‘What was Brian Samson doing, there in the American Zone?’
‘He was responsible for a prisoner from London: a German civilian named Winter,’ said Silas. He offered the seed cake.
The D-G took a slice of cake. ‘Winter, yes, of course.’ He bit into it and savoured it like old wine.
‘Paul Winter was a Nazi lawyer who worked for the Gestapo and who seemed to have an unhealthy amount of influence in Washington…a Congressman or someone. There was a tug of war between the State Department who wanted him released, the US Army who wanted him jailed, and the International Military Tribunal who wanted him as a defence lawyer. Meanwhile we had the blighter locked up in London.’
‘He had an American mother: Veronica Winter. Her other son went to America and came strutting back in the uniform of a US Army colonel. Reckless people, Americans, eh? He wasn’t even naturalized.’
‘Very pragmatic,’ said Silas, unwilling to make such generalizations.
‘I seem to remember that the mother came of a good family. I heard that she’d died of pneumonia in one of those dreadful postwar winters. She was a friend of “Boy” Piper. Sir Alan Piper who was the D-G at one time.’
‘Yes, “Boy” Piper was the one who sent me there to sort it out for the Department.’
‘Go on, Silas. I want to hear the story.’
‘There’s not much to tell. The wife…Winter’s wife that is, sent her husband a message…’
‘Now this is the Nazi fellow?’
‘Yes, Paul Winter the Nazi lawyer.’
‘In prison?’ asked the D-G, who wanted to get it quite clear.
‘He wasn’t in prison, in a billet. He’d been released in order to defend Esser. The Nazis accused at Nuremberg were permitted to choose anyone they wanted, even POWs from a prison cage, as their lawyers. The message said she was in this damned mountain hut, so off he dashed. He hadn’t seen his wife since the war ended. His brother was a US colonel as you said: he got a military car or a jeep or something and they both cleared off without waiting for permission.’
‘To Berchtesgaden?’
‘And in particularly foul winter weather. I remember that winter very well. When this fellow Paul Winter got to the mountain house, his wife Inge was waiting for him. She’d had a child; she wanted money.’
‘Did he have money?’
‘There was a metal chest buried up there. Esser had taken it there and hidden it. During their sessions together he told Paul where it was. Then I suppose Esser must have told Inge Winter that her husband knew. They dug it up. It was gold; a mixed collection of stuff Esser had collected from the Berlin Reichsbank vaults, leaving a signed receipt for it.’
‘And her child was Esser’s,’ supplied the D-G.
‘How did you know?’
‘It’s the only part of the story that sticks in my mind.’
‘Yes. Paul Winter must have suspected it wasn’t his. They’d been married for ages and never been able to have a child. I can imagine how he felt.’
‘And the two Winter boys were killed. But how did they get shot?’
‘That’s the question, isn’t it? If you want the truth they were shot by a drunken US sergeant who thought they were werewolves or deserters or gangsters or some other sort of toughs who might hurt him. That region was plagued with deserters from both sides who’d formed gangs. They stole army supplies on a massive scale, ambushed supply convoys, robbed banks and weren’t too fussy about who they hurt.’
‘The story I heard…’
‘Yes, there were lots of stories. Some people said that the Winters were shot by mistake: by someone who was trying to kill Samson and the General who was with him. Some said they were shot by the sergeant acting on secret orders from Washington. Some said Max Busby shot them because he was in love with Paul Winter’s wife, or, in another version, involved in some black-market racket with her. It’s impossible to prove any of those stories wrong, but believe me, I went into it thoroughly. It was as I told you.’
‘But the report said Brian Samson had shot them,’ said the D-G. ‘I remember distinctly. He was bitter about it right up to the day he died.’
‘Ah, yes. That was later. But at the time no one had any doubts. It was the drunken sergeant who was arrested and taken back to the cells. Only when the Americans asked for Samson to go and give evidence to their inquiry did things change. We couldn’t let Samson face any sort of questioning of course: that’s been Departmental policy since the beginning of time. When we refused to let Samson go down there, the Yanks suddenly saw a chance to get it all over quickly and quietly. By the time I arrived there, all the depositions were scrapped and new ones written. Suddenly they could produce eyewitnesses prepared to swear that Samson accidentally shot the two men.’
‘That’s despicable,’ said the D-G. ‘That verdict went on Samson’s record.’
‘You’re preaching to the converted, Henry. I protested about it. And when “Boy” Piper wouldn’t support me I made a devil of a fuss. Sometimes I think I blotted my copybook then. I was forever marked as a troublemaker.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ protested the D-G without putting much effort into it.
‘I don’t blame the Americans for trying it on; but I was furious that they could get away with it,’ said Silas mildly. ‘You couldn’t entirely blame the men who perjured themselves. They were American soldiers, draftees who hadn’t seen their families for ages. An inquiry might easily have kept them in Europe for another year.’
‘Was Busby a party to this?’
‘Busby was the Duty Ops Officer at the Nuremberg CIC office that night. He was getting a lot of stick because he was in command of the party. He preferred an accident with some foreign officer as the guilty party.’
‘I can see why there was such bad feeling between him and Samson when he came to work in Berlin.’
‘That’s why Busby went to work for Lange’s people: Brian Samson wouldn’t have him.’
‘And the wife?’
‘She took the gold, probably changed her name and disappeared from the story. There was no sign of her by the time Samson got to the house, and I never found her. She left Esser to face the hangman, and took her daughter and went into hiding; perhaps that’s what Esser wanted her to do. She was a very resolute and resourceful young woman. She worked in a nightclub in Garmisch, so she would have had no trouble in contacting the people from whom she could buy permission to live in the French Zone, which is what she did. That removed her from the British and the US jurisdiction. Eventually she got a French passport and took her gold and her baby…’
‘And lived affluently ever after,’ supplied the D-G caustically.
‘Crime does sometimes pay,’ said Silas. ‘We may not like to concede it but it’s true.’ He drank some tea.
‘How much gold was there?’ asked the D-G, helping himself to a second piece of seed cake.
‘I saw the large metal box. It had been buried – the dirt was still on it. It was provost exhibit number one. About this big.’ Silas extended his hands to show the size of a small steamer trunk.
‘Do you have any idea what that would weigh?’ said the D-G.
‘What are you getting at, Sir Henry?’
‘No one could carry gold of that dimension; it would weigh a ton.’
‘If she couldn’t carry it, what would she do with it? Why would you dig it out in the first place, unless you were going to take it away?’
The D-G smiled knowingly. ‘Speaking personally, I might dig it up because too many people know where it is.’
‘Her husband and Esser and so on?’
‘And perhaps many other people,’ said the D-G.
‘And bury it again,’ said Silas, following the D-G’s thought processes. ‘Ummm.’
‘Now there would be only three people who know where it is.’
‘And two of them are dead a few minutes later.’
‘So only Inge Winter knows where it is.’
‘Are
you suggesting that she got this American sergeant to shoot her husband and her brother-in-law?’
‘I’ve never met any of them,’ said the D-G. ‘I’m simply responding to the story you’ve told me.’
Silas Gaunt saidnothing. He tried to remember the evidence he’d examined and the soldiers he’d talked to. The sergeant was a flashy youngster with jewellery and a vintage Mercedes that he was taking home to America. Was he really drunk that night, or was that a ruse to make the ‘accident’ more convincing? And there was, of course, the sergeant’s missing woman friend, who was a singer with a dance band. Silas never did find her. Were the woman friend and Inge Winter one and the same person? Well it was too late now. He poured more tea, drank it and put the mystery out of his mind.
Soon, reflected Silas, the D-G would retire, and that would sever his last remaining link with the Department. Silas found the prospect bleak.
The D-G got up, flicked some cake crumbs from his tie and said, ‘I want you to promise me you’ll have someone to look at those trees, Silas. It’s a beetle, you know.’
‘I don’t think I could bear to lose those elms, Henry. They must be about two hundred years old. My grandfather adored them: he had a photo taken of the house when they were half the size they are now. There were four of them in those days. They say one of them blew down the night grandfather died.’
‘I’ve never heard such maudlin nonsense. Elms don’t blow down, they’re too deep-rooted.’
‘My mother told me it fell when grandfather died,’ said Silas, as if the honour of his family rested upon the truth of it.
‘Don’t be such a fool, Silas. Sometimes you have to sacrifice the things you love. It has to be done. You know that.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I’m going to send Mrs Samson over to Bret when she comes out. California. What do you think?’
‘Yes, capital,’ said Silas. ‘She’ll be well away from any sort of interference. And Bernard Samson too?’
‘No. Unless you…?’
‘Well, I do, Henry. Leave Samson here and he’ll roar around trying to locate her and make himself a nuisance. Bundle him off and let Bret take care of them both.’
‘Very well.’ The grandfather clock, which Silas had moved to this room because he didn’t trust the workmen not to damage it, struck five p.m. ‘Is that really the time? I must be going.’
‘Now, you’re leaving all the arrangements to me, Henry?’ Silas wanted to get it clear; he wanted no recriminations. ‘There is a great deal to be done. I’ll have to have matching dentistry prepared, and that takes ages.’
‘I leave it to you, Silas. If you need money, call Bret.’
‘I suppose the special funding mechanism will be wound up once she is safe,’ said Silas.
‘No. It will be a slush fund for future emergencies. It cost us so much to set up that it would be senseless to dismantle it.’
‘I thought Samson’s probing into the money end might have made it too public.’
‘Samson will be in California,’ mused the D-G. ‘The more I think of that idea the better I like it. Volkmann said that Mrs Samson has aged a lot lately. We’ll send her husband there to look after her.’
24
East Berlin. Müggelsee. May 1987.
‘How stunning to have the Müggelsee all to ourselves,’ said Harry Kennedy. He was at the tiller of a privately owned six-metre racing yacht: Fiona was crewing.
On a hot summer day the lake was crowded with sailing boats, but today was chilly and the lake was entirely theirs. It was late afternoon. The sun, sinking behind bits of cumulus – ragged and shrinking in the cooling air – provided fleeting golden haloes and sudden shadows but little warmth.
The wind was growing stronger, pressing upon the sail steadily like a craftsman’s hand, so that the hull cut through the water with a loud hiss, and left a wake of curly white trimmings.
Fiona was sitting well forward, huddled in her bright yellow hooded jacket complete with heavy Guernsey sweater and Harry’s scarf, but still she shivered. She liked the broad expanse of the lake, for it enabled her to sit still and not have all the work of tacking and jibing and trimming which Harry liked doing so much. Or rather liked to watch her doing. He never seemed to feel the cold when he was sailing. He became another man when dressed in casual clothes. The short red anorak and jeans made him look younger: this was the intrepid man who flew planes over the desert and the tundra, the man who fretted behind a desk.
She had seen a lot of him during that year he’d spent at the Charité. He’d taken her mind off the miseries of separation at a time she’d most needed someone to love and care for her. Now that he was working in London again, he saw her only when he could get a really long weekend, and that meant every six weeks or so. Sometimes he arranged to borrow this sailing boat from a friend he’d made at the hospital, and she brought sandwiches and a vacuum flask of coffee so they could spend all the day on the lake. These trips must have involved him in a lot of trouble and expense, but he never complained of that. She couldn’t help wondering if it was all part of his assigned duty of monitoring her, but she didn’t think so.
Neither had he ever suggested the impossible: that she should come to London to see him. He knew about her, of course, or at least he knew as much as he needed to know. Once late at night in her apartment after too much wine he’d blurted out, ‘I was sent.’ But he’d immediately made it into some sort of metaphysical observation about their being meant for each other and she’d let it go at that. There was nothing to be gained from hinting that she knew the real story behind that first meeting. It was better to have this arm’s-length love affair: each of them examining the thoughts and emotions of the other, neither of them entirely truthful.
‘Happy?’ he called suddenly.
She nodded. It wasn’t a lie: everything was relative. She was as happy as she could be in the circumstances. Harry sat lounging knee-bent at the stern – head turned, arm outstretched, elbow on knee, fingers extended to the tiller – looking like Adam painted on the Sistine ceiling. ‘Very happy,’ she said. He beckoned to her and she moved to sit close beside him.
‘Why can’t it always be just like this?’ he asked in that forlorn way that her children had sometimes posed similarly silly questions. She would never understand him, just as she had never been able to understand Bernard. She would never understand men and the way their minds could be both mature and selfishly childlike at the same time.
‘Ever been to the Danube Delta? There is a vast nature reserve. Ships – like floating hotels – go right down the Danube to the Black Sea. It would be a wonderful vacation for us. Would you like that?’
‘Let me think about it.’
‘I have all the details. One of the heart men at the Charité took his wife: they had a great time.’
She wasn’t listening to him. She was thinking all the time of the recent brief meeting she’d had with Bernard. They had met in a farmhouse in Czechoslovakia and Bernard had urged her to come back to him. It should have made her happy to see him again, but it had made her feel inadequate and sad. It had reawakened all her fears about the difficulties of being reunited with her family. Bernard had changed, she had changed, and there could be no doubt that the children would have changed immensely. How could she ever be one of them again?
‘I’m sorry, Harry,’ she said.
‘About what?’
‘I’m not good company. I know I’m not.’
‘You’re tired: you work too hard.’
‘Yes.’ In fact she’d become worried at her lapses of memory. Sometimes she could not remember what she had been doing the previous day. Curiously the distant past was not so elusive: she remembered those glorious days with Bernard when the children were small and they were all so happy together.
‘Why won’t you marry me?’ he said without preamble.
‘Harry, please.’
‘As a resident of the DDR you could get a divorce with the minimum of form
alities.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I explored it.’
‘I wish you hadn’t.’ If he had talked to a lawyer it might have drawn attention to her in a way that was undesirable.
‘Fiona, darling. Your husband is living happily with another woman.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I saw them together one evening. I almost stumbled into them in the crush at Waterloo Station. They were catching the Epsom train.’
‘You recognized them?’
‘Of course. You showed me a photo of him once. The woman with him was blonde and very tall.’
‘Yes, that’s her.’ It hurt like a dagger in the heart. She’d known, of course, but it hurt even more when she heard it from Harry.
‘You know her?’ he said.
‘I’ve met her,’ said Fiona. ‘She’s pretty.’
‘I don’t want to make you miserable but we should talk about it. It’s madness for us to go on like this.’
‘Let’s see what happens.’
‘You’ve been saying that since the time we first met. Do you know how long ago that is?’
‘Yes. No…A long time.’
‘Living without you is Hell for me: but being separated from me doesn’t make you miserable,’ he admonished her, hoping for a contradiction, but she only shrugged. ‘We haven’t got much time, Fiona.’
She kissed his cheek. ‘Harry. We are happy enough this way. And we have lots of time.’ It was the same conversation they’d had many times before.
‘Not if we were to start a family. Not much time.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘You know it is. Our children, Fiona. It’s everything I want.’
‘You’d come and live here?’ She was testing him now.
‘I lived here before.’
‘That’s not the same thing as living here permanently,’ she said.
‘Do I hear a discordant note in the Marxist harmony?’