Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

With his mind set on vengeance, Rattenhuber sifted through the list of Chancellery employees. For a while, he had fastened on a bad-tempered old janitor named Ziegler, who had worked at the Chancellery for years. Hauling him off to Gestapo headquarters, located in the crypt of the now-ruined Dreifaltigkeit church on Mauerstrasse, it was Rattenhuber himself who conducted the interrogation. But it quickly became apparent that Ziegler had nothing to hide. He was what he was – just a surly, ill-mannered floor-sweeper with a grudge against all of humanity.

After Ziegler, there were no more leads, and the stone-like face of Rattenhuber, the once-unshakeable Munich detective, was unable to conceal his helplessness.

Standing in the briefing room, Rattenhuber’s head almost touched the low concrete ceiling. Directly above him, an electric light dimmed and brightened with the fluctuating power of the generator.

Of all the fortresses which Hitler had put into use, Rattenhuber hated this bunker the most. Worst of all was the quality of the air. There were times when he had virtually staggered up the stairs to the main floor of the Chancellery building. Gasping, he would lean against the wall, two fingers hooked inside his collar to allow himself to breathe.

Hitler sat by himself. Except for a single sheet of paper, the table in front of him was bare.

Rattenhuber came to attention.

Hitler ignored the salute. Without even looking up, he slid the piece of paper across to Rattenhuber.

The general picked it up. It was a list of Knight’s Cross recipients. ‘Why am I looking at this?’ he asked, laying the page back on the table.

Hitler reached across and tapped one finger on the page. ‘It never left the bunker.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘Indeed it is,’ Hitler confirmed, ‘because this morning, Der Chef broadcast it to the world.’

There was no need to explain any more. Rattenhuber knew exactly what this meant. The blood drained out of his face. ‘I will begin an investigation immediately,’ he said.

Slowly Hitler shook his head. ‘You had your chance,’ he muttered. ‘I am giving this job to Inspector Hunyadi.’

‘Hunyadi!’ exclaimed the general. ‘But he’s in prison! You put him there yourself. He is due to be executed any day now. For all I know, he might already be dead.’

‘Then you had better hope it’s not too late,’ said Hitler. ‘You have already failed me twice, Rattenhuber. First, you let them try to blow me to pieces. Then you stand around uselessly while this spy roams the bunker at will. Now I am ordering you to bring me Hunyadi. Fail me again, Rattenhuber, and you will take that man’s place at the gallows.’

Following the directions that Stalin had written down for him, Pekkala made his way to a narrow dreary street in the Lefortovo District of the city. He rattled the gate at 17 Rubzov Lane – a dirty yellow apartment building with mildew growing on the outer wall – until the caretaker, a small hunched man in a blue boiler suit with a brown corduroy patch sewn into the seat, finally emerged from his office to see what the fuss was about.

‘He’s just moved in,’ said the caretaker, when Pekkala had explained who he was looking for.

He unlocked the gate and led Pekkala to a door on the ground floor of the building. ‘In there, he should be,’ said the man, then shuffled back to the office, in which Pekkala could see a huge grey dog, some kind of wolfhound, lying on a blanket beside a stove.

Pekkala pounded on the door and then stood back. The curtain of the single window facing out into the courtyard fluttered slightly and then the door opened a crack.

‘Comrade Garlinski,’ said Pekkala.

‘Yes?’ answered a frightened voice.

‘I hear you’ve just arrived from England.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Only to talk.’

‘Who sent you?’

Pekkala held up his red Special Operations pass book, with its faded gold hammer and sickle on the front.

The door opened a little wider now and the frightened-looking man who had, until the week before, been the head of operations at Unit 53A, the British Special Operations listening post at Grantham Underwood, appeared from the shadows. Even though it was the middle of the afternoon, Garlinski had been asleep. With orders not to leave the flat, he had little else to do except to make his way through the meagre rations that had been left for him in the kitchen. ‘Talk about what?’ he asked the stranger.

‘An agent of yours named Christophe,’ answered Pekkala.

Garlinski blinked at him in astonishment. ‘How the hell do you know about that? I haven’t even been debriefed yet.’ And now he opened the door wide, allowing Pekkala to enter.

Inside, there was almost no furniture; only a chair pulled up next to the stove. The walls were bare, with fade marks on the cream-coloured paint where pictures had once hung. His bed was a blue and white ticking mattress lying on the floor, with an old overcoat for a blanket.

‘Look where they dumped me,’ said Garlinski. ‘After all I’ve done, I thought I’d get some kind of hero’s welcome. Instead, I get this.’ He raised his hands and let them fall again with a slap against his thighs.

With only one chair between them, both men sat down with their back against the wall. Sitting side by side, they stared straight ahead as they conversed.

‘What is it you want to know?’ asked Garlinski.

‘Why were you in such a hurry to leave England?’

‘I thought that my cover was blown,’ explained Garlinski, ‘or that it was about to be, at any rate.’

‘What happened?’

‘I was on my way home from the relay station,’ explained Garlinski. ‘In my briefcase, I had several messages that had come in from SOE agents which I planned to copy and send out to Moscow that evening.’

‘Why were you bringing them home with you?’

‘Because that’s where I kept my transmitter,’ said Garlinski. ‘Of course, we weren’t allowed to leave with these messages, but since I was in charge of the relay station, no one ever checked. Until last week, that is.

‘I got stopped at a police checkpoint two blocks from my house. They were looking for black marketers. When they opened my briefcase, they saw the messages and decided to hold on to them until they had been cleared.’

‘Couldn’t you have told them you were working for SOE?’

‘I could have, but it would only have made things worse. SOE would have come down on me like a ton of bricks for removing messages from the station.’

‘What did you tell the police?’

‘I said I was trying to invent a new code for the army to use. I went on about it long enough that they must have thought I was telling the truth. They still held on to the messages, though, and I knew it was only a matter of time before someone figured out what I was up to. That’s why I had to leave.’

‘How did you get out of the country so quickly?’ asked Pekkala.

‘There was a safe house, right outside the underground station at the Angel up in Islington. I went straight there and your people arranged for my disappearance.’

‘Did SOE ever suspect you might be working for Russian Intelligence?’

‘If they did, I wouldn’t be here now, but I don’t know how much better off I am, left to rot in a place like this.’

‘At least you are alive.’

‘If you can call this living,’ muttered Garlinski.

‘How do you know about Christophe?’ asked Pekkala.

‘Only that the agent’s messages come through our station. My job is simply to take in the raw material, decode it and send it up the chain, and all as quickly as possible. What I can tell you is that the stuff Christophe sent us was usually a mixture of gossip, scandal and shuffles in the High Command. I hear the British use it on the radio stations which they broadcast into enemy territory. It was all pretty straightforward until about ten days ago.’