Michael Russell - The City of Shadows

A man entered. He wasn’t one of the people who had snatched her off the street. They were around her own age, not much older than the students outside. This man was in his sixties. He looked at her hard. His face was stern, but there was nothing about him that felt threatening to her.

‘Why am I here?’

She spoke in German. He replied in English.

‘Just be glad you are. There are worse places to be.’

‘What do you want?’

‘They were waiting for you, at the hotel.’

‘Who was?’

‘The Gestapo, Fraulein Rosen, Frau Harvey. I don’t suppose you knew we had the luxury of our own Gestapo here in the Free City, did you?’

She said nothing. He was right. There was a lot she hadn’t known.

‘My information is that when your room was searched, they found two passports. One Irish, in the name you registered in at the hotel. The police believe that’s false. The other issued by the British Mandate in Palestine.’

‘I could be of no interest to the Gestapo,’ she said defensively.

‘Nevertheless, they are interested. That’s all that matters.’

A great roar erupted again beyond the window. The old man walked past her. He stood looking out at the rally. It was coming to an end now.

‘When I was a student, we protested about the books they wouldn’t let us read. That was our passion, freedom. Now my students pull books out of the university library to burn. That’s their passion, hatred.’ He turned back into the room. The noise outside had suddenly stilled. The rally was over.

‘You will stay here today, Fraulein. Tomorrow Leon and Johannes will go up into the hills with you. The borders are policed very aggressively at the moment, but they’ll take you across into Poland through the forests. Leon will get you to the train that runs from Gdynia to Bromberg, that’s Bydgoszcz now, in Poland. You can get to Warsaw from there without re-entering Danzig. You have a ticket to Trieste, via Warsaw and Vienna. You’ll have a week or so in Trieste before your boat leaves for Palestine. It’s pleasant at this time of year. A lot pleasanter than our Free City anyway.’

‘You’re very well-informed.’

‘And you’re very lucky. You were very stupid to come here.’

‘I had a reason to come.’ The words didn’t convince her the way they would have done two days earlier. They didn’t convince the old man either.

‘There are a few decent men left inside the Schutzpolizei. When they can, they pass on information, especially about people the Nazis want to pick up. Perhaps you can imagine the risk someone would take doing that.’

Hannah nodded. She knew people had taken risks for her.

‘We heard about you by chance. The Gestapo put a call out for you. Some kind of passport irregularity. No one knew who you were, but the information came to a friend of mine. And as this irregularity involved a passport issued in Palestine he contacted me. I didn’t know who you were either, but it felt like you and the Gestapo might not get on very well.’

‘They had no reason to know who I was.’

‘Well, somebody knew you were Fraulein Rosen, not Frau Harvey. Somebody knew something. Who have you been speaking to in Danzig?’

‘The only person I’ve talked to is a priest, an Irish priest in Oliva.’

‘You came here to see a priest?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because nobody else would do it.’

‘It must have been very important in that case.’

‘My best friend was killed. He was one of the last people to see her alive. I think that’s important. But I’m about the only person who does.’

‘That all sounds very worthy. And you think you’ve got the right to put other people’s lives at risk because of your very important personal life, do you? All sorts of people, all over the place, now here in Danzig as well.’

‘This has got nothing to do with anybody else.’

‘You don’t think so?’ He shook his head. ‘I had to find out who you were. I did, this morning. A Jew with a British Mandate passport and a ticket from Trieste to Haifa? I telephoned the Jewish Agency in Trieste. Not an easy conversation, given the Danzig exchange’s propensity for listening in to overseas calls, but with a lot of guesswork and a little Hebrew to hide what I was saying, I got there. You’re working for the Haganah. Whatever you’ve been doing in Europe, I don’t doubt you’ve met dozens of people. All names the Nazis would like to have. Don’t think they wouldn’t ship you off to Berlin if they believed you had anything useful to tell them. Nobody in the world would even realise, because nobody knows you’re here, isn’t that right? Your friends in Trieste are pretty pissed off with you, Hannah.’

‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t even going to be here two days.’

‘I don’t know what you did to draw attention to yourself, but the sooner you’re out of Danzig the better, for your sake and everyone else’s. I’m not a Zionist myself. Fighting fascism here in Europe is more important than making the desert bloom. It’s a disease. You can’t run away from it.’

‘It’s not about running away.’

‘No, probably not. I used to believe that. There are a lot of things I’m not sure about any more. I’m an old man who didn’t expect to spend his old age gazing into the darkness I thought we’d left behind a long time ago.’ He looked at her and smiled more warmly; his irritation had gone. ‘I’m sorry about your friend. But that’s the way the world is now. I’ve got friends who didn’t die a natural death too. Before long we’ll all have friends like that.’

‘Doesn’t that matter?’

‘Of course it matters, but the personal life doesn’t. Not now. No one has a personal life any more. That’s gone. All we have is our survival.’ He touched her arm. ‘Good luck, Hannah,’ he said softly; then he walked out.

She stood in the room, alone again. She felt all the more alone because of those last, bleak words. She walked slowly back to the window. The students had gone. The swastikas still flew on the front of the Technische Hochschule. Behind it the dark hills rose up. That was where she had to go tomorrow. The man was right. She shouldn’t have come to Danzig. But though she understood what he said, she refused to believe it — it was the personal that mattered most of all now, now more than anything else.

*

Stefan sat in the bar at the Danziger Hof with a beer that he thought might help. It didn’t. He knew he’d got most of the truth out of Francis Byrne, except for one thing. Whatever was going on between the priest and Hugo Keller wasn’t about Hannah Rosen, or Susan Field, even if Susan Field’s death was what gave the abortionist the leverage to blackmail him. Father Byrne mattered, that was very clear; he mattered a lot. He was an important asset, and whatever he was doing for Keller, Hannah had been a threat. If she had been arrested it was because the abortionist was protecting his asset. Stefan sensed that he stood on the edge of something darker than he understood. He had seen the fear in Francis Byrne’s eyes. But he didn’t really care what it was about; the two men deserved each other. All he cared about was that he wasn’t finding Hannah. Hugo Keller had to be his next stop.

He had forced Keller’s address in Langfuhr out of Francis Byrne at the end, but this would be a very different proposition from a guilt-ridden priest. Keller would be doing what he did, buying and selling information. He would have connections, and if Dublin was any measure he would have connections with the police. Stefan knew he might have to push the Austrian hard. Keller would have to believe he would suffer serious physical damage unless he told him what he knew about Hannah’s whereabouts. He would probably have to hurt him. But he couldn’t take it too far. If she had been arrested he might need Keller’s help. Instincts he trusted told him the abortionist would respond to two things: real pain and real money. Stefan had to get the balance right. He had some money; more could be wired from Adam Rosen. The only other route was the diplomatic fuss Robert Briscoe could get out of the Irish government. Keller wouldn’t like the threat of the public eye on him, neither would the Danzig police. But he had to find her before anything else could happen. And the darkness he had sensed in Francis Byrne was gnawing at him. As he drained his glass and got up, he realised it was already too late to call on Keller. Two men were approaching across the bar. In the doorway the hotel manager looked on with a smile of sour satisfaction. One of the men was a uniformed Schutzpolizei. The other sweated in a belted leather coat that was too big for him. Stefan could already identify the Danzig Gestapo.