inside, stronger than guilt, stronger than what, once, he felt for Susan Field. But Stefan had to push. He had to know what he was dealing with.
‘Would you know what a captive bolt pistol is, Father?’
It felt like the words barely registered; they meant nothing.
‘They use it to stun animals, before they slaughter them.’
The priest looked puzzled. Stefan watched his face.
‘Susan Field took a bolt in the head from one before she was buried.’
If anything Byrne had said was real, so was his disbelief.
‘But she was dead! The guard said she was dead!’
‘I’d say the guard who drove the car from Merrion Square that night was a man called Jimmy Lynch, Father. He’s a guard all right, a detective sergeant. He was taking backhanders from your friend Keller. But I don’t think he’d have killed Susan Field without Hugo’s say so. That’s the man you handed Hannah Rosen to, to sort things out. Now no one’s seen her since.’
A day earlier, around the time Stefan Gillespie was boarding the midday Deutsche Luft Hansa flight from Croydon to Berlin, Hannah Rosen was standing in the library of a big apartment in the Danzig suburb of Langfuhr. Through the window most of the view was taken up by a large building of red brick and stone with a highly decorated, crenellated frontage that echoed the Hanseatic houses of the old town. It was the city’s university, the Technische Hochschule. Behind it were the wooded hills she had seen from the tram on her way to Oliva. Half an hour earlier the men who had pulled her into a car in front of the Danziger Hof had unlocked the door of the small bedroom that had been her cell. They led her through the apartment to a library. It was empty. They left her there with a cup of coffee and a roll.
That morning she had heard the sound of shouting and cheering outside, even in the locked room. Now she watched through the library window. The ever-present swastikas hung along the front of the university building; hundreds of students stood in front of it with flags and banners. Somewhere a man was speaking, but she could make out none of the words, only the ebb and flow of roaring and chanting from the crowd. She felt their wild enthusiasm. They were laughing and applauding. Without the flags, and with the words unheard, they seemed almost like people she knew. They looked like people she knew. She turned round, startled, as the door opened.
A man entered. He wasn’t one of the people who had snatched her off the street. They were around her own age, not much older than the students outside. This man was in his sixties. He looked at her hard. His face was stern, but there was nothing about him that felt threatening to her.
‘Why am I here?’
She spoke in German. He replied in English.
‘Just be glad you are. There are worse places to be.’
‘What do you want?’
‘They were waiting for you, at the hotel.’
‘Who was?’
‘The Gestapo, Fraulein Rosen, Frau Harvey. I don’t suppose you knew we had the luxury of our own Gestapo here in the Free City, did you?’
She said nothing. He was right. There was a lot she hadn’t known.
‘My information is that when your room was searched, they found two passports. One Irish, in the name you registered in at the hotel. The police believe that’s false. The other issued by the British Mandate in Palestine.’
‘I could be of no interest to the Gestapo,’ she said defensively.
‘Nevertheless, they are interested. That’s all that matters.’
A great roar erupted again beyond the window. The old man walked past her. He stood looking out at the rally. It was coming to an end now.
‘When I was a student, we protested about the books they wouldn’t let us read. That was our passion, freedom. Now my students pull books out of the university library to burn. That’s their passion, hatred.’ He turned back into the room. The noise outside had suddenly stilled. The rally was over.
‘You will stay here today, Fraulein. Tomorrow Leon and Johannes will go up into the hills with you. The borders are policed very aggressively at the moment, but they’ll take you across into Poland through the forests. Leon will get you to the train that runs from Gdynia to Bromberg, that’s Bydgoszcz now, in Poland. You can get to Warsaw from there without re-entering Danzig. You have a ticket to Trieste, via Warsaw and Vienna. You’ll have a week or so in Trieste before your boat leaves for Palestine. It’s pleasant at this time of year. A lot pleasanter than our Free City anyway.’
‘You’re very well-informed.’
‘And you’re very lucky. You were very stupid to come here.’
‘I had a reason to come.’ The words didn’t convince her the way they would have done two days earlier. They didn’t convince the old man either.
‘There are a few decent men left inside the Schutzpolizei. When they can, they pass on information, especially about people the Nazis want to pick up. Perhaps you can imagine the risk someone would take doing that.’
Hannah nodded. She knew people had taken risks for her.
‘We heard about you by chance. The Gestapo put a call out for you. Some kind of passport irregularity. No one knew who you were, but the information came to a friend of mine. And as this irregularity involved a passport issued in Palestine he contacted me. I didn’t know who you were either, but it felt like you and the Gestapo might not get on very well.’
‘They had no reason to know who I was.’
‘Well, somebody knew you were Fraulein Rosen, not Frau Harvey. Somebody knew something. Who have you been speaking to in Danzig?’
‘The only person I’ve talked to is a priest, an Irish priest in Oliva.’
‘You came here to see a priest?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because nobody else would do it.’
‘It must have been very important in that case.’
‘My best friend was killed. He was one of the last people to see her alive. I think that’s important. But I’m about the only person who does.’
‘That all sounds very worthy. And you think you’ve got the right to put other people’s lives at risk because of your very important personal life, do you? All sorts of people, all over the place, now here in Danzig as well.’
‘This has got nothing to do with anybody else.’
‘You don’t think so?’ He shook his head. ‘I had to find out who you were. I did, this morning. A Jew with a British Mandate passport and a ticket from Trieste to Haifa? I telephoned the Jewish Agency in Trieste. Not an easy conversation, given the Danzig exchange’s propensity for listening in to overseas calls, but with a lot of guesswork and a little Hebrew to hide what I was saying, I got there. You’re working for the Haganah. Whatever you’ve been doing in Europe, I don’t doubt you’ve met dozens of people. All names the Nazis would like to have. Don’t think they wouldn’t ship you off to Berlin if they believed you had anything useful to tell them. Nobody in the world would even realise, because nobody knows you’re here, isn’t that right? Your friends in Trieste are pretty pissed off with you, Hannah.’
‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t even going to be here two days.’
‘I don’t know what you did to draw attention to yourself, but the sooner you’re out of Danzig the better, for your sake and everyone else’s. I’m not a Zionist myself. Fighting fascism here in Europe is more important than making the desert bloom. It’s a disease. You can’t run away from it.’
‘It’s not about running away.’
‘No, probably not. I used to believe that. There are a lot of things I’m not sure about any more. I’m an old man who didn’t expect to spend his old age gazing into the darkness I thought we’d left behind a long time ago.’ He looked at her and smiled more warmly; his irritation had gone. ‘I’m sorry about your friend. But that’s the way the world is now. I’ve got friends who didn’t die a natural death too. Before long we’ll all have friends like that.’
