Traitor's Gate (30 page)

 An hour later, Dressel came into the room. He was smiling. ‘Well, your story has been confirmed. You can go. And I should apologize for any inconvenience we have caused you. The Herr Gruppenführer asked me to wish you luck and to keep him informed. We’ll take you to see the doctor and get you cleaned up a bit before you leave.’

‘Thank you. And thanks for listening to me, Dressel.’

‘Not at all,’ said the Gestapo officer. ‘But I would lay off Schalke’s woman from now on if I were you.’

‘You idiot, Schalke! You have balls for brains!’

Klaus had been expecting the summons to Heydrich’s office. He did his best not to flinch in the face of his boss’s ire. ‘Yes, Herr Gruppenführer!’

‘I mean if he was some young university student that would be fine, but this fellow has connections. And you knew that.’

‘I felt his conversations with the British secret service were suspicious.’

‘Oh, come on, Schalke, I was the one who got to the bottom of that, not you!’

‘You cannot believe him, surely, Herr Gruppenführer?’

‘Admiral Canaris does, and that is good enough for me. If it turns out de Lancey has been stringing the Abwehr along, it’s their problem not ours. And I do not want you to make it ours!’

‘No, Herr Gruppenführer.’

‘For an intelligent man, you can be very stupid, Schalke. You know as much as anybody how vulnerable we are after the von Fritsch business. The Gestapo doesn’t need any more enemies at the moment. So keep well clear of him and keep well clear of her. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes, Herr Gruppenführer!’

‘Good, because I will
not
’ – Heydrich slammed his fist on to his desk – ‘have the Gestapo undermined by the foolish actions of its officers.’

‘I understand, Herr Gruppenführer.’

Heydrich leaned back in his chair. His frown eased and his lips broke into a lascivious grin. ‘She must be quite some girl.’

‘She is.’

‘But she’s Jewish?’

‘Half-Jewish.’

‘That’s a big problem right there, Schalke. You know what you need?’

‘What’s that?’

‘You need to get laid. There’s a new cute little Austrian girl at Salon Kitty I should introduce you to. Paulina. She says she likes big men.’ Heydrich winked. ‘Let’s go tonight, eh?’

Klaus forced himself to smile. He was lucky that Heydrich was feeling so understanding, and he had to respond positively to it. ‘That’s a very good idea, Herr Gruppenführer. You’re right. It’s probably just what I need. Thank you.’

‘Excellent,’ said Heydrich and turned to the papers on his desk.

‘
Heil Hitler!
’ said Klaus, and left the office.

He knew he had been lucky to get away with a rebuke. Heydrich and Canaris were totally different men, but they had a strangely close relationship. As a nineteen-year-old naval cadet Heydrich had served on a training ship commanded by Canaris, and they had seen a lot of each other since then. They lived almost next door to each other in Schlachtensee and Heydrich would often visit the Canaris household to play the violin accompanied by Frau Canaris on the piano, while the admiral cooked a Spanish dish. Klaus knew also, because Heydrich had told him, that Canaris was trusted and respected by the Führer, who admired and was a little intimidated by his cosmopolitan sophistication. If de Lancey had Canaris’s protection he was untouchable.

That was depressing. Maybe he should shoot de Lancey himself. But although he would certainly not be formally prosecuted by the authorities, Heydrich would know that he was responsible and his career in the Gestapo would be over. He would probably be dead himself within a week.

And now that de Lancey had been released, Anneliese would know that Klaus was behind his arrest. His plan had been to blame other Gestapo officers and to tell her that he had set out to free de Lancey but had been too late. She would never believe that now; in fact she would hate him. He realized that she would never be his again.

The thought bore on him like an enormous dark weight. With his mother gone and Anneliese lost to him, what was the point of living? Maybe he
should
shoot de Lancey and then himself. Why had Anneliese rejected him? He loved her more than this Englishman did; he probably loved her as much as Paul had. Paul had been a great man; Klaus had always known that. But de Lancey? All right, he was good-looking and Klaus wasn’t; as far as Anneliese was concerned, that was probably enough.

Bitch!

Bitch? How could he think of his angel as a bitch?

Because he was angry with her, bitterly angry. If he couldn’t have her, then no one else would, not de Lancey, nor any other smooth-talking gigolo she might come across.

The passengers waited patiently in the cabin of the three-engined Lufthansa Ju-52 on the apron outside the great semi-circular terminal building at Tempelhof Aerodrome, among them Conrad. All of them had gone through the painstaking formalities at customs and passport control where papers were checked and questions asked, especially of the Germans on board. Each German traveller had to be sponsored by a ministry, have their allowances for foreign money stamped by the Reichsbank, and show an invitation from a foreign friend who would bear their expenses while abroad, all of which was noted in the Gestapo files. There were no simple tourists any more.

Theo had seen no reason why von Kleist’s visit to London could not go ahead. Apparently, Canaris had been impressed by Conrad’s ingenuity and had been quite happy to go along with the deception. He much preferred that to Conrad bravely refusing to talk until he eventually gave everything away under torture. To reassure the Gestapo of his cover, Conrad had stayed in Berlin a few days, even meeting Foley. Conrad assumed that Foley knew about von Kleist’s visit, but neither of them mentioned it. Foley did, however, confirm that Anneliese’s exit visa was in place once her other documents were ready. Conrad avoided seeing her; there was no point in provoking Klaus, and with luck they would soon be together in London.

The steward had announced that there was a brief delay while they waited for another passenger. Out of the window Conrad noticed an open-topped Mercedes containing a German general and a civilian speeding along the tarmac towards the aeroplane. It screeched to a halt, the general climbed out and briskly shook the hand of the civilian, who rushed up the steps. The soldier was General Paul von Kleist and the civilian his cousin Ewald. The last passenger safely on board, having circumvented all of the departure formalities, the door shut and the aeroplane taxied to the runway. A minute later it was airborne and on its way to London.

General Beck sat and stared at his desk, unfamiliarly clear apart from a fountain pen and a single sheet of paper bearing the title of the Chief of the General Staff.

It had been a humiliating couple of weeks. In the end von Brauchitsch had bowed to the weight of Beck’s memoranda and called a meeting of the generals at army headquarters in the Bendlerstrasse. He had read out Beck’s latest paper pointing out the absurdity of Hitler’s proposed invasion of Czechoslovakia and asked for comments from the assembled officers. General Adam, the oldest and most respected general present, had spoken about the West Wall defences of which he was in charge, and emphasized that they could never withstand a determined French attack. The other generals, with the exception of two, had agreed that the Führer’s strategy was dangerously flawed. The two dissenters were von Reichenau and Busch. Beck had torn a strip off Busch for suggesting that a German general’s duty was to blindly obey his führer.

But then von Brauchitsch had let the meeting lapse without reading out the speech Beck had prepared for him inciting the generals to threaten mass resignation. Afterwards, Beck was furious; von Brauchitsch avoided him.

Ten days later Hitler had gathered the same generals together at Jüterbog to watch the Wehrmacht’s artillery demolish some concrete bunkers that were supposed to represent Czech forti­fica­tions. The whole thing was a sham and Beck told him so. The gunners had had weeks to prepare and so had their ranges exact, and the concrete was nowhere near as thick as that in the Czech fortifications.

Hitler ignored him. Not only ignored him; he humiliated him. Either Busch or von Reichenau must have told Hitler about the generals’ meeting, because after dinner he spoke about the weakness of his general staff. He implied that they were cowards, that Beck was a coward. And at some point during the day he told von Brauchitsch to forbid Beck from writing any more memoranda.

Von Brauchitsch, his superior, had lost confidence in him. Hitler had lost confidence in him. He was being asked to plan a war based on a ludicrous strategy that would lead to certain defeat. His situation was intolerable. There was only one honourable course open to him.

He thought of all his conversations with Oster over the summer. Perhaps a coup was the only option left, but he knew he couldn’t lead it from his present position of weakness.

He glanced up at the portrait of his predecessor, Field Marshal Helmuth Count von Moltke, exuding austere intelligence and self-confidence. The humble Ludwig Beck had never done his office justice after all.

He pulled the single sheet of paper towards him and began to write.

Dear Colonel General,

It is with the greatest regret…

The taxi dropped Conrad off at the gates of Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s country house in Kent. He walked up the short drive and rang the bell on the front door.

‘Mr de Lancey!’

He turned to see a short round figure approaching him in a blue boiler suit wielding a trowel in one hand and a cigar in the other.

Churchill jammed the cigar between his lips, held out his hand and shook Conrad’s. When he was younger Conrad had attended a couple of dinner parties at which Churchill had held forth, and he wasn’t sure whether Churchill would remember him, but the great man’s smile was friendly, almost familiar.

‘Been in a motor smash?’ he said, looking at Conrad’s bat­tered face.

‘Slight disagreement with the local police in Germany,’ Conrad said. ‘Don’t worry, it’s all sorted out now.’

Churchill grinned. ‘Come along with me,’ he said through teeth clenched around his cigar. ‘I’m building a wall by the kitchen garden. I should be writing, but I thought I would just finish this row. I’m up to my neck in Ancient Britons, Angles, Saxons and Jutes. I thought I had shot of them when I left school, but they have come back to haunt me.’

‘I thought you were working on
Marlborough
,’ Conrad said. ‘I’ve read the first three volumes, and I’m rather looking forward to reading the final one. When will it be published?’ Although the first Duke of Marlborough was not exactly Conrad’s period, he enjoyed Churchill’s writing.

‘Harrumph,’ said Churchill, but he was grinning as he puffed on the cigar. ‘
Marlborough
is nearly finished. This is
The History of the English-Speaking Peoples
, a foolish project I promised to my publishers years ago. Bill Deakin is providing me with some valued assistance. He tells me you know each other?’

‘Yes, I know Deakin,’ said Conrad. Bill Deakin was a young don at Wadham, someone Conrad both liked and admired. Churchill’s habit of taking on and firing historical assistants was legendary amongst the academic community and Deakin had been brave to accept the post. ‘Until a couple of years ago I was working on my own thesis at Oxford. German history.’

‘A dark subject,’ said Churchill. ‘And getting darker by the day. Tell me, how is your father? I don’t see as much of him as I would wish.’

‘Very well, I think. He spends a lot of time in Somerset these days.’

‘An admirable man,’ Churchill said. ‘Of course I disagree with him on appeasement, but he was the only one of that Cabinet to do the right thing over the Hoare–Laval pact. They should all have resigned.’

They reached the wall, a half-completed line of red bricks sur­rounding the kitchen garden. It was a warm day and Churchill was sweating. He plunged his trowel into a bucket and smoothed the mortar along the wall, before carefully aligning a brick against a piece of string. The brick didn’t look very straight to Conrad, but he decided not to point this out to Churchill.

‘I saw Herr von Kleist on Friday with Randolph,’ Churchill said. Randolph was Churchill’s son. ‘I took him for a drive around the estate.’

‘What did you think of him?’

‘I like the man. He said he’s a patriot and I believe him. He says that the ordinary Germans do not want a world war. Do you think that is true, Mr de Lancey?’

‘I believe so, sir. Oh, they love their uniforms and their military parades, but Germany lost twice as many men as we did in the Great War.’

‘And do you think that Herr von Kleist has the support amongst the general staff that he claims?’

‘Once again, I believe so. I have met his family in Prussia and they are implacably opposed to Hitler. I think it is difficult for some of them; they have such an entrenched sense of duty that to oppose the head of state is something they will only do as a last resort. But they believe they are reaching that point.’

Churchill grunted. ‘Herr von Kleist says that General Beck requires a letter from the British government committing to support Czechoslovakia in the event of an invasion, so that he may show it to his supporters. A secret letter to someone who has declared opposition to a sovereign government is, of course, impossible for a serving minister to write. But I have discussed the matter with Lord Halifax, and I have drafted something which I hope will suffice. Would you be good enough to see that it gets to Herr von Kleist on your return to Berlin?’

‘Certainly,’ said Conrad. ‘Can you persuade our government to take von Kleist seriously?’

Churchill wiped his brow and sat on his steps. ‘I can try,’ he said. He frowned, his fleshy cheeks drooping. ‘Here I am, an old man without power and without party, what advice can I give?’

‘You must tell them what you think,’ Conrad said. ‘They might disagree with you, but they have to listen to you.’

‘I take it you don’t accept your father’s views on appeasement, then?’ he said.