by Ira Levin
Farnbach nodded. “‘The Reich restored,’” he said; “that’s what I have to keep thinking of.”
“And your officers and fellow soldiers,” the captain said. “They’re depending on you to do your job; you’re not going to leave them out on a limb, are you? I’ll give you a hand with Lundberg. I’m on duty Saturday but I’ll switch with one of the other men; no problem.”
Farnbach shook his head. “It isn’t Lundberg,” he said. He lunged; gloved hands pushed black-leathered chest.
The captain, one eye gaping from under his hat, fell backward over the railing, pulled his hands free of his coat and scooped armfuls of air. Turning feet-over-head, he dropped away toward the foaming basin far below.
Farnbach leaned over the railing and looked down unhappily. “And it doesn’t have to be Saturday,” he said.
Getting off the Frankfurt-to-Essen plane at the Essen-Mülheim Airport, Liebermann was surprised to find that he felt pretty good. Not great, no, but not rotten either, and rotten was the way he had felt the other two times he had set foot in the Ruhr. This was where everything had come from: the guns, the tanks, the planes, the submarines. Hitler’s armory this place had been, and its pall of smog had seemed to Liebermann (in ’59 and again in ’66) like a mark, not of peacetime industry but of wartime guilt; a sun-blocking shroud laid down from above rather than raised up from below. Going into it he had felt depressed and disheartened, reached for by the past. Rotten.
He had braced himself for the same reaction this time, but no, he felt pretty good; the smog was only smog, no different from Manchester’s or Pittsburgh’s, and nothing was reaching for him. On the contrary, it was he—in a smooth-speeding new Mercedes taxi—who was doing the reaching. And about time. Almost two months ago he had listened to Barry Koehler’s wild story from São Paulo and felt Mengele’s hatred assailing him; and now, finally, he was taking action, was going into Gladbeck to ask questions about Emil Döring, sixty-five, “until recently on the staff of the Essen Public Transport Commission.” Had he been murdered? Was he linked in any way to men in other countries? Was there a reason why Mengele and the Comrades Organization should have wanted him dead? If ninety-four men really were to die, there was a one-in-three chance that Döring had been the first of them. By tonight he might know.
But ei…what if Reuters had missed some of the October 16th possibles? The chance might really be one in four or five. Or six. Or ten. Don’t think about it; stay feeling good.
“He went into the passageway to relieve himself,” Chief Inspector Haas said in his guttural North German accent. “Bad luck; the wrong place at the wrong time.” He was a hard-looking man in his late forties, his face ruddy and pitted with pockmarks, his blue eyes close-set, his fair hair almost gone. His clothes were neat, his desk was neat, his office was neat. His manner to Liebermann was courteous. “It was a whole section of third-floor wall that came down on him. The foreman of the job said later that someone must have worked at it with a crowbar, but of course he would say that, wouldn’t he? It couldn’t be proved, because the first thing we did, naturally, after getting Döring out from under the rubble, was to use crowbars ourselves, to knock down everything that still threatened to fall. We felt we were dealing with a straightforward accident. Which we were; that’s what it’s been declared. The wrecker’s insurers have already reached an agreement with the widow; if there were any suspicion of murder, you can be sure they wouldn’t have been in such a hurry.”
“But still,” Liebermann said, “it could have been murder, conceivably.”
“It depends what kind you mean,” Haas said. “Some tramps or hoodlums might have been scavenging around in the building, yes. They see a man go into the passageway and decide to have themselves some sick excitement. Yes, that’s conceivable. Slightly. But murder with a more normal motive, aimed specifically at Herr Döring? No, that’s not conceivable. How could anyone who was following him have got up to the third floor and pried loose a whole section of wall in the short time he was in the passageway? He was in the act of urinating when he died, and he’d had two beers, not two hundred.” Haas smiled.
Liebermann said, “The prying could have been done in advance. One man is waiting, ready to give the final shove, and another, with Döring, induces him somehow to…go to the right place.”
“How? ‘Why don’t you stop and piss, my friend? Right over there on that X someone’s painted’? And he left the bar alone. No, Herr Liebermann”—Haas spoke with finality—“I’ve been through this before; you can be sure it was an accident. Murderers don’t go to such lengths. They choose the simple ways: shoot, stab, strike. You know that.”
Thoughtfully Liebermann said, “Unless they have many murders to do, and want them all…not to be similar…”
Haas squinted his close-set eyes at him. “Many murders?” he asked.
Liebermann said, “What did you mean just now, you’ve ‘been through this before’?”
“Döring’s sister was in here the next day, screaming at me to arrest Frau Döring and a man named Springer. Is this…someone you’re interested in? Wilhelm Springer?”
“Possibly,” Liebermann said. “Who is he?”
“A musician. Frau Döring’s lover, according to the sister. The Frau is much younger than Döring was. Good-looking too.”
“How old is Springer?”
“Thirty-eight, thirty-nine. The night of the accident he was filling in with the orchestra at the Essen opera. I think that lets him out, don’t you?”
“Can you tell me anything about Döring?” Liebermann asked. “Who his friends were? What organizations he belonged to?”
Haas shook his head. “I only have the vital statistics.” He turned a paper in the folder lying open before him. “I saw him a few times but I never met him; they moved here just a year ago. Here we are: sixty-five years old, one hundred and seventy centimeters, eighty-six kilos…” He looked at Liebermann. “Oh, one thing that might interest you; he was carrying a gun.”
“He was?”
Haas smiled. “A museum piece, a Mauser ‘Bolo.’ It hadn’t been fired, or cleaned and oiled, in God knows how many years.”
“Was it loaded?”
“Yes, but he probably would have blown his hand off if he’d fired it.”
Liebermann said, “Could you give me Frau Döring’s address and phone number? And the sister’s? And the address of the bar? Then I’ll be on my way.” He sat forward and put a hand down to his briefcase.
Haas wrote on a memo pad, copying from a typed form in the folder. “May I ask,” he said, “how you come to be interested in this? Döring wasn’t a ‘war criminal,’ was he?”
Liebermann looked at Haas busily writing, and after a moment said, “No, as far as I know he wasn’t a war criminal. He may have had contact with one. I’m checking a rumor. Probably there’s nothing in it.”
To the bartender in the Lorelei-Bar he said, “I’m looking into it for a friend of his, who thinks the collapse may not have been an accident.”
The bartender’s eyes widened. “You don’t say! You mean someone purposely…? Oh my.” He was a small bald man with a mustache with waxed tips. A yellow smile-face button smiled on his red lapel. He didn’t ask Liebermann’s name and Liebermann didn’t offer it.
“Was he a regular customer?”
The bartender frowned and stroked his mustache. “Mmm, so-so. Not every night, but once or twice a week. An afternoon sometimes.”
“I understand he left here alone that night.”
“That’s right.”
“Was he with anyone before he left?”
“He was alone, right where you are now. One seat over maybe. And he left in a hurry.”
“Oh?”
“He had change coming, eight and a half marks on a one-fifty bill, and he didn’t wait for it. He was a good tipper, but not like that. I meant to give it to him the next time he came in.”
“Did he say anything to you while he was drinking?”
“He was waiting for someone,” a man at the end of the bar said, a round-faced old man in a derby hat and a shabby overcoat buttoned up tightly to the collar. “He kept looking at the door, watching for someone to come in.”
Liebermann said, “You knew Herr Döring?”
“Very well,” the old man said. “I went to the funeral. Such a small turn-out! I was surprised.” To the bartender he said, “You know who wasn’t there? Ochsenwalder. That surprised me. What did he have to do that was so important?” He picked up his stein with both hands and drank from it.
“Excuse me,” the bartender said to Liebermann, and went away toward the other end of the bar, where a few men sat.
Liebermann got up, and with his tomato juice and his briefcase, went over and sat down near the old man, around the bar’s corner from him.
“Usually he sat here with us,” the old man said—he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand—“but that night he sat alone, in the middle there, and kept watching the door. Waiting for someone, looking at the time. Apfel said it was probably the salesman from the night before. He was some talker, Döring. To be honest, we weren’t sorry he was there not here. But he could have come over and said hello, couldn’t he? Now don’t get me wrong; we liked him, and not just because he picked up the tab sometimes. But he told the same stories over and over again. Good stories, but how many times can you listen? Over and over, the same stories; how he’d been smarter than different people.”
“He was telling them to a salesman the night before?” Liebermann asked.
The old man nodded. “In medicine. First he was talking to all of us, asking about the town, and then it was him and Döring, Döring talking and him laughing. The first time you heard them they were good stories.”
“That’s right, I forgot,” the bartender said, back with them. “Döring was here the night before the accident. That was unusual for him, two nights in a row.”
“You know how old his wife is?” the old man asked. “I thought it was a daughter, but it was the wife, the widow.”
Liebermann said to the bartender, “Do you remember the salesman he was talking to?”
“I don’t know if he was a salesman,” the bartender said, “but I remember. A glass eye, and a way of snapping his fingers that annoyed the hell out of me; as if I should have been there ten minutes ago.”
“How old was he?”
The bartender stroked his mustache and sharpened a tip of it. “In his fifties, I’d say,” he said. “Fifty-five maybe.” He looked at the old man. “Wouldn’t you say that?”
The old man nodded. “Around there.”
Liebermann, unstrapping his briefcase on his lap, said, “I have some pictures. They were taken a long time ago, but would you look at them and tell me if one of the men in them might have been the salesman?”
“Glad to,” the bartender said, coming closer. The old man shifted around.
Getting the photos out, Liebermann said to the old man, “Did he give his name?”
“I don’t think so. If he did I don’t remember it. But I’m good with faces.”
Liebermann moved his tomato juice aside, and turning the photos around, put them on the bar and separated the three of them. He pushed them closer to the old man and the bartender.
They bent over the glossy photos, the old man putting a hand to his derby.
“Add thirty years,” Liebermann told them, watching. “Thirty-five.”
They raised their heads, looking at him warily, resentfully. The old man turned away. “I don’t know,” he said. He picked up his stein.
The bartender, looking at Liebermann, said, “You can’t show us pictures of…young soldiers and expect us to recognize a fifty-five-year-old man we saw over a month ago.”
Liebermann said, “Three weeks ago.”
“Still.”
The old man drank.
Liebermann said to them, “These men are criminals. They’re wanted by your government.”
“Our government,” the old man said, setting his stein down onto its wet print. “Not yours.”
“That’s true,” Liebermann said. “I’m Austrian.”
The bartender went away. The round-faced old man watched him go.
Liebermann, putting spread hands on the photos, leaned forward and said, “This salesman may have killed your friend Döring.”
The old man looked at his stein, his lips pursed. He turned the stein’s handle around toward him.
Liebermann looked bitterly at him, and gathered the photos and put them back in his briefcase. He closed the briefcase, strapped it, and stood up.
The bartender, coming back, said, “Two marks.”
Liebermann put a five-mark note on the bar and said, “Some coins for the phone, please.”
He went into the booth and dialed Frau Döring’s number. The line was busy.
He tried Döring’s sister, in Oberhausen. No answer.
He stood crated in the phone booth with his briefcase between his feet, tugging at his ear and thinking of what to say to Frau Döring. She might very well be hostile to Yakov Liebermann, Nazi-hunter; and even if she weren’t, after her sister-in-law’s accusations she probably wouldn’t want to discuss Döring and his death with any stranger. But what could he tell her except the truth? How else gain a meeting with her? It struck him that Klaus von Palmen, in Pforzheim, might be getting better results than he. That would be all he’d need, to be outdone by von Palmen.
He tried Frau Döring again, following Chief Inspector Haas’s neatly penned digits. The phone at the other end rang.
“Yes?” A woman; quick, annoyed.
“Is this Frau Klara Döring?”
“Yes, who’s this?”
“My name is Yakov Liebermann. From Vienna.”
Silence. “Yakov Liebermann? The man who…finds the Nazis?”—surprised and puzzled, but not hostile.
“Looks for them,” Liebermann said, “only sometimes finds. I’m here in Gladbeck, Frau Döring, and I wonder if you’d be kind enough to let me have a little of your time, only half an hour or so. I’d like to talk with you about your late husband. I think he may have been involved—entirely innocently and without knowing about it—in the affairs of certain persons I’m interested in. May I come talk with you? Whenever it’s convenient for you?”
A clarinet piped faintly. Mozart? “Emil was involved…?”
“Maybe. Without his knowing it. I’m in your neighborhood now. May I come over? Or would you prefer to come out and meet me somewhere?”
“No. I can’t see you.”
“Frau Döring, please, it’s very important.”
“I can’t possibly. Not now. It’s the worst possible day.”
“Tomorrow, then? I’ve come to Gladbeck for the sole purpose of speaking to you.” The clarinet stopped, then piped again, repeating its last phrase, definitely Mozart. Played by the lover Springer? Which was why it was such a bad day to see him? “Frau Döring?”
“All right. I work until three. You can come over tomorrow at four.”
“That’s Frankenstrasse Twelve?”
“Yes. Apartment thirty-three.”
“Thank you. At four tomorrow. Thank you, Frau Döring.”
He freed himself from the phone booth and asked the bartender for directions to the building where Döring had died.
“It’s gone.”
“Which way was it, then?”
The bartender, bending, washing glasses, pointed a dripping finger. “Down there.”
Liebermann went down a narrow street and across a busy wider one. Gladbeck, or this part of it at least, was urban, gray, charmless. The smog didn’t help.
He stood looking at a rubbled lot flanked by masonry walls of old factory buildings. Three children piled
broken stones, making an angled barrier. One of them wore a military knapsack.
He walked on. The next cross-street was Frankenstrasse; he followed it to Number 12, a soot-streaked buff apartment house, conventionally modern, behind a narrow well-kept lawn. From its rooftop a finger of black smoke rose up to join the smog-shroud.
He watched a woman struggle a baby carriage through the glass entrance door, and went on in the direction of his hotel, the Schultenhof.
In his clean stark German room he tried again to reach Döring’s sister. “God bless you whoever you are,” a woman greeted him. “We just this second stepped in. You’re our very first call.”
Fine. He could guess. “Is Frau Toppat there?”
“Oh poo. No, I’m sorry, she’s gone. She’s in California, or on the way. We bought the house from her the day before yesterday. It’s for Frau Toppat! She’s gone to live with her daughter. Do you want the address? I’ve got it here somewhere.”
“No, thanks,” Liebermann said. “Don’t bother.”
“Everything’s ours now: the furniture, the goldfish—we even have vegetables growing! Do you know the house?”
“No.”
“It’s awful, but it’s perfect for us. Well, the God-bless still goes. Are you sure you don’t want her address? I can find it.”
“Positive. Thank you. Good luck.”
“We’ve got it already, but thanks, we can always use a little more.”
He hung up, sighed, nodded. Me too, lady.
After he had washed up and taken his late-afternoon pills, he sat down at the much-too-small writing table, opened his briefcase, and got out the draft of an article he was writing about the extradition of Frieda Maloney.
The door opened to the extent of its short tight chain and a boy looked out, pushing dark hair aside from his forehead. He was thirteen or so, gaunt and sharp-nosed.
Liebermann, wondering if he had got the number wrong, said, “Is this Frau Döring’s apartment?”
“Are you Herr Liebermann?”
“Yes.”
The door closed partway; metal scraped.