Last Flight to Stalingrad by Graham Hurley (simple ebook reader .TXT) 📗

2

BERLIN, 21 MAY 1942

Werner Nehmann was summoned to 20 Hermann Goering Strasse in an early evening phone call from the Ministry of Propaganda. The call came from one of the secretaries in Goebbels’ private office, an old-stager in the Promi called Birgit.

‘Why the invitation?’ he asked on the phone.

‘I’ve no idea. The Minister said ten o’clock. He’s still on the way back from München. I’m sending a car to Tempelhof.’

Nehmann was still living at Guram’s apartment on the Wilhelmstrasse. His Georgian friend’s business empire had lately expanded to France and he was currently occupying a handsome three-storey house in Tours while he cornered the market for quality vintages from the Loire Valley.

Nehmann hung up and glanced at his watch. Still early, barely seven o’clock. For the next couple of hours or so, over a glass or two of Sekt from Guram’s personal cellar, he worked on a couple of articles he owed Das Reich,Goebbels’ weekly offering to neutral countries abroad.Then, as darkness fell, and the city centre’s Blockwarten began to police the nightly blackout, he checked his own curtains and headed for the street.

Goebbels’ official Berlin residence was a ten-minute stroll away. With no raids anticipated, the late evening traffic was slightly heavier than usual and staff, uniformed or otherwise, were still emerging from the Reich ministries at the upper end of the Wilhelmstrasse. Hermann Goering Strasse was on the left, two streets from Hitler’s Chancellery.

Number 20 lay behind a high wall, a three-storey building with the faux-classical features favoured in the upper levels of the Reich. Nehmann paused a moment to light a cheroot, acknowledging the nod of recognition from the sentry who stood guard at the iron gate. After a multimillion Reichsmark renovation, the Minister of Propaganda had been living here since the beginning of the war. Add three more properties outside the city – two on Schwanenwerder, an idyllic island on the River Havel, and another at Bogensee – and Nehmann began to wonder how Goebbels ever made up his mind where to sleep at night.

Recently, out of curiosity as well as a sense of mischief, Nehmann had acquired a copy of the Minister’s first and only published novel, penned when he was twenty-five. It featured a troubled hero called Michael Voorman and it was, everyone quietly agreed, a pile of Scheisse, but what had caught Nehmann’s eye was Voorman’s principled rejection of materialism. What really mattered to the apprentice novelist was faith, and justice, and the pathway to a better future. What the author sought to avoid were the showy baubles of contemporary German life.

Nehmann ground the remains of his cheroot underfoot and stepped towards the gate. An early fantasy, he thought, amused as ever by where this level of deceit might lead a man.

A member of Goebbels’ staff, alerted by the sentry, was already waiting at the mansion’s open door. Another familiar face.

‘He’s back, Hildegard?’

‘Ten minutes ago. He’s in his study. You know the way.’

She stood aside and let him into the house before closing the door behind them. The ground floor offered a banqueting hall, reception rooms and the overpowering scent of furniture polish. Nehmann, who had no taste for public events, had successfully resisted a number of invitations in the early days of the war without damaging his access to the master of the house. He knew that Goebbels had assigned him the role of court jester, as well as maverick journalist, and he was more than content to keep the grind of official business at arm’s length. He also knew from contacts deep in the Promi that Goebbels regarded his take on the world as scurrilous, subversive and frequently brilliant, three reasons – he suspected – to explain the immunity he appeared to have won for himself. Recently, the Minister had given him a nickname, der Über.It was shorthand for der Überlebende. The survivor.

The grand staircase, the signature boast of so many Berlin renovations up and down the Wilhelmstrasse, was hung with fine art looted from galleries in France. Nehmann, as ever, paused beside a canvas by Courbet. He’d first seen this masterpiece a decade ago. It was hanging in a gallery on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris, and even then – barely able to eat on his meagre earnings from satirical scribblings – he’d regarded it as sublime. The fall of light on the white bones of the cliff face at Étretat. The seemingly artless brushstrokes that gave the rearing breakers both depth and menace. The scurry of clouds on the far horizon. You could taste the wind, smell the ocean, and every time he took another look it seemed to offer a fresh message. Tonight, he thought, it carries a warning. Never take anything for granted.

Goebbels was working in a small study on the second floor, a private space he regarded as sacrosanct. Nehmann knocked and announced himself.

‘Come…’

Goebbels was sitting in a leather armchair beside a desk, leafing through a sheaf of notes. He was wearing a suit but he’d discarded the jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He glanced briefly up, then waved Nehmann into the other chair. No words of welcome; nothing to break his concentration.

Nehmann knew better than to interrupt his master. With his senior staff at the Promi, the Minister had never been less than imperious, and recently he’d been insisting on regular 11 a.m. meetings to tighten his grip on every full stop and comma that emerged from the Ministry. Nehmann was mercifully spared this daily inquisition but word around the building suggested that the pressure on Goebbels was beginning to show, and, looking at him now, Nehmann knew that the rumours were true.

Although they’d spoken on the phone a number of times over the past weeks, he hadn’t seen Goebbels in the flesh since mid-April. The Minister had a face and a slightly skeletal physical presence you wouldn’t forget: high forehead, thin lips, coal-black eyes. For a small man, his voice was surprisingly deep and at his many public appearances he used it