Len Deighton 3-Book War Collection Volume 1: Bomber, XPD, Goodbye Mickey Mouse

Herr Holländer said, ‘I understand, Herr Bürgermeister. Marriage between two persons with one-third Jewish blood is forbidden, but marriage between a person with one-third Jewish blood and a person with two-thirds Jewish blood is permitted under certain circumstances. The man Meyer wanted to be down-graded so that he could marry the girl.’

‘But she must be mad,’ said the Burgomaster, trying sincerely to comprehend it. ‘A girl with only one-third Jewish blood could have married an Aryan.’

‘They are like that,’ said Herr Holländer. ‘I get them coming into the registry for advice. It’s hard to believe, but some of them would sooner marry one of their own kind than one of us.’

The Burgomaster shook his head in wonder. He looked up at Niels. ‘What did they pay you?’

‘Nothing, I did it to help. They were in love.’

‘Must I hand this matter over to the Gestapo?’

‘Three thousand marks.’

‘When I think of what I did for you, Niels … It was my influence that secured your discharge from your regiment when your mother told me of your stomach ulcer.’

‘Well, your influence didn’t last long, Herr Bürgermeister. I didn’t get a discharge. I was placed temporarily on the reserve. My papers came this morning. I rejoin the 15th Panzer-grenadier Division in Sicily next week. They are awaiting the invasion. I shall never come back.’ That little bastard Holländer was smirking gleefully.

‘You would do well not to come back, Niels. Give your mother a hero for a son, you at least owe her that.’

‘More than I owe her money to pay the rent and keep her from starving?’

‘I would rather starve than have a son like you. You are an enemy of the State, a thief and a liar.’

Niels stood waiting for the Burgomaster’s wrath to diminish.

‘Get out,’ he said after a long silence. Niels was pleased to get away so lightly.

‘And …’ said the Burgomaster. Niels turned. ‘You will pay the three thousand marks to the Winter Help Fund and show me the receipt. I shall not withdraw my invitation for dinner tonight, but I shall not be unhappy if you fail to turn up.’

‘Yes, Herr Bürgermeister,’ said Niels, trying to look sad. That was wonderful. He had far better things to do tonight: the dance, and providing the terror flyers stayed away perhaps a visit to the fourth floor of the Annex. There was a tall Viennese nurse whom he rather fancied. She would be tastier than the Burgomaster’s roast duckling.

Niels had been responsible for the eighteen invitations to the Burgomaster’s dinner at Frenzel’s. He had done the job carefully, remembering all sorts of obscure cousins and business colleagues. In fact, only one invitation had gone astray; the one to Frau H. Pippert, widow of a building contractor, had been typed with the wrong street-name and the postman had guessed, wrongly, that it was intended for Fräulein G. Pippert, a teacher at the Volkschule.

Gerda Pippert knew from the moment she opened the envelope that the invitation was not intended for her. On the other hand she also knew, unlike the Burgomaster, that Hanna Pippert – Johanna really, of course, but no one called her that – had died over six months ago. Hadn’t she received more than a dozen wrongly addressed letters of condolence from brick merchants, timber firms and manufacturers of stoves and boilers. And hadn’t she forwarded them to the brother-in-law of the dead woman at some address in Krakow. Gerda Pippert deserved the invitation. In the circumstances surely no one would begrudge her honorary membership of the Burgomaster’s family for one festive evening. It was over three years since she had eaten a meal at a fine restaurant and as for being recognized, if they didn’t even know that old Hanna was dead, what chance was there that they would remember her face. Anyway, old ladies looked alike. She could put some new lace on her black dress. One of her ex-students – now an artillery officer – had sent her an antique lace tablecloth from Brussels. She had never risked a teapot on it, but as a collar for the black dress it would be most chic. She decided to gatecrash the dinner, or, as she rationalized it to herself, attend as a friend of the family.

She had written a brief acceptance, carefully smudging the initial. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror of the wardrobe. It made the dress look quite new. Her white hair was drawn tightly back and fastened with a black ribbon. She would wear just a touch of face powder – it was a special event, after all – and leave her spectacles off. Then she remembered the old lorgnette. It was in the bottom of her sewing box, a splendid device with an ivory handle and gold rims to the glasses. She could no longer see very well through the lenses but held up to her face it looked most distinguished. What’s more, it would give her something to do with her hands. In the sewing box there was an old ivory cigarette holder too. She put it in her handbag. Tonight after the coffee and speeches and cognac she would try a cigarette again. If only her handbag were a little more elegant and the handle weren’t so worn, but if she held it low against her skirt it didn’t notice so much. She paraded up and down the bed-sitting-room practising wellborn gestures. The dress looked fine. Tonight Gerda Pippert, fifty-six-year-old spinster and schoolteacher, was to dine with the Burgomaster! It was the most exciting prospect she could remember since her holiday in Heidelberg in 1938.

Gerd Böll may have been the town wag but he was no fool. Sometimes he regretted that he had left the university, for the young people there had a sense of humour more nearly tuned to his than had the people of Altgarten. In spite of disapproving eyes Gerd continued to act the fool for he knew that it was his particular strength that he could endure the supercilious remarks of his neighbours without wishing them ill.

Of all the people of Altgarten, Gerd’s best friends were among the TENO engineers who manned the camp on the Krefeld road. Many times Gerd had taken his van and gone with them into the Ruhr after a big RAF attack. He had seen the TENOs digging for hours into burning wreckage and finding only shrivelled corpses. He’d seen them lifting steel beams in their bare hands and he’d noticed that some of the most pugnacious and disreputable roughnecks among them could be the most gentle with the injured. None of them were young, for the young had all been screened off to provide TENO battalions for bridge-building and demolition with front-line fighting units. Each man had a technical skill and their easy discipline reflected this, for theirs was a job where a few minutes could mean a cellarful of people saved from flames or drowning. They were a strange breed of men, new to Gerd Böll. They took a drink when others would need a night’s sleep, they settled for a cigarette instead of a meal and swore when lesser men would have wept.

In addition, Gerd liked their equipment: the tractors, lorries and mobile cranes, the pumps and generators, and the winches that could topple an office block.

It was five-forty, almost time for Gerd to report his movements to the Burgomaster’s Control Room. This evening of all evenings it was scarcely necessary, for he would be at Frenzel’s with the Burgomaster. For a birthday gift he had bought a small humidor, inlaid with ivory and mother of pearl. One of the Russian POWs had made it for him. He wondered if the Burgomaster would disapprove if he knew its origin. Perhaps he would recognize the style of work, for the madonnas they sold from door to door had the same design on the skirts as the humidor had round its lid.

Dark suit? Well, Gerd didn’t have a dark suit. Apart from this green suit he didn’t have one at all. And this one had long since ceased to fit him. He unfastened the jacket buttons and breathed out with a long sigh of relief. Well, he’d leave it open. It would never notice when he was sitting down. He sat down now at his antique desk and cleared aside the accounts and unanswered correspondence. From this window he had the ugliest view of Altgarten. The cramped slum tenements crowded together between brewery siding and gasworks as did the people inside them.

In the cobbled street a group of children, some of them in Hitler Youth uniform, were kicking a ball around. Gerd watched them with interest but eventually the moment he had been putting off arrived. He pulled a piece of paper towards him and sadly began a letter to his cousin August.

My dear kind August,

Perhaps you will despise me when you have finished reading this letter and yet, try as I have, I can find no alternative to writing it. This afternoon when I met you with Anna-Luisa and you both looked so radiantly happy it seemed clearly my duty (and my joy) to keep silent. Now I once again think otherwise. Think of me and my predicament as I write this letter. As unhappy as you may be, spare a moment to remember that I too am as sad.

The test of friendship is the extent to which a man will expose the friendship to total destruction by doing something he believes is in the best interest of his comrade. The girl is beautiful and to be sure has been a loyal employee and a fine guardian of little Hansl. But a young girl like Anna-Luisa has a life different from us, different too from any style of life we can remember. Like any beautiful girl living alone in a town filled with young men, the temptations put to her are unreasonable, but it would be dishonest of me, and foolish of you, to pretend that she has not succumbed to those temptations in a way that has made her notorious.

As your housekeeper, her private life is of only limited importance to you, and of no importance to me. But when marriage is mentioned, my dear good cousin, how can I not speak? At first you will dismiss my letter as gossip. Perhaps you will be tempted to ask for details. Do not do that, August. It can only cause you deep and lasting pain. Again I repeat, August, it can only cause you more pain than you already know.

Your cousin,

GERD

Chapter Sixteen (#ulink_326ccc07-593b-51cf-9775-1f48d08269e5)

Oberleutnant August Bach, who knew nothing of the letter his cousin had written to him and would in fact never know of it, walked along the soft beach in the evening light. One thousand suns bounced upon the wave-tops and the sound of the sea was harsh and constant.

It was the coldness of the sea that formed the water particles in the air – twenty thousand of them in every cubic inch – by cooling it to dew-point. So along the shoreline the incoming air became cloud and moved inland and became warm enough for the cloud to disappear. Patches of mist brooded in the cold trees and made the taller dunes into tiny desert islands. On the strand where August walked the mist was churned by the wind to reveal the golden horizon and then wrap him again in its cottonwool.

Deep-rooted yellow poppies and sea-sandwort struggled for life against the shifting sand that exposed their roots one day and buried their heads the next. Along the high-water mark nature’s usual debris had collected: edible urchins like battered shaving-brushes, cuttlefish bones, channel wrack, some of it dried and blackened, the mussels pounded loose from the endless steel stakes that extended out into the ocean and pointed at England. There was other flotsam too: pieces of packing-case with cryptic stencil marks, a few dozen squashed oranges and a burned piece of yellow lifejacket. Over everything there was thick shiny oil that added a sour smell of decay to the brisk salt breeze.

Bach tapped the loose sand from his boots, climbed a short flight of wooden steps and opened the door of the shack in which he lived. At first his men had thought him mad for commandeering this ramshackle hut perched high upon the dunes. It had been an equipment store for the Dutchmen who had planted the dune grass and maintained the sea wall. Bach had had it lined with insulating material and supported on new metal beams to make it dry and free of rats. Inside there were books, a stove, a simple Luftwaffe bedstead, an old armchair and a table at which he worked. The few men under his command privileged to see the place at close quarters recognized now the wisdom of his choice. His Luftwaffe signals company numbered one hundred and fourteen men, with him their only officer. He was quite happy to live and eat with them, but men who obey orders need a chance to complain without an officer to overhear. His little hut, half a kilometre from the other buildings, gave them that chance. He unlocked the door and let himself in. His desk was placed near to the window from which he could see the beach and ocean when the weather was clear. Willi, his second-in-command, had lit the stove, for even on a summer’s evening there was dampness in the air that made the bedding cold and edged the lenses of his binoculars with tiny spots of moisture. He filled a kettle from the tap at the washbasin. The pipe rattled like a machine gun and the water was warm from its journey through the hastily laid water pipe that went along the sunny dunes to the main building.

He treasured these few moments alone as he came to terms with this environment. He remembered Anna-Luisa and felt a warm contentment at his memory of her. He knew that once the Stabsfeldwebel arrived and work began he would no longer be able to give himself to these sentimental emotions. He wiped the lenses of his field-glasses and walked to the rear of the hut. From this window he could see back across the dunes to the radar buildings and, when it was not misty, all the way along the coast to the tip of the tall radar aerials of the next Himmelbett station.

He focused the glasses upon a clump of grass and waited for the mist to move. Just a fidget of wing and a stretch of long neck was for a moment higher than the edge of a nest. The grey herons were still there on the dune side. They usually stayed close to fresh water, especially in the summer, but since this coast had been made a prohibited area the wildlife had become more active. These had laid their eggs in May. Now it was almost time to go. He wondered whether they would return next winter. He felt that they were an omen.

Satisfied that all was well with the herons, he began to change from his uniform into old, more comfortable clothes. He pulled off his high boots, using the home-made wooden clamp behind the door. When the kettle began to hum gently he called Willi on the phone.

‘A cup of chocolate, Willi,’ he said.

‘Thank you, Herr Oberleutnant,’ said the man at the other end. August chopped the coarse chocolate pieces into chips, melted them in the boiling water and beat the mixture until it was frothy.

August was watching his Stabsfeldwebel marching along the dunes when the heron returned. It was a huge ungainly bird with curiously slow and mechanical wing movements that made it seem man-made. Its legs trailed behind it and from its beak there hung an eel. The bird in the nest gave a croak of pleasure and raised its head to look. Always one or other of them remained at the nest. ‘Kroink’; it circled the main buildings. Perhaps the great radar aerials attracted the birds, thought August, as it flew across the face of the Freya. White mist wove through the intricate metalwork like skeins of soft raw wool through a comb and the aerial moved gently, scanning as far as, and farther than, the enemy coast. Sometimes it even detected RAF planes that never left the English sky.

Willi Reinecke knocked briefly and waited for permission before he entered. He carefully brushed the wet sand from his jackboots and stood correctly at attention. The steaming cup of chocolate waited for him on August’s desk but first the two men enacted the ritual of salutes and greetings of rank that was a necessary prelude to all military intercourse.

Willi Reinecke was a tall thick-set man of indeterminate age. Born in Hessen-Nassau, the promise of work in the steel industry of the Ruhr had drawn him north as a young man, but, unemployed and desperate, he had finally joined the Army. He still had a lot of hair. It was greying at the sides in a distinguished way that would have looked right on a banker. As a youngster he had been quite a ladies’ man, but a grenade had exploded on a parapet while Willi was still looking over it. His nose had split open, his cheek was a maze of scars, and one ear was missing altogether, which is why he grew his hair long. A veteran of the Moscow battles, August had guessed when he had first been posted here, but the Stabsfeldwebel had growled ‘Verdun’ and only then did August realize that his second-in-command was a lot older than he liked to admit.

They had disliked each other on sight. Reinecke was a senior NCO of the old school. Twice August had seen him kick a man who had dawdled and he would not hesitate to clobber anyone who looked as if he might argue. These incidents had made the first trouble between them. At first August had tried to explain that the personnel he commanded were Luftwaffe technicians, not cannon-fodder, but that had no effect. Finally August had decided to fight with Reinecke’s weapons. He gave the amazed Reinecke a blistering dressing-down and ordered him to parade each shift an hour before their work commenced. At that time there were six shifts – manning the radar machinery was tiring for the plotters working in darkness and gruelling for the men exposed to the sea breeze – and so Reinecke found himself on parade six hours out of the twenty-four.

The lesson was not lost on the stubborn old man and, after a month of the new régime had convinced him that August was quite prepared to continue the same schedule for the war’s duration, he called for a truce. He did this when August was away on a two-day course in electronics. The Oberleutnant returned to find that the draughty little hut in which he had elected to live had been completely remade. It had been equipped with furnishings stolen or borrowed from goodness knows where and a large double-glazed window had been fitted to facilitate August’s bird-watching. From that moment the two of them had tried to work together, and in that curious way that happens sometimes to people with such contrasting beliefs and backgrounds they had become very close. When August Bach understood the man better he realized that his tyranny was matched by a concern for the welfare of his men. Willi Reinecke was not above stealing, lying and even falsifying documents to ensure that his men were properly clothed and fed.

Even more surprising was the skill that Willi Reinecke had shown in the plotting-room. For the first week or so August had used one of the younger technicians to help him plot the bombers, but Reinecke always appeared whenever there were enemy planes in the sector and finally August worked with him one night. Incredibly it was that night that the thousand-bomber raid upon Cologne passed overhead. Willi Reinecke didn’t have the lightness of touch for which the training school would give high marks. He stumbled up the steps of the ladder to the plotting-table and swore loudly when August needed silence. It was a rare night in which Willi didn’t drop his Kneemeyer measure two or three times or kick the table as he hastily gauged the speed of the bomber that the radar held in its beam. Willi’s value was in the way he could guess the intentions of the quarry. Some of them had a device that told them they were held in the invisible radar beam. These would jink and turn desperately. Willi would poise his marker over a point where he expected the bomber to go while August guided the fighter pilot on to it. It was surprising how often Willi outguessed the Tommis.

Willi Reinecke had a wife and two children. He didn’t smoke, rarely drank alcohol and lately he had shown an interest in August’s bird-watching. He was very proud of his first attempt at taxidermy and prouder still when August put it in a place of honour on his desk. In short, Willi Reinecke was a conundrum and that, more than any other thing, was what drew August close to him.

Willi removed his belt and special flak Service greatcoat with its wool lining and the stripes on both cuffs that, in the Wehrmacht, marked the company’s senior NCO. He hung it behind the door. August remained in his armchair and Willi sat erect in the seat at the desk. He nodded his thanks as the chocolate was pushed towards him. He sipped it and held his scarred hands around the cup for a moment before giving his report. He unfolded a piece of paper and read the names.

‘Two men sick since you left on Friday: one of the plotting-table orderlies – Gefreiter Path – said he had tonsillitis, but I took a look at him.’ Willi looked up. ‘He’s running a slight temperature but it’s only a sore throat. I’ve put him on light duties outdoors. That should do the trick and meanwhile he’s not breathing sore-throat bugs all around the Seeburg table.’ Again he referred to his paper. ‘The other case was Gefreiter Kick – the cook with the handlebar moustache – he complained of stomach pains. Too tender for indigestion and the wrong side for appendicitis. Regular colicky stabs of pain. I sent him into Rotterdam with the ration lorry; the hospital are holding him for observation. Meanwhile Unteroffizier Zewlinski will work the last shift until Kick returns or we get a replacement. There’s not much work on that shift except counting the stores.’