by Michael Dean
Glaser sighed and began his questioning, adopting a chatty, informal manner. ‘Do you know Chief Inspector Sauer? He’s a neighbour of yours, I see.’
She looked surprised, but answered readily enough. ‘I know her – Frau Sauer. Some of the neighbours make a point of greeting me. They offer to get my shopping from shops that won’t serve Jews, that sort of thing. Frau Sauer was one of them.’
‘Was?’
Frau Ballat nodded. ‘She stopped quite suddenly. I imagine he told her to.’
‘The Chief Inspector, you mean?’
‘Yes. Frau Sauer is completely dominated by her husband. He bullies her. I suspect he beats her. Mind you, it was a relief when she stopped talking to me.’
‘Why? Don’t you like her?’
‘Not particularly. But that wasn’t the reason. You end up feeling grateful for every kind word and glance. It’s humiliating.’
‘Did Chief Inspector Sauer have any contact with your late brother?’
She shook her head. ‘Not that I know of. But Ascher didn’t confide in me. We hated each other.’
‘Oh, surely not ...’
She grimaced impatiently. ‘I’m not going to sanctify him because he’s dead. Ascher was a Zionist.’
Glaser smiled. ‘And you’re not, presumably?’
‘Huh! Listen! Can I tell you a story?’
‘Please do!’ He liked her enormously.
‘My late husband was in a good regiment. The 120th – Bavarian Third Army. The only Jewish officer. He was wounded at Verdun. So they sent him back to the military hospital at Hagen. You follow?’ Her heavily lined eyebrows went up.
‘I do.’
‘He had four operations to remove shrapnel from his skull. He couldn’t wear a helmet after that, but he still insisted on returning to the front. You know what he wrote to me?: “Zipporah, if they see how we Jews fought for Germany, maybe they will finally accept us.” The day after he wrote that he was hit in the head again, and killed. A helmet would have saved him. He died trying to be a German in Germany. No, Herr Glaser, I’m not a Zionist.’
‘I’m sorry. About your husband,’ Glaser said.
‘Me, too. He was a clever man. Unlike Ascher, who was a schmerul. He believed in Fool’s Gold.’
‘Was he ... planning to emigrate?’
‘Sure!’
‘How far had he got with this plan?’
‘He had a place booked on a steamer, sailing from Marseille in three months’ time – the Mariette Pach. But the British have decided you need five hundred pounds to get into Palestine. That was the problem.’
‘Five hundred pounds is ... a lot,’ he mused.
Zipporah Weintraub nodded. ‘They want lusty farmers out there,’ she said. ‘Not skinny old art dealers with lungs scarred from TB.’
Glaser fought down a smile. ‘The painting that was stolen when Ascher was murdered, Blue Horses. Did it surprise you that it was in the safe? Not on display in the gallery?’
She frowned. ‘Maybe Ascher hoped to take the painting with him. To Palestine. Sell it there. You’d get more for a Franz Marc outside Germany.’
Glaser nodded. It made sense. ‘Blue horses were Marc’s major theme, of course. But do you happen to know the provenance of the one actually entitled Blue Horses – the one that was stolen?’
‘I’ve got the gallery papers upstairs,’ said Zipporah Ballat. ‘Do you want me to find the provenance note?’
‘Please do!’
She strode out again. She walked quickly – a long-paced masculine walk. After the telephone call, Glaser was restless at the thought of another long wait. He pictured Franz Marc’s handsome head, with its Roman nose and wavy mouth, in a brown cap, smiling through his yellow pipe, his eyes hooded. That was Macke’s portrait of his friend, painted, so Ascher Weintraub had once told him, when Macke and Elisabeth stayed with the Marcs in Munich.
Frau Ballat was back quickly. ‘Provenance note,’ she said.
Glaser held out his hand for it, but she ignored him.
‘Very interesting,’ she said, reading the note at the table. ‘Only two owners listed. The first is Maria Franck’
‘That’s ...’
‘Franz Marc’s wife.’
‘I don’t think she’s still in Munich, is she?’
‘The Marcs had a studio in Schellingstrasse,’ Zipporah Ballat said. ‘Number thirty-three. But Maria’s in Switzerland now. She had to get out in a hurry. Marc had a Jewish ancestor. It was the second owner who sold Ascher the painting. Heinrich Hoffmann.’
Glaser was amazed. ‘Hoffmann?’
‘Yes, why are you surprised? He came into the gallery all the time. You know Hoffmann?’
‘I’ve known Hoffmann for twenty years. What’s Hoffmann doing with ...?’
‘He advises Hitler on paintings. Not our sort of stuff, of course. But he knows a lot. Here!’
Zipporah Ballat handed the provenance note over.
‘Look at the date it was painted,’ she said, nodding at the note. The provenance note showed Blue Horses as dating from March 4th, 1916.
‘Is there something significant about the date?’
‘It was the day Franz Marc was killed.’
‘Ah! I see! I didn’t know he painted anything as late as 1916.’
‘No, neither did anybody else.’
Glaser nodded. A previously unknown work by Franz Marc, painted perhaps hours before his death, made the painting much more valuable, especially if sold abroad. So murdering Herr Weintraub to get it was beginning to make sense.
He hit the provenance note with his hand. ‘It doesn’t say how much Hoffmann paid Maria Marc for it. That’s strange.’
Frau Ballat shrugged. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’
‘How well do you know Sepp Kunde?’ Glaser asked.
‘Not well. I didn’t go into the gallery very often. Ascher didn’t want him or need him. Lange brought him in.’
‘Yes,’ he frowned. ‘How did Lange come to be a partner?’
‘My brother was a weakling, that’s how. Lange tried to muscle in on every Jewish art gallery in Munich. Ascher gave in first. Lange wants to buy us out, naturally. He’s made me an offer.’
She looked tired, deep lines appeared at her mouth, around the gash of carmine lipstick.
‘No good? Too low?’
She shrugged. ‘About two-thirds of the value – for my villa, the gallery, the paintings. Everything I own.’
‘Take it!’ He hadn’t meant to shout, but he did.
‘I would if I could,’ she shouted back. ‘He’s already threatened to lower the offer every day I delay.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘The problem is – I have another suitor. I’m a popular lady.’
‘What? Who?’
‘Buchner.’
‘Buchner’s made an offer, too?’
She sighed. ‘He wants to protect the gallery’s Expressionist paintings from the Gestapo. Very kind of him. He says the Gestapo will destroy them.’
‘There’s something in that.’
‘No doubt. He wants me to give him all the paintings, for the State Galleries. No doubt he’ll send the nice Inspector to smile at me while he’s taking them. That’ll be something to look forward to.’
A grim smile broke from Glaser before he could stop it.
‘And he wants my gallery, too, Buchner does. He’ll pay for that, but not much. He’s given me one week, before the Political Police seize everything and pay what they feel like. Probably nothing.’
Glaser groaned.
‘Funnily enough, Lange has given me exactly the same amount of time. He says he will report me to the Gestapo for tax evasion. He tells me that always works.’
‘Yes, that’s what I’ve heard, too.’ Glaser rubbed a hand over his beard.
‘Being reported to the Political Police and the Gestapo on the same day would be quite an achievement, don’t you think? We Jews always wish to excel.’
Glaser le
aned forward. He put his head in his hands. Then came up again. ‘Look ... do you want me to help you?’
He told himself it was for old man Weintraub. But he looked apprehensive at the possible astringent reaction – he even heard in his head the bitter jokes about the Aryan angel every Jew needs to get out.
‘Yes, please,’ she said immediately and humbly, looking at him with big brown eyes. ‘I’d be grateful, if you would. I have absolutely no idea what to do.’
Chapter Five
Late in the evening, in dim light in his poky office, Glaser sat staring at the wall and thinking of what Zipporah Ballat had said about Hoffmann’s connection to the Weintraub case.
Along with Gürtner, Hoffmann was the man most responsible for Hitler’s success. The first publicity brochure Hoffmann did for the Nazis – Germany’s Awakening in Pictures and Words – came out at the time of the Putsch trial, but because it wasn’t an official NSDAP publication, it wasn’t banned when the Party and its newspaper were. It was vital in keeping the Nazi message alive during the ban, until Gürtner persuaded a reluctant Minister President Held to lift it.
Hoffmann more or less invented political photojournalism, and certainly invented the political photo-postcard. There were few citizens of Germany who didn’t have a Hoffmann studio portrait of a uniformed Hitler on the wall of their home. Even the Hitler portraits on the cigarette cards children collected and pasted in albums were by Hoffmann. The Führer as soldier-statesman was a Hoffmann creation. All based on a photograph, a lying visual image.
On impulse, Glaser picked up the receiver on the telephone on his desk, phoned home and said he would be late for dinner. Lotte was displeased. Glaser banged the receiver down. He jammed his hat on, struggled into his mackintosh, seized his cane, and drove fast and dangerously through the twilight, heading for Schellingstrasse.
*
Schellingstrasse is at the heart of artistic Schwabing, and had been since before the war.
Then, Kandinsky and Klee had drawn and painted at the house next door to Hoffmann’s. Knut Hamsun had written at the marble tables in the nearby Café Stefanie, in Amalienstrasse. The Stefanie was an artist’s café; the waiters kept a notebook of unpaid debts. It was nicknamed the ‘Café of Grand Illusions’.
As he drove past it, Glaser pictured Hamsun scribbling away in the May sunshine. He was the creator of the stage character Ivar Kareno – a believer in the Nietzschean born leader, the man who elects himself ruler of the masses.
Had Hamsun perhaps looked up from his writing and looked across at a nearby table? Had he noticed the nondescript individual, whose hips were nearly as wide as his shoulders, dandruff flaking the collar of his scruffy blue suit? He would have been browsing the café’s free newspapers, making a single coffee last for hours. Even if he had, it is unlikely he would have identified this chap, with his strange moustache, as the natural despot his Ivar Kareno so craved.
Newly arrived from Vienna, Hitler had taken a room a few streets away in Schleissheimerstrasse. He was drawn to the Stefanie because that was the name of a girl he had worshipped from afar in his youth in Linz. He never spoke to her, but when she danced with officers at a military ball, she prompted his first ever romantic dream of suicide.
*
Glaser parked the motor car outside the photographer’s studio. In the window, there were flower paintings by the German Romantics on the left, photographic studies of Hitler on the right. Hoffmann had started as a painter, a pupil at Professor Knirr’s art academy.
Knirr was a respected establishment figure in Munich art. He had painted one of the very few portraits of Hitler not painted from photographs. Ascher Weintraub had told Glaser that Hitler had sat for it, so presumably it represented the man as he saw himself.
In it, the Führer was shown, three-quarter length, in a long, brown, single-breasted jacket, with swastika armband. His Iron Cross from the war was prominent on his breast pocket, as was his gold Party pin. One hand was cantilevered on his hip, the other gripped an Alpenstock, as if to help his progress through the pastoral German landscape behind him – the landscape so important to the fragile German identity. His expression was suitably severe, a balance between sound judgement and underlying bellicosity – ready to strike, and knowing when to strike.
Hoffmann could have ended up painting routine portraits at that level, but his father made him leave and go into the family photography business, which he regretted at first. His love of German Romantic painting – Hitler’s favourites, von Schwind, Spitzweg and Gruetzner – was genuine enough, not at all put on to curry favour with the Führer.
He and Hitler had stood shoulder to shoulder, watching, united in grief, when the Glass Palace, home of Germany’s biggest collection of Romantic painting, burned to the ground two years ago. It was the nearest Glaser had ever come to sharing an emotion with them.
Glaser made his way down an alley next to the studio, picking his way carefully across the cobbled courtyard, tapping with his cane to keep his balance. Lights were blazing in Hoffmann’s small house. Muffled music was audible, but nobody answered the door. Glaser gave it a push and it opened.
The blaring music was Carmina Burana. Inside, there was a narrow passage. A door to the left was open. Glaser glanced into a room with a chimney breast covered by a Gobelin tapestry. In front of the chimney breast was Henni, naked. Two SA men flanked her, one fully uniformed, one just taking his uniform off.
Tears sprang to Glaser’s eyes. He thought of Henni as lost, fallen. He thought of his daughter, Magda, now fifteen years old, and the terrible things that could happen. Hoffmann had been a widower since his wife died in the flu epidemic of ’28. No mother for Henni, and look what happens.
As Glaser was turning to go, Hoffmann’s voice huskily called his name. The photographer was leaning down over the banisters, on the upstairs landing. He was wearing a white vest, knee-length white underpants, socks and suspenders. His hair was awry and he was red in the face, obviously drunk.
Glaser was embarrassed. Hoffmann, unabashed, gestured at him impatiently to come up. But before he could do so, a woman of the streets appeared at the top of the stairs. She was blonde, heavily powdered and rouged, in a tight black skirt and beaded waist-length jacket. She flounced down, holding onto her hat, pushing past Glaser in the hall, without a word or a glance, wafting sickly perfume. She slammed the outside door behind her.
Glaser felt he had little option than to do Hoffmann’s bidding and join him. He made his way up to a landing bathed in rose light. The bare overhead bulb was mingling with red light from Hoffmann’s laboratory, visible through an open door. Glaser glimpsed Hoffmann’s Rolleiflex camera, on a bench, and large flat enamel baths full of developing fluid and fixer.
Almost against his will, Glaser had picked up quite a lot of information about photography from his discussions on the subject with Kaspar. So he also recognised the drying cabinet. Kaspar had told him Hoffmann’s top-notch drying cabinet could dry film in twenty-five minutes. Kaspar thought Hoffmann the best photographer in Germany, by a light year: ‘Hoffmann is a master of the science as well as the art of photography,’ Kaspar had said, during their last discussion, or quarrel, on the subject.
‘Good evening, Dr Glaser,’ said Hoffmann, peering up at the taller man. His speech was slurred, but his practised politeness was as polished as ever. ‘Wait in there, would you, while I get dressed.’
The room he indicated was a sparse office. Glaser put the light on, from a naked overhead bulb. There was a dusty rubber plant in the corner and, on the floor, untidy piles of Illustrierte Beobachter – the Nazi news magazine. Hoffmann was one of the founders of the magazine, which over the years had been his main source of press photograph commissions.
The only photograph in the room was on the desk. Cheaply framed, it showed Hoffmann himself, immaculately clad, perched on some stone steps, photographing Hitler in an adoring crowd. The Führer’s only guard was the gigantic figure of the adjutant, Wilhelm Brückner. Al
though he didn’t recognise the place, from the informality and lack of security Glaser guessed the photograph had been taken in Munich, not Berlin.
It was freezing cold. Glaser sat down in a wing-armchair. Hoffmann did not keep him waiting long. His hair was now neatly slicked back and gleaming. His stocky, broad-shouldered frame was encased in a heavy brown three-piece suit, with the waistcoat neatly buttoned. He smelled of lavender. He carried a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label in one hand and two glasses in the other. He plonked them down on the desk and sat heavily at the office chair.
‘Drink?’ He flashed his charming smile. It was suddenly silent. The gramophone record of Carmina Burana had come to an end.
‘No, thanks.’
Hoffmann shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. Don’t mind if I do?’ The question was rhetorical.
Hoffmann poured himself a generous slug and knocked it back. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Excuse the intrusion,’ Glaser said. Hoffmann nodded impatiently. ‘But did you sell a painting to Ascher Weintraub recently?’
‘No.’
‘Blue Horses? A Franz Marc?’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Your signature is on the provenance note.’
‘Forgery.’
Hoffmann took another slug of whisky. He liked and respected Glaser. But, while never less than immaculately courteous, he didn’t give a damn if the Public Prosecutor believed him or not, and it showed: Hoffmann represented the Nazi Party on Munich City Council, he was the Party’s sole official photographer, and a close intimate of Adolf Hitler. Since Hitler became Chancellor, he was beyond, if not actually above, the law, and he knew it and Glaser knew it.
‘I see,’ Glaser said. He sounded dispirited, even to his own ears.
‘Look, Dr Glaser,’ said Hoffmann cheerily, ‘it’s sad poor old Weintraub died that way. But I’m sure there’s a decent case against this handyman. What’s ...?’
‘Sepp Kunde.’
‘Right. So, why don’t you just rubber-stamp the document, and let it go to trial, eh? Why make life difficult for yourself?’