A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  They weren’t camps at all, of course, not like the ones in Germany. Hotels and boarding houses in the Manx towns of Douglas, Peel and Ramsay had simply been expropriated for the duration, much to the delight of their owners, who’d depended on the tourist trade before the war and faced ruin without it. The food was good enough, better than he’d been able to get in Berlin and later in France, and the company was stimulating, but one could attend only so many lectures, take only so many walks, before boredom set in. He shook his head; the British were a strange race. The internment camps were supposedly for ‘enemy aliens’ of one kind or another – fifth columnists who might sabotage Britain’s war effort from within. In Hitler’s Germany they would have starved and tortured such people – here they simply bored you to distraction.

  He heard the muffled chattering of voices and then the door behind him opened. Footsteps creaked over the narrow-planked hardwood floor. For an instant he wondered if he was supposed to stand but then it was too late. Two men and a woman took their places behind the table, barely glancing in his direction.

  He realised how ridiculous he looked in his cheap blue suit: a narrow-shouldered man at the end of his youth, dark hair thinning away in a widow’s peak, bony and pale, raw-knuckled hands gripping the arms of his chair nervously. Alien even to himself. What had happened to his life? What terrible joke had brought him here to this room in the Douglas Court House?

  The woman, in her fifties, wore a long, dark blue skirt, a fitted jacket to match and heavy-heeled black shoes. Her grey hair was pulled back tightly in a bun and she wore dark-framed glasses perched on her too large nose. Even from his position ten feet away, Steinmaur could see that her cheeks and chin were covered with fine downy hair.

  The taller of the two men was also older, just short of retirement age. He was slim, clean-shaven and hollow-cheeked with thick, heavily pomaded hair that was suspiciously dark for a man of his age. He had bushy eyebrows in need of trimming and a straight-stemmed pipe was clamped between his teeth. The man had the hooded eyes of a predatory bird and long, thin-fingered hands. He was wearing a heavy tweed suit, a white shirt and a dark green bow tie.

  The other man was in his mid-thirties and wore a major’s uniform without service insignia of any kind. He had a thin, neat moustache and carried a short leather riding crop in one hand, a swollen government-issue briefcase in the other. When he sat down, he placed his cap down on the table in front of him and laid the crop across it at an angle as though he were posing for a formal photograph.

  The older man took the central position with the uniformed officer on his left and the woman on his right. The major leaned over and whispered something in the woman’s ear. She nodded and then smiled politely, revealing two rows of very small teeth. Then the older man removed the pipe from his mouth and set it onto the heavy glass ashtray in front of him. The major leaned down, took out a thin file folder from his briefcase and slid his cap and crop to one side. He flipped open the folder, examined the contents for a moment then looked up at Steinmaur.

  ‘My name is Major Hoyt. This is Inspector Cuthbert of Special Branch and Mrs Baldwin from the Prison Board. You are Werner Erich Steinmaur?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Thirty-two.’

  ‘You were born in Berlin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are a Jew?’

  ‘My mother was a Jew. My father was Catholic. In Germany that makes you a Jew.’

  ‘According to our information, in 1932 you were a student at Friedrich-Wilhelm University.’

  ‘Yes. The Veterinary School on Luisenstrasse.’

  ‘You were training to be a veterinarian?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that where you learned your English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You resigned from the school before graduation.’

  ‘I was a Jew. I was asked to leave.’

  ‘You went to work at St Joseph’s-Heilanstalt Lunatic Asylum?’

  ‘Yes. In October 1934.’

  ‘What did you do there?’

  ‘I was an orderly. It was the only work available to me. Mostly I cleaned toilets. Sometimes I would help with the inmates.’

  ‘Help?’ asked the woman from the Prison Board.

  ‘Many of them were incontinent. I sometimes helped to clean them up.’

  ‘I see,’ said the woman. Steinmaur doubted that very much. It was unlikely that she’d ever wiped the arse of a drooling, pissing woman in her seventies or stripped the reeking sheets from a score of beds each morning in the catatonic ward. He said nothing. The major took up the questioning again.

  ‘How long did you work there?’

  ‘Until September of the following year – 1935.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I left the country.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My sister was raped by a group of Jungbann.’

  ‘Jungbann?’

  ‘Boys between the ages of ten and fourteen. Too old to be Pimpf, too young to be Hitler Jugend.’

  ‘Ten-year-olds raped your sister?’ asked Mrs Baldwin. She didn’t sound convinced.

  ‘Yes. Seven of them. She was thirteen. When they were finished, they urinated and defecated on her. They wrote the words Jiddische Sau on her stomach in shit.’

  ‘Jiddische Sau?’ asked Major Hoyt.

  ‘Jewish pig.’

  ‘This caused you to leave the country?’

  ‘After she was raped my sister committed suicide. My mother died less than a month later. I had no one left. I saw no reason to stay.’

  ‘Your father was already dead?’

  ‘Yes. Several years before. He was gassed in the First War.’

  ‘We didn’t use gas in the First War.’

  ‘The wind changed.’

  ‘Bad luck,’ said the major dryly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you leave Germany?’

  ‘I purchased forged papers.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘First to Switzerland, then France.’

  ‘You worked in France?’

  ‘Yes. In Paris. I was a waiter at the Hotel Meurice for some time, then I worked on a farm outside of St-Omer.’

  ‘Then you came to England?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were sponsored by Dr Franz Zimmerman of St George’s Hospital.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you come to know Dr Zimmerman?’

  ‘He was a guest at the Meurice on several occasions. He took an interest in me. My situation. I wrote to him. He offered to sponsor me through the Refugee Association.’

  ‘He got you a job at the hospital.’

  ‘Yes. As an orderly.’

  ‘With your petition for release you included several other letters of recommendation.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Miss Alice Derwent of the Red Cross Society, Dr Menzer of the Jewish Refugees Society, Joan Rosenstock of the Association of Jewish Refugees in Britain.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘These are friends?’

  ‘They are people I have written to.’ Steinmaur learned long ago that friendship was bought and sold like bread. The word meant nothing to him now.

  ‘I see.’ The major plucked a pen from the breast pocket of his jacket and jotted something down on the file in front of him. Cuthbert, the Special Branch official, spoke for the first time.

  ‘Herr Steinmaur?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you still consider yourself a German?’

  ‘The Germany I knew no longer exists.’

  ‘Surely you don’t consider yourself to be English,’ broke in Mrs Baldwin from the Prison Board. She seemed appalled at the thought.

  ‘I don’t consider myself to be anything. At this point I have no country, no nationality.’ Steinmaur smiled. ‘Perhaps if the war goes on for long enough, I’ll become a citizen of the Isle of Man by default.’ The members of the tribunal didn’t seem amused.
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  ‘But you are still a Jew,’ said Cuthbert.

  Steinmaur shrugged. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘You don’t sound very sure,’ said Mrs Baldwin. Steinmaur thought for a long moment, wondering what the correct answer was. Presumably there was some right thing for him to say but in the end he decided to tell the truth.

  ‘Once I was very proud to be a Jew,’ he said slowly. ‘Then I was humiliated by my Jewishness. By the time I left Germany I was frightened of it.’

  ‘And now?’ asked Cuthbert.

  ‘Now I am tired of it. It is a burden I no longer wish to carry.’ There was a long silence. Finally the policeman spoke again.

  ‘If your petition was granted, would you have any difficulty doing war work? Work which might harm people in your native country?’

  ‘I would have no difficulty, no.’

  ‘You seem very sure.’

  ‘It was a question I knew would be asked. I’ve thought about it a great deal.’

  ‘What about the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps?’ asked the major. The AMPC was a revised version of the First World War Labour Corps. The Corps was made up of young, physically fit aliens willing to do non-combative work.

  ‘I wouldn’t make a very good soldier, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Farm work?’ asked Cuthbert.

  ‘I’d be better suited to it. Or to my old job at the hospital.’

  Major Hoyt closed his file folder and glanced at Cuthbert. The Special Branch officer nodded. Hoyt turned back to Steinmaur. ‘That will be all.’

  ‘When will I know about my petition?’

  ‘In due time,’ the major answered. The tribunal was over.

  Half an hour later Werner Steinmaur stood at the fence that ran along the promenade and stared out through the wire. Directly in front of him, just beyond the fence, was the tall, stone-block spike of the World War One Memorial. Beyond that, in the centre of Douglas Bay and half-hidden by the squalling rain and mist, was Coniston Rock and the old tower lighthouse. After the rock there was only the sea and, somewhere in the distance, England.

  Twenty feet behind him was the stone-porticoed entrance to the Flora, one of a score of private hotels that ran along the oceanfront in a single, unbroken row. It contained thirty rooms on five floors, each room curtained off into four cubicles smaller than the average prison cell.

  Two of the other men who shared his fourth-floor room were smokers and Shulman, the elderly Potsdamer who had operated a greengrocers in Birmingham until the internment, had terrible gas. Everything in Steinmaur’s cubicle reeked of cabbage farts and tobacco. He preferred the promenade, even in the rain.

  Standing at the fence with its high, inward slanting shelf of barbed wire, Steinmaur watched the pewter-tinted sea and sky and wondered if his petition would be granted. Four hours away by ferry there was freedom, or something approximating it. He would take the train from Liverpool back to London, find himself rooms then begin his search for the right person to tell what he knew, to trade his secret knowledge for a future.

  It certainly wasn’t Cuthbert from Special Branch or Major Hoyt or the hairy-faced Mrs Baldwin. They were nothing more than guardians at the gate. He needed someone with far more power and influence than they had to offer.

  He thought about the face that haunted him. Steinmaur, no longer able to continue his studies, had been working at the Berlin Asylum when he’d first seen the man. Handsome, dark-haired, large hazel eyes ringed with gold. Seven years ago; a lifetime. He’d been wearing a doctor’s white coat and he’d been speaking perfect, Austrian-accented German to his two companions. Steinmaur knew him only as Der Wahlmann, The Chooser, the man who selected the victims for Hoche’s experiments.

  Herr Doktor Alfred Hoche was the second man in the group he’d seen that day, a consulting psychiatrist at the asylum and author of The Granting of Permission for the Destruction of Worthless Life, Its Extent and Form. That vile little document was Hoche’s vicious credo, a justification for the murder and sterilisation of anyone he, or the Reich, deemed unfit to join in the Fuhrer’s thousand-year experiment.

  The other man with Hoche and The Chooser was equally recognisable: Reinhard Heydrich, the young hawk-faced, newly appointed leader of the SD, the National Socialist Party’s Secret Service, Himmler’s Wenig-Schatz, his Little Pet.

  Pushing grey water across the floor with his mop, Steinmaur had done his best to make himself invisible to the small group of men but he couldn’t help picking up smatterings of their conversation as they strolled slowly past. From what Steinmaur could tell, the three men were discussing a technological breakthrough in the business of extermination. One of Heydrich’s people had come up with a plan to use carbon monoxide gas chambers for the disposal of Hoche’s ‘worthless lives.’ A prototype gas chamber was to be set up at the asylum. Head bent over his mop, Steinmaur had felt the bile rise in his throat as they discussed the gas chamber’s hypothetical efficiency rate. They might just as well have been talking about garbage.

  The Chooser had made several comments about the proposed gas chamber and even brought up the possibility of making the devices mobile. Heydrich had been intrigued by the idea. Then the three had gone out of earshot. A week later Steinmaur had been transferred to the crematorium adjacent to the asylum; he never saw The Chooser again.

  Until four months ago, as he rotted away in the filth at the Huyton Camp on the outskirts of Liverpool.

  At first he didn’t believe it. The Chooser was in British uniform now, one of a dozen in a party of officials on a tour of the facilities. Keeping his distance, Steinmaur had followed the group as they meandered through the camp, watching the uniformed man. After half an hour there was no doubt in his mind – it was the same man. A little older now, traces of grey at the temples, the features harder with the passing of time, but the same.

  A handsome man in a white coat blandly discussing methods of mass murder with a high-ranking Nazi seven years before suddenly appears in the uniform of a Royal Medical Corps captain, taking a tour of an English internment camp. It didn’t seem possible but it was true.

  Instead of going to the authorities at Huyton, Steinmaur decided to hold his tongue. Who was going to listen to the absurd suspicions of an interned Jew? Better to bide his time until he had formulated some reasonable plan of action.

  In the end, of course, it all depended on the right explanation. Over the last few months he’d come up with half a dozen, none of which really fit the facts. It was barely possible that the man he’d seen at the asylum was a doppelgänger mirror image of the medical officer at Huyton, or that he was some sort of agent sent to Berlin by British intelligence years before the war, but both ideas were far-fetched.

  Even in fiction doppelgängers rarely shared the same profession and it was hard to believe the British had been so far-sighted about world events that they’d inserted a spy into the Nazi medical-military establishment almost a decade ago.

  Steinmaur eventually came to the conclusion that the simplest explanation was probably the most likely. Heydrich was now head of Nazi intelligence, a spymaster in the business of employing spies. Hoche was a psychiatrist and clearly a friend of Heydrich’s. The third man seemed to know both of the others well. Ergo, the third man, now wearing the uniform of a British medical officer, was both a psychiatrist and a spy. At the very least he was a doctor with a highly questionable past.

  It was madness of course, a nightmarish conundrum: he was an interned German Jew, officially under suspicion, and by decree a man not to be trusted. Who would believe his story about an English psychiatrist being a Nazi spy? No one, of course. Not unless he had proof or a sympathetic ear.

  Werner Steinmaur put his hands up onto the cold wire of the fence, running them along it until they touched the sharp, rusted barbs. He pushed the tip of his left index finger against one of the twisted hooks and watched as a small crimson bead of blood appeared, bright against the monochrome background of the sea and sky.

  He felt the sting
of salt spray bite into the tiny wound and he brought the finger to his mouth, sucking on it thoughtfully. He still had that small truth, even here in this godforsaken hole in the universe; Jew, German, or internee, when pricked, he bled like any other man. He was alive but that wasn’t enough. He wouldn’t wait for the tribunal to decide his fate. It was time to act.

  * * *

  Police Constable Swift found a tiny parking spot between two cars on Grafton Street and deftly inserted the Ruby into the narrow gap. Yawning, Morris Black climbed out of the Austin and stood waiting on the pavement while his assistant locked up the vehicle. It was strangely quiet. The detective frowned, then suddenly realised what was wrong – for the first time in weeks the sirens were quiet; there was no alert. The weather was damply cold and the sky was overcast but that wouldn’t stop the bombers. Perhaps they’d run out of ammunition.

  Black yawned again, hearing his jawbone crack. He hadn’t finished at Westminster Baths until the small hours of the morning and even then he’d found it difficult to sleep, his mind filled with morbid images of Jane Luffington’s waxy, disintegrating corpse, his nostrils filled with the reek of camphor. He’d had other thoughts as well, of Fay, of Katherine Copeland. Of the past and the future, the pointlessness of a life he knew was only half-lived. He’d even considered leaving the Yard, but only briefly. Right now it was the only thing that seemed to give him purpose. Perhaps that was more than he had any right to hope for in a world being torn apart by war.

  Leaving his flat shortly after eight o’clock this morning, he’d gone to a prearranged meeting with Liddell at the MI5 offices located midway between Boodles and Whites on St James’s Street only a few blocks away, just south of Piccadilly.

  The conference had been a short one and consisted of a single order from the head of B Division: although the exhumation and autopsy of the Wren motorcycle courier had revealed the first direct connection between Queer Jack and Ultra, Black was to ignore this and concentrate solely on Liddell’s phantom agent-in-place, presumably the man responsible for the two deaths at the Zoological Gardens. Liddell gruffly explained the abrupt change in assignment by telling Black that he was being pressured by Sir David Petrie, the newly appointed director general of MI5 and his hired ‘efficiency expert,’ the ubiquitous Mr Horrocks, who was making life miserable for everyone.