Winter of the World

The opponents of Nazism were so weak. ‘Write the letter this evening, and mail it in the morning.’

‘Yes. Should I send you a copy?’

‘It will come to me anyway, you idiot. Do you think the minister himself reads your insane scribbling?’

‘No, no, of course not, I see that.’

Macke went to door. ‘And stay away from people like Walter von Ulrich.’

‘I will, I promise.’

Macke went out, beckoning Wagner to follow. Lieselotte was sitting on the floor screaming hysterically. Macke opened the parlour door and summoned Richter and Schneider.

They left the house.

‘Sometimes violence is quite unnecessary,’ Macke said reflectively as they got into the car.

Wagner took the wheel and Macke gave him the address of the von Ulrich house.

‘And then again, sometimes it’s the simplest way,’ he added.

Von Ulrich lived in the neighbourhood of the church. His house was a spacious old building that he evidently could not afford to maintain. The paint was peeling, the railings were rusty, and a broken window had been patched with cardboard. This was not unusual: wartime austerity meant that many houses were not kept up.

The door was opened by a maid. Macke presumed this was the woman whose handicapped child had started the whole problem – but he did not bother to enquire. There was no point in arresting girls.

Walter von Ulrich stepped into the hall from a side room.

Macke remembered him. He was the cousin of the Robert von Ulrich whose restaurant Macke and his brother had bought eight years ago. In those days he had been proud and arrogant. Now he wore a shabby suit, but his manner was still bold. ‘What do you want?’ he said, attempting to sound as if he still had the power to demand explanations.

Macke did not intend to waste much time here. ‘Cuff him,’ he said.

Wagner stepped forward with the handcuffs.

A tall, handsome woman appeared and stood in front of von Ulrich. ‘Tell me who you are and what you want,’ she demanded. She was obviously the wife. She had the hint of a foreign accent. No surprise there.

Wagner slapped her face, hard, and she staggered back.

‘Turn around and put your wrists together,’ Wagner said to von Ulrich. ‘Otherwise I’ll knock her teeth down her throat.’

Von Ulrich obeyed.

A pretty young woman dressed in a nurse’s uniform came rushing down the stairs. ‘Father!’ she said. ‘What’s happening?’

Macke wondered how many more people there might be in the house. He felt a twinge of anxiety. An ordinary family could not overcome trained police officers, but a crowd of them might create enough of a fracas for von Ulrich to slip away.

However, the man himself did not want a fight. ‘Don’t confront them!’ he said to his daughter in a voice of urgency. ‘Stay back!’

The nurse looked terrified and did as she was told.

Macke said: ‘Put him in the car.’

Wagner walked von Ulrich out of the door.

The wife began to sob.

The nurse said: ‘Where are you taking him?’

Macke went to the door. He looked at the three women: the maid, the wife and the daughter. ‘All this trouble,’ he said, ‘for the sake of an eight-year-old moron. I will never understand you people.’

He went out and got into the car.

They drove the short distance to Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Wagner parked at the back of the Gestapo headquarters building alongside a dozen identical black cars. They all got out.

They took von Ulrich in through a back door and down the stairs to the basement, and put him in a white-tiled room.

Macke opened a cupboard and took out three long, heavy clubs like American baseball bats. He gave one to each of his assistants.

‘Beat the shit out of him,’ he said; and he left them to it.

(vi)

Captain Volodya Peshkov, head of the Berlin section of Red Army Intelligence, met Werner Franck at the Invalids’ Cemetery beside the Berlin-Spandau Ship Canal.

It was a good choice. Looking around the graveyard carefully, Volodya was able to confirm that no one followed him or Werner in. The only other person present was an old woman in a black headscarf, and she was on her way out.

Their rendezvous was the tomb of General von Scharnhorst, a large pedestal bearing a slumbering lion made of melted-down enemy cannons. It was a sunny day in spring, and the two young spies took off their jackets as they walked among the graves of German heroes.

After the Hitler–Stalin pact almost two years ago, Soviet espionage had continued in Germany, and so had surveillance of Soviet Embassy staff. Everyone saw the treaty as temporary, though no one knew how temporary. So counter-intelligence agents were still tailing Volodya everywhere.

They ought to be able to tell when he was going out on a genuine secret intelligence mission, he thought, for that was when he shook them off. If he went out to buy a frankfurter for lunch he let them shadow him. He wondered whether they were smart enough to figure that out.

‘Have you seen Lili Markgraf lately?’ said Werner.