Last Flight to Stalingrad Graham Hurley (sight word books .TXT) 📖

Nehmann went to the window and read the report. It seemed there’d been an unfortunate incident at Montparnasse Metro station in central Paris. A man in his early forties had fallen in front of a train and been killed. This individual, unnamed, had an important role with the occupation forces, reporting directly to Ambassador Otto Abetz. Suspecting the involvement of French terrorists, ten hostages had been seized and shot that very afternoon.

Nehmann settled on the bed. He knew that there was a tariff that applied in circumstances like these. Kill a German in occupied France, or Brussels, or Amsterdam, or anywhere else in the Greater Reich, and you’d normally expect fifty hostages to be taken and held under sentence of death. In this case, only ten had faced the firing squad. Was there some doubt about the circumstances of this man’s death? And, in any case, who on earth was he?

Nehmann read the report a second time. Like the framed photo hanging on the wall next door, he suspected that it must have been deliberately left for him, part of a carefully composed tableau he couldn’t fail to notice. Goebbels, he thought to himself, trying to send some kind of message. He frowned, trying to understand the implications, then he shrugged and ducked his head to sniff the pillow. Shalimar by Guerlain, again. Maria.

Nehmann was in the kitchen, wolfing the last of the Weisswurst,when he heard a knock on the door. It was the Promi driver who’d picked him up from the airport. The Minister presented his compliments, he said, and would welcome Nehmann’s company for a drink or two. Nehmann finished the sausage and accompanied the driver down the main staircase to the street. It was nearly dark by now.

Expecting a lift to the Ministry, Nehmann found himself being driven north, over the Spree. Beyond the suburbs, the houses thinned, the land rising and falling, dark stands of pine trees in every direction. Already he’d asked the driver where they were going, getting no response. Now he had a suggestion of his own.

‘Bodensee?’

‘Ja,’the driver laughed. ‘Where else?’

The recently built villa at Bodensee was yet another of Goebbels’ residences, his country retreat, and already a national byword for the kind of indulgence to which a senior Party member could treat himself. It was alleged to have seventy rooms, though Nehmann had never met anyone who’d counted them, and the Minister used the place to brood, to write and to entertain. It was here that he’d courted Lida Baarova and doubtless others, and it was here, too, that he’d probably penned the letter Nehmann had taken to Rome.

The entrance gate, hard to spot, was hidden in the gloom of the pine trees. The driver led Nehmann to the big front door beneath the white stucco of the arch. Goebbels himself welcomed his visitor.

‘The Wanderer’ – he had a pencil in his hand – ‘returns.’

The driver stepped back into the darkness while Nehmann followed the Minister into the house. It was cavernous, an uneasy mix of Third Reich kitsch and something altogether more modern. Through a pair of open doors halfway down the hall, Nehmann caught sight of what he assumed was a huge reception room, black and white diamond chequers on the floor, the ceiling boxed in varnished wood, a long rectangular table set for a single place.

At the end of the hall, among a selection of looted French Impressionist paintings, was a framed photograph Nehmann had never seen before. He paused beside it. Goebbels, in a military greatcoat and a cap, was on the right, his gloved hands clasped in front of him, about to address an unseen figure. Behind him, at the very centre of the photo, was a woman in a three-quarter-length white fur coat. She had a flower in her hair and her gown extended to her ankles. She, too, was looking at someone on the right. An occasion of some kind, Nehmann assumed. He was right.

‘Olympia?’ Goebbels had stopped, too. ‘You’ve seen it? That was the night we launched Leni’s masterpiece.’

Nehmann nodded. Leni Riefenstahl was the Reich’s favourite film director and Olympia was her record of the 1936 Berlin Games. Nehmann had loved it at first sight, mainly because it broke all the rules: smash cuts, weird camera angles, extreme close-ups. Riefenstahl, he often thought, achieved on the screen effects he himself tried to put on the page. She understood, above all, how important it was to reach out and compel attention.

‘And that’s Baarova? In the fur coat?’

‘Lida.’ Goebbels barely spared her a glance. ‘Yes.’

He opened a nearby door and stood aside to let Nehmann through. This had to be the Minister’s study, in many ways a replica of his perch in the Wilhelmstrasse. The same neatly organised desk. The same side table stacked with film scripts. The same nest of family photographs. Nehmann noticed that door was still a centimetre or so open.

‘A seat, Nehmann. You must be weary.’ Goebbels waved his guest into one of the two armchairs. ‘Wine or whisky? I suggest the latter.’

Nehmann said he was happy with either. Goebbels busied himself with a cut-glass decanter, pouring two large glasses of what he said was single malt.

‘I expect a man can get sick of vodka.’ He smiled. ‘It’s very good to see you in one piece, my friend. Is it equally good to be home?’

Nehmann was noncommittal. Goebbels, as ever, was setting the conversational pace, pointing Nehmann in the direction they both understood. ‘Home’ meant the apartment on the Wilhelmstrasse.

‘I liked the flowers,’ Nehmann said. ‘And the Frauen-Warte cover was a nice touch.’

‘Excellent. The Elbrus edition broke every circulation record. Men in uniform have a wonderful effect on women. Put six of them on top of a mountain and millions of Frauen are ours for the taking. You’ll be glad to know that even the Führer approved in the end.’

Nehmann nodded. The first sip of whisky was burning his throat.

‘Someone left a cutting on my pillow,’ he said slowly. ‘In the bedroom.’

‘Really?’