Midnight in Berlin by James MacManus Read Free Book Online

trust you will allow me to take you to dinner when you are next in Berlin or I am next in Vienna.
    And that it was how it had started. Macrae tried to remember exactly when it was: eight, nine years ago? It didn’t matter. A few months later they dined again, this time in Budapest. Koenig had changed. He was quiet, reserved and very careful with his drink. He was endlessly curious about the military preparations in Britain, or rather the lack of them.
    â€œIt is strange to me – indeed to my colleagues – that at a time like this you appear to be disarming. Is that true, or is Perfidious Albion playing one of its tricks?”
    He had laughed. It was 1935 and the government of Stanley Baldwin in London had announced a cut in the defence budget and once again refused to countenance conscription. Meanwhile, Hitler had defied the advice of his own generals and sent three divisions into the demilitarised Rhineland, breaking the terms of the Versailles treaty.
    â€œYou know you could have stopped us? All the French had to do was move a brigade near the border while the British sent a naval task force into the North Sea with the threat of a blockade. Hitler would have backed down.”
    â€œYou think we made a mistake?”
    Koenig laughed. They were in a café by the river. Koenig said he preferred meeting in Budapest rather than Vienna. There were too many spies in Austria and they were all Nazis, he said.
    â€œAh, you English and your sense of humour. Mistake? The mistake is that you think you know Hitler. You don’t. We do. That is our problem.”
    â€œWe’re not alone, you know. The French have the biggest army in Europe.”
    â€œThe French!” Koenig had almost fallen off his chair laughing.
    Primrose wanted to meet the man she called “your debauched German lieutenant”. Having heard about their first evening, she was curious to meet someone who could behave so badly and apologise so sweetly. Primrose thought she understood something of Koenig’s behaviour. He had lost two brothers in the war, just as she had lost her Richard. Grief did strange things to a person, she said.
    When Koenig was next in Vienna it was arranged they would lunch at a new fish restaurant called Esterhazy several miles out of town on the Danube. The lunch began promptly at one o’clock, but it was not until early evening, as the waiters were laying tables for dinner, that they finally left.
    Macrae had sat back and watched and listened as his wife and the German officer explored the deaths of their siblings, talking as if they were part of the same family. He had never heard Primrose talk in that way. The millions of dead in the Great War had created a bond between those who had lost loved ones in the slaughter that transcended all barriers. Denied the intimacy of shared grief, Macrae felt like a stranger at the table. At one stage, Koenig had comforted Primrose as she was recalling the last time she had seen her brother.
    â€œI never said goodbye properly – that’s the awful part. I never told him good luck or that I loved him or anything,” she said.
    She had begun to cry, which is when Koenig had put his arms around her. They were drinking a light Austrian wineand Macrae noticed that by four clock they had each had a bottle.
    As the lunch stretched into early evening, Macrae felt more and more like an intruder on private grief. Primrose and Koenig shared memory after memory of their lost siblings. Macrae knew that if he were to get up and silently walk away, they would hardly notice. Their conversation flowed like a river emerging from dark subterranean caves where guilt and grief were etched in crude images on rock walls. Alcohol, memories of the dead and the thin thread of desire were creating a catharsis for these two people, his wife and the German lieutenant.
    Macrae got to his feet. “I think it’s time to go home, darling,” he said.
    They were both drunk