Free The Hour of the Cat by Peter Quinn Page B

Columbia House, the SS center on Potsdamer Platz, one of the interrogators kept a drawer full of the teeth he knocked out of detainees’ mouths.
    The nursemaids sat on a bench. They rocked their carriages back and forth. Perhaps they were intended to be noticed. A casual but deliberate warning: Admiral, no one is above suspicion. Gresser jumped to attention when Canaris re-entered his office, shoulders back, chin up, eyes ahead, the pose of a loyal and obedient subordinate.
    What were the chances, Canaris wondered, that he answered to other masters as well?
    Â 
    Â 
    Canaris put on the fresh shirt and undergarments that Gresser had laid out. He attended the conference on the situation in Spain, a topic that usually absorbed him, especially since the progress there was so notable, Franco’s Falangists growing stronger each day. He doodled on a pad during the presentation by the Luftwaffe officer who reported on the performance of various aircraft. He found it impossible to focus his attention on what was being said, a condition he had endured for a prolonged period over a decade ago, in the time of the Weimar Republic, when his career seemed stalled and he began an affair with a woman he’d first met as a naval cadet.
    He was certain his wife had no idea. Yet after weeks of reveling in the physical intensity of his illicit relationship, he fell in a funk that left him unable to concentrate and finally brought him to the point where he felt a vacuum had formed inside his head, a void that made thinking itself seem absurd. He went through the motions of work until thoughts of suicide drove him to see a doctor who referred him to a respected neuropathologist and psychotherapist, Doctor Manfred Stern, a half Jew married to the daughter of a minor Bavarian nobleman.
    Careful to make sure his visit took place at the doctor’s private office in the early morning hours, Canaris arrived by taxi, in civilian clothes. Doctor Stern was solicitous. He encouraged Canaris not only to describe his mental anguish but also to speak freely about his life. Canaris did so hesitantly at first, then surprised himself by going on for longer than he intended, though he left out any mention of his affair. Doctor Stern asked no questions until Canaris fell silent. “What about your wife?” he said.
    â€œWhat about her?”
    â€œYou’ve never mentioned her.”
    â€œI’m here to get medicine for my nerves, not to discuss my marriage.”
    â€œDo you know that line from Hamlet : ‘We know what we are, but not what we may be’? Sometimes, the opposite can happen. A man loses a true sense of who he is yet feels he’s changing into something he loathes and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. It’s characteristic of over-supple minds and can induce a kind of psychic paralysis.” The doctor recommended valerian drops as a mild sedative. “This may help relieve the symptoms. If you wish to treat the cause, I’d be glad to take you on as a patient.”
    Canaris never went back. He ended the affair and threw himself into his work. The sensation of numbing distraction came back only very sporadically, as it had this afternoon. Returning to his desk, he tackled the backlog of reports and letters stacked on his writing stand where he’d left off before his nap. The clock on the mantle chimed four. Gresser reappeared to announce the arrival of the new British naval attaché. The British had their faults. Tardiness wasn’t among them. Germany’s friends in Spain and Italy could learn a lesson from them.
    The attaché had none of the silly hauteur of his predecessor. Formal but pleasant, he surveyed the office with the studied sweep of a deck officer on watch and pointed at the model of the Dresden on the mantle. “Von Spee gave us a quite a scare. I lost two close friends in 1914, at Coronel.”
    â€œI was the Dresden ’s First Lieutenant,” Canaris