doing, Fritz,’ said Pauli. He was flattered that Esser had taken him into his confidence, for these were days when any small disloyalty was enough to get a man murdered.
‘I have a nose for what’s what. I’m not really a soldier; I’m a political person. I always have been,’ said Esser.
‘What will happen next? Your Hitler is certain to get a long prison sentence, isn’t he?’
‘We’ll bide our time,’ said Esser. ‘Adolf Hitler is the man Germany needs; we must wait for him, however long.’
‘For God’s sake, be careful, Fritz. You said Röhm is a ruthless bastard. If he finds out that you’re betraying him…’
‘I know how to handle him. He’s a homosexual, like Graf. There are too many homosexuals around Röhm; that’s one of the things I don’t like about the situation in Munich. I treat them all like spoiled brats. One day the Führer will deal with them. Until then those pansies need me. Röhm is hiding guns for the army – secret dumps all over the country. More than twenty thousand rifles, machine guns … even artillery.’ He grinned. ‘Without my office files they’d never know where anything is to be found.’
‘Alex Horner is here tonight. You should talk to him. One day he’ll end up as chief of the General Staff. There might be a time when an influential friend in the Reichswehr would be useful to you.’ Pauli wanted his friends to be friends with one another. It was something of an obsession with him.
Fritz Esser downed his drink. ‘Thanks, Pauli. But don’t worry about me. I know what I’m doing. Sometime we’ll go out and get drunk and I’ll tell you some stories about the Munich putsch that will make your hair curl. It nearly came off! I marched alongside the Führer. I was in Odeonsplatz when the police opened fire. The Führer was no more than thirty paces from me. He was still wearing his evening suit, with a trenchcoat over it. The man next to him was shot dead; he pulled the Führer down with him. Captain Göring was wounded. Only Ludendorff ignored the gunfire and marched on through the police cordon. It was a wonderful experience, Pauli.’
‘It was a fiasco,’ said Pauli, not unkindly.
‘One day you’ll regret you were not with us. We made history.’
‘Have another drink, Fritz. And then let’s see if we can find Alex. I want to get the two of you together.’
At that moment Pauli’s old friend Leutnant Alex Horner was smoking a cigar in Harald Winter’s study and being quizzed by Winter and old ‘Foxy’ Fischer. The study had never been refurnished since the Winters first moved in. The walls were lined with more or less the same books, and the floor covered with the same richly coloured oriental carpet. The same inlaid mahogany desk occupied one corner, and the only light came from the green-shaded desk lamp. Everything was clean and well cared for, but the footstools, like the polished leather wing armchairs, were scuffed and scarred by carelessly held cigars and the marks from drink glasses. The study, more than any other room in the house, had escaped unchanged over these eventful years, and Harald liked it all just the way it was; even the engraved portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm remained on the wall.
This evening the air here was blue with cigar smoke from the three men. The deferential attention the young man was receiving was flattering for him, but he was not surprised by it. For Leutnant Horner had recently been able to see for himself what was Germany’s most closely guarded secret: the newly established German military installations in Soviet Russia. Now the two men wanted a first-hand account of this astounding political development.
‘Did you visit all the factories?’ asked Fischer. He was seventy-two years old, totally bald and frail, but he would not give up cigars and brandy.
‘I really don’t know, but I went to some of the most important ones.’ Alex’s face had become hard and set into the inscrutable expression that the German army expected of its elite Prussian Officer Corps. His nose was wider, and the duelling scar that had been on his cheek so long had become more livid with age.
‘The Junkers airplane factories, near Moscow and Kharkov,’ supplied Harald Winter, to show he was already well informed. He looked especially sleek. He’d spent the earlier part of the evening dancing. Harry enjoyed dancing, and tonight he’d made sure of partnering most of the attractive young women here. At fifty-four he was still a better dancer than any of the younger men, and he was only too pleased to demonstrate it.
Alex Horner nodded. ‘There were twenty-three of us. We travelled separately. I didn’t, for instance, visit the poison-gas factory – it’s in a remote part of Samara Oblast – or any of the plants where artillery shells are manufactured. Ordnance specialists were sent there, and aviators reported on the flying schools. My assignment was to visit the tank training schools that we run in cooperation with the Red Army.’
Fischer crushed his cigar into the ashtray with unnecessary force. ‘I don’t like it, I’ll tell you. The idea of showing Bolshevik murderers how to use tanks and planes is madness. Those swine will attack us the first chance they get.’
‘Your fears are unfounded, Foxy,’ said Harald Winter, and smiled at the strongly expressed views. ‘The Versailles Diktat forbids us to have planes and tanks. The Soviets have not signed the Versailles treaty, and their cooperation is exactly what we need. The Russians want our expertise and we have to have secret testing grounds.’ The neatness of the deception pleased him.
‘You are being carried away by the prospects,’ Fischer told Winter. ‘I, too, want to get my factories fully working again, but I can’t keep a tank production line secret.’
Winter hesitated and a nerve in his cheek twitched. Then he admitted, ‘I have already supplied the army with modern planes. All-metal airframes. Aluminium alloys, monocoque construction, far advanced over the flimsy old wooden contraptions that were used in the war. I’d desperately like to hear how they are faring in field conditions in Russia. The army won’t let me send my technical experts there.’ He looked at Horner, half hoping that he would offer to arrange for this, but Horner looked away.
‘Perhaps I’m getting too old,’ said Fischer. ‘My son Richard thinks as you do: he’s obsessed with the designing of all these wretched tanks, to the point of neglecting our other clients. I tell him these Bolsheviks are treacherous and he laughs at me.’
‘We have a mutual enemy,’ said Horner. He blew a smoke ring and admired it. The drink and the conspiratory atmosphere had gone to his head.
‘Us and the Russians? The Poles, you mean?’ said Fischer. ‘I have never believed that Poland was a serious threat to us.’
There was a light tap at the door, and when Winter called ‘Come in’ his wife entered. Time had been kind to Veronica Winter. She had lost little of the beauty that had turned men’s heads when Winter had first met her. She was thinner now than she’d been then, and her face, throat and arms, revealed by the striped brown-and-yellow silk-voile evening dress she wore, were paler. But the serenity that made her desirable, and the smile that was so often on her lips had gone. Veronica was perturbed.
‘Harald!’ she said, having indicated that the other two men should not stand up for her. ‘Who are those dreadful men?’
‘Dreadful men?’ said Winter. ‘Which men?’ He flicked ash from his cigar. It was a sign of his irritation at being interrupted.
In an attempt to calm her Fischer chuckled and said, ‘There are so many dreadful men in your house tonight, Veronica, that even your husband
