Traitor's Gate (7 page)

There his demands to see the Ambassador were deflected by a charming Third Secretary of about his own age. Conrad’s plan was to complain about his own treatment with the hope of drawing Joachim’s death into the resulting outcry. But the Third Secretary explained that there was to be no outcry. Although Conrad’s arrest did indeed sound unwarranted, he had been treated well, he hadn’t even been interrogated let alone physically harmed, and he had been released as soon as the Gestapo had recognized their mistake. As for Joachim Mühlendorf, he was a German citizen and it was not British policy to interfere in the treatment of German citizens by the German authorities.

The Third Secretary maintained his calm no matter how hard Conrad pressed him. In the end Conrad gave up, frustrated, defeated.

Back at his hotel, he pulled out his typewriter and bashed out an account of his arrest. For an hour he thumped the keys until his fingers hurt. He read through the result: powerful, passionate, shocking. It lacked the dryly observed insights that the editor of
Mercury
liked in his magazine, but Conrad would force him to publish it anyway. And if Theo didn’t like it, to hell with him.

To hell with him? As Conrad stared at the article he knew that its publication could get Theo into serious trouble. He had promised Theo not to write about what had happened; he had to keep that promise. He tore up the sheets of typescript and went to bed.

The next day Conrad spent in the ‘Stabi’, as the Staatsbibliothek on Unter den Linden was called, armed with a new exercise book and notebooks he had scribbled in during his time at the prep school. He had spent three weeks in the library in 1933 researching his thesis on the Danish war. He was fond of the old place; it seemed one of the few institutions left in Berlin still free of Nazi influence. True, the Friedrich-Wilhelm University next door had been purged of non-Aryan and otherwise unsound professors and twenty thousand books had been burned in front of the opera house over the road, but the Stabi itself still contained tens of thousands of volumes written before National Socialism had ever been conceived.

He found himself a quiet desk, opened the exercise book and began writing. He had decided to write in longhand and type his work up later. He had been mulling over the first chapter for weeks, and he was pleased how easily it flowed.

The idea of writing a novel in Berlin had come to him during the Easter holidays, which he had spent in Suffolk. His plan was to write about a young Englishman who had married a German woman and lived in Berlin in 1914. One of the major characters would be a Prussian friend, an army officer. The novel would be about how a family could be blown apart by the prospect of war, and the difficulties that the Englishman and the Prussian faced as they realized they would soon be fighting each other.

Conrad was aware of the parallels with his own life: his father in Hamburg in 1914, and his own friendship with Theo. But that was the point. He hoped that by writing the book he would begin to sort things out in his mind.

In Spain he had seen how war corrupted the good and the bad, the socialists and the Fascists. Yet although Spain had given him a hatred of war, it had also given him a taste for action. He couldn’t stay in Suffolk any more. In Berlin he would be able to see for himself how the world was tearing itself apart. And by writing his novel here, perhaps he would understand it a bit better, or at least understand himself.

Although none of that would help Joachim.

At about half past three he called it a day, his head buzzing with what he had written. He strolled out into the courtyard of the Stabi and paused by the fountain, enjoying the June sun­shine and the crisp Berlin air. Creepers criss-crossed the old grey façade like a thick beard on an old grandfather’s face. The splashing of water from the fountain drowned out the hum of the traffic outside.

‘Lovely building, don’t you think?’

Conrad turned in surprise at hearing English spoken. Next to him was a short, middle-aged man with owl-like glasses resting on a pointed nose and a friendly smile. He looked very English.

‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ Conrad replied.

‘De Lancey, isn’t it?’ The little man held out his hand. ‘My name’s Foley. Captain Foley.’

Conrad shook the hand, feeling slightly bemused. ‘I’m with the embassy here,’ Foley said. ‘I heard you had arrived in Berlin, so when I saw you here I thought I would introduce myself. Do you fancy a stroll? I’m just going back across the Tiergarten to my office.’

‘All right,’ said Conrad, curious about what the little man might have to say. Perhaps the embassy was going to do some­thing about Joachim after all.

They set off along Unter den Linden, a bustle of cars, trams, buses and bicycles and the overladen brightly coloured wheel­barrows of street vendors selling everything from sausages to books. To Conrad’s eyes the street looked bare without its linden, although skinny saplings popped up at regular inter­vals, replacements planted a couple of years before, after the original trees had been ripped up to dig the new S-Bahn line. This end of the street was graced with grand buildings: the library, the opera, the university, and a veritable army of statues, with Frederick the Great rising massively on his horse in the middle of the road. A band of Hitler Youth streamed past; boys of nine or ten wearing swastika armbands and brown shirts and shorts. Conrad was glad to see that their marching step was pretty ragged, and they still acted more like a bunch of chattering schoolboys than the fanatical automatons they were being groomed to become.

‘Do you know Berlin?’ Foley asked.

‘I came here for a few months to research my thesis,’ Conrad said. ‘My mother is from Hamburg; I was actually born there. We left when war broke out.’

‘I was studying philosophy in Hamburg in 1914,’ said Foley. ‘It’s a wonderful place. But I was slow to leave: damned nearly didn’t get out. Your father is Lord Oakford, isn’t he? Arthur de Lancey as he was then.’

‘That’s right.’

‘I came across him during the war. Not in the trenches, although I did my stint there. Like him, I caught a bullet and ended up working for the general staff. Unlike him, I didn’t earn a VC catching it.’

‘That was military intelligence, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s a rather grand name for what we were doing,’ Foley said. He glanced up, his mild eyes meeting Conrad’s through his spectacles.

For a moment Conrad wondered whether the man was trying to tell him that he was still in intelligence. It seemed highly unlikely. Foley looked to be in his fifties, a nondescript pen-pusher if ever there was one. Conrad shook himself; he was imagin­ing it. His own father had left the Intelligence Corps in 1919, never to go near it again. Foley must have done the same.

They passed the junction with Wilhelmstrasse, a few yards down which stood the British Embassy. ‘I thought you said you worked in there?’ Conrad asked.

‘That’s a simplification,’ Foley said. ‘I’m actually the Pass­port Control Officer. My job is to grant visas to anyone wish­ing to visit Britain. Or anywhere else in the Empire, including Palestine. Our office is on Tiergartenstrasse. It’s another lovely building; my predecessor bought it for a song in 1920.’

They walked through the tall columns of the Brandenburg Gate and entered a construction site. In front of the Reichstag building, still empty since the fire in 1933, stood the Siegessäule, a two-hundred-foot-high monument built in the 1860s to com­memorate Prussia’s victories over Denmark, Conrad’s very own war, and Austria. It was known by irreverent Berliners as the ‘Siegesspargel’ or ‘Victory Asparagus’. Now the whole edifice was clad in scaffolding. And the road through the Tiergarten had been transformed into a straight, ugly scar, bordered on either side by the stumps of recently felled trees.

‘This is Hitler’s latest grand plan,’ said Foley. ‘He’s going to move the Siegessäule to the middle of the park and create a broad avenue from there to the Brandenburg Gate for his army to march along. In the meantime all this work is an infernal nuisance; it really fouls up the traffic.’

They crossed the road into the park, weaving through the stationary cars whose engines growled with impatience. ‘You must be quite busy at the moment,’ Conrad said. ‘I imagine there’s plenty of demand for visas.’

‘Rather. There seems to be no end to the queues. Jews mostly.’ He sighed. ‘Sadly we reject most of the applicants.’

‘Why?’ asked Conrad.

‘Quotas,’ said Foley. ‘Strict quotas, and getting stricter all the time. I could issue my annual quota of visas many times over, I could tell you. I ask for more, but they give me less. There’s unemployment in Britain and Arabs are rioting in Palestine, so there’s no room for more penniless Jews.’

‘I suppose it’s understandable,’ said Conrad.

‘No. No, it’s not,’ said Foley, a flash of anger in his eyes. ‘We have to help these people or many of them will die. I know of a number of cases of applicants we have rejected going to concentra­tion camps. Many commit suicide. Most Jewish Germans have been blind to what has been happening. Until very recently Germany was the most hospitable country in Europe for Jews. It was a sanctuary for displaced Jews from the East, from Poland and Russia. Jews are some of the most educated and influential people in this country, which is why they are a popular target for the Nazis. Most of them just could not believe that this current storm of anti-Semitism wouldn’t blow over. But now they realize it’s getting worse, especially since the invasion of Austria in March. And it will get worse still.’

‘I see what you mean,’ said Conrad. ‘And there’s nothing you can do for these people?’

‘We do what we can,’ said Foley grimly. ‘But it’s never enough.’

They plunged deeper into the park, leaving the piles of earth and jumble of construction equipment to their right. The Tier­garten was originally a royal hunting forest on the edge of old Berlin, but in the nineteenth century it had become a haven of quiet in the midst of the metropolis. Spindly trees closed around them and the roar of the machinery became a hum. Sunlight dappled the path beneath their feet.

‘Well, Captain Foley?’ said Conrad. ‘You’ve got me here. What do you want to say to me?

Foley smiled. ‘Oh, just that if you hear anything that you think might be of any use to His Majesty’s Government I’d be grateful if you could let me know. I’ll pass it on to the right people in London.’

‘I take it you have heard about my arrest the other night?’

‘Yes. And what happened to your cousin Joachim Mühlen­dorf. A terrible thing, but all too common these days.’

‘And are you going to kick up a fuss?’

‘I am sure that the Third Secretary explained to you the embassy’s position. And you understand that I—’

‘If you can’t help me, why should I help you?’ Conrad interrupted.

‘You have friends here. Is there anything you think we should know?’

Conrad thought about Joachim’s gossip about General von Fritsch and a conspiracy against Hitler. No doubt Foley would be very interested in all that. But he didn’t see why he should report conversations with his friends to someone he had only just met. ‘“We” being who exactly?’

‘“We” being the British government,’ Foley said. ‘Your govern­­ment.’ He touched Conrad’s arm. ‘Let me make some­thing clear. I’m not asking you to become a spy or any­thing like that. There’s nothing cloak-and-dagger about any of this. It’s just that war between our country and Germany sometime in the next few years is becoming a distinct possibility, and the more information we have about them, the better. All I’m asking is that you keep your ears open. Especially around your friend Lieutenant von Hertenberg.’

‘Theo? Why are you interested in Theo?’

‘He’s just one of many people we are interested in.’

‘You’re asking me to spy on my friends?’

Foley stopped. The frozen air rose in a cloud about his lips. ‘I’m asking you to do your duty. Just as your father did his duty in the war.’

‘I’m not my father, Captain Foley, and I’m not going to be your damned spy,’ Conrad snapped. ‘Now if you don’t mind, you go your way, and I’ll go mine.’ A narrow path wound into the trees on the right, and Conrad took it, leaving Foley standing behind him.

Conrad strode furiously through the woods. Foley was trying to manipulate him, use him in the same way he had been used in Spain. The mousy little spymaster was trying to enmesh him in exactly the kind of intrigue he had been writing about only that morning.
Realpolitik
, the cynical diplomacy of the balance of power, secret agreements and alliances, feint and counter-feint, the whole ghastly dance that had led to war twenty-four years before and might lead to war again. And then there was Foley’s facile assumption that because his father had fought so bravely in the last war Conrad would mindlessly follow orders towards another one.

Conrad’s pacifism ran deep. It was his father who had instilled a hatred of war into him. Arthur de Lancey had joined up in 1916, an older replacement for the wave of enthusiastic young subalterns who had been wiped out in the first two years on the Western Front. He had fought well, winning a DSO at the Somme in 1916 and a Victoria Cross a year later at Passchendaele, when he and a lance corporal had captured a German machine-gun position and held it against fierce counter-attacks until the rest of his company arrived. To Conrad as a boy this had seemed impossibly brave, and he was desperately proud of his father the war hero.

But the war hero had been changed by that day. His arm was badly mangled and had to be amputated. The scars in his mind were much worse. He was overcome with bouts of depression and irritability where he would fly into a rage with his wife or his children for no apparent reason. These bouts were unpredictable, and they could last a day or a month, but they were in stark con­trast to the much longer periods of normality when he was wise, kind and approachable.

He developed a passionate opposition to war in all its forms. After the armistice he became involved in international pacifist organizations, and spent time and money in supporting the Quaker Emergency Committee, which helped starving children in post-war Germany. As Conrad grew older, he came to admire his father’s idealism; indeed it paved the way for his own whole-hearted support of socialism when he was at Oxford.