Two Brothers

Hope Lost London, 1956

DAGMAR WAS DEAD.

As Stone lit a second cigarette at the blue flame beneath the screeching kettle he felt sure of it.

The brief idyll during which he had imagined his life might be about to begin again had been a cruel illusion. Long grey nothingness stretched out before him once more.

The story he wanted so desperately to believe was simply not credible. Escape from Birkenau? A soldier with the Partisans? Enslavement in a gulag? These things were possible. Just. But that they had led eventually to a post with the East German secret police, as MI6 insisted they had, that was not possible.

But at least now he would know. Whoever had written that letter knew a great deal about Dagmar. He would go to Berlin and find out the truth about what had happened to her.

In that there was some grim comfort.

What had happened during those terrible years after the perfume-scented kiss they had shared standing by the café table at the Lehrter Bahnhof in 1939? How long had she survived? The Jews had not been finally cleared out of Berlin until 1943. Had she lasted that long?

And what had happened then? To which charnel house did they send her? How did she die? Dagmar Fischer, loveliest girl in all of Germany.

By starvation? Disease? Gas? Was her body burned in an oven? Or did she nearly survive the camps only to fall, exhausted beyond endurance, into a ditch as the SS force-marched their victims towards Germany ahead of the oncoming Red Army? Did she die a slave in an underground factory? One of those hundreds of thousands of human beasts of whom Speer had apparently known nothing? Was her naked, skeletal cadaver heaped high amongst a thousand others, pushed into the pile by an American bulldozer with a weeping GI at the wheel? Were the local German population of Dachau or Bergen the last to lay eyes on her fly-blown remains having been forced there to bear witness by the horrified American troops? Did those German villagers stand staring with sullen stupefaction on that flesh for which every day he had longed and of which every night he had dreamt since he was a boy of twelve?

There was someone working for the Stasi in Berlin who knew the answer. Someone who knew enough about Stone and his love for Dagmar to forge the letter that had purported to be from her.

As Stone studied the glowing end of his cigarette throbbing in the darkness he struggled against the obvious conclusion as to who that person must be.

Trying somehow to avoid the dawning certainty that the dark and solemn oaths which once had bound the brave young members of the Saturday Club together had been broken in the most cruel and terrible manner.