The Grave of Truth (8 page)

‘I understand one thing,' she said. ‘Me and the children come second. I've accepted it for a long while, and I've tried to explain it to them so they wouldn't be hurt. But now we're threatened with God knows what, because of you and your goddamned job, and you have the gall to tell me you're not coming over to protect your family! You're going to Germany instead, while we sit in someone else's house and let them take on your responsibility. Okay, Max, you go and play detective, and I'll think up a good reason for Peter and Francine why their father's gone off and left them.' She swung round and walked away; at the door she half turned. ‘They'll be really glad to know you're insured.'

He drove them to Le Bourget at eight o'clock the next morning; his daughter was excited about going to London; his son had been morose and ill at ease the night before. He had muttered provocatively about being happy to miss school, but Max had ignored him. Ellie had been bright and artificial in front of the children, who quickly recognized that there was trouble between their parents, but when they were alone she refused to speak to him. At the airport he said good-bye, and it was forced and awkward. He kissed Francine, who started to cry from nerves and excitement, embraced his son, who went stiff, and kissed Ellie on the cheek.

‘Safe journey, darling. I'll call you tonight.'

‘That would be nice,' his wife said. ‘Come on, Peter dear, Francy, take hold of my hand—' Then they were gone. He ignored the funny pang of loneliness that nagged at him all the way back from the airport to his office. He spent the day in the cutting room, and the reference library, and at the end of the day he had completed a set of notes. He did not give them to his secretary to type out. He took them back to the apartment, where the English girl Pat cooked him dinner, and then he settled down to read them and the books he had brought with him. The subject matter was the closing days of April 1945 and the fall of the Bunker in Berlin.

There was a six-hour time difference between Washington and Bonn; the telex from the Director of CIA West Germany reached the Director in Washington a little before two o'clock. It was decoded and passed straight through to his personal tray, because of the double prefix TP, which it carried. The Director lunched in his office; he arrived there at eight o'clock prompt and set no limit on the hours he worked. He read the telex through carefully:

INTERPOL REPORT PROGRESS NEGATIVE
.
OUR INFORMATION RULES OUT TERRORIST RESPONSIBILITY FOR ASSASSINATION
.
ANALYSIS OF MOTIVE AND METHOD TALLIES WITH CONTACTS HERE
;
UNCLE VANYA OPERATION PROBABLE TO CERTAIN
.
REQUEST WASHINGTON LIAISON WITH APPROPRIATE AUTHORITY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE
.

The Director pressed a button on his telephone and spoke into it. ‘File on Sigmund Walther, right away.' He lit a pipe and puffed gently while he waited. They had been keeping a careful watch on the West German politician from the moment he had first declared his belief in
détente
with East Germany. His private telephone had been tapped and his office in Bonn infiltrated by an agent. There had been no evidence of complicity with the Russians, or of any motive but the one he proclaimed publicly: the reunification of Germany.

The Director was a man of boundless cynicism in respect of human beings and their motives. He believed nothing unless it showed evidence of venality, and Sigmund Walther was too good to be true. He was bidding for power, and he had chosen a policy which had the appeal of patriotism and peace, and
détente
which was fashionable, and stood no chance at all of becoming a reality. So the Director believed he was a fake. That belief didn't satisfy him because it left the true motivation of the man in doubt. Power alone was not sufficient explanation. To become leader of his party, to aim at the Chancellory itself—these were the obvious explanations why Walther projected himself as he did, but to the Director's subtle intelligence they were too obvious. There was a muted trumpet in the dulcet tones of Sigmund Walther's political pronouncements, a faint Wagnerian murmur that caught the Director's ear. West Germany was stable, prosperous and firmly tied to NATO and the Western alliance. She didn't need a saviour. There were no scandals about Walther. His business and private life was investigated over a long period without turning up a single dubious incident that could be used against him. Again it was too good to be true; the Director rejected it and told his people in Bonn to dig deeper and go back further. There had to be something discreditable. They hadn't found anything more heinous than a succession of love affairs with girls in his student days, and there were no pregnancies, abortions, drugs or suicides to make them worthwhile. Since his marriage to Minna Ahrenberg, he had never been involved with another woman. An upright businessman, succeeding through sheer ability and personal effort, a model husband, a devoted father, an incorruptible politician with high ideals. It was all a gigantic lie; the Director was convinced of it and let his counterpart in the West German Intelligence Service know exactly what he thought. And there, strangely, he had met resistance.

The head of German Intelligence had credentials which the West considered impeccable. He had led active resistance to the Nazis and to the SS Intelligence Service, when serving as a young officer under Admiral Canaris. He had been arrested after the Generals' Plot of 20 July, and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, where he had withstood torture and protected his associates. He had been released by the Americans, held for a long interrogation, during which he helped to track down senior members of the SD, including two of Reichsführer Himmler's aides, and by 1947 he was working for the Gehlen organization against the Russians. He had proved himself an anti-Soviet as well as an anti-Nazi; his name was officially Heinrich Holler, but he had several other names, including the one which he had been given at birth. He had astonished the Director in Washington by defending Sigmund Walther, and insisting that he was exactly the paragon he appeared to be.

The Director was adept at reading files, skipping the irrelevant details, mentally processing the facts. Walther had a lot of powerful friends among the old military establishment; that was a consequence of his marriage to a member of it, but they made odd bedfellows with the new rich industrialists, the lawyers and journalists and Social Democratic politicians who were part of his circle. Now he was dead; murdered with the maximum publicity in the heart of Paris, accompanied by a well-known political journalist. Uncle Vanya, the top man in Bonn had said. He certainly needed a specialist to help unravel this one. The Director closed the file; thought for a moment and then pressed a button on his second desk phone. ‘Send a message to Curt Andrews in Houston. Tell him to fly up here and be in my office by nine tomorrow. I have an assignment for him.'

Chapter 3

Sigmund Walther was buried in the family grave at Ohlsdorf cemetery in Hamburg. His father and mother were buried in the small plot, and he followed them on a beautiful sunny day, with a light breeze stirring his widow's black veil. His eldest son watched the veil covering his mother's face and tried to see if it concealed tears. He was angry with her for now adopting the conventional trappings of a ritual she had earlier said his father had always despised. His own concession was a black armband, though Freda had followed her mother's example and dressed in black, as had their cousins and the few close friends invited to the private burial. A public memorial service would be held later. They reminded Helmut of a flock of black crows gathered round the grave, his mother a little apart, seeming even taller because she held herself so upright. He forced back his own tears as the coffin was lowered. His father had left no instruction in his will; Minna Walther had rejected cremation, which Helmut thought was cleaner than the archaic committal to the ground. He didn't believe in a life after death; Sigmund had derided it. It didn't matter what happened to a body; life was the only important thing, and when that had gone it was a flame snuffed out that didn't rekindle anywhere else. Helmut was returning to university that afternoon; Freda and the younger children would go back to school; his mother insisted that she would be better if normal family life were resumed immediately. There was a lunch at their house for the cousins and the friends, which Helmut, the eldest, dreaded. He would be expected to be the host, support his mother, behave with gravity and self-restraint. All he wanted to do was shut himself in his room and cry his heartbreak out. When it was over, he took his mother's arm and they walked to the car. Inside she pushed back her veil. He saw how white her face was, but felt guilty because he did not undertstand her.

‘The little ones were very good,' Minna said. ‘Willi didn't cry—they were very brave.' Her son didn't answer. He had seen his brother's drawn face, and the way he kept biting his lip and fidgeting. Prussians, he thought. Thank Christ there's none of it in me. I'm just like my father.…

‘I don't think the younger ones should go to the memorial service,' he said; he was trying to take an adult view. ‘This has been quite bad enough for them.'

‘There's no question of it,' Minna said. ‘I want them to get back to normal. I just wish the lunch was over too, and I didn't have to see anyone.'

‘It was your idea,' her son said. ‘It didn't have to be done like this.'

‘No.' Minna turned towards him. ‘No, your father could have been cremated and popped into the ground; I've seen those funerals. It's the way you bury your pet dog.' Immediately she regretted the harshness of her answer, seeing it had upset him; he would never understand how much his hostility upset her.

She turned towards him, but he was staring out of the window, and he didn't look at her until they arrived back at the house. By four o'clock they had all gone. Helmut was on the train to Heidelberg, Freda and the younger children had flown back to Bonn where they were all at school. The housekeeper brought Minna a tray of coffee, and went out, shutting the door very quietly. Minna poured a cup and then left it to get cold; she smoked several cigarettes. The big room was silent; a small mantel clock ticked like a metronome. There were photographs on the tables and on an old-fashioned grand piano: they showed Sigmund and the children. There was a wedding group in a silver frame. People had sent flowers to her and the family; there were big vases displaying them, and they made the room seem artificial, as if it were a setting for a party. She stretched out her right hand, and looked at the gold wedding ring. She drew it back and forward on her finger; it slipped easily over her knuckle. Her hands had got thinner. She got up and opened the antique cabinet which had been converted to hold drinks, and poured herself a whisky.

Max Steiner was arriving at the airport at eleven twenty the next morning. She had booked him into a modest hotel, and told nobody that he was coming. Steiner knew about Janus. It was the most extraordinary coincidence; Walther would have called it Fate, that sent him to the Crillon that morning. It meant that what her husband had begun could be continued. The men who had killed him were merely instruments, she knew that. They hadn't known why he had to be murdered. Those who sent them believed that without Sigmund, it would all come to an end. She wouldn't be expected to carry on, or even to know the significance of Sigmund Walther's dying word, if she had ever heard it. Janus.…

They hadn't calculated on the existence of Max Steiner. Minna carried her glass across to the piano, and picked up the wedding group. Nineteen years ago. The clothes were very dated; Sigmund looked self-conscious and her own expression was shy. She looked very young, even for eighteen. Her father was there, tall and straight-backed, her mother in a pale blue hat and dress that matched her eyes. It was a good marriage for her; in his mid-twenties Walther was already successful, and the Ahrenbergs had no money, and no possessions. Ivan had swallowed up the house and the lands in Prussia. His drunken soldiers had looted the furniture and the silver and smashed up what they couldn't load up to steal. Sigmund Walther was a good husband for a penniless general's daughter. She hadn't known what love meant; she hadn't wanted to marry him or not wanted to; it had happened and she accepted it. He had made her love him afterwards. He was an accomplished lover, and he wanted her to enjoy it. Sex meant a great deal to Minna, and he was intuitive enough to develop that aspect of their early life until she was completely in love with him. He had encouraged her to have children; he wanted a large family unit; a beautiful pregnant wife was something a man prized like a decoration on his breast. Her own intelligence earned her the place in his confidence that no one else enjoyed. She held the wedding photograph for a minute and then put it face down on the piano. She took her glass back to the cabinet, refilled it, and went out to her husband's study. It was a businesslike room, with modern furniture, filing cabinets, a tape-recorder and a portable television set. She had promised to show Max Steiner what was in that room. She addressed herself in thought to her dead husband.

He would not be defeated, even in death. The search would go on.

Max flew into West Berlin the following day;
Newsworld
had a leg man in the city who had met Max in Paris, and they were friendly. He was at Tempelhof airport to collect him with a car. His name was Hugo Priem. As they shook hands, a tall man in an American-style suit and buttoned-down white shirt bumped into Max, and excused himself. He carried a suitcase and a Leica camera strung round his neck. Max didn't know it, but he had his first encounter with Curt Andrews from the CIA in the arrivals hall at Berlin airport.

He and Priem lunched together in a restaurant on the Kurfürstendamm. It was a bright day, and the wide avenue passed under their window, the traffic moving steadily; the ruined steeple of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church pointing its blunt finger to the sky stayed as a reminder of what war had done to the city.