The Secret of Spandau

by Peter Lovesey

  ‘And he comes to Berlin to write about you playing table-tennis?’ Valentin’s voice was raised too high to project sarcasm. It was not far short of a scream.

  ‘Yes.’ Heidrun brought her hand protectively across her chest.

  ‘And you believe him?’

  She blurted out impulsively, ‘My private life is my own. When some guy fancies me, I don’t need to have him vetted by the KGB.’

  He stepped towards her menacingly, and she backed away until she came up against a shelf unit. He came so close that she could feel his breath on her face. His hand darted towards her and she gasped and swayed. Instead of striking her as she expected, he grabbed a glass water-jug from the shelf.

  He held it to her face, pressing the hard surface against her cheek. ‘Who pays for this place?’ he said between his teeth. ‘Is this the kind of apartment where a common waitress lives? Who paid for this?’ He swung the jug down against the edge of the working-surface, smashing it. The handle remained in his hand, with a jagged piece of glass attached to it. He brought it slowly towards Heidrun’s face. ‘Answer me, Fraulein Kassner. Who pays?’

  She answered breathlessly, ‘You do. Please don’t hurt me.’

  ‘Untie the apron.’

  A shudder passed through her. She sobbed, ‘No.’ It was more in appeal than defiance.

  He actually touched the edge of the glass to her cheek. ‘Do it. Expose your breasts.’

  She whispered, ‘Please, Kurt. Please don’t cut me.’

  He said, ‘I’m waiting.’ He drew the glass far enough back from her face for her to obey the instruction, but still held it ready.

  She reached for the loop of the apron-string behind her neck and drew it forward over her head. The top of the apron still covered her breasts. It was held in place by cold sweat.

  As Valentin’s free hand snaked towards the dangling string, Heidrun took the only chance she had. She jerked her knee upwards, into his genitals. Then she shoved him away with all her strength and dashed for the door. She raced for the spiral stairs and she started up them.

  The structure of a spiral staircase is not designed for rapid ascent. Before Heidrun had got half-way up, Valentin had recovered enough to pursue her. She was wearing flipflops on her feet, and one of them hit the stairs at a difficult angle, causing her to slip one step. It broke the rhythm of her movement, and gave Valentin a chance. He reached through the iron-work, grabbed her by the shin and held on.

  Heidrun turned as well as she could to face him. He was standing on the living room floor with both hands clamped round her ankle, but the curve of the stairs prevented him from reaching her without letting go.

  For the moment he seemed content to hold on. Possibly the pain in his sexual parts had put a damper on his plans. He was breathing hard. He said ineffectually, ‘Are you going to come down from there?’

  Heidrun shook her head.

  He tugged at her legs and it skinned her shin, but there was nothing else he could do without letting go. And then she would run into the bathroom and bolt the door.

  Valentin apparently had taken stock of the situation, because he switched his approach. He told her in a voice held in control, even attempting to sound reasonable, ‘I didn’t intend to hurt you. I simply wanted to impress on you how reckless you have been. There’s an emergency on, and you could find yourself called to account. Do you understand?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘The orders are coming direct from Moscow. It’s the real thing, Heidrun. They wanted to know what progress you made with Calvin Moody, and I couldn’t tell them much.’

  ‘I see him several times a week,’ said Heidrun.

  ‘For table-tennis,’ said Valentin with contempt. ‘Is that more important to you than your work for us? You should be devoting all your energy and resource to Moody, and I find you feeding breakfast to this Englishman who obviously laid you last night. What am I going to tell them at Karlshorst?’

  ‘What do they want?’

  ‘Haven’t I impressed it on you enough? They want to know about Hess, what he is doing, saying, writing, thinking. Moody is closer to him than any other warder. Something is going on, something big, and it concerns Hess. Get closer to Moody. Get into his bed if you can. Get him to talk. And do it soon.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘You’ll try, and you’ll succeed,’ Valentin told her in a voice heavy with intimidation. ‘If you don’t, and quickly, don’t expect me to deal with you. It will be someone else. And it won’t be the china and glass that gets smashed.’

  He gave her ankle another wrench, released it and walked out, slamming the front door.

  Heidrun sat on the stairs and sobbed uncontrollably.

  31

  Red turned up early at the meeting-place – the central fountain in the Palace garden, hoping to get some time alone with Cal Moody – but the hope was frustrated. Heidrun and Cal arrived together precisely on time at 3.30 p.m. wearing identical ‘Olympischer Sportclub Charlottenburg’ tracksuits. It looked as if the interview would be as formal as the setting.

  This must have been stage-managed by Heidrun. From what she had said before, she had strong doubts of Red’s ability to sustain a conversation on table-tennis, even after the crash course he had lately undergone as a spectator. The idea of testing him out probably appealed to her competitive streak. She certainly had a mean look this afternoon. She was like a boxer staring out the opposition before a fight.

  Red didn’t let it trouble him. He had too much on his mind already. This was his big opportunity. He had set it up, and he didn’t mean to let it slip. There were vital things that he needed to know about the routine in Spandau, and Cal’s part in them. In twenty-four hours, he might be ready for the dialogue with Hess.

  The garden was laid out in the French eighteenth-century ornamental style, which meant that nothing in the main area was permitted to grow more than knee-high. The result was that the sun beat down fiercely on anyone lingering for long in the centre. Red had cooled off for short periods in the fine spray of the windward side of the fountain, but it was no place for a press interview, so he suggested a move to the shadow of one of the avenues that lined the sides of the garden.

  ‘Does this kind of garden appeal to you?’ he asked Cal sociably, without expecting his question to lead at once to the subject that interested him most.

  Cal cast his blue eyes rapidly over the dedicated efforts of two centuries of gardeners and commented, ‘Not much. If you gave me a choice, I’d be happier walking around the prison garden in Spandau. It’s a little overgrown these days, but I like it.’

  ‘Speer’s garden?’

  ‘That’s what we call it. He was Hitler’s architect, so while he was serving his time he devoted himself to making a place where the prisoners could walk. The directors encouraged it, naturally.’

  ‘Because it was work for the prisoners?’

  ‘Right. In its prime in the 1960s, that garden must have been one of the prettiest in the city. There are linden trees, pines, birches, lilacs, roses, hydrangeas, beds of irises. Some of us put in a few hours’ work there now and then to keep it from turning into a wilderness.’

  ‘I suppose Hess is too old to help?’ Red prompted him. This start was as good as a flier. For once, Cal was talking freely about prison life.

  Cal grinned. ‘From what I hear, he was always too old to help. Maybe that’s unfair, but I know he only ever worked there under protest. They used to find him asleep in the wheelbarrow.’

  Red laughed. Heidrun managed a slight smile.

  Cal, encouraged, went on, ‘There’s a nice story that happened long before my time, when all seven Nazis were in Spandau. Hess had been detailed to water the garden, and he refused. When he was reprimanded, he said, “Why should I do it? That’s a job for the water department: Dönitz and Raeder. They are both Admirals, so I leave it to them.” He has a nice sardonic line in humour.’

  Red nudged the conversation on. ‘How do you get on
with him yourself?’

  The nudge was too obvious for Cal. ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘we don’t want to talk about Hess all afternoon. Wouldn’t you like to ask us about the table-tennis league?’

  ‘Sure, but I’m also interested in you two as personalities,’ Red told him, ‘so your job comes into it.’

  Stiffly, Cal announced, ‘I’m not at liberty to say anything about my job.’

  The flier had been a false start. ‘Yes, you told us before,’ Red carried on, ‘and I wouldn’t dream of getting you in schtuck with your bosses. I’ll tell you what, Cal: I’ll guarantee not to mention Hess in the profile I write about you two. I mean, we three are buddies. If you happen to mention Spandau in passing, I’m interested and so is Heidrun, but it’s strictly between friends, isn’t that right, Heidrun?’

  Heidrun confirmed it with a nod and then, realizing that something more was wanted, added, ‘What are friends for, if you can’t trust them?’

  Cal didn’t appear to be entirely convinced, so Red slipped in a confidence-restorer: ‘Getting back to table-tennis, how did you two first link up?’

  ‘Shall I say?’ Cal asked Heidrun.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  For the next fifteen minutes, Red endeavoured to give a passable imitation of a sports reporter winkling out the facts for a profile piece. It was by no means the first time in his journalistic career he had waded into a subject he knew nothing about. The trick was to get the experts talking. In this case, a question about choosing the right bat unexpectedly did the trick. Red had a vague idea that the pimpled rubber covering affected the speed and spin of the ball, but it emerged that there were over three hundred rubbers on the market. There were tacky rubbers capable of picking up a ball on the underside of a bat, and long-pimpled rubbers which buckled on contact with the ball and flicked it back with the spin reversed. All this was revealed as they strolled up the gravel path between two double rows of evenly spaced trees towards the lake, Cal and Heidrun talked non-stop, leaving Red to ponder how on earth he could get back to the topic of Hess.

  It was a red squirrel that came to his aid, one of the many that waited for titbits along the walk. Heidrun stopped in mid-conversation and gave a cry of delight as the squirrel stopped a few yards ahead, sitting up on its hind legs to assess its chances. To their right, some people were feeding another squirrel, and Heidrun went over and asked them if they could spare a few nuts. In a moment, the squirrel was feeding from her hand.

  Cal looked on benignly and came out with a remark that put Red in good humour, too. ‘I wish we had them in the garden at Spandau,’ he said. ‘The old man would like squirrels. He’s very attached to his birds. They know his times. They gather in the trees about ten minutes before he’s due to exercise. He’ll be out in the garden this afternoon, feeding his birds.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Actually he went back inside at 3.30.’

  ‘His exercise times are still as precise as that?’ Red asked, hardly believing his luck.

  ‘One hour twice a day if the weather is right. 10.30 in the morning and 2.30 in the afternoon.’

  ‘But never longer?’

  Cal grinned. ‘Most times longer, but not this month.’

  ‘Why not this month?’ asked Heidrun, getting up, all the nuts gone.

  ‘It’s the Russian month. There’s one watchtower with a view of the garden, and you can bet that if we give him five minutes too long when a Russian is up there, we get bawled out by the director next morning.’

  ‘What does he do in the garden, apart from feeding the birds?’ asked Red, as they moved on.

  ‘He walks around the path. 215 steps. He used to make twenty-eight circuits, but he’s cut it down now. He sits on the bench that Speer made and reads a book.’

  ‘And if you’re on duty, you stand and watch?’

  ‘Right. While another warder searches his cell.’

  Heidrun asked suddenly, ‘What is that for? What do you expect to find?’

  ‘Anything he’s not supposed to have. Just now his letters have been stopped. He’s normally allowed to write and receive one letter a week of not more than 1,300 words. We have to make sure a letter hasn’t been smuggled in.’

  ‘So he’s in trouble,’ said Red. ‘What’s he been doing – trying to climb over the wall?’

  Cal gave a grin that said he had heard jokes like that a thousand times before. ‘He can’t even get up the iron stairs to his cell now. They had a small elevator installed for him. I don’t actually know what his latest offence is. When the Russians are in charge, they can be very severe with him.’

  ‘How does he take it?’

  ‘He wasn’t too happy when I saw him last night, but you never know with Hess. He’s used to the Soviets. There was something else disturbing him. It was an item he read in the newspaper.’

  ‘About himself?’

  Cal shook his head. ‘No, anything about himself or World War II is cut out before he sees the paper. This was a report about a fire in Munich the night before last. It gutted a nice old building there. He lived in Munich, you see. A man died in the fire, but Hess seemed more upset about the building. He has a different perspective than the rest of us. I guess all the people he knew are dead anyway.’

  ‘What’s one building, when so many were destroyed in the war?’ commented Red.

  ‘It must have had some importance for him,’ said Heidrun, suddenly more animated than she had been all afternoon. ‘Did you speak to him about it, Cal?’

  ‘A little. He isn’t one of the world’s great talkers.’

  ‘But maybe he confides in you sometimes?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so.’

  Heidrun was not so easily shrugged off. ‘If you find something when you’re searching his cell, do you report it?’

  ‘That depends. If it’s some small infringement, I might let him know that I found out. I don’t see the point in hounding an old man who is no danger to anyone.’

  ‘And let’s face it, love,’ added Red in a stagy aside to Heidrun, ‘if Cal finds anything, it’s probably been smuggled in to Hess by another warder. Cal isn’t going to grass on his mates.’

  ‘I think you are wrong,’ Heidrun answered before there was any reaction from Cal. ‘It’s a matter of loyalties. Cal has a responsible job to do, and he does it well. He has a higher loyalty, and that is to the directors. So if it is necessary, yes, he – What did you call it? – grasses on the other warders.’

  Red shook with amusement. ‘Cal, if you’re ever looking for someone to write you a reference, you know who to ask. A first-class man. Won’t hesitate to drop his mates in the shit.’

  Heidrun glared at him. ‘I don’t think that is very funny.’ She tucked her arm under Cal’s. ‘He is a first-class man. He’s good at his job and I am proud to know him.’

  ‘He isn’t a bad table-tennis player, either,’ Red remarked, winking at Cal. ‘Let’s get back to the interview, shall we? I heard Cal’s account of the way you two first met on the beach at Wannsee. Heidrun, would you like to tell me what you saw in Cal’s play that impressed you?’

  ‘Shall I tell him?’ Still gripping his arm, Heidrun looked up and practically fluttered her eyes at Cal, in a show of togetherness that Red supposed was intended to make him jealous. Privately, it came as an immense relief, as good as a bugle-blast from the US Cavalry.

  Heidrun gave what was, for her, a rhapsodic account of her first sight of Cal in play at the table. She made no mention of Kurt Valentin.

  The talk stayed on table-tennis for an appreciable interval, Heidrun missing no opportunity to coax and flatter her way into Cal’s affections. They sat for a time on one of the benches beside the lake, and she rested her hand firmly on Cal’s thigh until he stood up, professing an interest in waterfowl. Soon after, he announced that he had better be getting back, if Red had got all he wanted.

  ‘You’re not on duty again?’ asked Heidrun.

  ‘No, but I have things to do, like visiting the launderette. Not very exciting thin
gs, but they have to be done today.’

  ‘I have a washing-machine and drier,’ Heidrun informed him. ‘I don’t mind washing your things.’

  Cal smiled. ‘Thanks, but I can manage.’

  Red chipped in, ‘Don’t turn down a good offer, mate. I’ve got a stack of dirty washing at home. Let’s all meet at Heidrun’s place and make it a party.’

  Heidrun gave him a withering look, and said, ‘I’ll issue my own invitations.’

  But Cal was still looking for an exit-line. He said, ‘I think I’ll jog back now. Nice to see you guys.’

  Heidrun reached out and gripped his arm. ‘But we haven’t even fixed a time to meet on Tuesday.’

  ‘Tuesday?’ repeated Cal uncertainly.

  ‘The match against Moabit.’

  ‘Is that Tuesday?’

  ‘Yes. Is anything wrong?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I won’t be able to make Tuesday.’

  Heidrun suddenly went pale. ‘Why? I don’t understand.’

  Cal rubbed the side of his face. ‘It’s, em, the way things have turned out. There was a change of shifts. I’ve taken plenty of evenings off lately. One guy is off sick and another was promised Tuesday night, so I have no choice.’

  ‘But you know it’s the Moabit match,’ Heidrun protested.

  ‘Right. I meant to tell you before this. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Can’t you get someone to change with you?’

  ‘No chance.’

  Heidrun’s eyes had reddened at the lids. ‘Please, Cal. I won’t have a partner.’

  ‘Honey, if I could have fixed it, I would. I’ll make the next game for sure.’

  Heidrun bit her lip. Cal backed away a couple of steps, nodded to Red, muttered some form of farewell, and jogged away through the trees.

  ‘He promised to play all the games,’ said Heidrun, dabbing a tissue to the corners of her eyes. ‘He promised. What’s gone wrong? I couldn’t have been nicer to him. I tried, Red, I really tried.’