I got through to Benita, who said that Hermine had left her a message, and that about half an hour after I had spoken to her a man had called asking about an Indian princess. It was all I needed to know.
I collected my raincoat and a flashlight from the car. Holding the flash under the raincoat I walked the fifty metres back to Potsdamer Platz, past the Berlin Tramway Company and the Ministry of Agriculture, towards Columbus Haus. There were lights on the fifth and seventh floors, but none on the eighth. I looked in through the heavy plate-glass doors. There was a security guard sitting at the desk reading a newspaper, and, further along the corridor, a woman who was going over the floor with an electric polisher. It started to rain as I turned the corner onto Hermann Goering Strasse, and made a left onto the narrow service alley that led to the underground car-park at the back of Columbus Haus.
There were only two cars parked – a D K W and a Mercedes. It seemed unlikely that either of them belonged to the security guard or the cleaner; more probably, their owners were still at work in offices on the floors above. Behind the two cars, and under a bulkhead light, was a grey, steel door with the word ‘Service’ painted on it; it had no handle, and was locked. I decided that it was probably the sort of lock that had a spring bolt that could be withdrawn by a knob on the inside, or by means of a key on the outside, and I thought that there was a good chance that the cleaner might leave the building through this door.
I checked the doors of the two parked cars almost absent-mindedly, and found that the Mercedes was not locked. I sat in the driver’s seat, and fumbled for the light switch. The two huge lamps cut through the shadows like the spots at a Party rally in Nuremberg. I waited. Several minutes passed. Bored, I opened the glove-box. There was a road map, a bag of mints and a Party membership book with stamps up to date. It identified the bearer as one Henning Peter Manstein. Manstein had a comparatively low Party number, which belied the youthfulness of the man in the photograph on the book’s ninth page. There was quite a racket in the sale of early Party numbers, and there was no doubting that was how Manstein had come by his. A low number was essential to quick political advancement. His handsome young face had the greedy look of a March Violet stamped all over it, as clearly as the Party insignia embossed across the corner of the photograph.
Fifteen minutes passed before I heard the sound of the service door opening. I sprang out of the seat. If it was Manstein, then I was going to have to make a run for it. A wide pool of light spilled onto the floor of the garage, and the cleaning woman came through the door.
‘Hold the door,’ I called. I switched off the headlights and slammed the car door. ‘I’ve left something upstairs,’ I said. ‘I thought for a minute I was going to have to walk all the way round to the front.’ She stood there dumbly, holding the door open as I approached. When I drew near her she stepped aside, saying:
‘I have to walk all the way to Nollendorf Platz. I don’t have no big car to take me home.’
I smiled sheepishly, like the idiot I imagined Manstein to be. ‘Thanks very much,’ I said, and muttered something about having left my key in my office. The cleaning woman hovered a little and then released the door to me. I stepped inside the building and let it go. It closed behind me, and I heard the loud click of the cylinder lock as the bolt hit the chamber.
Two double doors with porthole windows led into a long, brightly lit corridor that was lined with stacks of cardboard boxes. At the far end was a lift, but there was no way of using it without alerting the guard. So I sat down on the stairs and removed my shoes and socks, putting them on again in reverse order, with the socks over the shoes. It’s an old trick, favoured by burglars, for muffling the sound of shoe-leather on a hard surface. I stood up and began the long climb.
By the time I got to the eighth floor my heart was pounding with the effort of the climb and having to breathe quietly. I waited at the edge of the stairs, but there was no sound from any of the offices next to Jeschonnek’s. I shone the flash at both ends of the corridor, and then walked down to his door. Kneeling down I looked for some wires that might give a clue to there being an alarm, but there were none; I tried first one key, and then the other. The second one was almost turning, so I pulled it out and smoothed the points with a small file. I tried again, this time successfully. I opened the door and went in, locking it behind me in case the security guard decided to do his rounds. I pointed the flash onto the desk, over the pictures and across to the door to Jeschonnek’s private office. Without the least resistance to the levers, the key turned smoothly in my ringers. Covering the name of my locksmith with mental blessings, I walked over to the window. The neon sign on top of Pschorr Haus cast a red glow over Jeschonnek’s opulent office, so there wasn’t much need for the flash. I turned it off.
I sat down at the desk and started to look for I didn’t know what. The drawers weren’t locked, but they contained little that was of any interest to me. I got quite excited when I found a red leather-bound address book, but I read it all the way through, recognizing just the one name: that of Hermann Goering, only he was care of a Gerhard Von Greis at an address on Derfflingerstrasse. I remembered Weizmann the pawnbroker saying something about Fat Hermann having an agent who sometimes bought precious stones on his behalf, so I copied out Von Greis’s address and put it in my pocket.
The filing cabinet wasn’t locked either, but again I drew a blank; plenty of catalogues of gems and semi- precious stones, a Lufthansa flight table, a lot of papers to do with currency exchange, some invoices and some life assurance policies, one of which was with the Germania Life.
Meanwhile, the big safe sat in the corner, impregnable, and mocking my rather feeble attempts to uncover Jeschonnek’s secrets, if he had any. It wasn’t difficult to see why the place wasn’t fitted with an alarm. You couldn’t have opened that box if you’d had a truck-load of dynamite. There wasn’t much left, apart from the waste-paper basket. I emptied the contents on the desk, and started to poke through the scraps of paper: a Wrigley’s chewing-gum wrapper, the morning’s
‘Number please?’ she said.
‘Ji-90-33-’
‘Trying to connect you.’ There was a brief silence on the line, and then it started ringing.
I have an excellent memory when it comes to recognizing a face, or a voice, but it might have taken me several minutes to place the cultured voice with its light Frankfurt accent that answered the telephone. As it was, the man identified himself immediately he had finished confirming the number.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I mumbled indistinctly. ‘I have the wrong number.’ But as I replaced the receiver I knew that it was anything but.
9
It was in a grave close to the north wall of the Nikolai Cemetery on Prenzlauer Alice, and only a short distance away from the memorial to National Socialism’s most venerated martyr, Horst Wessel, that the bodies were buried, one on top of the other, following a short service at Nikolai Kirche on nearby Molken Market.
Wearing a stunning black hat that was like a grand piano with the lid up, Lise Rudel was even more beautiful in mourning than she was in bed. A couple of times I caught her eye, but tight-lipped, like she had my neck between her teeth, she looked straight through me as if I was a piece of dirty glass. Six himself maintained an expression that was more angry than grief-stricken: with eyebrows knotted and head bowed, he stared down into the grave as though he were trying by a supernatural effort of will to make it yield up the living body of his daughter. And then there was Haupthandler, who looked merely thoughtful, like a man for whom there were other matters that were more pressing, such as the disposal of a diamond necklace. The appearance on the same sheet of paper in Jeschonnek’s waste-paper basket of Haupthandler’s home telephone number with that of the Adlon Hotel, my own name and that of the bogus princess, demonstrated a possible chain of causation: alarmed by my visit, and yet puzzled by my story, Jeschonnek had telephoned the Adlon to confirm the existence of the Indian princess, and then, having done so, he had telephoned Haupthandler to confront him with a set of facts regarding the ownership and theft of the jewels which was at variance with that which might originally have been explained to him.
