Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

Seeing this as a personal betrayal of the trust he had placed in Hunyadi, Hitler ordered the detective to be arrested, stripped of his membership in the Berlin Police Department and sent to Flossenburg. There, he was to await a trial whose outcome was a foregone conclusion.

In November of 1944, Leopold Hunyadi was dragged from his cell, and hauled before a magistrate in an improvised courtroom at the Flossenburg mess hall, where he received the news that he had been sentenced to death by hanging.

From that day to this, Hunyadi had lived in a kind of suspended animation, never knowing which day was to be his last. In the beginning, each time he heard footsteps in the hall outside his cell, his heart would clench like a fist at the thought that they were coming for him now. This happened so many hundreds of times that he grew numb to it, as if a part of him had already departed from his body and was waiting, somewhere beyond the concrete wall, for the rest to follow.

Although the tiny window in his cell was too high up for him to have a view, he could sometimes hear the wooden trapdoor of the gallows clunking open in the courtyard just outside his room. Rather than terrifying Hunyadi, the sound gave him comfort, because it meant that the Flossenburg gallows was operating on a drop system, which would kill its victims quickly, rather than a different method, also in use, by which men would be hoisted up a pole and left to dangle while they slowly choked to death.

To pass the time, Hunyadi made contact with the men on either side of him. He could not see or speak to them, so he employed a system known as the Polybius Square, which separated the alphabet into five rows of five letters, each letter in its own box, and with C and K in the same box. By tapping a heating pipe that ran through the rooms, the first set of taps indicating the horizontal position and the second set showing the vertical position within the box, it was possible to spell out letters.

Hunyadi had learned the system early in his career and had often eavesdropped on conversations between prisoners when carrying out investigations, sometimes even using the system to communicate with prisoners he had arrested, who mistook him for another prisoner and often divulged information that they would never have told the police.

Men came and went; all of them high-ranking officers, government officials or political prisoners. From this, Hunyadi came to understand that this particular prison block at Flossenburg had been selected as the final destination for those whose exits from this world had been decreed by the Fuhrer himself.

From newcomers, Hunyadi learned about the advance of the Allied armies, and he guessed that it would not be long before either the Russians or the Americans overran the camp. While his fellow prisoners tapped out their messages of hope that the Allies would save them, Hunyadi realised that the approach of these armies would only hasten their deaths.

The sun had just set that day when the door swung open and a guard named Krol walked in.

Hunyadi had been lying on his bunk. Now he sat up in confusion. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘Get undressed,’ ordered the guard.

Hunyadi, who had been asleep when Krol opened the door, was at first so confused by this command that he just sat on his bunk and did not move.

Angered by Hunyadi’s stupor, Krol stepped forward and fetched the detective a mighty slap across the face. ‘Strip, damn you!’ he bellowed.

Blearily, Hunyadi obeyed.

When at last he stood naked in front of Kroll, the guard turned and marched out of the room. ‘Follow me!’ he commanded.

As Hunyadi left his cell for the first time in months, another guard fell in behind him and he walked between the two men, the almost noiseless shuffle of his bare feet in stark contrast to the crunch of the guards’ hobnailed boots upon the concrete floor.

It was only when they turned a corner and he could see the courtyard dead ahead, that he finally grasped what was happening.

His heart began to thunder, as if it was trying to hammer its way out of his chest.

He could see the gallows now, and on it were three nooses, hanging side by side. Two men, as naked as Hunyadi, stood with the nooses in front of them, hands bound behind their backs. Nobody stood behind the third noose, and Hunyadi understood that it was meant for him.

He did not recognise the men. The paleness of their flesh appeared grotesque.

Why do they need us to be naked? Hunyadi wondered to himself. What final insult is this?

He was halfway across the courtyard now. Little pebbles in the gravel dug into his heels.

He thought of Franziska. He wondered what she was doing now. He had heard stories of people feeling something they described as a kind of snapping shock at the moment when their loved ones passed away, as if some invisible thread were snapping. I wonder if she’ll feel it, thought Hunyadi.

And then suddenly Hunyadi realised that the terror which had haunted him for so many days that he could no longer recall what it felt like to live without it was only the fear of dying and not of death itself.

As soon as he understood that, even the fear of dying lost its grip on him and faded away into the still air of the courtyard.

Krol turned and looked back at Hunyadi, to make sure that the man had not begun to falter. And the guard, who had led so many men to their deaths these past few months, was astonished to see Hunyadi smiling.

‘Stop!’ called a voice.

All three men, the two guards and Hunyadi, came to an abrupt halt. They turned in unison to see a man, wearing the finely tailored uniform of a camp administrator, come tumbling out of the same doorway from which they had only just emerged.

‘What is it?’ demanded Krol.

‘Bring him back,’ said the man.

‘I will not!’ roared Krol. ‘I have my orders!’

‘Your orders have been overruled,’ said the administrator, ‘unless you’d care to take it up with General Rattenhuber in Berlin!’

Krol blinked, as if a bright light was suddenly shining into his face. Grabbing Hunyadi by the arm, he marched the naked man back inside, followed by the second guard, who looked as confused as his prisoner.

As the three men stepped into the shadows of the concrete block house, they heard the heavy clunk of gallows trap doors swinging open.

‘What is happening?’ stammered Hunyadi.

To this, Krol just shook his head in stunned amazement.

‘What’s happening,’ explained the administrator, ‘is that your death has been postponed.’

‘But why?’

‘You have a friend in high places, Hunyadi. Very high places indeed.’

‘Hitler?’ gasped Hunyadi.

The administrator nodded.

‘But he’s the one who put me here!’ shouted Hunyadi. ‘I demand an explanation!’ But even as he spoke, Hunyadi became aware of how difficult it was to make demands of any kind when fat, middle-aged and the only naked man in the room.

The administrator, who had retrieved Hunyadi’s clothes from his cell, now dumped the reeking garments at his feet. ‘Ask him yourself when you see him,’ he said.

‘Pekkala,’ said Stalin, as soon as Major Kirov had left the room, ‘there is something we need to discuss.’

‘Can this not wait?’ asked Pekkala. ‘Every minute that I linger here in Moscow brings Hunyadi one step closer to Lilya.’

‘It concerns Lilya,’ answered Stalin, ‘and her family, as well.’

‘You mean her husband and their child?’

‘Exactly. So you have not forgotten them?’

‘Of course not,’ replied Pekkala. ‘I still remember the photograph you showed me, back when I first agreed to work with you.’

‘Yes.’ Stalin paused to clear his throat in a long, gravelly eruption from his smoke-clogged lungs. ‘Let us talk about that picture.’