Hitler's peace

As soon as he was inside the room he picked up the telephone and ordered some champagne and a cold lunch. Despite the war, the kitchens at the Adlon still managed to turn out food that was as good as anywhere in Europe. He moved the telephone away from the bed and buried it under a heap of cushions. Schellenberg knew that the Forschungsamt, the intelligence agency established by Goring and charged with signal surveillance and wiretapping, had planted listening devices in all of the Adlon’s four hundred bedroom phones.

Schellenberg took off his jacket and settled down in an armchair with the Illustrierte Beobachter and read a highly romanticized account of life on the Russian front that seemed to suggest not only that German soldiers were holding back the enemy masses, but also that in the end German heroism would prevail.

There was a knock at the door. It was a waiter with a trolley. He started to open the champagne but Schellenberg, tipping him generously, told him to go. It was one of the bottles of Dom Perignon 1937 he had brought from Paris-a whole case he had left with the Adlon’s sommelier-and he had no intention of letting anyone but himself open what was perhaps one of the last good bottles of champagne in Berlin.

Ten minutes later the door opened a second time and a tall, blue-eyed, corn-haired woman wearing a neatly tailored brown tweed suit and a checked flannel blouse entered the suite. Lina Heydrich kissed him, a little sadly, which was always the way she kissed Schellenberg when she saw him again, before sitting down in an armchair and lighting a cigarette. He opened the champagne expertly and poured a glass, then brought it to her, sitting down on the arm of her chair and stroking her hair gently.

“How have you been?” he asked.

“Good, thank you. And you? How was Paris?”

“I brought you a present.”

“Walter,” she said, smiling, although no less sadly than before. “You shouldn’t have.”

He handed her a gift-wrapped package and watched as she unwrapped it.

“Perfume,” she said. “How clever of you to know it’s in short supply here.”

Schellenberg smiled. “I’m an intelligence officer.”

“Mais Oui, by Bourjois.” She removed the seal and the scallop-shaped stopper and dabbed some on her wrists. “It’s nice. I like it.” Her smile grew a little warmer. “You’re very good at presents, aren’t you, Walter? Very thoughtful. Reinhard was never good at presents. Not even on birthdays or anniversaries.”

“He was a busy man.”

“No, that wasn’t it. He was a womanizer, that’s what he was, Walter. Him and that awful friend of his.”

“Eichmann.”

She nodded. “Oh, I heard all the stories. What they were up to in the nightclubs. Especially the ones in Paris.”

“Paris is very different now,” said Schellenberg. “But I can’t say I ever heard anything.”

“For an intelligence chief you’re a terrible liar. I hope you’re better at lying to Hitler than you are to me. You must have heard the story of the Moulin Rouge firing squad?”

Everyone in the SD had heard the story of Heydrich and Eichmann lining up ten naked girls in the famous Paris nightclub, then bending them over so that they could fire champagne corks at their bare behinds. He shrugged. “Those stories have a habit of being exaggerated. Especially after someone has died.”

Lina gave Schellenberg a penetrating sideways look. “Sometimes I wonder what you get up to when you go to Paris.”

“Nothing so vulgar, I can assure you.”

She took his hand and kissed it affectionately.

Lina von Osten was thirty-one years old. She had married Heydrich in 1931 when she was just eighteen and already an enthusiastic National Socialist. It was rumored that it was she who had persuaded her new husband to join the SS. Schellenberg himself thought the rumor was probably true, for Lina was a strong woman as well as a handsome one. Not a great beauty but well made, and wholesome looking, like one of those paragons of Aryan womanhood from the Nazi Women’s League you’d see exercising in a propaganda film.

She took off her jacket to reveal a peasant-style bodice that seemed to enhance the size of her breasts; then she unpinned her golden hair so that it fell about her shoulders. Standing up, she started to undress and they began their usual game: for each question he answered truthfully about what Amt VI was doing, she would remove an article of clothing. By the time he had told her all about Agent Cicero and the documents in Sir Hughe’s safe and his plan to assassinate the Big Three at Teheran, she was naked and seated on his lap.

“What does Himmler have to say about this?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t told him yet. I’m still putting the plan together.”

“This could save us from disaster, Walter.”

“It’s a possibility.”

“A strong possibility.” Lina kissed him happily. “How clever you are, Walter.”

“We’ll see.”