Fear Itself Read online

  Schellenberg was glancing hungrily at the menu – he hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. Better not overdo it, he told himself, since he was here on business, not for a three-course meal. ‘Thüringer, please,’ he said shortly.

  The waiter nodded. ‘Anything to drink?’ he asked hopefully.

  Schellenberg hesitated. After the day he’d had he would love a drink – he’d spent the afternoon listening to Müller, that pig from the Gestapo, outlining his plans to crush the few dissidents left in Prague. But he checked himself, and pointed to the empty bottle of mineral water he had just finished. ‘Another of these.’

  The waiter gave a second nod, curter now, making it clear he didn’t see much of a tip coming from Schellenberg’s sobriety.

  Schellenberg looked around at the other tables. Some of the people seemed mildly familiar – but then, he was discovering that in many ways Berlin was the world’s largest small town. There was one sharp-nosed man, as young as Schellenberg, sitting in a corner with a coffee and a copy of the Völkischer Beobachter, the Party paper. He wore a pale cotton suit, and a neatly creased brown derby sat on the table next to his coffee. His eyes strayed from the paper every few seconds, scanning the pavement. Schellenberg could have sworn he had seen him before.

  Just as his Thüringer came, with a small helping of Kartoffelsalat, a Dusenberg suddenly halted in front of the café. At the wheel sat a regular soldier in the uniform of the Wehrmacht. The back door opened and Heydrich got out, crouching to leave the car, then stretching to his full height. He was in uniform, with a holstered Luger on his hip. He wore the peaked hat of an SS officer, and black driving gloves of thin calf’s leather on both hands.

  Heydrich possessed the regular features of the handsome, though close up his nose was rather long and his lips slightly too full. He carried himself with a correctness that managed to seem natural rather than acquired. Schellenberg felt certain that if Hollywood should ever want to cast the real thing to play a Nazi officer, Heydrich would sail through auditions.

  He spotted Schellenberg and crossed the pavement to join him at the table. The waiter appeared at once by his side.

  ‘Kümmel und Kaffee,’ he said, drawing his gloves off. He peered at Schellenberg’s plate. ‘A better dinner than I’ve just had,’ he announced.

  ‘Oh,’ said Schellenberg. ‘Where was that?’ He was trying not to sound nervous. He’d found that Heydrich was best handled with a show of confidence, since the Gruppenführer had a predator’s nose for weakness.

  ‘At the New Chancellery. In the Führer’s private quarters,’ he added casually, and Schellenberg stiffened slightly. Heydrich elaborated. ‘You may know that our leader doesn’t eat meat, and although he is happy to serve it to others, it is not exactly a priority with his chef. I had schnitzel that reminded me of a pair of boots I once ruined crossing a stream. The Führer’s pancake looked positively delectable by comparison, which perhaps explains why he ate it with his fingers.’

  Heydrich gave a muted shudder, and Schellenberg allowed himself a small smile; anything more overt might be interpreted as laughing at the Führer, a prerogative he would leave to superiors like Heydrich. But he could picture Hitler’s rabbity teeth nibbling away under the cover of his bristle moustache, butter oozing down the small pear of a chin. There was always the unspoken discrepancy between the Führer’s vaunted ideals of manhood – blond, blue-eyed, wide-shouldered Aryans – and his own dark diminutive form.

  The waiter came and put down a demitasse and a small frosted glass full of clear liquid. Heydrich took an appreciative sip of his drink. Putting it down, he said, ‘The Führer was in a good mood this evening. That isn’t always the case.’

  Schellenberg said nothing, chewing on his sausage. This meeting had only been arranged at the end of the afternoon when Heydrich’s secretary had called and said it was urgent, and he waited now for Heydrich to tell him why. Was the dinner with the Führer the reason? It must be. Otherwise Heydrich would have seen him the next day in his office.

  But Heydrich seemed in no hurry to get to business. ‘He was very mellow; you’d almost think he’d had a couple of beers. Not that he had,’ he added, and Schellenberg nodded. Everyone knew Hitler neither drank nor smoked. Nor, despite having a putative girlfriend …

  ‘Anyway, I had an interesting phone call this afternoon. It was from Ausbach in Vienna. He’s in charge of counter-espionage now.’

  ‘What happened to Colonel Ronge?’ The Austrian had offered to work for the SS following the Anschluss, which had seemed sensible to Schellenberg, since Ronge would know the ins and outs better than anyone coming in from Berlin.

  ‘He was sent to Dachau for a spell after his loyalty came into question. I believe Canaris had him released, though he won’t be getting his old job back. But as I was saying,’ he added pointedly, and Schellenberg told himself to refrain from interruption, since Heydrich liked the sound of his own voice, ‘Ausbach rang to tell me there’d been an inquiry about a missing man. An American of sorts. I think you knew him.’

  ‘I did?’ asked Schellenberg in surprise. He was not aware that he knew anyone in America, German or not. His own family had stayed without exception in Germany – even in the mass emigration of 1848 none of them had left for the New World.

  ‘His name was Werner.’

  Schellenberg sat stock-still, silent. The high meadow grass, and the pines that stood like sentries around the small clearing. It had been almost three years since his encounter in Austria with the man of this name. After he’d returned from the operation and told Heydrich that the mission had been satisfactorily accomplished, Heydrich had seemed to lose all interest in the matter.

  ‘Yes, apparently people are looking for him,’ Heydrich continued.

  ‘What people?’ asked Schellenberg, unable to picture these researchers. He could only envisage the clearing, the thick tree trunk he had propped the body against, the way sunlight had slanted through, like nature’s insistent witness. ‘Did Ausbach say who?’

  ‘He wasn’t altogether sure, though he thinks they said they were Swiss. The inquiry came to someone in the district office in Lienz in the Ost Tirol. It’s quite a few miles west of Klagenfurt,’ he added, giving Schellenberg a knowing glance. ‘An organisation no one had ever heard of was asking questions of the local police. Trying to see if any dead bodies had gone unidentified. They claimed they were a humanitarian organisation, whatever that means,’ said Heydrich in deprecating tones. He made a face. ‘Probably Jews.’

  ‘Jews? Werner wasn’t one.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then why were they poking their noses into things?’ He felt both resentful and afraid, as if what had been acted out in that small clearing had been private business, and should remain that way.

  ‘I suppose they were operating on the principle that any enemy of ours must be a friend of theirs,’ Heydrich speculated blandly.

  ‘But why should they think Werner was our enemy? He was a member of the German-American Bund.’ Schellenberg realised his voice was rising.

  Heydrich gave him the appraising look Schellenberg was learning to live with – it made him feel like a milk cow whose capacity was constantly assessed by the farmer who owned it. He could only hope he continued to look worth his keep – God knows, there were many under Heydrich who failed their reappraisals, and lost their posts.

  ‘They wouldn’t think that necessarily,’ said Heydrich shortly. ‘But they seem to know he disappeared. Anyway, whoever these Swiss people are, it seemed peculiar to the local Polizei that they should be snooping around looking for a corpse. Strange enough in fact that it got mentioned in their regular report to headquarters in Vienna. That’s how it came to Ausbach’s attention.’

  ‘What were these Swiss told?’

  ‘Not a lot. They hadn’t gone far west enough in their searches, I gather, so they didn’t find a match. And when they widen the net, they’ll find the fish long gone – I made it clear to Ausbach that they were not t
o be assisted in any way by anyone, especially local officials in the area.’

  Schellenberg said nothing, waiting tensely.

  Heydrich finished his drink and held the little glass in one hand, staring at it moodily. He seemed preoccupied, not at all the usual crisp figure found behind his desk, with a mind like a meat mincer. ‘I found this evening a very unusual occasion,’ he said, letting his lower lip drop to suggest again what he’d thought of the meal. ‘Over dinner, the Führer began to reminisce. At first, I was slightly taken aback. It was my understanding from Himmler that there was something particular Hitler wanted to discuss. Instead he began talking about the Putsch. Not the Putsch per se,’ Heydrich corrected himself. ‘But his time in prison afterwards. He did six months, you know.’

  ‘I thought it was longer,’ Schellenberg said mildly. Hitler’s incarceration had assumed legendary proportions in Nazi lore. History – the Goebbels-directed official history, that is – now painted the Putsch as a courageous uprising that had been crushed with autocratic brutality by a decadent regime. The facts as far as Schellenberg knew were that the ‘insurrection’ had collapsed into farce like a leaky balloon. It had fizzled out almost right away – within twenty-four hours the leaders, including Hitler, had all been arrested, and the hoped-for uprising had been confined to a few hundred Party members marching around Munich for a night.

  He wondered when Heydrich would get to the business at hand, though he listened with interest, since it wasn’t often that one got to hear a first-hand account of the Führer.

  Heydrich explained that when Hitler was sentenced for leading the abortive rebellion, he had been sent to jail in Landsberg, outside Munich. His conditions had been anything but spartan – he had a large room to himself, with a view no less, and both the guards and most of his fellow inmates were sympathetic to his cause. One guard in particular had made it his duty to look after Hitler. His name was Seitz, and he was Austrian, which put Hitler in his favour already; he’d also been impressed by Hitler’s audacity in leading the attempted Putsch. And he was a friend of Ernst Röhm, who had participated in the Putsch too, but managed to escape doing any time.

  Schellenberg must have raised an eyebrow, for Heydrich looked at him. ‘Not that kind of friend,’ he said sternly, effortlessly reading Schellenberg’s mind. ‘They served in the war together.’

  Like Hitler, Heydrich went on, Seitz had been an enlisted man, and like the former corporal he held the same bitter view of the leaders who had let them and their country down. It was natural, therefore, that Seitz did countless small favours for prisoner Hitler, including supplying him with pens and paper.

  ‘For writing letters?’

  ‘For writing Mein Kampf,’ Heydrich said, raising a reproachful eyebrow.

  ‘Of course,’ said Schellenberg, and studied his plate.

  Doubtless Seitz would have become just another of Hitler’s followers, joining the Party in time, possibly rising to a middling rank in the SS which would have seen him now patrolling the old Czech border. But then something had happened.

  ‘Some prisoners were transferred to Landsberg from the city jail in Munich. Among them was a young radical named Driberg. A Bolshevik of sorts, though not a very brave one it seems – he had sat out the war in Switzerland rather than fight. In Landsberg he was shunned by most of the other prisoners; the rest liked to torment him – pissing in his food tray, banging on the walls when he tried to sleep. Driberg seemed to think the Führer was responsible for this, that he incited the other men to make his life hell.’ Heydrich shrugged, which suggested this might have been the case. ‘Then something snapped in the man, and he broke into Hitler’s room and attacked him.’

  ‘Really?’ Schellenberg tried to picture this, but couldn’t – it seemed the equivalent of a Christian punching Jesus.

  ‘Yes, but not with his fists,’ added Heydrich, as if to say the man wouldn’t have dared. ‘He took the coward’s approach, and used a knife.’

  ‘Mein Gott. What happened?’

  ‘The guard Seitz was passing and intervened. He disarmed Driberg, but not before sustaining wounds, terrible ones in his chest apparently.’

  ‘Did he die?’

  Heydrich shook his head. ‘No, not then at any rate. The Führer said he seemed to make a full recovery, though he was in hospital for a time. When the Führer’s sentence was up and he left, he found among all the guards lined up to say goodbye Seitz standing there, in uniform, as good as new. But six months later, he did die, from an infection in his chest – it wasn’t hard to link it to Driberg’s attack. Funny,’ he said dispassionately, ‘even after all these years the Führer was very moved remembering him.’

  ‘Did the Führer feel guilty about Seitz?’ Schellenberg ventured, putting down his fork as he swallowed the last morsel of potato salad.

  ‘Guilty?’ demanded Heydrich, seeming to enjoy the flicker of panic on his younger associate’s face. ‘Certainly not. The Führer thought Seitz was lucky to have had the good fortune to die for our cause.’ He added with a trace of amusement, ‘As he was, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Schellenberg, avoiding Heydrich’s eyes. They sat in silence as the waiter approached. Schellenberg suddenly wanted a large glass of Riesling to help him through this mystifying meeting. What precisely did Heydrich want? Had Schellenberg really been called to this night-time rendezvous to listen to him show off his knowledge of Hitler’s personal history? But when Heydrich ordered another kümmel, Schellenberg thought better of it and gestured to the waiter that he was fine with his water.

  ‘That would normally have been the end of the story,’ Heydrich said, with a tantalising undertone. Schellenberg knew enough to wait. And soon Heydrich went on.

  A year later as the financial crisis continued to grip the Weimar Republic, Hitler had been in Berlin when Röhm came to see him. Seitz was long dead, but Frau Seitz was still alive. Though only just – she had been diagnosed with cancer, and had only a few months to live. A sad story, but one which Röhm himself would normally have dealt with – a small cheque in gratitude for her husband’s bravery, perhaps, but nothing more.

  Frau Seitz wasn’t looking for money, however, at least not directly. Her concern was for her son, still just a boy and about to be left all alone in the world – she didn’t elaborate, but it was clear that there was no family close enough to take the lad in. He’d probably end up in a state Waisenhaus – orphanages that condemned you to a meagre life at best. What she wanted, she explained to Röhm, was to send the boy to America. Would he, or Hitler (for it was Hitler really, even then, she was asking) help provide the fare?

  Rather dismissively, Röhm had spoken to Hitler about the request, but surprisingly the Führer had ordered him to help her at once; Heydrich said Hitler seemed to enjoy recalling his generosity. Then as if to counter any suggestion that he had simply been soft, Hitler told Heydrich that he could see the use of a German in America who would always owe a debt of gratitude to the Fatherland. And the Party would have a middleman there, a contact, who would keep in touch with the boy and make sure this was the case.

  Heydrich sipped from his new glass of kümmel, smacking his lips as he put his glass down. This gave Schellenberg time to venture a question. ‘Why was Werner made the contact?’

  Heydrich sighed, suggesting to Schellenberg that he thought it had been a mistake – otherwise, why had Werner been killed? But then Heydrich surprised him, saying, ‘Actually, he wasn’t the contact originally. It was Jahnke.’

  Jahnke? Schellenberg was even more startled. The son of a Pomeranian landowner, Jahnke was a veteran member of the intelligence service, recruited long before the rise of the Party. Recently he had been running intelligence for the Foreign Service under von Ribbentrop. For this, he had earned the distrust of Himmler and, Schellenberg assumed, Heydrich.

  But Heydrich’s voice stayed neutral. ‘Jahnke had been in America a long time when this occurred. He had a business there in the West before the war; during the
war, of course, he proved invaluable.’

  Schellenberg remembered the stories – how Jahnke had helped foment industrial disorder in several American cities; how, more damagingly, he had planned the bomb that had gone off in Philadelphia towards the end of the war, killing ten and wounding scores. It was hearsay, of course, but then that was always the case in the espionage business: in a trade that was by definition secret, there was no such thing as a reliable history.

  ‘Jahnke placed the boy with a family of sympathisers, who’d moved to America many years before. When Jahnke came back to Germany, he handed over liaison duties to Werner. That wouldn’t have mattered – it was because Röhm retained a personal interest in the boy. But quite coincidentally, the boy grew up to become very well placed. It was then that the Führer saw an opportunity.’

  ‘Remarkable. But why wasn’t he spotted by the Americans? I mean, if he was placed with a German-American family over there.’

  ‘The boy got to America early enough to lose any trace of a German accent. And the link was with Jahnke at first, and for all I distrust Jahnke, I have never thought him an agent of the Americans. In any case, he was back here by then, and Werner was made the point of contact. Not by Jahnke – he knew Werner was a fool,’ he added, sniffing slightly, then gave a small sigh. ‘It was Röhm’s choice. Hitler left him to sort out the details.’ He sighed again, probably at the thought of how much unnecessary trouble had been caused by the captain – bully, predatory homosexual, leader of the SA, all in all the worst aspects of the Party’s military side. Then Heydrich seemed to pull himself together. ‘Once it became clear that this boy had managed to establish himself as an American, and in a privileged position to boot, it became necessary to protect his secret.’

  Which was why Werner had to die, thought Schellenberg. But it hadn’t been that simple, had it? Heydrich confirmed this when he said, ‘The problem was, Röhm arranged for Werner to communicate with us via the embassy. It should have only been a conduit, but Werner couldn’t keep his mouth shut. I suppose he felt he needed to explain himself, justify why he was allowed to send transmissions back. Whatever the reason, he talked. Which meant someone else knew as well.’