David John - Flight from Berlin

He thought he heard the horn of a river barge. Now and then he would open his eyes and see faces. He knew when it was Eleanor’s face, and Tom’s face, but others he didn’t know at all. Often there came a face with an efficient smile; her breasts rested on him when she leaned over to adjust his sheets, and a man with a copper-wire beard who put his face very close and shone a light right into his eyes. He had no sense of time. He felt the tube in his arm being checked and a dressing being changed on his upper left side. His one constant sense was of Eleanor always nearby. Sometimes he could sense her crouched next to him, her head almost on his pillow, and this made him feel calm, safe. He slept most of the time.

A morning came when he could see clearly again, when his eyes remained open, and the sister fetched the man with the copper-wire beard. The blanket was folded down over his chest. He couldn’t touch his upper left side. The burning itch of a major incision. A brown rubber tube led from his bandaged arm to a saline drip. To his left, a window gave a view across the river, framing the length of Westminster, all its pinnacles and parapets like an eroding black cliff on the opposite bank. The sky wore a heavy haze.

‘You’re very fortunate to be alive, sir,’ the man with the beard said, observing him over a pair of half-moon glasses. He had a genteel Scottish brogue.

‘How long have I been here?’

‘Four days. Your spleen was damaged, but the main rupture was delayed. You had heavy internal bleeding when they rushed you in. I performed an emergency procedure to stanch the flow.’

Denham closed his eyes and nodded, fighting a feeling of nausea.

The pain in his shoulder, the dizziness, and the blurred vision were symptoms, the man explained, of the spleen being starved of oxygen.

‘That’s quite a beating you got. I take it you reported the incident to the police?’

Denham gave a faint smile. To think he was in a country now where the police were on your side and the criminals didn’t wear uniforms. If the rupture had begun in Berlin, he realised, he would have bled to death at Rausch’s feet. He started to thank the surgeon but was overwhelmed by a series of hacking, dry retches.

He dozed again and was roused only by an altercation near the door of his room. The sister’s voice was saying, ‘Certainly you may not.’ A slight scuffling sound, and there was Rex, holding a bunch of carnations and a paper bag bulging with grapes, with some bare stems at the top.

Denham wanted to laugh. ‘Flowers? I’m not dead, man.’

‘Brought you a bottle of Bass, too, but that harridan just took it off me.’

He leaned over and offered Denham a skinny hand. ‘How are you feeling, old chap? You look all in.’

‘Don’t make any jokes, Rex. I may actually split my side.’

Rex’s face became earnest. ‘Dashed over like billy-o when I heard. Came yesterday as a matter of fact, but you were in no state. It was David Wyn Evans who informed me.’

‘You know him?’

Rex busied himself for a moment putting the carnations in a vase. ‘It’s, ah, confession time.’ He sat down slowly and lifted the creases of his trousers off his knees. ‘Evans reports to me. I’m his officer.’

David John

Flight from Berlin

T he net curtain billowed in a white arc. Outside, the heavy haze was giving way before a wind that whipped the dark surface of the river, sending a draught of cool air into the room. The sun dimmed, filtered through an ominous sky of sulphur and charcoal. Rex got up and closed the window.

‘All those beers and you never once mentioned it,’ Denham said. ‘Although I admit I had an inkling.’

Rex gave an embarrassed smile. ‘Well, I’m relieved. Couldn’t say anything until I knew you were on board. That said, we would never have made an approach if we’d known they were already shadowing you

…’

The first drops came down, followed quickly by a deluge, which pimpled the river in a great hiss, dissolving the Palace of Westminster in a wash of grey. For a few moments they stared out the window.

Denham said, ‘All this’-his hand gestured to his broken body-‘over some missing dossier?’

Rex grimaced.

‘Hitler must be stopped, old boy-and soon. Diplomacy will achieve nothing. And the few of us who realise that have been looking for other means…’ Rex pinched the inner corners of his eyes. ‘He’s a madman, nothing but, yet the diplomats come away saying his demands deserve consideration. The PM is wavering, and you know how many here are sympathetic. The Mayfair set-all bloody admirers-with voices in the cabinet. The Cliveden lot, who’ve been whispering against Phipps.’ He let out a long sigh. ‘This Anglo-German treaty Hitler is after-it must not happen. If it does, we’ll have paid with our souls for a shaky peace, weakened our allies, and made him unassailable into the bargain…’ He folded his thin arms and stared into the rain.

Denham couldn’t help but smile. ‘I’m not surprised the Times won’t print half your pieces.’

‘Think she’ll let me smoke?’ Rex said, pointing towards the door with his thumb.

‘I doubt it, but don’t mind me.’

Rex took out his tobacco pouch and poked a clump of brown shred into his pipe. ‘The Rhineland, six months ago. Our best chance to unite and stop him- missed. He took a gamble, but his instinct was dead right…’ He shook his head. ‘The man has an unholy sense for others’ weaknesses, their cowardice. He won’t stop now. Unless we make a bold move of our own, and I mean a bloody bold move, we’re looking at a German hegemony in Europe within a few short years…’

‘That bad?’

Rex slouched back in his chair, surrounded by curls of wood-smelling smoke. Water poured down the windows, filling the room with a veiled light.

Denham’s eyes began to droop.

‘Rex, that dossier…’

‘Yes, old boy…’

‘Why me…?’

The sound of Tom laughing approached from outside in the corridor. Rex stood up.

‘Almost forgot,’ he said, speaking around the stem of his pipe. ‘Hannah Liebermann is being kept at a sanatorium in Frankfurt called Klinik Pfanmuller. She’s allowed no visitors, so we may make of that what we will. Her parents are at home under house arrest. I’m sorry, that’s all we could discover… That was a splendid piece you wrote, by the way. Powerful stuff. But I fear not powerful enough to dent the steely heart of that regime…’

‘Then I’ll try harder… I’m not giving up.’

‘Yes, well, get some rest, old chap. I’ll see you when I’m next in town.’

T hree weeks later, on a bright day in the third week of September, Denham was discharged. Tom led him by the elbow up the steps of the house on Chamberlain Street, assuring him that he’d helped ‘old people’ with the Cub Scouts. Denham’s movements were slow and paid for with spasms of pain. He’d lost weight.

Eleanor had transformed the house. Swept it out and expelled the ghosts. The curtains in the windows were new, and there were flowers on the hall table.

‘Welcome home, Mr Denham,’ she said, taking off his hat and kissing him in the hall. He felt a soft twining around his leg and saw the amber eyes of a purring tabby looking up, a stray Eleanor had taken in.

He walked through the sunlit sitting room and into the drawing room, followed by Tom and the cat, taking in the changes, the smell of fresh paint and furniture wax. Years of living in dingy Berlin tenements had not prepared him for this. A lump rose in his throat.

He stopped in front of a dark mirror in the drawing room, his arm around Tom’s small shoulders, and looked at his reflection. His Berlin wounds were healing, with only the ghost of a scar likely on his brow and beneath his eye, but with a livid, uglier scar cutting down his right cheek from the corner of his eye to the side of his mouth.