Read Flight from Berlin for Free Online Page A

the loan. He cupped his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes. Meeting the combined demands of Greiser and his agent was like finding his way through a fantasy castle riddled with mirrors, mines, and trapdoors.
    Someone had left a wineglass on the stone paving of the terrace. On a sudden impulse Denham jumped up and kicked it, sending it high into the air in a great arc that ended in the lake.
    He’d known Greiser for years. They were the same age, both reporters, but the similarities ended there. Greiser was an opportunist with a diabolical talent for manipulating the foreign press. His cosmopolitan background was unusual in the Nazi hierarchy—he’d spent a year at Cornell, spoke fluent English, and had something of the college jock about him, which made him popular with the United Press boys. Yet he was the worst type of careerist fostered by the regime. Even the fanatics had the integrity of their faith, however loathsome, but Greiser believed in nothing. He’d begun his career reporting the truth and had switched to suppressing it, as though it were a natural evolution. He was wholly without conscience. Whatever grim fate he was threatening at the end of that exchange, Denham had no doubt that he meant it.
    Feeling a sudden urge to speak to someone human he returned to his room and placed a telephone call. The operator called him back after a few minutes with his connection to London.
    Tom answered. Their conversation was stilted at first, talking about school and cricket, but that changed when Denham mentioned he’d been inside the Hindenburg . His son had question after question, some of them highly original, in the way that only children can be.
    ‘You didn’t smoke a cigarette on board, did you?’
    ‘No, I didn’t. But there is a special fireproof smoking room.’
    ‘But how do they light the cigarettes?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Did you get me those stamps?’
    ‘Of course,’ Denham lied, hitting his forehead. ‘I’ve put them in the post.’
    He remembered that none of Tom’s school friends had got their hands on a recent Zeppelin issue. By such small tokens are status and respect conferred among eight-year-olds.
    Denham said, ‘How’s Mummy? Is she there?’
    ‘She’s gone for a walk with Uncle Walter.’
    Who’s Uncle Walter? ‘Ah, I see.’
    ‘When are you coming home?’
    ‘Soon.’
    Their chat concluded after Tom gave him a trumpet recital he’d been practising for school. It was an uncertain performance, full of breathy squeaks and duff notes, but Denham could picture the concentration on his small face.
    When he replaced the receiver, a valve in his heart opened and flooded him with sadness. He imagined for the thousandth time how it might have been if he’d made a success of things with Anna. He knew how hard it must have been for her to cope with him: his sudden departures on trips lasting weeks, his silences and secrets. His craving for solitude. He didn’t blame her for leaving him. But he missed Tom. Could they ever have been a happy, carefree family? The three of them living in that house in Hampstead, pottering in the garden on summer days like today or roaming on the heath . . .
    Or had there, in truth, been no real choice for him?
    He took out a small framed photograph he kept in his travelling case: of Tom holding up a slow-worm he’d found in a flowerbed, a squeal of horror and delight on his face, and Anna sitting on a deck chair behind him looking cross—a disjunction that never failed to make him smile. He placed it on the bedside table, lay his head on the pillow, and angled the frame so that his face was reflected in the glass. Then he imagined that he, too, was in the picture with them.
    But he was slipping into that slough of loneliness.
    He looked at his watch. It was still early.
    With an effort he got up and wandered downstairs to find the bar, thinking how much he was in the mood to hear a slow trumpet melody, pulled along by the lazy rhythm of a