutting in.
The barman leant forward confidentially, taking a quick look at either end of the bar.
“Arms dealers. From all over.”
“And there?” said Macrae, nodding to a third group who had drawn two tables together and sat in a circle, looking serious.
“Businessmen. There’s a lot of business in this city, if you know the right people.”
“You said Shirer, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Which one is he?”
“That’s Shirer in the middle,” said the barman.
“A small favour,” said Macrae, taking his card from his wallet and putting it on the counter. “Send this over to him, would you?”
“Sure,” said the barman. “Any message?”
“No.”
The barman frowned, looked at the engraved card, glanced up at Macrae as if to confirm his identity and walked over to the journalists’ table.
Shirer was round-faced, balding, with a moustache. He looked up at the barman, took the card, listened for a moment as the barman whispered in his ear, then looked across the room and nodded in the direction of the bar.
Macrae ordered another drink. The gimlet had worked but he would need a second for the walk home.
She was asleep when he got back but had left his bedside light on. There was a tumble of fair hair over her face. In sleep she looked younger than her forty years, a face unlined, the skin shiny with night cream. She had miscarried late in pregnancy while in India and had insisted on seeing the foetus of a baby boy almost fully formed. The authorities would not allow a burial in the cemetery, so she had servants dig a grave in the garden and placed a small cross over it. She had called her baby Richard. They had never tried again.
The portrait of her brother stood on her bedside table. He was sure she talked to him every night before sleeping. Good-looking boy, aged just nineteen when he was killed. He had been in a shell hole, stranded for two days between the lines while an artillery duel raged. Two of his own men died trying to reach him. Then they gave up.
Macrae went to sleep wondering whether he should have sent his card to Shirer. His broadcasts from Berlin had become famous in America and he was said to be very well informed. The Germans were keen to promote their version of events in Europe to an American audience and they were greatly helped by the support of such celebrities as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh.
Shirer might be useful. Joseph Goebbels himself was said to feed him stories. The American correspondent was adept at sifting the truth from the propaganda and if you listened carefully to his broadcasts you could detect his own views on the rise of the Third Reich.
Shirer was smart and well connected, but if all went well, Macrae wouldn’t need him. He had his own man well placed to know what was going on, a source nurtured over the years he had spent in Budapest and Vienna. It would be risky making contact again. He’d have to be careful. Berlin was a dangerous city.
Beside him Primrose turned, talking to herself in her sleep, long muttered conversations he had often heard but could never understand.
2
Berlin got to work early on winter mornings. From around seven, office workers streamed in from the suburbs by tram, overground and underground trains to staff commercial and government offices, cafés, shops and the big department stores. The biggest of all, Wertheim’s in Leipziger Platz, had a brilliantly lit quarter-mile frontage and employed a thousand people. At the other end of the square another huge store, Tietz, had sought to trump its rival by offering free breakfast to the first fifty customers to enter.
Berliners were constantly reminded that the efficient transport network was the creation of the National Socialist government. The days of the Weimar Republic, when overcrowding and strikes made public transport both uncomfortable and unreliable, had gone. Not only could workers get into the city on time, but those employed in the industrial belt further out could rely on trains and buses to take them to huge factories such as I. G. Farben, the chemical plant that alone employed three thousand people.
Midnight in Berlin Page 2
