The Company of Strangers Read online

Weiss left. An adjutant strode past. Minutes later he came back followed by Speer.

  Voss, like Hitler (not an unconscious imitation), enjoyed working at night. He worked with the door open to hear the voices, see the men, to gain a sense of the magnetic flow – those drawn to and favoured by the Führer and those he rejected and disgraced. In the short time he’d been in Rastenburg, Voss had seen men striding down the centre of that corridor, medals, pips and epaulets flashing, to return fifteen minutes later hugging the wall, shunned even by the carpet strip in the middle. There were others, of course, who came back evangelized, something in their eyes higher than the stars, greater than love. These were the men who had ‘gone’, left the decrepit shell of their own bodies to walk an Elysium with other demigods, their ambitions fulfilled, their greatness confirmed.

  Weber saw it differently, and said it with a cruder voice: ‘These guys, they’re all married with wives and families of lovely children and yet they go up there and take it up the arse every night. It’s a disgrace.’ Weber had accused Voss of it, too. Of sitting with his tongue out in the corridor, waiting for a tummy rub. It needled Voss only because it was true. In his first week, as Voss had laid maps down in a situation meeting while Zeitzler said his piece, the Führer had suddenly gripped Voss by the bicep and the touch had shot something fast and pure into his veins like morphine, strong, addictive but weakening, too.

  The Wolfsschanze stilled into the early hours. Corridor traffic halted. Voss filed the orders and prepared the maps and positions for the morning conference, taking his time because he liked the feeling of working while the world was asleep. At 3.00 a.m. there was a flurry of activity from Hitler’s apartment and moments later Speer appeared at the door looking like a matinée idol. He asked Voss if he wouldn’t mind cancelling him from the Reichsminister’s flight in the morning, he was too tired after his earlier flight and his meeting with the Führer. Voss assured him of his efficiency in the matter and Speer stepped into the room. He stood over the map and brushed a hand in a great swathe over Russia, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands and France. He became conscious of Voss studying him and put his hand in his pocket. He nodded, said good night and reminded him to tell the flight captain. He didn’t want to be disturbed in the morning.

  Voss made the call and went to bed for three hours. He got up just before 7.00 a.m., called a car and he and the chauffeur loaded the box files, along with a black metal trunk which had appeared in the situation room addressed in white paint through a stencil to the SS Personalhauptamt, 98–9 Wilmersdorferstrasse, Berlin-Charlottenburg. They drove to the airstrip where, to their surprise, they found Todt’s Heinkel charging down the runway. Voss could already feel the lash of Weiss’s fury. He went to the flight captain who told him they were just testing the plane under orders from Hitler’s adjutant. The plane circled twice and relanded. A sergeant with a manifest cleared the files on to the aircraft and they loaded them. Voss and the chauffeur drank a coffee in the canteen and ate bread and eggs. At 7.50 a.m. the Reichsminister’s car pulled alongside and Fritz Todt boarded the Heinkel alone.

  The plane immediately taxied to the end of the runway, paused, throttled up and set off down the snow-scabbed airstrip towards the black trees and low grey cloud of another grainy military morning. It should still have been dark at this hour but the Führer insisted on keeping Berlin time at his Rastenburg headquarters.

  As he left the canteen Voss was arrested by the rare sight of SS Colonel Weiss outside the Restricted Area I compound. He was in the control tower, looking green through the glass, his thick arms folded across his chest, his pale face lit by some unseen light below him.

  The continuous roar of the plane’s engines changed tone and the wings tipped as it banked over the pine forest. This was unusual, too. The plane should have continued west, piercing the soft gut of the grey cloud to break through into the brilliant, uncomplicated sunshine above, instead of which it had rolled north and appeared to be coming back in to re-land.

  The pilot straightened the wings of the plane and settled the aircraft into its descent. It was just reaching the beginning of the runway, no more than a hundred feet off the ground, when a spear of flame shot up from the fuselage behind the cockpit. Voss, already gaping, flinched as the roar of the explosion reached him. His driver ducked as the plane tilted and a wing clipped the ground, shearing away from the body of the plane, which thundered into the snow-covered ground and exploded with hideous violence, twice, a fraction of a second between each full fuel tank igniting.

  Black smoke belched, funnelling out into the grey sky. Only the tailplane had survived the impact. Two fire engines stormed pointlessly out of their hangar, slewing on the icy ground. SS Colonel Weiss dropped his arms, jutted his chest, stretched his shoulders back and left the observation platform.

  Voss grew into the iron-hard ground, his feet drawing up the numbing cold, transporting it through to the bones and organs of his body.

  Chapter 3

  8th February 1942, Wolfsschanze HQ, Rastenburg, East Prussia.

  Voss was driven back to Restricted Area I in silence, the dead hand of a full inquiry already on his shoulder. He pieced together the ugly fragments of information in his brain and felt his mind recoil in disgust. He began to see, for the first time, how a man could shoot himself. Until then it had been a mystery to him, on hearing of someone’s suicide, how a man could bring himself to such a disastrous conclusion. He smoked hard until he was quite faint and prickling. He staggered up the path to the main building and realized on entering that the horrific news had preceded him by some minutes.

  The dining room was full, but rather than being morbid with the news of the death of the most important and capable engineer in the German Reich, it was rife with the rumour of a successor. The monochrome mass of braid and band, oak leaf cluster and iron cross seethed like the bullring of the Bourse. Only one man was silent, head up, hair swept back, dark eyes shining under the thick straight eyebrows – Albert Speer. Voss blinked, sure as a camera shutter, and captured the image – a man on the brink of his destiny.

  Voss took a coffee, fed himself into the knots of conversation and soon realized that anybody with anything to do with construction and transportation was in the room.

  ‘Speer will take the Atlantic Wall, the U-boat pens and the Occupied West. It’s already been talked about.’

  ‘What about the Ukraine? The Ukraine is more important now.’

  ‘You didn’t forget that we declared war on the United States before Christmas.’

  ‘No, I didn’t, and nor did Todt.’

  Silence. Heads swung to Speer’s table. People were putting things to him and he was managing vague replies to their questions, but he wasn’t listening. He was coming to terms with a price. Appalled at the animal troughing around him, unwilling to accept anything that they attempted to confer on him, he was trying to justify to himself not only his presence there (for the first time and on such a tragic occasion), but something else whose nature he couldn’t quite grasp. He seemed to be coping with a strong, unpleasant smell which had reached his nostrils only.

  ‘He won’t give it all to him…the Führer wouldn’t do that. No experience.’

  ‘He’ll split Armaments and Munitions away from Construction.’

  ‘You wait…the Reichsmarschall will be here any moment. Then we’ll see…’

  ‘Where is Goering?’

  ‘At Romiten. Hunting.’

  ‘That’s only a hundred kilometres away…has anybody called him?’

  ‘Goering will take Armaments and Munitions into his Commission for the Four Year Plan. He’s in charge of the war economy. It fits.’

  ‘The only thing that fits, if you ask me, is that one’s face over there.’

  ‘What’s Speer doing here, anyway?’

  ‘He was stuck in Dnepropetrovsk. He flew in with Captain Nein last night.’

  ‘He fetched him?’ asked a voice, aghast.

  ‘No, no Captain Nein flew in th
ere with SS General Sepp Dietrich and offered Speer a lift.’

  ‘Did Speer and the general…talk?’

  There was silence at that probability and Voss moved across to some air force officers who were picking over the details of the crash.

  ‘He must have pulled the self-destruct handle.’

  ‘Who? The pilot?’

  ‘No, Todt…by accident.’

  ‘Did it have a self-destruct mechanism on board?’

  ‘No, it was a new plane. It hadn’t been fitted.’

  ‘What was he doing in a two-engined plane in the first place? The Führer has expressly forbidden…’

  ‘That’s what Todt was told yesterday. He was furious. The Führer waived it.’

  ‘That’s why they took the plane up for a practice spin.’

  ‘And you’re sure there was no self-destruct mechanism?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘There were three explosions…that’s what the flight sergeant said.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘There must have been a self-destruct…’

  ‘There was none!’

  Voss went to the decoding room to pick up any positional changes in the field. He took the decodes to the situation room. The corridor was silent. Hitler rarely moved before eleven o’clock, but on a day such as this? Surely. The apartment door stayed closed, the SS guards silent.

  Weber was already working on supply positions in the Ukraine. He didn’t look up. Voss leafed the decodes.

  ‘SS Colonel Weiss was looking for you,’ said Weber.

  ‘Did he say what he wanted?’ asked Voss, bowels loosening.

  ‘Something about those boxes of files…’

  ‘Have you heard, Weber?’

  ‘About the plane crash, you mean?’

  ‘The Reichsminister Todt is dead.’

  ‘Were those files on board?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Voss, stunned by Weber’s insouciance.

  ‘Shit. Zeitzler’s going to be mad.’

  ‘Weber,’ said Voss, amazed, ‘Todt is dead.’

  ‘Todt ist tot. Todt ist tot. What can I say, other than it will brighten the Führer’s day not to have that doom merchant on his shoulder.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Weber.’

  ‘Look, Voss, Todt never agreed with the Russian campaign and when the Führer declared war on America, well…poof!’

  ‘Poof!?’

  ‘Todt was a very cautious man, unlike our Führer who is…what shall we say…?’

  ‘Bold.’

  ‘Yes, bold. That’s a good, strong adjective. Let’s leave it at that.’

  ‘What are you saying, Weber?’

  ‘Keep your head down and your ears out of that corridor. Do your job, don’t blabber, this is all that matters,’ he said, and drew a circle around himself. ‘You haven’t been here long enough to know what these people are capable of.’

  ‘They’re already talking about Speer. Goering taking over…’

  ‘I don’t want to know, Voss,’ said Weber, closing his hands over his ears. ‘And nor do you. You’ve got to start thinking about those files, how they got on that plane and why SS Colonel Weiss wants to talk to you, because if he wanted to talk to me after such a morning I’d have been in the toilet an hour ago. Start thinking about yourself, Voss, because here in Rastenburg you’re the only one who will.’

  The mention of the toilet sent Voss out of the room at a brisk pace. He sat in one of the stalls, face in hands, and passed a loose, hot motion which, rather than emptying him, left his guts writhing.

  Colonel Weiss caught up with him while he washed his hands. They talked to each other via the mirror, Weiss’s face disturbingly wrong in reflection.

  ‘Those files…’ started Weiss.

  ‘General Zeitzler’s files, you mean?’

  ‘Did you check them, Captain Voss…before you took them into your care?’

  ‘Took them into my care?’ Voss asked himself, chest wall shuddering at the impact of this implication.

  ‘Did you, Captain? Did you?’ persisted Weiss.

  ‘They weren’t mine to check, and even if they were I wouldn’t know why I would have to check a large amount of documentation irrelevant to me.’

  ‘So who filled those boxes?’

  ‘I didn’t see them filled.’

  ‘You didn’t?’ roared Weiss, throwing Voss into free-fall fear. ‘You put boxes on to a Reichsminister’s plane without…’

  ‘Maybe you should ask Captain Weber,’ said Voss, desperate, lashing out at anything to save himself.

  ‘Captain Weber,’ said Weiss, writing him down in his book of the damned.

  ‘I was doing him a favour putting the files on the plane in the first place, as I was for…’He coughed at a garrotting look from Weiss and changed tack. ‘Is this part of the official inquiry, sir?’

  ‘This is the preliminary investigation prior to the official inquiry which will be conducted by the air force, as it is technically an air force matter,’ said Weiss, and then more threatening, ‘but as you know, I’m in charge of all security matters in and around this compound…and I notice things, Captain Voss.’

  Weiss had turned away from the mirror to look at him for real. Voss stepped back and his boot heel hit the wall but he managed to look Weiss straight in his terrible eye, hoping that his own stress, from the G-force steepness of the learning curve, was not distorting his face.

  ‘I have a copy of the manifest,’ said Weiss. ‘Perhaps you should read it through now.’

  Weiss handed him the paper. It started with a list of personnel on the flight. Speer’s name had been added and then crossed out. Underneath was the cargo. Voss ran his eyes down the list, which was short and consisted of four boxes of files for the Army Chief of Staff, delivery Berlin, and several pieces of luggage going with Todt to Munich. There was no mention of a metal trunk for delivery to the SS Personalhauptamt in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

  Voss had control of his panic now, the horizon firm in his head as he came up to the moment, or was it the line? Yes, it was something to be crossed, a line with no grey area, without no man’s land, the moral line, which once stepped over joined him to Weiss’s morality. He also knew that to mention the nonexistent trunk would be a lifechanging decision, one that could change his life into death. It nearly amused him, that and the strange clarity of those turbulent thoughts.

  ‘Now you understand,’ said Weiss, ‘why it’s necessary for me to do a little probing on the question of these files.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Voss. ‘You’re absolutely right, sir.’

  ‘Good, we have an understanding then?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Voss. ‘One thing…wasn’t there…?’

  Weiss stiffened in his boots, the scar dragging down his eye seemed to pulsate.

  ‘…wasn’t there a self-destruct mechanism on the plane?’ finished Voss.

  Weiss’s good eye widened and he nodded, confirming that and their new understanding into him. He left the toilets. Voss reverted to the sink and splashed his hot face over and over with cold water, not able to clean exactly, but able to revise and rework, justify and accommodate the necessity for the snap decision he’d been forced to make. He dried his face and looked at himself in the mirror and had one of his odd perceptions, that we never know what we look like to others, we only know our reflection and that now he knew he would be different and it might be all right because perhaps he would just look like one of them.

  He went outside for a smoke and to pace out his new understanding, as if he was wearing different boots. Senior officers came and went with only one topic of conversation on their hungry lips and two names, Speer and Todt. But by the end of that cigarette Voss had made his first intelligence discovery in the field, because the officers still came and went and they still had those two names on their lips but this time they were shaking their heads and the words ‘self-destruct mechanism’ and the ‘incidence of failure’ had threaded their way amongst the names. />
  It comes out of here and goes in there, thought Voss. The inestimable power of the spoken word. The power of misinformation in a thunderstruck community.

  Voss went back to work. No Weber. He replotted the latest movements from the decodes. Weber returned, took a seat, braced himself against the desk. Voss kept his head down, looked at Weber through the bone of his cranium.

  ‘At least I know you can listen now,’ said Weber. ‘You’ve passed the first Rastenburg test with an A and you don’t have to worry about me and those files. I didn’t fill them. I didn’t seal them. I didn’t even sign for them. Learn something from that, Voss. They’re saying now that somebody must have accidentally pulled the self-destruct handle in the plane. We’re all in the clear. Are you hearing me, Voss?’

  ‘I’m hearing you.’

  Voss did hear him, but only through the reel of film in his head which was full of the black metal trunk with its white stencilled address. His hands lifting the trunk and taking it into the plane where he jams it between the seats so it won’t slide about – two of Zeitzler’s boxes of files on top and two on the seats by the trunk. Todt comes on to the plane, preceded by his luggage, impatient to be away from the scene of his disastrous politicking and up into the light of the sunshine and the clear air where everything is comprehensible. He straps himself into his seat, not next to the pilot but in the fuselage where he might be able to do some work. The hold darkens as the door closes. The pilot taxis to the end of the runway. The plane steadies itself, the wings rock and stabilize. The propellers thrash the icy air. The pressure kicks in behind the old man’s back and they surge down the runway flashing white, grey and black at the snow and ice patches on the strip. Then Todt sees the black trunk and some low animal instinct kicks in the paranoia and a terrible realization. He roars at the pilot to stop the plane but the pilot cannot stop. The velocity is already too great. He has to take off. The wheels defy gravity and Todt has a moment of weightlessness, a premonition of the lightness of being to follow. They bank in the steep curve, the trunk tight against the wall of the fuselage. Todt staring into the black Polish pine trees, or are they East Prussian pine trees now, Germanic Empire pine trees? Todt’s weight has come back to him and he’s in a panic now. He’s seen the trunk before. He’s seen it in his head and he knows what’s in it. He knew what would be in it the night before and he woke up with the knowledge this morning and it was further confirmed by the flight captain who told him that Speer would not be on the plane. What was Speer doing here anyway? Todt and Speer. Two men who knew their destiny and had no hesitation in obeying. The plane’s wings are still perpendicular to the ground. The black forest is still flashing past Todt’s care-worn eyes. The wings flatten. They’re going to make it after all. The pilot is hunched and roaring at the control tower. The altimeter winds its way down through three hundred to two hundred to one hundred and fifty and Todt is praying and the pilot is praying too, although he doesn’t know why and that is how they enter the biggest noise, the whitest light. Two men praying. One who didn’t like war enough and the other unlucky to be flying him.