After Passmore left, the Director approached Klimt with the decanter. Moncrieff, he said, was about to arrive from the office. They knew a decent restaurant down the road. Reliable grub even in this time of austerity. Nice people. Klimt nodded. He felt he owed this man an apology. Not least because he’d so obviously let him down.
‘Not at all. Our friend from the Foreign Office was right. Walther’s putting nothing new on the table. But that’s hardly the point. When it came to making this trip, I’m not sure you had any choice in the matter.’
‘Meaning?’
The Director smiled, said nothing. Moncrieff arrived shortly afterwards, clumping up the stairs and announcing himself at the door. The table was booked for half eight. Best to make a move.
The restaurant specialised in offal. Klimt chose lightly spiced sweetbreads. The Director settled for braised pig’s head with black pudding. Moncrieff stuck with home-made faggots under a glistening roof of pork crackling, which was evidently his favourite. The war, they all agreed, had done wonders for the British diet. How many people had ever eaten this stuff before?
‘The French love it,’ Klimt pointed out. ‘The whole beast? It’s a way of life.’
This was no man’s land, a conversationally useful place to be. Over a bottle of Mouton Cadet, they shared memories of pre-war Paris and asked Klimt for updates. Was the Boeuf sur le Toit in the 8th still open? Could you still get a decent cassoulet at Allard? Was it still possible to attend midnight mass at Notre-Dame and then feast on borscht and vodka on the Left Bank? And – most intriguing of all – how did the nation’s new masters cope with the language? And all those Frenchmen?
‘Most of them we shipped to the Ruhr,’ Klimt pointed out. ‘Germans don’t let anything go to waste.’
‘The whole beast, Bjorn?’ A gentle smile from the Director. It was the first time he had called Klimt by his Christian name. From the Abwehr file, Klimt knew that this man’s nickname was Roly. Might he return the compliment?
Moncrieff was roaring with laughter. The whole beast. Guts and all. An army of Frenchies on the Ruhr. Lovely.
Klimt smiled. He liked these people. He admired their style, their wit, their seeming insouciance. Take them at face value and you were in danger of missing how good they were. Schellenberg thought them the best in the world, unmatched for guile and sheer originality, and he was beginning to sense that the Chief was seldom wrong.
The main course arrived. The restaurant was small and intimate. Moncrieff sawed at his crackling. Klimt speared a lightly sautéed sweetbread. The Director watched them both, an indulgent father hosting a rather special family get-together.
‘Why did Walther really send you?’ he asked Klimt after the waiter had departed with the empty plates.
‘You want the truth? I’m not sure I know.’
‘But he had a reason, surely.’
Klimt nodded.
‘And you must have thought about it.’
Nodded again.
‘So…? Care to give us a clue or two?’
Klimt bowed his head. This was dangerous territory and they all knew it. The social courtesies were over. They’d stepped out of no man’s land. Ahead lay the minefield where motive underpinned the usual tissue of half-truths. One false step, Klimt thought. One careless remark.
‘Schellenberg wants to be Emperor,’ he said lightly. ‘Canaris refuses to bow the knee. Everybody knows it’s only a question of time but Walther is an impatient man and so is Himmler.’
‘You’ve met him? Little Heine?’
‘Several times.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘He’s a believer. To people like him, the regime is a faith. He lives in the Dark Ages. He’s read the runes. He’s also very ambitious. He’s been studying the map for years and he knows the way to the top.’
‘Meaning?’
‘He has the power and he means to keep it. He’s not as damaged as Goering. He’s not as clever as Goebbels. He’s not an oaf like Kaltenbrunner. But he’s single-minded and he’s very good at keeping his ear to the ground. Maybe that’s why he prizes Schellenberg so much. Schellenberg understands Ausland. Schellenberg is fluent in Ausland. Ausland doesn’t frighten Schellenberg, unlike so many of our brethren.’
Ausland meant abroad. Ausland meant sitting in a poorly lit London restaurant with the taste of sweetbreads on your breath.
‘That makes Himmler a realist, surely.’ The Director was turning his empty glass in his hand.
‘Of course it does. Which is why Schellenberg can get clearance for expeditions like mine.’
‘You’re sure you have his blessing? Himmler’s? You’re certain he knows you’ve made the journey?’
‘I can’t imagine Schellenberg would take the risk otherwise. Himmler hates surprises. He’s a nervous man. Ask him to make a decision, any decision, and you’ll grow old waiting. He also lives in a world where everybody is expendable and Schellenberg knows that. No…’ he shook his head, ‘… I’m here because Himmler wants me here.’
‘A shame you’ve failed then.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Will there be repercussions? How will you report this evening’s conversation?’
‘I’ll tell Schellenberg the truth. I’ll tell him I sat down with the enemy and the enemy told us to get fucked.’
Moncrieff was filling his pipe. He glanced up, a broad smile on his bony face.
‘Brave man.’
‘But it’s true. And if I’d been listening to me, I’d have said exactly the same thing. Fucked is perfect. Fucked is exactly where we are. In our business you get a feel for the minor key, for what’s really happening under all the crashing brass. The gangsters have been in charge for years. And it’s starting to show. These are people who stumbled out of the wilderness and led us to the Promised Land. Now even they are beginning to understand that violence only begets more violence. Have either of you been to Hamburg recently? Or Cologne? Or Lübeck? The band’s still playing. The music’s as loud as ever. But you wouldn’t want to be a German anymore.’
Klimt accepted a cigarette. The last thing he’d intended to do was to make a speech but the truth was that he believed every word of what he’d just said. Did that make him a traitor? One of the army of defeatists that were filling the concentration camps? Or was there some kind of comfort or maybe even redemption in acknowledging the facts? He didn’t know.
‘You’ll be going back then?’ Moncrieff was lighting his pipe.
‘Of course.’
‘To face the music?’ He smiled.
‘A pleasure. As always.’
‘Anything we can help you with? You’re booked at the Savoy, courtesy of the wicked enemy. Will the one night be enough?’
‘I’d like to stay for two. I’m not here often.’
‘Of course. Our pleasure. Need anything fixing up?’
‘I’ll be all right. A little sightseeing. Then home.’
Moncrieff nodded. He’d see to the booking on the flying boat back to Lisbon. Arrange a lift down to Poole. Then he was struck by another thought. He turned to the Director.
‘By the way, sir, I made some enquiries about the Angell chap. Turns out he was with the bomber boys, jumped out of a Lancaster last month coming back from Saint-Nazaire. No one seems to know why.’
‘Anything wrong with the aircraft?’
‘Not a damn thing. There’s talk that he might have a problem…’ Moncrieff tapped his head, ‘… up here.’
‘Bailed out?’ The Director was frowning. ‘That’s desertion, isn’t it?’
‘Technically, I imagine it is.’ Moncrieff turned to Klimt. ‘Any chance of getting him back?’
*
Night again. Malin seemed to have influence in the camp. He’d arranged for Billy to change huts. It was the same four tiers, the same fug of unwashed bodies, the same straw mattress, but at least he had company.
Malin had a nearby bunk. They were close to the door that stayed open as dusk stole across the camp. ‘Supper’ had been a thin soup of hot water flavoured by rotting vegetables. Malin had made friends with fellow Poles and had somehow laid hands on an extra slice of black bread to mop up the remains of the soup. To Billy’s surprise, he was hungry.
The old man always referred to Hélène as ‘Madame’. He asked what had become of her. Billy said he didn’t know. They’d both been arrested in her apartment in Paris. They’d shared a car as far as a big railway station. Then she’d been driven away.
‘Gestapo?’
‘Grey uniforms.’
‘Could be SS. Could be anyone. A German isn’t a German without a uniform.’ He was staring at his empty bowl. ‘How was she?’
‘Upset.’
‘That boyfriend of hers? Klimt? He wasn’t around?’
‘No.’
‘Shame. She loved that man. I know she did. God always allows you one mistake in life. That may have been hers.’
‘But he looked after her, surely. He looked after all of you.’
‘God?’
‘Klimt.’
‘That’s true.’ Malin looked up. ‘Did you ever talk to him? Properly? Klimt?’
Billy held his gaze. The chateau by the river, he thought. Klimt’s pilot friend. The trouble they’d taken to check every rivet in this story of his.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t.’
Malin said nothing for a moment. Then he gave Billy a squeeze on his arm.
‘You’re learning fast, my friend. Which is probably just as well. Madame told me a lot about you. Before it all went wrong.’
*
Hélène had never been in prison in her life. For the last two days she’d occupied a single cell in the camp they called Ravensbrück. It lay in the flatlands north of Berlin. From the back of the car the landscape had the pallor of death.
At the reception centre outside the main compound they’d treated her with something close to respect. Unlike every other prisoner she’d glimpsed, she’d been allowed to keep her hair and her own clothes. They were all women here, no men. She’d been assigned a short, stocky Jew from Lübeck, a woman of some education, to attend to her.
The woman’s name was Ruth. She brought hot rolls in the morning, wrapped in a copy of Völkischer Beobachter, and she stayed for a chat. Hélène didn’t know whether she was a plant, a trap, whether the cell was equipped with a microphone, but in any case she didn’t care. She had no one to betray, no secrets to share except the burning conviction that this life of hers was over.
She’d been a fool at the chateau, kindling false hopes. She’d been crazy to believe that Klimt, fine man as he was, could guard her door forever. They lived in a time of darkness and now the darkness had won.
She’d worn her beloved beret on the train and in the car. She had it still. Alone in the cell, she sat on the cold concrete of the plinth and twisted it this way and that. She was grateful to have been spared the camp uniform but the days were long and the nights were worse and she was beginning to be afraid of her own company.
Listening to Ruth, she sometimes wondered whether she might be able to swap this single cell for a bunk in one of the hutments. Ruth lived with more than fifty other women. She’d made friends. The women looked after each other. Like any family they had their fallings-out but Ruth said the hutment was a place she looked forward to returning to. Because they were women, she said, and because they’d all coped with worse in their lives, they laughed a lot, despite the food and the stinking latrines and some of the female guards who’d put most men to shame. One day, said Ruth, they’d wake up to a horde of Russian soldiers chasing the Germans back to Berlin. Given the Russians’ appetite for anything in a skirt, liberation might be a mixed blessing but nothing lasted forever and in the end they’d be free again.
Nothing lasted forever.
Hélène didn’t believe her. This lasted forever. Not the cell. Not the wash of grey dawn light that brought her sleepless nights to an end. Not the cockroaches that scuttled across the floor. But this. This feeling of shame, of worthlessness. She’d never had a problem with self-esteem. She’d always known exactly who she was. Hélène Lafosse. Wife of the maverick Nathan Khorrami. Chatelaine of a neat little estate in the depths of the Touraine. Owner of the famous Valmy. Lover of a man who happened to be a Nazi. Friends in Paris had sometimes questioned the seeming contradictions in her busy life but she’d never felt the need either to explain or excuse the way she was. True, she’d made an accommodation with the New Order, with the hard-faced men in uniforms, but she’d also played mother hen to a brood of needy children who’d stepped out of the night and knocked on her door, and asked for shelter. Jews. Misfits. Résistantes. Refugees. They’d come and they’d gone. Until Billy Angell.
Was he the reason everything had fallen apart? On balance, she thought not. The Germans had swept into France. They had the country by the throat. It was in the nature of things that round every corner lurked the possibility of disaster, of arrest, of torture, of an early death. In her case that possibility wore an SS uniform and answered to the name of Huber. Huber was the fate that lay in waiting. And she’d been a fool to expect anything else.
And so she sat alone, head bowed, twisting the beret this way and that. Soon, she thought to herself. Please God.