Hitler's peace

“Of course you know what this means, don’t you?” I said. “It means you’re going to have to show me your bedroom wallpaper.”

“I hope you like it.”

“I’m sure I will.”

She led me into a hallway as big as a railway station, up the huge yellow marble stairs, into her bedroom, and closed the doors behind us. I glanced around. I didn’t see her wallpaper. I didn’t see the rug beneath my feet. I didn’t even see her bed. All I saw was Elena and the white silk gown slipping off her shoulders and the reflection of my own hands cupping her bare behind in a full-length cheval mirror.

I lay still next to the refuge afforded by Elena’s naked body. I thought of Heinrich Zahler and Helmut von Dorff lying in the cold ground of Beketovka. I thought of the insane Polish colonel who wanted to kill me, and the ruthless Nazi agent on the ship, and the imprisoned German major who was working to decode some signals that might reveal me to have been a Russian spy. I thought of poor Ted Schmidt’s body, or what remained of it, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. I thought of Diana lying on the floor of her Chevy Chase house and her nameless lover’s bare backside framed between her knees. I thought of Mrs. Schmidt lying in the cold drawer of a Metro Police morgue. I thought of the president. I thought of Harry Hopkins and Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin. I even thought of Wild Bill Donovan and Colonel Powell. But mostly I thought of Elena. The shadows moved across the bedside cabinet and I thought of death. I thought of my own death, and assured myself that it seemed a long way off when I was with Elena.

For a while I slept and dreamed of Elena. When I did wake, she was in the bathroom, singing quietly. I sat up, switched on the bedside light, lit a cigarette, and looked around for something to read. On a large chest of drawers were several leather-bound photograph albums, and thinking that these might contain some pictures of our old times together in Berlin, I opened one and started turning the pages. Mostly the album was full of pictures of Elena in various Cairo nightclubs with her late husband, Freddy, and, once or twice, with King Farouk himself. But it was a page of photographs taken in the roof garden at the Auberge des Pyramides (Elena captioned all of her pictures in a neat, penciled hand) that, for the second time that day, left me feeling as if a camel had kicked me in the stomach.

In the photographs, Elena was seated beside a handsome man in a cream linen suit. He had his arm around her and she looked to be on the most intimate terms with him. What was surprising was that this was a man currently occupying a cell at Grey Pillars, less than half a mile away. The man in the photograph was Major Max Reichleitner.

I told myself these pictures could hardly have been taken before the war. Hadn’t Coogan told me that the Auberge des Pyramides had opened just a few months before? Hearing Elena coming out of the bathroom, I quickly put aside the album and retrieved my hardly smoked cigarette from its ashtray.

“Light me one, will you, darling?” she said. She was wearing nothing but a gold watch.

“Here, you can have this one,” I said, moving to her side.

I watched her closely as she took a puff, then put it out. Unpinning her blond hair, which was long enough to come past her waist, she began to brush it absently. Thinking that I was looking at her with desire, she smiled and said, “Do you want to have me again? Is that it?”

She climbed onto the bed and held her arms open expectantly. Taking a deep breath, I knelt over her but I could not help but consider the possibility that she herself was working for the Germans. Given the intimacy in the photograph of her with Reichleitner, was it at all possible that he would have come to Cairo and not tried to see her? Elena simply had to be his contact. After all, she wouldn’t know that Reichleitner had been captured by the Allies.

I put myself inside her, drawing a long, shuddering gasp from her.

Only now did the speed with which she had gone to bed with me again seem at all suspicious. I began to thrust hard, almost as if I were trying to punish her for the duplicity I now strongly suspected. Elena came with equal force, and for a moment I abandoned myself to pleasure. Then she snuggled into my side, and my doubts returned. Was it possible that she was more than just a contact?

But if she was a German spy, when had she been recruited? Casting my mind back to Berlin in the summer of 1938, I tried to recall the Elena Pontiatowska with whom I’d been intimate.

Elena had hated the Bolsheviks, that much was easy to remember. I recalled one particular conversation we had had when news of Stalin’s Ukrainian terror began to reach the West. Elena, whose father had fought in the Russo-Polish war of 1920, had insisted that the whole edifice of Soviet communism was based on mass murder, but Stalin was no worse than Lenin in that respect.