The Other Side of Love (35 page)

Lieutenant Armin Lamm held the umbrella over Kathe as they hurried along Unter den Linden. A line of long black cars bearing swastika flags were circling the wet cobbles of Pariser Platz and drawing up at the Adlon. Inside the hotel, Kathe and Armin joined the crush of bejewelled women and high-ranking Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine officers waiting resignedly at the foot of the staircase while two rigid-backed Gestapo officers checked and rouble-checked their invitations. A voice near her ear said:

“My luck. The best-looking girl here has to be my sister.”

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‘Sigi, you stranger!”

she laughed, hugging him.

“What are you doing in Berlin?”

“Staff meetings,”

he said, again speaking into her ear.

“With our liege lord himself. Big doings.”

Shortly after they reached the private banquet-hall, Goering arrived. Grossly corpulent, bulging like a barrage-balloon in his vivid blue Luftwaffe uniform, he waved his fat beringed hands so that his diamonds glittered all during his brief speech to open the buffet.

On long linen-draped tables, food unobtainable to the ordinary Germans was displayed like jewellery. Golden French pate de foie gras set off the darkness of French truffles. Polish ham gleamed pink between a salad of Danish eggs, and rosy, translucently thin slices of Norwegian smoked salmon were flanked by the emerald of Czech hothouse asparagus.

Armin kept his burn-stunted left hand in his trouser pocket, removing it reluctantly to hold his buffet-plate. Diverting her attention from his disfigurement, he said:

“A culinary map of our conquests, eh?”

Goering was standing near by amid a clutch of toadies. He overheard.

“Well said, Lieutenant. All our table lacks is English roast beef, and that won’t be long coming.”

Kathe fluttered her lashes.

“How exciting, Herr Field Marshal. Is that true?”

“You wouldn’t even ask that question, Fraulein, if you’d seen the merry blaze of bonfires my Luftwaffe has set in London.”

At a smile from the cruel, thin, lipsticked mouth, the field marshal’s sycophants whinnied with laughter.

“Those Tommies are on the ropes. I haven’t a single doubt that pig Churchill will be singing surrender carols for Christmas. Early next year, my pretty young Fraulein, you’ll be enjoying roast beef of old England.”

Long after she went to bed she could hear Goering’s arrogant certainty. Images of the bloated field-marshal presiding over a similar party at Claridges kept running through her brain.

That Sunday morning, she arrived at Kingsmith’s before eight.

“I’ve changed my mind,”

she said to Aubrey.

“Tell Mr Churchill I’ll try to find out about Barbarossa.”

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I

After Aubrey had slipped out the back door into the courtyard, Kathe sat with her hands tightly clasped, waiting for the earliest hour that on a Sunday morning she could telephone the Habsburger Hof, the hotel where Sigi permanently kept a room.

Even so, she woke him. Apologizing, she said:

“Where were you after the buffet opened? I looked everywhere.”

“Another commitment,”

he said, and f||m his embarrassed cough she knew he had sneaked away to Potsdam to visit his overaged mistress, the dentist’s widow.

“Any free time today?”

“Uncle’s got me completely tied up.”

“But this is Sunday.’”

“Kathe, you’re not in any mess, are you? The evening’s free. As a matter of fact, I ought to see Mother.”

He came to dinner. After they had savoured his gift, real French coffee, Clothilde excused herself - it was her hour to read. Kathe and Sigi moved to the Herrenzimmer. He piled three logs above a messy heap of pine-cone kindling. When the fire caught, he rose to his feet, brushing his hands clean on his tunic.

Tell old Sigi your problems.”

He sounded like a warm-hearted priest ultimately ready to absolve every sin.

“What’s wrong?”

Work.”

Her cheeks were pale, and she had never felt more of a Judas. Tm just not cut out for business.”

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An aristocrat on both sides, Sigi readily accepted that no sister of his would enjoy being a shopgirl.

“I’ve been thinking …

“

She looked into the fire.

“They hire civilians at the Bendlerblock, don’t they?”

Sigi looked up from filling his pipe.

“You want to work for the OKW?”

“Look at you, in the thick of it.”

How could she be involving Sigi, her beloved clumsy bear of a brother, in her web of lies?

“Rushing off to Poland, Norway, Austria.”

Tm a soldier. You’d be stuck in an office.”

‘At least I’d be doing something for the Reich.”

‘You’re positive the Bendlerblock’s what you want?”

‘Would you … could you put in a word for me?”

The broad space between his eyes, the one feature he’d inherited from Clothilde, creased in a frown. He gnawed on his pipe for what seemed an endless pause.

“Let me see what I can do.”

Late the next morning, Sigi called Kingsmith’s.

“The woman at Civilian Personnel told me there were vacancies for clerks!”

he burst out.

“My sister, a filing clerk!”

Who could have better access to military documents?

“Sigi, don’t get excited it’s not your style. If that’s what they need, where’s the insult? I’ll go over before lunch.”

It was a cold clear morning. In her beige felt hat and lynx-collared coat, she walked briskly down Unter den Linden and cut across the Tiergarten. In twenty minutes she reached the complex of massive buildings that was the Bendlerblock. Staff cars were pulling in and out of the courtyards. Stern-faced sentries stood at attention or goose-stepped back and forth.

The basement of a brick building across the street housed the offices of Civilian Personnel. The supervisor, a harried-looking fiftyish spinster, personally interviewed Kathe.

“So you’re Captain von Hohenau’s sister. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that he steered you here.”

“Then I have a job?”

“That goes without saying.”

The older woman touched the sicklylooking fern on her desk.

“I’m presuming that since you’re related to Herr General von Hohenau the Abwehr”

- Army Intelligence

“will grant you top clearance. We’re terribly short-handed in Hall Six.”

“Hall Six?”

“That’s where the sensitive documents are kept. Report to me next Monday at seven forty-five. By then I should know if you’ve been cleared.”

224

II

Every day that week Kathe arrived at the shop before six, staying late so Aubrey could train her. She explained to her mother that she was once again changing to a job that helped the w?r effort, and must put the books in order for Herr Knaupf. Not that Clothilde enquired: having passed her married life as though her source of income didn’t exist, why would she question it now?

“I still can’t see one thing,”

Kathe groaned.

She was squinting into the minuscule lens of a tiny camera that Aubrey had assembled from pieces sewn into his uniform coat.

“Keep the other eye closed.”

“I am, I am. It’s hopeless.”

“Kathe, believe me, if I can snap pictures with it, you absolutely can. Give it another go round.”

Squinting fiercely, she again raised the camera between her thumb and forefinger. This time miracle of miracles she saw newsprint through the lens.

“Hooray!”

she cried, triumphantly tapping her fingernail to the pin-sized button. Within an hour, she had photographed a dozen pages of the Volkische Beobachter and was adept with the tiny mechanism.

“You’re ready for a surveillance tutorial,”

Aubrey said. He had already taught her the trick of moving without a rustle of cloth, a jingle of jewellery, without a footfall. He had considered teaching her a few close-combat techniques, but then decided she was far too slight to prevail in a physical clash.

“You mean I learn to follow somebodj T

“The reverse,”

he said.

“See if you knowwhen somebody’s following you. Take a walk wherever you want, and I’ll catch up.”

“How long a head start do I get?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“You’ll never find me.”

It had snowed heavily the previous night, but now the sun was out. On the Unter den Linden, the snow had turned to slush, and pedestrians stayed close to the buildings to avoid the muddy spray raised by a military convoy. From the Pariser Platz came the cheerful brassy notes of a military band playing

“O Tannenbaum”

as crowds streamed through the Brandenburg Gate into the Tiergarten. He decided Kathe would join the Sunday strollers. In the park, apple-cheeked blond children pelted snowballs, laughing adolescents sledded down hillocks, and Golden Victory glittered atop her marble and gilt column. He caught sight of Kathe as she jumped across the

225

wet hoof-holes of a bridle path. Following at a distance he was on the verge of losing her. He hurried forward, barely avoiding a galloping mare. The grey-haired rider, reining with a cavalry officer’s rapidity, peered haughtily down.

“Don’t they teach you men to get out of a horse’s way nowadays?”

It was one of the rare times anyone had noticed Aubrey.

In his uniform, he had moved through the heart of enemy territory noticed only by two nervous Berlin whores the weird moral code of the Third Reich demanded that prostitutes who serviced the armed forces should come from the lesser nationalities. In crowded beer-stubes, the sweating waitresses had barely glanced at him as they slammed down his orders of Weissbier and bockwurst. He was one more faceless soldier at the Soldatenkino; he spent a lot of time at these free cinemas for servicemen. German films, churned out by the Ministry of Propaganda, were universally bad, their anti-Semitism blatant and sickening, but at least he had a place to get out of the rain or snow.

He watched Kathe’s slight graceful figure veer in the direction of the zoo. Quite a number of men turned as she passed. Beauty, he reflected, is no asset to a woman who needs to remain incognito. She kept glancing from side to side and looking back. He had fallen in behind a couple of privates in Wehrmacht uniforms, and she didn’t notice him. He checked his watch, following her along the crowded paths for ten minutes before catching up.

“Fraulein,”

he said,

“I believe you dropped this?”

He handed her the handkerchief that he’d found that first night in the office and had kept with him, inhaling the scent of her to help blank out those horrible racist films.

Her face flamed, and she mumbled:

“Thank you, soldier.”

“Try again,”

he said without moving his lips.

“I’ll wait here a quarter of an hour.”

He found her sipping hot ersatz chocolate as she peered around Aschlinger’s on Potsdamerplatz. The cafe was full, and he waited to be seated with a group of noncoms. Rathe didn’t see him until she left.

“How on earth do you do it?”

she asked.

She had led him back to Kingsmith’s.

“Elementary, my dear Kathe,”

he said.

“I pay attention. Tomorrow you will notice everything, the way I taught you. You will not keep turning like a windmill.”

“That bad?”

she asked.

“Don’t you ever look around?”

“All the time. I’ve learned to hide doing it.”

He reached out to touch her cheek, the sole physical contact he had permitted himself to initiate.

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IV

On Monday, when she reported to the basement offices, the pressuredlooking supervisor actually gave a rusty little smile.

“As I expected, you were cleared for Top Secret. Here’s your pass and badge. Go through the courtyard and the desk clerk’ll direct you to Hall Six.”

Across the bustling corridor from Hall Six was a cloakroom. Here, a grey-uniformed Blitzmddchen, one of the Wehrmacht’s women’s auxiliary, was permanently stationed. She gave the clerks bodysearches whenever they entered or left the hall. Handbags were emptied and gone through. The guard at the dark-jambed door examined Kathe’s pass and badge. Inside, soldiers patrolled the narrow aisles. The cabinets were double-locked, and the nasal-voices supervisor explained the system to Kathe. One key was universal. The other was fished out of a large cracked pottery bowl at random by the clerk when she reported to work in the morning.

“Every meaningless memo is saved, sometimes in duplicate or triplicate. You’d never believe what idiotic stuff. Memos whether or not to ban mazurkas in Poland.”

She had come directly to Kingsmith’s after leaving work: should her movements be questioned, she could give the perfectly normal excuse of checking up on her manager.

“Mazurkas! Really Top Secret stuff.”

“This was only your first day. Don’t get the wind up.”

“Wind up? That’s a gross under-representation. But at least I’m a German, in my own country. Aubrey, you’re a man with nerves of steel.”

W

“You don’t know how funny that is,”

ne said, overjoyed that she believed him intrepid.

“Must you stay until I get the photographs?”

“Kathe, it’s best for you to know as little as possible about my orders.”