‘Of course. I had forgotten. You resemble your sister, Fraulein. And you have done a good job. I congratulate you. Now I must go.’ He closed the door, and seized Anna’s arm. ‘Why did you not tell me she was there?’
‘I did not think it mattered, sir.’
‘What? Do you think she heard what we were saying?’
‘I think it is likely, sir.’
‘Good God! What are we going to do?’
‘Sir?’
‘If she heard what we were saying—’
‘With respect, sir, we were discussing the conspiracy. She assisted me in my inquiries. She can have heard nothing she did not already know. Except for your appointment. But you are going to make that public anyway, aren’t you?’
‘And your trip to Switzerland? No one is supposed to know about that.’
You silly little man, Anna thought again; everyone knows about my mysterious trips, even if no one knows for certain what I do on them. ‘Katherine is entirely loyal to me and to the Reich,’ she asserted. ‘You may trust her absolutely, Herr Reichsführer.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ Himmler said. ‘The goods will be ready for you to pick up tomorrow morning.’
*
Anna waited until he had closed the door, then went into the inner office. Katherine had sat down again, but was still looking startled. She did indeed resemble her older sister, without quite matching her beauty. She was tall, but was still two inches shorter than Anna. Her figure was excellent, and indeed, voluptuous, but it lacked Anna’s sensuality. Her hair was just as yellow, but thick, where Anna’s suggested golden silk. And her features, although splendidly carved, failed to equal Anna’s perfection, and were even a trifle coarse, while her eyes, if a matching blue, had none of Anna’s come hither quality. But she aped Anna in every direction, from the way she wore her hair to her choice of clothes, without ever revealing the required elegance. Yet the real difference between them, Anna knew, was in their brains. Although they had received identical training at the SS school, albeit several years apart, Katherine had never achieved her sister’s speed of thought, her instant reactions, and, she supposed, her ruthlessness.
‘He gives me the creeps. Did he really forget who I was?’ Katherine asked.
‘It’s possible,’ Anna conceded. ‘He has a lot on his mind. Did you hear everything that was said?’
‘Well, I couldn’t help it. Are you really going to bring Mama and Papa to Berlin? Do you think they want to be taken anywhere, by you?’
Anna gazed at her. How she wanted to trust her, as she had claimed she did to Himmler. But there was another difference between them, the most vital of all. She had been dragged into the world of the SD by the threat that if she ever failed the Reich her mother and father, and her little sister, would die. Her skills, and her loyalty, had been purchased by that simple proposition. It had never occurred to her Nazi masters that all those qualities they so valued in her could ever be used against them, as she had now done for five years. But Katherine had actually volunteered to serve the Reich. Anna did not suppose she truly understood the Nazi philosophy – although like her she would have been given Mein Kampf and the works of Nietzsche and Houston Chamberlain to study. She knew that her sister’s sole motivation had been to get out of her parents’ prison and hopefully follow in Anna’s apparently successful footsteps. In doing this, she had adopted that philosophy absolutely. Thus for her ever to learn the truth could be catastrophic.
‘They think you are a German whore,’ Katherine said. ‘They hate you.’
‘And do they not hate you?’
‘Well . . . I suppose they do. So . . .’
‘They are still our parents, and it is our business to protect them if we can. We certainly cannot abandon them to the Russians. You do not have to see them if you don’t want to.’ And if the plan that was forming in her mind could be made to work, she would never see them again, she thought. That would mean abandoning her to the looming disaster that was about to overtake Germany, but . . .
‘Then I shall not,’ Katherine declared. ‘If you knew the things they said to me when I told them I was joining the Party.’
. . . she had chosen her path, and must go along it to the end. ‘The decision is yours,’ Anna agreed. ‘Now, I have things to do.’
She turned to the door.
‘Anna!’
Anna waited.
Katherine licked her lips. ‘When you go away for the Reichsführer . . . do you kill people?’
Anna turned back. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘That’s what you do, isn’t? Kill people for the SD. When I think of the way you drew your pistol and shot Hellmuth . . . and he was already pointing his gun at you.’
Hellmuth, Anna thought. It had not occurred to her that Katherine and Essermann, working together for so many months, to track down the conspirators, would have become close. ‘Hellmuth was a traitor to the Reich,’ she said.
‘But he was your lover.’
‘He betrayed me as much as the Führer.’
‘So you killed him. Just like that. Anna . . .’
‘There are some things it is better for you not to know.’ Anna closed the door.
*
Since the block in which her once luxurious flat had been situated had been hit by a British bomb, Himmler had moved Anna to one of the apartments situated in the bowels of this building. She had made it as comfortable as possible, but it could never be enjoyable. It was terribly small, and although efficiently air-conditioned there could be no substitute for fresh air. It also contained her maid, Birgit. Birgit had now been with her for four years, and a considerable intimacy had grown up between them; the woman was often a great comfort. But she, like everyone else, was in a tremendous twitter over the events of this past week. She would know that Himmler had returned from Rastenburg, would want to discuss it, hope to learn some truths as opposed to the wild rumours that were still sweeping the city. Anna was not in the mood for that.
She went down through the Gestapo Headquarters, greeted deferentially by the various secretaries and agents she encountered, and out on to the street. It was a brilliant late July afternoon, the glowing sun accentuating the calamity with which she was surrounded. To every side there were rubbled houses and cratered streets. The emergency services were hard at work clearing up some of the mess left by the previous night’s raid, but the men all stopped to look at the strikingly beautiful young woman in the secretarial uniform walking past them. As did the various other passers-by. Anna smiled at them all. This might be the last time she would ever walk the streets of Berlin. If her plan worked.
It had to work. She had to make it work. But it would need very careful calculation, and the utmost determination. She was not really worried about either of those aspects. But it would also depend upon Henri Laurent. The Swiss banker to whom she delivered the funds that Himmler carefully accumulated from every source he could think of for depositing in a numbered account, had claimed to have fallen utterly in love with her. Well, she enjoyed him too. But he knew her only as a dedicated Nazi agent, and while he had indicated that he did not approve of the regime, he also worked for them in his role as a money launderer.
How would he respond to the knowledge that she sought only their destruction? And the problem was compounded by the fact that it would be very difficult to tell him part of the truth without revealing all of it. It would then become a business of which mattered more to him, her love or his professional integrity. But without his aid, she did not see how she could get her parents to safety.
The last week had been the most stressful of even her life. She needed to stretch her muscles, to relax . . . and to be adored. She went to the SS gymnasium, which, buried half underground, had so far escaped destruction.
The doorman blinked at her. ‘Countess?’ It was mid-afternoon, and Anna usually did her training first thing in the morning.
‘Good afternoon, Bruno,’ Anna said. ‘Is Stefan available?’
‘Well, yes, Countess. But—’
‘I’ll surprise him.’
Anna stepped past the desk and went along the corridor. There were several training rooms, some empty, some in use. She went to her usual room, opened the door, and gazed at the couple who appeared to be wrestling on the mat, but as they were both naked it was difficult to suppose that either judo or karate was involved. ‘Good afternoon,’ she said.
Stefan rolled off the woman – she was hardly more than a girl – while she uttered a terrified squawk, scrambled to her feet and ran for the showers.
‘Hard at it, as always,’ Anna remarked, closing the door.
‘Countess!’ Stefan stood up, panting, whether from his recent endeavours or an anticipated crisis Anna wasn’t immediately sure.
‘I know,’ she said sympathetically. ‘This is not my usual time. But I need a work out.’
‘Of course. The young lady got carried away.’ He reached for his singlet and shorts.
‘I think you should leave those off,’ Anna recommended. ‘You are quite a good-looking fellow, you know, Stefan. Worth a second glance, anyway.’
Stefan gulped even as he flushed. But she had meant it. As a professional trainer he was in the pink of condition, hard-muscled with a splendid torso. He was not very tall, and his overly-rounded features were a long way from handsome, but he had wavy yellow hair, and was certainly well equipped where it mattered, even if at this moment somewhat diminished by the interruption.
She was giving way, she knew, to that wicked sense of humour that was essential to survival for anyone in her profession. Stefan had now been her trainer for three years, and like so many men, had fallen desperately in love – or more correctly, lust – with her the first time he had seen her without her clothes. He had even made advances, and been firmly snubbed, although she understood that such adoration, which had lasted for all of those unrequited training sessions, might one day come in handy in the increasingly uncertain world in which she was forced to exist.
But today, for all the cloud of guilt that hung above her like a thunderstorm – so many men, with their wives and children, condemned for attempting what she had attempted, and also failed – suddenly there was light at the end of the tunnel. If she could just get to it.
‘You have not brought a change,’ Stefan said, hesitant as he considered what might lie ahead.
‘Then I shall do without,’ Anna agreed. ‘It was an impulse.’
He uttered a little sigh of anticipated pleasure, as she went to the changing room, which was adjacent to the showers. The girl, just stepping from her stall, gasped and grabbed a towel to hold in front of her.
‘This is the Countess von Widerstand,’ Stefan announced, proudly.
The girl gave another gasp and dropped the towel, hastily retrieving it before it reached the floor.
‘I am not going to bite you,’ Anna said reassuringly. ‘But Stefan and I require to be alone.’
Stefan scooped the girl’s clothes from the bench and stuffed them into the arms clutching the towel. ‘Dress outside.’
Another gasp, and she scuttled from the room.
‘I hadn’t meant you to be quite so hard on her,’ Anna said. ‘Or has she already experienced that?’
‘No,’ he said, watching her release her tie and unbutton her shirt.
‘You mean I interrupted you?’ Anna slid her skirt past her thighs. ‘I am a wretch.’
Stefan was showing signs of recovery. ‘I have been so worried. All these rumours . . .’
‘Well, it is all over now. So you can stop worrying.’ She slipped the straps for her camiknickers from her shoulders, and they followed the skirt past her thighs, before reaching up to release her bun and allow her hair to cascade on to her shoulders and down her back.
Stefan gazed at those flawless breasts; his greatest ambition was one day to be able to hold them, but he knew that to interfere with Anna, unless Anna wished to be interfered with, was the shortest possible route to a hospital . . . at the very best. ‘You,’ he said. ‘I was worried about you. They said there was shooting at Gestapo Headquarters.’
Anna unclipped her suspender belt and sat down to roll down her stockings. ‘Yes, there was. And in answer to you next question, yes, I did some of it. But as you see, I am still here.’
But what she might have had to do was no longer important; he was staring at the blue mark on her right rib cage, where she had once been shot. He did not know the details.
‘And I feel like doing some shooting now,’ she said. ‘Load a pistol for me and prepare a target, will you?’
‘Of course, Countess.’
He went into the gymnasium. Anna followed, lay on the mat beneath the weights and exercised her arms for several minutes; she was as skilled at unarmed combat as she was with a weapon, and while she knew that the secret of that art was timing and delivery, the ability to get all of one’s weight into the blow at the decisive moment, she also knew that muscles were very necessary. Stefan, watching her with glowing eyes, dropped one of the cartridges he was inserting into the Luger’s magazine with a clatter.
Anna ignored him, and satisfied, got up and began to run, round and round the large room, hair flopping behind her, breasts rising and falling, muscles flexing in her thighs. Round and round she went while sweat dribbled down her face and from her armpits. ‘Next time,’ she panted as she passed him for the twentieth time.
Stefan pulled himself together, rested his hand on the lever. Anna rounded the room and approached the table. Stefan waited until she was almost up to him, then said, ‘Now!’
As he spoke, he pulled the lever, and the full size cardboard image of a man began to cross the far end of the room, some twenty yards away, from left to right. Anna stopped running and in the same movement turned, grasped the pistol, levelled it, and emptied the magazine. The cardboard shook as each bullet struck home. Anna laid down the empty gun, now at last breathing deeply. Stefan went forward to peer at the target. ‘Four in the head, five in the body. Where did you aim first?’
‘You know that I always aim at the head,’ Anna said. ‘Because that makes any other shots unnecessary. Thank you, Stefan.’
She returned to the changing room and stepped into the shower, face turned up as she flooded her hair and herself. Stefan stood in the doorway to watch her; he thought that he could do this for the rest of his life. When she turned off the water to soap herself, he asked, ‘Was there really an attempted revolution, Countess?’
‘I’m afraid there was,’ Anna said. ‘Didn’t you hear the Führer’s speech?’
‘Yes, I did. But . . .’
Anna shampooed her hair. ‘You no longer believe everything he says.’ She smiled through the soap at his expression. ‘I don’t think you are unique. But in this case everything he said was true.’
‘He mentioned you by name. He said that without the support of his loyal aides, such as the Countess von Widerstand, he could not have triumphed.’
Anna finished showering and dried herself, then towelled her hair. ‘And you did not believe him.’
‘Oh, I believe that. Any man who could be certain of your support would be invulnerable.’
Anna dressed herself. ‘You say the sweetest things.’
Stefan licked his lips. ‘Countess . . . Anna . . .’
She opened her shoulder bag, found her brush, and stroked her still wet hair.
‘Can we win this war?’
‘If you believe what the Führer says, then we will win it.’
‘But do not, well . . . we may all die.’
‘We are all going to die, one day, Stefan.’ She encased the long golden strands in a tortoiseshell clip.
Another lick of the lips. ‘To die, without having held you in my arms . . .’
Anna rested her hand on the side of his face, and his fingers closed on hers. ‘You shall have your wish, Stefan.’
‘Anna . . .’ The fingers tightened.
‘Before you die. I
give you my word.’
She freed herself and left the gymnasium. Promises cost nothing.
*
The evening was still bright, and she felt better for both the exercise and for using the gun. She supposed she occasionally suffered from hubris, but the feeling of superiority her skills engendered was irresistible. And in her tortured existence, without a degree of hubris she did not think she could survive.
She walked back to Gestapo Headquarters; it still wanted a few hours before the RAF would appear, as nowadays they did almost every night. She needed to work out what was coming next, what she intended to have happen next, to think, and felt that the gym session had freshened up her brain. On the surface of it, the question was a simple one. Thanks to Himmler’s blind faith in her loyalty, she was being given the opportunity to get her parents out of Nazi control . . . if Laurent would go along with her. It would also mean that as she would have to go with them, she would be able to end this horrendous existence she had endured for six years. As to where she could possibly wind up, and with whom, she had really no idea; those were bridges she would cross when the initial step had been taken . . . although she knew where she wanted to wind up, and with whom. But to take that step meant abandoning Katherine. Well, there could not really be a choice, and as she had thought earlier, Katherine had made her own bed of her own free will. But still, to write off one’s sister . . .
She realized that a car was nosing along the pavement beside her, sufficiently unusual in petrol-starved Berlin. Now it stopped, and a man got out. ‘Oh, shit!’ she remarked. She did not recognize the man, but both the lounge suit and the car indicated only two possible sources, and one of them, the Gestapo, was not possible; much as they might want to, no Gestapo agent would nowadays dare interfere with the Countess von Widerstand. That meant it had to be . . .
‘Countess?’ the man asked, anxiously, having overheard her comment on his appearance.
‘It must be on my shoes,’ Anna suggested. ‘Don’t tell me: it’s a matter of life and death.’
Angel of Doom (Anna Fehrback Book 5) Page 4
