Richard Gordon: THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

'He's left us alone because he thinks he should show how he trusts us.'

'Oh, Jim, you are exasperating. He left us alone because he thinks I deserve a little adultery.'

In the bedroom she threw off her hat and a pair of orange laced-edged silk French knickers. But we were both so eager she fell on the coverlet in the rest of her outfit. I enjoyed Sir Edward's daughter while she was still in her mourning clothes from his funeral. Not bad for the butler's boy.

The fourth death could have been my own. The next day I called at Ainsley's office, which had files stacked everywhere and a busy air of closing down. 'This might interest you,' he said, sorting through a sheaf of photographs on his desk and flicking one towards me. It showed the page of a printed book, a column of names and addresses, each entry numbered, resembling a telephone directory. My own name struck me at once.

'Elgar, John,' the entry started in bold type. '1911. geb., Chemiker, London W. 1., Harley Street, RSHA IV E 12, Statpoleit Dьsseldorf.'

'That's from the Gestapo's Sonderfahndungsliste GB, Special Search List for Great Britain,' Ainsley told me cheerfully. 'Our Field Intelligence unearthed it. It contains about two and a half thousand names, put together by one of Himmler's boys called Schellenberg. You're in distinguished company. There's Noel Coward, David Low the cartoonist, Rebecca West, Gilbert Murray, Bertrand Russell…those figures after your name are the number of your file in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt.' That was the Reich Central Security Department. He folded his hands across his red knitted cardigan with a smile. 'They were going to establish Gestapo headquarters in London, Liverpool, Birmingham and so on.' Then for the first time I heard Ainsley laugh. 'Just think of the people you'd have to be seen dead with! I think Noel Coward made that remark about it.'

'I'm flattered the Nazis thought me so important in Wuppertal.'

Ainsley tossed another photograph across the desk, of a round-faced bespectacled nonentity in SS uniform, not unlike Himmler himself. 'That's SS Colonel Dr Franz Six, former professor of economics at Berlin University. He was to have been in charge of the fun. Instead, he had to content himself with the mass murder of Russians with his Einsatzgruppen. At the moment, thank God, we've got him locked up at Nьrnberg. Looks a nasty piece of work, doesn't he?'

'And thank God Hitler's Operation Sealion never came off.'

'I can console you that the invasion would have been an unmitigated disaster for the Nazis.'

'Because the RAF won the Battle of Britain?'

'No, my dear fellow.' He gave me a wise look. 'Because the Fleet was anchored at Scapa Flow. The Germans had no ships, and we could have blown their barges out of the water. Britain always wins wars by sea power. I fancy that Hitler's famous intuition told him that, as the man didn't know a bowsprit from a barnacle.'

It was almost two years later. I was having dinner with Jeff Beckerman at Munich in the middle of December, 1947. He had been driven in a US official car 150 miles from Stuttgart to meet me.

'Seeing you here's saved two precious days,' he declared jovially. 'Now I can cancel the Savoy and pick up the _Queen Mary_ from Cherbourg.'

'So Britain's not worth visiting any longer?'

'Commercially, no,' he replied frankly. 'Attlee's government may be swell for the British working man, but it doesn't exactly encourage anyone to try making any dough.'

Jeff lit a cigar between courses. He was still fatter, in a civilian suit like myself, with a flashy tie. We were both staying the night at a hotel run by the American Government for the flock of officials and businessmen at the time gently cropping its way across Germany. It was a warm, comfortable, well-stocked oasis in a city still dark, cold and damaged.

Our table was by an upstairs window, and I could look over the Marienplatz by the Munich Rathaus, where about noon on November 9, 1923, Hitler and his Brownshirts picked up Julius Streicher on their way to the Feldherrenhalle, where the Nazi revolution came to grief under the muzzles of the police carbines. In his triumphal days, Hitler ceremoniously retraced the route, Gцring, Ribbentrop and the rest all marching in jackboots along the tramlines.

I recalled the official photographs Ainsley had shown me, taken at Nьrnberg in the early hours of October 16, 1946. The same Nazis were lying on top of plain black-painted coffins against a background of brick, the cut nooses still round their necks, each body neatly labelled with an adhesive strip. Ribbentrop wore a dark striped suit and stylish tie, Keitel's face was a mask of blood, Frick wore the sporty tweed jacket he had affected during his trial, and Gцring having pre-empted the hangman lay on an Army blanket with his right eye a little open, looking at the camera with a wink of death.

We talked about prewar days in Wuppertal. I told him of Gerda, with a child from some unknown SS Schьtze. She could never know that I had brought her the penicillin. But she had written effusively thanking me for the bar of chocolate. 'Did you really have a contact with the German generals before the war?' I asked Jeff with curiosity. 'You remember, when you would have prevented the whole thing if the Foreign Office man hadn't fobbed you off with teacakes.'

'Sure I had.'

'Was it Gerda herself? I often thought so.'

'No, but you know him. Herr Fritsch.' I frowned. The name meant nothing. 'The manager of the brewery, who always wore a wing collar.'

'But he was a nonentity!'

'He'd have liked you to think so, for safety's sake. He'd dropped the "von". He was related to Werner von Fritsch, who was Army Commander in Chief before Hitler got rid of him in the spring of 1938. He resigned after some homosexual scandal had been cooked up by the Nazis. Who knows? If they'd taken me seriously in London, you and I might be sitting here now amid scenes of peace and prosperity.'

I was still mystified over Jeff's urgency to see me. 'I'm flattered you drove all this way,' I told him.

'You needn't be. It's a matter of business. I came to Munich with a specific purpose. To ask if you'll work for me again.'

'But I've already got a job. I'm going to be a professor.'

'Professor"!' He did not hide his contempt.

'Besides, I can't possibly move to the States. For domestic reasons.'

'The job isn't in the States. It's right here in Germany. I'm restarting operations in a big way. You think I'm crazy?'

'Of course I do. Germany's just a scrap heap from the North Sea to the Alps. They're even talking of demolishing what's left of the factories and turning the country into the biggest farm on earth.'

'Sure. But Germany can't go on being the poor-house of Europe for ever. Germany's a country with a future. Look what's happened already. We re-established the Lдnder, putting back the calendar to the peaceful days of little kings and cuckoo-clocks before Bismarck. We found enough Weimar politicians who'd somehow kept out of trouble under Hitler-there weren't any left alive who'd stood up to him. We even put up Communists, for God's sake. Then we let them have elections, back in 1946. Nothing like starting training in democracy early.'

'Hitler was democratically elected,' I reminded him.

'He would not be elected again. When your guts are ripped out, you're in no mood to try charging the enemy. Listen, it's going to be like this. The Four-Power Council has been deadlocked for months. Right? The Russians would like to extend Communism to the Rhine, we'd like to extend Democracy to the Vistula. Those are two impossibilities. So the Russians will eat their share of the Germans like cannibals. We shall invite our share to sit down and halve the goodies. The western Lдnder will have to combine into a new Republic sooner or later, just to face up to the Russians.'