Aurore

by Graham Hurley

  ‘You’re German?’ he enquired.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Here on business?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not an easy thing to do, my friend. You’ve come from South America, perhaps? Brazil, maybe? Argentina?’

  Klimt didn’t reply. He wanted to know more about the picture.

  ‘Tell me about the artist,’ he said.

  ‘An Englishman. Andrew Prebble. He lives here in London. He’s too old for the war. His good fortune, my friend. And mine.’

  ‘It’s a life drawing? From a model?’

  ‘He did it from a photograph.’

  ‘I see.’ Klimt was staring at the picture again. ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘The picture?’

  ‘The woman.’

  There was a brief silence, broken by the parrot. Fuck the Boches. Khorrami tossed it a cashew nut and told it to behave. Then he took Klimt by the arm. Intimacy came naturally to this man and he walked Klimt back towards the big room at the front.

  ‘Let me sell you something else,’ he said. ‘You like landscapes? I have something very special.’

  They paused in front of the estuary watercolours. Klimt said they weren’t to his taste. Khorrami feigned disappointment. Something else, perhaps?

  Klimt shook his head.

  ‘The picture of the woman with the beret,’ he said. ‘Why The Stolen Hour?’

  Khorrami gazed at him for a moment, then stepped across to the desk where the receptionist was pretending not to listen.

  ‘Francesca? You want to explain this title to the gentleman?’

  ‘Of course, Mr Khorrami.’ She looked up at Klimt. That same melting smile. ‘I guess it’s that special time of the day. Late afternoon? Early evening? When everything feels just right? For both of you?’

  ‘Perfect.’ Khorrami was beaming down at her, his thick fingers resting lightly on her shoulder. Mine, he was telling Klimt. All mine.

  The phone rang. Francesca listened briefly to the caller, then whispered a name to Khorrami. He nodded, made his excuses and disappeared upstairs.

  Klimt had noticed a comments book lying on an occasional table in the corner of the room.

  ‘May I?’ He nodded at it.

  ‘Of course. It was there for the soirée last week. The artist who does the portraits was our guest of honour. Andrew. Mr Prebble.’

  Klimt began to leaf through the book. There were pages of comments, most of them effusive. The evening must have drawn hundreds of guests. ‘Peace in our time’ read one comment. ‘The face is the window to the soul’ another. Then, on the last page, he noticed a third, fuller hand, black ink.

  A tribute to your untiring genius, mon vieux, and your good taste in women, as well as fine art. Comme toujours. Roly.

  Klimt looked up. The receptionist was on the phone again, her back turned. Roly was Guy Liddell. Roly was the Director. Roly was the spy-catcher who appeared never to have heard of Hélène Lafosse, of the Château de Neaune, of Billy Angell. Klimt toyed briefly with removing the page and folding it into his pocket but decided against it. Commit nothing to paper. Keep everything in your head.

  Keep everything in your head. One last look at the canvas, he thought, and then I’ll go.

  *

  It was Ruth who interceded on Hélène’s behalf. She’d earned the trust of the SS Über-Lagerkommandant who helped run the camp. She’d knocked on her office door an hour after she’d taken her lunch. At that time of day, she was close to being human.

  ‘It’s about prisoner Lafosse,’ Ruth announced.

  ‘Ja?’

  ‘She needs company. She’s depressed. I’ve seen it before. It’s a medical condition.’

  ‘I have orders to keep her in her cell. It’s for her own good. She won’t be with us long. A week at the most.’

  ‘Really?’ This had never happened before. ‘Why?’

  ‘I have no idea. These kinds of orders, you ask no questions.’

  The Über-Lagerkommandant looked up. The interview was plainly over. Ruth hadn’t finished.

  ‘Lafosse is a danger where she is,’ she said. ‘That’s my opinion.’

  ‘A danger to whom?’

  ‘To herself. Depression plays tricks with the mind. If you want to keep her safe let me take care of her.’

  ‘You think you can do that?’

  ‘I can try,’ Ruth risked a smile. Safe was a word that mattered in circles like these. Play safe. Stay safe.

  Within the hour Hélène had been released from solitary confinement. Ruth walked her across the parade ground to ‘C’ hut where she lived. The Kommandant’s office had arranged for the temporary reallocation of a prisoner who slept in the bunk above Ruth.

  Hélène’s arrival in the hut caused a stir. This was a woman in civilian clothes. A woman with a stylish beret, for God’s sake. And she wore no badge. Ruth had done her best to pave the way. She said she’d talked to the newcomer. Hélène was French. She lived in Paris. She was a nice woman, a little quiet, a little afraid. Ruth had no idea why she’d been arrested in the first place but she wouldn’t be with them long. Make the most of her. Make her welcome.

  That night, Hélène found herself the centre of attention. She was grateful for countless little acts of kindness but she had no appetite for either food or conversation. Later, long after the lights had gone out, she heard a whisper in the darkness and rolled over to find herself staring at a face just inches away. Ruth appeared to be asleep.

  Hélène had noticed the woman before. She was tall, and even thinner than the rest of the prisoners. She wore a violet-coloured badge on her striped uniform. Ruth said she was deeply religious, a woman of the cloth. She’d been arrested by the Gestapo after preaching a street sermon outside Goebbels’ birthplace in Rheydt. The sermon had been about the iniquities of propaganda.

  Now she wanted to warn Hélène about the countless ways this place could kill her. Never upset the guards, especially the Ukrainians. Never trust any meat, especially in summer. And never stray into the forbidden zone.

  ‘Forbidden zone?’

  ‘By the wire. Fifteen metres. The guards are in the tower. They get bored. They’ll shoot you.’

  Hélène nodded, said she understood. The woman was staring at her. Huge eyes in the darkness. She didn’t want to end this conversation. She had lots of other things to tell her, special secrets that would keep her safe. Hélène said another time. She was grateful but she was also very tired. Please leave me alone.

  The woman vanished. Hélène rolled over, her face against the wall. She was using the beret to cushion her head against the prickles of the straw through the thin mattress. She closed her eyes. She wanted no more of this. Try very hard, and she could still catch the faintest scent of cigars.

  38

  They came for the old man at dawn. Billy, already awake, heard a murmur of voices outside. Then the sound of the door opening at the far end of the hut and the stamp of boots on the wooden floor. One of the guards had a flashlight, sweeping from bunk to bunk until it settled on Malin. He appeared not to be surprised. He got up without protest. The footsteps receded. The door closed. Silence again.

  Roll call was at seven. The filth on the window was pebbled with rain. A pair of orderlies appeared, shouting at the prisoners, holding the door open as they stumbled out into the murk. With the orderlies was another man whom Billy hadn’t seen before. He was wearing an SS uniform and he spoke a little English.

  ‘Engell?’ Billy nodded. He was all but alone in the hut now. ‘You come with me.’

  Billy followed him to the door. Outside, the other huts were emptying fast. On the parade ground prisoners were forming themselves into untidy ranks, hut by hut. Billy recognised a face or two from his own hut and made to join them. Then came a tug on his arm.

  ‘This way, ja?’

  The SS man pointed to a distant stand of pine trees. They appeared to be outside the wire. The rain was heavier now. Behind him he could hear a guard bellowing at a prisoner.
He wanted to look behind him but something told him not to. With a growing sense of dread, he splashed through the puddles towards the wire.

  Two sentries guarded the gate. Billy stepped through. On the other side were the trees.

  ‘The path. To the right.’

  Billy spotted the path. There were wheel marks in the mud. Ahead, through the trees, he glimpsed a low brick building. A chimney soared above it. No smoke.

  ‘Now left.’

  A narrower path. No wheel marks. He trudged for maybe a hundred metres, his head down, trying to shield his face from the rain. Branches were lashing above his head, the forest bending and groaning in the wind from the east.

  ‘Here.’

  Billy stopped. Looked up. A line of wooden gibbets had been built among the trees. There were crude ‘T’ shapes maybe three times his height. From either arm of the ‘T’ hung a body. Heads lolled at odd angles. Tongues protruded between parted lips. Eyes gazed sightlessly into nowhere. And with each new gust of wind, the bodies swayed. Billy stared up at them. It was beyond comprehension. He couldn’t take it in.

  ‘This one.’

  The SS officer was pointing to the left. Billy didn’t want to look, didn’t want to know. It had to be Abel Malinowski. And it was. Billy stared at his sunken face, at the gape of his toothless mouth, at the faded yellow star pinned to his thin chest.

  ‘Roll call takes an hour,’ the officer said. ‘And so we wait.’

  *

  At Ravensbrück, the rain had stopped and the first fingers of sunlight were creeping slowly towards the camp. Roll call was over and the prisoners were preparing for the long trudge to the factories beyond the wire. This was to be Hélène’s first day of proper work. The women in the hut had prepared her for it. Ten hours repairing uniforms for the Eastern Front. An entire day bent over a looted sewing machine, darning bullet holes, mending tears in the heavy serge fabric after a bayonet thrust, preparing the grey tunics for yet another luckless soldier. Hélène had expressed a polite interest in these accounts. She knew the women meant to be helpful but she’d never much cared for sewing.

  The prisoners had formed themselves into a long file. The camp gate was half a mile away. Hélène still had her beret but she’d hidden it at roll call in case the guards took it away. As the line of prisoners began to shuffle forward, she could feel it tucked into the waistband of her skirt. A lone splash of colour in this long grey caterpillar, she waited for her chance.

  It came minutes later. They’d left the huts behind them. Ahead lay the main gate. To the right, no more than thirty metres away, was the fence. The fence was high, topped with barbed wire. Sentries patrolled outside and more soldiers manned the guard towers. Hélène could see insulators on the sturdy fence posts and the electric wires strung between. Fifteen metres, she told herself. The forbidden zone.

  For whatever reason, the column of prisoners had come to a halt. This appeared to be routine. Women turned to talk to each other. One of them took a look at Hélène’s face and asked her whether she was all right.

  ‘Yes,’ Hélène said.

  Above the camp, the clouds were parting. She tilted her face to the sun, felt the sudden warmth on her skin. She had the beret in her hand now. She was smiling. She was glad it was nearly over. Then she started to run.

  *

  Billy, soaked, was numb. It felt as if he’d been standing here among the dripping trees for most of his life. Every turn of his head, every attempt to avert his gaze, every bid to look at anything but the hanging line of bodies had prompted a word of command from the officer. Look at the old man. Look what you’ve done. Just look. Now he wanted to know what happened next.

  ‘Next? We go back.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There,’ he jerked a finger towards the building with the chimney. ‘Every day we have bodies we must burn. You will help with this one.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You. Soon the old man will be stiff. Easier to deal with…’ he smiled, ‘… ja?’

  Billy closed his eyes. All he could think about was the mortuary at Bristol Infirmary. More broken bodies. Irene. Countless others. He couldn’t do it. He knew he couldn’t. He’d done his best. He’d tried to play the part. But in the end he’d failed. There was no more room in his life for any of this madness. It was over.

  The officer studied him. Water dripped from the peak of his cap. He appeared to have expected this moment.

  ‘You want to talk to someone? Someone with better English than me?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Kommen Sie.’

  They retraced their steps through the trees. The sentry let them back into the camp. Roll call was over and Billy could see the prisoners shuffling into columns for the march to work. Ahead lay the camp gates and the guard house. The officer told Billy to wait outside. He didn’t appear to think he was worth keeping an eye on. He stood alone in the rain.

  At length the officer reappeared and gestured for Billy to follow him. A corridor led to an office at the end. The office was bare: two filing cabinets, a desk and a big map of the camp on the wall behind. At the desk sat a figure Billy recognised. SS uniform. And a faint smile when he saw the Blöd armband. Agnès, Billy thought. And the Spanish couple. And the soldiers laughing in the truck.

  ‘You’re ready, Mr Engell?’ Huber had a pad at his elbow. Billy nodded. This man was waiting to take his confession. He’d probably been here for hours.

  ‘I’ve been lying,’ Billy whispered. ‘None of what I said is true.’

  39

  Klimt left London next morning, Ursula Barton driving him down to Poole for the flying boat service back to Lisbon. Klimt sat beside her and they passed the journey speaking in their own language, conversing like old friends. Ursula, as he had suspected, came from a village in the Black Forest. She’d married an Englishman before the war. When he’d turned out to be a bad lot she’d been obliged to send him packing and find herself a job. Her native German had, after considerable vetting, enabled her to secure a secretarial post at MI5 and she quickly won a promotion to find herself working under diplomatic cover at the British embassy in The Hague. She’d been there when Walther Schellenberg, a rising star in the late thirties, had pulled the Venlo stunt.

  Klimt knew all about Venlo, a town on the Dutch/German border. Two British military officers had been lured into a trap and kidnapped. The operation, meticulously planned, had come from Schellenberg’s fertile brain and the results of the subsequent interrogation had ended up on desks in Berlin. The very boldness of the operation had won the admiration of Hitler. He loved giving the British a black eye and young Walther Schellenberg was on his way.

  ‘The Führer used to call him his “Benjamin”.’ Klimt was smiling. ‘In the Abwehr, we used to keep an eye on him. He was exotic. He was an original. The old bruisers couldn’t stand him, of course. A man who didn’t smoke, scarcely drank, had no taste for a brawl? Unthinkable.’

  They parted in good humour at the pontoon in Poole Harbour. Within the hour Klimt was airborne over the English Channel, anticipating the moment when the bony ribs of the Brittany coast would appear beneath them. The flight was full, a dowdy mixture of military personnel, businessmen and other figures in unremarkable suits who were probably fellow spies. Klimt was sitting beside a lean American Major who, thankfully, had no interest in making conversation. He’d guessed already that Klimt was a German and had retired behind the pages of Picture Post.

  Erwin Busch, Schellenberg’s young attaché, was waiting at the flying boat terminus beside the Tagus. He’d spotted Klimt’s name on the passenger manifest. The Chief was in town for a series of meetings and would be staying overnight at the embassy. This evening he’d proposed an outing to the casino in Estoril, down the coast. Erwin had booked a private room where they could talk. Afterwards, if he cared to, Klimt might gamble.

  Gamble? Klimt stood in his bedroom at the embassy. The view over the city was, as promised, sensational. The flying boat had finishe
d refuelling and was taxiing slowly into the river for the next leg of its flight down to the coast of West Africa. He watched it come to a halt while the pilot ran through the last of his checks. Then it began to move, faster and faster, tugging a long ‘V’ across the blue waters of the estuary until the pilot hauled it into the air. The big white bird performed a graceful turn to the south before Klimt lost it in the haze. I should be on that plane, he thought. With Hélène.

  Erwin drove Klimt to Estoril. The casino stood at the top of a carefully tended stretch of grass that ran down to the waterfront. Erwin assured Klimt that Estoril was a party town. Lots of women. Lots of businessmen on the make. Lots of locals peddling worthless information to anyone they thought might be a spy.

  Schellenberg was waiting for them in the private suite overlooking the gambling floor. He must have been in the sun because his face was lightly tanned and he seemed relaxed. He sent Erwin away for drinks. A glass of white wine for himself. Bottles of Sagres for Erwin and Klimt.

  ‘So tell me…’ he said, nodding Klimt into a chair.

  Klimt did his best. He’d met with a senior diplomat. His name was Passmore. He had the ear of the mighty.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said there might be a chance for talks.’

  ‘For peace?’

  ‘For the fighting to stop.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He told me unconditional surrender.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Nothing. Either we lay down our arms or the war goes on.’

  Schellenberg nodded. None of this appeared to come as a surprise. Erwin was back with a tray of drinks. Klimt studied his glass of lager. Then his head came up again.

  ‘Madame Lafosse.’ He was looking at Schellenberg. ‘When do I get to see her?’

  ‘Sadly, you won’t.’

  ‘Won’t?’

  ‘No. Madame Lafosse died this morning. She appears to have taken her own life. It’s not uncommon in the camps.’