Traitor's Gate (6 page)

But even though he owed his freedom to Theo, he knew that he could not simply push what had happened to Joachim out of his mind.

‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ The pastor repeated the familiar prayer in unfamiliar German words as he scattered earth on to the coffin six feet down in the frozen earth. Conrad hunched his shoulders in the stiff breeze that blew in from the Elbe, bringing with it stinging drops of rain. They were in the small, exclusive cemetery next to the small, exclusive church where Mühlendorfs had been christened, married and buried for generations.

A miserable day for a funeral.

Conrad closed his eyes and thought of the Joachim he had known since he was a boy. He could almost hear his cousin talk­­ing excitedly about the latest book he had read. Joachim had introduced Conrad to the adult realm of ideas with an enthusi­asm and vigour that Conrad found impossible to resist. He didn’t want to resist. Shakespeare and Goethe; Kant and Locke; Keats and Schiller; Newman and Luther; Bentham and Marx; Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Balzac; Joyce, Kafka and Mann: they read them all and discussed them all. It was Joachim who had first lent Conrad the
Communist Manifesto
, and who ensured that when the socialist creeds swept Oxford University in 1930, Conrad was already well versed in the necessary texts.

Without Joachim, Conrad’s life would have been different. Poorer.

The pastor’s words stopped and Conrad opened his eyes. There were very few mourners there: a dozen members of Joachim’s family and no more than a half a dozen others, one of whom was Dressel, the Gestapo officer. The Mühlendorfs had tried to keep the ceremony a quiet family affair. They were ashamed of their son in life and even more ashamed of him in death.

The cognac flowed freely at the gathering afterwards in the tasteful Mühlendorf mansion, which clung to the wooded slopes of the hill above Blankenese, a former fishing village on the north bank of the Elbe. The conversation, following the tension at the graveside, was light and brittle, as was the laughter. Conrad would have cut the reception if he could, but he was duty bound to represent his mother, so he decided to stay for an hour, and then he would escape to the station and the train back to Berlin.

He felt a touch on his elbow. It was his uncle Manfred, a bulky man with a neatly trimmed, pointed beard. ‘Let’s get away from here,’ he said, and he led Conrad out into the garden.

The rain had stopped, but the breeze was still blowing. Below them was the broad highway of the Elbe, dotted with ships big and small, old and new. Ship-owners like Manfred Mühlendorf enjoyed living here: they could watch their vessels moving back and forth to the great port of Hamburg, earning good money in front of their very eyes. A dark shower cloud was scudding in from the North Sea to the west, like a giant ball, rolling up the thin bars of sunlight reflecting off the river in front of it.

‘You were a good friend to my son,’ Uncle Manfred said, his voice catching. ‘I always thought you were a good influence on him.’

‘He was my cousin. And he was a good influence on me.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Conrad. ‘He was a brave man, at the end.’

‘Brave?’ said Uncle Manfred, puzzled.

‘You know I was there when he was arrested?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, he was arrested by the Gestapo because he was over­heard by one of their agents gossiping about a rumour he had picked up in Moscow. There was probably nothing in it. But they arrested him anyway and tortured him and he died.’

‘But they said he was discovered in a well-known haunt for homosexuals with another man...’

‘I know what they said, but that’s not what happened. I was there. Do you believe me or do you believe them?’

Manfred looked closely at his nephew. ‘I believe you.’

Conrad stopped and faced his uncle. Manfred Mühlendorf was a powerful man. ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, are you going to let the state kill your son without kicking up a fuss?’

‘What can I do?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Conrad. ‘But I do know that you can do something. It’s only because people like you don’t do anything that these bastards can get away with it.’

Uncle Manfred frowned, but he was listening.

‘You have contacts in the government, don’t you? This country has been turned into one great armaments factory. Your ships must carry some of that material.’

‘They do. Quite a lot of it.’

‘Then make a fuss, Uncle. Joachim was a brave man. He deserves it.’

As he sat on the train from Hamburg to Berlin staring out of the window over the endless North German Plain, Conrad wondered whether Manfred Mühlendorf would do something. He hoped he would. It would only be a gesture, he wouldn’t be able to bring Joachim back to life, but a gesture would be important. Conrad had known that the Third Reich was brutal: that was why he had come to Germany, to see that brutality at first hand. Well, in that he had succeeded. But he couldn’t understand how the Germans had let this Third Reich emerge. He knew them well: they were a cultured, moral, law-abiding race. True, some of them had tendencies to militarism, but Marx and Engels were German, as were Bach and Beethoven, and Goethe and Rilke.

And now they were standing by and watching their country imprison, torture and kill their neighbours, their friends, even their children.

But what could they do? What could Conrad do? He had come to Germany to observe and to write, but now he wanted to
do
something, to show that he at least thought that Joachim’s death was wrong, that it shouldn’t go unnoticed, unpunished.

He thought about his cousin’s last days. He was beginning to wonder whether Joachim’s gossip had been entirely innocent. Joachim had sought out Theo, a man he scarcely knew, to tell him a rumour. Why Theo? Then there were Joachim’s friends who were willing to help Theo. What friends? And help him do what?

Perhaps this mysterious Johnnie von Herwarth was one of these friends. And perhaps there was more to the plot to remove Hitler than Theo made out.

Theo clearly knew more than he had been prepared to tell Conrad. Also, Theo’s contacts within the Gestapo seemed to be remarkably good. Conrad supposed that anyone in Germany could have a ‘friend’ in the Gestapo, but a friend who was will­ing to contact Theo at three o’clock in the morning?

It didn’t make sense. Not Theo. If anyone could be trusted to keep his head in modern Germany, to keep a healthy distance from Nazism and all its vile ideas, it was Theo.

And how the hell had the Gestapo found out about Joa­chim’s indiscretions in the first place?

It was the implication of that last question that bothered Conrad the most.

Klaus Schalke stepped out of the door of 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and walked the few metres around the corner to the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais on Wilhelmstrasse. This opulent building, which had served as the Berlin home of members of the Prus­sian royal family, was now the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst, or the SD, and housed the office of Reinhard Heydrich, who was head of both the SD and the Gestapo.

Klaus was apprehensive. Although he knew that he was one of Heydrich’s favourites, he also knew he wasn’t safe. Like most people, there were stretches of his past life that might appear unsound in the wrong light. No one in Nazi Germany was safe, not even members of the Gestapo.

It had been a bad week. Klaus was worried about his mother, usually so energetic, who had fallen ill yet again and hadn’t been able to shake a general lassitude for a couple of months now. The doctor said there was nothing wrong with her but Klaus was sure there was. He didn’t know what he would do if anything happened to her, anything... well... final. He knew he wouldn’t be able to bear it.

Klaus hated his father: a small man, meticulous and nasty, who had resented his son’s size and sloppiness, and had beaten him regularly. But his mother, bigger than his father, warm and loving, had always been there to comfort him. He couldn’t imagine life without her.

He still had not received a reply to the carefully crafted letter he had sent the week before to his angel, the only other woman in his life, and he was beginning to fear that it would remain unanswered like all the others. He had really hoped that this time... but he was being foolish. As always.

And now this.

Klaus was sent straight into Heydrich’s office. Heydrich was sitting at his desk studying a file Klaus recognized. ‘
Heil Hitler!
’

‘Sit down, Schalke,’ Heydrich snapped.

Klaus’s fears were justified: his boss was not happy. As he did as he was bid, he somehow managed to trip over the edge of the rug in front of Heydrich’s desk and lurched into the chair with a thump and an ominous sharp crack. Clumsy at the best of times, he seemed to find it impossible to control his limbs when he was nervous. He pushed his glasses back on to his nose and Heydrich’s glare slipped into focus.

For someone in such a powerful position Heydrich was young: he had become head of the Gestapo at thirty and was still only thirty-four. He was tall with a high forehead, small restless eyes and full lascivious lips. He had long slender hands: he was an excellent violinist. Like Klaus, he had a disturbingly high voice. He exuded a unique aura of delicate violence. Unlike Klaus, women found him handsome, or at least those who liked their men with a hint of danger did.

There were several good reasons why Heydrich liked Klaus. Klaus understood the importance of information: of gathering it, of sifting it and of using it. And he was capable of finding ingenious solutions to difficult problems. In fact it was this skill that had brought Klaus to Heydrich’s attention when Klaus was a junior lawyer in the Berlin prosecutor’s department working on some of the Gestapo’s cases.

Heydrich suffered from persistent rumours about his an­cestry; his grandmother’s name was Süss, which sounded Jewish. One of Heydrich’s henchmen who knew Klaus’s abilities also knew he had been to university in Halle, Heydrich’s home town, and so asked him to help. At that time, when most of the professional classes had to show documentary evidence of their Aryan ancestry if they wanted to keep their jobs, forged documents were easy to procure. The Gestapo’s plan was simply to forge the Süss grandmother out of existence. But Klaus advised against this: people who knew the Heydrich family in Halle knew about Frau Süss; denying her existence would simply leave the head of the Gestapo vulnerable to more rumour. Klaus’s suggestion was to make an already compli­cated family situation more complicated. Of course Frau Süss existed, of course she was Heydrich’s grandmother, but she had only taken the name Süss as a result of a second marriage to a locksmith, who anyway wasn’t really Jewish. A couple of subtle alterations to documents were required, an ancient birth certificate was mislaid – nothing too blatant. The trickiest bit had been changing a date on a tombstone.

Heydrich was impressed. Not just with the idea, but with the mind that had produced it. So he offered Klaus a job in the Gestapo. It was an offer Klaus could not very well refuse. Since then he had done all kinds of awkward jobs for Heydrich, including accompanying him for nights of debauchery on the town, nights which his boss relished but Klaus found embarras­sing and frankly disgusting.

‘How could you have let this happen, Schalke? Didn’t you know that this man had a weak heart?’

‘I am very sorry, Herr Gruppenführer. We had no way of knowing. There was nothing on file.’ At least there wasn’t now. Klaus had located the reference to Joachim’s heart condition in the army medical report which had denied him entry to the reserves. This he had swiftly removed.

‘I have had von Ribbentrop on the telephone to me. And worse than that, Göring.’

‘I can understand the Foreign Minister,’ Klaus said. ‘But why Göring?’

‘Mühlendorf’s father owns a shipping line in Hamburg. His ships transport most of the Reich’s iron ore down from Sweden. He goes hunting with Göring – they are best friends. And he is kicking up a fuss.’

‘That is unfortunate.’ Von Ribbentrop was of no real con­sequence, but Göring was not someone you wanted to cross. Although the Gestapo was universally feared in Germany, it was by no means universally powerful. In the Third Reich power was disseminated among many institutions. Heydrich’s Gestapo was only one of these. There was the Party, the Wehrmacht, Göring’s Luftwaffe, Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, the Finance Ministry, the industrialists and businessmen. The civil service, including the Foreign Office, and the judiciary retained some influence. Even Himmler and the SS, the Gestapo’s parent organiza­­­tion, were not all-powerful. No single individual was in Nazi Germany, except perhaps the Führer himself. And he liked to keep things that way.

‘Unfortunate? It’s not unfortunate. It’s the inevitable result of your bungling! Why couldn’t you have been more careful with Mühlendorf? You knew he was a diplomat.’

‘I should have been, Herr Gruppenführer. But I am con­vinced that he was hiding something.’

‘What about the Englishman, de Lancey? Is he a spy?’

‘I don’t know. We have let him go. But we will keep an eye on him.’

Heydrich examined the file on his desk, which was open at Klaus’s report on Mühlendorf. ‘So what do you think he was hiding? Do you believe there really is a plan to overthrow the Führer?’

‘There might be.’

‘From where? Within the Foreign Office?’ Heydrich snorted. ‘What can they do? Send a cable to the Führer humbly request­ing his resignation?’

‘Possibly within the Foreign Office. Possibly the army. You know how unhappy they are about von Fritsch.’

‘Do you have any proof?’

‘Not yet. But I can look for it.’

‘The generals believe they are responsible to no one but themselves; they haven’t yet understood that it is their duty to serve the National Socialist state.’ Heydrich looked at Klaus sharply. ‘We have to be very careful about the army. I don’t want you going around arresting soldiers: there will be no end of trouble.’

‘I understand, Herr Gruppenführer!’

Conrad was determined to register his own protest at Joachim’s death. But what could he do, a lone foreigner in a country where the whole might of the state was focused on the suppression of protest? He had seriously considered marching into 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and yelling at that big Gestapo oaf. Even if he was arrested in the process, it would make him feel better and his detention might get some publicity. But he knew that would be at best pointless, at worst dangerous. So he went to the British Embassy, just a little further up Wilhelmstrasse from the Gestapo headquarters.