The City of Shadows

15. Zoppot Pier

Stefan took the same tram through the suburbs of Danzig that Hannah had taken. He walked through the same gardens to the cathedral. It had been impossible to sleep. He had lain in the bedroom at the Danziger Hof, staring out of the window, waiting for the dawn. The idea that Hannah was in danger had become real in Ireland, but not as real as it was here. He knew a lot more about her now. He understood her sudden departure before Christmas. There had been a part of her she kept shut away; he had sensed that. He thought it had all been personal, but at least he knew it was about something else now. And for anyone who had grown up in Ireland in the last twenty years, none of it was so remarkable. When he was child, it was all around him. Guns were smuggled and money was collected and people were hidden in barns and attics. As a boy, while his father was still a policeman in Dublin, he could sense which of his friends’ fathers were Volunteers and Sinn Feiners and IRA men. David Gillespie tried hard to keep his family outside what was happening, but Stefan knew instinctively what it was good not to see and even better not to talk about. What Hannah Rosen was doing in Palestine didn’t feel so far away. But if he had thought Robert Briscoe was exaggerating the danger, to put pressure on him to help, he didn’t think so now. He knew Germany would feel very different from the place he’d visited as a child. He’d read enough after all. But it was much more. The hours at Tempelhof had unsettled him. There was danger, directionless perhaps, but there all around him, hanging in the air. And it was here too in Danzig. He felt its breath as Arthur Greiser welcomed him to the Free City.

A Mass was ending at the cathedral when he arrived. The sun was shining. There were people everywhere. Through the open doors of the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity and the Blessed Virgin he heard the organ. He recognised a Bach Chorale. His mother used to play it on the piano at Kilranelagh. ‘Es ist das Heil uns kommen her.’ It is salvation brings us here. He walked slowly through the crowd, taking his bearings. He had already decided that the less attention he drew to himself the better. It wouldn’t take him long to find the priest, but he would rely on his own resources; he wouldn’t walk in and leave his calling card. There was no question now; Hannah was missing. All he knew was that she had set off to find Father Francis Byrne at the cathedral in Oliva. That was where he had to start.

As he looked through the crowd towards the cathedral doors he was suddenly staring at someone he knew. He recognised him immediately. The face was thinner. There wasn’t the same sense of immaculate, careful dress. If anything he looked scruffy. But Stefan hadn’t forgotten the man who had smiled at him so contemptuously in the hallway of the house in Merrion Square. He hadn’t seen him since the day he arrested him, but the image was fixed in his head. It was Hugo Keller. And as he stared, he was aware that Keller would almost certainly recognise him. He stepped back into the shadow of a tree. People were standing in groups, talking. Keller seemed to be waiting for someone. The Austrian turned back towards the cathedral; a priest was coming out. And as the two men met, Stefan had no doubt who Keller had been waiting for. He had never seen the priest before, but he was there now; thirty-five perhaps, not very tall, with fair hair just starting to recede. Stefan couldn’t begin to explain what the abortionist was doing here with Father Francis Byrne, but he knew he needed to be careful. He knew Danzig was a place where anything that couldn’t be explained was probably dangerous.

The mass-goers were drifting away from the cathedral square. Keller and Byrne walked towards the gardens, deep in conversation. The priest was agitated. He didn’t speak loudly, but Stefan could feel he was holding his voice in check, along with his emotions. The two men were close to him now. He turned his back and walked in the opposite direction. Then he stopped abruptly and looked round, across the square and through the trees. They were heading for the park. There were other people going that way too, back to Oliva and Zoppot and the trams into the city. Stefan waited. Once the two men were in the park the trees would be thick enough to hide him. He would be able to follow them without being seen. He wouldn’t approach them together. He still needed to start with Father Byrne. As he watched their backs ahead of him he could see that they had stopped talking now. It was not a happy silence. They were both angry, but as the conversation resumed Stefan could tell that it was Hugo Keller who was controlling it.

The priest and the abortionist emerged on to the main road through Oliva. Stefan stayed back among the trees at the park gates. He watched them approach the tram stop. A Number 2 tram was pulling up, heading back into Danzig. He was unsure what to do. If he got on the tram Keller might see him. He stepped out on to the road uncertainly. He might have to risk it. At the tram stop Byrne took an envelope from his pocket. He thrust it furiously into Keller’s hand, then spun round and walked rapidly away towards Zoppot. Keller watched him go, a satisfied smile on his face. He put the envelope in his pocket. And as the doors of the tram opened he got on.

Stefan didn’t want to lose Keller after all this. He knew the Austrian’s presence here was no coincidence, but he had to follow one or the other. And it still had to be the priest. It was the priest Hannah had come to see. He was the one who had sent Susan Field to Merrion Square. And he would know where to find Hugo Keller again, that was obvious. Stefan let the tram pull away, then crossed over behind it and followed Byrne. The priest was still agitated, maybe even more agitated now. He was walking fast, but there was no purpose in it. There was something about the way he moved that told Stefan he wasn’t going anywhere in particular, however fast he might be moving. He was just walking because he didn’t want to stand still.

It was a long walk too. The pace slowed a little but the priest kept going, as if the only thing in his mind was keeping his back to the cathedral. Eventually they were walking down a steep hill towards the seafront at Zoppot, towards the spa buildings and the cafes and the hotels. It was only when he reached the sea that Francis Byrne stopped, quite suddenly, because there was no further to go. A railing separated the promenade from the beach, and beyond that there was only the Bay of Danzig and the Baltic Sea.

Trying to get his bearings, Stefan focused on the high red roofs of the Hotel Casino, the biggest building along the busy promenade; it was directly behind the priest. He recognised it from the brochure he had picked up in his room at the Danziger Hof. It was where Arthur Greiser had recommended he went when the artistic treasures of Danzig palled. ‘Afternoon tea-dances, roulette and baccarat; the largest and most elegant hotel in Eastern Europe. Have you ever sat on a bar stool and watched the sun rise over the sea? You can enjoy such a spectacle in the Casino Bar, the prettiest cocktail bar in Europe.’ Stefan couldn’t imagine many hotel guests sitting in the bar all night waiting for the sun to rise, but the Senate President would probably have been up for it. All around there were holidaymakers now, cheerfully braving the cold wind that blew in off the sea. It had been warm in the sheltered cathedral square, but on the front the wind still bit hard in April.

Francis Byrne stood for a moment, gazing down at the sweep of white sand and grey water. Immediately below him a group of children, laughing and squabbling, were building a sandcastle. He turned away and continued along the promenade to the wide wooden pier that stretched out into the calm Baltic waters. It wasn’t so busy here. Couples walked slowly, arm in arm; children ran; old men stood at regular intervals with fishing rods. The priest stopped to light a cigarette. Stefan was close to him now. Francis Byrne’s hands were shaking as he cupped them round a match; twice a match went out. Stefan watched. Agitation was good. People talked when they were agitated and they didn’t think about what they were saying. Stefan took the lighter from his pocket and held it up to Byrne’s face, blocking the sea breeze with his back so that the priest could finally light the cigarette.

‘Vielen Dank.’

‘I didn’t expect to find Keller here, Father,’ Stefan replied in English.

The priest stiffened, his hands stayed cupped to his face.

‘This is one of the longest piers in Europe, seven hundred yards. Sea air, sea views, and the end of the pier is highly recommended for its lack of dust. The brochure says the only thing there isn’t is monotony. Let’s see.’

The priest still didn’t move.

‘Will we take a constitutional, Father? I think so.’

Francis Byrne did as he was told. They started to walk slowly along the pier.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘Detective Sergeant Gillespie. I’m a Garda officer.’ Byrne didn’t respond. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you since last year, about Susan Field’s death. You’ll remember you wrote a letter to my inspector, to say you didn’t know Susan very well, and how sorry you were to hear she’d died. I had a lot more questions at the time, but they were never asked. You did say you’d never heard of Hugo Keller. You know him now though.’

‘Are you with Hannah?’ The hand holding the cigarette was shaking.

It was Stefan’s turn not to respond. He didn’t need to.

‘I told her what I could,’ said the priest quietly, looking out to sea.

Even in those uncertain, fearful words Stefan knew that whatever Francis Byrne had told Hannah Rosen, it was not the truth, certainly not all of it, but none of that mattered.

‘Do you know where Hannah is, Father?’

The priest was too preoccupied with himself to hear the question.

‘I wanted to tell her everything. I tried to. I can’t lie any more!’

He stopped and turned to face Stefan. There was a plea for help in his eyes, and they were growing wet with tears. Getting someone to confess was usually the hard part for Stefan, yet it looked like getting Byrne to stop was going to be the problem now. It was what had happened yesterday and the day before that Stefan needed to know about, not the past; but Hannah had broken the lock on the cupboard where Francis Byrne kept his secrets and Stefan’s arrival had just kicked the door open. However hard he tried to bring the priest back to Hannah and Danzig, it was the past that was pouring out now.

It was fast and confused. He told Stefan he hadn’t gone to Merrion Square with Susan that day. It was only when something went wrong that Keller had phoned him and told him he had to come. It was serious. She was bleeding badly; she was barely conscious. She was asking for him. Someone had to take her to hospital. There was a car. The driver said he was a guard. They only had to drive across the square to Holles Street but the guard drove to the Convent of the Good Shepherd instead. The Mother Superior took one look at Susan and said she couldn’t help. They needed to get her to a proper hospital. The Coombe was nearest, but on the way the guard stopped the car. Susan wasn’t moving. It was too late. She was dead. The guard told him to go home. No one could help her. The only thing he could do was pray for her. And he had done what the guard said. He left her there. As Father Byrne closed his eyes, his lips moved silently. He was praying, for himself. Stefan didn’t need divine guidance to know who the unknown guard was: Jimmy Lynch.

As Father Byrne spoke, staring out at the Baltic Sea, Stefan simply listened. He knew he wouldn’t get any more out of him till this was over. The priest hadn’t looked at Stefan as he told the story; only once, at the end, did he turn and hold the detective’s gaze, shaking his head, somehow still in disbelief. Then he turned back to stare silently at the grey sea. Stefan had the feeling he was wondering if he couldn’t find an answer and an end to it all out there. He doubted Byrne had the guts for that, but he didn’t much care if he had or not. There was more self-pity in Francis Byrne than Stefan had the stomach for. He had been on Kilmashogue when the earth spewed up Susan Field’s body. That was something to feel pity for. All this was a waste of time. He grabbed the priest’s arm and pulled him back round again, hard.

‘Where did Hannah go?’ Stefan demanded.

Byrne looked at him blankly.

‘When she left you, where did she go?’

‘I … I don’t know.’

‘The police were looking for her. Why?’

‘I don’t know anything about the police. Why would I?’

There was a brief hesitation. It didn’t sit with all that gushing truth.

‘Who did you speak to?’

‘She came here, and we talked, and she went away. That’s all.’

‘What were you saying to Hugo Keller this morning?’

‘Nothing. Nothing that concerns Hannah or you.’

The defences were going up again, but Stefan already knew that when Hannah left him the priest had contacted Keller. It wouldn’t have been difficult to find where she was staying, and the first thing the police would have discovered was that the name Hugo Keller had given them wasn’t the one on the Danziger Hof register, or on her passport. She was supposed to be Mrs Anna Harvey, not Hannah Rosen.

‘You’re still lying, Father. You told him she was in Danzig.’

‘All right. I panicked. I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said not to worry. It didn’t matter. He said he’d sort it out.’

‘With a little bit of help from the Gestapo.’

‘No, of course not. He said she wasn’t important.’

‘But you’re important, aren’t you? Important to Keller. I don’t know why exactly, but I do know what his speciality is. He’s blackmailing you.’

Byrne didn’t answer, but the answer was in his eyes.

‘It wouldn’t be so hard would it, not with your track record? An affair, an abortion, a dead woman. It’s not going to get you a job in the Curia.’

There was grim silence now. Perhaps the hold Hugo Keller had over the priest was stronger than the fear inside, stronger than guilt, stronger than what, once, he felt for Susan Field. But Stefan had to push. He had to know what he was dealing with.

‘Would you know what a captive bolt pistol is, Father?’

It felt like the words barely registered; they meant nothing.

‘They use it to stun animals, before they slaughter them.’

The priest looked puzzled. Stefan watched his face.

‘Susan Field took a bolt in the head from one before she was buried.’

If anything Byrne had said was real, so was his disbelief.

‘But she was dead! The guard said she was dead!’

‘I’d say the guard who drove the car from Merrion Square that night was a man called Jimmy Lynch, Father. He’s a guard all right, a detective sergeant. He was taking backhanders from your friend Keller. But I don’t think he’d have killed Susan Field without Hugo’s say so. That’s the man you handed Hannah Rosen to, to sort things out. Now no one’s seen her since.’

A day earlier, around the time Stefan Gillespie was boarding the midday Deutsche Luft Hansa flight from Croydon to Berlin, Hannah Rosen was standing in the library of a big apartment in the Danzig suburb of Langfuhr. Through the window most of the view was taken up by a large building of red brick and stone with a highly decorated, crenellated frontage that echoed the Hanseatic houses of the old town. It was the city’s university, the Technische Hochschule. Behind it were the wooded hills she had seen from the tram on her way to Oliva. Half an hour earlier the men who had pulled her into a car in front of the Danziger Hof had unlocked the door of the small bedroom that had been her cell. They led her through the apartment to a library. It was empty. They left her there with a cup of coffee and a roll.

That morning she had heard the sound of shouting and cheering outside, even in the locked room. Now she watched through the library window. The ever-present swastikas hung along the front of the university building; hundreds of students stood in front of it with flags and banners. Somewhere a man was speaking, but she could make out none of the words, only the ebb and flow of roaring and chanting from the crowd. She felt their wild enthusiasm. They were laughing and applauding. Without the flags, and with the words unheard, they seemed almost like people she knew. They looked like people she knew. She turned round, startled, as the door opened.

A man entered. He wasn’t one of the people who had snatched her off the street. They were around her own age, not much older than the students outside. This man was in his sixties. He looked at her hard. His face was stern, but there was nothing about him that felt threatening to her.

‘Why am I here?’

She spoke in German. He replied in English.

‘Just be glad you are. There are worse places to be.’

‘What do you want?’

‘They were waiting for you, at the hotel.’

‘Who was?’

‘The Gestapo, Fraulein Rosen, Frau Harvey. I don’t suppose you knew we had the luxury of our own Gestapo here in the Free City, did you?’

She said nothing. He was right. There was a lot she hadn’t known.

‘My information is that when your room was searched, they found two passports. One Irish, in the name you registered in at the hotel. The police believe that’s false. The other issued by the British Mandate in Palestine.’

‘I could be of no interest to the Gestapo,’ she said defensively.

‘Nevertheless, they are interested. That’s all that matters.’

A great roar erupted again beyond the window. The old man walked past her. He stood looking out at the rally. It was coming to an end now.

‘When I was a student, we protested about the books they wouldn’t let us read. That was our passion, freedom. Now my students pull books out of the university library to burn. That’s their passion, hatred.’ He turned back into the room. The noise outside had suddenly stilled. The rally was over.

‘You will stay here today, Fraulein. Tomorrow Leon and Johannes will go up into the hills with you. The borders are policed very aggressively at the moment, but they’ll take you across into Poland through the forests. Leon will get you to the train that runs from Gdynia to Bromberg, that’s Bydgoszcz now, in Poland. You can get to Warsaw from there without re-entering Danzig. You have a ticket to Trieste, via Warsaw and Vienna. You’ll have a week or so in Trieste before your boat leaves for Palestine. It’s pleasant at this time of year. A lot pleasanter than our Free City anyway.’

‘You’re very well-informed.’

‘And you’re very lucky. You were very stupid to come here.’

‘I had a reason to come.’ The words didn’t convince her the way they would have done two days earlier. They didn’t convince the old man either.

‘There are a few decent men left inside the Schutzpolizei. When they can, they pass on information, especially about people the Nazis want to pick up. Perhaps you can imagine the risk someone would take doing that.’

Hannah nodded. She knew people had taken risks for her.

‘We heard about you by chance. The Gestapo put a call out for you. Some kind of passport irregularity. No one knew who you were, but the information came to a friend of mine. And as this irregularity involved a passport issued in Palestine he contacted me. I didn’t know who you were either, but it felt like you and the Gestapo might not get on very well.’

‘They had no reason to know who I was.’

‘Well, somebody knew you were Fraulein Rosen, not Frau Harvey. Somebody knew something. Who have you been speaking to in Danzig?’

‘The only person I’ve talked to is a priest, an Irish priest in Oliva.’

‘You came here to see a priest?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because nobody else would do it.’

‘It must have been very important in that case.’

‘My best friend was killed. He was one of the last people to see her alive. I think that’s important. But I’m about the only person who does.’

‘That all sounds very worthy. And you think you’ve got the right to put other people’s lives at risk because of your very important personal life, do you? All sorts of people, all over the place, now here in Danzig as well.’

‘This has got nothing to do with anybody else.’

‘You don’t think so?’ He shook his head. ‘I had to find out who you were. I did, this morning. A Jew with a British Mandate passport and a ticket from Trieste to Haifa? I telephoned the Jewish Agency in Trieste. Not an easy conversation, given the Danzig exchange’s propensity for listening in to overseas calls, but with a lot of guesswork and a little Hebrew to hide what I was saying, I got there. You’re working for the Haganah. Whatever you’ve been doing in Europe, I don’t doubt you’ve met dozens of people. All names the Nazis would like to have. Don’t think they wouldn’t ship you off to Berlin if they believed you had anything useful to tell them. Nobody in the world would even realise, because nobody knows you’re here, isn’t that right? Your friends in Trieste are pretty pissed off with you, Hannah.’

‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t even going to be here two days.’

‘I don’t know what you did to draw attention to yourself, but the sooner you’re out of Danzig the better, for your sake and everyone else’s. I’m not a Zionist myself. Fighting fascism here in Europe is more important than making the desert bloom. It’s a disease. You can’t run away from it.’

‘It’s not about running away.’

‘No, probably not. I used to believe that. There are a lot of things I’m not sure about any more. I’m an old man who didn’t expect to spend his old age gazing into the darkness I thought we’d left behind a long time ago.’ He looked at her and smiled more warmly; his irritation had gone. ‘I’m sorry about your friend. But that’s the way the world is now. I’ve got friends who didn’t die a natural death too. Before long we’ll all have friends like that.’

‘Doesn’t that matter?’

‘Of course it matters, but the personal life doesn’t. Not now. No one has a personal life any more. That’s gone. All we have is our survival.’ He touched her arm. ‘Good luck, Hannah,’ he said softly; then he walked out.

She stood in the room, alone again. She felt all the more alone because of those last, bleak words. She walked slowly back to the window. The students had gone. The swastikas still flew on the front of the Technische Hochschule. Behind it the dark hills rose up. That was where she had to go tomorrow. The man was right. She shouldn’t have come to Danzig. But though she understood what he said, she refused to believe it — it was the personal that mattered most of all now, now more than anything else.

*

Stefan sat in the bar at the Danziger Hof with a beer that he thought might help. It didn’t. He knew he’d got most of the truth out of Francis Byrne, except for one thing. Whatever was going on between the priest and Hugo Keller wasn’t about Hannah Rosen, or Susan Field, even if Susan Field’s death was what gave the abortionist the leverage to blackmail him. Father Byrne mattered, that was very clear; he mattered a lot. He was an important asset, and whatever he was doing for Keller, Hannah had been a threat. If she had been arrested it was because the abortionist was protecting his asset. Stefan sensed that he stood on the edge of something darker than he understood. He had seen the fear in Francis Byrne’s eyes. But he didn’t really care what it was about; the two men deserved each other. All he cared about was that he wasn’t finding Hannah. Hugo Keller had to be his next stop.

He had forced Keller’s address in Langfuhr out of Francis Byrne at the end, but this would be a very different proposition from a guilt-ridden priest. Keller would be doing what he did, buying and selling information. He would have connections, and if Dublin was any measure he would have connections with the police. Stefan knew he might have to push the Austrian hard. Keller would have to believe he would suffer serious physical damage unless he told him what he knew about Hannah’s whereabouts. He would probably have to hurt him. But he couldn’t take it too far. If she had been arrested he might need Keller’s help. Instincts he trusted told him the abortionist would respond to two things: real pain and real money. Stefan had to get the balance right. He had some money; more could be wired from Adam Rosen. The only other route was the diplomatic fuss Robert Briscoe could get out of the Irish government. Keller wouldn’t like the threat of the public eye on him, neither would the Danzig police. But he had to find her before anything else could happen. And the darkness he had sensed in Francis Byrne was gnawing at him. As he drained his glass and got up, he realised it was already too late to call on Keller. Two men were approaching across the bar. In the doorway the hotel manager looked on with a smile of sour satisfaction. One of the men was a uniformed Schutzpolizei. The other sweated in a belted leather coat that was too big for him. Stefan could already identify the Danzig Gestapo.