Huber's Tattoo

by Quentin Smith

  Natasha cursed her failure to act earlier. Henry’s safety had been her very first concern as well, but she had acquiesced to his wishes and suppressed her instincts as a police officer.

  “I am watching him carefully, sir,” Natasha said, painfully aware that it was past eleven at night and she had not the faintest idea where he was.

  Suddenly a chill ran up her spine. Dieter Schröder: he knew an awful lot about Lebensborn progeny and Steinhöring; he was a loner, a misfit, a man with hatred and bitterness festering within him. Did he fit the profile of a serial killer? Did he pose a threat to Henry? Had Henry arranged to meet him in secret? What about the fat man, Lars, whom Henry had chased after at the Bräuhaus?

  “Is anything else… unusual going on, Natasha? Is Henry… you know?” Bruce asked awkwardly.

  Natasha clenched her free hand into a ball and pressed it against her lips. What was she supposed to tell her boss? The truth, which would find them both on the next flight back to London? Henry would never forgive her when he was so close to finding out everything he needed to know, perhaps even enough to solve the murders. One more morning with Schröder should have it wrapped up, shouldn’t it, she thought.

  “Nothing, sir.” Natasha winced as she spoke.

  “Is Henry in his room?” Bruce said casually, as though in passing conversation.

  “I think so, sir.” How could she now tell Bruce that she was in Henry’s room and that Henry was missing, for the second time?

  “I can rely on you to keep me up to date with any unusual or pertinent developments, can’t I, Natasha, as we discussed previously?”

  Natasha closed her eyes. Her career was finished, she thought. How could she ever recover from this breach of trust? It was one thing speaking to Bruce over the phone, separated by a thousand miles, but it would be quite different when she was inevitably confronted by him, face to face.

  “Of course, sir.”

  Natasha lay back on the bed, troubled, confused and tired. Bruce’s call had completely side-swiped her, an unexpected salvo from the flank. She was left with an unsettling feeling that her Superintendent did not believe her. This was all Henry’s fault – and she did not even know where the hell he was.

  She dialled Henry’s number and waited. No answer, straight to voicemail. She placed the phone on her chest and closed her eyes on the soft, sausage-shaped pillow. Despite its unfamiliar shape and consistency, it was comfortable behind her fatigued head and she quickly fell into a disturbed sleep.

  Natasha awoke with Henry beside her. A quick, anxious glance confirmed that they were both fully clothed. As her eyes squinted in the unfamiliar light, she noticed some half-eaten sugared Lebküchen next to Henry’s side of the bed, crumbs scattered across the bedside table. His fingers were still dusted with icing sugar.

  She frowned; it was just like at the hotel in Carsac. Had Henry been that stressed by the shocking revelations of the previous day? Were his headache and odd behaviour just symptomatic of his mind trying to cope with what it was being forced to digest? Dieter Schröder was most certainly opening their eyes to a world that they had never previously known about and which seemed very likely to be, in some way, closely connected to the string of bizarre murders they were investigating.

  Natasha lay back and rested her arm across her forehead. She felt increasingly out of her depth. What was going on? On the one hand she was fending off her Superintendent’s probing questions, lying, while on the other Henry was concealing vital information from her and, worse still, behaving bizarrely. Bruce had mentioned this at her appointment, so he obviously knew something was going on. She began to wonder if she was making a mistake by playing the devil’s advocate. Perhaps it was time to confide in Bruce, come clean, be professional.

  But a quick glance down at Henry’s sleeping face beside her made Natasha realize that she cared too much for him to draw the line so indelibly. She knew there would be implications for Henry if she revealed all to Bruce. Did he deserve that right now?

  Sixty

  They stood outside Schröder’s front door patiently while they listened to him unfasten the seven bolts and chains.

  “You were eating Lebküchen with your fingers last night,” Natasha said.

  Henry frowned and shook his head.

  “I thought they were yours.”

  Natasha stared at him. After her phone call from Bruce she was beginning to feel a cloud of doubt hanging over her judgement. Was Henry hiding something?

  “I don’t remember, Natasha. Honestly.” Henry shrugged his shoulders like a petulant teenager.

  “Where did you go last night?”

  He narrowed his eyes ever so slightly.

  “Did I go out?”

  Natasha stared at him, trying to evaluate him, wishing she had someone with whom she could share her concerns. Superintendent Bruce was not yet that person. Not now. The door creaked open.

  “Guten Tag, meine Freunde!” Schröder greeted them cheerfully, clasping his hands together. Cats waltzed around his legs, brushing up against him repeatedly and meowing. “Come in, come in!” He said.

  A discordant cacophony of odours hit them as they entered: fresh coffee, garlic and animal hair. Fighting their way past cats, Natasha and Henry took their seats in the lounge. Schröder had already lit a number of candles dotted about the untidy room.

  After coffee, pleasantries and a brief discussion about the day’s weather – throughout which Natasha found herself contemplating Schröder suspiciously, looking for indications that he might be capable of the heinous crimes they were investigating – Schröder beckoned them over to the dining table.

  “Here is something you must see,” he said, picking up his frameless glasses and perching them halfway up his nose.

  Piled on the table were seven large, aged, cloth-bound volumes, frayed around the edges of their stained, earthy covers. The black leather spines were marked with the letters ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’, as well as dates ranging from 1936 to 1945. One volume was marked ‘Other’. They were numbered up to eight, but number one was missing.

  Henry glanced at Natasha as he felt his heart skip a beat. Could they be staring at secret records from the Heim Hochland Lebensborn program? He looked up at Schröder, who, to his surprise, was studying Henry’s face closely.

  “These are the surviving records of births at Steinhöring up to 1945.” Schröder paused, caressing the top volume. “You see, all births are recorded with only the mother’s name, listing her home address as the former SS Officers’ Club in München.”

  Schröder opened the musty-smelling book at a natural divide that had clearly been visited numerous times before. His eyes scanned the heavy yellowed pages hungrily, as though he had never seen them before. Many pages were lined and all entries were handwritten in faded blue ink.

  “Here is a typical… er, geburtsurkunde,” Schröder said.

  “Birth certificate,” Henry translated.

  The aged document, slightly torn around the edges and bearing the markings of having once been folded into three equal parts, was adorned at the top with the double Sig rune emblem used by the Schutzstaffel.

  “What is this symbol?” Henry asked, placing a finger beneath an emblem adjacent to the Sig rune. It resembled a child’s stick drawing of a headless person with arms extended above the shoulders, or perhaps a simple three-branched, leafless tree.

  “The Lebens rune was the official symbol used to denote the Lebensborn program and appears on all geburtsurkunde.”

  Natasha looked at Henry, her face drawn and apprehensive.

  Schroder read out the details of the certificate open in front of them: “Gustav Nauhaus; born 31 March 1939; mother was Gudrun Nauhaus; her registered home address is recorded as the SS Officers’ Club in München.”

  “Where was the baby born?” Henry asked.

  “Right here in Steinhöring, where we visited yesterday.”

  “Why does the official birth registry not have these documents?” A
bushy-tailed, red Persian cat jumped on to the table and walked across the book, brushing lazily against Schröder’s arm.

  “Nein, mein Schatz,” Schröder said, lifting the cat and placing it on the floor. “Lebensborn had its own secret record-keeping system and its own registry office, separate from the rest of the village. All these records were very nearly completely lost when the Nazis fled,” Schröder said, patting the book. “As a consequence, many Germans still do not know about Lebensborn. Many do not want to know about it. Most are ashamed of it. It is one of the Nazis’ best kept secrets that has endured for… generations.”

  Schröder scratched his wispy blond hair with grubby fingernails.

  “People like me and Lars, we are outcasts, an embarrassment to most Germans. We have no one to talk to about our origins, fathered by the Nazi swine who nearly destroyed Europe.”

  Schröder shrugged nonchalantly, clearly masking much personal anguish.

  “Who can be proud of such parentage?” he asked.

  Henry swallowed. He felt shivery and was conscious of goose pimples breaking out across his skin. The truth he had sought for so long was now uncomfortably close, but also unpleasantly brutal.

  “Our victims were born after 1945,” Natasha said.

  “They may be in this volume.” Schröder lifted the thinnest of the seven books, a russet-brown volume marked ‘Other’.

  Leafing through it revealed the same Lebens and Sig rune emblems on the certificates.

  “This book is a mystery to me as it contains the records of births right up to 1979. They are all marked down as ‘born in Steinhöring’ but I doubt they could have been born here, despite the stark similarities to all the other geburtsurkunde.”

  They all pored over the documents for a few silent moments.

  “Do you see how all of these documents in this last volume are signed by the same SS officers: Huber and Pahmeyer?” Schröder said, tapping a dirty fingertip on their signatures.

  Henry and Natasha nodded.

  “Who were they?” Henry asked.

  Schröder shrugged.

  “We have to know if our victims’ names appear in there,” Natasha said.

  Henry felt utterly horrified by what he was seeing. If the victims’ names were in the register, then he, too, might be listed.

  “Vera Schmidt,” Henry said, aware of the lack of moisture in his mouth as he tried to lick his dry lips. “Look for Vera Schmidt.”

  “Geburtsdatum?”

  “23.04.1971,” Natasha said, reading off the sheet of paper she had taken from her bag.

  Schröder found the entry. Natasha and Henry stared in disbelief at the birth certificate, written in confident, swirly strokes of faded blue ink. There was a blotch of ink where the letter ‘t’ had been crossed – too much pressure.

  So this was where Vera’s journey had begun – a thousand miles from where she died. Was it because of something in these controversial origins that she had met her end in far away London? Did some sinister fingers of this forgotten organization still reach into the hearts of other countries, so many years later? If so, then what was their motive? Who else was still at risk?

  Schröder continued to search, but Luc Bezier and David Barnabus were not included in the records and they could not find entries for either Jeremy Haysbrook or Francois Pequignot. But they did find a Jürgen Hoffmann and a Frank Pfeiffer, whose entries matched Haysbrook’s and Pequignot’s dates of birth exactly.

  Henry thought back to the genealogy search he had initiated in London into his own origins and acknowledged that Haysbrook and Pequignot may also have been subject to a ‘de-Germanization’ of their birth names. It would be impossible to know, beyond doubt, whether the entries for Hoffmann and Pfeiffer indeed related to Haysbrook and Pequignot.

  “I think you might be in here, too, Inspector,” Schröder said, patting the opened volume with the flat of his hand.

  Henry froze, as if he had been caught playing truant by the headmaster. Schröder’s gaze did not leave his face.

  “I noticed… er… Ihre narbe… on the back of your head, Inspector.” He nodded slowly, touching the back of his own neck. “I think yesterday must have been a bit of a shock to you, ja, – if you did not yet know?”

  Henry lowered his head and sighed. His scar itched but he refused to scratch it. He did not know where to look. The moment he had been dreading was upon him. The subject of such disharmony between he and George, the most likely cause of his entire unsettled life, was now perhaps within the turn of a page of being revealed. Did he really want to know, he wondered?

  Natasha stepped closer to Henry and placed a discreet, comforting hand against his upper arm. How on earth did Schröder know? Her suspicions about Schröder suddenly deepened. She wanted to whisk Henry from his house before he could divulge anything further to Schröder, before he could reveal personal details that might endanger him.

  “Geburtsdatum, Inspector?” Schröder asked, lifting his eyebrows as he leafed through the musty pages.

  Don’t do it, Henry, Natasha screamed silently in her head.

  “17 March 1961,” Henry said, defeated.

  Natasha watched as Schröder’s long index fingernail dragged down the entries in vain.

  Thank God, she thought, Henry is not in there, he should be safe now.

  “Look under Heinrich Weber,” Henry said quietly, too afraid to look.

  Natasha turned sharply to look at Henry’s face. She could see his eyes flick in her direction self-consciously, but he would not meet her gaze. She felt hurt, misled, even betrayed. How long had he known about all of this without disclosing anything to her? She had protected him, taken risks for him, yet in return he had once again been secretive. Was it unreasonable of her to have expected him to share something of such importance with her? How many more secrets was he withholding? Confused and hurt, she let go of his arm.

  “Ah!” Schröder said with sudden delight. “Here, Heinrich Weber; 17.03.61. Is this you, Inspector?”

  Henry felt nauseous as he studied the entry: the old-fashioned curly penmanship in blue ink. Was it written by a man or a woman? Could it have been penned by Huber, or Pahmeyer? His mouth was dry, his breaths coming fast as he felt Natasha shrink away from him. Quite rightly, she must have been wondering who on earth he really was. He stumbled backwards and sat down, displacing a curled-up sleeping cat as he did so. He sat in silence for a moment, staring at his clasped hands between his knees.

  “Do you have any idea why only some Lebensborn children were tattooed?” he said, looking up at Schröder.

  Schröder turned around, leaving Natasha staring at Henry’s birth certificate, adorned with both the Nazi Sig rune and the Lebens rune emblems. It seemed surreal, but then only the naive would believe that Nazi ideals died out completely in that fateful Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945.

  “I do not, Inspector. Do you?”

  Henry sat without moving a muscle. He could not think: he could not order his thoughts; he could not believe what had been revealed to him in less than an hour of his tormented life.

  “I have a theory, though,” Schröder said, cautious.

  “Who would have continued with such a… a… an evil undertaking for so many years after the war ended?” Henry said, without looking up.

  “Inspector, Nazi sympathies did not die with Adolf Hitler. Neo-Nazism is alive and well, even in the Germany of today. Such people would most certainly have been active, underground, in the immediate years after war ended.”

  “How do you feel about Nazi sympathisers?” Natasha asked coldly, staring at Schröder. She could not mask her accusatory tone.

  Schröder shot a disparaging look at her.

  “I despise them. I despise everything they have ever stood for and believed in. Lars and I are living proof of their evil and we are just two amongst thousands whose lives are still lived in the shadows of their crimes.” He paused, glancing at Henry with a small hand gesture. “Look at your Inspector Webber, look
at how he suffers. I will guess that much of his life has been very difficult up to this moment.” Schröder sighed.

  Natasha felt a pang of protectiveness towards Henry, for though she knew this to be true about him, she was increasingly circumspect about Schröder.

  “What is it that you so hate about Lebensborn?” she said. “What is your… theory… about the tattoos?”

  Schröder sighed.

  “Let me tell you what it was like to be a Lebensborn child, Sergeant. Most of us were sent to foster care with Nazi officials, many of whom were based in… you know… Konzentrationslager.”

  “Camps?” Natasha said. A glance at Henry confirmed that he was deeply withdrawn into himself and she could not be sure that he was even listening.

  “Ja, camps. Imagine the emotional scars from growing up in such awful places. We were starved of motherly love. In a way, no one wanted us, despite our fantastic genetic Komposition. Many Lebensborn children grew up to have mental problems and… er… autismus… was common.” Schröder glanced at Natasha to check that she understood. She nodded.

  “Some of the mothers were only young girls, you know, kinderen. They were popular with many of the SS officers and… it is too awful to think about it.” Schröder’s voice trailed off.

  A blue-cream Persian came up to him and mouthed something at him silently, as though it was speaking, but no sound issued forth. He reached out and stroked the cat. It purred appreciatively.

  “If children were… deformieren… or had the wrong physical features, they were sent to camps where most of them died, quickly. They were not wanted. Then, after the war, after liberation, well…”

  Henry looked up and stared at Schröder. Despite his withdrawal, he was listening, perhaps reluctantly.

  “Nobody wanted us after the war either, whether we were German, or Norwegian, or French, or Polish. Everyone despised us, everyone distrusted us. After all, we were the fruits of pure evil.” Schröder fell silent.