Shadow and Light

by Jonathan Rabb

  The man opened another drawer, pulled out a clipboard, and flipped through the pages. “Number II. Personal effects are in bin 6. What happened to your mouth?”

  Hoffner stared at the vacant face. “It wouldn’t have made more sense to put them in bin II?”

  “There is no bin II.”

  Hoffner thought to answer, but the man had landed at this particular desk and was therefore grappling with his own incompetence. Why make him take on a whole department’s?

  A minute later, Hoffner was spilling the contents of a small bag onto a tray. The naked Thyssen had evidently been dressed at one point. A silver cigarette case and lighter, along with a Patek Philippe watch, scraped noisily across the metal.

  “I didn’t see a suit of clothes.” Hoffner spoke loudly enough to be heard at the desk. “Where was all this?” He watched as the man grudgingly pulled himself away from his paper and retrieved yet one more clipboard from the drawer. This time, Hoffner couldn’t help himself: “You don’t think it might do to keep it all together?”

  The man continued to flip through the pages. “Personal bits. Families like to take a look at the paperwork. Make sure nothing’s gone missing. We don’t want them seeing more than they need to. Make enough sense for you, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar?”

  Hoffner stood obediently and waited for the answer.

  “No suit,” the man said as he read. “Most of it was lying about the office or in the desk. The rest they found in the pockets of a pair of trousers that were in a closet. The trousers are in bin 4.”

  Hoffner knew to let this one go. The man held out the pages as he went back to his paper. “You can take a read, if you want.”

  “No. That’s fine.”

  The pages dropped to the desk and Hoffner turned back to his tray.

  It was an odd assortment of business cards, receipts, a program from an exhibit that had been at the Cassirer Gallery in August of last year. There was Thyssen’s university ring—he had studied at the Ludwig-Maximilians in Munich—a woman’s earring, thirty marks or so in paper, but nothing to do with either Phoebus or Ostara. The dim logic in the choices made it clear that the Kriminal-Assistent who had put this all together was well on his way to a posting at the morgue.

  Hoffner was slipping everything back into the bag when he noticed a pin caught inside the program. It was no bigger than a fingernail, and when he turned it over, he found himself staring at an openwinged eagle perched on a wreath. This time, however, the wreath was circling what looked to be two runic letters.

  The first thought, of course, was of Herr Goebbels and his tiny badge, but there was something else here that Hoffner recognized. The trouble was, he had no idea what that might be. Instead, he continued to stare at the symbols.

  It was nearly a minute before the voice at the desk interrupted: “You all right?”

  Hoffner looked up. The man was peering over. “What?” said Hoffner.

  “Your breathing. It’s very loud. You having trouble or something? What happened to your face?”

  Hoffner focused. “No. No trouble.”

  The man waited, then turned back to his paper.

  It was the distraction that cleared the way. Staring again at the pin, Hoffner saw why the university ring had been in the bag, why the names had appeared in the file inside his coat pocket, and why he had been right to come looking for Herr Thyssen. He scanned the cabinets across the room and headed for number II.

  The chemically pale Thyssen slid out easily. It was not, however, his lifeless expression that held Hoffner’s attention. Taking the left bicep, Hoffner slowly pulled the arm away from the torso. The body’s stiffness made only a small gap possible, but it was enough to detect the outline of two symbols cut into the soft flesh at the upper reaches of the ribs. They were identical to the ones on the pin.

  Hoffner felt the sharp pull of anticipation in his chest. He had seen these symbols before, studied them. The fact that they were locked away in a file somewhere up in his office only sent the acid deeper into his throat.

  ROSA

  IT WAS AS IF EIGHT YEARS had vanished in a matter of minutes.

  Hoffner sat at his desk and wondered how he could ever have forgotten these drawings. The same lingering doubts, the same selfdelusion that had claimed success then, now resurfaced with the appearance of the ten yellowed sheets lying in front of him.

  He reached into his drawer and pulled out a bottle of brandy as he read:

  Notes on meetings, December 4, 1918, through January 18, 1919, Thule Society, as recorded by Kriminal-Bezirkssekretär Stefan Meier, Kriminalpolizei, Munich:

  December 4: Our first meeting outside the beer hall. We meet at the house of Anton Drexler, a locksmith in the employ of the railroad shops. Drexler is a small, sickly man who talks for over an hour about the “mongrelization” of the German people and the corruption of the socialist regime. He refers to members of the government as “the Jew Eisner and the Jew Scheidemann.” There are nine of us. I believe we are only one of several cells of “initiates” meeting throughout the city tonight. Unlike Eckart, Drexler is a poor speaker. We are instructed to bring documented proof of our Aryan ancestry to the next meeting.

  December 9: Again we meet at the house of Drexler. Only four of us are permitted to remain once our papers are examined. Two other members of the Society are present, but we are not told their names. One of them is a doctor. He takes a sample of blood from each of us. We are then given copies of two books written by Guido von List (The Invincible and The Secret of Runes), magazines published by Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels (Prana and Ostara), a directory of pan-Germanic and anti-Semitic groups by Philipp Stauff (The German Defense Book), and the manifesto of the Armanist Religious Revival from the organization known as the Walvater Teutonic Order of the Holy Grail, written by Hermann Pohl. An excerpt from Liebenfels’s Ostara I, #69 makes clear the general thinking behind all of these writings: “The holy grail is an electrical symbol pertaining to the panpsychic powers of the pure-blooded Aryan race. The quest of the Templars for the grail was a metaphor for the strict eugenic practices of the Templar Knights designed to breed god-men.”

  December 13, 18, 24, 29: We meet at the house of the journalist Karl Harrer (founder of the Workers Political Circle and chairman of the German Workers Party [see below]). He is no better a speaker than Drexler and, over the four nights, takes us through the history of the Society (see below), the rituals of Rebirth and Order (see below), the Covenant of the pan-Germanic people (see below), and the hierarchy of the races (see below). We are each required to recite long passages from The Invincible and to exhibit physical stamina and strength by withstanding long periods of heavy objects being placed on our chests.

  January 5: We are taken to a house on the outskirts of the city, where we are given our first initiation rites. This includes full disrobement, the cutting of two runic symbols into the underside of the left upper arm, and the laying on of hands by a man we are instructed to call Tarnhari. We are told that he is the reincarnation of the god-chieftain of the Wölsungen tribe of prehistoric Germany. We are now required to recite from memory passages from The Invincible and to pledge a vow to our racial purity.

  January 9, 14, 15: The rituals continue at the house of Rudolf Freiherr von Seboottendorf, where we are joined by seven other initiates from around the city. Seboottendorf is a mystic trained in the art of Sufi meditation. Over the three nights he leads us in séance-like rituals meant to contact the Ancients from the lost island civilization of Thule. Seboottendorf is the only one of us to make contact.

  January 18: We are brought to the lodge on Seitz Strasse and introduced to the members of the Thule Society. There are, by rough estimation, seventy men present. I am able to learn twenty or so of the names (see below).

  The detective sergeant who had infiltrated the Thule Society and written the report in 1919 had been found dead in his apartment three days later, another apparent suicide. To this day, Hoffner’s friends in the Munich Kripo remain
ed skeptical—and with good reason. Hoffner closed the cover and ran his thumb across the label: Sewer Construction Applications—1906. Like the men at Phoebus, Hoffner had managed a little misdirection in filing of his own. Even now, the Rosa Luxemburg case was too raw to keep any of its papers properly filed. Red Rosa—the “Devil Jewess”—had last been seen bobbing in the Landwehr canal eight years ago, and while questions still remained about her disappearance, her death had brought the revolution of 1919 to a screeching halt.

  All those weeks with soldiers spilling into Berlin like wastewater, pitched battles along the Siegesallee and the Schloss Bridge, armed workers determined to bring every stone down—and then two shots to the back of the head, and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were dead. The leaders were gone. The Communists were finished.

  And the bodies? Liebknecht’s turned up the next morning—trampled, beaten, bloodied—an “unknown man” discovered in the fighting. But not Rosa. She was nowhere to be found. Two months slipped by, and everyone wondered where she had gone. Was she really dead? Had she escaped to the east, plotting her return with comrades Lenin and Trotsky? Could there still be reason to panic? And then, mercifully, the little corpse had floated up—swollen, disfigured. She had been there all along. That’s what they told themselves. The city was safe again. There had never been a Luxemburg case. There had been no files, nothing for the Kripo and Polpo to deny. There had been only an angry mob and the justified killing of a fanatic. And Berliners quickly forgot that Rosa had ever troubled them at all.

  And yet here was Hoffner with her file in his hands. The Thule Society document was frightening enough, but it was the story beyond the sergeant hanging from a rope that now troubled him—those eight weeks in 1919 while Berlin waited for Rosa’s body to appear: the weblike intricacies that had connected the Thulians with a ritualistic killer set loose on Berlin; the deceptions that had plunged the city into a panic fueled by the fear of Bolshevism; Rosa’s dead and preserved body, found that first night and ferreted away by the Polpo until they could use her to heighten the panic. All of this had been orchestrated by the Thulians with the sole aim of tearing down the then-fledgling government in the hope of replacing it with their own vision of purity and order: a mythic rebirth, forever seared into the flesh by those tiny runic symbols.

  Sascha had been seduced by these men. Fichte had been betrayed by them. Martha had been killed by them. And now, these Thulians, who had used Rosa Luxemburg—and Hoffner himself—and whose failure had forced them to slip silently away eight years ago, were once again making themselves known in Berlin. Hoffner had been lucky in 1919, lucky to find enough in the tangled strands to threaten them with exposure. The price for that luck had been almost everything. Maybe that was why he had chosen to forget as well.

  Hoffner poured himself another glass and picked up the telephone. The men of the Thule Society—once again hiding in the shadows—had evidently found a political outlet for their message. Why it had them venturing into the world of film and sound and sex was another question entirely.

  “Yes,” Hoffner said when the line engaged. “Kriminal-Kommissar Nikolai Hoffner here.” The woman on the other end seemed to perk up at the mention of the title. “I need to speak with someone at your political desk. Someone familiar with parties, organizations . . . Berlin, Munich . . . Yes. Thank you.”

  Half an hour later, Hoffner underlined the date “1926, October” and said, “You’ve been very kind, Herr Wenkel . . . No, I won’t be needing a complimentary subscription . . . Of course, if I’m working on anything of interest, the Tageblatt will be the first to know . . . Very good.”

  He placed the telephone in the cradle and stared down at his notes. It all looked so straightforward when laid out on a page. Draw a few arrows between the dates, and it was a direct line from the back room of a Munich beer garden to the Pharus Hall:

  1917: Workers Political Circle formed

  1918: members of WPC form German Workers Party

  1919–1920: GWP purchase of Völkischer Beobachter (newspaper edited by Dietrich Eckart)

  1920: new party leadership and addition of National Socialist to name

  1923, November: failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch (response to January occupation of Ruhr by French for unpaid reparations, former General Erich Ludendorff and unknown Corporal Adolf Hitler at helm)

  1923, December: Eckart dead (heart failure)

  1924, April through December: leaders of party in Landsberg prison (Ludendorff acquitted)

  1925: twelve seats won in Reichstag

  1926, October: Joseph Goebbels in Berlin

  It was a nice bit of digging for a reporter who seemed eager to make his mark. Not that the man at the Tageblatt had any inkling of the connection between the Thule Society—the organizing force behind the Workers Political Circle—and the group now calling itself the National Socialist German Workers Party. Nor could he have known that the detective pressing him for information had spent a rather interesting evening in 1919 in one of those Munich swill holes listening to the drunken rantings of the late Thulian Herr Eckart. Given Hoffner’s recollection of the man and his capacity for schnapps, heart failure seemed a kind assessment as the cause of death.

  It was on the morning after that meeting that Hoffner had been handed the file now lying in front of him. With its lists of members and publications, it made clear just how much money the Thulians had been sitting on in 1919. And yet, according to the reporter at the Tageblatt, the new National Socialists were dirt poor. Evidently failed coups and prison terms tended to dry up the coffers. They also attracted a very different kind of following. Perhaps, then, it was no surprise to hear the latest Thulian incarnation calling itself a “thinking man’s party”—an unemployed, pfennigless, marginalized, Jew-baiting, Communist-hating thinking man—but in large enough numbers to keep violence at the forefront without the help of old friends like the Freikorps.

  Even so, the Thulians had somehow found enough money to bankroll Phoebus’s purchase of the Hasenheide property. So, as it turned out, Hoffner’s first instincts to see Lang this morning had been right, after all.

  SOMEONE HAD WASHED the lobby carpets last night, leaving the smell of wet wool and lye as Hoffner’s first impression of the Deutsches Theater. It might have been worse. There might have been singing coming from behind the wall of doors.

  Instead, the theater was dark as Hoffner stepped through. The rows of seats looked like a legion of silent dwarfs readying for attack. The only thing keeping them from the stage was the presence of a barebulb lamp, whose glow was casting menacing shadows all the way down into the orchestra pit. The effect was a little sinister for merry widows and student princes, but maybe that was what lunch breaks were all about.

  The security man out front had told him to head for the Kammerspiele, the small theater where the real dramas rehearsed and performed. It was a quick march under the balcony overhang, past the left flank of dwarfs, and over to a door where a flight of stairs led down. Half a minute later, Hoffner heard the telltale sounds of acting.

  He pulled back a door and found himself the focus of perhaps twenty pairs of eyes. With them came an instant silence. The stage was directly to his right and up half a meter. In front of him, fifteen rows of seats climbed to the shadows of the back wall. Most of the eyes were positioned in small clumps throughout the house. No one seemed to move until a man stood and said, “This is a closed rehearsal, mein Herr. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  For the second time today, a voice from the darkness reached out for Hoffner. “My fault, Max.” It was Lang. “It’s up here, Nikolai.” A bit of light caught the reflection of a cigarette case somewhere near the back, and Hoffner headed up.

  This time, Lang was in the back row.

  “Coward,” said Hoffner.

  Lang laughed a quiet, throaty laugh and offered Hoffner a cigarette. “That’s films, Detective. This is the theater. The farther back, the better.”

  Hoff
ner took the cigarette and sat. “So what are we watching?”

  “Actors.”

  “You don’t sound all that keen.”

  “Just because I have to use them doesn’t mean I have to like them.”

  “Actresses, on the other hand . . .”

  “Very different, of course.”

  The three men onstage were back to whatever it was they were working through. One of them was perched on a ladder with a large bucket in his hands.

  Lang said, “Do you like Brecht, Detective?”

  “I don’t go to the theater much.”

  “Most of the people who like him don’t go to the theater much. The ones who’ve never been adore him.”

  Hoffner lit up. “Is the one with the bucket meant to be cleaning the ceiling?”

  “I’ve no idea, and I’ve been watching him for over an hour. What is it I can do for you, Detective?”

  Hoffner placed his hat on the seat between them. “You might be getting a telephone call from a young producer. He was just let go from Phoebus.” Hoffner expected at least some recognition, but Lang continued to stare at the stage.

  Lang said, “Word is that they’re in a bit of trouble, though what do you expect with—”

  “Yes,” said Hoffner. “With all those swinging tits and screaming ghouls. I’ve heard.”

  Lang nodded and made a wincing face as the bucket clanged to the ground. “He does that every ten minutes or so. I think he’s bored. Then again, it might be part of the thing. Who knows. So why will I be getting a call from this producer?”

  “He was rather helpful.”

  “Introduced you to a young lady friend of his?”

  “He let me see a few files I needed.”

  Lang’s eyes followed the bucket back up the ladder. “That was very kind of him. And now you want me to hire this little rat. I’m glad I could be so useful.” The man settled in again atop the ladder, and Lang said, “By the way, speaking of young ladies, have you found ours?”