“I know I’m not exactly a catch,” I said as the walls vibrated around us and dust fell off the ceiling into our hair. “You could almost certainly find someone younger. With better prospects. But I’m honest. As far as that goes, these days. And it’s just possible that I’ll make you a good husband. Because I love you, Kirsten. I love you very much.”
I threw that bit about love in because, generally speaking, it’s what a girl wants to hear when a man asks her to marry him. But it wasn’t true and we both knew it. I’m a much better liar than I am an actor.
“I assume that your proposal has something to do with this,” she said.
She opened her handbag and showed me a buff-colored envelope she’d received that very morning. It had no stamp, just a postmark, and was quite obviously from the Gestapo.
I took the letter out of the envelope, noted the address on Burgstrasse, and nodded. I knew the address, of course. It was part of the old Berlin stock exchange. And the official letter was a formal summons to explain her “antisocial” comments to a commissar Hartmut Zander. My only worry now was that she might think I’d engineered the whole thing in order to persuade her to marry me. It was the kind of dirty trick that many Gestapo men were wont to pull, just to get a peek at a nice girl’s underwear.
“It’s very sweet of you, Bernie,” she said, “but you don’t have to do this. I couldn’t let you.”
“Listen, you have to trust me on this, angel, I knew nothing about that letter. But now that I’ve seen it, here’s what I think. You’re in a tight spot. There’s no doubt about it. I’d come with you but I’m not allowed. You’re not even allowed a lawyer present at the interview. But marry me and I think I can make all this go away. In fact I’m certain of it. After that you don’t ever have to see me again if you don’t want to. I’ll forget about the ring I have in my pocket and the loud evening I had planned after we got married. We’ll just call it a marriage of convenience and leave it at that. It’ll be like a business arrangement. We’ll meet for a coffee in a year’s time and have a good laugh about it. You can divorce me quietly and everything will be like it was before.”
“Why are you doing this, Bernie?”
“Let’s say that lately my own lack of nobility has begun to get me down. Yes, let’s say that. I have an urgent need to do something good for someone else. In recent weeks I’ve seen one too many bad things, and the plain fact of the matter is I like you a lot, Kirsten, and I don’t want to see anything bad happen to you. It’s as simple as that, really.”
“Could something bad happen to me?”
“If what you told me is true, then they’ll give you a rough ride. Oh, not that rough. Just a verbal battering. And you even might talk your way out of it. Some do. Maybe you’re the type to give as good as you get. Don’t admit anything. That’s the best way to handle these Gestapo commissars. Then again it’s equally possible you’ll go to pieces, in which case you might end up in prison for a short spell. Say, six months. Ordinarily that’s not so bad. But lately things have got much tougher in the cement. Even on the outside food is short. In Brandenburg it’s several hundred calories less than that. Skinny little thing like you might find that hard going. At the very least you might lose your job. And jobs are difficult to get when you lose them on account of the Gestapo. It might be awkward getting another.”
She nodded quietly. “The ring, Bernie. Could I see it, please?”
“Sure.” I felt inside my vest pocket, polished it on my trouser leg, and then handed it over.
She looked at it for a moment, smiled a charming sort of smile, and then put it carefully on the finger of her left hand.
The next day we were married and, during the simple ceremony, Kirsten moved the ring onto the finger of her right hand, as if she really meant it, like a proper German wife. It was a small but important gesture and one that did not go unnoticed by me.
Twenty-seven
The S-Bahn train to Genshagen, about an hour south of Berlin, was packed with car workers and factory managers returning there from visiting relations, and officials from the German Labor Front, the SS, and the Luftwaffe. Eavesdropping on their cozy conversations, it was impossible to tell them apart, and this caused me to reflect on the long and close relationship the Nazis had enjoyed with Daimler-Benz AG. Jakob Werlin, one of the company’s directors, had been a personal friend of Hitler’s since before the 1923 putsch and, according to the Munich Post, on the leader’s release from Landsberg Prison in 1924, it was Werlin who collected him from the gates and drove him away in a new Mercedes-Benz that he subsequently gave to Hitler. So perhaps it was Daimler-Benz’s support for Hitler that had helped persuade the Nazis to eliminate taxes on German automobiles soon after they formed a government — a nice payback for all their support. But it wasn’t just cars that Daimler-Benz supplied to the Nazis. There was a huge number of airplane engines for Germany’s fighters and bombers, as well; the company was crucial to the country’s war effort. One day I hoped some thoughtful historian would point out the close connection between the Mercedes-Benz motor car and Germany’s favorite dictator and that the Lord would find a way to pay these bastards back for their help in bringing the Nazis to power and keeping them there.
One of the company directors, Max Wolf, met me at the train and drove me straight to the factory. He was in his late fifties — one of those very stiff, mustachioed Prussian Lutherans from Schwiebus, in Poland — and a man for whom the Daimler-Benz company was a way of life. The little gold Party badge glittering like a tiny satrap’s diadem on the lapel of his tailor-made suit seemed to indicate that his particular way of life had worked out well for him so far. He couldn’t have seemed more smug if he’d been a bull walrus at the end of a successful mating season.
“The director of the factory, Herr Karl Mueller, is a personal friend of General Schellenberg,” he informed me. “Herr Mueller has instructed me to provide you with all the cooperation you need in the completion of your orders, Captain.”
“That’s awfully kind of him, and you, Herr Wolf.”
“As you probably know, we’re mainly aircraft engines here at Genshagen,” he explained in the car. “The Mercedes-Benz automobile is made at Sindelfingen, near Stuttgart. That’s where General Schellenberg’s car is now. I’m to give you the export paperwork for that vehicle and then lend you another vehicle that you can drive south to Sindelfingen, where you can collect the new one, to drive to Switzerland.”
I winced a little; whenever people use the word “vehicle” it always reminds me of pompous traffic policemen, which, I now realized, was what Wolf most reminded me of.
We drove into a factory compound that was as big as a decent-sized town and surrounded with the very latest 88-millimeter antiaircraft guns. These were obviously effective as there wasn’t a lot of bomb damage to be seen. I also noticed the presence of several female SS troopers. Wolf saw me paying them attention.
“Given the makeup of the workforce, the SS guards are an unfortunate necessity, I’m afraid. Half of our twelve thousand car workers are foreign, many of them slave laborers — Jews, mostly, and all of them women — from the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück nearby. But they’re well fed and quite happy with the conditions here, I think.”