Estocada

by Graham Hurley

  Tam steadied himself, looked carefully around. Nothing. No one. He judged the hotel to be at least half a mile away. They’ve gone ahead on foot, he told himself, to prepare a little surprise. He began to approach the car, still hugging the side of the road. It was an Opel, old, poor condition. The radiator was still warm and something was dripping slowly on to the asphalt beneath the boot. He bent to the driver’s door, peering in. On the floor beside the passenger seat he could make out a discarded bottle. Then, from nowhere, came a sudden, firm pressure in the small of his back and a voice, male, low, just inches from his ear. German, again. And a message that left little room for ambiguity.

  ‘Any tricks, I’ll kill you. Put your hands on the car roof.’

  Stupid, he thought. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Stupid and careless and entirely your own fault.

  Tam feigned incomprehension. Best play the innocent Britisher.

  ‘Do you mind telling me what’s going on, laddie?’ Thick Scots accent. Lost on his new friend.

  The gun wavered. There was a rustle of clothing. Tam steeled himself, waiting for the right moment, knowing that he’d have a single chance to level the odds.

  The moment came when the figure behind tried to turn him round. Tam lunged backwards, chopping sideways with his elbow. He felt the point of his elbow connect with bone and the stranger gasped with pain, reeling away, one hand holding his face. Tam didn’t take his eyes off the gun. It was a small revolver, dangling uselessly from his other hand. Tam bent the arm double, hearing the gun clatter onto the road, and then he applied a chokehold around the scrawny neck, squeezing and squeezing until the body was limp in his arms.

  The man was smaller than he’d somehow expected: broad, sallow face, bloodied nose, three-day growth of stubble. Open-mouthed, he was struggling for air. Tam dragged him to the rear of the car and then let him sprawl in the damp grass at the side of the road. One eye flicked open and he stared up at Tam, uncomprehending. From a trouser pocket Tam retrieved a pair of keys. The revolver was still lying in the road. Tam broke the barrel and checked the cylinder. Three bullets. Moments later, he was behind the wheel. The engine fired on the third tug on the starter. Releasing the handbrake, he trod on the accelerator, surprised by the car’s response. Only when he reached the main road, his eyes still glued to the rear-view mirror, did he stop to find the switch that worked the lights.

  There were no maps in the car. Tam drove through Jáchymov, searching for a signpost. On the other side of the town he found what he was looking for: Praha, 142 kms. He drove carefully, keeping his speed down, hauling the car round corner after corner, following the road down the mountain. With luck, he’d be in Prague within a couple of hours. Then he glanced down at the fuel gauge. The needle was hovering on empty.

  He pulled over and stopped. The second key opened the boot. Hoping for a spare can of petrol, he found nothing but sacking and the sweet stench of excreta. Something or someone had been in this tiny space only recently. He stared at the rumpled sacking a moment longer then gathered an armful, trying to hold it at a distance length, and dumped it at the side of the road. He was right. Shit, very possibly human. What kind of people transported live bodies in a space like this? And didn’t bother to clean up afterwards?

  Driving slowly now, he motored on, praying for a town big enough to offer a petrol station. Minutes later, his prayers were answered. At a crossroads stood a café and a line of pumps. Both were closed, and when he pulled to a halt and tried one of the pumps he found it padlocked. He approached the café and peered in, hoping for some sign of life. Nothing. A glance at his watch told him it was barely one in the morning. He had six hours to kill. At the very least.

  Abandoning the car and walking would leave him at the mercy of any passer-by. He had no idea where he was and little faith that a knock at some stranger’s door would produce the offer of help. Salvation, he knew, lay at the embassy in Prague. Stronge would know what to do, who to talk to. Tam had no option but to wait.

  He started the car again and parked in the shadows beside the café. A blanket of cloud hid the full moon and there was still a little warmth in the night air. He pushed the seat back as far as it would go, cursing himself for setting out from the hotel without his greatcoat, and tried to fit his long body to the sagging upholstery. For a while he tried to fight off memories that swam out of the darkness: the glimpse of faces as the car swept past back in Jáchymov, the moment he felt the gun in his back, and the eternity of waiting as he steeled himself to respond. Had he really signed up for this? A near-death encounter with a bunch of homicidal strangers in a faraway country of which he knew very little? The stench from the boot still lay heavy in the car. He shifted the weight of his body again and turned his face to the open window. Seconds later, a tribute to his days in the military, he was asleep.

  *

  A voice awoke him, hours later. The car was flooded with sunshine. A face swam into focus, peering in through the open window. He was young, freshly shaved. He was wearing a uniform.

  ‘Policie,’ he grunted.

  He gestured for Tam to get out of the car. Tam struggled to open the door, then stood beside the Opel in the cool of the dawn and stamped the stiffness out of his limbs. A blue van was parked in front of the Opel, barring the way back to the main road. Two other policemen were staring down at the boot.

  Tam retrieved the keys from the dashboard.

  ‘You need the smallest one,’ he said, nodding towards the boot.

  ‘You’re German?’

  ‘English.’ Tam’s hand went to his jacket pocket. Thank God he was carrying his passport.

  The movement had alarmed the young policeman. Tam found himself looking at a gun.

  ‘This car is yours?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A friend’s, maybe?’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘You stole it?’

  ‘Borrowed it.’

  There was an exchange in Czech between the policemen. The younger one motioned Tam towards the rear of the car.

  ‘Come,’ he said in German.

  Tam found himself staring down at the open boot. Last night, in the dark, he hadn’t noticed the long strip of torn sheet. It was knotted the way you’d tie a gag and it was heavily bloodstained. The smell of shit was overwhelming.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t know. This is nothing to do with me.’ Tam began to explain about last night, what had happened beside the parked car, but the young policeman wasn’t listening. He told Tam to put his hands up. The stranger’s revolver was in the pocket of his jacket. The policeman found it in seconds, extracting the three bullets, weighing them thoughtfully in his gloved hand. Then he looked at Tam.

  ‘Well?’ he said again.

  11

  BERLIN, 17 MAY 1938

  The summons to meet Generalfeldmarschall Hermann Goering was delivered by Georg. It was early, not yet eight in the morning, and Dieter was half-naked in the kitchen of his apartment. At first he thought it was a joke, a light-hearted prelude to a planned night on the town ahead of the wedding at the weekend. Only when Georg tapped his watch and told Dieter to make himself look respectable did it dawn on him that he meant it. Half-past nine at the Air Ministry. And, if he was lucky, every prospect of one of Der Eiserne’s looted cigars.

  Der Eiserne meant The Iron One. Dieter had laid eyes on Goering only once, at a passing-out ceremony after the final year of his flight training, but the more he heard about the father of the Luftwaffe, the more he’d grown to hold him in some regard. For one thing, he was a pilot’s pilot, a combat veteran from the war of the trenches, a gladiator with a sizeable tally of enemy kills to his credit. He’d fought with the Brownshirts in Munich, sustaining a serious injury during the July putsch. This, so the gossip went, probably accounted for his rumoured appetite for narcotics but more to the point was the fact that he’d somehow kept the party hacks and the party apparatus at arm’s length. Der Eiserne might not have the guile of a Goebbels, or the
fanatical attention to detail of a Himmler, but he’d managed to stake out impressive territory of his own amongst the warring chieftains at the top of the Reich, and that – for Goering and his young pilots – was a victory worth applauding.

  Georg drove Dieter to the Air Ministry. He’d had the pleasure of piloting Goering on a number of occasions and described him as a man who’d never quite left his childhood behind. He loved the show of high office – medals, honours, fancy uniforms – and he never tired of helping himself to whatever caught his eye as the Reich began to expand. Only last month, Georg had flown him back from Vienna with the rear of the aircraft crammed with antique furniture and works of art, priceless objects which would doubtless end up in one or other of Goering’s many properties. To Georg this hunger for other people’s possessions was theft, pure and simple, yet he still warmed to the man’s spirit and the way he never bothered to hide the sheer scale of his many appetites. A lot of these people are putty in Hitler’s hands, Georg told Dieter. You can see it in the way they behave when he’s around, in the way they bow to his every whim, laugh at his every joke. But Goering is never like that. He respects Hitler, of course he does. But in the end Der Eiserne is always his own man.

  The Air Ministry was in Wilhelmstrasse, a stone’s throw from Hitler’s Chancellery. Unlike its Prussian neighbours, it was a modern, six-storey building with clean lines and even a spacious underground garage.

  An aide from Goering’s office was waiting for Dieter in the huge reception area. To survive at the top of the Berlin dunghill you had to make sure that your headquarters were at least as grand as everyone else’s and in this never-ending battle for floor space and sheer effect Goering was already a seasoned veteran. Dieter followed the aide towards a huge staircase, pausing to admire a stuffed elk guarding a corridor that seemed to disappear into the far distance.

  ‘The Generalfeldmarschall shot it last year at Carinhall.’ The aide gave the elk a pat. ‘It takes two men to lift it.’

  Goering’s first floor office was no less impressive: a desk the size of a small aircraft, more stuffed trophies on the wall, and the soft rumble of trams from the boulevard beyond the tall windows. Behind the desk hung a vast oil painting depicting a dogfight over the trenches during the last war. A single triplane with German markings was locked in a tight spiral dive, chasing some luckless English pilot to his death while brown-uniformed Tommies tried to shoot the Fokker down with small-arms fire. Goering happened to be on the phone. Noting his guest’s interest in the painting, he offered a broad smile and nodded at the waiting chair, and Dieter let himself be enveloped by the velvet upholstery while he tried to identify the helmeted figure in the Fokker’s cockpit. According to Georg, Der Eiserne had notched up twenty-two kills before the war came to an end, and this was doubtless one of them.

  ‘Many of the English were children in the air. Some of them asked to get shot down.’

  Goering had at last brought his phone call to an end. He was a big man in every way: big face, big handshake, his massive body barely contained by the bulging uniform. He appeared to be in the rudest of spirits. In a moment he wanted Dieter to tell him about Japan. But first he had to know more about Keiko.

  ‘Is this woman of yours as wonderful as everyone’s telling me? I thought Japanese women weren’t supposed to be tall? How come someone your size can hook a beauty like that?’

  Dieter didn’t know whether to take this as a compliment. Goering came at you like a tidal wave, exactly as Georg had warned. Dieter had no right to be surprised but barely minutes of interrogation left him feeling like a dog on the beach after a thorough dousing. He wanted to shake himself dry, catch his breath, prepare for the next breaker.

  ‘Well? You’re in love with the woman? Is that it?’ Goering slapped a meaty thigh. The thought clearly delighted him. Then his mood changed. He leaned forward over the desk. His face suddenly darkened. A ringed finger was inches from Dieter’s face.

  ‘Ribbentrop,’ he snarled. ‘The man’s a fool. Make sure she understands that. You hear me, young man? Tell her. Sit her down and make sure she’s listening. Spell it out. Von Ribbentrop is all show. There’s nothing inside. He bought his title and married his money. He’s an empty house. He should be demolished, put out of his misery. You’ve met the man?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Earlier this week. We attended a party for one of his children.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Myself and Keiko.’

  ‘As I thought. And the lady? What did she think of Mr Ribbentrop?’

  ‘She said he was very polite.’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘He seemed very interested in her.’

  ‘That’s a lie. Ribbentrop is interested in no one but himself. Himself and his own prospects. If we could teach a monkey to speak a couple of languages, he’d make a better Foreign Minister.’ He glared at Dieter a moment longer and then composed himself. The squall had come and gone. Now he wanted to know about Japan. Was it good out there? Had they treated him well? Were they as crazy in the air as everyone said?

  Dieter coped with the volley of questions as best he could. At first acquaintance, the Japanese were guarded and over-formal and hard to get to know but in the end they could be fun. Their hospitality was second to none. And yes, they flew like lunatics.

  ‘Excellent.’ Goering was beaming now. ‘So what do you want to do, young man? Be honest.’

  Dieter had anticipated the question. A return to operational flying would take him away from Berlin, away from Keiko, and just now he didn’t want that. A recent conversation with one of the test pilots over at Johannistahl had suggested an alternative.

  ‘Maybe a flying job on one of the research programmes?’

  ‘That’s a possibility. What about the Regierungsstaffel? Like your pal Georg?’ The Regierungsstaffel was Hitler’s private squadron at Tempelhof.

  ‘I’m not multi-rated.’

  ‘We could attend to that.’

  ‘But I’d miss single-seat flying.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. It’s an addiction. Only fighter pilots understand that. Make the cockpit your own and you make the sky your own. Make the sky your own and you’ll live for ever.’ He paused for a moment, eyeing the phone. ‘You’ve been having a try-out with the new Emils. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Wonderful. A different aeroplane.’

  ‘Good. I was talking to the Kommandant over at Johannistahl. He’s been watching you from his office. A natural showman, he said, but safe, too. That’s not an easy trick to pull off. Any fool can fly for the girls but it’s surviving that matters. The Kommandant was impressed.’

  Dieter felt himself blushing. It wasn’t every day that the Head of the Luftwaffe, probably the most powerful airman in the world, offered a compliment like this.

  Goering was brooding again, his big head lowered, his carefully manicured hands toying with a paperknife. Dieter wondered for a moment whether he’d lost the thread of the conversation. Then the huge head came up.

  ‘Display aviator,’ he said, smacking the flat of his hand on the desk. ‘You did well in Japan. People liked you, especially the pilots. Put you in an Emil and you can fly your heart out. You’ll be displaying solo all over the Reich. I’ll have someone draw up a programme. Summer’s coming. People have money in their pockets. I’ve never known this city so happy, so contented. The crowds will love you. Meet them. Shake their hands. Kiss the babies. Make eyes at the pretty women. Just keep them sweet, ja?’

  Dieter nodded. It sounded the dream posting. From as far away as Munich, or even Vienna, it was only a couple of hours back to Berlin. Thanks to the new Emil.

  ‘Thank you, Herr Generalfeldmarschall.’

  ‘A pleasure, young man. One other thing.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘That fool Ribbentrop. Put an end to the man’s fantasies, you hear me? Lock your lady up.’

  *
/>   The man’s fantasies? In the tram back to his apartment, Dieter wondered what the phrase meant. At the birthday party in Dahlem he’d had the opportunity to talk to the new Reichsminister for Foreign Affairs. First had come a couple of perfunctory questions about Dieter’s months in Japan. Then had followed a long monologue about his own diplomatic triumph in signing some pact or other, and how his standing with the Führer was unmatched by any other of the regime’s leading figures. He alone understood the world beyond the German frontiers, and he alone had brought the Italians and the Japanese to the negotiating table.

  Dieter had tried to listen to this speech with the kind of enraptured attention he imagined his host was used to but it was hard not to agree with Goering that the man was an embarrassment. He never looked you in the eye. His real attention was always elsewhere. He was pompous and over-loud and extremely pleased with himself, and when he abruptly broke off to stride self-importantly from the drawing room to answer yet another phone call, Dieter was swamped with relief. Reporting back to Berlin, Eugen Ott had doubtless done his best to blacken Oberleutnant Merz’s performance in Japan but Ribbentrop would have been too busy to have given the matter the slightest attention.

  And Keiko? Dieter found it hard to believe that she would ever be attracted to a windbag like this. Wrong.