The traitor, p.19
The Traitor, page 19
‘You looked as though you were miles away!’
She lifted herself off him, putting on her practised smile.
‘Not at all, Kurt, far from it,’ she purred. ‘I was just thinking how much I love watching myself on top of you.’
The general nodded his head in polite acknowledgement, as though he had performed some small service for her, such as opening a door. Fool.
‘And I can’t wait to try some of that delicious coffee you’ve brought me.’
‘It’s the best,’ he said as he got up. ‘You deserve it.’
Leni lay back on the bed, smiling back up at him coquettishly, although the true nature of her expression was relief. Now was the time, in this supposedly post-coital glow, in which she gleaned most of her information. But tonight she couldn’t be bothered. It was getting near one o’clock, and she would still have to type up her two other clients from this evening. They would be angry with her, she knew it, but it was too bad.
No, perhaps she had better give it a try. She turned herself on to her stomach, and let her head and arms dangle over the side of the bed.
‘So when will I see you again?’
‘Not as soon as I would wish.’
‘Oh?’
‘Maybe many months.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I can’t tell you that, my little Leni.’
‘Will you bring me back some more coffee, though?’
‘They don’t have much coffee where I’m going.’
‘Is that a clue?’
The general’s face turned sour. He crouched down in front of her, the rolls of his stomach just inches from her face. Grabbing her chin, he yanked her head up to face him.
‘You’re a good fuck, and that’s how it stays. What I do, or who I am, is no business of yours, understood?’
Leni did her best to nod. She wasn’t scared – she rarely was. Having seen these men having an orgasm, she found it impossible to take them seriously.
‘Sure,’ she said, ‘sure. It was just an innocent question.’
‘There are no innocent questions, young lady.’
He let go of her chin. She carried on staring at the floor while the general continued to dress. At least she had tried. He had probably suspected that the place was an SD outfit, but that wasn’t going to stop him sampling its delights. Kitty’s had a reputation for being the best in Berlin.
‘Right,’ said the general, now dressed, ‘I’m leaving now.’
She looked up, a teasing grin on her face.
‘Not even a kiss goodbye for your little Leni?’
He looked embarrassed. Good – she had got the upper hand again. Instead, he bent forward and clicked his heels together.
‘Goodbye, Fräulein.’
Fuck his formality. He couldn’t just screw her and then pretend they had spent the last half-hour making social chit-chat at a reception. She didn’t lift her head up, only her hand, as if to wave him goodbye and dismiss him at the same time.
She lay like that for many minutes, just gazing at the pattern on the Persian rug, following its swirls. Mother and Father had a similar rug, although not as sumptuous as this one. Her twin brother Heinrich used to lie on it, using its patterns as a bizarre road system for his wooden cars. He hated it when she joined in, as she would want to make the cars have hideous crashes, sometimes damaging their fragile frames.
Poor Heinrich, gentle Heinrich, dear Heinrich. She used to love to tease him, saying that he was the girl and she was the boy. And at eighteen, when he had gone off to fight in France, she had been jealous, saying that he would be a hopeless soldier; she would be a better one – much stronger, much braver. But all that came back from France was a 2nd Class Iron Cross and a swastika flag. Gentle Heinrich had actually been very brave Heinrich, knocking out two French machine-gun emplacements until a third one had claimed him. They put the medal in a glass box, and hung it next to Father’s 2nd Class Iron Cross from the first war. At one point during the tears, Father had worked out that Heinrich must have won his medal about five miles from where he had won his.
And so, until November 1942, they were the average German family, with their share of loss and hardships. Leni had started her law course at Dresden, and was seeing Paul. Father carried on working as a civil servant, and Mother did voluntary work to help with the war effort. And then came the visit they had long feared, their guilty little secret that they had kept well hidden to allow Heinrich to join the army and Leni to become a student. Their war-hero father, who had fought so bravely for the Fatherland, was in fact nothing more than a Jew.
For the Gestapo, the knock on the door was at a surprisingly sociable hour – nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. As soon as Father had opened the door, he knew that he had been denounced. It wasn’t worth wondering who had done it; it could have been anybody – even family members were betraying each other. He was taken to the cells, where he spent a week with little food or water, and was beaten so badly that his left eyeball was dislocated. It had then got infected, and had to be removed in hospital.
He was lucky. Apart from his eye, the only other thing he lost was his job. He hadn’t been sent to the camps because of his Iron Cross, but even that wasn’t a guarantee. He was allowed back home, although he had to report to the Gestapo at four o’clock every day. And because the tram conductors wouldn’t let him on, he would have to walk there, a four-kilometre gauntlet of abuse, spit and blows. Within three weeks, Father’s spirit had been broken. The light in his eyes, which had stayed burning even after the death of Heinrich, vanished. He would sit in front of their empty fireplace, his remaining eye fixed on the Iron Crosses and a picture of Heinrich.
It didn’t surprise Leni that Paul ended their relationship – she had always suspected he was a bit spineless. Neither did it surprise her that the great amount of attention she normally received from other men disappeared, replaced with the whispers of ‘Jude’. And no longer was she asked to sign up to all those Nazi Mädchen groups, the ones who had been so desperate to have her join because of her great figure and looks. Never mind that she wasn’t actually a Jew, but then she wasn’t going to deny who her father was, wasn’t going to pretend that he wasn’t a part of her. It was they who were making her into a Jew, not her family.
What did surprise her was the arrival of the SD. Mother had screamed at the two officers, dressed in black SS uniforms, when they took Leni away. That had earned her a punch, and words to the effect that where Leni was going was better than living with a bitch who had soiled the Volk by marrying a filthy Jew. Leni had cried too, and had felt a little scared, but she knew she wasn’t being taken to a camp. They would have taken Father first, and besides, she didn’t think the SD had anything to do with the camps.
Instead she was taken on a hellish five-hundred-kilometre, two-night train journey to a small hotel outside Stuttgart, where she found herself sharing a room with a girl called Heidi from Bohemia. Over the next two days, around fifty other young women joined them. They had come from all over the Greater Reich, all attractive and, it soon appeared to Leni, intelligent. Nobody knew why they were there, and the guards and hotel staff were not forthcoming. The consensus was that as all of them were in some kind of trouble, they were presumably being groomed for a task that might serve as atonement.
On the third morning, a tall thirty-year-old man wearing the uniform of an SS untersturmführer walked into the dining room during breakfast. The room went quiet as the officer walked slowly along the tables, and Leni noticed that many of the girls flinched as the uniform passed directly behind them. The officer stopped at the picture of the Führer that hung above the buffet table, saluted it with a stiff Heil Hitler, and turned to address them.
‘Ladies,’ he began, a little too loudly, ‘ladies, you are here because there is a vital task we want you to perform for the Reich. You have been selected because you possess characteristics that are rare and therefore extremely useful for your Führer and the Fatherland. However, I should tell you that everything that takes place here is absolutely secret. If any of you talk about it, then you will all – all – be sent to a concentration camp.’
He allowed himself to look down at their faces, all of which were registering some form of shock, except that of Leni, who raised her eyebrows at him mockingly. He looked away. Pathetic. She had always suspected that most of these SS men were little more than their uniforms, and this one seemed especially hollow. He cleared his throat before continuing.
‘Over the next week, myself and a team of experts will be assessing you to see whether you match up to the rigorous standards required for the task. I am afraid that only twenty of you will be selected . . .’
This caused a murmur throughout the room. The officer lifted his hand to silence them.
‘The other thirty have nothing to fear. They will be sent back home, where they will be put under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Believe me, that is no fun, and you will earn far more freedom if you are selected. The tests will be hard, and I expect you all to try your best for the good of your Fatherland. You should be honoured even to have got this far, but I regret only the very best will be chosen. Are there any questions?’
Although the girls started to speak all at once, it was Leni whose voice carried above the din.
‘What is this task? There seems little point in taking all these tests if we don’t know what they’re for!’
‘I regret, Fräulein, that only the twenty lucky girls who have been selected will find out what the task is.’
‘Lucky?’ Leni came back in a flash. ‘Lucky?’
The officer looked exasperated.
‘Yes, Fräulein – lucky. It will be a privilege to serve the Reich in the way we intend. And of course, Fräulein Steiner, those problems you have at home will be alleviated if you make it through to the last twenty. That goes for all of you.’
That caused Leni, as well as the others, to shut up. It wasn’t so much the threat, but the fact that he knew who she was.
‘Yes, girls, for this is your way to help yourselves. If you succeed, we shall turn a blind eye,’ he said, pointedly looking at Leni, ‘to any indiscretions that you or your families may have committed. Any other questions?’
The girls stayed quiet. Like Leni, they were all reflecting on their problems back home, each knowing that they had little choice but to co-operate. Bastards, she thought, especially this one for joking about Father’s eye.
‘Good. One final thing. My name is Untersturmführer Schwarz. I shall be here for the duration of the tests, so please feel free to contact me about any problems you have, large or small. Enjoy the rest of your breakfast!’
What a shit, thought Leni as Schwarz walked out, what a shit, acting the kindly uncle, the benevolent schoolmaster. He was as bad as his uniform indicated. Leni wanted to shout at him, to tell him what she thought, but she knew that would see her father in Theresienstadt before the day was out. Neither could she share her thoughts with the others, because one of their number was bound to be an informer. Leni looked around – many of the girls were crying slightly, including Heidi, who was sitting next to her. She brought Heidi’s head to rest on her shoulder, and, gently stroking her hair, whispered words of encouragement to her.
Schwarz was right: the tests were hard. It seemed that the SD had assembled every leader in his or her field to assess them. A professor of English from Berlin University grilled Leni in that language for two hours, asking her questions about her family and her childhood. The head of Stuttgart’s medical school carried out a thorough investigation of her physique, even asking her questions about her sexual background. A female psychiatrist spent an inordinate amount of time trying to establish whether Leni had any mental difficulties, any hang-ups, any dysfunctions.
It came as little surprise that Leni was picked for the last twenty. Schwarz told her that she was ‘outstandingly qualified’ for the task, although she would have to learn to temper her rebellious streak. She never got the chance to say goodbye to Heidi, because those who had failed were immediately spirited away. She often wondered what had happened to Heidi, who had seemed too fragile for the task. Had she really gone back to Bohemia, allowed to live a near-normal life? Or was she now in a concentration camp? Leni knew the answer – it was only optimism that kept her asking.
At six o’clock the next morning, the remaining girls were picked up by a sealed truck, which took them two hundred kilometres to the alpine town of Sonthofen, just north of the Austrian border. There, they were installed in an Ordensburg, a training school for SS cadets and future Nazi leaders. This Ordensburg was a ‘castle’ built in the Teutonic style in 1934, and was one of four such establishments in Germany. The presence of so many young women caused some excitement, although Schwarz did his best to keep them separate from the male cadets.
Over the next two months, Leni was trained in a wide variety of activities. For the first time in her life, she handled firearms, which she took to well after some initial apprehension. Although not the best, she was a more than competent shot, as well as showing a natural skill in unarmed combat. They were also taught how to code and decode messages, and were given lessons in National Socialism, economics, the war, first aid, as well as learning how to drive all manner of vehicles.
But despite the glamour and range of these topics, it was becoming clear to Leni and the other girls that there was a growing emphasis on topics such as sexual health, cosmetics, seduction and conversation. It was Leni’s nature to be direct, and thus she put it straight to Schwarz over soup one evening.
‘So, Karl,’ she said, adopting an intimacy that infuriated the untersturmführer, ‘are we going to have to screw some people at some point?’
Schwarz put down his spoon, and looked around the table. The other girls had also stopped eating.
‘Because that’s what all this is about, isn’t it, Karl?’ Leni continued, enjoying her audience. ‘You want us to become whores, don’t you? All this training in guns, and learning how to spot a Romanian officer’s uniform and the rest is just rubbish, isn’t it? Why else would we have all these lectures on venereal diseases and learning how to make the perfect cocktail? We’re just going to become SD whores—’
‘Shut up!’ barked Schwarz. ‘That’s enough!’
Leni stopped, remembering her father.
‘Have you finished?’ asked Schwarz.
Leni nodded.
Schwarz took a deep breath.
‘All agents, male or female, have to undertake activities they may find distasteful. And yes, that often includes sex. For sex is the most powerful weapon in the female agent’s armoury, and it can achieve far more than long and expensive surveillance. You will become some of the most valuable tools in the protection of the Reich, for many of you will be posted to establishments frequented by senior Wehrmacht and SS officers. It is important that the SD knows what men at this level are thinking, and it is essential to the war effort if we weed out those who are starting to, shall we say, question their allegiances.’
Schwarz paused, taking in the mood of the table. It was silent and a little stunned. The girls had suspected that sex would be part of the task, but not to the extent that Schwarz was outlining. Leni caught Schwarz’s eye.
‘Yes, Leni?’ Schwarz asked wearily. She might be a pain, he thought, but she would be brilliant. What man wouldn’t be captivated by her long brown hair and defiant, pouting mouth? And as for her figure, well, that had been the talk of his fellow officers here at the Ordensburg for the past eight weeks.
‘So you do want us to work as prostitutes?’
‘Yes, Leni, we do, and that is final. I don’t need to tell you what will happen if you don’t help. You’re all too far in just to turn round and go back to your mothers and fathers.’
Nobody, not even Leni, finished their soup.
She looked up from the swirls on the Persian rug. There was a knocking on the bedroom door, accompanied by Waltraut the maid’s insistent exhortations for her to open up. She looked over at the clock on top of the chest of drawers. It was quarter past one. Surely not another client at this time? It wasn’t as if it was Friday or Saturday night. She got up, yawned, and put on her silk robe.
‘Yes, Waltraut?’ she asked, as she opened the door.
‘It’s Hauptsturmführer Strasser here to see you, Fräulein Leni. He says he hopes it’s not too late.’
Leni broke out into a big smile. Carl. Her lovely Carl. If it had been anybody else she would have had him shooed away, but not Carl.
‘Tell him to come up in ten minutes. And then sort out the room while I have a wash.’
Any tiredness disappeared as she walked down the corridor to the bathroom. She hadn’t heard from Carl in a month, and now here he was, turning up in the middle of the night. It was unlike him to be so random, a thought which troubled her as she ran a shallow bath. She removed her gloves, and stepped into the lukewarm water. At least it wasn’t cold, which it always was in her flat. A regular hot bath was one of the few luxuries, along with good food and wine, that made working at Kitty’s bearable. She knew that there were some women in Berlin who had prostituted themselves just to earn some scraps for their children – in comparison Leni felt lucky, very lucky. In fact, she might even have put on a little weight since leaving Sonthofen. She looked down at her stomach, and pinched it – there was very little fat, but she had definitely been thinner back in Dresden.
She splashed herself all over with a sponge, concentrating on her breasts and vagina. She and Heinrich used to joke about such a bath – a ‘whore’s bath’ – when the water supplies ran low back home. The force of the irony never stopped hurting, especially when she had up to five such baths a day. She got out and briskly towelled herself dry.
Strasser was already sitting on the edge of her bed, his boots off, and swigging from a bottle of champagne. His uniform, normally so well pressed, looked crumpled, and she could smell that he had been drinking heavily. His state somewhat dented her enthusiasm.
‘Hello, Carl,’ she ventured tentatively. ‘I thought we had New Year’s Eve a couple of days ago!’
