A day with the lawyers. Harald Beer was enjoying it, too. Unlike his father, he was a businessman first, then a bookman. The first few days since he had taken over at Beer Verlag had been devoted to the accounts. Now it was contracts.
He had asked to see every contract in the building. They made a staggering sight in his office. They covered his desk and half the floor. Of course some of the older stuff had lapsed and could be thrown out immediately. He filled a tea-chest with half a century of his father’s and his grandfather’s mistakes and had them taken out before the lawyers arrived. There weren’t even any autographs worth saving.
He sifted through the rest and set aside any that still yielded a profit, or might be worth renegotiating. There were some good things in the backlist: classics of German literature that would certainly ensure the survival of the firm and ought – with more discrimination – to have taken it to the top of the publishers’ league. The future was not wholly bleak.
But there was still plenty of dead wood to hack out, and he had brought in the lawyers to help. They were painfully cautious. They had to be harried and bullied into finding clauses that gave Beer’s a let-out, or at least the opportunity of paying off the unwanted authors. Harald rapidly developed a facility for locating the phrase … shall discharge the publisher of any obligation … and by the end of the morning he reckoned he had discharged obligations to the tune of six million Deutschmarks. It was salutary to discover how the costs of slim volumes of mediocre poetry and dull criticism mounted up.
So by the morning’s end he felt elated. Beer Verlag was slimmer and in better shape. In future the policy would be to publish bigger books that appealed to a wider section of the public. The one he had foremost in mind was the Hess memoir. Without any doubt it was destined for the bestseller lists.
The lawyers had gone to lunch and Harald was sipping a scotch and still contemplating Hess when a call was put through to his office.
‘Herr Beer?’
‘Yes?’ He answered warily. He had informed the switchboard that he was unavailable to incoming calls from authors or their agents. Any decisions about contracts or scripts would be communicated by post the following week. It was always possible, however, that one of the less experienced girls was doing the lunchtime stint on the switchboard.
‘This is in regard to your recent letter to an old gentleman.’ But it was not the voice of an old gentleman. The voice was firm and articulate, the accent local.
‘Which gentleman is that?’ Harald asked.
‘This must be confidential, Herr Beer.’
‘You may speak freely to me.’
‘You are alone?’
‘Yes. Who are you?’
‘The letter you sent indicated that you are in possession of a book in typescript that your late father negotiated to publish.’
The Hess memoir. Harald reached for a pen. ‘That is quite correct. Before we go on, may I have your name?’
‘Pröhl. It is not important. I am just a go-between, speaking on behalf of the writer.’
Pröhl. It was familiar to Harald, but in what connection? He was certain it had come up since his father’s death. Not in the contracts. Not in the accounts. Where?
‘Are you still there, Herr Beer?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have been asked to thank you for the letter and the suggestion it contained.’
‘Merely a thought in passing,’ said Harald, trying to sound casual.
‘For obvious reasons,’ Pröhl went on, ‘the author of the book is unable to respond in person.’
‘I follow you, Herr Pröhl.’
‘He asked me to inform you that his wishes in regard to the book remain unchanged.’
‘Unchanged?’ Harald’s hand trembled. This was not what he had expected to hear. It was a blow he could hardly stomach. ‘Are you quite certain of this?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Has he considered the points I raised – the probable advantages that publicity would achieve?’
‘He has given his answer, Herr Beer.’
Harald flicked his tongue around his lips. ‘Surely he is open to further discussion.’
‘I am sorry. He is inflexible. It’s not surprising, is it? He has lived with inflexibility for the past forty years.’
‘I am aware of that. I was suggesting a way of breaking the deadlock.’
‘But it’s not on. Goodbye, Herr Beer.’
‘Wait!’ Harald was desperate. The biggest opportunity of his life was slipping away from him. ‘May I contact you again about this?’
‘It won’t be necessary.’
‘But when he dies …’
‘… his executors will contact you, I’m sure.’
‘But I’d like to consult him about the illustrations,’ said Harald on an inspiration. ‘I know he is very particular about illustrations. He says something in the typescript about a picture several books have used that is supposed to be of himself and his sister as children. It’s incorrect. We at Beer Verlag have high standards. We can’t afford to make a mistake like that. I’d like to submit some agency pictures for him to approve.’
‘I’ll mention it,’ said Pröhl.
‘What is your number?’ Harald asked. ‘I’d like to be able to contact you about this.’
To his profound relief, Pröhl gave a local number before putting down the phone.
Harald was still shaking. He poured himself another scotch. There had to be a way of overcoming this. He couldn’t submit to the will of that stubborn old Nazi in Spandau.
While his brain worked on the problem, he went to the safe, unlocked it and lifted out the packet, still in its wrapper with his father’s handwriting on it. He removed the typescript and the contract. This was one contract he would not be showing the lawyers.
He leafed through the flimsy sheets of typing. To be brutal, Hess was a dull writer, but that would be no problem. There were professional editors upstairs who could whip the book into shape. Its selling power was Hess’s unique knowledge of events in the years before his capture. Things that would change the history books, sensational things that he had kept silent about for all these years. He meant them to be revealed to the world only after he was dead. Why? Could his silence have been his guarantee of survival?
As Harald turned the pages, a name caught his attention, and it was the name he had tried to remember earlier. Pröhl. Hess had married Ilse Pröhl. So it was one of the family who had made the phone call.
Harald’s mind worked faster. Who was likely to benefit from the huge advances that the memoirs were certain to attract? He took down a tax guide from his shelf and began to work on the figures. It was a question of comparing income accrued before death with the tax levied on an estate.
After twenty minutes, he picked up the phone and dialled the number Pröhl had given him.
‘Herr Pröhl?’
‘Speaking.’
‘This is Harald Beer. I have been thinking over what you told me. I wonder whether a compromise is possible.’
‘I don’t see how,’ said Pröhl.
‘We could take another look at the contract. I’ll be perfectly straight with you. We obtained the rights to this book in 1964 for two million Deutschmarks, which was a tidy sum then, but looks like a bargain now. Frankly, it will make much more money that that. The contract gives my firm the exclusive right to sub-license to other publishers throughout the world. It means that if we abide by the agreement, and no money changes hands until after the decease of the writer, there will be a very big pay-out to the estate for one or two years, and an extremely heavy tax-bill. I’ve been looking at the figures –’
‘Before you go on, Herr Beer,’ Pröhl put in, ‘I’m not empowered to discuss money with you.’
‘All right. But at least you can convey an offer from Beer’s?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Five million now into any bank account your client cares to name and another five million to his estate on publication. As well as increasing our offer fivefold, it will represent a tremendous saving in tax.’
‘I see.’ There was a pause. ‘I won’t promise, but if I were able to call you tonight …’
‘I shall be here at my desk until nine this evening,’ said Harald, smiling for the first time in an hour.
The afternoon session with the lawyers went particularly well. He could confidently commit the firm to a five million advance. He would, of course, dangle the bait and then make it conditional on publication within two years, irrespective of Hess’s survival thereafter. Once the family had contemplated an immediate fortune, they would soon prevail on the old man to sign a new contract.
He tried to keep occupied as the evening closed in, but time still dragged. He had asked the switchboard to let all incoming calls come through to his office, which meant taking a few tedious enquiries from people who had tried to reach him in the day, but he cut them short with some excuse about a call from New York on another line.
By eight, he had the building to himself, and he was unable to concentrate on any kind of work. He sat by the phone, consuming claret left over from the last party. Across the room, his spade-bearded grandfather stared out of the portrait. Rolf Beer had been born only a few years earlier than Hess. He had once been Burgermeister. Very likely he had known the Hess family. There must have been some solid reason why Hess entrusted his memoirs to the house of Beer.
9.00 p.m. Nothing. Harald’s nerves were on edge. He had promised himself not to phone Pröhl again. It would betray his eagerness. He was trying to cultivate the laid-back manner of the smooth negotiator.
A buzzer sounded.
He picked up the phone, but it was dead. For a moment he was disorientated, thrown by the unexpected. It was the intercom with the front door that had sounded.
He switched it on. ‘Who’s there, please?’
‘Pröhl. We spoke earlier.’ Clearly enough, it was Pröhl’s voice.
Harald pressed the button that released the door. ‘I wasn’t expecting you in person, but please come in. It’s the door at the end of the hallway.’ He quickly stowed away the claret bottle and glass just as the knock came on his door. ‘Come in, Herr Pröhl.’
The visitor was a good match for his voice: about thirty-five, a slight, compact figure, neat in his movements, elegantly dressed in a grey pinstripe and white shirt with a gold collar-fastening under the dove-grey tie. ‘In the end I decided it would be more practical to come in person,’ he explained to Harald as they shook hands. He clicked his heels in the old-fashioned way. ‘These are highly confidential matters, and one hears such disquieting stories about telephone-tapping.’
‘True,’ said Harald, gesturing Pröhl into an armchair. This was encouraging, now that he had taken it in. The indications were that the family was ready to do business. ‘Would you care for a drink?’
‘I don’t take it, thank you.’
‘I must apologise for the state of the office,’ Harald said, waving his hand towards the contracts stacked against the wall. ‘There is so much paper-work when one takes over.’
Pröhl nodded. The courtesies done, he appeared to be waiting to do business.
‘So you have passed on the offer I made?’ said Harald, seating himself in the chair opposite Pröhl. ‘How is Herr Hess?’
‘I am here to verify one or two things, Herr Beer,’ Pröhl said curtly.
‘Whatever you wish.’
‘First, your copy of the manuscript. It came into the possession of your firm some twenty years ago, is that correct?’
‘In 1964,’ said Harald. ‘As a matter of fact, I noticed only today that Herr Hess signed the agreement on April 26.’ He paused, but there was no reaction from Pröhl. ‘His seventieth birthday.’
‘Interesting. Tell me, how did it come into your possession?’
‘My father’s, actually. I was not aware that the book existed until I found it a few days ago in the safe over there.’
‘I see.’ Pröhl frowned slightly. ‘You understand that we would like to confirm its authenticity.’
Harald assumed a slightly hurt expression. ‘I can assure you that Beer Verlag deals only in authentic works, Herr Pröhl. You are not suggesting that the script in our possession is some sort of forgery?’
‘I’m sure Beer Verlag is irreproachable. However, one has to be on one’s guard. You remember the lamentable affair of the so-called Hitler Diaries? The perpetrators fooled some eminent military historians as well as hard-headed journalists.’
‘There is a significant difference in this case,’ Harald pointed out. ‘Herr Hess is still alive to verify the work.’
Pröhl made a dissenting sound with his lips and shook his head. ‘The authorities would not allow it. They are extremely agitated to learn of the existence of the book. Hess has been reprimanded by the directors and had his letter-writing privileges taken away. It is only thanks to a friendly warder that we are able to keep in communication.’
‘That is distressing,’ said Harald. ‘I would not have wished to be the cause of any discomfort to Herr Hess.’
‘It may be for the best,’ said Pröhl dismissively. ‘Tell me, do you have the original manuscript?’
‘His handwritten version? No. Presumably it was passed out of the prison on scraps of paper, as the Speer Diaries were. What we have is the top copy of the typescript. Would you care to examine it?’ Harald went to the safe and took out the package.
‘But you have no idea who typed this?’ said Pröhl as he took the script from its wrapper.
‘None whatsoever. My father dealt with it. That’s the agreement on top of the script. You can see that Herr Hess signed it.’
‘Do you happen to know of the existence of any other copies?’
Harald shook his head. ‘I haven’t even made any spares for myself. It’s a very hot property, as you will understand when you get a chance to read it.’
Pröhl looked up sharply, and his brown eyes locked with Harald’s. ‘What do you mean by that, Herr Beer?’
‘Some of it is explosive stuff. I can understand why the authorities are disturbed, if they have any idea what Hess has written.’
‘Such as …?’
‘The British are in for shocks when this is published. And the Russians will go berserk.’
‘The Russians? Why?’
‘Because of what he reveals about the massacre of Polish soldiers in the war. You’ve heard about the Katyn Forest graves?’
Pröhl nodded. ‘Hess knew something about that?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Harald went on with relish. ‘I dare say you know the salient facts. In 1943, the German Army found mass graves near Smolensk containing over four thousand corpses of Polish officers, each shot in the back of the head. They accused the Russians of the atrocity, because the area had been part of Soviet-occupied Poland. They said it took place in the spring of 1940. But the Russians made a counter-accusation, saying that the Germans had carried out the killings when they invaded the Smolensk area in July and August of 1941.’
‘Herr Beer, this argument has been going on for forty years,’ said Pröhl. ‘The Germans deny responsibility and so do the Russians. The forensic evidence seems to point to the Russians, but so what? It was a tragic episode, but it’s not an issue any more, except to the historians.’
Harald leaned forward challengingly. ‘With respect, Herr Pröhl, you could not be more wrong. I know Poland. I have many friends there. Katyn is still an open wound. Each Polish government since the war has endorsed the Soviet version – that it was a Nazi atrocity – but, believe me, the mass of the people are not taken in.’
‘They blame the Russians,’ said Pröhl. ‘So?’
‘Four thousand bodies were buried at Katyn, but up to fifteen thousand Polish soldiers disappeared from the face of the earth in the early part of the war.’
‘Numbers get exaggerated in stories of this sort,’ Pröhl commented, continuing to turn the pages of the typescript in a preoccupied way.
‘They were men taken prisoner by the Russians when they occupied Eastern Poland in 1939,’ Harald proceeded as if he hadn’t heard. ‘Over half of them were officers, the elite of the Polish Army. The Russians kept them in three large prisoner-of-war camps. They were permitted to write home until the middle of April 1940, when the letters suddenly stopped arriving. The camps were evacuated and the men transported in railway trucks to unknown destinations. The bodies at Katyn account for less than a third of the missing men.’
‘What does this have to do with Hess?’
‘Well, in 1940, he was head of the AO.’
‘The Auslandorganisation?’
‘Yes – which as you know was officially set up to strengthen links with Germans living in foreign countries, but was also set up as a cover for intelligence-gathering. If you study the chapter he has written on the events of 1940, you will see, Herr Pröhl, that he received reports from German agents that confirmed –’
Pröhl said mildly without looking up, ‘Katyn?’
‘Not only Katyn. Dergachi and Bologoye.’ Harald noted with satisfaction the bemused expression on his visitor’s face, before going on to explain, ‘The two other sites where up to ten thousand more of the missing Polish soldiers were murdered and buried by the Soviet NKVD.’
Pröhl raised his head in surprise. ‘These are places in Russia?’
‘Dergachi is ten miles north of Kharkov. The men from Starobelsk Camp were taken there. Bologoye, where the Ostashkov prisoners were liquidated, is on the main route between Moscow and Leningrad.’ Harald got up from his chair, too wound up to remain immobile any longer, and paced the room. ‘God knows what will happen in Poland when the book is published. Those murdered men are coming back to haunt the Russians. With Solidarity barely suppressed, it’s all that’s needed to trigger an anti-Soviet uprising.’
A sniff from Pröhl indicated reservations. ‘Even if it’s true, it won’t ever be proved. No one is going to be allowed to dig for evidence in Russia.’
‘Don’t you see?’ Harald broke in excitedly. ‘This book provides overwhelming evidence. Turn up the chapter Hess has written, Herr Pröhl, and look at the precise dates, the locations, even the identities of the NKVD units responsible and the names of the officers in charge. And the whole point is that Hess was in custody in England when the Germans invaded Russia, so there can be no question any longer that the Russians carried out these terrible events.’
Pröhl put down the typescript and said, ‘Fascinating. But why didn’t this come to light when it happened, and Hess got the information from his agents in Poland?’
Harald turned to face his visitor, using his hands to reinforce the point. ‘This was 1940. Remember? We were friends of Russia then. We had signed the Non-Agression Pact.’
‘So Hess kept the news to himself?’
‘He told Hitler and Göring, but it went no further. And at the end of the war, Russia was one of the Allies in judgement over the Third Reich. It was not the time to tell the truth about the killings. Plenty of people knew about Katyn, but it was conveniently brushed aside at Nuremberg. The Germans were in the dock, not the Russians.’
Pröhl appeared to have grasped the point now. ‘And Hess has lived with this secret since 1940?’
‘Right! The Russians are still not certain how much he knows, but they simmer with suspicion. The Soviet judge at Nuremberg was ordered to demand the death penalty, but it was over-ruled by the other judges. Hess played the amnesia card at the trial to fox the Russians. He said nothing about the massacre in his evidence. Yet his first years at Spandau were dominated by the secret. He suspected that the Allies would poison him if they learned what he knew. He didn’t even dare discuss his knowledge with the other prisoners.’
Pröhl still seemed reluctant to be totally convinced, almost as if it were a point of family honour that was at issue. ‘If all this is true, I can’t understand why he has waited so long to tell the world about it. Is he still in fear of being poisoned?’
‘You must read the book!’ Harald almost cried out in his enthusiasm. ‘He is the most tenacious man I have ever come across. No, he isn’t concerned about himself. He has old-fashioned ideas about honour and justice. He wants the facts to be known, so that the Third Reich will be absolved of any suspicion over Katyn and the missing thousands. If he is ever released –’
‘He will never be released now,’ said Pröhl. ‘God knows, the family has tried to get him out.’
This was the very point that Harald had wanted Pröhl to make. He pounced on it. ‘But there is a chance if we publish now. The effect will be sensational. Everyone will clamour to read the book. This won’t simply be his family and a few people holding banners outside the gate of Spandau Prison. The attention of the world will be focussed on his cause. The pressure to release him will be irresistible.’
Pröhl nodded. It might have been in confirmation.
‘Would you care to discuss my offer now?’ Harald asked him civilly. As he spoke, he reached for the script. It was a gesture not without significance; the property had been licensed to him.
Pröhl’s hand clamped down on the package first. ‘Before we do,’ he said, moving it away from Harald, ‘there is something I must check, Herr Beer.’ He got up and walked towards the door.
‘Just a minute!’ said Harald in alarm. ‘Where are you going with the script?’
‘Oh.’ Pröhl turned, smiled and rested the script on a table between them. ‘My mistake.’ He continued to move towards the door.
‘Is there anything wrong?’ asked Harald.
Pröhl opened the door a fraction and looked out, as if checking for an eavesdropper. Harald meanwhile picked up the Hess memoir and held it possessively to his chest. Possibly Pröhl had heard something outside. The old building sometimes creaked as the temperature dropped in the evening.
Pröhl stepped outside the door.
Suddenly a second man had replaced him in the doorway. Harald stared in petrified amazement. The man was wearing a strange mask. He was holding a hand-gun, a clumsy-looking weapon with a long barrel. He was pointing it at Harald’s face. He squeezed the trigger.
Harald Beer only had time to utter the words, ‘What is it?’ before he succumbed to the onset of vertigo and loss of breath. The respiratory centre of his brain was paralysed. He reeled, staggering into a pile of contracts and fell dying on them, permanently discharged of any more obligations.
The murder weapon was a seven-inch gas-gun fired by a KGB hit-man. Really it was just a sophisticated version of that simple toy, the water-pistol, except that the spray it fired was concentrated hydrogen cyanide.
The hit-man took a step backwards into the hall again and closed the door. Julius, the KGB agent known falsely to Harald as Pröhl, was waiting there.
‘Done?’
‘Done,’ answered the hit-man.
‘And now we must wait?’
‘Five minutes. There is a mask for you in the case.’
They had brought in the briefcase containing their equipment when Harald had released the electronic lock on the front door to admit the visitor. The hit-man had come into the building with Julius and waited in the hall for his cue to kill. Had Harald greeted them in the hall, the hit-man would have been passed off as one of the Hess family.
While they waited for Harald to die and the fumes to disperse, Julius reviewed the encounter. He felt he had handled it reasonably well. In a few minutes he would take possession of the typescript and the contract. That was the good news.
The bad news was that Harald Beer had not been able to disclose anything about the present whereabouts of the original manuscript, the hundreds of scraps of paper that Hess must have managed to smuggle out of Spandau. Harald had not even known how his father had acquired the typed copy. At Karlshorst, they would not be overjoyed about that. This assignment was by no means completed.
The other piece of news – about the mass slaughter of the Poles – was best forgotten. For Julius, it was superfluous, but dangerous knowledge. It would not be prudent to mention it at Karlshorst. The KGB chiefs would read it for themselves in the memoir. And he would make a point of mentioning that he had made only a cursory inspection of the typescript.
The hit-man was looking at his watch. ‘Ready? Better put on our masks.’
‘One moment,’ said Julius. He took a cigar from his pocket and struck a match to light it.
‘You can’t smoke that thing now,’ the hit-man testily told him.
‘I need it.’ Julius inhaled to get the cigar well alight, then cleared his lungs with several deep draughts of air. Holding the cigar between two fingers, he drew the gas-mask over his head. Then he pushed open the door of Harald’s office.
Harald’s body lay sprawled among the contracts, the eyes fixed in a hideous stare, the teeth clenched and traces of froth at the edges of the mouth. The hit-man felt for the pulse at the side of the neck, then confirmed with a nod to Julius that the job had been successfully executed. There would be nothing to tell that the death was due to anything except a cardiac arrest.
Julius still had instructions to carry out. It was necessary to force each of the dead man’s fingers away from the Hess memoir to obtain it. He checked that he had the correct script. Then he opened a filing cabinet and spent a few minutes searching for the office copy of the letter Harald had originally addressed to Hess.
When he had found it, he held the flimsy paper at arm’s length and touched the lighted cigar to one corner until a small flame was kindled. He placed the burning paper next to a heap of contracts, which soon ignited. There was enough paper in the place to ensure that the fire would not go out. The desk was of wood, and the walls were panelled oak.
As a final touch, he pressed the cigar between the dead man’s fingers.
The room was already filling with smoke as Julius and the hit-man left the building unseen and walked two blocks to where their car was parked.