Traitor's Gate Read Free Page B

wasn’t I?’
    ‘You were. You also weren’t wearing very much.’
    ‘It was a warm evening. I hope you didn’t get into too much trouble on my account.’
    Conrad had, but it was a long time ago. ‘So why did you want to see Theo?’
    ‘I had something I wanted to discuss with him, something I’d heard in Moscow. Unfortunately, he brought a couple of girls along. Perfectly nice girls, but they rather got in the way of a frank discussion. Anyway, I seem to have offended him.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘I suppose I was a bit indiscreet. Hertenberg became quite huffy and more or less threw me out.’
    ‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Conrad.
    Joachim shrugged. ‘I was a little drunk. But I was speaking in English, and the girls didn’t understand. I’m sure there was no one listening.’
    ‘For all his enlightened ideas Theo is a Prussian at heart,’ Conrad said. ‘He disapproves of people behaving badly. He can’t help it.’
    Joachim leaned back in his chair. He carefully transferred the cigarettes from the packet the waitress had given him to a silver case engraved with the Mühlendorf family crest. The procedure complete, he offered one to Conrad before lighting one of his own.
    ‘Do you trust him?’ Joachim asked, looking closely at Conrad.
    ‘Theo? Yes. Absolutely.’ There was not a trace of doubt in Conrad’s voice.
    ‘Have you seen him recently?’
    ‘Not for five years now. Not since I was over here in 1933. But we were very close at Oxford.’ Theo was a Rhodes scholar, the first to arrive at Oxford from Germany since the war. Conrad and he had quickly become friends. It wasn’t just that they shared a mixed heritage – Conrad’s mother was German and Theo’s grandmother American – nor that they both embraced the intellectual fashions of the time: the Labour Club, pacifism, home rule for India. They seemed to share the same view of the world, or at least they had seemed to then. Conrad was looking forward to seeing him in Berlin. Theo had always been a source of good-natured sanity; it would be interesting to see what he made of the insanity all around him. Besides, a night on the town with Theo was always fun.
    ‘You know he has joined the army now?’ Joachim said.
    Conrad nodded. ‘I know: he wrote to me a couple of years ago and mentioned he had joined the reserves. It seems quite unlike him.’
    ‘It might have been a ploy to avoid signing up for the Nazi Party,’ Joachim said. ‘I tried that dodge myself, but the reserves wouldn’t have me.’ He tapped his chest. ‘It’s my heart. I get these palpitations.’
    ‘So what did you do?’
    Joachim shrugged. ‘I became a Party member. I had to if I wanted to become a diplomat.’
    Conrad couldn’t help showing his surprise. Joachim had been a convert to Marxism in the 1920s, several years before it was fashionable in England.
    ‘Don’t look so shocked,’ said Joachim. ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’
    ‘Of course it means something,’ said Conrad. ‘How can you be a member of such a vile organization, even if it is just for the convenience of your career? That’s a terrible reason.’
    ‘You’re quite right, Conrad,’ Joachim said. ‘I am a morally corrupted individual who deserves every ounce of your disap­proval. But the question is not am I a Nazi, but is Theo one?’
    ‘I doubt it very much,’ said Conrad. ‘I haven’t seen him for years, but he was my closest friend at the university. His views on right and wrong are deeply entrenched. I would be very surprised if he had become a Nazi, a genuine one.’ Although when Conrad had spent a month in Berlin in the spring of 1933 just after the Nazis had come to power, Theo had seemed complacent about Hitler. To Conrad’s disgust he had said that someone had to bring order back to the country; it was just a pity the new Chancellor was so common and vulgar. As far as Conrad was concerned, the least of Hitler’s sins was that he was ‘common’. But Conrad couldn’t