Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

The Mühlbergers argued in whispers as Heinz painstakingly herded model pigs into a cardboard farmyard. How can we trust the Soviets since Stalin made his devil’s pact with Hitler? What if the British are secretly negotiating a peace with Germany? Heinz looked up at me.

‘Hans, we need you to run an errand.’

‘We shouldn’t involve him in this,’ Elsa protested. ‘He should be trying to organise the students. They’re the future.’

‘I think I’m about to recruit one of my fellows,’ I told her.

‘That’s good.’

‘But I’m not scared of carrying out actions for the Circle.’

‘Elsa, you know we can’t go ourselves.’

‘But—’

‘What is this errand, anyway?’ I asked.

Heinz beckoned me closer and told me of a woman with a message from British Intelligence, who wanted to work with the Circle and its contacts. She had information to prove that this proposition was genuine.

‘It’s too dangerous,’ Elsa murmured as she carefully placed in position a farmhouse fashioned from a box that had once contained sugar lumps.

‘Her name is Astrid Nagengast.’ Heinz gave me an address to memorise for the following evening. ‘Be careful.’ He smiled. ‘She’s a fortune-teller.’

When I got home my stupid parents were huddled around the wireless, the cheap little ‘people’s radio’ with its dial restricted to approved stations and its big round speaker that every household secretly knows as the ‘Goebbels-snout’. Fanfares preceded the announcement of the German army’s march into Athens. As I crept past, my father stood up and grabbed my arm.

‘Hear that?’ he declared, a fat tear rolling down his face. ‘England is finished! We’ll soon have vengeance for our Ernst.’

Next day when I told Kurt that I had to postpone our meeting until later that evening he became suspicious and provocative.

‘Are you on a secret mission?’

‘Please, Kurt, don’t make foolish jokes.’

‘Maybe you just don’t want to see me.’

‘Of course I do. We’ll talk later.’

Astrid Nagengast had a sharp face and bright eyes, with a mass of silver ringlets scattered across a high, proud forehead. It was hard to tell how old she was. Fifty? Sixty, even? What was certain was the striking elegance and vitality in her looks and demeanour. Age is life, the only real proof of it. Youth always seems closer to death, I thought, recalling the fallen blossom of the day before.

‘Do you know what you’ve come to collect?’ she asked me as she showed me into a small study cluttered with books and peculiar objects.

‘No.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s a simple thing, foolproof. It shouldn’t put you in any danger.’

There was an African mask on one wall, a chart of the zodiac on another. Above a desk littered with papers and curios hung an etching of some alchemical diagram. I looked around, wide-eyed.

‘Esoteric knowledge,’ she said with a smile. ‘Nothing to be afraid of.’

‘Are you really a fortune-teller?’

‘Well, one has to be careful. There’s been something of a clampdown in the past few years. It’s completely illegal in Berlin. I’m a voice teacher mostly. And a breath therapist, but I still have plenty of psychic consultations. If anything, there’s been a rise in demand.’

‘What?’

‘For astrologers, clairvoyants. The future has become a serious business lately. For example, so many people wanted to know when the time was right, you know, to leave.’

‘You mean Jews?’

‘Jews, yes, and others. Most of us left it too late.’ She sighed. ‘And there are the others who believe in it. I’ve had army officers as clients, worried about upcoming campaigns. It’s been amazing how many secrets they’ve let slip. Plenty of the higher-ups are superstitious too. We can use that against them. And they’ve had fortune on their side for so long, they’re scared that their luck is about to change. Well, it is.’

She opened a drawer in her desk, took something out and handed it to me. It was some strange kind of playing card. I looked at it. In profile a crowned and bethroned man held a sceptre and at his side was a golden shield emblazoned with an imperial eagle. The face of the figure was slightly smudged. At the top of the card was the number IV, at the bottom the legend: L’EMPEREUR.

‘That’s the message you’re to take to the Circle. It proves we’re acting in good faith.’

‘It’s a code?’

‘Yes. And if your friends are able to understand it, then it will in turn give us proof of the Circle’s operational status. In itself it’s a harmless token. If you get stopped and asked about it just say you found it in the street. Tell your friends that we need to pass something on to a contact in the Deputy Führer’s office.’

‘Another card?’

‘You’re a clever boy. There’ll be something else, too. But the cards are a good basic cypher. They’re a memory system. You’d better go now, you know far too much already.’

I called at Kurt’s flat on my way home. He lived in a fifth-storey apartment with a small balcony. Here we could converse freely, away from the anxious family table, far above the fear-haunted streets.

I talked about what had happened with my brother Ernst: how he had realised that the war was wrong, that everything the party said was a lie. I told him how Ernst had joined the Circle through the Mühlbergers and how I had become involved. Kurt shuddered when I told him about the atrocities Ernst had witnessed in Poland.

‘With so much of hell in the world,’ said Kurt, ‘there must be a heaven somewhere.’

‘We have to work for it,’ I told him. ‘For peace. For justice. There’s a group of us. Will you work with us?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I can hardly believe it, Hans. Is this real?’

‘Of course.’

‘But this evening, for example. You said you had to go somewhere, some secret mission or other. How do I know that it’s not all some sort of made-up story?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘I don’t know. It could be a trick. Or a trap.’

‘Kurt, really.’

‘Look, Hans, this is treason you’re asking me to get involved in.’

‘I know that.’

‘Then trust me. Show me something so that I know this isn’t just a game.’

I took out the playing card from my violin case and held it up. I explained to him that it contained a message.

‘How marvellous,’ said Kurt. ‘A code. Have you worked out what it means?’

‘Of course not. I’m simply meant to pass it on.’

‘Let me see it.’

He took it from me.

‘It’s some sort of trump card,’ he said.

‘It’s a memory system.’

‘Yes,’ Kurt squinted at it. ‘Number four, L’Empereur. The clue could be in the number and the arrangement of letters. Or in the image itself. The Holy Roman Emperor.’

‘Kurt, I don’t think we should be doing this. I’m just the messenger.’

‘See? The face has been marked. There’s a blot of red ink. Maybe that’s been deliberately added. It’s around the chin. The emperor with the bloodstained mouth. The bloodthirsty emperor?’

‘I’d better put it back.’

‘Of course!’ he suddenly exclaimed. ‘It’s the beard. See? The beard was white but it’s been coloured in. The emperor with the red beard. It’s Barbarossa!’

Of course we knew of Barbarossa, Emperor Frederick I who reigned in the second half of the twelfth century. We had often been told by our history teachers that it was Barbarossa who first established the German people as the true heirs of Roman imperial power. And there were many legends about him.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Is it true that he sleeps with his knights beneath Mount Kyffhausen?’