Nest of the Monarch Read online

  Out in the chill night air of the plaza, the old man blinked in the light from the gas lamps. Becht led von Lerchenfeld down the cobbled street toward the neighborhood where he lived.

  “This meeting,” von Lerchenfeld said. “Who was it with? Was it the parish priest, but no—we met yesterday. I am forgetful, you will say.”

  “Not the priest, no.”

  Another block and the old man said, “I am not used to walking so far. Is it much farther? This meeting?”

  “No, it is close now.”

  As they walked through the ever-darker streets, Becht’s anger fell away. Now he simply walked with a frail old man who believed that the church should hold sway over the state. A mistake. He must be made an example of.

  But though Becht had killed many men, he had begun to feel a reluctance to kill this one. He was himself a Catholic. Years past, he had been, before he became a believer in Adolf Hitler and the salvation that Nazism brought to Germany. Could not one be a Christian and a Nazi? Surely. But here in this wooded yard leading to von Lerchenfeld’s house, he would end a fellow Catholic’s life.

  The old man looked up in perplexity. “But this is my home.” They stopped short of the rectangle of light thrown from the front window on the yard and pavement.

  “This is the meeting,” Becht said. “The one between you and me.” And, because he had been ordered to do so, he led von Lerchenfeld into the completely dark lawn and made an example of him: a blow to render him unconscious, the puncture wound at his neck, and blood welling. The smell, coppery and thick. Intoxicating. He knelt and feasted.

  When they found von Lerchenfeld, they would know the work of the Nachkommenschaft.

  Becht removed the plain black coat he wore to protect his uniform and left it at the scene. Withdrawing a handkerchief from his pocket, he carefully wiped his face and hands. Yes, finding von Lerchenfeld thus, people would know terror, physical and spiritual. It was in service of the Führer’s aims; and yet the old man’s words churned through him. The fellowship of Christians. The sacred church.

  Ah, what was he becoming? In the quiet of the garden, his appetite slaked, he felt a strange and unwelcome pang of guilt. He had slain an old man, a Christian. And then this unholy drinking of blood that, in his new role, he had craved. He had trusted that horror was needed in the polluted world to make it clean again. Over the months, the years, he had receded further and further from the man he had been. Did not everyone change on the path of life? But it was not just that he was unrecognizable to his old self. No, it was worse than that. He was damned. For truly there was no going back. No forgiveness, not even in Christ.

  Having acknowledged this brutal truth, Becht took a deep breath of the icy November air. Hovering about him, from stray drops jeweling his trousers, his boots—the cloying, sweet smell of von Lerchenfeld’s vintage blood.

  WERTHEIM’S DEPARTMENT STORE, LEIPZIGER PLATZ, BERLIN

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19. Kim combed her chin-length dark hair behind her ears, then changed her mind and combed it straight. As she stood in front of the mirrors in Wertheim’s second-floor lavatory, the person in the fourth stall seemed to take forever.

  Kim had left Rachel Flynn in the ladies’ shoe department downstairs and couldn’t reasonably spend too long in the powder room.

  At last the toilet flushed, and a woman in a stylish suit emerged, straightening her fitted jacket.

  Kim entered the stall and sat on the toilet seat, removing from her handbag the pouch that she had retrieved from her bedroom bookcase.

  The paper inside described her meeting with Hannah Linz and suggested that the woman might be of value as an information source. She requested approval to pursue the contact, to pin down specifics about her claim of an operation that would be of interest to the British government. If the information had value, SIS might want to consider an extraction.

  Kim acknowledged that the information she’d gleaned so far had not been the product of a spill. The woman had sought her out specifically because of her supposed influence with Alex Reed.

  Await instructions.

  Stepping out of her shoes, she balanced on the toilet seat and reached up to partially lift the cover of the water tank. Slipping the waterproof packet inside, she held on to a short chain that was attached to it. She affixed a small hook to the side of the tank where it could not be seen from the front.

  Kim maneuvered herself down from her perch and slipped back into her shoes. Her decision to file the report felt right. After only two weeks in Berlin, she had already acquired a possible productive source worthy of debriefing—though perhaps by a different agent than herself. The service might even choose to extract Linz. Since the woman was already underground, it was not likely to come to the authorities’ attention or create an incident.

  She flushed the toilet to make sure the chain from the pouch did not clink against the porcelain. Washing up, she used the mirror to memorize the faces of the other women in the lavatory and took the escalator back to Ladies Shoes.

  Rachel waved from across the expanse of the showroom, beneath the glass-roofed atrium and elaborate chandeliers.

  “I thought you’d gotten lost,” Rachel said, holding her Wertheim’s shopping bag.

  “So many escalators!” Kim said. “I shouldn’t wonder if I had.”

  But of course, if she could lose her way in a department store, even the world’s largest, she would deserve to be drummed out of the service.

  10

  PRENZLAUER BERG, BERLIN

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21. Water dripped from somewhere, pinging onto old floors, releasing the earthy smell of mold and ancient bricks turning to powder. From the shadowed corner of the room Hannah watched as Franz interrogated their guest, tied to a chair.

  Next to Hannah, Micha muttered, “We’ll get nothing more. End it.”

  Their captive was Gaèton Paquet, a French citizen, a railway worker. He deserved to die, but he had not yet caused damage. In the Volkspark Friedrichshain, her fellow partisans had intercepted him before his Berlin handler could contact him.

  The building was abandoned, one of a series of bolt-holes the Oberman Group used in their rotation from place to place. This one was unheated, and Hannah pulled her father’s leather jacket more snugly around herself, fingering the ivory buttons.

  In France, Gaèton’s recruiter had only given him a meeting place and a passcode, so he had not recognized the personnel substitution when it happened. Armed with forewarning from Tannhäuser, their excellent mole, Micha and Leib were waiting in the park for Gaèton. They had met him with the passcode and the Frenchman had willingly left with them. He believed he was on his way to transform his life from railway worker without prospects to a valued Nazi asset. But instead of being welcomed into the new brotherhood, he had found his worst nightmare: Jews with weapons.

  Franz turned to look at Hannah, signaling that he was done. With his better command of French, he had conducted the interrogation, but he was letting her decide if there were more depths to plumb. Although Franz was the group’s leader, he often deferred to her, and after some initial hesitation her compatriots did also. After Miriam had been captured last summer, Hannah was now the only woman in their small group of partisans.

  She stepped forward. This one’s Talent—very strong, rated at 7.2—was site view. By virtue of that Talent, he was probably terrified since he might well have experienced visions of the basement interrogations that had gone before.

  She looked at the stocky Frenchman with his puffy face distorted by Franz’s beating. If he thought he was suffering now, he had not seen much of the world. Gaèton Paquet was a virulent anti-Semite, and the world would be better off without him, but she believed that he knew nothing more about the Nazi agents in the Alsace where he had been recruited.

  “Take him to the French embassy,” she said. They would handcuff him to the wrought-iron fence with his false passport stuck in his pocket, along with an accusation that he had offered his Talent to th
e Nazi government. It would be another demonstration of the Oberman Group’s powers, one that would not be lost on the French or the Germans.

  “And if he comes back?” Franz looked at the prisoner with weary contempt.

  “If he returns, then we kill him.” Hope began to seep into Gaèton’s face.

  Hannah turned to the man. “You will not use your gift for Nazi ends.” She spoke in English, which the man could understand, if barely. “You comprehend?”

  He nodded with great conviction.

  “You swear?”

  Pleading with his eyes, he said, “Oui, oui, I do. I swear.”

  She and Franz walked out together, leaving Micha to arrange the car and the dead-of-night delivery to the embassy.

  The heavy door was sprung on its hinges. Franz scraped it shut, and they made their way upstairs. Here the water from the roof fell in a stream down the wall, the afternoon sun having melted the early snowfall that had earlier frosted the neighborhood. Even amid the pockmarked bricks, the dirt and mold, and wearing a tattered coat, Franz managed to look patrician. The way he carried himself, his hair—always clean and combed. He had given up much to join the resistance. Not that he’d had a choice.

  He lit one of the Frenchman’s Gauloises, blowing an irritated stream of smoke. He would rather have killed him. “Nothing from the wife of the British diplomat?”

  “No. I think Alexander Reed was not receptive. If she even spoke to him.” There was no reason why the wife of a British trade secretary would try to get a stranger an appointment with her husband. But the woman had had a look in her eyes, one that had encouraged Hannah; it felt like she had actually listened, since she hadn’t just brushed her off. But how foolish to think that a socialite like her would upset protocols! Mostly people did what was expected of them.

  “There are other embassies,” Franz said. “Try the American next.”

  All their conversations were about this subject. Her escape from Germany. He wanted her gone. She should be of use to the Western powers, but Hannah was not convinced that Britain or France would mobilize if Hitler made moves against his neighbors. So if she left, she would likely be out of the fight. She and Franz had argued many times about this, and eventually she capitulated. But when nothing came of the British embassy appeal, she was secretly relieved.

  Franz went on, like the dripping of the water onto the bricks in the next room. “William Dodd may listen. The American ambassador. Or his daughter.”

  Hannah removed her knit cap and massaged her sweating scalp.

  “And get rid of the red hair,” he said. “It’s like a sign: I am a Jewish criminal.”

  “They need to know it is the Rotes Mädchen. The Red Girl. I want them to know.”

  “You are proud, Hannah. That may kill you.”

  She remembered how she and her father had allowed the pallid, scarred SS lieutenant to intimidate them in their own parlor. Becht, his name was. But in her mind, she called him the vulture. She remembered how she had fallen to her knees on the carpet at the cinema, weeping and helpless.

  So now she was proud? Not the word she would have used. Disobedient was one she liked. Well. Franz always looked for more from her. He wanted evidence that under the soldier lay a person. How tiring it was. There was nothing underneath.

  He snorted, annoyed by her silence. “They know your name. The Gestapo has your description. You are on borrowed time, and all because of your love of bombs.”

  After the bomb destroyed the Nazi staff car last summer, she had been seen fleeing. Her description was later put together with the former cinema operator, and it was not hard to imagine who had made the connection. The explosion had badly injured an SS colonel. How dearly she wished it had been the vulture.

  “Do you know why I love bombs? Do you?” He didn’t bother to answer. “Because all we do otherwise is take out recruits here and there, the ones our mole knows of. But it does not stop the Russian Witch.”

  “We do what we can.”

  “And it is not enough!”

  “You are too ambitious, Hannah.”

  “I will die young, so I am in a hurry.”

  “We die when our time comes.”

  She shrugged. Life was full of uncertainties, but she could not imagine herself living long.

  “You are ungrateful,” Franz said. “If it were not for Tannhäuser—”

  “Oh yes, your great friend from the old days. Who stood silently by when the Nazis denied you permission to play Chopin in public. Your loyal friend.”

  He ignored the old provocation, going back doggedly to his embassy plans. “So you will go to the Americans?”

  She sighed. “I need better shoes.”

  “Shoes?”

  “A woman is judged by her shoes. If I am not going to look like a revolutionary at the embassy, I need good shoes. Expensive ones.”

  Franz nodded. He would probably steal them himself.

  She gave him a brief smile. Franz needed some emotion. Then, pulling her knit hat firmly over her head, she slipped out of the building onto the wet streets, steaming in the wan sun.

  11

  A TAXI, BERLIN

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24. Even midweek and at 10:00 PM, Berlin’s endless party carried on. In the taxi, on her way to drinks with her new friend Rachel, Kim watched people still arriving for dinner. They walked arm in arm, smartly dressed. She let the crowds on the Kurfürstendamm distract her for a few moments.

  Then the message from the Office came back to mind. They had rebuffed her. Duncan had sent on to London her request to exploit the Hannah Linz lead. In a swift turnaround came the answer. No.

  Duncan had relayed the message to her in the Tiergarten, including the galling phrase, Don’t let your heart lead you. His Majesty’s Government, he had explained, was not eager to cause friction in Berlin or meddle with police actions.

  In Stahnsdorfer Street, in the Steglitz-Zehlendorf area, Kim entered a cozy, cigarette-charged restaurant, Die Toskana, with mirrors surrounding banquets and every table filled. She made out Rachel’s crowded table in the corner, the scene of a nightly gathering of correspondents that went on into the early hours of the morning. Rachel had said Kim would be welcome anytime, and tonight she felt the need for a distraction.

  The introductions included a large, florid man in an ill-fitting suit, Chuck MacIntyre of the United Press. Fiftyish and dapper Peter Grann of the Berlin bureau of the London Times, and the bearded and barrel-chested Ernst Rauschning, foreign press chief of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. Peter Grann had a date, Annie. Next to Rauschning, a man was introduced as Theodor, his pomaded hair parted on one side.

  Rachel introduced Kim as a member of the tribe, citing her freelance magazine work.

  “Breezy stuff,” Kim said. “Recipes and fashion.”

  “Well, women’s fashion beats dispatches on Germany’s Four-Year Plan,” Chuck MacIntyre said, raising his whisky in a weary salute.

  Rachel smirked. “Don’t say that too loudly.” She slid a meaningful glance at a table across the room.

  As Kim got settled, she followed Rachel’s glance to a table with several men in uniform. She was startled to see that one of them was Hermann Göring, and Rikard Nagel as well, who was accompanied by his wife. Sonja caught Kim’s eye and nodded.

  Ernst Rauschning glowered at the table of Nazis and muttered, “Standards in this place are slipping.” He waved his empty glass at a waiter.

  MacIntyre settled his large frame against the back of the banquet. “You’re American, then? Sounds like.”

  Kim trotted out her cover story of having been raised in America and meeting her husband in Lisbon when she’d been on holiday. A new round of drinks arrived, whiskies on ice for Kim and MacIntyre, and without ice for the others.

  “Göring is quite attentive to Sonja Nagel,” Kim observed to Rachel. The air minister had the woman deep in conversation, leaning in close.

  “Yes, he likes those wraithlike Scandinavian women.” Rachel blew smoke out t
he side of her mouth like a man. “And she is his mistress.”

  That was news. “Does Rikard know, do you think?” On Kim’s other side, she noted that Rauschning had placed his hand on Theodor’s knee. Lovers, then.

  Rachel watched Göring’s table. “He must know, but what can he do?”

  Kim could think of several things he might do, but perhaps there were career advantages where Göring was concerned.

  Talk turned to Peter Grann’s coming posting to Istanbul, which the table considered a promotion. Annie complained of his leaving. Kim tried and failed to listen.

  Don’t let your heart lead you. As though she had simply made an emotional judgment about Linz. Ambassador Phipps, Duncan had said, did not like the arrangement of her supposed marriage to one of his consular staff and had taken issue with the Foreign Office’s decision to embroil—as he had put it—the embassy in espionage, at least with something so brazen as the sham marriage.

  Rauschning left for the men’s room, leaving her next to Theodor, who had said barely a word so far. The man caught a waiter’s attention, pointing at himself and Kim. His eyes glittered, reflecting the restaurant lamps, the mirrors, too much whisky. “One has to keep ordering,” he said, his words slurring. “You must have noticed—it’s how you survive.”

  “Is Berlin so bad?”

  “Bad?” He stared into his empty glass. “It’s splendid. Frightfully splendid, depending on who you are.” He switched to German, speaking more to himself than to her. “We are all celebrating. Eating, making love, reporting enemies, having champagne, staying up so we do not have to lie down and close our eyes. A splendid time. Even the fiends think so.”

  Teufel. That word again. “The Nazis?”

  He chuckled. “If you need to ask, you aren’t drunk enough.”

  She did not care for his tone, not in her present mood. At the table in the corner, Göring stood up and helped Sonja into her wrap. They left together, with Rikard sitting there, accepting it, or acting like he did.