Searchlights lit Berlin’s new showcase airport, creating a theatrical effect from the blood-red flags, silver eagles, and rows of regimented windows: the hallmarks of the brutal new style.
‘I haven’t packed,’ Denham mumbled to the three SD men escorting him in the BMW.
‘You’re going straight on the flight.’
One of the men showed Denham’s passport at the desk, then escorted him past the brass rail, out onto the runway, and towards the steps of the plane. Its silver fuselage glinted under the lights. The baggage hold was closing and the fuel truck reversing away. The propellers began to turn. In the door of the plane a young stewardess was beckoning for them to hurry.
Denham reached the steps just as the engines began to roar, but before he could climb inside, the SD man grabbed his elbow. With his other hand holding on to his trilby he yelled, ‘Make any attempt to reenter the Reich and it’s straight back to the cells. Understand?’
‘I’m not coming back,’ Denham said, taking his passport from the man’s hand.
He hobbled through the door of the plane and said hello to the stewardess, seeing the effect of his ravaged face in her eyes. Pretty eyes, too. Iceberg blue. Inside the cabin were about sixteen tall, upholstered seats, all occupied, except one. In their haste to flush him out of their Aryan paradise, Denham guessed they’d bumped someone off the flight. At least he had a window seat. He eased himself in with care, trying not to faint from the hot pokers in his ribs.
The plane began to move. It rumbled along the runway for a minute; then the engine noise swelled in pitch, there was a sudden acceleration, and they were away, up out of the Reich. Trying not to rest his stitched-up brow against the window he watched the spider’s web of illuminated streets radiating from Potsdamer Platz station, the long line of car taillights passing along the Tiergarten, the dark mass of the zoo and its lakes. Drifts of cloud slipped over the wing. A few minutes later they were over the western districts of Wilmersdorf, Charlottenburg, and Spandau, and Berlin was stretching away behind them.
Iceberg Eyes asked if he’d like a drink. He winked at her and asked for a triple whisky, neat, and some aspirin.
‘I’ll have the same,’ said an American voice. ‘Without the aspirin.’
Eleanor stood in the aisle, smiling at the man seated next to him, asking if he wouldn’t mind swapping seats. Denham had never seen her look so lovely. She was in a navy suit with a marocain blouse and had her hair held up by a black felt band with a ribbon.
He blinked, fearing another hallucination like the ones that had haunted his cell. Maybe in truth he was still there, doped on morphine and comatose, incapable of breaking through the surface to reality, and not wanting to.
‘You sure took your time,’ she said, sitting down next to him.
He touched her forehead with his finger.
‘It’s me, Richard. I’m real. This is real.’ She kissed him gently on his swollen lips.
‘How did you…?’
But it didn’t matter for now. He put his arms around her, and pressed his face to hers, ignoring the agony in his hand, cheek, and ribs. He began to cry.
‘I don’t look too grand, do I?’
She took his bandaged hand and kissed it. ‘I think you’re the grandest person on earth.’
They downed their drinks, and Eleanor said, ‘Sleep for a while. Then we’ll talk.’
Denham drifted off to the hum of the propellers and the stewardess announcing, ‘Our flight time over the Reich is one and a half hours; we land at Croydon Airfield, London, in four hours…’
He awoke with the word ‘home’ on his lips and realised that Tom had been swimming through his dream. The cabin lights were off, and he looked out of the window at great ranges of clouds, towering white in the moonlight and plunging into silvery canyons and crevasses. Where are you hiding, son?
‘The stars look like ice crystals, don’t they?’ Eleanor said softly. She was curled sideways into her seat, watching him, a blanket wrapped around her.
‘Did you get me released?’ he asked.
‘Uh-huh.’ She nodded with a sleepy smile.
‘Did they really kill Roland?’
Her face fell. ‘You know about that?’
‘I heard the broadcast.’
She sat up and began to tell him what had happened. The murder of Roland at Haeckel’s hands. Hannah’s victory and the broadcast.
She explained how Sir Eric Phipps approached no less a person than Heydrich himself, sitting behind Hitler at the Olympic stadium, and demanded Denham’s release, or to see him the same day.
‘Some people in high places like you, buddy. This SS big shot Heydrich told him there was an espionage charge against you, but it sounded so vague that Sir Eric asked if it wasn’t really a crock o’ shit-but in diplomatic language, of course. Meanwhile your old friend Rex Palmer-Ward and others in the press corps put pressure on that prize asshole Greiser to confirm what I’d told them about you being held in the Gestapo cells for talking to Liebermann… The Germans panicked, afraid of another scandal hot on the heels of Liebermann while the Games were still on. But it seems they were also worried about upsetting you Brits. Eric Phipps is the brother-in-law of Sir Fancy-Tart…’
‘Sir Robert Vansittart?’
‘Yeah, tall fellow, talks with a potato in his throat. Apparently he has a hell of a sway over your foreign policy. So the krauts made a snap decision to deport you, and I got on the same flight.’
‘I’m nothing but trouble.’
‘Hey…,’ she whispered, smoothing his hair.
‘And Tom…’
‘We’ll find him.’
They sat, holding each other’s hands for a while in silence, before Denham said, ‘Did anyone mention a dossier?’
Eleanor shook her head. ‘A dossier?’
He peered out into the darkness, but could see nothing but the reflection of his own face in the glass.