by Ben Pastor
This was a neighbourhood he knew well from his school and service days in Berlin. Ahead, the sullen block of the criminal court crouched like a watchdog, back to back with the army’s Staff College and the largest military complex in town.
Keeping to the little shade available, he paced along the wall of the garrison barracks across from a secondary school. There, something caught his strained attention. He could swear they were shouting assembly orders inside the compound. At this unusual time of day? Did it mean anything? Everything else was tranquil. At the end of the street, sitting in the car, Grimm was listening to the radio; the tinny sound of a popular song rose and fell, like an invisible, irregular wave that wafted out of the Olympia and at some point in the air met the echo of the same song from a high window.
Bora marked the time: 11 a.m., 15 July 1944.
In twenty minutes, they had cleared the hurdle. Bora had elaborated an imperfect but feasible plan.
“Inspector, how long would it take you to fetch the Eppner papers? They may be irrelevant to the case, but I need to see them. Who knows, we might discover that the reputable vicar and the other guests lied about the birthday party at the watchmaker’s. We could end up with not one but two self-confessed murderers.”
True to his profession, Grimm showed no appreciation for the irony. “It won’t take more than the time to go to Alex and back,” he answered, flatly. “Longer, if Eppner was transferred elsewhere, or if the chief orders me to fetch Glantz back from the Gestapo. He confessed, and he’s ours.”
“Fine. Let me off here and go. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”
“It’s nearly two miles to the hotel, Colonel! I could leave you at the underground stop.”
Bora pretended more irritation than he felt. “You know, it annoys me when people treat me as if I were crippled. I will walk. See you at the hotel when you get there.”
No sooner had the Olympia started eastwards than Bora took the underground to Kugler’s office, seven stops away on Mainzer Strasse.
MAINZER STRASSE, NEUKÖLLN, 11:46 A.M.
In that quarter of immense working-class apartment blocks, a gloomy porter with a wet rag in her hand told Bora that he’d find Frau Kugler in the office. “Couldn’t pay the rent, so she relocated here, where her man used to work.”
It had a yellow façade, wedge-shaped, like a slice of nondescript cheese between two modern multi-storeyed slices of bread. One on top of the other, there were two ugly metal-framed windows with panes painted dark blue for curfew, which surely forced those inside to turn the light on even in daytime.
To the right of the door, the nameplate (in fact, Kugler’s business card) had been altered. The title “Private Investigator” was crossed out, and Kugler’s first name, Gustav, had been replaced by Witwe, “widow”.
Bora rang a disturbingly loud electric bell, and before the echo died out the door opened. He faced a bony, weary-looking little woman of uncertain age, with a kerchief tightly wound around her head and tied above the forehead. Wisps of hair, of an undefinable drab colour, mostly like mud, had escaped the cloth at her temples.
She said at once, “The agency is no longer in business,” and even before Bora could explain he was not exactly a client, she began to sniffle without weeping, with all the dignity she could muster in such a miserable place.
“I’m sorry for your loss, madam. May I come in?”
“Can’t see why you’d want to come in, but come in.”
She threw the ground-floor window wide open when he entered. At a glance, Bora reckoned there were two rooms in all, one above the other: the bedroom was presumably at the top of a spiral staircase, and this here was Kugler’s old office. His work desk was now strewn with turnips and various kitchen items. On the wall, the month of June still showed on the calendar, probably untouched since the man’s death.
An invented tale of family ties explained Bora’s visit, in search of private papers gathered by the late investigator. Frau Kugler stared blankly at him. She seemed too discouraged and exhausted to raise any objections. Her three children were nowhere to be seen, so Bora imagined they’d been sent out into the country, as many young Berliners had. “In the country”, he knew, was a euphemism that often meant that the alternative to burrowing underground during air raids was to labour in the fields for brutal employers who saw in you a cheap drudge, or – if you were a girl – even worse. It took close to a minute for her to digest the question and come up with an answer. She used the hem of her apron as a potholder to remove a ramekin of boiling water from the top of an iron stove, roaring even in this heat.
“Be my guest,” she said. “Whatever you’re looking for, if it’s still here, you’ll find it in the archive.”
If it’s still here. Bora eyed the kindling in a cardboard box at the foot of the stove with concern – mostly pieces of discarded furniture, varnished and foul-smelling, but also rolled-up folders and shredded files.
“Archive” was a lofty word for the filing cabinet against the back wall. Bora had no idea of the volume of work Kugler might have garnered in wartime, and with clearly reduced means. The top two drawers were empty. Opening the third, he realized that Frau Kugler was methodically burning the files, from the letter A onwards. He anxiously pulled out the bottom drawer, where no “Rüdiger” was featured under the letter R. His only hope was that Kugler’s papers were filed under the names of those he’d been watching, not his clients’. In the third drawer, the letter M was empty. Bora searched through the file labelled N, from which several documents seemed to be missing. Of the folder concerning a certain Neumann (spousal infidelity), only two pages densely filled with dates and addresses remained. Who knew, it might be the same case that cost Kugler his life. Bora was heartened to find the Niemeyer file still in place.
Frau Kugler, unmoved by the discovery, cleared a space on the desk for him, between the turnips and a short stack of chipped plates with a gilded rim. She had in the meantime put on a pair of galoshes wholly unsuited to the weather.
“Today it’s the bread queue,” she announced. “I have to go. When you’re through, please pull the door shut behind you.”
How Berlin had changed. Never before would the lower middle class, so faithful to principle and self-respect, have allowed a stranger to step into this squalor, and allow the same stranger to remain alone in the house to rummage around at will.
However, the circumstance suited him, because Kugler was altogether a capable organizer. Bora made sure the surface of the desk was clean before resting the folder on it. The first item was the contract signed by Ida Rüdiger with a flourish (Bora could imagine her vengeful spite as she penned it). A series of cards followed, paperclipped in sets of four. They chronicled the stake-outs near Villa Gerda: day, hour of arrival and departure, remarks. A handful of envelopes contained other papers and photographs. Bora could not skip over anything; it would take him at least an hour to go through the contents. He decided to take along the cardboard folder to do it at leisure. In exchange, he left a couple of banknotes under the stack of plates. Having given neither his surname nor his address, there was no way for Frau Kugler, were she so inclined, to return the money.
As he was about to leave, he stumbled over the box of kindling, and from the folder he held under his arm a sprinkling of small photos came loose and fell on the floor. Intrigued, Bora picked them up. They’d been taken from a distance, probably from the shrubbery by the edge of the pond, where a strip of public land bordered the gardens. The rear entrance to Niemeyer’s villa, which he’d seen portrayed in the Weimar gossip sheets, was recognizable in all of them. Niemeyer, less impressive than in his official portraits, was peeking out of the door, or else was pictured in a smoking jacket or sports outfit standing next to a tall young woman.
She could not be Frau Eppner, because the watchmaker’s romantic wife was well over forty. It might be the lover whose gowns Ida Rüdiger (so said Kupinsky) set on fire in the bathtub. Bora returned to the desk to flip through the
photos. In one enlargement, where the girl appeared from an advantageous three-quarter angle, her face was obliterated by ink. He wet his forefinger and tried to wipe it clean, to no avail. He’d try later with soap or alcohol.
On the back of every photo were pencilled the date and time of day. All had been taken at about the same time, 3:30 p.m. or 4:30 p.m.. In all but the two enlargements, the girl was wearing a hat that partly hid her features, and round sunglasses. She was bareheaded in the close-ups, made for unknown reasons quite useless by Kugler’s ink. But perhaps there were good reasons. Bora shoved the folder into his briefcase. Before leaving, he thoroughly searched the desk drawers. He also climbed the spiral staircase to the darkened upper room, where a frameless mattress lay on the floor and cardboard boxes contained clothes and whatever else the widow had brought along.
When he walked out of Kugler’s place, there was no one in the wide street; the old working-class apartment buildings lined it battered and mute. The shade lay in pale, narrow strips, and a sweltering heat rose from the pavement. Bora filled his lungs with the stagnant city air. He’d suffered scorching summers in Ukraine, and in Spain before then. Now he ran hot and cold, and if he was sweating, it was a chilly sweat.
He found a spot to collect his ideas, inside a modest but cool eatery along Jägerstrasse, until the war an Italian restaurant much frequented by air force cadets and their girlfriends. He ordered a bottled lemonade and was left alone.
15 July. Written at Mutti Maria’s. Thank God Kugler’s loopy widow is the orderly kind. One more day and fire would have reduced what’s in front of me to a handful of useless ashes.
Two very interesting things: the photos (16 in all), portray the same young blonde, who apparently visited the victim at about 3:30 p.m. one day a week, leaving after one hour. The calendar in my notebook tells me it was always a Wednesday. The visits are recorded from mid-February to Wednesday, 17 May (Kugler was dumped by Ida Rüdiger the following day). Two enlargements are from photos shot, I believe, from inside a car parked along Lebanonzederpfad. In both the girl is shown to be alone as she walks towards Niemeyer’s property (you can see the Wirths’ garden behind her). If only I could wipe off the ink concealing her features … Kugler pressed the nib of his pen on the paper while he blackened it. We’ll see.
The most stimulating detail, however, is that three of the surveillance photos date from the first half of February (1, 8, 15). Kugler’s contract with Ida Rüdiger bears the date 23 February. Must I assume that he was shadowing the girl before the papers were officially signed? Or rather that he’d already started the surveillance of Niemeyer and his visitors on his own? Why? On whose orders?
I can’t put forward a precise theory. She could be anyone. But why erase her features? To benefit (or out of fear of) whom? Ida Rüdiger would have no use for a scribbled-over image. Nowhere does Kugler identify the girl, unless I can infer something from the address of a modelling agency in Pankow.
Another question: why was the hour of the meetings so regular, week after week? It reminds me of the appointment you make with a physician, a dentist, a masseur.
Lovers’ trysts are carved out of the day whenever one can make it, especially if there’s a jealous lover still on the scene.
What follows is pure and hasty conjecture on my part, but I am pressed for time (the week is nearly up). Nebe will not keep me here for ever, and I could be called back to the front at any time. I try not to dwell on it, but that’s what I’m dying to hear: I am consumed by anxiety for my men. My place is in the field with them. They know I didn’t want to leave, no matter how fond I was of my late uncle.
As I say, it’s pure speculation, but here is what I think:
The girl in the photos is the same I’ve heard about elsewhere
– Bora did not write that he had read about her in Niemeyer’s delirious letter to his lawyer –
She regularly visited Niemeyer once a week (for a hypnosis session?)
Kugler’s interest (or rather the interest of those who really hired him)
– Bora omitted “possibly Heldorff, or others” –
predates the contract with Ida Rüdiger, and may have the same motivation (jealousy?), or a completely different one
It’s crucial for me to stop by the hairdresser’s today. I would be wise to phone her beforehand to make sure she’s home, but I don’t want to give her fair warning and risk that she stays away on purpose. 12:34 p.m. – time to go, before Grimm gets back to the hotel.
10
Survival is just one aspect of the struggle.
HANS BERND GISEVIUS, WHERE IS NEBE?
LEIPZIGER HOF, 1:32 P.M.
Sitting in the lobby with his back to a fissured and expertly patched-up bow window, Bora knew from the way the sunlight bothered him that he was running a high fever. For years, he’d been somatizing anxiety; if premonitions had been merchandise, he could have sold them wholesale. Grimm should have been here already, but was still away on his errand. Eppner might have been transferred from Kripo headquarters, or Kupinsky’s body fished out of the Spree … However, Bora was ready to discard the excuse of bureaucratic snags. What, then? His misgivings did not go as far as that. Despite being practised in mental censorship, he kept bumping against the same troublesome consideration: meetings at the Führer’s headquarters never began before midday, and usually lasted no more than one hour. Should Stauffenberg act today, it should be over just about now. Apart from the activity he’d imagined more than detected behind the wall of the garrison barracks, nothing in fact warranted his feeling of alarm. SS and army vehicles were around, but not in a state of alert. The officers he’d seen did not look apprehensive. Civilians went about their business as usual. Hard to tell what happened inside army schools. They were great, impenetrable, silent buildings.
Still, if today is the day, after the fact they need to take the city, block all communications and neutralize the SS and police. Only the army can do so, but it will need reinforcements from outside Berlin. This would require two or three hours, which dilutes the surprise factor. Of course, you can give the alert early and disguise the movement of troops as an exercise.
The north-western Berlin quarters teemed with barracks. There were the army schools at Potsdam and Döberitz, the Prussian Military School, the Reserve Army troops … By marching left and south from its quarters on Ziegelstrasse, the Greater Berlin Military Police Battalion could head straight for Unter den Linden. The Berlin Guard battalion Grossdeutschland was housed in Moabit, a bit further out on Kruppstrasse, where he himself had attended the army’s Staff College, north of the Olympic Stadium.
Who headed up the battalions these days? Politically aligned, they did not strike him as the kind of outfits that participate in a coup: unless you convince them that their armed intervention (against other Germans!) serves to prevent an overthrow. It’d happened a decade earlier, when the SA was beheaded in one fell blow, with the excuse that they were plotting a rebellion.
Bora tore himself from such subversive thoughts. Unless Grimm had been maliciously sent from pillar to post by the Gestapo, he was grossly overdue. Did it mean anything? And would any conspiracy succeed in consigning the police to their stations and headquarters? The bright yellow fabric of the sofa danced before his eyes. He’d take a quinine pill, if he thought he could keep it down. He forced his mind back to the subject of Walter Niemeyer.
Keep your sights on him, Martin. It’s all about what happened that evening. Imagine the scene. Gifted or not with second sight, Niemeyer is calmly leaving his evening bath when he finds a hunting rifle pointed at him. How could it happen? Easy.
Whomever he worked for, a man like Kugler could find his way in; any policeman or former policeman, SS man, Gestapo agent or intelligence officer knows how to open a door without forcing it. I’m capable of it, too. I, too, have done it.
It all happens so quickly, Niemeyer has no time to react. The first shot brings him down (so says Olbertz), the second finishes him off (or is unne
cessary). Then it’s just a matter for the killer to sneak out (with or without stealing or searching for something first). That same night, Ergard Dietz dies at the hand of Russian runaways, so useful because we can hang on them all sorts of crimes. And what about the faceless blonde, with her migraines and compromising revelations? She has already left Berlin – unless they’ve eliminated her. Possible? Possible. Dr Olbertz, Uncle’s friend, grew very alarmed when we exchanged barbs about dangerous visitors.
Bora’s mind wandered to dangerous subjects again. Could Olbertz, too …? How many officers, how many civilians in Berlin were somehow peripheral to the great wheel of a conspiracy? Nebe could have picked me to penetrate the plot and beat his colleague Heldorff to it … or to prove his implication in it. But even if I am external to the intrigue, I cannot betray my brother officers. How can the chief of the Kripo not suspect me? Goerdeler, on whose recommendation he supposedly chose me (?), has been accused of political unorthodoxy for years. In that case, Nebe’s game could be even more nefarious.
Three minutes to two o’clock. Bora could no longer sit still. He wasn’t hungry, but went to have a late bite in the deserted Leipzig hall, after which he left the hotel on an errand of his own.