Second sight, p.42
Second Sight, page 42
“She will be treated well, as a prisoner of the Reich,” Heydrich said to Lori, as if Meryem, who stood impassively beside the bed, had been transformed into one of the trophy heads that gazed down upon them with lacquer eyes.
Once outside, he locked the door with a bar and padlock and pocketed the key. “She will be quite comfortable here,” he said, inviting Lori to look through the judas hole. She drew back. “You won’t look?” he said. “Well, tomorrow, perhaps. You can see her through the inspection window every day when you come. That is an irrevocable privilege. But you mustn’t speak to her, and I really can’t permit her to join us for coffee until further notice.”
By now Lori understood the situation. A madman who had the power to do anything he liked was madly in love with her. She no longer treated him like a lunatic; it was too dangerous. She spoke calmly to him now as if imprisoning Meryem in a bedroom decorated with stuffed boar’s heads and the antlers of stags was something that no ignorant woman could understand unless a man explained it.
“Why is this necessary?” she asked.
Heydrich smiled indulgently. “To save Meryem from something far, far worse,” he said. “You must take it from me that every reading of the cards is filled with secrets of the Reich.”
“Really? That part of it escapes me entirely.”
“Of course it would, darling girl. You are perfectly innocent.”
“But I want to understand. What secrets did she reveal this morning, for example?”
That morning in the cards Meryem had seen Heydrich sitting in the dark in an open car, between two stone walls that led to a half-timbered farmhouse with a thatched roof. It was early morning; the darkness around him was filled with soldiers. He was waiting for something to happen. He looked at his watch; it said 4:40. At that moment, just as dawn broke, swarms of airplanes appeared overhead, and all around Heydrich in the lifting darkness thousands of engines stuttered to life.
“She described something that I know is going to happen,” Heydrich said. “More than that I cannot say, even to you. But the detail is so precise that anyone but me who heard it would believe she must be a spy, and a very dangerous one at that. Luckily I know better; I believe in her powers. But what if she blurted this out in the presence of an enemy of the Reich—one of those Jew Communists your husband brings home? The result would be disastrous. No, she must be protected. We will keep her here, in this place that has so many happy memories for all three of us.”
Then, as usual, Heydrich drove Lori into Berlin, gazing worship-fully at her profile while the car rolled through the streets of the northern suburbs. When the driver opened the door to let her out at the end of Goethestrasse, Heydrich put his gloved hand over hers and detained her for a moment. “How much more enjoyable it was to be alone in the car—don’t you agree?” he said. Lori was silent as usual. He kissed her hand. “Until tomorrow!”
This happened on a Monday. Apart from the fact that Meryem was locked in a room in the forest, nothing changed. In the days that followed Lori was “arrested” as usual every morning in the Tiergarten and driven to the hunting lodge. Heydrich insisted that she gaze through the judas hole at Meryem, who was always in the same position, seated at the table, facing the door, with the cards spread out on the polished tabletop. If she had not moved, and sometimes even spoken, Lori would have thought that she was looking not at her living friend, but at some sort of mannikin Heydrich had placed in the room to deceive her.
Their mornings together went on as before, cakes and coffee, music and gallant compliments, except that Meryem was locked away upstairs so there were no readings of the cards. Then, on the Friday, Lori arrived to find Meryem downstairs again. She read the cards as before, this time predicting that Heydrich was going to be decorated by the Führer himself. “Describe the medal,” he said. Meryem did so. “The Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Swords and Diamonds,” Heydrich said, wagging an admonishing finger. “No! Really, you little nigger scamp, this time you’ve gone too far!” But it was obvious that he was very pleased. Lori played a Lehár medley on the piano, which had just been tuned, Heydrich said, by the best expert in Berlin and a party member since beer hall days.
“I have never heard the music sound more glorious,” Heydrich told Lori. “And now I have a little surprise for you. Something has happened that makes it possible for Meryem to leave Germany, and I think she should do so at once, this weekend at the latest. But with the utmost discretion.”
“If you advise it, it shall be done,” Lori said. “But tell us your opinion. By what means should she travel?”
“Oh, no!” said Heydrich playfully. “None of your guessing games! I am not a travel agent. I myself am going sailing this weekend. You’re such a wonderful sailor, I wish we were going out on the water together, but that cannot be. It may be the last chance any of us have to enjoy the Baltic in our innocent little pleasure boats. More than that I cannot say.”
As soon as Heydrich let them out of the car, the two women collected Hubbard, interrupting him at his writing. The three of them took the first train to Rügen, and at midnight that night they sailed for the coast of Denmark in the Christophers’ yawl Mahican. At dawn they put Meryem ashore on the Danish island of Falster.
On the beach, Meryem embraced Lori convulsively. They had swum ashore through the frigid water, and both were shivering.
“Don’t go back,” Meryem said in a shaking voice.
“I must,” Lori replied.
“For God’s sake, why?”
“I feel it. Very strongly. But if you tell me that I’m wrong, that there’s no reason to go back, I’ll believe you.”
They looked at each other for the last time, gray eyes and green. Meryem, knowing that her friend saw the same future for herself as she did, said nothing more. Suddenly Lori began to cry, wildly. She pushed Meryem away, a violent shove into which she put all the strength of her body, then plunged into the water and swam back to the Mahican. The tide was running out, so she covered the distance between the shore and the boat very quickly.
Nine days later, at 4:40 in the morning as Meryem had foretold, the mechanized German army started its motors and invaded Poland under a canopy of hundreds of warplanes.
“What was it that you knew?” Christopher asked Lla Kahina. “What was going to happen that made it impossible for my mother to stay in Denmark?”
“It would be wrong to tell you that,” Lla Kahina said. “Maybe what I saw in the cards never happened. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know.”
“I was.”
“I know you were.”
“Let me judge the right and wrong.”
She held up a wrinkled palm. “No,” she said. “I can’t. Go to England. Talk to Dickie Shaw-Condon. He was there, too.”
9
AT ROSSENARRA HALL, THE DRAUGHTY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY HOUSE in the extreme north of England that was the seat of his family, Sir Richard Shaw-Condon, ninth baronet, explained the etymology and history of his title to Paul Christopher.
“ ‘Baronet’ seems originally to have meant ‘young’ or ‘little baron,’ and for a long time it was used in England as a title by the sons of barons,” he said, punctuating his sentences with a phlegmy barking laugh. “Then, in 1611, King James, bless his Scotch soul, needed money to send Protestants to settle in Ulster and keep the papists down, so he created the baronets of England; people bought the dignity, you see. Not that it was much of a bargain, ha-ha. One gets to walk ahead of all the knights except Knights of the Garter on ceremonial occasions. Baronets are commoners, you know. Rank without privilege, that was the royal idea.”
Although a drizzle was falling, the two men were seated outdoors in a gazebo because it was warmer in the open air than in the dank interior of the house. Indoors, Sir Richard had worn a long woolen scarf from his public school, Worksop College, in addition to several layers of sweaters, a greenish tweed jacket thick enough to stand up in the corner by itself, and a French fisherman’s cap. “Do come, always happy to see you,” he had shouted into the telephone when Christopher called from London. “Can’t ask you to stay, though. My American guests always go away with chilblains.” In fact Sir Richard never invited foreigners, especially not Americans, to stay at Rossenarra Hall. He had had enough of them during his long career in the secret service. Like the rabbits and cats and tortoises in Alice in Wonderland dressed up in English clothes and speaking a demented sort of English, people from abroad were dotty impostors. This perception had given him certain advantages in his dealings with British agents of other, expendable nationalities.
Now, unwinding his Worksop scarf and doffing his jacket under the roof of the gazebo, Sir Richard said, “Always used to keep a flat in London in the winter when I was gainfully employed. Can’t manage it now.” As a much younger man he had had flaxen eyebrows that flowed like mustaches and a pink, disdainful face; in those bygone days he had looked fashionably steamed in an upper-class way, as if he had just stepped out of a hot tub. The eyebrows were gray-white now, and so was the petulant face. There were few hot baths at Rossenarra Hall; the water had to be heated in the kitchen and carried upstairs in buckets, and even if Sir Richard had been able to afford the wages, few in Britain would do such work nowadays. He produced a hunting flask and offered it to Christopher.
“Brandy? It’s Spanish, I’m afraid.”
“No thank you.”
“I will, if you don’t mind,” Sir Richard said, tipping the flask. “They say it’s good for the heart. I’ve heard it said that Winston drank a pint of this stuff every day, besides buckets of champagne, when he was running the war. He had the heart of a lion. Do you think there was any connection?”
“I don’t know. What kept you going?”
“During the late war? Not brandy; you never saw spirits unless you happened to be prime minister. Dreams of glory kept me going, I suppose; I was younger in those days. It was all such a long time ago. One hardly remembers. Sorry I can’t offer you luncheon here. But they do a rather good mixed grill at the pub in the village, if you’re up to the local cookery.”
“I don’t think I am, honestly.”
“Oh.” Sir Richard’s tone was resentful. He had hoped for lunch in the village; he lived without servants or wife and ate very little cooked food.
“The last time we met, as I remember,” he said, “I gave you luncheon at my club. We shared a bottle of the ‘71 Riesling. It’s all drunk up now. You were just out of the jug and were looking for the bastard that got you put inside.”
“That’s right. You were very helpful to me.”
“I hope you haven’t told anyone that. It was the hell of a scandal you stirred up afterwards over that man Darby.”
“That was long before.”
“Was it? Well, one bad ‘un is much like another. I suppose you’re on the trail of some new mystery. What do you want this time?”
“Something a bit more personal. I’ve recently learned that you knew my mother in Berlin before the war.”
“Did you indeed? May one ask from what source?”
“From two separate and usually reliable sources, actually—the O. G. and Meryem.”
“Oh, dear,” Sir Richard said.
10
IT DID NOT TAKE UP VERY MUCH OF SIR RICHARD’S MORNING TO report the essentials of Lori Christopher’s fate. Nettled as he was by missing out on lunch, he came straight to the point.
“There’s not much to tell,” he said. “In the summer of 1939 I was sent to Germany under deep cover to meet Nazis and recruit as many of them as possible. Awful job. They were true believers as well as being frightened out of their wits by the Party police, worse than the Russians in your day because the Nazis really were believers, so I got nowhere for weeks. Finally I was reduced to trolling in the nightclubs, and one night I ran into this disgusting Hun in a low dive called Kaminskys Telephonbar. It was just the sort of place the Brownshirts liked. Every table had a telephone, you see, and if one of the tarts, Knabe oder Mädel— they had both sexes—took your fancy you could ring up him or her and arrange the price. Blind drunk this Hun of mine was, ringing up the girls and suggesting the most appalling acts to them, all the while pawing the ones sitting at the bar. He kept on buying me drinks and talking to me between fondlings about Heine; fortunately I’d read German at Oxford so I had the old Jew-baiter by heart. I quoted Die Lorelei and Romanzero by the yard, making a tremendous hit.”
Christopher interrupted. “But Heine was a Jew.”
“A Catholic Jew who despised Jews,” Sir Richard said. “My Hun adored that. It tickled him so that I began to wonder if he didn’t have a Jewish grandmother himself. Anyway, he seemed to have a lot of money and the barmen and the tarts were sucking up to him; I thought the money was why.
“Well, to make a long story short, just as the dawn was breaking he left off kneading one of the tarts, and with lipstick all over his face, turned to me and said, ‘I suppose you think I’m enjoying this.’ He made this woeful Hun Pagliacci face, so of course I said, ‘Certainly not. One can see at once that you’re not enjoying it at all, old boy. Obviously you’re used to the company of a much finer type of woman.’ ‘How right you are,’ the Hun said. ‘Come along and I’ll show you.’ All this was a bit off-putting, as you might imagine, but against my better judgment I went along with him, up the steps of Kaminskys Telephonbar, out into the open air and into this great black Hun motor car awaiting him with purring motor at the curb. It came equipped with a couple of obvious Gestapo thugs—leather coats, gangster hats, stupid eyes, the whole kit. What’s this? I thought, and then I took a closer look at the Hun himself and realized who he was—none other than Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Nazi secret police, first deputy to Himmler, homicidal maniac, the lot, exactly the sort of target I was instructed to attack. It was like winning the sweeps. I’ve often used this episode to illustrate to younger men the importance of seizing the main chance. Serendipity—wonderful Yank word, that—is all. One never knows who anyone is going to turn out to be, don’t you agree?”
“Completely,” Christopher said.
“I knew you would, old boy; so do we all who know the feel of pavement beneath our feet, ha-ha. Not many of us old parties left in the great game.”
“You’re right. Please go on.”
“Yes, of course, mustn’t lose the thread. Well, inside his staff car, Heydrich chatted away as if we’d been at the dear old SS Academy together. It seems he’d found the ideal German woman and fallen madly in love with her. She was beautiful, the blood of Prussian nobility flowed in her veins, she rode like a Valkyrie and played the piano like Clara Schumann used to do. Unfortunately she was married and she was as virtuous as a vestal virgin. Not only that, she loved her husband. None of this discouraged Heydrich. ‘I could take her by force, or have her husband killed, of course,’ he said … those were his exact words, I’ve never forgotten them … ‘but she must make the choice. She must sooner or later realize that my love cannot be denied and come to me of her own free will.’ Calm as you please, old Reinhard was. He was quite mad, you see, born that way probably, and as your father wrote about him, he saw things with the joyful clarity of the incurably insane. In the meantime, he said, he was having this woman arrested by his men two or three times a week and brought to his hunting lodge.
“ ‘My aim is to relieve her of the burden of her scruples by taking the matter right out of her hands,’ he said. ‘She can hardly blame herself for anything if she’s under arrest. Not that she has any reason to do so up to now. I assure you our friendship is perfectly innocent, she always brings along this Gypsy girlfriend of hers as a chaperone and to divert suspicion I pretend to flirt with the friend and have her tell my fortune. Actually the woman disgusts me; she’s as dark as a nigger and I think she may even be a Jew. She’s hinted as much to me. We have coffee together, discuss music and poetry and painting, all the finer things; sometimes I persuade my love to play something restful for me on the piano, and then we go our separate ways—I to my work, she back to her dreary world. These moments are the bright spots of my life. Of hers, too, but of course she’s not yet ready to admit that to me.’ “
Sir Richard had a reputation among his own kind as a storyteller; he had lived as a bachelor in a society that placed considerable value on the extra man’s ability to keep a dinner party interested. He surpassed himself in his description of how he sat with Heydrich in the backseat of his Mercedes and watched through the bulletproof window while the Gestapo thugs arrested Lori and Meryem and loaded them into another car. The women were on horseback and Heydrich instructed his men to let them finish their ride, so that he could watch them canter by for his pleasure, black hair and blond hair flying like the pennons (as Heydrich put it) of Aryan and barbarian womanhood.
“I need hardly tell you,” Sir Richard said, “that the blonde was your mother. Puppy love was written all over Heydrich’s face. I mean to say, if he hadn’t been who he was it would have been quite pathetic. As it was, I knew that I had him, one way or another, if only I could stay in touch with him and get in touch with his lady love.”
It did not take him long to accomplish the latter. One of the first people Sir Richard met after his arrival in Berlin was Otto Rothchild.
“Amazing chap, Otto, the perfect slippery exile, knew absolutely everybody in Berlin, that was his stock in trade,” Sir Richard said. “That included your parents, of course. For a fee of only two hundred American dollars he introduced me to your mother. For obvious reasons I didn’t want to meet your father just yet, so we called at that flat in Charlottenburg with all those marvelous pictures one morning whilst he was writing. Of course I was taking the hell of a chance going there because Heydrich had the place wired and watched round the clock, but there was no means of seeing your mother without being seen by Heydrich’s men in any case, so it had to be done. I went straight to the point, knowing quite well that I might never have another chance. Before coming I had typed out a note; I can still quote it by heart: ‘I AM AN AGENT OF BRITISH INTELLIGENCE. IF YOU WILL HELP ME TO KILL REINHARD HEYDRICH PLEASE SAY THE WORDS “GOD SAVE THE KING”. HIS DEMISE WOULD BE A BLESSING TO YOUR COUNTRY AS WELL AS MY OWN. MY COMPANION KNOWS NOTHING OF THIS AND NEITHER MUST ANYONE ELSE. YOU UNDERSTAND THAT I HAVE PUT MY LIFE IN YOUR HANDS ALONG WITH THIS LETTER. IF YOUR ANSWER IS YES YOU WILL FIND FURTHER LETTERS HIDDEN IN YOUR SADDLE IN TIERGARTEN STABLES.’ Your mother was a natural agent. She sent Otto into the kitchen to fetch a glass of water, read the note, handed it back to me, and said, cool as you please, ‘God save the King.’ By the time Otto came back, the deal was done and old Reinhard was a dead man.”
