Berlin Red (8 page)

As Fegelein’s Mercedes wove its way past heaps of rubble from the latest air raids, bound for Himmler’s headquarters in the village of Hohenlychen, north-west of Berlin, Fegelein scribbled down his report about that day’s conference in the bunker.

These days, it was usually bad news, and Fegelein was content to transmit any details from the briefings by secure telegraph from SS Headquarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. But good news, such as he’d heard today, required a more personal delivery, especially since he would be arriving with the gift of Hagemann’s own blueprints for the Diamond Stream device.

Besides, it gave him the chance to spend more time with Fraülein S.

Her real name was Lilya Simonova, although he rarely used it even when speaking to her directly. Although there were plenty of people around with Russian-sounding names, especially here in the east of the country, Fegelein felt safer not advertising the fact that his own chauffeur was one of them. Besides, it lent her an air of mystery which he was happy to exploit, since it helped to baffle those gossiping fishwives who were always whispering behind his back.

Having served briefly as Fegelein’s secretary, Lilya had taken on the role of chauffeur, after his original driver had got drunk and crashed the car into a lamp post on the way to pick him up. This driver’s name was Schmoekel and he, like Fegelein, had been a former cavalry man until being invalided home when he had ridden his horse over a mine. The incident had left Schmoekel with a grotesque scar across one side of his face. Unfortunately, it was the side which faced Fegelein when he was sitting on the passenger side of the two-seater car he had been given by the SS motor pool. Fegelein found it unpleasant to have to look at this deformed creature every day and he was more relieved than angry when Schmoekel finally smashed up the car, providing him with an excuse to reassign the mangled cavalryman to a desk job far away.

Replacing Schmoekel with Fraülein S had been a stroke of genius. As she took over the task of shuttling him back and forth from the Chancellery to the apartment of Elsa Batz on Bleibtreustrasse and to Himmler’s headquarters at Hohenlychen, north of Berlin, Fegelein had noticed that Fraülein S was a better driver than Schmoekel, as well as a good deal softer on the eyes.

Fegelein was well aware of the rumours, circulated by his jealous rivals in the high command, about his apparent failure to bed this particular woman. One particularly hurtful piece of gossip made out that Fraülein S was ‘too beautiful’ for him, as if the woman was simply too far out of his league for him to even contemplate what he had so easily achieved with numerous other secretaries before her.

But that, Fegelein protested in his imaginary conversations with these rumour fabricators, was precisely the point. There had been so many others, literally dozens by his count, and every single one of them had since moved on, either because he had fired them or because they had requested transfers which, under the circumstances, he was obliged to grant them.

It had reached the point where he actually required a good secretary, and one who was going to stick around for a while, more than he needed to satisfy his instincts.

Pretty though she was, Fegelein had been forced to forgo any dalliance with Fraülein Simonova in favour of running a competent liaison office. Humiliating as it might have been to hear his manhood criticised, he could reassure himself that these gossip-mongers were simply envious of his marriage, of his standing with the Führer, of the trust Himmler had placed in him and yes, even of the woman who sat beside him now.

‘I’m not sure we have enough fuel to reach Hohenlychen,’ said Lilya. ‘I didn’t realise we would be leaving the city.’

‘There’s a fuel depot in Hennigsdorf,’ replied Fegelein. ‘We can stop there on the way.’

Lilya glanced at the rolled-up blueprint lying on the dashboard. ‘That must be important, for you to be delivering it in person.’

‘It’s the best pieces of news we’ve had in months,’ replied Fegelein. Then he turned his attention to the pad of paper on his lap, where he had written out the notes for his report to Himmler. ‘How does this sound?’ he asked. ‘The success of the guidance system known as Diamond Stream . . .’

And then he paused. ‘Should I call it a system? That doesn’t sound quite right to me.’

At first, she didn’t reply. The moment she heard the words ‘Diamond Stream’, the moisture had dried up in her mouth. ‘How about “the Diamond Stream technology”?’

‘Much better!’ Fegelein crossed out the old word and wrote in the new one. ‘The success of the guidance technology known as Diamond Stream has revitalised the V-2 programme to the extent that we can now deliver to the German people the reassurance of military superiority, while at the same time making it clear to our enemies that we are far from being defeated on the battlefield. No,’ he muttered. ‘Wait.’

‘Is it the word “defeated”?’ asked Lilya.

‘Exactly,’ answered Fegelein. ‘I can’t use that. I can’t even mention defeat.’

‘How about “Making it clear to our enemies that we are still masters of the battlefield”?’

‘Excellent!’ He glanced at Fraülein S and smiled. ‘Where would I be without you?’

One of the most valuable lessons that Lilya Simonova had learned during the frantic days as British Intelligence rushed her through her training at Beaulieu was that once she had convinced her sources of information that she could be trusted, the sources would repay this trust with loyalty of their own. After this, the sources would remain stubbornly faithful, not only because the bond between them had become a reality, but also because of how much they stood to lose if they were wrong. Not only the life of the agent, but also the lives of the sources depended on the appearance of truth.

To forge that bond with her enemy, knowing all along that it was balanced on a lie, had triggered in her moments of what bordered on compassion even for the monster that was Fegelein.

This was the hardest thing she had ever done. It would have been easier to kill Fegelein than to cultivate his loyalty and trust, even as she was betraying it herself. Before it all began, she would never even have considered herself capable of such a thing. But the war had made her a stranger, even to herself, and now she wondered if it would even be possible to return to a place where she could look in the mirror and recognise the person she had been.

It had taken many months to earn Fegelein’s trust. During this time, she had passed every test, both official and unofficial, which Fegelein could think to throw at her. On the advice of her handlers back in Britain, she had made no attempt to gather information during the time when she was being vetted. No contact had been established with courier agents. No messages had been transmitted. This was because of the danger that false information might be fed to her, and carefully monitored to see if Allied intelligence acted upon it. As Lilya later discovered, Fegelein had employed this tactic several times.

Back in England, Lilya had been told that she should become active as an agent only when she was absolutely certain that her source’s confidence had been secured. Her life depended on that decision. That much she had known from the start. What Lilya had not known, at least in the beginning, was that you could never be certain. All you could do was guess, hope that you were right, and begin.

That day came when Fegelein appointed her as his new driver, replacing the grimly scarred man who had held the job up until then. Usually, after his midday meetings with Hitler, it was Fegelein’s habit to spend the remainder of his time at the apartment of his mistress, leaving Lilya Simonova outside in the car in which Fegelein would leave behind the briefcase containing any briefing notes to his master, the Lord of the SS.

Fegelein left the briefcase in the car because he thought it would be safer there than in the house of Elsa Batz, whom he cared for, up to a point, but whom he did not trust.

Alone in the car, Simonova would read through the contents of the briefcase and, later, would deliver the information, along with any gossip she had picked up from Fegelein that day, to a courier agent, who then forwarded the details to England.

Lilya knew very little about the courier, other than the fact that he worked at the Hungarian Embassy.

For the transfer, Lilya would deposit information in the hollowed-out leg of a bench in the Hasenheide park, just across the road from the Garde-Pioneer tram station. Occasionally, messages would be left for her there, indicating that she was to make contact with her control officer in England, whom she knew only as ‘Major Clarke’. For this purpose, she had been issued a radio, to be used only in such emergencies.

Her last contact with Major Clarke had been only the day before, when he had ordered her to find out all she could about this Diamond Stream device.

And now there it was, barely an arm’s length away, resting on the dashboard of the car as they roared across the German countryside, bound for the lair of Heinrich Himmler.

‘Wait!’ Fegelein said suddenly. ‘Pull over! There’s something I forgot.’

Lilya jammed on the brakes and the car skidded to a halt, kicking up dust at the side of the road. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘It’s Elsa’s birthday.’ Fegelein looked at her helplessly. ‘We’ll have to turn around.’

‘And keep Himmler waiting?’

‘Better him than Elsa,’ mumbled Fegelein.

As she wheeled the car about, the chart case tumbled into Fegelein’s lap.

‘I won’t be long, but I’ll need you to wait in the car. You can look after this while I’m gone,’ Fegelein told her, replacing the map case on the dashboard.

‘Of course,’ she said quietly.

‘Where would I be without you, Fraülein S?’ repeated Fegelein. As he caught sight of her luminously blue eyes, his gaze softened with affection. Those eyes were like nothing he had ever seen before, and their effect on him had never lessened since the first day he caught sight of her in Paris. She was sitting at a desk in a dreary, smoke-filled room crowded with secretaries typing out documents for translation by the city’s German occupation government. Pale, bleached light glimmered down through window panels in the roof, whose glass was stained with smears of dirty green moss. Whenever he thought about that moment, Fegelein would hear again the deafening clatter of typewriters, pecking away like the beaks of tiny birds against his skull, and he remembered the instant when she had glanced up from her work and he first saw her face. He had never recovered from that moment, nor did he ever wish to.

‘Where would you be?’ she asked. ‘In search of the perfect word for your reports to the Reichsführer. That is where you’d be.’

Her words were like a cup of cold water thrown into Fegelein’s face. ‘Exactly so,’ he replied brusquely, turning back to face the road. In that moment he realised that the reason he had not thrown himself at her long ago was because he had fallen in love with this woman, and he could not bring himself to treat her the way he had treated the others, and even his own dismally promiscuous wife.

‘Was that General Hagemann I saw with you on the steps of the Chancellery building?’ she asked.

‘He prefers to be called a professor,’ confirmed Fegelein, ‘but that was him all right, and since he has just misplaced a very valuable rocket, it may be the last time you see him.’

‘He lost a rocket?’

Fegelein explained what he had learned. ‘It’s probably at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, but I expect the old general would sleep a little better if he knew that for a fact. And I would sleep a little better, too, if you would take my advice and agree to carry a pistol. I’d be happy to provide you with one. These are dangerous times and they are likely to get more so in the days ahead. I gave one to Elsa, you know, and she seems happy with it!’

‘Perhaps because she needs it to defend herself against you.’

Fegelein laughed. ‘Even if that was the case, I’d have nothing to worry about! What Elsa needs more than anything is some lessons in target practice. Believe me, I tried to teach her, but it’s pretty much hopeless.’

‘Well, I don’t want a gun,’ said Lilya. ‘How many times have I told you that?’

‘I have lost count,’ admitted Fegelein, ‘but that doesn’t mean I’ll give up trying to make you see some sense.’

The truth was, Lilya did carry a weapon. It was a small folding knife with a stiletto point and a small device, like the head of a nail, fitted into the top of the blade which enabled the user to open the knife single-handedly and with only a flick of the thumb.

It had been a gift from a man she almost married long ago. One late summer day, they had gone on a picnic together to the banks of the Neva River outside St Petersburg and he had used the knife to peel the skin from an apple in a single long ribbon of juicy, green peel. Before them, white, long-legged birds moved with jerky and deliberate steps among the water lilies.

‘What birds are those?’ she had asked.

‘Cranes,’ he replied. ‘Soon they will begin their long migration south.’

‘How far will they go?’ she asked.

‘To Africa,’ he told her.

She had been stunned to think of such a vast journey and tried to imagine them, plodding with their chalk stick legs in the water of an oasis.

Later, when she got home, she had discovered the knife in the wicker basket which they had used to bring the food. When she went to return the knife, the man told her to keep it. ‘Remember the birds,’ he had said.

It was not until much later that she noticed a maker’s mark engraved upon the blade – of two cranes, their long and narrow beaks touching like two hypodermic needles – engraved into the tempered steel.

Of the possessions she had carried with her on that long journey out of Russia, this knife was the only thing she had left. The diamond and sapphire engagement ring, which she had been wearing when she arrived in England, was taken from her for safekeeping by the people who trained her for the tasks which had since taken over her life. She wondered where that ring was now, and also where the man was who had slipped it on her finger, on the island in the Lamskie pond at Tsarskoye Selo, already a lifetime ago.

Then the voice of Hermann Fegelein broke into her memory, like a rock thrown through a window pane. ‘I will not always be your commanding officer,’ he said. Reaching out, he brushed his hand across her knee.

‘I know,’ she replied gently, glancing down at his arm.

And if Fegelein could have known what images were going through her head just then, his heart would have clogged up with fear.

Radial artery – centre of the wrist. Quarter-inch cut. Loss of consciousness in thirty seconds. Death in two minutes.

Brachial artery – inside and just above the elbow. Cut half an inch deep. Loss of consciousness in fourteen seconds. Death in one and a half minutes.

Subclavian artery – behind the collarbone. Two-and-a-half-inch cut. Loss of consciousness in five seconds. Death in three and a half minutes.