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Page 31.

Chapter 4. Berlin, 1991: U-Boot Captain and Countess

The old U-boot warrior was always punctual, and the Countess had a reputation for always being late. Knowing this, he was not surprised when he found himself waiting in the 20th floor sky-dining room of the Hotel Magdeburg late one evening. In any case, the view was lovely, and he had his 24-year old granddaughter Bernadette with him. The girl was a tall, lovely brunette with wide blue eyes and creamy skin. She was studying medicine at the Free University of Berlin, Benjamin Franklin Klinikum, and he was proud of her; for that, and because she took good care of him. She was a good girl. She had driven him here, parked the car, patiently walked to the elevator with him, and now sat close by him plaudernd—chatting. He kept one hand on his cane, and the other linked with hers, as they admired how the high 19th Century rooftops all around were stippled with a fine lacing of early snow.

Seidlitz and Berna had already eaten one marzipan torte each, and had drunk one cup of hot coffee, when Madame Didier finally strode in from the elevator.

The restaurant was nearly empty, waiting out the last hour before closing for the night. It occupied an entire floor in the office tower, with a well-lit glass and aluminum snack bar in the middle and elegant little tables with white linen cloths overlooking the charms of Charlottenburg on all sides. The only sounds were the occasional sweeping sound of the kitchen door opening and falling shut as the sole waiter on duty passed through; or the cleaning lady complaining about her ankles in the kitchen; or the steady whoosh of the central air system blowing in a clean dry warmth.

“Bitte,” said Madame Didier as she hurried across the carpeted floor extending her hand. “Entschuldigen Sie doch. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s nothing at all,” said Seidlitz, as he and Berna rose and they three shook hands before sitting down at the small table again with its rose in a glass, its old mustard stain on the linen, its half-full coffee cups and smeared cake plates.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” she said.

Seidlitz nodded sharply, with a snappy bow of the head, to show that he was entirely at her service. She was every bit as lovely as the tabloids tattled she was. He’d seen pictures of her in a bikini at Cannes, or in a turtleneck at Davos, or with an actor in sunglasses on the Étoile in Paris, the city where she now lived. How could anyone be impatient with a woman like this? She was 45, still fresh and crisp if only more ripe and worldly, and wore her golden-brunette hair stiffly teased up into a white band that crossed from ear to ear. Her clothing and jewelry were understated and pricey. Her perfume painted a light violet mood with just the right after-note.

She bit her lip and got right to it. “I wrote to you at some length about my problem.”

Berna spoke up, stirring a spoonful of sugar in to her grandfather’s tea. “If you don’t mind, I will be bold and interrupt. My grandfather and I have been very anxious to meet with you, and we want to help as best we can. But so many years have passed now.”

Madame Didier acknowledged this. “Bit by bit, I am trying to narrow down my search for my real father. Luckily I am in a position and can afford the travel and expense. If I am in the least causing you any expense—” She produced a wallet full of credit cards.

Seidlitz laughed gently. “No, no, Madame.”

“Very well.” She put the wallet away, but left one card to pay for everyone. She spoke more delicately and sensitively than he felt she needed to: “I understand that after the war you did meet with the families of the Sturmer men.” He could picture them, sturdy British sailors in their old World War II warship named after a coastal city with such a Germanic sounding name—the sort of irony a hunched and bleary Hitler had been fond of wistfully remarking about to his field marshals, while poring over maps of his crumbling empire—that his enemies had good Germanic names like Eisenhower (Eisenhauer, a smith, a beater of iron), Nimitz (nice Prussian Junker name), even the Dutch or Flemish Roosevelt, ‘Field of Roses’.

“Oh yes,” Seidlitz said, leaning both hands on the cane between his knees. Berna leaned against him, putting one arm protectively over his shoulder and the other on his forearm. Her long blonde hair hung down over her light blue sweater.

“I can imagine how sensitive it is.”

He touched the corner of his eye, where a tear always sprang up at the long-ago memory. “It is unimaginable,” he said in a strangled voice. “At first it was unbearable to see them. Then I was surprised that they understood that that was war and now is peace. We were on warships and both did what we had to do at the time. I did not want to take their sons and husbands and brothers from them. I learned that they understood this and respected me for coming to them after the war.”

“It must be very difficult for everyone,” she said.

“You have your own problems,” he said. Berna squeezed his hand, warning him not to say too much. His knowledge came mainly from those grocery store scandal sheets and the gossip hour on television.

She nodded. “I did not know my father was not my father until I was your age, Berna. My mother married a poor man who drowned off a fishing boat. We lived in Siberia when I was a baby, outside Anadyr on the Chukhot Peninsula on the Arctic Sea. My mother, who loved me very much and used to sing lullabies to me and call me Umnitsa, Good Girl—she died of it soon after in 1949. I have only vague memories of life in Anadyr as a small child. Mostly it seems it was always dark and cold and we had not enough to eat. My mother married a man named Vadim Samsonov, a simple and rather brutal sailor who drank all the time and beat her. He drowned when he fell off a fishing boat off Siberia. When my mother died, his sister raised me—my Auntie Dora. She was part Russian and part Yupik. She made sure I was adopted by Westerners, because she could not raise me by herself and run a tavern and all. My luck was to be taken in by a wealthy French family. The tabloids tell the rest.”

Berna stirred her coffee with a kind, practical hand. She would make a fair-minded doctor, her grandfather thought as he listened attentively. Berna said: “I have never known deprivation, so it is all foreign to me, but I imagine your mother suffered considerably.”

“Everyone did,” Madame Didier said in her German, which had a strong French accent.

“You must have a beautiful home in Neuilly,” Berna said with innocent admiration. She could have added others, all well-known to paparazzi, on Lake Constance, in Provence, on the Ligurian Riviera, and more.

Madame Didier nodded with a certain mixture of sad pride. “I have three boys, who are all doing very well. One is in the French Navy, one is a wealthy corporate CEO, and one is an atomic scientist. They make me proud and happy. I have two grandchildren by now. But I always wanted a lovely girl like you, and now it is too late for me.”

Berna impulsively reached out and took the woman’s hand. That is the doctor in her, Seidlitz thought. “Maybe I can visit with you on my next trip to Paris. I sometimes make a holiday there.”

“By all means, come see us and we’ll take you for a drive to Versailles or maybe we’ll stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens and see the Orsay.”

“I’d love that!”

“Are the alligators still so big in the Berlin Zoo?” the Countess asked.

Seidlitz and Berna both laughed. “They feed them so much!”

Berna said: “Your mother now, she had a lovely daughter.”

Madame Didier beamed. “You say the right things, Berna.”

Seidlitz tapped his cane lightly on the carpet, thinking about H.M.S. Sturmer. “I was filled with the utmost anxiety when I received your letter saying that possibly your real father might have survived the sinking. The official report was that she went down with all hands, and that is what the plaque in Canterbury says, as well as the records at the Royal Navy Museum in London, which I have visited from time to time.” He kept tapping that cane. “When you are an old man, and you killed many beautiful young men in your youth, you go with old blind eyes to run your fingers over their names as if you and they could have a conversation. But my tongue wanders. So you think your real father survived the sinking?”

Madame Didier sighed deeply, folding her hands on her lap. “That is one of the many mysteries about this, Herr Seidlitz. I am hoping that we will see some light as we put the many tiny pieces of this puzzle together.”

Berna added: “And the atomic espionage?”

Seidlitz said: “We’ll get to that in good time, Kindl. That’s another matter and another time, in the last days of the war—Fehler’s boat, U-234, which he surrendered to the Allies in May of 45. He was carrying a load of atomic bomb materials, and a Luftwaffe general, and a couple of Messerschmitt jets to Japan for bombing Los Angeles and San Francisco. The war could have turned out quite differently. I have spoken with him a number of times. He is an old man of 80 now, living here with his wife and children. What an adventure he had! What a bold and humorous man!” He tapped his cane again, and leaned on it with the weight of terrible memories that never went away.