Estocada

by Graham Hurley

  He let the word settle. Then he wanted to know about General Beck.

  ‘You think he means it?’

  ‘Means what, sir?’

  ‘Means to oppose Hitler? I understand he’s resigned. And I understand you’ve had the pleasure of meeting the man.’

  Tam shot a glance at Ballentyne and then nodded. Beck, in his judgement, was a patriot who now saw no alternative to getting rid of Hitler.

  ‘And how, pray, will he do that?’

  ‘To be frank, I’ve no idea. But I suspect he means it. And I suspect he’s not alone.’

  ‘Mr Ballentyne?’

  ‘That’s right, sir. I can give you a handful of names, but not in this company.’

  Churchill nodded, then invited Freddie to take a turn around the distant lake. Freddie got up and left without a word. Tam wondered whether he shouldn’t be doing the same.

  ‘Well, Mr Ballentyne?’

  Ballentyne tallied the names. Hans Oster, number two in the Abwehr. The Kordt brothers, senior diplomats. Hjalmar Schact, a leading businessman. Hans Bernd Gisevius, a senior Gestapo figure. Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, a Prussian aristocrat. The list went on.

  Churchill listened attentively, nodding at each of the names. When Ballentyne had finished he sat back for a moment and closed his eyes, the action of a man who had just enjoyed a good meal. His hands were clasped over the swell of his belly. He seemed replete.

  ‘So what do you want me to do?’ he asked at last. ‘For this brave little platoon?’

  ‘They need an assurance that we’ll help the Czechs.’

  ‘By marching?’

  ‘Yes. And they have to believe it. That’s the message we want to send. And Moncrieff here is in a unique position to deliver it.’

  ‘I believe it, Mr Ballentyne. And Mr Moncrieff, I wish you nothing but good fortune. I, too, am a messenger. I am only too happy to pass the word on, to try and do justice to these men’s courage, but I fear the message, my message, your message, will fall on deaf ears.’ He fell silent a moment, his eyes closing again. But then he stirred. ‘Our Foreign Secretary is a man of unswerving moral purpose. He cannot deal with evil because he lacks the ability, or perhaps the inclination, to recognise it. Halifax, alas, is a sheep. And that is deeply unfortunate because we live in the age of the wolf. Therein lies the problem.’

  Tam felt like applauding. The age of the wolf. Perfect.

  Churchill reached for the bell. When the retainer appeared from the house Churchill gestured at the other bottle. Tam heard the cork pop.

  ‘Courage is right,’ he said softly. ‘Step out of line in Berlin and you pay with your life.’

  ‘I believe you, Mr Moncrieff. These people are playing with us. Have you ever noticed how Herr Hitler specialises in weekend crises? The Rhineland adventure? The morning he chose to crush Austria? Always a Sunday. I sometimes wonder whether this isn’t personal. The last upset happened back in May when the Czechs mobilised. That was a weekend, too, and Mr Chamberlain had to be summoned back from his trout fishing. Is that any way to treat a serving Prime Minister?’

  He was grinning now and Tam glimpsed the child he must once have been: impish, mischievous, ungovernable. Then, from nowhere, came a sudden gust of wind, scattering page after page of manuscript from the pile on the table. Tam was on his feet at once, while Ballentyne secured the rest of the pile. One by one, Tam retrieved the vagrant pages and returned to his seat.

  Churchill, with that same grin, thanked him for his services to literature. Then he beckoned him closer.

  ‘You know the secret about Mr Chamberlain?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘He wants to fight the Gods of War single-handed. Which is why he will lose.’

  23

  POTSDAM, BERLIN, 2 SEPTEMBER 1938

  It took Dieter many hours to dispose of the damage to the converted stables at Potsdam. Georg talked to the squadron commander and won him time off. Dieter, sleeping on a borrowed mattress on the floor of the living room on his first night back home, rose early. By midday, the pile of discarded wreckage in the stable yard outside the back door was at waist height: the remains of the bed frame, a smashed chest of drawers, shelving torn from the wall, cupboards ripped apart, floorboards splintered by frenzied work with a crowbar.

  Back in the kitchen, on the single table that had survived the carnage, Dieter had amassed a smaller, more intimate collection of objects: presents he and Keiko had swapped over the brief weeks of their relationship: a drawing of an eagle she’d penned to celebrate his birthday; an insect trapped in amber Dieter had acquired from a market stall in Pankow. He’d had this tiny keepsake attached to a delicate silver chain. Keiko had worn it only once, and now – stepping into the blaze of sunshine outside to examine it more closely – Dieter thought he understood why. The tree resin, aeons before it hardened into amber, had robbed this tiny insect of its life. Was hanging it around your neck a celebration of that moment? Or were there darker implications?

  These were questions of a kind that had never troubled Dieter before but times were changing fast and with bewilderment came something else that was hardening into anger. Strangers had arrived in the middle of the night and torn his life apart. The woman he loved had disappeared into the bowels of a regime that would answer to no one. The best party tricks, as he was beginning to recognise, defied explanation. So just how was he supposed to get Keiko back?

  There was another item of Keiko’s he’d so far failed to find. It was a sash she wore around her waist when a special occasion called for a kimono. The last time he’d seen it was the afternoon they’d paid a visit to the Ribbentrops’ villa out at Dahlem. The embroidery was intricate. The work of many months, it had been made by a great aunt of Keiko’s whom she’d always treasured. But search as he might, Dieter couldn’t find it.

  By midday, the house was cleared of wreckage. Dieter, stripped to the waist in the hot sun, sipped a glass of water from the well in the courtyard. In the corner of the yard was a stable stall that had survived the attentions of the Gestapo. When they’d first moved in it had been full of old tools, mainly implements for the garden, and Keiko had begun to add other junk. He’d seen her cross the yard from time to time and disappear inside.

  He finished the water and made for the stall. The door was hung in two parts. The latch on the upper section was stiff and he had to pull hard to get it open. Sunshine revealed a tableau of spades and forks and rusting buckets, heavily cobwebbed. Dieter wrestled open the lower half of the door and stepped inside. Very faintly, he thought he caught the smell of hay, of horses. At the back of the stall was an old chest of drawers piled high with more rubbish: broken flower pots, empty paint tins, packets of seeds. Dieter gazed at the debris for a moment, knowing that Keiko would never leave her beloved sash in a place like this. Then his attention was caught by one of the drawers. It was an inch or so open.

  He stepped closer, then pulled out the drawer. Inside was more debris: tobacco tins full of screws and nails, binder twine, paint brushes that had never been washed properly, stiff with neglect. The drawer was deep. He began to poke about. At the very bottom, hidden from any casual inspection, was a biggish envelope. Beside it, carefully wrapped in a grubby towel, an object he could hold in the palm of his hand.

  Dieter glanced over his shoulder, then peeled away the towel. It was a camera, very small. He stared at it. A metal cap protected the lens and there were Japanese ideograms on the reverse. Dieter took a tiny step backwards, wondering whether he wanted to take this search any further. Already, the implications were uncomfortable. A miniature camera in the hands of a foreign national.

  The clinching evidence, he knew, would be the contents of the envelope. They felt knobbly beneath his touch. The flap wasn’t gummed down. There was no writing of any kind, no address. He opened the flap and reached inside. His fingers counted four, then five, of the little cylindrical objects. He took one out, held it up. It was a roll of film, much smaller than the normal 35 mm, and it h
ad been exposed.

  Dieter returned the film to the envelope and sealed the flap. He had to find somewhere else for this, and for the camera too. All it would take was another visit from the Gestapo, another day’s grim demolition of everything they could find, and Keiko’s fate would be sealed, because the camera and the exposed film told only one story. That Goering had been right. That Ribbentrop had opened his office, his files and perhaps his heart to a spy.

  Dieter took the envelope and the camera back to the house. His abandoned shirt lay on the floor. He put it on, tucked it into the waistband of his trousers and then slipped the envelope and the camera inside. Back in the sunshine, he returned to the stables. The best of the spades had seen better days but it would have to do. Later, he’d return to the stall for a more thorough search but now he had to make it out to the woods.

  His running circuit crossed the farmer’s meadow behind the stable block. Dieter ambled towards the distant treeline. He was whistling. He was enjoying the sunshine. For anyone who happened to be watching, he hadn’t a care in the world. There were rumours of truffles in the woods. He loved truffles. And so now was the time to put those rumours to the test.

  It was cooler once he’d left the meadow. For several hundred yards he followed the path he knew. Then, after a check behind him, he plunged into the trees. The ground was soft underfoot and sloped away towards the gleam of sunshine on a pond. Dieter was looking for something he’d recognise later, a particular tree, a landmark of some kind, and he found it in the shape of an old stone trough, half-hidden beneath a thicket of brambles.

  He knelt quickly beside it, carving a tiny notch in one end with the blade of the spade. Then he measured seventeen paces along the face of the hill. Seventeen was his lucky number and it brought him to the bole of a huge oak tree. He studied it for a moment, memorising the spread of the tree as it sent its roots deep into the earth. Then he began to dig, spading the cool earth into a neat pile beside him. A spy, he kept telling himself, I fell in love with a spy. Minutes later, the camera and film safely hidden, he shovelled the last of the earth back into the hole and stepped back before covering it with a layer of vegetation. It looked, he thought, like a grave.

  *

  That same afternoon Tam Moncrieff landed at Tempelhof Airport. Bella was there to meet him. The area beyond the passport control booth was crowded with friends and relatives awaiting arrivals. A little to his surprise, Bella threw her arms around him and kissed him on the mouth.

  ‘Cover story.’ She kissed him again. ‘It’s a spy thing.’

  They drove into the centre of the city. Tam described the visit to Chartwell and his meeting with Churchill.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you that? When I read your palm?’

  ‘You did.’ It was the first time Tam had made the connection. ‘So you knew all along?’

  ‘Either that or I’m psychic. What do you think?’

  Tam smiled. He realised how much he’d missed this woman. She had a buoyancy and a disregard for the normal rules that verged on the reckless.

  ‘So whose idea was Churchill?’ he asked.

  ‘Uncle Andrew’s. He’s got family connections with Blenheim Palace. He got you in.’

  Tam nodded. He gave her other names, mainly diplomats and journalists he’d met over the last couple of days.

  ‘Uncle Andrew again. He’s a free spirit when it comes to the Establishment line. But he’s a believer, too.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘In you. Any use? These people you met?’

  Tam shook his head. In every conversation, he’d been talking to the converted. To a man, and in one case a woman, they believed that Britain was best defended on the Czech frontier. If we caved in on this occasion, then no London bomb shelter would be deep enough to cope with the consequences.

  ‘They know what’s coming,’ he said. ‘And we all know we have to stop it. The question is how.’

  Bella nodded. The Czechs in Prague, she said, had just given in to Henlein’s demands, a development that had come as a nasty surprise to Hitler and Ribbentrop.

  ‘They had a meeting in the Chancellery a couple of days ago,’ she said. ‘They summoned Henlein and told him to make yet more demands, the more extreme the better. What they can’t afford is any kind of reasonable settlement. They want trouble, too, in the Sudetenland. Czechs beating up the locals. Blood on the paving stones. They call them incidents. If you think that’s code for lying, you’d be right.’

  Tam nodded, staring out of the window. The lines of huge swastika banners appeared to have thickened over the last few days. Set-dressing, he thought. For the start of the next act.

  ‘And Edvard?’

  ‘He’s gone, I’m afraid.’ Tam felt her hand close on his.

  ‘Hanged?’

  ‘Shot.’

  Tam absorbed the news. He’d expected no less but it still made his belly heave. These people are psychotic, he thought. Tell the same lies for long enough and the entire world will believe you. First Edvard, blindfolded, on his knees before some pitted brick wall. Then a series of confected atrocities from the heartlands of the Sudetenland, yet more compelling reasons why Hitler owed the locals a helping hand.

  ‘Any word from Schultz?’ He glanced across at Bella.

  ‘He wants to see you this evening. Six o’clock. The Hauptbahnhof. Platform 7. The western end.’

  *

  Tam was at the station with minutes to spare. Of Schultz there was no sign. The platform was crowded with city workers waiting for a train home and Tam watched them, wondering what these people made of the latest developments. Were they aware of what really went on behind the closed doors along Wilhelmstrasse? And if so, did they care?

  ‘Moncrieff.’

  Tam spun round. It was Schultz. He was in civilian clothes – black leather jacket, black leather trousers, black boots – and the strain on the whiteness of his face told its own story. Too much time indoors, too many crises, resolved or otherwise.

  ‘You look awful,’ Tam said.

  Schultz shrugged. You did what you had to do. None of it was easy but he’d be a fool to expect anything different. He’d no idea rebellion was such hard work, paying visits, stiffening resolves, feeding egos, keeping a bunch of wilting flowers at least half-watered.

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ Tam said. ‘One day they’ll give you a medal.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Whoever’s left.’

  ‘You think it’s that easy?’

  ‘I’m sure it’s not.’

  A train was approaching, the locomotive wreathed in steam. The crowd retreated a step or two from the edge of the platform. Tam wanted to know whether the train was for them.

  ‘No. Some of these people will get on. The rest are waiting for the next train. It’s a place to meet, that’s all.’

  Hitler, he said, had now issued the order for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The first divisions were to cross the frontier on the first of October.

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Yesterday. The generals are shitting in their pants. Goering, too. Only Ribbentrop opened a bottle.’

  ‘The generals told you?’

  ‘Of course. When they need their arses wiping they come running. Playing Nanny was never a role I wanted.’ He paused to let the steam train come to a halt. ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m back. Isn’t that the news you want?’

  He nodded, then took Tam by the arm and steered him away from the hiss of the locomotive. He needed to be sure about the forthcoming visit to Nuremberg.

  ‘The person you’ll be meeting. You’ve brought a message? Some kind of assurance?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well…? What is it?’

  Tam held his gaze. The last of the carriage doors were banging shut and a piercing whistle announced the departure of the train. Tam waited for the final carriage to clear the platform and then turned back to Schultz.

  ‘The British will fight,’ he said. ‘If
that helps.’

  ‘I’m sure it will. Is that a guarantee?’

  ‘It’s whatever you make of it.’

  ‘Then it might be worthless.’

  ‘In which case I won’t bother even going to Nuremberg. It’s your decision, not mine.’

  Schultz was frowning. This wasn’t the conversation he’d anticipated.

  ‘It’s Kovač, isn’t it?’ he said at last. ‘You can’t forget him. You can’t lay the fucking man to rest. Don’t bother denying it. Just say yes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I don’t understand what you’re doing here. Who’d come back to Germany feeling the way you’re feeling? After what we’ve done to that friend of yours?’

  ‘Me,’ Tam said. ‘And precisely for that reason. When do you want me in Nuremberg?’

  ‘Tomorrow night.’

  ‘I take the train?’ Tam nodded down the platform.

  ‘No. We’ll be flying you down there. The Führer’s special squadron.’ Schultz at last managed what might have been a smile. ‘That makes you honoured, my friend, as well as lucky.’

  *

  Dieter had searched for hours for the tiny notebook where Keiko had kept addresses and telephone numbers that were important to her. The cover was black leather, embossed in gold, and he knew that the information inside included a telephone number that would take her directly to Ribbentrop’s office. Empty-handed by the end of the search, he could only conclude that the Gestapo had seized the notebook as evidence. Which meant that he’d have to ask for the Foreign Ministry’s main number, just like any other member of the public.

  When the operator connected him to the Foreign Ministry switchboard, the voice on the other end laughed.