Flight from Berlin

by David John

  Eleanor was a stone in a field of waving grass, consigned here to the bleachers to look down on all she had lost. To hell with her newspaper column. She considered slipping away while she had the chance, and before her ex-teammates marched in.

  Too late.

  An earth tremor of applause. The loudspeakers rose to a shriek, and the crowd stood to greet the distant figure entering between the towers of the Marathon Gate. At the same moment sunshine dazzled on the wet granite, as if the elements were in abeyance to some diabolical luck that accompanied him. A fanfare sounded, drowned out by yells of Heil!—the first few shouted with hysteria before finding their measure in a deep chant.

  The American reporters remained in their seats, which shook beneath them with the noise. To the right, beyond the glass partition of the box, a group of Italian air force cadets were whooping and whistling.

  Hitler descended the monumental steps to the track, followed by an entourage of Olympic officials, military brass, and Party satraps. His left hand grasped the belt buckle of his uniform; the right acknowledged the rolling roar with a type of benediction—a limp, upturned palm, held at shoulder height.

  Around her Eleanor saw faces twisted in the type of ecstasy she’d once seen among the Holy Rollers in Tennessee. Only the Italian cadets next to the box were laughing, not taking the moment seriously.

  On the track, the dictator stooped to greet a small girl, who curtsied and held a bouquet towards him. Finally, he climbed the steps to his box and saluted with an outstretched arm. The crowds stamped their feet and began singing the Party anthem. Eleanor lit a cigarette.

  ‘Jesus H Christ,’ Gallico said. ‘Where’s the spirit of international harmony? Is there any song less appropriate?’

  ‘ “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” ’ said Eleanor.

  The singing petered out as a great bell tolled, and sailors standing around the rim of the stadium synchronised the raising of each nation’s flag. It was the moment Eleanor had dreaded.

  The French, in blue berets, were the first large team to emerge, marching from a tunnel beneath the Marathon Gate. As they passed Hitler’s box the tricolour was dipped and they gave the fascist salute, which he returned, to the crowd’s intense delight. The British were next, but gave him nothing but a brisk eyes-right.

  ‘Which hotel are you at?’ Gallico said.

  ‘Every hotel’s full. William Dodd and his wife are putting me up.’

  The Italian team entered, shambolic, like the chorus of a comic opera, but the air force cadets next to the box swept off their caps and yelled, proclaiming them heroes of the patria.

  ‘William Dodd . . . our ambassador?’ Gallico was impressed.

  ‘He’s a college buddy of Dad’s.’

  The Indian team passed by in their turbans. A single Costa Rican, carrying his flag, was given a tremendous cheer. The Australians, in cricket caps, waved at the crowd and ignored the Führer. A large Bulgarian team marched in with a high kick, to much mirth in the stadium.

  Soon, the crowd was reserving its biggest applause for those teams that saluted. Eleanor watched Gallico scribble: ‘. . . like Romans in the Colosseum of yore, condemning or reprieving chariot teams before their emperor . . .’

  At last, the Americans. Seeing their sheer numbers, the largest team, beaming and relaxed, felt like a stab in the heart. She stood and waved, struggling to keep the quiver from her lip, but soon her shoulders sagged.

  Eleanor, you damned fool.

  As they passed Hitler they took off their straw boaters and held them to their hearts, and the crowd seemed to warm to their easy manner.

  ‘I guess we’re not too hot at marching,’ Gallico said, watching the athletes’ loose-gaited walk. ‘Apart from Brundage, that is.’ Even from this distance they could see the determination on the man’s face as his arms swung stiffly behind the Stars and Stripes. ‘Is that a goose step?’

  Eleanor spoke through a loud sob. ‘His big head’s so far up his ass I think that puffed-up chest is his forehead.’

  ‘Hey, hey.’ Gallico put his arms around her. She leaned her head on his shoulder, smelling cigarettes, Brylcreem, and bubble gum, and hugged him, starting to feel foolish.

  ‘I’m such a chump.’ Thick tears rolled down her cheeks, which he dried with his handkerchief.

  ‘You’re one of the nicest people I know,’ he said.

  She linked her arm in his and tried to compose herself.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Me and the boys, we’re going to talk to Brundage. See if we can’t change his mind . . . He may not want to cross a unanimous US press corps.’

  Eleanor’s breath quaked in her chest. ‘Paul, honey . . . I don’t deserve you.’

  The team was still passing by on the track below. She spotted Glenn Morris and Lou Zamperini and waved at them with Gallico’s handkerchief. Towards the back she saw Olive and Marjorie, their faces flushed with pride. She called their names, and to her great surprise they spotted her and waved back.

  Finally, a tumultuous roar greeted the home team. The Germans, dressed in white, marched in immaculate drill and executed a flawless salute.

  All the teams now stood in formations behind their national flags, and a hush fell as an elderly Olympic official stepped up to the rostrum to begin a long speech. The crowd began to fidget, and Eleanor sat back, drained by tears.

  Her eyes came to rest, vacantly, on the straw boater of one of the American reporters, and her mind drifted. She was remembering the long, hot family summers on Long Beach. Her father had worn a straw boater to work each day in the sweltering city. How had she forgotten that? In the afternoons her mother would drive her and her younger brother, George, to swimming lessons to keep them out of mischief—playing alone in the dunes or along the trolley tracks. When she was eleven George died of polio, but she carried on swimming, almost as an act in his memory. He was eight years old, and a really sweet boy.

  She came out of her reverie to a heavy silence. All eyes were upon a tall blond runner, carrying the Olympic torch, who stood in the gap at the stadium’s western side. Gracefully he ran down to the track and cantered around the rows of athletes before sprinting up the steps of the Marathon Gate on the opposite side. The crowd held its breath. The runner paused, holding the torch high, then plunged it into the bronze brazier. Flames leapt into the air, and another huge roar shook the stadium.

  Eleanor felt the noise cast her adrift, decoupling her from the existence she had known, and she was struck by a conviction that a chapter in her life had closed for good.

  Chapter Eight

  The warm weather made the whiff from the Schultheiss Brewery more than usually rank. Denham told the driver to stop on the corner of Kopischstrasse, and saw the man’s nose wrinkle in the mirror. A second smell, of paraffin, followed a dog that tore past with a burning rag tied to its tail. Some children on the corner were laughing.

  ‘You live round here?’ the man said, pocketing the tip. ‘It stinks.’

  Denham got out and slammed the door.

  Welcome to Berlin!

  After a day riding the world’s finest passenger aircraft he couldn’t face the crowds on the Ringbahn and had treated himself to a cab home from the airfield. The drizzle of the afternoon had eased off, leaving the air heavy and the streets smelling malodorously sweet.

  Kopischstrasse, in the Kreuzberg district of the city, was a row of Wilhelmine buildings standing in the shadow of a Gothic brick water tower. The solemn balcony facades with wrought iron work were relics of grander times, but now each monumental house was carved into small, run-down apartments.

  In the sepulchral hallway of number five, radio music was coming from the ground-floor apartment of Frau Stumpf, his landlady. He put his head round her door, but saw she had company. At her kitchen table, back towards him, was the balding fat head of his downstairs neighbour, Reinacher. The man was a tirele
ss bore. If he wasn’t collecting for one of the Party’s endless relief drives, he was knocking on doors, enlisting the tenants into some sort of activism. The red collection tin sat on the table. Frau Stumpf, hunched in her shawls, shot Denham a look that said, ‘I have to listen to this Quatsch,’ so he placed the bottle of schnapps he’d brought for her next to the door and closed it without Reinacher hearing.

  He was fond of Frau Stumpf, a delicate, absent-minded woman who treated the tenants with an old-fashioned courtesy. She’d lost her only son at the third battle of Ypres and had led a kind of half life since. He’d sometimes keep her company and eat her terrible stollen cakes.

  The two-room apartment he rented on the third floor smelled scorched and musty after his week away, and a jade plant had withered in its pot beside the tile stove. He opened a window onto the courtyard, with its lines of greying laundry, threw his hat onto the corner of the door, and noticed the thin layer of soot covering everything. A sour smell of hops wafted in.

  He wound the handle of the Victrola and placed the needle on the record left there a week ago, the Hot Five playing ‘Alligator Crawl.’ Humming the riff and lilt of Armstrong’s trumpet, he lit an HB and sat for a few minutes, watching the smoke unfurl in the dusty light.

  Hannah Liebermann.

  He’d give Rex a call. The old hack usually had good sources and might even have a lead on how to contact her. There even was a chance he was still in the office.

  He answered after one ring.

  ‘Rex, beer at the Adlon?’

  ‘Be there in half an hour, old boy.’

  Denham put his hat back on, but before leaving the building climbed to the fifth floor and knocked gently on the door of the attic apartment.

  ‘Everything all right, Frau Weiss?’

  After a while a chain rattled and the bolt turned. The door opened ajar and an old lady’s face peeped out like a bird’s. Her eyes moved fearfully in their sockets, but she smiled like a little girl when she saw him, then unhooked the chain and took his forearm in her avian claw.

  ‘Could be better; could be worse,’ she said with a shrug. ‘It’s these children. They don’t behave the way they used to. Would you get me some coffee and sugar this week?’ She fumbled for a note in her apron pocket, but he waved it away.

  Frau Weiss, the building’s only Jewish tenant, had not left her apartment in two years. Not since her husband had gone out to buy a newspaper and never returned. A week after his disappearance his bloated remains were dredged from the Landwehr Canal showing fatal wounds to the head, but the police had declined to investigate.

  By the time Denham arrived at the Hotel Adlon it was a fine summer’s evening. Unter den Linden was closed to traffic for the opening of the Games, and crowds of strolling Berliners and tourists were out enjoying the heat. Loudspeakers along the avenue played Strauss waltzes in between official announcements, as though the city were one great carnival. He was ready for a cold beer.

  Rex Palmer-Ward, chief correspondent for the Times, was waiting for him at their usual corner table in the upstairs bar, puffing on his calabash pipe, the long strands of his salt-and-pepper hair tumbled down over his forehead. He’d been a friend of Denham’s for years in ways for which Denham would always be grateful. Godfather to Tom and, during the hollow days of Denham’s divorce, comforter and fellow sorrow-drowner.

  The place was packed with press, shouting and chatting in a dozen languages. Rex rose to greet him, extending a stick-thin arm. Denham had rarely seen him eat. He seemed to subsist on nicotine, alcohol, and salted nuts.

  ‘Hello, old boy. Did you catch the opening of the Games?’

  ‘I made a flying visit,’ Denham said and ordered a beer for himself and another for Rex. ‘Are your chaps over from London?’

  ‘Yes, the Times and Daily Mail boys were mightily impressed, of course.’ He began stoking his pipe with a cocktail stick. ‘Took them to the press briefing at the zoo ballroom this morning. The little Doctor was as quick as a whip as usual . . . made a ringing speech about how the Games had nothing to do with propaganda—Germany merely wanting to show its best side—this from the world’s master propagandist . . .’

  Their beers arrived.

  ‘Look at this,’ Rex said, lifting the Berliner Morgenpost from his side pocket. ‘I had to read the Nazi press to find out the King is holidaying on a yacht in the Med with this American woman, Wallis. Our boys are pretending he’s at Balmoral.’

  ‘That’s game of them.’ They both laughed.

  Denham said, ‘You wouldn’t happen to know of a Jewish sports organisation I could contact? Got a story about an athlete I’m following up.’

  Rex frowned. ‘Not likely. Independent sports bodies are banned as far as I know. Can’t you simply doorstep this person?’

  ‘Maybe. If I can get close. But I suspect this one’s protected in case people like me come along asking questions. The athlete is Hannah Liebermann. She’s competing under duress.’

  ‘Good God.’ Rex looked up from his pipe. ‘Be careful. They’re twitchy. If they think you’re snooping behind their Olympic stage scenery they’ll throw you out. And then who will I drink with? So, where on earth did you hear that?’

  ‘A source I had to charm and coax,’ Denham said, seeing in his mind’s eye the intensity of Friedl’s face on the airship, the light of ploughed fields and sky reflected in it. That bizarre question. ‘Did we meet at a poetry reading in Mainz last year?’

  Rex was watching him, curious.

  ‘You know, you’ve got one of those faces, old chap. People confide in you . . . They trust you. It’s why you get the good stories.’ He tapped out the carbonised debris and cleaned the bowl of the pipe with his finger.

  They were silent for a moment; then Rex changed the subject.

  ‘Been invited to any of the parties?’

  ‘Not one.’

  ‘Here.’ He pulled an envelope from his jacket and slid it across the table. ‘Can’t make this one—if you want to go you’ll have to pretend you’re me.’

  Denham removed the thick card invitation with embossed italic lettering. ‘Ah, the language of diplomacy.’ The inscription, in French, began:

  On behalf of the Reich Government

  Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda

  DR JOSEPH GOEBBELS

  requests the honour of your company for dinner at an ‘Italian evening’

  The party was to be held on the Pfaueninsel, a nature reserve island in the Wannsee, where many of Berlin’s rich and powerful had their homes.

  ‘I’ll dust off my dinner jacket,’ Denham said.

  ‘Won’t do. It’s white tie and tails.’

  Over the noise of the bar a pianist began playing ‘Frauen Sind So Schön Wenn Sie Lieben,’ a tango Denham had been hearing a lot on the wireless. Women are so beautiful if they’re in love.

  Rex said, ‘Phipps will be at that reception. Introduce yourself to him.’

  ‘Sir Eric Phipps? Are you serious . . . ?’

  Rex nodded. ‘He may look like a squirrel with stage fright, but our ambassador’s no fool—and he doesn’t have the time of day for the appeasers. Phipps is one of us. Tell him you drink with me.’

  ‘You’ve pulled him up a peg in my estimation,’ Denham said. ‘I didn’t know you knew him.’

  Rex leaned towards Denham, his face grave and confiding. ‘By the way, old chap . . . with that trustworthy face of yours . . . if anyone were to pass you some intelligence—significant intelligence—I know you’d act in the nation’s best interests. Keep yourself above reproach and all that. Am I right?’

  Denham put his beer down. ‘If it’s important I’d put King and country first, if that’s what you mean.’

  His old friend’s expression was hard to read.

  ‘Rex, this is cryptic even for you. Was there some intelli
gence in particular?’

  But Pat Murphy from the Daily Express had appeared at the table, rubbing his hands. ‘Evening, gents. There’s a rumour going around that one of the German lady high jumpers is, in fact, a man.’

  ‘Only one?’ Rex said, his face amused again.

  Two Americans from the Reuters Bureau also pulled up chairs, and soon the table was in a haze of smoke from Rex’s reignited, smouldering pipe. Denham decided it was time to eat.

  He was leaving the grand lobby when he found himself sharing the revolving front door with two women who were entering. One was short and chattering, the other a tall blonde with a stylish pillbox hat tilted low to one eye. She had a long neck, a wide, full mouth, and a beauty spot just to the right of her nose. No makeup. For a long moment they exchanged glances through the glass.

  His favourite bistro on the Bergmannstrasse usually put him in a good mood. On quiet evenings, and if there were no uniforms in the place, the patron tuned the wireless to a Parisian jazz station that played live sessions of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. But tonight the place was crowded and noisy, along with every other restaurant on the street. He tried jotting some shorthand for his Hindenburg piece, but the evening’s conversation with Rex had riled him.

  It seemed to confirm something he’d long suspected about his old friend: he had links to the British Secret Intelligence Service, the SIS. Not so surprising, perhaps. Spies and journalists alike were in the information game, courting contacts, mining for secrets. In times like these the jobs were almost identical. And as the chief Times correspondent Rex had sources all over Germany.

  Phipps is one of us. Tell him you drink with me.

  First an entrée to the ambassador at a high-level reception—what had prompted that?—then a heavy hint that any intelligence passing Denham’s way should be handed in to the British authorities. In other words, his longest-standing journalist friend was asking him not to be a journalist. He chewed his bread slowly as he considered this.