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Diary of a Dead Man on Leave - Softcover

Downing, David

 
9781641291293: Diary of a Dead Man on Leave
Softcover
ISBN 10: 164129129X ISBN 13: 9781641291293
Verlag: Soho Crime, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

From bestselling author David Downing, master of historical espionage, comes a heart-wrenching depiction of Germany in the days leading up to World War II and the difficult choices of one man of conviction.

In April 1938, a man calling himself Josef Hofmann arrives at a boarding house in Hamm, Germany, and lets a room from the widow who owns it. Fifty years later, Walter Gersdorff, the widow’s son, who was eleven years old in the spring of 1938, discovers the carefully hidden diary the boarder had kept during his stay, even though he never should have written any of its contents down.
 
What Walter finds is a chronicle of one the most tumultuous years in German history, narrated by a secret agent on a deadly mission. Josef Hofmann was not the returned Argentinian immigrant he’d said he was—he was a communist spy under Moscow’s command trying to reconnect with remaining members of Germany’s suppressed communist party. Hofmann’s bosses believe the common workers are the only way to stop the German war machine from within. Posing as a railroad man, Hofmann sets out on his game of “Russian roulette,” approaching Hamm’s ex-party members one at a time and delicately feeling out their allegiances.
 
He always knew his mission would most likely end in his death, and he was satisfied to make that sacrifice for the revolution if it could help stop Hitler and his abominable ideology. But as he grows close to the Gersdorffs, accidentally stepping into the role of the father Walter never had, Hofmann begins to wish for another kind of hope in his life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Downing grew up in suburban London. He is the author of the Jack McColl novels, Jack of Spies, One Man’s Flag, Lenin’s Roller Coaster, and The Dark Clouds Shining; the thriller The Red Eagles; and six books in the John Russell espionage series, set in WWII Berlin. He lives with his wife, an American acupuncturist, in Guildford, England.

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SATURDAY, APRIL 23

It is almost midnight. I am sitting at a small table by an open window, in the north German town of Hamm, writing these first lines. The rest of the house is quiet, but voices rise and fall on the street below, some talking quietly, others loud with drink and the end of a working week.
     It’s now been almost twenty-eight hours since I boarded the overnight train in Rotterdam. The papers I acquired in New York passed inspection at the German frontier; in Cologne, where I changed trains; and at the ticket barrier in Hamm. I took a cab from the station to the district surrounding the railway yards, intending to ask after lodgings in as many bars as I had to, and struck lucky at the first—one of the barmen knew a place nearby where someone had just moved out.
     It was a large house on a T-junction corner, probably a manager’s house in prewar days, when managers still lived among the workers. A canal ran parallel with the upper arm of the T, and beyond that the freight yards stretched away under a haze of smoke. A small Nazi flag hung limply over the front door.
     A boy of around eleven or twelve answered my knock. I asked for Frau Gersdorff, the name I’d been given at the bar, and he stood and stared at me for a few seconds, as if he had trouble understanding. “My mother,” he said eventually. “I’ll fetch her.” Halfway down the hall he stopped, turned, and told me with great seriousness that his name was Walter, as if it was really important that I knew who he was.
     He reappeared a few moments later with a harassed-looking blonde woman in her late thirties or early forties. I introduced myself as Josef Hofmann and agreed to the rent and terms that she briskly outlined. Seeing in my papers that I’d only recently arrived in Germany, she asked where I’d been, and when I said Argentina, she gave me a look that mingled surprise and suspicion in roughly equal measure. I told her it seemed like a good time to return to the fatherland. “Of course,” she murmured, but her eyes said: “What an idiot!”
     She took me up to the vacant room, a large, airy attic with a fine view of the distant hills to the south. Away to the right I could see the railway yards where I was expecting to find work.
     I said it would do. Frau Gersdorff told me that the guests’ bathroom was on the first floor and that supper was served at six-thirty, breakfast at seven. Walter watched from the doorway, and when his mother left, I got the feeling it was only her gentle push that prevented him from staying.
     I unpacked my suitcase, visited the bathroom, and made my way downstairs in search of the promised supper. There I met the first of three—as I later discovered—other lodgers. This one, a thin man of average height with short black hair, sunken eyes, sucked-in cheeks, and a thick black mustache hanging over a small mouth, introduced himself as Aksel Ruchay. He was wearing an immaculate Reichsbahn uniform, which—as my father would have said—suggested that
he rarely went near an actual train. The small enamel swastika in his lapel matched the Völkischer Beobachter in his lap.
     A second lodger appeared almost immediately. He was probably five years older than Ruchay but seemed much less sure of himself. He was a short man, slightly overweight, with hair thinning at the front over a worried but kindly face. He checked his hands before shaking mine, the sure sign of a workingman. His name, he said, was Jakob Barufka.
     Supper was being served by the time the final lodger appeared, a young man with slicked-back blond hair in his mid to late twenties. After apologizing to Frau Gersdorff for his late arrival, he told me his name was Rolf Gerritzen, and volunteered the information that he worked as a junior manager at Islacker Wire and Cable. He too wore a Nazi pin in his lapel, mostly, I suspect, because he prefers to swim with the tide. He ate his sausage, cabbage, and potatoes twice as fast as anyone else and seemed incapable of sitting still in his chair between courses.
     As we devoured our apple-cake dessert, I told the three of them where I’d supposedly come from and why, and that I was hoping to get an administrative job on the railway. Ruchay nodded sagely when I said I had thought it a good time to return to Germany, and Gerritzen could hardly contain his enthusiasm for the Reich’s future. Both Ruchay and Barufka confirmed the party’s information that the Reichsbahn, like every other sector of the Reich’s economy, is experiencing acute labor shortages—they were sure I would have no problem finding a job. “Success breeds its own difficulties,” Ruchay murmured wisely, which prompted another panegyric from Gerritzen. It was ridiculous, but I found myself rather liking the young man. I told myself that in any other time and place, he’d just be another decent young man with more energy than he knew what to do with.
     There were others in the house. I heard Frau Gersdorff talking to someone in the kitchen, and while sitting at the table, I saw a tray being carried down the corridor that leads to the rear. A short while later a young man came in through the front door and disappeared into that part of the house. After Ruchay and Gerritzen had left—the one to his room, the other to the cinema with his sweetheart—Barufka filled me in. The cook’s name was Verena; she lived a few streets away. Later I saw her leave, a pretty, dark-haired woman in her late thirties. The tray was for Anna’s—Frau Gersdorff’s, Barufka corrected himself—blind and bedridden father, who lived in one of the rooms at the back. The young man was her elder son, Erich, who was a “bit wild” but nice enough when you got to know him.
     I reserved judgment on all of this: Barufka, I already suspected, was one of those people who tends to see the best in others, and sometimes only the best. He told me some of his own life story over the course of the next couple of hours: four years on the western front as a gunner, the railways ever since, a marriage that had failed soon after his return from the war. He had a grown-up married son in Hamburg whom he greatly loved but rarely saw. Since his divorce he had lived in lodgings, saving money, which he sent to his son. Barufka thought Anna—Frau Gersdorff, he corrected himself again—ran a very good lodging. He was, I realized, more than a little in love with her.
     He asked me about my life, and I gave him the official version, the facts of service on the eastern front sliding into the fiction of a career in Argentina. He was interested in the latter, and I talked with some authority about the wonders of Buenos Aires and the Pampas, taking care not to mention my brief acquaintance with the prison system and deportation process.
     At a minute to nine, Ruchay reappeared, and turned on the lounge wireless for what was obviously a ritual hearing of the news. When the reader announced, with barely suppressed excitement, that Czechoslovakia’s Sudeten Germans had demanded full autonomy, Ruchay’s face seemed to light up, and I felt obliged to force a smile of satisfaction to my own lips. It is still hardly a month since Austria was gobbled up by the Reich. The slide into war is gathering speed.
     After the news everyone retired to their rooms. Frau Gersdorff hadn’t appeared since supper, but...

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Verlag
Soho Crime
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
164129129X
ISBN 13 
9781641291293
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Soho Press
https://sohopress.com/the-best-of-soho-press-2021/

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