I returned to the mess, and sat in my luxuriously furnished bedroom trying to decide where my obligations lay. There were big risks and bigger principles involved. I shied from making up my mind, though I sensed my thoughts were irresistibly carrying me towards resolution. I opened my file of personal letters and took out Rudi's visiting card.
The address was on the north edge of the Elberfeld valley, up one of the long flights of stone steps. I climbed them counting-there were two hundred and sixty-four. At the top was a tall grey house, falling like a cliff on the steep slope. There were more stairs inside, unlit. I had to strike matches to read the number of Rudi's flat on the top floor. I banged a brass knocker fashioned like a Notre Dame gargoyle.
There was silence. Then someone shuffling behind the door. 'Who's there?' demanded a German voice, not Rudi's.
'Herr Elgar. From FIAT. I'm known to Count von Recklinghausen.'
More shuffling, more silence. I waited patiently for several minutes. Bolts were slipped back and the door opened. In the light of a further door standing ajar, I found myself facing a fattish man of about sixty, with a boyish red and white complexion and hair dyed bright blonde. He nodded towards the other door. 'Rudi's through there,' he said sullenly.
I entered a small room crammed with elaborately decorated antique furniture-a dresser with carefully arranged pewter platters, a cabinet of painted crockery, a hefty pear-shaped coffee-pot, the Drцppelminna, a local curio. All indicated that the owner had come down in the world. It was freezing cold, like all German houses, the paraffin stove reeking in the corner clearly newly lit for my reception. Rudi wore a red and black dressing gown of quilted silk over his sportsman's jacket.
'This is a pleasure,' he greeted me in his singsong English. 'Though not an unexpected one.'
35
'Would you like a cup of coffee? It's real.'
'No thank you. As you suspected, I've come on business. I want to get it over as soon as possible.'
Rudi began to dissertate infuriatingly, 'What do you think of the furniture? It is in the baroque style created by Count von Berg, who was once a big noise in the district. The flat belongs to Hans, who let you in. I'm lucky these disturbed times to find a roof over my head.'
'I've come about penicillin. I want to buy some.'
'To buy? But you of the master race have penicillin enough.'
'It's for a German.'
'I see.' He offered a packet of Lucky Strike, then lit one himself. 'What are you prepared to pay?'
'What's your usual charge?'
'You can have five days' supply for fifty pounds.'
'I haven't got fifty pounds.'
'Then I cannot help you.'
'I could have you imprisoned for these activities, remember.'
'Isn't that an empty threat? You would not dare to implicate yourself. I'm sure you can raise sufficient pound notes or dollars.'
'You know we're not supposed to have any currency except occupation marks.'
'I know that is a regulation often broken.'
There was silence. Rudi continued smoking unconcernedly. 'Your penicillin's stolen, I suppose?' I asked.
'You do me an injustice. It comes from a most respectable source-the kidneys of the Americans. The precious fluid is collected from the big Army hospitals round Frankfurt, the penicillin reclaimed by a chemist from I G Farben here in Wupertal. At first I thought the process utterly revolting, then merely bizarre. It recalls our name for the weak beer during the war-"Hitler's bladder irrigation".'
'You steal the urine, then?'
'You really have a low opinion of me, Mr Elgar. A man who steels urine cannot stand very high even in the fraternity of criminals. The Americans are glad enough to give it to my friend the chemist for official distribution. Only a little of the fruits of his labours comes my way.'
The story rang true. Florey had used the same method with his first cases in Oxford. And the re-extraction of penicillin needed apparatus no more elaborate than the Heath Robinson equipment in the animal house.
'You see, we Nazis can't be as black as you paint us. You still turn to us if you're in sufficient trouble.'
'My God, you're conceited,' I told him.
Rudi was unmoved. 'You British are great preachers, and so lay yourselves open to the suspicion of being great hypocrites. Such indignation in your newspapers! But to paraphrase Clausewitz, genocide is the continuation of racial policy by other means.'
'You were well taught in the 'Goebbels kindergarten, I see.'
'Goebbels, Himmler, Hitler-they've all been exalted, far too flatteringly, in your demonology. Herr Hitler was just another German statesman like Bismarck, or even Bismarck's completely unmemorable successors, Caprivi and Hohenlohe. Hitler was more unscrupulous than Bismarck, but no less opportunistic. Perhaps he was more skilful, more adept at bluff. That was Hitler's game, you know. He did not want war. I see that I bring the colour to your cheeks, Mr Elgar. But Herr Hitler got almost all he wanted by only threatening war. And you must admit that a war won without fighting is better for both sides than victory and defeat.'
'He bluffed, we called his bluff, and the result lies all round you,' I told Rudi shortly.
'Herr Hitler miscalculated. He believed that you would rat on the Poles in 1939. After all, he had reason enough. You ratted on the Czechs at Munich in 1938. You are looking at me angrily, Mr Elgar, not because I am telling the truth, but because I am the only German in a position to tell it to an Englishman.' Rudi reached for a black leather briefcase on the dresser with the pewter dishes. He drew from it a sheet of paper. 'We are yoked in the harness of an illegal conspiracy, Mr Elgar. So you shall see how much I trust you.' He said this without irony.
It was a letter from the Wolfsschanze, the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's Russian Front Headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia. It was dated July 14, 1944-less than a week before the bomb plot misfired. The brief typewritten text commended Herr Recklinghausen for his work at Nordhausen in Thuringia. I knew that Nordhausen had a factory for flying bombs, that it was manned by slave labour and that the Americans found so many of them dead their rows of bodies floored the huge barbed-wire compound. Hitler's spiky signature at the bottom gave an icy feeling in my heart. The man had actually touched the paper I was holding.
'This wasn't anything to do with propaganda,' I told Rudi.
'In wartime you have to take many jobs and do as you are told.' He took the letter back. 'That piece of paper could land me in Nьrnberg. But I know that you must keep the secret as well as I. You British and Americans cannot blame Herr Hitler for all that has happened in Germany, you know. Nor can we Germans, though naturally we make him our scapegoat. Hitler gave the German masses what they wanted-uniforms, processions, marching soldiers, order, discipline and revenge for our shame in 1938. You may raise the Jewish question, but antisemitism in Germany was not mobilized by Adolf Hitler. It was another Adolf, Stцcker, a protestant clergyman, Wilhelm the First's court chaplain. He founded the Christian Social Party in 1878, when the politics of the masses first began in Germany. The German Conservatives soon joined in the game. An enemy is necessary for any political party, otherwise it starts looking responsible for its own mistakes. What enemy more convenient than the Jew, who is everywhere and mixed up with everything? Besides, there is malice in every human heart, a cudgel for every human fist.'
Now it was Rudi who had coloured, as though speaking to a room of brownshirted cronies. 'Ignoble emotions are more easily exploited than noble ones. Your British cynicism must tell you so, Mr Elgar? And Herr Hitler had a knack for exactly that. He assumed mock fury in dramatic speeches, and flattered Germany with spectacular leadership. Though in fact he thought the German people just as stupid as the masses of any other nation.'