A War of Flowers (2014) (48 page)

‘Any idea when Himmler plans to present this dossier?’ Rupert asked.

‘Not just yet. He’s still assembling the evidence. Keeping his powder dry, and waiting for the right moment to pounce.’

Rupert shook his head.

‘You have to hand it to them.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Rupert noticed Obersturmbannführer Freiburg approaching with two guards.

‘It is required for you to leave immediately.’

The guards took him under each arm and Rupert winced as he was hoisted in the air like a tailor’s dummy, and half dragged, half carried into the road outside, where for the entertainment
of the assembled celebrity-spotters he was unceremoniously dumped, and given a few sharp kicks in the ribs as a souvenir. He rested on the pavement for a short while until someone helped him to his
feet and then he progressed down the street, declining the offers of a charming lady in a shop doorway, until the cold air sobered him up and somehow he made his way home.

The Sportpalast on Potsdamer Strasse was a great white palace of a place, built in the early years of the century with an ice rink and shops and a stadium capable of holding up
to fourteen thousand people. It was a popular venue for boxing matches – the cream of society turned out for fights featuring the celebrated heavyweight Max Schmeling – as well as beer
festivals, concerts and cycle races. But in the past five years it had become the venue for an even more popular form of entertainment: Nazi Party rallies. Perhaps because only the Party faithful
were invited, the Hitler Youth leaders and the local Party divisions, these tended to be lively affairs, one of which had taken place just a few days ago, according to tattered remains of a flyer
on the wall:
For one night only: The Führer: A Man of Peace!

Rosa wished she had never mentioned meeting a man to her mother. Already Katrin Winter was making preparations in her head while Rosa’s father had an edge of worry in his eyes when his
daughter explained that she had no idea where the man lived, who his family was, or exactly what he did. But he had faith in his daughter’s good sense, and besides, it was very difficult to
tell a twenty-five-year-old woman whom she could and could not meet for a date at the cinema. To disguise her trepidation as she waited, Rosa watched the people around her, thinking that it might
make one of her ‘Observations’. There was a couple next to her, obviously married from the tone of their conversation, which was mostly an argument about their chances of ever owning a
new Volkswagen car. Two elderly ladies, one large and one thin, walked past, exercising dogs that were the precise mirrors of their owners. Across the forecourt a pair of workmen were attempting to
free a swastika banner that had become entangled in a streetlamp. One man held the ladder while the other lunged fruitlessly at the rope, before abandoning the attempt and leaving the banner
hanging limply, like a noose. The couple next to her began laughing at the pantomime, but it still wasn’t enough to distract Rosa from the meeting with August Gerlach.

She saw Gerlach before he saw her, heading across the road with a determined hunch to his shoulders, wearing the same grubby fedora and natty grey suit as before. Lost in thought, the jocular
demeanour was nowhere to be seen and instead his narrow blade of a mouth was a grimace and the bristles on his jaw cast a blue shadow on his face. Rosa had a tendency to see the animal
characteristics in human beings and she often privately entertained herself by attributing the appropriate creature to each person she met. Everything about August Gerlach, from his purposeful
stalk, looking neither left nor right, to his lean frame and sharp nose, had a lupine quality. There was something of the wolf about August Gerlach – he had that beast’s clever eyes and
alert, predatory air. Yet even as she thought this, Rosa reprimanded herself for being what Susi would call immature and summoned an enthusiastic smile.

‘Hello, sweetheart. Pfennig for your thoughts.’

‘I was just thinking of a story.’

‘A story you know, or one you made up?’

‘Just something I wrote.’

Gerlach led the way to the bar area where he bought her a cup of hot chocolate and a glass of schnapps for himself. He took off his hat and looked around.

‘I was here, actually, the other night. The Führer was on magnificent form. You should have heard him. He went on for hours. He’s very angry about the Czechs.’

‘Why are they always so hysterical at the Sportpalast?’

‘Hysterical?’ he sounded testy. ‘Why do you say that?’

It was the word Rosa’s father used. Whenever the speeches came on the radio at home, Anselm Winter would turn them off and put music on the gramophone instead, but sometimes, from another
room, she would hear him listening to the Führer’s shriek, when he thought no one else could hear.

‘Over-excited, I suppose is what I mean.’

‘There’s plenty to get excited about.’

‘Is there? I don’t feel excited. But perhaps I don’t read the papers enough.’

‘Good thing.’ Gerlach smiled. ‘Pretty ladies shouldn’t discuss politics. Anyway I’m looking forward to this movie. Grethe Weiser’s a real piece of
work.’

A piece of work
. What did that mean?

He gave Rosa’s drab, olive-green suit an appraising look. She had come straight from work, though she was wearing lipstick, and had stuck a pink carnation in her hat in honour of the
occasion.

‘Ever thought of letting your hair down?’

Rosa blushed. She was entirely unused to direct comments on her looks or being called a pretty lady or having a man rake his eyes over her with such merciless attention. She wasn’t going
to tell him that it had never occurred to her to wear her hair in anything but braids.

‘Sometimes.’

‘You should. Ditch the glasses too. It would suit you.’

He rattled the ice round in his glass, like a gambler rolling a dice.

‘So you do that then? Think up stories?’

‘Just fragments really. Impressions.’

‘Clever girl.’

‘I’ve always liked writing, you see. I used to want to be a writer, when I was younger, and I read somewhere that the place to start would be to record the details of what you see in
everyday life. Even quite ordinary things. They don’t have to be dramatic or important. It makes you notice more, you see, and it trains you to describe—’

‘Because . . .’ Gerlach interrupted, shaking his head slowly. ‘It’s beginning to make sense to me now. It was a story, wasn’t it? Your tale about the lady on the
Wilhelm Gustloff
.’

‘Not at all.’

His odd, sharp smile curled across his thin lips. ‘Tell me. I can take a joke. You were just making up . . . what did you call it? . . . an impression, to impress me.’

Rosa felt the blood rush to her cheeks again, this time in agitation.

‘I promise you. It definitely happened. I wouldn’t lie. I wasn’t trying to impress you. And I don’t know why you keep asking about it.’

‘Why wouldn’t I? It’s not every day a girl sees a murder.’

‘I didn’t say it was a murder.’

‘Sounded that way to me. Have you changed your mind, then?’

‘I know what I saw.’

‘Told anyone else about it yet?’

Exasperated, her voice rose.

‘Of course I haven’t! I don’t even want to remember it. I don’t want to talk about it at all. Though I’m beginning to think I should.’

Reaching a hand across her roughly, he grabbed her, his fingernails making sharp scarlet crescents in her forearm.

‘Now then, sweetheart. No need to get upset. People are listening. Don’t make a scene.’

He looked about him, with an explanatory grin, then let her arm go and rubbed the bristles on his jaw.

‘Forget I said anything. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. How about a smoke before we go in?’

He felt in his pocket and freed a box of cigarettes, extracted one and clenched it between his lips and he felt in his other pocket for a light. And that was when Rosa froze. She had always had
a good eye for detail, and the detail which caught her eye now, and made her heart race, was his matchbook. A little fold of white card with gold lettering on it.

She remembered the matchbooks that rested on the coffee tables on the ship. She had even thought of bringing one home as a memento, until circumstances had provided other, more horrible memories
of her trip. But how would August Gerlach have come by those matches unless he had been on the
Wilhelm Gustloff
himself? And if he had been on the
Wilhelm Gustloff
, why was he
pretending that he hadn’t?

Rosa knew there might be an innocent explanation, but innocent explanations were increasingly difficult to come by. She focused her eyes on the table and took a deliberate sip of chocolate,
hoping that he had not noticed anything amiss, but Gerlach had registered her alarm and was watching her, she knew it, the smoke of his cigarette pulsing like his own breath.

He leant towards her, bringing with him a pungent gust of lemon and vetiver aftershave. His eyes narrowed, as though he was squinting down the barrel of a gun.

‘Anything wrong, sweetheart?’

‘Nothing. I’ll just pop into the ladies’ before the film starts.’

‘Don’t be long.’

She left the café, but instead of turning left, down the steps leading to the Kino, she slipped through the foyer into a narrow tunnel and entered the Sportpalast itself. For a second she
halted at the entrance and looked around at the sheer scale of it. She had been to the Sportpalast before, she and Susi had come skating here as girls, but in its deserted state the arena appeared
impossibly vast. It was silent and semi-dark like some great cathedral, with tiers of balconies rising up to the ceiling and thousands of chairs ranked expectantly before an empty dais. The walls
were still decked from Hitler’s speech a couple of days ago, festooned by banners reading
We follow our Führer
, garlanded with ivy wreaths and the obligatory giant eagle with
outstretched wings poised above the lectern.

After a second’s hesitation, she moved quickly. Even though it would be several minutes before Gerlach came to look for her, she threaded her way urgently along the stalls, making for the
far end where, she guessed, there would be a side exit leading onto Pallasstrasse through which she could slip away. As she hurried she calculated what to do. She had no idea who August Gerlach was
but she knew that he could find her – he
would
find her – if she didn’t act fast. He might not know where she lived, but he had discovered where she worked – she was
sure she had never told him – and he would seek her out. In her fright she felt curiously liberated. She realized that Gerlach had answered a question for her, a question she had not even
asked herself.

Rosa hastened along Lützowstrasse, hugging the inside of the pavement, keeping close to the shade of the buildings. The streetlamps cast jagged shadows, inking in the side streets and
glancing off the cobbles. A group of boys overtook her, laughing, a car blared past, and behind her she heard the rapid pacing of a man’s footsteps growing closer. Seized with alarm, she
looked around for somewhere to conceal herself and saw, down a side street, the entrance to a cinema.

The musty, velour-carpeted foyer was deserted. Judging by the music emerging from a curtained entrance, the programme had already begun and the ticket clerk had gone off duty. Nor was there
anyone waiting behind the coat check counter, so she slipped inside the auditorium and stood at the back of the stalls in the glimmering light. The stalls were sparsely populated. Only a few people
were dotted at random among the rows as the imperial blare of the Ufa Tonwoche newsreel announced another military manoeuvre. The footage showed German army cars entering the Sudetenland and the
camera panned along the route, filling up the screen with smiling faces, flowers, and right-arm salutes. Children running alongside, town squares decorated with swastikas and smiling faces
everywhere. The camera cut to a newsstand and the sight of it made Rosa think, yet again, of Rupert Allingham, in his office the other day, in his ash-flecked suit and tie at half mast, talking
about Prague.

After she had read the report of the dead girl from her book of Observations, he had asked her why she wrote. Not presuming to confide her journalistic ambitions, she had said,

‘People always want things to be neat, but I like to look at the underside of things, like . . .’ she had searched for an appropriate image, ‘like turning a carpet over and
seeing the pattern beneath.’

Rupert’s eyes had lit up, like a teacher with a good pupil.

‘That’s exactly what journalism is about. Untidying the things that people want tidied, looking at what other people have brushed under the carpet.’

‘That’s journalism?’

‘Sure. A better description of journalism would be hard to find. Look at things as clearly as you can, and then write about them as clearly as you can. That’s journalism. All the
rest is entertainment.’

Emboldened by this discovery, she had asked,

‘So what about the lady on the cruise ship? Might you be able to write about what happened to her?’

‘Tell you what, you can help me write the story.’

She had stared at him, mesmerized, clutching the bag on her lap.

‘Do you really mean that?’

‘I do mean it, Fräulein Winter. You seem a most intelligent young woman and a punctilious writer. It’s a shame you’re so happily settled with the Führerin. I could do
with an office assistant.’

Now, standing in the dim light of the cinema stalls, she made her decision. She would leave the Führerin’s office straight away. She would call the next morning and pretend that she
was needed urgently at home, to help with her parents, and give no forwarding address. Then she would collect Hans-Otto from school with Brummer, and let him walk the dog, which was his favourite
job in the world, and later she would visit the office of Herr Allingham and ask to be taken on as his assistant. In a new job, under the protection of an English journalist, she would be safe from
any further attentions of Herr August Gerlach.