Bad Company by Jack Higgins

Author:Jack Higgins [Higgins, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Suspense, Adventure, Thriller
ISBN: 9780425195215
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The sitting room was crowded, not only with furniture, but with the bric-a-brac accumulated over a long life. An old grand piano stood in a corner, the top crowded with photos, some in silver frames, the largest of a handsome young man in the uniform of an army captain.

Ferguson picked it up. “Your husband?”

“Yes, that’s George. He was a military policeman. I was an interpreter. That’s how we met.” She sat down, clutching Benny on her lap. “I was interrogated, you know, by the intelligence people, about being on the staff in the Bunker.”

Ferguson nodded to Hannah, who said, “Tell us about that, Mrs. Grant.”

“There’s nothing really to tell. I was an SS auxiliary, a secretary, a typist. I was twenty-two years old. I was transferred from SD headquarters in Berlin. SD meant SS Intelligence, but I was, like I’ve told you, just a young office girl.”

“So you were there for six months? Until April ’forty-five and the final catastrophe?” Hannah asked.

“That’s right. I was a relief secretary, the most junior of all. I made the coffee, that sort of thing.”

Dillon was filled with an enormous compassion for this woman, already old and, more than that, old beyond her years, a woman who had been at the sharp edge of history, but also a woman who was lying.

“So you knew the Führer?” Hannah asked.

“Of course, but the others were far more important than me, the other secretaries, I mean.”

Hannah nodded. “And Sturmbahnführer Baron von Berger? You knew him?”

“Oh, yes.” The old lady stroked Benny’s head. “He was in the Bunker for the last three months. Wounded in Russia. He came to be decorated, and the Führer took a fancy to him, made him an aide.”

“I see. Was there anything special about him?”

“No.” The old lady said. “The last couple of days were terrible, everything was confused. Then the Führer and his wife committed suicide and we all scattered, ran for it. A lot of us went through the underground tunnels. Some of us made it. I reached the West and the Americans a couple of weeks later.” She shook her head, as if looking back into a past that she didn’t want to see. “But I went through all this with the British intelligence people all those years ago.”

Ferguson interrupted. “So you didn’t see anything of von Berger at the end?”

She shrugged. “He was there and then he wasn’t, but that was true of so many people.”

Hannah carried on. “And yet we know that von Berger escaped from Berlin in a Storch aircraft. He was a prisoner of war for a couple of years, then became a hugely successful businessman.”

“I know nothing of that. Please believe me. I was just a relief secretary, nobody of any importance.” She said almost vacantly, “I made the coffee,” and because she was old and tired and her guard was down, she added, “The Führer liked it black and not too strong. The second cup he liked with brown sugar. Of course at the end, he had the palsy.

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