A Night of Long Knives (Hannah Vogel)

by Cantrell, Rebecca

  Wilhelm pulled a string hanging from the lightbulb and closed the door. “What are you doing here?”

  I shrugged. “I was in the neighborhood and thought to drop in.”

  “Into the lion’s den. Sounds about right.”

  I sat in the chair behind the desk. It gave me a feeling of control, something I liked, especially in this room.

  “Have you found Anton?”

  I shook my head. “Have you?”

  “I said that I would bring him to your friend.” His voice sounded hurt.

  “I do not mean to sound rude.”

  “Apology accepted. Such as it was.”

  “Am I under investigation by the SS? Have they taken Anton?”

  He ran his index finger over his lips. I remembered the gesture from the first time I met him at El Dorado when he was still a teenager. Would he help me? I was the enemy, although if the SS scratched the surface of his life, they would know that he was too. It was dangerous for him to help me, and all I had on my side was hours spent in my kitchen, his love for my brother, his sense of honor, and his reckless nature. I folded my hands in my lap and waited.

  Finally, he flashed a devil-may-care grin that reminded me of my brother. “I can try to find that out. If you’re under investigation, there would be a file.”

  I let out a breath I had not known I held. My brother, Ernst, was watching out for me. “Can you check the purge list for a Manfred Brandt?” I opened the desk drawer. Rubber bands and a handkerchief.

  “Who was Brandt?” I noted his use of the past tense. If Mouse was on the list, he was expected to be dead. Nazi record keeping was that matter of fact, and that thorough.

  “Friend of Röhm’s.” I closed the drawer with a thud.

  “Then he was probably on the list.”

  “I like to be certain.”

  “So you want me to check the purge list, and the files for you and Anton?”

  “Are they secret?”

  “Not from me. I have the highest level of clearance.”

  He sounded so proud of it. I gritted my teeth. “Could you find out about the existence of the files without telling anyone that you are looking?”

  “Of course,” he said, sounding surprised that I had asked such a thing. I had to hope that he was correct and would be able to go undetected. I did not want him to endanger himself.

  “Have you heard of a Hauptsturmführer Lang?”

  “Little guy. Interrogations. They use him before they send people to the more . . . hands-on interrogators. He’s known for tricking people into revealing things. Clever.”

  I felt proud of Lang for getting information without having to beat it out of people. What kind of woman had I become? “Do you know where his office is, or where he lives?”

  “Based on the last time you asked me a question like that, you want to break in,” he said, referring to how he had helped me to sneak into El Dorado dressed as an SA brownshirt, complete with moustache, three years before.

  “You are learning.” I hoped to find out what information Lang had about me, and about Anton. If the Nazis had Anton, he would know, as closely as he followed the case. He might be the only one I knew who had that knowledge.

  “If it’s not one thing, it’s another with you.” He sighed and stood. “Let’s go.”

  As we neared the door, he unbuttoned his fly, so that when he stepped out he was buttoning it up.

  My face burning, I slid my arm through his, and we left the building amid catcalls.

  “Was that necessary?” We walked down Motz Strasse in the bright sunlight.

  “Would you rather them think we were talking about breaking into SS offices or fucking?”

  “We were not in there long. You must not have much stamina.”

  “Really?” He looked insulted. We both laughed.

  We strolled down Potsdamer Strasse, arm in arm. I wondered what Boris would think and looked around guiltily.

  He dropped me off a few blocks away at Haus Vaterland, a giant building full of theme restaurants. “Wait for me at the Wild West Bar.”

  I put my hand on his arm. “Let me go with you.”

  “It’s more dangerous if you’re there. You’re not SS. I don’t want you leaving the building as a prisoner.”

  I hesitated, but I saw his logic.

  I paid my entrance fee of one Reichsmark and walked across the lobby, past the immense fountains to the ugly marble staircases.

  I pushed through the swinging saloon doors and took a gander at the Wild West Bar. Anton would have loved it. If we were ever free, and in Berlin, I would bring him here. Tears welled up in my eyes. Would he ever see this room, or any room?

  A cowboy in a ten-gallon hat ushered me to a seat beside a round wooden table. The tabletop was painted billiard-green and each place had a trompe l’oeil painting of cards and stacks of poker chips. The cowboy handed me a menu with a flourish and touched the brim of his hat. I pictured Anton holding his hand palm-out in an Indian greeting.

  “Something to wet your whistle?”

  I tried not to laugh at his Western accent. “Something without alcohol. What do you recommend?”

  “Lemonade, fresh squeezed.”

  “One of those and . . .” I hurried through the menu. “Pork and beans.”

  He pulled an order pad out of his holster.

  The only other patrons were a table of tourists, British judging by their tweeds.

  The lemonade was, as promised, fresh squeezed. The beans and pork fat were salty, inedible, and authentic. I wished that Anton were here to share some. He would have bolted them down, authenticity being more important than flavor. I hoped he was eating well.

  I pulled out my notebook and wrote down what I knew so far. Lang could hang me for the contents of the notebook, but I had to keep the information until I knew that Sefton or Bella had gotten it out. I might as well add to it. It already contained enough to condemn me many times over.

  Still, I kept a weather eye on the door. I closed the notebook and put it away when Wilhelm walked in a few hours later.

  He sat across from me and ordered a whiskey from the cowboy. They held eye contact a second too long.

  “Pardner of yours?” I asked. The cowboy sauntered to the bar.

  “Once. Now he’s only someone to inform on me.”

  “Should we go?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “What did you find?”

  The cowboy headed over to our table with Wilhelm’s whiskey. Wilhelm leaned forward and kissed me full on the lips, for the second time that day, a warning to the cowboy.

  The cowboy plopped the shot glass on the table so forcibly that whiskey slopped onto the painted poker chips.

  I stared straight down at the green table until he was out of earshot. I remembered how years before, Wilhelm had gone into that same leftmost dark room with an aging and unattractive transvestite to get even with my brother. “Enough of that, Wilhelm. I will allow you to kiss me to save us both from SS enquiries, but not to get even with some waiter.”

  He knocked back his whiskey in one gulp, just as he did the night I saw him at El Dorado, when he wore a brown SA uniform instead of a black SS one. “My reasons were the same the second time.”

  I sighed. No point in arguing. And maybe he was right. He knew far more about the dangers that he confronted than I. “What did you find?”

  “No file on you or Anton Vogel or Anton Röhm. Not in the general files or in Lang’s office.”

  I relaxed my shoulders. One less thing to worry about.

  “Which is strange.” He toyed with his empty glass. “There should be one on Anton Röhm. There was a police file on him when he disappeared. I should have at least found that.”

  My shoulders tightened again. “What about Manfred Brandt?”

  “And that’s stranger. Even if he wasn’t on the purge list, which I couldn’t find either by the way, he’d have a file. Practically everyone has a file. There’s even a file on me
. Clean. I checked.”

  “Did you find Lang’s address?” If he did not have files in his office, perhaps he had brought them home.

  Wilhelm recited a street address not too far from Haus Vaterland. “He left headquarters with some other officers so he’s not going to be home for at least a little while.”

  “Now is the time,” I said. “And this time it is my turn. I will do this one alone. Two people will cause more notice than one.”

  He ducked his head in acknowledgement. We stood. He abruptly pulled me into a real embrace. I clung to him. When we separated, both our eyes were full.

  “Be careful,” he whispered.

  “You too.”

  The cowboy stormed over and handed Wilhelm the bill.

  We walked out of the Wild West Bar together. I hoisted my satchel higher on my shoulder, Luger bumping my hip.

  24

  I walked to Lang’s apartment, sweat running down my back. Berlin had never been so hot in all my memory. Already late afternoon, and I walked in the shadows of the apartment buildings, but heat radiated off the stone sidewalks. We needed rain.

  How could I gain access to his apartment? I had no key, and no idea of how to open a locked door without one. I thought of calling Agnes and hiring a lock picker, but that would take too much time, even assuming I trusted her to find someone. And who would be willing to break into the home of a leader of the SS? Only a mother desperate for news of her child.

  Perhaps he left his windows open, not an uncommon thing to do in this heat. I circled his apartment, an older building, built in the classical Wilhelminian style, like Lang himself. Large windows faced the street. According to Wilhelm, Lang lived on the bottom floor.

  Even in this heat his windows stayed shut. In fact, his was the only apartment in the building with closed windows. I supposed that too was in character.

  A ROOM TO LET sign hung in a window on the top floor. I rang the landlady’s bell, and she hurried out to look me over before letting me in. Unlike most landladies, she was young, younger than I. Her unfashionably long hair was pulled back in a bun and dark circles shadowed her eyes. On her thin hip she bounced a baby wearing only a diaper.

  “May I help you?” Her diction was pure Hanover, high German at its finest. What was she doing in Berlin?

  “I noticed the sign.” I pointed upward. “May I see the room?”

  I had no idea how that would help me break into his apartment, but it would get me closer. I would have to trust to luck and a sharp eye.

  “Please follow me.” She led me past his apartment door. The baby starfished his limbs out to the side as she bent to unlock her own door.

  Instinctively, I reached for him as he tipped back. She hefted him safely back onto her hip and gave me a surprised look, as if trying to catch a falling baby were an unusual act.

  “Here.” She handed him to me. “Hold this.”

  The baby smiled. I guessed his age at about six months. He reached one sweaty hand up and grabbed my hair in his fist. I laughed and untangled it. It had been too long since I held a baby. I bent my head and sniffed his soft curls. Nothing smells quite like a baby.

  When I raised my head, the landlady gazed at me, astonished.

  “I am sorry. It has been a long time since I smelled a baby.”

  “The room is not for children.”

  “Mine are grown.”

  We stepped into her front hall. Along the wall next to the door ran a row of neatly labeled pegs. On each peg hung an apartment key. Lang’s key was second from the bottom. I turned my back to the pegboard and handed her the baby. When her eyes moved down to his, I grabbed Lang’s key behind my back.

  The baby fussed and stretched his arms back toward me.

  “He’s so hot. Nothing suits him.”

  “Perhaps a wet cloth. My son used to love to suck on those.” True, after a fashion. My brother, Ernst, had loved that and raising him was the closest I had come to having a baby. He had never been a fussy baby except when teething.

  “Wait here.” She carried the wailing child down the hall.

  Lang’s house key was standard, not much different from Boris’s, which I carried in my satchel. I dug out Boris’s key and, not without a pang, switched Lang’s key for his. He would be unhappy to learn that I had switched out his house key with another man’s. I dropped Lang’s key into my satchel and hung his keyring, now holding Boris’s key, back on the peg. Eventually it would be discovered, but perhaps not for days.

  I stood fanning myself with my notebook when she returned. The baby sucked mightily on a scrap of blue flannel.

  She extolled the virtues of the single room, desperate for a tenant. Not surprising, since the stifling tiny room looked like attic storage. I thanked her, but told her it was too hot.

  “Everywhere is too hot.” She shifted the baby to her other hip.

  “Nevertheless, I am not interested.”

  She led me downstairs and showed me through the front door. On the outside, I caught it before it closed, waited to give her time to get back inside her own apartment, and sneaked in.

  I hurried down the hall to Lang’s door. What if he was home? I did not dare to knock and alert his neighbors to my presence. I would have to trust Wilhelm, and hope that I was not about earn myself a free ride to Gestapo headquarters.

  With sweat-slick hands I fumbled with the key before jamming it into the lock. I turned it. The door clicked open smoothly. I stepped over the threshold, wincing when a floorboard in the entryway creaked. I pushed the door closed with a soft thud, then relocked it. I did not want anyone stumbling in, and if Lang came home, he would suspect nothing.

  The apartment felt as hot as the high plains of the Apache in August, or at least that’s what Anton would have said. The smell of lemon polish filled the hall. A stand by the door held a lone umbrella, furled. A hat tree stood to attention next to the umbrella stand, holding a recently brushed gray fedora and an overcoat, both too warm to wear in this weather. I ran my fingers through the silken pockets, shuddering at the sense of intimacy. One pocket yielded a clean, pressed handkerchief, the other nothing.

  I tiptoed down the hall into the parlor. His furniture was Spartan, but surprisingly modern: a simple black leather couch and chair grouped around an oval wooden table. Everything gleamed. On the table a young Lang smiled from a framed photograph of a boy on a beach with his mother and father, a terrier now long dead jumped in front of them with a stick of driftwood in his mouth. Lang’s eyes were alight with mischief and his left arm was throwing something out of view of the camera, perhaps another stick for the dog. I wondered what had happened to change the mischievous boy into the sinister man.

  I drew my eyes from the picture and focused on searching his apartment. He knew a great deal about me when he stopped me at Lichterfelde. If the files were not in the SS office, perhaps he had them here.

  It would be easy to search because it was so spare. I did a quick pass through the parlor. Not a scrap of paper, let alone a file. Even the desk in the corner stood empty, as if he had known I was coming and cleared it out. In spite of the punishing heat, goose bumps raised on my arms. I wiped my palms on my dress and searched the desk for hidden compartments, but found none.

  The kitchen, also immaculate and containing little food, yielded up no secrets either.

  I stepped into the only remaining room: his bedroom. It too smelled of lemon, and I wondered how often his housekeeper came, or if he polished his furniture himself. The curtains were drawn, but light filtered through.

  A black wool blanket covered his immaculately made single bed. On a whim, I lifted the blanket and smiled, perfect corners. Atop his night table rested a clock and a pair of folded reading glasses, the only personal touch in the room. I spun around, trying to decide where to search.

  I started with his simple dresser, top to bottom. The first drawer contained neatly folded underwear. I gritted my teeth and rifled through them, expecting to find nothing. But in the corner I
spotted a square of paper. I pulled it out, surprised, and turned it over. My mouth dropped open in shock. A picture of me.

  I practically dropped the photograph. Almost two decades old, taken when I received my Abitur, the last day of school. I wore a light summer dress much like today. My wide and innocent smile said that I had no idea my fiancé would be dead in the War within a week. Where had Lang found the picture?

  My apartment. He had entered my apartment with me three years ago. He must have stolen it then. I tried not to think about my picture lying in his underwear drawer for three years as I returned it. As tempted as I was to steal it back, I did not wish to tip him off. The other drawers contained nothing interesting.

  I moved to his tall wardrobe, ignoring my reflection in the mirror. I did not want to see myself in his room again. Dark suits hung neatly, hangers perfectly spaced. I slid my hand into the empty pockets. Did he ever come here? Perhaps his real home was elsewhere.

  A pair of polished shoes and a pair of boots rested on the bottom of the wardrobe, next to cedar shoe trees and a folded flannel cloth mottled with black shoe polish. A spare SS hat on the top shelf.

  I closed the door, about to give up in despair, when I spotted a grain of sawdust on the floor. I tapped on the back. A muffled thud answered my knock. The door sounded hollow.

  My heart pounded as I ran sweaty palms across the door, looking for a trigger. Nothing. I pressed on each corner, and finally a panel slid open. Specks of sawdust drifted to the floor. Gray file folders, held in place by elastic bands, nestled in a painstakingly carved out compartment. He had secrets after all.

  I slid out the topmost folder. A tingle ran down my spine as I read my own name. Hannah Vogel. I flipped it open. My police folder from 1931. I raced through his case notes. He had done a thorough history of me, listing details about my life back to my school times. He knew far more about my everyday life than Boris.

  I read on. After my disappearance he suspected that I kidnapped Anton from Röhm. The last page listed my known associates. A penciled circle surrounded Boris’s name. Banker was written next to it with a question mark. I flipped back a page. He had penciled in a page of recent notes in his cramped handwriting. They mentioned that I was expected to marry Ernst Röhm and listed the date that Hitler had him arrested. No mention of my meeting with Sefton, so hopefully he had not followed me there. I set the folder on the floor and went to the next one.