The Other Side of Love (52 page)

Among the refugees were SS who had discarded their uniforms. Accustomed to giving orders, trained to be intimidating and unscrupulous, they were resourceful survivors.

VI f

It was raining when she reached the road that marked the boundary of the American Zone. While she waited under an oak tree for the shower to pass a canvas-covered American army truck pulled up. At first, fearing another rape, she shrank back. But the corporal with the round face had a warm smile. He indicated that she should climb in the back.

Now she assumed she was being offered a lift.

“Are you going in the direction of Frankfurt?”

“Hey, you a Limey?”

No, German.”

“Do you got your de-Nazification?”

De-Nazification?”

Well, no big deal, frowline. You just gotta answer a bunch of questions, then you’re home free.”

hey stopped to pick up other border-jumpers, and soon the truck was filled with anxious people. They came to a station where the

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platform was crowded with a snaking slow line of Germans waiting to board a passenger train.

On the track ahead of her she saw a short thick-shouldered man in shabby civilian clothes talking earnestly to an American officer. Though the German’s back was to her, she saw the sleeked blond hair. Was it Groener?

She passed through the Pullman cars where American Public Safety officers and their interpreters were at work on the de-Nazification. Unnerved by the sight of Groener - or his Doppelganger - Rathe blurted out her answers without premeditation. Where had she worked? (The Top Secret files of the OKW.) Had she personally known any top Nazis? (Once she had visited Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest.) At the back of the train, the majority of the Germans - those deemed without Nazi leanings - had their legs painted with a stripe of washable white paint.

Kathe was transferred to the detentioncamp at Ober Tappenburg to await further questioning.

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In the middle of September, two weeks after Wyatt had visited Ober Tappenburg, he received a note from the British Sector. Aubrey would be in Berlin on an ordnance survey the following Tuesday.

Wyatt stood at one of the Dahlem drawingroom windows watching his brother-in-law get out of a khaki-painted sedan. The receding hairline, glasses and abstracted expressA! as he came up the path type-cast Aubrey as an Oxford don raHer than an officer in His Majesty’s spit-and-polish army. Poor Araminta, Wyatt thought with a rueful smile. Could anything be more off the mark than those deep dark suspicions of hers that Aubrey was one of the SOE glory boys? Before the bell could ring to summon the obsequious jug-eared old butler, he ran to fling open the front door.

“Hey, Aubrey. Hey, old buddy,”

he said, pulling his reticent brother-in-law into a clumsy male bearhug that was heartfelt on both sides. They hadn’t seen each other since

1942, when Aubrey had come down to London after Peter’s death. When they pulled away, their eyes were moist. Going upstairs to Wyatt’s frivolously pink bedroom, they had pre-dinner drinks.

Wyatt saw that Aubrey, though as self-deprecating as ever, shrugging off compliments on his captain’s pips, had an air of confidence lacking in the prewar years.

Aubrey saw the near-invisible line of a scar in Wyatt’s sandy uose-cropped hair, saw the lines cut deep in his suntanned face. That

ear-eyed American naivete had vanished, replaced by a quizzical

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toughness. It wasn’t in Wyatt to be unjust, but Aubrey could tell that any German who came in contact with Captain Wyatt Kingsmith, US Army of Occupation, must find him exceedingly tough. Sighing, Aubrey wished it were otherwise. Easy does it, he told himself, and decided to wait for the propitous moment to ask whether Wyatt knew anything about Kathe. He took out his new snapshots of Geoff.

Wyatt, laughing, fingered through the grey wrapped package.

“Run that by me again. Uncle Euan’s been teaching my kid to play cricket?”

“Well, he bowls one of those big plush balls at Geoff s little bat.”

“Cricket my ass!”

“Geoff means everything to both of them, Wyatt, and Grandfather, too,”

Aubrey said quietly.

“They haven’t recovered from losing Araminta.”

Wyatt’s grin faded.

“Who has?”

He glanced at his thin gold watch.

“Twenty after seven. In precisely ten minutes you’ll hear the dinnergong. Frau Lowe, our housekeeper, runs the joint like a Waffen-SS training-camp. Germans!”

“They’re going through terrible times.”

“It couldn’t happen to better people.”

“Isn’t that rather a blanket indictment?”

“Damn right. Aubrey, you’re talking to a guy who toured Buchenwald right after it was liberated. Newsreels and photographs don’t do the place justice. That stink - I’ll never get it out of my system. The shower rooms with holes for the poison Zyklon B. The ovens. The poor sad corpses that insisted on moving around! A toothless old man told me he had been a student at the Sorbonne and was twenty-five. He collapsed at my feet. Twenty-five fucking years old when he died, and he looked a hundred! How one group of humans could inflict such misery on another is beyond me.”

“Up the street I saw three little girls - they couldn’t have been much older than Geoff burrowing through a barrel with a sign

“Edible Garbage”.”

Wyatt sighed and refilled his glass.

“OK, I feel for the kids; I wish we could ship in enough eggs, milk and Hershey bars so they wouldn’t keel over in the streets. But as for the rest of the Krauts …

“

His hand pantomimed a cutting slash across his throat.

“How do you imagine they feel about us and our bombing raids?”

“Buddy, they asked for it! Wait and see what a big humanist you are after some Kraut SS tells you in a conversational tone, soldier to soldier, that he was only following orders when he marched a hundred or so Russian Jews through the snow. No matter how bad he felt about shooting the three-quarters of them who fell by the wayside, the Army is the Army and no soldier tells his superior what he will and won’t do. Then later on he forgets himself and

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blurts out that the Yids only got what was coming to them.”

“You can’t judge all Germans by the SS. They were Hitler’s elite.”

‘Never fool yourself, Aubrey. Maybe the Fritzes didn’t all put on a black uniform, but it was the love-affair of the millennium, the Third Reich and old Schickelgruber. Remember the Olympics? Those huge crowds oozing adoration. When the Ftihrer delivered the goods, they were nuts for him.”

Aubrey sipped his drink. From his own Top Secret observation, he was forced to agree. While panzer divisions racked in country after country, all Germany (with the exception of a few courageous souls like Schultze and Kathe) delighted in playing Follow the Leader. And Teutonic necks were crooked from looking in the opposite direction when neighbours, Jew and gentile alike, were whisked on to trucks.

Wyatt cocked a knowing eyebrow.

“No arguments, huh? Well, you’re the one who quit Oxford to alert the world to the camps.”

Aubrey, who had never confessed authorship of Tarnhelm, made a noncommittal shrug.

Wyatt’s expression turned bleak.

“The thing is, Aubrey, those early camps were vacation paradises compared to what came later, and”

He stopped at the sound of the downstairs gong. Glancing at his watch again, he said:

“Seven-thirty, right on the dime.”

II

“So what think you of the Neue Femina, glittering apex of our famed Berlin nightlife?”

Wyatt asked, raising his foaming glass of beer.

After the elaborately served dinner of GI staples in Dahlem, Wyatt had bounced his brother-in-law betweeiAie wrecked facades of the Kurfurstendamm to the Neue Femina. TMe nightclub’s male clientele for the most part wore American officer’s pinks, while the German distaff side wore short, tightly belted dresses and complaisant smiles.

“Fraternization”

with German women was as much against regulations as thievery and black-marketeering, but there was no way to keep young men far from home separated from hungry girls desperately willing to sell themselves for a meal.

“Livelier than our clubs in the British Sector,”

Aubrey responded. Glancing at the blackened stone wall, he added:

“The ambience reminds one of the Fiihrer Bunker.”

“That’s postwar Germany.”

Aubrey, who had observed very little softening of Wyatt’s killevery-German line, drew a breath.

“Wyatt, I need your help.”

Hey, what are brothers-in-law for?”

“Have you been out to the Grtinewald?”

Abruptly Wyatt turned to stare at the next table. The contralto was now singing a medley from Oklahoma!, and the two boisterous Army

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Air Corp pilots with their arms around a pair of vividly made up adolescent German girls had joined in, bawling

“Oh, what a bee-yootee-ful mo-o-orning …

“

“Have you?”

Aubrey prodded.

Wyatt, who was drinking a boilermaker, chugalugged his beer, then caught the eye of an overage waiter in shabby Lederhosen, pointing down at his shot-glass and the cracked stein to indicate he wished a refill. Only then did he look at Aubrey.

“If you’re asking whether I dropped by the house, yeah, I was there.”

“Did you see any sign of Aunt Clothilde or Kathe?”

“The place is bombed out, old buddy. Uninhabitable.”

The flesh of Wyatt’s jaw was pulled taut.

“Aunt Clothilde’s dead, and so’s Sigi.”

“God … How?”

“Sigi probably gave his life for the Vaterland. Clothilde - who knows? Maybe a raid, maybe natural causes.”

“Kathe?”

“Matter of fact, I saw that li’l ole gal this month.”

Aubrey jerked, and his iceless gin and tonic sloshed on to the planked table.

“You saw her? All these hours and you never mentioned that you saw her? Where is she? Here in Berlin?”

“Ober Tappenburg.”

“Isn’t that one of your detentioncamps?”

“You bet your ass.”

“Why in God’s name is she being held?”

“The usual. Further questioning regarding war crimes and Nazi leanings.”

“Kathe? I never heard such rubbish! She’s no Nazi.”

“She didn’t join the party, but she did everything else. A wartime stint with the OKW”

“You know as well as I do that Sigi was his uncle’s aide.”

“She was such a good buddy of the late lamented Adolf that he invited her to his Eagle’s Nest hideaway.”

Wyatt ground out his cigarette viciously.

“Aubrey, she admitted knowing about the camps. Not even a stabbing gesture at remorse. We were discussing Araminta’s death, and the only thing on her mind was me getting her sprung.”

“Could you have helped her?”

“Nope.”

“Did you put in a good word?”

“Nope.”

Aubrey thought: Why don’t I tell him? Why don’t I simply say,

“She worked for us - she risked her life for us’? But telling the truth was treason.

“I don’t know what happened between you, Wyatt,”

he said in a clipped voice.

“The fact remains. She’s still our cousin.”

“De-Nazification means getting rid of Nazis just like delousing means getting rid of lice. And, cousin or not, this broad is a louse.”

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‘You bastard!”

Aubrey was on his feet.

“You bloody idiotic bastard!”

At the next table, the young flyers had stopped singing. The thicknecked muscular young lieutenant pushed back his chair. Taking a step towards Aubrey, he asked:

“What’s that you just said to my fellow-officer, you Limey prick?”

“I told this arsehole here that he’s a bloody stupid bastard, and if you’re too drunk to understand bloody English, then ask him to explain it.”

“Take off those fucking glasses!”

The pilot outweighed Aubrey by a good thirty pounds.

Without hesitation Aubrey slid his horn-rims on to the table, standing. The pilot swung a boxer’s upward blow. The strong whitened knuckles never connected with Aubrey’s chin. Aubrey, moving so swiftly his actions were near-invisible, stuck out his long thin leg, tripping his assailant, jamming him into the wooden seat he himself had just vacated. Replacing his glasses, he strode around tables filled with noisy Americans and hectically gay German girls. Wyatt scratched his forehead as he watched the tall, slightly rouncf-shouldered British officer disappear into the smoky shadows of the cellar stairwell. It was entirely possible that his late wife had been a better judge of her brother’s character and wartime activities than he.

t

HI

The thunder had faded behind the Odenwald mountains and the rain was a drizzle when Aubrey was led to the interrogation-room on the second floor of the Ober Tappenburg’s women’s barracks. It was regulations, the short nervous-eyed private said as he stationed himself inside the door, for detainees tcAe kept under surveillance during visits. Aubrey knew the surveillalrce was as much for him as for Kathe. Suspicion reigned supreme in the four occupying powers”

intelligence communities, for each maintained a well-hidden covey of German agents that the others would kill to uncover. Aubrey took out a bottle of aspirin, fumbling. White tablets spilled across the floor. As he kneeled to gather them, he glimpsed microphones hidden under the table.