The seventh of december, p.34
The Seventh of December, page 34
"There's another thing… "
As he looked at me, he slowly cocked his head to one side, and then smiled. "You want me to tell a lie."
That was the problem of being a twin; he knew me too well. "I just want you to save a situation, that's all. By the time you get home I'll have managed to get the documents back; there's no doubt about that, I will have them - you know what I'm like when I have a bone to pick."
"And I also know what you're like when you've got a bone to point, Tommy."
We both laughed with the same laugh that we had done the whole of our lives. 'Pointing the bone' was the Aboriginal way of planting a death curse, and neither of us was in doubt that the bone was pointing firmly in Stanislaus's direction. No one could try to kill my brother and hope to get away scot-free.
"When you do get back to London, you must keep stumm about what went down here, okay?"
"Jeeze, Tommy… "
"Invoke the Official Secrets Act - that'll shut them up."
Michael didn't look too happy, but he knew where this was heading.
"I want you to say that we agreed the documents would be safer with me, and that's why you didn't bring them back with you - if Steve asks why, just say I pulled rank. As to where I went after I left you, you have no idea. All I would say was that I was on some secret mission for the Government in the south of France. Shorty already knows what I'm up to in Bayonne, and is sworn to secrecy; you must get him alone and make him promise to say nothing to his uncle. Say that it came from me. I don't want you to tell them anything about Stanislaus, or Elizabeth's treachery, and certainly nothing about her plan to kill both you and Steve."
"Just in case either or both of them decide to hop in a plane and parachute down to give you a hand?"
"Give me a hand? Get in the way, you mean."
"And how do I explain my gunshot wound?"
"Ah, come on, brother! You're an adventurer; you can think up some scenario that involves escaping the clutches of a handsome, leather-clad Nazi with designs on your virginity… "
"Let's not get too carried away, Tommy." He guffawed until the pain made him clutch his side. "Okay, I do understand, and mum's the word. I'll make something up, and then you can tell them the truth when you get back home - you hear me? I said when, not if. Understood?"
"I will be home; I have a date with a Yank, remember?"
"Very well, on your own head be it. But, Tommy, Mum would kill me if she knew I was lying for you."
"And we both know that you've never, ever lied for me before… "
"Nor you for me, either… "
I chuckled, and then kissed his temple. "I love you, Michael."
"I know that, brother. Now, what are you going to do about Elizabeth?"
"It all depends on the results of my visit to Stanislaus tonight. If he's got the documents, and I get them back from him, I won't need to go to Mulhouse to pay my respects to Elizabeth - I'll write her a note telling her the game's up and that she has until the end of the week to get out of the country. Then I'll write a second letter and post it without a stamp - that'll delay delivery by about four or five days. I'll send it to the Sicherheitspolizei, telling them she's been a naughty girl."
"A naughty girl? Steve and I would both be dead if she had her way - "
"Michael," I said, interrupting him. "What would you rather have? Elizabeth dead, or spending the rest of her life in hiding, looking over her shoulder and regretting her choices? I want her to agonise about her every move until her dying day. If things go according to plan, Stanislaus will be dead meat by morning - I'll have to confront him face to face, and I can't afford for word to get around that I've been back in Germany. Once I'm holding the documents in my hot little hand, I'll get rid of the snivelling piece of shit and then write my letter to Miss Peterson."
"Once she's out of the country, what's to stop Elizabeth calling in some favours, Tommy? Her father's a rich man."
"I don't care how rich he is, but he cut her off, remember? I'll make sure that I spell it out in my letter to her that she'll no longer be welcome anywhere in the Britain, or the Empire, and will be considered 'undesirable' by both SOE and MI6."
She would understand that these two agencies would circulate her name; effectively it meant she would be fair game for any British agent who ran across her. They would bring her in if they could. If not? Well, in the long run she would be considered a traitor and therefore an open target.
"I'll also make it clear that I'm letting Bill Donovan know about her plan to sell the documents to the US, which means she won't get a warm welcome at home either."
"What happens if she changes her mind and decides to donate the material once she knows that you've spilled the beans?"
"I'm betting it will already be too late, Mikey," I said. "Knowing Elizabeth the way I do, I guarantee that her first letter of negotiation has already been written and posted. Also, don't forget that you, Steve and I can prove that she and Stan were in this together; the fact that he shot you puts them both on the hit list."
He nodded. "So… South America, then?"
"That's where I'd go if I were her."
What I knew, but Michael and the others didn't, was that Elizabeth was still on the payroll of the US Foreign Service. During her time in the Spanish Civil War she had reported on the movements of American civilians who had gone there to fight. She'd been receiving a stipend from the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation since 1935.
And, as a continuing employee of Uncle Sam, her letter, asking for money for information of this magnitude, could be easily construed as treason.
If I killed Stanislaus tonight, and then wrote the letter straight away, it would give her perhaps two days to flee Germany. Otherwise, she'd disappear into the great Nazi mincing machine.
"Check my soutane, please, Auntie."
"God will strike you down, Thomas," Aunt Berthilde replied, adjusting the rosary at my waist.
I had decided to travel as a priest, using the robe Père Christophe had given me. "But I'm travelling as a Huguenot priest, Auntie Bibi." I winked at her.
"Then my God may forgive you," she said, and then crossed herself. "And I really don't care what the other one thinks."
"Auntie, they're the same God," Michael protested.
She harrumphed loudly. "That's what you think, Michael Haupner!"
It was time for us to go, and she was extremely upset. She was eighty-six years old and knew that we would probably never see each other again. I kissed her, and then promised to give her love to her nephews - my father and his brother, my Uncle Otto. This made her cry even harder. I had tried to persuade her to allow herself to be smuggled to England but she wouldn't hear of it, saying that she was too old to learn a new language. We performed a ritual burning of Colonel Alberbach's uniform in her kitchen range, and then we had to go.
We turned and waved goodbye to my elderly aunt from the gateway of the Haupner family farm before walking north to the crossroads, to catch the tram to Strasbourg station. Even from the roadside in front of the Château de l'Ile I could see her tiny form in the distance, waving a small, white handkerchief.
When I arrived at Stanislaus's address in Freiburg, I slipped over the fence in the dark and took off the cassock, hiding it in the bushes where I could find it again. I checked my Beretta, screwed on its silencer, then moved quickly and quietly across the yard to the living room windows.
It took no effort to break in. After giving the house a thorough once over, I found a comfortable chair in the corner of his living room and waited for him to come home from his meeting.
I would never forget the look on Stanislaus von Willenbach's face when he glanced around the room and then saw me sitting in the corner with my Beretta aimed at his forehead.
"I wouldn't do anything stupid, Stan," I said, as he instinctively reached for his pocket. "You know what a good shot I am."
His reply was blustering - pretend-astonishment, tinged with half-laughter. "Tommy, what a surprise; but why the gun - why are you here?"
"I'll give you three guesses, Stan." I moved to the sideboard, and keeping my gun aimed between his eyes, poured myself a glass of his very good imported Scotch with one hand. I didn't intend to drink it. I was a show of nonchalance – quiet menace.
He licked his lips, and then said, "I have money."
I laughed softly, then leaned against the sideboard slowly shaking my head. "No, that's not true, Stanislaus. We both know Daddy hates your guts. You don't have money, but you do have something that doesn't belong to you."
"No I don't," he said.
Big mistake. I shot him through the fleshy part of his right thigh; he fell screaming to the floor. I pointed my gun at the other leg.
"Come on, Stan, you know that was only a graze. Now, let's have that conversation again. You don't have money, but you do have something that doesn't belong to you."
"You didn't have to fucking shoot me," he yelled, sobbing at the same time.
I crossed to where he lay on the floor, squatted down and grabbed the back of his hair, forcing him to look me straight in the face. "Maybe not, Stan, but you see I don't take kindly to people who shoot my brother."
His look of fright told me that things had clicked into place. He'd thought Michael had been taken into custody, or worse. The same look signalled that he realised that there was nothing he could say that could sway me. Typical of all cowards, who think themselves better men than they actually are, he tried a bit of bravado.
"I don't have whatever you're after," he said, desperately.
"Now, Stan, I don't want to be difficult, but you're a terrible liar. Left leg, is it then?" I placed my gun barrel against his left thigh. I got no pleasure from this, but right from my early days of training, I had been taught that fear yields more results than pain – up to a point, and then most sane people will give up the truth if they think the agony will stop if they do.
"No, no," he screamed. "It's in the desk under the window."
"Tsk, tsk, Stan - guess what? I already checked there."
I pulled the trigger. Then, as he lay on the ground, blubbing, I pushed the gun to his temple and ground my thumb into the bullet hole in the leg nearest me. Strangely, he had quite a high pain threshold. It took me about two minutes to get the combination for the safe I'd discovered earlier, hidden in the hallway behind a terrible Dürer print, when I'd been 'casing the joint', as Shorty would have put it. When he eventually did pass out, I tied his hands behind his back with his own necktie, and manhandled him onto the sofa.
The documents were in the safe, as I had supposed they would be. I sat at his desk and closed my eyes for a moment, then slipped once more into the mindset of my favourite German alias, the Prinz von Plettenberg. Using Stanislaus's typewriter I wrote out a denunciation saying that I'd been alerted to the fact that he had stolen important documents from Paris and also photographed secret papers from Munich, both of which he intended to sell either to the British or the Americans. I had sent my agent to assassinate him, to avoid tainting the family name - Andreas von Willenbach was a major donor to the Nazi Party machine. I added that my agent had instructions to 'convince' Stanislaus to hand over his copies of the documents and then offer the man the choice of an honourable death by his own hand or a bullet in the back of the head.
When my agent arrived, he'd found von Willenbach in the middle of dinner, a large fondue on the table in front of him. There had been a scuffle after Stanislaus had been escorted to his safe at pistol point to retrieve the documents and where, unbeknown to my agent, he had also stashed a revolver. In the commotion, von Willenbach had been unfortunately wounded by a bullet from his own gun.
With the situation eventually under control, and before his execution, von Willenbach confessed that he had performed his traitorous acts in tandem with his fiancée, Elizabeth Petersen, who had seduced and killed a German general - I added the address in Mulhouse where she could be found. He'd hoped that this exchange of information would allow some negotiation to spare his life.
My agent told me that he had tried to telephone me, but the lines were down. As he turned from the 'phone, Stanislaus had picked up the fondue burner from the dinner table and thrown it at him. My agent had fired and killed the man, but the pile of documents, which he'd placed next to the telephone, had been hit directly by the burner and scattered across the floor. They had been saturated in its oil and had burst into flames. The fire had been so ferocious and widespread that he had been unable to put it out, and had been lucky to escape with his life. He reported that the house had been burning furiously by the time he'd reached the corner of the street and looked back.
I signed it: Für das Vaterland! Ernst, Prinz von Plettenberg. Heil Hitler! and addressed it to Kriminalrat Reiner Hertel, head of the Munich secret police.
I added a postscript, saying that I myself had only heard of what had transpired a day after the fire when I had called my agent in the evening at his home to check on the operation. I also apologised for not presenting myself in person with this information, but explained that I had only that morning heard news of a Dutch spy, masquerading as a party member and working in the red-light district of Ghent, which was something that needed my own immediate personal attention. I was sorry I had not put a stamp on the envelope, but said I had written in haste and had posted it at night - I was just relieved that von Willenbach's copies of the secrets of the Reich were now a pile of ashes in the smouldering remains of the house of a lifeless traitor.
I knew that the letter read like a scene from a comic opera, but I also knew how Hertel's mind worked; I'd had the displeasure of meeting him socially several times before the war. He loved crime novels and attended performances at the Volksoper - light, frothy, mindless pieces that held a hint of melodrama. He would find a missive full of high drama, written by a German prince, impossible to doubt. The veneration of the old aristocracy was absolute. A statement by someone of the upper classes was a Diktat to someone like Hertel. Despite Hitler's attempt to make his own henchmen the "new aristocracy", even he had failed, and he'd used members of the ancien régime to bolster his own authority and standing among those who'd once obeyed the nobility without question. "If it came from a prince, he must be telling the truth". I could almost hear the words in the Kriminalrat's thoughts.
Two birds with one stone - British and American hands would be clean, and the status of my favourite alias would rise in the eyes of the Nazis for his patriotism.
There was one task left to perform. I wrote a second letter, to Elizabeth at the house in Mulhouse. I addressed it to the German alias she and I had invented one night in Spain, as a joke. Gertrude Giftspieler - "Gertrude who plays with poison". There was no need to sign it; she would know it came from me.
Our friend is dead - and so are you, if you don't leave immediately. There is a Schießen ohne Vorwarnung Befehl - a shoot-without-warning order - issued for you. Run while you have a chance. The papers are now in friendly hands; you cannot negotiate. In case you think of denouncing your former friends, you know that this will already have been covered. We were not there.
I hear that Buenos Aires is lovely at this time of year.
She would be bound to hear of the fire, but would have no way of knowing that the documents had not been rescued first and sent to Hertel.
Before leaving I put everything in its place, as I had described in the letter to the Kriminalrat. I didn't intend to wait around to watch the house burn to the ground, and the perfectionist in me wanted everything in its place. I shot Stanislaus through the forehead - I couldn't bring myself to burn him alive - and dragged his body to the dining table, the place in which he might have stood to throw the fondue burner. I stashed the documents in my haversack, then scattered an impressive collection of pornographic photographs and books on the desk next to the telephone and across the carpet beneath it. I'd found them locked in the safe alongside the Uranprojekt and Joliot's research. Part of me rather hoped that some remnants of the pornography would survive the fire. I drenched them in oil from the fondue burner, then placed it on the floor next to the desk. With a final glance around the room I took one of Stan's more alarming photographs and lit the corner with Shorty's Zippo, which I had lifted from his pocket when I'd farewelled him at La Fumée. "This is for Michael," I whispered, and threw the burning photo on to the oil-soaked pile of papers on the desk.
"Ach mein Gott!" a woman exclaimed, as I passed her in the street a few minutes later. She pointed to the east. About a kilometre away, I could see the glow in the sky of Stanislaus von Willenbach's burning house.
I posted both letters in the postbox outside the railway station, and then hurried down the street with my head down, the hem of my soutane flapping around my ankles.
Chapter 14
I had reckoned on more than two weeks to get from Freiburg to Bayonne but, with a little luck on my side, I had made it in just eleven days. For future reference, I needed to remember that on the days that I was dressed like a priest, even a Protestant one in a Catholic country, I could get to places and do things that no-one questioned.
There were many lonely and miserable nights spent sleeping in hedgerows, or hiding in barns, thinking about Shorty and how much I missed him. I often practised the fingering of my concert pieces on sticks held under my neck before I went to sleep. The music seemed to soar from leafless willow branches as I played soundlessly, with my eyes closed and with his face sketched in my mind.
By the time I presented myself at the Portuguese Consulate I was very tired, and very, very dishevelled.
Although my Spanish was reasonably fluent, I had no Portuguese. For the best part of half an hour, I speculated repeatedly on the idiocy of having a Consulate receptionist in France who did not speak French. Once I wrote down why I was here, in Spanish, she seemingly understood with a loud exclamation of, "Aah!"
