The Company of Strangers. Robert Thomas Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ think that in talking to people you never know what they know, you never know what they think, and innocuous words can take on huge importance. He stopped writhing in his bed – he hadn’t served up Weber, he’d just handed Weiss the spoons.

      

      He went to Gatow the following afternoon, nervous as if it was a visit to the doctor, who might find a mild symptom the precursor of something deadly. He was met by a housekeeper who took him to a book-lined room at the back of the house. She gave him real coffee and a homemade biscuit. Giesler came in with a large man of military rectitude but who was dressed in a blue double-breasted suit. He was bald with a brown, clipped fringe of hair at the back and sides. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. Voss was introduced but the man’s name was never given.

      They talked about his work at Heidelberg University and recent developments in physics. The man was knowledgeable, not expert, but he understood. The words ‘fissionable material’, ‘critical mass’, ‘chain reaction’ and ‘atomic pile’ were not mysterious concepts.

      The conversation switched from physics to the Russians. Voss expressed his fear of them:

      ‘They have no reason to be forgiving after what we have done to them. We have broken a pact, invaded their country, and brutalized the population. After the defeat we have suffered at Stalingrad it is possible that they will have the confidence to drive us back. If they succeed I believe they will not stop until they reach Berlin. They will punish us.’

      ‘So you would see it as advantageous that we negotiate a separate peace with the Allies?’

      ‘Imperative, unless we want to see Germany or a part of Germany in the Soviet Union. Perhaps we can even persuade the Allies that we are not the real enemy in this war and that…’

      The man held up his hand.

      ‘One step at a time,’ said the man firmly. ‘First we will work on your transfer away from Rastenburg. You will need some training, too. The Abwehr headquarters along with the Army High Command has moved south to Zossen and we now live for our sins in a concrete citadel out there called Maibach II. You will spend some months with us. The work you will be doing is very different – gathering information, running agents in the field – it’s not the military intelligence that you know. After that we will send you to Paris and from there we will try to position you in Lisbon.’

      ‘Lisbon?’

      ‘It’s the only place in Europe now where we can talk easily with the Allies.’

      

      Voss lived with his mother while he completed his training in Zossen. She looked after him as if he was at school again and it was a comfort for both of them. It was a wrench when he was transferred to France in June.

      He spent eight months in the Abwehr’s French headquarters at 82 Avenue Foch in Paris and, furnished with his new perception of the power of words, saw the horrific consequences for others who hadn’t yet come to the same understanding.

      French and British men and women were arrested, sent to concentration camps, tortured and executed for what was, more than half the time, a totally imaginary situation. Both the Abwehr and the SD/Gestapo, who operated from next door, were playing what became known as radio games. Voss never worked out whether it was merely Allied stupidity or German infiltration into their intelligence operations at a very high level which enabled these deadly games to be played. Once an Allied radio operator was captured and his codename and signal extracted an Abwehr operator would continue broadcasting to London. Later when there were two security signals required, the Allies would reply simply reminding the operator that he’d forgotten his second signal but to continue. The baffled and angry radio operators soon supplied the second security signal to the Germans. Following these fictitious Abwehr broadcasts more agents and supplies would be flown into some misty French field and a reception from the Occupying force. These new agents’ codenames were then used to build fictitious networks operated by the Abwehr and Gestapo, dispersing vast quantities of misinformation to the Allies. Meetings convened by operational Allied agents were frequently attended by Abwehr men using captured agents’ codenames.

      Occasionally Voss would stage arrests in the street to maintain verisimilitude.

      Most intelligence activity was mirage and artifice. Very little was real. Intelligence, he discovered, was built on the foundations of the imagination and, in the case of the radio games, a blind belief in the veracity of technology. It was a terrifying concept, as terrifying as if the basic principles of physics or maths were completely wrong and whole academic disciplines had been built on falsehood and thus all discoveries were intrinsically wrong, all achievements bogus.

      Voss also learned never to fall in love in this world. Lovers betrayed each other easily. Torture, the Gestapo’s preferred method, was unnecessary. Just the insinuation of a lover’s infidelity to a prisoner was as powerful as any of their appalling applications. The emotional betrayal played such devious and teasing tricks on the mind. Jealousy was inevitable in the loneliness of a cell. The darkness, with only the infected mind for company, created powerful images that at first disheartened and later so enraged and ravaged the prisoners that they would grasp at a new strength and in their vindictiveness bring down not just the lover, but all the connections as well.

      This did not mean that Voss was celibate in his time in Paris – that was impossible and there was something to prove to Giesler too – but he kept his distance. A French-woman called Françoise Larache taught him a different and darker lesson about love in the intelligence game.

      They met when using the same bar. He would take a coffee in the mornings and find her watching him. He would stop off in the evening for a glass of something and she was often there at a table, smoking her strong cigarettes. They exchanged words and began to share a table, where he would watch her red lips connect with the thick tip of her cigarette, and her fingers pick off the flakes of tobacco from her pointed tongue. One night they went for a meal and back to his apartment where they made love. She was energetic and inventive, doing things on their first night which surprised him.

      They became regulars of each other’s company in bed, and as Françoise was quick to demand, out of bed as well. She pushed him to do things which were at first exciting and then became increasingly more reckless. She liked to make love on the balcony with people passing in the street below. She would lean back over the rail, her arms around his neck, and then suddenly let go so that he nearly lost her over the edge. They would have sex in doorways and on landings while people ate their dinner and table-talked. She would even cry out and the talk would stop inside. Voss would have to close his hand over her mouth. The greater the chance of being discovered, the more excited Françoise became.

      Then one day in the autumn with the dried leaves rustling over the balcony, her mischievous eye, the one that glinted when she looked up at him from under her eyebrow, became darker, as if he was seeing deeper in and what was there was more sinister, taboo.

      It started with a request that he spank her for being a naughty girl. Voss felt stupid with a grown woman over his knees and she had to encourage him to be serious and to be more severe. It didn’t seem to be fun any more. He still lusted after her, but for Françoise the sex was being driven by something else. He became reluctant to play her games, she angry. They had furious arguments, monumental rows with flying objects, which would end in brutal love-making where each thrust into her seemed to be a payment back. He found himself reeling out of his apartment into the docility of occupied Paris, unable to believe what he’d participated in the night before, only knowing that it was powerful, intense and degrading.

      Françoise’s goading became worse. There was no fun now. She said terrible, unforgivable things and, СКАЧАТЬ