In the Garden of Beasts (18 page)

Yet under Diels the Gestapo played a complex role. In the weeks following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Diels’s Gestapo acted as a curb against a wave of violence by the SA, during which Storm Troopers dragged thousands of victims to their makeshift prisons. Diels led raids to close them and found prisoners in appalling
conditions, beaten and garishly bruised, limbs broken, near starvation, “
like a mass of inanimate clay,” he wrote, “absurd puppets with lifeless eyes, burning with fever, their bodies sagging.”

Martha’s father liked Diels. To his surprise, he found the Gestapo chief to be a helpful intermediary for extracting foreign nationals and others from concentration camps and for exerting pressure on police authorities outside Berlin to find and punish the SA men responsible for attacks against Americans.

Diels was no saint, however. During his tenure as chief, thousands of men and women were arrested, many tortured, some murdered. On Diels’s watch, for example, a German communist named Ernst Thälmann was imprisoned and interrogated at Gestapo headquarters. Thälmann left a vivid account. “
They ordered me to take off my pants and then two men grabbed me by the back of the neck and placed me across a footstool. A uniformed Gestapo officer with a whip of hippopotamus hide in his hand then beat my buttocks with measured strokes. Driven wild with pain I repeatedly screamed at the top of my voice.”

In Diels’s view, violence and terror were valuable tools for the preservation of political power. During a gathering of foreign correspondents at Putzi Hanfstaengl’s home, Diels told the reporters, “
The value of the SA and the SS, seen from my viewpoint of inspector-general responsible for the suppression of subversive tendencies and activities, lies in the fact that they spread terror. That is a wholesome thing.”

MARTHA AND DIELS TOOK
walks together in the Tiergarten, which was fast becoming recognized as the one place in central Berlin where a person could feel at ease. Martha especially loved strolling through the park in autumn, amid what she termed “
the golden death of the Tiergarten.” They went to movies and nightclubs and drove for hours through the countryside. That they became lovers seems likely, despite the fact that both were married, Martha in technical terms only, Diels in name only, given his penchant for adultery. Martha loved being known as the woman who slept with the
devil—and that she did sleep with him seems beyond doubt, though it is equally likely that Dodd, like naive fathers everywhere and in every time, had no idea. Messersmith suspected it, and so did Raymond Geist, his second in command. Geist complained to Wilbur Carr, head of consular services in Washington, that Martha was
a “most indiscreet” young lady who had been “in the habit of constantly going about at night with the head of the Nazi Secret Police, a married man.” Geist himself had heard her call Diels, in public, a variety of affectionate names, among them “dearie.”

The more Martha came to know Diels, the more she saw that he too was afraid. He felt “
he was constantly facing the muzzle of a gun,” she wrote. He was most at ease during their drives, when no one could overhear their conversations or monitor their behavior. They would stop and walk through forests and have coffee in remote, little-known cafés. He told her stories of how everyone in the Nazi hierarchy distrusted everyone else, how Göring and Goebbels loathed each other and spied on each other, how both spied on Diels, and how Diels and his men spied on them in turn.

It was through Diels that she began for the first time to temper her idealistic view of the Nazi revolution. “
There began to appear before my romantic eyes … a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.”

Not even Diels, as events soon would demonstrate.

CHAPTER 14
The Death of Boris

T
here was still another lover in Martha’s life, the most important of all, a doomed Russian who would shape the rest of her life.

She first caught a glimpse of him in mid-September 1933 at one of the many parties Sigrid Schultz held at her apartment, where she lived with her mother and her two dogs. Schultz typically served sandwiches, baked beans, and sausages prepared by her mother and provided a lot of beer, wine, and liquor, which tended to cause even Nazi guests to shed doctrine in favor of fun and gossip. In the midst of a conversation, Martha happened to glance across the room and saw a tall, good-looking man at the center of a group of correspondents. He was not handsome in a conventional sense but very attractive—maybe thirty, short blond-brown hair, strikingly luminous eyes, and an easy, fluid manner. He moved his hands as he spoke, and Martha saw that he had long and supple fingers. “
He had an unusual mouth, and upper lip,” recalled one of Martha’s friends, Agnes Knickerbocker, wife of correspondent H. R. “Knick” Knickerbocker. “I can’t describe it other than to say that it could go from sternness to laughter in an exploding split second.”

As Martha watched him, he turned and looked at her. She held his gaze a few moments, then looked away and became involved in other conversations. (
In a later unpublished account she recalled minute details of this moment and others to follow.) He turned away as well—but when the morning came and the night distilled to its essential elements, this meeting of glances was the thing that both remembered.

Several weeks later they encountered each other again. Knick and his wife invited Martha and a few other friends to join them for a night of drinks and dancing at Ciro’s, a popular nightclub that employed black jazz musicians, a twofold act of defiance given the Nazi Party’s obsession with racial purity and its condemnation of jazz—in party jargon, “
nigger-Jew jazz”—as degenerate music.

Knick introduced Martha to the tall man she had seen at Sigrid Schultz’s party. His name, she now learned, was Boris Winogradov (pronounced “Vinogradov”). A few moments later, Boris appeared before her table, smiling and self-conscious. “Gnädiges Fräulein,” he began, offering the customary German greeting, meaning “dear young lady.” He asked her to dance.

She was struck immediately by the beauty of his voice, which she described as falling somewhere between baritone and tenor. “Mellifluous,” she wrote. It moved her, “struck my heart and for a moment left me without words or breath.” He held out a hand to guide her from the crowded table.

She quickly learned that his natural grace had limits. He walked her around the dance floor, “stepping on my toes, bumping into people, his left arm stuck out stiffly, turning his head from side to side trying to avoid further collisions.”

He told her, “I don’t know how to dance.”

It was such an obvious fact that Martha burst out laughing.

Boris laughed too. She liked his smile and his overall “aura of gentleness.”

A few moments later he said to her, “I am with the Soviet embassy. Haben Sie Angst?”

She laughed again. “Of course not, why should I be afraid? Of what?”

“Correct,” he said, “you’re a private person, and with you I am too.”

He held her closer. He was slender and broad shouldered and had eyes she deemed gorgeous, blue-green flecked with gold. He had irregular teeth that somehow enhanced his smile. He was quick to laugh.

“I have seen you several times before,” he said. The last occasion,
he reminded her, had been at Schultz’s home. “Erinnern Sie sich?” Do you remember?

Contrarian by nature, Martha did not want to seem too easy a mark. She kept her voice “non-committal” but did concede the fact. “Yes,” she said, “I remember.”

They danced a while longer. When he returned her to the Knickerbockers’ table, he leaned close and asked, “Ich möchte Sie sehr wiederzusehen. Darf ich Sie anrufen?”

The meaning was clear to Martha despite her limited German—Boris was asking if he could see her again.

She told Boris, “Yes, you may call.”

Martha danced with others. At one point she looked back toward her table and spotted the Knickerbockers with Boris seated beside them. Boris watched her.

“Incredible as it sounds,” she wrote, “I had the sensation after he left that the air around me was more luminous and vibrant.”

SEVERAL DAYS LATER
Boris did call. He drove to the Dodds’ house; introduced himself to Fritz, the butler; then went charging up the stairs to the main floor carrying a bouquet of autumn flowers and a disc for a record player. He did not kiss her hand, a good thing, for that particular German ritual always annoyed her. After a brief preamble, he held out the record.

“You don’t know Russian music, do you,
gnädiges Fräulein
? Have you ever heard ‘The Death of Boris,’ by Mussorgsky?”

He added, “I hope it’s not my death I am going to play for you.”

He laughed. She did not. It struck her even then as “a portent” of something dark to come.

They listened to the music—the death scene from Modest Mussorgsky’s opera
Boris Godunov
, sung by the famous Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin—and then Martha gave Boris a tour of the house, finishing in the library. At one end was her father’s desk, immense and dark, its drawers always locked. The late autumn sun broke through the high stained-glass window in pleats of many-hued light. She led him to her favorite couch.

Boris was delighted. “This is our corner,
gnädiges Fräulein
!” he exclaimed. “Better than all the others.”

Martha sat on the couch; Boris pulled over a chair. She rang for Fritz and asked him to bring beer and a casual fare of pretzels, sliced carrots and cucumbers, and hot cheese sticks, foods she usually ordered when she entertained unofficial visitors.

Fritz brought the food, his step very quiet, almost as if he were attempting to listen in. Boris guessed, correctly, that Fritz too had Slavic roots. The two men traded pleasantries.

Taking a cue from Boris’s easy manner, Fritz quipped, “Did you communists really burn the Reichstag?”

Boris gave him an arch smile and winked. “Of course we did,” he said, “you and I together. Don’t you recall the night we were at Göring’s and were shown the secret passageway to the Reichstag?” This was an allusion to a widely believed theory that a team of Nazi incendiaries had secretly made their way from Göring’s palace to the Reichstag via an underground tunnel between the two buildings. Such a tunnel did, in fact, exist.

All three laughed. This mock complicity in the Reichstag fire would remain a joke between Boris and Fritz, repeated often in varying forms to the great delight of Martha’s father—even though Fritz, Martha believed, was “almost surely an agent of the secret police.”

Fritz returned with vodka. Boris poured himself a large drink and quickly downed it. Martha settled back in the couch. This time Boris sat beside her. He drank a second vodka but showed no obvious sign of its effect.

“From the first moment I saw you—” he began. He hesitated, then said, “Can it be, I wonder?”

She understood what he was trying to say and in fact she too felt a powerful, instant attraction, but she was not inclined to concede it this early in the game. She looked at him, blank.

He grew serious. He launched into a lengthy interrogation. What did she do in Chicago? What were her parents like? What did she want to do in the future?

The exchange had more in common with a newspaper interview than a first-date conversation. Martha found it vexing but answered
with patience. For all she knew, this was how all Soviet men behaved. “I had never before met a
real
Communist, or a
Russian
for that matter,” she wrote, “so I imagined this must be their way of knowing someone.”

As the conversation wore on, both consulted pocket dictionaries. Boris knew some English, but not much, and conversed mainly in German. Martha knew no Russian, so deployed a mix of German and English.

Though it took a good deal of effort, she told Boris that her parents were both offspring of old southern landowning families, “each as well ancestored as the other, and almost pure British: Scotch-Irish, English, and Welsh.”

Boris laughed. “That’s not so pure, is it?”

With an unconscious note of pride in her voice, she added that both families had once owned slaves—“Mother’s about twelve or so, Father’s five or six.”

Boris went quiet. His expression shifted abruptly to one of sorrow. “Martha,” he said, “surely you are not proud that your ancestors owned the lives of other human beings.”

He took her hands and looked at her. Until this moment the fact that her parents’ ancestors had owned slaves had always seemed merely an interesting element of their personal history that testified to their deep roots in America. Now, suddenly, she saw it for what it was—a sad chapter to be regretted.

“I didn’t mean to boast,” she said. “I suppose it sounded like that to you.” She apologized and immediately hated herself for it. She was, she conceded, “a combative girl.”

“But we do have a long tradition in America,” she told him. “We are not newcomers.”

Boris found her defensiveness hilarious and laughed with unrestrained delight.

In the next instant, he adopted a look and tone that she recalled as being “solemn in the extreme.”

“Congratulations, my noble, gracious, little Marta! I too am also of ancient lineage, even older than yours. I am a direct descendant of Neanderthal man. And pure? Yes,
pure human.
”

They collapsed against each other with laughter.