David John - Flight from Berlin

‘My name is Denham. D-E-N-H-A-M. I will return tomorrow afternoon to speak by telephone to the person named on that envelope. He will be most interested to hear from me.’

W hen Denham got home, Friedl showed him a manuscript he’d been working on during his months in hiding. There were almost a hundred pages of No Parts for Stella, an experimental novel. It was the story of a high-minded Berlin actress who loses all integrity in her bid for fame. In a series of increasingly dire compromises she slips further down a moral slope, so that by the time she’s a star, she’s a monster. It wasn’t a bad read. It explored the perils of ambition and notions of personal worth, but the lurid, uncompromising style was both its strength and its failing.

‘Any good?’ Friedl asked, when he was near the end.

‘Ye-es,’ Denham said, ‘but I think it’s ahead of its time. It’ll need a rewrite if you want to show it to a publisher.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, for one thing, you’ve written a scene where she sleeps with all the male extras in Frederick the Great…’

T hat evening Eleanor took them to hear Ambrose and His Orchestra at the Cafe de Paris. In the gilded red interior Denham could tell the boys thought it all very high hat: a dinner-jacketed set treating platinum blondes to champagne and eggs Benedict. Eleanor led them into the ballroom, gliding down the semicircle stairs and between tables lit by amber lamps. She’d waved her hair, powdered her face, and wore a new glossy lipstick called Havana Dusk.

‘Violins,’ Nat said, as though he meant spittoons. They found their table with a banquette of red upholstery. ‘Two trumpets and only one sax!’

‘Kid, you wouldn’t know class if it kicked you in the nuts,’ Eleanor said. ‘Let’s dance.’ The orchestra had begun a pepped-up arrangement of ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’

A waiter brought an ice bucket and poured their flutes with a flourish while Denham watched the odd spectacle of an elegant American woman being twirled around by a shock-haired, spotty youth who wouldn’t have looked amiss on the Petrograd Soviet. Nat made one attempt to swing her over his hip, but Eleanor was far stronger than he was.

Denham’s mind wandered.

He pictured Rausch sitting in his office on the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin tomorrow morning. Perhaps a corner office looking onto that pillared courtyard where the supercharged Mercedes cars pull in with pennants on the hubcaps, bringing the high SS to work. Leather coat hanging from a hatstand; his desk with two telephones, one for the outside world, one internal-for his parallel world, the vast police spiderwebs of the Reich. He sees the envelope marked Poste Diplomatique, the one his secretary has not opened. Curious, he tears the flap with his honour dagger, and removes a single drawing, the very one Denham saw when he’d first opened the dossier-the lad with the charcoal freckles and the clear cold eyes. Something in the fullness of the young man’s lips faintly suggests a kiss, a mocking kiss, and a man of Rausch’s urbanity sees it.

He is perplexed, but then his gaze falls to the signature, which burns into his eyes. The appalling secret pouting up at him. Now he is nervous. He reads the typed note attached with a paper clip: Denham’s offer to exchange the complete List Dossier in return for the safe passage from Germany of Jakob, Ilse, and Hannah Liebermann. There follows an instruction to communicate with him by telephone at the German embassy in London tomorrow at 16:00 Greenwich Mean Time. Rausch flattens the drawing on the desk, dagger upright in his hand, and stares at nothing. His nerves give way to incredulity, then to rage.

Denham had retrieved the drawing and a handful of others that morning from the bank vault. The rest of the dossier, including his finished translation of Forster’s notes, he left in the vault ready to give to Evans. For the plan to work, the fake dossier, the one he would give Rausch, would contain… what?

Suddenly he felt the full danger of what they were doing. An insane risk that could end in their deaths. Even if it all went as planned, he couldn’t shake off a fear that these marvellous months with Eleanor-the happiest of his life-were about to end.

‘What’s up, buster? You’re as sad as a map.’

She was leaning over him, radiant, and she brushed his cheek with a kiss. Taking his hand she led him to the dance floor, where the orchestra was playing a gentle rumba. A dark-skinned woman balancing an arrangement of fruit on her head stepped up to the microphone, accompanied by three crooners in white tuxedos.

He took Eleanor’s fingers in his own and put his other arm low around her waist, breathing in her perfume. Gently he moved his hips with hers.

‘A penny for your filthy thoughts,’ she said.

‘My darling…’

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know… I’ve a feeling things can’t carry on…’

She looked at him quickly with hurt and fear in her eyes.

‘… the way they were. Once we’ve gone through with this. Somehow, it will change us. I just want you to be ready for that.’

She lay her head on his shoulder as they moved to the rhythm.

‘Regret over doing nothing will change us far more,’ she said.

He smiled at her, though she couldn’t see his face. The melody enveloped them in its sweet cadence.

When she looked up at him again, a tear was making a track down her powdered cheek.

They stopped still in the centre of the floor, held each other close, and kissed long and deeply, oblivious to the couples shuffling in circles around them. They kissed as though they were about to part for a long time, or forever.

The young official at the embassy main desk sprang to his feet when he saw Denham, as though he’d been waiting for him all day, then looked confused when he saw Eleanor. He ushered both of them upstairs regardless.

The embassy’s new interior seemed designed to intimidate the visitor and flatter the vanity of the incumbent, von Ribbentrop, who had impressed Hitler with his smooth hauteur, and with his ability to speak French and English, skills he’d learned from his years as a travelling wine salesman. His pompous portrait hung in the entrance hall. The oversized staircase lined with bronze torches gave onto a pilastered landing, where a bust of the Fuhrer was garlanded with sprigs of oak and pine, like some psychotic god of Yule.

The official showed them into a large salon overlooking St James’s Park, where the chestnut trees were budding with bright green leaves, and asked them to wait. When he’d gone they were too nervous to sit and paced the edge of the carpet towards the far wall, on which was hung a KRAFT DURCH FREUDE picture calendar for 1937. A family of four waved ecstatically from their Volkswagen.

The door opened and a fat man in a dark suit entered. There was a Party pin in his buttonhole. He resembled a grossly grown-up doll. He gave them a supercilious stare. SD, Denham thought.

‘Mr Denham?’ he said in English. ‘I have orders to arrange a telephone call to Berlin for you at four p.m.’ He turned to Eleanor with a quizzical look.

‘She’s with me,’ Denham said.

The man gestured to a telephone on a gilded table under the window. ‘You can take the call there in a moment. I’ve been keeping the connection open.’ He left the room.

Seconds later the telephone rang. Eleanor squeezed Denham’s hand. He walked towards it. It rang again, and he picked it up.

‘Hello, Rausch, this is Richard Denham.’

A brief pause filled with static before a thin, high voice said, ‘This is Reinhard Heydrich.’

Denham’s mouth opened, but words had fled. ‘I see,’ was all he managed at last, clutching the receiver very tightly.