The Aftermath Page 15

  ‘You see a mistake?’

  ‘No … Nein. Ist. Perfekt. But it’s Kensington. Not Kensingtown.’

  ‘Ah!’ Ursula seemed genuinely annoyed at herself. She reread the word aloud: ‘Ken-zing-tonn. I am sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine. An easy mistake. No one will mind. Ist der Minister schon hier?’

  ‘He is in the salon.’

  ‘Let’s hope he’s one of ours.’

  ‘One of ours?’

  ‘As opposed to “one of theirs”. I mean, let’s hope he’s on our side. One of the good guys.’

  Ursula indicated that he had something on his chin by touching her own.

  ‘You have blood.’

  Lewis touched the spot and dotted blood on to his finger.

  ‘That’ll teach me for trying to shave without soap. My feeble attempt at saving resources.’ He licked his finger and sealed the cut with his spit. ‘Still bleeding?’

  Ursula took a kerchief from her coat pocket and held it up to dab the cut. She paused, waiting for him to give her permission to proceed. Lewis pushed out his chin, hoping that no general or Bürgermeister would be passing by at that precise moment.

  ‘Bitte.’

  Ursula tended his cut like a mother, and, although she did it with an unfussy matter-of-factness, her attentions made Lewis blush. Her smell close up was like fresh linen.

  ‘There. Now you are ready to meet the minister from Kensing-ton.’ She stepped back a pace, sensing his embarrassment.

  ‘Thank you. Auf in den Kampf!?’

  She nodded. ‘Auf in den Kampf.’

  And the two of them set off towards the main salon, ‘to battle’.

  The men were standing in smoky clusters of twos and threes, and the hubbub of their voices was intense. It was quite a turn-out: General Surtees had come, along with other CCG top brass; the rotund Bürgermeister was here, smoking his full-sized Cuban cigar like some German Churchill; and Vaughan Berry, the commissioner, was in attendance, looking strained and dutiful. Shaw was easy to spot; one of only two men not in uniform, he was surrounded by an attentive petitioning cabal, each one keen to get their pennyworth from the MP while they could.

  Lewis quickly explained who was who to Ursula. ‘The thin man is General Surtees. My ultimate boss. And yours.’

  ‘One of ours?’

  Lewis smiled. She was a quick learner. He shook his head.

  ‘The man in the banker’s suit?’

  ‘That’s the commissioner.’

  Vaughan Berry was the only other man in the room not in uniform. Lewis thought highly of Berry. He’d famously refused to wear the navy-blue uniform of the CCG, as it reminded him of an air-raid warden’s. ‘One of ours,’ Lewis said.

  ‘And the man talking to the minister now?’

  Lewis felt himself bristle. It was Major Burnham and, from the look of things, he was already in the process of lobbying the MP into submission. Lewis was annoyed at himself for not getting here before Burnham had the chance to pollute the MP’s thinking. Shaw looked like a man intently trying to solve a difficult conundrum: hand thoughtfully to chin, head tilted sympathetically as if trying to hear and remember everything that was being said.

  ‘Major Burnham. Intelligence.’

  ‘One of theirs,’ Ursula said, without needing to ask.

  At breakfast, Lewis found himself sitting opposite Burnham and a visiting American, General Ryan Caine, here to see how the Brits were getting on and share something of life in the American zone. Caine had the close-cropped hair that even American three-star generals seemed to prefer; it made him look virile and youthful, while the sunspots blotching his skin suggested exposure to sunnier climes and a life fully lived. He exuded the ease of a man enjoying his time in Germany and the low-grade smugness of a man visiting his poorer, struggling cousins.

  ‘Isn’t it time you eased up on the fraternization laws? I hear that just talking to a German woman amounts to soliciting in your zone.’

  ‘I think, for now, the Germans prefer a clear separation.’

  ‘You know, in Frankfurt now we already have a special civil service for marriages between American servicemen and German civilians. Now, that’s a simple way to integrate with a society.’ Caine was all over Ursula with his eyes. ‘If you ever want to switch to a friendlier zone, Fräulein …’

  Ursula, Lewis was pleased to observe, remained gracefully underwhelmed.

  ‘The British zone has many more problems, General.’

  ‘Well, you’re right there.’

  A waiter brought plates of breakfast: eggs, sausages, rashers, grilled halves of tomato, mushrooms, onion, black pudding, liver.

  ‘You may be broke, but it’s good to see you’re not cutting back on the hospitality,’ said Caine. The American then grew serious. ‘Don’t you think it’s time to give the Germans the steering wheel back? We need to act fast. If we’re not careful, they’ll start thinking the Soviets are a better prospect. We need to get their businesses going. Give them the capital they need. Then give them their head. Give them the tools … There’s talk of a plan to give them – and Europe – massive aid. It’s being discussed in Washington as we speak. We all need a strong Germany.’

  ‘But first we need a clean Germany, General,’ Burnham said.

  Caine cut a piece of liver in two and forked some into his mouth.

  ‘Well, of course,’ he said. ‘Root the fuckers out first. Pardon my language, Fräulein.’

  With a light smile, Ursula indicated that she was more amused than offended.

  Lewis had eaten half an egg and a rasher of bacon, but the conversation was tightening his stomach, shrinking it. He was desperate to say something. He glanced down the table. De Billier was in conversation with Marshall Sholto, and well out of earshot. But Shaw, who was sitting the other side of Ursula, was now listening in on the exchange.

  ‘I liked what you said earlier, Major: “You can’t build a house on rotten foundations.”’

  Lewis’s heart sank. Lewis had heard these same words from the lips of Wilkins. And now Burnham was keeping the Chinese whisper going, no doubt having planted it during his chat before breakfast. In this way, unfounded prejudice cemented into hard opinion and went on to form policy.

  ‘The Germans have had twelve years of ignorance and illiteracy,’ Burnham said, encouraged by the minister. ‘It’s made people into animals. We can start the process of reconstructing their psyches when we have established the rule of law and rebuilt basic infrastructures, but, until then, we need to be vigilant. Kindness is a luxury we can’t afford.’

  Burnham’s lashes blinked at Lewis.

  ‘You believe there’s a threat of insurgency?’ Shaw asked, taking things in the direction Lewis didn’t want them to go.

  ‘The chaos on the ground and the mass movement of displaced people provide perfect cover for the Nazi to disappear, then reappear, having reinvented himself as an “innocent”.’

  ‘You have the questionnaire,’ Caine suggested.

  ‘The questionnaire is helpful, but we’re having to refine it slightly – we have to probe a little deeper into people’s pasts to get to the truth. We need more personnel to deal with the backlog. But we also need better intelligence to find the real criminals. It’s not just a case of sheep and goats. It’s the goats who are sheep and the sheep who are wolves. Or Werwolf.’

  The word hooked everyone.

  ‘You have them here?’ Caine asked.

  ‘We had a convoy attacked by two insurgents last week. Turned over a lorry full of gin.’

  ‘They know where to hit you guys hard,’ Caine quipped.

  ‘Insurge
nts?’ Lewis asked. ‘Or people looking for food?’

  ‘The two we arrested looked fairly well nourished,’ Burnham returned. ‘They both seemed convinced Hitler was alive and well and would come back to trounce us yet. When I pointed out that the Führer was dead, one asked me to prove it, saying that the Russians had never produced a body.’

  ‘Show me the body!’ Caine exclaimed. ‘As if the Führer were Jesus Christ himself!’

  ‘The Werwolf’s value as propaganda far outweighs its achievements, Minister,’ Lewis said, determined to kill this myth and bring the conversation back to what mattered.

  But Burnham had everyone where he wanted them.

  ‘They both had the 88 tattoos,’ Burnham continued. ‘Burnt on the forearms.’

  ‘Eighty-eight?’ the minister asked.

  ‘It’s code. The eighth letter of the alphabet?’

  Shaw counted it out. ‘H. HH?’

  Burnham nodded. He wanted Shaw to say it.

  ‘Heil Hitler?’

  Lewis urgently felt the need to step in now.

  ‘Stuff and nonsense. You can see 88s painted on walls and ruins all over the city. It simply shows how bad things are that people are prepared to contemplate going back to that.’

  ‘Maybe some Germans haven’t learned their lesson?’ Caine suggested.

  ‘Justice must be seen to be done,’ Shaw said. ‘The people back home demand it.’

  ‘Surely it’s better that justice is actually done rather than simply seen to be done.’

  ‘You’re not a politician, Colonel. Perception is nine tenths of the truth in my world.’

  ‘Chasing a few fanatics is hardly our priority,’ Lewis said, his restraint buckling. He was aware that Ursula had gone quiet, as the men dissected her country.

  ‘So what would you say are our priorities?’ Shaw asked.

  Lewis straightened his back and spread his hands on the table. ‘You can’t introduce democracy to a people that’s starving and fragmented. If we feed people, house them, reunite separated loved ones, create work, then we have nothing to fear. But, right now, there are millions of able-bodied Germans unable to work because of this “cleaning” process. Families are still living apart. Thousands are still in internment camps.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Shaw nodded thoughtfully. But this litany of to-do’s wasn’t as compelling as the stories about the Werwolf.

  ‘You have real sympathy for the natives, Colonel,’ General Caine observed. ‘Is this why they call you Lawrence of Hamburg?’

  Burnham must have leaked this.

  ‘Perhaps you could tell the minister and the general about the special arrangement in your house, Colonel,’ Burnham suggested. He turned to Shaw and Caine. ‘Colonel Morgan is pioneering a new approach to Anglo-German relations.’

  Lewis had always envied the ability of the Intelligence boys to sit with generals and ministers and speak their minds without recourse to authority, but Burnham was sorely testing Lewis’s egalitarian bent. And now Burnham was directing the conversation to his will.

  Reluctantly, Lewis found himself explaining to the table how he had come to share a house with a German family. When he’d finished, there was a long, stigmatizing silence. What, before, had seemed a humane act now sounded almost scandalous.

  ‘Now that’s fraternizing, Colonel,’ Caine said.

  ‘I wonder. Doesn’t it compound a sense of resentment?’ Burnham asked, in a perfectly reasonable tone. ‘I mean, wouldn’t these Germans rather be with their compatriots? In the camps?’

  The table looked to Lewis to answer the question.

  ‘In Nissen huts? Freezing half to death?’ He knew he was subverting the official line on this, but Shaw needed to know.

  ‘I’ve heard they’re pretty comfy,’ Shaw said. ‘They have heat. And food. Which is more than half of England is currently enjoying.’

  ‘I think, given the choice, most of us would stay in our house if offered the chance,’ Lewis said.

  ‘Well, let’s hope your kindness doesn’t come back to bite you, Colonel,’ Shaw said.

  Lewis had already said too much and he could see that General de Billier was agitated at his criticism of British efforts in front of the minister. He’d leave it to the tour to show the Member of Parliament how things really were in the camps.

  Lubert sat in the sour-milk-smelling waiting room of the Direct Interrogation Centre, trying to remember anything – anything other than being German – that might incriminate him in the eyes of British Intelligence.

  The centre had been set up in the old art school behind the Binnenalster. The last time Lubert had been here was in 1937, with Claudia, to view works by the artist Böcklin, one of the few decent German artists not defined as degenerate by the regime. Hitler had apparently bought eight of his works. Lubert and Claudia had had a great row about him afterwards: she liked Böcklin’s clear moral messages; he said that was precisely the problem with him. She had called Lubert ‘snotty’ and unable to see the art for what it was, he had got as far as calling her a populist; but the row was not really about art or taste, it was about the regime.

  He told himself that he had nothing to fear. He had performed his act of self-recollection – Besinnung – which all Germans had been encouraged to make as part of the process of acknowledging their part in the great crimes their nation had committed. He disliked the idea of collective guilt, but he was not one of those yesterday’s men who blamed the Allies for Germany’s current woes; nor did he rue the hangings of defendants at Nuremberg one bit. He had filled out his Fragebogen – the 133 questions that would determine his professional future – more easily than he had expected. Indeed, it was hard to see how they expected to identify the real culprits through it. It seemed too polite, lacking in trickery or any penetrating interrogation. There were one or two odd questions which had made him laugh, but, by and large, he’d filled it out with confidence and a clear conscience. He’d even enjoyed the exercise of ‘remembering who he was’.

  Lubert’s name was called, and he made his way to the interrogation room. As he approached the door, he breathed in deeply, reminding himself not to be combative, to remain humble, to keep it civil. The rumour was that the British were not finding enough Germans of the ‘wrong colour’ and were being far more vigorous in their interviewing.

  His interrogators were both seated behind an oak desk. One of them was smoking, and gestured for Lubert to take a seat. The other did not look up but instead continued to examine the paperwork before him, paperwork Lubert could see – from the green ink and his own terrible, looping cursive – was his completed questionnaire. The man turned the pages, forward, then back, forward, then back, as though puzzled by a discrepancy. Something didn’t add up, or was missing. If his long, theatrical pause was designed to unsettle, it worked. Lubert was riled before they had even started.

  ‘Herr Lubert?’ the first man asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Captain Donnell, and this is Major Burnham, Head of Intelligence. We will conduct this interview in English and German according to our needs. Our understanding is that you are a fluent English speaker.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The major still didn’t look at Lubert but continued to seem bemused by the questionnaire or, rather, by some of Lubert’s answers. When he spoke, his voice was low and soft, his German immaculate.

  ‘You’re a lucky man, Herr Lubert.’

  Herr Lubert didn’t dispute this. He waited, knowing that his ‘good fortune’ was about to be unpacked and expanded upon by this man with the peculiarly long eyelashes.

  ‘You have survived the war intact. Too young fo
r the first. Too old for the second. You still live in your house. You have your assets. You have a sympathetic landlord.’

  Lubert wanted to dispute the part about assets, but he kept his peace.

  Burnham raised his head, and Lubert looked at him. The man’s eyes really were too pretty to be those of an interrogator. He searched for sympathy in them.

  ‘I am grateful,’ he replied, in English, wanting to balance things.

  ‘Really?’ Burnham answered. He looked down at the questionnaire and turned it to the page that seemed to be causing offence.

  ‘From some of your answers, I detect a certain ingratitude of tone. Even a disdain.’

  It was a valid enough criticism. He had never liked having to answer questions, especially officious ones. They brought out something stubborn and contrary in him.

  ‘I think there was a question about toy soldiers. It … didn’t seem relevant.’

  ‘Great care and time has gone into compiling these questionnaires.’

  ‘Yes. But … I couldn’t see the relevance of the toy soldiers.’

  ‘Did you ever play with toy soldiers?’

  ‘You will arrest all men who once played with toy soldiers?’ Lubert couldn’t stop himself.

  ‘Herr Lubert, a dismissive tone might push you into a category you wouldn’t want to be in. Did you play with toy soldiers or not?’

  ‘Yes. I was like any normal boy.’

  ‘Good. That’s all I needed to know.’ Burnham marked the empty box. ‘And then there was this …’ Burnham’s finger moved to a later question, his face screwing up into an expression of confusion. ‘Question R.iii. What did you mean by this answer? If I can call it an answer? This seems … a facetious way of answering such a serious question.’

  Lubert knew that Burnham was an intelligent man. He knew that Burnham knew why he had answered the question the way he had: because it was a ridiculous question. At the time, he had had to read it again, thinking it must have been badly translated or especially inserted just to test him. He’d decided that it was just a thoughtless question composed by an unthinking clerk somewhere in Whitehall or Washington. And that it did not deserve a serious answer.