Every Spy a Traitor, page 8
‘And you say he seemed shocked?’
‘As if he’d suddenly realised he’d made a mistake by speaking English. He rushed away then.’
‘And you didn’t get a photograph of him?’
‘I didn’t think it would be a terribly good idea to whip out my camera in the Kremlin, do you?’
* * *
That was the first and last George Banks heard of the mysterious, well-dressed Englishman in the Kremlin. He instructed Branstone to spend what time he could at the Lux Hotel on Gorky Street where the majority of western visitors stayed, but Branstone never saw him again.
London was most interested, of course. No one at Head Office needed telling how important the sighting was – an Englishman in the Kremlin, after all, and leaving the Council of Ministers building. Not just another communist getting drunk in the bar at the Lux.
But they got nowhere. MI6 looked into it as best they could, but drew a blank. Merton was a large college and, according to Branstone, there were two other colleges involved. They were talking about one of thousands of potential students. Of course, they did investigate the matter, but there were no records that were of any use, no lists of who’d played for the Merton chess team all those years ago and details of any tournaments.
As someone helpfully pointed out, it wasn’t even as if they were searching for a needle in a haystack. They first needed to find the bloody haystack!
Chapter 7
Germany
May 1937
Cooper followed the route through Germany suggested by the Maurers. Munich seemed like a good place to start and when he studied his map of Europe the route made sense – a clockwise tour of Germany.
He allowed himself three weeks, taking a lunchtime train on a Tuesday from Zürich to Munich and staying on the first night at the Wolff on Arnhulf Strasse, close to the station. He’d stayed there because he’d arrived late and thought he’d move somewhere less busy, but there was something about Munich that immediately put him on edge and from the moment he arrived he felt he needed to be close to the station. Just in case, though he wasn’t quite sure just in case of what.
There was an unquestionable military edge to the city, the station and the streets around it teeming with groups of armed men, most of which appeared to be Nazi gangs with their distinctive swastika armbands. It was little better when he checked in at the hotel. He was taken into a side room where his passport and the visa issued at the German consulate in Zürich was carefully examined by a man who never introduced himself and seemed to be unconvinced with Cooper’s reasons for being in Munich. ‘Looking around’ sounded too vague, he had to admit, but he knew better than to announce he was a writer.
Cooper only went out during the day, never too far from the hotel, all the time feeling thoroughly miserable and nervous about making notes in public so doing his best to memorise his thoughts and then transcribe them in his room.
He did have a stroke of fortune, though, when he visited the Information Bureau at the railway station the morning after his arrival and discovered they were selling the new English edition of Baedeker’s Guide to Germany. He spent a couple of hours going through it in a bar near the station, astonished at the amount of detail, even for relatively small towns. It would, he soon realised, be an invaluable companion.
He was a bit shaken though by the section on German history. National Socialism, it said, has ‘systematically carried through the national revolution and eliminated both fruitless Parliamentarianism and the mutual clashing of economic and local interests’.
It didn’t get any better. ‘Simultaneously … constructive work has begun on the abolition of unemployment, the reorganisation of agriculture as the backbone of the nation, the reawakening of race-consciousness and a corporative organisation of the classes.’
It seemed very political for a travel guide and he wondered whether the laws in Germany meant they’d been obliged to insert it. He had no idea, but it didn’t feel like a warm ‘welcome to Germany’.
* * *
The following morning, he was walking towards the river when he found himself on Prannerstrasse, where a slightly frayed Union Jack and a brass plate in need of a good polish announced the location of the British consulate and, for no obvious reason, Cooper decided to pop in: maybe the consulate had a library there where he could catch up on the English papers.
The consulate was reached through the courtyard of the building and on the steps leading to the entrance, a dozen people – mostly men – were waiting, each clutching a bag or a handful of papers and looking exhausted. Cooper joined the rear of the queue, but as he did so a man appeared from inside the consulate and approached him.
‘Are you here for a visa?’ He spoke in poor German with an English accent. He was tall and awkward-looking, with thinning hair and a pair of spectacles held together by white tape and had a harassed air about him.
‘No, I’m British, actually. I was just passing and wondered if you perhaps had, I don’t know, information for British visitors to Munich?’
‘Do you have your passport with you?’
‘I do, as it happens.’
‘Very well then, you’d better come in, though I’m not sure what we can do to help. We’re not a tourist office, you know.’
It was clear that the consulate was anything but a tourist bureau and was unlikely to be the home of an agreeable library where he could read the British papers in peace and quiet. Another dozen people waited in the foyer, some sitting, the others standing, all looking anxious.
The man who’d shown him in took him into an office and gestured for him to sit down and offered Cooper a cigarette. His desk was cluttered with stacks of files and at least three ashtrays.
‘In other times I suppose we may have been of some help – places to visit, you know – that kind of thing. But not any more. We’re overwhelmed here: all these Jews are looking for visas to get out of Germany. To get a visa to leave they need to be able to show an entry visa from a country that will take them in. The Jews say they’re having a dreadful time of it under the Nazis, their lives are barely worth living, they tell us, which is why so many of them are trying to leave. But it’s not that easy, we can’t just hand out visas to whoever asks for one. London is very, very strict, you know, and I’m not altogether sure I blame them. One does have a degree of sympathy for the Jews, of course, but… you know…’
He paused, as if unsure as to how Cooper would react.
‘I say, you’re not a journalist, are you, by some chance? I ought to have asked first. I hope you realise this is all entre nous, it makes a change to have someone in this office who’s neither pleading for their life or telling me what to do!’
‘No, I thought Munich would be an interesting place to visit. And you don’t need to worry, I’m just an innocent tourist.’
‘Well, that’s good to know. My name’s Andrews, by the way.’
Cooper smiled again and gave his name and Andrews said he knew, he’d seen it on the passport, and chuckled, clearly pleased with himself.
‘What I meant to say is that while one is not completely unsympathetic to the Jews one does occasionally have to ask oneself whether they may have contributed in some way to their situation, if you get my drift… I mean, whose side are they on, other than their own? Why are they always so unpopular, eh? I know we have to be cognisant of the Nazi threat and stability in Europe, but as I see it the communist threat is of greater concern to us and one does have to say that the communists and the Jews… well… they’re often one and the same.’
Cooper was appalled, so much so he didn’t react at all, but Andrews appeared to take this as some kind of agreement.
‘If they stay in Germany, they’ll just have to get used to being not so well off. And if they leave… well, that’s what they’ve done for centuries. The wandering Jew, eh?’
Andrews laughed loudly, making a snorting sound as he did so as if something was caught in his throat, leant back in his chair and looked very pleased with himself.
Cooper stood up and said he really must get a move on and he could see how busy it was here.
Andrews escorted him to the reception area and wished him a good day. Before he left, Cooper stood in the entrance and paused. The people waiting there looked at him desperately on the off chance he may be there to help them and Cooper – not without a little shame – studied them for a while.
He was the writer now, searching for characters.
The old man with a stained tie clutching a framed certificate.
The couple in their early thirties each holding a small suitcase, possibly hoping they could depart that day.
The middle-aged man in an immaculately tailored suit trying to adopt a confident, military bearing but with trembling lips.
The woman in her twenties, a sleeping baby coddled beneath her coat.
Each one of them a character.
Each one of them a novel.
* * *
Cooper spent the rest of the day walking around Munich, trying to absorb the atmosphere but instead feeling polluted by it. On his way back to the hotel he stopped at the station to book a ticket. He’d leave for Stuttgart the following afternoon. That night he studied his Baedeker, planning where to go the following morning before his train departed.
‘National Socialism originated in Munich in 1920; the party still has its headquarters here and the town is officially known as “the capital of the movement”.’
As if spurred on by this, the next morning he found himself drawn to Brienner Strasse, where the Braun Haus – the headquarters of the Nazi Party – was located, north of the station, between Königsplatz and Karolinenplatz.
Cooper felt unaccountably calm as he approached the large building guarded by a dozen men in uniform. Perhaps it was the ticket in his wallet that would take him away from Munich in just a couple of hours, or maybe he felt less vulnerable being a foreigner or it could be that he was thinking now as a writer and seeking out experiences. But for whatever reason, he bounded up the stairs to the entrance and when he was stopped by a guard, acted put-out and said he was here to see… and it was at that moment that his confidence failed him and his German sounded decidedly hesitant as he asked if it was possible to see someone who could explain the situation to him and the guards looked at him as if he was mad as they surrounded him, and for a moment Cooper thought he was about to be beaten up, and then someone he couldn’t see barked an instruction and a small man appeared as the guards parted and asked him who he was and what he wanted.
Five minutes later Cooper was in a windowless room in the basement of the Braun Haus, which would have felt like a cell had it not been so comfortably furnished, and he was sitting in an easy chair answering the questions from a man in a black suit that looked like a uniform.
He told them his name and where he was from and said he had no interest in politics whatsoever but he had heard much about Germany and some of it was… controversial… but he thought it best if he come to see for himself. ‘Because you can’t always believe what you read in the newspapers, can you?’
‘No, you most certainly can’t.’ This was all in English because they’d already established that the man in the black suit that looked like a uniform spoke far better English than Cooper did German. ‘And you say you’re a writer?’
‘After a fashion, I suppose.’
The man raised his eyebrows to indicate he was confused, and Cooper had to admit he couldn’t blame him because it did all sound rather vague.
‘I’d describe myself as an aspirant writer: I’m planning to write something.’
‘An article?’
‘A book.’
‘About Germany?’
‘And France too, possibly Switzerland. Maybe Italy and Spain and I daresay I’ll try and visit Belgium and Holland, too. It’s a novel, you see.’
Cooper tried to outline the plot and although it did all sound rather rambling the man seemed rather interested, especially when he mentioned the diamond thief and when Cooper described the woman he’d met in the hotel in Innsbruck and hinted at a theme of romance in the plot.
‘And you’ve come to the Braun Haus… why? Do you think the National Socialist Party purchases stolen diamonds?’
The man’s thin lips tightened, and his eyes narrowed, and now Cooper began to feel uncomfortable and wondered what on earth had made him come anywhere near this place.
‘You see, Mr Cooper, we know you were in the British consulate on Prannerstrasse yesterday and we’re interested to know what your instructions were? To find out what we’re up to? See if you have any cells here? Borrow some files… get as many names as possible?’
Afterwards, when he left the wretched building, Cooper took the view that in the circumstances, he’d handled everything really rather well. He recalled his schooldays when he’d been somewhat shy and often fearful but coped intuitively by concentrating on being calm. And always smiling. A teacher had once told him that with his good looks and his smile, he’d get away with a lot. So, in that windowless room in the Braun Haus, he hadn’t panicked, he’d managed to appear put-out without being too angry and, most importantly of all, came up with a plausible story which he stuck to.
That was the most important part of it, sticking to a story.
He was jolly pleased with himself. It was as if he had a natural aptitude for all this. He had an imagination and could think through tricky circumstances. Perhaps he’d be a writer after all.
He told them he’d gone into the consulate for any information they had for an Englishman at a loose end in Munich and they didn’t have any so he had a brief chat with an official there – his name? Andrews – and then left. The place was full of people looking for visas.
‘How many?’
‘About a dozen inside and maybe a similar number queuing outside.’
‘Jews?’
‘I imagine so.’
‘Did you speak with any of them?’
Cooper shook his head.
‘Then how did you know they were Jewish?’
‘I’m assuming they were. I was told they were applying for visas to enter Britain and I gather your Jewish citizens don’t feel terribly welcome here. Look, I’m mindful that I’ve taken up a good deal of your time and so you must have work to do and I have a train to catch so if I could…’
The man stood up and said to wait. He closed the door and Cooper didn’t hear a locking noise, which was reassuring, but he thought better than to check and he assumed he was being watched so he made a point of looking as calm as possible, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes and toying with the idea of writing some notes on the encounter because this was really very good material but he thought that would look suspicious, so he just sat still.
It was two hours later when the man returned, standing in the now open doorway and saying he could leave and holding out his passport and his wallet and as Cooper took them, he said he was most sorry that Mr Cooper had missed his train, but he was sure he’d find another one.
Cooper smiled and said nothing as he was escorted out of the Braun Haus.
Missing the train was inconvenient, but more importantly, it was, after all, material for the book.
* * *
Cooper spent the next fortnight travelling round Germany, loosely keeping to the route suggested to him by the Maurers, because that seemed as good an itinerary as any. From Munich he travelled to Stuttgart, which his Baedeker assured him enjoyed ‘the reputation of being the most go-ahead city in Germany’, though there seemed little about it which could be counted as go-ahead. From there he took the train to Frankfurt, the birthplace of Goethe, whose poetry he’d studied at university and which he’d never really got on with. He visited the Goethe Haus on Grosser Hirschgraben near the Rossmarkt, but even then, the poetry failed to come to life.
And so, he continued, from Frankfurt into the Ruhr – Düsseldorf, Essen, Dortmund – which felt like one enormous factory, and he thought that maybe these politicians in Britain who talked about German rearmament had a point. But above all, it was the unremitting Nazi nature of the places he visited that made the greatest impression on him: the ubiquity of the men in uniform and the huge swastika flags draping down buildings; the all-pervading atmosphere of menace, suspicion and triumphalism.
It didn’t feel like a nation that had been heavily defeated almost twenty years before. Quite the opposite, in fact.
It was summed up for him by a line in his guidebook on Essen, which he’d read as the train pulled into the station: ‘Adolf Hitler Strasse leads from the main station to Adolf Hitler Platz’.
In Düsseldorf he’d had a haircut at a barber shop on Kaiser-Wilhelm Strasse where the atmosphere was cold and unfriendly, as if they suspected him of something and as a result Cooper was nervous and asked for das üblich – ‘the usual’ – which didn’t seem to translate in the way he’d hoped. He spent a miserable twenty minutes staring at the framed photograph of Hitler in his eyeline and at the end was horrified: he’d been given a brutal, military haircut. The man watching him from the wall would have been amused.
* * *
He’d expected more from Hamburg. He’d travelled there on a night train from Münster because he was worried about his budget and decided he needed to economise. He ended up in a third-class compartment, but it wasn’t too busy, and the few other passengers slept through the journey. The train stopped in Osnabrück, where another passenger joined Cooper’s compartment, sitting opposite him, their feet touching. The man was in his early twenties, pale and weary, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, and when he got round to lighting it his hands were clearly trembling.
The train was held at Osnabrück for nearly twenty minutes and all the time the young man glanced anxiously out of the window.
He only relaxed when they noisily pulled away, but still clutched a leather holdall tightly to his chest and made sure his battered suitcase was wedged between his legs and the seat. Cooper smiled at his companion and wished him a good evening and the young man asked where he had travelled from and Cooper said Essen, but he’d been in a number of places before that, and the young man said his German was very good, but where was he from?
