Legacy of War

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Yes it is,’ Isidore replied. ‘You can’t put a lion on trial.’

  ‘Enough!’ Gerhard said. ‘Konrad is my brother. I was his victim. I have the right to decide how we deal with him.’ He looked at the other two. ‘Do you agree?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Isidore said.

  Saffron hesitated, then sighed, releasing all the tension from her face and shoulders.

  ‘Of course, darling – you’re right.’

  ‘Good. Then my decision is that we should try to find a way of bringing Konrad to justice. I want him in a court of law, so that the world can learn what he did. Because it wasn’t just me. He was there from the moment his hero Heydrich set up the death camps, right up until the final victims died. I want him to be confronted by his evil. And then, if a judge sentences him to death, yes, by all means let him be killed.’

  Isidore nodded in agreement. ‘Well said. But you should both be aware that any trial is going to involve allegations about him that might cause embarrassment and even shame for both your families. The prosecution would make terrible accusations against Konrad, but his defence might drag you into this too.’

  ‘That’s a risk I’m willing to take,’ said Gerhard.

  ‘Even if you have to stand in the dock and tell the world the story you told us today?’

  ‘Even then.’

  ‘Very well, I am in a position to assist this legal process. My son Joshua went out to Israel in ’47. A year later he volunteered for service in the war against the Arab League. He works for the government now, in the Central Institute for Coordination.’

  Saffron burst out laughing. The change was as drastic and unexpected as the African sun blazing through the clouds after a torrential storm. A puzzled frown crossed Isidore’s face.

  ‘I don’t understand – why is that so funny?’

  ‘It’s just that the Special Operations Executive was officially known in Whitehall as either the Joint Technical Board, or the Inter-Service Research Bureau. The names made a bunch of saboteurs and secret agents sound like pen-pushers. Something tells me the Central Institute for Coordination might be the same kind of outfit.’

  Isidore shrugged. ‘I cannot say. But you may not be entirely wrong. So, we are agreed that Konrad von Meerbach will be brought to justice. My guess is that he is already on the very long list of men that Israel wishes to punish. To be honest, I don’t know whether our infant state yet possesses the means to track down the men who tried to exterminate our race. But I dare say Joshua will have a more informed opinion. I will contact him and explain the situation to him. If you tell me your itinerary, I will ask him to meet you somewhere along the way.

  ‘Let us stop talking business and have lunch. Claudia has been preparing a feast for us. She is longing to hear all your news, Gerhard. And Saffron, I must warn you, my beautiful, sweet wife is one of the world’s great interrogators. There is not a scrap of information about your babies she will not soon know.’

  ‘Do you know what I see when I look at you, H-P?’ said Sir Jeremy Cummings, MP, turning his head towards the tall, impeccably tailored, blue-eyed man in his early thirties strolling beside him through St James’s Park.

  Hans-Peter Klammer had been Cummings’s guest for lunch at the Carlton Club, at No. 69 St James’s Street, the spiritual home of upper-class Conservative politics in London. The two men had got on well. Now Klammer gave the relaxed, confident smile, just one perfectly judged degree short of smugness or arrogance, with which he befriended men and seduced women.

  ‘I dread to think!’ He gave a light laugh that put a smile on Cummings’s face too. ‘Please, enlighten me.’

  ‘I see the future,’ Cummings said. ‘I see peace between our nations. I see a better, peaceful, prosperous Europe.’

  Klammer looked at him quizzically. ‘You see all that . . . just by looking at me?’

  His English was perfect. His light German accent was as far removed from the harsh guttural tones of all the villainous Nazis in the war films that still filled London’s cinemas as a light Strauss waltz from Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’.

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ said Cummings, letting himself be teased. Then his face took on a more serious cast. ‘Look here, old boy. Times are changing. Without India, the Empire’s a busted flush. Britain’s future lies within Europe, a united Europe, run for everyone’s good . . .’

  ‘By agreeable fellows like you and me . . .?’

  ‘Precisely. Put the war behind us and work together, that’s the way of the future. This new European Coal and Steel Community that just set up shop in Brussels is only the start. We’ll be in a United States of Europe soon, mark my words. There are men just like us in Paris and Rome, preparing to lead that union. And you are just the sort of chap we’re looking for to join us.’

  ‘A German without any blood on his hands?’

  ‘If you want to put it like that . . . yes.’

  ‘Well, it’s an interesting thought, and we must talk about it properly one day. But for now . . .’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I must get back to work. I can’t be late.’ He smiled again. ‘German punctuality, and all that.’

  Klammer thanked Cummings for lunch, bade him goodbye and kept walking past Buckingham Palace to Belgrave Square, where the newly created Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany as it was commonly known, had recently opened its Consulate-General. His title there was that of Cultural Attaché, and he was charged with using his social skills to remind the British of the civilised values of German culture. Or, as one of his seniors at the Foreign Ministry had dryly remarked, ‘Make them forget the Blitz and remember Bach and Beethoven.’

  Klammer had given his boss the same delightful smile he had bestowed on Cummings, and regarded him privately with the same emotion: utter, withering contempt.

  When he got back to the office, Klammer’s secretary, Steffi, handed him a letter, sent from Germany.

  ‘Your mother has written again,’ she said. ‘I recognise her handwriting. She must be so proud of you. I’d love to meet her.’

  ‘One day, perhaps . . .’ Klammer said.

  In truth, his mother was dead, her body incinerated in the hellish firestorm created by the Allied bombing of Hamburg in 1943. It was an act of murder that Hans-Peter Klammer would not forgive as long as he had breath in his body.

  The letter he held in his hand bore the handwriting of a well-educated woman of a certain age, and was phrased in maternal language, but its intent was very different. So when, among the wittering about Uncle Horst and Auntie Denise, Klammer came across the line, ‘An Englishwoman called Saffron Courtney Meerbach has been the centre of attention in our neighbourhood,’ his eyes sharpened.

  ‘She’s married to Gerhard von Meerbach,’ the message went on. ‘Do you remember? That fighter ace who was disgraced when he was accused of being a traitor. We’re all so curious about her. Since you’re in London, you must find out all you can. I want to know everything!’

  The men for whom those words had been written commanded Klammer’s loyalty now, just as they had through all the years when, as an undercover agent for the Nazi Party’s intelligence agency, the SD, he had faithfully reported every scrap of dissent against the Führer that he observed within the Foreign Service, right up to the fall of Berlin.

  Klammer got down to work and began by calling a press cuttings agency. He presented his credentials and explained that he was contacting them on behalf of his country’s Stern magazine.

  ‘They are working on a profile of a German citizen called Gerhard von Meerbach,’ Klammer explained. ‘He is the heir to one of my country’s largest industrial fortunes, and he happens to have married a British lady by the name of Saffron Courtney. Naturally, German readers will be fascinated by this love between two former enemies. So I wonder if you could possibly give me copies of everything you have on her. Bill me privately. Stern will reimburse me in due course.’

  Within a couple of days, a br
own envelope arrived in the post containing carefully labelled and dated cuttings of newspaper and magazine articles in which Saffron Courtney had been mentioned. The majority were dried-out, yellowing snippets that dated back to the pre-war years. Saffron’s name appeared in one list after another of Bright Young Things who had attended high society balls and country house parties.

  Trivial nonsense, Klammer thought, dismissively. But then he came across an item whose author declared that, ‘Not content with dazzling Mayfair and Belgravia, Miss Courtney has been taking Oxford by storm since beginning her studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Those in the know have anointed her the Zuleika Dobson of her generation.’

  Ach so, the social butterfly has a brain.

  With the outbreak of war, Miss Courtney disappeared from view until her name flickered briefly into view, buried in a long, formal list of recipients of medals for gallantry. She had been awarded the George Medal, the civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross. It was the last cutting in the file.

  That can’t be right, Klammer thought. A beautiful young heroine wins the highest possible civilian award for courage, it should be perfect propaganda. Where are all the front-page headlines? Where are the magazine covers?

  He called the agency to check whether they had missed anything, but was told, ‘No, there was nothing else. Not a dicky-bird.’

  Sometimes one learns as much from the dog that does not bark as the one that does. The intelligence officer in Hans-Peter Klammer understood that someone had wanted Miss Courtney kept well hidden. And that someone had the power to say ‘No’ to the press.

  So what were you up to, my dear?

  Klammer had collected the cuttings, put them into order and was about to replace them in the envelope when he spotted something. The envelope wasn’t empty. There was one last cutting, tucked away at the back, that had somehow not come out with the others.

  Klammer pulled it out. This piece of paper was not old and yellow. It was dated a couple of weeks earlier. It showed Saffron Courtney Meerbach, as ravishing as ever, leaving a restaurant with her husband and people whom the reporter described as ‘old wartime comrades’.

  When Klammer read the names of those comrades his face broke into a smile. Now he knew why Saffron Courtney had been kept out of the papers. Hans-Peter Klammer had already informed his handler in Germany that he was making good progress. He confidently expected to compile a thorough dossier on Saffron Courtney Meerbach. Now he had to discover what she had been doing as a British secret agent. And that required a roundabout approach.

  There was no point trying to get anything out of the other people in the newspaper photograph. Former SOE operatives were fiercely loyal to their old organisation. They would never tell a stranger, particularly not a German, about a wartime comrade. Any approach to them would lead to Courtney Meerbach being tipped off that someone was investigating her.

  But Klammer knew that SOE had not been popular with the rest of the military and intelligence establishment. The professional spies in the Secret Intelligence Service had looked down on the Baker Street crowd as rank amateurs who wasted resources and got in the way of conventional intelligence gathering. The army’s senior officers were similarly disdainful about the oddballs and foreigners whom SOE appeared to favour as its recruits, and resented every penny of its budget.

  Klammer needed to find someone in the British Ministry of Defence, or the Foreign Office, within which the SIS theoretically operated, who would be willing to pass on gossip from days gone by. His new ally Sir Jeremy Cummings sat on the House of Commons Select Committee for Foreign Affairs. He might know the right person to speak to. But, Klammer thought, he might need a little persuasion to divulge such information.

  He thought for a while about Cummings, and then about his wife, Lady Anabel, the daughter of the Marquis of Daventry. She was a plain woman, with the bitter expression of a woman who knew that her husband had only married her for her title, her money and her father’s high society connections. Any man who had her for a wife would surely be looking for his amusements elsewhere.

  Klammer sent a telegram to Germany:

  I HAVE FOUND A SPLENDID AU PAIR JOB IN LONDON FOR COUSIN HEIDI. BUT SHE MUST COME QUICKLY, BEFORE SOMEONE ELSE TAKES IT!

  Two days later, Klammer was at London Airport to meet the British European Airways flight from Cologne. A beautiful girl with her hair tied into long, blonde pigtails emerged into the Arrivals area, caught his eye and ran towards him, throwing her arms wide to hug him, squealing, ‘Uncle Hans!’

  ‘My dearest Heidi,’ he said, catching her and planting a chaste kiss on her forehead. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m so, so happy to be here!’ Heidi exclaimed, her cornflower eyes wide with innocent excitement.

  ‘Well, come with me, and I’ll tell you all my news.’

  Heidi looked for all the world like a warm-hearted German Mädchen of eighteen or nineteen at most. She was, in fact, a tough, unrepentant, thirty-year-old prostitute, with blood as cold as a viper’s. The Führer, it was said, was the only man she had ever loved, and one of the few she had never slept with. In his absence, she had loyally served the Reich as a mistress to a series of high-ranking Nazis. Heidi was even said to have been the last person to have seen Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann before he disappeared on 1 May 1945, although, as the story went, ‘She wasn’t looking him in the eye at the time.’

  Now she ran a wildly profitable cathouse in Hamburg, but still undertook assignments for the sake of the cause. When Klammer explained the situation, Heidi had shrugged and said, ‘If you introduce us on Friday, he’ll tell you anything you want by Monday.’ Then she’d looked at him and said, ‘Come on, Hansi, let’s do it for old times’ sake. You know we’re both as bad as each other.’

  Klammer introduced Heidi to Cummings at a performance of The Marriage of Figaro at the Royal Opera House. Lady Anabel was there. Before the curtain went up and during the interval, Heidi ignored Cummings completely. Instead she charmed his wife, hanging on her every word and laughing sweetly at her slightest sign of wit. For his part, Cummings could hardly keep himself from drooling, becoming ever more frantic as Heidi ignored his increasingly desperate attempts to catch her attention.

  Towards the end of interval, the two women went off to powder their noses. Cummings grabbed Klammer’s arm, pulling close like a co-conspirator, and in a low but desperate voice said, ‘I’m not going to beat about the bush, old man. That niece of yours, acting like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Is she as sweet as she pretends or as randy as she looks?’

  ‘Hmm . . .’ Klammer murmured. ‘A century ago, a man who asked an uncle such a question about his niece would have found himself fighting a duel.’

  ‘Yes, well, that was then and this is now. So tell me straight, is that little Fraülein fair game or not?’

  ‘Well, it is not for me to make decisions on her behalf. I am not her father, and she is twenty-one—’

  ‘Really? Not sure if that’s a relief or a disappointment.’

  ‘In any case, she is old enough to make her own decisions . . . And I am old enough to know better than to interfere in another man’s marriage.’

  ‘Thanks, old man, much appreciated.’

  Cummings made his pass later that evening, as they were all walking between the opera house and the restaurant where they were having a late dinner. As they went to bed that night, he told his wife he would be away all weekend on constituency business, barely bothering to hide his true intentions, which Lady Anabel had plainly worked out for herself. At nine on Saturday morning, he picked up Heidi, who was waiting outside Klammer’s flat, and drove her away to a cottage on a friend’s country estate.

  ‘How was it?’ Klammer asked her, when Heidi reported back on Sunday evening.

  ‘Oh, you know English gentlemen. They’re only interested in boys or beatings . . . or both.’

  ‘And Cummings?’

  ‘Beatings. I spent my week
end whipping an Englishman black and blue.’ She smiled, kissed Klammer on the cheek and said, ‘I can’t thank you enough.’

  ‘So, did he tell you anything?’

  ‘Oh yes. He knew exactly who Saffron Courtney was. He’d known her when she was a debutante before the war, and had heard about her during it. His exact description of her was, “Beautiful, deadly, but nothing but ice between her thighs.”’

  ‘Charming. Anything more detailed?’

  ‘No, but he said he knew a man who’d be able to help.’

  Sir Leonard Minturn was a veteran British diplomat, with strong connections to the intelligence world.

  ‘Happy to help,’ he said, when Klammer called him. ‘Young Cummings has nothing but good to say about you. Worth keeping in with him, by the way. He’ll be Prime Minister one day, you mark my words.’

  A little more conversation and a stiff gin later, Minturn got down to business.

  ‘There was an old boy at SIS called Brown, been around since the Stone Age. He’d set up a spy ring in Germany before the first war and he was still going strong when the second show began.’

  ‘They hadn’t retired him?’ Klammer asked.

  His contact shrugged. ‘I dare say he’d been taken off the books officially. But one still saw him about the place, and he was said to spend a lot of time at the Cabinet Office, too. Now our Mr Brown was one of those sly old boys who still have an eye for a pretty girl, you know the type, I’m sure.’

  ‘I have every intention of becoming one,’ Klammer said.

  His contact laughed. ‘Don’t we all! Anyway, Brown once let it slip to a chum of mine that the two most beautiful women he had ever recruited were a mother and daughter. And I reckon the daughter was this Saffron Courtney woman.’

  ‘Really? What makes you say that?’

  ‘Because we had our eye on her too.’

  ‘On account of her pretty face?’

  ‘That was part of it. The other was her war record.’