Riptide
Authors: John Lawton
John Lawton
is the director of over forty television programmes, author of a dozen screenplays, several children’s books and seven Inspector Troy novels.
Lawton’s work has earned him comparisons to John le Carré and Alan Furst. Lawton lives in a remote hilltop village in Derbyshire.
THE INSPECTOR TROY NOVELS
Black Out
Old Flames
A Little White Death
Riptide
Blue Rondo
Second Violin
A Lily of the Field
First published in 2001 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, England
This ebook edition published in 2012 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.
Copyright ©John Lawton, 2001
The moral right of John Lawton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their
attention at the earliest opportunity.
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 61185 989 8
Printed in Great Britain
Grove Press, UK
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26–27 Boswell Street
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WC1N 3JZ
For
Sheena McDonald
Back from the edge
Cosima Dannoritzer, Iris Schewe (of the
Stadtmuseum
, Berlin) and Alfred Gottwaldt (of the
Deutsches Technikmuseum
, Berlin) who steered me around pre-war
Berlin.
Gordon Chaplin, who let me retreat to his Manhattan loft to write my novel, while he retreated to Florida and wrote this.
Antony Harwood, my agent, once described in the
Grauniad
as a leather-jacketed rock’n’roller with the soul of an aesthete.’ He has long since given up
the leather jacket. The rock’n’roll persists.
John Bell, who knows really odd things about the London Underground.
Stilton
§ 1
Berlin April 17th 1941
It was an irrational moment. A surrender of logic to the perilous joy of common nonsense. When the train stopped between stations on the S-Bahn, Stahl felt exposed, fearful for
his life in a way that made no sense. High on the creaking metal latticework, the train tortured the tracks and juddered to a halt. Then the lights went out and Stahl knew that there was an air
raid on. Yet again the RAF had got through to a city that the Führer had told them would never see a British plane or hear the crash of a British bomb. Berlin the impregnable, some of whose
citizens now trembled and wept in the darkness, packed into a swaying train, high above the streets.
It was irrational. He was no more at risk here than on the ground. It just seemed that way – as though to be stuck on the elevated tracks like a bird on the wire made him into . . . a
sitting duck. He recalled a phrase of his father’s from the last war, one every old Austrian soldier used occasionally – every old British soldier too, he was certain – ‘If
it’s got your name on it . . .’ which meant that death was inevitable, and urged a grinning stoicism on those about to die.
The raid distracted him. He had been pretending to read a newspaper. He always did when he waited for the word. Tonight he had been oddly confident that there would be word. So confident, he
became worried that he would miss her. More than once he had carried the pretence into practice, and had been caught engrossed in some nonsense in the
Völkischer Beobachter
and all but
oblivious when she had brushed past him and muttered a single sentence.
The train moved off, the lights still out, sparks visible on the tracks below – hardly enough to make them the moving target his fellow-Berliners thought they were. At
Warschauer
Straße
station passengers shoved and kicked till the doors banged open, a human tide surging for ground level and the shelters. The moment had passed, he was happier now in the open air
and, as ever, curious about the men who dropped death on the city night after night. He stepped onto the platform, gazing into the clear, night sky hoping for a glimpse of a Blenheim or a Halifax.
This was a reprisal raid. Last night – and into the small of hours of the morning – as the wireless had crowed all day, the Luftwaffe had blasted central London.
She brushed his shoulder. So quick, so quiet he could have missed her. A dark woman in a belted, brown macintosh, almost as tall as he. He could scarcely describe her face – he
didn’t think he’d ever seen her eyes.
‘You are in the gravest danger. Go now. Go tonight.’
He heard his heart thump in his chest. He had expected this for so long that to hear the words uttered at last was like a body blow. The wind knocked from his lungs, his pulse doubled, a
weakness in the knees that was so hackneyed a response he could scarcely believe it was happening to him.
‘Go now,’ she had said. ‘Go tonight.’
‘Leave Berlin,’ it meant, ‘leave Germany.’ And with that phrase, twelve wretched years of his life were stitched and wrapped and over.
A uniformed corporal grabbed him by the arm with not so much as a ‘Heil Hitler’, and pulled him towards the staircase. His cap went flying, rolling onto the tracks, the little silver
skull glinting back at him in the moonlight.
‘It’s a big one, sir. We have to take cover.’
Stahl knew the man. That meant he was getting sloppy. He should have known the man was there. An Abwehr clerk – a privileged pen-pusher, the sort who’d never see the front line
except as punishment. Stahl could not recall his name – odd that, that he should have a hole in his memory, a memory so precise for words heard, so precise for words seen – but he let
himself be manhandled, clerkhandled, into a shelter: a concrete blockhouse beneath the S-Bahn station, hastily thrown up in the winter of 1939. Throughout the false start of Czechoslovakia and the
easy victories over Poland and France, the Führer had made swift provision for bomb-shelters, whilst reminding them all that they weren’t going to be bombed. It was a brave man –
in Stahl’s experience, a drunken man – who pointed out the anomaly.
Stahl was surprised. He’d never been in a street shelter before. He’d half expected satanic darkness, piss in the corner, vomit on the floor. But it was clean and only faintly
malodorous. It was warm, too – the combined heat of all those bodies and the pot-bellied French stove against the back wall, looted from the Maginot Line less than a year ago, into which an
enthusiastic youth, with phosphorous buttons on his jacket, was stuffing the remains of a beer crate. He stripped off his raincoat and draped it over one arm. The concrete cell was dimly lit by a
ring of bulkhead lights – light enough for people to see him for what he was.
A middle-aged man in rimless spectacles had both arms wrapped around a whimpering woman. He stared at Stahl, patted his wife gently on the back. She too turned to look at Stahl and, finding
herself looking up at an SD Brigadeführer in full uniform, less hat – all black and silver and lightning – she stopped whimpering. Stahl stood shoulder to shoulder with the
corporal, sharing a small room with fifty-odd strangers, and heard the murmurs of fear and reassurance dwindle almost to nothing as though he himself had silenced them. It wasn’t him. It was
the uniform. It possessed a power he had never thought he had. He wore it out of choice. His job permitted him civilian dress if he saw fit: Canaris wore plain clothes, Schellenberg wore them more
often than not, but the dulled imaginations of the Geheime Staatspolizei – long since abbreviated to Gestapo – favoured a ‘civilian uniform’ of trilby hats and leather
greatcoats. Stahl felt better in a real uniform. In a world where all identities were false it was a plain statement. The boldness of a barefaced lie. It seemed to him far less sinister than the
ubiquitous leather coat. Why the Berliners should be more scared of him in a shelter than on a train needed no thought – they were showing treasonable fear in the presence of a man whose
power over them might well be life and death – and he stood between them and the door.
When the all-clear sounded, Stahl found himself in the street with the Abwehr corporal once more. This time the man saluted. The contrived formality of a barked ‘Heil Hitler’ –
contrived, Stahl knew, since there was hardly a man in the Abwehr who didn’t secretly despise Hitler, the Party and the SS. Stahl returned the salute, scarcely whispering the Heil Hitler.
Perhaps he’d said it for the last time?
The man was right. It had been a heavy raid. They’d listened to the bombs explode, felt the earth shake, for well over an hour – wave after wave of bombers, so many he’d given
up the focused monotony of counting. Now the air stank of cordite, and a haze of dust hung over the city in the moonlight.
He walked home through blitzed streets of dust and debris, almost empty of traffic – cars were abandoned at the roadside, trams did not run, people scurried like ants in all directions,
directionless. Stahl turned the corner into
Kopernikusstraße
ten minutes later. It was deserted, almost silent. His apartment block and the one next to it had collapsed like bellows,
breathed their last and died. The main staircase clung precariously to the wall where the strength of the chimney-breast had resisted the blast. He could see the top floor as clearly as if someone
had pulled away the front, like the hinged facade of a doll’s house. He could see his own apartment, the floor hanging skewed, his bed with one leg resting on nothing, four floors of nothing,
his mahogany wardrobe, one door open, almost tilting into the void, and his overcoat flapping on the back of the bedroom door.