Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

“Look, without hearing the tape, my opinion is this: The whole thing has been cooked up by the Russians to blackmail the British secret service using Burgess and you as cutouts. You’re the back door to MI6 and MI5.”

“Story of my life,” muttered Maugham.

“Harold Heinz Hebel is possibly working for Soviet intelligence. The GRU. The KGB. Who knows which service? But it has to be a strong possibility that he came by this tape because the Russians gave it to him. He tells me he wants money for the tape or else he’ll send it to the New York Times .”

“How much money does he want?”

“Two hundred thousand dollars.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I expect Hebel thinks you are best placed to pay the blackmail money yourself and then persuade-not to say blackmail-the British to pay you that money back. There’s Hebel’s security to think about, too. It’s one thing blackmailing the British down here on the French Riviera. It would be something else to try it in London.”

“Could the Russians really be in it for the money? Nothing else?”

“I don’t know. Look, this isn’t supposed to be a joke, but the opportunities for the USSR to trade with capitalist countries for some much needed foreign currency are limited. It just might be that extortion is their best export right now.”

“And who better to extort money from than the British security services?” said Maugham. “It’s like something out of a novel by John Buchan. Yes. I may not be in the security service loop anymore, but undeniably the last few years have been an intelligence disaster for my country. Richard Hannay may save the day for queen and country, but there are plenty of others who have managed to comprehensively fuck it up: Alan May, Burgess and Maclean, and the fellow now serving fourteen years in prison for handing all our atomic secrets over to the Russians-Klaus Fuchs. By all accounts, the American FBI thinks the British security services are a contradiction in terms, a laughingstock, and they’re probably not wrong. A lot has changed since my own service in nineteen seventeen. We were good then. Formidable. Back then boys went up to Cambridge from their public schools to learn how to be lawyers and civil servants, not Russian spies. Undoubtedly the British government would indeed prefer to keep all of this very quiet. Especially now there’s a possibility of our two countries renewing their cooperation on atomic research. And while there’s no danger of any of the British newspapers being permitted to publish any of these revelations, American papers are a lot harder to control. Two hundred thousand is probably cheap next to the price of what it’s costing Britain to develop an atomic bomb on its own account. Having said that, two hundred thousand is a lot of money for me. A hell of a lot.” He sighed. “Suppose I stump up the cash and the British refuse to reimburse me? What then? Some of these Whitehall people are very tight with money, you know. I mean, really stingy.”

“Then you send it to the New York Times yourself.”

“Would that make me a traitor? I don’t know.”

“I’d say a good lawyer might convincingly argue that you bought the tape to protect the interests of your country. But that your country let you down.”

“Yes, there is that argument, I suppose.”

I shrugged. “Wait and hear the tape. Who knows? Maybe you’ll think it’s someone else’s problem after you’ve listened to it.”

“Tell me about this man, Harold Heinz Hebel. What else do you know about him?”

“He’s a rat who’s giving rats a bad name.”

“You already told me how he blackmailed that poor German captain, von Frisch, in nineteen thirty-eight. But you also said that you met him again, during the war.”

“That’s right. It was East Prussia. The winter of nineteen forty-four to forty-five. And that was the last time I spoke to him until this morning at the Grand Hotel.”

“I think that before we go any further you’re going to have to tell me about that. In fact, you need to tell me all you know about our friend Harold Hebel. If I’m going to contact my friends in MI6 to ask for their help here, they will certainly need to know everything you know about this awful man.”

“He’s an opportunistic survivor who lives near humans and needs to be exterminated because he carries disease. He’s a rat. A rat that deserves to be drowned in a bucket. Now, let me explain why. Let me tell you about what happened in Konigsberg.”

KONIGSBERG

1944-1945

I always loved Konigsberg. The capital of East Prussia, it was a beautiful old city and, in many ways, very like Berlin. My mother was from Konigsberg, and when I was a child, we used to go there to visit her parents, who ran a Viennese-style cafe and confectionery near the Kaiser Bridge, and occasionally, to take a beach holiday at the nearby seaside town of Cranz. But most of all I remember the Konigsberger Zoo in the Tiergarten, which was one of the best in Europe and I can still recall, aged four, riding on the back of the elephant and seeing the bears. The bear pit at the zoo was even bigger and better than the one in Berlin. My grandfather owned a Mercedes-Benz-one of the first cars in Konigsberg-and, to me, riding in the back of that car was almost as good as riding on the back of the elephant. Until they lost everything in the inflation of 1923 my grandparents were reasonably well off, I think. My grandmother was a good woman, always helping other people. There was a Jewish convalescent home in Luisenthal where she often took unsold cakes from the cafe and I used to wonder why it should have been this place that should receive her charity. Now I know why; she was herself half-Jewish. Much later, in 1919, my first wife and I went there on our honeymoon and we stayed in my grandparents’ villa on the Upper Pond, which seemed to us like the last word in gracious living. We must have visited every attraction the city had to offer, including the Amber Museum-Konigsberg is famous for its German gold, as amber is sometimes called-the Prussia Museum, and the zoo, of course, but mostly we just sat in the front garden and stared out at the pond. It was a very happy time for me. The war was over and I was still alive, with all my limbs intact, and in love. My wife adored the place and for a while we even thought about living there. In retrospect, I wish we had. Maybe she would have been spared the influenza that killed her not long afterward. The flu wasn’t as bad in Konigsberg as in Berlin. Fewer people to spread it, probably; there were only three hundred thousand people living there in the twenties, as opposed to the four million in Berlin.

My being sent to Konigsberg in 1944 was supposed to be a punishment and feel like an exile from Berlin, but to me it felt like I was almost going home, especially as, until that summer, the city and most of East Prussia had been largely untouched by the war. As things turned out it was perhaps fortunate I was away from Berlin and out of anyone’s mind when Count von Stauffenberg made his failed attempt at a coup in July 1944, otherwise I might have been swept up in the wave of executions that followed. More than a hundred kilometers to the southeast of Konigsberg, Hitler came on German radio and announced he was alive, and if anyone was there to witness a demonstration of loyalty and affection-but only if they were-people breathed a great sigh of relief.

I was a lowly lieutenant, an officer attached to the 132nd Infantry Division and the FHO-the branch of German military intelligence responsible for the Eastern Front-and it was my job to help make meaningful assessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions, and communicate these with the army commanders on Paradeplatz. Those assessments were very simple: The Red Army was poised to annihilate us.