Agent in Berlin, page 19
‘It would be simpler all round if I met one of your men outside the cell, there’s really no need for you to come down.’
He dressed in the Sturmbannführer uniform he’d found – he reckoned a rank any higher may arouse suspicion given his age – and went straight to the cell where a guard was waiting outside. He told the guard to give him the keys, he wasn’t to worry, he’d return them. ‘You can go now.’
The first thing Josef said as he entered the cell was ‘Rudi!’ He looked at him in astonishment. The man was sitting on the edge of a narrow bed and Rudi went to sit next to him.
‘What is this all about Joe?’
‘Nothing.’ He was shaking violently and his eyes were red. His breath smelt of fear. ‘I mean, it’s obviously not nothing… otherwise I wouldn’t be here. It’s a misunderstanding, Rudi, a case of mistaken identity!’
‘Who do they think you are?’
‘Would you believe it, a British spy – it’s ridiculous!’
Harald Fuchs world disintegrated a little further. ‘You’ve not mentioned anything about me, have you?’
‘No, Rudi, I mean not yet—’
‘What the hell do you mean not yet?’
‘I thought I could say you’re a friend so you can vouch for me – just a friend, no more than that – obviously. What with you and my Mitgliedskarte… you’ll vouch for me, Rudi, won’t you… are you even listening?’
Rudi was lost in another world, one where he was being tortured and then dragged naked through the streets of Lübeck and forced to marry Else in front of everyone he knew while still naked and… Christ, his parents, they’d…
‘Rudi!’
‘Yes, sorry, I am listening, Joe, keep your voice down. I’ll get you out of here, don’t worry.’
‘Really?’ He looked pitifully grateful and threw his arms round the young SS officer. Fuchs knew it was his opportunity to act. He pulled Josef close to him, the smell of the man’s sweat almost overpowering. He moved his hands to Josef’s head and ruffled his hair in as affectionate a manner as he could manage and then moved his hand to his cheek, stroking it gently before placing it across his mouth. He used his weight to force the man down and his hands to cover his mouth and nose. He was surprised how long it took Josef to realise what was happening, by which time it was too late. He was surprised at how quickly Josef suffocated. He’d expected it to take longer.
He sat with the limp and lifeless body for a while, gently stroking his head as if helping him to sleep before covering it with the coarse blanket, pulling it up to cover most of his face. Untersturmführer Harald Fuchs was remarkably composed as he closed the cell door and stopped outside the guard’s office to throw the keys on his desk and tell him prisoner Lustenberger was now asleep and he should leave him be. Back in the SS offices he took off the Sturmbannführer’s uniform and put his own back on. He didn’t want to risk being seen leaving the building so late or someone noticing him arriving home well past one so he found a quiet inner office where he could rest for a few hours and then be at his desk when his colleagues arrived in the morning.
* * *
Karl Henniger arrived early the following morning, looking forward to the interrogation of Werner Lustenberger. Having the two women identify him so readily was a real coup. It was only a matter of time before he confessed and this time Henniger ensured he’d find out everything about who he was working for. And overnight there’d been more good news: the specialist search team had found a metal box hidden in the eaves of the roof of the building next door to where Lustenberger lived. It contained a Minox Riga camera and other paperwork.
Karl Henniger was on the verge of breaking a British spy ring. Surely promotion was now inevitable.
Then the telephone rang.
* * *
At first it appeared Werner Lustenberger had died in his sleep, which was of course a disaster but could be put down to sheer bad luck. It was only early in the afternoon that the autopsy report came in, showing he’d been suffocated. After that all hell broke loose. The custody officer and the guard who’d been on duty that night were brought in and slowly the tale of the mysterious Sturmbannführer emerged. The custody sergeant explained he’d not actually seen him but he had definitely called on an internal SS line and the guard said yes it was definitely a Sturmbannführer but it was dimly lit in the corridor and he didn’t get a very good view.
No, he wouldn’t know him if he saw him again.
Chapter 18
Berlin
August 1939
If you don’t get out there now it may be too late.
It was what everyone was telling Barney Allen. Piers Devereux was part of a now increasingly influential group at 54 Broadway convinced war was imminent. The MI6 director Sir Hugh Sinclair was slightly more cautious but no less pessimistic. The Foreign Office was all over the place as usual: it was hard to make out what they really thought though the consensus at Broadway was that they were counting too much on forming an alliance with the Soviet Union and they’d left this far too late.
But most of all it was also what his network in Germany was telling him, especially Jack Miller. It wasn’t that Jack was panicking – he wasn’t the type – but there was a nervous tone to his communications.
I need to know what’s going to happen if… you know… When are you coming over? If you’re planning to come over you’d better make it sooner rather than later… do you have a date yet? Maybe I should come to London…
It was that last message that determined it for Barney Allen. He couldn’t risk Jack Miller coming to London: he doubted Jack would get back into Germany and he needed Jack in Berlin.
Over the past few months much of Barney’s network of spies, sources and contacts had withered away. For a start there was the group run by Werner. Since his arrest and death Barney had decided to avoid contact with any of Werner’s sub-agents, even though it appeared he’d died without giving anything away. They were cast adrift like the rear carriage from a moving train.
Then there were Jack’s sub-agents: by now, many of them had fled Germany or were refusing to have anything to do with him any more and Barney couldn’t really blame them. He knew they were lucky none had been arrested and betrayed Jack. He put that down to their taking care in recruiting people and his skill at managing to keep in contact with them while still operating on the cell principle, whereby they were as isolated as possible from other agents in the network.
Barney Allen arrived in Berlin on a Tuesday morning in the middle of August on the night train from Paris. It was just over three months since he’d been in the city when he’d fled from it on another night train, this one to Amsterdam.
He didn’t think anyone suspected him of being connected with Werner Lustenberger but couldn’t be certain, and nor could he be sure if his hurried departure from Berlin hadn’t aroused suspicion. So Edward Campion became an accountant called Brian McKenzie, a Canadian citizen from Toronto, in Berlin because he’d been on business in Paris and his office had asked him while he was in Europe – they thought Europe was like a small country – to go to Berlin to chase a debt owed to one of their clients by a company called Kohn and Sons. In case anyone checked, Kohn and Sons was a Jewish-owned company, which the owners had closed down two years previously rather than being forced to give it away. Barney had to admit Broadway came up with some bloody good cover stories.
Brian McKenzie was booked into a small hotel just off Pariser Strasse, the kind of place the Gestapo paid less attention to than the larger hotels. It was also a short walk from Jack’s apartment on Sächsische Strasse, where they met a few hours after his arrival.
‘You don’t have a Canadian accent.’
‘Hopefully the Germans won’t realise that and with some luck I won’t bump into too many Canadians.’
‘You don’t look like a Brian either.’
Barney shrugged and looked round Jack’s apartment. It was a comfortable place, bright and airy with a nice parquet floor, but a complete mess with piles of papers everywhere, along with three typewriters, a dozen empty bottles and a half a dozen soon-to-be-empty ones. The kitchen had at least a week’s worth of washing up on display. If the Gestapo ever raided the place, they wouldn’t know where to start. They were sitting facing each other in armchairs and Barney noticed a silk scarf draped over the back of Jack’s chair. The scarf was dark green with a floral motif in bright colours. Barney nodded towards it.
‘Is that yours, Jack?’
The American turned round and smiled as he rubbed the silk between his fingers. He shook his head.
‘Have you had a woman here?’
‘Plural.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Women rather than woman. You don’t need to worry though, Brian, none of them are Nazis. That’s just the kind of thing a Brian would worry about.’
‘It’s too dangerous having a woman here.’
‘Helps my cover story though, don’t you think? Young American abroad… money, drink, women… Less suspicious than living a monastic life. I’m interested in sport, women and drink – not politics, remember? I’m careful who I bring back, you don’t need to worry.’
‘I’m pleased to hear you vet them, that’s a relief.’
Jack held up the silk scarf. ‘This belonged to a Polish Jewish girl, the most beautiful woman I’ve met in Berlin. She was something interesting in the fashion industry here but fled with her family to Paris a year ago. She was back last month to collect some things.’
‘Foolish of her to return.’
‘She’d managed to get French papers. Have you ever noticed how a woman’s scent remains on a silk scarf for ever?’
Barney looked carefully at Jack: despite the carefree, almost louche manner his face was more lined and he seemed fidgety, bouncing a foot up and down in an annoying manner and chewing his fingernails. He hadn’t stopped smoking since Barney had arrived.
‘How come you never told me about this Werner Lustenberger?’
‘I did, Jack.’
‘After he was arrested, when you asked me to find out what had happened to him.’
‘I was going to tell you. He was arrested on the Monday, wasn’t he, and we were due to meet on the Tuesday. I was planning to tell you about him then and vice versa and I was going to get you to work as a team. You were going to be my pack of wolves, Jack: now you’re a lone wolf. So, what did you find out?’
‘I’ve told you what I know: at the end of June his apartment was advertised for rent. I wasn’t going to risk going in to enquire, they were bound to be checking on that. But then there were the death notices for him in the Völkischer Beobachter and Der Angriff – they must have wanted to make sure people knew he was dead.’
‘There’s an important contact Werner was looking after. Now I need you to take them over. Listen carefully.’
It took Barney an hour to carefully explain everything to Jack Miller, the American listening carefully, and when Barney finished Jack sat back and ran the silk scarf under his nose.
‘I can see why you want to keep this one going.’
‘You’ll get on with it, Jack?’
The American nodded.
‘I think I’ll be here for at least a week. It will take me that long to find out that Kohn and Sons has closed down and there’s no way my clients in Canada can get their money back.’
‘There is something else, before you go. My commissions have dried up: British newspapers don’t seem very interested in sports stories from Germany these days and as for the American ones – I’ve more or less run out of travel stories, to be honest. I’m not too sure about this but if I’m going to maintain my credibility here, I think I’m going to need to immerse myself in the foreign press corps – up to now I’ve avoided them. Otherwise, the authorities will start wondering what I’m up to. I need to register as a news correspondent at the Propaganda Ministry and start attending their briefings. There’s an Italian restaurant where the English-speaking reporters hang out – I need to join them. If I start writing news features can you make sure they get published?’
‘I’ll sort that out – but nothing too controversial, Jack, I—’
‘For Christ’s sake – anything and everything in the damn country is controversial.’
‘It sounds like a good idea: why the hesitation?’
‘Because the foreign correspondents here – especially the American ones – tend to fall into one of two camps: there are those who are frankly too credulous about the regime, they tend to believe and write too readily what they’re told. Then there are those who are less credulous and far more critical – proper journalists in other words – but they tend not to last too long before they have their accreditation withdrawn and they’re thrown out—’
‘We can’t be having that.’
‘I know.’
‘So what’s the problem, Jack? You’ll just have to join the former camp and get on with it, as unpleasant as it may feel. In the meantime, you’d better get on with that contact I was telling you about.’
* * *
Jack Miller became a British agent at the end of 1937, since when he’d reminded himself every day that however many precautions he took and however careful he was, it was impossible to eliminate danger.
He knew whenever he turned up to meet a contact there was a real possibility he’d been betrayed and the Gestapo would be waiting for him. What surprised him was how when he was back at his apartment at the end of a successful meeting he’d sit in his armchair and reflect on how exhilarating the experience had been. At first, he assumed there was something wrong with him – what normal person flirts with death like that? – but then realised if he didn’t feel that way he wouldn’t have lasted as long as he had.
But this mission was testing his resolve to its absolute limit. The day after the Englishman gave him his instructions, he went on a dry run, feeling more exposed than usual because it wasn’t as if he was on his way to cover a sporting event or writing a travel piece.
He took the U-Bahn to Tiergarten and headed north. He knew a nice restaurant in Moabit and if stopped he’d say he was heading there, explaining it was such a pleasant evening he’d decided to go this way. He entered Brücken Allee from the south and walked along until he came to the apartment block, pausing opposite it to light a cigarette and take a closer look. He couldn’t spot anything obviously suspicious: no one lurking in the shadows, no twitching curtains, no car parked outside the building with the driver pretending to doze. He moved on: he knew these days the Gestapo were more subtle, less obvious. He left Brücken Allee through its north side and caught the U-Bahn back from Bellevue.
The following evening, he walked all the way to Brücken Allee and went down the side of the apartment block where some large rubbish bins gave him a place to hide. He’d imagined it would be a long wait but he’d only been there for ten minutes when he heard footsteps and peered out through the bins. It was a Japanese man walking towards the door. Jack moved towards him as the man carefully unlocked the door and looked round in a confused manner and held the door open for Jack to follow him.
The man did glance round as Jack followed him up the stairs: Jack smiled and wished him ‘good evening’ and doffed his trilby and the man nodded. He glanced round again as they passed the third floor and then stopped on the stairs, clearly unsure whether to say anything. Jack stepped towards him.
‘I’m a friend of Werner and I need to speak with you – in your apartment.’
Tadashi Kimura looked shocked at first and then angry and said that wasn’t possible and Jack said it had to be, it was urgent: they could hardly discuss matters here on the stairs, could they – what about the neighbours?
Moments later they were inside the apartment. Kimura remained standing for a while and then closed the curtains, finally indicating Jack should sit.
‘Can you sit down too please, Tadashi? You’re making me nervous.’
‘I don’t know who you are.’
Jack resisted the temptation to say he wasn’t sure either and wondered whether it would be rude to take out his cigarettes. ‘I told you, I’m a friend of Werner.’
‘I don’t know anyone called Werner. I’m not sure who you are or what this is about and I—’
‘You met Werner at a club for homosexuals in February and you brought him to this apartment where you introduced him to Arno and… please let me finish… and you asked for his help in getting Arno out of Berlin and to England and Werner said he’d help but in return he’d want secret information from the Japanese embassy which the British would be interested in and you handed that over to Werner towards the end of March.’
He paused, unsure whether the Japanese diplomat had taken all that in. Tadashi said nothing and remained motionless as he watched Jack as if looking for some clue.
‘Where is Arno?’
Still no reaction. Tadashi continued to study Jack through the spiral of smoke as he removed his jacket, loosened his tie and leaned forward.
‘How do you know Werner?’
You’ll have to tell him, Jack, there’s no point in keeping anything from him… he’s too important.
‘We were colleagues: we’re in the same line of work.’
‘You’re not German?’
‘I’m an American.’
The first sign of a reaction, slightly raised eyebrows.
‘You said you were a colleague of Werner: has anything happened to him?’
‘When did you last see him, Tadashi?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I know you saw him at the end of March when you handed the documents over and I believe he next came to see you towards the end of April to assure you everything was in order and soon he’d be able to help Arno escape.’
The Japanese diplomat nodded. ‘He told me it wouldn’t be too long and I said it had taken too long already but he said they had to be very careful. Since then, I’ve heard nothing. I have no idea where he is – he lied to us and tricked me into giving him the—’
