“The ones I’ve got to bring in.”

  “Oh. I can’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you even if I knew.”

  “Why not?” Martin asked with slight impatience. Haslam offered his ghost of a smile. “You used to be in Intelligence, and you are now in Secret Intelligence, and this is one of the little differences you’ll have to appreciate. The less we tell you, the less you’ll be carrying in your head if something ever goes wrong and you don’t have time to reach your capsule.” He paused. “Is there anything else you’d better not ask?” Martin stopped pacing and stood looking down at him.

  “Just the way in.”

  “The way in is going to take a couple of days to arrange. We had to wait until you were ready to go. Tonight there will be two explosions in this city— relatively small ones but sufficient to destroy the appropriate personnel records at present in the files. Tomorrow night a certain Standartenführer Helmut Zimmer of your own SS unit will meet with a fatal accident. You will then take over his duties.”

  11

  BERLIN, 9 NOVEMBER 1939

  My dear Brother,

  (She had first written simply Dear Franz as usual, and then changed it.) This is the fourth time I’ve written to you, but I still haven’t had any reply, and 1 don’t even know if my letters are reaching you. 1 was told on good authority that l should write to you, by which it was obviously meant that you were receiving mail. I know that Mother and Father have written to you too—we phone one another almost every day to talk about you.

  I’ve nothing to tell you from this end. My life goes on, and the war goes on. But we are so very anxious to hear from you, Franz, and last night when I was trying to get to sleep the idea came to me that if the authorities are withholding your mail from you—for very good reasons, of course—or if your mail is getting lost because of the busy war traffic, you might think we’re not writing to you. That would be terrible, Franz. You might feel that your crime against the State was so heinous— which of course it was—that we have no more love for you, and no forgiveness. But the authorities understand that although your youth and 116

  foolish ideas led you to such an inexcusable act, your family remains loyal to you, and loving, knowing that you have now realized the great wrong you committed against your fellow Germans. It is the right of the State to punish you, as you are now being punished, but it is the right of your family to forgive you and go on loving you as deeply as ever. If you should ever think otherwise, it would be so very, very wrong, and so very cruel, to yourself and to us. This, above^everything else in the whole world, you must believe.

  Please write to us, as soon as you can.

  With my fondest love, as always,

  Hedda

  The train swayed through the curves, its dim blue interior lights flickering. She had got on at Lehrter Bahnhof, not far from the hospital.

  It had been much the same letter as the first three, for what else was there to say? There was only this one message for him—We love you—and it must be sent out to him time after time until he received it, and understood. It was a lifeline they must throw to him in the dark stormy waters his life had become, and without it they might not save him. There were many cases of suicide at the concentration camps, when prisoners believed nobody cared about them anymore. That it should happen to Franz was her waking nightmare.

  “Have you heard the news, Fräulein?”

  The train rocked.

  “What news?”

  “From Munich!”

  “Oh. Yes. Yes, it’s terrible.”

  Everyone was talking about it at the hospital: last night a bomb had gone off in the Burgerbrau Keller in Munich, only a few minutes after Hitler and his highest

  Party chiefs had left. The British Secret Service was being blamed vociferously in the press.

  “We were so lucky,” the man said, “not to have lost our Führer. It would have been unthinkable!”

  “Unthinkable,” said Hedda, “yes.” Oh, God, if only they’d stayed for those few minutes more . . . they would have been wiped out, off the face of the earth. .. . It occurred to her as the train drew her through the blacked-out city that she had only to say aloud—I wish to God Hitler had been blown to pieces!—and she’d be packed off at once to a prison camp, like Franz. These days the margin between life and death, between tolerable living and unbearable suffering, was infinitely narrow. Your own thoughts frightened you.

  She’d been on the lookout for people who had friends or relatives in the camps—for anyone who knew anything at all about them, so that she might help Franz in some way, if only by understanding what he was going through. That was how she’d heard about the suicide rate. There was an electrified wire all around the camps, and prisoners ran into it when they couldn’t stand it any longer. It was also how she’d learned how to phrase her letters to Franz, though obviously she wouldn’t have been so stupid as to say anything against the authorities. But it had sickened her to put things like your crime against the State and the great wrong you committed against your fellow Germans. . . . There’d been those ghastly, treacherous moments— always when she was steeling herself to face another visit from Vogel, or lying sleepless afterward and wanting someone to blame—when she’d wished her brother had used a little more sense before he’d pitched them all into danger, most of all himself. But already she was beginning to applaud him silently for doing what he had; every time these uniformed brutes arrested another Jewish family or took their terrible reprisals against the Polish partisans, she thought with increasing and secret pride, My brother spoke out against them and accused them publicly, knowing what risks he was running. . . .

  On the telephone, Mother was always asking, “But whatever made him do such a thing?” Father had said, more than once, “He did what he felt he had to do.” Her pride in Franz was the only warmth she knew, in these desolate days.

  “Are you going to Grünewald, Fräulein?”

  She half-turned to look at the man beside her; they were both clinging to the straps in the middle of the aisle: this was the rush hour ending the day. His face was simply another in the crowd, ill-defined in the dim blue light.

  “Why do you ask?” These days, she didn’t trust strangers. She couldn’t see his eyes; his face was in shadow.

  “Do you remember the Havel, by the little bridge?” he asked her softly.

  “The Havel?”

  “Where we swam, not long ago. And the restaurant, where you insisted' on strawberries, remember?” Suddenly he gripped her arm. “Don’t say my name.”

  She drew a quick breath. “You . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “But it’s not possible.” Her heart was thudding as she stared into his shadowed face. It must be a trap of some sort—he was a plainclothes Gestapo man. Martin had flown back to England weeks ago. “I’m afraid I don’t know you, mein Herr.”

  In a moment he continued, “There were other people at the restaurant. Someone could have overheard us talking there. But no one was near us in the water. When we were swimming, I asked you if you’d kept the little stuffed monkey I gave you three years ago. I won it at the fairground. You said you’d lost it, and I pretended to be deeply hurt. Remember? No one could know about that. You’re safe with me.”

  She leaned against him in relief, closing her eyes, and his hand tightened on her arm. “But what are you doing—” and she stopped. Questions were dangerous these days, even in the half dark and with the racketing of the train. “I’m so very sorry,” she murmured, “about Vanessa.” She’d seen it in the Berlin press, about the accidental death of the young English lady of whom the Führer had said: “charming and intelligent, she was not only a true friend of Germany but also an unofficial ambassador for her own country in her unwavering desire for peace between our brother nations.”

  “We miss her,” Martin said.

  The train was slowing, and people began moving along the aisle. During the three-minute stop at Tiergarten Bahnhof neither Martin nor Hedda spoke, but stood close to each other, waiting. There were some vacant seats now but they remained where they were; close like this, they were less easily noticed, less easily recognized. One question was circling in Hedda’s thoughts: what was he doing in Berlin? He was an enemy alien now!

  “How did you find me?” she asked in a low voice as the train moved off.

  “I followed you from the hospital. It wasn’t safe to meet you there. I want to know about Franz.”

  The sound of her brother’s name played on her nerves like a sharp pain. “There hasn’t been any news.” “You thought he was in Buchenwald.”

  “Yes, it’s been confirmed. They—they say he’s now been placed in some kind of special category, and isn’t treated so harshly. He—”

  “ ‘They’ say?”

  “A—a friend told me. Someone who knows a little about what goes on. There’s even the possibility that he’ll be moved to the privileged section of the camp.” “Because of your father’s position?”

  “I—expect so.” She was trying to get that creature’s voice out of her mind: I am going to revoke my request to Kommandant Koch that your brother 'should be granted privileges, his dry, pale hand on the telephone. She moved away from Martin a little, feeling unclean. He sensed something wrong at once.

  “Is the General all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your mother?”

  “Oh, yes. They were interrogated, and so was I. But that was all.”

  “You’ve tried to get in touch with Franz?” He was drawing her back to him, closer, his strong hand on her arm, and she didn’t resist; she closed her eyes against the flickering blue bulbs, feeling his comfort. There was no one she could talk to like this, or be with; at the hospital she had to watch every word—at the hospital or anywhere. It was the same for everyone —you could never be sure who were your friends.

  “I’ve written four letters to him,” she said. “But he hasn’t answered. He might not be getting them.” She turned her head so that she could whisper close to his ear. “I want you to know something. I’m proud of what he did. Very proud.”

  “Of course. You should be.”

  “It wasn’t just romantic recklessness. He recognized the enemy.”

  “And said so. Not many did that.” The train was slowing again. “Listen to me. We’ll meet again, perhaps somewhere we can talk properly. It’s just possible that I can help Franz, or at least get news of him for you.” They swayed against each other as the train reached the platform and the blue bulbs steadied. ‘I've got to leave you now. Take care, and have faith.”

  For an instant his hand pressed her arm and then there were shoulders nudging past, and bobbing heads, and she was alone again among strangers.

  It was a half-pound block of nitro-starch and at three minutes after midnight the alarm clock went off and the stab striker impacted and the filing cabinet bellied outward to the shock and hurled the burning contents across the office, smashing three windows and overturning a desk.

  On the comer of the street opposite the Schutzstaffel Main Economic and Administrative building a news vendor by the name of Jakob Grimminger, once George Harris of Penge, England, looked up and saw the glow of flames in several of the third-floor windows. He left his pitch, walking comfortably along to the public telephone outside the post office.

  “Willi caught the train all right,” he said cheerfully.

  Just before two in the morning, twenty-three-year-old Fritz Reichhart, duty corporal of the guard at the SS 49th (Friedrichsfelde) Battalion, a satellite unit attached to Berlin Headquarters, was patrolling the Personnel Records Office two floors below ground. Most of the files here dealt with the officers of the SS-Führungshauptamt Department of the Totenkopfverbände.

  Reichhart was a conscientious young NCO, but everything seemed in order here and he was thinking about Marthe, his fiancee. Last night at the cafe she’d alarmed him by saying she’d missed her period—and he knew what that meant. Her mother and father were strictly High Church and they’d make sure he smarted for this, all the way to the altar.

  It was by chance that Corporal Reichhart was passing near the big green metal cabinet in the comer of the huge room at a few seconds before two o’clock when the two heavy doors blew open and the blast flung him like a scarecrow across one of the tables and then threw the table after him.

  A few minutes later a taxi driver named Leopold Janza, a naturalized German bom in Kladno, Czechoslovakia, got out of his cab and crossed the pavement to the public telephone box by the railings.

  “The engine’s running beautifully,” he said, “after that overhaul.”

  Soon after dark the following night, 10 November, a black Mercedes 540-K sports-tourer of the SS Metropolitan Transport Pool was being driven northeast toward Brandenburg, not far from the Mittelland Canal. The passenger occupying the rear seat was SS-Colonel Helmut Zimmer, a hero of the Knight’s Cross and something of an amateur painter when he could find the time. A few months ago, soon after his promotion, he had completed a picture of the main entrance to the camp at Gross-Rossen. He painted in the Primitive style, with the bold coloring and the disciplined lines of Henri Rousseau, and the three figures at the gates of the camp stood out sharply: a guard talking with two prisoners, their striped uniforms clean and crisplooking and their hands correctly at their sides as they listened attentively. The guard had a hand raised as if he were pointing something out to them, as if he were showing them around the camp.

  Colonel Zimmer had taken the unprecedented liberty of offering his picture to the Führer, as a gesture of loyalty and homage from the Concentration Camp Inspectorate; and to his deep gratification the gift had been accepted.

  The Colonel was admiring the autumnal colors of the trees as the powerful headlights swept across the scene; for that kind of background he would need ocher, burnt sienna and plenty of chrome yellow. As the Mercedes took the last curve before the canal on the outskirts of Brandenburg the bimetal strip of the thermal detonator lodged precisely six inches from the exhaust silencer reached the required temperature and completed the delay-train circuit. The cylinder of straw-colored lead sulphanate alongside was activated, and the young SS driver fought with the wheel as the car shuddered and seemed to lift from the roadway before it tilted and rolled over in a tumultuous burst of flame that cast fiery hues among the chrome-yellow leaves overhead.

  In the light commercial van that had been following the Mercedes for the last fifteen miles sat Ludwig Androsch, an Austrian-born Mischling whose papers now indicated Aryan descent. He actually felt the thump of the explosion as the shock wave reached his van, but he drove past the blazing vehicle in safety and when he had assured himself that no one could conceivably survive the blast he drove on to Brandenburg. Stopping at the first Bierhalle he came to, he went inside to use the telephone.

  Ludwig had been moon-dropped onto German territory a week ago from an airfield in the Netherlands, and had witnessed this very event a hundred times—in the middle of a ping-pong table in a country mansion in Sussex, and the black Mercedes 540-K sports-tourer —made by Dinkytoy—had only flicked over against the green sponge trees when the instructor had prodded it, without, of course, catching fire.

  “I’ve had a very successful day,” he said into the telephone, “so I thought I’d stop for a nice cold beer.”

  Three minutes later, in the cluttered office on the mezzanine floor of the house in Charlottenburg, Major Haslam lifted the receiver on his desk and pushed the button of the intercom for Martin Benedict’s quarters.

  “We’re sending you in,” he said.

  12

  BUCHENWALD, 12 NOVEMBER 1939

  The first snow had come to the region a week ago, its . small hard flecks driven by the wind across the bleak face of the Ettersberg too fast for much of it to settle; it had left a semblance of frost on the bare earth in the encampment.

  Today, at four o’clock in the afternoon as arranged, three black staff cars moved rapidly along Eickestrasse from the SS Residential Area built for Kommandant Koch and his senior officers. A few minutes later the cars arrived at the main gate to the compound, and nine men climbed out: SS-Colonel Koch; SS-Major Rodl, First Officer-in-Charge; SS-Captain Weissenborn, Second Officer-in-Charge; SS-Colonel Brinkmann, a visitor from the Camp Inspectorate; SS-Major Scheldt, his assistant; two officer-aides and two noncommissioned officers from Residential SS Troops. They all wore heavy greatcoats, buttoned securely against the cutting wind; in addition they had been prudently fortified with schnapps, partaken in Kommandant Koch’s luxurious two-story villa.

  A small military band began to play as the visiting party walked briskly through the gates, and the loudspeaker system crackled into life, calling the camp to attention. The bandsmen wore red uniforms with traditional braid and frogging, but the other prisoners were in the regulation striped cotton shirts and trousers, standing close together in groups against the icy wind.

  “The band is mostly Hungarian,” the Kommandant told his guests. “They’re not too bad with the violin, either, and we sometimes ask them to play for us when there’s a party going.”

  “Typical of the way you run things here,” nodded Colonel Brinkmann, “if I may say so, Herr Kommandant. Music is so civilized.”

  Major Scheldt was having to lengthen his stride in order to keep at the Colonel’s side; he wasn’t a short man by any means, but Brinkmann was setting a fast pace. Scheldt was still trying to get the measure of him; he seemed likeable enough—he’d charmed Frau Koch with his compliments—but he’d also shown a bit too much fondness for discipline when he and Scheldt were alone. Some of them were like that: they didn’t catch on too fast to the idea of “brother officers.”

  “This is the inner camp,” the Kommandant was saying as they moved quickly across the frozen mud of the compound. He indicated the barbed wire enclosure. “We sometimes get a big trainload in and we put the excess number in there for a while. We also house the special prisoners who are waiting for resettlement.”