A Thousand Suns (39 page)

Rises in the east, sets in the west
.

West was where he was headed. He started to swim, in his heart knowing the cold would get him before long.

Chapter 59

Burning the Bodies

5 a.m., 30 April, Berlin

It was easy to lose track of the time, down there, down in that dimly lit warren of concrete rooms. For some inexplicable reason he had thought it was five o’clock in the evening, not five o’clock in the morning.

He looked up at the early-morning sky. It was a pale grey, and, for once, it was silent in Berlin. The Russian artillery was sleeping. The featureless clouds above were letting go of a light drizzle of rain, and delicate drops, like cold pinpricks, touched his cheeks. He closed his eyes and felt the raindrops on his eyelids and tasted the still, cold, morning air. It felt good, to drift away from this messy end to things, if only for a few moments, to savour something as simple as the coolness of rain on his face.

He heard the sound of boots scraping on wet concrete. Someone coughed awkwardly, dispelling the quiet, and he was immediately back where he would rather not be.

Hauser opened his eyes.

He stood in the small courtyard beyond the western emergency exit. Goebbels, Frau Jüng and a few of the remaining staff officers looked on as four of Hitler’s personal guards brought the bodies outside. They carried them out on white, linen bed-sheets - improvised stretchers. He watched in silence as they carried both bodies across the courtyard to a corner where the brick walls were at their highest. The bodyguards placed both of them on the ground with surprisingly little ceremony or deference; almost dropped them, like two sacks of grain.

There were no words spoken, and Hauser noticed very little grief displayed on the grim line of faces watching both Adolf and Eva Hitler being doused with petrol.

The sheets had fallen aside as the bodies had settled and both Hitler’s and Eva’s heads had emerged. Eva looked asleep. Her face looked peaceful, as if the cyanide had been mercifully quick. By contrast, Hitler’s face looked like that of a man who had died badly, violently. Blood coated the right side of it, from a bullet wound to his temple, and his mouth was pulled back in a vicious snarl of agony.

Otto Gunsch, Hitler’s adjutant, brought out the body of the German Shepherd, Blondi, and placed it carefully beside them with a tenderness than had not been afforded to the two bodies. Gunsch, who had the impassive face of a brutal and ruthless killer, kneeled down and stroked the dog’s head gently. He muttered a few words too, before stepping back as the last of the fuel was emptied over the three bodies.

Hauser rubbed his eyes tiredly.

The communication from the Americans had arrived only three hours ago, at two in the morning. That was when everything had come tumbling down for Hitler and, Hauser reflected, for himself too. The preceding hours, however, since the telegram from President Truman had arrived and confirmed that he agreed to the terms . . . they had been the happiest of Hauser’s life.

He had shared several glasses of brandy with Hitler and Eva and his three personal secretaries. Only two or three of the officers in the bunker had joined in; the others had stayed warily away from the sudden and unplanned eruption of joy and celebrations.

It had been an impromptu party, of sorts, in the map room.

Hitler had announced to the few present that the war was over, and that the Americans had announced they were to step in to help what was left of their army expel the Russians from Berlin. The ladies, although bemused by this announcement, had cheered gleefully and raised their glasses, and Hitler had sought out Hauser with his eyes.

He had winked at him, like a friendly uncle.

They had sung along to some records, and Hitler had talked to Eva about urgent things that would need to be done first thing in the morning. He had cornered Hauser before he prepared to turn in for the night, as the party was winding down, and embraced him without warning.

He had let Hauser go and patted him awkwardly on the shoulder, as if embarrassed by the emotional gesture. He had said one last thing to Hauser as he held the door of the map room open and Eva brushed past him into the passage, heading for their quarters.

‘There’s a lot both you and I will need to do tomorrow. We have a busy time ahead. Get some sleep, Karl.’

Bormann stepped forward and produced a cigarette lighter. He lit one end of a rolled-up cone of paper. He waited until the flames had firmly taken hold of it before stepping back and tossing it onto the bodies. The flames engulfed Hitler, his wife and his dog, with a dull
thump
, and Hauser felt the warmth on his face from the other side of the courtyard.

The second communication from President Truman had been a simple statement that Hitler should surrender now, or suffer dire consequences. There had been no mention at all of the previous communication. And twenty minutes after Hitler had been handed the telegram, he had bid farewell to his staff and retired to his personal rooms with Eva. As Gunsch had stood guard outside, it was clear to all that the final moment had arrived. Hauser had heard many of them muttering that they were surprised that Hitler had left it so long, wondering what miracle it was that the Führer had been doggedly hanging on for. And then the muted conversations amongst the officers had swiftly moved on to the subject of the breakout that they were planning.

They all heard the single shot fired inside Eva’s bedroom.

Hauser had felt strangely immobilised by events, unable to think or do anything, other than follow the others outside shortly after the deaths had been confirmed, as they prepared to have the bodies promptly destroyed.

He watched as the flames caught the dog’s fur, and the animal seemed to shrink before his eyes.

Hauser wondered what happened next for him.

Some of those here planned on leaving; others, fearful of the fighting around the Chancellery, were for staying. Most of them appeared locked into a state of indecision. Perhaps they were to just wait until someone from the outside world knocked on the door of the bunker and told them the war was finally over.

To Hauser they looked pitiful. Goebbels, Bormann, the staff officers, even Hitler’s bodyguards. They looked like a group of children left unattended, unsupervised for too long - lost, confused, and those in uniform like little boys playing at being soldiers.

Hauser shook his head with disgust. Even Hitler, ultimately, had disappointed him.

In the last few days he had begun to see how weak and frail the man was. Only last night as they celebrated, had he returned, briefly, to the powerful and charismatic figure he once was. But even then, his jokes and his stories had solicited tired, long-suffering smiles from those around him. He had become like the drunken, awkward party guest that everyone wished would leave.

The flames had engulfed Hitler’s head, and now, amidst the popping and hissing, he imagined he could hear the man’s mewling cry, like Schenkelmann’s. Pathetic.

The Jew’s research notes and Hauser’s project data for the bomb were in a box in the bunker. That was a box of incredibly valuable information. And, he reflected, he too was going to be valuable.

His work could go on. His knowledge and his skills would be of extreme interest to the Russians, of that he was sure.

When they arrived, all of these people standing with him out in the courtyard and watching the flames would be unimportant, superfluous. He could well imagine the first Russians to arrive being trigger-happy, hungry to exact a little vengeance upon the first faces they stumbled across.

It would be important, he decided, to lie low, to remain unfound until their intelligence officers arrived at the scene later on, and then . . .
then
, he could make himself known, and humbly offer his services.

While every other face in the courtyard remained impassive, emotionless and still, there was a smile spreading across his.

Hauser could see in the time ahead, after this war was brought to a conclusion, that there were going to be great opportunities for a man like him. He turned away from the flames and headed back inside the bunker to collect his box of notes. Those papers were going to be his passport out of here when the Russians came.

Chapter 60

Decision

He studied their motel rooms from across the parking lot. There had been a light on in one of them until just now. He looked at his watch - it was approaching four in the morning. He would love to be tucked up in bed like them, but there was some thinking to do and perhaps a final job to be done.

It was decision time.

As he stood silently in the darkness, lit only faintly by the flickering neon light outside the diner, he allowed his mind to wander, to start gathering up all the loose ends into a manageable knot; loose ends that spanned over sixty years, all of his professional life, in fact.

His mind drifted back to the end of that last meeting with Truman. There had been an almost tangible sense of relief in the conference room as Hitler’s implied deadline came and went. Hours had passed and nothing had happened. Then Truman drafted a second, cautiously worded telegram to Hitler, calling for his surrender once more. It was over.

Then the work,
his
work, began.

The worst of it had all been a long time ago, the killings. Some of them were still fresh in his mind. He sometimes thought he saw their faces in a crowd, or on the evening news, or at least faces that reminded him of them; the faces of those innocent witnesses whose deaths he had calmly ordered.

The whole thing had been a nasty, unpleasant business, but a necessary job that had been passed his way to organise. In the weeks that had followed that meeting at the White House in the last days of the war, in fact for several months afterwards, he had been put in sole charge of the hastily assembled little department as it went about cleaning up many of the scattered breadcrumbs.

It had needed to be done quickly with the minimum of fuss, and certainly without the unnecessary involvement of any other departments. The President had decided that a small, ring-fenced mini-agency with a lean head-count of dependable, well-remunerated and experienced agents was the perfect tool for the job. The breadcrumbs had needed tidying up, therefore it was he, and his little task force, who’d had to ensure that all seventeen of the civilian witnesses simply vanished, with no one left to make a noise.

There were some
vanishings
that had stuck in his mind more than others; the truly unpleasant ones. They were the ones that, even today, could disturb his sleep and keep him up until the first pale shades of dawn. There were other ones, though, that he’d found comparatively easy to organise. For example, there had been that obnoxious Brooklyn janitor who had discovered the decomposing remains of a body on the roof of his tenement building late in the summer of ’45. He could still remember the janitor’s name - Bradley Donegan. The body he had accidentally stumbled upon was grostesquely distorted by both the fall impact and several months of decomposition and would have passed as just another John Doe in a city that served them up every day.

It would have passed for a John Doe, that is, except for the fact that Donegan had seen the German uniform and was asking a lot of awkward questions. The mess, of course, had been quickly cleared up by the Department. The body never made it to a morgue, and the uniform was hastily incinerated in the building’s basement boiler room. His report to the local police went missing, and Bradley Donegan, a single, middle-aged man with a legacy of violent offences against his ex-wife and a taste for under-aged hookers, was found hanging in his apartment a few days later.

He smiled.

Never lost a single night’s sleep over that piece of shit
.

The world was most definitely a better place without Bradley Donegan in it.

But then, to counter that, there were those ones that had troubled him deeply.

For example, the young elementary school teacher, Ms Elaine Scherbaum, who had spotted the erratic behaviour of ‘a large military-looking aircraft’ over the Prospect Park area. There had been children in her care at the time. That had complicated things further.

He had struggled with that one, long and hard, allowing himself much more time than was prudent to wrestle with the decision of what to do. Most of the children he was prepared to let go. None of them had seen the plane themselves, and had only heard their teacher comment on it briefly. It would have been an unnecessary risk to consider these children as liabilities. Children tell stories all the time. No one ever listens to them.

But it turned out that one of them, a twelve-year-old girl, had seen the plane along with Miss Scherbaum. Worse still, the girl had made a big deal about seeing something that looked like a body fall from the plane. Deciding what to do with them had been a very tough call, but there was no way he could afford to let them go around talking. The young teacher had family, sisters and parents in New York, and the longer she was left the more it looked like she would share her story with them. With some regret, there had been strings that needed pulling, quite a few in fact, to ensure both the little girl and the teacher were held longer than they should have been at the precinct station and then driven back home in the early hours by a squad car that met with an unfortunate end off the Brooklyn Bridge. The policeman driving the car had drowned along with them, and the next day the vehicle and all three bodies were recovered. The police discovered one of the car’s tyres had blown, and a curiously weak section of guard rail on the bridge, it appeared, had failed to prevent the car from going over.

That one had been unpleasant. But it had been by no means the worst.

He shuddered at memories that crept insidiously forward into the light.

What about the young boy?

They are taking the boy and his father, the only two people from this small coastal town to have seen the body on the beach, taking them back to Washington to be properly debriefed. At least, that’s what he’s told them. And, being patriotic Americans, they’re eager to help in any way they can.

It’s just him and Blaine in the car with them. He doesn’t know Blaine well. The man is older than him, has served in the OSS for some time. He had helped in the round-up of Japanese-Americans back in
’
41
.
Blaine looks like a hard sonofabitch, and there are no black marks on his record. He comes across as the kind of guy that doesn’t ask questions, just gets the job done with as little fuss and fanfare as possible. That’s why he was one of the first to be hastily headhunted and recruited by the Department. A safe pair of hands.

They’re driving south along the coast road, looking for somewhere remote enough to pull over and do this thing. Blaine spots a track off the road, leading into woods. It’s perfect. Blaine looks at him, and he nods back. The car pulls off the road and bounces uncomfortably along the rutted track into a tree-shrouded twilight. He turns round to the father and the boy and tells them it’s probably a good point for them to take a toilet break, as they won’t be stopping for some time. Even then, odd and unlikely as that is, they nod, trusting him unquestioningly because he wears a suit and has shown them an ID card with the American eagle embossed in tin across it.

He suggests the father goes first, and nods to Blaine to go with him. The men both leave the car and stumble through knee-high ferns into the woods to seek their own private spots. Only, Blaine isn’t going for a toilet break. He watches them until both men vanish, then smiles reassuringly at the boy.

‘Are we going to see the President?’ the boy asks.

‘He’s a busy man right now. Even though we’ve finished up in Europe, our boys’re still fighting the Japs. There’s a lot still to do.’

‘Yeah,’ says the boy thoughtfully. ‘How do you think that German ended up over here?’

‘I don’t really know. That’s why we’re taking you and your father back to our headquarters so we can puzzle this thing out together. You did the right thing telling the authorities.’

The boy smiles, proud that he’s done his bit.

He knows this is going to be hard.

He thanks God he can delegate the messy business to Blaine. It’s one thing to remotely give the go-ahead for some innocent to be discreetly removed, quite another to have to pull the trigger oneself.

Through the trees, he can see movement. It’s Blaine returning alone. The boy’s father is dead. Now it’s the kid’s turn.

The boy turns to follow his gaze. ‘Where’s my dad?’

He wonders whether there’s any point keeping up the pretence now. The lad may struggle, or try to run if he works out what’s about to happen, but he won’t outrun a bullet.

The boy looks back at him. ‘What’s happened to my dad?’

‘I’m sorry, boy, but we’ve got to do this.’ He gestures to Blaine to grab the lad and pull him out of the car, and finish off this unpleasant job. But Blaine remains fixed to the spot, shaking his head.

The boy is beginning to panic. ‘What have you done with my daddy?’ he begins to whimper.

‘Blaine, get the boy!’ he orders the man.

Blaine shakes his head again. ‘I can’t do it. Not a kid.’

‘What? Just fucking well do it!’

The boy, now sobbing, turns to Blaine, standing outside the car. ‘Please don’t hurt me!’

Blaine, the ‘hard’ man, is crumbling - not so hard after all it seems. ‘I can’t do it, sir. There must be another way.’

‘You know we have to do them both, now get on with it!’

The man grimaces and pulls his silenced handgun out. He raises it uncertainly, lining the gun up on the boy in the car.

‘I’m really sorry, kid,’ he mumbles. ‘You have to get out of the car now.’

The boy opens the rear door and steps outside, his eyes fearfully locked on the pistol. He whispers ‘please’, his hands involuntarily clasped together like he’s praying.

‘Do it, Blaine!’

The man fires a wavering shot that hits the boy in the arm. The boy’s startled face looks down at the growing crimson stain on his sleeve. He looks up from the wound and without a word of warning turns on his heels and runs from the car, up the dirt lane towards the main coast road.

The boy has to be stopped . . . but the useless fool Blaine is not giving chase. He’s staring after the boy, his gun arm isn’t raised to finish the boy off. It’s hanging uselessly by his side.

He climbs out of the car and grabs Blaine’s gun and turns round to take aim. But the boy has stumbled, and lies on the ground shaking, trembling, sobbing. His momentary bid to escape spent.

The dozen or so strides he takes towards the boy cowering on the floor have been replayed time and time again in his mind. The final shot he has managed, over time, to blank out.

He shuddered, the boy had definitely been the worst of them.

There had been seventeen in total. Seventeen civilians whose deaths he’d had to arrange in the months after the end of the war. And then after that, after the civilian liabilities had all been disposed of, there had been another job for him and the Department - ensuring that those men who had attended Truman’s crisis conference had remained silent on the matter, for the rest of their lives.

Being the youngest man who had attended during those two days at the White House had most definitely been a factor in Truman’s decision to entrust him with keeping the whole incident under wraps; he would outlive them all.

For the last sixty years, he alone had overseen the task entrusted to the Department - collating data on those men, powerful men who lived very political and complicated lives; watching closely those who looked wobbly, those whom he had a hunch might just talk.

And, oh yes . . . there had been a few.

Several of the most senior men who had been with Truman on those two days had come dangerously close to looking like they might spill it all as they entered the autumn years of their lives. Of course, that was when they became most worrying: old men, facing their inevitable mortality and wondering if now, after so many years, it might just be safe enough to tell a favourite grandchild or nephew an incredible story from way back.

He smiled with satisfaction as he recalled the discreet and not so veiled warnings he had made to some very powerful and influential men from time to time throughout his long vigil. Men who had recoiled with shock that they should be under surveillance so many decades after the event.

Men who should have known better.

Wallace smiled with pride. Truman had turned to him on that final day, as men great and powerful filed dutifully and silently out of the conference room. Truman had quietly asked
him
to stay, and no one else.

President Truman took off his glasses and rubbed his tired and red-rimmed eyes. The last forty-eight hours had clearly taken a lot out of him. ‘I’m the new boy, here, Wallace. I don’t know who to trust, who are the sharks. All I know is that amongst all these supposedly wise men, it was your advice that seemed to make the most sense. It was your counsel I took in the end, not theirs.’

‘Thank you, Mr President,’ replied Wallace.

‘I’m going to need someone I can trust, someone with a lot of smarts, someone who can work quickly, think on his feet like you did today, to make sure this whole sorry episode stays buried. Think you’re up to it?’

‘Me, sir?’

‘Yes, lad, you.’

‘I’ve not been in intelligence long, sir . . . just a few months -’

‘Then perhaps you’re untainted. You’re not habitually used to procedures, ways of doing things that might slow you down . . . red tape that might prevent you from acting quickly, if it was required. Do you understand me?’

‘I’m not sure I do, sir.’

‘This must never, ever become known to the public. And I’d like you to take charge of that. I’ll make sure you have everything you need - money, men, materials, your own little secret agency . . . just make sure this thing never surfaces. Whatever it takes . . . you understand me?
Whatever it takes.
Whatever you need to do, I don’t care what it is, and I won’t want to know either, you make sure this remains a secret.’