them beat up people who didn’t salute. As his eyes adjusted after the glare of the street, he saw that he’d entered a post office and remembered the stamps his son, Tom, had asked him to find.
The walls of the narrow street amplified the advancing sound, the drumbeat now underscored by the crunch of marching feet.
He watched from the post office window as the brigade leader passed, holding high a banner with the words DEUTSCHLAND ERWACHE — ‘Germany, awake.’ Shoppers along the pavement raised their right arms, holding groceries in the other. Row after row of Brownshirts followed the banner, caps strapped under their chins, boots smacking the cobblestones. Each man carried a tall swastika flag of scarlet, white, and black and sang what sounded like a hymn, except that it was about sharpening daggers on kerbstones.
Denham folded his arms and swore under his breath. Warm weather in Germany brought out a tide of shit these days.
Just out of sight, a car horn blared once, and then persistently, causing the marchers to break step. Something must have blocked their way, because as the rows in front came to a sudden halt the ones following collided into their backs, throwing the parade into disarray. Caps were knocked off, flagstaffs whacked into faces, and fronts shoved against rears. The men swore and yelped, shouting, ‘ Halt! ’ to those in the rear.
‘Haaaalt!’
Denham snorted with laughter. What was going on? He pulled his Leica out of the case and tried to get a couple of shots of the farce unfolding.
‘Mister Denham.’
He usually got a better fee for an article with photos.
‘Mis-ter Den-ham.’
Denham froze.
A man’s voice was yelling his name over the commotion outside. It was coming from the direction of the car horn, which sounded again.
‘Mis-ter Rich-ard Den-ham?’
The voice was addressing him in English. So, chances were it didn’t belong to a Brownshirt. In fact, it sounded familiar. He stepped outside into the crowd of uniforms and saw, about twenty yards down the street, a black, open-topped Maybach parked half up on the pavement. The old street was so narrow, however, that it left barely six feet for the marchers to pass. Standing in the car was the tall, plumpish figure of Hugo Eckener, waving with his hand high in the air.
‘My dear Richard,’ he yelled, ‘I saw you go in. Have you just arrived?’
‘Dr Eckener,’ Denham said, unsure how to return such bonhomie with a brigade of aggrieved Brownshirts looking on. He sensed trouble.
‘Come on, get in. I’m giving you a ride to the hangar. You can check into the hotel later.’
Reluctantly the marchers began manoeuvring around the vehicle, casting malign looks at Eckener and Denham.
Self-conscious, he walked to the car, put his case on the backseat, and was about to hop in when an iron hand gripped his shoulder and yanked him around. A thickset, sunburned man glowered into his face. He wore the cap and insignia of a Scharfuhrer. The brown collar strained around a neck that was like a rump of cured ham.
‘You took photographs of this?’ he said.
Denham felt the Leica become hot in his hand.
‘You thought it was amusing?’ The man’s breath came in short snorts. Violence hung in the air like static.
‘Comrade,’ Denham said, attempting a smile. ‘Hasn’t this week before the Games been decreed a Week of Jollity and Cheerfulness?’ He heard the Anglican vowels in his German as if his voice were a recording on a gramophone.
A brown bank of uniforms was moving in around him, penning him with no gap for escape.
‘Your name, sir.’
‘My name’s Denham. I’m a British reporter resident in Berl-’
‘British?’ the man said, parodying Denham’s voice. ‘And what is your business here?’
His mouth began to dry. ‘Your esteemed Dr Eckener has asked me here. I’m writing a piece on the new Zeppelin.’
The Scharfuhrer looked over the heads of the men and stared at the doctor.
‘Our esteemed Dr Eckener closes his heart to our national awakening, yet feels free to do whatever he pleases.’ For some reason the men chuckled, as if this were some local running joke. He turned back to Denham. ‘But you, sir, are coming to the barracks.’
Denham opened his mouth to protest, but it was Eckener’s voice that sounded, filling the length of the street on the warm air.
‘This man is here at my invitation.’
Standing in the open-topped car he towered over the Brownshirts, the chin beneath his goatee wobbling with rage. Elijah addressing the followers of Baal.
‘You’re harassing a foreign guest of the Reich’s, and believe me, that will not go well for you in the week before the Olympic Games.’
The Scharfuhrer seemed to waver. The men glanced at each other.
Denham saw his moment, shoved his way through the uniforms, and jumped into the passenger seat. The Maybach’s engine roared. He took a ten-reichsmark note from his wallet and held it towards the Scharfuhrer.
‘Here. No harm done,’ he shouted. ‘Buy your men some beers.’
The man snatched the note just as the car jerked forwards and accelerated up the street, forcing the men bunched at the back of the brigade to step quickly out of the way.
‘Do you often ruin their parades?’ Denham said over the noise of the engine.
‘Criminals and gangsters,’ Eckener shouted. He was furious.
Denham leaned back in his seat and laughed, pulling the brim of his hat over his eyes. ‘Always keep your head down and stay out of fights. I should have learned that lesson from the war.’
He had to admire the old man’s effrontery, but then Hugo Eckener enjoyed an immunity afforded to few other opponents of the regime. In 1929 he’d become the most famous German in the world when he circumnavigated the globe as commander of the Graf Zeppelin- the first voyage of its kind in an aircraft. Immense crowds turned out to greet the silver machine when it landed in Tokyo, San Francisco, and New York, fulfilling his dream that the Zeppelin should forge links of friendship among nations. He was an ebullient, courageous, driven man, an enormous personality who counted kings and presidents among his acquaintances. So high was his standing at home and abroad that the Nazis dared not touch him, and he knew it.
‘It’s wonderful to see you again,’ Eckener yelled. ‘How long has it been?’
Denham saw familiar houses, gables, and barns speeding by. ‘I haven’t been here in six years. Not since we flew with you on the Graf to Brazil.’
‘Ha! Yes. Your dear father saved our skins on that one…’
But Eckener’s mind, Denham sensed, was still seething with Brownshirts.
‘You told those devils that you’re living in Berlin. Is that true?’
‘It’s true.’
The old man shook his head. ‘Unglaublich.’ Incredible. ‘You mean you choose to live in this lunatic asylum? What about your family?’
Denham shrugged. ‘My wife said I was more intimate with the typewriter than with her, and left me. Besides, Berlin is where the news is. I sell a lot of stories from there.’
‘You have a son, though, yes?’
‘That’s right. Tom. He’s eight years old.’
‘Surely you miss him?’
‘Of course. But…’
‘The British,’ Eckener said with admiration, ‘are intrepid.’
Denham’s other reason for living in Germany was harder to explain, but he knew it had something to do with the hysteria gripping the country. The shrieking, stamping monstrousness of it had the odd effect of making him feel sane and normal. There’d been times in the quiet civility of Hampstead, in the difficult years after he’d returned
