Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

‘Excellent!’ He glanced at Fraulein S and smiled. ‘Where would I be without you?’

One of the most valuable lessons that Lilya Simonova had learned during the frantic days as British Intelligence rushed her through her training at Beaulieu was that once she had convinced her sources of information that she could be trusted, the sources would repay this trust with loyalty of their own. After this, the sources would remain stubbornly faithful, not only because the bond between them had become a reality, but also because of how much they stood to lose if they were wrong. Not only the life of the agent, but also the lives of the sources depended on the appearance of truth.

To forge that bond with her enemy, knowing all along that it was balanced on a lie, had triggered in her moments of what bordered on compassion even for the monster that was Fegelein.

This was the hardest thing she had ever done. It would have been easier to kill Fegelein than to cultivate his loyalty and trust, even as she was betraying it herself. Before it all began, she would never even have considered herself capable of such a thing. But the war had made her a stranger, even to herself, and now she wondered if it would even be possible to return to a place where she could look in the mirror and recognise the person she had been.

It had taken many months to earn Fegelein’s trust. During this time, she had passed every test, both official and unofficial, which Fegelein could think to throw at her. On the advice of her handlers back in Britain, she had made no attempt to gather information during the time when she was being vetted. No contact had been established with courier agents. No messages had been transmitted. This was because of the danger that false information might be fed to her, and carefully monitored to see if Allied intelligence acted upon it. As Lilya later discovered, Fegelein had employed this tactic several times.

Back in England, Lilya had been told that she should become active as an agent only when she was absolutely certain that her source’s confidence had been secured. Her life depended on that decision. That much she had known from the start. What Lilya had not known, at least in the beginning, was that you could never be certain. All you could do was guess, hope that you were right, and begin.

That day came when Fegelein appointed her as his new driver, replacing the grimly scarred man who had held the job up until then. Usually, after his midday meetings with Hitler, it was Fegelein’s habit to spend the remainder of his time at the apartment of his mistress, leaving Lilya Simonova outside in the car in which Fegelein would leave behind the briefcase containing any briefing notes to his master, the Lord of the SS.

Fegelein left the briefcase in the car because he thought it would be safer there than in the house of Elsa Batz, whom he cared for, up to a point, but whom he did not trust.

Alone in the car, Simonova would read through the contents of the briefcase and, later, would deliver the information, along with any gossip she had picked up from Fegelein that day, to a courier agent, who then forwarded the details to England.

Lilya knew very little about the courier, other than the fact that he worked at the Hungarian Embassy.

For the transfer, Lilya would deposit information in the hollowed-out leg of a bench in the Hasenheide park, just across the road from the Garde-Pioneer tram station. Occasionally, messages would be left for her there, indicating that she was to make contact with her control officer in England, whom she knew only as ‘Major Clarke’. For this purpose, she had been issued a radio, to be used only in such emergencies.

Her last contact with Major Clarke had been only the day before, when he had ordered her to find out all she could about this Diamond Stream device.

And now there it was, barely an arm’s length away, resting on the dashboard of the car as they roared across the German countryside, bound for the lair of Heinrich Himmler.

‘Wait!’ Fegelein said suddenly. ‘Pull over! There’s something I forgot.’

Lilya jammed on the brakes and the car skidded to a halt, kicking up dust at the side of the road. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘It’s Elsa’s birthday.’ Fegelein looked at her helplessly. ‘We’ll have to turn around.’

‘And keep Himmler waiting?’

‘Better him than Elsa,’ mumbled Fegelein.

As she wheeled the car about, the chart case tumbled into Fegelein’s lap.

‘I won’t be long, but I’ll need you to wait in the car. You can look after this while I’m gone,’ Fegelein told her, replacing the map case on the dashboard.

‘Of course,’ she said quietly.

‘Where would I be without you, Fraulein S?’ repeated Fegelein. As he caught sight of her luminously blue eyes, his gaze softened with affection. Those eyes were like nothing he had ever seen before, and their effect on him had never lessened since the first day he caught sight of her in Paris. She was sitting at a desk in a dreary, smoke-filled room crowded with secretaries typing out documents for translation by the city’s German occupation government. Pale, bleached light glimmered down through window panels in the roof, whose glass was stained with smears of dirty green moss. Whenever he thought about that moment, Fegelein would hear again the deafening clatter of typewriters, pecking away like the beaks of tiny birds against his skull, and he remembered the instant when she had glanced up from her work and he first saw her face. He had never recovered from that moment, nor did he ever wish to.

‘Where would you be?’ she asked. ‘In search of the perfect word for your reports to the Reichsfuhrer. That is where you’d be.’

Her words were like a cup of cold water thrown into Fegelein’s face. ‘Exactly so,’ he replied brusquely, turning back to face the road. In that moment he realised that the reason he had not thrown himself at her long ago was because he had fallen in love with this woman, and he could not bring himself to treat her the way he had treated the others, and even his own dismally promiscuous wife.

‘Was that General Hagemann I saw with you on the steps of the Chancellery building?’ she asked.

‘He prefers to be called a professor,’ confirmed Fegelein, ‘but that was him all right, and since he has just misplaced a very valuable rocket, it may be the last time you see him.’

‘He lost a rocket?’

Fegelein explained what he had learned. ‘It’s probably at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, but I expect the old general would sleep a little better if he knew that for a fact. And I would sleep a little better, too, if you would take my advice and agree to carry a pistol. I’d be happy to provide you with one. These are dangerous times and they are likely to get more so in the days ahead. I gave one to Elsa, you know, and she seems happy with it!’

‘Perhaps because she needs it to defend herself against you.’

Fegelein laughed. ‘Even if that was the case, I’d have nothing to worry about! What Elsa needs more than anything is some lessons in target practice. Believe me, I tried to teach her, but it’s pretty much hopeless.’

‘Well, I don’t want a gun,’ said Lilya. ‘How many times have I told you that?’

‘I have lost count,’ admitted Fegelein, ‘but that doesn’t mean I’ll give up trying to make you see some sense.’

The truth was, Lilya did carry a weapon. It was a small folding knife with a stiletto point and a small device, like the head of a nail, fitted into the top of the blade which enabled the user to open the knife single-handedly and with only a flick of the thumb.

It had been a gift from a man she almost married long ago. One late summer day, they had gone on a picnic together to the banks of the Neva River outside St Petersburg and he had used the knife to peel the skin from an apple in a single long ribbon of juicy, green peel. Before them, white, long-legged birds moved with jerky and deliberate steps among the water lilies.