Munich

1

In his bedroom in the Regina Palast Hotel, Hugh Legat was asleep.

He was splayed out on his back, fully clothed and unconscious, his head lolling to one side, like a drowned man fished out of the sea. The light was still on in the bathroom; the door was slightly ajar; the room was cast in a pale bluish light. At one time there had been voices in the corridor outside – he had recognised Strang, then Ashton-Gwatkin – and footsteps. But the Prime Minister had at last gone to bed and gradually these extraneous sounds had ceased, and now there was only the rhythm of his breathing and his occasional muttered cry. He dreamed that he was flying.

He was too deeply asleep to hear the noise of his door handle being tried. What woke him was the tapping. It was soft at first, more like a scratching of fingernails on wood, and when he opened his eyes he assumed it was one of the children trying to clamber into their bed after a nightmare. But then he saw the unfamiliar room and he remembered where he was. He squinted at the luminous hands on the hotel’s alarm clock. Half-past three.

The noise came again.

He reached out and turned on the bedside lamp. The memorandum lay on the nightstand. He rolled off the bed, opened the drawer of the desk and inserted it into the hotel’s guide to Munich. The floor creaked as he crossed to the door. He touched the handle but at the last moment some instinct warned him not to turn it.

‘Who’s there?’

‘It’s Paul.’

The German loomed on the threshold, absurd in his conspicuousness. Legat pulled him into the room and glanced quickly up and down the corridor. Nobody was stirring. The detective must be spending the night in the Prime Minister’s sitting room. He closed the door. Hartmann was going around the bedroom collecting Legat’s overcoat, his hat, his shoes. ‘Put these on.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘Quickly. I want to show you something.’

‘Are you mad? At this hour?’

‘It’s the only time we have.’

Legat was still half asleep. He rubbed his face and shook his head in an effort to fully wake himself. ‘What is it you want me to see?’

‘If I tell you that, you won’t come.’ In his determination he seemed almost demented. He held out the shoes. ‘Please.’

‘Paul, this is dangerous.’

Hartmann gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Do you think you have to point that out to me?’ He threw the shoes on to the bed. ‘I shall be at the back of the hotel. I shall wait for you outside. If you’re not there in ten minutes, I shall know you’re not coming.’

After he had gone, Legat paced up and down his small room for a minute. The situation was so preposterous he could almost believe he had dreamed the whole thing. He sat on the edge of the mattress and picked up his shoes. He had been too tired to take them off properly before he went to sleep. Now he found he couldn’t unpick the laces, even with his teeth. He had to stand and kick his toes into the shoes and lever in his heels with his fingers. He felt angry. He was also – he would admit it to himself – frightened. He put on his hat and draped his coat over his arm. He went out into the corridor and locked the door behind him, turned left and walked quickly around the corner towards the rear staircase. At the bottom he passed the entrance to the Turkish baths. A moist aroma of steam and sweet oils briefly released memories of the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall and then he was out through the glass doors and into the small street at the back of the hotel.

Hartmann was smoking a cigarette, leaning against the bodywork of one of the open-topped black Mercedes they had been driving around in all day. The engine was ticking over. He grinned when he saw Legat, dropped the cigarette into the gutter and ground it out with the toe of his shoe. He opened the front passenger door, like a chauffeur. A minute later they were driving down a wide boulevard of shops and apartment blocks. The breeze was still warm. A swastika pennant fluttered on the bonnet. Hartmann didn’t speak. He was concentrating on the road. His face in profile, with its high forehead and Roman nose, was imperious. Every few seconds he checked the mirrors. His anxiety transferred itself to Legat. ‘Is there anyone behind us?’

‘I don’t think so. Will you look?’

Legat twisted round in his seat. The road was empty. A gibbous moon had come up and the tarmac was like a canal, flat and silvery. A few of the shop windows were lit. He had no idea of the direction they were travelling. He turned back to the windscreen. The car was slowing for an intersection. A couple of patrolling policemen in their bucket-shaped helmets stood on the corner. Their heads followed the Mercedes as it approached. When they saw the official pennant they saluted. Hartmann looked at Legat and laughed at the absurdity of it, showed his large teeth, and for a second time it struck Legat that he was not entirely sane.

‘How did you get hold of the car?’

‘I gave the driver a hundred marks to borrow it. I said I needed it to meet a girl.’

The city centre had dwindled into suburbs and factories. Across the dark fields Legat could see the fires of furnaces and chimneys – scarlet, yellow, white. For a while a railway track ran along the centre of the autobahn. Then the road narrowed and they were in open country. It reminded Legat of the drive from Oxford up to Woodstock, and the pub they used to go to there – what was it? – the Black Prince. After ten minutes, he could no longer keep his alarm to himself. ‘Is it much further? I’ll need to get back to the hotel soon. The PM is an early riser.’

‘It’s not that far. Don’t worry. I’ll get you back before morning.’

They passed through a small Bavarian town, entirely shuttered and asleep, and presently entered the outskirts of a second. This too appeared entirely normal – whitewashed, half-timbered walls, steep red-tiled roofs, a butcher’s shop, an inn, a garage. Then Legat caught sight of a place name – Dachau – and he knew why he had been brought out here. He felt obscurely disappointed. So this was it? Hartmann drove carefully through the empty streets until they were on the edge of the town. He pulled up at the side of the road, turned off the engine and doused the headlights. To the right was woodland. The concentration camp was on the left, clearly visible against the moonlit sky – a high barbed-wire fence stretching as far as Legat could see, with watchtowers, and behind them the low outlines of barracks. The barking of guard dogs carried on the still air. A searchlight mounted on one of the towers prodded ceaselessly across a vast parade ground. It was the immensity of it that was most shocking: a captive town within a town.

Hartmann was studying him. ‘You know what this is, I take it?’

‘Of course. It’s been reported often enough in the press. There have been regular demonstrations against the Nazi repressions in London.’

‘You didn’t join them, I suppose?’

‘You know very well I couldn’t. I’m a civil servant. We’re politically neutral.’

‘Naturally.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Paul – don’t be so bloody naive!’ It was the obviousness of it that he found most insulting. ‘Stalin has vastly bigger camps, where people are treated even worse. Do you want us to go to war with the Soviet Union as well?’

‘I merely point out that some of the people transferred into Germany by the agreement today may well end up in here by the end of the year.’

‘Yes, and no doubt they would have ended up here in any case – assuming they hadn’t been killed in the bombing.’

‘Not if Hitler had been deposed.’

‘If! It’s always if!’

Their raised voices had been noticed. Beyond the wire, a guard with an Alsatian dog on a short leash started shouting at them. The probing finger of the searchlight swung across the parade ground, over the fence and on to the road. It advanced towards them. Suddenly the car was filled with brilliant blinding light. Hartmann swore. He switched on the engine and found reverse gear. He looked over his shoulder, one hand on the steering wheel, and they backed away at speed, swerving from side to side down the middle of the road until they reached a side street. He put the Mercedes into first gear, swung the wheel and they made a U-turn, sending up a spurt of dust and smoking rubber. The acceleration as they pulled away threw Legat back in his seat. When he checked behind them the searchlight was still weaving back and forth across the road, blindly searching. He said furiously, ‘That was a bloody stupid thing to do. Can you imagine the row if a British diplomat was arrested out here? I want to go back to Munich – now.’ Hartmann continued to stare ahead and didn’t answer. ‘Did you really drag me all the way out here just to make a point?’

‘No. It happened to be on the way.’

‘On the way to what?’

‘Leyna.’

So then, at last: Leyna.

She had wanted to set eyes on Hitler – not to hear him speak: she declared herself a communist; that would have been unthinkable – but just to see him in the flesh, this half-sinister, half-comical brawler and dreamer, whose Party only four years earlier had come ninth in the elections with less than three per cent of the vote, but who now was on the brink of becoming Chancellor. Most nights during the campaign, after addressing one of his huge rallies, he returned to the city. Everybody knew the address of his apartment. Her proposal was that they should go and stand outside it in the hope that they might catch a glimpse of him.

Hartmann had been against it from the start. He had called it a waste of a good day, a trivial bourgeois diversion (‘Isn’t that what you people call it?’) to focus upon an individual rather than upon the social forces that had created him. But there was more to his reluctance than that, Legat had realised afterwards: Hartmann knew what she was like, the sort of recklessness of which she was capable. She had appealed to Legat to use his casting vote in her favour, and of course he had done so – partly because he was curious to see Hitler himself, but chiefly because he was half in love with her: a fact of which all three were aware. They treated it as a joke, himself included. He was so much less experienced and worldly than Hartmann, still a virgin at twenty-one.

And so, after their picnic on the grass in Königsplatz, they had set off.

It was the first week of July, just after midday, very hot. She was wearing one of Hartmann’s white shirts with the sleeves rolled up, a pair of shorts, and walking boots. Her limbs were brown from the sun. It was more than a mile away, through the centre of the city. The buildings shimmered like fantasies in the haze of heat. As they passed the southern end of the Englischer Garten, Hartmann had suggested they go swimming in the Eisbach instead. Legat had been tempted but Leyna would not be put off. On they went.

The apartment was at the top of a hill, facing on to Prinzregentenplatz, a busy, drearily impressive half-cobbled square through which trams ran. By the time they reached it they were sweating and bad-tempered. Hartmann was hanging back in a sulk and Leyna had decided to goad him further by pretending to flirt with Legat. The building in which Hitler lived was a luxurious, turn-of-the-century block with a hint of a French chateau about its design. Outside it a gang of about a dozen Stormtroopers was loitering, closing off that portion of the pavement, obliging pedestrians to step into the road and walk around the Führer’s six-wheeled Mercedes which was drawn up waiting for him. Across the street, no more than twenty yards away, a small crowd of curious spectators had gathered. So, he was in residence, Legat remembered thinking – and not only that: it looked as though he was about to leave.

He asked, ‘Which is his apartment?’

‘Second floor.’ She pointed. A balcony ran between two bays with French windows. It was solid, heavy masonry. ‘Sometimes he comes out to show himself to the crowd. Of course, this is the place where his niece was shot last year.’ As she delivered the last sentence she raised her voice slightly. A couple of people turned to look at her. ‘Well, they lived together, didn’t they? What do you think, Pauli? Geli Raubal – did she kill herself or was she bumped off because of the scandal?’ When Hartmann didn’t reply she said to Legat, ‘The poor kid was only twenty-three. Everyone knew her uncle was fucking her.’

A middle-aged woman standing nearby turned and glared at her. ‘You should shut your filthy mouth.’

Across the street, the Brownshirts were coming to attention, forming themselves into an honour guard between the door of the apartment building and the car. The crowd shuffled forwards. The door opened. Hitler appeared. He was wearing a dark blue double-breasted suit. (Later, Legat decided he must have been on his way to lunch.) Some of the onlookers cheered and clapped. Leyna cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled, ‘Niece-fucker!’

Hitler glanced over at the small throng. He must have heard – the Stormtroopers certainly had: their heads had all swung in their direction – but just to make sure, she repeated it. ‘You fucked your niece, you murderer!’ His face was expressionless. As he climbed into his car a couple of the SA men broke ranks and started coming towards her. They had short truncheons. Hartmann grabbed Leyna’s arm and pulled her after him. The woman who had told her to shut her filthy mouth tried to block their path. Legat pushed her out of the way. A man – a big fellow, her husband presumably – swung a punch and caught Legat just below the eye. The three of them ran out of the square and down a leafy residential road.

Hartmann and Leyna were in front. Legat could hear the boots of the Brownshirts thumping on the cobbles very close behind. His eye was stinging and already beginning to close. His lungs were searing as if they had been pumped full of liquid ice. He remembered feeling both terrified and entirely calm. When a side road appeared to the right, and Hartmann and Leyna ran straight past it, he swung down it, between big villas with front gardens, and presently he became aware that the Stormtroopers were no longer pursuing him. He was alone. He leaned on a small wooden gate to recover his breath, gasping and laughing. He felt almost ecstatically happy, as if he had taken a drug.

Later, when he got back to their hostel, he found Leyna sitting in the courtyard with her back to the wall. Her face was turned to the sun. She opened her eyes and scrambled to her feet as soon as she saw him and hugged him. How was he? He was fine: better than fine, actually. Where was Paul? She didn’t know – once the fascists had given up the chase and they were safe he had shouted at her and she had shouted back and then he had walked off. She inspected his eye and insisted on taking him upstairs to his bedroom. While he lay on the bed she soaked a hand towel in the basin and folded it into a compress. She sat on the mattress beside him and held it to his eye. Her hip was pressed against him. He could feel the hardness of her muscle beneath her flesh. He had never felt more alive. He reached his hand up behind her head and laced her hair between his fingers and pulled her face down to his and kissed her. She resisted for a moment, then kissed him back and swung astride him, unbuttoning her shirt.

Hartmann didn’t come back all that night. The next morning, Legat had left his share of the bill on the dresser and slipped away. Within an hour he was on the earliest train out of the city. And that had been the only great adventure in the carefully planned life of Hugh Alexander Legat, ex-Balliol College, Oxford, and Third Secretary in His Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, until this night.

They motored on in silence along the narrow country roads for the best part of an hour. It was colder now. Legat kept his hands in his coat pockets. He wondered about where he was being taken, what he should say when he arrived. To this day he had no idea whether Hartmann knew about his act of betrayal. He had always assumed he must have done: why else would he never have got in touch in all the years since? He had also written to Leyna – two letters full of love and remorse and pompous moral lectures; in retrospect he was glad they had both been returned unopened.

Finally, they turned off on to a long drive. The headlights picked out neatly trimmed grass verges and low iron railings. Ahead was the shape of a large house – a manor house, it would have been in England – with outbuildings. In a small round window beneath the eaves a solitary light was burning. They passed through an arched gateway and pulled up on a cobbled forecourt. Hartmann switched off the engine.

‘Wait here.’

Legat watched him walk towards the door. The front of the house was covered by ivy. In the moonlight he could now see that the upper windows were barred. He had a sudden presentiment of horror. Hartmann must have rung a bell. A minute later, a light went on above the door. It was opened from the inside – a cautious crack at first, and then wider, so that Legat could see a young woman in a nurse’s uniform. Hartmann said something to her, gestured to the car. She leaned around him to look. There was a discussion. Hartmann raised his hands a couple of times, making some point or other. At last she nodded. Hartmann touched her on the arm and beckoned to Legat to join them.

The hall smelled of overcooked food and disinfectant. Legat registered the details as he passed them: the carved Madonna above the door, the noticeboard covered in green baize and studded with pins but with no notices, the wheelchair at the bottom of the staircase, a pair of crutches beside it. He followed Hartmann and the nurse up to the first floor and a little way along a passage. The nurse had a large bunch of keys attached to her belt. She selected one, unlocked a door. They waited while she went inside. Legat looked at Hartmann, hoping for an explanation, but he wouldn’t meet his eye. The nurse reappeared. ‘She’s awake.’

It was a small room. The iron bedstead took up most of it. Her head was propped up on the pillow, a thick white nightgown buttoned to her throat. Legat would never have recognised her. Her hair was cut mannishly short, her face was much fatter, her skin waxy. But it was the lack of animation in her features, in her dark brown eyes especially, which rendered her a stranger. Hartmann went forward and took her hand and kissed her forehead. He whispered something to her. She gave no sign of having heard. He said, ‘Hugh, why don’t you come in and say hello?’

With an effort Legat walked to the side of the bed and took her other hand. It was plump, cool, unresponsive. ‘Hello, Leyna.’

Her head turned slightly. She looked up at him. For an instant her eyes narrowed a fraction and it seemed to him that perhaps something moved there. But afterwards he was fairly sure he had imagined it.

On the drive back to Munich Hartmann asked Legat to light him a cigarette. He lit it, placed it between Hartmann’s lips, then took one for himself. His hand was trembling. ‘Are you going to tell me what happened to her?’

Another silence. Eventually Hartmann said, ‘I can tell you as much as I know, which isn’t much – we split up after Munich, as you might expect, and I lost touch with her. She was too much for me. Apparently, she went back to Berlin and started working for the communists more seriously. They had a newspaper – Die Rote Fahn – she was part of that. After the Nazis came to power, they banned it, but it carried on publishing underground. As I understand it, she was caught in a raid in thirty-five and sent to Moringen, the women’s camp. She was married by then, to a fellow communist.’

‘What happened to her husband?’

‘Dead. Killed fighting in Spain.’ He said it flatly. ‘After that, they let her out. Of course, she went straight back to the comrades. They caught her again. Only this time they discovered she was Jewish and they were rougher – as you can see.’

Legat felt sick. He crushed the cigarette between his fingers and threw it out of the car.

‘Her mother got in touch with me. She lives not far from here. She’s a widow, used to be a teacher, no money. She’d heard I’d joined the Party, wanted to see if I could use my influence to get her proper treatment. I did what I could, but it was hopeless – her brain was much too badly damaged. All I could do was pay for the nursing home. It’s not a bad place. Because of my position, they’ve agreed to overlook the fact that she is a Jewess.’

‘That’s decent of you.’

‘“Decent”?’ Hartmann laughed and shook his head. ‘Hardly!’

They drove on for a while without speaking. Legat said, ‘They must have beaten her terribly.’

‘They said she fell out of a third-floor window. I’m sure she did. But not before they’d carved a Star of David into her back. Could I have another cigarette?’ Legat lit one for him. ‘This is the thing, Hugh. This is what we could never grasp in Oxford – because it’s beyond reason; it’s not rational.’ He waved the cigarette as he spoke, his right hand on the wheel, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. ‘This is what I have learned these past six years, as opposed to what is taught in Oxford: the power of unreason. Everyone said – by everyone I mean people like me – we all said, “Oh, he’s a terrible fellow, Hitler, but he’s not necessarily all bad. Look at his achievements. Put aside this awful medieval anti-Jew stuff: it will pass.” But the point is, it won’t pass. You can’t isolate it from the rest. It’s there in the mix. And if the anti-Semitism is evil, it’s all evil. Because if they’re capable of that, they’re capable of anything.’ He took his eyes off the road just long enough to look at Legat. His eyes were wet. ‘Do you see what I mean?’

‘Yes,’ said Legat, ‘I do see. I see now exactly what you mean.’

After that, they didn’t speak for half an hour.

It was starting to get light. There was traffic at last – a bus, a flatbed truck piled high with scrap metal. Along the railway track in the centre of the autobahn the first train of the morning was moving towards the city. They overtook it. Legat could see passengers reading newspapers announcing the agreement.

He said, ‘So what will you do?’

Hartmann was so absorbed in his thoughts he seemed at first not to have heard the question. ‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘Carry on, presumably. I imagine this is how it must feel to realise one has an incurable disease: one knows the end is coming, but even so one can’t do anything except keep on getting up each day. This morning, for example, I have to prepare a foreign press summary. I may well be required to present it to Hitler personally. I’m told he may have taken a shine to me! Can you believe it?’

‘It could be useful, couldn’t it – to your cause?’

‘Could it? This is my dilemma. Am I right to continue to work for the regime, in the hope that one day I can do some small thing to help sabotage it from within? Or should I simply blow my brains out?’

‘Come on, Paul! This is too melodramatic. The former, it has to be.’

‘Of course, what I really ought to do is blow his brains out. But everything I am prevents me, and besides, the one sure consequence would be a bloodbath – certainly all my family would be destroyed. So in the end one goes on in hope. What a terrible thing hope is! We would all be much better off without it. There is an Oxford paradox to end with.’ He had started checking the mirror again. ‘Now I should drop you a few hundred metres away from your hotel, if you don’t mind, in case Sturmbannführer Sauer is watching. Can you find your way from here? This is the opposite end of the botanical garden we talked in yesterday.’

He pulled up outside a grand official building – a law court, by the look of it, festooned with swastikas. At the far end of the street Legat could see the twin domed towers of the Frauenkirche. Hartmann said, ‘Farewell, my dear Hugh. All is good between us. Whatever happens we shall have the consolation of knowing that we tried.’

Legat climbed out of the Mercedes. He closed the door behind him and turned to say goodbye but it was too late. Hartmann was already moving off into the early-morning traffic.