The Company of Strangers. Robert Thomas Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ