David John - Flight from Berlin

‘We made it,’ Friedl said, laughing, and Eleanor hugged their faces to hers in the dark.

The four great propeller engines fired and began to drone, vibrating the wooden floor of the container. They were floating away from the ground, lifting westwards towards the skies beyond the Reich.

They sat for a while, listening to the propellers and the rushing wind. It was Eleanor who broke the reverie.

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Do what?’ Denham said.

‘Give Rex the bogus dossier. The real one’s here. I saw. And even now in the dark I recognise… its smell.’

‘Yes,’ Denham said.

‘Why?’

A long pause. And when he spoke he felt they were the saddest words he’d ever spoken.

‘Because Rex betrayed us.’

In his mind’s eye Denham imagined the scene, early tomorrow morning in the summer palace of the Hohenzollerns on the Wilhelmstrasse. Rex enters the building unseen, perhaps through one of the tunnels that crisscross the government quarter. He is fresh and alert, nervous before his meeting with Reinhard Heydrich, the thirty-three-year-old dauphin, the Fuhrer’s rumoured successor. Satisfied, too, because through his initiative alone the mission had succeeded. He is ushered into the presence. A globe tilted to the window perhaps; equestrian trophies; even an epee, wire mask, and kit thrown in one corner. Heydrich rises to meet him. He is gangling and fair, towering in black, squinting at Rex over his long nose. An Olympian coldness. Rex presents the dossier. A word of congratulation perhaps, and then he takes it over to the tall windows and opens it, curious, but without emotion. His back is towards Rex. Inside, nine or ten loose sheets, some of the great man’s drawings. He had expected those. Behind the drawings, a thick, sealed envelope. He opens this and pulls out a wad of papers tied with string. All typewritten, with corrections in handwriting. This he is not expecting. Not expecting at all.

‘My dear Herr Palmer-Ward,’ he says, turning round on the heels of his boots. ‘ What have you given me?’

He is holding it up. Rex blinks. It means nothing to him.

In Heydrich’s hand is the draft manuscript for No Parts for Stella, an unfinished experimental novel by Friedl Christian.

‘T here were hints,’ Denham explained. He took off his jacket, folded it into a cushion, and made himself as comfortable as he could in the dark. ‘I just didn’t want to see them… or draw the conclusions. Lurking in the back of my mind was the question I never asked: who was the British journalist that you, Friedl, were supposed to meet at the stadium, on the day of the opening ceremony, the man who was to identify himself to you with the password? With your man, Captain Rogel, arrested, and because you feared an SD trap, you didn’t show up. But waiting there in the drizzle, on his own beneath the bell tower, was Rex. I’m sure of it.’

‘So it was one of my brighter decisions,’ Friedl said.

‘Captain Rogel, or someone in the resistance group, had contacted him and offered the dossier. Not surprising they picked Rex. He is chief correspondent of the Times. Maybe they also knew he’s a British intelligence officer, which would have made him the perfect choice.

‘That same afternoon, I got back to Berlin from my week in the south and met him for a beer at the Adlon. His disappointment at not getting the List Dossier must have been very much on his mind. But just as he was brooding over his loss: serendipity. From something I said he realised that it was I who had been approached that day, and he thought I had the dossier.

‘With me sitting there in front of him, he couldn’t believe his luck. But he wasn’t completely sure. Maybe I’d hidden it-and hours later my apartment was searched and ransacked-or maybe I’d been told its hiding place. So he decided to draw me in and recruit me to British Intelligence. He introduced me to the very organisation whose operations he was secretly betraying to the SD. It was a good plan. Why not let me deliver it, out of patriotic duty, to the British SIS, of which he was the chief intelligence officer in Berlin? Hence the sudden invitation to meet Sir Eric Phipps. If that didn’t work, the SD could arrest me and beat it out of me. Either way, Rex and his SD master, Heydrich, would get the dossier.

‘Doubts must have set in, though, after Rausch learned nothing from me in the interrogation. When Rex visited me at my sickbed in London, it may have been partly to find out for himself. And in the meantime, when the trail went cold, he ran a covert campaign to discredit Phipps, and then to move Evans from active duty, replacing them with appeasers who would not hinder Nazi ambitions.

‘Then the dossier was found. The irony was, if that nasty ambush at the Dutch border had worked, Rex would have been thwarted. We would’ve had nothing on us but the bogus dossier. But when he learned we were fugitives inside Germany, he was just waiting for our call for help, and it came from you, my darling…’

‘From a pay phone on the highway…,’ Eleanor said.

‘You told him to meet us at the sanatorium, and he primed the trap. Against all the odds, it failed, but he saw one last chance and made it just in time.’

‘But honey…,’ Eleanor began. ‘Couldn’t all this be pure

… suspicion? A misunderstanding?’ She shifted position on the wooden floor without finding comfort. ‘You have no proof… have you?’

Denham sighed. He knew she liked Rex. Everyone did, including Tom, who was his godson for Christ’s sake. But the proof was in his inside pocket. It was inscribed in ink on the title page of the small rust red book, The Poems of Stefan George. The very book Rausch had in his possession during the interrogation. In a younger hand were written the words: Rex Palmer-Ward-Balliol College, Oxford-Lent term 1919.

‘But why?’ Eleanor said, when he’d explained. ‘Why?’

Denham shook his head in the dark. ‘We have to warn the SIS,’ he said.

‘And the dossier?’

Denham shrugged. ‘We’ll find a way to get it to them…’

‘With the appeasers in charge?’ Eleanor said. ‘Oh, forget that. I say we give it to the Hearst newspaper corporation-as soon as we land.’

‘D r. Eckener has given you these cabins,’ Lehmann said, opening the door to a narrow corridor on B deck. ‘They were added during the winter refit and are the only ones with windows. You will see no other passengers on this deck.’

Captain Ernst Lehmann had been waiting for them in the cargo hold when the containers were opened. He had ushered them here, explaining that he was an old colleague of Eckener’s, had been since the war, and was on board this voyage as an observer. A shortish, handsome man, he wore the peaked cap and brass buttons of a Zeppelin officer. There was a sad sobriety about him, Denham thought.

Denham’s cabin was furnished with an aluminium bunk bed, a reading lamp, and a fold-down washbasin. The bed’s crisp sheets had been turned down. It was no larger or more comfortable than a sleeper in a good Pullman train, Denham supposed, save for the incomparable view of the world. From the window of tilted Plexiglas, he saw Amsterdam passing below, its streets glowing arteries of Saturday night traffic, its suburbs great webs of fairy lights.

‘Beautiful,’ he mumbled.

‘You can open it if you wish,’ said Lehmann. ‘There is no draught, even at an airspeed of a hundred kilometres per hour.’

The window opened with a push, and Denham leaned out as far as he dared. A moonless night, but the sky glittered with stars. To his left, two of the propeller engine cars could be seen sticking out from the gargantuan hull. The noise was tremendous, but beneath the flow of aerodynamism, the ship’s skin was insulated in stillness. Ahead of the ship to his right, drifts of white vapour parted like wraiths. He closed his eyes and breathed in the smell of the ocean, and a cold, crystalline air he imagined came from the stars themselves.