The shouting rose as the dogs sped into the second lap.
‘In that case photograph everything in the dossier,’ Denham said. ‘I will use the original to exchange for the Liebermanns.’
The tall man considered this new tack, tapping the tip of his black umbrella on the ground and slowly shook his head. ‘The power of that dossier is its uniqueness and authenticity-and in the fact that we will have the original proof and no one else. Sorry. I can ask, but they’ll say no copies.’
Denham felt his spirits sliding. There goes plan B.
Evans glanced sideways at Denham. ‘Our colleague, Mr Palmer-Ward, is getting most eager to take possession of it.’
‘Soon,’ Denham said, distracted. He had to think.
There was a great commotion as the hounds tore past in a blur, leaving behind one dog trampled, yelping in the dust, its hind legs broken. A great ‘oh’ from the crowd. Denham put his hands over Tom’s eyes as two men ran onto the track to put Slippy Boy out of his suffering.
T he meeting around the kitchen table at Chamberlain Street that evening felt like a war cabinet. Denham explained that they were on their own in the matter of the Liebermanns; there would be no help from the British government. Eleanor began to cuss, but Denham cut right to it: the only idea he had left.
‘Tell me, Friedl, who actually knows what’s in the List Dossier-I mean not just that it exists, but what it contains.’
‘Everything in it? Only Jakob and Kurt. But most of the officers in the network read a copy of the Mend Protocol.’
‘And the Sicherheitsdienst, the SD. They’ve never seen it?’
‘No.’
‘So how much would they really know about it?’
‘Depends what they learned from interrogating that officer. That it concerns Hitler’s war record and missing years. Probably no more than that. They would have been wary of learning the details until they’d informed Hitler…’
‘That fits. I certainly got the impression that Rausch, who interrogated me, did not know.’
‘I suppose only Hitler himself would be able to fill in the whole picture,’ Friedl said.
‘Yes, but he would have to confide in someone, wouldn’t he? If he were to impress upon them the seriousness of the matter? Even tell them some of the truth.’
‘Who knows? Maybe one or two very senior SD.’
‘Such as Heydrich?’
‘It’s possible…’
‘But the SD men tracking it down will know from him how urgent and serious this is-even if they don’t know why.’
‘Without a doubt.’
‘They will know it is imperative that they recover it. For him.’
‘You know that very well yourself.’
‘So if, again for argument’s sake, we arrange to give a dossier to, say, Rausch…’
Friedl closed his eyes. ‘Richard… where is this going?’
‘Rausch is not going to know for certain if it’s not the dossier.’
‘No, I suppose not…’
Denham clasped his hands together and turned to Eleanor. ‘I think we’ll call on our Nazi friends.’
Chapter Forty-two
The German embassy on Carlton House Terrace was being redecorated. Denham dodged the ladders and paint buckets en route to the visitors’ desk and handed over a manila envelope.
‘This needs to go in your diplomatic pouch on this evening’s flight,’ he said.
The young male official grimaced, looked at the name and address, and took the envelope by the corner, as if it might contain rat poison.
‘We will need to know what’s in this.’
‘You could open it and take a look if you like, but Obergruppenfuhrer Heydrich will have you killed.’
The man looked sharply up.
‘My name is Denham. D-E-N-H-A-M. I will return tomorrow afternoon to speak by telephone to the person named on that envelope. He will be most interested to hear from me.’
W hen Denham got home, Friedl showed him a manuscript he’d been working on during his months in hiding. There were almost a hundred pages of No Parts for Stella, an experimental novel. It was the story of a high-minded Berlin actress who loses all integrity in her bid for fame. In a series of increasingly dire compromises she slips further down a moral slope, so that by the time she’s a star, she’s a monster. It wasn’t a bad read. It explored the perils of ambition and notions of personal worth, but the lurid, uncompromising style was both its strength and its failing.
‘Any good?’ Friedl asked, when he was near the end.
‘Ye-es,’ Denham said, ‘but I think it’s ahead of its time. It’ll need a rewrite if you want to show it to a publisher.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, for one thing, you’ve written a scene where she sleeps with all the male extras in Frederick the Great…’
T hat evening Eleanor took them to hear Ambrose and His Orchestra at the Cafe de Paris. In the gilded red interior Denham could tell the boys thought it all very high hat: a dinner-jacketed set treating platinum blondes to champagne and eggs Benedict. Eleanor led them into the ballroom, gliding down the semicircle stairs and between tables lit by amber lamps. She’d waved her hair, powdered her face, and wore a new glossy lipstick called Havana Dusk.
‘Violins,’ Nat said, as though he meant spittoons. They found their table with a banquette of red upholstery. ‘Two trumpets and only one sax!’
‘Kid, you wouldn’t know class if it kicked you in the nuts,’ Eleanor said. ‘Let’s dance.’ The orchestra had begun a pepped-up arrangement of ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’
A waiter brought an ice bucket and poured their flutes with a flourish while Denham watched the odd spectacle of an elegant American woman being twirled around by a shock-haired, spotty youth who wouldn’t have looked amiss on the Petrograd Soviet. Nat made one attempt to swing her over his hip, but Eleanor was far stronger than he was.
Denham’s mind wandered.
He pictured Rausch sitting in his office on the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin tomorrow morning. Perhaps a corner office looking onto that pillared courtyard where the supercharged Mercedes cars pull in with pennants on the hubcaps, bringing the high SS to work. Leather coat hanging from a hatstand; his desk with two telephones, one for the outside world, one internal-for his parallel world, the vast police spiderwebs of the Reich. He sees the envelope marked Poste Diplomatique, the one his secretary has not opened. Curious, he tears the flap with his honour dagger, and removes a single drawing, the very one Denham saw when he’d first opened the dossier-the lad with the charcoal freckles and the clear cold eyes. Something in the fullness of the young man’s lips faintly suggests a kiss, a mocking kiss, and a man of Rausch’s urbanity sees it.
He is perplexed, but then his gaze falls to the signature, which burns into his eyes. The appalling secret pouting up at him. Now he is nervous. He reads the typed note attached with a paper clip: Denham’s offer to exchange the complete List Dossier in return for the safe passage from Germany of Jakob, Ilse, and Hannah Liebermann. There follows an instruction to communicate with him by telephone at the German embassy in London tomorrow at 16:00 Greenwich Mean Time. Rausch flattens the drawing on the desk, dagger upright in his hand, and stares at nothing. His nerves give way to incredulity, then to rage.
Denham had retrieved the drawing and a handful of others that morning from the bank vault. The rest of the
