As the lunch proceeded, Martin found himself talking more than he normally did, as the Major drew him out on the subject of Berlin, the Chancellor, and the possibility of war. He also threw in one or two personal questions about Martin’s background, and listened attentively, toying with his Apfeltorte and nodding in all the right places.

  “Raced at Brooklands, did you? What kind of car?” “A Frazer-Nash.”

  “Ah! One of the chain gang, eh? Beautiful motor car.”

  “That one was, until I crashed it.”

  The Major looked up. “Crashed, eh? Came out all right, obviously.” He asked casually, “Got any scars to show for it?”

  “Only on the legs.”

  “Ah. Lucky.”

  It had been another of those personal questions, and Martin noted it as they sipped their coffee.

  “Benedict . . . Benedict . . . Now I’ve got it! You were on the stage, weren’t you, in London? Five or six years ago?”

  “Just for a while.”

  “Of course, of course—Cyrano de Bergerac. Right?” Martin laughed briefly. “Don’t remind me of the notices.”

  “You were good in that one—very good! My wife quite lost her head over you, I remember clearly. Well, well—Martin Benedict, the actor, now it all comes back to me. What made you give it up?”

  Martin gazed across the dining room, carried back in his thoughts for a moment. “It was too artificial. If

  I’d been any better at it, I would probably have discovered the deeper realities of the game.”

  “Well, I think you were damned good, you know. Damned good.”

  Later, walking back to the Embassy in the warmth of the afternoon, Major Brooks slipped a final question into their conversation. “Have you any friends in this country? Close friends?”

  Martin found himself thinking at once of Hedda. But she wasn’t really a close friend. “No, I can’t say that. Mostly the kind of friends you make on irregular visits, and then lose touch* with.”

  “Ah. Any of them anti-Nazi?” He glanced around him again, and Martin realized the Major must have been in Berlin for quite a time: he’d developed the well-known “German look,” the quick glance over the shoulder.

  “I don’t know them well enough,” Martin told him, “to know what they think about the Nazis.”

  “They wouldn’t shout the odds about it, in any case, would they? Doesn’t do, in this place.”

  They parted company soon afterward, outside the British Embassy, and on his way back to the Adlon Hotel Martin reviewed their two hours of conversation, trying to make some kind of pattern out of it. He was now sure that Major Brooks hadn’t run into him at the Embassy by pure chance, and that the impromptu invitation to lunch had not been a gesture of courtesy between fellow officers.

  In the evening there was a further telephone call from his father in London, asking after Vanessa. Martin told him:

  “She’s bearing up well enough. We had tea together, and talked about home, and her friends there. I’d say everything’s going to be all right, once I’m on the plane with her.”

  “You’re doing a splendid job, Martin. I have informed General Westerby. And of course your mother’s tremendously relieved.”

  “Good show. Give her my love, will you?” Before he rang off, he remembered the Major. “I had lunch with someone you know, by the way. Major Brooks.”

  “Brooks?”

  “Major Stanley Brooks, Royal Signals.”

  “Oh? I don’t think I’ve met him. But in case I’m wrong, please give him my best regards.”

  “Out!”

  Feet tramped along the corridors.

  “Out!”

  Doors banged, slamming back on their hinges.

  “Out!”

  Franz rolled off the bare wooden bench and got to his feet and stood swaying, wondering what was happening.

  Outside in the courtyard of the big building, engines were starting up.

  “What time is it?” asked the man with the smashed hand.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, you lazy bastards—out!”

  The door of the cell slammed back and Reintz stood there, truncheon in hand. Franz got past him through the doorway with only a light blow, but he heard the man with the smashed hand give a grunt of pain as he followed. His name was Clemens, a senior partner of a tailoring firm in Potsdam, established in 1873 and now with four branches, two of them in Berlin and two in Hannover. He had told Franz all this, and other things, during the night. Yesterday afternoon, after the final interrogation, he had been too slow in going through a doorway, and they had slammed the door on his hand. This he had told Franz, too.

  “Out! Out!”

  The whole building was alive with running men.

  “Don’t put your shoes on! Who told you to put your shoes on?”

  A man was sent reeling against the wall in the bleak lamplight of the corridor.

  The building swarmed in the night.

  “Come on there, at the doubler

  Franz looked around for Clemens, and stopped, waiting for him to catch up. Clemens wasn’t a young man, and couldn’t get his breath.

  “What are you standing there for, you stupid clod? Get onr

  The truncheon swung and hit the wall and Franz went lurching after the other men, untouched, untouched this time and trying to understand this new sensation; normally when they hit out there was nothing you could do, you just waited and held your breath till it came; but not this time; it must mean something, some kind of independence, some kind of freedom, snatched out of the dark.

  “Get those shoes off! Hang 'em around your neck, come on, like all the others are doing, are you bastards blind or something?”

  Franz ran in his socks. His shoes were in the cell; there hadn’t been time to get them. It didn’t matter. He looked back again for Clemens, but couldn’t see him among the line of running men in the long green-painted corridors. He couldn’t catch up. “It’s my asthma,” he’d told Franz in the night, when they’d talked to each other endlessly to keep their minds on the life they had known before, the one that had been interrupted. “I’ve been to every spa in Europe, but there’s no real cure, you know, not for asthma.”

  “Form up in lines! Quick, now, come on!”

  They were in the big courtyard, shoving one another to make room, dodging the men in uniform, the acrid stink of exhaust gas on the air as the long black vans started moving away, taking the first of them. But the courtyard was almost filled by now with jostling men as the cells emptied, and when the last van swayed through the gates there was still half their number left.

  A light clinking sound came into the night, like Christmas sleigh bells.

  “Stand still, you bloody clods, stand still!”

  They obeyed, standing like patient cattle as the guards went along the lines, looping the chains around their waists and passing on, looping the next, and the next. It took a long time, but the night was warm and the sky cloudless.

  Franz looped the thin iron chain around his waist and passed the rest of its length to the next man and stood waiting again, thinking. Had they informed his father yet? Certainly. His father was a general, one of the youngest and most brilliant in the Army; but he had no time for Hitler or his wild policies, and this was known. Certainly he would have been informed of his son’s treasonous-acts. Yet Franz regretted nothing.

  Sigrid had said, two months ago, “They’ve arrested the Gotthelfs.” She had said it angrily, throwing the door open and surprising them at their clandestine reading, so that they had slid their copies of Zweig and H. G. Wells and Freud under their chairs, thinking it might be someone else. “All of them,” Sigrid had said with a soft fierceness, “even Benni.” Benni was three years old, and only yesterday they had given him a ride on Franz’s new bicycle, holding him firmly on the saddle.

  Franz knew the Gotthelfs had been arrested, but he hadn’t yet told anyone. He had felt too sick about it, knowing what the night sounds had meant: the rapping on the door, the voices raised, the scuffling of feet and finally the vehicle starting up and driving away. He’d been expecting it for a long time. They all had.

  “We must do something,” Sigrid said, shutting the door and sitting cross-legged on the floor among them, throwing back her dark hair.

  “Why us?” Jakob asked, and she swung to look at him.

  “As long as we go on asking that,” she told him slowly, “nothing will ever get done. That is ‘why us.’ ”

  Standing with the chain around his waist, Franz thought again that by this time Sigrid was probably dead.

  “All right ,” a guard shouted suddenly, “we’re going to move off!” He waited until there was absolute silence, and then lowered his voice. “You’ll run in your socks and you won’t talk. You won’t make any noise. Any one of you making a noise will be dealt with, and you know what that means: it means you won’t ever reach where we’re going.”

  The other guards formed up alongside the prisoners and started swinging their clubs. “Move! Move, you bastards!”

  They went through the gates at the double, one man stumbling and giving a whimper as a truncheon came down, the rest of them pulling against the chains to make sure the ones behind them didn’t lag. “Move!” The guards ran alongside them, aiming steady blows at their heads if they seemed to be going too slowly. “Move, you lazy sods, come on!”

  Franz tripped, regained his footing and ran on, pulling at the chain. She was probably dead by now, he thought, because she had been the ringleader, from the moment she’d come into the room like that and told them about the Gotthelfs. Sigrid had found the small hand printing press at a pawnbrokers, and bargained for it; she and Karl had done most of the composition work. It was easier, already, to think about her as dead, rather than fear for her all the time. It would happen to all of them before long, but she would be first, and in a strange way it was ennobling, and Franz, running steadily in the pack of chained men through the night, thought of Sigrid with veneration.

  “Keep moving!”

  They were running in their socks, Franz assumed, so as not to wake the populace; it must be very early, for there was no traffic. They were being smuggled out of the city by dark, like something unclean, so that by morning the streets would look orderly again.

  But one man, beaten too hard or simply exhausted, had dropped to his knees, and those near him had to lift him and drag him along by the chain with his feet still on the ground; and after a while his socks wore through, and then his skin, and he began leaving two parallel streaks of red on the tarred surface of the street, detracting from the neatness that should be there in the morning.

  “Keep moving!”

  The black clubs swung and fell, and the sound of the chains grew faster, the incongruous sound of sleigh bells in the summer night.

  The train was waiting for them when they reached the station. They had expected that; they’d heard about the long dark trains that left Berlin night after night. It was said that war was coming, and some people spoke against the idea, because they had no enthusiasm for another war; and there were also those who listened to the “black” radio, and told their friends the news from overseas, or at least told the people they believed to be their friends; and these nights the trains were growing longer.

  “Halt! Halt, you bastards!”

  They stood in their lines along the platform, smelling the coal and the steam as the enormous engine towered over them with its smoke clouding the stars. Franz looked for Clemens, his new friend, and saw that he stood sagging with his bald head down, supported by the men closest to him. Clemens had asthma, and couldn’t ever keep up. Franz had been on this particular platform before, many times; from here they’d taken the holiday train to the Black Forest, he and the other students; and from here he had taken the train for home at the end of the winter term.

  The guards moved constantly, keeping their prisoners in order, and the sound of a whip came singing thinly from the far end of the lines.

  “Where are they taking us?” a man whispered.

  “I heard it was Buchenwald,” someone answered. “They’ve got a camp there.”

  4

  By six-thirty in the evening the restaurants along the Kurfürstendamm were filling up, and people still crowded the pavement cafes, sitting at the little iron tables with their ice cream and ersatz coffee. By seven o’clock the traffic was clogging at the lights, and a taxi was hard to find.

  Martin had been waiting five or six minutes, standing with one foot on the pavement and one in the road, watching the traffic for an empty cab. People strolled past him, many of them laughing in the warm late-summer air; the people of Berlin laughed easily, Martin had noticed in the last few days, as if they were whistling in the dark. Newsboys shouted at their stands, but sales were slow; nobody wanted to hear about the “militant Polish fanatics” or “Germany’s readiness” for war.

  When the traffic stream was blocked by the lights at the crossroads, Martin watched the crowds instead. Not all of their gaiety was false; a lot of people were truly enjoying themselves. A party of children were throwing streamers at one another across a cafe table, one of them blpwing a horn while the others hunted the last of the currants from the birthday cake; three businessmen, still in their formal suits, were linking arms along the pavement, singing impromptu snatches of the Horst Wess el; two women were dancing to the raucous rhumba beat from a gramophone.

  The people at the café nearest the traffic lights fell silent for a few minutes as two Gestapo men stopped on their rounds, bending over a man sitting alone; for a moment he seemed unable to find his papers, then held them out, waiting. One of them took his arm and he stood up, protesting at first but going with them when he saw it was useless, his short black-coated figure seeming to dangle between the two uniformed men as they took him to the van parked at the curbside. Then talking broke out again, more loudly now, and Martin heard the word “Juden” passing among the tables. A woman began laughing and her friends took it up, banging their spoons against their coffee cups; she must have said something especially funny.

  A taxi swerved suddenly into the curb and Martin got in, slamming the door; but before it could pull away the door opened and a young SS lieutenant put his head in.

  “Will you allow me to share? I'm late for duty.”

  “Of course. Jump in.”

  As the taxi swung back into the traffic the lieutenant said with a laugh of recognition, “Martin! I didn’t know you were back in Berlin!”

  “I'm afraid I—” He searched the young officer’s face. “Good Lord, it’s Rudi!” They shook hands warmly. “I didn’t recognize you in the uniform!”

  “But what a pleasing surprise!” Rudi said in English.

  Martin laughed again. “Your English is still terrible.” They went back to German, asking each other about their friends and families.

  “And the beautiful Vanessa?” the young lieutenant asked.

  “Still beautiful,” Martin told him, remembering that Rudi had been rather keen on her when they’d last met at the Olympic Games. “We’re flying back to London together in a few days’ time.”

  Rudi’s dark face became serious, and he glanced down. “I suppose that’s wise, yes. It’s a shame, isn’t it?”

  In a moment Martin said, “So you think it’s certain?”

  “War? Yes. Have you read the Volkische Beobachter today?”

  “I saw the headlines,” Martin lied. The Volkische Beobachter was Hitler’s organ for propaganda.

  “Germany is ready.” Rudi swung his young intense face to look into Martin’s eyes. “We hope to remain good friends with England, of course. The Führer wishes it. But we are ready, for whatever we have to do.”

  Martin was trying to recall the eighteen-year-old boy in the tennis flannels only three years ago, cheering the British teams lustily, his arm around Vanessa whenever he found the excuse as they sat together watching the arena; but Rudi had changed, almost unrecognizably, and not just because of the smart gray uniform. He had become very intense, jerking his hands in sharp gestures as he talked, a note of reverence coming into his voice whenever he mentioned Germany or the Führer.

  “I’m in the Germania Regiment, you know. It’s one of the elite: our particular duty is the protection of the Führer himself. You can imagine the pride I feel, the responsibility r

  “I congratulate you,” Martin said, and then let Rudi go on talking as he watched the glittering avenue for a moment, seeing it blacked out suddenly in his mind’s eye, the crowds melting away to leave the buildings silent under a droning sky.

  “Peter is in the same unit with me—you remember Peter?”

  “Of course.” Martin looked away from the window. “Did he marry Hedda?”

  Rudi hesitated. “No. They broke it off.” His dark eyes became shadowed again under the peak of his cap.

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Actually, she broke it off. She said it was because Peter had joined the SS. But of course there must have been some other reason—it couldn’t have been that.”

  “Why not?”

  Rudi looked surprised. “Because we are the elite. Especially the Germania Regiment—one of the closest to the person of the Führer!” He waited, but Martin said nothing. “It was just an extraordinary reason for her to give—just a stupid excuse.”

  In a moment Martin said slowly, “Hedda wasn’t given to making stupid excuses for anything. I remember her very well.”

  Rudi looked away. “She’ll have to get over that attitude of hers. It could get her into serious trouble.”