But it wasn’t Viv he was thinking of by the time Holland and he reached the bottom of the stairs. It was Berta Heinkel. Obviously he had been impressed by her performance in the diner. But now he was upgrading his review, because she had seemed to know things about Gordon that the old man had never told him. And now he would never be able to ask.
Over the next few days he would continue to be impressed. Because, by day’s end, Berta Heinkel’s peculiar expertise would be in great demand. And within a week she and Nat would be seated together on a Swissair nonstop from Washington to Bern-the very place where, long ago, Gordon Wolfe had begun assembling the makings of his own destruction.
SEVEN
Berlin-December 20,1941
Don’t you hate parties like this?”
Not much of a pickup line, but the girl brightened as if someone had finally pushed the right button. Or maybe it was just the glow of the candles from the Christmas tree, a towering spruce that lit up the room even more than the Biedermeier chandeliers.
“Don’t I ever,” she said above the roar of conversation. “It’s the uniforms I hate most. Everyone showing off, even the ones who aren’t in the Wehrmacht. What good is a uniform when you’re just working for some ministry, sitting in an office all day?”
“Exactly,” the boy said.
“Sometimes I think we’ve all gone a little mad with this war mentality. My name is Liesl, by the way. Liesl Folkerts. And you are?”
“Kurt. Kurt Bauer. And I feel exactly the same.”
He didn’t really. Nor did he hate the uniforms, except out of envy. He wished he was wearing one, if only because then he might look eighteen. If anything, he found the girl’s comments bracingly scandalous, the sort of remarks that might have caused a more seasoned listener to employ the precautionary tactic now known as the
But at age sixteen Kurt was too young and inexperienced, not to mention spellbound.
The girl’s boldness was especially remarkable considering the setting-a Christmas party at the elegant home of Wilhelm Stuckart, second in command at the Interior Ministry. The many various uniforms of the Reich were indeed in abundance on this icy winter evening. Already Kurt had spotted the fussy getups of the Ministries of Interior, Armaments, Economy, and Propaganda. One Luftwaffe staff officer wore a god-awful white jacket as silly as Goring’s, and with almost as many bogus ribbons. The only members of the uniformed class not strutting like peacocks were two Gestapo wraiths dressed in the black of the SS. They lurked amid the holiday greenery like tall, somber elves.
Otherwise the scene was festive enough, with a bounty and opulence rare to behold in this year of rationing and restrictions. Brisk servants toted trays of champagne and foie gras across the Oriental rugs and floors of Italian marble. A long, sturdy buffet table made of Black Forest walnut held a huge silver platter of smoked ham and an icy bed of oysters on the half shell. There were also overflowing bowls of potatoes, beans, salads, and baskets of bread, plus more chocolates and pastries than Kurt had seen in ages. He had already spotted a magnificent butter stollen for later sampling.
The pleasant surprises were not limited to the buffet. The Stuckart washroom offered real toilet paper and scented bars of genuine soap.
But the evening’s most interesting fare was the talk. This was some of the best-informed gossip in Berlin. Even seemingly frivolous blab offered tasty morsels. Moments earlier Kurt had overheard two spangled women debating which hotels in occupied Paris would offer the most stylish accommodations for visiting Germans come springtime.
The hottest topic was the Americans, who had just entered the war. From what Kurt could gather, the consensus from the corridors of power on Wilhelmstrasse seemed to be that the Yanks wouldn’t make much of an impact for at least a year, and by then the war would be over.
One of the few topics he
And on at least one count he genuinely agreed with her: These sorts of parties weren’t to his liking. Coming here had been his father’s idea. It was yet another session in Reinhard Bauer’s crash course in the social dynamics of wartime commerce, a tutelage that had begun just after Kurt’s sixteenth birthday. Already he had endured weeks of formal introductions, factory visits, and ministry auditions.
This week had been typical: Monday, coffee at the Bosch Works in Kleinmachnow. Tuesday, lunch at the Ministry of Armaments. Then a Wednesday train ride to the city’s northwest reaches for a tour of the Rheinmetall- Borsig factory, followed by Thursday’s engineering tutorial on metallurgy and Friday’s luncheon with accountants at the Red-White Tennis Club, where his father was appalled to discover that the ballroom had been commandeered as a barracks for the crew of an antiaircraft battery, newly positioned on the back lawn.
To close out the week they had come to the Stuckart party, where Kurt was expected to feign a politely casual air and exude holiday cheer even as he strived to make an impression. The Stuckarts lived only a few blocks from the Bauers’ home in Charlottenburg, and Kurt had sweated beneath his starched collar as they walked the darkened streets of the blacked-out city. Hard to believe that only two winters ago he had been among the crews of teen boys daubing the neighborhood curbs with luminous white paint to help people find their way in the dark. It was a Hitler Youth project, speaking of silly uniforms. Kurt’s group had also helped the neighbors build sandbagged new exits from their basements, which had been converted to bomb shelters.
At least Kurt’s father hadn’t insisted that he wear the annoying Hitler Youth lapel pin. Kurt had left that behind in a dresser drawer. Good riddance. Nothing was more certain to mark you as a juvenile if you happened to meet some attractive young woman.
It wasn’t that Kurt didn’t sympathize with his father’s need to display loyalty. That would always be an issue for the Bauers. Reinhard blamed himself, tutting that he had waited too late to join the Nazi Party. He had then compounded his problems by dropping the aristocratic “von” from the family name. As acts of appeasement go, it didn’t exactly rank with Neville Chamberlain at Munich, but it was nearly as ineffective. Party hacks still mistrusted them as Hohenzollern blue bloods, and their peers now dimly regarded them as slumming opportunists, little better than Jews in their grasping zeal for reichsmarks.
Not so long ago, Kurt would have welcomed his status as an industrial debutante. He had once longed for the day when, like his forebears, he would be counted on to make big decisions affecting the livelihoods of thousands. But that sort of trust had been reserved instead for his older brother, Manfred, and for years it had been Manfred who got the grooming and the testing. Manfred tagged along on corporate retreats into the fresh air of the Hartz Mountains, and on collegial weekend hikes into the piney depths of the Grunewald. When war seemed imminent, Reinhard fretted over whether to press for an officer’s posting for Manfred in the Wehrmacht or to instead finagle placement in some safer endeavor that would still offer the badge of national service.
Then along came the blitzkrieg. Like everyone else, Reinhard watched the grainy newsreels of hapless Poles with their lances and horses, and then the fleeing Frenchmen in medieval helmets. He concluded that the rest of the war would also proceed in this “easy” fashion, even as patriotic obituaries soon began filling the newspapers. And so, to Manfred’s delight, Reinhard steered his elder son into the officer corps.
He should have known better, of course. It was like putting all of your money into a stock at its peak value. Two months after Manfred departed for the front lines, the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union. By the time of the first snowfall it was apparent that the stock price was falling, although up to now everyone had been too stunned to even whisper about selling. So, with Manfred indisposed for the indeterminate future, Reinhard decided he had better begin preparing Kurt, just in case.
The boy at least had a head for math and physics, and he was also a whiz at English. And with so many
