The City of Fading Light

by Jon Cleary

  The band began to play I’m in the Mood for Love and people in the big room became misty-eyed, including even some senior SS officers. Carmody waited for Fred Doe on trumpet to blow a sour satirical note, but tonight Doe wasn’t misbehaving, just playing straight. There were too many uniforms at the Adlon this evening.

  When the number was finished and the band left its stand to take a break, Carmody excused himself from the table and went round to see Fred Doe. He introduced himself and explained what he had in mind, his story on the musicians of Berlin.

  “Sure, pal.” Doe was no more than thirty-five, but looked at least ten years older. He had thick grey hair, a thin moustache and a long lined face whose summer tan looked yellow. He had dark shortsighted eyes that had never looked past tomorrow and never would, a husky voice and a horn blower’s callus on his bottom lip. “But nothing political, okay? I saw who you’re with tonight, that Lady Arrowsmith dame.”

  “I’m with Cathleen O’Dea,” said Carmody and couldn’t help the note of pride in his voice; he was like a schoolboy going out with the prettiest girl in town for the first time. “Lady Arrowsmith is just a source.”

  “Well, good luck with your source, pal. And good luck with the O’Dea dame. I know who’d be the less poison.”

  Carmody resented the jazz man’s opinion, but said nothing. He made an appointment for the next day and went back to his table. Krebs was still eating, still swivelling his eyes, and Cathleen and Meg were still sparring, neither showing any visible wounds. Meg, indeed, was offering advice.

  “When your film is finished darling, take your money and run. You asked me if there is going to be war—” she paused, decided the evening was not going to be all fun after all, and went on, “Yes, I think so. I think it is stupid and will be terrible and the only winners will be the Russians.”

  “That’s one theory I haven’t heard,” said Carmody, aware that Krebs had come back into their orbit again. “Who told you that?”

  “Ah, darling, do you give away your sources of information?”

  “Germany will be the only winner,” said Krebs.

  “Yes, darling,” said Meg, patting his hand as she might have that of a stupid child. “Let’s go home, everyone’s getting too serious. Don’t worry about the bill, Sean. It’s on my account. Goodnight, Cathleen darling. Do take care of yourself. There must be so many temptations in your business.”

  “And in yours,” said Cathleen, “darling.”

  Meg kissed Carmody on the cheek, took Krebs in tow and led him out of the dining room, smiling and waving to people as she went. She might have nowhere to go, thought Carmody, but she knows how to make an exit.

  “She knows how to make an exit,” said Cathleen. “What are you smiling at?”

  “My mother used to say that when two people thought the same thing at once, they’d finally reached the stage of being truly married.”

  “Are you proposing to me?” Her smile was wicked. Then she relented. “I’d never put you over a barrel like that, not in times like these.”

  “What times?”

  “Let’s go home,” she said abruptly.

  She led him out of the room, making her own exit. It seemed to Carmody that it was a less successful one than Meg’s. In times like these, he thought, actresses are less important than courtesans. Then he smiled again. Meg would be amused to hear herself described as a courtesan, especially at the court of a leader who was said to be asexual.

  When they got out of the taxi outside Cathleen’s apartment building, Carmody’s first instinct was to look up and down the Uhlandstrasse.

  “What’s the matter?”

  For the first time he told her of the visit from the Gestapo that afternoon. “I don’t want them calling on you.”

  She, too, looked up and down the street. “I can’t see anyone. Are they usually obvious when they’re watching you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They went up to her apartment. He opened the door with her key, took her in his arms and kissed her. It was a lingering kiss; she didn’t push him away. It seemed the proper end to the evening and it was all he expected. Then she undid two buttons of his shirt and her hand was caressing his chest.

  “I should be doing that,” he said.

  She took his hand and put it inside his shirt. “Go ahead, be my guest.”

  They went into the apartment on a laugh that seemed to come out of the same mouth, so closely were they locked. Laughter is a good thing to take to bed; tears have toppled an erection but never laughter. They made love surrounded by themselves in the German director’s mirrors. It was like being in the best brothel in Berlin, but it was free and the love-making, as well as the love, was sincere. He couldn’t have been happier. She, being an actress, wasn’t sure.

  IV

  Extracts from the memoirs of General Kurt von Albern:

  . . . I was in love in the last weeks of peace in 1914, with my wife and my young son Helmut. I had been married eight years and was settled down; I was a major, the youngest in my regiment, and life, it seemed, could not have offered more. But then it did: it offered war . . .

  We were afraid of the Russians. (How history repeats itself!) But the Kaiser was looking for excuses for war to break out; now, answering to conscience, rather than patriotism, I think we all were. I came of a class bred for war, like cavalry horses. My father had fought against France in 1870 (another war in search of excuses); my great-grandfather, who would go anywhere for a war, fought at Waterloo in Field Marshal Blücher’s army. I had the family appetite, much to my wife’s distress. There is no such thing as a proper soldier’s wife; women are much too sensible about violence, though they too often cause it. But they never long for war, even if their husbands are generals, which I was not then . . .

  I took her to Kranzler’s, where we had gone when courting. It was where the Guards officers congregated; the café was thronged with them that evening. Usually the talk was of horses or dogs, occasionally of women; that evening the talk was of war. The sundaes turned sour in front of us, the street musicians outside were playing military marches, the officers strutted between the tables like turkey cocks. I saw the sadness (it might even have been disgust; I have never been very good at reading women’s expressions) in my wife’s eyes and I knew I had just seen the first casualty of the war, though it had not yet begun . . .

  Now, with Eva dead, I was once more back in Berlin preparing for a war based on excuses. This time I was with Romy, a woman who understood what we were about and was prepared to help. I loved her, but no more than I did Eva . . .

  I had to see Helmut. I had hoped to avoid him, but he was too devoted to me; and I to him. I should have to tell him . . . He, unfortunately, was so much like his mother . . .

  5

  I

  HELMUT VON Albern turned off the autobahn and on to one of the side roads that led into the Grunewald, the Green Forest of Berlin. He had not been surprised that his father should suggest they meet there rather than in some hotel or café in the city; it was consistent with his father’s strange behaviour over the past few days. He parked the Opel, got out and walked into the woods, following a path that, though he had not followed it in years, was still familiar. Nothing, he thought, changed in the Grunewald; it looked as manicured as ever, not a pine cone or broken branch littering the floor of the woods; the firewood gatherers had done their scavenging. He caught glimpses of horses and their riders through the trees; he had ridden that same path as a boy with his father. At the weekend the woods would be alive with picnicking families, but in the early evening of this weekday there were few people around.

  He found his father waiting for him at the spot he had named; he was surprised to find Romy von Sonntag with him. What was going on? Were they going to elope?

  He shook his father’s hand and kissed Romy’s. It was all very formal, so different from meetings at the studio, but it had been like that all his life. The strange thing was that there was more warmth and
true affection between himself and his father than anything he had experienced with those he had met in the easy camaraderie of the film business.

  “Shall we walk?” said his father. “We’ll look less conspicuous than standing about like street-corner conspirators.”

  Helmut looked at Romy, who smiled at him. She was in her early forties, blonde and slim, as beautiful as any woman he had ever photographed, an aristocrat whose only fault was that she had married for money. She came of an old Saxony family that had lost its holdings years before she was born; she had married Harald von Sonntag, whose family had made their money in the Kaiser’s day and had come very late, by her own family’s standards, to the von in their name. She was not the first nor would she be the last woman who had chosen money ahead of love; she was not the first nor would she be the last who had discovered their mistake too late. Silk sheets are a luxury but they don’t always make the happiest bed.

  “What are you two up to?”

  Romy was walking between the two men; she took Helmut’s hand rather than the General’s, a gesture Helmut noticed. “Your father hasn’t slept for two nights, wondering whether he should tell you. We are planning to kidnap Hitler. Or kill him, if needs be.”

  He could hear birds singing in the trees above him, the hum of cars on the distant autobahn, the soft tattoo of a cantering horse; yet it seemed his head had gone hollow, that the sounds he heard were not really sounds at all but only memories, as in a dream. Even what Romy had said was something out of a dream, a nightmare.

  His father looked past Romy at him. “It had to come, Helmut. We could not let him go on.”

  “We?” He stopped dead, letting go of Romy’s hand. “You and Romy?”

  The General and Romy had pulled up, were turned to face him. He saw for the first time the strain in their faces. There was no fierce light in their eyes: these two were not fanatics. He realized, because he knew how his father’s mind worked, that what they planned was a course of duty. He remembered something his father had once quoted to him from an essay by Prince Friedrich Karl of Prussia, written some time last century: Honour alone was a Prussian officer’s task-master; conscience was his judge and his reward. There would be no politics, at least not on his father’s part, in the plot to kill Hitler.

  “There are others involved,” said the General. “I can’t tell you their names.”

  “They are people like us,” said Romy. “Who care for Germany and its future.”

  “I care for it!” He hadn’t meant to sound so fierce. “But to kill him?”

  “If that is necessary, yes. But we hope to stop him by kidnapping him. He will have us at war within a week or two. We’re not ready for war, not yet.”

  They walked on again, walking slowly. It was cooler here in the forest after the heat he had experienced all day on the set at Neubabelsberg, but Helmut felt more than cool; he was chilled. Romy had taken his hand again and he noticed her hand was as cold as his own.

  “Hitler has surrounded himself with yes-men on the General Staff,” said the General. “Not all of them, but too many of them. Keitel, for example. They call him Ja-Ja—he’s never been known to say no to Hitler. They’ll lead us to disaster.”

  “Are the English involved in this with you?”

  It seemed he could not have insulted his father more; the General stopped in his tracks, absolutely rigid. Romy said sharply, snatching her hand out of Helmut’s, “How dare you suggest such a thing to your father!”

  “I’m sorry.” It had been a grievous mistake; he should have known it would have been impossible to countenance such a conspiracy. His father was not anti-British, indeed he retained some of the old German aristocracy’s pre-1914 admiration for things British; but he would never have accepted foreign help in a plot to save his own country. Germany was a German’s concern and only his. “One hears so many rumours.”

  “Not at the film studios, I hope,” said his father, still stiff and affronted. “Nothing that will help Germany has ever come out of there.”

  There was no answer to that: the General had only contempt for the film business. “No, not there, Father. Colonel von Gaffrin was telling me about them.”

  The General and Romy looked at each other worriedly, then back at him. “Hans? Have you been to see him?”

  “He came to see me.”

  “Why?”

  Helmut hesitated, then said, “He wanted me to give a warning to someone working on our film. The Abwehr has a file on her.”

  “Her?” Romy was quicker than the General. “Is it the American actress or your friend, the British one?”

  “How did you know about her? Melissa, I mean.”

  “We, too, hear rumours.”

  “From Hans? Damn, why doesn’t he mind his own business!”

  “Perhaps you are his business,” said the General, his stiffness lessening. “He always looked on you as a nephew.”

  Helmut nodded, chastened. “I know. But I don’t want to be caught up in anything . . .”

  “Is your friend caught up in anything?”

  “Melissa?” He almost laughed at the idea. “No, of course not.”

  “Then it’s the American girl,” said Romy. “Has Hans got something on her?”

  “Not Hans. But Admiral Canaris has something. I don’t know what it is, but Hans felt she should be warned.”

  “Did you warn her?”

  “I left her an anonymous note. She suspects there is something between Hans and me. Why were you so concerned about his coming to see me?”

  Again the look passed between the General and Romy. The General looked around, as if he suddenly were looking for spies amongst the trees. There was a pale dusk down here on the floor of the forest, but the sun still struck obliquely through the upper branches, so that the three of them stood beneath a green-gold ceiling. The birds seemed to have gone; the horse riders had cantered away; all that could be heard was the faint hum of the autobahn traffic. The General decided that a forest was the ideal place for sharing a secret.

  Nonetheless he lowered his voice even more; Helmut had to lean forward to catch what he said: “Hans is in the plot with us. He has been our main contact here in Berlin.”

  Helmut leaned back, shaking his head at the reckless foolishness of the older generation. “You’ll all be found out! God, don’t you know Berlin, more than anywhere else, is rotten with spies? No one, not even the top Nazis, trust each other.”

  “That’s our safeguard. They are so busy watching each other, they don’t have time for us.”

  “They must know you’re in town.”

  His father nodded. “I’m sure they do. That’s why Romy is with me. They know she is my mistress—” He smiled at her, a lover’s smile. “Do you mind my calling you that?”

  “It’s the nicest compliment. At my age—” There is something about the smile of a woman in love that a man can never equal. Helmut had seen the same smile on his mother’s face. God, he thought, how lucky Father has been! It did not occur to him that he had been blind to the expression on Melissa’s face.

  “They think we are having a stolen week together.”

  “Is that all you’re having?”

  “No,” said Romy. “I am helping them with their plan.”

  “How, for God’s sake?” He felt so much older and wiser than they. He had turned the years round: his father had spoken to him like this when he had first broached the subject of going into films.

  “We are drawing up a map of every Gestapo station in Berlin. Romy is going to drive me around at night while I mark the stations on the map. They will be surrounded by troops, loyal troops, as soon as Hitler is taken.”

  “Take him? What are you going to do when you kidnap him?”

  “We shall announce we have taken him into custody for his own safety, that Himmler and others plan to overthrow him. Then our troops will move.”

  “Where do you get these troops? Loyal to whom? Father, you’re dreaming. And letting Romy drive
you around! In that big Horch of hers? Why not in a bus with a big sign on the side?”

  The General was a rare one: he admitted his mistakes. “You’re right. We must get a less conspicuous car . . . You have an Opel, haven’t you? Everyone has one of those, haven’t they?”

  “Father, you never did have the common touch—”

  “For which I thank my stars.” But he had the grace to smile; and so did Romy. “You mean the working-class is not as well off as Hitler leads us to believe?”

  “If you mean do they all have cars, Opels, no, they don’t. But yes, an Opel is less conspicuous than a Horch or a Mercedes.”

  “Would you lend us yours?” said Romy. “You can drive the Horch.”

  They’re drawing me in, Helmut thought, even if that’s not their intention. He looked at his father, afraid for him. The General was not old: he could not think of him as an old man. But he belonged to the past, to the dreams of the “eternal Germany,” of a wise monarchy and an intelligent elite that knew what was best for its country. Helmut himself was no socialist, National or Marxist, but he knew and believed that the days of elitism were gone forever. It was tragic and sad for Germany that the Nazis preached their own form of elitism.

  “What if Himmler moves first? Goering? The Luftwaffe is loyal to him.”

  “The country would never follow them the way they have Hitler.”

  “Do you think it will follow Hitler into war?”

  “Of course. Have any people ever rebelled against their leaders at the beginning of a war? At the end when they’ve lost the war, yes. But never at the beginning.”

  “You would know more about that than I,” said Helmut, but did not mean to be unkind, though his father appeared to flinch.

  “Please, Helmut—” Romy put a hand on his arm. “We are committed to what we have to do. Please don’t let us argue about it. Will you lend us your car? I shall use it only at night—”

  He sighed inwardly. He was an amateur in any sort of conspiracy, a complete maiden in a kidnap or assassination attempt; but he was a student of film, he had learned how a plot was constructed; out of fiction he would try to show his father and Romy some lessons in fact. “I’ll come with you, be your driver.”