The Secret of Spandau

by Peter Lovesey

  Heidrun moaned.

  ‘I think she’ll talk now,’ said Jane.

  Heidrun shook her head, but it was unconvincing. She sheered away in fear as Red came closer.

  He told her, ‘They beat Edda Zenk with a pistol. They cut up her face before they killed her. Those are the people you helped. Are you going to force me to do it their way?’

  ‘No!’ Terror showed in her eyes.

  Jane said, ‘Red, you don’t have to hit her again.’

  He grabbed a hank of Heidrun’s hair. ‘Who do they work for?’

  She whispered, ‘The East.’

  ‘The KGB?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was never told to me.’

  He tightened his grip. ‘You’re a fucking KGB agent.’

  ‘Not an agent. I’m of no importance.’

  ‘But you’re on the payroll?’

  ‘Once you start, it’s forever.’

  ‘You were planted on Cal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because of his job in Spandau? They wanted to know if Hess told him anything?’

  ‘Yes.’ She added quickly, ‘I learned nothing of any use.’

  ‘He didn’t fancy you.’

  Stung into defiance again, she flung back, ‘He didn’t get much chance, did he?’

  He kept his eyes on Heidrun’s, though he guessed the effect of the rebuke on Jane. ‘Valentin was your case officer, is that the word?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You set Cal up, and they got what they wanted and murdered him.’

  ‘Please let me go, Red.’

  He nodded and moved away. He had learned enough. Jane, too, released her hold, allowing Heidrun to stand up.

  Red said to Heidrun. ‘You were going in to see Cal. Why don’t you take a look at him? See what your friends did to him.’ He let her go past him into the living-room and said in a hollow voice to Jane. ‘That was pretty sick-making. I’m sorry.’

  She shook her head in a way that signified understanding, if not acceptance. She felt shamed by the violence, her own as well as Red’s, but that was unavoidable. The verbal abuse had been harder to take. She had known without being told that he had slept with Heidrun, but she had hated hearing it thrown back at him, like muck. Yes, she felt pretty sick.

  She said flatly, ‘Shouldn’t we call the police?’

  He summoned the faintest grin. ‘My mates from headquarters?’

  ‘Heidrun will have to talk to them,’ Jane emphasised. ‘If she tells them everything …’

  ‘We’ll be here all night answering questions,’ commented Red. ‘There’s something more important to do.’ And intuitively, with startling clarity, he envisaged a way to do it. He had always been governed by impulse, and often it had failed him; but this was irresistibly simple, brilliant and timely. Mad, quite mad, but right. If he never lived to do anything else, he was going to try this. He took hold of Jane’s hand. ‘We said we owed it to Dick to discover the truth about Hess. Do you still believe that?’

  ‘Of course, but—’

  He cut in excitedly, ‘I reckon we owe it to Cal and Edda Zenk as well, don’t you?’

  She saw the point of that, but she was still at a loss to understand what Red intended. ‘Well, yes, but now that Cal is dead, we’ve lost our line into Spandau. How will we ever get in touch with Hess?’

  ‘I’ll go in and talk to him,’ Red answered with absolute seriousness.

  She screwed up her face in mystification. ‘What?’

  ‘I’m going to bluff my way in there.’

  ‘That’s crazy, Red.’

  ‘Maybe, but the crazy ideas sometimes work.’

  ‘You can’t walk into a prison.’

  He smiled. ‘I’m not going to walk in, darling. I’m going to run. I’ll put on Cal’s tracksuit and cap and jog over there, just like he does. I know the routine, don’t I?’

  She was practically bereft of words. ‘It isn’t possible.’

  Heidrun’s discouragement was suddenly added to Jane’s from the living-room doorway. ‘Only a fool would try it, Red. They have orders to shoot.’

  He answered, ‘They don’t shoot the bloody warders.’

  ‘Even if you got inside, they’d arrest you before the gate was closed.’

  ‘Who? The military? It’s the Russian month for guard-duty. They bring in a new set of soldiers every time. Those boys don’t know one warder from another.’

  ‘Red, you haven’t planned this. You haven’t thought it through,’ Jane tried to impress on him.

  ‘He’s mad,’ said Heidrun.

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if the bloody Russians have a go at Hess after what’s happened,’ Red persisted. ‘Somebody in Spandau needs to be told about the carnage out here. The old man is in real danger.’

  ‘Who are you trying to convince?’ asked Heidrun.

  Red crooked his finger at her. ‘Come here.’

  She shrank back into the room.

  ‘I said come here.’

  She hesitated, fearful of more violence. ‘I’m sorry, Red. I don’t want you to get shot. That’s why I said those things.’

  He continued to beckon her with his finger and by degrees she came, until she stood just out of arm’s reach in front of him.

  He said, ‘Take off your trainers.’

  She obeyed.

  ‘Now take out the laces and hand them to me.’

  When that was done, he made her face the wall while he bound her wrists. ‘You’re too bloody dangerous to let loose, he told her. ‘If I was one of your mob, I’d kill you, wouldn’t I?’ He led her into Cal’s bedroom and, with help from Jane, finished the job of trussing her up, finally tying her to the bed itself with strips of sheet. She made no resistance, realising, probably, the truth of his remark.

  That accomplished, he stripped to his underwear, took Cal’s tracksuit from its hook on the bedroom door and changed into it. ‘I need your help, love,’ he told Jane. ‘In the back pocket of my trousers is a small wallet with my press-card. Got it?’

  She picked the trousers off the floor. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Somewhere in there is a scrap of paper with three phone numbers, right?’

  ‘Is this it?’

  ‘Great. The first number will get you the chief warder’s room in Spandau Prison. There’s a public phone in the U-Bahn Station at the end of Breite Strasse, where the taxi put us down, OK? Tell the guy on duty that you’re speaking for Warder Calvin Moody. Cal had some aggro with a break-in at his flat and that’s why he’s reporting so late, but he’s on his way, and should be with them in twenty minutes. Leave it at that. Nothing else. Can you do it, love?’

  ‘Of course, but—’

  ‘Then I want you to take my own clothes back to the flat. You’ll get a taxi in the same place, no problem. The key’s in the pocket and money as well.’ He winked at her. ‘You’ll find a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label beside my bed. Have a good slug.’

  She wasn’t capable of smiling any more, even for Red.

  He still had something else to ask. ‘Also by the bed is an address book. Look up a guy called Willi Becker. He lives in the Chamissoplatz, in the Kreuzberg section of the city. If anything goes wrong, anyone gives you flak, anything, go to Willi. Don’t phone. Go and see him. Tell him where I am, why, everything he wants to know. Willi is OK. He’ll take care of you. Got all that?’

  Jane whispered that she had. She tilted her head towards the bedroom. ‘What about her?’

  ‘Forget her. If you feel inclined, you can make another call in the morning and tip off the law.’

  Jane clung to his arm as he tried on a pair of Cal’s jogging shoes. She held back her tears, but only just. ‘Red. It’s too dangerous. It can’t possibly work.’

  ‘I almost believe you, love,’ he admitted, ‘but if I don’t try, I can’t live with myself – or anyone else.’ He drew her to his chest and they held each other for a couple of seconds. They didn’t kiss.

  She tried to snatch him back
as he pulled away. But he was too quick for her.

  42

  Jogging was a new activity for Red, never to be disclosed to the press colleagues who frequented his usual drinking haunts in the city centre. He had asserted many times over jars of beer that he would never make an exhibition of himself on the public highway so long as he was capable of the sort of exercise that could be enjoyed with a pretty girl in private. In a parody of the late Sir Winston Churchill, he would sum up his personal recipe for good health as ‘jig-jig, not jog-jog’.

  Yet now he was compelled to set aside his principles. To make a credible impersonation of Cal, he could hardly take a taxi to the nearest street corner and then jog up to the front gate of Spandau. He had to show some sweat for the mile or so between Old Spandau and the prison. He took it slowly, much more slowly than Cal’s customary pace, not wanting to give himself away at the end by looking like a man finishing a marathon.

  He would have died rather than admit it in the press club, but Red actually found the jogging beneficial. It gave him time to prepare mentally for the job he had set himself, literally to get his act together. In one of the pockets of the tracksuit top was Cal’s pass, the ticket into Spandau. It bore a passport-sized photo of Cal. There wasn’t much facial resemblance to Red. The best to be hoped was that when Red approached the prison entrance, the powerful down-beam from the arc-lamps would throw his face into shadow under the peaked cap. The two men were similar in build. Cal must surely have been well known in the prison as the warder who jogged to work, so the running-kit should call him strongly to mind. It ought to be possible to get through the gate.

  Then the problems would really begin. Several of the books on Hess showed rudimentary plans of the interior of the prison. If Red got through the gate, he would find himself in the guard-house, which was a separate building, isolated from the main cell-block where Hess was under guard. He would have to satisfy the Russians of his identity before a second gate could be opened to admit him to the courtyard in front of the cell-block entrance. If he got that far, and past the guard on the cell-block door, he could not fail to be recognized as an impostor by the other warders, who might be Russian, French, American or British. He would need to persuade them that it was vital that he spoke to Hess. He would have to pass more guards armed with sub-machine guns to penetrate to the last cell at the extreme end of the block, where the old man was held. And more daunting than any of the physical obstructions was the prospect of meeting Hess himself.

  Red wasn’t new to the game of meeting famous people. Early in his career, he had learned the wisdom of the dictum that the best way to fail as a journalist is to be uncertain about anything whatsoever on this earth. You treated celebrities like you treated your friends, and most of them responded positively. They needed you as much as you needed them:

  But Hess was like no one else. He was the loneliest man in the world, and, according to those who had known him in Spandau, one of the strangest. It was for the psychiatrists to speculate whether more than forty years in prison, twenty of them in solitary, had shaped his personality. Maybe he had always been suspicious by temperament, reluctant to confide and rigid in his personal decisions. This was the man who had been unwilling to bring his wife and son to Spandau on a visit until Christmas 1969, twenty-eight years and six months after he had seen them last; who had said that if he had his time over again he would still serve Hitler and still make the flight to Scotland, even with the prospect of the rest of his life in Spandau. A man who had often driven his fellow-prisoners to the point of exasperation. Iron-willed, secretive, caustic, cranky, yet, as Albert Speer once wrote, … now, thanks to his consistency, he was regarded with a certain respect, even among his enemies.

  How could you succeed in extracting confidences from such a man when you arrived unexpectedly in his cell by night, the first pressman he had seen in nearly half a century? Was it reasonable to expect a rational response from a man over ninety years old? Not for the first time, Red was going to have to make snap assessments. He couldn’t plan the conversation – if he was lucky enough to get one. It would be improvisation all the way.

  He could feel moisture in the air as he trotted along Wilhelmstrasse, three-quarters of his journey done. A light drizzle cooled his face and made aureoles around the streetlamps. There wasn’t much traffic now. He reckoned it was close to midnight.

  The school at Wilhelmstadt with its athletics track came up on his right and after that the red-bricked military barracks, the place where the British forces were based. Ahead, the street forked into Gatower Strasse. By the intersection was the Melanchthon Church, where he had kept watch on the prison entrance.

  No loitering now, Goodbody, he told himself. Keep running right up to the gate.

  The castellated outline of the directors’ building loomed through the trees. The prison itself was set further back on the right, behind its electric fences and walls and watchtowers.

  Red turned off Wilhelmstrasse onto the cobbled approach to the prison entrance. He faced the twenty-foot arch in its sham-medieval façade of twin turrets and crenellated battlements, the great blue doors, the warning notices, the lights mounted on the turrets and at the margins of the electric fence.

  He trotted forward into the pool of light. Not the moment, he thought, to wonder whether Jane had managed to get through on the phone to the chief warder’s office. Or whether she had even found a coin to fit the slot.

  He came to a halt in front of the small door built into the main gates, through which he had seen Cal come and go a number of times. He hesitated. What happened now? Did he press the bell, hammer on the door, or wait?

  There were sounds on the other side. The grille in the door was slid across and a pair of eyes scrutinised him. Obviously he was expected to say something.

  He cleared his throat and said, ‘Warder Moody, reporting for duty.’ He relied on his Cornish accent to pass for American. He sometimes put on voices when he was telling stories in pubs, but he didn’t fancy trying them out on a Russian with a sub-machine gun.

  The grille was slammed shut again, and for several seconds, which he reckoned aged him by as many years, Red waited.

  Then, Sesame! They were unbolting it from the inside. The door opened and he stepped in. It closed at once behind him.

  The Soviet sentry was shorter than Red expected and not much more than a boy, yet he looked capable of using the gun. He spoke something in Russian. Repeated it.

  Of course! Red fumbled in his top pocket for Cal’s ID. He meant to show it briefly and pocket it again, but the sentry insisted on taking it from him. Fortunately, the light wasn’t too good on that side of the gate.

  Unfortunately, the sentry indicated that Red should move into the guardroom on the left, where there was strip-lighting, and other Russian guards waited. He ambled in, trying to make it seem like routine, and nodded to the NCO behind the desk. The glare of the lights made him blink. There was a German shepherd-dog lying on the matting at the rear of the room. It pricked up its ears and took a long look at Red. Something else he didn’t understand was said and a book was pushed towards him. There was a ballpoint attached to it with string.

  No panic. They wanted him to sign in.

  But there was a problem: he didn’t know how Cal signed his name. He hadn’t bothered to examine the signature on the ID card. He had been wholly taken up with the photo that didn’t resemble him.

  The ID had been handed to the NCO, who was holding it face down as he waited for Red to sign.

  Red held out his hand for the card and said casually, ‘OK?’

  The NCO kept hold of it and pointed to the book.

  Red nodded. Maybe if he scrawled some kind of signature, the card would be handed over without a comparison being made. Somehow, he knew it wouldn’t. So he had to try another ploy.

  ‘Did I sign out yesterday?’ he said rhetorically, flicking back to the previous page and looked for a signature that might be Cal’s. ‘I have a feeling I missed. No
, I was wrong. Here it is.’ And a million thanks to Cal, rest his soul, for having a simple, spiky signature that could be copied with confidence.

  Red turned the page over, signed and put down the pen.

  Immediately, the NCO shouted an order and three guns were trained on Red.

  ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘What is this?’

  Nobody answered. Someone came from behind and frisked him. Something had gone horribly wrong. The muzzle of a gun was jabbed into his back.

  The NCO said in English, ‘You are not Moody. Who are you?’

  Red stared back at him and was made sickeningly sure that there was no possibility of bluffing the man. The widely-spaced, slate-grey eyes were not particularly intelligent, but they were utterly certain. They knew for a fact that they were looking at a phoney. Yet he had to go on with the act. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’ he asked. ‘The Russian sense of humour?’

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘It’s on the card in your hand.’

  ‘You are not Warder Moody.’

  ‘Listen, buddy, I know who I am.’

  The NCO spoke another command in Russian. Two guards grabbed Red’s arms and jerked them upwards behind his back, forcing his face down onto the desk. His nose crunched against the wood as if he had run into a wall. It went numb momentarily, then spikes of pain drove through it.

  The dog was barking excitedly.

  The NCO made a grab for the cap Red was wearing and slung it aside. He took a grip on Red’s hair and screwed his face to one side on the desk. The guards maintained the excruciating hold on his arms. Blood seeped hotly from his nose.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I told you,’ Red blurted out. ‘Call the chief warder if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘You are not a warder. We have pictures of all the warders. What do you want in this prison?’

  ‘To do my bloody job!’ Red groaned.

  Something else was said in Russian and the holds on his arms were relaxed. He straightened, still wincing with pain. ‘Buggers!’ he said. ‘I’ll report this to the bloody directors.’