David John - Flight from Berlin

‘Hannah?’

Another door led from the sitting room, to her bedroom, he presumed, and it was closed. They approached it, treading softly.

Something was wrong.

He tapped on the bedroom door. ‘Hannah?’

There was more than a smell of pine needles in the room.

‘Come in.’ A young woman’s voice. Drowsy.

He pushed open the door to the bedroom, dark inside, and could make out the bed facing him, and Hannah lying under white sheets. She lolled her head towards him, but it was too dark to see her expression.

A loud slam.

The apartment’s door closed behind them; in front of them the bedroom door was pulled fully open. A figure stood in the dark, with the rose glow of a cigarette in his fingers. Its resinous aroma filled the room. A Turkish cigarette.

‘Good evening, Denham,’ said Rausch.

The black form of a second SD man filled the doorway to the apartment, barring the exit. Denham recognised the same hulking figure with the broken nose who’d demanded his documents on the train.

He turned and met Rausch’s face: the glazed-back brown hair, the high cheekbones, the cold, aphotic stare. A glint against the dark suit, and he noticed the gun, a Mauser automatic, pointing at him. He exhaled slowly, feeling that same strange calm he’d felt when the Gestapo came for him. Some survival instinct, perhaps. Remain still when circled by an aggressive beast, lest motion provokes it to slaughter. Terror, he knew, came later.

‘What have you done with Rex?’ he said.

‘He didn’t make it,’ Rausch said. A mock sadness. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint. It was I who wrote his name in the visitors’ register. Now who have we here?’ He looked past Denham. ‘Friedrich Christian? The warm boy?’ He gave a short, mirthless laugh. ‘An unexpected bonus, I must say.’

‘You should be more careful who you call a warm boy,’ Friedl said.

Rausch stepped into the light of the lamp, a look of profound disgust on his face. He beckoned to the SD man, who walked forwards, pistol drawn, and struck Friedl hard across the head with the butt, sending him crashing to the floor. Rausch watched him writhe for a moment.

‘Denham,’ he said, stubbing his cigarette on the rug next to Friedl’s face, ‘I am filled with admiration. I wanted you to know that before we shoot you. All that time you denied knowledge of the dossier

…’

He held out his hand for the satchel. Denham did nothing, and the Mauser’s aim moved up to his face. Then he reached over and took it gently from Denham’s hand.

‘You were willing to sacrifice yourself if the hour demanded. You resisted even when you had no hope; you overcame pain; you did not break. In another life, perhaps, you would have made an exemplary SS man.’

Denham gave a melancholy smile. ‘I really didn’t know anything, Rausch. And as for the SS, I drink and smoke too much.’

Rausch sat down in an armchair, the Mauser still trained on its target, the satchel held to his chest. ‘You really wanted to exchange this for a family of Jews? That’s the bit we didn’t buy. What was your scam, tell me. Was the old man offering a king’s ransom if you helped them escape?’

On the floor Friedl moaned.

‘No scam, Rausch,’ said Denham. ‘They’re just people I like. Fellow human beings.’

The eyes narrowed. ‘Fellow human beings…’ He gave a thoughtful grunt, lit another Murad with a steel lighter, and leaned back, observing Denham through a ring of yellow smoke. ‘Ye-es, I suppose the Jews are part of our species. But they are not part of our race… That’s the point. They are sublimely clever, Denham, to survive as they do by destroying cultures from within, like parasites, like bacilli…’ He glanced at Hannah’s sleeping form through the open bedroom door. ‘So few of them, and yet such influence-in the law, in medicine, in banking. We continually underestimate them… But here I am, talking away.’

The Mauser cocked with a fluid click.

‘D ’you think they’re all right?’ Eleanor said, not taking her eyes off the main doors.

She and Martha were still seated in the Hanomag in the forecourt of the clinic.

‘Stop biting your nails,’ Martha said. ‘That’s the fifth time you’ve asked in fifteen minutes…’

‘Oh Jesus.’

The dark interior of the Hanomag was suddenly lit by the headlights of a car coming up the drive.

Martha turned to look through the back window. ‘All right, get down in your seat…’

The two women slid down, almost crouching on the floor of the car, as the grey BMW rolled into the forecourt and parked in a space between two other cars.

Peeking over the door Eleanor made out the heads of Jakob and Ilse in the backseat and saw the driver’s door opening.

A wave of danger washed over her.

‘How are we going to handle this?’ Martha whispered.

T he SD man held his gun to Denham’s neck while Rausch carefully removed the List Dossier from the satchel. His hand trembled slightly, Denham noticed, as if it were a holy relic, or charged with some astral energy. Fuhrerkontakt.

Friedl moaned again on the floor. Denham turned to him, but the SD man pushed the gun hard into his neck.

‘Don’t you speak?’ Denham said to him, his face forced back towards Rausch.

Still Rausch stared at the old oilskin cover of the dossier, touching the charred corner, the frayed edges, not opening it. Yellowed corners of paper, the drawings, peeped from the side.

‘Go on, Rausch,’ Denham said. ‘Aren’t you going to take a look?’

He could see the man was struggling with himself, duty fighting temptation.

Heydrich warned you not to look.

Finally Rausch said, ‘It is not my place to know.’

‘What, that your god, your great Hitler, is nothing but a-’

Rausch dropped the dossier, moved quickly, and punched Denham in the stomach, doubling him over.

The SD man pulled Denham up by his hair to give Rausch another hit, but the Hauptsturmfuhrer was talking now, bare-teethed, his face crimson. ‘Tonight’s report was going to state that British spy Richard Denham was shot while resisting arrest. But you have just inspired me to make you an extraordinary offer, to accept or decline as you wish.’

He jerked the barrel of the Mauser towards the open bedroom door. ‘Go in.’ Denham stepped forwards, hands half raised, still gasping for air from the punch. ‘Go.’

In the dim room Hannah slept, breathing in a deep rhythm, long hair covering half her face. A princess in a fairy tale, slumbering under an evil spell.

Rausch said to the SD man, ‘Guard the other one.’ Then he followed Denham in, still aiming the Mauser, and turned on the bedside light. ‘An experiment,’ he said, sitting on the edge of the bed. His face was contorted with hate. ‘We’re going to test your love for your fellow human beings.’ He pointed the gun at Hannah’s temple with a straight right arm. ‘My offer is to spare you, and kill her…’

‘No-’ Denham’s head reeled.

‘Your life… for a Jew’s. ’

‘Wait-’

‘I’m going to count to three. One…’

‘Rausch, you’ll be well rewarded if you-’

‘Two…’

‘You’ve got the dossier, damn it, what more do you want-’

‘Three!’

Rausch looked at where the gun touched Hannah’s temple.

‘All right, take me, not her.’

His trigger finger squeezed, and the sheets surged violently.

Staring at Denham, Rausch’s eyes were bulbous with disbelief.

A syringe was plunged deep into his neck.

He dropped the Mauser on the bed, struggled with Hannah’s fist, and pulled the needle out. The vial was empty. He’d received the full dose.