Their chains were rusted, the brake pads crumbling and the leather seats sagged like the backs of broken mules. But the tyres still held air and, as the father pointed out, this way was better than walking.
When the dog had been buried, they sat down to a meal of smoked pheasant served on slices of gritty bread which had sawdust mixed into the flour. Meagre as it was, this seemed to be the only food they had left.
By two o’clock that afternoon, the father announced that it was safe for them to travel.
They walked out to the narrow road that ran beside the farm.
‘Stick to the back roads,’ advised the father. ‘Just keep heading west and you’ll be there in less than a day.’
‘Good luck to you both,’ said Pekkala, and he shook hands with the man and his son.
‘Udachi,’ replied the father, wishing them good luck in Russian.
Kirov gasped to hear the sound of his own language.
But Pekkala only smiled.
The man had known all along where they came from.
Wobbling unsteadily upon the bicycles, Kirov and Pekkala set off towards Berlin.
At that precise moment, Inspector Hunyadi was sitting alone in a conference room in the Reichschancellery building, waiting to begin the first of several interviews of members of the German High Command about the leak of information from the bunker.
In choosing a location for these interviews, Hunyadi had been given little choice, since this was one of the few places left in the Chancellery with its roof remaining intact.
This had, until not too long ago, been the location of Hitler’s meetings with his High Command; one at midday and the other at midnight. It was a grand, high-ceilinged room, with white pillars in each corner and paintings of different German landscapes – the Drachenfels Castle overlooking the Rhine, a street scene in Munich, a farmer ploughing his field at sunrise on the flat, almost featureless plains along the Baltic coast. In between these paintings, windows taller than a man looked out on to the Chancellery garden. In the centre of the room stood a long, oak table, on which the maps of battlefields would be unfurled and gestured at by field marshals waving ceremonial batons. Along the back wall, comfortable chairs with padded red leather seats had welcomed those whose presence was not immediately required.
At least, that’s how it used to look.
One night in late October of 1944, a 250-pound bomb dropped by an American B-17 landed in the Chancellery garden, barely fifty feet from the outside entrance to the briefing room. The explosion blew out the windows, spraying the back walls with glass, shrapnel and mud. The upholstered chairs were hurled into the air, along with the briefing-room table, in spite of the fact that it normally took ten men to lift it. In a matter of seconds, every piece of furniture in the room was wrenched into pieces, some of which became embedded in the ceiling.
At first, Hitler had insisted that the briefings continue in their usual location. The windows’ holes were sealed up with plywood. The wreckage of the table was removed and those in attendance did their best not to stare at the gashes in the walls, from which shards of window glass still protruded like the teeth of sharks.
Maps were spread out upon the floor and men crouched down to trace their fingers along routes of advance and retreat.
Forty-eight hours after the explosion, just as the midnight meeting was about to commence, a twisted dagger of metal from the bomb’s tail fin fell from its resting place in the ceiling and stuck into the floor, right in the middle of a map of the Schnee Eifel mountains.
That was too much, even for Hitler, and before he left the city for another of his fortresses, he ordered a new location to be found. By the time he returned, in January of the following year, the only place left was the bunker.
Since the power was out and the windows were blocked up with plywood, Hunyadi had resorted to a paraffin lamp to light the room. The yellow flame, tipped with greasy black smoke, writhed behind the dirty glass shroud. Most of the furniture had been removed. But the conference table was still here, along with a couple of chairs. It was enough to serve Hunyadi’s purposes, but little more. In addition, the paintings had all been removed. Now Hunyadi surveyed the dreary expanses of yellowy-brown paint on the empty walls, studded with the hooks from which the portraits had once been suspended.
Hunyadi had considered summoning everyone on his list to the police station, where he could have questioned them in one of the holding cells, but he wanted to play down the appearance of a formal interrogation. In addition, German military law usually required that any interrogation of a military official be carried out by someone of equal rank. Not only did Hunyadi lack the pay scale of the officers who would soon be marching through that door, but he wasn’t even a soldier.
No matter what location he chose, the reception was likely to be chilly, especially since most, if not all of them, would already know why they were being summoned. Even to be questioned meant that their loyalty had fallen under suspicion.
As the minutes passed, Hunyadi felt the quiet of the room settling like dust upon his shoulders. Even though his rational mind assured him that he was not back in a cell, he still felt trapped in this windowless space and it was all he could do not to bolt into the street. He thought about all the people he had sent to prison over the years. Rarely had he ever felt pity for the people he’d helped to convict, but now he grasped the full measure of their suffering. It was strange that this had come to him only after his release from Flossenburg. In the weeks he had spent in that cell so much of his mind had shut down that every emotion, no matter how extreme, had been dulled to the point where he felt almost nothing at all. Maybe that was the true punishment of prison – not the loss of time but rather the inability to feel its passing.
A few minutes later, the door burst open and there stood Field Marshal Keitel, with cheeks almost as red as the crimson facing on his greatcoat. Without waited to be welcomed, he stamped into the room, removed his hat and tossed it on to the table. Then, resting his gloved knuckles on the polished surface, he leaned across until the two men’s faces almost touched. ‘You miserable little man!’ he spat. ‘Did you ever stop to think that I have a war to run?’
Keitel, in his early sixties, had greying hair, a high forehead and fleshy ears. When he closed his mouth, his teeth clacked together like a mousetrap, causing the flesh around his jowly chin to quiver momentarily.
‘I just have a few questions,’ said Hunyadi, removing a notebook from his chest pocket, along with the stub of a pencil. ‘Please sit,’ he told the field marshal, gesturing at a chair on the other side of the table.
‘I won’t be here long enough!’ roared Keitel. ‘Just hurry up and ask me whatever it is you need to ask, so you can report back to the Fuhrer that I am not the source of any information leak.’
‘So you are aware of the leak?’
‘Of course! For months, there have been rumours.’
‘What kind of rumours?’
Keitel breathed in sharply through his nose. ‘Things finding their way on to the Allied radio network.’
‘What things?’
Keitel shrugged angrily. ‘Useless gossip, mostly. The sordid details of people’s lives.’
‘The Fuhrer seems to think it is more serious than that.’
Slowly, Keitel leaned away from Hunyadi. He pulled himself up to his full height, fingers twitching inside grey-green leather gloves. ‘He has no proof of that, at least none that I have seen or heard about. If you ask me, he’s chasing a ghost, and we have other, more important things to occupy our minds. It is simply a distraction, which is exactly what the Allies had in mind.’