Last Man to Die (16 page)

‘Then what are you waiting for? Get your butt up to the next floor,’ the disembodied voice of authority came back down the corridor, just as Sinead’s fingers reached in the direction of the soldier’s shirt buttons.

‘Yes, Sergeant,’ he whimpered, and was gone.

Sinead closed the door quietly before she turned round. She had a brave half-smile on her face which she tried desperately to turn into a convincing look of triumph, but the lower lip began to wobble and in a moment the resistance was gone and tears were flooding down her face. She threw herself into Hencke’s arms and sobbed great tears of tension and
relief. She was still crying when she lifted her head and began kissing him passionately, her salty tongue probing between his lips.

He did not respond, just as he had failed to do in the lorry, but she was making all the running. Her body was warm from the nervous energy, her nipples burning against his own body, her tears turning to sighs of passion.

‘Peter, in this world it may be our last time. Please!’

Something told him that for her it was also the first time. She was so young, scarcely older than some of his pupils. He was confused, uncertain, the self-righteous moralizing of his aunt ringing in his ears, but his indecision was overwhelmed by Sinead’s insistence. In the end he had little real choice but to join in and, if not exactly enjoy it, at least to take comfort in her gratification. She knew what she wanted, instinctively, even if she wasn’t totally clear how she wanted it. The raw energy more than compensated for her youthful ignorance. It wasn’t great sex, but for her it would always be special.

When she had finished she lay back to catch her breath, coming down to earth, her whole body tingling, feeling places within for the first time. She knew it was a moment she would never be able to forget, or to repeat, no matter how many years she might live. Not even with Hencke. It was a long time before either of them spoke.

‘You have someone back home?’ Perhaps it wasn’t the most tactful question but she couldn’t help herself; she didn’t have much experience at this. She had to ask. She felt now she had the right.

‘No. Not any more.’ His words were clipped,
without any trace of self-pity, as if all emotion had already been wrung out of him. But in the gaze which held her she could once again see the fire inside, and there was pain.

‘You lost someone, too?’

He didn’t respond, simply nodded.

‘But if they’re gone, why are you so impatient to get back home?’ She made it sound like a rebuke.

‘Wouldn’t you be?’

She propped herself on an elbow. ‘I’m not sure, Peter. Back to Germany? I don’t want to take sides in your war, but over here we don’t hear pleasant things about Germany.’

‘It’s like many places. Some good parts and fine people. Many bad. Like most places. Like Ireland, I suspect.’ He was deflecting her questions, throwing the challenge back at her. ‘Why did they arrest your brother?’

She didn’t reply immediately. ‘They claimed he left a bomb. There was a warning. But a policeman got hurt …’

‘Did he do it?’

‘I …’ She pulled away from him and her face flushed with anger that he should dare raise the question, but his eyes were searching around inside her. He already knew. ‘I … don’t know. In all honesty I truly don’t know.’ There was great misery about her. ‘And I don’t know why, Peter Hencke, but that’s the first time I’ve ever said as much to anybody. Even to myself.’ He had penetrated more than her body, and with the admission, a little bubble of faith which had survived all previous doubts and assaults quietly burst within her.

‘So he might be guilty?’

‘The policeman didn’t die,’ she began in mitigation,
but she wasn’t convincing even herself. Her head fell forward to hide her confusion, her long russet curls falling about the pale skin of her breasts. ‘He was crippled. He won’t ever walk again.’

‘He had family? Children?’

She could do no more than nod.

‘And friends, who were so filled with revenge that they shot your father. This is your “family affair”?’

‘I didn’t start our troubles, Peter.’

‘You may not have started it. But who’s going to finish it? That’s always the difficult part.’

Suddenly she resented the assault upon her integrity and ideals, and the way he was ripping her world apart. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that it wasn’t Hitler but Poland which started World War Bloody Two. And that you’re going home to finish it!’

‘I’m sorry, Sinead. I have no right.’ He paused, remembering the widow. ‘We all do things of which we are not proud, which we would change, if we could.’ He reached out to touch her hand, to re-establish contact. She didn’t respond, but neither did she move away. ‘There are some things we would gladly die for, if we could change. Which means that others, too, sometimes must suffer. I know. I have my own “family affairs” to see to.’

‘But why, Peter? You said you had no family left.’

‘I have memories. Sometimes all you have left are memories.’

‘And can you live just for memories?’

She studied him closely, following the profile from his high forehead down his long nose to the scarred lip and sharp, determined chin. He didn’t reply straight away. It seemed a lifetime since anyone had got close enough to ask such questions.

‘I’ve tried. Yet … you spend your life looking
back, and the farther you have to look back the more you die each day, little by little. No, I can’t live for memories, no one can. You mustn’t try.’

‘But you are prepared to die for them?’

She waited, but there was no answer. For all their adventure and talk together she still knew little more than his name. He was a man who kept his secrets wrapped tightly around him, a man with fire in his veins and steel in his bones, yet who could still cry over a little girl and her teddy bear.

‘Why are you going back?’

He remained silent, unwilling or unable to say, staring blankly at the ceiling.

‘Peter Hencke, I don’t want you to be the last man to die in this bloody war!’

A wry smile began to play around his lips – or was it the scar? ‘No one wants to be the last man to die. Not in this war, not in any war.’

‘Does … that mean you’ll be coming back?’

He turned to face her until she could see his eyes. He didn’t want any misunderstanding.

‘You mustn’t hope for me to be something I cannot be. No, Sinead, don’t think of it.’ He shook his head. ‘I won’t be coming back.’

‘Not too hot for you, sir?’

The only reply was a grunt.

At least he’s not complaining, not yet, thought the barber. Doesn’t mind me scalding my fingers raw, but let him feel the slightest discomfort from the hot towels and he’d let the entire bloody street know. After which he’d moan about his shave not being close enough. And he never left a tip, not even at Christmas.

‘Did you see they got Hencke at last?’

‘What, you mean that bloody German? Thought they’d picked him up a long time ago.’

It was not an uncommon assumption. With so many stories queuing up to demand space in the news columns as the war drew to its climax, the coverage of Hencke’s escape had rapidly disappeared from the pages. Even today’s report had been restrained, wrapping up what editors decided was an old story.

‘No. They found the blighter in Cricklewood – or what was left of him. Seems he’d been leading the police a right merry chase, then a couple of nights ago he got caught underneath one of their V-2s. Poor sod. Seems unfair somehow.’

With victory within their grasp the British sense of fair play was beginning to flourish once more. And since Hencke had a name he was no longer simply
another bloody Kraut but a real character, even an underdog, and the barber held a sporting regard for any underdog, particularly since he had done the decent thing and thrown himself under one of his own rockets.

‘Serves the miserable Hun right,’ the customer barked from underneath the towels. ‘Should have shot him if they’d caught him alive. Probably a damned war criminal anyway; most of them are.’

‘Well, I don’t suppose we shall be able to shoot them all.’

‘Damn it, but I’d like to try,’ the voice came back from within the fog of steam, as the barber tried to remember from behind which desk the customer had fought his war. ‘Particularly this one.’

‘Why him?’

‘Most dangerous type of Hun. Doesn’t know when he’s beaten. Too stupid and arrogant to know when he’s lost the bloody war.’ But it was more than that. It was his example, one lonely man – even a German – running around the country sticking his fingers in the face of Authority, an example which all too many seemed willing to follow. It couldn’t be tolerated. These were difficult and unsettled times, when people needed to be reminded about their proper place and duties. There was more than one way to lose an empire. ‘And be damned careful how you trim the moustache!’

The barber stropped the razor and examined the customer’s throat. One day, he promised himself. One day …

In Berlin the news that Hencke’s body had been discovered was heard widely, even though it was carried only by the BBC and listening to enemy radio
was an offence punishable by summary execution on the street corner. The populace took comfort in the fact that the law was unenforceable; there simply weren’t enough lamp posts. But in the Bunker the news became available to very few; Goebbels saw to that. Hencke had been his prize. Great hopes had been raised upon the prospect – which many took as a promise – of a triumphant return to Germany, and he didn’t like to disappoint the Fuehrer. Indeed, it was Goebbels’ full-time task to keep the spirits of the Fuehrer high, to persuade him that salvation was still at hand, to find every omen, helpful horoscope or shred of encouraging news and cling to it like a climber to an ice face.

Above all, however, Goebbels was a realist. That’s why he was so useful to the Fuehrer. He wasn’t a carpet-widdling spaniel like so many of the others. He told the Fuehrer what he wanted to hear, of course, but not to ingratiate himself and flatter, only to encourage and strengthen. If they were to salvage anything from the heap of scrap into which Germany was being bombed, they needed time and the undisputed leadership which only the Fuehrer could provide.

And they needed luck. It was ironic how, after all their planning and preparation and
putsch
-ing, all the great victories and still greater reverses, everything came down to a matter of luck. If only they’d invaded Russia a year later, after an armistice on the Western Front. Or reached Moscow a month earlier, before the snows. If only that oaf Goering had continued bombing the British airfields a few weeks longer when the enemy had only a handful of aircraft left, instead of turning his snout towards the blitzing of London. If only the Japanese hadn’t bombed Pearl
Harbor and brought the Americans rushing into the war. If only … It all came down to luck and fickle fortune in the end. That’s where Hencke came in. Goebbels wanted him as his lucky charm, to dangle round the neck of the Fuehrer, to ward off the doubters and defeatists who undermined the leader’s morale and to give him back the resolve to continue for the few vital weeks they needed. With Hencke and a little luck anything would still be possible. Yet suddenly the luck seemed to have run out.

Hencke was beginning to feel that death might, after all, be a soft option. They hadn’t been long in the rusty fishing smack, only a few hours, but the seas were rough and growing fiercer, and he was a rotten sailor.

She noticed the sudden sallowness in his complexion and the grimness about his mouth, the scar tugging at his lip. ‘Think positive. The weather makes it more difficult for the coast-guard, too. Anyway, we’ve not long now,’ she encouraged.

No sooner had she spoken than through the low-hanging storm clouds on the horizon appeared the outlines of a rocky coast.

‘What is this place?’

‘Man. The Isle of Man, they call it.’

‘I thought we were going to Ireland?’

‘One step at a time. The Isle of Man is in the middle of the Irish Sea, halfway there. All the direct routes to Ireland are carefully guarded. We’re going to try to slip through the back door.’

‘As long as it’s dry land I don’t think I care any more …’

‘You should feel at home. The island is full of Germans and Italians sitting out the end of the war.’

‘What?’

‘It’s one of the main internment points for enemy aliens and prisoners.’

‘You’re taking me to an island the British use as one vast prison camp?’ he groaned, trying to find the strength to raise an eyebrow.

‘It’s the Irish in me,’ she said, mocking him. ‘But don’t worry. They’re so busy trying to stop people getting out that no one expects anybody to try to get
in
.’

Hencke had held out, against seemingly overwhelming odds, until they were approaching the relative calm of a small west-facing harbour called Peel, over which towered the crumbling red stonework of a ruined castle. He and Sinead had no opportunity to admire the view; they had been ordered into the hold to hide them from prying eyes. So Hencke had lost sight of the horizon, the only immovable and unheaving object to which his fragile senses had been able to cling, at precisely the moment his stomach was assailed by the overpowering stench of fish. His resistance came to a sudden end.

‘And this is the secret weapon with which Germany is going to win the war?’ Sinead taunted as he sat hunched over a bucket.

‘If you have any mercy, shoot me.’

‘Too late,’ interrupted the skipper, clattering down wooden stairs which led from the deck. ‘Apparently the British government have just announced that you are lying on a slab in a mortuary somewhere in London. Officially you’re dead already!’

Hencke thought for a moment about attempting a smile, but decided that triumphs could never be
celebrated on a retching stomach. He reached for the bucket.

Any depression that Josef Goebbels might have allowed himself on hearing that his talisman had been found crushed under a pile of German-induced rubble quickly disappeared when he received the top-secret cable from the German Embassy in Dublin.
Hencke … Alive … Free … In Dublin. Halfway Home!

It was 10 April. Russians less than eighty miles east of Berlin, their advance troops already ripping through the outskirts of Vienna. To the west the Americans, Canadians and British, swarming across their bridgeheads on the Rhine, their vanguard almost as close to Berlin as the Red Army and making faster headway. The great Reich which had once stretched from the edges of Moscow to the Atlantic and from the northern tip of Norway as far as Africa, now reduced to a narrow ribbon a few dozen miles across as the vast armies of their enemies pressed in on all sides. For a man whose task it was to manufacture propaganda, all that recent weeks had given him by way of raw material were bricks of straw.

But now! A saga of German courage, of triumph against seemingly insuperable odds, an epic example of endurance which showed that all was not lost, that victory could still be theirs! All they needed was time, a little more sacrifice from the German people, another burst of national resistance. If only Germany could hold on a few weeks longer, Stalin would go too far as he had always done, the West would begin to understand how wrong they had been to trust him, and how much greater was the menace
of Bolshevism than any posed by Nazism. Then, perhaps, they could come down from their Alpine fastness …

If only Germany could hold on a little longer. If only the Fuehrer could hold on. And with the inspiration of Hencke’s example, they both might.

He brushed aside the fine layer of dust that had already settled on the cable, savouring once more the most encouraging news he had received in months. More dust began instantly to fall. The Americans and British were bombing the capital around the clock, the last hope of German resistance in the air had already been blasted from the sky or reduced to matchwood on pulverized airfields, and even the bits of Berlin that had not suffered direct hits were being slowly shaken to pieces. It was April, yet scarcely a tree in the city bore any leaf, as if a Valkyrian whirlwind had stripped them bare. The skies above the capital were beginning to fill with the yellow, acrid smoke of cordite, soot and dust which turned day into night and the eternal hope of spring into darkest autumn. Goebbels fanned the flames of hope amongst all who would listen, but he knew the odds lay heavily against him.

And all because of one man. Winston Bloody Churchill! The evil old drunkard who, if only he hadn’t been so monumentally stubborn and short-sighted, could have brought the war to an end less than a year after it started with Britain and its empire still intact, and Germany straddled across Europe. They could have shared the world between them. But in his whisky-sodden blindness he had thrown away the historical destiny of their two great nations, had bled them both dry, Winston Bloody Churchill, who had been biting their backsides for
years. Well, perhaps it was time for him to take some of his own medicine. And the poison was here, in Goebbels’ hand.

He knew he couldn’t wait until Hencke was back. Hencke might never get back or, if he did, it might all be too late. Goebbels needed something now, not next week. So he would announce Hencke’s survival and escape to Ireland, and humiliate Churchill in his bare-faced lie, and hope to cause so much confusion that the world would never again believe a thing that the British leader told them, even if he had Hencke, his grandmother and his entire fornicating family on public display in London Zoo.

The lights flickered and dimmed as the blast from a nearby explosion momentarily disturbed the smooth running of the generator. Another cloud of dust descended from the ceiling and fell around Goebbels. But in the half light, he didn’t seem to mind. For the first time in days, he was smiling.

‘I did warn you.’

The old, baleful eyes turned, admonishing, but said nothing. Cazolet was right, after all. Damn him.

‘Don’t feel too depressed,’ the younger man continued, adopting a more generous tack. ‘It’s not the first time Berlin Radio has accused you of lying.’

‘The great British public expect their politicians to lie,’ Churchill responded mournfully.

‘So …?’

‘But not to get caught.’

‘They can’t blame you.’

‘Willie, he is part of the biggest escape of the war. In response we are forced to launch a nationwide manhunt. Then, with all eyes upon us, we announce his death. Yet within days Goebbels is able to tell
the whole world I was lying. If he ever has the proof, if in spite of it all Hencke turns up in Berlin, we shall never hear the end of it. At best I shall look incompetent, as though I am losing my grip. At worst it will look as if I have been deliberately deceiving both our electors and our allies to cover up my own inadequacies. Sacrificing the truth for my own squalid personal purposes – that’s what they will say.’

‘What does one man matter? The whole world is changing, victory is within our grasp … Hencke is a mere drop in the great oceans swirling around us.’

The Old Man looked up sharply. ‘Willie, you do not yet understand.’

‘You’re right, I don’t. I’ve always felt you had some sort of mystical attachment to this man, admiration for him, even. Solidarity amongst escapees.’

‘He is a brave man. And far from being a drop in the ocean he is of overwhelming significance.’

‘As you said, I do not yet understand.’

Churchill shook his head sorrowfully, his fleshy jowls quivering in agitation. ‘It was all so simple when it started. Hencke seemed just another escaping soldier, of little consequence, the merest flicker of a candle in the darkening night of German defeat. But …’ He sighed deeply. ‘He has changed, beyond anything we could have expected. He is no longer anonymous. Eisenhower chose to turn him into a token of his victory over me, now Goebbels has embraced him as a symbol of ultimate resistance. In every broadcast Berlin Radio makes he will try to humiliate and destroy me through Hencke.’