Читать книгу World War 2 Thriller Collection: Winter, The Eagle Has Flown, South by Java Head - Jack Higgins, Justin Richards - Страница 31

The birthday party that Harald and Veronica Winter put on for their younger son, Pauli’s twenty-fourth birthday was the first real birthday party he’d had since he was a child. Although unsaid, it was his parent’s celebration of Pauli Winter’s first term at university, his return to civilian life. The lovely old house was ablaze with lights and noisy with the excited chatter of more than fifty guests and a ten-piece dance band. In a grim sort of joke that was typically berlinerisch, the invitations were overprinted upon billion-mark banknotes. Back before the war, an unskilled worker in one of Harald Winter’s factories earned twenty-five marks a week, but the staggering inflation of the previous year had seen the value of Germany’s paper money plunge to a point where one U.S. dollar bought over two and a half billion marks. Foreigners came across the border from Holland and Czechoslovakia and bought land and mansions with handfuls of hard currency. Then finally the madness ended. The Reichsbank issued its new Rentenmarks, one of which was worth one billion in the old currency. As if in celebration, Aschingers, the famous restaurant near the Friedrichstrasse railway station, offered one main dish, a glass of beer, a dessert, and as many rolls as you cared to eat for just one new mark. Inflation had stopped.

As the smoke cleared, it was apparent that the middle classes had suffered most: in the final few terrible weeks most people’s life savings totalled not enough to buy a postage stamp. But some Germans had not suffered. Harald Winter had almost doubled his fortune. Like many industrialists, he was allowed to borrow from the Reichsbank, which, in the manner of most government departments, reacted very slowly to the events of the day. Thus, even when the Reichsbank was charging its top rate of interest, Harald Winter could continue borrowing and repaying at rates far, far below that of inflation. And by 1924 the five-million-Reichsmark debt due to his father-in-law was nothing like enough to buy a meal in Aschingers. It could be renegotiated to almost anything Harald Winter decided.

But not everyone present at Pauli’s birthday party this evening had been as fortunate and as astute as Winter. Many of them had had at least a part of their money in government securities, and now they were talking about the law of December 8, 1923. The socialist government had decided that their own debts were to be advantageously revalued – for instance, the reparations due to France – but the millions of holders of now worthless government securities would not be compensated.

‘By God!’ said Frau Wisliceny, who’d come with her daughters and, to Peter Winter’s indignation, brought her son-in-law Erich Hennig. ‘I’m beginning to believe that ruffian Hitler is right about the rogues who govern us.’ Frau Wisliceny had not mellowed with age – a big, handsome, matronly woman in an elaborate but decidedly unfashionable Paris gown that she’d had since before the war. Frau Wisliceny eachewed the new fashions for the sake of which women sacrificed their long hair and exposed their legs. Her voice was firm and decisive, and she prided herself that she was as well informed as anyone in Berlin and happy to argue about art, music, or politics with any man present.

‘Surely you would not wish to be ruled by such a rascal?’ said Richard Fischer. Foxy Fischer’s son, now forty-three years old and running the family’s steel empire, had left his ageing father in order to flirt with Inge until Frau Wisliceny moved into the group. Not that Frau Wisliceny would oppose a marriage between the two of them or object to Richard’s flirting. Richard Fischer was the most eligible of bachelors, and her eldest daughter was getting to an age when to be unmarried was noticeable. But Inge had not given up hope of marrying Peter Winter, and as long as he remained single she had eyes for no one else.

‘You’d better lower your voice,’ Erich Hennig advised. ‘That little Captain Graf over there is one of Hitler’s most notorious strongarm men, and the big brute with him is his so-called adjutant.’

‘I’m not frightened to speak my mind,’ said Fischer. He, too, was a big fellow, and his full beard, the confident manner that his riches provided, made him a formidable adversary in any sort of conflict.

‘Hitler will go to prison anyway,’ said Frau Wisliceny, in an attempt to avoid any friction that might arise between her son-in-law and Fischer. ‘Even the Bavarians won’t let him get away with an armed putsch against their legally elected government.’

‘I’m not sure he will,’ said Peter Winter. He was tall and slim, with a pale complexion that had come from long hours studying his law books. In his well-fitting evening suit he was as handsome as any man in the room. He’d let his dark hair grow unfashionably long, so that it touched the top of his ears. Inge eyed him adoringly. Peter was not the sort of man every girl would want: some said he was an unbending snob, too old-fashioned for the fast-moving permissiveness of Berlin in the twenties. But Inge had decided that there could be no other man for her, and now that her sister Lisl was married…‘My class in law school went to Munich last week. We spent some time with the prosecution people, and they let us see the evidence.’

‘But there is nothing to prove,’ said Lisl. ‘Hitler’s guilty. It was an attempt to seize power by armed force. It’s simply a matter of sentencing him.’

Peter looked at her before replying. Marriage to the awful Hennig obviously agreed with her. She looked well and happy and was even more self-confident than he remembered. Most of her friends had predicted that she’d be crushed by the opinionated, dogmatic, domineering Hennig, but the opposite had happened: it was Lisl who made all the decisions, and when it came to political opinions Hennig deferred to his beautiful young wife.

Peter said, ‘You only need half an hour in Munich to realize that this is no criminal trial, it’s more like an election. What jury will send a war hero such as General Ludendorff to prison?’

Lisl replied, ‘We’re not talking about Ludendorff, who everyone knows is only half dotty. We’re talking about Hitler, a madman.’

‘I don’t know how carefully you follow Hitler’s speeches,’ Peter told her with the dispassionate moderation that he’d learned from his law professor. ‘But I read through some of his speeches. Hitler is being described as “the new Messiah” and he cultivates this. He condemns moral decay, corruption, and vice and is able to rally round him people with very differing views: that is his skill.’

‘I’ve heard all that tosh,’ said Fischer. ‘But if you listen to Hitler, you’d think that all the vice and corruption in the world are here in Berlin.’ He stroked his beard and looked to Inge for approval. She smiled at him but then turned back to look at Peter.

‘He does,’ agreed Peter mildly. ‘But that appeals to the Bavarians. Those damn southerners. They like to see Berlin as the base of centralism, the home of the Prussian military – which they fear and despise – and Protestant Berliners as the greatest obstacle to their aim of restoring a Bavarian kingdom, complete with Catholic monarchy. Hilter skilfully panders to all these feelings.’

Fischer said, ‘And those Bavarians see Berlin as a place controlled by Jewish capitalists. It suits their anti-Semitic nature.’

The band started playing a Lehár waltz. ‘It’s a crime not to be dancing,’ said Frau Wisliceny. ‘Inge, is this dance booked?’

‘No, Mama.’

Frau Wisliceny looked pointedly at Richard Fischer, who immediately asked Inge to dance.

Peter would have asked her sister Lisl to dance, if only as a way to annoy Hennig, but Hennig was too quick for him and whirled his wife away onto the dance floor with no more than a curt nod to them.

Someone invited Frau Wisliceny to dance and, left alone, Peter Winter turned to watch two soldiers who were standing near the bar. One of them was Fritz Esser, of course. There was no way of avoiding recognition of the debt he owed him, but he didn’t have to approve of the fellow’s activities or of the horrid little homosexual who’d come here with him. And Peter thought it appalling that the two men should have arrived in their comic-opera uniforms. Captain Graf was wearing the modified uniform of an army captain. Esser wore a new sort of uniform: brown shirt, breeches, boots, and Sam-Browne-style leather belt and shoulder strap. Both men were members of the uniformed ‘army’ that the notorious Captain Ernst Röhm commanded – under ever-changing titles – as a military arm for Hitler’s National Socialist Party. ‘Storm troopers’, they called themselves.

Peter Winter hated the Nazis almost as much as he hated the communists. He distrusted their cavalier use of words such as ‘freedom’, ‘honour’, ‘bread’ and ‘security’. He believed that only stupid people could define the failings and opportunities of this complex world by means of trite catchall mottos.

Deep down he had always hoped that by some miracle he’d wake up and find himself back in a well-ordered world run from the Imperial Palace by that autocrat Kaiser Wilhelm, who cared nothing for what the Reichstag decreed. But, gradually and grudgingly, he’d come to believe that the new postwar constitution provided a truly democratic framework by means of which Germany would again become the greatest nation in the world.

Despite his distaste for socialism, Peter Winter was that evening one of the very few people in the Winter house – or, indeed, in the whole city – who supported Ebert, the socialist president. Germany must be run by the law; that was why he was studying to be a lawyer. The organized violence of communists and Nazis was a threat to the law, to the stability of German middle-class society, and therefore to everything that Peter held dear.

So Peter Winter found it difficult to conceal his hostility as he walked over to where Captain Graf was talking to Fritz Esser. He hated these men not only for what they were but because of their continuing association with Pauli. He had a sense of foreboding that made him want to protect his younger brother from these unpleasant rascals. At least he’d been able to persuade Pauli to leave Graf’s wretched Freikorps. Had he remained in Munich with them much longer, there was little doubt that Pauli would have become a Nazi stormtrooper and been here tonight in one of these ridiculous uniforms.

‘Not dancing, gentlemen?’ said Peter provocatively. He signalled to the waiter for more champagne for his guests. They knew who he was, of course, Graf had met him before, and Esser had known him from the time he’d pulled him out of the sea off Travemünde.

‘We are talking business,’ said Graf. He had a notebook in his hand, and he was wearing steel-rimmed spectacles to read from it.

‘Come along! This is a celebration. Drink! Dance! Have fun!’

Neither of the two men could decide how to respond to Peter’s friendly words, but both knew they were being mocked. As he turned his head, Graf’s spectacle lenses flashed with the reflections of the grand chandeliers, and his fierce eyes showed anger.

When the servant had poured wine for both men, Esser lifted his glass in salute. ‘Prosit!’ he said and grinned broadly. Peter bowed and took his leave of them.

‘The place is full of Jews,’ Graf told Esser once Peter Winter had gone. ‘And the Winter family have grown rich and fat feasting on the corpses of our comrades.’

‘Our time will come,’ said Esser. He put a thumb into his belt and stood surveying the dancers like a lion tamer.

Captain Graf was looking at the far end of the room, where four young girls in scanty sequined two-piece outfits had suddenly started their dance. Captain Graf didn’t share Esser’s appreciation for half-naked girls, and he turned away with a scowl on his face. ‘Jewish, capitalist filth!’ said Graf.

Esser grunted and continued to watch the floor show. The girls were Pauli Winter’s idea; they’d been specially brought over to the house from a Revue-Bar. Esser recognized the dancers, and the girls knew him. His face was known at every drinking place in Berlin, from the Kempi on Leipziger Strasse to the sleazy little bars on Invalidenstrasse where pimps plied their trade. Esser, unlike Graf, liked girls. He drank his champagne. He had long ago learned that everything of which Captain Graf disapproved was ‘Jewish, capitalist filth’, and until now he had never dared to contradict his boss. But the past year had seen a change in Esser’s loyalties. He’d been close enough to the Nazi Party leadership to know that Graf’s hero – and immediate commander – Röhm was not blindly loyal to Hitler. Soon there must come a confrontation between Röhm’s uniformed SA – Sturmabteilung – and the grey-faced civilians of the Nazi Party leadership, and Esser had decided that, whether Hitler got a prison sentence or not, his future was with ‘Der Chef’. ‘They are damned good dancers,’ said Esser defiantly and applauded the Revue-Bar girls. Captain Graf snorted angrily, stuffed his notebook back in his breast pocket, and strutted off towards the upstairs smoking room and bar.

Pauli Winter saw Graf’s tiff with Esser from the dance floor. Pauli was transformed. No longer in the haircut that he’d had since entering cadet school, which had made his skull into a furry pink billiards ball, his blond hair was long enough to fall forward across his eyes. His new evening suit – from his father’s tailor – fitted close upon his stocky, muscular figure, and many female eyes watched him with interest as he waltzed with one of the Guggenheimer daughters. His student life had revealed a new aspect of Pauli, for he was a sociable young man who enjoyed parties, girls, drinks, and dancing more than lectures and books. On this account his first exam results had been so poor that he’d not yet told his father about them. Sometimes he wondered why he’d let his parents persuade him to go to university, but they had been determined to get him out of the Freikorps. They were hypocrites. They applauded the way the Freikorps fought the communists but deplored Graf and the men who did the fighting.

It was not easy to adapt to the schoolroom again after the violent rough-and-tumble of the Freikorps. But Peter was at the law school, too, and Peter sorted out all the problems in that rather imperious way that he did everything. But even Peter couldn’t help Pauli get better marks. Company Law was not something that interested Pauli very much but, as usual, Pauli wanted to please his parents. He wanted to please everyone: he knew it was a foolish weakness, but he too often agreed to whatever was required of him rather than be subjected to long arguments.

When the dance ended, Pauli applauded the band and thanked Hetti Guggenheimer. She was a pretty girl – dark hair and large brown eyes with lashes that she too readily fluttered at young men. Hetti Guggenheimer was one of Pauli’s fellow first-year students. She was studying medicine and always got top marks. Hetti’s next dance was booked with someone else, but she went through the motions of referring to her card before excusing herself to Pauli. Pauli didn’t mind too much. There were lots of pretty girls here, and he was popular with the girls. Although he’d never grown as tall as his brother, Pauli had the American good looks of the Rensselaer family. His cheekbones set high in a bony skull, large intense eyes, and wide smile had made him look like the sort of actor that Hollywood casts as a cowboy. And, like the archetypal cowboy, he was soft-spoken, easy-tempered, and uncomplaining. Now, taking his leave of Hetti, he went back to where he’d left his beer and looked round the room. He saw Esser and Graf having what was obviously some sort of argument and watched Graf go strutting upstairs angrily. Pauli smoothed his disarrayed hair, tucked in his rumpled shirt, and went over to Esser. ‘Is everything all right, Fritz?’

‘Everything is just fine.’

‘I saw Captain Graf come past me. He looked angry.’

‘You know what he’s like, Pauli. His anger passes.’

‘You usually get along so well with him.’

Esser drunk champagne and Pauli realized that he was thinking about his reply. Finally he said, ‘Things have changed since the old days, Pauli. After you left us to go to school, the battalion became different.’ It was nearly a year since Pauli had left them to start the cramming course he’d taken before the entrance exam. Ten months of living with his parents. It seemed much longer. Much, much longer.

‘Different how?’

‘Too many youngsters. Spiteful kids who never went to the war and want to show how tough they are. And I miss Berlin.’

‘And Graf?’

‘He’s become too pally with Röhm, and I don’t get along with Röhm. He’s too damned ambitious to be a soldier. He plays politics.’ Esser looked round to be sure he wasn’t overheard. ‘I went to the Führer and told him what was happening.’

‘The Führer? Hitler?’

‘I told him that Röhm is looking for an opportunity to take over. With the Führer in prison, Röhm could take control of everything.’

‘Perhaps Röhm will be sentenced to a long prison term, too.’

‘It’s possible. But Röhm has remarkable friends and supporters: in the army, in the Bavarian government, and in the judiciary, too. They all know that sooner or later the Nazis will come to power.’

‘So you believe the Nazis will get into power,’ said Pauli. The idea of that small, cranky organization forming a government seemed unlikely.

‘Good men will be needed then, Pauli. Reliable men like you. When you’ve finished at law school, there will be a good job waiting for you.’

‘With the Nazis?’

‘All the top men are lawyers. I’m even thinking of studying law myself.’

Pauli slapped him on the shoulder. ‘You could do it, Fritz. I would help you.’

He laughed self-consciously. ‘I’d need coaching. I left school when I was fourteen.’

‘We’ll talk about all that next week, when we have lunch. So you are a Nazi?’

‘Yes, I am a secret member. That cunning bastard Röhm tries to keep us brownshirts separated from the Party. Röhm still has dreams of ditching Hitler and restoring the monarchy, but the Führer knows what he’s doing.’

‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Fritz,’ said Pauli. He was flattered that Esser had taken him into his confidence, for these were days when any small disloyalty was enough to get a man murdered.

‘I have a nose for what’s what. I’m not really a soldier; I’m a political person. I always have been,’ said Esser.

‘What will happen next? Your Hitler is certain to get a long prison sentence, isn’t he?’

‘We’ll bide our time,’ said Esser. ‘Adolf Hitler is the man Germany needs; we must wait for him, however long.’

‘For God’s sake, be careful, Fritz. You said Röhm is a ruthless bastard. If he finds out that you’re betraying him…’

‘I know how to handle him. He’s a homosexual, like Graf. There are too many homosexuals around Röhm; that’s one of the things I don’t like about the situation in Munich. I treat them all like spoiled brats. One day the Führer will deal with them. Until then those pansies need me. Röhm is hiding guns for the army – secret dumps all over the country. More than twenty thousand rifles, machine guns … even artillery.’ He grinned. ‘Without my office files they’d never know where anything is to be found.’

‘Alex Horner is here tonight. You should talk to him. One day he’ll end up as chief of the General Staff. There might be a time when an influential friend in the Reichswehr would be useful to you.’ Pauli wanted his friends to be friends with one another. It was something of an obsession with him.

Fritz Esser downed his drink. ‘Thanks, Pauli. But don’t worry about me. I know what I’m doing. Sometime we’ll go out and get drunk and I’ll tell you some stories about the Munich putsch that will make your hair curl. It nearly came off! I marched alongside the Führer. I was in Odeonsplatz when the police opened fire. The Führer was no more than thirty paces from me. He was still wearing his evening suit, with a trenchcoat over it. The man next to him was shot dead; he pulled the Führer down with him. Captain Göring was wounded. Only Ludendorff ignored the gunfire and marched on through the police cordon. It was a wonderful experience, Pauli.’

‘It was a fiasco,’ said Pauli, not unkindly.

‘One day you’ll regret you were not with us. We made history.’

‘Have another drink, Fritz. And then let’s see if we can find Alex. I want to get the two of you together.’

At that moment Pauli’s old friend Leutnant Alex Horner was smoking a cigar in Harald Winter’s study and being quizzed by Winter and old ‘Foxy’ Fischer. The study had never been refurnished since the Winters first moved in. The walls were lined with more or less the same books, and the floor covered with the same richly coloured oriental carpet. The same inlaid mahogany desk occupied one corner, and the only light came from the green-shaded desk lamp. Everything was clean and well cared for, but the footstools, like the polished leather wing armchairs, were scuffed and scarred by carelessly held cigars and the marks from drink glasses. The study, more than any other room in the house, had escaped unchanged over these eventful years, and Harald liked it all just the way it was; even the engraved portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm remained on the wall.

This evening the air here was blue with cigar smoke from the three men. The deferential attention the young man was receiving was flattering for him, but he was not surprised by it. For Leutnant Horner had recently been able to see for himself what was Germany’s most closely guarded secret: the newly established German military installations in Soviet Russia. Now the two men wanted a first-hand account of this astounding political development.

‘Did you visit all the factories?’ asked Fischer. He was seventy-two years old, totally bald and frail, but he would not give up cigars and brandy.

‘I really don’t know, but I went to some of the most important ones.’ Alex’s face had become hard and set into the inscrutable expression that the German army expected of its elite Prussian Officer Corps. His nose was wider, and the duelling scar that had been on his cheek so long had become more livid with age.

‘The Junkers airplane factories, near Moscow and Kharkov,’ supplied Harald Winter, to show he was already well informed. He looked especially sleek. He’d spent the earlier part of the evening dancing. Harry enjoyed dancing, and tonight he’d made sure of partnering most of the attractive young women here. At fifty-four he was still a better dancer than any of the younger men, and he was only too pleased to demonstrate it.

Alex Horner nodded. ‘There were twenty-three of us. We travelled separately. I didn’t, for instance, visit the poison-gas factory – it’s in a remote part of Samara Oblast – or any of the plants where artillery shells are manufactured. Ordnance specialists were sent there, and aviators reported on the flying schools. My assignment was to visit the tank training schools that we run in cooperation with the Red Army.’

Fischer crushed his cigar into the ashtray with unnecessary force. ‘I don’t like it, I’ll tell you. The idea of showing Bolshevik murderers how to use tanks and planes is madness. Those swine will attack us the first chance they get.’

‘Your fears are unfounded, Foxy,’ said Harald Winter, and smiled at the strongly expressed views. ‘The Versailles Diktat forbids us to have planes and tanks. The Soviets have not signed the Versailles treaty, and their cooperation is exactly what we need. The Russians want our expertise and we have to have secret testing grounds.’ The neatness of the deception pleased him.

‘You are being carried away by the prospects,’ Fischer told Winter. ‘I, too, want to get my factories fully working again, but I can’t keep a tank production line secret.’

Winter hesitated and a nerve in his cheek twitched. Then he admitted, ‘I have already supplied the army with modern planes. All-metal airframes. Aluminium alloys, monocoque construction, far advanced over the flimsy old wooden contraptions that were used in the war. I’d desperately like to hear how they are faring in field conditions in Russia. The army won’t let me send my technical experts there.’ He looked at Horner, half hoping that he would offer to arrange for this, but Horner looked away.

‘Perhaps I’m getting too old,’ said Fischer. ‘My son Richard thinks as you do: he’s obsessed with the designing of all these wretched tanks, to the point of neglecting our other clients. I tell him these Bolsheviks are treacherous and he laughs at me.’

‘We have a mutual enemy,’ said Horner. He blew a smoke ring and admired it. The drink and the conspiratory atmosphere had gone to his head.

‘Us and the Russians? The Poles, you mean?’ said Fischer. ‘I have never believed that Poland was a serious threat to us.’

There was a light tap at the door, and when Winter called ‘Come in’ his wife entered. Time had been kind to Veronica Winter. She had lost little of the beauty that had turned men’s heads when Winter had first met her. She was thinner now than she’d been then, and her face, throat and arms, revealed by the striped brown-and-yellow silk-voile evening dress she wore, were paler. But the serenity that made her desirable, and the smile that was so often on her lips had gone. Veronica was perturbed.

‘Harald!’ she said, having indicated that the other two men should not stand up for her. ‘Who are those dreadful men?’

‘Dreadful men?’ said Winter. ‘Which men?’ He flicked ash from his cigar. It was a sign of his irritation at being interrupted.

In an attempt to calm her Fischer chuckled and said, ‘There are so many dreadful men in your house tonight, Veronica, that even your husband can’t keep track of them.’

‘How can you say such a thing, Herr Fischer?’ she replied, feigning offence. To her husband she said, ‘Two men in some sort of uniform.’

Harald Winter said, ‘One of them is a fellow who calls himself “Captain” Graf, one of the ruffians who took his private army down to Munich to fight the communists.’

‘Pauli’s commander?’ said Veronica.

‘Yes, until our Pauli had enough sense to stay here and go to school.’

‘And the other?’ said Veronica.

‘Is there another?’ said Harald. He looked at Fischer, who shrugged, and then to Alex Horner.

Horner answered her. ‘His name is Fritz Esser. He’s a friend of Pauli’s, Mrs Winter. An old friend.’

‘The name is familiar,’ she said doubtfully.

Alex added, ‘Back before the war he lived at Travemünde. Pauli recruited him into his Freikorps and he stayed with them.’

‘The Essers,’ said Harald Winter. ‘Yes, I remember the family. They lived in the village, near Mother. It’s the little fellow who saved the children from drowning. Why do you want to know, darling?’

‘People are asking me who they are, Harald. They hardly look like friends of ours. And now this Captain Graf person has gone up to the servants’ rooms.’

Winter got to his feet. ‘Whatever for?’ he asked, but he guessed the answer before it came. There were two youngsters working in the house, and Captain Graf’s homosexual activities had been given considerable publicity. Some said that threats of police prosecution on this account were the reason he’d taken his battalion from Berlin.

Veronica blushed. ‘I’d rather not say, Harald.’

‘I’ll have the blackguard thrown out!’

Now the other two men were standing. Fischer put a hand out to touch Winter’s arm. ‘Let someone else go, Harry. Graf is a dangerous fellow.’

‘Please allow me to attend to it,’ said Alex Horner with studied casualness. ‘Graf is, I regret to say, a member of the Officer Corps. His behaviour directly concerns me.’

Harald Winter didn’t answer, nor did his wife. It was Fischer who replied to Horner’s offer. ‘Yes, Leutnant Horner. That would be the best way.’

There was a certain grim inevitability to the unfortunate business at Pauli’s birthday party. Inviting Captain Graf to such a party was undoubtedly a mistake, but no one had expected him to accept the invitation. It was only because Esser was coming that Captain Graf came, too.

Once inside the house, Captain Graf drank his first glass of champagne far too quickly. It was French champagne. Where Harald Winter had got it no one knew, but once Graf had downed one he had another and then another. Then Esser found the cognac. Captain Graf’s storm company had captured a French distillery during the 1918 offensives, and the bouquet brought happy memories of those exciting days so long ago. And Graf was a man as easily affected by memories as by alcohol. By the time he spotted the young under-footman and followed him upstairs, he was tight enough to miss his footing on the steps more than once.

Captain Graf afterwards maintained that he’d only been looking for a bedroom in which he could rest for an hour, but when Hauser – Harald Winter’s longtime valet and general factotum – stopped Graf from entering a servant’s room on the second floor, Captain Graf stabbed Hauser in the chest with a folding knife.

Hauser – in his mid-forties and gassed in the war – shouted and collapsed, bleeding profusely. One of the chambermaids heard the scuffle and found Hauser unconscious in a pool of blood. She screamed after Captain Graf, who was by then running down the back staircase with the bloody knife still in his hand.

It was Leutnant Alex Horner who intercepted Graf. He knew the house from his many visits there, and guessed Graf’s route of escape.

‘Captain Graf? I believe –’ Graf lunged at Horner with the knife, and Horner avoided the blade so narrowly that its tip slashed the front of his dinner jacket.

But Alex Horner was not the dressmaker’s dummy that Graf mistook him for. His years at the front with Pauli and the vicious trench raids that Leutnant Brand had repeatedly assigned him to had produced reactions that were as instinctive as they were effective.

Horner swung aside and, as Graf completed his unsuccessful knife thrust aimed a powerful blow at the captain’s head. It sent him reeling, but Graf was a fighter, too. He recovered his balance and lunged again, so that Alex had to retreat up the narrow servants’ corridor to avoid the slashes aimed at him. Graf grinned, but it was a drunken grin, and it encouraged Alex to take a chance. He kicked hard and high, knocking the knife aside. Horner grabbed the knife, and now it was Graf’s turn to flee.

Graf found his way down the servants’ stairs, through the pantry, and to the tradesmen’s entrance at the rear, and slammed the heavy door behind him. The wooden frame had swollen with the damp of winter, and by the time Alex had wrenched it open, run through the yard, and reached the street, there was no sign of Graf except some footprints in the newly fallen snow.

Alex Horner stopped and caught his breath. He knew enough about fighting to know when to stop. He looked up the moonlit street; there were coaches waiting to collect guests, their coachmen huddled against the cold night, faces lit by glowing cigarettes, the breath of the horses making clouds of white vapour. It was very cold, as only Berlin can be, with a few snowflakes drifting in the wind and a film of ice on everything. The city was silent, and yet it was not the empty stillness of the countryside; it was the brooding quiet of a crowded, sleeping city. From somewhere nearby came the sound of a powerful motorcar engine starting, and the squeal of tyres. That would be Graf; the fellow was often to be seen in his big motorcar.

Alex reached into his pocket for a cigarette and stood there on the street smoking as he thought about what had happened. Thank God, Graf had had plenty to drink – he’d have been a formidable adversary sober. Better to forget the whole business, he decided. Graf and his ilk had friends in high places and in the Bendlerblock the army bureaucrats were now referring to Röhm’s storm troops as the ‘Black Reichswehr’, treating them as a secret army reserve. Testifying against Graf might well mar his career prospects. Any last delusion that the army kept out of politics had long since gone. Getting promoted in this curious postwar army was like walking through a minefield.

By the time Alex Horner had finished his cigarette and returned to the party, it was almost as if nothing untoward had occurred. Hauser was in bed and being attended by a doctor, the bloodstains had been scrubbed from the carpet, the band was playing, and the guests were dancing as if nothing had happened. In fact, many of the guests were not aware of the murderous scuffie on the back stairs.

Peter Winter was dancing with a glorious girl in a decorative evening dress of a quality that was seldom seen in Germany in these austere times. The girl had brazenly approached Peter and asked him to dance. ‘I hear you’re a good dancer, Herr Winter. How would you like to prove it to me?’

Her German was not good. The grammar was adequate, but the accent was outlandish. Not the hard consonantal growl of the Hungarian or the Czech, this was a strange, flat drawling accent of a sort he couldn’t for a moment distinguish.

‘Are you Austrian?’ Peter asked.

She laughed in a way that was almost unladylike. ‘You flatterer! I heard you were a ladies’ man, Peter Winter, and now I declare it’s true. You know my German is not good enough for me to be Austrian. Is that what you say to any girl you encounter with a weird accent you don’t recognize?’

Peter blushed. It was exactly what he said to any girl whose accent he couldn’t place. ‘Of course not,’ he muttered.

‘I’m from California, U.S.A.,’ she said. ‘We’re almost family. Your mother was at school with my aunt.’

‘That’s not family,’ said Peter.

She laughed. ‘You Germans all have such a wonderful sense of humour.’ But Peter was not amused to be the butt of her joke. ‘Well,’ she said, stretching her long, pale arm towards him, ‘aren’t you going to ask me to dance?’

Peter clicked his heels and bowed formally. She laughed again. Peter felt confused, almost panic-stricken, and this was a strange, new experience for him. He wanted to flee but he couldn’t. He was afraid of this girl, afraid that she would think him a fool. He wanted her to like him and respect him, and that, of course, is how love first strikes the unwary.

‘Yes, you dance quite well,’ she said as they stepped out onto the dance floor to the smooth romantic chords of ‘Poor Butterfly’. Her name was Lottie Danziger and her father owned two hotels, three movie theatres, and some orange groves in California. She wore the most attention-getting evening dress of anyone there. It had a tubelike shape that deprived her of breasts and bottom. It was short and sleeveless, and its bodice was embroidered with bugle beads and imitation baroque pearls in the sort of Egyptian motif that had been all the rage since Howard Carter’s amazing discoveries in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. The trouble was that the beadwork was so heavy that it made Lottie want to sit down, and so fragile that she was frightened of doing so.

Lottie was like no other woman that Peter Winter had ever met. She was not like the German girls he’d known, or even like any of the Rensselaer family. She was beautiful, with pale skin and naturally wavy jet-black hair, cut very short in a style that was new to Berlin, not like the short hairstyles that were necessary to get the close-fitting cloche hats on, but bobbed almost like a man’s. She had dark, wicked eyes and a mouth that was perhaps a little too big, and very white, even teeth that flashed when she smiled. And she smiled a lot. Not the polite, tight-lipped smiles that well-bred German girls were taught, but big open-mouthed laughs that were infectious: Peter found himself laughing, too. But above all Lottie was intense; she was a fountain of energy, so that everything she did, from dancing to telling jokes about the young men she’d encountered on the ocean liner, was uniquely wonderful, and Peter was beguiled by every movement she made.

‘But I have a chaperon, darling. We couldn’t possibly go without her.’ It was her crazy transatlantic style to call Peter ‘darling’ right from the first moment, but her flippant use of the word made it no less tantalizing. Every suggestion he made for seeing her again was met with some wretched rule about her chaperon. She was playing with him: they both knew that she could meet with him alone if she really wanted to, and it was this that put an extra edge on their exchanges. She was so desirable that his need for her pushed all other thoughts and aspirations out of his head.

‘But you don’t look like a Rensselaer,’ she said, having for a moment silenced his attempts to arrange another meeting. She swung her head back to see him better and cocked it on one side, so that her dark, wavy hair shone in the lights. ‘No, you don’t look like a Rensselaer at all.’

She was teasing him, of course, but he readily joined her game. ‘And what do the Rensselaers look like?’

‘Gorgeous. You have only to look at your mother to know that. The Rensselaers are the most beautiful family in the whole of New York. Why, when your uncle Glenn came back from the war he must have been getting on for forty years old, and yet there wasn’t a girl in the city who didn’t dream of capturing him. The groans and gnashing of teeth when he married were to be heard from Hoboken to Hollywood. Your uncle Glenn came here just after the war, didn’t he?’

‘He was an Air Corps major attached to the Armistice Commission. He wanted Mother to go back to New York, but Father was against it.’

‘Why?’

‘He said it would look bad. All through the war he’d been saying that Mother was at heart a German. That was how he prevented her from being interned. How would it look, he said, if when the Allies won she went running back to America?’

‘Her parents are too old to travel, and they’d give anything to see her again.’

‘Papa was adamant.’

‘Do all German families obey Father so readily?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Peter.

‘In America your father would find life more difficult. You should have heard what my father said when I first told them I was coming to Europe.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He cut me off without a penny, darling,’ she said with a laugh. ‘But eventually he came around.’ She hummed the melody: ‘“Poor Butterfly”, it’s such a beautiful tune, isn’t it? I never hear it but I think of the war: all those poor butterflies that never came back.’

‘Yes,’ he said without being sure that he understood. Until now he’d not liked Americans, not the Rensselaers, not President Wilson, not any of them. They were not easy to understand. But this one – with her hair bobbed almost like a man’s, and the fringe that came down to her eyebrows – was captivating. As he swung her past a huge arrangement of fresh-cut flowers, she extended her hand so that the fingertips brushed the blooms. It was a schoolgirl’s gesture – she had to show the world how happy she was. Perhaps all Americans were like that: they were not good at secrecy, they had to demonstrate their emotions.

They danced on until they passed Inge Wisliceny dancing with Richard Fischer. Inge looked especially beautiful tonight. Long dresses and deep necklines were becoming on her. Lottie let go of Peter’s hand to wave to her. Inge smiled sadly as they whirled past and disappeared. ‘And where is your uncle Glenn now?’ she asked.

‘Heaven knows. Somewhere in Europe. Every few weeks we get a postcard from him. He visits now and again and he’s always sending gifts of food. He thinks we’re starving.’

‘Many Germans are starving,’ Lottie reminded him. ‘But Glenn was always generous. He was my favourite man. I was eighteen when he got married. I cried to think I’d lost him. I went to the East Coast just to be a bridesmaid. Handsome, clever and brave.’

‘And rich, too,’ said Peter sardonically. He was getting rather fed up with this eulogy to Glenn Rensselaer.

‘Not your uncle Glenn. He cares nothing for money, but his father is rich, of course.’

‘My grandfather, you mean; yes, he got rich from the war,’ said Peter. ‘They say that one out of every ten trucks the American army used came from a Rensselaer factory.’

‘You’re not going to be one of those boring people who want to blame the war on war profiteers.’

‘So many people died,’ said Peter. ‘It’s obscene to think that the fighting made anyone rich.’

‘So what would you prefer?’ she said. ‘That the government own everything, make everything, and decide how much money each and every citizen deserves?’

‘It might be better.’

‘You’d better stay away from politics, Peter Winter. No one will believe that you could be so dumm as to want to deliver yourself to the politicians.’

‘Yes. Long, long ago my brother, Pauli, told me more or less the same thing.’

There was something touching about Peter Winter when he admitted to his shortcomings. ‘You’re adorable,’ she said and brushed her lips across his cheek. He caught a whiff of her perfume. ‘Why are you staring at me?’ he asked.

‘I know you so well from your photographs. Your grandmother has pictures of you everywhere in their house in New York. And in the room where I practised piano there is a photo of you at the keyboard. You must have been about ten or twelve. They told me you practised three hours every day. Is it true?’

‘I’ve given up the piano. I haven’t touched a piano for years.’

‘But why?’

‘My hand was injured.’

‘Where? Show me.’ She pulled his hand round into view. ‘That? Why that’s nothing. How can that make any difference to a real musician?’

‘I can’t play Bach with a fingertip missing.’ For the first time she heard real anger in his voice, and she was sorry for him.

‘Don’t be so arrogant. Perhaps it will prevent your becoming a professional pianist, but how can you not play? You must love music. Or don’t you?’

‘I love music.’

‘Of course you do. Now, tomorrow you will visit me and I will play some records for you. Do you like jazz music?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘If you think it’s only all right, then you haven’t heard any. Tomorrow you’ll hear some of the best jazz music on records. I brought them from New York with me. You’ll come? I’m staying with the Wislicenys.’

‘I know. Yes, I’d be honoured.’ Listening to jazz music was a small price to pay for being alone in her room with this wonderful girl.

‘The really great jazz is not on records. You should hear it in Harlem. Although you have to go to the black people’s brothels in Memphis or New Orleans to hear the real thing.’

Peter Winter turned his head away so that she didn’t see his embarrassment. Even in this degenerate, wide-open city of Berlin one didn’t expect well-brought-up young ladies to know what a brothel was, let alone to mention it in conversation with a man.

‘Are you looking for someone?’ she asked.

‘My brother.’ It was not true, but it would do.

‘Your father sent for him. I was there. Is something wrong?’

‘Pauli invited some strange people.’

‘Sure, but it’s his show.’

‘His birthday? Yes, but sometimes one’s friends do not mix well with family.’

‘Will he get told off?’

‘He’ll get round it. Pauli can charm his way out of anything,’ said Peter.

‘Do I hear a note of envy?’

‘No.’ Peter smiled. How could he ever envy Pauli, except sometimes for the way that his parents indulged him? ‘He’s always getting into the sort of scrapes that test his charm to the very limit. Goodness knows how he’ll ever pass his law finals.’

‘I can’t imagine your brother, Pauli, as a lawyer.’

‘And what about me?’

‘Easily…a trial lawyer, perhaps. You have the style for that.’

‘And Pauli doesn’t?’

She was cautious. Peter’s readiness to defend his brother against any sort of criticism was something of which the Wisliceny girls had already told her. ‘Is there any need for him to do anything? Isn’t it enough that he’ll inherit half the Winter fortune and keep this fine old house going while you run the business?’

Peter smiled grimly. ‘Father would have something to say about that. Father is a man of the Kaiserzeit…. So, I suppose, am I.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘And you don’t object to us formal, humourless Teutons?’

‘Object? Goodness, what could I object to? I’m not going to marry and settle down here. I’m just a tourist.’

He hastily thought of something to say. ‘Pauli’s not a fool. He’s clever, and as brave as a lion.’

‘Poor butterfly…’ she sang softly as they danced. She knew the words, and her soft, low, murmuring voice was bewitching.

‘Keep your money’

Pauli loved and feared his father, but now the time had come for him to speak up for himself or be crushed by his father’s personality. He looked at the picture of the Kaiser that hung on the wall, and then he caught his breath and turned on his father. ‘You pretend it’s a party for me, but who are invited to your grand house? Your rich friends and the people you want to impress, that’s who. Do you know what I think about your friends and your party…?’ He stopped. His mother’s face had turned pale, and there was a look of such anguish there that he could not bear to hurt her more. Through the door he could hear the band playing ‘Poor Butterfly’. It took him back to the first day of the 1918 offensive – the captured British battery, the tinny gramophone.

‘Go on,’ said Harald Winter calmly. Deeply hurt by his son’s outburst, he couldn’t repress a secret feeling of satisfaction that Veronica was present to see his predictions come true. For Harald more than once had said that Pauli was an ungrateful wretch. It was his terrible experiences in the war, of course. Harald Winter had always been quick to explain the faults of those around him. Pauli had been through all sorts of hell, and that had affected him. Otherwise the boy would have been pleased to have such a lavish celebration held in his honour. As for Pauli’s complaint that most of the people there were friends of his parents rather than his own friends, he should have the sense to understand that this was his chance to get reacquainted with people who matter. And, anyway, a formal dinner of this scale was not something that his Freikorps rowdies, or his noisy, loose-living student friends, would appreciate. Judging by what Winter heard at his club, the whole party would have become an orgy inside ten minutes.

Harald Winter told his son, ‘Captain Graf was invited at your insistence, as I understand it. How do you explain his disgraceful criminal conduct?’

‘I fought alongside Graf, and many others like him. They fought the communists, and are still fighting them, to keep Germany safe for you and others like you. Who are you to sit in judgement on him? What did you do in the war except make money?’

‘I haven’t noticed that you decline the chance to spend a portion of it. You have a generous allowance, a motorcycle … your college fees, books, you run up bills at my tailor.’ Harald stopped, choked with indignation and anger.

‘Keep your money….’

‘No, Pauli, no. Say nothing that you’ll regret tomorrow,’ his mother pleaded.

‘What loyalty do you show to your friends?’ persisted Pauli. ‘Tonight you’ve invited all your aristocratic Russian refugee friends: princes, dukes and duchesses, and even that old fool who claims to be a nephew of the Tsar. Do they know that aircraft built in your factories are helping to train the Red Army that kicked them off their grand estates?’

‘The army don’t ask my advice about where to use their aircraft,’ said Harald Winter calmly.

‘I can’t continue living in this house,’ said Pauli. ‘I should never have moved back here. It’s stifling, constricting, like a prison, like a museum.’ To his mother he said softly, ‘It’s better that I go, Mama: We live in such different worlds. You hate my friends and I have grown to hate your values.’

‘Decency and respect? What values are you talking about?’ said Harald Winter. ‘Poor Hauser was stabbed by that madman Graf. Your friend Esser has drunk so much that he vomited on the morning-room carpet and knocked over a caseful of chinaware. How dare you tell me that you hate my friends and my values?’

Pauli shrugged. It was always like this when he was dragged into a row; he found himself arguing to support issues in which he didn’t believe. He loved Hauser and despised Graf, but that didn’t change the fact that his father’s world was an ancient, alien place from which he must escape. ‘I’m sorry, Papa. Forgive me, but it’s better that I leave. I will go to Hamburg or Munich or somewhere I can start again. I would never have got through my finals anyway. I am too stupid to study the law. But Peter will fulfil your hopes and expectations.’

‘Pauli…’ said his mother.

‘Let him go,’ said Harald Winter. ‘He’ll be back when the money runs out. I’ve heard it all before. Let him discover what it’s like to be a penniless beggar in these terrible times. He’ll be back knocking at the door before the month is out.’

Veronica said nothing. She did not believe that Pauli would come back begging for his father’s help. And, in fact, neither did his father.

In the event, Pauli did move his effects from the house, but he didn’t go to Hamburg or Munich. He moved into a room in the nearby district of Wedding in a boardinghouse run by a war widow, an intimate friend of Fritz Esser. Pauli declined to take any more payments from his father, but he did not give up his law studies.

It was Peter who spent hours pleading his brother’s case. It was Peter who reminded his father of the terrible time Pauli had had in the war, and Peter who conspired with his mother so that the approaches were made when Harald was in a good mood.

Although Pauli took no more money from his father, his brother, Peter, transferred money to his bank account each month. Pauli’s parents accepted this covert financial arrangement, and honour was satisfied. Pauli was happy to feel that he wasn’t accepting money from his father, while his father was happy to know that in fact he was. And, as Harald Winter remarked to his wife, he didn’t want Pauli to be driven to such a state of penury that he sold that house on the Obersalzberg.

Most important, Pauli got permission from the university to switch, starting the following term, from company law to criminal law. It was a study that Pauli found immediately interesting and relevant. To everyone’s surprise, not least to Pauli’s, he caught up quickly with his fellow students and came fifth from the top in his exams.

Coaching Fritz Esser in this subject was less successful, although with a great deal of effort Fritz got through his interim exams before abandoning his studies. One day, he promised, he’d go back and get his law degree. But meanwhile he’d become a full-time paid official of the Nazi Party and wholly occupied with politics.

Soon after Pauli left home, his uncle Glenn Rensselaer found his shabby lodging. Glenn was working for some American office-machinery company that had its main agency in Leipzig. He came often to Berlin and always brought Pauli presents. Pauli liked Glenn; he liked the way he came up to the top-floor garret room and did not stare around at the cracked lino, the newspaper pasted on the broken windowpanes to provide a modicum of privacy, the chamberpot under the bed, or the unshaded light bulb. Glenn seemed perfectly at home in the rat-infested tenement. The occasion of his arrival was usually marked by Glenn’s presenting the landlady and certain other tenants with bottles of schnapps. Glenn said he got them cheap, but Pauli knew he paid full price at the shop round the corner. Glenn was like that.

When Pauli passed his final exams, it was Glenn who persuaded Harald to attend the ceremony, and Glenn who arranged dinner for twenty-four people at Medvedj, a smart restaurant on Bayreuther Strasse, and footed the bill for blinis and caviar, borscht and kulibiaki, a gypsy trio, and all the trimmings in this fashionable restaurant where Berlin’s Russian exiles liked to go when they could afford it. And when Glenn asked so casually what Pauli would do next, and Pauli gave a long, involved explanation about a company that had offered to provide him with an office and secretarial help on condition that he do some legal work for them, Glenn’s congratulations sounded warm and sincere. But Glenn Rensselaer was no fool, and he guessed just as quickly as did Peter and Harald Winter that the ‘company’ that was to play fairy godmother was the Nazi Party, and that Pauli was going to be defending some of the worst thugs involved in the streetfighting, assaults, and murders that had become a regular part of the German political scene.

When, the following October, Peter talked about becoming engaged to Lottie Danziger, Glenn Rensselaer gave Lottie a jade brooch bearing Peter’s initials on the gold setting and gave Peter a watch engraved with the date of their intended engagement party. ‘Now,’ Glenn Rensselaer told them both, ‘you’ll have to go ahead.’ And they did. It was another big party, this time at the Wisliceny house. Lottie’s parents did not come. They had long before decided that Lottie was going to marry the eldest son of a West Coast oil tycoon, and they were angry to think of Lottie’s marrying Peter Winter, a German. ‘Not so angry as I am,’ said Harald Winter to his wife the night he first heard the news: and many many times afterwards. ‘I don’t know what appals me more,’ he said, ‘the thought of him married to an American or to a Jew.’

His wife did not take this insult personally. During the war she had grown used to hearing her countrymen denigrated and insulted. Calmly she said, ‘How can you say that, when the Fischers are such close friends?’

‘The Fischers are different.’

‘And Peter and Lottie plan to live in Germany. Think of her poor parents – six thousand miles away – they are losing her forever.’ It was an expression of Veronica’s guilt. Now, as her father grew old, she thought about him more and more.

Harald Winter grunted. He felt not at all grateful to fate or to the girl. Of course they would remain in Germany. Peter hadn’t taken complete leave of his senses, thank God.