by Jon Cleary
Lutze picked up the top sheet of notepaper, held it up to the light.
“Does anything show up?” said Carmody, hoping nothing would.
Lutze shook his head. “Sometimes the indentation from the page above comes through . . . There’s nothing. You had better tell us how you knew what was going on here?”
Carmody sighed inwardly: he was betraying everyone today: “Lady Arrowsmith told me. She didn’t say who it was, just where it was supposed to take place.”
“She told us nothing yesterday and last night,” said Decker angrily, and bounced the Mannlicher in his hands, as if he should have shot Meg.
“We’ll never know now, will we?” said Lutze, looking carefully at Carmody.
“No, I suppose not. But I don’t think she was trying to kill the Fuehrer. She committed suicide, for God’s sake—” His voice unexpectedly rose. All at once he had to defend Meg; whatever her faults, she had not been an assassin. “Maybe she was trying to warn Hitler—”
“Why should she shoot herself, to do that?”
“Would he have stopped to listen to her? She told me herself—he would have nothing to do with her, he’d kicked her out of his circle—” Suddenly he gave up, overcome by sadness for Meg. Perhaps she had chosen the best way out, suiciding in front of the monster who had let her down, laying her death on him. Though Carmody doubted that Hitler would care . . . “It’s all over, anyway. Hitler’s safe and the war will go on.”
“Yes,” said Lutze, and to Carmody’s acute ear sounded regretful. “You will have to come with us. There will be more questions.”
Down in the street the crowds had begun to disperse, but a big group hung about in the middle of the street, watching Meg Arrowsmith’s body being loaded into an ambulance. As Carmody and the two Gestapo men got into a taxi, the ambulance went away down the Unter den Linden, under the lime, the plane and the chestnut trees. Carmody looked up at the sky; the clouds had lifted and the sun was shining. Germany, he thought, was mocking the sad, dead Lady Arrowsmith.
13
I
Extracts from the memoirs of General Kurt von Albern:
. . . We were fortunate to escape from Herr Burberry’s apartment. As soon as the Mannlicher went off—a stupid mistake for a professional soldier—I dropped it in the bath and hurried out to the living room to join Helmut. There was no question of staying for a second attempt to kill Hitler; we had to be gone from the apartment as quickly as possible. Helmut had opened the door and I was about to follow him when I saw the pages for my journal, face down on the table as I had left them. I had left them there, hoping that Helmut might read them; but he is a man of honour, as I should have known an Albern would be, and the pages had been left undisturbed. I grabbed them and Helmut and I went out of the apartment.
To our dismay we saw that we could not go down the way we had come. Some people were standing in the open front doorway; it was impossible to tell who they were. A man came into the vestibule and started to come up the stairs. He looked up, then paused; he looked vaguely familiar, but I don’t know who he was. Then two other men came into the vestibule; one of them shouted a name, which I didn’t catch. Then the three of them began to hurry up the stairs.
By then we had disappeared. Helmut had been trying the other three doors on the landing; one of them opened as he turned its handle. We slipped inside; we were in another apartment. We could hear two or three excited voices in an inner room; the owners of the voices must have been craning out of the windows to see what was going on below. I felt acute embarrassment at being in someone else’s home uninvited and unsuspected; it is not something a gentleman does. Helmut put his finger to his lips, stood with his ear against the front door. We heard the three men come up on to the landing; a moment, then they had gone into Herr Burberry’s apartment. We waited a few more seconds, then Helmut opened the door and we stepped quietly out on to the landing. It went against my whole breeding to be sneaking out like this; one should retreat with dignity. But I found myself following Helmut, who was showing the value of common sense over chivalry; perhaps he learned it in the film business. We went down the stairs, trying, as Helmut whispered to me, to look like guests from one of the apartments who had been witnessing the procession.
The tactic succeeded. The caretaker (I assume it was he) and a woman I suppose was his wife looked at us, but did not hinder us; indeed, the man, with a proper sense of his place, touched his forehead to me . . .
. . . We are now back at The Pines, all four of us: Romy, Melissa, Helmut and myself. For the moment there is happiness on a personal level; perhaps a brittle happiness, but in wartime, as I remember from the Great War, happiness is a day-to-day emotion. Helmut and Melissa are to be married at the weekend. I do not know how happy they will be; there seems to be a certain doubtfulness about Helmut’s outlook towards the marriage. Romy, however, assures me it will work and I suppose one must bow to a woman’s opinion in such matters. I should have thought, however, that she, of all women, would wish for more in a marriage than that it should just work . . .
A week, two weeks at the most, to see how the war will progress now that England and France have entered it, then Helmut and I will volunteer our services. I had never thought that duty would have a sour taste to it . . .
II
Extract from the diaries of Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels:
3 September 1939:
. . . We shall win this war! I must never allow myself to believe otherwise . . .
III
Cathleen stood at the window of her and Mady’s suite in Brown’s Hotel in London and looked out at Albemarle Street. The narrow thoroughfare was being prepared for war: dark blinds were being screwed into place inside the shop windows, sandbags stood like Roman foundations waiting to be built upon again, a sign was going up pointing to the nearest air raid shelter. But the passers-by in the street, despite looking slightly odd with their gas-masks hanging from one shoulder like natives’ dilly-bags, did not appear to be disturbed. Cathleen had had only two days’ acquaintance with the English but already she was beginning to appreciate that they were a nation apart. Patient to the point of exasperating someone as impatient as herself, phlegmatic and with a self-deprecating humour: they really were like Edmund Gwenn and some of the other English actors she had worked with. The hotel seemed to be staffed with waiters and maids who had come from the English branch of Central Casting.
I must stop thinking in movie terms . . . The world had become too serious for such points of reference.
“Did you know Lady Arrowsmith?” said Swenson, the man from the London office of World Press.
“Only slightly.”
“It was a good piece Sean did on her. Have you spoken to him?”
“He rang me from Copenhagen last night. He’s fine, but I’m glad he is coming to London.”
“They’re sending me there to replace him.” Swenson, a veteran of ten years in Asia and Africa, a reporter of wars in China and Ethiopia, wrinkled his nose at the assignment. “Now his press accreditation has been revoked—”
“I’m glad,” said Cathleen, who, sensibly and womanly, had a selfish attitude towards war. “For his sake. I’m sorry you have to go to Berlin.”
“I guess it could be worse. They could be sending me to Warsaw.” He closed his notebook. “I’ll do a sympathetic piece on you, Cathleen. When Louis B. Mayer reads that you really went to Germany to find your mother, he’ll give you absolution. He might even buy your story for a movie.”
“Sure,” said Cathleen. “But at a bottom price.”
As Swenson left, Mady came in carrying boxes and shopping bags. “Oh, I’ve gone mad! The storekeepers in Bond Street are out on the sidewalks waving little American flags in my honour—What’s the matter?”
Cathleen had sat down in a chair and begun to weep. Mady dropped everything on the floor and rushed to her, fell to her knees and put her arms round her daughter. “Honey, please—it’s all over now—”
“I know.” Cathleen nod
ded, dried her eyes, blew her nose. “It just hit me—” The train journey to the frontier, the heart-shrinking delay there while everyone’s papers were checked and double-checked, the two-day stay in Copenhagen while waiting to get on a ship, the voyage to Hull, the last train journey to London, the anxious waiting to get through to Sean . . . “It’s been a nightmare—I didn’t realize it at the time—”
“Honey,” said Mady, who had survived her own nightmare and would have nightmares to remember it by, but who would survive them too, “it’s all over.”
Cathleen took off Mady’s hat and wig, stroked the growing stubble on her mother’s head. “It isn’t really all over. Maybe for you and me, but not for Sean.”
“What will you do? You and him?”
“I hope we can get married. Then—” She shrugged. “I don’t know. He won’t give up his job, not even for me. He’ll become a war correspondent and God knows where they’ll send him.”
She felt sad, which always gives the proper depth to one’s happiness. If she couldn’t have everything, she would take what came. She was an optimist now, a proper actress. She wondered if Melissa, the other optimist, the other actress, was still trying for happiness in Germany.
“Things could be worse.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Mady, who had never told herself such a thing in Ravensbrueck.
IV
Lutze and Decker had kept Carmody for three hours, but Lutze, if not Decker, knew when a man was telling the truth. They let him go, but told him his press card would be withdrawn on their recommendation by the Foreign Press Office. “Will they take any notice of the Gestapo?” Carmody had said.
“They will now war has started,” said Lutze. “Will you write something about Lady Arrowsmith?”
“Yes,” said Carmody, who would rather have not written anything; he did not want to be an apologist for her, yet she deserved some sort of sympathetic obituary. “But you have ruined my story. Everyone else has got at least a three-hour beat on me.”
Lutze smiled. “You will have had time to compose your thoughts, Herr Carmody. Good luck.”
For a moment Carmody was almost tempted to shake the hand of the Gestapo officer; but there were limits to tolerance. “Do you think you’ll track down whoever was going to kill Hitler?”
“Who knows?” Lutze shrugged. “Somewhere, in some gun shop, there must be a record of who bought that Mannlicher. It’s only a matter of time, Herr Carmody.”
Unless the war escalates, thought Carmody, and failed assassination plots become unimportant. He went home to Ludwigstrasse, pausing to go into St. Ludwig’s and say a prayer for himself and Cathleen, for the soul of Meg Arrowsmith and for the escape of the unknown would-be assassins.
When he came out of the church he looked automatically for Kreisler; but the Leierkastenmann was absent this morning. If he is wise, Carmody thought, he has taken his thousand dollars, his monkey and his hurdy-gurdy and gone to the country; anywhere but here in Berlin, where the bombs would soon be falling. Carmody looked up at the sky and wondered where the Polish bombers were. Was the war in Poland already over?
He wrote a piece on Meg Arrowsmith, a thousand words that seemed to take him an age. Then he rang the central phone exchange and asked to be put through to London; to his surprise he was connected immediately. London, as he had expected, blasted him for being so late with the story; they seemed to think that his excuse of being held by the Gestapo a poor reason for being beaten by the other wire services. They were equally unsympathetic when he told them his press card had been revoked and he would be on his way back to London as soon as he got his exit permit—“Sunday, probably. In the meantime, will you send Bill Swenson or someone to check on Cathleen O’Dea and her mother—they’ll be at Brown’s Hotel, I think—”
“Is there a story in her and her mother?” London wasn’t going to waste the time of one of its most experienced correspondents on just a social call.
“You can make up your own mind on that, sport,” he said, abruptly, belligerently Australian.
For the moment he was tired of this side of the world; he suddenly felt the weight of Europe’s history, its intrigues and betrayals, its wars that drew in other, more innocent people. Even more, he felt the inability of any man to halt the course of manifestly destined events. He had seen, if never in the final image, the impending tragedy of Meg Arrowsmith and he had been able to do nothing to prevent it. He had stumbled on the attempt to assassinate Hitler and had been able to do nothing to stop its failing and had almost betrayed its plotters, whoever they were. He had fought for and written about a cause in Spain that had failed: democracy was dead there for God knew how many years to come. He had covered the spread of Nazism, had written warningly against it, and now all his despatches were just scraps of paper on the wind. Selfishly, forgetting Cathleen for one jaundiced, utterly depressed moment, he all at once longed for what he had tried to escape, the landscape of home. Yet he knew in his heart that even there men failed when destiny prevailed.
“Now I’m going to bed,” he said. “Don’t bloody ring me till I ring you.”
He hung up and went to bed. It was dark when he woke. He got up and went over to the Wilhelmstrasse, did the rounds of the ministries, all of which were now working behind blackout blinds. Saturday he did the rounds again; but now everyone knew he was no longer accredited and no one would talk to him. It was a long day and a long night; all he wanted now was to be gone. Sunday morning he went to Mass, sat at the back of the church and saw all the German heads bent in prayer and wondered whether they were praying for peace or victory. His own prayers were selfish: that he would soon be with Cathleen.
Just after midday he was walking from his apartment over to his office, ambling down the Kurfürstendamm under the shining sun, when he saw the people on the terrace of the Café Kranzler suddenly all stand up. A waiter had come out of the café itself and said something in a loud voice; the noise of the traffic drowned it from Carmody’s ears. He moved quickly towards the terrace, reached over the railing and grabbed a man by the arm.
“What did he say?”
“England has just declared war on us! Can you believe it?” Then the man, stout, well-dressed, too old to be needed in the war, recognized that he was speaking to a foreigner. “Are you English? How could you do this to us? What sort of men are in your government?”
“I guess they’re different from yours,” said Carmody and walked on.
People in the street looked stunned; suddenly the war was serious. A bus was halted at a cross-street by a traffic policeman; the passengers in their glass cage stared out at Carmody with the dull hopeless look of the trapped. Somewhere a clock struck: it had no resonance, no music to it, just the sound of iron on iron.
Olga was in the office, standing at the window when Carmody walked in. She turned and looked at him, then burst into tears. He went to her and put his arms round her, without embarrassment to either of them.
“They’ve just delivered your exit permit,” she snuffled. “They really want to be rid of you.”
“Maybe it’s best,” he said, still holding her, surprised at how solid she was beneath her plain blue dress. “You should try and get out of Berlin, too.”
“My mother would never leave. Neither would I. This is our city—we were both born here. My mother was born here in the year Chancellor Bismarck made Berlin the capital of Germany.” She drew herself out of his arms, wiped her eyes. Now there was some embarrassment in her face, as if she had flung herself at him. Carmody, comforter of lonely women, he thought; but felt no pride, only sadness. “I’m sorry, Herr Carmody—”
“Will you come to the station to see me off?” He would be on the evening train for Copenhagen.
“Of course. Perhaps you’ll come back here—they say the war won’t last long—”
“Perhaps,” he said.
He looked out of the window. It was the most marvellous summer’s day, a day for family picnics, for lovers’ strolls; th
e beaches along the Wannsee would be crowded, the Grunewald occupied by children and their parents. The air seemed to glitter, to lift up the skyline of domes and steeples till it was suspended like some child’s cut-out silhouette. The leaves sparkled like tossed emeralds in the simmering bowls of the trees in the square; the banks of blooms of the flower-sellers blazed like the bushfires he had fought back home. He lifted his eyes, gazed at the sky, at the brilliant light that had captured the imagination of painters and poets and even hacks like himself, the light that, tinged by the soon-to-come smoke and dust of the bombing raids, would soon begin to fade.
“Perhaps,” he said again, but his voice held no hope: for her, for Berlin, for Europe.
******
This book was written from background provided by sources too many to mention all by name. Individuals who lived or are still living in Berlin, contemporary newspapers and magazines, the Berlin Library and other archives: I have drawn on all of them. But my constant guide was that excellent chronicle of Berlin in Hitler’s time: William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It was invaluable.
THE END
Enjoy these Jon Cleary’s novels, as both Ebooks and Audiobooks!
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Scobie Malone Series
Dragons at the Party
Now and Then, Amen
Babylon South
Murder Song
Pride’s Harvest
Dark Summer
Bleak Spring
Autumn Maze
Winter Chill
Five-Ring Circus
Dilemma
The Bear Pit
Yesterday’s Shadow
The Easy Sin
Standalone Novels
The City of Fading Light
Spearfield’s Daughter
The Faraway Drums
