Berlin Red (20 page)

‘Gentlemen!' said Hitler, rising from behind the table in his briefing room.

Across from him, members of the High Command waited expectantly for his announcement. They stood shoulder to shoulder, crammed into the little space like commuters on the metro.

‘Gentlemen,' said Hitler, ‘I am pleased to report that the Diamond Stream device is now fully operational, and is currently being installed in all V-2 rockets.'

‘How long will it take before launches commence?' asked Fegelein, who stood at the front of the jostling crowd.

‘It is imminent,' replied Hitler. ‘Tell that to Himmler when you see him.'

‘At once!' barked Fegelein, cracking his heels together.

That night, lying on the bed in the apartment of his mistress Elsa Batz, Fegelein drank cognac from a bottle, stark naked except for his socks. He had decided to wait until morning before driving to Himmler’s headquarters with news of the Diamond Stream device. Bad news Fegelein usually dispensed by telephone, but good news, such as this, he preferred to deliver in person. Himmler normally went to bed early and any benefit Fegelein might have derived from heading out immediately to Hohenlychen would be cancelled out by having woken up his master.

‘The idea of it!’ huffed Fegelein. He paused to take another swig of cognac.

‘Of what?’ asked Elsa. She was sitting at a table by the window, wearing a white dressing gown, and casually filing her nails. Elsa was a round-faced woman with platinum-blonde hair and rosy cheeks, who had formerly been employed as an exotic dancer at the ‘Salon Kitty’ on Giesebrechtstrasse. Available solely to high-ranking members of the military, Salon Kitty was one of the only nightclubs allowed to operate in Berlin, for the reason that it was secretly run by the SS. What went on there was filmed by members of Rattenhuber’s Security Service, to be used later as blackmail or as an excuse for arrest.

From the first moment Fegelein saw Elsa Batz, one night back in the summer of 1944, he had known that their lives would somehow become entwined. From her languid movements, up there on the stage, and the sleepy sensuality in her eyes, Fegelein perceived a strange familiarity about her from which he could not walk away. This fact brought him no joy. He knew, from all the other mistresses he had kept over the years, exactly how complicated and expensive this was going to be. With equal certainty, he knew that the physical attraction he felt for Elsa Batz had nothing to do with whether or not he would actually like her. In fact, in a very short time, he might well grow to despise her. But that had nothing to with how badly he needed to possess her.

Fegelein was well aware that Salon Kitty was nothing more than a honey trap. He even knew where the cameras were located and the names of men who had, when confronted with the evidence of blackmail, chosen to end their own lives rather than end up like dogs on Rattenhuber’s leash.

That was why, in a very short space of time, he persuaded Elsa to quit her job and then set her up in this luxurious apartment on Bleibtreustrasse.

It was here that he spent several nights a week, at times when his wife, Gretl, would assume that he was up at Himmler’s headquarters at Hohenlychen, north of the city. The fact that Fegelein kept a mistress, in spite of the occupational hazard associated with marrying Eva Braun’s sister, did not come as a surprise to anyone who knew him. Fegelein felt fairly certain that even his wife was aware of the apartment on Bleibtreustrasse, although she never mentioned it. His wife, it seemed, neither knew, nor cared to know the details. In marrying a man like Fegelein, contending with a mistress was inevitable.

Much to Fegelein’s surprise, he and Elsa Batz did not grow to hate each other. It was true that they had very little in common, but what they had turned out to be enough. Unlike all the other women he had kept, Elsa Batz remained content to be Fegelein’s mistress. She never set her sights on being anything more than she had ever been to him, and this alone ensured the survival of their relationship.

‘The idea’, continued Fegelein, ‘that, after everything I’ve done for Hitler, he would so much as entertain the notion that I might be guilty of treason is just absurd.’

The rustle of the filing ceased. ‘But you say there is, in fact, a leak of information.’

‘Probably,’ replied Fegelein. He was staring at the ceiling as he spoke. ‘But it’s just small stuff. With a million Russian soldiers waiting on the Seelow Heights, ready to pour into Berlin any day now, we all have more important things to care about.’ He took another drink. The cognac burned in his throat. ‘It’s trust I’m talking about. Hitler should trust me in the same way Himmler does, and in the same way that I trust Fraülein S!’

At the mention of that name, Elsa Batz felt something twisting in her guts. Fegelein often mentioned his secretary, and always in the most glowing of terms. It had lately occurred to Elsa that she might not be Fegelein’s only mistress. She had satisfied herself with being who she was because she knew that, sooner or later, Fegelein would abandon his post as Himmler’s liaison. When the battle for this city commenced, Fegelein himself would not be part of it for any longer than he had to. When the time came to run, it was she, and not Fegelein’s dreary wife, who would accompany him to safety. He was her ticket out of here. All she had to do was make sure nothing came along to change his mind.

‘She trusts me, too,’ muttered Fegelein, more to himself than to Elsa. ‘Trusts me with her life, and so she should.’

‘I trust you,’ Elsa said softly.

Fegelein glanced across the room at her. ‘What?’

‘I trust you with my life,’ she told him.

He blinked at her uncomprehendingly. ‘What are you talking about, woman?’

Fegelein often scolded her like this, but there was something in the coldness of Fegelein’s voice this evening which caused a feeling of dread to wash over Elsa Batz. In that moment, she suddenly realised that she was about to be replaced by this mysterious Fraülein S. It seemed obvious, now that the idea had presented itself. She had been ignoring all the signs. Until this moment, her safety had relied upon doing nothing. But now, to do nothing would not just be the end of her cosy apartment on the Bleibtreustrasse. It would be suicide.

‘Who is this man who’s asking all the questions?’ she asked, changing the subject.

‘Some Berlin cop named Leopold Hunyadi,’ answered Fegelein.

‘A policeman?’ she asked. ‘Just an ordinary policeman?’

‘Not quite,’ said Fegelein. ‘First of all, he’s the best detective in Berlin. And secondly, he’s an old friend of Hitler’s. They go way back, apparently, but how they know each other I have no idea. I hear he’s not even a member of the National Socialist Party, so what their friendship’s based on I have no idea.’ Then he laughed. ‘Probably not what ours is based on, anyway!’ He patted the empty space beside him on the bed.

She got up and walked out of the room.

‘Elsa!’ Fegelein called after her. ‘Elsa! Come on! I was kidding!’

But there was no reply.

With the cognac swirling in his brain, Fegelein settled his head back into the pillow. The last thought through his head before he slipped beneath the red tide of unconsciousness was of Fraülein S, and the sacred bond of loyalty they shared.

The sun was setting as Hunyadi emerged from an underground station just outside the Berlin Zoo. Air raids had wrecked part of the station’s structure above ground, but the metro had continued to function. Not far from the Zoo station stood a huge concrete tower, built to support one of several anti-aircraft batteries engaged in the defence of Berlin.

Hunyadi made his way to the tower and, escorted by a Luftwaffe officer in command of the anti-aircraft defences, travelled in a rattly lift to the top of the tower. Here, on a wide circular platform, an 88mm flak gun pointed at the sky, its barrel ringed with more than a dozen bands of white paint, each one of which marked the downing of an Allied plane.

In a recessed alcove on this platform, Hunyadi found what he was looking for – a field radio station powerful enough to communicate with other flak towers all over the city.

Hunyadi’s inquiries as to where it might be possible to monitor not just military radio traffic, but all radio traffic coming in or out of the city had led him to this place.

He handed a radio operator a scrap of paper on which a series of numbers had been written. They represented all the frequencies known to have been used by Allied agents in transmitting messages to their bases in England and Russia.

After leaving instructions with the radio operator to inform him of any traffic on those frequencies, Hunyadi went down to the second level of the flak tower, entering into a bare concrete room filled with unpainted wooden crates of 88mm cannon shells. By shifting some of the crates around, although it took all his strength just to drag them, he fashioned for himself a place to sit. From one pocket, he pulled a piece of cheese wrapped in a handkerchief and from another pocket came a hunk of dark brown Roggenbrot. With no idea how long he’d have to wait, Hunyadi settled down to eat his dinner.

He was fast asleep, four hours later, when the wail of air-raid sirens jolted him awake. His first reaction, like that of every other inhabitant of this city, was to scurry to the nearest underground shelter.

He rushed towards the door, barely able to stay on his feet since the hard wood of the ammunition crate had given him a case of pins and needles. Arriving in the doorway, Hunyadi was almost knocked down by a dozen men trampling up the stairs to take their positions at the flak gun. He stepped aside to let them go by and was just about to make his way downstairs when the last man to pass called him back. ‘Stay here,’ he warned. ‘By the time you make it down into the street, the bombs will already be falling. Besides, you’re safer up here than down below.’

There was no time for Hunyadi to question the wisdom of this, because, at that moment, the room was filled with a deafening crash which dropped the detective to his knees.

‘Have we been hit?’ he asked.

‘No!’ The man laughed, holding out his hand to help Hunyadi to his feet. ‘That’s us firing at them! And you’d better get used to it, old man, because we’re just getting started.’

Dazed as he was by the blast, the only words which really struck him were ‘old man’. I’m only forty-five, he thought, but perhaps, these days, that does make me old, after all.

And then the lights went out.

He staggered back to his throne of crates, just as another shattering boom filled his ears. Vaguely, above the high-pitched ringing in his ears, Hunyadi heard a metallic clang as an empty shell casing was ejected from the breech of the 88 on to the concrete platform above him.

Hunyadi put his hands over his ears, careful to keep his mouth open to equalise the change in pressure caused by the explosions above him, and hunched over with his face almost touching his knees.

How long he stayed that way he could not tell. The firing of the gun became a nearly constant roar, the echo of one blast overlaying the next until he could scarcely tell one from the other. Sometimes, he heard the drone of planes above him and the muffled thump of bombs exploding, as well as the sharp commands of gun aimers and loaders, but it all reached him in a chorus so jumbled that the sounds seemed to come from a dream.

He had no idea if the radio man, up on the firing platform, was still monitoring the frequencies. More likely, thought Hunyadi, he is too busy doing his usual job. Hunyadi took some comfort in the fact that anyone with access to a secret transmitter would probably have sought shelter along with the rest of the city’s population, rather than stay at their post and risk being blown to pieces by the very people they were trying to help.

From time to time, Hunyadi was aware of men moving about in the darkness around him as they hauled fresh boxes of cannon shells up to the firing deck. Occasionally, someone would shine a red-filtered torch as they searched among the crates.

During a lull in the firing, Hunyadi rose up from his throne of ammunition boxes and climbed the concrete staircase to the gun platform. The air was filled with gun smoke, which seeped into his lungs and filled his mouth with a metallic taste, as if from resting a coin upon the tongue. Moving past the silhouettes of men, Hunyadi made his way through the carpet of spent shells to the chest-high wall of the platform. From here, he watched searchlights rake across the night sky, like swords wielded by some clumsy giant. In some places, dust from the bombing plumed so thickly that the searchlights seemed to break against the clouds, fragmenting their beams and angling them back to the earth. Distantly, he heard the shriek of falling bombs and then he saw the flash of their explosions, which vanished into tidal waves of smoke.

‘When you stopped firing the gun,’ Hunyadi said to a man who came to stand beside him, ‘I thought it was over.’

‘We are just cooling the barrel,’ replied the man. His features were so hidden in the darkness that it seemed to Hunyadi, still disoriented by the concussive force of the explosions, that the night itself had taken shape and was conversing with him now. ‘It’s beautiful, don’t you think?’ asked the man.

‘Beautiful?’ asked Hunyadi.

‘A terrible beauty, I grant you,’ said the darkness, ‘but a beauty nonetheless.’ He raised an arm and pointed at the sky. ‘See there!’

Hunyadi looked upwards, just in time to see a searchlight fasten on a plane. It looked no bigger than an insect, and it was hard for him to imagine something which seemed so small being capable of so much damage. Although he had lived through numerous air raids, he had always been below ground when they took place. All he had ever known of these attacks was the panic of rushing to the shelters and the distant, rumbling earthquake of the bombs as they exploded. And he was well acquainted with the aftermath, as he made his way through shattered streets, dodging fire trucks and ambulances driven by civilians wearing yellow armbands and strange, wide-brimmed helmets which made them appear like Roman gladiators. But he had never actually seen a raid in progress, as he was doing now, and he could not deny that the man had been telling the truth. There was a mesmerising beauty to this vast apocalypse.

Now two other searchlights zeroed in upon the bomber, so that it seemed to balance, helpless and impaled upon the icy spear points.

Hunyadi heard a sharp command from somewhere behind him and he turned just as the cannon fired. The roar and the sudden change in pressure shoved him off his feet. He stumbled back and fell against the wall. His head was filled with a shrill ringing sound, as if a tuning fork had been struck inside his brain. Even over this, he heard the sound of laughter and a hand reached from the dark to help him up again.

The last thing he saw before he clambered back down into the magazine was the bomber, bracketed by tiny sparks as the anti-aircraft shells exploded around its wingtips. There was a momentary smear of orange fire as shrapnel tore the bomber to pieces. Then the night became empty again, and the searchlights resumed their awkward sweeping of the sky.