Death’s Head

by Campbell Armstrong

  He shook his head: did he detect a sound of pity in her voice? He wanted suddenly to laugh. It seemed absurd – being offered comfort by a prostitute whom he couldn’t afford to pay.

  ‘Don’t you have a job?’

  ‘That’s a stupid question,’ he said. ‘Don’t you recognize me?’

  ‘Recognize you?’

  ‘I’m von Ribbentrop.’

  She raised her eyebrows: ‘I’m Eva Braun.’

  ‘Then perhaps we might have recognized each other,’ he said.

  She opened her bag and fished inside it. Amongst various objects – hairgrips, a tattered pack of playing cards, cigarettes, items of cosmetics – she produced a scrap of paper with an address on it.

  ‘If you want a bath,’ she said, and she smiled for the first time.

  He took the paper silently: written on it in broad pencilled letters was an address in the Barbarossa Strasse. He thrust it into his overcoat pocket, not knowing how to react. He felt the need to say something, anything, but he remained silent.

  ‘Sometimes I’m there, sometimes not,’ she said.

  He looked at her but already she had pushed past him to the street where she was soliciting a passer-by. He saw the man light her cigarette for her and then they became involved in conversation. He watched them move along the pavement, the woman taking the man’s arm, the man trying self-consciously to free himself from her grip. Why had she given him the address? Did she imagine that he might one day come into some money and become a regular customer? Or was it something else – some sense of guilt she was perhaps trying to expiate? As he stepped from the doorway into the busy street it did not occur to him that her offer might be genuine and her act one of impulsive generosity, because these were terms that had been erased from his vocabulary.

  Schwarzenbach heard the noise a second time: there was someone in the surgery. His first reaction was that Eberhard and Spiers had returned – perhaps with some new scrap of information, perhaps even to take him to their headquarters for intensive questioning. He searched his mind frantically. What had he overlooked? What had he forgotten? Moving into the kitchen and towards the surgery door, he tried to dismiss the Americans from his thoughts: he was becoming obsessed with them. Whoever was in the surgery, it didn’t have to be either Eberhard or Spiers – it could be anybody. One of his patients, perhaps, with an emergency case. Anybody. He listened. The sound came again. Someone was moving around the room. He went forward, hesitating at the door that led to the surgery. He wanted to call out but didn’t. Catching his breath, he pushed the door open. The surgery – with a window that faced the street – seemed inordinately bright and for a moment, a foolish moment, he thought that the room was empty, that the sounds he had heard had been manufactured – not by some human agent – but by the house itself. And then he saw Franz Seeler standing by the door. He went to his desk and sat down.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come here, Seeler,’ he said, aware of the way in which his voice was broken and hoarse.

  Seeler looked profoundly apologetic: ‘I heard what happened last Thursday. I heard about Broszat and the others –’

  Schwarzenbach looked up at him. ‘You should have been there. Why weren’t you?’

  ‘I couldn’t make it,’ Seeler answered. He sat down. ‘Thank God.’

  ‘It’s as well for you that you couldn’t make it.’ Schwarzenbach felt unaccountably nervous all of a sudden, as though Seeler’s presence had a deeper and more intense meaning than he could at present fathom.

  ‘And Broszat’s dead,’ Seeler said.

  ‘They’ve got Katzmann as well.’ Schwarzenbach looked at the other man: Seeler was of a physical type that he couldn’t tolerate – a broad, flat forehead that suggested brute idiocy, a nose pushed back against his face like a prizefighter, and thick negroid lips.

  ‘Katzmann?’ Seeler asked. ‘They took Katzmann but they didn’t keep him for long. My information is that when he learned he was to be handed over to the Russians he committed suicide.’

  ‘Katzmann did?’

  ‘So I have heard.’

  So Spiers had been bluffing – in all likelihood Katzmann had told the Americans nothing. Schwarzenbach rose from his desk and went to the window. With increasing frequency these days he found himself scanning the street below the window. ‘Why did you come here anyway? It’s a bloody stupid thing to do.’

  ‘I came to say that I’m leaving Germany.’

  ‘Leaving? When?’

  ‘I go tonight,’ Seeler said. ‘First to Geneva and from there to Spain.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Africa, possibly.’ Seeler shrugged, as if it didn’t matter where he went so long as he left Germany.

  ‘And you came to offer your farewells?’ Schwarzenbach asked.

  ‘Not entirely.’

  ‘What then?’

  Seeler was silent for some time, playing with his fingers, cracking the bones in a way Schwarzenbach found highly annoying. He seemed intent on jerking each finger out of its socket.

  ‘I think you should come with me,’ he said at last.

  Schwarzenbach was surprised. ‘How can I?’

  ‘It can be arranged quite easily. You only have to say the word, and I will see that your papers are prepared and tell you how the transport has been arranged –’

  ‘Why should I? Why should I run away?’

  Seeler laughed: ‘Gerhardt, you persist in fooling yourself that nothing can touch you. You’re blind. Do you imagine that you’ll be able to live out the rest of your life without the truth being discovered? Do you really think that?’

  ‘I hope so –’

  ‘Just think. Just think about it a moment. All over Germany now people are putting the bits and pieces together. It’s like a big jigsaw puzzle. Someday someone will turn up the fact that there’s something very odd about Gerhardt Lutzke. I don’t know what – but the piece just won’t fit the jigsaw. And they’ll start to ask questions. Embarrassing questions for you. Don’t you realize that?’

  Schwarzenbach felt that he was being patronized: ‘It may seem extraordinary to you, Seeler, but I feel much safer here than I would in Spain or anywhere else.’

  Seeler made a noise at the back of his throat that might have been either contempt or disbelief. ‘Gerhardt, time is running out for every one of us. Why are you so stubborn? Why don’t you realize what’s going on around you?’

  Schwarzenbach moved towards his desk. It was preposterous that Seeler should come here and tell him what to do. Why didn’t Seeler simply leave? What did he want? Schwarzenbach felt curiously safe all at once, safe and impregnable, as if nothing could ever touch him, as if he were above and beyond the whole squalid situation. Seeler was the one who wanted to run, to get out: Seeler was the coward.

  ‘I’ve nothing to say. I’m staying here.’ Schwarzenbach touched the various objects that lay on the surface of his desk – paper-weight, pen, blotter – like a man seeking some sort of proof that the external world existed. Why couldn’t he make Seeler realize that there was nothing to be gained in fleeing? A life of exile – foreign countries, alien languages, strange food, uncomfortable climates: what sort of existence was that? It was a negation of life: it was unGerman.

  Seeler gazed at the upturned palms of his large hands. ‘It’s your funeral, Gerhardt. Stay in Germany, if that’s what you want. But do you really think they won’t track you down? Do you imagine that they aren’t looking for you even now, at this very moment?’

  ‘Looking for me?’ Schwarzenbach laughed. ‘They may be looking for a man called Schwarzenbach, but they aren’t looking for me.’

  Seeler shook his head incredulously: ‘You imagine that you’ve got it made, don’t you? How long do you think your false papers will support you?’

  ‘You won’t convince me,’ Schwarzenbach said.

  Seeler hesitated a moment and then, moving forward, held out his hand. ‘Who knows? We may meet again.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Schwarzenbach
said. ‘And perhaps not.’

  ‘The world isn’t such a large place, Gerhardt.’

  Seeler shrugged. At the door he stopped and turned, as if he were about to say something else. But he was silent, and when he left he went in silence.

  Schwarzenbach went into the kitchen and opened a fresh bottle of cognac. He poured himself a drink and sat at the table clenching the glass tightly. The room was cold. For a moment he wondered if perhaps there was a grain of truth in what Seeler had said; but after a moment’s consideration he realized that there wasn’t. Poland was a century away and his memories of it now were dismal recollections, like those of some half-glimpsed object brought back to mind. The trail was dead. What did it matter if Bothmann’s papers made mention of someone called Schwarzenbach? The Polish landscape hid beneath its surface more crumbling bones and putrefying corpses than there were names to be accounted for: who could say with certainty that Schwarzenbach hadn’t died, and was buried there, buried deep in some miserable weed-choked field? There was nothing to prove otherwise.

  When he had finished his drink he put on his overcoat and went out.

  He kept thinking about the woman. Why had she given him the address in the Barbarossa Strasse? Did she want something out of him? But what? He had nothing to give. There was nothing he could offer her. Walking through crowded streets, considering her, he rejected the possibility that she had been motivated by kindness. It was a concept alien to the post-war world, incongruous in ruined cities where everyone grafted and struggled to survive.

  It was turning dark now. A hard wind was blowing through the streets. She was a prostitute and nothing more. She sold her flesh – hadn’t he seen her in action? He remembered the painted face and the threadbare clothes, the dead fur that lay around her shoulders. What could he offer a woman like that, even if he wanted to offer anything? And yet it was human contact of a kind, a collision with another being after days of silence and solitude. It broke the barriers he had erected around himself like the last frail fences of sanity, and it had drawn him, however briefly, into a pale memory of what relationships were like. But he was being absurd: she was only a whore – and Berlin was full of whores, every woman would spread her legs for a few ounces of fresh butter – and since she was no more than that it was ludicrous to invest the meeting with a significance it couldn’t possibly have.

  He took the scrap of paper from his pocket and unfolded it slowly. Peering at the faded letters in the dim light, it occurred to him that possibly he was the butt of a practical joke. What guarantee did he have that the woman actually lived there? That it wasn’t the address of the local police station, or the headquarters of an organization, or even more likely still a blank bombsite? He tucked the paper back into his pocket. He turned off the Lutherstrasse and into a side street where the wind, travelling full blast, struck him with threats of ice. Frozen, he found his way into a bar and spent the last of his money on a glass of beer.

  He stood against the bar and listened to the silence of conversations around him.

  Schwarzenbach waited for a break in the passing traffic before he could cross the street. The lamps of vehicles hung in the darkening air like disembodied eyes searching for recognizable objects. Lamps like those had been suspended over rows of barbed wire in the concentration camp: he heard a voice, someone crying out from a point somewhere above, and then he realized that what he had heard had existed only in his imagination. He shook his head. Thinking of Seeler, some part of his mind still wondering if Seeler were right, he found his way to the other side of the street. Muffled in heavy greatcoats, three or four American soldiers passed him, and he heard their excited talk drift away as they receded. Was Seeler right? Was he right to take his chance and run? And exactly how much credence could Schwarzenbach put into Seeler’s warning? How long do you think your false papers will support you? How long? How long?

  The wind blew strongly against him, catching papers and tossing them up in the air as if they were white hands grasping for something solid. Suddenly desperate, a stab of fear running through him, he tried to think of all the precautions he had taken to bury Schwarzenbach: there were the papers of course, genuine government issue, even if the facts on the papers were false; before leaving Poland in the scared chaos of the Soviet advance, he had destroyed the records pertaining to his work in the camp; he hadn’t known about the references to himself in Bothmann’s documents – how could he? – but these weren’t important because without any kind of substantiation they were useless. What had he overlooked? He could think of nothing except that he might have been more cunning; he might have murdered a prisoner in the camp and dressed the corpse in an SS uniform with Schwarzenbach’s papers in the tunic – but there hadn’t been time. In spite of the fear that the Russians were advancing and would shortly be upon them, he might have considered his own irrefutable destruction more thoroughly. But there simply hadn’t been enough time. He had done what he could – but what had he overlooked?

  He was allowing Seeler’s conversation to worry him inordinately, that was all. He was permitting his imagination to take flight. Nerves, nothing but nerves: that was the effect Berlin could have on a man. The great ragged shadows that seemed to leap alive from nowhere, the streets that deceived you into thinking they led to other streets but ended instead in smashed apartment houses – it was nothing but an attack of nerves.

  A drink. He wanted a drink.

  There was suddenly some sort of commotion. A bottle went spinning through the air and splintered against the wall. Flakes of broken glass showered across someone’s head and someone else, pushing his table back, got to his feet and cursed. Grunwald moved to the other end of the bar away from the action. He saw two men circle one another with ugly slices of glass in their fists. They were breathing wildly and one was already cut: blood ran across his face and into his open mouth. The men were both civilians and whatever had caused the incident, whatever offence, it was obvious that they were thinking of nothing else than how to damage each other. Grunwald watched in fascination as they closed together and the slivers of sharp glass swung like flashing razors through the air, drawing more blood from the men. Both were smeared with incoherent streaks of red and as they clashed together again one yelled out painfully and dropped his weapon to the floor. As he stooped to retrieve it, the other brought his knee sharp and hard upwards into his face, and the man who received the blow went sprawling back across chairs and tables, toppling them, losing his own balance and striking the back of his skull against the wall. For some seconds there was silence and then the barman went towards the unconscious man with a wet towel and began to wipe his face. The other man dropped his piece of glass, picked up his jacket, and began to wipe his bloody hands on his trousers with slow self-conscious movements, as if he were only just aware of the fact that he had inflicted pain and injury and was amazed by the realization. Grunwald lifted his glass and sipped beer. Like people who had frozen into immobility at some prearranged signal, those who had been watching the fight suddenly began to come alive again. Grunwald stared into his beer and wondered why it was that violence – as if it were some kind of magic spell – could silence people.

  Schwarzenbach pushed the curtain back from the doorway and before he could reach the bar a fight had broken out. He stepped away for safety since blood and glass seemed to be flying everywhere, and when he felt he was safe he observed the fight closely. In a matter of seconds it was finished. Someone lay in a slashed mess against a wall, motionless, as if all life had been crushed out of him. Schwarzenbach felt as if he had been cheated in some strange way, and the excitement he had experienced during the brief fight remained unfulfilled. Why did it seem that violence had its own peculiar beauty? He watched a barman run to the inert figure on the floor, a towel flapping in one hand.

  He pushed the curtain away from his face and moved towards the bar. Halfway across the floor he stood suddenly still: some faint intuition, some vague impulse, made him turn his head to the side. As
if frozen he stopped, his arms stiff and numb by his side, his legs – like limbs subjected to a mild electric shock – tingling quietly.

  Beyond the bar there was a cracked mirror, faded and brown: in this mirror – in spite of the cracks – he saw reflected an unmistakable face.

  For a moment he did not know how to act. If seemed that a paralysis had stricken him. His mind would not function. And then with a great effort of will he turned round, went back through the curtain and climbed the steps to the street. He stood there in the penetrating cold of the night, shaking like a child after a nightmare.

  He pushed his hands into the pockets of his coat and moved off some yards from the entrance to the bar. He waited there in the shadows, chaotic thoughts pushing through his brain.

  Grunwald put down his empty glass and turned to leave. He examined the scrap of paper and the address yet again. It wasn’t far to the Barbarossa Strasse and he wondered if he should go there. What could he lose? At the very worst the woman could turn him away: on the other hand it might mean the chance to sleep under a roof for once – if in fact the whole thing wasn’t a practical joke.

  He left the bar. He climbed the steps to the street. His breath hung on the biting air. He moved away in the direction of the Barbarossa Strasse.

  Schwarzenbach watched the figure go down the street and then, when there was a safe distance between them, he followed.

  13

  A dark and broken staircase led invisibly upwards. Grunwald waited and then began to climb it, his hand clutching the rail for support. The house was utterly silent: a graveyard building. He wished that he had a match; it was impossible to tell what lay in front of him. He reached a landing and paused to catch his breath. There was a sharp pain in the centre of his chest which touched him like a brief flare of light and then passed.

  On the next landing he stopped again. Was that a noise from below? He listened but heard nothing: anyway, there were so many loose fragments of cement around it was likely he had knocked a piece over the side. He continued to climb the stairs, growing more and more certain that he was the victim of a joke. The whole building was apparently deserted. Besides, who could have lived there and not done something about the smell? Excrement, garbage, the stale trapped smells of cooking that might have been years old – these hung in the air with a presence that was almost tangible.