by Philip Kerr
“You say this happened in 1934, Baron?” I asked. He nodded. “That’s a lot of water under the bridge. How do you know this fellow Stumpff is still alive?”
“Because a couple of weeks ago my daughter, Helene Elisabeth, saw Wolfgang Stumpff on a tram in Munich.”
I tried my best to eliminate a note of surprise from my voice. “Your daughter was on a tram?”
The baron smiled weakly as if perceiving the absurdity of such an idea. “No, no,” he said. “She was in her car. Leaving the Glyptothek, the Sculpture Gallery. She was at a traffic light and she looked up and saw him at the window of a tram. She’s quite certain of it.”
“The Glyptothek,” I said. “That’s in the Museum Quarter, isn’t it? Let’s see now. A number eight from Karlsplatz to Schwabing. A number three and a number six, also to Schwabing. And a number thirty-seven from the Hohenzollernstrasse to the Max Monument. I don’t suppose she remembers which number it was?” The baron shook his head, and I did the same. “No matter. I’ll find him.”
“I’ll pay you a thousand marks if you do,” he said.
“Fine, fine, but after I find him it’s down to you and your lawyers, Baron. I won’t play advocate for your son. It’s better that way. Better for your son but, more importantly, better for me. I’m finding it hard enough to sleep at night as it is without speaking up for a mass murderer.”
“People don’t talk to me that way, Herr Gunther,” he said stiffly.
“You’d better get used to it, Baron,” I said. “This is a republic now. Or did you forget? Besides, I’m the fellow who knows exactly how to find your son’s ace in the hole.” That was just a bluff, to stop his fine nostrils from looking any more pinched than they already were. I had gone too far, waving my conscience in front of him like a matador’s cape. Now I had to convince him that being blunt was just an idiosyncrasy of mine and that I was more than equal to the job. “I’m glad you offered that bonus because this won’t take more than a few days, and at ten marks a day, plus expenses, it might be hardly worth my while otherwise.”
“But how? I’ve already made a few inquiries of my own.”
“I could tell you. But then I’d be out of a job. Of course, I’ll need to speak to your daughter.”
“Of course, of course. I’ll tell her to expect you.”
The truth was that I had no idea where I was going to start. There were 821,000 people in Munich. Most of them were Roman Catholics and were pretty tight-lipped about everything, even in the confessional.
“Is there anything else you need?” he asked. By now my insolence was quite forgotten.
“You could pay me something in advance,” I said. “For thirty marks, you get the rest of my week and the comfort of knowing that the petition for your son’s release is as good as on the train to Landsberg.”
FIVE
In Germany there is a record of almost everything. We are a meticulous, observant, and bureaucratic people, and sometimes behave as if documentation and memorandum were the identifying hall-marks of true civilization. Even when it involved the systematic murder of an entire race of people, there were statistics, minutes, photographs, reports, and transcripts. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of war criminals might successfully have resisted conviction but for our very German obsession with numbers, names, and addresses. Many records had been destroyed in Allied air raids, it was true, but I was certain that somewhere I would find Wolfgang Stumpff’s name and address.
I started at police headquarters, visiting both the Registration of Address section and the Passport Office, but found no trace of him there. Then I checked at the Ministry of the Interior on Prinzregentenstrasse. I even looked for his name at the Society of German Jurists. I knew that Stumpff was from Munich and that he had studied to be a lawyer. The baron had told me that much himself. And reasoning that it was highly unlikely he could have come through the war without doing military service, my next port of call was the Bavarian State Archives on Arcisstrasse, where there were records going back as far as 1265. These had suffered no damage at all. But I had no luck there either, except to discover that the archives of the Bavarian army had been moved, to Leonrodstrasse, and it was here, finally, that I found what I was looking for, in the Rank Lists—the officer rolls for Bavaria. Alphabetically listed, year on year. It was a beautiful bit of record-keeping, handwritten, in purple ink. Hauptmann Wolfgang Stumpff of the 1st Gebirgsdivision, which was formerly the Bavarian Mountain Division. I now had a name, an address, the name of Stumpff’s regimental commander—I even borrowed his photograph.
The address in the Haidhausen district of East Munich was no more, having been completely destroyed on July 13, 1944. At least, that’s what the sign on the ruins told me. And temporarily bereft of ideas, I decided to spend an afternoon riding the trams—specifically the three, six, eight, and thirty-seven, with the photograph of Stumpff I had borrowed from his file. But before I did I had an appointment to meet the baron’s daughter outside the Glyptothek.
Helene Elisabeth von Starnberg was wearing a knee-length beige skirt, a yellow sweater that was just clingy enough to let you know she was a woman, and a pair of pigskin leather driving gloves. We had a pleasant conversation. I showed her the picture I had purloined from the army archives.
“Yes, that’s him,” she said. “Of course he was much younger when this picture was taken.”
“Didn’t you know? This is at least a thousand years old. I know because that’s how long Hitler said the Third Reich would last.”
She smiled and, for a moment, it was hard to believe she had a brother who had lived and worked in the lowest pit in hell. Blond, of course. Like she’d stepped down from the Berchtesgaden. It was easy to see where Hitler had developed his taste for blondes if he’d ever met a blonde like Helene Elisabeth von Starnberg. Either way she was a creature from another world. I might have misjudged her, but my first thought about her, that she’d never been on a tram, was not one I was able to dislodge. I tried to picture it, but the image wouldn’t stick. It always came off looking like a tiara in a biscuit tin.
“Are you any relation to Ignaz Gunther?” she asked me.
“My great-great-grandfather,” I said. “But please don’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t,” she said. “He sculpted a lot of angels, you know. Some of them are rather fine. Who knows? Maybe you’ll turn out to be our angel, Herr Gunther.”
By which I assumed she meant the von Starnberg family’s angel. Maybe it was lucky it was a fine day and I was in a good mood, but I didn’t reply with a rude remark about how, if I was going to help her brother, I’d have to be a black angel, which, of course, was what people used to call the SS. Maybe. More likely I just let that one slide by me because she was what people used to call a peach, in the days before they’d forgotten what one looked and tasted like.
“There’s a fine group of guardian angels sculpted by Ignaz Gunther in the Burgersaal,” she said, pointing across Königsplatz. “Somehow they survived the bombing. You should take a look at them sometime.”
“I’ll do that,” I said, and stepped back as she opened the door of her Porsche and climbed inside. She waved a neatly gloved hand from behind the split windshield, fired up the flat-four engine, and then sped away.
I walked south across Karlsplatz and the “Stachus,” which was Munich’s main traffic center, named after an inn that had once stood there. I walked along Neuhauser Strasse to Marienplatz, both of them badly damaged during the war. Special passages had been constructed for pedestrians beneath the scaffolding, and the many gaps between bomb-damaged buildings were filled with one-storied temporary shops. Scaffolding made the Burgersaal as inconspicuous as an empty beer bottle. Like everywhere else in that part of Munich, the chapel was being restored. Every time I walked around the city I congratulated myself for being lucky enough to spend most of 1944 with General Ferdinand Schorner’s army in White Russia. Munich had been hit hard. April 25, 1944, had been one of the worst nights in the city’s his
tory. Most of the chapel had been burned out. The high altar had perished, yet Gunther’s sculptures had survived. But with their pink cheeks and delicate hands these were hardly my idea of guardian angels. They looked like a couple of rent boys from a bathhouse in Bogenhausen. I didn’t think I was descended from Ignaz, but after two hundred years who can be sure of anything like that? My father had never been entirely certain who his mother was, let alone his own father. Either way, I’d have sculpted the group differently. My idea of a guardian angel involved being armed with something more lethal than a supercilious smile, an elegantly cocked little finger, and one eye on the Pearly Gates for backup. But that’s me. Even now, four years after the war ended, my first thought when I wake up is to wonder where I left my KAR 98.
I came out of the church and stepped straight onto a number six heading south down Karlsplatz. I like trams. You don’t have to worry about filling them up with gasoline, and it’s safe to leave them parked down some insalubrious backstreet. They’re great if you can’t afford a car, and in the summer of 1949, there were few people, other than Americans and the Baron von Starnberg, who could. Also, trams go exactly where you want them to go, provided you’re wise enough to choose a tram that’s going somewhere near where you’re going. I didn’t know where Wolfgang Stumpff was going, or where he was coming from, but I figured there was a better chance of seeing him on one of those trams instead of some others. Detective work doesn’t always require a brain the size of Wittgenstein’s. I rode the number six as far as Sendlinger-Tor-Platz, where I got off and caught a number eight going the opposite way. It went up Barer Strasse, to Schwabing and I rode this one as far as Kaiser-platz and the Church of St. Ursula. For all I knew, there were more sculptures by Ignaz Gunther in there, too, but seeing a thirty-seven coming along Hohenzollernstrasse, I hopped on that one.
I told myself there was no point in riding each tram to its terminus. My chances of spotting Wolfgang Stumpff were improved by riding them around the center of Munich, where there were many more people getting on and off. Sometimes being a detective involves playing statistician and figuring out the probabilities. I rode them on top and I rode them down below. Up top was better because you could smoke, but it meant you couldn’t see who was getting on and off inside, which was what people called that part of a tram that wasn’t upstairs. It was nearly all men on top because nearly all men were smokers, and if women did smoke they preferred not to do it on a tram. Don’t ask me why. I’m a detective, not a psychologist. I didn’t want to take a chance that Stumpff wasn’t a smoker, but I figured the baron’s daughter would never have seen Stumpff if he had been upstairs on a tram. Not from the window of a Porsche 356—it was too low. She might have seen him on the top deck if she had been in a cabriolet, but never from a coupe.
Why am I going into such detail? Because it was these little, routine things that made me remember what it was like to be a cop. Sore feet, some sweat in the small of my back and on the inside of my hat, and exercising my peeper’s eye. I had started to look at faces again. Searching apparently standard faces on the seat opposite for a distinguishing characteristic. Most people have one if you look hard enough.
I almost missed him coming downstairs. The tram had been full inside. He had intense dark eyes, a high forehead, thin mouth, chin dimple, and a canine nose that he carried in a way that made you think he was on the scent of something. He reminded me a lot of Georg Jacoby, the singer, and, for a brief moment I half expected him to break into “The Woman Who’s My Dream.” But Wolfgang Stumpff’s distinguishing characteristic was easy. He was missing an arm.
I followed him off the tram and into Holzkirchner railway station. There he caught a suburban train south to München-Mittersendling. So did I. Then he walked about a mile west along Zielstattstrasse to a pleasant, modern little villa on the edge of some trees. I watched the house for a moment and then saw a light go on in an upstairs room.
I didn’t care if Vincenz von Starnberg spent twenty years in Landsberg or not. I didn’t care if they hanged him in his cell with weights tied to his ankles. I didn’t care if his father died of a broken heart. I didn’t care if Stumpff was inclined to give his old university comrade a character reference or not. But I rang the doorbell all the same, even though I had told myself I wouldn’t. I wasn’t going to make a pitch for the sake of SS Sturmbannführer von Starnberg, or for his father the baron. No, not even for a thousand marks. But I didn’t mind making a pitch for the sake of the peach. Being considered as some kind of angel in the pale blue eyes of Helene Elisabeth von Starnberg was something I could live with.
SIX
Three days later I received a certified check drawn against the baron’s personal account at Delbrück & Co. for one thousand deutschmarks. It had been a while since I’d made any real money of my own, and for a while I just left the check on my desk so I could keep my eye on it. From time to time I picked it up and read it again, and told myself I was really back in business. Feeling good about myself lasted for the whole of one hour.
The telephone rang. It was Dr. Bublitz at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. He told me that Kirsten was ill. After developing a fever her condition had worsened and she had been transferred to the city’s General Hospital, near Sendlinger-Tor-Platz.
I ran out of the office, jumped on a tram, then hurried across Nussbaum Gardens to the Women’s Clinic on Maistrasse. Half of it looked like a building site; the other half looked like a ruin. I walked through a gauntlet of cement mixers, around a redoubt of new bricks and timber, and up the stone stairs. Builder’s dust ground under the soles of my shoes like spilled sugar. Hammering echoed loudly in the hospital stairwell with monotonous force, as if some prehistoric woodpecker was making a hole in an even larger tree. Outside, a pair of jackhammers were finishing a battle for the last foxhole in Munich. And someone was drilling the teeth of a very long-suffering giant while someone else was sawing off the leg of his even more long-suffering wife. Water was splashing into the courtyard outside, as if in some subterranean cavern. A sick coal miner or injured steelworker would have appreciated the peace and quiet of that place, but for anyone else with eardrums, the Women’s Clinic sounded like hell with all the windows open.
Kirsten was in a small private room off the main ward. She was feverish and yellow. Her hair was matted against her head as if she had just washed it. Her eyes were closed and her breathing rapid and shallow. She looked extremely ill. The nurse with her was wearing a face mask. From what I could see of her face it looked like a good idea. A man in a white coat appeared at my elbow.
“Are you the next of kin?” he barked. He was stout, with a center part in his fair hair, rimless glasses, a Hindenburg-size mustache, a stiff collar you could have cut corns with, and a bow tie off a box of chocolates.
“I’m her husband,” I said. “Bernhard Gunther.”
“Husband?” He searched his notes. “Fräulein Handlöser is married? There’s no record of that here.”
“When her family doctor referred her to the Max Planck, he forgot about it,” I said. “Maybe we didn’t invite him to the wedding, I don’t know. These things happen. Look, can we forget all that? What’s wrong with her?”
“I’m afraid we can’t forget it, Herr Gunther,” said the doctor. “There are regulations to be considered. I can only discuss Fräulein Handlöser’s condition with her next of kin. Perhaps you have your wedding certificate with you?”
“Not with me, no,” I said, patiently. “But I’ll bring it with me next time I come here. How’s that?” I paused and endured the doctor’s indignant scrutiny for a moment or two. “There’s no one else but me,” I added. “No one else will be visiting her, I can assure you of that.” I waited. Still nothing. “And if all that leaves you uncomfortable then answer me this. If she’s unmarried, why is she still wearing a wedding ring?”
The doctor glanced around my shoulder. Upon seeing Kirsten’s wedding ring still on her finger, he searched his notes again as if there might be
some clue as to the proper course of action to be taken. “Really, this is most irregular,” he said. “However, given her condition, I suppose I will have to take your word for it.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
His heels came together and he nodded curtly back at me. I was quickly getting the impression that he had obtained his medical degree at a hospital in Prussia, somewhere they gave out jackboots instead of stethoscopes. But in truth it was a common enough scene in Germany. German doctors have always regarded themselves as being as important as God. Indeed, it’s probably worse than that. God probably thinks he’s a German doctor.
“My name is Dr. Effner,” he said. “Your wife—Frau Gunther—she is extremely ill. Gravely ill. Not doing well. Not doing well at all, Herr Gunther. She was transferred here during the night. And we’re trying our best, sir. You may be assured of that. But it’s my opinion that you must prepare yourself, sir. Prepare yourself for the worst. She may not survive the night.” He spoke like a cannon, in short, fierce bursts of speech, as if he had learned his bedside manner in a Messerschmitt 109. “We will make her comfortable, of course. But everything that can be done, has been done. You understand?”
“Are you saying she might die?” I asked, when, at last, I was able to get a shot back at him.
“Yes, Herr Gunther,” he said. “I am saying that. She is critically ill as you can see for yourself.”
“What on earth’s wrong with her?” I asked. “I mean, I saw her only a few days ago and she seemed fine.”
“She has a fever,” he said, as if this was all the explanation that was required. “A high fever. As you can see, although I don’t advise you to get too close to her. Her pallor, her shortness of breath, her anemia, her swollen glands—these all lead me to suppose that she has a bad case of influenza.”