Schellenberg concluded the meeting and left his office. He had parked his car on Hohenzollerndamm instead of his usual place outside the front door, reasoning that the walk might afford him an opportunity to see if he was being followed. He recognized most of the cars parked outside the offices of Amt VI; but further up the street, toward the taxi file on the corner of Teplitzer Strasse, he saw a black Opel Type 6 limousine with two occupants. It was parked facing north, the same direction as Schellenberg’s gray Audi. But for Arthur Nebe’s warning he would have paid it little or no attention. As soon as he got into his car, Schellenberg picked up the shortwave transmitter and called his office, asking his secretary, Christiane, to check on the license plate he read off in his rearview mirror. Then he turned the car around and drove south toward the Grunewald Forest.
He drove slowly, with one eye on his mirror. He saw the black Opel make a U-turn on Hohenzollerndamm and then come after him at the same leisurely speed. After a few minutes, Christiane came on the radio again.
“I have that Kfz-Schein,” she said. “The car is registered to Department Four, at the Reich Main Security Office, on Prinz Albrechtstrasse.”
So it was the Gestapo who were following him.
Schellenberg thanked her and switched off the radio. He could hardly let them follow him to where he was going-Himmler would never have approved of what he had arranged. But equally, he didn’t want to make it too obvious that he was trying to lose them; so long as the Gestapo were unaware that he had been tipped off about them, he had a small advantage.
He stopped at a tobacconist and bought some cigarettes, which gave him the opportunity to turn around without it looking like he’d spotted the tail. Then he drove north until he reached the Kurfurstendamm, turning east toward the city center.
Near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, he turned south onto Tauenzienstrasse and pulled up outside the Ka-De-We department store on Wittenberg Platz. Berlin’s biggest department store was full of people, and it was a comparatively simple matter for Schellenberg to give the Gestapo the slip. Entering the store by one door, he left by another, picking up a taxi at the stand on Kurfurstenstrasse. The driver took him north, up Potsdamer Strasse toward the Tiergarten, and then dropped him close to the Brandenburg Gate. Schellenberg thought Berlin’s famous monument was looking a little scarred from the bombings. On top of the quadriga roof, the four horses drawing Eirene in her chariot seemed rather more apocalyptic than triumphal these days. Schellenberg crossed the street, glanced over his shoulder one last time to check that he was no longer being followed, and hurried through the door of the Adlon, Berlin’s best hotel. Before the war the Adlon had been known as “little Switzerland” because of all the diplomatic activity that took place there, which was probably one reason why Hitler had always avoided it; more important, however, the SS avoided the Adlon, too, preferring the Kaiserhof in Wilhelmstrasse, which was why Schellenberg always conducted his liaisons with Lina at the Adlon.
His suite was on the third floor of the hotel, with a view of Unter den Linden. Before the National Socialist Party had cut down the trees to facilitate military displays, it had been just about the nicest view in Berlin, with the possible exception of Lina Heydrich’s bare behind.
As soon as he was inside the room he picked up the telephone and ordered some champagne and a cold lunch. Despite the war, the kitchens at the Adlon still managed to turn out food that was as good as anywhere in Europe. He moved the telephone away from the bed and buried it under a heap of cushions. Schellenberg knew that the Forschungsamt, the intelligence agency established by Goring and charged with signal surveillance and wiretapping, had planted listening devices in all of the Adlon’s four hundred bedroom phones.
Schellenberg took off his jacket and settled down in an armchair with the Illustrierte Beobachter and read a highly romanticized account of life on the Russian front that seemed to suggest not only that German soldiers were holding back the enemy masses, but also that in the end German heroism would prevail.
There was a knock at the door. It was a waiter with a trolley. He started to open the champagne but Schellenberg, tipping him generously, told him to go. It was one of the bottles of Dom Perignon 1937 he had brought from Paris-a whole case he had left with the Adlon’s sommelier-and he had no intention of letting anyone but himself open what was perhaps one of the last good bottles of champagne in Berlin.
Ten minutes later the door opened a second time and a tall, blue-eyed, corn-haired woman wearing a neatly tailored brown tweed suit and a checked flannel blouse entered the suite. Lina Heydrich kissed him, a little sadly, which was always the way she kissed Schellenberg when she saw him again, before sitting down in an armchair and lighting a cigarette. He opened the champagne expertly and poured a glass, then brought it to her, sitting down on the arm of her chair and stroking her hair gently.
“How have you been?” he asked.
“Good, thank you. And you? How was Paris?”
“I brought you a present.”
“Walter,” she said, smiling, although no less sadly than before. “You shouldn’t have.”
He handed her a gift-wrapped package and watched as she unwrapped it.
“Perfume,” she said. “How clever of you to know it’s in short supply here.”
Schellenberg smiled. “I’m an intelligence officer.”
“Mais Oui, by Bourjois.” She removed the seal and the scallop-shaped stopper and dabbed some on her wrists. “It’s nice. I like it.” Her smile grew a little warmer. “You’re very good at presents, aren’t you, Walter? Very thoughtful. Reinhard was never good at presents. Not even on birthdays or anniversaries.”
“He was a busy man.”
“No, that wasn’t it. He was a womanizer, that’s what he was, Walter. Him and that awful friend of his.”
“Eichmann.”
She nodded. “Oh, I heard all the stories. What they were up to in the nightclubs. Especially the ones in Paris.”
“Paris is very different now,” said Schellenberg. “But I can’t say I ever heard anything.”
“For an intelligence chief you’re a terrible liar. I hope you’re better at lying to Hitler than you are to me. You must have heard the story of the Moulin Rouge firing squad?”
Everyone in the SD had heard the story of Heydrich and Eichmann lining up ten naked girls in the famous Paris nightclub, then bending them over so that they could fire champagne corks at their bare behinds. He shrugged. “Those stories have a habit of being exaggerated. Especially after someone has died.”
Lina gave Schellenberg a penetrating sideways look. “Sometimes I wonder what you get up to when you go to Paris.”
“Nothing so vulgar, I can assure you.”
She took his hand and kissed it affectionately.
Lina von Osten was thirty-one years old. She had married Heydrich in 1931 when she was just eighteen and already an enthusiastic National Socialist. It was rumored that it was she who had persuaded her new husband to join the SS. Schellenberg himself thought the rumor was probably true, for Lina was a strong woman as well as a handsome one. Not a great beauty but well made, and wholesome looking, like one of those paragons of Aryan womanhood from the Nazi Women’s League you’d see exercising in a propaganda film.