Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright Page 11

  “An interesting job. Do you feel safe here?” Katja asked.

  “Not completely. The zoo director is an old pal of Goering, so I stay far away from him. But the assistant director is a friend of Frederica, and she gave me the job, so I have at least one ally here.”

  “Where do you sleep?”

  “Right here. I roll out a mattress on the floor. It’s a little lonely, but I have the animals as company. And I can usually get food in the canteen. I go there just as they’re cleaning up, and no one asks questions.”

  “So, you’re in charge of the big cats?” Katja asked, impressed.

  “No, Herr Riedel is actually in charge of them. He measures out the food for each species and puts it in the right bowl. Then, at feeding time, I simply deliver the bowls to the correct cages. I also carry food over to some of the other houses on a freight bicycle.”

  “Is that dangerous? Getting in the cages with the big cats, I mean.”

  “Well, I don’t get in with them. Come back with me into the corridor and I’ll show you how the system works.”

  They stood together in front of the lion cage. “You can see that every cage is double, with an inside and an outside part. The dividing wall has an opening that I can control electrically with a key, from here.” Peter pointed overhead to a locked box.

  “I start by luring them with food to the outside cages. While they’re eating, I lower the connecting doors and enter the inside cages from here and do the cleaning. When I’m done, I reopen the connecting doors and lure them inside again.”

  “I guess you have to be careful to keep track of which doors are open and which are closed.”

  “Yeah, but you develop a system after a while.”

  Katja let her eyes sweep along the line of cages. “Do they ever threaten you?”

  “Yes, all the time. But that’s their nature. The Nazis are a bigger danger, since I don’t know how to recognize them. Fortunately, no one seems to notice a man who cleans cages.”

  “Good. Then I can stop worrying about you for a few days.” Katja laid a hand on his sleeve, surprised to find the arm beneath as muscular as Dietrich’s. She looked at her watch. “I’ve got to be back at the Charité in half an hour, so I can’t stay. Do you need anything? Food, a little money?”

  “For the moment, I’m all right. Just take care of yourself. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you too.”

  “You won’t lose me, I promise.” She embraced him hurriedly, slipped from the storage room, and threaded her way again through the crowd of people admiring the great predators.

  At the entrance to the zoo, she peered down the avenue for the Strassenbahn. Nothing in sight. Damn. She hated to be late, even by only a few minutes. She paced like the lions she had just seen and gazed dully at the buildings all around her. Then something brought her to a halt.

  What? She could almost feel the word form in her mouth. Frederica Brandt was coming toward the zoo. Was she going to visit Peter? For a fleeting instant, Katja felt a charge of electricity at the thought they might have a pleasant encounter and talk again. It had been so long.

  But Frederica was not going to the zoo, only buying a newspaper from the kiosk a hundred meters from the entrance. She folded it under her arm and walked away from the kiosk, across the street in the opposite direction.

  Katja had an instant recollection of the same gesture. The day they had met here, five years before, Frederica had bought a newspaper and then discarded it.

  As Katja stared into the distance, another recollection surfaced, of waiting with Leni Riefenstahl in the office of the propaganda ministry, where Frederica had just been hired. A table was covered with the day’s newspapers. Frederica did not need to buy a paper, and she certainly did not need to come all the way to the zoo to do it.

  There had to be more to the story, so she strolled toward the kiosk, glancing with forced casualness inside it as she passed. An old man, balding and spectacled, was arranging his piles of papers. He wore fingerless gloves and a wool scarf wrapped high around his neck, but otherwise he was unremarkable. What had she expected? She was baffled.

  She returned to the stop, and when her Strassenbahn came, she boarded it, scarcely aware of paying and finding a seat. Wheels were turning in her mind and, inexplicably, her mood lightened.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Katja let several days pass while she ran through her mind all the possible meanings of the kiosk transaction. None of them made sense. The only thing that seemed certain was that the newspaper was a prop and Frederica had either given or gotten something at the kiosk. And whatever it was, she had been doing it for five years.

  Finally, Katja was able to get off her hospital shift early and, at six o’clock, she stood waiting in the twilight outside the Ministry of Propaganda. When Frederica appeared, Katja confronted her. “Can we talk some place? I have something important to discuss with you.”

  Frederica was clearly caught off guard, but seemed pleased to see her. “Well, yes, if you wish. There’s a café only a few streets from here. We could have some coffee.”

  Katja shook her head. “I’d rather we just kept walking.”

  “What’s gotten into you?” Visibly perplexed, Frederica allowed herself to be pulled along.

  Katja wasn’t sure what sort of tone to take, or even what she was doing. Her suspicions could be all nonsense, so she began cautiously. “You know that Rudi is in Sachsenhausen. You care for him as much as I do, so why haven’t you tried to use your influence with Dr. Goebbels to get him out?”

  Frederica stopped. “I told you I don’t have any influence with the Reichsminister.”

  “But you do. I’ve seen him put his hands on you like someone who owns you. I don’t care what’s going on between you and Goebbels, but he might care that you have some regular business with a kiosk near the zoo.”

  “What are you talking about?” Frederica’s voice was steady, but her sudden drop in volume showed Katja she had struck a nerve.

  “I was there yesterday and saw you buying a newspaper you didn’t need. Just like you did the day we went to see the gorillas. Peter saw you do it too, some time ago. You’ve been buying and throwing away newspapers from that kiosk for five years. What’s going on?”

  Frederica took a breath and answered softly. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “I’m just trying to get you to help Rudi.”

  Frederica stopped walking, in spite of the cold. She faced Katja, boring into her with gray-green eyes. “You have no idea what you’re doing.”

  Katja wanted to press her lips on those eyes, and the urge made her angry. “No idea? Maybe not. But I know what I want to stop doing,” she said. “For seven years, I’ve been swept along with the lies. I’ve helped sell the lies, about what it meant to be German. I didn’t much care when the Brownshirts killed each other for some trumped-up reason in 1934, or when they dragged out hundreds of “un-German” books we’ve been reading for years and set fire to them. I didn’t even really object when they smashed all those shop windows of the Jews and burned their synagogues. I looked away when the deportations started. Then we declared war on Poland, and I was prepared to believe that we only “shot back.” But it’s come home now. Someone I care about is in a concentration camp, for the crime of loving someone. I’ve had enough.”

  Frederica shook her head softly. “Stop, Katja. Your heart’s in the right place, but you can’t help things from where you are.”

  Katja pulled her along again. Too many people on the street who could overhear. “Listen, you said something just like that the last time we talked. That ‘there are bigger issues at stake,’ and that I just didn’t understand them. What are they? Why are you sneaking around? What are you hiding? Are you passing out information or receiving it?”

  Frederica looked around nervously. “Don’t talk so loudly. You’ll get us both arrested.”

  Katja drew her into an empty alleyway. “You are involved in something against them, aren’t
you? What is it? Are you stealing something? Is it sabotage? I’ve seen it, so you can’t lie.”

  Frederica closed her beautiful eyes for a moment. “I can’t tell you anything.”

  “Why not? Why don’t you trust me?”

  “Why should I? You’re married to a nice Nazi soldier and have a nice Nazi father- and mother-in-law. I trust you least of all.”

  “That’s not fair. That’s not who I am. Not any more. What can I do to make you trust me?”

  Frederica looked down at the hand that held her. “Nothing.”

  “Not even this?” On a sudden impulse, Katja pressed Frederica back against the wall and kissed her full on the mouth. A kiss that did not invade and might have been innocent, but for its force and the long moment Katja held it.

  Frederica did not resist, nor did she kiss back, as if she were waiting for some third entity to arrive and arbitrate.

  But none came and when Katja broke the kiss, Frederica stood for a moment, as if dazed. Then she said, “That was reckless.”

  “No one’s here to see us. Everyone’s gone.” Katja glanced around to confirm. “I’m sorry. Not for the kiss, only for endangering you. But I have to show you that I’m on your side.”

  Frederica looked exasperated. “You don’t even know what side I’m on.”

  “I think I do. It’s the side I’ve finally come to myself. Look, we need each other. We’re both already committing a crime by helping Peter. I’m willing to go further. A lot further. Do you—”

  Frederica touched her lips with a gloved hand, silencing her. “Come home with me.”

  *

  “I’ll make us some coffee,” Frederica said, hanging both their coats up on hooks in an alcove by the door.

  “Anything to take the chill off.” Katja gazed around the room while Frederica busied herself in the kitchen, a little surprised at the modesty of the apartment. Surely the Reichsminister ought to have taken better care of one of his mistresses. The modest sitting room held only bookshelves, a floor lamp, sofa, and narrow coffee table. A table in the corner served as a dining area, and the door on the opposite wall presumably led to the bedroom. Only the carpet seemed of good quality.

  “You read a lot in English,” she observed, walking along the bookshelves.

  “Are you surprised?” Frederica brought in cups, saucers, sugar bowl. “Most are from my university days.”

  “Where did you study?”

  “Here in Berlin. But I was no longer a student when they burned all those books in the Opernplatz. I’ve still got copies of some forbidden books—Brecht, Sinclair, Hemingway.”

  Katja glanced along the shelf. “Also Shakespeare, Milton, Marlow, Blake, even a translation of Julius Caesar. This is not the library of a ‘good German.’”

  “I studied British literature. But you’ll find some good Germans there too. Goethe, who’s really a bore, Schiller, less so, Thomas Mann, and even the Nibelungenlied. It doesn’t get any more Germanic than that.” She returned to the kitchen to pour the boiling water over a filter into a porcelain pot. “What about you? What do you read?”

  Katja stood in the doorway while they waited for the water to filter down. “Nothing as poetic as what you’ve got. I studied at a technical institute—film, photography—and mostly I read about that. I wanted to be a filmmaker like Leni Riefenstahl, and was thrilled to work with her. Triumph des Willens is a masterpiece, but I was slow to grasp its real message. I even went with her to film in Poland at the beginning of the war. But what we saw was not the Germany we filmed in Nuremberg. Or maybe it was. That’s an even more depressing thought.”

  With the hot porcelain pot in hand, Frederica led them back to the tiny table and filled both their cups. The smell of the fresh coffee was intoxicating.

  “Sorry. I digressed. Since filmmaking never came to anything, I did what my father encouraged me to, studied nursing. Now my bookshelves are full of medical books.”

  Frederica sipped her coffee, holding Katja’s glance, and Katja’s face warmed at the scrutiny. “Please trust me,” Katja said. “I never would have de—”

  “Sssssh!” Frederica stood up abruptly from the table and went to turn on the radio. It was the state news station broadcasting reports about Polish crimes against Germans. She turned the volume up high, then sat down again and leaned in, inches from Katja’s face.

  “Before we go any further, you have to know, you’re leaping off a cliff here. If you survive the rocks, the water is very deep, and there are sharks.”

  Katja couldn’t resist a smile. “Okay, I think we’ve gone about as far as we can with the cliff metaphor. Please, stop all the obfuscation and tell me what you’re doing. Is it black market, extortion, sabotage?”

  “You can leave now without my answering that question and everything will be as before. And you won’t have put yourself in mortal danger.”

  Katja ignored her. “Who are you doing it for? What do you do? How can I help?”

  “Answer this question first. What about your husband?”

  It was a reasonable question, so Katja took a long drink of coffee while she composed her answer. “What about him? He’s a good, decent man, doing what he believes is right. But it’s not right. When he comes home, I’ll…I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m not his puppet. I have a mind of my own, and I’m past the point of worrying about what he thinks of what I do.”

  “Are you willing to betray him?”

  “What do you mean? Commit adultery?” Katja felt herself blushing again at the thought of adultery with Frederica.

  Frederica appeared to blush too. “There are other ways to betray him.”

  Katja paused to consider, to answer truthfully. “My husband never cared much about racial purity before, and he didn’t hate Jews or Gypsies, or Communists or homosexuals. This new Germany has changed him and I don’t like it. I can’t make his decisions for him, but I can make my own. Tell me what you were passing to the kiosk man. Or what you got from him.”

  Frederica stirred her half-drunk coffee and seemed to study the little whirlpool she made. “I told you my mother abandoned me when I was young. To be more precise, she handed me over to my aunt when I was six, and after that I only saw pictures of her. When I was ten, my aunt sent me back to live with my father.”

  “What has this got to do with the kiosk at the zoo?”

  “Be quiet. I’ll get there. Anyhow, when my father died, I stayed in Germany, of course. I had been here for eleven of my eighteen years. I was getting by and felt no need to contact anyone in England. Obviously no one there cared much about me. But suddenly, in 1934, just at the time I was working for Leni Riefenstahl, I got a call from someone in England offering me a job. An organization called the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, was recruiting people to integrate into the new German government. They offered to pay me a stipendium to simply apply for a job in any of the ministries. The higher the job, the higher the stipendium. I agreed and applied for the secretarial pool at the propaganda ministry.”

  “Wait, I don’t understand. Who hired you for the SOE?”

  “My aunt made the call. But I reported to the organization in general, then later to someone called Handel—obviously a code name. I had to report to him once a month, just to assure him I still held the position. I didn’t have to deliver anything, just stay in contact.”

  “How long did that go on?”

  “For years. Until the war started, in fact, when the SOE promoted me and gave me my own code name, Caesar.”

  “Caesar?” They must have been expecting great things of you.”

  “It is ridiculous, isn’t it? They never told me why. In any case, my job was anything but imperial. I just plodded along, month after month making myself valuable. I did a few things I’m not proud of, but finally I got the position I needed to really be useful as typist and transcriber to Otto Jakobs.”

  “Who is he?”

  “The principal stenographer at the propaganda ministry. You met him at
the Reichstag speech you attended with Frau Riefenstahl. Anyhow, I type the finished copy of the dictations that he takes down in shorthand.”

  Katja was losing the thread that now seemed very far from the newspaper-kiosk question. “What’s so special about working for Jakobs?”

  “Goebbels dictates his diary entries to him every day. I get to type them.”

  “His private diaries?” Katja’s amazement grew like a rising sun.

  “Which contain his private conversations with Hitler, military reports from the front, gossip about Goering and the rest of the inner circle. He goes on endlessly.”

  “And you make a copy of everything for the SOE?”

  “Summaries. He writes thousands of words, so I have to decide what might be of interest.”

  “Who do you deliver it to?”

  “The kiosk, of course. Roughly once a fortnight. But that can’t go on. It’s obviously become too repetitive. If both you and Peter have noticed me, then others could have also.”

  “Who do you talk to? Who gives you orders?”

  “I don’t talk to anyone. If I’m caught, I can’t betray anyone other than the drop, and I don’t know him. He sees to it that the coded text is sent by wireless to someone named Handel. I almost never hear from Handel directly, usually through a message left at the kiosk, or an encrypted telephone call, but that’s rare.”

  “So you are passing Goebbels’ reports to this Handel. But who is Handel?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody important in British Intelligence.”

  Katja sat back, the full import of the remark finally sinking in. Frederica was a spy.

  Chapter Nineteen

  June 14, 1940

  “Deutschland Sieg! Deutschland Sieg!” The hooligans behind Katja were shouting and pounding their fists against the air, as if it disagreed with them. But no one disagreed with them. Everybody was cheering. Holland, Belgium, arrogant France, all defeated in a week. And England in full retreat. It was breathtaking.