Jack Ludlow - A Bitter Field

Veseli/Wessely took her gently by the arm to guide her through the crowd, which left Cal to look about him. He saw Jimmy Garvin with a big jug of beer in one hand, a sausage in the other, standing back and not engaging in conversation, no doubt composing a feature about mass hysteria for some future date.

Then Veseli was beside him, leaning over to talk quietly in his ear while he handed him a bratwurst, wrapped in a linen napkin. There was something hard inside, which Cal’s fingers identified as a key. With the babble of conversation there was no chance of either being overheard and it looked as if they were having a friendly chat.

‘Tonight, as Hitler is speaking, the Czech army will enter the so-called Sudetenland and stop all this nonsense.’

‘I thought-’

‘Never mind that. The key to his suite of offices is in your hand and a layout of the hotel is drawn on the napkin, showing the emergency exit from Henlein’s suite. The papers are in his safe and you have been given the means to get access to what you came for.’

‘I came under false pretences.’

‘You must forgive the general and I for deceiving you — that was essential.’

‘What if I decline to do it?’

‘Then I must, so please tell me quickly what you intend.’

‘How would you get away with it if you did it?’

‘I would not, Mr Jardine. I might succeed but I would not long survive since suspicion would soon fall on me. The best I could hope for is a firing squad.’

‘But you will take that risk?’

Veseli laughed. ‘It is not a risk, it is certain I would die.’

‘Who were you going to pass the papers to?’ Cal asked.

That was a solution to one conundrum he had in his bath: the Czech did not insult him by denying there was someone, but there was no way he was going to reveal any more.

‘If I depart this square, my absence will be noticed, for to do so when the Fuhrer is speaking would be seen as a gross insult to him…’

There was no way of faulting that statement; Veseli stood literally head and shoulders above most of his fellow men. He couldn’t move anywhere without it being spotted.

‘… while you can leave without raising even a slight eyebrow, especially if you claim to have eaten something that disagrees with you and which forces you to return to the hotel.’

‘The guards?’

‘Tonight, they will be here in the square, as will every Nazi in the town. None will want to miss this.’

‘The clerk at reception?’

Veseli pointed him out and also the Ice Maiden, standing next to Henlein, who was talking to Corrie, adding that the hotel would be practically deserted, given all the staff were rabid anti-Czechs if not quite National Socialists, while the guests had come specifically for this rally. It was not a residence for anyone not committed to the cause.

‘The news of the movements of the Czech army may come before Hitler is finished speaking, but it is hoped not. Either way, Henlein will seek to flee and to do that he needs his car, which is parked in the same place as your own.’

‘Though not without those documents.’

‘But hopefully you will have them and when he sees that they are gone he will not hang around to find out who stole them.’

‘Miss Littleton?’

‘I will make sure she is escorted to safety. Both you and she, being foreigners, will be free to travel through the army lines when things quieten down and it has already been arranged they will not attack the Victoria but the headquarters of Frank’s Nazis. Stay at the hotel and wait till order is restored.’

‘It is still dangerous.’

‘What can we do in these times without hazard, Herr Barrowman? Take those documents, give them to your government and let them know what that little Austrian bastard is really like.’

‘And what will you be doing?’

Veseli laughed softly. ‘Me, I will be starting a riot.’

Even with the babble of talk in the square the loudspeakers had been disseminating a sort of background growl, which was the audience at the Congress Hall in Nuremberg and that began to fade into silence.

Veseli managed one more point before the Cheb crowd followed suit. ‘I will also tell you that inside that safe is a large sum of money, subventions from the German Foreign Office, which Henlein uses to fund the SdP. I would not object if you took that too and found a better use for it.’

‘Noise?’ seemed an apposite question and he was not talking about that which was abating now.

‘Imagine what it will be like when the Fuhrer is insulting my poor country.’

The hush fell and there was an expectant silence from both the assembled crowd and the loudspeakers, which emitted only a steady crackle now. Then the loud voice spoke out, like a guards drill sergeant.

‘Der Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!’

The orchestra struck up with a patriotic march only to be overwhelmed as that ‘ Sieg Heil ’ was answered by thirty thousand throats in a deafening roar of welcome for the godlike master, which drowned out its brass instruments, while those at the Cheb rally now had their arms outstretched too and were yelling just as lustily.

The hails went on for an age and so emotional were the folk around the square that they had their eyes closed and were near to ecstasy. It was a great trick to pull, that long walk up the avenue of adoring acolytes, a march with glittering escorts and tessellated banners that raised to a supreme pitch the soaring sense of anticipation, even if it was invisible.

By the time the baying had died away and he said his first quiet words, all over the Reich and in many places beyond, most listening were in the palm of his hand, ready to be manipulated into a frenzy.

‘Meine Kameraden.’

It was his standard opening line and what followed was the usual guff, about when he had first decided that the Reich needed him and then responded, how in six years, with their help, he had raised Germany to the pinnacles on which it now stood. He would go on for certainly over an hour, sucking them in and making them believe these ‘good comrades’ were his inspiration instead of mere tools.

Slowly but surely the voice would rise as he recalled his own struggles, much magnified so they matched those of the nation: the glory and filth of army service, being gassed, the stab in the back that brought national humiliation and then the rebirth under his guiding hand, all the tropes by which Germans deluded themselves.

These were the kind of myths which turned rational human beings into cliched trotting dolts. As he had reflected many times, as a Scot, his own nation was not immune, though they did not turn to murder to prove them, more inclined to fire themselves up with a dram.

Cal could not wait for the insults to start, as Hitler damned everything and everyone who did not succumb to his genius, and now that he had manoeuvred himself out of sight of Corrie he clutched his stomach, put the now empty napkin to his mouth, looked pained and made his way out of the square.

As he passed Jimmy Garvin the youngster made to move. The blast for him to stay still was furious and the language left no doubt about what he would do to him if he followed. Out of sight and in deserted streets — the Czechs who lived here were inside with the blinds drawn and the doors barred — he could pick up his pace.

The garage was at the back of the hotel and open. Inside were Henlein’s Mercedes, a few other smaller vehicles and Cal’s Maybach. The box from the boot he wrapped in one of the blankets from the back seat, able to smile at the irony of their so-different purposes that day; the hunting knife he jammed in his trouser belt.

The back door led into a lobby and a set of uncarpeted wooden stairs that were used by the staff, which creaked alarmingly as he stepped on to them. On the grounds that being surreptitious was a bad idea he made his way up them and accepted the sound would be treated as normal to anyone who heard them.