“Precisely. And you must get through it as soon as you can.”

  Martin turned back to face his instructor, suddenly worried. “Give me a few more days. For God’s sake don’t take me off this assignment. I couldn’t stand that.” “It is up to you,” Tempel said sharply, “whether we take you off this assignment. It is up to you.” He went back to the desk, making a note. “Tomorrow, Colonel Brinkmann, you will be allowed to go out into the streets for twelve hours, alone in civilian clothes. I want you to observe and memorize everything you see and hear. Talk to people, as a German citizen; you will in future use your German civilian cover, and this will be your first opportunity of working with it. You may well be asked for your papers by the Gestapo or the SS. Be prepared for that. Immerse yourself in German life, German culture and German attitudes. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well.” Tempel looked at his watch. “We have been working for sixteen hours. A good day. Tomorrow, of course, you will be taking a little fresh air. Enjoy it. But remember, Colonel Brinkmann, that if you encounter the Gestapo or the SS or an ordinary Schupo, and fail to safeguard your cover, you may well be arrested and taken for intensive interrogation. It will be up to you to decide at what time you should use your capsule, but you must make absolutely certain that you use it before there is any risk of revealing information that might conceivably endanger this unit. That is sacrosanct.”

  “I understand.”

  “Very well. I wish you good night.”

  Martin nodded to both men and for the first time for sixteen hours allowed himself to loosen his tight-fitting gray tunic as he walked to the flight of steps.

  “Colonel Brinkmann!”

  Martin swung around and banged his heels together. “Heil Hitler!”

  8

  GERMAN-POLISH FRONTIER, 31 AUGUST 1939

  The evening was fine, with a slight breeze blowing. Earlier in the day there had been clouds over the hills, threatening rain, but now the sky was clear. Long before eight o’clock, German Army transports had arrived quietly on the outskirts of Gleiwitz, Oppeln and Hoch-linden, close to the frontier. From most of the transports men had jumped to the ground and moved to their prescribed assembly points. They had been recruited from concentration camps deep inside Germany, and wore Polish Army uniforms; they were under the orders of SS officers and men from Standarten 23 and 45, based in Upper Silesia.

  The trucks moved slowly through the region, their lights doused and motorcycle outriders escorting them to their dispersal points. Several of the men stumbled as they jumped from the transports; they were grievously undernourished and their heads had been shaved, so that their caps often fell off and had to be retrieved in the half-dark.

  From three smaller trucks, dead bodies were unloaded at strategic points. They had donned their Polish uniforms in the concentration camps, where they had been prisoners, and had been given lethal injections by the SS doctors. Some of the bodies were already stiff,

  which made—as an SS corporal remarked—for easier handling. They had been designated, in General Heydrich’s secret orders for this operation, as “Canned Goods.”

  Under cover of darkness the various units went into action. At eight o’clock precisely the radio station at Gleiwitz was “stormed” by the “Polish” troops, and shots were loosed into the air, ensuring that none of the radio staff was hurt. In the other areas, most of the “Poles” drawn from the concentration camps were mown down by the German “defenders,” and in certain places, where SS troops were engaged, the uniformed corpses were dispersed where they could easily be discovered.

  Soon after the “attack” was broadcast on the radio station at Gleiwitz, startled citizens heard anti-German announcements in Polish over their wireless sets, mingled with revolver shots. The customs office at Hochlinden was demolished, and shaven-headed corpses were discovered strewn about in the area.

  BERLIN, 1 SEPTEMBER 1939

  At ten o’clock in the morning Adolf Hitler announced to the Reichstag that German forces had moved into Poland in a counterattack to several armed assaults made the night before in the areas of Gleiwitz, Hochlinden and Oppeln.

  In the evening of the same day, Great Britain and France issued an ultimatum to Germany to withdraw her troops from Poland, in failure of which demand their ambassadors would ask for their passports.

  As night came, the city was blacked out, and at seven o’clock the air raid sirens sounded. After the all-clear, people came into the streets again, making their way along the whitewashed curbstones to fill the beer halls and the restaurants and the nightclubs until they were doing record business. But nobody was celebrating the new war, and few of them, in the privacy of their own minds, were thanking the Reichschancellor for bringing it into their lives.

  BERLIN, 3 SEPTEMBER 1939

  At one minute after nine o’clock in the morning a note was delivered to the Foreign Minister by Sir Neville Henderson, stating that, unless German troops were withdrawn from Polish soil by eleven o’clock, Great Britain would declare war.

  Soon after that hour he returned to the Foreign Ministry in the Wilhelmstrasse and was given a blunt refusal.

  It was a sunny day, and people stood in the streets listening to the amplified radio announcement telling them that Germany was now at war with Great Britain, thanks to the English warmongers and capitalistic Jews.

  There was no cheering, and the crowds soon dispersed.

  A taxi driver, waiting for the lights to change along the Kaiserdamm, told his passenger indignantly, “Hitler started this war, if you ask me, not them others. He’s been thirsting for it ever since he got into power.” He’d had a drink or two, or he wouldn’t have said such a thing, but that made no difference. He was reported and arrested within fifteen minutes and taken to Gestapo Headquarters.

  By late afternoon the staffs of the French and British Embassies had left; the two buildings stood empty, their doors locked and guarded by the city police.

  LONDON, 3 SEPTEMBER 1939

  The day had been warm, almost sultry, with clouds darkening the sky toward evening. A storm crashed and flickered across London, and an air raid alert electrified the already threatening atmosphere.

  Many people mistook the first rolls of thunder for bombs dropping, and went to their shelters and basements, emerging later red-faced but consoled by a BBC commentator in a late-night program in which he said it had in any case been “good practice.”

  Mr. Winston Churchill, a political outcast, had dinner at the Savoy Grill that night. He had been making himself highly unpopular for years now, claiming that the only way of preventing another world war was to show Hitler that England was ready to fight. But nobody wanted to—life was too pleasant, and so far the German Chancellor had reacted favorably to Mr. Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, and surely Germany had no excuse to invade England.

  At the Savoy, the Duke of Westminster—whose admiration for Adolf Hitler was well known in Government circles—chose to make an unpleasant scene, blaming Churchill to his face for having brought about a new war with Germany.

  But Churchill was not wholly friendless. A few others were of like mind, and hoped somehow to save England and the rest of the civilized world. Among them were King George VI, President Roosevelt, and the Canadian.

  It was the Canadian who telephoned the house in St. James’s Street very late that night, and it was the king’s equerry who answered.

  “Are all your people back from the Embassy?” the Canadian asked. “Back from Berlin?”

  “Not all. A few are still waiting for a plane. But we’re not worried; the Germans are being quite punctilious.” “And what about our people?”

  “They’re all back.” The equerry paused fractionally. “Except of course for those who will be staying.” “Underground.”

  “Strictly.”

  “And what about our people for ‘Damocles’?”

  There was another pause. The equerry was well known for distrusting telephones, but the Canadian didn’t have time to worry about that; he was just in by Clipper from Washington and his party there demanded to know everything that was going on. “His party” was the established code reference to President Roosevelt.

  “Everything is in order,” the equerry said reluctantly. “We’ve already got a man under intensive training.” “When will he be going in?”

  “As soon as he’s pronounced ready.”

  ‘Til tell my party,” the Canadian said.

  “Please do that. Good of you to telephone,” the equerry said, and rang off.

  9

  BUCHENWALD, 20 SEPTEMBER 1939

  As the gates of the camp were swung open to let in the work force, the band struck up with a Hungarian folk measure, fast and lively in the evening air. There were a dozen musicians, mostly Hungarian gypsies, with guitars and harmonicas and trumpet and drum, and their music carried to the far comers of the compound. Even the guard dogs pricked up their ears.

  A man swung idly from the gallows, his face growing darker by the minute. He had escaped that morning from a work party, and been caught; and now there was a big notice fastened to the front of his shirt: HELLO AGAIN, I’M BACK!

  Franz sat with his eyes closed, so that he could listen to the music without seeing anything around him. Over the last few weeks he’d been gradually forgetting the other world he had lived in, not deliberately but because it was more and more difficult to remember it. The images of the past had been in subtle shades and hues, and now they were being painted over with strong brush strokes in black and crimson, until the original was almost lost. But now he saw it again more clearly as the music flowed around and into him, bringing tears that he’d refused to shed until now, even at the very worst of times. In this he was like his sister; in fact Hedda had taught him the trick, the very first time he’d bumped his knee on their sled: “If you don’t cry,” she’d said, “you’ll be like a grownup!”

  But now that he’d grown up he knew different. The old man in Block 13 had been crying all through the night since he’d arrived, not because the guards beat him all the time for being so slow, but because he missed his wife. They had shot his wife in front of him when she’d climbed down from the train and started screaming. It was to stop her screaming, the SS corporal had said with a laugh; very effective, he’d thought. Franz had been there, and remembered how the screaming had suddenly stopped, leaving only the sound of the locomotive’s quiet hissing and the call of a bird in the woods, and the old man’s thin and desolate crying.

  For a while Franz was able to hear the gypsy music and pretend he was in the Tiergarten, lying on the summer grass with his hands behind his head and the sun gold against his closed eyelids; then the other sound grew louder with every minute until the music was half drowned by the tramp of feet as the work force entered the camp.

  Then the loudspeakers crackled, as he knew they would, because it happened every day at this hour.

  Corpse-carriers to the gatehouse!

  He opened his eyes, knowing better than to dawdle. None of the guards had hit him since Corporal Trot had made him pin on the badge, and he hadn’t been detailed to any of the work forces; but he was now one of the permanent corpse-carriers and the loudspeakers could bark out the order at any time of the day or night.

  He got up and limped to the gate. His shoes were odd—a brown and a black with one sole much thicker than the other—but he was lucky they weren’t clogs, which would take the skin off your feet in the first day’s wearing. In any case it was his striped shirt that had worried him more than his shoes when they’d thrown it at him in the clothing store: it had been laundered, but there were still rust-red stains near the three bullet holes. He’d told the kapo he wouldn’t wear a dead man’s shirt, but the man had laughed, showing his yellow gapped teeth, and said the whole consignment had been “graciously bequeathed by the dear departed” and did he expect half the prisoners to run around naked?

  Corpse-carriers to the gatehouse!

  Franz broke into a run toward the long file of men. Many of them were still walking well enough after breaking stones all day in the quarry, but they were bringing the dead ones with them and couldn’t keep up the pace of the gypsy music trying to hurry them along.

  Corpse-carriers at the double!

  Franz made for the first body, but it came to some sort of life as he held it in his arms, and they performed a strange little dance, staggering about as if each were trying to support the other.

  “On the heap!" bellowed Corporal Trot. “Come on then!”

  “He’s not dead!” Franz called.

  “Of course he’s dead!” shouted the Corporal, and brought his club against the man’s neck. Franz heard the spine snap and felt the dead weight on him. “Don’t you know I’m always right?” said Trot, and gave his high cackling laugh.

  “I have sinned . . . and I have done wrong to my fellow men . . .”

  They listened to the Jew intoning his prayers. Franz and Hirzel were sitting together near the open doorway of Block 13, watching the stars glimmering above the peaks of the Harz Mountains to the north. Hirzel wore the red armband of a block senior; he had been at the camp for more than a year and was treated with respect, and not only because of the armband, though it gave him the power of life over death if he chose to use it.

  “I have slandered . . . and I have been deceitful. .

  Hirzel shifted his feet. “Now they’re at war,” he asked quietly, not to disturb the Jew, “will it be good or bad for us?”

  Franz noted that he’d said “they,” not “we.” His long year here had isolated him from the world outside, and he could not join “them” in the war.

  “If they lose,” Franz said, “we’ll be rescued.”

  “Yes. But in time?”

  They watched the stars above the black peaks.

  “I have been proud . . . and I have been disobedient . . "

  There had been no letter, Franz had been thinking all day. It had occurred to him before, but he’d decided it was still too early for,one; then this morning he’d known, as soon as he’d woken, that there wouldn’t be a letter; and the thought had remained with him all day, through the churning dust and the metallic shouting of the loudspeakers and the thudding of the clubs and the staccato pock-pock of the revolver shots in the far comer of the camp. There wouldn’t ever be any letter, and he understood that now.

  “My God, before I was created l signified nothing . .

  Hirzel moved again in the starlight. “Letters take time to get here,” he said softly, astonishing Franz with his telepathy. “For a lot of reasons.”

  “I’ve told you, I don’t expect them to write to me.” Perhaps Hirzel’s telepathy wasn’t so astonishing; Franz had talked to him about this several times during the day, it was so much on his mind.

  “They’re proud of you,” Hirzel said.

  “No. I thought they would be, one day, when so many people would have read our leaflets that they would have started a revolution and wiped out the Nazis; but I don’t think they’re proud of me now. There weren’t enough leaflets, for a revolution.”

  . . And now that I am created l am as if I had not been created . .

  Someone called out for the Jew to shut up, and Hirzel turned and said with authority, “Let him finish.” The Jew had told him, early this morning, that tonight he was going to die. Hirzel hadn’t asked him how, or why; that was the Jew’s business. He was saying the prayer for the departing.

  “Letters take a long time,” the block senior told Franz. “And even when they reach here they’re searched for money, and then like as not they’re simply thrown into the rubbish bin. You ought to know that.”

  But Franz went on arguing. He’d let them all down, the whole of his family. Even an Army general could lose his status on account of his son’s treasonable act. As for Hedda, they would have dragged her along-for questioning, or even put her into jail on suspicion of being a party to the act—his act. He hadn’t eaten for three days when he’d thought of this, even the few scraps that came his way; and Hirzel had found him face down in the mud after a rainstorm, half-drowning. Could he expect the comfort of a letter from his father, demoted in rank because of him, or from his sister, imprisoned because of him? They would never want to hear his name again.

  "I am dust in life, and how much more so in death . .

  The Jew was softly beating his chest as he intoned his prayer.

  Hirzel lowered his head, staring into the distance until a star that had been poised on the rim of the mountains winked out; then he lifted his.,head again, and lowered it, creating the star and destroying it, creating it again, playing at God.

  “How did you get your badge?” he asked Franz.

  “I don’t know. They just gave it to me.”

  “Your father’s a general. That’d be it.” He said it with pride. His own father had been a sergeant in the

  war, and his mother had taught him it wasn’t for everybody to be given command of men, so he’d grown up with a sense of reverence for those who could lead. Just to be sitting beside this boy whose father was a general gave him a glow of shared exaltation.

  “No,” Franz told him. “They knew he was a general when I was first arrested.”

  “You must have influence, then.”

  “No. It was probably some kind of mistake.”

  “Luck, then,” Hirzel said, and created his star again from the side of the black mountain. “It keeps you out of trouble, anyway.”

  Franz hesitated, wanting to take this chance of reminding the big man that he remembered, and was grateful, yet feeling the embarrassment of putting such things into words, because of the way it had happened.