The City of Fading Light

by Jon Cleary

  He was tempted; but there were things to do. “I’ll try and get there. It may be late—”

  “I’ll be awake.”

  They came out opposite the Brandenburg Gate and an empty taxi, as if waiting for them to appear, cruised by. Carmody hailed it, put Cathleen into it, and sent her on her way. Then he stood looking across at the tall symbolic gateway with its twelve Doric columns. Did Kreisler, the hurdy-gurdy man, ever come here to play his tunes? Where did you go looking for an organ-grinder at eight o’clock at night in a city of almost three million people? He had never seen Kreisler anywhere but in the Ludwigstrasse and then only about once or twice a month; he had no idea where else he might grind out his tunes. In the quiet back streets where children played, outside the Opera House, along the Friedrichstrasse or the Kurfürstendamm?

  Profligate to the point of pain, he hailed a taxi and went cruising. Yes, the taxi driver knew the Leierkastenmann, but he had no regular pitch; he played all over the city. They drove all over the city centres, up and down the Friedrichstrasse, the Unter den Linden, round the Potsdamerplatz and Alexanderplatz, up and down the Kurfürstendamm. It was there, on that garishly lit street, on their second trip up and down, that Carmody saw the hurdy-gurdy man come out of a side street. Carmody got out of the taxi, paid the fare, which seemed to him a down payment on the taxi, and walked back to Kreisler.

  He had set up his organ outside the Café Kranzler, was playing The Sidewalks of New York to the crowd at the tables on the café terrace. The monkey was dancing, lethargically and with a tired, abstracted look on its tiny face, like the look Carmody had seen in photos of marathon dancers in the Depression.

  “Good evening, Herr Carmody. Do you like my happier tune? A neutral one, nothing about Warsaw or Paris or London.”

  “It’s better than the ones you’ve been playing over on Ludwigstrasse.”

  “Ah, but that’s a different audience there. These people are what Berliners like to think they really are—carefree, cynical, not interested in the Fatherland. See how approving they look?” The drinkers and diners at the tables did, indeed, look as if they approved his choice of music; they were smiling, nodding their heads to the melody, some even looking as if they wished they were walking the sidewalks of New York. “You have to know your audience, Herr Carmody.”

  “Could I talk business with you?”

  “You want to hire me for a party? A moment, please, while I collect their appreciation . . .” The tune came to an end. He left his hurdy-gurdy and, with the monkey resting on his arm with a cup held in its paw, he moved along the railing of the terrace, raising his hat politely as his audience dropped coins and notes into the tin cup. He came back to Carmody, stuffing the money into his pocket. “They are giving more than pfennigs this last week. They are throwing their money away, as if it doesn’t have any value any more. What did you want to see me about?”

  “Let’s get out of this traffic.” The pavement was crowded, but Carmody was not afraid of being overheard by any of the passers-by; he was more afraid of the exposure from the illuminations of the thoroughfare itself. The Kurfürstendamm was said to have the brightest lights in Europe: it was like standing on a brilliantly-lit stage. He had no way of knowing that Lutze or Decker was not in the audience. “Let’s go down here.”

  He led the way down the side street, paused in the doorway of a shoe store closed for the night. Kreisler parked his hurdy-gurdy by the kerb, put the monkey back on his chain, and came across to join Carmody in the doorway. He did not seem surprised or puzzled that their meeting was taking on a clandestine air.

  “You don’t want me for a party, Herr Carmody,” he said flatly.

  “No. I want you to do some forging for me.”

  Kreisler laughed softly, took out a cigarette and lit it. He coughed after the first puff hit his chest. “They’ll kill me eventually . . . I’m out of practice, Herr Carmody. I haven’t done anything like that in years.”

  “I’ll pay you well, whatever you ask.” It was Cathleen’s money he was throwing around, but he would pay it out of his own pocket if needs be. “I want a passport and an exit permit. I can get you the necessary paper forms for the permit—we may have a bit of trouble getting a passport for you to fix.”

  “We?” He coughed again, hit his chest again. Over by the hurdy-gurdy the monkey also coughed, a tiny echo, and Kreisler smiled at it and made a clicking noise with his tongue.

  “The only name I’m going to give you will be the one on the passport and on the permit. Will you do the job?”

  Kreisler drew on his cigarette, then blew out smoke; there was no cough this time. “How soon?”

  “Thursday evening at the latest. I have to get photographs—I can’t get those till the person we’re helping arrives in Berlin.”

  “Someone from one of the camps, eh?” He knew the system, didn’t query it; he had been in Sachsenhausen. “How much will you pay?”

  “Do you want marks or American dollars?”

  Kreisler smiled, his thin face masked by a net of lines. “Someone has talked to you about inflation? I remember it, too. Dollars, Herr Carmody. One thousand dollars.” He looked at Carmody craftily; over by the kerb the monkey turned its head to look at them, as if it understood they were talking big money. “It’s a big risk.”

  “It’s a big price,” said Carmody, shocked at it. But he wasn’t going to bargain, not with someone else’s life at stake: “Righto, a thousand dollars. You’ll get half when I bring you the passport and paper and the photographs, the other half when you deliver. We can trust each other?”

  Kreisler dropped his cigarette, ground it out with his shoe. “I think it’s only people at our low level, Herr Carmody, who can trust each other.”

  That was good enough for Carmody; they shook hands. “Come to my office Thursday evening, six o’clock.” He gave the address on the Potsdamerplatz. “Can you leave your organ and the monkey at home?”

  Kreisler smiled again. “I know how to be inconspicuous, Herr Carmody. One never forgets that, when you’ve had the Gestapo chasing you.”

  II

  Helmut was chasing the future, trying to catch sight of its face. “If we only knew what was going to happen—”

  “I’m going to have our baby,” said Melissa. “That’s what’s going to happen.”

  She was neither worried nor complacent: just common-sensible. Motherhood matures a woman, so they say, forgetting all the mothers who abandon their children because the last thing they want is to be thought mature. She was planning the immediate future, mapping out the months ahead; perhaps that she was to bear a general’s grandson had given her a sense of strategy. She had decided to accept Helmut’s proposal of marriage, even at a discount. Half a love was better than none, especially when you were pregnant.

  “I’m a Catholic,” said Helmut, not wishing to put obstacles in the way, just hoping to put things off.

  “I’m Church of England, but it doesn’t matter. I never went to church, anyway.”

  He didn’t go, either; but he decided now was not the time for confession. “We’ll be married as soon as you like—”

  “Tomorrow?”

  No, not tomorrow. “I can’t—Father has some business to attend to—I want him and Romy at the wedding—”

  “So do I. Well—” She sat with her hands in her lap, composed, patient. Dammit, he thought, she already looks motherly.

  “We’ll arrange it as soon as possible. I have to find a priest who will marry us without all the business about the banns—that takes time—”

  He had come here to her flat on his way home from the studio. He had thought of her during the day, but only in odd moments; to be fair to himself, he told himself, he had thought of his father, too, only in odd moments. Karl Braun, almost hysterical in his haste to finish the film, had demanded more camera set-ups than Helmut had ever done even in two days’ shooting; the crew had griped, but, well-trained and responsive to Helmut if not to Braun, they had done their
job. At the end of the day Helmut felt he had been shooting half a dozen episodes of an old-time serial.

  “Take your time,” said Melissa; then leaned forward, took his face in her hands and kissed him. “Don’t worry, Helmut. We’ll work it out.”

  “I hope so,” he said, and was a little surprised that he meant it.

  When he had gone Melissa got up and went to the window and looked out across the drab rooftops. Her flat faced east, towards England, Bradford and home; but she felt no homesickness. She wondered what her parents would think of her situation; it would probably be beyond her mother’s comprehension. Pregnant to a German, determined to stay on in Germany even if war came . . . She could imagine her mother’s shame, trying to explain that to her friends. Her father would say nothing, other than to write her one of his usual short letters in which he would say that he would try to understand, but in which it would be obvious that he was utterly bewildered. He would end by saying he was about to go over to Leeds to see Hutton bat, Love, Dad. It was a pity parents were so necessary, though she did love them. Then she thought that soon, in another seven months, she, too, would be a parent and necessary. Then she began to weep, not with joy but with fear.

  Helmut drove into Berlin to the Hotel London in Wilmersdorf. It was a modest establishment, solid, neat, well-run; but a hotel more for captains and majors than for generals. It did not run to suites, just to large airy rooms furnished to stand the test of time and the conservative tastes of regular guests from out of town. It was not a hotel for assignations, or if it was, it was, in hunting terms, a well-camouflaged hide.

  General von Albern and Romy von Sonntag had adjoining rooms with a connecting door. Helmut went up to his father’s room because the hotel’s small lobby was no place for the discussion he wanted to have with his father. Romy came into the room through the connecting door, sat down on the bed already turned down for the night. Helmut, looking at the bed where his father and Romy probably made love, was suddenly embarrassed and wished he had suggested to his father that they should go for a walk.

  “Everything is ready,” said the General. “We are just waiting on word from Hans.”

  “Father, are you sure you’re the one for the job? It’s something for a professional sniper—”

  “Where does one hire a professional sniper for such a task?”

  “Your father can do it,” said Romy. “We drove out into the country today—your father wanted to test the gun. His shooting was marvellous, on target all the time.”

  “The telescopic sight makes it easy,” said the General modestly. “Don’t worry, Helmut . . .”

  Don’t worry: he heard an echo of Melissa’s voice. “What sort of gun is it?”

  His father produced a small case, opened it. A rifle, broken down into two pieces, and a telescopic sight were fitted into slots in the felt-lined case. “A Mannlicher—I used one like this on safari in Africa ten years ago. This particular gun is a beautiful model, a pleasure to shoot. It will give me double pleasure tomorrow.” For a moment he sounded almost sadistic, which he was not.

  He stood admiring the rifle, remembering happier times for hunting. He had been a noted shot, always welcome in hunting parties; Goering had twice invited him to go shooting boar with him, but he had coldly but politely declined. In his mind’s eye now he could see himself, after killing Hitler, bringing this gun to bear on Goering, a prize boar. It was a Mannlicher-Schoenauer 7 × 57 mm fitted with a detachable 4- power Zeiss telescope. The Mannlicher had been a prized gun with hunters for years; he remembered that President Theodore Roosevelt had used a 6.5 × 54 mm, a favourite he used to call “my meat rifle.” Tomorrow the Mannlicher would be used in the cause of justice: an Austrian gun to execute an Austrian upstart.

  “Are you going alone to this Englishman’s flat?”

  “Yes.”

  Helmut sighed, like a parent deciding that his son had to be protected from himself. “I’m coming with you.”

  “No!” The objection came from Romy; her hand twisted the neat sheets of the bed. “You must let your father do this himself—”

  “It doesn’t matter, darling,” said the General. “I’ll be delighted to have him with me. More than that—proud.”

  Helmut felt he had just been recruited into his father’s regiment. He had always, to his father’s great disappointment and sometimes anger, shied away from the militarism that had been the family tradition. The big house on the estate outside Hamburg was full of military memorabilia, of portraits of his father and grandfather and great-grandfather in dress uniform; anniversaries of battle victories had been toasted as if they were family birthdays. Sometimes he had felt he was living in a war museum, a museum dedicated to a past that, he suspected, even his father knew had gone forever. Now he had volunteered for a future place in the museum.

  The phone rang and Romy, still sitting on the bed, picked up the bedside phone. She had to lean over to reach it and the action drew up her skirt, exposing the inside of a still firm and beautiful thigh. The mildly erotic sight made Helmut turn away as, once again, he saw her and his father in this bed.

  “Yes?” Romy turned to Kurt von Albern. “It’s Hans.”

  The General took the phone from her. “Yes? . . . Yes, we can come at once. Is something wrong? . . . I’ll bring someone—a new recruit. I’m sure you’ll be pleased . . .”

  Helmut, standing by the bedroom window, winced mentally when he heard the word recruit. “Perhaps Hans won’t be pleased—”

  “Of course he will.” It was a long time since he had seen his father so bright-eyed. “He wants us to meet him at Herr Burberry’s flat.”

  “Shall I come?” asked Romy.

  “Of course. You are part of the unit—why shouldn’t you see the place where we are going to make history?”

  Oh God, thought Helmut, soon he will be waving battle flags. “What are you going to do with the gun—leave it here in your room? What if one of the maids starts prying?”

  “It’s not that sort of hotel,” said Romy, as if Helmut was criticizing her own servants. “I’ll get my hat and gloves.”

  Of course, don’t go anywhere out of uniform: Helmut was cynical with despair.

  “We’ll go in my car. We don’t want to advertise ourselves in the Horch.”

  “I’ll bring the gun,” said the General.

  Twilight was deepening into night: it seemed to Helmut, his cameraman’s eyes working subconsciously, that it was the ideal light for assassins setting out on a mission. But as they reached the Kurfürstendamm the last light in the sky faded, obliterated by the brilliance of the lights along the wide, busy street. He was glad when they reached the comparative gloom of the Unter den Linden. He parked the Opel in a side street and the three of them went back to the Unter den Linden.

  Hans von Gaffrin, dressed in civilian clothes, stepped out from beneath one of the trees and came quickly towards them as they arrived outside the entrance to the building where Oliver Burberry had his flat. He already had the front-door key in his hand; he opened the door and they went into the discreetly lit hallway. Without saying a word he led them up the stairs to the top floor, paused and smiled at Romy while she got her breath, then opened the door to Burberry’s flat and ushered them in.

  Only then did he look at Helmut. “I guessed it was you, from your father’s voice. Welcome.”

  “You don’t mind?” Helmut said hesitantly.

  “Not at all.” Then he turned to the General, held out the two keys. “Take these now. The caretaker is usually somewhere at the front of the building during the day, but at night he’s in his small flat at the back, on the ground floor. He gives information to the Gestapo and sometimes we have used him for the Abwehr. You will have to be careful.”

  “Where did you get the keys?”

  “We had them made. At one time Admiral Canaris had Herr Burberry under surveillance.”

  The General was looking about the flat. “Where is the bathroom?” He saw Helmut smile and fo
r a moment looked puzzled; then he, too, smiled. “It’s not what you think—I don’t want to use it. Not for that purpose anyway. It will be my sniper’s position.”

  “A moment, Kurt—” Hans von Gaffrin was reluctant to give his news; the General was keyed up, like a recruit on his first day at the rifle butts. “Tomorrow is not the day, the ride to the Victory Column has been postponed.”

  “Oh no!” said Romy and reached for the General’s hand. “After all our planning—”

  “It has been postponed, I said—not cancelled. He is to address the Reichstag at the Opera House at ten o’clock on Friday morning. Then he will drive up the Unter den Linden, through the Gate and on to the Column.”

  “Why the postponement?” The General looked angry, as if the Austrian ex-corporal had disobeyed orders.

  “Poland is to be invaded at dawn on Friday. He will be celebrating the first victory of the next war.”

  “Great God, that’s what we’re trying to prevent!”

  The General stood stiffly for a moment, then all at once he sat down without looking behind him; fortunately, he fell into a chair. Romy held his hand, lifted it to her lips and kissed it. Gaffrin and Helmut stood silent, the one angry and disappointed at the foiling of their plan, the other relieved and yet afraid. Relieved that his father would now not have to go through with the dangerous attempt on Hitler’s life, afraid of what the invasion of Poland would bring.

  “We must still kill him,” said Romy, as if she were housekeeping. Women, Helmut thought, have a way of keeping their mind on one thing at a time. War could be attended to later. “Then the army can withdraw from Poland—”

  “Goering will take over,” said Gaffrin. “He won’t disappoint his Luftwaffe by withdrawing.”

  “Romy is right.” The General had recovered; he stood up, ready to inspect the situation again. “Let me see the bathroom.”

  Gaffrin said nothing, but it seemed to Helmut that he gave the slightest shrug of his shoulders. He led the General down a narrow hall, leaving Helmut and Romy in the big living room.