No Dawn for Men (9 page)

“I’ll go first,” said Tolkien, when he realized that Shroeder and Korumak were staring at him intently, their mouths shut, waiting for him to continue.
To lead them
, he thought. “I’ll anchor the ladder on the other side. We did similar exercises during the war. It’s not so hard.” He spoke briskly, without hesitation, trying to exude a confidence he did not feel. He had seen the old wooden ladder sticking out from a paint-stained canvas tarp when he and Shroeder had met on the roof the evening before. Remembering the scaling and rappelling training he had done on Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, he had been the one to suggest escaping across Hermann Goering Strasse’s rooftops.
Of course I was twenty-three then,
he now said to himself.

“We need you, Trygg,” said Shroeder.

It was Trygg who had said that stealing a car would be easy, that most people left the key in the ignition when they parked their car, and that he could easily power the ignition without a key if necessary. They would head north, he said, in the opposite direction of Deggendorf. No one would be looking for them north of Berlin. He knew a place where they could cross quietly into Poland and from there travel south until they had to cross back again into Germany near Metten Abbey. A seven-hundred-kilometer journey, and fraught with danger, but he had friends, the little man had said, who would help them along the way. Who was this dwarf? Who were these friends? Were they a ring of car thieves? How did he know so much about electrical engineering? Tolkien felt sorry for the dwarf, who, with his bowlegs and low center of gravity, was clearly not built for gymnastics. Far from it. A fall from the ladder meant certain death. But yes, Professor Shroeder was right, they needed Korumak, they needed him badly, and for reasons that seemed both clouded in mystery and yet vitally important.

“These things are weighing heavily,” Shroeder said, brushing his fingers on his sternum. He had the amulet on a silver chain around his neck and the parchment sewn into the lining of his tweed jacket.

Hearing this, Professor Tolkien lifted the sack they had carried up with them containing the two sofa pillows that Trygg would sit on while driving, and flung it across the chasm to the roof opposite, where it landed with a quiet thud. Then, whispering to himself,
hand-foot, hand-foot
, he knelt on the parapet and started across.

16.

Berlin

October 7, 1938, 11:00 a.m.

Ian Fleming stood inside the front door of the Olympic Boxing Club, unfolding his umbrella, his dripping Macintosh forming puddles at his feet. He was astonished at the size of the crowd sitting on rows of benches around the center ring. One of them, front row center, he recognized as a German movie star, now brunette, but a sexy, flirtatious blond in a Hitchcock movie he had seen a dozen or so years ago in Geneva. She was smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder and chatting with a middle-aged man in a dark suit and tie sitting next to her, leaning close to the man’s ear, so as, Fleming assumed, to be heard over the general din. In the movie, she had killed Cyril Richard who had tried to rape her. With a knife. What was her name?

Hanging from the twenty-foot-high ceiling were a series of sweating, rusting parallel pipes that branched out in the middle diagonally like a metro map. Naked light bulbs hanging in wire cages lit the room, mostly illuminating the smoke from a hundred cigarettes. Leather punching bags, some for hand work, some for body work, hung from steel braces in each of the room’s four corners. A group of men, reporters he recognized, were gathered around a scale on a pedestal on the right wall, taking turns weighing themselves, joking, passing around a flask.
The press,
Fleming thought,
my kind of people.

“That’s Anny Ondra,” said a voice behind him. “Schmeling’s wife.”

Fleming turned to see Rex Dowling, the American reporter, grinning at him, his straw-blond hair a dull brown now, and plastered to his head, a handkerchief raised to mop the rain from his face.

“I see you don’t believe in umbrellas.”

“They’re for sissies.”

Fleming smiled. He and Dowling had been playing an unacknowledged game, the English toff versus the American hayseed, since they first covered the Berlin Olympics together in 1936. “They don’t get pneumonia though,” he replied.

Dowling smiled his big, dumb, handsome smile and shrugged, saying through his teeth, “I have a message for you.”

“From whom?” The even pitch of the Englishman’s voice hid his inner concern. Dowling had also spotted Billie at the Sportpalast last week. He also stayed at the Adlon. And he had bedded half the women in the place, or so it was said.

“Your Uncle Quex.”

Fleming remained silent, absorbing this entirely unexpected answer.

“He says the sun is shining in Hyde Park.”

“That’s rare this time of year.”

“No need for an umbrella.”

Fleming now quickly eyed Dowling from head to toe. “Shall we sit,” he said. “I see two empty seats in the last row, there, near those bags.”

After they were seated, both men took out notepads and pencils. They both knew that they actually had to file stories on what had been touted as Max Schmeling’s first open-to-the-public appearance in a ring since his devastating loss to Joe Louis, the great American “Braun Bomber,” in June. He was to spar with the German amateur heavyweight champ, a young, sculpted-from-marble Aryan named Bruno Schmidt, whom the boxing-mad German people had taken to their bosom after Max’s debacle in New York. Though it was billed as a simple spar, the rumor had been spreading that Schmidt was going to fight for real, perhaps to knock the disgraced Schmeling out. Thus the large crowd of reporters, politicians, and in-favor celebrities in the room. Goebbels, who had loved Schmeling after he beat Louis in 1936, now hated him. The man had never joined the Nazi Party. His manager was a Jew. The sycophantic German
haute monde
crowd naturally followed suit. It had just been announced that the handsome but now former world champion would be fighting Adolf Heuser next year for the European Heavyweight title. No one cared. They wanted to see him pummeled, toppled once and for all from Germany’s boxing pinnacle.

“What’s the message?” Fleming asked.

“You need to extract three people.”

“Yes. By Sunday.”

“There is a farm in Meppen, on the Muhlenberg road, near the Dutch border. A kilometer after an abandoned rail spur, on the right. The farmhouse is right on the road. Two yellow lights will be on above the front door. Your plane will land between ten and midnight. The pilot will only wait five minutes. You are to board as well.”

“Thank you.”

“You are to ask for Baron Rilke. ‘I am here to call on Baron Rilke. Baron Maximilian Rilke? No, Baron Laurens Rilke.’ If the two lights are not on, do not turn in. You are to contact your embassy about getting up to Meppen. It’s a haul.”

“How do I contact you? In an emergency, I mean.”

“Tell Hans you are looking for the handsome American from Chicago.”

“And you’ll appear.”

“Or someone in my place. He or she will want to know what time it is London.”

“Simple.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you again.”

“Good luck.”

Fleming did not answer. Schmidt and Schmeling had entered the ring, both wearing headgear. He eyed Schmeling—six foot tall, heavy browed, perhaps a hundred ninety pounds, thirty-two inch waist, muscular but slim for a heavyweight. He was bouncing on his toes, staying warm. Schmidt was perhaps two-ten, all muscle, but a lumberer, easily out-maneuvered. It occurred to Fleming that Schmeling could kill Schmidt if he wanted to. Send him to the Norse version of Hades. He remembered what his boxing instructor at Bletchley, a gnarled, retired middleweight from the East End, his cockney accent thick and garbled, had told him: it’s the element of surprise, milord. You’re bound to get into a scuffle or two. Don’t waste time. A right to the bridge of the nose will kill a man just as soon as one of them fancy karate chops or judo kicks. Karate he had pronounced
karayty
, judo
jew
-dough, like Cary Grant’s
Jew-
dy
, Jew-
dy
, Jew-
dy
.
Of all the hand-to-hand training Fleming had done at Bletchley, he liked boxing the best. No sneakiness to it, just square off and pound away.

“You surprise me old boy,” he said finally.

“I couldn’t resist not bringing an umbrella.”

“Quite. You could still get pneumonia. It’s damp and chilly in here.”

“Americans don’t get sick, you know that. They need to stay healthy so they can save the world from evil.”

“Again.”

“Correct.”

“I suppose we should stay for the show.”
Follow through.

“Of course.”

“What’s Miss Ondra’s story?”

“Mrs. Schmeling?”

“Yes.”

“They say she loves him.”

“More’s the pity.”

“Don’t you have your hands full?”

Fleming did not respond.
Billie.

 
“She’s a beauty.”

“I don’t disagree.”

“A gentleman wouldn’t.”

“No.”
Meaning what, precisely?

“She seems thick with that square-jawed young SS fellow. Stout as an oak.”

Fleming did not answer. The green-eyed monster eats at Mr. Hayseed. And me too.

“I saw them getting into one of those Nazi Daimlers this morning.”

Again Fleming did not reply. He pretended he was scribbling on his pad. Not interested.

“Fleming,” Dowling said, “he’s SS for Christsake.”

The Englishman looked up at Dowling, keeping his face composed. “I’m aware of that,” said.

The American paused a second, staring at his fellow reporter-cum-spy. “Of course,” he said.

“She’s not a Nazi, Dowling.”

“Of course not.”

“There are things I can’t tell you.”

“Of course.”

“I have a favor to ask.”

“Go ahead, no harm in asking.”

“I need to get someone out of Germany, an engineer working on a secret anti-mine material. He wants to defect.”

“A Nazi?”

“No, a Jew.”

“I will leave a message with Hans. ‘Any messages from the handsome American from Chicago?’”

 
“Fond of that ‘handsome American’ bit, are we?”

“The agent I replaced had his dick cut off by the Gestapo before they killed him. I may as well have some fun while I’m alive.”

“How many have there been?” Fleming asked.

“Reporter types you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I’m the third so far. And you, which number are you?”

“They don’t tell us such things, but I’m led to believe I’m the seventh.”

“Lucky number.”

“If you say so.”

“Not me. Look it up, you’ll be amazed.”

* * *

After the uneventful spar, Fleming and Dowling left together. The rain had stopped and the sun was breaking through rapidly thinning clouds. “I’ll walk for a while,” Fleming said curtly, heading east on Bismarkstrasse back toward the Adlon.
Bloody Americans,
he thought.
Getting into a Nazi Daimler indeed. Bloody women.
Lost in these thoughts, he did not notice the hulking black Daimler gliding along next to him at the curb, looking up only when two men, one tall and thin, the other short and stocky, both in overcoats and fedoras, blocked his path.

“Herr Fleming,” the stocky one said.

“The very same,” Fleming answered.

“You will come with us, please.”

17.

Berlin

October 7, 1938, 1:00 p.m.

“You have some interesting things in your pockets, Herr Fleming.”

“In England we don’t do searches without good cause.”

“That is why you are in decay.”

Fleming remained silent.

“A list, for example, of various German government agencies, addresses, and telephone numbers.”

“I’m a reporter. I often need to get quotes.”

“Department of Raw Materials, Office for Racial and Settlement Questions, Waffen Supply Office, many others.”

“My God, do you think I’m a spy?”
Shock
, Fleming said to himself,
that’s the ticket.

“Perhaps.”

“I’d be the worst spy in history, then, carrying around a list of my contacts. You’re joking of course.”

“We don’t joke here.”