Last Flight to Stalingrad by Graham Hurley (novels to read .txt) 📕

‘Your children?’

‘We had help.’ He paused, his eyes still closed. ‘A name for you, Nehmann. Kurt Ludecke.’

‘I’ve never heard of him. It means nothing.’

‘It wouldn’t. He was with us in the early days, but then his nerve failed and he fled. In the end, it was that madman Rosenberg who told me.’

‘Told you what?’

‘About Ludecke. About him fucking my wife. I had to confront her before she’d admit it. Yes, Nehmann. My wife. The mother of my children. Unfaithful. You begin to understand now? About Lida?’

His eyes were open at last and it suddenly dawned on Nehmann that this man probably had no one else in the world to talk to. Surrounded by potential enemies, often of his own making, he’d sentenced himself to an isolation that would, from time to time, be hard to bear. One of the conditions of surviving at the top of the Nazi Party was that you trusted no one, confided in no one, offered no one ammunition of any sort. No wonder he’d needed a mistress.

‘She was responsive? Your Lida?’

‘She was careful. As she should be. We talked a great deal. Some evenings there was no one else in this little boat, just us. I could make her laugh. She liked that. Maybe it was the sound of my voice. I used to tell her stories all the time, things we used to get up to in the old days, and she’d tell me that the sound of my voice would make her tingle all over. Were we intimate? Yes, but not physically, not at first, and, oddly, that made the attraction all the more powerful. We both knew it had to happen. But not quite yet.’

That year, at the Nuremberg Rally, Goebbels spoke from the podium. Before the speech began, he told Lida that there’d come a moment when he’d briefly touch his face with a white handkerchief. She was to watch out for this gesture because it meant that he was passionately in love with her.

‘And you did it? It happened?’

‘Of course. It was a promise as well as a confession.’

‘And?’

‘She said she was flattered. And perhaps a little more than that.’

On one of the evenings at Nuremberg, Goebbels described arranging for Baarova’s latest film to be shown for the first time. The story was set in the world of spies and the audience at the premiere included the likes of Himmler and the Abwehr chief, Wilhelm Canaris.

‘It was a decent script, Nehmann, I made sure of that. She had the lead role, and everyone agreed she was sensational. I also had the film retitled. I insisted it be called Traitor.I was sending a message, a personal little billet-douxto my faithless devil of a wife. Canaris understood at once, of course. That man insists on a code for everything.’

Nehmann smiled. He’d once interviewed Canaris. This was a man who spent his life chasing enemies of the Reich yet Nehmann left Abwehr headquarters suspecting that their Chief’s own support for the Führer was less than total. Given his role in the Nazi machine, Nehmann had loved the irony.

‘And Lida? At Nuremberg?’ he asked.

‘She agreed to stay on for a day or two. We had a meal that night with some of the film people at the Ufa studios. In my position it isn’t easy to hide yourself away but somehow we managed it. A miracle, Nehmann. That night I prayed to God, and God delivered.’

Next morning, he said, Lida insisted on returning to Berlin. Distraught, Goebbels sent a messenger to the station to intercept her.

‘He was carrying a huge bunch of roses, Nehmann, and a photograph I’d managed to lay hands on.’

‘Of?’

‘Me.’

‘And?’

‘She didn’t get on the train.’

He smiled at the memory, and then trailed his fingers in the water.

‘Something precious comes into your life, Nehmann, you’ll do anything to keep it. Don’t you find that? Don’t you agree it pays to be Master of the Hunt? Time waits for no man. Hesitate, and all is lost.’

He was looking at the villa again, the low waterside property that Frolich had been sharing with Lida. The summer had come and gone. The Master of the Hunt, in his own words, was besotted.

‘I was putty in her hands, Nehmann. Sometimes there’s nothing sweeter than an act of total surrender, not just to the moment, but to all the moments to come. I had to write to her. I had to talk to her. I had to hear the sound of her voice, if only to reassure myself that I hadn’t made her up. I used to put calls through to the house there. Actors work strange hours. Frolich was often still at home. He got a lot of calls from Herr Muller.’

‘That’s what you called yourself?’

‘Yes. And I loved it. The excitement. The subterfuge. All that hiding your real self away.’

‘Except for the one who really mattered.’

‘Of course. Exactly. The one who really mattered. Our secret got out in the end. There were all kinds of unpleasantness. With Frolich, of course, and Magda, and finally the Führer himself. Some days the pressures were unbearable but we both knew we had to be true to ourselves, to what we had. There’s a cabin out in the woods at the Bodensee. I still visit it sometimes, even now, although the pain can be intense. We had a big fur rug in front of the log fire. We spent hours there together, summer, autumn, deepest winter, it didn’t matter, just as long as we had each other.’

He nodded and lay back in the sunshine, the faintest smile on his face. Goebbels had long struck Nehmann as an actor manqué. Face to face or roaring at tens of thousands at some tribal meeting or other, he could adopt whatever persona the occasion required. His repertoire of tricks – physical gestures large and small – was extensive. He used his voice like a musical instrument. He was the master, as he’d just admitted, of hiding his real self away.