The Burning Sky

CHAPTER THREE

‘Can you stop your Yids?’

Jardine, who now had his own pistol out, was, for the first time, really sharp. ‘Peter, this is not the bloody golf club, will you stop calling them that.’

‘Can you?’

‘There’s no telephone here.’

‘Something of a flaw in the organisation, I hazard. I’m beginning to regret accepting this commission, all this danger is not my cup of tea at all.’

That laconic statement got Lanchester a look and a wry smile: Jardine had been right when he declined to accept that they were really friends, but they had served together as young subalterns in the last months of the Great War, and whatever else the man was he was no coward; he had been a damned fine officer with a mind sharp enough to know when it was foolish to be brave, as well as when it was necessary to employ just that quality to carry forward his men. They had both stayed on in the army after the war, Lanchester because he was open about not being fit for anything else, Jardine for his own personal reasons.

That he lacked convictions did not single Lanchester out from his fellow regimental officers: they were all racial bigots to a degree, with the concomitant drawback that some of them were certifiable dunderheads as well — not all the donkeys in the British army were generals. Lanchester was far from the exception: it had been Callum Jardine who was the outsider in his declarations that what they were doing in the Middle East on behalf of the British Government was utterly wrong and likely to produce the exact opposite result of what was intended.

You did not pacify the locals by dropping bombs on rebellious Iraqi villages, killing more women and children than the targeted fighters, acts carried out at the behest of government ministers like the aforementioned Winston Churchill, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time. These policies were something about which Peter Lanchester had been sanguine, and Callum Jardine furious enough to eventually resign his commission.

‘Why we did not crush these Hun buggers when we had them on the floor, I still do not comprehend, Cal. Their army was totally beaten in 1918 and now they tell us they were stabbed in the back by their own bloody politicos.’

‘You trying to remind me I was wrong about that, Peter?’

‘Only in a roundabout way, old boy, but I do recall you saying that there was every reason to grant the Hun an armistice instead of killing several thousand more, whereas I was all for pushing on and burning Berlin. Come to think of it, I’d still happily go to Holland and shoot the Kaiser.’

‘I was concerned about more of us dying for no purpose, not least myself, and I am sure you can remember the losses we suffered as well as I can. But I’m doing my best to make up for not agreeing with you here and now.’

‘And to quote that fine comedian, Mr Oliver Hardy, this is another fine mess you have got me into.’

‘Not that again!’

Iraq had been Mesopotamia when they first served there and it had been hell: hot enough to fry an egg on the toe of your boot, dusty, flyblown and deadly. The army of which they had been a part had artillery, trucks, armoured cars and aircraft; the Arabs old pattern rifles, guile and, sometimes, suicidal bravery, which made patrolling extremely risky.

Lanchester was of the opinion that shooting first and asking questions after was sound military sense; Jardine, marginally senior by date of his commission, was not, and in employing his tactics he had got two infantry half-companies trapped in an Iraqi village of mud huts and narrow streets, totally outnumbered and with no means of calling for support.

‘I got you out, didn’t I?’

‘Only by my crawling on my belly for several hours along a dry watercourse! Christ, I am still picking the sand out of my teeth. If you’d heard some of the names my chaps were calling you …’

‘Don’t worry, Peter, my lads were using the same language and it was we who provided the rearguard and took the casualties.’

‘Justice and no more, old fruit, and thank the Lord no one died. But the question is, if we are in the soup now, which I rather suspect you think the case, how are we to get out of it?’

That got a wave of the Jardine’s Mauser. ‘I don’t think we can shoot our way out.’

‘Nor, I suspect, will you think of sacrificing your …’ Lanchester paused then to choose his word carefully ‘… refugees?’

Jardine went back to his bag and opened it again, taking out a folder of papers. ‘These are their travel documents, Peter, tickets from the Hook of Holland to Harwich, as well as the names of their British sponsors, with supporting letters. Without someone to vouch for them and feed them they will be turned away.’

‘Money?’

‘They will have their own, at least in highly saleable commodities, which was what we were arguing about in that apartment. I was telling them to take those and abandon everything else.’

That got a loud and disapproving sniff, to which Jardine responded with a bored look. He moved to the large cupboard, opening both the doors and reaching inside. Unable to see, Lanchester heard a series of wooden clicks. Then his companion emerged, closed the doors and soundlessly moved the cupboard to one side, revealing a square hole in the floor.

‘This is the tunnel. It takes you into the docks, and if you walk directly down to the quayside and turn left you can’t miss the Den Haag.’ There was no need to say that was the Dutch ship by which they were to depart. ‘The captain has been paid.’

‘Risky.’

‘No, he has helped before and I trust him.’

‘It does not strike you that the Hun have knowledge of this tunnel?’

‘That depends on whether you have told me everything you know, Peter.’

‘I would have to be stupid to hold back on anything now, would I not?’

‘It’s possible they know, but unlikely, Peter, because if they did, I would have been taken as I walked in here, as would my refugees. Germans are methodical, it is not in their nature to take chances, and the first thing I checked was that no one had been here since my last visit. Not even the most careful entrant could have passed by the precautions without leaving a trace.’

‘Supposition, brother.’

‘What else have I got? If the Gestapo knew this was the way out they would have been all over it to make sure they did not cock up, and they haven’t. It is also true that if your chum in the Berlin embassy knew certain things, then Jerry knows too.’

‘My man knew what you were up to but not how you go about it.’

‘Did he tell you how he found out?’

‘No, and I did not ask.’

‘There’s a lot of competition in intelligence-gathering in this neck of the woods, the new boys created by the Party treading on the toes of the old police and spy agencies, like the Abwehr. Your embassy contact wasn’t the military attache by any chance, was he?’

‘Clever boy, Cal.’

‘Rumour has it there’s a turf war going on between the Abwehr and the SS, who want all counter-espionage to be in their hands, so the army boys might not be averse to queering their pitch by passing on certain bits and bobs, as you called them, to our embassy. What do you think?’

‘It’s a reasonable prognosis, but that does not explain the thugs we avoided earlier.’

‘If relations are bad between the SS and the Abwehr, they are truly diabolical between the SS and the SA. If my name and location came up as a suspect, the Brownshirts would jump at a chance to beat their rivals to it so they can claim to be the true guardians of the Nazi faith, and they spy on each other all the time. We will never know, but it is very possible that a party of Gestapo were on their way to the Reeperbahn when that truckful of club-carrying beauties alighted.’

‘And here and now?’

‘Why would the army intelligence boys tell the Berlin attache half a tale? — which backs up my theory that this escape route is unknown to the Gestapo. They have only got part of the story and that is there is a cell in Hamburg, of which I am a part, queering their pitch of stripping the departing Jews of their wealth. They would deduce we are using the Elbe to get them out with their possessions, but that only allows you to block the obvious routes, like the main dockyard gates.’

‘They could search the departing ships.’

‘It would take too long and upset the ships’ owners, who would divert their cargoes elsewhere. I would guess they have limited information about the where and when of any alternative exit, and it is obvious we must have one that does not involve normal tickets, so they would have to spread themselves around the whole area, which is huge. These docks are close to the size of Liverpool.’

‘They might also be inside on the quays?’

‘Perhaps, but again distributed very thinly and wondering what to cover, and we have to hope no idea of which vessel we will be heading for, given there are dozens of them sailing in and out of the port every day.’

‘Have you asked yourself how they came by whatever knowledge they do have?’

‘Of course, but I don’t think there’s a leak at the Jewish end. That could only come through interrogation and I am unaware of anyone being arrested who knows anything.’

‘And you would know?’

‘My Jewish contacts would know.’

‘If I was running this show from the Hun end, they wouldn’t.’

‘Is that what you’re in now, Peter, counter-intelligence?’

‘Good God, no! You know me, Cal, I couldn’t run the sock counter at Harrods.’

The absurdity of that would have made Jardine laugh at another time; now was too serious. ‘Since I am making assumptions, I must give you a choice. If you wish to go, do so now, through the tunnel; give the captain my name and he will get you out of here even if me and my party don’t manage to join you.’

‘Have I ever told you how your bloody nobility gives me a pain in my posterior?’

‘More than once.’

‘One of these days you must tell me the real reason you engage in such asinine activities.’

Jardine pocketed his Mauser, picked up the Gladstone bag and went to the door, turning the handle. ‘I would advise you not to hold your breath while waiting for a response.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To see if I can draw off any watchers. Maybe if I move, so will they, because I am convinced they cannot know who is coming and from where, or if they are close to the real escape route. But for certain they know my identity, so they might tail me, which will leave the way clear for the Ephraims.’

‘And if you’re wrong?’

‘Then you will hear gunshots. After that, you must decide how to act on your own.’

‘Say they do follow you, I assume that leaves me to get these bloody people through the tunnel?’

‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

‘And you, how do you get out?’ Jardine just grinned and touched the side of his nose with an index finger, which exasperated Lanchester. ‘If you do manage, Cal, for the sake of the Lord do not tell anyone I helped to rescue some Yids. I’ll never live it down.’

‘Army amp; Navy Club, Peter, two weeks from now and you can buy me luncheon. Oh, and by the way, don’t be surprised by the way our party is dressed. Can I have my scarf back? I might need it.’

Lanchester was taking the muffler off when he too grinned. ‘Does Bonny Lass speak Yiddish?’

‘No idea.’

Lanchester ran a tidying hand over his glossy black hair. ‘Might be prepared to learn if she does, don’t you know. How long does it take to get to Rotterdam?’

‘I saw the way she looked at you, Peter; for what you’re thinking about, Tokyo is not far enough.’

‘And I saw the way she looked at you, Cal, but never underestimate the charm of a true Englishman.’

The sun is slow to fall near the Baltic, but it is low in the long evenings, so it cast deep shadows between the high warehouses that lined the deserted street. Approaching the lorry, with a couple of men seemingly working to load it, moving boxes about, it was hard to appear nonchalant, even harder not to look too directly at them to see if they had the kind of coarse appearance such labourers should have.

Gladstone bag swinging in one hand, the other in his trench coat pocket holding tight the now warm stock of his pistol, Jardine did flick a glance towards them as he passed close by, throwing them a crisp ‘Guten Abend’.

His suspicions were heightened by the way they failed to respond, it being a mark of polite behaviour for Germans to do so, while the impression of faces too bland was fleeting, of hands a bit too white and teeth that seemed too even. Likewise the clothing had none of the wear that came from doing a lousy job for low pay. The hairs were standing on the back of his neck when he passed the cab, yet he dare not look back to see if they were watching him.

In such building-created canyons, sound travels, and though he could not see it, he heard the distant start of a car engine, as well as that particular whining noise one makes when reversing. As he came to the first junction, to a road running away from the dockside, he looked along it to observe it was empty; had the car been there and so obviously official-looking it had needed to be withdrawn? How many bodies did they have on this job?

His heart jumped when the lorry engine started, a deep throbbing note as it idled, then the pitch of the engine rising as it revved and moved, that mixing with the crack of his heels on the pavement. Gears and engine pitch changed twice, then the noise became a diminishing echo, fading eventually till his shoes were making the only audible sound. The combination of that car noise and a lorry, hitherto stationary too long, indicated they were either police or Gestapo. It made no odds which, they had moved because of him and that had to mean he was being tailed; good for his refugees, not so hot for him, given he had no idea of the resources they had employed for the task.

The street being long and straight, he saw the Auto Union coupe, hood up, coming towards him at quite a distance, moving slowly on the cobbles, which made it buck and sway, the jarring of its body as the springs failed to cushion it properly indicating the car was carrying too heavy a load. The first clue to it being the Ephraim family was the sight, in the driver’s seat, of the man Lanchester had called his blue-eyed boy, both hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead, while alongside him sat the father with a worker’s cap pulled well down, hiding his grey hair.

Jardine saw blue-eyed boy’s lips move and guessed it was an admonishment not to look in his direction, the coincidence of their arriving as he was departing as good a way as any to let them know of possible danger. As the car passed, it being natural for him to glance in its direction, he saw five people crowded in the rear, the daughter and youngest son sat on laps, then the suitcases strapped onto the jump seat, too many to his mind, which produced a flash of irritation which grew as he crossed the road behind it, halting at a bus stop and able to look back the way he had come and see the vehicle drive on past the doorway from which he had emerged.

That luggage rankled: it was always a problem to get people to leave things behind, items they had probably not even noticed for years suddenly taking on huge sentimental importance. Valuables he could comprehend; it would be a fair bet that Papa Ephraim had stuff on his lap and all around his feet, old master and modern art paintings in leather tubes, a case of precious objects that had to include heirlooms and, inevitably, a solid-silver seven-branch candlestick for Friday night prayers. It did not matter what he made of the car and it being overloaded — it only mattered if those on his tail, and they had to be there even if he could not see them in the gathering gloom, were made curious.

Blue-eyed boy would not stop until he was out of sight: the ship was not due to sail until first light, so a way would have to be contrived to get the family into that tunnel entrance in the dark. It was no longer his problem; he just had to keep the watchers watching him and then he had to get clear and out of Hamburg and Germany by a different route, the first stage of that to get on the approaching bus.

Jardine knew with night coming his best chance was to return to St Pauli, though not to the bar in which Lanchester had found him — the red-light district was busy in the hours of darkness and there were streets there that would make it near impossible for anyone to follow. Once in his old stamping ground, his way out he already knew, the only problem he had was of being picked up before he could get there.

Many times throughout his life Callum Jardine had been in a position of danger in which he could do nothing to alleviate it; people now saw the last campaign of the Great War as a walkover, the German army retreating and the Allies dogging their heels. It was nothing like that: in retreat the Kaiser’s army made the advancing Allies fight for every pre-prepared trench system and they had been constructed in advance and in depth.

The only way to take them, tanks rarely being available, was by infantry attack, and if the tactics had improved since the bloodbaths of Verdun and the Somme, it was still hard pounding, while to that was added the feeling, with things hopefully coming to the end, that no one wanted to be the last one to stop a bullet.

Sitting on the first bus, which took him to the Hauptbahnhof, followed by another from the main railway station to St Pauli, Jardine was aware that he was sat in well-lit seats and easily observed, a bit like a target in a shooting gallery. That feeling did not diminish when he was finally on foot and he had to remind himself of those times, the occasions when, as a soldier in battle, you come to terms with the possibility of death, allied to the knowledge it is not in your hands to avoid it. The hardest part was to keep his watchers feeling he was unaware of their presence: never spin round, don’t do that stopping-to-look-in-a-window trick so you can see if anyone else halts too — let them think they are secure and potentially you are unknowingly leading them to something significant.

The Reeperbahn was, by the time he got there, its usual Friday night self, full of locals drinking in the bars, of sailors and visitors from more straight-laced communities come to sample the liberal streets of the famous red-light district. In the many iffy places Cal Jardine had been since he left the army he had learnt that setting up a way out was of paramount importance, one of the first things to be worked out before indulging in any activity, and Hamburg was no different — it was just easier than most.

He suspected his tail knew they were in trouble when, after talking to a streetwalker, he dived into the Herbertstra?e: first they lost sight of him because of the high metal panels that shut off the street from public view. When they, too, pushed their way through the unlicensed whores who congregated at each end of the street, passing the big sign saying ‘Women Prohibited’, they entered a narrow, crowded and garishly lit alleyway, full of men either just staring, or bargaining with the scantily clad women sitting in the brightly lit windows.

The narrow alley Jardine made for had more than just a raised window beside a doorway; it was an apparent dead end, but a special one, and as he entered he spied Gretl, the woman who worked there, deep in discussion with a drunken, noisy quartet who, by their colouring and dress, looked to be seamen and Dutch. Jardine had passed several windows in which sat young and attractive women, scantily clad and available for business; this was a different kind of establishment altogether and the way Gretl was dressed underlined that.

A big lady in every respect, tall and far from young, she had on red lederhosen, a waistcoat of similar leather material which hardly managed, so tight was it laced, to contain her huge bosom, and on her head a horned helmet that barely contained her brassy fair hair. This outfit was set off with a pair of black, shiny thigh boots with spiked heels, while in her hand she held a riding whip.

Gretl had worked the Herbertstra?e for decades to become a feature of the place. Most of the window girls came for a few years and many from country towns and villages, not Hamburg. They saved up the money they made from selling their bodies, overseen and kept medically clean by the municipality, then retired back to their locality, no doubt without their neighbours being aware of their past, to set up a shop or some kind of business, or merely to become a marriageable catch with their nest egg — in some senses a more morally upright bunch than those they served.

As he approached, walking at speed, Gretl turned to look at him and he was presented with quite a sight: her eyes were picked out in thick kohl, her cheeks caked with deep make-up and her lips a bright-red slash on her lined face. She was in the midst of a stream of German invective that told those with whom she was negotiating that the price they wanted to pay for her services was very far from sufficient. When Gretl looked like that, the customers who got into her inner sanctum paid a high price for their parsimonious temerity. It would be painful, but that was before she eased their soreness with the other skills she had honed over the years.

Sighting Jardine she smiled, exposing large, yellowing teeth, then enquired in a deep guttural voice if he had finally come for a treatment, which made the Dutchmen, for in their protested responses they established that was their nationality, look and act aggrieved. All she got was a quick peck on the cheeks, leaving Jardine with the taste of pancake on his lips as he slipped past her. The last thing he heard was Gretl reassuring her putative clients that he was only passing through.

There was no way of knowing if his tail had seen him come in to Gretl’s little cul-de-sac. If they had, she would delay them and be damned ferocious with it, but all it would take to shut her up would be the production of an identity card: no one feared the police more than those who lived and worked the Reeperbahn; if a customer complained to the Polizei, they always took their side — the reputation of the district came before right and wrong. If it was the Gestapo, that was ten times worse.

The room Gretl used was lit in red, with couchettes, a bed and various instruments of torture on the walls, manacles and harness. Behind a curtain was a door to the back alley — every establishment had them, gloomily lit by the moon and barely wide enough for two people to pass, but, like the street it served, cut off by high barriers at both ends, these locked. Once through, Jardine dropped his bag and took out his Mauser, waiting: if they were coming they would do so immediately.

After half a minute, when nothing happened, he opened the bag, well aware he had a limited amount of time, trying to assess the probable actions of those pursuing him. If he worked it right, that would allow him to get clear; getting it wrong probably meant incarceration in somewhere like Dachau, being subjected to repeated beatings and torture as the SS sought information on his Jewish contacts so he would take some of them with him as he died to avoid that.

Since they did not follow they could not have seen him disappear and thus had no idea where he was: he could be in any number of the rooms behind an empty prostitute’s window, so the only way to collar him was to shut off the Herbertstra?e at either end and that would take time — time to get to a phone and get a message to whoever was overseeing the pursuit, time to get the manpower in place — and he calculated he had up to ten minutes before such precautions could be brought in to play, a period he cut in half for safety.

Off came his trench coat and out of the bag came a sailor’s reefer jacket, a cap and a duffle bag, as well as the scarf he had taken from Lanchester and that was wrapped around his neck. The pistol was transferred, as well as a wallet containing his British passport, also the few possessions he wanted, a change of shirt and socks, his washbag and a money belt containing some US dollars, British pounds and a thick bundle of German marks, several of which he extracted before concealing the belt under his shirt. His German papers, bearing a false name, he kept handy, as well as the discharge book he had, which identified him as a Czech sailor.

The Gladstone he left by a wall in the middle of the alley so as to protect Gretl — they would question every whore in the street, and since none would admit to knowledge he had to suppose they could not finger anyone, which should lead to an impasse: not even the Gestapo could shut down the Herbertstra?e without causing a riot in the city of Hamburg. He went back through Gretl’s parlour to find her in full flow, beating on the bare buttocks of one of her Dutchmen while his three companions, bottles of very pricey beer in their hands, noisily egged her on.

Jardine didn’t stop and neither did Gretl, she was too professional, even when in passing he stuck a rolled up bundle of marks into her ample cleavage. Within seconds he was out in the crowded street, heading for the barrier, his heart in his mouth as he joined the throng and slipped between the two overlapping metal plates, to be immediately accosted by one of the unlicensed street girls. Engaging in conversation with her allowed him to assess the risks he faced, relieved that all he could see was one anxious-looking fellow in a long leather coat and fedora, less at ease given the sound of approaching sirens, added to the attention he was getting from the whores.

To disappear was easy; all he had to do was walk off with his whore. Who was going to stop a man dressed like a sailor doing that?