The Other Side of Love (60 page)

For a few seconds longer Aubrey watched the brush held by a liver-spotted hand above the canvas, then he coughed.

“Sir?”

Churchill turned.

“Why are you standing there? Come over here, Mr Osmond.”

Aubrey crossed the sunlit space thinking that maybe Churchill had sprung from mythical Avalon. What short of wizardry could explain how this old man, after the hectic work-pace, the monumental decisions, the endless political manoeuvres of a six-year global war, could conjure up a minor underling’s literary pseudonym?

“I’m honoured that you remember, sir.”

Churchill gave a wheezing chuckle.

“You must try another novel.”

“I plan to, sir.”

The old man swabbed his brush on the palette, throwing a streak of azure across his rendering of a romantically tumbledown Greek temple.

“Well, what is so urgent that you needed to drive down here?”

“It’s about my cousin.”

“Fraulein Kingsmith?”

“She’s been in an American detentioncamp for months.”

Churchill’s bushy white eyebrows drew together.

“It’s necessary to cast out the Nazi villains.”

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‘Sir, you know that Kathe wasn’t a Nazi.”

“Do I?”

“You yourself convinced her to work for us. We have an obligation

to her.”

“I am aware of my obligations!”

Massive pink head bent to his rounded chest, Churchill was exhibiting one of his celebrated temper tantrums.

Aubrey’s guts turned to jelly, yet his voice remained calmly stern.

“Sir, if you refuse to help her, I will have to tell the Americans precisely how she helped us.”

“You are in His Majesty’s service!”

Churchill growled.

“I’m aware the penalty will be severe.”

Setting down his palette, Churchill opened a humidor. He sniffed a Romeo y Julieta cigar, his mood changing from anger to reason.

“Surely by now’, he said,

“you understand that we must retain our few hidden warriors. Without them, where is the hope of stemming the tide of Stalinism?”

Aubrey in the past months had seen enough of the eternal Soviet manoeuvring to impose puppet communist regimes in all four zones of the conquered country; he accepted that Stalin intended to swallow up not only Germany but also the countries of Eastern Europe, and possibly Western Europe, too. Churchill was right. They needed an ultra-secret German network as much as ever. Yet he went on doggedly:

“I won’t be endangering our secrecy, sir. Kathe was never part of CI4 proper. I’ll use any means available to get her free.”

“Kingsmith, that’s treason you’re talking!”

Til face the firing squad, then.”

Churchill continued to glare from und Hhose tangled white brows for a few more seconds, then he gave aSaugh that shook his belly.

“Downes said you were a good man. Decent and honourable to a fault, Downes always said.”

About getting Kathe released, sir?”

“A rather delicate spot you’re putting us into, Kingsmith. Let me think what can be done.”

Chewing ruminatively on the unlit cigar for nearly a minute, he said:

“The best answer is a swift interrogation.”

Aubrey’s fists clenched.

“Have her questioned? Now? When the world’s in an uproar?”

The horror-stories trickling out of Nuremberg had cast every German as a moral leper: once the War Crime Trials started, there would be a greater deluge of loathing.

“Kathe will be drowned.”

The Americans want to be fair. Fraulein Kingsmith isn’t guilty of anything, is she?”

Only of being stupid. She wouldn’t be in the detentioncamp if she’d broken her oath of secrecy and told our ally’s Public Safety People that she’d spied for us.”

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Churchill’s jowls quivered, but he spoke mildly enough.

“Yes, yes. Some excellent information, including advance notice for those damnable rockets.”

“We lost my sister to one, sir.”

Forgive me, Araminta, for using your death so shamelessly.

“I recall, my boy, and it saddened me.”

Churchill squinted appraisingly at his painting.

“But can’t you see how vital it is, Kingsmith, that the American intelligence community never gets wind of CI4? Should they hear of our depleted little band, then it must follow as night to day that Mr Stalin will hear, too. Fraulein Kingsmith will need to go through the motions of a trial.”

“The motions, sir? You yourself ordered me to ask her for information about Barbarossa. She managed to get clearance for Top Secret files and that makes her guilty.”

“If need be, we’ll let you pick a battery of barristers. The girl’s father was an Englishman, after all, so a cousin helping won’t be amiss. In the meanwhile it would be best for her to start out with one of their lawyer chaps.”

“Today in medieval Nuremberg, a city that once resounded with millions ecstatically cheering Adolf Hitler, there opened the trial of twenty-two top Nazis. Martin Bormann will be tried in absentia, but the twenty-one other defendants were transferred under heavy guard from the connecting prison to the Justizpalast, that same grey sandstone building where the Nazis enacted their heinous racial laws. The defendants spent this entire day hearing the list of charges against them: crimes against peace, crimes against humanity and crimes against defenceless minorities. Specially constructed earphones with channels for translation into four languages were used. Afterwards many in the jammed courtroom discussed the impact of seeing the accused Nazis listening impassively, even with boredom, to the stream of their hideous and grisly crimes. This correspondent spoke to”

At a tap on the door, Wyatt switched off the American Armed Forces Network. He was in his Dahlem billet and he crossed the cabbage rose carpet of his spacious over-pink bedroom to let in his guest. Aubrey.

After the greetings Aubrey said:

“Kathe’s going to be interrogated next week.”

“So quickly? Who told you?”

Ignoring the second question, Aubrey said:

“The timing couldn’t be worse.”

“Yep, rotten,”

Wyatt agreed with a depressed glance at the dometopped radio.

“She’ll be hauled before a tribunal for sure, and

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then …” He raised his palms.

“God knows. Apropos, word is out that General Clay’s decided to hand over the job of de-Nazification to the Germans next April.”

“She’ll certainly be tried before April,”

Aubrey said.

“Tell me a bit about your tribunals.”

“They vary. The legalities of de-Nazification are murky. The definitions of who is a war criminal and who isn’t are pretty cloudy, too. But, in the light of what’s going on in Nuremberg, none of our guys will be weak sisters. For the time being, there’ll be twenty-year, or thirty-year terms. Capital sentences.”

“She’ll be allowed counsel, won’t she?”

“That’s for sure.”

“Do you know any top-rank lawyers?”

“In civilian life there were those who considered me deviously warped enough to be a good litigator.”

“You?”

Aubrey stared at Wyatt.

After a long pause, Wyatt said:

“You can be quite a prick, know that? I am good. If you don’t believe me, cable old man Uzbend. He keeps writing piteous letters to find out when I’m being discharged. Look, I’ll work my ass off to get her acquitted.”

Wyatt went to the maidenly dressingtable, pouring two stiff drinks. He handed a tumbler to Aubrey.

“If our former entanglement’s got you hot under the collar, forget it.

“Minta is still my wife.”

“And you blame the Germans for her death,”

Aubrey said.

“I can still remember a night in New York when you swore Kathe was a Nazi.”

“Guilty on both counts. But, Jesus Christ, Aubrey, you can’t honestly believe I’m conniving to shove myAture sister-in-law into gaol for the next twenty years.”

“There’s certain evidence she won’t divulge.”

Wyatt peered at Aubrey.

“I put a hypothetical case before Kathe the day I returned her to Ober Tappenburg,”

he said.

“I postulated that you were in the SIS or SOE. That you were dropped into Germany. That she helped you.”

“What did she say?”

“That I was nuts.”

A cat howled. There weren’t many cats left in this starving city. Aubrey said without inflection:

“There’s never been any insanity in the family, has there?”

Wyatt stared a moment longer into the bespectacled eyes. He had a partial answer. Aubrey, bound by secrecy, was telling him as much as possible of his wartime activities. But what about Kathe? Couldn’t the strong hint that she’d been a British agent also be a ploy on Aubrey’s part to make him more sympathetic to her case? After all, granted she might not have babbled English official secrets to the de-Nazification

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team, but surely when he had visited her in Ober Tappenburg, when she had been so desperate to get out, she would have said something. As he’d told her later, one little clue that she’d worked for Aubrey and he would have contacted Aubrey pronto. There’s certain evidence she won’t divulge. The cynic in Wyatt pointed out that this evidence could well be incriminating.

Nevertheless he said with absolute sincerity: Til give the case my damnedest. And consider the impression we’ll make. A gallant American cousin defending her. A gallant British cousin as star character witness.”

Tve been ordered back to our zone.”

“That’s a lousy break for her.”

The dinnergong sounded.

“So if when - Kathe goes before a tribunal I’m her counsel?”

“That’s up to her.”

390

i

Two American Public Safety officers interrogated Kathe. On the windswept morning of 2 January 1946, she was transferred from the Ober Tappenburg detention facility to the Konigstrasse Prison in Frankfurt, where she would await trial before an American tribunal.

Seen from the street, the high-walled prison complex appeared to have sustained no damage. However, “high-explosive bomb had destroyed the row of warders”

housing R the rear and dangerously weakened the roof of the women’s wing. The roof had been replaced with corrugated tin that intensified the cold weather and amplified every sound. As a guard let Wyatt along the tier, their footsteps resounded like masculine drumrolls beneath the shrill hooting cries of the inmates. The narrow slits of cells gave off a strong odour of carbolic.

As Wyatt was admitted, Kathe rose. The English-tailored clothes she’d acquired on that escapee week with Aubrey were now as rumpled as her earlier German rags had been. She appeared yet thinner. But her hair was neatly drawn into a thick single plait, and her skin was no longer underlaid with the waxen pallor of the afternoon he’d delivered her back to Ober Tappenburg.

As a family member I’m allowed to visit,”

he explained without prelude. He was only permitted ten minutes.

“Treatment here OK?”

When it comes to prisons”

she forced vivacity -

“the Amis win hands down over us Jerries.”

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Was the visit being monitored? Wyatt glanced at the open door. His GI escort chewed at a hangnail while tilting his head towards the guardroom, where a radio was playing the Armed Forces Network’s record of the Jack Benny Show, very little of which could be heard through the surrounding din.

“You were locked up?”

Wyatt asked in a low voice.

“Towards the end of the war.”

“Any particular reason?”

She shrugged.

“How’s Aubrey? Could you get them to let me write to him?”

“The officer in charge of Konigstrasse Prison is a hard-nosed bastard. It took a lot of fast talking to get him to authorize this visit.”

“After what happened in the Tiergarten, it was nice of you to take the trouble.”

She gestured that he should sit at the foot of the cot as she sank down on the thin pillow.

Since she was making an effort at normality in this noisy zoo, Wyatt sat.

“This isn’t a social call. I’m here to offer my services as your counsel.”

“That’s very kind, but not necessary. The charges are all true.”

“During the interrogation did you mention being in prison during the war?”

“I don’t need a lawyer.”

He gripped her wrist.

“Wrong, Kathe, wrong. You need one in the worst way. You could get a life sentence. Hell, right now there’s tribunals who’d hang you!”

She looked down at the large hand clenched around her fragile wrist, then directly at him. He saw that, although she might have more colour, her eyes had that same drabbed suffering as earlier. He let go of her wrist.

“How’s your little boy?”

she asked.

“Geoff?”

He frowned. His brutal if honest appraisal of her situation couldn’t have sunk in yet. Otherwise why would she be enquiring about a child she’d never met?

“Didn’t I make it clear? No light sentences right now.”

“Yes, I know. They let us see the newspaper. Have you a photo?”

Taking out his wallet, he extracted the latest snapshot.