The Other Side of Silence

FIFTEEN

I always loved Königsberg. The capital of East Prussia, it was a beautiful old city and, in many ways, very like Berlin. My mother was from Königsberg, and when I was a child, we used to go there to visit her parents, who ran a Viennese-style café and confectionery near the Kaiser Bridge, and occasionally, to take a beach holiday at the nearby seaside town of Cranz. But most of all I remember the Königsberger Zoo in the Tiergarten, which was one of the best in Europe and I can still recall, aged four, riding on the back of the elephant and seeing the bears. The bear pit at the zoo was even bigger and better than the one in Berlin. My grandfather owned a Mercedes-Benz—one of the first cars in Königsberg—and, to me, riding in the back of that car was almost as good as riding on the back of the elephant. Until they lost everything in the inflation of 1923 my grandparents were reasonably well off, I think. My grandmother was a good woman, always helping other people. There was a Jewish convalescent home in Luisenthal where she often took unsold cakes from the café and I used to wonder why it should have been this place that should receive her charity. Now I know why; she was herself half-Jewish. Much later, in 1919, my first wife and I went there on our honeymoon and we stayed in my grandparents’ villa on the Upper Pond, which seemed to us like the last word in gracious living. We must have visited every attraction the city had to offer, including the Amber Museum—Königsberg is famous for its German gold, as amber is sometimes called—the Prussia Museum, and the zoo, of course, but mostly we just sat in the front garden and stared out at the pond. It was a very happy time for me. The war was over and I was still alive, with all my limbs intact, and in love. My wife adored the place and for a while we even thought about living there. In retrospect, I wish we had. Maybe she would have been spared the influenza that killed her not long afterward. The flu wasn’t as bad in Königsberg as in Berlin. Fewer people to spread it, probably; there were only three hundred thousand people living there in the twenties, as opposed to the four million in Berlin.

My being sent to Königsberg in 1944 was supposed to be a punishment and feel like an exile from Berlin, but to me it felt like I was almost going home, especially as, until that summer, the city and most of East Prussia had been largely untouched by the war. As things turned out it was perhaps fortunate I was away from Berlin and out of anyone’s mind when Count von Stauffenberg made his failed attempt at a coup in July 1944, otherwise I might have been swept up in the wave of executions that followed. More than a hundred kilometers to the southeast of Königsberg, Hitler came on German radio and announced he was alive, and if anyone was there to witness a demonstration of loyalty and affection—but only if they were—people breathed a great sigh of relief.

I was a lowly lieutenant, an officer attached to the 132nd Infantry Division and the FHO—the branch of German military intelligence responsible for the Eastern Front—and it was my job to help make meaningful assessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions, and communicate these with the army commanders on Paradeplatz. Those assessments were very simple: The Red Army was poised to annihilate us.

As an officer I was entitled to a room at the Park Hotel, on Huntertragheim Street and close to the Lower Pond. Built in 1929, the Park was the last word in modern luxury; at least it was until almost two hundred RAF Lancaster bombers turned up on two consecutive nights at the end of August 1944 and bombed the city to bits. Almost every building to the south of Adolf-Hitler-Platz, including the famous castle and the cathedral where Kant was buried, were destroyed or damaged. Thirty-five hundred people were killed and tens of thousands made homeless—a foretaste of the terrible fate that was soon to befall Berlin. The upper floors of the Park Hotel and many of the men living on them disappeared in fire and smoke, but the second floor I lived on was spared and somehow the restaurant next door survived, too, which was just as well as it was one of the few places where German officers were allowed to take girls from the women’s auxiliary services who, even in 1944, were sometimes strictly chaperoned.

There was one girl in particular, Irmela Schaper, a signals officer with the German naval auxiliary, of whom I was very fond. I had recently remarried, but that didn’t make much difference to either Irmela or me since the city was more or less encircled by the Red Army and it was obvious to both of us that we were probably going to be killed. Irmela was a local girl. Her father worked for Raiffeisen Bank on Sträsemanstrasse not very far away from naval headquarters in the old seaport. I worked in the basement of what had been the post office close to Paradeplatz and we first met in a tobacconist’s on Steindamm a short way north of there. We’d both heard that the cigarette ration had arrived in the city and went there simultaneously, only I got there first and bought the last packet. Not that these were much of a smoke, just a roll of cardboard and a few centimeters of inferior tobacco. It’s hard to credit what we used to smoke back then. Anyway, she looked very smart in her double-breasted naval uniform, blond and buxom, which is just the way I like them, and as soon as I saw her I offered to share this last packet with her. I’m telling you all this because Irmela is the key to the whole story of what happened with Harold Heinz Hebel, or Captain Harold Hennig as he then called himself. But you’ll have to let me tell this story in my own way; I’m not a professional like you, Mr. Maugham; you’d probably tell me to start more fashionably in the middle instead of at the beginning. Well, maybe I can still do that.

“Ten each,” I said to her, filling my cigarette case and then handing her the packet.

“That’s very gallant of you,” she said, and let me light one for her. She smoked it like a schoolgirl, hardly sucking the stuff in at all, and it made me smile, a little, but not so much that she might have thought I was laughing at her; that would have been impolite and foolish. Most women like to believe they’re sophisticated, even when you’re pleased that they’re not.

“Don’t be fooled. My armor is all rusted up and we had to eat my trusty white steed before he starved. If I tried to bow I’d probably fall flat on my face. Since the RAF left town my sense of balance isn’t so good. My ears still feel like there’s a brass band just around the corner.”

“You mean there isn’t? These days I don’t hear so well myself. In fact, I may never sleep through a thunderstorm again without thinking Thor is an English bomb aimer in a Lancaster.”

“As far as I’m concerned, ‘sleep’ is just a nice word in a fairy story. I’d like to believe in it, but experience and the Ivans have taught me different.”

“Maybe we should get together for a drink one night and see who yawns first.”

“It won’t be me. I’m wide awake. You’re the most interesting thing that’s happened to me since I arrived from Berlin.”

“Don’t you like Königsberg?”

“As a matter of fact, I love it.”

“It’s my hometown. I used to live here.”

“And now?”

“You call this living?”

“It’s better than the alternative, perhaps. Well, now I know it’s your hometown I love it even more.”

“It was a nice place to live before the English decided to redecorate it.”

“Let’s not think about that now. What do you say we get a boat and you let me row you around Castle Pond?”

“Why would you want to do something so arduous on a warm day like this?”

“I don’t particularly, but I can hardly offer to show you around your own hometown.”

“Why not? Frankly, your guess about where anything is now is as good as mine. Yesterday I went for a walk along Copernicus Strasse before I realized it was Richard-Wagner-Strasse. I feel like a stranger here myself.”

“It doesn’t matter. The streets are all going to have Russian names soon. This time next year Richard-Wagner-Strasse will probably be Tchaikovsky Prospekt, or Borodin Street.”

“That’s a pleasant thought.”

“Sorry. I’m an intelligence officer, but sometimes you really wouldn’t think it.”

“I think it’s best to know the worst that can happen.”

“That seems to be my job description.”

“We could talk about it over dinner.”

“That’s the most pleasant thought I’ve heard in a long time. Where would you like to go? The safest place for dinner used to be the Blutgericht in the Castle courtyard basement.”

“I know. Until they bombed it.”

“Which leaves the Park Hotel.”

“There’s another place I know near the zoo on Erich-Koch-Platz.”

I shook my head. “It can’t be the Stadtkeller. That’s closed, too.”

“No, this is somewhere else.”

“Not the naval nunnery.”

Nunneries were what we called the dormitories where most of the women’s auxiliary services were housed.

“No, but it’s somewhere quiet, candlelit, with just the one exclusive table. Mine.”

“I like the place already.”

“After the bombing my parents left their apartment and went to live at their country house in Pillau. I stayed on. The auxiliary service commander thinks they’re still living there.”

“Which means that you don’t have to keep the service women’s curfew.”

“Exactly.”

“Nice.”

“So. You’re invited for dinner. It’s canned stuff, mostly. But my father did have quite a decent selection of Mosels.”

“Suddenly I seem to have quite an appetite.”

“Shall we say eight o’clock?”

I glanced at my watch. “That’s going to be the longest five hours of my life. What am I going to do with myself until then?”

“So go row a boat.”

And that was it. I went to her parents’ apartment in Hammerweg Strasse for dinner. She cooked me a meal, I drank a couple of bottles of nice cold Mosel, and within a couple hours of me arriving there, we were lovers. That’s how things were in those days. Implausibly fast. Uncomplicated. Nobody mentioned love or marriage or consequences. Nobody thought about the future because nobody thought they had a future. Really, you can’t beat how easy life can be when you think there isn’t going to be a tomorrow. Weeks passed like this and together, as winter arrived, we celebrated what we assumed might be our last few months on earth.

Irmela was tall and athletic. She was also highly intelligent, which was why she was working as a lightning maid in the naval signals section. She had to be intelligent to encrypt all communications using a special four-rotor code machine called the Scherbius Enigma before sending them. Before the war, she’d studied mathematics at Albertina University on Paradeplatz. The university was destroyed, like almost everything else in Königsberg, and while many people, including me, still took the risk of going into the remains of the university library in search of books—Gräfe und Unzer, the largest bookstore in Europe and opposite the university, had been completely consumed by flames after a napalm bomb fell through the glass roof—General Lasch, the military commander of Hitler’s northern army, had his army headquarters in a bunker deep under the ruins. For several weeks I was just happy to see a lot of Irmela, who was an enthusiastic and noisy on-the-top kind of lover with considerable experience of men, which I came to appreciate. She knew I was married and didn’t want anything from me except my company and my jokes, which in those days were a lot better than they are now. Experience has taught me that it’s better to be serious, and I should know; I’ve tried and failed to be serious on thousands of occasions.

After the British bombing, the Russians halted their attack on the city for the winter and regrouped. Somehow the Alhambra movie theater on Hufenallee managed to keep going despite having been hit by a bomb, and while plays were no longer performed we often went there to see a movie, even though that always meant having to sit through newsreels telling us how well the war was going for Germany, and how victory would be ours in the end. Sometimes, after the film, Irmela would ask me if things were really as good as the Ministry of Truth and Propaganda described, which was a safe and secure way of asking if they were as bad as everyone said they were. Mostly I said that reports of mass rape and atrocities that stemmed from East Prussian towns nearer the Russian front were always exaggerated. But she knew I was lying and not because she thought that I believed in the final victory; she knew I was trying not to scare her, that’s all. And one day toward the end of October 1944, she confronted my lies and evasions head on. Of course, she’d read some of the signals traffic about a place called Nemmersdorf, which was about a hundred kilometers east of Königsberg; she also knew that I’d been there to report on the situation for the FHO. We were in bed at her parents’ place in Hammerweg Strasse at the time, and had just finished a particularly noisy bout of lovemaking.

“Christ,” I said, “I hope the neighbors don’t complain. Anyone would think I was raping you, or something.”

That was the only time she hit me.

“Don’t make jokes about that kind of thing,” she said gravely. “I don’t know a single girl in the auxiliary service who isn’t petrified about what’s going to happen when the Ivans turn up. You hear things. Bad things. Terrible things. We’re all terrified.”

“It’s not as bad as people say.”

“Liar,” she said. “Liar. Look, Bernie, neither of us is a Nazi. The Gestapo aren’t listening. Just for once don’t spare my feelings. I know you’re trying to stop me from worrying, but I also know you were somewhere near Nemmersdorf. Your name is on the report. You don’t have to give me the details, only please tell me if anything of what I’ve heard about that place is true or not. If the Ivans really are as monstrous as people say they are. Or if the whole thing really is meant to deter us from surrendering. Which is the other rumor, of course. That the Ministry of Truth is trying to scare us out of surrender.”

I lit a cigarette and helped myself to some of her father’s brandy.

“Please,” she said. “I need to know. Every woman in Königsberg wants to know what to expect. Particularly the women in the auxiliary services. You see, none of us in the auxiliary is particularly sure of our status as noncombatants. We’re in uniform and are obliged to obey military orders but forbidden to use weapons and we’re subject to civilian law. So where does that leave us? Will we be treated like civilians or prisoners of war? And will it matter a damn which is which when the Russians turn up? I don’t mind dying. But I’d rather not be gang-raped before I die.”

I didn’t speak. How could I tell her what I knew? The things I’d heard from the few survivors of Nemmersdorf beggared description.

“Please, Bernie. Look, the word is that there were seventy-two women and girls in Nemmersdorf aged between eight and eighty-four. And that all of them were raped.”

I nodded. “As a matter of fact, it’s worse. Much worse than anything you’ve heard.”

“How is that possible?”

“Raped, mutilated, and murdered.” I paused. “All of them. Women crucified. Breasts cut off. Violated with vodka bottles. Your worst nightmare. What happened at Schulzenwalde was worse. There were ninety-five at Schulzenwalde. Dr. Goebbels is already organizing a team of Swiss and Swedish reporters and observers to go and see the place for themselves so he can tell the world’s press that this is what Germany has been fighting against all along. Frankly, I think you can expect the newsreels to start getting worse from now on. They’ll be telling the truth, in other words. As you say, their intention is now to deter us from surrendering. As if fighting on to the last is really going to make any damn difference.”

“Why are the Russians doing this? I thought there were supposed to be rules on how you treat people in war.”

“There are. It’s just that we’ve treated Soviet POWs and Jews so very badly that we can expect no better treatment ourselves. There’s a concentration camp to the west of here called Stutthof where more than a hundred thousand people—mostly Poles—are currently imprisoned. But we’ve been starving and murdering Jews there for a year.”

Irmela nodded. “Which would fit with what we’ve heard in the signals. Naval captains have been complaining to their superiors here and in Danzig. Ships from the German navy have been used by the SS to take Jews to Stutthof from a camp called Klooga in Estonia. Apparently those prisoners were in a pretty bad way.”

“Look,” I said, “I think there’s every chance we’ll get all of the women and children out of Königsberg before the Red Army finally gets here. But before that happens, things in this city are going to get an awful lot worse.”

One night, we were going to the Spätenbrau Restaurant on Kneiphöfsche Langgasse, near Cathedral Island. But en route we went to see the ruins of the cathedral and Immanuel Kant’s grave, which was largely undamaged, mostly to give ourselves an appetite for life. Irmela knew a lot about Kant but was always kind enough not to tell me too much at once since I was an intelligence officer more by default than by aptitude. What I knew about Kant you could write on a spinning gas nebula. The cathedral itself was like a huge, empty skull found in the embers of a fire after some medieval execution. It was hard to know exactly what the RAF had been aiming their bombs at, since the nearest military target was more than a kilometer away. Or was it that they figured the only way to beat Germany was to be as bad as Germany? If so, then it certainly looked as if they had a good chance of winning.

“I always thought I’d get married in here,” said Irmela as we wandered hand in hand around the ruins.

“Anyone in particular?”

“There was someone, but he was killed at Stalingrad.”

“One of the lucky ones, probably.”

“You think so?”

“We won’t see most of those boys again. From what we know in the FHO, they’re most of them working in Soviet slave-labor camps. If you ask me, your boyfriend was spared.” I nodded. “So, let’s you and I get married instead. In here. Right now. Come on. Why not?”

“Well, for one thing, you’re already married,” she said, “in case you’d forgotten.”

“What’s that got to do with anything? Besides, my wife is back in Berlin and I’ll probably never see her again. Oh, and there’s this for good measure: You say you love me and I certainly love you and I just happen to have a ring on my finger that will do for a ceremony until I can buy another. Besides, you’ll probably be a widow before very long. And the blasphemy and bigamy certainly doesn’t matter either since I’m going to hell already. If it makes you feel any better I’ll take full responsibility for this when I get down there. I’ll say, ‘Look, it wasn’t Irmela’s fault, I persuaded her.’”

“You promise?”

“I can include that in the vows we make, if you like.”

“We don’t even have a priest.”

“Who needs a priest in a Lutheran cathedral? I thought that was the whole idea of the German Reformation. To abolish priestly intercession. Besides, I can remember all the damn words. I’ve been married enough times already to know them by heart.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Under the circumstances I can’t honestly see that God will mind very much. Frankly, I think he’ll be glad that anyone can be in a ruin like this and still believe that the idea of God is even possible.”

“I think he’s possible, just not very likely,” she said. “There were a hundred children killed in this cathedral when they took shelter from those RAF bombs. As a way of confirming that God doesn’t exist it probably beats Nietzsche, don’t you think?”

“In which case this will be like a second chance for him. For God, yes. A good way for him to get started in this city again. A chance to make it up to us. To show us that he really means something. You know, I’ll bet we’ll be the first people to get married in this church since that happened.”

“You’re mad, do you know that?” But she was smiling. “Why do you want to do this?”

“Because words matter, don’t they? Most of the time I don’t say what I mean just to keep from being arrested by the Gestapo. For once I’d like to say something that’s actually important and mean it.”

She nodded.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

We were still celebrating our mock marriage—to be honest, it had seemed a lot more than a mock marriage at the time—with a horsemeat dinner in the Spätenbrau Restaurant when the devil put in an early appearance, as might have been expected after our lighthearted blasphemy. An unexpected bottle of extremely good Riesling arrived at our table, followed closely by its handsome donor, an SD captain whom, for a moment—it had been six years—I only half-remembered. But he remembered me, all right. Blackmailers need to have good memories. It was Harold Hennig, and to my irritation, he greeted me as if we’d been old friends.

“Berlin, wasn’t it?” he said. “January, thirty-eight.”

I stood up; he was a captain, after all, and I a mere lieutenant and it was a few moments before I connected him with the von Frisch case.

“Yes. It was. Gunther. FHO.”

“Harold Hennig,” he said, and clicked his heels as he bowed politely at Irmela. “Well, Gunther, aren’t you going to introduce me to this charming young lady?”

“This is Over Auxiliary—?” I was never quite sure of her non-military rank in the women’s auxiliary and glanced at Irmela, who nodded back that I’d got this right. “Miss Irmela Schaper.”

“May I join you both?”

“Yes.”

“You look as if you’re celebrating something,” he observed.

“We’re alive,” I said. “That’s always a cause for celebration these days.”

“True.” Captain Hennig sat down and took out an elegant, amber cigarette case, which he opened in front of us to reveal a perfectly paraded battalion of good cigarettes and then offered them around the table. “True. Where there’s life, there’s hope, eh?”

Irmela took one of his cigarettes and studied it like an interesting curio, and then sniffed the tobacco appreciatively. “I don’t know if I should smoke this or keep it as a souvenir.”

“Smoke it,” he said, “and take another one for later.”

So she did.

“Is this what the Gestapo is smoking these days?” I said, savoring the taste of a real nail. “Things must be better than I thought.”

“Oh, I’m not with the Gestapo anymore,” he said. “Not since the beginning of the war. I work for the Erich Koch Institute now.”

“On the corner of Tragheimer and Gartenstrasse,” said Irmela. “I know that building.”

“Since the bombing we’re rather more often found in Friedrichsberg.”

“That must be nice,” I said. “And a lot safer, too, I’d have thought.”

Erich Koch was the Nazi Party gauleiter of East Prussia, and his huge country estate at Friedrichsberg, just outside the city, was the center of his commercial exploitation of the province, which, by all accounts, was completely unscrupulous. But his authority was absolute and General Lasch was obliged to give way to Koch’s imperious demands. Even now the Erich Koch Institute in the city’s Tragheim district was being remodeled—to a princely standard, it was bruited; while, at Koch’s orders, a large number of civilian workers was soon to be put to work building an airplane runway on Paradeplatz, presumably so Koch could make a quick getaway in his personal Focke-Wulf Condor—and this at a time when there was a more pressing need to build the city’s defenses for the Battle of Königsberg that was coming as soon as winter was over. Everyone assumed it would be the spring thaw of 1945 when the Red Army made its big push against the city. Right now, everything was frozen solid. Even the Russians. It was Erich Koch who had refused to consider the comprehensive and systematic plan proposed by General Lasch for the immediate evacuation of all civilians from East Prussia and who had placed his faith in building a wall—the Erich Koch Wall—in a place and to a construction standard that was of questionable value.

“The governor isn’t in Friedrichsberg for reasons of his own personal safety,” explained Hennig, “but because that’s simply the best place to coordinate the defense of the city. It’s not just Königsberg that’s under threat but Danzig, too. Rest assured, the governor is looking after all our interests.”

“I was sure he would be,” I said, but everyone knew that Koch was looking out for his own interests most of all. I had a good idea that the Park Hotel where I was living was actually owned by the Erich Koch Institute and that the army was obliged to pay Koch four marks a night for every officer staying there, but I thought it best to confine my comments to general approval of the gauleiter. Koch was notoriously touchy and inclined to order the arrest and execution of anyone critical of his absolute rule. Public executions were common in Königsberg, with bodies left hanging from lampposts near the refugee camps on the southern side of the city where, it was believed, there was a much greater need for discipline.

“And what service do you perform for Governor Koch?” I asked Hennig, being careful not to mention blackmail and extortion.

He shook his head and poured some wine into a glass. “You might say that I’m his aide-de-camp. A military liaison officer. Just a glorified messenger, really. The governor issues an order and I have the job of conveying it to the military commander. Or anyone else who matters.” He smiled at Irmela. “And what about you, my dear? I can see that you’re in the naval auxiliary but doing what, may I ask.”

“I’m in signals.”

“Ah. You’re a Valkyrie. A lightning maiden. No wonder this fellow Gunther is spending time with you, my dear. He always did like to stand a little too close to high voltages. In nineteen thirty-eight, he almost got his fingers burned. Didn’t you, Gunther?”

“It’s a wonder I have any fingerprints left,” I said.

At this Irmela picked up my right hand and kissed my fingertips, one by one, and while I appreciated the tenderness of her gesture, I could have wished that she’d not done this in front of Harold Hennig, for whom all knowledge was power, probably. It wasn’t that I thought he might tell my wife, but there was just something about him knowing about us I didn’t like.

He grinned. “Well, we’re all survivors, eh?”

“For how much longer, though,” I said. “That’s the question.”

“A word of advice, old fellow,” said Hennig. “There are only two people in East Prussia who still believe in the final victory. One of them is Adolf Hitler. The other is Erich Koch. So, if I were you, I’d avoid defeatist talk like that. I’d hate to see you end up decorating a lamppost for the edification of some foreign workers and refugees.”

“It’s horrible the way they do that,” said Irmela.

“And yet it is hard to see how else good order is to be maintained in this city,” said Hennig. “Iron discipline is the only way we are going to hold out for any longer.” He shook his head. “Anyway, I’m very glad to have left behind the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse way of doing things. The Gestapo, I mean, with their torture chambers and knuckle-dusters. To be quite frank, I was never cut out for all that heavy stuff. Even with the law behind you, it’s not for me.”

His eyes glanced momentarily at me and I wondered if he’d forgotten how my partner, Bruno Stahlecker, and I had been obliged by him to fetch Captain von Frisch from Gestapo HQ after Hennig and his thugs had finished beating the old man half to death. But even if he hadn’t forgotten about this and knew that I hadn’t either, it was probably best I didn’t mention it now. No one likes to be told that he’s a loathsome piece of shit in front of a beautiful woman.

Hennig looked perfectly at ease, however, as if he’d been recalling his days with a student society given to displays of unruly behavior. He thrust his hands in the pockets of his riding breeches and pushed his chair back so that it stood on only two legs, rocking to and fro, and continued in this somewhat expansive mode, as if he was someone used to being listened to.

“But whatever you think of summary executions, my dear, I can promise you that the Russians will do much worse than we are capable of. I think it’s only now that it’s beginning to dawn on people just what we’ve been fighting for all along. The decline of the West faced with Slav barbarism. I mean, the historian Oswald Spengler was right. If anyone ever wanted proof of that, it’s right here. Or at least a hundred kilometers east of here. I fear for the whole of European civilization if the Ivans conquer East Prussia.” He chuckled. “I mean, I could take you to my office and show you a Soviet newspaper, the Red Star, with horrifying editorials that you could hardly credit might have been written. One in particular comes to mind now: ‘Kill the Germans. Kill them all and dig them into the earth. We cannot live as long as these green-eyed slugs are alive. Today there are no books, today there are no stars in the sky; today there is only one thought. Kill the Germans.’ That kind of thing. Really, it’s quite shocking just how filled with hate for us these people are. One might almost think that they intended to drink our blood, like vampires. Or worse. I expect you’ve heard the reports about cannibalism. That the Red Army has actually eaten burger meat made of German women.”

After Hennig’s earlier warning about defeatism I wasn’t disposed to argue that the Russians had been provided with good teachers in barbarism. But I did try to moderate his language a little. “I see no point in upsetting Miss Schaper with talk like that,” I said, noticing that she had paled a little at the mention of cannibalism.

“I’m sorry,” said Hennig. “Lieutenant Gunther is absolutely right. Forgive me, Miss Schaper. That was thoughtless and insensitive of me.”

“That’s all right,” she said calmly. “I think it’s best to know exactly what we’re up against.”

“Spoken like a true German,” said Hennig. He turned in his chair and snapped his fingers at a waiter. “Bring us some brandy,” he said. “The good stuff. Immediately.”

A bottle of ten-year-old Asbach Uralt arrived on the table and Hennig threw some banknotes beside it as if money meant nothing; and given that he worked for Koch, it probably didn’t. The splash around Paradeplatz was that, with the help of the institute’s ruthless manager, Dr. Bruno Dzubba, the diminutive Koch had amassed a personal fortune of more than three hundred million marks, and it was clear from the fistful of cash in Hennig’s hand and the expensively tailored uniform he was wearing that some of this money was coming his way, at least in the shape of a generous expense account. Hennig uncorked the bottle and poured three generous glasses.

“Here’s to happier subjects,” he said and toasted Irmela’s eyes. “Your beauty, for instance. I confess I am very jealous of Lieutenant Gunther. You will forgive me if I say I hope you have a friend who’s a lightning maid, Miss Schaper. I should hate to be here for much longer without a charming young lady to spoil like Lieutenant Gunther.”

“It’s she who’s been spoiling me, I’m afraid,” I said.

“The mind reels at the very thought.” Hennig downed his brandy and stood up. “Well, thank you for a delightful evening, but I’m afraid duty calls. The governor has to address the representatives of the People’s Storm Unit here in the city tomorrow morning. Governor Koch has been appointed as their local commander. And I have to write his speech for him. Not that I have the first clue about what to say to them.”

The People’s Storm Unit was the new national militia that Goebbels had just announced—a home guard composed of conscripted men aged between thirteen and sixty who were not already serving in some military capacity. With a keen sense of humor most Germans were already referring to the People’s Storm Unit as the Father and Son Brigade or, sometimes—and even more amusingly—the Victory Weapon.

After he’d gone—but not before Irmela had promised to introduce him to some of her female friends—I breathed a sigh of relief and then downed my own brandy.

“I can’t fault his taste in alcohol,” I said. “But I do hate that man. Then again, I hate so many men these days that I simply can’t remember them all or exactly why I hate them, except to say that they’re Nazis, of course. Which is as good a reason as any, I suppose. It’s so much easier to know why you hate people now.”

“But why do you hate him in particular?”

“Take my word for it, there’s a good reason in his case. It’s a righteous, holy thing to be able to hate a man like that. Love thy neighbor? No. It can’t be done. The fact is I really do believe that Jesus Christ would have made a special exception in the case of Harold Heinz Hennig. And if not, then it’s clear to me that it’s impossible to be a Christian. Just as it’s impossible to believe in a God who would let a hundred children die taking shelter in his church.”

I paused for a moment and she kissed my fingertips again.

“Please, Bernie. Let’s not talk about that anymore. I want to kiss every centimeter of you before I go to sleep tonight. And then I want you to do the same to me.”

But I still had an itch that I needed to scratch. “That’s another thing,” I said. “I hate that he knows about us. That there’s something between us now. It worries me. For a man like that, all knowledge is something to be used like a loaded pistol.”

Irmela sighed and put down my hand. “You’re crazy to worry about him, Bernie. Think about it. What possible harm could he do us? Besides, he’s just a captain.”

“Not just any captain. He’s an extension of Erich Koch. Did you see the way the waiters in here fawned over him? The quality of his uniform? That amber cigarette case? Besides, the man used to be a blackmailer. Possibly still is, for all I know. The leopard doesn’t change his spots. So maybe he’s got something on Koch. Perhaps Erich Koch is the lemon who’s being squeezed now. You know, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. There must be a hell of a lot to get on a bastard like Erich Koch.”

“You’ll have to explain some of that. Why is Koch a lemon? I don’t understand.”

I told her all about the von Frisch case, to which Irmela very sensibly replied:

“But he’s got nothing on you, Bernie Gunther. Or on me. Neither of us has anything to hide. Nor do we have any money to give him. Do we? Besides, there’s a war on and there are more important things to worry about, wouldn’t you say? You’re worrying about nothing. If you’re going to blackmail someone you only do it when there’s a profit in it, surely?”

“Why is he here now?” I asked.

“It was a coincidence, that’s all.”

I sipped my brandy and then bit my fingernail.

“There’s no coincidence with him. He doesn’t arrive in your life without there being a reason. That’s not how it works with a man like that.”

“So how does it work? Tell me.”

But I could not. After the wine and the brandy, it was beyond my powers of speech to explain to her the sense of foreboding I had about seeing Harold Hennig again. For her to have understood how I felt about Hennig it would probably have been necessary for her to have returned with me to 1938 and seen poor Captain von Frisch’s battered body lying in a pool of blood and urine on a cell floor. Looking back on it now I might have said it was like that picture by Pieter Bruegel popularly known as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: I imagined an ordinary day in Königsberg—if such a thing was even possible; Irmela and me walking by the sea, hand in hand, enjoying the view and looking at the ships with innocent smiles on our windswept faces, but as oblivious to what is really going on in the picture as Bruegel’s plowman or the lumpish shepherd staring up at the now empty gray sky. Meanwhile, somewhere in the corner of the canvas a tragedy unfolds, unnoticed by almost everyone. Hubris knocks us from the sky and we are both drowned in the freezing northern sea.

That’s the thing about blackmail. You don’t understand how it could ever happen to you until it does.

Winter came early that year. Snow filled the gray December air like fragments of torn-up hope as the Russians tightened their cold, iron grip on the miserable, beleaguered city. Water froze in the bedroom ewers and condensation became ice on the inside of windowpanes. Some mornings I woke up and the bottom of the iron bedstead I shared with Irmela looked like the edge of the roof outside, there were so many icicles hanging off it. Defeat was staring us in the face like the inscription on a new headstone. Christmas came and went, the thermometer dropped to an unheard-of level and I more or less forgot about Captain Harold Hennig. Matters affecting our survival demanded more attention. Fuel and food ran short, as did ammunition and patience. The general opinion was that we could last for another three or four more months at most. Unfortunately, this opinion was not shared by the great optimist who had quit his wolf’s lair in Rastenburg and was now safely back in Berlin. But Irmela and I had other things on our minds than mere survival, not least the fact that she was pregnant. I was delighted, and when she saw my own reaction so was Irmela. I promised, faithfully, that if by some miracle I survived the war I would divorce my wife in Berlin and marry her; and if I didn’t survive, then something of me might, which would be some consolation at least for a life cut short, if not tragically—I could hardly claim that—then for a life that had been cut short of meaning. Yes, that was how I thought about the prospect of having finally fathered a child. Something of me would remain after the war. Which is all part of the butt-fuck that is life’s grotesque comedy.

Then, one day in late January, and quite out of the blue, Captain Hennig arrived in a government car with an order for me to report to Gauleiter Koch on his estate in Friedrichsberg and neither I nor my senior officers in the FHO had any option but to comply since the order was signed by Erich Koch himself. Not that I was in any way indispensable to my superiors. Only the most dimwitted intelligence officer could have failed to notice that the Russians were winning. But no one at FHO HQ ever looked at me the same way again; it was assumed among my fellow officers, not unreasonably, that I was another of Koch’s larval spies.

We drove west out of the city, on the Holsteiner Damm, along the northern shore of the Pregel River and, after about seven miles, where the black river flowed into the even blacker Vistula Lagoon, we saw the house, which bordered one or two other palaces of lesser grandeur. Hennig had not told me why I had been summoned there by the gauleiter, about that he remained infuriatingly silent, but usefully he did explain that the house had been built by King Frederick III of Prussia in 1690 as a lodge for elk hunting, although as soon as I caught my first sight of it I formed the conclusion that a place of that size might more plausibly have been used as the base for a yearlong expedition to hunt woolly mammoths or saber-toothed tigers. Prince Bismarck would have scorned the place as too grand and, perhaps, too Prussian, but judging by the pretensions of Gross Friedrichsberg, I expect it was just right for the eldest son of Frederick the Great—who must have been justifiably worried how else he was going to live up to the enormous reputation of his father—and Erich Koch, of course. Given that the place was the size of Potsdamer Platz station, I imagine Koch must have thought it was the perfect house for a former railway employee like him.

Immediately prior to my leaving FHO headquarters with Hennig I’d been told that the Schloss Gross Friedrichsberg, as it was known to all who worked there—and it was indeed a huge estate, being several hundred hectares—was now owned by the East Prussia Land Company, lest there be any suggestion that Koch was enriching himself at the expense of the German people; the fact that Koch was owner of the East Prussia Land Company was probably just an unfortunate coincidence.

An immaculate butler ushered us through the front door and straight into the castle library, where Koch was waiting beside a coal fire that could have powered a class 52 steam locomotive for the DRG. To be fair, it was a very large room and it probably needed a big blaze in the grate to prevent the glacier ice from encroaching past the farthest sections of the bookshelves. The gauleiter was seated in a Louis XV–style gilt wingback chair that was as tall as a giraffe and only served to make him even smaller than he certainly was. With his toothbrush mustache and smart party tunic, Koch looked like a ration-book Adolf Hitler, and meeting him in the flesh, it was difficult to take seriously his very public assertions in the Völkischer Beobachter that the lowliest German worker was racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than any Russian. I’d seen smaller Nazis but only in the Hitler Youth. And he looked about as racially valuable as the onanistic contents of a schoolboy’s handkerchief. He stood up but not noticeably and then we saluted each other in the time-honored way.

“Thank you for driving out here,” he said.

I shrugged and looked at Hennig. “Hennig did the driving, sir. I just admired the view. It’s a nice place you have here.”

Koch smiled sweetly. “No. It’s not mine, you know. Would that it were. The East Prussia Land Company owns this lovely house. I just rent it from them. God knows why. These old Prussian houses cost a fortune to heat in winter, you know. I’ll probably bankrupt myself merely trying to keep this place warm.” Koch waved at a drinks tray. “Would you like a drink, Captain Gunther?”

“I’ve not often been heard to say no to a glass of schnapps,” I said. “And it’s Lieutenant Gunther now.”

“Yes, of course, you had a difference of opinion with Dr. Goebbels, didn’t you?”

“I was wrong about something. Made a mistake. I’m probably quite lucky to be a lieutenant, sir.”

“That’s all right.” Koch grinned and poured us a glass of schnapps. “The doctor and I have never exactly seen things eye to eye. Prior to my appointment as the East Prussian governor I’m afraid he rather suspected me of having been implicated in the publication of a newspaper article that made fun of his physical handicaps.”

There was only one handicap that I recalled, but it seemed foolish to disagree when all I really wanted was to get out of that place as soon as possible. The last thing I wanted was to be drawn into a twilight rivalry between these two little men. I tasted the schnapps, which was enough to promote an emaciated smile.

“How would you like to be a captain again?”

At that stage in the war, it was better to be the lowliest kind of officer there was. Being a general seemed like a responsibility that no one would have wished for. But I shrugged with an indifference that I felt could reasonably have been interpreted as modesty. Koch wasn’t concerned with my feelings in the matter, however, and had already assumed that, like him, I was keen to advance in life and to profit wherever and whenever possible, and probably however, too.

“And you will be,” he said. “I need only call your commanding officer, General Lasch, to make that happen.”

“It’s kind of you. But I wouldn’t trouble yourself on my behalf. I’ve long ceased to believe that my future lies in the army.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble. I’m always glad to help someone who’s fallen foul of Joey the Crip. Isn’t that so, Harold?”

“Yes, sir,” said Captain Hennig. “We don’t like the doctor very much.”

“Harold tells me that you were a policeman in Berlin before the war. A commissar, no less.”

I finished the schnapps and let him pour me another, the way I like it, right to the brim, before putting that one down the tube, too.

“That’s right.” I was pleased to change the subject. Or so I thought. “But my maternal grandparents were from Königsberg. I used to visit here a lot when I was a boy. I always liked coming to the old Prussian capital. You might almost say that for me this is a home from home.”

“I feel much the same. I’m from Elberfeld, near Wuppertal. But this is where my heart now lies. In East Prussia. I love it out here.”

I glanced around the library. All those books were making it easy for me to understand why he had such a foolish, sentimental attachment to the place. Books are precious. They can almost make you feel at home. In any other home but that one they’d have been used as fuel.

“When you came here as a boy, I bet you visited the old Amber Museum.”

“Oh, yes sir. Prussian gold, they used to call it.”

“Indeed. The world’s major source of amber is the Samland. And Palmnicken, in particular. We’ve had Jews—mostly women—surface mining the stuff for the last few years. Tell me, do you like amber?”

I didn’t, as it happened. To me, amber had always looked like nature’s plastic, not in the least bit precious and no more than a curiosity at best. I couldn’t ever understand why some people seemed to prize the stuff so highly. But since I felt we were now, perhaps, finally coming to the point of my being there, I nodded politely and said, “Yes, I suppose so. I never really thought much about the stuff.”

“What else do you know about it?”

“Only that it’s expensive. Which is where I stop knowing about anything very much. There’s usually a tight hand brake on my thinking when there’s a lot of money involved.”

“As there is for everyone these days. We’re all of us having to make sacrifices in this terrible war that was forced upon us by our ideological enemies. But Harold tells me that you are not without diversions in Königsberg. That there is a lovely girl in the naval auxiliary you’ve been seeing. What’s her name?”

“Irmela. Irmela Schaper.”

“Good. I’m glad about that. A soldier should always have a sweetheart. Don’t you agree, Harold?”

“I do indeed, sir. Especially now that I’ve seen the girl. She’s as sweet as a sweetheart gets.”

“Before she stops being a sweetheart and becomes a wife, eh?”

Koch laughed at his own joke. But it was too near to being true for me to join him in a smile.

He went over to a desk as big as a Tiger tank and pulled open an enormous drawer. “Come over here, Captain,” he said. “Come and see.”

The drawer was full of amber objects—necklaces, brooches, earrings, cigarette holders, animal carvings; it looked like one of the many market stalls near the museum I’d seen when I was a boy.

“Please, pick something out for your sweetheart.”

“I couldn’t, sir. Really, it’s very kind of you, but—”

“Nonsense,” said Koch. “Whatever you think she’d like. A nice necklace, or perhaps a brooch. Or for yourself, if that’s what you’d really prefer. Harold has a very handsome antique cigarette case. Not to mention a beautiful pair of cuff links that were originally made for Arthur Schopenhauer.”

I’d have much preferred to have taken nothing; the idea of being in Koch’s debt was horrible to me, especially now that I’d learned how some of the stuff was mined. And I couldn’t help but think that much of what I was looking at had been stolen from someone else—from Jews, probably. But finally I could see I had no choice in the matter. I picked up a gold necklace that contained a large teardrop piece of amber and, holding it up in front of my eyes, let the firelight illuminate the perfectly preserved insect it contained.

“Oh yes,” said Koch. “Good choice. That’s a Wilhelmine piece from before the Great War. Fascinating, isn’t it? The way an insect from thousands of years ago should have become trapped by some sticky tree resin which then fossilized.”

“Perhaps it will remind her of me,” I said.

Koch took the necklace from my hand, wrapped it in a sheet of tissue paper from the same drawer like a local shopkeeper—evidently he’d done this kind of thing before—and then placed the object in my tunic pocket, as if he would brook no argument against his gift.

“Do you feel trapped, Captain Gunther?” he asked. “Like that insect?”

“A little, sometimes,” I said carefully. I hadn’t forgotten Hennig’s words of caution about defeatism and the gauleiter’s predilection for hanging defeatists from the city’s lampposts. “Who doesn’t? But I’m sure it’s just temporary, sir. We’ll break out of this encirclement before very long. Everyone thinks so.”

“Exactly. Before the light there must first be the darkness. Is it not so? And now let me show you something else.”

Koch led the way out of the library and into the hall, which seemed to have more antlers on display than a Saxon deer park—not to mention the whole arsenal of musketry that had probably put them there. As we walked across a marble checkerboard floor I felt as if I were a pawn about to make a move with which I strongly disagreed. I ought to have walked through the front door and all the way back to Paradeplatz. Instead I followed Koch to a door where a suit of Gothic armor stared at me with slit-eyed, steely disapproval. I should have been used to that, having once worked for General Heydrich.

We went down two flights to the basement and into an enormous darkened room where he struggled to find the light switch.

“Here, sir,” said Hennig, “let me.”

A few seconds later I was looking at a series of decorative panels, each of them half a meter in height, that were arranged along the room’s walls. Some of these panels had imperial crowns and a large letter R on them, while others depicted hunting scenes; there were also ornate carvings—entwined imperial eagles, classical warriors, more imperial crowns, and mermen holding dolphins; and all of them made of amber. Frankly, there was a little too much amber in there for my taste; about a ton of the stuff. It was like being inside an enormous beer bottle.

“Tell me, Captain Gunther, have you heard of the Amber Room?”

“No, sir.”

“Really? The famous Amber Room that was a gift from King Frederick William the First to his then ally, Tsar Peter the Great?”

I shrugged, hardly caring if Erich Koch thought me ignorant. I thought he was an outrageous crook who probably deserved to hang, and his opinion on anything—least of all my knowledge of amber and Russian history—mattered not in the least.

“Russians weren’t so bad then, I guess,” I said.

“That was before Communism,” said Koch, as if I were the one German who might have forgotten 1917.

“Yes, it was.”

“Well then, let’s see. In 1701 Peter installed these magnificent panels in a special room in the Catherine Palace near present-day Leningrad, where they stayed until we liberated them a few years ago and brought them here to Gross Friedrichsberg. When it was still at the palace, the room was often described as the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

I tried to look impressed, although my own opinion was that this wide-eyed, lazy description of the Amber Room must have been given by people who didn’t get out very much. I was getting a little tired of Koch’s reverence for the orange stuff, so I decided to hurry things along.

“Sir, might I ask what all this has to do with me?”

“You’re going to help us get these priceless artifacts back to Berlin, where they belong.”

“Me? How? I don’t understand.”

“Don’t worry,” said Koch. “We weren’t thinking of making you hide them under your coat, Captain. No, we had something else in mind. Didn’t we, Harold? Something a little more sophisticated.”

“We’re going to load them on a refugee ship that’s due to leave the port of Gotenhafen in a few days’ time,” said Hennig. “The MS Wilhelm Gustloff. As you probably know, many of those ships are frequently targets for Russian submarines from the Baltic fleet operating out of the Finnish port of Hangoe. We thought it might help to guarantee the safety of both passengers and panels if the Russian navy was informed that one of their most important national treasures—which we may have to trade back one day—is on board that same ship.”

“They might be rather less inclined to sink it,” said Koch, as if I might have failed to understand.

“Informed? How? By postcard? Or would you like me to drive to the front and give them a letter?”

Hennig smiled. “Well, that would be one way. But we were rather hoping you might persuade that sweetheart of yours—the little lightning maid—to put out an unencrypted signal on an open frequency informing the Russians, indirectly, of the presence of the Amber Room on board the Wilhelm Gustloff.”

“Really,” said Koch, “when you stop and think about it, this would be to the advantage of everyone.”

“Persuade her? How? What am I supposed to tell her?”

“Only what we’ve told you.”

“Need I remind you both that putting out a signal without encoding it using a Scherbius Enigma machine would be a court-martial offense? For which she could easily be shot as a spy. Or worse. You’re asking her to break the very first rule of being a signals auxiliary.”

“No, no, no,” said Koch. “My authority as Prussian gauleiter supersedes all local military and naval codes and protocols. There would be no chance of this even getting near a court-martial.”

“There are going to be as many as ten thousand people on that ship, Gunther,” said Hennig. “Civilians. Women and children. Wounded German soldiers. The Russians might not care for them. But they would never attack if they thought by doing so they’d be destroying the famous Amber Room.”

“Is it them you’re worried about?” I asked. “Or these priceless bits of tree resin?”

“That’s a little unfair,” said Hennig. “This is, by any definition of the word, a great historical treasure.”

“Then it beats me why you don’t just give an order to our Marine War Office commanders in Kiel and have them put out a signal.”

“For the simple reason that they’re in Kiel,” said Koch, “and more than seven hundred and fifty kilometers away from my authority.”

“Besides,” added Hennig, “if the Russians were to intercept an unencrypted naval communication from Kiel they’d assume it was some kind of trap. On the other hand if it comes from a small and, let’s face it, unimportant naval station here in Königsberg, they’ll conclude it’s not been authorized by the Marine War Office and then be inclined to take it more seriously. That the person sending the message is someone desperate to prevent the loss of thousands of lives.”

“And what happens if this cultural blackmail of yours doesn’t work? What if the Russians aren’t as keen on amber as you are, sir? What if they’re not interested in preserving a national treasure? Let’s face it, they haven’t shown a great deal of care for anything else in this damn war. Haven’t you heard of Stalin’s math? If there are ten Russians and one German left alive at the end of this war he will consider it to have been won. They now own the international patent on scorched earth.”

“Nonsense,” said Koch. “Of course they don’t want to lose the Amber Room. It was the fucking Ivans who disassembled it for transport to some Siberian shithole in the first place. They must think it’s valuable. Our men got there only just in time to prevent that and shipped it back here to Königsberg instead.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry gentlemen. But I won’t do it.”

“What the fuck do you mean, you won’t do it?” said Captain Hennig.

“I won’t. It’s a monstrous thing to ask of a girl like that.”

“Says who? You? Fuck you, Gunther. This isn’t just any beer cellar Fritz who’s asking you for a favor, this is the governor of East Prussia.”

“She’s only twenty-three years old, for Christ’s sake. You can’t ask a girl like that to disobey strict orders and take a risk not just with her own life but with the lives of thousands of people.”

“You dumb idiot,” said Hennig. “Call yourself an intelligence officer? I’ve seen scum in my toilet that’s more intelligent than you.”

“It’s all right, Harold,” said Koch calmly. “It’s all right. Let’s be civil here. Is that your final word, Gunther?”

Suddenly I felt tired—too tired to care much what happened to me now; it might have been the schnapps; then again the whole war felt like a lamppost that had been tied around my neck. Only, maybe it would be my neck tied to the lamppost.

“Yes it is, sir. I’m sorry. But I simply can’t ask her to do this.”

Koch sighed and pulled a face. “Then it looks as if you’re not going to be a captain again, after all.”

“I suppose I really don’t care what happens to me.”

Hennig sneered. “It also looks as if you’re walking back to town.”

“Gentlemen? After what I just heard? I could certainly do with some fresh air.”

I didn’t tell Irmela what had happened. I thought it best not to worry her. It’s not every day in Nazi Germany you turn down a man as powerful as Erich Koch, and part of me expected that I might be arrested at any time and thrown into the concentration camp at Stutthof. They hadn’t threatened me, exactly, and, more important, they hadn’t threatened her, but I hardly thought they would just give up. Somehow I had to think of a way of preventing them from intimidating Irmela, and soon, too.

“Do you have to go to work tomorrow?” I asked her that night.

“Why?”

“I’m just asking, that’s all. I was thinking maybe we could spend the time here together, alone.”

“I’m on duty. You know that. I can’t not just turn up. This is the naval auxiliary we’re talking about here, not a Salamander shoe shop. Besides, they’re relying on me. In case you had forgotten, there’s a lot happening right now in the Baltic Sea.”

We were in bed at the time, and sharing the cigarette now lying in the cheap imitation amber ashtray that was balanced on my chest.

“I understand.”

“It’s not that I don’t like spending time with you, my darling snail. I do. These moments we have here are very precious to me. Shall I tell you why? Because I never thought I would have them. When you showed up in my life I had more or less reconciled to myself to ending my life here without ever having known the real love of a man.”

“What about Christoph? The fellow who died at Stalingrad.”

“We were lovers. But we weren’t in love. There’s a difference. Besides, he was just a boy.”

“Nothing wrong with that if you’re just a girl.”

“I know you think that. And maybe that’s what I was before. But I’m a woman now. You made that happen. Without you I’d still be giggling in cinemas. You treat me like something precious. Like I matter to you. You listen to what I have to say like you genuinely care. I can’t tell you what that means to a woman. That’s all I ever wanted. To be heard by the man I love.”

I was silent for a few moments after that. There’s nothing quite like a few loving words from a woman to make a man quiet.

“Look,” I said, “if anyone ever threatens me as a way of trying to get to you, then please tell them to go to hell. I’ll take my chances. In this life and the next.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m just saying. I’m not the one who’s important here. You are.”

“Yes, but why are you saying it?”

“There’s a war on. People say all kinds of strange things when there’s a war on.”

“All right. I understand all that. Look, has this got anything to do with Captain Hennig?”

“No,” I lied. “Nothing to do with him at all. As a matter of fact I don’t think I’ve seen him since that night in Spätenbrau, on the day we were married.”

“I couldn’t let anything happen to you, Bernie,” she said. “Not now. You’re such a sweet man, do you know that? You’ve given me my life.”

“Nonsense. It was yours from the beginning.”

“It’s true. No one was ever as kind to me as you’ve been. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“You have to think of the baby now. Not me. Do you understand? I’m not in the least bit important beside you and the child.”

“I don’t understand. Why are you talking like this?”

“All I’m saying is that I want you to be careful, Irmela.”

“We’re surrounded by the Red Army, by Russian fighters, there’s no fuel and not much food, there are no secret weapons to rescue us, our homes are defended by the Father and Son Brigade, and you want me to be careful? You’re ridiculous, do you know that? If I didn’t love you so much I’d say you were going crazy.”

“Maybe I’m just crazy about you? Did you consider that possibility? That’s right. I’m mad about you.”

“Well, that makes two of us who are mad. It’s infectious, obviously. Give me another cigarette.”

“In my tunic.”

I hadn’t intended to give her the amber necklace but she found it when she was going through my pockets looking for cigarettes and I hadn’t the heart to tell her that it had been given to me by Erich Koch.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “For me?”

“No, I was rather thinking I might wear it myself.”

“I absolutely love it,” she said, putting on the amber necklace immediately and bounding across her bedroom to look at herself in the cheval mirror. “What do you think?” she asked, turning to face me.

I had to admit it suited her very well, a conclusion that was made easier for me by the fact that she was entirely naked at the time.

“Yes, it looks good on you.”

“You really think so?”

I smiled. “Yesterday’s newspaper would look good on you, Irmela.”

“It must have been very expensive,” she said.

Once again I felt a little awkward when I failed to admit that it had been a gift from Erich Koch and very soon afterward I started to regret I hadn’t told her the truth about the necklace, fearing Harold Hennig would do it for me and spoil things. There was no doubt about it. I had started to care for Irmela very deeply, much more than I could have imagined was even possible for a man of my age. I had no right to the love of a nice girl of twenty-three. I was almost fifty, after all; fifty years of fuckups and disappointments, which means that when you think you only have a few months of life ahead of you every minute seems to count, and every feeling becomes magnified, massively. I’d have done anything to protect her and the baby she was carrying, but it’s odd how inadequate anything like that can begin to feel. The best part of me was probably gone forever, but I could still hope to look after her.

The next day, when I walked down to Paradeplatz as usual, I found myself tailed by a black Audi. With so few cars on the snow-covered, cratered roads it was easily noticed, like a large and shiny spot of ink on a white sheet of paper. It stayed about ten meters behind me, which was another reason to notice it. I’m a fast walker. There were three men in it I didn’t recognize, but I knew that wouldn’t last. An introduction was coming whether I wanted one or not. I just hoped the freemason’s handshake wouldn’t be too painful. I kept walking in the hope that the longer I kept walking the farther away I was taking them from Irmela’s building but after another hundred meters I saw the futility of it, turned, slipped on the ice, almost falling over, and walked back to the car with as much dignity as I could muster. When I leaned down to the driver’s window I almost fell again. One of the men in the car sniggered. I knew they were Gestapo even before he flashed his brass identity disk in the palm of his hand. Only the friends of Koch and the Gestapo could get that kind of joke or, for that matter, the petrol.

“You Gunther?”

“Yes.”

“Get in,” said the man with the disk.

I didn’t argue. His wooden face had been argued with many times before, to no avail, and at least it was just me they were arresting. So I sat in the back of the Audi, lit a cigarette, listened patiently as their leather coats creaked against the car seats, and tried to think of all the other times I’d been picked up by the Gestapo and managed to talk my way out of it. Of course, things were very different now the war was almost lost. The Gestapo had always been good listeners but since July ’44 and Count Stauffenberg, they’d stopped listening to anything very much except the sound of tightly strung piano wire.

To my surprise we didn’t go to the Police Praesidium on Stresemannstrasse, behind the North Railway station. Instead we drove a little farther east and stopped in front of the Erich Koch Institute on the corner of Tragheimer and Gartenstrasse, which was one of the last buildings in Königsberg still displaying Nazi flags. It added a nice touch of color to a city that had gone prematurely gray with fear and worry. Absurdly, some bandbox guards came to attention as the car drew up; they must have figured the only cars with petrol contained people who were important. The Gestapo even opened the car door for me and two of them escorted me through the cliff-high doors and up the marble double stairway, where a man was carefully fitting long, brass stair rods. At the top stood a tall plinth with a bronze of Erich Koch staring over the balustrade, like a satrap surveying his empire. Or maybe he was just checking that the stair-rods were being fitted correctly. Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling as if in imitation of the freezing weather outside, which made the blasts of warm air blowing from the vents in shiny new ceramic stoves all the more surprising. The institute was noisy with hundreds of foreign workers hammering and painting and redecorating, which seemed a little premature as the Red Army hadn’t yet said which color they’d have preferred for 1945.

I was ushered along a corridor as big as a bowling alley where thick, new blue carpet was being laid and, for a moment, I wondered if I was actually in the East Prussian School for the Blind in Luisenallee. It was the only possible explanation for so little foresight and so much obvious reluctance to face the truth. Amid the ignorant confusion of it all Harold Hennig was standing with his hands in his breeches pockets, his gray tunic open, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, and quite probably he didn’t. Every time I saw him I knew he wasn’t ever going to be one of the unlucky ones without a comfortable chair when Ivan stopped the balalaika music. Seeing me he beckoned me forward and led the way into an office already carpeted but without much furniture, just a lot of fluff on the floor, a couple of chairs and a half-size desk on which lay his greatcoat and cap. A large portrait of a very pink-faced Adolf Hitler was hanging on the wall. Wearing a gray greatcoat with the collar turned fashionably up and a peaked hat, the leader was looking off into the middle distance as if trying to decide if the blue of the carpet matched the blue of his eyes. He needn’t have been concerned. It was a cold blue with an affinity for black and a degree of darkness that Goethe understood only too well, and an excellent color match.

“Here’s me thinking this is East Prussia,” I said, “when the true state we’re living in turns out to be Denial.”

Hennig snorted with contempt, put his hand on my shoulder, which I didn’t much like, and walked me over to the fireplace, where a log the size of a wild boar was sizzling quietly, just like my temper. From the mantelpiece he took down an amber box and flipped it open.

“Smoke a cigarette, Bernie,” he said quietly. “Take the edge off your tongue.”

I took one, lit it, and tried to stay inside myself for a few minutes longer.

He smoked one, too. I even lit the match for him. For a while all we did was blow smoke at each other. It was beginning to look as if we could get along really well.

“When the pathologists examine your dead body,” said Hennig, “they’ll probably find you had an enlarged mouth.” He sighed wearily. “Nineteen forty-five, and you still haven’t learned that you should talk only when words are safer than silence.”

“I’m not going to change my mind about my girl,” I said.

“You don’t have a mind. Not to speak of. For a Fritz in intelligence, you’re very fucking dumb. I thought the same back in thirty-eight. You were dumb to get mixed up in that business with von Fritsch. You must have known how it would all play out. Sure you did. An idiot could have seen how that was going to end. Himmler himself gave the orders to frame that fucking general. You were dumb to take that case.”

“I took it because Captain von Frisch was my commanding officer in the Great War. And because I loved him.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. You were dumb. Principles are for people who can afford to have them, not for you and me. You were lucky to walk away from that case with your fingernails.”

“Maybe. But I’m still not going to help you now.”

“Yes, you are,” he said. “And here’s why, dumbhead.”

He collected a file off the desk and handed it to me—a thin blue file on the cover of which was the official stamp of the Saint Elizabeth Hospital on Ziegelstrasse, and the name of Irmela Louise Schaper. I didn’t have to open it. I already knew what was in it.

“One of the benefits of being the governor of East Prussia is that no one has any secrets from you. No, not the smallest thing. Not this small thing, certainly. Even doctors don’t dare plead the usual code of patient confidentiality in Königsberg. And not when the Gestapo tell them otherwise. So. Your girlfriend is going to have a baby. Congratulations. I presume you’re the father. Although some of those naval girls like to set sail with a big crew on board, if you know what I mean. And I do wonder what your poor wife will say when she finds out.”

“You bastard,” I muttered.

“Not me. But the baby, yes, almost certainly. Anyway, time will tell. Which—let’s be honest here—is short. No, please don’t talk, for once just listen, Gunther. Because this is no longer really about you, is it? Not anymore. To be frank, I only need you in case your girlfriend is sufficiently principled not to understand what’s good for her. And her baby, of course. Let’s not forget that little twinkle from your eye.”

He fished a piece of grayish paper out of his breeches pocket and showed it to me. The paper was headed Identity Pass for the MS Wilhelm Gustloff. Irmela’s name was printed on the bottom of the pass.

“Thanks to the generosity and understanding of the governor, all of the women in the women’s naval auxiliary are to be given one of these. It’s a special pass, printed on the Wilhelm Gustloff’s own printing press. They’ve got everything on that ship; a swimming pool, movie theater, three restaurants, and, most important of all, the real prospect of seeing Germany again. Even now those auxiliary women are being told that they’re the lucky ones. That they’re to be evacuated from Königsberg. Today. Already they’re breathing a sigh of relief. The good-looking ones at any rate. I should think many of them have already left the city by now since boarding commences on January twenty-fifth. Which is tomorrow. I say all of the women but as you can see this particular pass has yet to be signed by the governor. Or I. And until it is, it simply isn’t valid.

“As soon as it is signed, both Miss Schaper and her unborn child, of course, can board the ship. But not until then. You see where I’m going with this, Gunther. Either she agrees to send the unencrypted signal—which I will supply, of course—and on an open channel, or she’ll be the last naval auxiliary left in the city when the Russians turn up. After which I don’t give much for her chances or the baby’s. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you of all people what the Russians are doing to our women. It was you who wrote the report on Nemmersdorf, wasn’t it? How many women was it they violated? The Russian soldier seems to regard the rape of German women as a patriotic duty. I mean, they fuck like they’re using a bayonet. So, I wonder how many Ivans she could take on before she lost that baby.”

“You put that very nicely, Hennig. So nicely I wonder how I don’t see how many of your teeth I can make stick to my knuckles.”

“You don’t want to hit me, Gunther. That would spoil everything. For you. For your girl. And her invisible jockey.”

I bit my lip, which was momentarily better than biting a senior officer. I wasn’t sure what the military law on that one was, but I didn’t think it was a ticket home on the MS Wilhelm Gustloff.

“And where will you be? When the ship sets sail.”

“Oh, I’ll be on the ship, too. Someone has to oversee the transport of the Amber Room back to Germany. I’m sure you agree it’s much too valuable to let it travel by itself.”

“I’m impressed. How did you manage that?”

“Let’s just say that when the gauleiter was in the Ukraine—where he was also the governor, of course—he managed to spirit away the contents of four whole museums. And those are just the ones that I know about. I should say he now has an art collection to rival Hermann Göring’s.”

“And you threatened to tell Hitler or Himmler about them. Is that it?”

“It would have been my duty as a German officer.”

“And Koch? What about him?”

“He’s staying on in Königsberg. Bravely. As you might expect of a man like that. Right up until the very last minute, when I believe he has made plans to facilitate his own escape to a house on the coast and then on an icebreaker, to Flensburg. But you needn’t concern yourself with the governor’s safety. All you have to do is go and see your little lightning maid, show her this identity pass, and then tell her what to do. She won’t even have to endure the scrutiny of her colleagues as she carries out this important duty for the governor. As we speak, she’s probably the last one there. So, it couldn’t be simpler.”

“Suppose she says no.”

“You’d better make damn sure she doesn’t say no, hadn’t you? Not if you want to be a daddy in eight months. As soon as I’ve seen her give the signal—yes, I’m coming with you, Gunther, just to make sure—I’ll sign this pass and you can drive her to Gotenhafen yourself, where you can say your romantic good-byes. I’m afraid there’s no pass for you, my friend. Sorry about that. Not unless you’re part of the submarine training division; we need those boys to crew the U-boats. Or unless you’re badly wounded. Then again, I suppose we could always make that happen. Ordinarily, that might be the only alternative for a swine like you. For me to have those two thugs in the corridor take you outside and blow your brains out. But with you, Gunther, things are different, I think. You’d probably welcome a bullet in the back of the head. But failure to comply with the governor’s orders will only result in you being assigned to the concentration camp at Palmnicken, where your duties will include assisting the SS to dispose of three thousand Jewish female workers. Which I imagine you’ll probably think of as a fate worse than death. That’s what I can promise you. So, as you can no doubt see, you really don’t have a choice.” He looked around the room as if he expected that the fluff and the chairs were going to back him up. “Look, it’s not so bad what I’m asking you to do here. Anyone would think that I want something really difficult. All I’m trying to do is preserve the lives of everyone on that ship.”

“Including yours.”

“Naturally including mine. In a few months’ time, when the war is over, and you’re dead or in a Soviet labor camp, and Irmela and I are safely in Germany, you’ll wonder why you didn’t cooperate sooner. The fact is, we could have arranged for your passage home, too. I could have used a good man to help me guard all that priceless amber. So, do I have your cooperation, or not?”

Through all that he said, even through his white smiles and his smooth laughter and total confidence that I would meekly do exactly what he said, I knew that one day, in an unimaginable tomorrow’s world to which I knew I might never belong, I would see him again and pay him back in kind for everything he had done. For a moment the threat of some nebulous future revenge tried to form itself in my mouth and I even took a breath to give these futile words air. Instead, recognizing my impotence, I said nothing and I even think I must have nodded my quiet and spineless assent. The things you do for a woman.

Hennig buttoned up his tunic and then fetched his greatcoat and his cap.

“Shall we go?”