David John - Flight from Berlin

A quiet, high-pitched bray came down the line. ‘You’ve won some admirers here, you know. After three days working you over my boys were convinced you knew nothing of that dossier.’ The voice had the offhand easiness of power. ‘You even had Rausch fooled. Either you’ve got nerves of steel, or he’s going soft.’

Under his shirt Denham felt a bead of sweat roll from his armpit down to his belt. He thought of the long pale face in the photograph on the wall of that SD torture room. The tiny eyes deeply set, slanted, bright, and cruel.

Recovering himself he said, ‘Well, I didn’t want to make it easy for you. No fun in that, is there?’

The soft braying laugh again. ‘You’re making us a marvellous offer, Herr Denham. The dossier in exchange for three inconvenient Jews? How could we say no?’

Denham felt a dizzying surge of adrenaline. ‘There are two conditions.’

‘Go on.’

‘Rausch, and no one else, is to bring the Liebermanns in a single car to the town of Venhoven, on the Dutch border, at five p.m. next Friday. There’s a small hotel called Hotel Mertens, about five hundred yards from the German frontier. I’ll be there with the dossier. Second, Jakob Liebermann keeps his fortune. He’s not to be robbed by the Reich.’

A long pause.

‘Agreed,’ Heydrich said finally, ‘with the exception of the location. The handover is to take place at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin

…’

‘No.’

‘See it from our point of view,’ Heydrich said, sounding positively reasonable. ‘You are handing over property that belongs to the Reich. It is appropriate that you do so on German soil, where we can be certain of no outside interference.’

‘No.’

‘Really, Herr Denham, I’m a fencer myself, you know. I’m honour bound to act with chivalry.’

‘We stick to my terms or… I go straight to the British Foreign Office with what I have in my possession.’

Another silence on the line. Behind the static Denham sensed the Obergruppenfuhrer’s mood souring.

‘But who will believe any of it?’ he said.

The Fuhrer is not married.

Denham did not rise to it. ‘I’ll expect Rausch at Venhoven with the Liebermanns, alive and well, and no one else. At five p.m. on Friday.’

The pulse in his neck was pounding. Three, four, five seconds more of hissing silence on the line. He was about to hang up, when the thin voice spoke again.

‘I was really too hasty in signing the order for your release.’ And then: ‘Very well then, we go with your plan. But now I must warn you.’ His voice dropped. ‘Try to cheat us over this and we will hunt you down. Do you understand?’

Denham placed the phone down onto its cradle. He turned to face Eleanor and she ran towards him. His hands trembled, and his shirt was soaked through.

The old town of Venhoven on the River Maas was a little over five miles from the German border. Denham knew it from a driving trip he’d made with his father to Germany years ago. It had been their halfway stop for the night. The country along the frontier to the east, where the hotel was located, was undulating, wide open farmland, the strategic sweep into the Low Countries that had made it the scene of countless battles. Without the cover of trees or buildings, he thought, it would be harder for the SD to pull any tricks.

It was a tiring day-and-a-half’s journey, driving from London to Harwich, waiting for the car to be winched onto the ferry, and sailing to the Hook of Holland. He drove through the night with Friedl sitting next to him, having eaten a light meal on the crossing.

‘Hope Nat’s all right looking after the cat,’ Denham said, to break the silence.

‘He’ll manage.’

Friedl was watching the suburban lights of Rotterdam passing in the darkness. Denham had spotted at least four cars with German number plates behind them for long stretches of the road but told himself there was nothing odd about that. They were heading east after all.

It was a leaden, dim morning with a sharp wind picking up when they pulled into the forecourt of the Hotel Mertens at 7:00 a.m. on the Thursday. They had more than a day and a half to spare before the handover. Plenty of time to notice if there were any suspicious comings or goings.

Friedl had been eager to accompany him, but on the strictest understanding that no part of the plan involved crossing into the Reich. He seemed determined to share the danger, Denham thought, perhaps to atone for his unwitting role in Denham’s arrest and torture. But for Denham’s part, he was thankful for an extra pair of eyes and ears.

He absolutely did not trust Heydrich. A hundred times in his head he went over that telephone conversation. The man had agreed to the deal too easily. And the more Denham thought about it, the harder he found it to believe that Heydrich would simply comply.

The most exposed and dangerous part of the plan lay in the journey itself. Heydrich’s men might easily have shadows on them as soon as they arrived in the Hook of Holland. If they could do that, then they could ambush the car anywhere along the way and simply take the dossier. True, all they’d get was a bogus dossier, containing a handful of genuine drawings from the bank vault wrapped around a sheaf of worthless papers. But Denham, too, would be cheated if he didn’t get the Liebermanns. So if SD agents did stop the car, the safest thing was to make sure they found no dossier at all, bogus or otherwise. Then there was still at least a chance of holding them to their word.

After a long discussion in Chamberlain Street, Eleanor had come up with a precautionary plan. She would send the bogus dossier by parcel courier from the US embassy in London to arrive at the hotel the same day as Richard.

Then she would take a flight to Berlin.

Richard, preoccupied with practicalities, was slow to absorb this last part.

‘What?’

‘As a precaution,’ Eleanor said, ‘to make sure the Germans are honouring the deal. I want to know for certain that they’ve told the Liebermanns of their impending release…’

Denham was incredulous. ‘How? Jakob and Ilse are under house arrest.’

‘I’ll get a message to them…’

Denham flatly refused to go along with it.

‘That’s absolutely insane. The Germans know you’re involved in this. The Gestapo probably have a file on you. You publicly humiliated Willi Greiser for Christ’s sake. You can’t just fly into Berlin pretending you’re on a weekend’s vacation. They’ll be suspicious, my love.’

‘And if I were there officially, invited by the embassy?’

Denham looked at her blankly.

She reached into her handbag and handed him a folded page of newspaper, which he opened out on the kitchen table, puzzled. It was torn from a week-old New York Times.

‘FBI closes in on Alvin “Creepy” Karpis…’

‘Bottom left,’ she said.

Near the foot of the page was the heading U.S. AMBASSADOR'S DAUGHTER TO WED SOVIET DIPLOMAT with a head shot of a laughing Martha Dodd.

‘Good God,’ Richard said, holding the page closer.

Ambassador Dodd, it seemed, had surprised the State Department by announcing his daughter’s engagement to a Mr Boris Vinogradov, thirty-four, press attache at the Russian embassy, Berlin…

‘The intelligence services will have her for breakfast,’ he said.

‘And look who’s got herself invited to the engagement party.’

Eleanor was holding up an embossed invitation with her name inscribed across the top in a girlish hand. ‘May first, US embassy, Berlin. The invitation arrived this morning. I’m staying with the Dodds.’

‘You’re not going.’

Denham spent the rest of the evening trying to talk her out of it, listing every risk she was running. But her mind was set firm.