by Nele Neuhaus
“Parkinson’s,” he explained. “Most of the time I do well, you know, but the trip was a bit exhausting.”
“I won’t bother you for long,” said Fachinger kindly.
“Oh, go ahead and bother me as long as you want.” Old gentlemanly charm flashed in his blue eyes. “It’s a nice change of pace to speak with such a pretty young lady, you see. Otherwise, there are only old bags here.”
Fachinger smiled. “Good. So you saw Mrs. Frings on the evening of May third. Was she alone or accompanied by someone?”
“She could hardly move on her own. There was a lot going on here, including an open-air performance in the park. I saw her with the man who visited her regularly.”
Fachinger listened carefully.
“Can you remember about what time that was?”
“Of course. I have Parkinson’s, you know, not Alzheimer’s.”
It was supposed to be a joke, but since his expression didn’t change, the officer didn’t realize that at first.
“You know, I’m from East Berlin,” said the old gentleman. “I was a professor of applied physics at Humboldt University. In the Third Reich, I wasn’t allowed to practice my profession because I sympathized with the Communists. So I spent years abroad, but later in the German Democratic Republic, my family and I had a good life.”
“I see,” said Fachinger politely. She wasn’t quite sure what he was driving at.
“Naturally, I knew the whole ruling Socialist Unity Party leadership personally, even though I can’t really claim that they were particularly congenial. But as long as I was allowed to do research, the rest didn’t matter to me. Anita’s husband, Alexander, was in the Ministry of State Security; he was an officer in a special unit and responsible for covert operations in foreign-exchange management.”
Fachinger sat up and stared at the man.
“So you knew Mrs. Frings from before?”
“Yes. Didn’t I mention that?” The old man thought for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. “Actually, I knew her husband. Alexander Frings was a counterintelligence officer during the war in the Foreign Armies East department, and a close colleague of General Reinhard Gehlen. Perhaps that name means something to you?”
Fachinger shook her head. She was taking notes feverishly, sorry that she’d left her tape recorder sitting on her desk.
“In his capacity as counterintelligence officer in the Abwehr, Frings had an intimate knowledge of the Russians, you see. And after Gehlen and his whole department surrendered to the Americans in May 1945, they were attached to the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA. Later Gehlen founded, with the express approval of the United States, the Gehlen Organization, from which the West German Federal Intelligence Service was formed.” Fritz Müller-Mansfeld gave a hoarse laugh, which quickly changed to a cough. It took a while before he could speak again. “Within a very short time, dedicated Nazis became dedicated democrats. Frings didn’t go with them to the United States preferring to remain in the Soviet Occupation Zone. Also with the approval and knowledge of the Americans, he infiltrated the Stasi and was responsible for foreign-exchange procurement for the GDR, but he remained in contact with the CIC, later the CIA, and Gehlen in West Germany.”
“How do you know all this?” Fachinger asked, astounded.
“I’m eighty-nine years old,” replied Müller-Mansfeld amiably. “In my lifetime, I have seen and heard a great deal, and forgotten almost as much. But Alexander Frings impressed me, you see. He spoke six or seven languages fluently, was very intelligent and cultivated, and he played along with the game on both sides. He was the control for numerous Eastern Bloc spies, and was allowed to travel in the West at will. He knew high-ranking Western politicians and all the important industrial leaders. The arms lobbyists in particular were his friends.”
Müller-Mansfeld paused to rub his bony wrist.
“Why Frings was attracted to Anita—other than because of her looks—is to this day hard for me to understand.”
“Why’s that?”
“She was an ice-cold woman,” replied Müller-Mansfeld. “There was a rumor going around that she’d been an overseer at KZ Ravensbrück, you see. She had no intention of going to the West, where she would have risked being identified by former concentration camp inmates. She met Frings in Dresden in 1945. When they married, he was able to protect her from further criminal prosecution because by then he had contacts with both the Americans and the Russians. With her new name, she had also shed her Nazi views and made a career for herself with the Stasi. Although…” Müller-Mansfeld snickered maliciously. “Her weakness for Western consumer goods earned her the secret nickname ‘Miss America,’ which annoyed her no end.”
“What can you tell me about the man who was with her that evening?” Fachinger asked.
“Anita had visitors fairly often. Her childhood friend Vera was often here, and sometimes the professor, as well.”
Fachinger patiently waited as the old man rummaged through his memory and lifted his water glass to his lips with a trembling hand.
“They called themselves ‘the Four Musketeers.’” He laughed again, the sound hoarse and derisive. “Twice a year, they would meet in Zürich, even after Anita and Vera had buried their husbands.”
“Who called themselves the Four Musketeers?” asked Fachinger in bewilderment.
“The four old friends from before. They’d all known one another since childhood—Anita, Vera, Oskar, and Hans.”
“Oskar and Hans?”
“The arms dealer and his adjutant from the finance board.”
“Goldberg and Schneider?” Fachinger leaned forward excitedly. “Did you know them, too?”
Fritz Müller-Mansfeld’s eyes sparkled with amusement.
“You have no idea how long the days in an old folks home can be, even when it’s as luxurious and comfortable as this one. Anita liked to tell stories. She had no relatives anymore, and she trusted me. Anyway, I’m also one of those from Eastern Germany. She was cunning, but not nearly as crafty as her friend Vera. She’s a sly one. She’s done well for a simple girl from East Prussia, don’t you think?”
He rubbed his knuckles again, lost in thought for a moment.
“Anita was very excited last week. Why, she never told me. But she had a lot of visitors. Vera’s son was here several times, the bald one, and also his sister, the politician. They sat with Anita in the cafeteria for hours. And the Little Tomcat, who came regularly. Used to push her wheelchair around in the park.”
“The Little Tomcat?”
“That’s what she called him, the young man.”
Fachinger wondered what “young” meant from the point of view of an eighty-nine-year-old.
“What did he look like?” she asked.
“Hmm. Brown eyes. Slim. Medium height, average-looking face. The ideal spy, right?” Müller-Mansfeld smiled. “Or a Swiss banker.”
“And he was also with her on Thursday evening?” Fachinger asked patiently, although she was quivering with excitement inside. Bodenstein was going to love this.
“Yes.” Fritz Müller-Mansfeld nodded. Fachinger took her cell phone out of her pocket and searched for the photo of Marcus Nowak that Ostermann had sent her half an hour ago.
“Could it have been this man here?” She handed him the phone. He shoved his glasses onto his forehead and held the display very close to his eyes.
“No, that’s not the man,” he said. “But I’ve seen him, too. I think it might have even been that same evening.” Müller-Mansfeld frowned. “Yes, I remember now,” he said at last. “It was on Thursday, around eleven-thirty. The theater performance had just ended, and I went to the elevator. He was standing in the foyer, as if waiting for somebody. I noticed how nervous he was. He kept looking at his watch.”
“And you’re quite certain that it was the same man?” Fachinger asked, verifying this before taking back her phone.
“One hundred percent. I have a good memory for faces.”
* * *
When they didn’t find Professor Kaltensee at the Kunsthaus, Bodenstein and Kirchhoff drove back to the station in Hofheim. Ostermann greeted them with the news that the DA considered the grounds too flimsy to warrant a forensic examination of Nowak’s vehicles.
“But Nowak was seen at the location where a body was found, and he was there at the approximate time the crime was committed!” Pia exclaimed, getting worked up. “And one of his vehicles was sighted in front of Schneider’s house.”
Bodenstein poured himself a cup of coffee.
“Anything new from the hospital?” he asked. Since early that morning, an officer had been assigned to sit outside Nowak’s room and make a note of each visitor and the time of the visit.
“This morning, his wife was there,” replied Ostermann. “At noon, his grandmother visited and one of his colleagues.”
“That’s all?” Pia was disappointed. The case was not moving forward.
“But I’ve found out plenty about KMF.” Ostermann looked through his documents until he found the right folder, then gave his colleagues a report. In the thirties, Eugen Kaltensee, in a somewhat crass but at the time not unusual manner, had seized the company of a Jewish business owner who had discerned what was happening in Germany and left with his family. Kaltensee had used the inventions of the previous owner for the arms industry, expanded his business in the East, and made a fortune. As a supplier to the Wehrmacht, he had been a member of the Nazi Party and one of the biggest war profiteers.
“How do you know this?” Pia asked Ostermann in amazement.
“There was a trial,” he replied. “The Jewish former owner, Josef Stein, sued to get his company back after the war. Supposedly, Kaltensee had signed a statement saying that in the event Stein returned to Germany, he would have to give back the company. Naturally, this document could not be found, a compromise was reached, and Stein received shares in the firm. It was a big story in the press at the time, because although there was clear evidence that Kaltensee had exploited KZ prisoners in his factories in the East, he was classified as ‘exonerated’ and did not face prosecution.”
Ostermann gave a satisfied smile.
“I’ve traced the former general manager of KMF,” he said. “He retired five years ago and does not have anything particularly good to say about Vera and Siegbert Kaltensee, because they booted him out in a rather nasty way. The man is familiar with the entire operation to the smallest detail, and he told me everything.
“In the early eighties, the company suffered a serious crash. Vera and Siegbert wanted more influence, so they hatched intrigues against Eugen Kaltensee, and as a result he restructured the firm. He set up a new shareholder agreement and divided the voting rights at his own discretion among family members and friends. A fatal decision, which to this day guarantees that there will be discord within the family. Siegbert and Vera each received twenty percent; Elard, Jutta, Schneider, and Anita Frings ten percent each; Goldberg eleven percent; Robert Watkowiak five percent; and a woman named Katharina Schmunck four percent. Before Kaltensee could change this agreement again, he fell down the cellar stairs and broke his neck.”
At that moment, Bodenstein’s cell rang. It was Fachinger. “Boss, I’ve hit the jackpot!” she shouted. Bodenstein motioned to Ostermann to wait a moment as he listened to the excited voice of his youngest colleague.
“Very good, Ms. Fachinger,” he said at last, and ended the call. He looked up with a satisfied grin on his face.
“Now we can get an arrest warrant for Nowak and a search warrant for his company and residence.”
* * *
23. August 1942. I’ll never forget this day as long as I live, when I became an aunt! At 10:15 this evening, Vicky gave birth to a healthy baby boy—and I was there. It went so quickly, especially since the whole time I’d been thinking that something like this could take hours and hours. The war is so far away and yet so near. Elard has gotten leave from the front—he’s in Russia—and Mama has been praying all day long that nothing will happen to him, not today. This afternoon Vicky’s labor pains started. Papa sent Schwinderke to Doben to fetch Mrs. Wermin, but she couldn’t get away. The wife of farmer Krupski in Rosengarten has been in labor for two days, and she’s almost forty. Vicky was very brave. I admire her courage. It was terrible and wonderful at the same time. Mama, Edda, and I, with help from Mrs. Endrikat, got it done without Mrs. Wermin. Papa opened a bottle of champagne and finished it off with Endrikat—the two grandfathers. They were pretty tipsy when Mama showed them the baby. I also got to hold him in my arms. Incredible to think that this creature with the tiny hands and feet will one day turn into a big strong man. Vicky named him after our papa, Heinrich Arno Elard—even though Edda said he should at least have Adolf as his middle name—and then the two grandfathers shed a few tears and cracked open another bottle of champagne. When Mrs. Wermin finally arrived, Vicky had already soothed the baby, and Mrs. Endrikat had washed and swaddled him. And I will be the godmother! Oh, life is so exciting. Little Heinrich Arno Elard was totally unimpressed when Papa explained to him quite solemnly that one day he would be the lord of Lauenburg Manor, and then the boy threw up on his shoulder. How we laughed! A marvelous day, almost like before the war. As soon as Elard comes home on leave, there’ll be a christening. And soon a wedding! Then Vicky will really be my sister, although we’re already the best friends that anyone can imagine.…
* * *
Thomas Ritter stuck a yellow Post-it in the pages of the diary and rubbed his burning eyes. It was unbelievable. Reading the entries immersed him in a long-vanished world—the world of a young girl who led a sheltered life on the huge estate belonging to her parents in Masuria. These diaries alone would have provided enough material for a splendid novel, a requiem for the doomed world of East Prussia. Almost as good as Arno Surminski or Siegfried Lenz. In great detail, the very observant young Vera had depicted not only the country and people but also the political situation. She wrote from the point of view of the daughter of a lord of the manor whose parents had lost two sons in World War I and then had retreated to the East Prussian estate. They had been critical of Hitler and the Nazis but did not stop Vera and her friends Edda and Vicky from joining the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls. Also fascinating was the depiction of the travels of the young girls with their BDM group to the Olympic Games in Berlin and Vera’s sojourns at a Swiss boarding school for girls, where she’d missed her friend Vicky terribly. When the war broke out, Vera’s older brother Elard went into the Luftwaffe and there quickly made a name for himself through his achievements. Especially moving was the development of the love story between Elard and Vicky, the daughter of the estate steward Endrikat.
Why had Vera objected so vehemently to portraying her youth in East Prussia in the early chapters of her biography? After all, she hadn’t done anything to be ashamed of, except maybe for her membership in the BDM. But out in the country, where everyone knew everybody else, back then it would have been almost impossible not to join without getting into difficulties. Ritter kept on reading, and gradually he had understood why it would have been better for these memories from Vera’s point of view to be thrown into the fire than fall into the hands of strangers. Considering what he had learned last Friday, these diaries were truly explosive. As he read the entries, he’d taken copious notes, which had caused him to reorder the first chapters of his manuscript. In the diary from 1942, he’d then found the proof. After he’d read the description of August 23, 1942—the day that Hitler had ordered his bombers to attack Stalingrad for the first time—he went straight to the Internet and looked up the brief bio of Elard Kaltensee.
“That can’t be,” muttered Ritter, staring at the screen of his laptop. Elard was born on August 23, 1943, it said. Was it possible that Vera had given birth to a son exactly one year after the birth of her nephew? Ritter looked for the diary from 1943 and leafed through the pages to August.
Heini is one year old. What a sweet little guy—
he looks good enough to eat. And he is already walking.… He went back a couple of pages, then flipped a couple of pages ahead. In July, Vera had returned from Switzerland to her parents’ estate and spent the summer there, a summer that was overshadowed by the death of Walter, her friend Vicky Endrikat’s eldest brother, who had fallen at Stalingrad. No word of a man in Vera’s life, not to mention a pregnancy. There was no doubt that Elard Kaltensee was in reality Heinrich Arno Elard, who was born on August 23, 1942. Then why did it say in his biography that he was born in 1943? Had Elard made himself a year younger out of vanity?
Ritter jumped in alarm when his cell phone rang. Marleen asked where he was. It was already past ten. Thoughts were whirling around in Ritter’s head, and he simply couldn’t stop now.
“I’m going to be even later, I’m afraid, sweetheart,” he said, trying to sound apologetic. “You know I have a deadline tomorrow. I’ll be there as soon as I can, but don’t wait up for me. Just go to bed.”
She had scarcely hung up when he pulled over his laptop and started typing the sentences he’d formulated while he was reading. He smiled as he worked. If he could substantiate his suspicion with solid proof, then Katharina and her publishing colleagues would definitely have the sensational story they wanted.
* * *
“Nowak was also at Taunusblick on Thursday evening,” said Bodenstein after he had told Ostermann and Pia about Kathrin Fachinger’s conversation with Anita Frings’s neighbor.
“And I doubt it was because of the theater performance,” Pia remarked.
“Tell me more about KMF,” Bodenstein said to Ostermann.
Vera Kaltensee had been furious when the new shareholder agreement was revealed during the reading of her husband’s will after his death. In vain, she had attempted to contest the agreement. Then she attempted to buy out Goldberg, Schneider, and Frings’s shares, but that was not permitted according to the agreement.
“By the way, Elard Kaltensee was suspected at the time of having shoved his stepfather down the stairs. The two of them had never gotten along,” said Ostermann. “Later, it was judged an accident, and the matter was dropped.” He looked at his notebook. “Vera Kaltensee was not at all happy that she now had to ask permission from her old friends, her stepson, Robert, and a friend of her daughter’s for every deal she planned to make. But with Goldberg’s help, she managed to be appointed honorary consul of Suriname. That enabled her to secure the rights to bauxite deposits in Suriname, which gave her an automatic entry into the aluminum business. She was no longer content to be merely a supplier. A few years later, she sold these rights to the American firm Alcoa, and KMF became the world leader in rolling mills for aluminum processing. The subsidiaries that administer the actual capital are located in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, the British Virgin Islands, Gibraltar, Monaco, and who knows where else. They pay next to nothing in taxes.”