Mister Wolf Read online

  Bormann brooded for the duration of the drive back. Fields approaching harvest under a baby blue sky against the spectacular Alpine backdrop made little impression. The cocooned interior of the vehicle, upholstered in the finest napped leather, was another matter. Bormann was a car nut; the Führer, too, though he had never learned to drive.

  The immediate and vexing problem of the drawings being raised again by the Führer took up the rest of the journey, and just as well because after dinner the Führer drew him aside.

  Bormann pulled a long face and said some idiot had taken the initiative of transferring the safe to the Führer’s private office in Berlin, thinking it was needed there.

  Bormann stared at the floor and thought of noodles, sauerkraut, knuckles of ham, sausages and onion tarts.

  ‘Which idiot?’ asked the Führer.

  Bormann reeled off a name and added, ‘He has been transferred as of today,’ thinking, pâté de foie gras, Coq au Riesling.

  Because the Führer knew nothing of how offices worked, Bormann was gambling that the transfer of an entire safe 600 kilometres north would not strike him as in any way odd. The implication was that the Führer’s privacy had been respected. If Bormann reported that its contents had been transferred that would have led to spittle-flecked accusations of interference. But the Führer seemed quite pleased by the weight of the operation – a whole safe moved – even if it was an administrative balls-up.

  With the Führer satisfied for the moment, Bormann sat back and contemplated his labyrinth. He was not a sophisticated man – quite the opposite, being culturally clueless and proud of it, other than acquiring stuff on the advice of so-called experts (it was the age of such people) – but at intrigue he excelled, through a combination of peasant cunning, bureaucratic blocking, grinding hard work, excellent memory, personal loans dished out left, right and centre from Party funds, and extensive files on everyone. Like it or not, nearly all were indebted.

  Anywhere else he would have been chief of secret police but he had identified precisely the power base of the regime: the desk. Others had too but Bormann had identified the right desk, the secretarial one that sat right outside the Führer’s kennel.

  That evening, Bormann stayed late in the hope of running into the strapping kitchen maid who was usually up for a quickie. The Führer was in conference long into the night. Fräulein Braun was in her quarters, no doubt reading romantic trash, even more of a prisoner than the late Princess Geli. Bormann felt almost sorry for Braun.

  The kitchen maid said she had the painters in. That didn’t bother Bormann, but he had to make do with a hand job. Afterwards he took a beer onto the deserted terrace. The Führer’s bedroom light was still on. Bormann thought it safe to risk a cigarette and lit up, only to be caught by the Führer creeping out of the shadows. Bormann whipped the cigarette behind his back and blew smoke out of the side of his mouth, hoping it didn’t show. It was the first time he had seen the man in a dressing gown. Black with grey trimming. Noticing Bormann looking, the Führer said it was a birthday present from Fräulein Braun.

  ‘Give,’ he said. He meant the cigarette. Bormann handed it over like a caught-out schoolboy. In all his years, he had never been the subject of one of the Führer’s towering rages and wondered if his moment had come. Heini Himmler he had seen reduced to a squeaking wreck.

  To Bormann’s astonishment, the Führer took a drag, handed it back and said, ‘Filthy habit. Now put it out.’

  For lack of an ashtray, Bormann stepped on the butt and stayed standing on it.

  ‘We need to talk about what happens next,’ said the Führer.

  Bormann had never seen the man so fragile or human, even in the depths of his depressions.

  That night they hatched the future.

  Bormann said all the signs were that an attempt on the Führer’s life was imminent and the Army was behind it. His agents were at work and names would be forthcoming.

  The Führer, whose instinct for surviving such attempts was uncanny, said he had known in his bones.

  But it was Bormann who voiced what the Führer dared not think when he said, ‘Why not let the assassination go ahead?’

  BERLIN

  July 1944

  1

  August Schlegel flew into Berlin from Budapest via Vienna on the regular Lufthansa flight on the evening of Wednesday, 19 July, after what looked like another stinking hot day. Berlin was no longer the city it was. The extent to which it had been knocked about was more visible from the air, with flattened industrial outskirts as grey and pitted as a moon landscape. No air raids for most of the summer but destruction was a fact of life. Rubble, shortages and dust, the city more stuffed than ever with foreign workers in their wooden huts, sprung up like weeds on waste land.

  The plane banked and Schlegel watched one train beetle-crawl past another on its elevated track. The city still functioned but not like Budapest where waiters continued to serve real coffee and cream. A cabin attendant handed out boiled sweets. Schlegel sucked hard on his, depressed at being back. BERLIN spelled out in huge letters on the runway struck him as faintly ominous.

  The aeroplane wallowed in to land, engines whining in protest.

  They all disembarked and walked across the wide concrete apron to the arrivals hall.

  Passport control was a formality. Customs on the other hand singled him out, two badly shaven elderly goons keen to make the most of their authority. Open the bag. Close the bag. Papers. Purpose of trip. Open the bag again. Schlegel supposed it amused them. He was asked if he was carrying any gifts and to state the purpose of his visit.

  ‘No gifts. Courier,’ he said.

  He had to show them the papers. ‘Inventory of art works for sale,’ he said and pointed to the signed documents, stamped by the SS and Hungarian customs.

  Still they detained him with their pointless questions. For two minutes it was funny then Schlegel started to sweat. Did they know something he didn’t?

  The folder and papers were taken away for copying. Something seemed odd about them when they were returned. Schlegel flipped through the document. It seemed to be all there. The two goons looked at him. Authority confronted by another authority was always an uncomfortable experience. But they said he could go. Schlegel stuffed the folder back in his case, wondering if the men had been tipped off. As the waiter in Budapest’s Gerbeaud café had said to him, not so many young men with white hair.

  *

  Much later he would try to decide the best point of entry into the events that were about to unfold. He could have cut the cake at any point really. What he didn’t understand then was how deep correlations of historical coincidence could turn out to be so personal.

  The one lesson Schlegel would learn was that you have to understand how the past telescopes into the present.

  *

  By that troubled summer of 1944 there was no past in the sense of lives being joined up by the usual connections of memory or nostalgia. If one did look back, it was only over one’s shoulder, to check no one was following.

  Anyone observing Schlegel on that evening of 19 July would have seen a tall, ordinary young man still in his twenties, wearing a hat and a suit too hot for the weather, carrying an overnight valise. His shoes were in a state of poor repair. He looked like he got not enough sleep and too little to eat, but by then sleeplessness, hunger and shoes with holes were the norm.

  The city lay baked by the oppressive heat. Even the language was a welcome return after Hungarian, not a word of which Schlegel had recognised, not even the one for beer (sör). He took the S-bahn to Ostkreuz, changed and got off at Alexanderplatz. His apartment was a twenty-minute walk, through quiet dusty streets. He crossed a small square of trees with tired leaves and peeling bark. Cafés and restaurants were gone, their staff and owners long since mobilised, practically cheered off, given their reputation for universal rudeness. What was left was not worth patronising. The Hungarians were still serious about their cafés. The Gerbeaud was like
a salon, with its formal layout of separate tables and heavy brocade.

  Schlegel walked past mostly young women sitting on doorsteps, watching what was left of life go by. One saluted him with a beer bottle. He experienced a stab of desire at the sight of her skirt pulled up over her thighs to catch the last of the sun. Who might she think he worked for, he wondered; Ministry of Propaganda?

  His tiny lodgings were up five flights, above a closed dance hall. The climb still left him breathless. He counted the ninety-six steps and paused as always on the third turn. The letdown of homecoming, he thought, as he entered his little box that stood alone at the top of the stairs.

  He paused, alert. Something intangible in the dead air made him think it had been disturbed during his absence.

  It was still light outside, the start of getting dark.

  Everything was where he had left it: his service pistol, not taken to Budapest, under the floorboards; a heel of a stale loaf in the bread bin. The feeling of disturbance persisted.

  Perhaps it was a result of now working for the Gestapo.

  He knew as well as anyone that people had grown most afraid of themselves.

  He resolved to go out and get drunk. His own form of deviancy amounted to seeking out illicit roving venues where forbidden music was played and teenagers – mainly boys with long hair – gathered to get high and enjoy the last of their freedom before conscription.

  His purpose was to go in undercover to expose the scene he was patronising, though he had done nothing about that, having rather fallen for this forbidden world.

  He’d hung around student venues, claiming to be a freelance photographer on a ministry grant, compiling an archive of endangered frescoes. Schlegel had once met such a fellow, who couldn’t believe his luck: excused active service for undemanding work, with travel and accommodation thrown in. Schlegel told the students he was back from Köln where he had come across hot jazz parties. Thanks to Gestapo files, he knew what he was talking about. One gang called itself the Edelweiss Pirates, another the Raving Dudes.

  Inside the venues, usually cellars of bombed-out buildings, maybe thirty to fifty kids crammed into a dark, sweaty space where they drank and smoked and necked and danced. A basic sound system amplified the gramophone and the tinny rhythms of crude, urgent music were transmitted like messages from another planet.

  *

  On the night of the nineteenth, Schlegel went looking for such a club. These visits had been going on for about six weeks. He knew he was playing a dangerous game. By then he was going for the pleasurable distractions of Gerda, who was a bit older than the general crowd. He didn’t know what she did, other than postgraduate work connected to the university. Like many young women in Berlin, she was sexually generous.

  They hadn’t talked much or introduced themselves rather than bump into each other and start jigging to the music. Then it was first names and kissing in the dark and a few times after that easy gratification in shadows and doorways before going their separate ways. The blackout encouraged casual sex. Schlegel would have liked to get to know her better – she seemed lively and interesting – but it was an unwritten code that such encounters took place apart from the rest of life.

  That night the local venues he tried weren’t being used. It was dark with almost no moon and when he cracked his shin on a concrete pillar he gave up and went home.

  *

  He checked his mailbox. A couple of envelopes, one a bill, the other plain and unaddressed. Inside he found a folded sheet of foolscap and a list of names.

  Upstairs, Schlegel looked at it properly – a column of typed names and initials, single spaced, with nothing to say what they meant; perhaps thirty in all. None of the names he recognised. He was irritated more than puzzled, until down near the end he saw his own.

  ‘Schlegel’.

  And his initial.

  ‘Schlegel A’.

  Above his name: ‘Stempfle B.’ Below: ‘Zehnter K.’ He had never heard of them but finding his own name on a list was bound to rack up a man’s persecution complex. The regime specialised in secret lists. List after list. Was it a warning?

  He slept badly and got up in the night, more worried about the Budapest documents. Papers in order; he decided the folder was wrong – it looked the same, but not quite: marbled paper, two ribbons for tying, a standard product. It felt newer. Sloppy fuckers, not bothering to return the original folder, he thought, and told himself it was just another irritating detail in an irritating day. As for the real point of the trip, Schlegel hadn’t a clue, but more had been going on than he knew. He sighed. No use wasting time on imponderables. Some mysteries weren’t there to be solved.

  He went back to bed, slept badly and this time got up and inspected the foolscap list. The creases, folded for the envelope, looked new but the page itself felt old. He stared at his name and thought that was what had woken him. Whether he had been dreaming about his long-lost father – however hard that was when he knew nothing of the man or even what he looked like – somewhere in the depths of his unconscious he had made the connection.

  Schlegel was August, his father Anton. Both Schlegel A.

  Was it his father’s name on the list rather than his?

  But his father had gone to Argentina in the early 1920s never to be heard from again, or to be mentioned by his mother, except once when Schlegel was fifteen to announce she had been told by the German embassy he had drowned in Argentina, swimming in a river. By then Schlegel remembered nothing of the man, so he didn’t miss him. He was annoyed to be reminded of this vague, forgotten presence, like the first ripple of a breeze that brings bad weather, and he recalled a dim childhood memory of imagining him working for the Argentinian railway, building high spectacular bridges that spanned wild gorges over tumbling rivers. Why he should think his father had built bridges, he had no idea.

  2

  Schlegel went to work as usual on the morning of Thursday, 20 July after two days off sick – at least, according to what he had told the office. Another hot day was promised. It was still cool as he crossed the river. He preferred the forty-minute walk to the stink and squash of rush hour transport.

  On Friedrichstrasse a section of S-Bahn track was down. The city was a smash-up. Everyone was so nerve-tested that Schlegel wondered if his hair hadn’t gone white for a second time.

  The list was in his pocket. He didn’t know what to make of it but his organisation possessed a huge central index for all capitals, regions and zones of occupation, and if any names on the list had come to the attention of the Gestapo they would feature in its files. He decided to check, thinking if it really was his father, he must have not gone to South America or gone and come back without telling anyone.

  *

  ‘Feeling better?’ Dunkelwert asked. There was nothing solicitous about the remark. Nor could Schlegel detect sarcasm, only flat disbelief.

  ‘Food poisoning,’ he said.

  Dunkelwert was barely taller than he was sitting. He had watched her beady tracking of his arrival as he hung up his hat. Schlegel looked around the office. Such busy bees. Dunkelwert had a slogan for everything – ‘Efficiency and punctuality’; ‘Time given to the state is dedicated time,’ whatever that meant. The ineffectual Bletsch, nominally in charge, sat in his glass hutch, but Dunkelwert was taking over because the Party increasingly ran the show. She was its mouthpiece and usher of reforms, with performance assessment and forty- and fifty-year old men being treated like kids.

  Control was easier since their offices had been damaged in an air raid. They were now lumped together in a former typing pool with cubby holes, fancily described as carrels, partitioned shoulder high, with no natural light because broken windows were boarded up and awaiting repair after months.

  Dunkelwert with her nicotine moustache and tobacco stained fingers made Schlegel think of a malevolent animated doll wound up to tread a fine line between persecutor and victim. She wasn’t his actual superior but being ambitious had positioned herse
lf as de facto team leader, making her one of an emerging breed of a species thought to be extinct – the career woman. She had consolidated her base by setting up committees no one bothered about until it was too late. Technically she worked for the same department as Schlegel. Section 5a covered antisocial behaviour and shirking, which, as the cynics said, covered a multitude of sins, but through control of joint committees with sections 2 (sabotage) and 4a (Catholicism, Protestantism, Freemasonry), she was able constantly to interfere and exploited the condescension with which she was treated by retorting, ‘You are only saying that because I am a woman.’ As for any personal life, Schlegel couldn’t imagine her sharing anything, let alone her body, yet from the way she sometimes looked at him he wondered if she was a sexual predator, but of what? Boys? Girls? He suspected if not physical cruelty then at least a degree of mental torture.

  *

  The day started with the usual endless Thursday meeting. Bletsch was an old timeserver, with a big quiff and a toothbrush moustache, who made a point of giving Dunkelwert a hard time because she was after his job.

  Bletsch did his rah-rah act to gee them all up. Most couldn’t care less. Despite a heavy caseload, the job was not complicated. It was the work of a network of informers more than any active investigation on their part. After that it was about what the apprehended could share about others. Schlegel and Dunkelwert had two such cases on their books: a farmer’s wife shopped by her vindictive mother-in-law and a juvenile delinquent looking to wriggle off the hook by offering up a molesting priest. Schlegel was familiar enough by then with the process. It was like watching a plug being pulled as it dawned on the accused that everything had just changed. Guilty or not, there were no mitigating circumstances. Actually that was not quite true. Situations were often more negotiable than they appeared. Dogs could learn new tricks. Thus did the informed on become the informers.