‘Yes. We were.’
‘To get a passport?’
‘Yes. And to live.’ The whisky was fire down my throat. ‘Hans and Dora both tried to get him a passport. But even the non-Nazis left in the embassy in London could do nothing. They are all issued from Berlin, so, so…’
Walter leant forward with his elbows on his knees. I saw he wore a mint-green shirt and his new wedding band. He was a snappy dresser, in a careless, flamboyant way.
‘But you know this already,’ I added.
‘Yes,’ he said. He shifted a little in his seat. ‘We’ll get back to that. Let me tell you what else we know.’
I bit my lip. Walter watched my face. ‘A German acquaintance of Bert’s,’ he said, ‘a man he trusted, lured him into a trap.’
There are things in that black hole. Waiting for me.
‘Bertie was taken in a car from a restaurant meeting with a so-called passport forger in Basel straight over the border. Gestapo had come from Berlin.’
He sat back. ‘That’s all we know for now. All our sources can tell us.’ He threw back his head to finish his drink, then placed the glass carefully down on the coffee table in front of him.
‘Does Dora know?’ I am trying to think of more questions, there are more questions to steer this—
‘Yes.’ He turned to me. ‘She asked me to come to you. Ruthie—’
‘But he–they–were always so wary.’ I am picking my way round that black, steaming place, dread weaselling in my gut.
‘Ruthie.’ Walter took the glass out of my hand and set it down. ‘The friend was Hans.’
And then I fall. It is dark and hot and silent. There is breath in my ear, a heated rhythm I need to get away from. I stagger down the hall to the bathroom and retch. The whisky burns and stinks again. I check in the cabinet, then close it, holding on to the basin.
When I came out I saw Walter sitting in his mint-coloured shirt on the sofa, more innocent than I would ever be.
He watched me sit down.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I need to ask you this.’ He had an activist’s grief-and-anger and he had come to show it to me, to get as close to the culprit as possible. I couldn’t blame him. ‘You said Hans went to the German embassy in London?’
‘For a passp—’
‘You saw him there.’
I nodded. My stomach turned again.
‘He was getting his instructions,’ Walter said slowly, articulating what we both knew. ‘And delivering Bertie up to them as proof of his turning.’ Walter rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. ‘Also Rudi Formis–we think.’
I was screaming, but nothing was coming out. After a minute Walter put a hand on my shoulder.
‘Is there anything else,’ he said more gently, ‘you think we should know?’
I shook my head. The question hurt.
‘Are you sure?’
There was nothing left. We sat for a few minutes in silence.
‘They will want Bertie’s sources,’ I said, trying to pull myself together, to show some inkling of the strategic thinking I so clearly lacked. ‘But he barely has any. He gets all his information from–’
Walter cut me off. ‘It’s his outlets they want. They want the link between Bert and the British papers.’
It was as if a rifle sight were trained on her.
‘Bert will never give Dora to them,’ I said.
Walter breathed in sharply, running both hands over his head with his eyes closed. ‘They don’t need him to.’ He got his voice under control. ‘They have Hans for that.’
After a few moments he put his arm around me and squeezed my shoulder. He must have decided that my guilt, all that I saw but refused to see, would punish me without any help from him.
He stood, retrieved his coat from the back of a chair.
‘Dora will need to change the locks,’ I said.
Walter nodded, but we both knew that our world–Dora’s and mine and who knows who else’s–had been blown open to Them, locks now a gesture as futile as the boards over the fanlight.
‘Nothing you want to ask me?’ He was putting his satchel strap over his head.
I looked up. I couldn’t say his name.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what we know. Hans ran off from the Gestapo car at Weil am Rhein. They made a play of shooting him but no body has been produced. My guess is he’s either back in Berlin with his masters or gone to ground somewhere.’ He placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘I want you to promise me something, Ruth,’ he said. ‘If he contacts you, you let me know.’
I nodded, humiliated to have to be told to do the right thing.
In the hall Walter said, more kindly, ‘I don’t feel right leaving you alone.’ But he went anyway.
The whisky bottle was on the kitchen bench, under cabinets of a soft, unnatural green with turned-bone handles. I poured another. The plumbing flushed loudly from the communal toilet on the stairwell.
In the bathroom cabinet there were two sachets of sleeping powder in the box. I had never taken it before. I didn’t know if two would be enough. I considered the question at a distance, like a hypothetical, even as I stood there at the basin with the box in my hands. Extraordinary, really, to have the means of escape in every sleepless refugee’s cabinet: a small box with ‘Veronal: Good Nights’ written on it in cursive script. So many of us, then and later, took this way out, each into their own good night–Zweig and Hasenclever, Tucholsky and Benjamin. I needed a glass from the kitchen. But as I examined the grey face in the mirror, I failed even to have a sense of my own life as tragic enough for the gesture.
And I would not leave Dora.
Just as she would not have left me. Though it is the hardest thing, to work out one’s weight and heft in the world, to whittle down all that I am and give it a value.
I washed my face and left for the post office, to telegraph her that I was coming, and then to book a train. I walked along the median strip between the plane trees separating opposing streams of traffic. Women in suits and seamed stockings were leading dogs, taking children to run about in the bois. A boy on roller skates tumbled into me to brake, the mother so kind, apologetic, as if, God knows, we were all in this together, and how could she control it? Pardon, Madame, je suis desolée. Desolée. We are all desolated here.
There were no seats available on the ferry for two days. When I got back to the flat in Neuilly I pulled the blinds and went to bed.
In the afternoon her reply came, slipped under my door by the concierge. ‘All well here LX,’ Dora wrote. ‘Swiss investigator coming. Using your room 1 week for interviews. Please come after. Waiting for you Thurs am.’
That she called me Loquax was either a gesture of forgiveness or a sign she’d never expected much from me in the first place. I got out of bed and made myself a bowl of instant soup. I’d do as she said, and leave in a week.
The next morning, a postcard arrived from Switzerland, dated before the kidnapping. ‘Gruss aus Ascona’ printed in red over a photograph of the lake. ‘BJ in good spirits,’ Hans had written in his perfect hand. I felt his betrayal rip right through my life. I called Walter. I hoped the Swiss would catch him soon.
TOLLER
That last week I saw Dora twice. Once, when I was ostensibly at one of my morning sessions at the psychiatrist’s. We took a walk on Hampstead Heath. Dora was incandescent with rage and hope together; she had the concentrated glow of a hunter approaching her quarry. There was no pull to anything else.
Spring was late, just a softening of the greyscape. We moved at a clip to stay warm, our boots crunching in time on the gravel. Dora talked the whole time, stopping only to cup a hand to light another cigarette. Her nails were massacred and there were reminders, names and numbers, inked into her skin; layers of them, some recent and some faded by a wash or two.
She was consumed by Berthold Jacob’s kidnapping. They had got him drunk, she told me, bundled him into a car ‘to go to finish the business at the
“forger’s” house’ and sped him across the German border. The simplicity of the plan was offensive, given all Bert’s and her caution during these two years of second-guessing the Gestapo. But this case was a far cry from those of Lessing and Formis, Dora said, where the Czechs, cowed by German threats, did not protest. The Swiss were outraged about Gestapo activity on their soil. They had threatened to cut diplomatic ties with Berlin and had protested to the League of Nations. And they’d sent a public prosecutor to investigate the case properly in London.
‘Here?’ I stopped. ‘Why London?’
Her eyes squinted coolly at me. ‘It was Hans.’ It could have been the sun, or the smoke from her cigarette, but in her face I read also disgust–with him of course, but also with herself for not having foreseen it. ‘Our Hansi lured his best friend into a trap.’
‘He turned?’ A stupid question, blurted in one of those moments of shock when one becomes iterative, grasping with a dumb word which one does not wish to be true. She didn’t bother answering.
‘You’re not safe now,’ I said.
‘The Swiss have arrested him.’ She touched my arm with one hand. ‘In a restaurant by the lake at Ascona, of all places.’
The Swiss investigator, Roy Ganz, had already arrived in London. Scotland Yard was being deliberately uncooperative, Dora said, not providing anywhere for him to conduct interviews, or any information they might have on Nazi activities in Britain.
‘It’s outrageous.’ She stamped out the cigarette under her boot as if it held some of the blame. ‘So I’m organising for Roy to do his interviewing at the flat instead. I’ve called everyone in–and I mean everyone–to tell him what they know about Hans, and everything we suspect about what that lot have been doing here in London. Ganz will go back fully armed.’ She extended her hands as if to hold something big. ‘We can connect Hans directly with the German embassy in London–Ruth and I saw him there with our own eyes, for Christ’s sake. That’s enough to place the Nazis on British soil, planning this kidnapping. And God knows what else. It will be impossible for this government to keep turning a blind eye.’ She stopped and touched my forearm again. ‘We’ll get Bertie out too.’
There was a quiet ecstasy under her fury, her hand-waving and chain-smoking. For a long time she and They had been waging a tactician’s war, each camouflaged and concealed, the only proof of their existence being mysterious epiphenomena–violent deaths, articles in newspapers, questions in parliament. Now the waiting was over, and they were coming out to face one another.
She slipped her arm through mine. ‘It’ll be a coup for us in the end, I’m sure,’ she said.
This wasn’t a hope she was cajoling herself into. Her confidence was genuine. Bertie was now a lure on a long red thread, and when she and this Ganz fellow reeled him back into the light of international scrutiny, they’d beach the beast. I didn’t want to think about Ganz.
‘How’s Mathilde?’
‘Fine. Unflappable, as it turns out. Makes good tea cake. Reigns calmly knitting over everything. Though nothing escapes her, at all.’
She took a strand of hair out of her mouth where the wind had blown it. ‘Ruth’s coming next week, so that’ll be three of us. It’s funny, but she’s never left me before.’ She laughed a little.
‘I don’t see how that makes you safer.’
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it’s the safest I could possibly be for the moment. Ganz is staying with me. My own private investigator.’
It slipped out before I could think. ‘Is he, are you—?’
What on earth was I asking her? Whether she was in love? I had no right.
She put her hands in her pockets. ‘He’s very … nice,’ she said, in a tone by which we both understood perfectly the limitations of the thing. ‘Look, they’re hardly going to dare do anything to us while he’s in the flat. The British would have no choice then but to protest as loudly as the Swiss about something done under their noses.’
‘And when he goes back?’
She turned her head on the side, looking up to me. ‘Thought I might turn up on your doorstep. With a suitcase.’ She smiled a close-lipped smile. ‘Again.’
I looked at the ground. Sometimes your life feels like a pile of wrong decisions.
‘I’m kidding!’ she laughed. She took the inside of my arm again, just above the elbow. We started walking. ‘Mathilde and I are thinking of going up to Dudley’s country house. We’ll take Ruth. There are always options.’
I couldn’t tell if she was rallying me or herself.
We walked in silence, till we reached the pond she had visited the night I’d told her Christiane was coming and she had left me to sit watching men leap through the dark into the black water. We both knew that refuge in some baron’s country house was just a way of stalling for time. There was no place on earth she could go and not be in their reach.
We sat on a bench. I thought of the carp I used to glimpse sometimes in my mother’s pond, blurs of gold under the ice, like something half remembered or yet to come, déjà vu or a promise. I looked at the water here, the ground around it dirty and naked. A few daffodils bobbed surprised, oversized heads out of the earth, lonely for colour in a dun world. My breath got shorter. There seemed a terrible inevitability about it. I studied the space between my legs.
‘Stop it.’ She put two fingers to my chin, turning me to her. I let myself be kissed. When we drew apart she put her forehead to mine. ‘Ernst. We made this decision a long time ago.’
‘Did we?’ I pulled away. I was holding back sobs. ‘Did we? I don’t remember.’
A duck came from nowhere and launched herself on the black water. Two early-born ducklings followed, eyes only for their mother. Dora put her hand on my chest. ‘You did for yourself.’ She breathed in sharply. ‘And I did for me.’ She removed her hand. ‘I’m not stupid. I know it’s quite possible they’ll get me.’ She turned to face the water. ‘But I am not—’ Her voice too started to crack. She patted herself crossly for cigarettes, found them. Lit one. I saw she was gulping it back, the thing she couldn’t think about, that would take her over if she let it. She threw her head back to shake it off. ‘I am not making it easy for them.’
We sat not touching. After a few minutes I took out my handkerchief and wiped my face. ‘What about India? Africa?’ I said without hope.
She shook her head slowly. ‘I wouldn’t be me.’
And then a fury rose inside me, white behind my eyes. I wanted to take her tiny stubborn shoulders and shake them, wanted to drag her off, imprison her in a tower. I could not bear this foreknowledge, I could not bear that she also knew. I wanted to scream at her that if they got her she wouldn’t be her precious self then either. But that would have been cheap. And anyway, of course, there was still hope. I said nothing at all.
The last time I saw her was at the Great Ormond Street flat on the Friday. I’d dropped by to have my own session with the Swiss investigator. Wolf the academic was just leaving. Dora propped the door open with her body, one hand covering the mouthpiece of the phone. ‘I’ll bring you back your keys then,’ I heard Wolf say to her, raising his hand in wordless salute. When he turned he was startled to find me there. His face was blotchy and pinched behind his trim moustache. He touched his hat and fled.
I took off my coat while she finished her call.
‘He seemed in a hurry,’ I said, gesturing to the door.
‘You won’t believe this.’ Dora was smiling, shaking her head. She told me when Wolf had arrived that morning and realised Ganz was already in the flat he bolted into Mathilde’s bedroom and shut the door. ‘He stayed holed up in there the whole morning.’ The Swiss investigator was now out for a walk so Wolf had made his getaway. Dora rolled her eyes.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it’s a permanent getaway.’ Wolf had told her ‘she had gone way, way too far’, inviting attention with all this interviewing and ‘public agitating’ against the Reich. Having Ganz stay overnight with her was absolutely the las
t straw. ‘He told me things were stretched between us beyond repair.’ Dora shrugged at the mysteries of male pride, which I doubt were mysteries to her at all. ‘How can you break up,’ she said, ‘if you were never really together?’
Dora didn’t love Wolf. She knew full well the narrowness of his appeal, the fragile constructions of grey breath and thought that were his theories for changing the world without setting foot in it. He was the worst kind of armchair revolutionary: supercilious and cautious to the point of cowardice; international and theoretical to the point of irrelevance. He had been precisely nowhere during our real revolution. What the men Dora took as lovers understood–indeed, what made her so attractive to them–was her independence. She did not want more from them. She certainly did not want more from Wolf.
We were still drinking our coffee when Ganz returned. He was a tall blond fellow with an even, open face, perfect as a mannequin, and as forgettable. When he started speaking it was clear he was fair-minded, decent and intelligent and I could not have liked him less. In our interview I told him how I was being followed in London, about the death threats in the post, about Hans proposing a trip with me to Strasbourg, and his wanting to see what I was writing.
When I left, Dora was already greeting the next interviewee at the door. I placed one hand on the small of her back, half-caress and half-goodbye, and she nodded at me. Our thing was always continuing.
RUTH
When I arrived at Great Ormond Street from Paris I left my case in the entrance and ran upstairs. The building smelt like it always did, a warm combination of piny cleaning fluid and toast. I hadn’t heard anything from Dora since her telegram, but I didn’t expect to. I knew she’d have been consumed by the investigation.
I reached the wooden stairs and caught my breath. They might still be interviewing. I’d prepared my confession over the past seven days for whoever would hear it, the tale of all I had failed to see. Of football and the embassy and Hans in the document cupboard, of the Gestapo impersonating Scotland Yard and how Hans knew to introduce a lord by one name. The passport plan. I would tell it and tell it. I smoothed my skirt and knocked.