Frederick Forsyth - The Deceiver

Nothing happened for a while. After two minutes there was a shuffling sound, and the door opened slowly. Fräulein Neumann was very old, in a black dress, white-haired, and she supported herself on two canes. McCready judged her to be in her late eighties. She looked up at him and said, “ Ja ?”

He smiled broadly as if in recognition.

“Yes, it is you, Fräulein. You have changed. But not more than me. You won’t remember me. Martin Kroll. You taught me at primary school forty years ago.”

She stared at him levelly, bright blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses.

“I happened to be in Weimar today. From Berlin, you know. I live there now. And I wondered if you were still here, The telephone directory listed you. I just came on the off chance. May I come in?”

She stood aside, and he entered. A dark hall, musty with age. She led the way, hobbling on arthritic knees and ankles, into her sitting room, whose windows looked down on the street. He waited for her to sit, then took a chair.

“So I taught you once, in the old primary school on Heinrich Heinestrasse. When was that?”

“Well, it must have been ’43 and ’44. We were bombed out. From Berlin. I was evacuated here with others. Must have been the summer of ’43. I was in a class with ... ach , the names—well, I recall Bruno Morenz. He was my buddy.”

She stared at him for a while, then pulled herself to her feet. He rose. She hobbled to the window and looked down. A truck full of VOPOs rumbled past. They all sat upright, their Hungarian AP9 pistols bolstered on their belts.

“Always the uniforms,” she said softly as if talking to herself. “First the Nazis, now the Communists. And always the uniforms and the guns. First the Gestapo, and now the SSD. Oh, Germany, what did we do to deserve you both?”

She turned from the window. “You are British, aren’t you? Please sit down.”

McCready was glad to do so. He realized that despite her age, she still had a mind like a razor.

“Why do you say such an extraordinary thing?” he asked indignantly. She was not fazed by his show of anger.

“Three reasons. I remember every boy I ever taught at that school during the war and afterward, and there was no Martin Kroll among them. And second, the school was not on Heinrich Heinestrasse. Heine was Jewish, and the Nazis had erased his name from all streets and monuments.”

McCready could have kicked himself. He should have known that the name of Heine, one of Germany’s greatest writers, was restored only after the war.

“If you scream or raise the alarm,” he said quietly, “I will not harm you. But they will come for me and take me away and shoot me. The choice is yours.”

She hobbled to her seat and sat down. In the manner of the very old, she began to reminisce.

“In 1934 I was a professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. The youngest, and the only woman. The Nazis came to power. I despised them. I said so. I suppose I was lucky—I could have been sent to a camp. But they were lenient; I was sent here, to teach primary school to the children of farm laborers.

“After the war I did not go back to the Humboldt. Partly because I felt the children here had as much right to the teaching I could give them as the smart youth of Berlin; partly because I would not teach the Communist version of lies, either. So, Mr. Spy, I will not raise the alarm.”

“And if they capture me anyway, and I tell them about you?”

She smiled for the first time.

“Young man, when you are eighty-eight, there is nothing they can do to you that the good Lord is not going to do quite soon now. Why did you come?”

“Bruno Morenz. You do remember him?”

“Oh, yes, I remember him. Is he in trouble?”

“Yes, Fräulein, bad trouble. He is here, not far away. He came on a mission—for me. He fell ill, sick, in the head. A complete breakdown. He is hiding out there somewhere. He needs help.”

“The police, all those soldiers—they are for Bruno?”

“Yes. If I can get to him first, I may be able to help. Get him away in time.”

“Why did you come to me?”

“His sister in London, she said he had told her very little of his two years here during the war. Just that he had been very unhappy, and his only friend had been his schoolteacher, Fräulein Neumann.”

She rocked backward and forward for some time.

“Poor Bruno,” she said at length. “Poor, frightened Bruno. Always so frightened. Of the shouting and the pain.”

“Why was he frightened, Fräulein Neumann?”

“He came from a Social Democrat family in Hamburg. His father was dead, in the bombing, but he must have made some uncomplimentary remark about Hitler in his home before he died. Bruno was billeted with a farmer outside the town, a brutal man who drank much. Also, an ardent Nazi. One evening Bruno must have said something he learned from his father. The farmer took his belt to him and whipped him. Hard. After that, he did it many times. Bruno used to run away.”

“Where did he hide, Fräulein? Please, where?”

“In the barn. He showed me once. I had gone to the farm to remonstrate with the farmer. There was a barn at the far end of the hay meadow, away from the house and the other barns. He made a hole in the hay bales up in the loft. He used to crawl in there and wait until the farmer had fallen into his usual drunken sleep.”

“Where, exactly, was the farm?”

“The hamlet is called Marionhain. I think it is still there. Just four farms in a group. All collectivized now. It lies between the villages of Ober and Nieder Grünstedt. Take the road out toward Erfurt. Four miles out, turn left down a track. There is a signpost. The farm was called Müller’s Farm, but that will be changed now. It probably just has a number. But if it is still there, look for a barn set two hundred yards away from the group, at the end of the meadow. Do you think you can help him?”

McCready rose.

“If he is there, Fräulein, I will try. I swear I will try. Thank you for your help.”

He turned at the door.

“You said there were three reasons you thought I was English, but you gave me only two.”

“Oh, yes. You are dressed as a farm worker, but you said you came from Berlin. There are no farms in Berlin. So you are a spy. Either working for them”—she jerked her head toward the window, where another truck rumbled past—“or for the other side.”

“I could have been an agent for the SSD.”

She smiled again. “No, Mister Englander. I remember the British officers from 1945, for a short while before the Rus­sians came. You are much too polite to be SSD.”

The track off the main road was where she had said it would be, to the left, toward the tract of rich farmland that lies between Highway Seven and the Autobahn E40. A small sign said OBER GRÜNSTEDT. He cycled down the track to a junc­tion a mile farther on. The road split. To his left lay Nieder Grünstedt. He could see a wall of green uniforms surrounding it. On either side of him lay fields of uncut maize, five feet high. He crouched low over the handlebars and pedaled away to his right. He skirted Ober Grünstedt and saw an even narrower track. Half a mile down it, he could make out the roofs of a group of farmhouses and barns, built in the Thuringian style with steeply sloped tiles, towering peaks, and tall wide doors to admit the hay wains to the hollow square yards inside. Marionhain.

He did not want to pass through the hamlet. There might be farm workers there who would clearly spot him as a stranger. He hid his bicycle in the maize and climbed a gate to get a better view. To his right he saw a single tall barn, of brick and black-tarred timbers, set away from the main group. Crouching inside the maize, he began to work his way around the hamlet toward it. On the horizon the tide of green uniforms began to move out of Nieder Grünstedt.