Midnight in Berlin Read Online Free PDF Page B

suspicion that you are attempting to acquire secret information by illicit means. You must have no relations or communications with persons acting, or professing to act, as spies or secret agents …
    The note went on to state that information of interest to His Majesty’s Government should be gathered through contact, either formally or socially, with military personnel of the host country or by observation: “Your status is the same as those of diplomats working within the embassy and you are expected to behave accordingly.”
    Those were the rules laid down in a little book drawn up by the Foreign Office in London called
Practice and Etiquette for Service Attachés.
The trouble was that such gentlemanly behaviour did not work in the Berlin of 1938. The year was hardly a fortnight old and Macrae could see the beginnings of a crisis that might finally shake the complacency of those in London who thought the best way to deal with a ravening wolf was to keep feeding him.
    He made one phone call from the embassy, took a taxi down the Unter den Linden avenue and got out at a bridge across the Spree. It was mid-morning and the streets were quiet. He walked over the river, turned left and marvelled as a magnificently domed renaissance building came into view through the leafless trees of the Lustgarten. The Berliner Dom called itself a cathedral but in fact lacked a resident bishop and thus had no claim on that title. It was simply a religious building designed to celebrate the Protestant faith in Germany. It was half past eleven. There would be a short prayer service at noon, as there was every day.
    He killed time by climbing the 267 steps up to the gallery that ran round the interior of the domed roof. The view onto the nave below was dizzying. A lavish marble and onyx altar dominated one end of the church. The polished bronze pipes of a large organ rose over the choir stalls like the masts of a stately galleon at the other end. Gilded statues and royal sarcophagi gave the interior the extravagant appearance of an Egyptian temple rather than a German church.
    He retraced his steps and went into the shop by the entrance. Amid books, reliquaries, candles and tourist guides he saw a large pile of prominently displayed copies of
Mein Kampf.
He picked one up. It was the same edition he had bought in Vienna four years earlier. An incoherent, badly written book dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic when it first appeared in 1926. Twelve years later it remained a bestseller, or so the publishers in Berlin reported.
    â€œYou want to buy it?”
    He turned to see an elderly woman with strands of grey hair falling over the folds of a face that had once been very beautiful. She had spoken in accented English. It had been silly of him to wear his cavalry twill overcoat and lace-up brogues.
    â€œNo. It seems strange to find such a book here in the church.”
    The woman gave a low chuckle.
    â€œAh, you English. You think you know everything, don’t you?” She took the book from him and replaced it on the stand. “Not for sale,” she said.
    â€œWhy do you display it?”
    â€œProtection, young man. You want a candle?”
    The service began promptly at noon with a full congregation of several hundred people. There were prayers, the choir sang the twenty-fourth psalm, the priest gave a brief address extolling Christian powers of endurance and fortitude intimes of stress. Twenty minutes later he was walking down the steps of the cathedral when a young officer in the uniform of a lieutenant and wearing a swastika armband detached himself from the worshippers and walked over.
    â€œHeil Hitler!”
said the officer loudly, and saluted with outraised arm and a click of his heels. Macrae saluted in return, his right hand rising to his head with palm facing outwards in a sharp gesture. It was against army rules to salute in civilian clothing and without military headgear, but Macrae was damned if he