A Night of Long Knives (Hannah Vogel)

by Cantrell, Rebecca

  “I did. I might come back again, assuming you still want me.”

  “Why?” He chewed the end of his cigar and dropped his voice. “Does this have to do with Röhm?”

  “Indirectly. One of Röhm’s men was killed last night. I wish to know about the case.”

  He laughed bitterly. “Case? We’ve been ordered by none other than Hermann Göring to burn files related to murders around the time of the Night of the Long Knives.”

  “But this was no execution. He was—”

  “No investigation. In case you hadn’t heard, they killed your friend Röhm.”

  “He was not my friend.” I stopped walking. “Really, Fritz—”

  He ignored me. “They killed him and many others. We don’t have numbers. But we do have orders.”

  My heart sank. No one investigated Mouse’s death. Or anyone else’s. “Did you take crime scene photos?”

  “Probably, if it didn’t look like an SA matter. In case someone changes his mind, and we must investigate after all.”

  I described the murder location, and he installed me in the office of a colleague out for the day so that no one would see me loitering in the hall. Then he hurried to fetch the folders. He clearly wanted me out of the police station as soon as possible. I had no desire to tarry.

  He returned with two gray folders. The miller and Mouse. I opened them. He read upside down, like old times.

  I examined the first picture. A chubby man in a long apron sprawled next to a partially open door, lifeless eyes open and surprised. A ring of keys rested near his outstretched right hand where I had dropped them. The miller. I had not seen his face. According to the file, he had a broken rib, Mouse’s trademark, and had been stabbed through the heart. Had Mouse killed him? The miller was survived by a wife and three children.

  I opened the second folder and looked at Mouse. He looked just as he had when I left him the night before. Eyes that I had closed, palms up by his sides, blood soaking the front of his brown shirt, my makeshift bandage drenched. Seeing the picture brought back the smell of his blood mingled with the overwhelming smell of flour. I swallowed, nauseated. “How close was the shooter?” I said, trying to distance myself.

  “Close.” Fritz tapped his thick finger against tiny black dots on the edges of Mouse’s shirt, near the bullet hole. “See the powder burns on his clothes?”

  “Why would he let someone get so close with a gun?” Mouse was more savvy than that.

  He shrugged. “Perhaps someone he didn’t perceive as a threat.”

  “Can you tell how tall the shooter was?”

  “Now why would you ask that? But no.”

  Because I wanted to know if it was a child. I looked back at the miller’s file. “Different causes of death. Seems odd.”

  He scanned both reports. “Looks like the miller was killed first, perhaps a half hour before the second one.”

  I suspected that Mouse had killed the miller, and someone else had killed Mouse. But who? I shuddered. Whoever it was, he had Anton. I stared at the picture, trying to forget Anton’s trusting eyes. He had stood somewhere in the frame of this picture, not long before it was taken.

  My gaze moved to Mouse. He wore a sheathed SA dagger, one of the commemorative ones Röhm had commissioned earlier this year for SA members who had joined before December 1931, complete with an engraving of Röhm’s signature. They would be grinding those signatures off soon, I bet. Loyalty to the SA and Röhm were not the honor they had been last week.

  I traced my finger across the picture of the bloody blade. Mouse had been armed with the same kind of weapon that had killed my brother. And he could have killed me with it when I bent over him to work on his wound. A chill ran down my back. “Do you suppose he used that dagger to kill the miller?”

  Fritz took a deep breath. “No comment.”

  I held the photo close to my eyes. Dropped near the body was a bent twig. Anton’s Indian sign! My heart leaped. He had been there. I studied the twig. Three bends. So he had been there with two people. Mouse and someone else.

  “What do you see?”

  I pointed to the twig, furious with myself for having it missed it when I stood near Mouse. “Anton was there. That is his sign.”

  “Anton? At a murder scene? Where is he?”

  “I do not know, Fritz.” I fought down a wave of tears. “I think that the man who shot Mouse took him.”

  “The victim’s name was Mouse?” His square hand twitched. The police officer in him wanted to write that down.

  “Manfred Brandt,” I whispered. “SA.”

  He skimmed the report. “We have a suspect, if we could investigate, but the SA connection precludes it.”

  “You have a suspect?” I kept my voice calm.

  “A woman. Mid-thirties, short blond hair, cleft chin—” He looked at me in shock. “That’s you.”

  The taxi driver had given them my description, as I had known he would. “He was shot before I found him.”

  “God damn it, Hannah.” It was so incongruous for him to swear that I almost smiled. Almost. “What are you mixed up in this time?”

  “Röhm’s men caught us. His men kidnapped Anton, and they took me to Hanselbauer. Friday night.”

  “But the next morning they started the killing there.”

  “I know. I last saw Anton the night before the killings. . . .”

  He came around the desk to my side. His arm went around my shoulder.

  “Easy there,” he said, as if I were a horse or a dog.

  I leaned against him, pulling myself together. When I stepped away, he dropped his arm, revealing his Nazi party badge.

  “You are a Nazi too. Devout?”

  “I’m as devout as I must be. Like most of us.” I nodded. I too had helped the Nazis to save a child’s life. Who was I to judge? “So who do you think killed him?”

  “We had one other lead.” He ran his stubby finger down the report. “Here.” His finger tapped a line. “We found an automobile parked near the mill. Registered to a Gregor Gerber.”

  Mouse’s partner. Had he killed him to keep the ransom for himself? Or had he only lent Mouse his automobile?

  “If Gerber’s a Nazi, then—”

  “I heard he is not SA,” I said, remembering Agnes telling me so.

  He shrugged and fell silent.

  I let him think for a while, then cleared my throat.

  He came out of his reverie and spoke. “If I had to speculate, and this would be off the record, if you still had a record, I’d guess that if your man was close enough to Röhm, then they’ve been hunting him since that first night. Don’t know why the automobile would still be there. Seems as if the Nazis who shot him would have retrieved it.”

  “So Mouse is just a latecomer to the executions?” I hoped that was wrong. If not, the Nazis had Anton, and he was already dead.

  “The explanation doesn’t always have to be complicated, Hannah.” He reordered the reports and shuffled them into the folders.

  “If he was on their list, then why did they not murder him the first day?”

  “They had a list? Have you seen it?”

  My mind clicked. “Or perhaps he betrayed Röhm.”

  “Assuming there was a betrayal.”

  “Perhaps it was not the Nazi leadership. Perhaps it was an SA man out to get revenge for someone betraying them to the SS.”

  “Or perhaps he committed suicide,” said Fritz with a wry smile. “Speculation will only get you so far.”

  “He did not commit suicide by shooting himself in the torso. I imagine he would have picked the head.”

  “Given it some thought, have you?”

  I changed the subject. “Do you wish to notify the next of kin? The murder victim’s wife and son live over the Sing-Sing in Neukölln.” I did not tell him that I already notified the widow, or that he would not find her there in any case.

  “We’re not allowed to notify next of kin.” He looked at the office door.


  “So the widows, the sisters, the mothers, wait, never knowing?” I tried to catch his eye, to make him think of the next of kin. How would Bettina feel if she waited for him to come home, never to know if he was alive or dead?

  He shifted. “I don’t like it any more than you do.”

  I found that hard to believe. He had not seen the women, chronicled their pain and loss. He saw only files. “Is that so?”

  A muscle twitched under his eye. I was being unfair, but my heart was with those women standing in line, never to find out what had happened.

  I sighed. “Tell Bettina I send my love.”

  “I will, Hannah.” He smiled, a worn-out version of the smile I had known for more than a decade. “And I’ll check around, discreetly, to see if the police picked up Anton last night, a boy on his own. If they did, I’ll bring him back to our house.”

  Tears of gratitude stung my eyes. “Thank you, Fritz. I am sorry for what I said. You are a good friend.”

  “I do the best I can, and I know it’s not enough.” He spread his broad hands. “It’s all closing in. You don’t know.”

  “I don’t. And I wish you didn’t either.”

  We embraced, and he hurried out the office door. I gave him a few minutes’ head start, then left.

  A travesty that the police were not following up on Mouse’s murder. Perhaps it was not political. Why would the Nazis follow him to a windmill in the middle of nowhere? They could have shot him at his house, in front of his wife and child, or dragged him to Lichterfelde for the firing squad. Unless Lang had made the connection with the telegram and followed them to the windmill to see where they might lead him. One more loose end tied up.

  Back out on the street with my notes, I resolved to go to the address where Gerber had registered his automobile. If Gerber had killed Mouse and kidnapped Anton, perhaps they were holed up there waiting for another ransom attempt. But if he had, why had he abandoned his automobile for the police to find and fled in a taxi? Perhaps the automobile had engine trouble.

  I hiked my satchel up on my shoulder. Anton had to be at Gerber’s. Why waste time second-guessing Gerber’s motives? The best plan was to go to his address, get him back, and leave the mystery of the automobile unexplained. I could think about it in Switzerland.

  I sat on a bench in front of the police station, facing the busy street, and pulled my satchel into my lap. Uniformed policemen trotted in and out of the imposing front doors, once tough and independent thinkers, now registered Nazis. How had Hitler gotten to them so quickly and so thoroughly? As devout as they needed to be, so Fritz had said, but how devout was that? If the police picked Anton up and discovered that he was Anton Röhm, would they try to find his mother, or would they devoutly turn him over to the Nazis for execution?

  I pulled Boris’s street map out of my satchel and looked up Gerber’s address. The street was near the Spree, in the factory district, if I recalled correctly. I sighed. It looked like a business address, not a home. If so, I would have to track him from there.

  On the way to Gerber’s, I bought a lemonade, too bitter, from a vendor in a stuffy underground shop. That would have to do for lunch.

  I arrived at an empty lot, fenced on all sides. I circled until I found a knothole to peep through. Yellowed newspapers and trash blown against the fence formed an unbroken ring. Brown grass grew high and undisturbed. Gerber did not live here. No one did. Nor was there a business. He gave a false address when he registered his automobile. I slumped against the fence. I had no leads, nothing.

  I sat in the hard-packed dirt and leaned my back against the fence and thought. Anton was gone, and I had no idea where to find him. I bit back tears. But sitting here would not help me to find him. Perhaps Agnes had found a number for Gerber.

  And if not, there was always Wittenbergplatz. Agnes had said he sometimes went there. Tonight I would stake out Wittenbergplatz for a man with no right index finger and thumb. I thought back to the time that I was almost raped there, in 1931, when investigating my brother’s death. I did not relish the idea of going back after dark.

  I stood and brushed dust from my dress. I could not sit around until tonight or hope that someone would contact Frau Röhm about a ransom, or that Anton would escape on his own and end up at Bettina’s. I could not stand still.

  21

  Who else might know about Mouse’s murder? Agnes might, but it was still too early to reach her. Sefton was next, I decided. He had known Röhm, and Mouse and Röhm were close. A slim chance, but I was beyond caring.

  I hailed a taxi to the Adlon, hoping that Sefton was in and wondering if the man who had left Frau Röhm’s valise of money might also be there and recognize me. I hurried up the grand staircase.

  No one took special notice of me, and when I knocked on Sefton’s elegant door he answered it himself, wearing his paisley dressing gown. He looked as if he had been awake for a long time, although patchy dark stubble on his jaw showed that he had not yet shaved.

  “You know it is almost two?”

  He rubbed his eyes, but he did not look tired. “Too early to get up. Come back at tea time.”

  He started to close the door, but I pushed my way in.

  A small self-possessed woman stood in the center of his room, fashionable gown and shoes immaculate and in stark contrast to my shabby shoes and sweaty dress.

  I had not seen her in years and never expected to find her in Sefton’s bedroom. Her men came from the major aristocracy. Sefton’s pedigree was too short, so this was something beside a simple assignation. Or perhaps she was mixing with the lower classes for a thrill.

  “Bella.” I inclined my head. Bella Fromm was the society reporter for the Ullstein papers. Her family was old aristocracy. She mingled with counts, dukes, and even the kaiser. She was also Jewish. Berlin was no place for her anymore. Still, while my friend Paul, another Jewish reporter, had been replaced, I was certain that her powerful patrons had enabled her to keep her job. “Lovely to see you again.”

  “Hannah.” She held out her gloved hand at such an angle that I could kiss it or shake it. I shook it, rings hard against my palm, even through her glove. “I thought you’d left Berlin.”

  “I returned.”

  “Leaving soon?” She glanced at Sefton’s polished hotel door.

  “Germany?” I said, pretending to misunderstand her. “Are you?”

  She shook her head, flashing her jewelled earrings. “Not while I still can do good.”

  She was braver than I, and I had to respect her for it. She would stay until the SS dragged her off to a camp. “Admirable sentiments. I am grateful there are still Germans working to do good.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Same as you.” I forced a smile on my face. “Working to do good.”

  Sefton looked from one of us to the other in fascination, as if we played a highly amusing game of tennis.

  “I haven’t heard from you in years.” Her tone was accusatory, as if I had left as a personal affront.

  “I do not appear in the society pages. So perhaps you were looking in the wrong place.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  I turned to Sefton. “Get dressed. I cannot stare at those pale hairy legs another minute.”

  “Hear, hear!” She clapped her gloved hands.

  “This is where I point out that, all evidence to the contrary, this is in fact my hotel room. And I can dress howsomever I wish, pet.” But he padded to the dresser and pulled out a pair of finely creased trousers.

  “I was sorry to hear about the von Schleichers,” I said to Bella. I was not, much. With his shady backroom deals, ex-Chancellor von Schleicher had done as much to help the Nazis into power as anybody, albeit inadvertently. His new bride, however, was probably innocent, and both had been gunned down by the Nazis even before Röhm. “I know that you were close.”

  She nodded, little chin set firm. “I lost more than a few dear friends to this purge.”

  Sefton rummaged in the wardro
be behind her, eventually pulling out a white shirt. I smelled starch across the room. Adlon had wonderful laundry service.

  “For goodness’ sake, sit down,” he said before leaving us alone.

  I perched on the desk chair I had sat in while typing the day before yesterday, when the world, already complex, seemed simpler than now. The typewriter was nowhere in evidence. Back under his dancing shoes?

  She sat on the wingback chair, her own back straight.

  “What is the governmental reaction to the purge?” She would know. She had friends in the highest of places, even amongst aristocratic Nazi sympathizers.

  She hesitated. We had disagreed politically for years, she a monarchist, I a socialist. But we both knew that neither of us would ever be a Nazi. “Officially they are delighted.”

  “What do the diplomats think?” She attended most diplomatic functions and threw the most extravagant diplomatic parties in Berlin. Although I knew of them, I, as Peter Weill or Hannah Vogel, had never been invited to one. Sefton might have been deemed worthy of a few, if he brought someone interesting with him.

  “I’ll know more tomorrow.” She opened a gold cigarette case and extracted a cigarette. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “I do,” I said, more to annoy her than because I minded.

  She returned the cigarette to the case and closed it with a snap. “Hitler is due to attend a party the Americans are having at their embassy tonight. I’m certain that the official version of the bloodbath will be trotted out then.”

  “What are the Americans celebrating?”

  “Their independence day, July Fourth.”

  “Ironic timing. Considering.”

  She gave a wry chuckle and slipped the cigarette case in her bag.

  “So, what do you know now?” I said, not letting my original question go.

  She shrugged her tiny shoulders. “Some think it’s the beginning of the end for the Nazis. Others think it’s the end of the beginning.”

  “I vote for the second. But I hate it.”

  “I fear that you are correct.” The way that she said you let me know how surprised she was that I was correct.

  Sefton emerged from the bathroom, fully clothed. “How are you two getting on?”