The barber stropped the razor and examined the customer’s throat. One day, he promised himself. One day …
In Berlin the news that Hencke’s body had been discovered was heard widely, even though it was carried only by the BBC and listening to enemy radio was an offence punishable by summary execution on the street corner. The populace took comfort in the fact that the law was unenforceable; there simply weren’t enough lamp posts. But in the Bunker the news became available to very few; Goebbels saw to that. Hencke had been his prize. Great hopes had been raised upon the prospect – which many took as a promise – of a triumphant return to Germany, and he didn’t like to disappoint the Fuehrer. Indeed, it was Goebbels’ full-time task to keep the spirits of the Fuehrer high, to persuade him that salvation was still at hand, to find every omen, helpful horoscope or shred of encouraging news and cling to it like a climber to an ice face.
Above all, however, Goebbels was a realist. That’s why he was so useful to the Fuehrer. He wasn’t a carpet-widdling spaniel like so many of the others. He told the Fuehrer what he wanted to hear, of course, but not to ingratiate himself and flatter, only to encourage and strengthen. If they were to salvage anything from the heap of scrap into which Germany was being bombed, they needed time and the undisputed leadership which only the Fuehrer could provide.
And they needed luck. It was ironic how, after all their planning and preparation and putsch-ing, all the great victories and still greater reverses, everything came down to a matter of luck. If only they’d invaded Russia a year later, after an armistice on the Western Front. Or reached Moscow a month earlier, before the snows. If only that oaf Goering had continued bombing the British airfields a few weeks longer when the enemy had only a handful of aircraft left, instead of turning his snout towards the blitzing of London. If only the Japanese hadn’t bombed Pearl Harbor and brought the Americans rushing into the war. If only … It all came down to luck and fickle fortune in the end. That’s where Hencke came in. Goebbels wanted him as his lucky charm, to dangle round the neck of the Fuehrer, to ward off the doubters and defeatists who undermined the leader’s morale and to give him back the resolve to continue for the few vital weeks they needed. With Hencke and a little luck anything would still be possible. Yet suddenly the luck seemed to have run out.
Hencke was beginning to feel that death might, after all, be a soft option. They hadn’t been long in the rusty fishing smack, only a few hours, but the seas were rough and growing fiercer, and he was a rotten sailor.
She noticed the sudden sallowness in his complexion and the grimness about his mouth, the scar tugging at his lip. ‘Think positive. The weather makes it more difficult for the coast-guard, too. Anyway, we’ve not long now,’ she encouraged.
No sooner had she spoken than through the low-hanging storm clouds on the horizon appeared the outlines of a rocky coast.
‘What is this place?’
‘Man. The Isle of Man, they call it.’
‘I thought we were going to Ireland?’
‘One step at a time. The Isle of Man is in the middle of the Irish Sea, halfway there. All the direct routes to Ireland are carefully guarded. We’re going to try to slip through the back door.’
‘As long as it’s dry land I don’t think I care any more …’
‘You should feel at home. The island is full of Germans and Italians sitting out the end of the war.’
‘What?’
‘It’s one of the main internment points for enemy aliens and prisoners.’
‘You’re taking me to an island the British use as one vast prison camp?’ he groaned, trying to find the strength to raise an eyebrow.
‘It’s the Irish in me,’ she said, mocking him. ‘But don’t worry. They’re so busy trying to stop people getting out that no one expects anybody to try to get in.’
Hencke had held out, against seemingly overwhelming odds, until they were approaching the relative calm of a small west-facing harbour called Peel, over which towered the crumbling red stonework of a ruined castle. He and Sinead had no opportunity to admire the view; they had been ordered into the hold to hide them from prying eyes. So Hencke had lost sight of the horizon, the only immovable and unheaving object to which his fragile senses had been able to cling, at precisely the moment his stomach was assailed by the overpowering stench of fish. His resistance came to a sudden end.
‘And this is the secret weapon with which Germany is going to win the war?’ Sinead taunted as he sat hunched over a bucket.
‘If you have any mercy, shoot me.’
‘Too late,’ interrupted the skipper, clattering down wooden stairs which led from the deck. ‘Apparently the British government have just announced that you are lying on a slab in a mortuary somewhere in London. Officially you’re dead already!’
Hencke thought for a moment about attempting a smile, but decided that triumphs could never be celebrated on a retching stomach. He reached for the bucket.
Any depression that Josef Goebbels might have allowed himself on hearing that his talisman had been found crushed under a pile of German-induced rubble quickly disappeared when he received the top-secret cable from the German Embassy in Dublin. Hencke … Alive … Free … In Dublin. Halfway Home!
It was 10 April. Russians less than eighty miles east of Berlin, their advance troops already ripping through the outskirts of Vienna. To the west the Americans, Canadians and British, swarming across their bridgeheads on the Rhine, their vanguard almost as close to Berlin as the Red Army and making faster headway. The great Reich which had once stretched from the edges of Moscow to the Atlantic and from the northern tip of Norway as far as Africa, now reduced to a narrow ribbon a few dozen miles across as the vast armies of their enemies pressed in on all sides. For a man whose task it was to manufacture propaganda, all that recent weeks had given him by way of raw material were bricks of straw.
But now! A saga of German courage, of triumph against seemingly insuperable odds, an epic example of endurance which showed that all was not lost, that victory could still be theirs! All they needed was time, a little more sacrifice from the German people, another burst of national resistance. If only Germany could hold on a few weeks longer, Stalin would go too far as he had always done, the West would begin to understand how wrong they had been to trust him, and how much greater was the menace of Bolshevism than any posed by Nazism. Then, perhaps, they could come down from their Alpine fastness …
If only Germany could hold on a little longer. If only the Fuehrer could hold on. And with the inspiration of Hencke’s example, they both might.
He brushed aside the fine layer of dust that had already settled on the cable, savouring once more the most encouraging news he had received in months. More dust began instantly to fall. The Americans and British were bombing the capital around the clock, the last hope of German resistance in the air had already been blasted from the sky or reduced to matchwood on pulverized airfields, and even the bits of Berlin that had not suffered direct hits were being slowly shaken to pieces. It was April, yet scarcely a tree in the city bore any leaf, as if a Valkyrian whirlwind had stripped them bare. The skies above the capital were beginning to fill with the yellow, acrid smoke of cordite, soot and dust which turned day into night and the eternal hope of spring into darkest autumn. Goebbels fanned the flames of hope amongst all who would listen, but he knew the odds lay heavily against him.