Midnight in Berlin (41 page)

As the train cleared the city and picked up speed in open country, Sara looked around at her fellow passengers. It was early in the morning and most seemed asleep. For some reason, she felt she was being watched, but she told herself this was understandable paranoia. She had just murdered a man; not just anybody but a senior Gestapo officer. With that thought in her head, she began to tremble uncontrollably. She felt sick and hurried to the lavatory. She was violently ill. She threw water in her face and looked in the mirror. A haggard, sleepless face looked back. She was in shock, she told herself. She slapped her face hard on both cheeks. She stopped shaking.

At Duisburg, Sara and other passengers joining the Rotterdam train were directed to a reserved waiting room. Customs officials entered and asked if anyone had anything
to declare. It was a cursory visit, but they were followed by several police officers.

Kitty Schmidt arrived at the Salon at ten thirty that morning, slightly later than usual. She had done some Christmas shopping and went straight to her office, put the bags down and began to check the takings of the night before. There was thirty thousand marks in notes of various denominations in the safe, their best night of the festive season. She was counting the money when a woman cleaner appeared in the door and muttered something about the best room in the house. She appeared frightened.

Kitty took the master key and followed the cleaner. On the carpet below the door to the room was a fresh red stain that appeared to have oozed out of the room itself. Kitty bent and touched the stain with her finger. It was not wine, as she had thought; it was blood, wet, red blood. Kitty told the cleaner to tidy another room and opened the door of the honeymoon suite.

She stepped inside and closed the door quickly behind her. There was a sickly smell in the room. Bonner was lying with bedsheets covering his lower body and congealed blood and sand across much of his torso. His face was frozen in a grotesque parody of a medieval gargoyle, mouth open and blood-smeared teeth in a rictus grin. The sight and smell of the dead man made her retch.

Kitty Schmidt knew at once what had happened and what she had to do. The Jewish girl had murdered a senior Gestapo officer. And she, Kitty Schmidt, mistress of the most infamous brothel in Europe, had to leave the country. Now. She went straight back to the office, scooped up the cash and told the cleaner to go home. She knew her life and that of anyone
who worked at the Salon would be very short once the Gestapo found out what had happened.

The railway crossing at the Dutch border with Germany was only a few hundred yards from the main road between the two countries. Convoys of vehicles, lorries, buses and horse-drawn carts were waiting at the frontier in lines that stretched back along the road as far as Sara could see.

The train had stopped to allow the frontier police to board and examine all passports. Sara could hear them moving down the carriage, flipping open documents, asking questions. She concentrated on the chaos of traffic at the road frontier.

A woman beside her followed her gaze and said, “The Dutch government closed the frontier to all road traffic yesterday.”

“Why?”

“Too many Jews wanting to get out. Many leave their transport and try walking through the woods at night. The Germans shoot a lot of them, apparently.”

Sara turned away to find a passport-control officer looking down at her. His uniform was new and he was young, hardly more than a schoolboy. He had a pistol in a holster on his belt. Sara tried not to look at it. Hanging from a lanyard around his neck was a stamp. In one hand he held a clipboard file.

She handed him the travel permit. He opened it carefully, spread it on his clipboard and examined it. He said nothing, but she watched his eyes moving back and forth across the document. She thought of time trickling through the hourglass in coloured sand. She wondered if they had found him yet.

“English?” the official said.

“Yes. Going home.”

It was only later, when the train was well on its way to Rotterdam, that Sara realised that the parents of that youth must have arranged his job with the frontier police, to avoid conscription. It was a reserved occupation and they were probably a decent family living close to the border who knew what strings to pull to keep their son out of the army.

He had placed that precious piece of paper on his clipboard and stamped it vigorously, then returned it to her with a smile. She had been lucky, just as she had been with that beautiful hourglass Bonner had given her. She began shaking again and clutched her arms around herself to control the trembling. It was almost one o'clock and she had eaten only an apple all day. She would get a sandwich at Rotterdam and some coffee. She was free, almost safe, and soon she would be a long way from Berlin.

The feeling persisted that someone was following her. She got up and walked the length of the carriage. Seats were two abreast on either side of the corridor. She recognised no one. People glanced at her and turned back to their newspapers or the window. She told herself not to be silly.

It was four o'clock in the afternoon when the train reached Rotterdam. The passengers flooded onto the platform, only to be shepherded into a long hall with queues leading up to two desks manned by Dutch frontier police. Here passports were stamped after lengthy enquiries about the final destination. Her temporary passport carried no Jewish identification, but the name was enough. Where had she been born, what was her occupation, where was she going, why had she left?

The questions went on for almost an hour. Several officers examined her English documentation in turn, each muttering something to the other as the document was handed over. She could see they were frightened. They have closed their borders to fleeing Jews because they do not want to provoke Germany, she thought. Hitler wants to expel an entire race of his own people and no one wants to take them, for fear of harbouring opposition to the mighty Third Reich. And now the Dutch are helping the Germans shoot anyone trying to cross the closed frontier at night.

It was dark when they returned her travel document and let her go. She caught the bus to the Hook of Holland with only minutes to spare. She still had not eaten. They had given her nothing more than a glass of water in that little back room in the passport office where all those frightened men tried to decide whether to put a German Jewess with English papers back on the train across the border to Germany.

She had a meal at last at a harbourside café. The SS
Batavia
loomed over the quayside, its black-painted bow, white superstructure and single funnel illuminated by floodlights. The hull was rusty, paint flaked from the deck housing and the portholes were smeared with encrusted salt. It was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen.

Sara forked a dish of pasta and tomato sauce into her mouth, refusing to take her eyes off this wondrous vessel. It was eight o'clock and they would board in an hour. She ordered a bottle of Heineken beer and drank thirstily.

The sailors told her the crossing was a good one for a night in midwinter, but to Sara it seemed that the ship and its passengers
were unlikely to survive to reach the English coast. The
Batavia
heaved and groaned, sliding down one huge wave before wearily clambering up the next. Every now and then, the ship rolled sideways, the twin masts dipping perilously close to the waves. Sara sat in the upper lounge, wrapped in a blanket, miserably waiting for seasickness to drive her yet again to the lavatory.

Even then, feeling as close to death as a perfectly healthy human being can do, she knew she was being watched. Someone was following her. She had seen the dark blue hat with the feather of a game bird on the train from Berlin, hadn't she? And the woman with the crocodile-skin handbag, had she been on the bus from Rotterdam? Then there was the man with polished shoes and an umbrella – had he been on the Rotterdam train, or had he got on at the Ostbahnhof? She had no evidence and had seen nothing to support her paranoia beyond her intuition. But she just knew.

The
Batavia
docked at six the next morning in Harwich. A salty rain slanted in from the sea, driven by a wind that whipped spume from the wave tops. The dockside cranes, wharves and terminal sheds were shrouded in a thick grey mist that defied daylight.

Everywhere she looked she saw the same dark grey, only a shade lighter than black. Even the faces of the porters, the dockers and the passport officials looked grey. God must have created a special hue of grey in his celestial paintbox for this island nation, she thought. She looked back at the ship that had carried her to freedom. It was no longer the glamorous vessel she had seen the night before. The
Batavia
looked like an old dog that had come in from the rain and was about to shake itself dry.

She bought a copy of
The Times
at the station. “Tuesday, December 20th 1938, price 2d,” it said on the front. She was going to read every word, from the advertisements on the front page to the sports news at the back. She was going to learn everything she could about her new homeland. England was going to be her refuge, her harbour, her haven. She said a silent prayer to thank her father for his foresight in making his children learn the language of Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens. That is how he described it. No other nation on earth ever had such cultural heroes, he said, not even the Greeks. She would find a job and start again.

On the train to Liverpool Street Station in London, she sipped a cup of weak milky tea and repeated her destination to herself: Liverpool Street Station, Liverpool Street Station, Liverpool Street Station. The wheels on the track picked up the refrain and whispered it back to her. She was safe, she was free, she was going to Liverpool Street Station in London. She began to read
The Times.
There was a full page of personal advertisements on the front. A widow, through great misfortune, was forced to ask for a loan of £300. She offered references as to her good character. The Hon. Mrs F. Gore wished to make it clear that the photograph of herself in the window of a shop in Bond Street had been used without permission.

She turned inside to find that the classified advertisements continued over two further pages. Turning page after page of dense text, she came to Imperial and Foreign News on page 13. Sara half expected to see a report from Berlin of a grisly nightclub murder. Instead, a correspondent reported in a single column that Field Marshal Göring was holding talks with wealthier members of the Jewish community in Germany
to speed Jewish emigration. The story said that the government hoped to complete its anti-Jewish policy by persuading Western nations to take the remaining six hundred thousand Jews in Germany over the next two years.

Over the page, Sara read that there was no sign of any change in the severe cold that had brought widespread snow to eastern and central England. The temperature at Kew Gardens in London had fallen to 26 degrees Fahrenheit. Frozen points meant delays to many rail services, especially on east-coast routes to Liverpool Street.

She began to feel better. Now at last she could tell herself she was free. She had escaped. She wondered about Kitty and the other girls in the Salon, then pushed the thought away. Finally, she allowed herself to confront the guilt that had followed her every step of the way from the Salon to that rust-bucket port in England. Her brother Joseph. What would they do to him in vengeance? She knew he would have urged her to escape; she could almost hear him pleading with her to flee, to escape any way she could. She had told herself there was nothing more they could do to him, even if he was alive.

She took comfort in the thought that he had been killed long ago, that Bonner had merely been lying, as Macrae had said. She hoped that was true, although the voice of intuition told her it was not so. Her guilt was still there. Maybe that was why she had felt followed and watched. Maybe it was her conscience that had dogged her steps all the way from Berlin.

Liverpool Street Station looked rather like the cargo port she had left two hours earlier. The same fortress-grey colour everywhere. The same grey faces, only here they were hurrying to buses, taxis, and down into the tube station. It was very cold and it was snowing. The pavements outside were awash with slush. She suddenly felt famished. What little she
had eaten in the last twenty-four hours had vanished over the rail of the
Batavia.

Across the road, she saw a welcoming splash of colour in the murk. The word “Café” was spelt out in large letters illuminated in yellow lights. A tropical palm tree formed the letter “C”. Inside, in a thick fug of smoke, she saw people eating, drinking tea and smoking. She found a seat in the corner. Yes, she would have a proper English breakfast – bacon, eggs, sausage, tomato and fried bread.

She looked up at the counter to signal a waitress. A middle-aged man in a white raincoat smiled at her. He was carrying two cups of tea on a tray. He walked over and sat down at her table without saying a word. The bulbous veined nose and the locks of white greasy hair that fell over his collar were vaguely familiar.

Before she could say anything, he said, “Welcome to England. I have some friends who would like to talk to you.”

Sara was exhausted and hardly able to move when they picked her up from the café and drove her away. She had developed a hacking cough on the boat that made her chest ache. She felt filthy, unwashed, and wanted nothing more than a hot bath, some clean pyjamas and to be allowed to sleep for days. Later, they said, later. First, we want to talk to you. They took her to a large house somewhere near Big Ben. She knew that, because she could hear the booming bongs of the hourly chimes very clearly. She was taken to an airy room at the top of the house, with a basin, a narrow metal frame bed and a view over the trees of a garden square. A matronly middle-aged woman ran her a hot bath, then gave her some clean underwear and a mug of tea while the men waited in the car outside. They drove her to an anonymous building in Westminster and led her to a small office, where she remained until they took her to the hospital.