Chavasse was in the act of pulling on the hunting jacket he had taken from the inn at Berndorf, and he smiled. “Now, surely you know better than to ask me a thing like that, Colonel?”
Von Kraul sighed. “After all, we are supposed to be allies. How much simpler it would be if we were completely frank with each other.” He held open the door. “Shall we go?”
His car was a black Porsche, and he handled it more than competently as they moved through the heavy traffic in the center of the city and crossed the Alster by the Lombardsbrucke.
Chavasse glanced at his watch. It was just after seven-thirty, and he turned to his companion and said, “How long will it take us to reach Nagel’s place?”
Von Kraul said, “Twenty minutes, perhaps even thirty. Certainly not longer.”
Chavasse made a quick decision. “I’d like to call in on a friend, if you don’t mind. Just to let her know I’ll be a little later than I said.”
Von Kraul chuckled. “A woman, eh? Will it take long?”
Chavasse shook his head. “Only a couple of minutes, I promise you, and it’s on our way.”
Von Kraul made no further comment after Chavasse gave him the address, and they continued in silence through the busy streets.
It was a fine autumn evening and the rain had stopped. Chavasse lowered the window and lit a cigarette, feeling suddenly content. Every so often he had a feeling that things were running his way, that the job was going to get finished in exactly the way he wanted.
When the Porsche braked to a halt in front of the apartment house where Anna lived, he got out feeling absurdly happy and grinned through the side window at von Kraul. “I’ll only be a couple of minutes.”
Von Kraul smiled, the cheroot still between his teeth. “Take your time, my friend. Within reason, of course.”
He went up the stairs two at a time and rang Anna’s bell and waited, humming to himself. There was no immediate reply, and after a moment or two he rang the bell again. Still there was no reply. He tried to open the door, but it was locked and he frowned and pressed the bell-push again, holding his thumb in place for several seconds this time, thinking that perhaps she might be in the bath.
It was only then that he felt afraid. He hammered several times on the door and called her name, but there was no reply and he became aware of the peculiar silence that reigned throughout the entire house.
He went downstairs quickly and knocked on the door of the caretaker’s apartment in the hall. At first nothing happened, and he kicked the bottom of the door savagely, and then he heard slow reluctant footsteps approaching.
The door opened a little and the caretaker peered out. “Yes, mein Herr, what is it?”
“Miss Hartmann,” Chavasse said. “The young woman upstairs. I can’t get any reply.”
The caretaker was a middle-aged man with watery blue eyes and a pouched and wrinkled face. He shrugged. “That is not surprising, mein Herr. Fraulein Hartmann went out nearly an hour ago.”
Chavasse rammed his shoulder against the door with such force that the caretaker was sent staggering across the room to crash into the opposite wall. There was a cry of alarm as Chavasse followed him in, and a gray-haired woman shrank back in her chair, a hand covering her mouth.
Chavasse grabbed the terrified caretaker by the front of his shirt and pulled him close. “You’re lying!” he said. “I happen to know that nothing on earth would make her leave her apartment at this particular moment.” He slapped the man backhanded across the face. “Where is she?”
The man’s head rolled from side to side helplessly. “I can’t tell you, mein Herr. It’s as much as my life’s worth.”
Chavasse slapped him again, viciously and with all his strength. The woman flung herself across the room and tugged at his arm. “Leave him alone. I’ll tell you what you want to know, only don’t hit him any more. He’s a sick man. He was wounded at Stalingrad.”
Chavasse pushed the caretaker down into a chair and turned to the woman. “All right, you tell me and you’d better make it convincing.”
As she opened her mouth to speak, her husband said desperately, “For God’s sake, keep your mouth shut. Remember what he threatened to do if we talked.”
“I know what I’m doing, Willi,” she said, and turned back to Chavasse. “About twenty minutes ago, a car drew up outside. There were two men in it, only one got out.”
“How do you know about this?” Chavasse asked.
“I saw them from the window. The one who came in knocked on the door and my husband answered. He wanted to know the number of Fraulein Hartmann’s apartment. A few minutes afterward, we heard a scream and when we went out into the hall, he was dragging her down the stairs.”
Chavasse closed his eyes for a moment and drew a long breath. “Why didn’t you call the police?”
“He threatened us, mein Herr,” she said simply. “He said that at the very least, he would see that my husband lost his job.”
“And you believed him?” Chavasse said in disgust.
She nodded. “These people have the power to do anything, mein Herr. They are all around us. What chance have poor people like ourselves to oppose them? They got us into the last war – they will have us fighting again before they are done.”
Tomorrow the world, he thought. Tomorrow the world. He turned away from her, a sudden hatred for everything German rising inside him. She followed him to the door and held out a key.
“This is a master key, mein Herr. Perhaps you would like to examine the apartment?”
He took it from her without a word and went slowly up the stairs. There was no life left in him at all, and he unlocked the door and went inside and switched on the light.
She’d put up a struggle, that much was obvious. The carpet was rucked up and the table in the center of the room was overturned, the telephone lying on the floor. The table and chair by the window were in their usual positions, the Hebrew textbook and notebook lying open, almost as if she had been working a moment before and had simply left the room for a little while.
He looked into the bedroom. She had obviously changed on coming in and undergarments were strewn carelessly across the bed. He picked up a nylon stocking that had fallen to the floor and stood with it in his hands, staring blindly into space. After a while, he dropped it onto the bed and returned to the living room, and discovered Colonel von Kraul in the act of righting the upturned table.
CHAPTER 13
“You were so long, I began to worry,” von Kraul said as he picked up the telephone and placed it on the table. “Your friend has gone out?”
Chavasse nodded slowly. “Yes, and I’m very much afraid she won’t be coming back.”
“There would appear to have been a struggle,” the German said. “Don’t you think you should tell me about it, my friend? Presumably, it has some connection with the business we have in hand.”
Chavasse sat down. After a moment or two, he looked up and said, “There doesn’t seem much point in keeping it to myself now, does there?”
“Not really,” von Kraul said. “In any case, I may be able to help.”
Chavasse shook his head. “Somehow, I don’t think so.” He stood up and walked across to the window and looked out into the darkening street. “I came to Germany to find Martin Bormann. We’d heard that he was alive and that he’d written his memoirs.”
Von Kraul’s eyes had narrowed slightly, but his face remained calm. Only the whiteness of his knuckles as his hands tightened over the handle of his walking stick betrayed the fact that he was considerably moved by what Chavasse had just told him. “And were these facts true?”