“They took me to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Carl. I was there. They let me go after a few hours. They wanted to know – they knew all along of course – whether the man we’d met in Geneva was my father. And what I was whispering about.”
Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, secret police headquarters, watch-tower of hell, rumoured to be a place where more people went in than came out. However, Emma had not been held for very long, presumably to avoid complications with the Foreign Ministry, although Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse bowed to no-one. A pin-prick against Trott? A little dig at them, to show that they were being watched, wherever they were? The mere fact that she was Dutch cast suspicion on Emma, she was given to understand, and having a father working at the Dutch legation in Switzerland was enough reason to be sent to a camp. Hints, intimations of punishable offences, the staple ingredients of the murder-by-stealth methods favoured by the clerks of Himmler’s elite corps.
“What was that about you whispering something?”
Her explanation shook her husband more than she had foreseen.
“My God, Emma, how could you? I told you in confidence!”
“I couldn’t help it, all I could think of was what you’d said, Carl. And he was so… it was as if he were worlds away, almost a stranger. I wanted him to know what we know. Only three more weeks. And so I told him, and he was back with his feet on the ground straightaway. I hope he’ll do something with it. He must.”
Carl said nothing. The warning they had received today was impossible to take lightly. Emma’s arrest, albeit brief, was a threat of the most direct sort. Thank God they had not overheard what she relayed to her father in Switzerland, or he would never have seen her again. This was the opening gambit in a chess game, with the Gestapo making all the moves. Carl Regendorf, we’re hot on your trail, and your trail leads to von Trott, that boss of yours. We don’t like your boss very much, nor his friends and associates. We don’t like anything about you, really, not your wives, your children, or your families. Arrogant intellectuals, the lot of you, with your nice houses and fancy talk and posh names and your manicured notions and unreadable books and your foreign connections. It’s high time for change, you see, and so we’ll get things going by arresting one of your women. Give her a scare, show how much we know about her. Everything, in fact. Just a little bit of fun on our part, as you will appreciate. We all have to start somewhere.
Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse dungeons, no better place for comedy.
Carl and Emma sat in the conservatory in the fading light, their bags still unpacked. Emma had telephoned him to ask if he could come home early. She was upset, but not by any means panic-stricken.
“And as I was leaving, one of them grinned at me and said: ‘By the way, your mother’s quite a looker.’ I wonder what he was getting at. Mama has only been in Switzerland once since the outbreak of war. Do you suppose they have suspicions about her as well?”
Carl made no reply, his mind being filled with Emma’s arrest and the repercussions that might have for Trott. In hindsight, of course, making contact with her father had been very foolish. But it had seemed such a shame not to take the opportunity of seeing him briefly. Just to be amongst themselves, no treading on eggshells for a change. He often wondered what exactly Emma’s father was doing in Switzerland. A solitary job, apparently, not that he seemed lonely. The lakeside restaurant had not been particularly busy, Carl reflected. Only three or four occupied tables, one of which was next to theirs. A man had been sitting there reading a newspaper with screaming headlines: the
