Traitor's Gate (16 page)

‘I know, but they didn’t, did they?’ Conrad said, squeezing her arm. ‘The one problem was that we didn’t know what newspaper your uncle would hand me. Fortunately the Gestapo never noticed that his
Frankfurter Zeitung
miraculously became a
Berliner Tageblatt
.’ It was strange but despite the risk, or possibly because of it, Conrad had enjoyed the whole experience. He would certainly think twice about doing it all again, but it had been a sweet feeling to fool the Gestapo. ‘And if we can get your father out of the country tonight it will all have been worthwhile.’

‘Thank you so much, Conrad,’ Anneliese said. ‘Do you think Captain Foley will have the visa?’

‘I hope so. I’m sure he will have done all he can to get it.’

‘I’m trying not to get my hopes up in case I’m disap­pointed, but it’s difficult not to.’ And indeed there was eagerness in Anneliese’s voice and in her step as they walked along Tier­garten­strasse. ‘I will miss my father if he goes to Britain, but at least I’ll know he’ll be safe.’

The people queuing patiently along the street outside the Pass­port Control Office were wilting in the heat, brows glistening with sweat. The Yorkshire commissionaire recognized Conrad and led him through to Foley’s office. The captain was pleased to see them, as was his dog, but Conrad sensed immediately there was something wrong. Perhaps because Foley was English and she was German, Anneliese didn’t seem to pick up the same feeling.

‘Congratulations to both of you,’ Foley said in English with a smile. ‘That information your uncle gave us was gold dust, pure gold dust.’

‘I’m glad,’ said Conrad. But as he said it he realized he wasn’t. He hadn’t really considered what usefulness the information would have for his country. It was Anneliese’s father he was concerned about. Whatever he was doing, he wasn’t doing it for Britain, he was doing it for victims of Nazism, individuals who were important to him: Anneliese, Dr Rosen, Theo, Joachim, and, he realized, ultimately himself. He was still wary of the kind of blind patriotism that required unquestioning loyalty to one’s country’s government: there was too much of that all around him in Berlin.

‘Fräulein Rosen, I would be extremely interested in obtaining any further information your uncle may be able to provide.’

‘I am sorry, Captain Foley,’ Anneliese replied in halting English. ‘He was quite afraid this time. I do not think he will help you again.’

‘I quite understand,’ said Foley, switching to German for Anneliese’s benefit. ‘But please just ask him to bear it in mind in future. If the situation in this country continues to deteriorate, he might change his position.’

‘I will tell him,’ said Anneliese. ‘Now, have you issued the visa for my father, Captain Foley?’

‘Yes, I have it here,’ said Foley with a quick smile, touching a form in front of him.

‘That’s wonderful!’ said Anneliese, glancing at Conrad. See­ing his expression, she looked at Foley. ‘What? What is it? What’s wrong?’ A note of panic rose in her voice.

Foley sighed. ‘It’s the exit permit,’ he said. ‘The Gestapo won’t grant one.’

‘But I’ve done all the paperwork! The passport, the tax-clearance certificate. It took me weeks to get it all together.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with the paperwork,’ said Foley. ‘Usually when there is a hiccup like this we can sort it out, inducements can be brought to bear. In this case I asked a good friend of mine to do all he could, and normally that’s enough. But not this time. My friend says that someone doesn’t want your father to leave the country.’

‘No.’ She whispered the word and her lower lip trembled. A single tear ran down her cheek. She sniffed. ‘I’m sorry. I just thought... I hoped... I knew I shouldn’t have counted on it but...’

Foley opened a drawer in his desk and produced a clean hand­kerchief, which he offered to her. Conrad realized he must be used to desperate weeping women in his office; he prob­ably had a stack of them stowed away there. She dabbed her eyes. Conrad moved over to her and put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned into his body.

‘Is there nothing you can do?’ he asked.

Foley shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve tried everything. The entry visa to Britain is good for six months, but without an exit permit it’s useless.’

‘I can’t let him rot in a camp,’ Anneliese protested.

Foley sighed. ‘I appreciate the risk you both took to bring me this information, and I will continue to do what I can for your father. I have pulled people out of concentration camps before, provided we can get the exit permit.’

‘Perhaps he won’t be rearrested?’ Anneliese looked at Foley hopefully.

‘Perhaps,’ he said. But all three of them knew it was unlikely. If someone had been concerned enough to block the exit permit, he would probably want to make sure that Dr Rosen went straight back into custody.

Anneliese pulled herself together. She stood and held out her hand. ‘Thank you for all you have done, Captain Foley.’

‘I’m just sorry it wasn’t enough.’

They were just about to leave when Conrad hesitated. ‘Captain Foley. You said “someone” doesn’t want Dr Rosen to leave the country. Do you know who that “someone” is?’

‘Yes, yes I do.’ Foley examined a small notebook. ‘It’s a Gestapo officer named Klaus Schalke. He’s quite the rising star, apparently, a favourite of Heydrich’s.’

‘Schalke?’ said Conrad.

‘Do you know him?’ Foley asked.

Conrad glanced at Anneliese, who was clearly surprised by his recognition of the name. ‘You could say that. We’re not exactly best of friends. He was the one who arrested me. He let me go after my cousin died in custody, and I would have thought he had forgotten me, but perhaps he bears a grudge.’

‘Who knows?’ said Foley. ‘Sometimes these people can be persuaded, but my contact was advised not to approach Schalke. He was told it might make things worse.’

‘Can we speak to him?’ Conrad said. ‘Perhaps I can find out what he has against me, if indeed there is anything.’

‘No!’ said Anneliese.

‘But I’m a British citizen—’

‘If you’ve had a brush with him in the past you should keep well clear of him,’ she said.

‘Fräulein Rosen is probably correct,’ said Foley. ‘And Schalke’s opposition might well have nothing to do with you. He’s a Nazi, isn’t he? Perhaps the idea of a Jew giving blood to an Aryan fills him with revulsion. These people have a very warped view of the world.’

Conrad shared Anneliese’s gloom as they left the building. ‘If this Gestapo officer blocked the exit permit because of me, I’m very sorry,’ he said.

‘Captain Foley’s right; it probably had nothing to do with you,’ Anneliese replied. But she avoided his eye as she said it. She was understandably upset, and angry, but Conrad didn’t know whether her anger stretched to him.

‘What now?’ he said.

‘My father’s due to be released at three o’clock this after­noon. I was planning to meet him and give him his visa. Now I suppose I will go to see him be freed and then arrested again.’

‘Can I come with you?’ Conrad asked. ‘I’ve heard so much about him, I’d like to see him. Of course if you’d rather not, I would quite understand.’

‘No, please come. I’d like that. And after all you have done for him it would be good for you to see him, however briefly.’

They went straight to the Anhalter Station. Dr Rosen was in prison in the city of Dessau, about eighty kilometres to the south-west of Berlin. At twenty minutes to three, Conrad and Anneliese arrived in a taxi at the gates of a grim stone building. Anneliese threw herself into the arms of a middle-aged woman with wispy grey-blonde hair, who was standing watching the gates expectantly. It was even hotter in Dessau than it had been in Berlin, and the woman’s hair was damp with sweat.

‘Mama, this is Conrad de Lancey, an English friend of mine who helped me get the visa.’

The woman held out her hand to Conrad. She had kind blue eyes. ‘May I see it?’ she said, her voice eager.

‘Yes you may, but, Mama
,
it’s useless! We couldn’t get an exit permit. The Gestapo wouldn’t issue one.’

The woman staggered as if she had received a physical blow. ‘Does that mean... Oh,
Liebchen
, look. The van.’

Sure enough, parked twenty yards along the road in the shade of a chestnut tree was a green van of the kind that Conrad had already been inside.

‘They’re here! The Gestapo are here!’ Anneliese’s voice was anguished.

They waited outside the gates for the next twenty minutes, the sun beating down on them, neither mother nor daughter willing to move into the shade. The street was like an airless oven, heat bouncing off the stone walls of the prison. There was no sign of movement in the van, and in the shade it was impossible to see whether it was occupied. But they knew it was.

At a couple of minutes past the hour, the heavy prison gate opened, and a small olive-skinned man in a baggy suit emerged.

‘Papa!’ Anneliese ran to him, followed by her mother. Dr Rosen held them both tight. Conrad stood back, but the doctor noticed him over the shoulder of his daughter and smiled. It was an extraordinary smile of strength and kindness. Conrad would never forget it. ‘Oh, Papa, we couldn’t get the papers! We tried, we tried so hard, but we couldn’t get the papers!’

Two ordinary-looking men wearing pristine raincoats even in the mid-afternoon heat emerged from the van and approached the trio. Conrad was beginning to recognize the uniform of the plain-clothes Gestapo. The doctor stood up straight to meet them. Anneliese detached herself from him.

One of them presented the doctor with a sheet of typed paper. ‘Dr Rosen. This is a protective custody order. Please come with us.’

‘One moment, please.’ The policemen stood respectfully aside as the doctor took the hands of his wife and daughter. ‘Look after each other, won’t you?’

‘I will,’ said Frau Rosen.

He turned to his daughter who was blinking back tears. ‘Anneliese? Will you look after your mother?’

She bit her lip and nodded.

‘I won’t be long: they’ll let me out soon.’ Then he kissed them both.

The women watched bravely as one of the Gestapo eased him away, slipped handcuffs over his wrists and led him off to the van.

Then Anneliese cracked. ‘No!’ she screamed, and she sank to her knees. Her mother crouched down and held her. In that position they watched Dr Rosen being bundled into the back of the vehicle. A few seconds later it drove off, and was gone.

After a miserable afternoon with Frau Rosen, Anneliese and Conrad returned to the station and a train back to Berlin. Conrad took Anneliese back to her place, which turned out to be a room in a tenement building in the Scheunenviertel, the poor Jewish quarter. This was a part of Berlin that Conrad had never visited: bustling, narrow cobbled streets; small shops stuffed full of cheap goods; children everywhere running, playing and gawking; murky corner bars; high, crowded tenements, plaster peeling off the walls. And everywhere there was graffiti: cartoons of Jews beheaded or hanged, obscene inscriptions, or the simple word
Jude
in large clear letters. Several shop windows were boarded up, where the glass had been recently broken.

Many of the inhabitants, with their untrimmed earlocks and beards, wore traditional Jewish orthodox dress, and all around Conrad heard the unfamiliar sound of Yiddish. The people were from Eastern Europe, refugees from the pogroms of Russia and Poland, with little in common with the indigenous German-speaking Jews; even their religious observance was different. Anneliese said that when she had been forbidden to continue studying to become a doctor on account of her ancestry, she had decided to live amongst the community of which the state had decreed she was now a member, to surround herself with other people whose basic rights were inexorably being stripped away from them. Besides, the rent was low.

Anneliese’s room was on the fourth floor. It was baking hot and she opened the windows on to the interior courtyard. At least the stove, a tall blue-and-white tiled contraption that dominated the room, was unlit. Everything was clean and tidy, with the exception of a single bookcase which was overwhelmed with volumes. On top of the wireless was a photograph of Anne­liese with her mother and father and a tall thin young man: a brother. Everyone was smiling. Happier times.

‘Conrad?’ said Anneliese, in a small voice. ‘Can you stay? Please?’

So Conrad stayed. They ate a simple supper of bread and soup, talked, and then he held her long into the night until eventually she fell asleep and, a few minutes later, so did he.

Conrad flicked through his copy of
The
Times
, amused to see that the censor had blacked out the report from Berlin. After a good morning’s work at his flat, he had dropped in to the Café Josty for a cup of coffee. He was beginning to rather like the place, and Anneliese was right: they did have a good selection of foreign newspapers. Outside, cars, bicycles, buses and trams swarmed around the green spindly traffic tower in the middle of the Potsdamer Platz. It didn’t look big or strong enough to tame the mass of clanking, roaring machinery.

He was pleased with his new flat. Warren Sumner had helped him find it. It was located in a quiet square near Nollendorfplatz and decorated in a very modern style. The owner, a Jewish archi­tect who was abandoning Berlin for Paris, was happy to leave the art and furniture in Conrad’s care. Conrad agreed to pay the rent directly to him in Paris, which was a great relief to the man since the strict German exchange controls had prevented him from taking more than a tiny sum with him.

Conrad had spent the morning writing an article for
Mercury
on the difficulties German Jews faced trying to get visas to leave the country. He had toned down the outrage and anger that had suffused his first draft, and the resulting piece was more powerful for it. He felt he had made his point: the British government should let more Jews into Britain and Palestine.

Although he had mentioned the difficulties of doctors obtain­ing visas he had been careful not to refer to Dr Rosen directly. And he knew it would be foolish to sign the article under his real name: he needed a pseudonym. In Spain he had used ‘Matador’, but that was hardly appropriate in Berlin. After some reflection he had chosen ‘Linden’.