David John - Flight from Berlin

‘You’ll hang out your tongues but the trough has been drained

You’ll panic like cattle whose farm is ablaze

And dreadful the blast of the trumpet.’

Whatever hope he’d had of getting out vanished. He was going to die in this room.

And suddenly they stopped.

The telephone was ringing.

Rough hands heaved him off the floor and onto the chair. He spat out a great gob of blood and pressed his tongue against loose teeth. Blood poured into his right eye from where the wire cable had caught him on the eyebrow; it spattered to the floor from the gash in his cheek. Vision in the other eye was out of focus. He was soaked with piss, sweat, blood.

‘Rausch here… No, Herr Obergruppenfuhrer. Not yet.’

The interrogator replaced the receiver and looked at him. The last thing Denham remembered before the room went dark was the worry in the man’s eyes.

W hen he came round, his body was a flowering garden of agony, from the crown of his head to the balls of his feet. Even the smallest breath came with a shot of hot pain.

Denham could hear a radio in the guards’ room tuned at high volume to coverage of the Olympics. He had no idea how long he’d been out.

‘… I have the honour now of speaking to twenty-five-year-old Berlin policeman Karl Wollke’- a cheer from a couple of the guards- ‘who earlier won a gold medal for Germany in the shot put…’

He lay on his side on the fold-down cot and stared at the white brick wall. His brain felt as though it was listing to one side, like a boat taking on water, and there was only partial vision in one eye.

‘… The Fuhrer waved to me from his box and then I knew I could beat the Olympic record of sixteen point zero three metres. It was all down to the Fuhrer…’

He had some confused notion that he might have died if the telephone hadn’t rung, but the sequence of events was too difficult and tiring to recall. His entire attention was focused on the pain. If only they’d give him a glass of water. He’d do anything for that.

‘Saved by the bell, eh?’ said a familiar voice.

He mustered his strength to turn over on the cot. Dr Eckener was standing in the door. He was swinging Arthur Denham’s pocket watch, like a hypnotist. ‘You’ve got the luck of the devil, Richard, my boy.’

‘Yes,’ Denham mumbled through swollen, bloodied lips. ‘I’m on a real winning streak today.’ He looked out of the corner of his puffy eye to get a better look at the old man, but Eckener had gone. And Tom had come, dressed in his school uniform and cap. His shorts were covered in grass stains and dirt.

‘Where’ve you been hiding?’ Denham said.

‘You know where,’ whispered his son, grinning. His two front teeth were missing and his face had caught the sun, with more freckles on his nose. ‘Look, I’ve made a drawing for you to give to those men. But you mustn’t hold it and smoke at the same time or it might burn.’

‘I’ll be careful,’ whispered Denham, his eyes filling with tears. ‘Wonderful to see you, son.’ He tried to get up on his feet, holding his hand out to Tom for support, but it wasn’t Tom who helped him. ‘Who are you? Where did my son go?’

A man with a stethoscope around his neck was standing in the cell. The coat might have been white once but was covered in stains.

‘Did they find their dossier?’ Denham said vaguely, feeling the room begin to turn.

The man raised a finger to his lips. ‘No speaking allowed with prisoners,’ he said, and began opening a black medic’s bag.

‘No, oh no,’ Denham whispered, recoiling into the corner and beginning to weep. He had a sick dread that the man was reaching for a small saw to amputate his fingers, but instead he took out a bottle of iodine and some cotton swabs and began wiping the worst wounds above and below Denham’s eye, around his lip and on his gashed cheek. Then he tapped a nickel syringe, injected a local anaesthetic, which felt cold, like meltwater, and stitched the wounds. When he was finished he helped Denham take off his bloodied shirt and soiled trousers, and gently touched each rib to see which were broken. Chest and arms were black and blue, yellow and purple, silver and grey. He was nacre that had yielded no pearl.

The pain in his left hand was acute, so the doctor rubbed it with a cool ointment and wrapped it up in a tight clean bandage.

‘Nothing to be done about the cracked ribs. Time will heal them,’ he said, his face without expression, and left the cell, taking the bloodied clothes with him.

Denham lay down and pulled the blanket over him. His teeth no longer fitted together when he closed his jaw, and every limb throbbed. In places the pain was dull and constant; in others it was sharp and intolerable only when he moved, but everywhere there was pain.

Within an hour of leaving Denham’s apartment Eleanor herself entered Gestapo headquarters on the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. The man at the reception desk looked up in surprise at the American woman in the broad-brimmed hat, sunglasses, and clothes from a fashion magazine. He scratched his jaw, dialled a number, spoke to someone, and told her she couldn’t see Denham under any circumstances.

Smoking one cigarette after the other, she’d returned home to the Dodds’ residence to ask the ambassador’s advice, the price of which was Martha’s finding out about her involvement with Denham.

‘Best inform the Brits tomorrow,’ Dodd told her in his dry voice. He was brushing his tailcoat, as if it were an act of extreme penance, in preparation for another diplomatic function. ‘They’ll make enquiries, although if your friend’s lost in that system’-he glanced up at her, looking like a long-suffering horse-‘information could be hard to come by.’

‘Couldn’t you ask Sir Eric Phipps to do something?’

‘You could ask him yourself if you’re coming with us to the Chancellery reception tomorrow night, although, my dear, you’re perfectly excused from another night of all those nodding penguins talking bunk…’

T he next morning, hoping she might encounter Roland Liebermann and find out if there had been any repercussions since her visit with Denham yesterday, Eleanor headed to the Reich Sports Field, where Hannah was competing in the fencing finals.

A radiant sky shone over the Dietrich Eckart stage, an open-air amphitheatre built into a wooded hill near the stadium. The occasional cloud sailed overhead like an airship, casting a lazy shadow onto the piste. Tall pines around the rim of the arena creaked in the tense hush. All eyes were focused on the stage where the bouts were in progress.

The Hungarian champion was in mid-duel with an Austrian girl.

Eleanor took a seat in the centre near the aisle steps and scanned the stage around the piste for Hannah, using a pair of opera glasses she’d borrowed from Mrs Dodd. She spotted the girl right away, seated apart from everyone else, accompanied by the same potbellied little coach, who was flapping about, giving her instructions. She seemed not to be listening. In fact she appeared deathly pale, gazing straight ahead, seeming not to see anything.

Eleanor began searching the crowd for Roland but saw no sign of the dark, lovely boy with the mutilated face. She wondered where he could be and surprised herself by imagining that he was a beautiful kisser. It was only when she was peering along the almost empty row at the very back that she saw not Roland but Jakob Liebermann sitting alone, a Panama hat half shading his face, and for the second time since yesterday evening she had a strong presentiment that something was very wrong.

She left her seat and ran up the steps to speak to him.

When she reached him he stared at her with blank eyes. The world seemed dark before him.