The Night Gate - Enzo MacLeod Investigation Series 07 (2021)

by Peter May

  ‘Lise, go!’ The bellow of the young man’s voice reverberated around the bedroom.

  She lifted her case and hurried out of the room, barely daring to glance in Bauer’s direction.

  ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ Bauer yelled again.

  The young man who had shouted at Lise to go wore a sick smile on his face as he took a step towards Bauer, fists bunched at his side. ‘I’m Lise’s big brother,’ he said. ‘As you’d know if you’d ever bothered to visit the family. She’s finished with you, you fuck! And you’re going to get what’s coming to you.’

  His friend took a step to the side as the two of them moved in on Bauer, so that he could only strike out towards one at a time.

  Bauer tensed, fuelled by fury and fear in equal measure. He knew he was going to take a beating, but had no intention of going down without a fight.

  As she left the apartment, Lise heard his voice raised in a blood-curdling yell, and then a commotion that suggested a level of violence that could only end in blood and tears. She blinked away tears of her own that threatened to blind her as she hauled her suitcase off down the stairs.

  It was several hours before the pain in his head eased. His lower lip, sliced open by a broken front tooth, had bled profusely, long after his attackers had gone. One eye was almost closed, although he was sure he had reduced the swelling and the bruising by applying a bag of frozen vegetables straight from the freezer. His ribs ached, and hurt every time he moved, making him wonder if one or more were cracked or broken. But he suspected that the heavy boots that had kicked him repeatedly when finally he went down had inflicted most of their damage on the arms with which he had tried to protect himself.

  He too had managed to administer a fair amount of damage, the evidence of which remained in the swollen and bruised knuckles of both hands.

  Several paracetamol had taken the edge off most of the pain, but it was only now that it was ceasing to fill his entire conscious world and fade into the background. He sat in the dark of the front room, sipping gingerly at a glass of whisky and sparkling water. It was filled to the brim with ice cubes that numbed his lips as he drank.

  His rage had finally subsided, giving way to self-pity, and he felt the first warm tears trickle down his bruised face. The tumbler shook in his hand, and he closed his eyes to try to gather himself. Through the glass all along the front of the apartment, the light of the city spilled in to lay the elongated shapes of his windows across the floor. And only now did the full sense of his loss strike him.

  Lise was gone. It was over. She would never be back, and he knew that it was entirely his fault. The regret he had always felt following violent outbursts against her haunted him now. Genuine sorrow for what he had done to her, and in the end to himself. His mother, too, was gone. No one but himself left to blame.

  He moved stiffly across the room and went to the kitchen to refill his glass, and when he returned, slumped into the swivel chair behind his desk. His eyes hurt when first he turned on the desk lamp, and he screwed them tight shut to reopen slowly and accustom them gradually to the light. Earlier he had gathered together all the sheets of paper that had spilled on to the bedroom floor and returned them to Greta Jung’s orange folder. It lay now in the circle of light on the desk. He pulled it towards him and opened it. Photocopies of the records she had tracked down in the vaults of the Würzburg archive, printouts of obscure web pages she had unearthed in her search for details on the history of Karlheinz Wolff. The story of his sister, Erika, and of his first encounter with the industrialist Guido Fischer. There was a Wikipedia entry on Fischer, in which Wolff was mentioned, and described as having become a dealer in art for Hermann Göring. But no explanation of how that had come about.

  Just beyond his reach, and outside the pool of light on his desktop, Wolff’s diaries lay in an untidy pile. Silent shadows from the past, lying in the dark, inviting him to read. He gazed at them for a very long time before finally succumbing to temptation. His chair creaked as he leaned forward to corral them into the light. He sat back, flicking through each in turn to arrange them in date order. He did not have the concentration to give them his full attention right now, but he riffled through some of the earliest entries, struck by how similar Wolff’s handwriting was to his own.

  It seemed that Wolff had begun these diaries sometime during his early years at university. His first entries revealed a youthful lack of self-confidence, an almost obsessive exercise in navel-gazing. A growing awareness of his shortness of temper, and a propensity for violence when he lost it. Bauer found these difficult to read. They were words he might have written to describe himself, yet penned by a man who pre-dated him by two generations.

  Wolff’s fascination with his sister verged on infatuation, and was clear in all his entries about her. Unhealthily so. She was beautiful, talented, beyond reproach. He missed her passionately when she went to Paris, and described sleepless nights thinking about her. Sometimes his dreams of her verged on the erotic.

  Bauer skipped the account of his trip to Paris with friends to exact revenge on the man who had made her pregnant. It struck far too close to home. And he skimmed forward until he found what really interested him. The entry that described his first meeting with the man who was head of the German air force, the Luftwaffe. The man made Reichsmarschall by Hitler at the start of the war, giving him seniority over all other officers in Germany’s armed forces. Hermann Göring. Described by Greta Jung in the café in Würzburg as an art thief.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Bauer takes a sip of his whisky and leans forward into the light to

  read.

  Wolff’s Diary: Wednesday, August 21, 1940

  Guido and I drove from Berlin to Carinhall in his fabulous Mercedes-Benz 320 Cabriolet. It is a seductive powder blue, and with the top down, and the wind in our hair, the journey took little more than an hour. It was a beautiful, sunny summer’s day and Guido was in a fine mood. The Wehrmacht had swept through Western Europe. France had fallen. Göring’s Luftwaffe was in the process of blowing Britain’s feeble force of Spitfires out of the sky over southern Britain, and we’d begun bombing London to soften up the English for the coming invasion.

  Forty-two years old and I was as nervous as my first day in the trenches. Dressed in my best suit with a stiffly pressed white shirt and blue tie, I had spent a good twenty minutes shining my shoes to the point where I could see my reflection in them. I was about to meet the second most powerful man in Europe.

  Guido found my anxiety amusing. He never tires of teasing me and spent much of the drive berating me for my sense of humour, or lack thereof. Göring, he said, was genial company and looking forward to meeting me. For his part, Guido is a regular guest at the hunting lodge.

  ‘He built it in 1934 in the Schorfheide forest as a private retreat,’ Guido told me, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. ‘Named it after his first wife, Carin, three years after she died. But it’s been much enlarged since then, and is now an official state residence and hunting lodge.’ He turned towards me, amusement in his eyes. ‘All paid for by the German people, of course.’

  Open countryside gradually gave way to the large area of forest north of Berlin that they call Schorfheide, and eventually we stopped at the gatehouse to the Carinhall estate to have our documents checked before being allowed any further. A long, straight road cut a swathe through the trees. I could see the hunting complex in the distance, shimmering in the heat of the day. Somewhere beyond it lay the Dölln lake, and there were birds circling lazily in the sky above the water.

  ‘There are wings for staff, and a doctor and a dental surgery,’ Guido said. ‘There’s a sauna and fitness room, and an indoor swimming pool. And, of course, Göring’s model train set.’ He laughed uproariously. ‘Nearly a hundred metres of electric rails, with tunnels, bridges, and even miniature aeroplanes. There’s also a cinema, if you fancy taking in a movie while we’r
e here.’ He turned and shook his head at the look on my face, which I can only imagine was open-mouthed and foolish. I have been to Guido’s house many times, but wealthy as he is, he possesses nothing on this scale. It was all far beyond anything I might ever have imagined in my wildest dreams.

  We drove past all the outbuildings and into a large courtyard in front of an impressive, white-painted lodge. A wild boar stood mounted on a plinth in the middle of a square pond, testament to the building’s legacy as a hunting lodge. A grand entrance was framed in stone with Party flags raised on either side. Life-sized couchant stags flanked the doorway.

  We drew up alongside several other vehicles, and Guido cut the motor. He turned to me then, and warned, ‘Hermann’s good company, as I said. But he can also be unpredictable.’ He lowered his voice as if someone might be listening. ‘You’ll probably remember the Beer Hall Putsch when Hitler first tried to take power in Munich. 1923. It was a disaster. A failed coup d’état. A lot of Party members were shot and killed by police, and Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison. Hermann was there, too, and was wounded in the shooting. A nasty wound that got infected. The doctors gave him morphine for the pain, and the poor guy got hooked on the stuff. All these years later he’s still addicted.’

  Guido stepped out of the car, but then leaned back in, lowering his voice even further. ‘Morphine addiction’ – he shook his head – ‘leads to complications, Karlheinz. Excites the nervous system, creates excessive activity in certain glands. It can lead to extreme outpourings of energy.’ His voice reduced itself almost to a whisper. ‘And sometimes abnormal vanity.’ To my surprise he winked at me and grinned. ‘Which pretty much describes der dicke Hermann to a T. You never know quite how you’ll find him.’ He straightened up and his voice returned to normal levels. ‘Come on, my friend. Time to meet the Reichsmarschall.’

  I think he enjoyed stoking the flames of my anxiety, making me even more nervous than I already was. And to describe our host as ‘fat Hermann’ just before we were to meet him was clearly and mischievously designed to unnerve me.

  Inside a dark entrance hall, we were greeted by a flunky in white shirt and waistcoat. He made me think of a maître d’ in a restaurant. I was asked to sign the visitors’ book, which stood on a lectern just inside the door. It was huge, and heavy to open, and the pages released a fusion of scents left by a procession of visitors over many years.

  ‘You’re in exalted company now, young man,’ Guido said, as I leaned over it to scrawl my name and date and signature. ‘If you look back through these pages you’ll see that they have borne witness to such visitors as former US President Herbert Hoover, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Benito Mussolini, the kings of Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia.’ He grinned. ‘Now everyone will be able to boast that they’ve seen your name in here, too.’

  A long, tiled hallway led us past walls mounted with classical works of art, many of which I recognised from my studies in Frankfurt. There were sculpted figures and vases raised on marble plinths, all lit by ceiling panels that diffused light from overhead to minimise shadows.

  Finally we were led into the Jagdhalle, a vast salon with exposed beams rising into the apex of the roof. It was sixty-five-and-a-half metres long, Guido had told me on the drive down, but I’d had no concept of how big that was until I walked into that great hall. A huge fireplace at the far end occupied most of the wall. Rugs laid on polished floors stretched between groupings of soft furnishings, discreetly patterned three- and five-piece suites gathered around large tables, a long dining table in front of the fire. Electric chandeliers hung from the cross-beams all along the length of the hall. Punctuating the outer wall, antlers were mounted above each arched window, and on the wall facing, formal chairs and long wooden tables stood beneath regal tapestries and priceless paintings.

  Göring was lounging on a settee at the far end of the hall reading a newspaper. I could see that he was dressed in the white cotton summer tunic worn in many of the photographs I’d seen of him. A big, corpulent man with a full, round face and dyed black hair oiled back from a broad forehead.

  Guido leaned in and whispered, ‘He keeps lions here, you know. So make sure you don’t get on the wrong side of him.’

  Göring saw us coming, put his newspaper to one side and stood up to greet us. It seemed to take an age traversing the length of this Jagdhalle, to reach him. As we approached I saw his Iron Cross attached at the neck of his tunic, and the famed Blue Max dangling on a piece of leather from his collar. He had a florid complexion that spoke to me of too much good living and dangerously high blood pressure. He shook my hand vigorously, fat fingers adorned with ostentatious gold and silver rings.

  I felt quite small in his presence, but bathed in the warmth of his bonhomie and gently smiling blue eyes. ‘Herr Wolff,’ he said. ‘I am pleased to meet you at last. Guido has told me so much about you.’

  ‘All of it good, I hope, sir.’

  He grinned at Guido. ‘Herr Fischer is nothing if not discreet . . .’ He turned back to me. ‘May I call you Karlheinz?’

  I have to confess to being quite taken aback. Though even had I wanted to, I was in no position to decline. And why would I? ‘Of course,’ I said.

  He took me by the arm, then, and led me a little way down the hall to show me a painting that took pride of place on the window-facing wall. It stood almost two metres high, and was a depiction of a handsome woman in hunting gear set against a clear blue sky. She wore a high, turned-up collar, and a falcon perched on her left arm, wings outspread. ‘What do you think?’ he said.

  ‘Magnificent.’

  He glanced at me. ‘You know it?’

  ‘The Falconer, by Hans Makart,’ I told him. Guido had provided me with a list of Göring’s most prized works. Homework for my visit. ‘A gift a couple of years ago from Herr Hitler, I believe. On the occasion of your forty-fifth birthday.’

  Göring turned a knowing look in Guido’s direction. ‘Well briefed, Guido.’ His smile faded slowly. ‘Would you leave us now, please?’

  If anything, I think Guido was even more startled than I. I could see him choke back his surprise. ‘Of course, Reichsmarschall,’ he said, and they seemed suddenly on more formal terms. He nodded to me, and turned to walk back along the length of the great hall before finally vanishing through the door at the far end.

  Göring turned. ‘Come join me in a coffee.’ The waistcoated flunky who had shown us in was still hovering at a discreet distance. Göring waved a careless arm in his direction. ‘Fresh coffee for my guest, Daniel.’ And he steered me back to where the impression of his ample behind remained pressed into the settee. He flopped into it again. ‘Take a seat.’ And I sat, uncomfortably, in an armchair opposite, wishing to God that Guido was still there.

  He seemed distracted. Searching about his person, and then the settee around him, for something that remained elusive. I sat in silence and felt as if he’d forgotten that I was even there.

  The coffee arrived on a tray that Daniel placed on the table between us. He poured two cups black, bowed and left. Göring emerged from his distraction to brandish a hand towards the cream jug. ‘Help yourself,’ he said.

  I poured a tiny drop of cream into my coffee and took a sip. It was as good a coffee, I think, as I have ever tasted. But Göring showed no interest in his. Instead he had turned his disconcerting gaze fixedly on me. ‘Are you a lover of the modern, Karlheinz?’ I frowned my lack of understanding and he clarified. ‘Art.’

  ‘It is mostly what I have dealt in, sir.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’

  I panicked a little, then, wondering what would be the correct response, before deciding that honesty might be the best policy. ‘Some of it, yes. I am a great admirer of the impressionists, less so of artists in the mould of Picasso or Dali.’

  ‘You are aware that Herr Hitler believes all modern art is degenerate, a symptom of
the decay of Western civilisation.’

  ‘I have read that, sir.’

  ‘We have accumulated vast quantities of the stuff, Karlheinz. Confiscated it. Much of it from Jewish collectors. The Führer would have it destroyed. But this work has an inherent financial value on the international market and Herr Hitler has been persuaded that its sale will boost the war coffers. I would like you to trade in this marketplace on behalf of the Reich.’

  I was stunned. Why me? Yes, I’d been trading in art for Guido Fischer, but this was an entirely different level of responsibility. I had no idea what to say.

  Göring smiled, as if he could read what was going through my mind. ‘At least, that shall be your cover.’

  ‘My cover?’

  ‘This war will extend the borders of the German state across all of Europe, Karlheinz. A redistribution of power. And wealth.’ He paused pointedly. ‘And art. Our Führer has an admirable plan to build what everyone is calling a super museum at Linz in Austria. The world’s best art will hang on its walls.’ His pause again presaged the unexpected. ‘He wants da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to be the centrepiece of that collection.’

  I’m sure my astonishment was apparent in my expression, for it caused him to smile.

  ‘You know a certain dealer in art called Paul Lange, I understand.’

  Even the mention of his name was enough to summon dark clouds of remembered anger. I’m sure he must have seen the shadow of it cross my face. ‘Yes, sir. We studied art together at Frankfurt.’

  ‘Herr Hitler has attached Lange to the Kunstschutz in Paris and asked him to secure the Mona Lisa for his Führermuseum. By fair means or foul.’

  My astonishment was greater than my reticence. ‘Lange?’

  ‘Yes, Lange.’

  I said, ‘But surely, we know exactly where the Mona Lisa is. Why not just seize it?’