Traitor's Gate - Softcover

Ridpath, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1781851816 ISBN 13: 9781781851814

Verlag: Head of Zeus, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

A nerve-shredding, intelligent thriller based around the first plot to kill Hitler, the story of a secret conflict ignited on the eve of World War Two.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Ridpath spent eight years as a bond trader in the City before giving up his job to write full-time. He lives in north London with his wife and three children. Visit his website at www.michaelridpath.com.

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Traitor's Gate

By Michael Ridpath

Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Michael Ridpath
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78185-181-4

CHAPTER 1

It was still possible to have fun in Berlin, even in 1938. You could go out to a nightclub, you could drink champagne, speak of old times, drink more champagne, perhaps say more than you should. In more normal countries in more normal times the consequences of such a night might have been a sore head and apologies for the rash words of the night before. In Nazi Germany the consequence was death.

Conrad de Lancey was looking forward to the evening. He had arrived by train from the Hook of Holland that morning, dropped his things off at his hotel and spent the afternoon wandering from the former Imperial Palace past the grand buildings that lined Unter den Linden, through the Brandenburg Gate to the Tiergarten, where he had lost himself amongst the trees and ponds.

After a miserable year spent licking his wounds, he was glad to be out of England.

He had escaped from Mosquito Hill. Unable to go forward or back, he had run sideways, away from the Spanish brigade and towards the retreating Washington Battalion on his right. He had successfully mingled with the American walking wounded staggering back from the front. His luck held out when he managed to hitch a lift to Valencia with an outfit known as 'the Scottish Ambulance Unit', commanded by a formidable nurse wearing a voluminous tartan kilt. From there he stowed away on a ship bound for Marseilles. A week later, his arm in a sling, he was back in Oxford.

He had hoped to return to his old life: his unfinished thesis, his pretty cottage in Manor Road and his beautiful wife. But he came home to find Veronica gone and everything changed. As autumn became winter, the cottage, which Veronica had professed 'divine' when she had moved in, and 'a pokey hovel' when she had moved out, had become a damp, chilly rebuke, a daily reminder of warmer, happier times.

When Veronica had first left him, Conrad had felt shocked, numb. After a couple of weeks the numbness had been replaced by a slow, burning anger. He had tried to ignore it, to pretend it wasn't there. Whenever his friends or his family tried to speak to him about her, he parried with finely honed banalities.

Spain hadn't helped – those memories of the rotting corpses of his comrades on Mosquito Hill, of the desperate faces of the bombed-out orphans of Madrid and above all of the cruel betrayal of the idealistic young workers by the commissars and the politicians which had led to bullets in the backs of Harry and David. A noble cause had been corrupted into a hell of violence, cruelty and death.

Back in Oxford, he tried to work on the thesis for his D.Phil., about Prussia's war with Denmark in 1864. This little war, which had comprised two campaigns of a few weeks each, had eaten up four years of his own life, and he was sick of it. Oxford was damp and miserable without Veronica. When one morning in December Conrad had spied an advertisement in The Times for a teacher at a prep school in the depths of Suffolk, on a whim he had applied.

He was there for the beginning of the Lent term in January, covering for a member of staff who had been badly injured in a car smash. He laid low for a term and a half, not seeing anyone, his family, his friends and certainly not Veronica. He enjoyed teaching small boys French and Latin, and the isolation helped. But when the teacher he was covering for returned to school for the second half of the summer term, Conrad turned down the headmaster's offer of a permanent position.

For almost a year he had ignored all those issues that had been so important to him that he had risked his life for them: peace and war, socialism and fascism, the disaster that was engulfing Europe. But he had had enough of skulking in the lanes and water meadows of Suffolk. He decided it was time to face up to what was happening in the world.

So he bought a one-way ticket to Berlin.

It was a warm night, but unlike London, which had been shrouded in low grey cloud when Conrad had left Liverpool Street station the previous day, the air here was fresh and clean. Even at this hour the Kurfürstendamm was busy; tall blue-uniformed traffic policemen expertly marshalled the cars, trams and buses swishing along the street. It had only just got dark, and the pavements were alive with people flitting in and out of the pools of light emanating from the shop fronts, cafés, restaurants, cinemas and theatres. Many wore uniforms: greenish-grey for the army, brown for the Party functionaries and black for the SS. Many didn't. All of them had a sense of urgency, a sense of purpose.

Conrad paused under a street lamp to consult the note Joachim had sent to his hotel, including directions to the club. A young man, barely more than a boy, wearing a sharp suit and a thin moustache was leaning against an iron poster column a few feet away. He hissed something to Conrad under his breath. Conrad smiled politely and went back to his note. Just then a fashionably dressed lady approached, sniffing loudly. The youth smiled and the two disappeared. Clearly some transaction had occurred or was about to occur, but Conrad wasn't entirely sure what it was.

With a jolt he noticed the advertisement revealed on the poster column, a grotesque caricature of a man with a beard and a hooked nose, holding out a handful of coins and grasping a map of Germany under his arm. It was advertising an exhibition called Der Ewige Jude – The Eternal Jew.

Conrad walked a few steps further along the Ku'damm and turned off along a side street. Within a few yards he came across an illuminated sign of a jolly-looking cockatoo. He descended the neon-lit stairs and plunged into a dark, warm atmosphere of smoke and alcohol, of music and chatter. The place was nearly full and, as Conrad scanned the crowd, he spotted Joachim at a table near the back. Conrad wound his way through the tables towards him and Joachim leaped to his feet, his face breaking into a broad grin as he held out his hand.

Conrad shook it warmly. His cousin was pudgier than when they had last met, and his slicked-back hair had thinned. He was dressed very properly in evening clothes, but his cheeks were shining and his white tie was slightly askew. Conrad noticed an open bottle of champagne on ice on the table, and he suspected it wasn't Joachim's first.

'I'm sorry I'm a little late,' said Conrad, in German.

'I've been here a while,' said Joachim, in English, with a grin. 'It is wonderful to be back in Berlin after freezing Moscow. I know these places are a bit tame, but there is enough of an atmosphere about them to remind me of the good old days.' Joachim's English was excellent, but his accent was unique: a mixture of Germanic precision and the affectation of a 1920s Oxford aesthete.

Conrad scanned the dance floor and was relieved to see that the couples dancing were of mixed sex. Conrad had visited the notorious Eldorado Club in Berlin with Joachim in 1929 at the tender age of eighteen. To say that he had been shocked would be an understatement. 'I imagine the Nazis have closed all your favourite old haunts.'

'Many of them,' said Joachim. 'But there are still some interesting places to go. You just have to know where to look. Have a glass of bubbles, old man. It's filthy stuff these days, I'm afraid, but you get used to it after a couple of glasses.'

Joachim Mühlendorf was Conrad's cousin, a diplomat in Germany's embassy in Moscow who was on a week's leave in Berlin. He was one of the few people with whom Conrad still...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Head of Zeus
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1781851816
• ISBN 13: 9781781851814
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar