Page 24 of The Banned Books of Berlin

Berlin, May 1933

‘Please, Leon. It won’t take long, just an hour or so. I can’t think of anyone else to ask.’

He frowned. ‘To move some luggage? Can’t Werner help you?’

‘The club is closed today and I need someone I can trust,’ Freya told him. ‘If anyone finds that trunk, I’m in serious trouble.’

‘So where are you taking it?’

She bit her lip. ‘That’s the thing. I need to find another hiding place – or maybe we can just dump it somewhere.’ Her nerve had gone. Walther Grube would be delighted to punish her for his humiliation, and hoarding banned books would see her locked away for years.

‘I won’t ask what’s inside,’ Leon said, ‘as long as you promise it isn’t a dead body?’

Freya smiled and shook her head. ‘Nothing like that. I’m sorry, I can see you’re keen to get going but I’m desperate.’

It had taken her a while to summon the courage to venture out from the club, with the gun Franz Schwartz had given her strapped in a holster around her waist. Even pulling the trigger seemed inconceivable, but its solid weight reassured her. She had come to the Kohls’ apartment on the off-chance Leon might be there, or if not, that his mother might know where he was. She’d wondered about looking for him at the law faculty, but her chances of finding the attic room again were slim and Leon had ordered her specifically to stay away. Thankfully, she’d caught him at home, packing to leave the city. He didn’t tell her where he was heading and she knew better than to ask. He was clearly preoccupied, and Frau Kohl was similarly anxious and tight-lipped. Freya felt guilty about bothering them at such a time, and if there had been any other alternative, she would never have done so. Leon was her last resort. How would she manage without him?

‘I’ll wait in the courtyard till you’re ready,’ she said. ‘Thanks, Leon. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.’

Fifteen minutes later, he appeared: grim-faced, with a haversack over his shoulder. They took a tram part of the way back to Schoneberg and walked the rest. Leon wore a cap and kept his head down, avoiding anyone’s gaze, and she did the same. They didn’t speak. Approaching the Zaubergarten by the rear entrance, Freya’s heart began to pound and her throat became constricted. What if Walther Grube had come back? He had keys and could let himself in whenever he wanted. Franz was right: she couldn’t spend another night in this place. She’d find a cheap hotel for tonight and start looking for a room the next day. Once they’d dealt with the books and her mind was clear, she’d make a plan.

‘I’ll go first,’ she told Leon, unlocking the back door, and locking it again behind them once they were inside. She made a quick sweep of the ground floor, her hand on the gun barrel. It was empty, as far as she could see, waiting for the chandeliers to blaze and the still, dusty air to fill with music and laughter. Dear Lord, but she would miss this place. She opened the unobtrusive door and led the way down the back staircase, straight into the storeroom.

‘Wait here,’ she whispered to Leon, and tiptoed through to her bedroom. The rumpled blankets told their own story, and for a second she was back there, defenceless, with Grube grinding her body beneath his. She could feel his suffocating weight and the white heat of his rage, and for a second she thought she might faint. Taking a few deep breaths, she walked on into the dressing room. It was similarly deserted. Leon is here and you have a gun, she reminded herself; nothing bad is going to happen.

‘All clear,’ she said, returning to the storeroom.

Leon had taken the suitcase into the middle of the room and thrown open the lid. ‘Oh, Freya,’ he said, looking at its contents. ‘You don’t do things by halves, do you?’

‘And there’s this,’ she said, moving aside a couple of boxes and dragging out the trunk. ‘More of the same, as you can see. I can’t get it up the stairs by myself, but if you help me, we could take it out through the back door and load it on to the porter’s trolley. I can probably manage by myself from there, actually.’

‘Why have you collected all these books?’ Leon asked. ‘What were you planning on doing with them?’

Freya shrugged. She didn’t even know anymore. ‘I wanted to save them. It seemed important to make a stand and this was all I could think of. I’m not sorry, Leon. You once said we’d each have to find our own way, and this is mine. Better than nothing, isn’t it?’

He smiled, but so sadly she could hardly bear it. ‘I know somewhere we could take them. I have the keys to an empty apartment not far from here. They’d be safe there for a while, at least – as long as nobody ambushes us along the way.’

Freya knew instantly the place he had in mind: an apartment with a blue door, on the corner of a parade of shops. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That sounds perfect. I’ll get the trolley in place upstairs.’

She flung open the storeroom door – and gasped. On the other side stood a Nazi in brown uniform, a khaki cap pulled low over his forehead. She stood there, frozen with horror, and the man laughed. It was Walther Grube. He grabbed her around the waist, turned her around and pushed her back into the room, slamming the door behind them. Leon bunched his fists but it was an unequal struggle; in three strides, Grube had reached him, drawn a baton and winded him with a single blow to the stomach, followed by two vicious punches to the jaw that left Leon semi-conscious on the floor. Grube’s fist gleamed with brass knuckle dusters and his eyes shone with bloodlust as he kicked Leon’s prone body.

‘Leave him alone!’ Freya screamed, launching herself forward.

Grube slapped her twice in quick succession, once on each cheek, then wrenched her arm behind her back and held it there as he hissed in her ear, ‘You and I have unfinished business, don’t we, Fr?ulein?’

Taking a pair of handcuffs from his pocket, he snapped one half around Leon’s wrist, dragged him across the floor, towing Freya behind him, and locked the other cuff to the pipes that ran from floor to ceiling. Leon groaned, writhing with his knees to his chest, and spat a bloody tooth from his mouth.

Walking over to the trunk, Grube flipped open the lid with his baton and looked inside. ‘Ha, I knew it! You didn’t fool me for a second. I’m assuming these books were never going to end up on the bonfire tonight. Well, I shall take them there myself later. But first, I’m going to have a little fun before I turn you in.’

Leisurely, he unbuckled his belt, unknotted his khaki tie and took off his jacket, which he draped over a stack of boxes. Underneath he wore a thin singlet, and the muscles bulged in his pale arms. He was standing between Freya and the door, and was quick and lithe as a cat; she had no chance of getting past him.

‘You’ll be glad to hear that there’s no chance of us being disturbed,’ he went on. ‘I’ve bolted the doors from the inside and we’re quite alone, the three of us. Shall we go into your bedroom, Fr?ulein, or do you think your friend Herr Kohl would like to watch us here?’

Leon let out a roar. He pulled himself upright, holding on to the pipes, and lunged impotently towards Grube, who laughed again. He still had a smile on his face when Freya raised the gun, holding it in both hands as Franz had taught her, and squeezed the trigger. With a flash of light and a crack that sounded ear-splitting in the confined space, the pistol jumped in her clenched fingers and a jolt travelled all the way up her arm. She couldn’t even tell whether she’d hit Grube, although how could she have missed, at virtually point-blank range? He stared at her in disbelief, his smile fading. When he raised a hand to his shoulder, she saw blood oozing between his fingers. He looked at them in wonder, then came to life: snarling as he threw himself towards her. She stepped back, aimed at his chest and fired again, and then once more to make sure. Grube staggered a couple of paces before dropping to the floor, his body dropping like a felled tree. His head rolled to one side, and he lay without moving.

The storeroom still rang with the echoes of those three deafening shots, like ripples spreading over the surface of a pond. Leon stared at Freya, his eyes wide. She replaced the safety catch on the gun, her fingers trembling, and put it back in the holster around her waist. I have killed a man, she told herself, but the fact was impossible to comprehend. What frightened her as much as anything was the momentary sense of power and excitement that had flooded her body when Grube had fallen. Was she no better than a Nazi? She walked to his body and crouched beside it. His face was blank, emptied of all expression, his eyes fixed and unseeing. She tried not to look at the scarlet mess of his torso as she felt gingerly in his trouser pockets for the handcuff key.

‘Try the jacket,’ Leon said, his voice low and indistinct.

Grube’s outer jacket pockets contained another pair of knuckle dusters, a neatly folded white handkerchief, a letter in a handwritten envelope that she didn’t want to open, and a set of door keys. She searched the inner breast pocket and found a couple of smaller keys on a ring, along with his Nazi party membership card and a photograph of a boy with white hair, aged around ten, sitting on a doorstep between his parents. Freya didn’t like to look at that, either; she couldn’t think of Grube as somebody’s son. She took the keys over to Leon and attempted to fit one with shaking fingers into the minuscule lock on the handcuff. Eventually the cuff snapped open and he rubbed his wrist.

‘Are you all right?’ Freya asked. His lip was split and swollen, and blood was caking along the cut on his jaw.

He nodded, looking at her with an expression she couldn’t make out. Before he could speak, they heard a crash of breaking glass on the floor above, followed by the sound of a bolt being drawn back. Freya reached for the gun at her waist but her hand hovered above the holster; she was afraid of what she might do. Footsteps advanced down the stairs. There was nowhere to hide the bloody corpse on the floor, no time even to throw a blanket over it, so she waited, as if in a dream, to see who would be revealed when the door swung open.

‘Dear God!’ Violet exclaimed, taking in the scene. She was holding a gun herself, Freya noticed, and wearing a raincoat over a tweed suit. ‘What the hell happened here? And who is that?’

‘Walther Grube,’ Freya replied. ‘He was going to turn us in, so I shot him.’

‘In the circumstances, that might be just as well.’ Violet put the gun back in her coat pocket and looked down at Grube’s body. ‘Not bad for a first attempt: thorough, if lacking in finesse.’ She turned to Leon. ‘I’ve come to tell you the game’s up. The brownshirts found that little surprise you left in the bonfire and raided the attic. Egon picked up a tail last night. They took him in and he must have cracked because there’s a warrant out for your arrest. Grube would have been the hero of the hour if he’d brought you back.’

Leon’s face had turned deathly pale. ‘What about Magda?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘And Josef?’

‘I assume they’re on the run,’ Violet answered. ‘And so should you be, though heaven knows how far you’ll make it.’

‘How did you know I was here?’ he asked.

‘Your mother told me,’ Violet said. ‘She took some persuading but eventually she realised I’m on your side.’

‘Are you though?’ Freya said. ‘How do we know that?’

Violet laughed. ‘You’ll have to take my word for it – apart from the fact I’m not marching you down to the nearest police station.’ She frowned. ‘But we’re wasting time. If we don’t dispose of your friend here, and quickly, you’ll be joining Leon on the Most Wanted list.’

Freya was to make several difficult and dangerous journeys throughout her life, but this had to be the most surreal. She walked arm in arm with Violet, while a Nazi brownshirt wheeling a porter’s trolley piled high with luggage followed behind. None of them spoke. Rain was falling steadily and she wondered whether the bonfire would stay alight or even catch fire in this weather. The ceremony might have to be postponed and Goebbels would never get to make his speech about purifying German culture. She remembered Walther Grube proudly sharing his inside knowledge and her gut clenched. She hated the man, viscerally, but taking his life would change hers for ever.

Violet was in charge of the situation, which was fine with Freya; Leon, too, apparently. We’re amateurs, Freya thought, watching the English girl decide what needed to be done. She was the professional, and it seemed ridiculous that Freya could ever have thought of her as nothing more than a cabaret dancer. After she had stripped Grube of his trousers, watch, cap and boots, she told the other two to help her empty the trunk of books.

‘What shall we do with them?’ Freya had asked, her arms full.

‘That’s the least of our worries,’ Violet had replied, glancing up as she crouched by the trunk. ‘You could dump them in Herr Goldstein’s office, I suppose. He’s in Switzerland so he won’t care.’

And that’s what Freya had done, adding Wolfi’s books from the suitcase to the pile. Repeated trips upstairs made her nervous but she reminded herself the club’s main entrance at the front was bolted from the inside, and Violet would deal with anyone who tried to enter through the back. When she returned from the last sortie, Leon was holding Grube under the arms, his head lolling grotesquely to one side, while Violet grasped his knees. Freya looked away as they wrestled his body into the trunk, breathing heavily over the various thuds and crunching of bone.

‘He’s stiffening up,’ Violet had muttered. ‘Press his head down, Leon. For God’s sake, he’s already dead – you’re not going to hurt him.’

It had been a tight squeeze but they’d at last managed to force the lid shut and stood back.

‘We’d better wait till it’s dark,’ Violet had said. ‘That’s only a couple of hours, and with a bit of luck, everyone will be so taken up with this ridiculous book burning, they won’t pay so much attention to us. What are you going to do, Freya? Stay here or come with us?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied, dazed. ‘Come with you, I suppose.’

‘Then you’d better pack a few things,’ Violet said. ‘No one will be looking for you. Not yet, anyway. I can give you some money for a train ticket but that’s it, I’m afraid. I shouldn’t even be here.’

‘I thought you were meant to be back in England already,’ Leon said, rousing himself.

‘I was,’ Violet replied. ‘But they owe me a few days’ leave and I knew you’d need some help. I’ll be going home with the ambassador’s party tomorrow. There’s a new chap arriving to take over so some of the staff are changing.’

They held each other’s gaze for what seemed like a long time, and Freya excused herself to start packing in case they wanted privacy. Where could she go? It would have to be a big city, where no one would be curious about a young girl turning up out of the blue. She had a second cousin in Munich; perhaps he would take her in to start off with. Or maybe she would make her way to Hamburg and apply for a visa to America, as Franz Schwartz had suggested. Will I have to keep running all my life? she wondered, throwing some underwear into Wolfi’s suitcase. And what about Leon? Where could he hide to escape the Gestapo? Suddenly she was desperate for them both to get as far away from Germany as possible. Her fingers trembling, she levered up the loose floorboard and took the wad of notes from her cash box, stuffing them into a canvas bag which she bound against her chest.

When she returned to the storeroom with her luggage, Violet was mopping blood from the floor with a bucket of soapy water and Leon was wearing Grube’s uniform. The jacket was too big for him and the trouser legs had a few blood spots, which he was dabbing with a damp cloth, but the clothes would probably pass muster in the dark.

‘Thank you,’ Freya told Violet. ‘And I’m sorry I thought you were a Fascist.’

‘I suppose that’s understandable,’ Violet said, squeezing out a mopful of pink suds. ‘I’m glad I convinced you, at least.’

After the floor and walls had been thoroughly washed, Freya emptied the bucket in the bathroom and helped Violet and Leon heave the trunk containing Grube’s body upstairs and load it on to the porter’s trolley. And suddenly they were back in the outside world, walking through the night while the city heaved, taut with excitement. The streets were busy, despite the weather; lorries crammed with stormtroopers thundered through puddles in the road, while couples and families in their Sunday best hurried eastward, their faces alight with anticipation. Brownshirt brigades were out in force and the police patrolled in packs, looking for any excuse to arrest passers-by, or at least have fun beating them up. Shutters had been pulled down over shop windows but nobody seemed in the mood for looting. Somewhere in the distance, they could hear the tramp of feet and hundreds of male voices raised in unison – a beautiful, thrilling sound, Freya thought, until you heard the words of those Nazi songs: death to Jews and Hitler’s banners flying in every street.

The three of them crossed the canal and pressed on towards Tiergarten. People might have wondered why a uniformed member of the SA should have been acting as a porter, but nobody cared enough to give Leon a second glance. He had to stop occasionally and wrestle the trolley from a pothole, and once he called out and Freya and Violet turned to see the trunk toppling slowly into the street. Freya gasped, her heart in her mouth. A motorcycle had to swerve to avoid it and a leather-booted policeman shouted at Leon to watch his step. They must have caught him in a good mood, though, because he helped Leon right the trolley and load the trunk back in place.

‘Dear Lord, that’s heavy,’ he said, taking off his cap to mop his brow. ‘What have you got in there?’

‘My winter wardrobe,’ Violet said. ‘I have a large collection of shoes, which this oaf should treat with more care.’ And the policeman had smiled, pocketing the five-mark piece she’d given him for his trouble.

They would make their way through Tiergarten, Violet had said, and then along the river until they found a secluded stretch or some kind of shelter. Freya and Violet would keep watch while Leon tipped the trunk into the water, pushing it as far out as possible. She made it sound so easy. As they walked beside the rushing Spree, swollen with rainfall, Freya realised they were heading in the direction of her old apartment. She remembered sitting by the river that night she’d gone to fetch her father while her mother lay dying, almost three years ago. It was a relief to know Ingrid didn’t have to see how the country had changed since then and that she was at peace, her suffering over. Freya would never have considered leaving Germany had her mother been alive, but now there was nothing to keep her here. Nothing apart from Leon, and she’d lost him already.

Violet squeezed Freya’s arm and nodded ahead. They were approaching a bridge, its base shrouded in darkness. Violet stood aside to let a couple walking towards them pass by, waiting for Leon to catch up. ‘This is a good spot,’ she told him quietly, once the strangers were a safe distance away. ‘I’ll guard the other side and Freya can stay here. We’ll make a noise if anyone comes. Push the trunk as far out as possible – midstream, if you can.’

Freya stood in the centre of the path, looking back along the way they’d come. An idea had come to her for a possible escape route and the more she thought about it, the more brilliant it seemed. Her breath was shallow, her heart thumping. If only Leon could get rid of the trunk, this nightmare would be a step closer to ending. Seconds later she heard a grunt followed by a splash, and turned to see the brass corner of Grube’s coffin gleam in the eddying current before sinking beneath the black water. Before she could think twice, she drew back her arm and hurled the gun after it.

The three of them regrouped under the bridge. ‘Good job,’ Violet said. ‘Now I suggest we split up right away. Do either of you need any money?’

Leon shook his head. ‘I have enough.’

‘Wait!’ Freya grabbed Violet’s arm. ‘I have a plan that might work. For Leon, that is.’

‘Spit it out, then,’ Violet said. ‘There’s no time to hang around.’

‘We need to go to Rupert’s apartment,’ Freya said. ‘You know they’re setting off for California tomorrow? Rupert’s travelling with Franz and his boyfriend Grant. Well, Leon could go in Rupert’s place. I mean, he and Rupert look similar enough, especially if Leon wore spectacles. He could travel on Rupert’s passport with the visa stamped in it, and then later, once he’s left the country, Rupert can say his passport was stolen and reapply for exit papers. He’s English – there won’t be a problem.’

‘And why on earth would this Rupert fellow agree to that?’ Leon asked. ‘He hasn’t even met me.’

‘Because I have something he wants,’ Freya replied. ‘And he’d do anything to get it.’

Violet stared at her, and then laughed. ‘You might be on to something. It’s worth a try, at any rate.’

‘But what about Freya?’ Leon asked Violet.

‘What do you mean, “What about Freya?”’ she repeated.

‘Take her with you to England,’ he replied. ‘You know it’s not safe for her to stay here, not after what’s happened. They’re bound to link her with Grube’s disappearance sooner or later.’

‘I haven’t got exit papers or a visa, though,’ Freya stammered. They both ignored her.

‘No,’ Violet said flatly. ‘I’m in enough trouble as it is. I can’t go back with a stowaway.’

‘Yes, you can,’ Leon told her. ‘Say she’s an informer who’s been working for you and her life’s in danger. It’s half true, anyway. Please, Violet – I’ve never asked you for anything. Will you do this for me?’

Violet looked at him for a long time, her face half hidden in shadow. ‘Dear God,’ she muttered at last, turning away. ‘All right, then.’