The Other Side of Love (25 page)

Early on Sunday afternoon, for the first time the telephone sounded.

Answering, the major said respectfully:

“Yes, sir … Yes … Absolutely … Quite a unique young lady …

“

He extended the earpiece.

“For you, Kathe.”

Bewildered that anyone should know her whereabouts, she took the instrument.

“Miss Kingsmith?”

The gruff cadenced English voice was vaguely familiar.

“Winston Churchill here.”

The once-scorned MP was finding more and more support; the British hated bullies, and the Nazis had been kicking underdogs for a long time: first the Jews, then the Czechs, and now the Poles.

“Mr Churchill,”

she said.

“We are most deeply appreciative of what you have already done, and are even more grateful for your contribution in the future.”

“I must say none of this seems completely real to me.”

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‘Mark you me, it’s real. That little dictator of yours is on the warpath.”

Churchill’s rumble sounded jovially ominous.

“Miss Kingsmith, I commend your courage.”

As she hung up, she realized the major was watching her meditatively.

“You’re very young; you’ve had three days”

training, not three months. But Mr Churchill’s seldom wrong about people. Let’s hope for your sake he’s right this time.”

That afternoon Downes and she drove back to London.

IV

During Kathe’s absence, Alfred had hired a deaf pensioner as a temporary chauffeur. The wizened old man drove them home from the station, going fifteen miles an hour along a quiet stretch of the Kurfurstendamm. Alfred and Clothilde asked about the family.

“All anybody talked about is a war,”

Kathe said.

“Wyatt’s worried.”

“He’s not normally an alarmist,”

Alfred said.

“Alarmist! They’re digging up Hyde Park. Even the little children have been issued with gas-masks.”

“So they have here,”

Clothilde said.

“This crisis is all hot air,”

Alfred said with a cautious glance at the deaf old man beyond the glass.

“Heaven knows I’m no Nazi but, believe me, Hitler’s only getting back what that ridiculous treaty took away. Those French, how they insisted on their pound of flesh from Germany!”

Kathe inhaled the acrid scent of chrysanthemums, her welcomehome bouquet.

“What would be so awful if we were married this year?”

Clothilde’s smooth forehead creased iofc a frown.

“We’ll make the announcement the Christmas after next*

“And that’s that,”

Alfred added.

“No more nonsense.”

After she had unpacked, Kathe was drawn to Sigi’s room, which smelt faintly of his tobacco and the must of the decrepit von Graetz tapestry. She stood a long time staring up at the faded near-invisible medieval lettering: Loyalty to country, fidelity to oath.

V

That night Sigi came to dinner. After the gala roast chicken, he suggested they stroll down to the lake. The August evening was balmy, the moon almost yellow, but with the parental turndown her earlier sense of doom had settled back with a vengeance.

“You’re quiet tonight,”

Sigi said.

“Missing Wyatt?”

Sigi, a lot of people in London seem convinced there’ll be a war.”

“The Poles will cave in,”

he said.

“Their cavalry doesn’t stand a chance against our panzer divisions.”

“But if England and France stepped in?”

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‘They didn’t side with Czechoslovakia, why would they with Poland?”

A bulky outline loomed in front of the lake. The straw target, stored away years ago, had been set up again. When she was twelve Sigi had installed it to practise his shooting. Wild to copy her big brother, she had pestered him for lessons. Her co-ordination was excellent, and despite the Luger’s heaviness and recoil she had hit the bull’s-eye far more consistently than he.

“I see you’ve been practising,”

she said meaningfully.

“Don’t read anything into it. The junior officers at the Bendlerblock are being tested on marksmanship.”

“Mmm.”

He halted, fingering a rhododendron leaf.

“Kathe, how about coming to Bavaria? The top brass has been summoned to Berchtesgaden - no, actually to Mount Kehlstein.”

Hitler was often photographed in the Bavarian alps at his beloved summer home in the village of Berchtesgaden. Last year, however, a less public retreat had been completed for him atop Mount Kehlstein, a sanctuary so lofty that it had been nicknamed the Eagle’s Nest.

“I’m going with Uncle, of course, and we’re expected to bring a lady.”

The general was a confirmed bachelor.

“The Fiihrer makes my skin crawl.”

“Of course he does,”

Sigi said agreeably.

“But you’re so perfect. A blonde of blondes, heroine of the Olympic gold. Besides, I don’t know anyone else to invite.”

Sigi’s voice had grown awkward. Neither he nor his family ever mentioned Marga Salzwebel, the plump, cornfortable, fortyish Potsdam dentist’s widow, his long-term mistress. He put his thick warm arm around Kathe’s shoulder, giving her a brotherly hug.

“Look at it this way. How many people get to see the Eagle’s Nest?”

She pushed herself out of her depression. Surely Hitler’s meeting with his generals would be momentous information for the British. They had reached the target. She picked up a metal bullet-case and threw it. The path of yellow moonlight on the lake shattered.

“If you swear not to leave my side,”

she said. Almost immediately the guilt the major had warned of swept through her with a vengeance. She would be betraying not only her country, but also her halfbrother.

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I

Perched high in the mighty outcropping of mountains that comprise the Goll massif, the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s ultimate eyrie, can be reached only by a road built to be used exclusively by the Fiihrer and his guests. This single lane, a marvel of engineering, zig-zags precipitously up Mount Kehlstein, burrowing through tunnels to emerge on yet vaster, more intimidating alpine panoramas until one can see far into Austria. Here, where wiŤis race clouds around the roof of Europe, even in summer there is a nip to the air.

It was chilly at eleven on that mid-August morning when an escort of BMW motorcycles, headlights ablaze, swerved from the topmost tunnel leading a line of Mercedes-Benz limousines fitted with swastika flags. The motorcade carried chieftains of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht - the OKW - the High Command of the Army, Navy and Air Force, which had been set up by Hitler the previous year when he had named himself Supreme Commander.

In the fourth car, Kathe, sitting between Sigi and General von Hohenau, fought car-sickness by taking deep breaths from the open windows. She wore a dirndl dress with a cardigan, for this was to be a

“casual”

luncheon. The general’s hand rested on the thick briefcase between his gleaming black boots. He had not spoken since they had pulled away from Hotel Kronprinz, the comfortable window-box-adorned hostelry commandeered for the OKW in nearby Berchtesgaden. Sigi had taken out his pipe, and General von Hohenau had said:

“Our lance-corporal doesn’t care for a man with

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the smell of smoking on him.”

There had been a paternal note in the warning. Though the general never displayed open affection to Sigi, he considered his long-deceased brother’s son his heir.

The three passengers jerked forward as the driver swerved around a final turn, pulling to an abrupt halt on the large oval that marked the end of the road. There was nobody on hand to greet them, no sign of the Eagle’s Nest. A pair of immense closed bronze gates set into the face of the mountain seemed unreal - they might have been borrowed from the Arabian Nights. The heads of the OKW and their wives were being helped from cars by their aides. Each senior officer gripped a bulging briefcase. The wives, decades older than Kathe, had dressed as if for a formal garden-party. Mountain winds pulled at their silk skirts and hats. A large-brimmed straw hat blew off to be chased by a driver.

After five minutes, General von Hohenau tugged the Iron Cross that dangled from a chain around his tunic collar.

“The nerve of it,”

he muttered to Sigi.

“Leaving us to cool our heels!”

Just then the bronze doors slowly swung open. A trio of black-clad SS officers emerged.

“Ladies and gentlemen,”

the Sturmbannfuhrer - the SS equivalent of major - called in a thick Bavarian accent.

“If you will come this way, please.”

A broad high tunnel had been drilled into the heart of the mountain. Copper chandeliers set into the high arch of the ceiling shed receding pools of light. There were two pairs of bronze doors. As soon as all had walked inside, first one pair then the other clanged shut. Gleaming boots and high-heeled shoes reverberated more rapidly. After an eighth of a mile that seemed far longer, the tunnel made a sharp right turn. They were in front of a large lift lined with Venetian mirrors. One of the SS guides barred the open lift, another hustled inside to open a trap-door while the third directed the junior officers down an iron ladder into the service-level.

Sigi started to follow the other aides, but the one-eyed general took his arm, holding him back.

“My nephew, Oberleutnant von Hohenau, stays with me.”

Kathe stood pressed close to her brother as they rose silently and with no sense of motion.

II

The two-storey granite and sandstone house, intended for top-level conferences, was not large, but the mountain-top had been levelled for vast terraces that looked down on scudding clouds, villages clinging to mountain-sides and green faraway valleys.

Hitler, lumpy in a Bavarian costume, stood on the terrace surrounded by men in similar get-ups. Each group of OKW visitors was

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escorted to greet the host. When it was her group’s turn, Kathe’s legs felt rubbery. Hitler also appeared on edge, continually touching his silver buttons, the braid of his jacket. Recalling Kathe - or primed to recall her - he enquired whether she was preparing herself for the 1940 Olympics. Repulsed yet mesmerized by the pale blue gaze, she responded that she wasn’t yet in training.

“I see you’re appropriately dressed,”

he said, glancing with malicious satisfaction at the aristocratic older women shivering in their silk dresses at the sides of eminent husbands. He waved away Sigi and General von Hohenau, chatting with Kathe about her victory, about Leni Reifenstahl’s film of the 1936 Games. Grand Admiral Raeder’s group waited.

After Kathe had been dismissed with a handshake, she moved to the stone parapet where Sigi was talking to a guest in the Bavarian get-up.

“Welcome to Mount Kehlstein, Fraulein Kathe.”

Sigi’s companion spoke as if they were old friends. He was about Sigi’s age, but powerfully compact and a good head shorter.

“What a pleasure to see you again.”

Sigi asked,

“You remember Otto Groener, don’t you, Kathe?”

Otto Groener? It took her a moment to connect the name with Sigi’s old schoolfriend, the Gestapo officer who had passed on word that Wyatt’s antecedents were on their files. She supposed Otto Groener might be considered handsome with his aura of vigour, his sleeked blond hair, his square chin, short nose and keenly alert if small eyes. But in her admittedly prejudiced opinion Groener’s stance, feet planted apart, head thrust energetically forward between thick shoulders, made him look remarkaBy like a bull readying itself for a charge. *

“Sigi used to talk a lot about you,”

she said.

“But we’ve never met.”

“Years ago we did.”

His smile showed the effects of early privation: jagged teeth with numerous gold fillings.

“You were a beautiful little girl, and I must say that time has only improved you. No wonder the Fiihrer honoured you with so much attention.”

He paused.

“Do you still live out there in the Grunewald?”

“The same house, yes.”

“House? That’s a palace!”

Sigi and Kathe both demurred.

Groener’s eyes were fixed on Kathe.

“No, it’s true. In those days, believe me, I’d hardly been near anything that grand, much less inside. My father was a bricklayer. In Munich nothing was being built, so we came to Berlin. No work there, either; but you know how it was then - the Jew contractors gave all the jobs to the bolshies. Let me tell you, we’d have starved without the soup-kitchen. Still, I wanted a good education, so I pushed my way into Sigi’s school. I

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can’t count the number of times I’d have been shoved back out if my pal here hadn’t come up with my fees.”

Sigi looked embarrassed.

“You more than repaid me with that walking tour of the Berchtesgadenland. What magnificent country you come from!”

“Yes, those days are behind me.”

Groener passed a hand over his hair - it grew in a peculiarly straight line across his forehead and must be heavily brilliantined to remain smooth in this wind - and smiled at Kathe.

“Now I outrank your brother; I’m a Hauptsturmfuhrer.”

The SS equivalent of captain.

“I have an elephant’s memory for favours.”

And I bet you never forget a wrong, Kathe thought. He seemed to be waiting for a response, so she murmured: