The Other Side of Love (32 page)

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This bizarre little chapel - was this the last place she would see her son? Kathe made a small choking sound. The three SS officers lounging against the wall had crushed out their cigarettes in a saucer and were positioning themselves to the right of the pseudo-altar. The tallest, an Untersturmfiihrer with a fleshy knobby face, called out:

“Who brings the manchild and for what purpose?”

His booming voice had an artificial ring, as if the mumbo-jumbo embarrassed him.

“I, Otto,”

came the response. Late the previous night, Groener had arrived at Villa Haug. When he’d come up to her room, Kathe had closed her eyes as if too weary to speak, and he had retreated, obviously to celebrate the birth with these friends. The trio raised their arms in a Nazi salute. Groener carried in the naked infant. His handsome face was sternly tensed, his black boots moved gingerly. With an audible sigh of relief, he set the baby on the swastika-covered pillow.

“I bring my son. I name my son. I dedicate my son to the Black Order and to our Fiihrer.”

“It is an honour to be an SS man,”

chorused the others.

“We dedicate this, our newest brother of the Double Lightning, to our Fiihrer.”

“It is an honour to be an SS man,”

intoned the knobby-faced Untersturmfiihrer.

“Touch him with the gleaming wolfs tooth that he might never know fear.”

Groener reached to his belt, and the candle-flame glinted on a silver dagger. With both hands he raised it above the baby.

Kathe started to her feet.

“No!”

she shrieked.

Turning to her, the four men showed their teeth in conciliatory smiles.

“It’s a little tradition of ours,”

Groener said.

“If you’re worried, I’ll put the point on my own finger.”

The baby began to cry, jerking his spiall arms and legs. Water arced up, wetting Groener’s sleeve. The men laughed, Groener the loudest of all.

“See, Kathe?”

he said proudly.

“Our boy can already handle his own battles.”

He touched the wrinkled, pulsing, angry red forehead with the dagger.

“May you march forward into the future with the duties, obligations and privileges granted unto you by membership in the Black Order.”

The clear baby urine had melted awkwardness. The others repeated his words, their voices deep and reverent.

Groener touched the dagger-point again to the baby’s forehead.

“Your name is Erich.”

“Erich …

“

Kathe murmured.

“Welcome, Erich, son of Otto. We welcome you to the honour of belonging to the brotherhood of the Black Order,”

the four men chorused.

“So, Erich, shall you join us in the Fatherland’s holy crusade against lesser races.”

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Flickering candles threw shadows on the men’s faces as they, softly and not very tunefully, began singing the

“Horst Wessel Lied’, the Nazi anthem.

“Die Fahne hoch, die Reihen dicht geschlossen …”

Her breasts ached to nurse Erich as he continued to kick and scream. Was it possible that the newborn infant retained some primordial ancestral memories? Was this descendant of Jewish Leventhals, working-class English, Southern Americans and proud Teutonic Knights protesting at the spooky Nazi ritual? His cries rose over the singing.

“Die Knechtschaft dauert nur noch kurze Zeit…

“

V

After the naming ceremony, Groener carried her up to her tower room, kissing her goodbye. He must return, he said, to

“cleaning up the Polish ghettos”

- the meaning of which would later horrify the world.

At lunch-time Kathe heard a car crunching over the gravel. She pushed aside the untouched tray, moving unsteadily to the window that opened on the front.

A thin welldressed civilian was helping a stout brunette from a large Mercedes. After they hurried inside Kathe continued to stare at the car. The licence-plate number was FM 798. FM meant the car came from Frankfurt am Main. To obtain petrol for so long a journey meant that the owner was a golden pheasant, a Nazi with a gold party badge. Yes, now she could see the swastika medallion that marked the Mercedes as belonging to a high-ranking official.

After a few minutes the couple emerged. The man’s arm circled protectively around the woman’s plump shoulders. She carried a small blanket-swathed bundle. They paused at the bottom of the steps, Homburg and blue felt hat bending over the baby.

If the day ever came when it was once more safe for a German to be a German regardless of the racial laws, Kathe told herself, she would storm the city of Frankfurt searching for a boy named Erich, born on 10 April 1940.

She clenched her right fist. Til get you back,”

she said in a low clear voice.

“I swear I’ll get you back.”

204

1940-1

10 September 1940

Even before England is brought to her knees, we must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign.

It is of decisive importance that our intention to attack be kept secret.

From Hitler’s private papef predating by

two months his Directive 21 to draw up

plans for an invasion of Russia code-named

Operation Barbarossa

Unlike the SOE, MI6 and the other British intelligence networks within Germanconquered Europe, the actions of the small organization known as CI4 have remained under fixed restraint. CI4 is still operational, yet even to this day only a handful of ministers are privy to its wartime files. Many of the British agents and the German resistance fighters lie in mass graves with the other victims of the brutal totalitarian Nazi regime. The survivors, gallant men

and women who risked everything, can never be honoured or repaid.

SIR AUBREY KINGSMITH, Most Secret:

A History of British Espionage

(Oxbridge Press, 1991)

j i

7

Lieutenant Aubrey Kingsmith halted to wipe his glasses outside double doors bearing brass plaques: British Passport Control.

And the people who were still filling in forms at the counters had indeed come to this suite on the thirty-fifth floor of the Rockefeller Center for visas and passports. Others like Aubrey, though, slipped through doors with the small black-painted warning: Restricted to Authorized Personnel Only. These men anA-women were woven into the loose web of British intelligence or nizations in the western hemisphere.

Both Aubrey and Downes were in the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, the spy network that Churchill had founded as one of his first actions as Prime Minister. Downes, however, was also top man of a far smaller and yet more clandestine group: CI4. Reporting directly to Churchill, he had a scant half-dozen agents, all with German underground connections. Aubrey, one of the tiny network, had been dropped into the Reich twice.

Downes’s business in the United States, however, was for the SOE. For two weeks the major had been conducting briefings while Aubrey unobtrusively took notes. This was Aubrey’s first free evening in New York.

Emerging into the wall of late-afternoon heat, he detoured around the Rockefeller Center, an unobtrusive manoeuvre to ensure that he wasn’t being followed not that he expected to be, but his training had tattooed the necessity of caution on an already thoughtful

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nature. Having reassured himself that nobody was paying the least attention to him, he gave himself up to the sweaty pleasures of walking through a city at peace.

At the Kingsmith apartment, Humphrey greeted him with an avuncular hug and a barrage of questions about the British family. He kept interrupting his nephew’s responses. From letters he knew about Elizabeth’s evacuees, Euan’s buying trips, Porteous’s incredible stamina on the job and Araminta’s adventures with London’s Auxiliary Fire Service she was one of the few women drivers in the AFS.

“She’s at the Basil Street station, conveniently near Harrods,”

Humphrey said archly.

“Not much to buy at Harrods,”

Aubrey said.

“Just as well. She doesn’t have much to spend. She gets two pound two a week, then kicks back fourteen bob for her meals.”

“Let’s hope Hitler never takes it into his mind to blitz London the way the Luftwaffe’s been pounding Coventry.”

Humphrey’s jowls trembled sadly as he shook his head.

“How’s that young RAF pilot of hers? Safe, I hope.”

“Absolutely.”

Aubrey wasn’t so positive as he sounded. Since the fall of France, when the Luftwaffe had been able to take off from the French coast, an RAF fighter pilot might sometimes go up as often as a dozen times a day. The casualties were staggering; when Aubrey had left England, Peter had been the sole pilot left in his fighter squadron.

“He’s given her a diamond ring.”

“My niece marrying into the peerage!”

Aubrey, not wishing to mar his uncle’s harmless snobbish pleasure, didn’t mention that the Earl and Countess of Mainwaring had ignored their youngest son’s engagement as well as the Kingsmiths”

letters.

“Dear, Aubrey looks like he could use a drink.”

Rossie, changed from her workday girdle and silk suit to a floor-length hostess coat, swept in.

“I could, too.”

Aubrey requested soda water.

“Well, well,”

Humphrey said archly.

“From Euan’s letters it seems to me you should have acquired a taste for Scotch.”

Aubrey’s cover was a desk job in supplies at a nonexistent gunnery school in the Highlands.

“I must say it gave me quite a start when I heard your voice. What brings you to the States? Our new lend-lease programme?”

Aubrey pressed the cold glass against his forehead and changed the subject.

“When Dad heard I was coming, he sent me this.”

He fished out a folded paper curved by his body’s heat.

“It’s a list of plated biscuit-barrels and salvers, egg-holders, secondhand Victorian things. He wants you to let him know if you’re interested.”

“Then, it’s possible for Euan to ship goods?”

Rossie asked.

“The boats coming in this direction have space. And England’s rather in need of dollars.”

208

Humphrey sighed and glanced towards the wall, where he had taped a large map of the world. Red-topped pins marked the forces of the beleaguered British Empire, black Hitler’s expanding territory.

“It’s dreadful, dreadful. What do you think of this talk of the Nazis invading England?”

“We’ll be ready for them,”

Aubrey said.

Rossie had been reading the letter.

“We can sell however much Euan can ship. Victorian plate’s considered antique here and sells like hot cakes.”

“Our business is up fifty per cent over last fall.”

Humphrey thrust out his chest.

“Oh. And, Aubrey, Wyatt sends his apologies. He’ll be late for dinner. Work. No case handled by the firm goes to trial without his opinion. That’s saying a lot. Carrothers, Uzbend and Hanson are the absolute tops.”

Over an enormous rib roast - Aubrey couldn’t accustom himself to the American profligacy with food - Humphrey brought up the subject of the Berlin Kingsmiths. Kathe, it seemed, wrote intermittently to her uncle and aunt.

“But we’ve only sent them a condolence note,”

Humphrey said.

“Under the circumstances - Wyatt and her breaking up, the war it doesn’t seem the right thing. Seconds, either of you?”

He clashed the sharpener against the carving-knife, then burst out:

“Damn it all! I can’t get over a niece of mine - and a step-nephew - being on the other side.”

“Humphrey, we’re not on any side,”

Rossie pointed out.

“You’ve been a citizen for years, and we’re neutral.”

“Hitler’s a swine. And one hears awful stories about the occupied countries. Well, I suppose we should Aank God for neutrality. Otherwise Wyatt would be in the thick ojht.”

II

Carrothers, Uzbend & Hanson had their offices on the twentieth floor of the Dejong Plaza, the same huge complex that housed Kingsmith’s. Wyatt’s window overlooked Fifth Avenue. He had just returned from the conference-room, where Joseph Broadmore, founder and chief executive officer of Broadmore, Inc., had pounded on the table and demanded they resort to litigation to recover moneys owed the company. Wyatt had suggested a compromise about payment, and Broadmore had calmed a bit. Wyatt held an agreement that he had drafted earlier in the day to this end. Taking off his jacket, he unknotted his blue rep tie and picked up the long yellow legal pad to redraft the clauses in light of the marginal notes he had jotted during the meeting. After a few minutes he looked up to gaze at the dark window. His tan had faded and, maybe because of this, he appeared thin.

209

Why am I so lonely?

Why indeed? Certainly it wasn’t from isolation. He dated a number of girls, and slept with two: a stunning redheaded divorcee and a very pretty legal secretary from a firm on the next floor. He was invited to the right dances and the right weekends, his parents insisted he live at home. The partners and associates in his firm asked him to join them for lunch and invited him to their dinner-parties. Yet at heart he felt set apart. A fraud, a phoney, a ringer. Possibly if his mother had called him Wyatt Leventhal he would have felt more attuned with himself.

Kathe …