The Secret of Spandau (34 page)

She tried to snatch him back as he pulled away. But he was too quick for her.

Jogging was a new activity for Red, never to be disclosed to the press colleagues who frequented his usual drinking haunts in the city centre. He had asserted many times over jars of beer that he would never make an exhibition of himself on the public highway so long as he was capable of the sort of exercise that could be enjoyed with a pretty girl in private. In a parody of the late Sir Winston Churchill, he would sum up his personal recipe for good health as ‘jig-jig, not jog-jog'.

Yet now he was compelled to set aside his principles. To make a credible impersonation of Cal, he could hardly take a taxi to the nearest street corner and then jog up to the front gate of Spandau. He had to show some sweat for the mile or so between Old Spandau and the prison. He took it slowly, much more slowly than Cal's customary pace, not wanting to give himself away at the end by looking like a man finishing a marathon.

He would have died rather than admit it in the press club, but Red actually found the jogging beneficial. It gave him time to prepare mentally for the job he had set himself, literally to get his act together. In one of the pockets of the tracksuit top was Cal's pass, the ticket into Spandau. It bore a passport-sized photo of Cal. There wasn't much facial resemblance to Red. The best to be hoped was that when Red approached the prison entrance, the powerful down-beam from the arc-lamps would throw his face into shadow under the peaked cap. The two men were similar in build. Cal must surely have been well known in the prison as the warder who jogged to work, so the running-kit should call him strongly to mind. It ought to be possible to get through the gate.

Then the problems would really begin. Several of the books on Hess showed rudimentary plans of the interior of the prison. If Red got through the gate, he would find himself in the guard-house, which was a separate building, isolated from the main cell-block where Hess was under guard. He would have to satisfy the Russians of his identity before a second gate could be opened to admit him to the courtyard in front of the cell-block entrance. If he got that far, and past the guard on the cell-block door, he could not fail to be recognized as an impostor by the other warders, who might be Russian, French, American or British. He would need to persuade them that it was vital that he spoke to Hess. He would have to pass more guards armed with sub-machine guns to penetrate to the last cell at the extreme end of the block, where the old man was held. And more daunting than any of the physical obstructions was the prospect of meeting Hess himself.

Red wasn't new to the game of meeting famous people. Early in his career, he had learned the wisdom of the dictum that the best way to fail as a journalist is to be uncertain about anything whatsoever on this earth. You treated celebrities like you treated your friends, and most of them responded positively. They needed you as much as you needed them:

But Hess was like no one else. He was the loneliest man in the world, and, according to those who had known him in Spandau, one of the strangest. It was for the psychiatrists to speculate whether more than forty years in prison, twenty of them in solitary, had shaped his personality. Maybe he had always been suspicious by temperament, reluctant to confide and rigid in his personal decisions. This was the man who had been unwilling to bring his wife and son to Spandau on a visit until Christmas 1969, twenty-eight years and six months after he had seen them last; who had said that if he had his time over again he would still serve Hitler and still make the flight to Scotland, even with the prospect of the rest of his life in Spandau. A man who had often driven his fellow-prisoners to the point of exasperation. Iron-willed, secretive, caustic, cranky, yet, as Albert Speer once wrote, …
now, thanks to his consistency, he was regarded with a certain respect, even among his enemies
.

How could you succeed in extracting confidences from such a man when you arrived unexpectedly in his cell by night, the first pressman he had seen in nearly half a century? Was it reasonable to expect a rational response from a man over ninety years old? Not for the first time, Red was going to have to make snap assessments. He couldn't plan the conversation – if he was lucky enough to get one. It would be improvisation all the way.

He could feel moisture in the air as he trotted along Wilhelmstrasse, three-quarters of his journey done. A light drizzle cooled his face and made aureoles around the streetlamps. There wasn't much traffic now. He reckoned it was close to midnight.

The school at Wilhelmstadt with its athletics track came up on his right and after that the red-bricked military barracks, the place where the British forces were based. Ahead, the street forked into Gatower Strasse. By the intersection was the Melanchthon Church, where he had kept watch on the prison entrance.

No loitering now, Goodbody, he told himself. Keep running right up to the gate.

The castellated outline of the directors' building loomed through the trees. The prison itself was set further back on the right, behind its electric fences and walls and watchtowers.

Red turned off Wilhelmstrasse onto the cobbled approach to the prison entrance. He faced the twenty-foot arch in its sham-medieval façade of twin turrets and crenellated battlements, the great blue doors, the warning notices, the lights mounted on the turrets and at the margins of the electric fence.

He trotted forward into the pool of light. Not the moment, he thought, to wonder whether Jane had managed to get through on the phone to the chief warder's office. Or whether she had even found a coin to fit the slot.

He came to a halt in front of the small door built into the main gates, through which he had seen Cal come and go a number of times. He hesitated. What happened now? Did he press the bell, hammer on the door, or wait?

There were sounds on the other side. The grille in the door was slid across and a pair of eyes scrutinised him. Obviously he was expected to say something.

He cleared his throat and said, ‘Warder Moody, reporting for duty.' He relied on his Cornish accent to pass for American. He sometimes put on voices when he was telling stories in pubs, but he didn't fancy trying them out on a Russian with a sub-machine gun.

The grille was slammed shut again, and for several seconds, which he reckoned aged him by as many years, Red waited.

Then, Sesame! They were unbolting it from the inside. The door opened and he stepped in. It closed at once behind him.

The Soviet sentry was shorter than Red expected and not much more than a boy, yet he looked capable of using the gun. He spoke something in Russian. Repeated it.

Of course! Red fumbled in his top pocket for Cal's ID. He meant to show it briefly and pocket it again, but the sentry insisted on taking it from him. Fortunately, the light wasn't too good on that side of the gate.

Unfortunately, the sentry indicated that Red should move into the guardroom on the left, where there was strip-lighting, and other Russian guards waited. He ambled in, trying to make it seem like routine, and nodded to the NCO behind the desk. The glare of the lights made him blink. There was a German shepherd-dog lying on the matting at the rear of the room. It pricked up its ears and took a long look at Red. Something else he didn't understand was said and a book was pushed towards him. There was a ballpoint attached to it with string.

No panic. They wanted him to sign in.

But there was a problem: he didn't know how Cal signed his name. He hadn't bothered to examine the signature on the ID card. He had been wholly taken up with the photo that didn't resemble him.

The ID had been handed to the NCO, who was holding it face down as he waited for Red to sign.

Red held out his hand for the card and said casually, ‘OK?'

The NCO kept hold of it and pointed to the book.

Red nodded. Maybe if he scrawled some kind of signature, the card would be handed over without a comparison being made. Somehow, he knew it wouldn't. So he had to try another ploy.

‘Did I sign out yesterday?' he said rhetorically, flicking back to the previous page and looked for a signature that might be Cal's. ‘I have a feeling I missed. No, I was wrong. Here it is.' And a million thanks to Cal, rest his soul, for having a simple, spiky signature that could be copied with confidence.

Red turned the page over, signed and put down the pen.

Immediately, the NCO shouted an order and three guns were trained on Red.

‘Christ!' he said. ‘What is this?'

Nobody answered. Someone came from behind and frisked him. Something had gone horribly wrong. The muzzle of a gun was jabbed into his back.

The NCO said in English, ‘You are not Moody. Who are you?'

Red stared back at him and was made sickeningly sure that there was no possibility of bluffing the man. The widely-spaced, slate-grey eyes were not particularly intelligent, but they were utterly certain. They knew for a fact that they were looking at a phoney. Yet he had to go on with the act. ‘Is this some kind of joke?' he asked. ‘The Russian sense of humour?'

‘What is your name?'

‘It's on the card in your hand.'

‘You are not Warder Moody.'

‘Listen, buddy, I know who I am.'

The NCO spoke another command in Russian. Two guards grabbed Red's arms and jerked them upwards behind his back, forcing his face down onto the desk. His nose crunched against the wood as if he had run into a wall. It went numb momentarily, then spikes of pain drove through it.

The dog was barking excitedly.

The NCO made a grab for the cap Red was wearing and slung it aside. He took a grip on Red's hair and screwed his face to one side on the desk. The guards maintained the excruciating hold on his arms. Blood seeped hotly from his nose.

‘Who are you?'

‘I told you,' Red blurted out. ‘Call the chief warder if you don't believe me.'

‘You are not a warder. We have pictures of all the warders. What do you want in this prison?'

‘To do my bloody job!' Red groaned.

Something else was said in Russian and the holds on his arms were relaxed. He straightened, still wincing with pain. ‘Buggers!' he said. ‘I'll report this to the bloody directors.'

The Russian was unimpressed. ‘As you refuse to identify yourself correctly,' he said stiffly, ‘we are obliged to search you. This way.' He beckoned.

Red hesitated. Unwisely, because another order was rasped out and he was grabbed and hustled across the guardroom by the two young soldiers who had held him. The dog snapped at his legs, disclosing, mercifully, that it was chained to the wall and just out of range.

They dragged him struggling through a door at the back into a cell not more than seven feet square. There, they used their boots on his shins, kicking his legs from under him. Helpless, he rolled into a foetal position in one corner, but they soon had him flat to the floor and face down. One guard kneeled on his spine, while the other dragged the clothes from his body. Inside half a minute, he was stripped naked, his clothes tossed outside. They allowed him to lean against the back wall. But the ‘search' didn't end there, because one of the guards stood over Red with the stock of his sub-machine gun poised to brain him if he moved, while the other removed the sling from his gun and wound one end of it around his fist. The way they worked together had the makings of a well-drilled routine of sadism.

Red felt a trickle of something against his inner thigh. He looked down at an involuntary jet of his own urine. The Russians pointed and cackled with amusement. Then the voice of the NCO broke in, bellowing some order. He materialised behind them in the doorway. The guards backed off at once.

‘Get up!'

Red obeyed, using the wall as an extra support. He might have been standing on stumps, because all feeling in his shins and feet had gone. He didn't care about the loss of dignity. He didn't care that much about the pain. He was overwhelmed by the sense of failure, and that really hurt. Two good guys had died, and this was the best he had been able to achieve.

The NCO appraised the work of his men, running a long look over Red's suffering body. ‘Now you had better tell me who you are,' he advised with heavy menace. ‘What is your true name?'

Red simply shrugged.

‘There is a procedure for dealing with intruders,' the Russian told him. ‘We are permitted to shoot them. The orders are categorical. These are orders that apply to the guards of each of the occupying powers. I quote for your benefit, so that you fully understand.
A guard will fire his weapon against persons who have gained entrance into the courtyards by force or other illegal method
. You have gained entrance illegally.'

‘According to you,' commented Red.

‘We shall therefore take appropriate action. First, I shall inform the Soviet director. He may order me to interrogate you or he may simply give the order for you to be shot. Now do you wish to tell me your name?' He waited a second, and then said, ‘Very well. Your underclothes will be returned to you and you will be locked in here until I receive my orders.'

Red looked away.

His tee-shirt and pants were slung into the cell and the door was slammed.

Jane had never felt so desolate as at that moment when she stood at the top of the iron stairs of Cal's flat after Red had run off into the night. She had a horrid conviction that she would never see him again, whatever the outcome of his foolhardy scheme to get into Spandau Prison. She was angry with herself for having tamely acquiesced in the plan – if it deserved to be described as such. She had known from the day she met him that Red was his own worst enemy, a creature of impulse, destined for trouble. It wasn't hard to see how vulnerable he was. Yet this evening she had let herself be dominated by the force of his character, when she
knew
it was insane to try what he proposed.