‘Will we have another war?’
‘It can be avoided.’
‘How?’
‘Give Germany back what she lost at Versailles. We have no objections to you ruling the waves, in fact the Führer admires the British Empire, but we are the land power to match your sea power. Let us look to our backyard and we will leave you to your oceans.’
‘I think there are one or two nations that might object.’
‘Nations? Is Poland a nation? No, like the rest it is the construct of a fool of an American president and men who were too supine to tell him to mind his own business.’ That thought obviously angered him. ‘The Americans do not understand Europe, and nothing proved that more than Woodrow Wilson’s stupidity at Versailles.’
His voice dropped. ‘We want peace, Herr Jardine; we need peace to restore Germany.’
‘And once restored?’
‘Then we can destroy the Bolsheviks and I hope and expect that is a crusade in which, instead of being enemies, the British Empire and the Greater German Reich will be allies.’
When Cal thought about what those same Bolsheviks were doing in Spain it was a tempting prospect, but he doubted it would ever come to pass. Göring barked an order and the dining room was cleared.
‘You are a calm man, Herr Jardine, and I admire that. When I invited you here, I was not sure what to do with you.’
‘Are you now?’
Göring stood up. ‘I am going to retire. Sleep well.’
There was no sign of Göring in the morning, but he did hear the sound of distant gunfire, so he assumed he was hunting. There was plenty of other noise, made by workmen building, sawing and hammering, and a pre-breakfast walk showed that Carinhall was a construction site – if Göring needed money, this was where it was going.
On his walk he tried to sum up the man – he had a feeling if he got away from here, still questionable, he might be asked. Göring was a bit of an opportunist, which did not mean he did not believe in the German destiny of which he had spoken the previous night; in that he was passionate and perhaps that was why he was a Nazi, they being, to him, the only people who could restore the country to what it had been in his youth.
Yet for all his more open perspective and lack of humbug, he was as deluded as any of his comrades; he sincerely believed in an absolute impossibility, that Great Britain would let Germany have a free hand on the Continent. It was a chilling thought, and one he had harboured for many years, that there was going to be another war and maybe one that would be even more terrible than the last. Old Sir Basil saw it too, so did Peter Lanchester and his mysterious cabal of backers – why could not the politicians and the people who voted for them?
‘It’s not impossible,’ he said out loud. ‘It can be stopped and it must be stopped.’
‘Herr Jardine.’ It was Brauschitz. ‘When you have breakfasted I will fly you back to Unterlüss.’
Well that answers one question, he thought. He’s not going to shoot me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Jardine had a lot of things he thought wrong with the Germans, and that came from growing up as a young schoolboy in Hamburg, having spent his formative years in a French lycée, which, it had to be said, made him exotic enough to avoid the bullying that might have come his way and very popular with the girls.
As a nation, never mind individuals, they were damned serious and too ready to take offence. Try being five minutes late for a meeting in a coffee bar and it was like the fall of the Roman Empire; what you say is what you mean – the exact opposite of the way the British behaved. A friendship declared was like a blood ceremony without a cut, and God help you if you failed to meet the obligations.
Yet you could not fault their efficiency: when they said his goods would be delivered on a set day, that was the day they would arrive in Hamburg, and he was there before them, in what was for him an old stamping ground. Gessler had assembled the agreed batch of weaponry, he had inspected everything and it was all proper; he had even tested random weapons and they worked.
There was a residual guilt from his last departure from the city, so hurriedly made, in which he had to go without saying goodbye to someone important: the lady who had not only occasionally shared a bed with him for several months, but also probably saved his life with a phone call. The walk he took around St Pauli, with a hat low on his eyes, took him past many of the places he had frequented and it was good to know the people who had been there before were still around.
They were doing what they had always done, selling the dream of a good time as long as you could pay, very likely purveying stuff you could buy for one mark for ten – twenty if you were a real idiot; the club hostesses were still pretending to drink what was supposed to be champagne and the heavies were still there to ensure the clients pay the excessive bills when they complained.
The sad bit missing was the bar of Fat Olaf, where Peter Lanchester had found him on that fateful day. That was closed and shuttered, and where was he? Had he paid a price for Cal Jardine getting away before the Brownshirt SA thugs arrived to beat his brains out? He hoped not, and the chances were good; Fat Olaf was a survivor, maybe he had opened up somewhere else.
He had walked the Reeperbahn, slipping into the Herbertstraße as darkness fell to make sure Gretl the great dominatrix was still plying her trade and her whips, glad to see her in a new costume of sparkling gold, glaring out with practised ferocity to the street, waiting for those players and payers who wanted to go home and tell a great story about their Hamburg adventure; it had never occurred to Cal that anyone really enjoyed the first part of Gretl’s thing, it was the way she took the pain away that made her an institution.
He was sad that he dare not say hello, because he did not have a clue what had happened when he left; Lette might know and, if she still worked in the local party HQ, would be finished by now. She had an apartment in Trommelstraße, not a place with a telephone and not a good address, but one with neighbours who looked after her kids when she was working.
It was not easy to call without everyone knowing – it certainly had not been in the past, and many was the time he had been ribbed when he came of a night, doubly so if he was spotted by the old lady scrubbing the stone steps as he left in the morning, and in a sense he was breaking an agreed rule: she had always known if he went it would be sudden, he had an unspoken order that the break should be final.
It’s damned difficult to be on the wrong side of a door when you worry about what might happen when you knock. Lette was a beautiful widow, good company, and there might be a new man in her life, which made Cal wish he could pretend to be some kind of door-to-door salesperson. That there was someone home, he knew – the radio was playing dance music.
He raised his hand to knock, then hesitated, thinking to walk away. This was all wrong, it went against the grain of everything he advised others to do, everything he thought right about how to behave – you cut the cord when it was life and death. Just then a neighbour came out to use the communal toilet and he had to hit the door to avoid suspicion.
It was heart-stopping the way the music diminished, the sound being turned down, and his heart was in his mouth as he waited, listening to the farting coming from the toilet. When the door was opened it was by Lette’s daughter, Inge, no longer the gauche twelve-year-old he remembered, but a promising fourteen and looking like the beginnings of a real woman.
‘Uncle Cal,’ she cried, her eyes wide open with glad surprise; then she flung herself at him and her shout brought the two boys running. Christian and Günter, both younger than their sister. They were around his legs within seconds, shouting his name. Having ruffled their hair and said their names he looked up and there was Lette, in an apron and looking tired, in what passed for a hall; was she drying her hands, or was that hand-wringing fear?