Alphabet House

by Adler-Olsen, Jussi

  His opponent’s weakness was in the process of being exposed.

  During the hour that followed, Lankau relived the past. The veil was drawn aside.

  Lankau registered Arno von der Leyen’s every reaction and movement. He left nothing of importance out of his account apart from the identity of the Postman, which was never mentioned. He omitted some events and replaced them with others, where necessary.

  But the story never strayed far from the truth.

  When Vonnegut woke up that morning in late November, he discovered to his horror that three men on his floor were missing. He ran from room to room, tearing his hair, but touching nothing. The open windows in two of the rooms spoke for themselves. All the remaining patients lay in bed, unconcerned and smiling as always, in anticipation of the washbasins being brought in, followed by breakfast. Calendar Man even stood up and made him a slight bow.

  Less than ten minutes later the security guards turned up. They were savage, uncomprehending, and in a rage. Even the doctors had to submit to brutal questioning, as if they were criminals or responsible for what had happened. The four remaining patients in Lankau’s room were separated from one another for a couple of days and then brought down one by one to the treatment room below. Here they were interrogated, beaten with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and tortured with whatever instruments were available. The longer it took to make the torturers feel convinced of their innocence, the more severe the torture became. It had taken a particularly long time with Gerhart Peuckert. Although he had a high rank in the security forces – the SD – the chief interrogator showed no signs of collegial understanding. No one escaped – not Peter Stich, Kröner or Calendar Man. Even the inanimate general on the opposite side of the corridor was brought down. After some hours they let him go. He never uttered a word.

  After that Gerhart Peuckert collapsed, and during the days that followed they thought he was going to die.

  Then the crisis passed and he showed signs of recovery. Apart from the physical after effects of the torture, everything returned to normal. Neither Gerhart, the weepy-eyed Calendar Man, nor any of the others could explain to their oppressors what had happened to the three missing patients.

  Less than a week later two grave-looking plainclothes men came for the security officer in charge, the one who had also held the interrogations. They hauled him off in the middle of a meal and locked themselves in with him for some hours. Then they dragged him out into the courtyard in front of the general hospital wards and hanged him in spite of his high-pitched, blubbering protests. This was an unheard-of dishonour; he wasn’t even worth an execution squad. His one fatal mistake in the course of eight ruthless years had been to allow Arno von der Leyen to disappear in front of their very eyes, and not to have reported the catastrophe to Berlin immediately.

  Kröner and Peter Stich began recovering quite quickly and after New Year’s they were declared fit for service and discharged with a few hours’ warning. For a while now Gerhart Peuckert had not been reacting to anything at all.

  Leaving him behind caused them no apprehension.

  The fighting at the front was fierce as the Germans steadily retreated. For Kröner it constituted a double risk, because all officers connected with the security service were also potential targets for their own men’s bullets, which resulted in many deaths. But despite the fact that Kröner had the authority to do the same dirty work as before, and thereby gain many enemies, he managed to engineer himself into a position where his own men had no chance to knife him in the back. The moment that rumour became reality and the Führer had actually died in the middle of his so-called tireless fight against Bolshevism, Kröner disappeared from his camp without warning, without possessions or provisions, and without a scratch on him.

  When he came to relating Peter Stich’s subsequent fate, Lankau stared into space for a while. ‘We never heard anything more from Peter Stich,’ he said eventually. Arno von der Leyen didn’t react. He looked at him with watchful eyes and remained silent. ‘There were many who were killed in those days.’

  What Arno von der Leyen didn’t have to know was that, after being discharged from the SS reserve hospital in Ortoschwanden, Stich had been sent straight back to Berlin in his original capacity as concentration camp administrator.

  There were two reasons for this.

  Firstly, the movement of staff and prisoners between concentration camps had been intensified, while at the same time the need to disband the camps had gradually became more and more obvious. This process required considerable administration, expertise and a firm hand. And secondly, the panzer divisions in which Stich had most recently been serving were suffering great losses. Many divisions had been pinned down or wiped out. There was no longer any need for him there. However, in the extermination camps his presence was an asset. One could expect his contribution to be one hundred per cent.

  Thus, right to the end, Stich had played his simulant role better than any of them. He was in safety and had authority.

  ‘Our leader was known as the Postman, but that hardly surprises you, does it?’ said Lankau, noting with mistrust the nod from the man opposite him.

  ‘You needn’t worry about what I know or don’t know, but what you don’t want to do is leave anything out. You tell me everything, understand?’

  Lankau smiled and licked a corner of his mouth with the tip of his tongue. ‘His true identity can’t mean anything to you because he’s no longer alive, but he was useful when it came down to it.’

  Arno von der Leyen didn’t react.

  Lankau’s audience of one was already in the grip of the story. During the last days of the central administration of the Third Reich in Berlin, the Postman had acquired a general knowledge as to which political purges were being carried out in Goebbels’ own district. He had the lists of those who had been deported, sentenced to death, executed, or were missing or imprisoned. He knew whose turn was next and for which crime.

  In this way he intended to collect four sets of identities whose age and sex would fit himself and his co-conspirators. He had not yet given up the possibility that Lankau and Dieter Schmidt had succeeded in escaping.

  He found three of the identities without much effort – opponents of the Third Reich who had recently ‘disappeared’ and had had no relatives. The same people who would be regarded as heroes or freedom fighters when the war finally ended. If they stepped into these men’s shoes they would have nothing to fear in the event of a judicial purge.

  It didn’t prove difficult for the Postman to destroy any evidence.

  After some fruitless searching the Postman found a suitable candidate for the fourth identity in a Potsdam jail. It was a coincidence he found both amusing and ironic, a Jew who throughout the entire war had been working under a false name in the middle of town as a top civil servant. A trail of corruption, bribery and fraud had followed in his wake. Many people had good reason for wishing him dead before the interrogations were over and his transfer to the concentration camps became a reality. A wish the Postman gladly consented to fulfil.

  The Jew disappeared without trace.

  For the Postman, one person more or less in the greater scheme of things had never made much difference. He had managed to acquire four new identities with ages and appearances that fitted.

  During the final collapse of the Third Reich the Postman, too, disappeared without trace.

  Eight days after the capitulation on 17th May 1945, Kröner and the Postman met beside a remote and deserted stretch of railway close to a little village in the heart of Germany.

  The entire country was in chaos. Shops were being plundered. Wares, livestock and people were being scattered in impulsive flight or last desperate retreat.

  A couple of miles from the appointed meeting place, where the western Allied troops had by chance come to a halt, Kröner and the Postman had been waiting separately for the report of surrender. A scant few miles further up the line the railway was under the control of Soviet tro
ops.

  After another couple of days in hiding Lankau turned up as well, emaciated and lice-infested like a tramp. It was a surprise to see him again, yet gratifying. All three had braved Armageddon and the distance involved, exactly according to the plan they’d agreed upon at the hospital. It was here they were to meet when the end of the war became reality. Their future would be determined by a dilapidated railway wagon crammed to bursting point with the valuables they had bought at the cost of many a Russian slave labourer’s life.

  And the wagon was still there. A whole lifetime of events had passed between the day an engine had carefully nudged it into place, and now, when all the fighting had ceased.

  A trifle overgrown with moss, but untouched, the wagon was tucked away and forgotten on a remote siding close to Hölle, north of Naila in Frankenwald. It was filled with religious relics, icons, silver altarpieces and other valuables.

  Priceless treasure.

  All three were ecstatic. Despite their exhaustion, and in Lankau’s case his severe wounds, they were fully capable of putting their plan into practice.

  That Dieter Schmidt had been killed was regrettable. But none of them were inconsolable. It meant one less to share with. On the other hand, the Postman and Kröner were shocked to learn that Arno von der Leyen’s attempt to escape had succeeded. The Postman was furious. The wagon would have to be moved and the remainder of their plan carried out immediately.

  The lock on the wagon’s sliding door was rusty but intact. Inside the wagon itself the remains of a slave labourer who, in the rush of things, had not been heaved out after being liquidated, still lay spread over the first row of cases like an untidy pile of clothing. Behind him, rows of brown cases were stacked from floor to ceiling. Two of the cases in the first row were marked with a faint cross. These the Postman tore open. After having distributed their contents – American dollars, tinned food and civilian clothes – the Postman opened his briefcase and handed his cohorts their new identities.

  The Postman was well prepared and shared his plans for the sequence of events which would follow without a single protest. From now on they were other people and could only use their real names when alone with each other. They had to renounce their previous lives and be completely loyal to one another in every way.

  Now and always.

  On that day Kröner had to swear to his comrades that he would keep away from northern Germany forever, from where he was born, had lived all his life, and presumably still had a wife and three children. He had come to the same conclusion himself.

  For Lankau there was no decision to make. He had loved his wife before the war. They had been happy, with four children. Now the Russians occupied both his hometown of Demmin on the river Peene and the area where his parents lived in Landryg.

  He would never be able to go there again.

  In the Postman’s case things were different. Even before the war he was hated in the region he came from. There wasn’t much sympathy for the blessings of Nazism and the Third Reich’s new order among the simple rural villagers, and the Postman had informed on those who were anti-Nazi. Too many women had lost their loved ones on account of him.

  He would never be able to return home, either.

  The Postman was childless but had a woman who followed him in silent admiration, no matter what his life offered her. He impressed on them that she was one they all could trust.

  Standing before their wagon and wearing their new clothes, the three swore yet again a sacred oath that from that moment on they would wipe out the past and regard their families as dead.

  Then they divided the tasks between them. The Postman assumed responsibility for transporting the wagon to Munich. In the meantime Kröner and Lankau were to go to Freiburg and try to seek out Gerhart Peuckert, whom they were certain had knowledge of their undertaking, but whose subsequent fate was unknown.

  If they found him alive they were to liquidate him.

  For the Postman, the transport of the wagon went surprisingly smoothly. Several thousand dollars exchanged hands. The American liaison officer who had received the money later disappeared on his way back to base from the town hall in Naila.

  Munich itself was seething with signs of dissolution. Black market dealings and bribes were the order of the day.

  Everyone was for sale, as long as the price was right. The unloading of the goods took place with great discretion, and before the month was over most of the valuables had been distributed among five different Swiss bank vaults in Basel.

  The task Kröner and Lankau had before them wasn’t as easy.

  The landscape was bleak. A country that had been raped, torn to pieces by an idea that now had to be exorcised at all costs. The bicycle trip took them eight days. Travelling 300 miles in an occupied territory marked by confusion, suspicion and control after control.

  For both Lankau and Kröner, going to Freiburg was like moving from the frying pan into the fire. Even though the town and its surroundings had barely survived the war, it was more than likely that there were still people around who had known of their stay in the hospital.

  When they finally reached their goal, their anxiety vanished like dew in the sun. Only twisted steel reinforcements, pulverized rubble and concrete blocks remained to bear witness to the hospital that had shielded them for a time from the death outside. The town was in chaos and confusion. Everyone had their hands full just thinking about themselves and their families. People were choosing to look forward.

  Even in the neighbouring villages of Ettenheim and Ortoschwanden, any information as to what had taken place was extremely scanty. The few reports they managed glean contained the same account of a bomber that had veered off course during the final bombing of Freiburg and dropped its entire load in the hills. Reasonably enough, the general conclusion was that the bombing had been a mistake. A mountain was a mountain, and trees were just trees. A few of the more alert citizens had noticed that from that day on there’d been fewer ambulance transports in the vicinity.

  The SS hospital had taken its well-kept secret to the grave, along with those who had perished in the bombardment.

  After the reunion in Munich all three lived quite modestly for a while. The city was crowded and the Allies took over its administration with great efficiency. As it became more and more difficult to go unnoticed, the Postman came up with the surprising solution of settling in Freiburg, the most beautiful of all Germany’s beautiful towns.

  Thus they lived a carefree life for some time, until the Postman learned that, just before the eradication of the SS hospital, several patients had been transported to the reserve hospital, Ensen bei Porz, in the vicinity of Cologne. Here, during the final phase of the war, doctors had been given the task of investigating the extent to which certain war neuroses and provoked psychoses could have an organic origin. The great majority of patients were found unsuitable as guinea pigs and immediately sent back to active duty after a superficial examination. But the Postman had been led to understand that a few of the Alphabet House’s previous inhabitants were still there.

  At Ensen bei Porz they found out that Gerhart Peuckert had not been among the patients transferred from the Alphabet House and that he was already dead.

  Lankau leaned back and looked at Arno von der Leyen. His story had ended abruptly. He hadn’t revealed the Postman’s true identity with so much as a word. Aside from the fact that he was still bound to the chair, he was pleased with himself.

  Von der Leyen shook his head. He face had gone pale. ‘Gerhart Peuckert died, you say?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I said.’

  ‘At which hospital?’

  ‘At the reserve hospital at Ortoschwanden, God dammit!’

  ‘Is that what you also call the “Alphabet House”? Is that the place where we were hospitalized? Was he killed during the bombing raid?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ Lankau sneered. ‘And so what?’

  ‘I wanted to hear you say it again. I’ve got to be sure.’
Von der Leyen’s eyes narrowed. It was clear he was trying to catch the slightest revealing twitch in Lankau’s face. Lankau regarded him with total impassivity.

  Von der Leyen’s face went suddenly hard. ‘An exciting story, Lankau,’ he said tonelessly. ‘I’m sure you’ve had your reasons for being so careful. There must be a lot of money involved.’

  Lankau looked away. ‘You bet your life there is! But if you think you can coerce us, you’re making a mistake. It’ll never work.’

  ‘Have you heard me make any demands? The only thing I have to know is what happened to Gerhart Peuckert.’

  ‘You’ve just been told. He died.’

  ‘You know what I think, Lankau?’

  ‘Should I care?’ Lankau closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on the sound he’d just registered. A slight creak that came if he leaned forward just a bit. Von der Leyen’s blow to his chest diverted him instantly from these investigations. The greyness had vanished from Arno von der Leyen’s face. He prodded him again with the pistol barrel. Lankau looked at it and held his breath.