The Elegant Lie

…

After the meeting with Eckberg, Carter climbed onto his rickety bicycle and pedalled through the backstreets of the Sülz district◦– Kyllburger, Blankenheimer, Leichtenstern◦– until he came to the Lindenburg hospital. The pavements were crowded with people on their way to work. When Carter reached the corner that Galton had chosen for the meeting, he paused and looked around. There were still a few hours before the rendezvous, but he wanted to make sure he was familiar with the place.

Above him, in what had once been a large and solidly built stone building, an old lady sat on a balcony behind an ornate iron railing, knitting. Behind her, the building seemed to be nothing more than a gaping hole, the interior having collapsed in upon itself. Carter could not understand how she had got there or where she lived among the bare-brick walls and glassless window frames.

Below her on the street corner a young man played a small accordion. On his left sleeve he wore an armband painted with three black dots to indicate that he was blind, although the fact was plain enough to see already, since his empty eye sockets were only partly hidden behind a pair of dark round glasses.

Carter wondered what had stolen his sight: a grenade blast in a bunker, or a rush of fire in the burning cockpit of a plane, or some terrible hand-to-hand fight. There were so many of these wounded, half-assembled men gimping and shuffling and feeling their way with the tap of flimsy canes that Carter almost felt ashamed to stand there in one piece.

A horse and cart trundled past, its iron-rimmed wheels clattering upon the cobblestones. The back of the cart was filled with children on their way to school, each carrying a small satchel and watched over by a stern-looking woman in a headscarf who sat on the buckboard with the driver, only facing backwards so she could keep an eye on her students.

Painted in white letters on an iron girder, which was all that remained of a shop, were the words, ‘We want action. Words are not enough.’ Across from that, a theatre had opened showing The Best Years of Our Lives, with Fredric March and Myrna Loy. Although the movie was already a couple of years out of date, it was still the only business open on that street.

Carter lingered there, studying the doorways and the alleys and the rubble-filled dead ends where he might be cornered if he ever had to run. Satisfied at last, he pedalled along the military ring road on the southern edge of town, wooden brake pads smoking as he raced between the luminous green of neatly tended sports fields and the jagged shapes of empty, bombed-out buildings until he arrived at last at the gates of Dasch’s compound.

Dasch and Ritter were waiting. Dasch was tallying receipts and Ritter lounged in a chair, reading an old copy of the US Army magazine Stars and Stripes.

‘Do you have the money ready?’ asked Carter. ‘The meeting is in an hour and I have to get back across the city on that bicycle.’

Dasch lifted a grey canvas satchel onto his desk. ‘All here,’ he said, patting the lumpy contents of the bag.

Carter stepped forward to take it.

But Dasch’s hand remained upon the satchel. ‘I was thinking,’ he said.

Carter stopped in his tracks. ‘Thinking what?’

‘I just wondered if it might make sense for you to have an escort. This is an awful lot of money, after all.’

‘Are you worried about him stealing it or about me stealing it?’ asked Carter.

‘I am worried about it getting stolen,’ replied Dasch. ‘It won’t make much difference who has taken the money if it’s gone. For this reason, Ritter has persuaded me that I should allow him to accompany you.’

‘And he’s going to drive me there in the Tatra?’

‘Of course.’ Ritter tossed aside the magazine. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

‘It’ll stand out too much,’ Carter told him.

Ritter glanced across at Dasch. ‘But that’s the car I drive!’ he protested.

‘Carter is right,’ said Dasch. ‘You can take the Wanderer instead.’

The Wanderer was a small, lopsided sedan whose rear springs had almost given way, so that the back of the chassis appeared to be resting on the wheels. Carter had seen the old car parked behind the garage, a silhouette of oil gradually seeping out from beneath its leaking engine. He hadn’t even thought it was still running.

‘You can’t be serious!’ Ritter growled indignantly. ‘It’s humiliating even to get behind the wheel of that thing.’

‘You can swallow your pride for a few hours,’ said Dasch. He removed his hand from the bag and Carter picked it off the desk, surprised at its weight.

Ritter soon appeared from behind the garage, hunched inside the Wanderer and revving the engine savagely since it seemed on the verge of cutting out. Clouds of bluish smoke belched out of the rusty tailpipe. ‘Hurry up and climb in!’ he shouted at Carter. ‘Otherwise we won’t get there at all.’

Soon they were rattling along towards the meeting point. The passenger-side window was missing and wind shrilled past the poorly fitting piece of plywood that had been put there in its place.

For a while, each man kept to himself. Then suddenly Ritter began asking questions, in the same relentless fashion he had used when they first met.

How do you know this man? Where did you first meet him? Is he known to be a criminal? Did you approach him or was it the other way around? Are there others like him or is he the only one you can deal with for black market goods? Does he know where you live? Does he know you were in prison? Does he know why? Do you trust him? Does he trust you?

Once more Carter endured the barrage, the answers, true or false, forming in his mind before Ritter had even finished his questions. Finally, though, he threw up his hands and said, ‘Enough!’

‘That isn’t for you to decide.’

‘In case you had forgotten,’ said Carter, ‘you and I are driving to this rendezvous with a bag of Dasch’s money and we’re coming home with a truckload of contraband. So whether you trust me or not, we’re headed in the same direction, whatever that turns out to be.’

‘There is some truth to that,’ admitted Ritter.

‘I asked you once before if you were a cop,’ said Carter. ‘You dodged the question then. Are you going to dodge it now as well?’

Ritter considered this for a moment. ‘I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to tell you, just to pass the time. I was an interrogator during the war. I operated mostly on the Eastern Front, questioning high-ranking enemy officers.’

‘You speak Russian?’

‘I do,’ he replied. ‘My father was a businessman who often travelled to the Soviet Union. He sold parts for steam turbines that were used at hydroelectric plants. He was convinced that the future of Germany lay not in our alliances with the west, but to the east, in Russia and beyond. Because of that, he insisted that I learned Russian. He refused to believe that our two countries would end up in a war and when the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed in August 1939, guaranteeing peace between Russia and Germany for the next ten years, he felt sure that his instincts had been correct. And then, when Germany disregarded the pact and invaded Russia in 1941, it broke my father’s heart. And for myself, instead of using my language skills to sell steam turbines the way my father had imagined, I ended up firing questions at Soviet commissars, majors, colonels and even a general or two.’

‘Only officers?’

Ritter shrugged. ‘They were the only ones who knew anything of value. In the opinion of the German High Command, the average Russian soldier could barely sign his own name, let alone tell you where his division was about to be deployed. It wasn’t true, but the High Command were very fixed in their ideas about what the Russians could and couldn’t do. That was what cost us the war, something they might have been able to avoid if they had only listened to me.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Carter.

‘In June 1943,’ explained Ritter, ‘a Russian transport plane strayed over our lines during a snowstorm and crash landed. There were ten people on board, of whom three survived. They were all officers attached to the headquarters of General Zhukov’s 14th Army and I was given the task of interrogating them. I took my time. No violence. The trouble with pain is that it will make a person say anything, no matter how far-fetched, just to stop the process, even if only for a while, and that is of no use at all. The shock of finding out that one is not going to be tortured is often more effective than any infliction of pain. So they began to talk, although not about anything they thought I could use, such as Russian troop movements or rates of desertion or the failure of tank engines or anything like that.’

‘Then what did you learn?’ asked Carter.

‘What those men told me was something I already knew, which was that Germany was planning an attack. They threw it in my face, to show how much they knew about us and how little we would learn about them. And I allowed them to believe they had succeeded. I showed surprise. Even astonishment. And this made them even more boastful, adding details about the attack designed to humiliate our delusions of conquest. Unknown to them, however, what they had actually given up was far more valuable than anything they could have told me about their own army. You see, this was not just any attack we had been planning. This was to be the greatest assault of armour in the history of mankind, punching a hole through the centre of the Russian forces, not far from the city of Kursk. If it succeeded, it would snap the entire Red Army in two, draining them of their resources in a way from which even they would be unable to recover. It would finish the war in the east, allowing us to concentrate our forces on the impending invasion of the Anglo-Americans in the west. In short, it would have decided the war in our favour. I informed the High Command of my findings and advised that the attack should be called off, but they told me it was too late. Hitler had already made up his mind. He believed that, even if the Russians did know what we had planned, they would be unable to stop us. He also believed that secrecy had been maintained, so it was, in fact, impossible that these Russian officers would have known. They told me I was being duped, and that the Soviet officers were saying anything that came into their heads, just to lead me away from acquiring any real information.’

‘Was there no one who believed you?’ asked Carter.

Ritter laughed in a single, humourless bark. ‘There were plenty,’ he replied, ‘but none who were prepared to risk their lives by saying so. It didn’t matter. Most them died, anyway. In July of that year the attack went ahead, and the German forces encountered an intricately constructed series of defensive lines stretching back hundreds of kilometres, each one of which had to be assaulted and overcome at the cost of so much German manpower and machinery that, in the end, the Battle of Kursk turned into one of the most expensive defeats of the entire war. More than half a million men were killed and twelve thousand heavy tanks were lost. After the loss of the 6th Army at Stalingrad earlier in the year, Germany had reached a point where our losses could not be replaced.’

Although Ritter was staring intently through the windshield, he did not appear to see the road ahead. It was as if his eyes had rolled back into his skull and he was witnessing again not just the loss of a battle, but the crumbling of his entire world.

‘I found out later that this was all due to the work of a single Russian spy. His name was Nikolai Ivanovich Kuznetsov, but he called himself Paul Siebert. There actually was a Paul Siebert. That was the brilliance of his disguise. Siebert, a German Army lieutenant, had been captured earlier in the war and he had been interrogated in much the same way as I interrogated those Russian officers◦– without violence, using only the relentlessness of courtesy, patience and seemingly harmless enquiry. After learning everything there was to learn about Lieutenant Siebert, down to the tiniest eccentricities and details of his life, he was taken out and shot. And then Kuznetsov, armed with every detail of Siebert’s life, was smuggled back behind German lines.’

Carter had heard of this man from Wilby, who spoke the name Kuznetsov with fear as well as admiration. That the Russians could engineer a human weapon so perfectly adapted for its purpose had sent a pulse of dread through their British and American counterparts from which they had yet to recover.

‘He not only gathered information,’ continued Ritter, ‘but also carried out assassinations and sabotage. On one of these missions, he had gone to murder the military governor of East Prussia, a man named Erich Koch. He gained access to Koch’s office and began a conversation with him. During this conversation, Koch told Siebert that the war would soon be over, thanks to a massive attack soon to take place in the Kursk region. That fragment of information saved Koch’s life, temporarily at least, and Siebert alerted his Russian masters about the planned assault. And unlike my own masters, the Russians actually listened. One man did all that. One perfectly placed spy destroyed an army. So if I seem overly cautious to you, it is only because of the fact that, if someone had actually taken my advice, you might be driving me about, instead of the other way around.’

Arriving at the rendezvous point, Carter directed Ritter to a spot just down the road, where they had a view of all the streets feeding into the intersection.

Galton’s van was already there.

Carter could see the shadow of somebody sitting in the passenger seat. He unbuckled the leather straps on the canvas bag and looked inside. It was filled with bank notes, bundled into stacks as thick as his fist.

‘It’s all there,’ said Ritter. ‘I counted it myself.’

‘Given how little you trust me,’ said Carter, ‘you won’t mind if I return the favour. If this is even a little bit short, this guy will never work with us again.’

‘It is correct!’ snapped Ritter. ‘Now go! The man is waiting.’

Carter was staring at the van. A sense of uneasiness was crackling like static in his mind, but he did not know why.

‘What are you waiting for?’ demanded Ritter.

‘Cut the engine,’ said Carter.

‘Why?’ demanded Ritter.

‘Because the only people who would leave a parked car running in this town are either the police or the army. They’re the only ones with enough fuel not to run out of gas while they’re waiting.’

Ritter sighed. ‘I can’t guarantee this thing will even start again.’

‘Do it now,’ said Carter.

Ritter turned the key and the car shuddered into silence. ‘Now what?’ he demanded.

‘We wait,’ Carter told him.

‘Wait for what?’

‘Just wait.’ Carter stared at the blue van, trying to understand why something didn’t feel right. He looked for the old woman knitting on her balcony, but the place was empty except for a chair with a cushion. The blind accordion player had also disappeared. The street was entirely empty except for Galton’s van.

‘Would you mind telling me what this is about?’ asked Ritter. ‘I don’t see anyone.’

‘That’s the problem,’ said Carter.

‘It’s time. If you don’t move soon, he’s going to leave.’

‘Then let him leave.’

‘Dasch won’t like that.’

‘There are things he would like a hell of a lot less. Now shut up and let me do my job.’

Ritter sighed and folded his arms. But he kept quiet from then on.

Carter searched the street, hunting for some definite sign that his instincts were telling the truth. He could feel sweat beading on his face. The time for the meeting came and went. Minutes passed. Just when Carter had begun to wonder if his fears had got the better of him, he caught sight of a faint grey haze as a puff of exhaled cigarette smoke drifted through a half-open doorway in the shell of a building next to the hospital. A moment later, the door swung wide open and a man wearing an unbuttoned trench coat walked out into the middle of the road. He put his hands on his hips, revealing a gun in a shoulder holster. The man looked up and down the street, then threw up his arms and swore. Now the man who had been sitting in the passenger seat climbed out of the van. It was not Galton. He joined the man already standing in the street.

‘Police,’ whispered Carter. ‘They’re plainclothes, but that’s who they are.’

‘My God, I think you’re right,’ said Ritter.

Now two more men appeared through the doorway, one of them shoving the other, who fell to his knees in the road.

Carter recognised the person on the ground.

It was Galton. He struggled to get up, but one of the policemen kicked him over again. This time Galton stayed down, cowering with his arms around his head.

A car pulled out of an alley.

Galton was hoisted to his feet and thrown into the back seat along with the man who had kicked him. The car sped away, passing by Ritter and Carter. Two remaining men piled into the van and that, too, drove away.

Then the street was empty once again.

Ever since the first policeman had walked into the street, Ritter had not moved. It seemed he had not even breathed. Slowly he put one hand on the steering wheel and took hold of the gearstick with the other.

‘You’ll want to start it first,’ Carter told him quietly.

Flustered, Ritter got the engine going. Then he slammed the Wanderer into gear and they drove back the way they had come, moving carefully through the narrow streets, as if Ritter had only just learned how to drive. Neither of them spoke. They headed straight for Dasch’s compound on the outskirts of the city and Ritter would have driven straight through the gate if the guard had not opened it in time.

Ritter pulled up outside Dasch’s office, got out, slammed the door and walked inside.

Carter remained where he was. His heart was beating too fast and he was having trouble thinking straight. He had no idea whether he would be blamed for what had happened and, if he were, exactly what Dasch would do about it. Finally, he took hold of the satchel that contained the money, opened the car door and climbed out.

At that same moment, Dasch emerged from his office, followed closely by Ritter, whose face was still the same chalky shade of white as it had turned in the moment he’d seen Galton kicked into the street.

Dasch walked right up to Carter and took hold of his shoulders. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine,’ Carter stammered.

‘Ritter said it was a trap.’

‘It was,’ replied Carter, ‘but we got lucky.’

‘That was not luck!’ said Ritter. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, we would both be under arrest by now. We would be finished. All of us!’

‘You misjudged him, Ritter!’ said Dasch, his voice raised to a shout. ‘You’ve been doing that since the first day you met him. Why don’t you finally admit it.’

For a few seconds Ritter’s mouth twitched, as if he were trying to suck out something caught between his teeth. But then he blurted out, ‘It’s true!’ He turned to Carter and solemnly he said, ‘I will not make the same mistake again.’

For a moment, even Dasch looked surprised at Ritter’s admission. Then he got down to business. ‘This man you were dealing with,’ he asked Carter, ‘does he know you are working for me?’

Carter shook his head. ‘Of course not.’

‘Are you absolutely sure?’

‘Positive.’

Dasch stepped forward and embraced him. ‘Thank God for that,’ he sighed. Then he stood back. ‘My friend, you are still trembling with fear!’

Dasch was right, but not for the reasons he believed. To Carter, it was starting to look as if Eckberg had been right, and that he could no longer rely on Wilby’s promises to keep him safe.

‘The police have nothing on you,’ continued Dasch. ‘Even if they tracked you down, it would mean nothing. No money changed hands. You never set eyes on the goods he intended to sell. As far as they’re concerned, you didn’t even show up to the meeting. All you are guilty of is a conversation with this man, and they could hardly convict you with that.’

Now Ritter chimed in. ‘Mr Dasch is no stranger to the police, but they always leave here empty handed.’

‘I keep meaning to ask how you do that,’ said Carter.

Smiling, Dasch patted him on the cheek. ‘Patience, my friend,’ he said. ‘That day is coming soon.’