Two Brothers

room, leaving a long smear of blood on the floor as they did so.

‘Heil Hitler,’ said the lead trooper, clicking his heels and giving the German salute.

Then they were gone.

Frieda sank back into her seat. Gulping, fearful that she would be sick. Trying to comprehend what had just happened.

Adolf Hitler, the subject of that ridiculous, ubiquitous salute, had been in power for sixty days.

And during that time it had become possible for an entirely innocent and defenceless man to be clubbed unconscious in a doctor’s surgery and then abducted. Not just with impunity but as a matter of state policy.

In sixty days.

And Hitler intended his Reich to last for a thousand years.

Tears began to fall on the notes Frieda had been making. Blue ink dissolving in the splashes, mixing up the sentences concerning Frau Schmidt’s pregnancy. Tiny, salty tributaries to an ocean of sorrow that awaited the world.

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 cafe 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.

Opening up Shop Berlin, 1 April 1933

DAGMAR FISCHER STARED at her face in the mirror. Normally she rather enjoyed looking at herself. She was beautiful and she knew it, so why shouldn’t she appreciate her own reflection? What was it Otto Stengel had said in that silly note he wrote? Her eyes were like dark and sparkling pools? Or had it been Paulus? They both said such sweet things. But Paulus’s notes were usually in French.

And her eyes were rather lovely, it would be foolish to deny it. Rather like Norma Shearer’s, Dagmar thought, or perhaps Dietrich’s, or the English star Mary Astor. They slanted slightly downwards at the edges which gave them, she fancied, an expression of great mystery with perhaps a touch of melancholy too. The eyebrows were all wrong of course, thick schoolgirl eyebrows which she hated but was absolutely forbidden to pluck. She had tried to do it by stealth, taking exactly three a day from above each eye, but it had seemed to make no difference at all, and when out of impatience she upped her daily quota to ten her father was on to it immediately and harangued her over breakfast. He had told the maid to remove the honey from the table and not to return it for a week, which had been mortifying. Not the loss of the honey but the shame of being scolded publicly. In front of the maid.

She turned away from the mirror and considered the dress that had been laid out for her. It was awful of course, almost as bad as school uniform, which was the only other option her parents had been prepared to consider.

A sailor dress for heaven’s sake! She wasn’t a child.

Her figure was developing. She had a bosom.

You couldn’t wear a sailor dress with a bosom, it looked ridiculous. And socks! White socks, as if she were starting kindergarten. Dagmar considered a rebellion. After all, this was Father’s plan, not hers. She could hold on to the banister and refuse to cooperate.

But of course she couldn’t.

Her father was not a man to be disobeyed. He had given his orders and they would be followed to the letter.

‘Above all, we must show a brave face,’ he had said.

Easy for him, Dagmar thought, he didn’t have to face the world dressed as a ten-year-old.

She turned once more to her reflection.

Her face did not look very brave.

If only she could have worn a little make-up. Some of her friends at the expensive school she attended had already begun secretly to wear it when they went out. They said it made them feel smart and confident. Dagmar would have liked very much to be feeling smart and confident that morning.

She wondered whether if she sneaked some eye shadow and blusher from her mother’s dressing table it might pass unnoticed. Except she knew it wouldn’t be. If she applied enough to make her feel smart and confident then it would be enough to make her father call for a flannel and wipe it off in front of the servants.

There was no getting round it. The brave face that she put on would have to be her own, plain and unadorned. She must thrust her chest forward and her shoulders back as Fraulein Schneider her swimming mistress always insisted, and put from her mind the fact that she was dreading what her father expected her to do that morning with all of her heart.

She took up the blue and white sailor dress, put it over her head and pulled it down over her silk slip. Then she sat on the bed, lifted her long elegant legs and reached forward to put on the despised white ankle socks.

Her mother’s head appeared around the door.

‘Are you ready, dear?’ she asked. ‘Hurry with your shoes. You know how angry Father is about lateness.’