the old man offering a king’s ransom if you helped them escape?’
On the floor Friedl moaned.
‘No scam, Rausch,’ said Denham. ‘They’re just people I like. Fellow human beings.’
The eyes narrowed. ‘Fellow human beings…’ He gave a thoughtful grunt, lit another Murad with a steel lighter, and leaned back, observing Denham through a ring of yellow smoke. ‘Ye-es, I suppose the Jews are part of our species. But they are not part of our race… That’s the point. They are sublimely clever, Denham, to survive as they do by destroying cultures from within, like parasites, like bacilli…’ He glanced at Hannah’s sleeping form through the open bedroom door. ‘So few of them, and yet such influence-in the law, in medicine, in banking. We continually underestimate them… But here I am, talking away.’
The Mauser cocked with a fluid click.
‘D ’you think they’re all right?’ Eleanor said, not taking her eyes off the main doors.
She and Martha were still seated in the Hanomag in the forecourt of the clinic.
‘Stop biting your nails,’ Martha said. ‘That’s the fifth time you’ve asked in fifteen minutes…’
‘Oh Jesus.’
The dark interior of the Hanomag was suddenly lit by the headlights of a car coming up the drive.
Martha turned to look through the back window. ‘All right, get down in your seat…’
The two women slid down, almost crouching on the floor of the car, as the grey BMW rolled into the forecourt and parked in a space between two other cars.
Peeking over the door Eleanor made out the heads of Jakob and Ilse in the backseat and saw the driver’s door opening.
A wave of danger washed over her.
‘How are we going to handle this?’ Martha whispered.
T he SD man held his gun to Denham’s neck while Rausch carefully removed the List Dossier from the satchel. His hand trembled slightly, Denham noticed, as if it were a holy relic, or charged with some astral energy. Fuhrerkontakt.
Friedl moaned again on the floor. Denham turned to him, but the SD man pushed the gun hard into his neck.
‘Don’t you speak?’ Denham said to him, his face forced back towards Rausch.
Still Rausch stared at the old oilskin cover of the dossier, touching the charred corner, the frayed edges, not opening it. Yellowed corners of paper, the drawings, peeped from the side.
‘Go on, Rausch,’ Denham said. ‘Aren’t you going to take a look?’
He could see the man was struggling with himself, duty fighting temptation.
Heydrich warned you not to look.
Finally Rausch said, ‘It is not my place to know.’
‘What, that your god, your great Hitler, is nothing but a-’
Rausch dropped the dossier, moved quickly, and punched Denham in the stomach, doubling him over.
The SD man pulled Denham up by his hair to give Rausch another hit, but the Hauptsturmfuhrer was talking now, bare-teethed, his face crimson. ‘Tonight’s report was going to state that British spy Richard Denham was shot while resisting arrest. But you have just inspired me to make you an extraordinary offer, to accept or decline as you wish.’
He jerked the barrel of the Mauser towards the open bedroom door. ‘Go in.’ Denham stepped forwards, hands half raised, still gasping for air from the punch. ‘Go.’
In the dim room Hannah slept, breathing in a deep rhythm, long hair covering half her face. A princess in a fairy tale, slumbering under an evil spell.
Rausch said to the SD man, ‘Guard the other one.’ Then he followed Denham in, still aiming the Mauser, and turned on the bedside light. ‘An experiment,’ he said, sitting on the edge of the bed. His face was contorted with hate. ‘We’re going to test your love for your fellow human beings.’ He pointed the gun at Hannah’s temple with a straight right arm. ‘My offer is to spare you, and kill her…’
‘No-’ Denham’s head reeled.
‘Your life… for a Jew’s. ’
‘Wait-’
‘I’m going to count to three. One…’
‘Rausch, you’ll be well rewarded if you-’
‘Two…’
‘You’ve got the dossier, damn it, what more do you want-’
‘Three!’
Rausch looked at where the gun touched Hannah’s temple.
‘All right, take me, not her.’
His trigger finger squeezed, and the sheets surged violently.
Staring at Denham, Rausch’s eyes were bulbous with disbelief.
A syringe was plunged deep into his neck.
He dropped the Mauser on the bed, struggled with Hannah’s fist, and pulled the needle out. The vial was empty. He’d received the full dose.
Noises bubbled from his throat as he tried to stand, alerting the SD man, who clomped in, pistol drawn.
A discharge flash-lit the small room. Denham’s ears were deafened.
The SD man’s head thumped softly as it hit the door. His body crumpled, leaving a red trail down the white gloss, the hole in his forehead small and dark, like a cleft cherry, his final expression surprise.
In Denham’s hand the Mauser felt leaden and filthy. A sharp smell of cordite filled his nostrils.
Rausch had fallen back onto the bed, still gurgling and clutching his throat.
‘You were right about one thing,’ Hannah shrieked, kneeling on the bed, a knee on either side of Rausch’s chest. ‘You-continually-under-esti-mate-us.’ Each word was punctuated with a stab of the needle-in his arm, in his shoulder.
Denham grabbed her wrist and prised the syringe from her hand, feeling all the strength in her body ebb away.
‘Enough,’ he said.
She threw her arms around him and sobbed. ‘Horrible, horrible,’ she said.
‘M artha, look.’
The pig of a man in a seersucker jacket they’d seen earlier, the one who had changed the tyre, got out of the BMW and walked towards the building’s main doors, where he was greeted by a fat woman in a nurse’s uniform.
‘Jesus, her butt’s as big as a barn.’
It was almost dark, but they could hear her explaining something urgent, gesticulating, pointing inside, and saw the alarm on the man’s face. He returned to the car, spoke for a moment to the SS driver, then ran into the clinic.
R ausch’s eyelids drooped as the drug took effect.
‘What was in that?’ Denham said.
‘Phenobarbital, I think, and a cocktail of other stuff,’ Hannah said, pulling herself together. ‘While the good Dr Pfanmuller was distracted talking to these men I took an empty syringe from the trash, put it on the tray, and started acting drowsy. He assumed he’d already given me the sedative.’
Friedl came to the door clutching his head. ‘What happened in here?’
‘Take his gun,’ Denham said to him, pointing at the dead SD man. ‘Hannah, get dressed. We’re leaving in under one minute.’
He put Rausch’s feet up on the bed and covered him with the sheets.
‘Denham…,’ he said, a weak smile on his lips. Then his lids closed, and he began to snore.
‘Your parents will be arriving at any moment,’ Denham said.
‘My parents? But-’
‘I’ll explain on the way. Hurry.’
In the next room Denham put the List Dossier back into the satchel, noticing that it still contained the bogus dossier they were going to exchange at the border.
