“And what’s more, we can make all this business with Helmut Knochen go away.” The Insomniac clicked his fingers. “Like that. We’ll put you up at a little boardinghouse in Göttingen. You’ll like Göttingen. It’s a nice town. From there it’s a short car ride down to Friedland.” He shrugged. “If things work out, we could perhaps make the arrangement more permanent.”
I nodded. “Well, it’s been a long time since I saw de Boudel. And naturally, I would like to get out of La Santé. Göttingen’s nice, as you say. And I do need a job. It all sounds very generous, yes. But there is something else I’d like. There’s a woman in Berlin. Perhaps the only person in the whole of Germany who means anything to me. I’d like to go and see her. Make sure she’s all right. Give her some money, perhaps.”
The Insomniac picked up a pencil and prepared to write. “Name and address?”
“Her name is Elisabeth Dehler. When I was last in Berlin, about five years ago, her address was twenty-eight Motzstrasse, off the Ku-damm.”
“You never mentioned her before.”
I shrugged.
“What does she do?”
“She was a dressmaker. Still is, for all I know.”
“And you and she were—what?”
“We were involved for a while.”
“Lovers?”
“Yes, lovers, I suppose.”
“We’ll check out the address for you. See if she’s still at that address. Save you the trouble if she’s not.”
“Thanks.”
He shrugged. “But if she is, we have no objections. It will be difficult. It’s always difficult going in and out of Berlin. Still, we’ll manage.”
“Good. Then we have a deal. If I knew the words, I’d sing ‘The Marseillaise.’”
“A signature on a piece of paper will do for now. We’re not much for singing here at the Swimming Pool.”
“There’s one question I have. Everyone calls this place the Swimming Pool. Why?”
The two Frenchmen smiled. One of them stood up and opened a window. “Can’t you hear it?” he said after a moment. “Can’t you smell it?”
I got up and went to his side and listened carefully. In the distance I could hear what sounded like a school playground.
“You see that turreted building over the wall?” he explained. “That is the largest swimming pool in all of Paris. It was built for the 1924 Olympics. On a day like today, half the children in the city are there. We go there ourselves sometimes when it’s quieter.”
“Sure,” I said. “We had the same thing in the Gestapo. The Landwehr Canal. We never went swimming there ourselves, of course. But we took lots of others there. Communists, mostly. That is, provided they couldn’t swim.”
28
From La Santé I was transferred to the Pension Verdin at 102 avenue Victor Hugo in the suburbs of Sainte-Mandé, which was about a five-minute drive south from the Swimming Pool. It was a quiet, comfortable place with polished parquet floors, tall windows, and a lovely garden, where I sat in the sun awaiting my return to Germany. The pension was a sort of safe house and hotel for members of the SDECE and its agents, and there were several faces I half recognized from my time in the Swimming Pool, but no one bothered me. I was even allowed out—although I was followed at a distance—and spent a day walking northeast along the Seine as far as the Île de la Cité and Notre Dame Cathedral. It was the first time I’d seen Paris without the Wehrmacht everywhere, or without hundreds of signs in German. Bicycles had given way to a great many cars, which did little to make me feel any safer than I’d felt as an enemy soldier in 1940. But a lot of this was just nerves—cement fever after spending the last six months in one prison or another: I couldn’t have felt more like a big-house brother if I’d been carrying a ball and chain. Or looked like one. That was why they took me to Galeries Lafayette on boulevard Haussmann to get some new clothes. It would be an exaggeration to say that my new clothes made me feel normal again: Too much water had run off the mountain for that to happen. However, I did feel partly restored. Like an old door with a new lick of paint.
The French had not exaggerated the difficulty of traveling to Berlin. The inner German border between West and East Germany—the Green Border—had been closed since May 1952, with transport links between the two halves of the country mostly severed. The only place where East Germans were able to cross freely into the West was in Berlin itself; and getting in or out of the East was restricted to a few points along a heavily guarded and fortified fence, of which the largest and most frequently used was the Helmstedt–Marienborn crossing at the edge of the Lappwald. First, however, we had to go to Hannover, in the British zone of occupation.
We left the Gare du Nord on the overnight train—me and my two French handlers from the SDECE. They had names now—names and passports—although it seemed unlikely that their names were real, especially as I now had a passport myself—French—in the name of Sébastien Kléber, a traveling salesman from Alsace. The Frenchman with the eyebrows went by the name of Philippe Méntelin; the Insomniac was calling himself Émile Vigée.
We had a sleeping compartment to ourselves, but I was too excited to sleep, and when, nine and a half hours later, the train pulled into Hannover Railway Station, I uttered a quiet little prayer of thanks that I was back in Prussia. The equestrian statue of King Ernst August was still in front of the station, and City Hall with its red roofs and green cupolas looked much the same as I remembered, but elsewhere the city was very different. Adolf Hitler Strasse was now Bahnhofstrasse; Horst Wessel Platz was now Königswerther Platz; and the Opera House was no longer occupying Adolf Hitler Platz but Opern Platz. The Aegidienkirche on the corner of Breite Strasse was a bombed-out ruin, overgrown with ivy and left that way as a memorial to those who had died during the war. Elsewhere, the city was hardly recognizable. One thing hadn’t changed, however: It’s said that the purest German is spoken in Hannover; and that’s certainly what it sounded like to me.
The safe house was in the east of Hannover, in a large wooded area called the Eilenriede on Hindenburg Strasse, close to the zoo. The house was a largish villa in a smallish garden. It had a red mansard roof and an octagonal corner tower with a silver-steel cupola. This tower contained my room, and although my door wasn’t locked, it was hard to rid myself of the impression that I was still a prisoner. Especially when I mentioned to Émile Vigée that I’d seen two suspicious-looking men from my Rapunzel-like vantage point.
“Look there,” I said, inviting him into my room and over to the window. “On Erwinstrasse, is it?”
He nodded.
“Those two men in the black Citroën,” I said. “They’ve been there for at least an hour. From time to time, one of them gets out, smokes a cigarette, and watches this house. And I’m pretty sure he’s armed, too.”
“How can you tell from here?”
“It’s a warm day, but all three buttons on his suit are done up. And every so often he adjusts something on his breast.”
“You have keen eyes, Monsieur Kléber.”
Every time Vigée spoke to me now he called me Kléber, or Sébastien, to help me become accustomed to hearing this name.
“I used to be a cop, remember?”
“Nothing to worry about. They’re both with us. As a matter of fact, they’re going to drive you to Berlin and back here before going on to Göttingen and Friedland. They’re both German and they’ve made the drive many times before, so there shouldn’t be a problem. They both work for the VdH here in Hannover. He glanced at his watch. “I invited them both for dinner tonight. To give you a chance to meet them. They’re a little early, that’s all.”