The connection to Reni is obvious enough. Protecting his patronage and membership lists. Gerhard fits in there, also. Someone close enough to Reni to have access to such information.
How was Vogel to know they were estranged? Then Randall and I come snooping around. Maybe we know something, too. Maybe we’ll even trace Reni’s murder back to Vogel. But where does Gorik figure in? And why bother following me to Prague? Why not just get rid of me in the car? Am I still being used as somebody’s bloodhound sniffing out loose ends? In which case, that could mean Maria. But why? What part could she play in all this? More questions than answers.
Kramer finishes the pastry and coffee, feels again in his pocket for the bank key. Maybe the answers will lie in this, he thinks. Maybe Reni has played the games master one last time.
It’s just after nine when Kramer enters the large front doors of the Bank Austria on Am Hof in the middle of Vienna’s Old Town. It’s all marble pillars and mahogany counters in here: old money, old secrets. He has no idea where the safe-deposit box is, but figures that there must be some code on the key to identify the branch. He crosses the stadium-size main hall to the proper window and is the first in line for today’s business. The clerk is a young woman with a beauty mark on her upper lip that is in no way beautiful; it sprouts hairs. She has on a black suit and too much perfume. Her hair is cut severely in a V with long bangs in front. Kramer hands her the key without saying anything, and she examines the serial numbers, sniffs, then pushes a pad and pen across the counter to him.
“Name, please,” she says.
He hadn’t figured this far ahead. Stupid of him, but there it is. Of course the box is going to have to be in someone’s name. Kramer thinks about this for a moment, hesitates with the pen hovering over the paper.
“This is your key, isn’t it?” she says, rapping her fingers on the counter.
He gives her a scrunched eyebrow look that’s supposed to convince her of his proprietorship, but only draws her attention to the bandage on his forehead.
He’s about to scribble “R. Müller” on the pad, then puts himself in Reni’s mind. If she left the key for me, in my city, she’s damn well going to take care of the identity. He signs his own name, shoves the pad across to the clerk, and she examines it against the signature on file.
“They look different,” she says, looking up at his bandage again.
“I’m a little shaky today,” he says, drawing out his passport and Austrian visa. “Too much wine last night.”
She looks at the identification closely, sucks air, and finally nods her head.
“That’s you, I guess. Follow me.”
He retrieves his identification, and she buzzes him through a half door back to the vaults, flicks the timed combination expertly, and opens the large barred doors. It’s cold in the vaults, like a wine cellar. They find the proper number after a bit of searching. The box is low, one row from the bottom, and they must both bend down to insert the two keys and open the lock. She has good knees bending down, but catches his glance and puts a hand on them, standing quickly.
“Will you be needing a room, Herr Kramer?”
Kramer pulls out a double-wide box. By the heft of it, he knows there’s a fair amount of stuff inside.
“Yes. That would be very helpful.”
His heart is racing; he feels that he may be nearing the end of all this mystery. But he forces himself not to look inside the box until the door to the tiny cubicle with a table and chair closes behind him. The overhead light is incandescent; there are no windows.
He opens the metal box slowly, almost reverently. He sees a sheaf of papers inside surmounted by an envelope. He pulls the envelope out first: it’s addressed to him, typewritten. He tears it open, fumbles the letter out and unfolds it, his hand trembling:
Dear Sam,
I’m sorry to have sent you on such an Easter egg hunt, but it was the only way I could tell the world. Believe me, the only way. It all began in 1974 when I came back to Germany from Crete …
The War Crimes Commission is housed near Bonn’s Bundestag in an aluminum-and-glass structure from the 1950s. It’s late afternoon now. Kramer just managed to catch the midday flight from Vienna. He goes to the visitors’ reception and flashes his press card to gain admittance to the library. Rows of somber desks fill the large reading room; blue- and red-bound reference volumes line the high walls. Kramer goes to the call desk and hands a white-haired civil servant, who is in no way civil, his press ID along with a printed request: the folder on SS-Oberleutnant Arno Semich. The librarian adjusts his half-frame reading glasses, peering down at the request slip, then looks over the frames at Kramer. His eyes are filled with liquid; white guck like farmer’s cheese clots the rims of his eyelids. He sniffs once, wordlessly, and turns back to a younger colleague who does the fetching. They are all dressed in blue lab coats, as if this were a pharmacy. The younger man disappears behind double doors, and Kramer catches a glimpse of a warren of metal floor-to-ceiling cases filled with gray cardboard file boxes. No luxury of computers here. The mandate is soon to run out, anyway; the statute of limitations on war crimes set to expire. You can only chase the past so long, Kramer figures. Go hunting for the Nazis in the old folks’ home too ardently, and you’ll only miss those who are taking over the country currently.
Kramer sits on a Naugahyde-covered bench opposite the call desk thinking about Reni’s letter, about the sheaf of documents in the safe-deposit box.
Her memoirs. A xerographic copy of them, at any rate. And just as Pahlus described it, the document is political dynamite. Kramer did not have time to go through it thoroughly this morning but could see Reni was obviously an ardent diarist. Not only did she detail shenanigans in Bonn’s corridors of power, but in the city’s bedrooms, as well. And in her concluding section, he found the secret list of Vogel’s members and sponsors. A quick perusal made Kramer give a low whistle. So-called liberals and conservatives alike, all stripes of the political spectrum were included there. They were doing what politicians do best in a volatile time of change: hedging their bets. This time on the neo-Nazis.
Quickly leafing through the other typed pages, Kramer found the name Gorik, and along with that, another name: Semich. SS-Oberleutnant Arno Semich. A name that brought him to Bonn and perhaps to the end of the long trail.
Maybe you’ll become a real journalist again, Sammy, Reni wrote in her letter to him. Fit the last piece to this puzzle, and you’ll have a fine little picture of corruption.
Kramer thinks he knows what that final piece will be, for things are clicking in his head; little things he’s noticed but not remarked on. They make sense, however, now that Reni has given him the name.
Fifteen minutes later, Kramer’s name is called. He goes to the desk, retrieves the file, and takes it to one of the rows of desks, each with a green-shaded brass lamp attached to it. He turns on the light and pulls the contents from the cardboard file box. There is very little documentation. Semich was born in 1918 in Munich, joined the Hitler Youth in 1934, the SS in 1939, earned degrees in law and economics from Heidelberg. During the war, he headed a battalion of Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads, that was responsible for the deaths of 5,200 Serbs and Muslims in and around Sarajevo. A wanted war criminal, Semich was initially arrested by the advancing Fifth Army near Innsbruck and held in an American detention camp until the morning of June 16, 1945, when he escaped. He has not been heard of since.
Kramer quickly thumbs through the affidavits of dozens of witnesses and the report of the commission on the attempts to trace him. The final page bears a stapled photo of Semich as a young SS officer astride a horse. There are two noncoms with him, their hands on the flanks of the tall animal. Semich has his death’s head cap pulled down low over his eyes and smiles arrogantly at the camera. Kramer squints at the photo, then gets up, goes to the call desk, and requests a magnifying glass. The rheumy-eyed assi
stant looks at him dumbly for a moment as if he has not heard, then lazily opens a drawer behind the counter and fishes out a small square magnifier, the type used for examining photographic proof sheets. Kramer takes this back to his desk. He jerks the glass unsteadily over the photo at first, and the image of Semich is unclear. Then he settles the magnifier firmly over the face, and the features leap out of the surroundings with distinct clarity. The black and white dots separate for an instant and then fuse again as his eye adjusts. There the nose is, hawklike, and predatory. The same eyes; the thin tight lips fixed in an ironic smirk.
Kramer looks up and out the high windows to the gray day. He takes a deep breath. Suddenly, it all makes sense to him. All the disparate facts come together for him like the black and white dots of the photograph, which suddenly form a picture.
Later in the day, he will pay a visit to Bad Lunsburg and see Kommissar Boehm, but for now he returns the file, gets his press pass back, and then goes out for a pint of beer to sit and think. To make sure the dots hold; that the mosaic is set.
There are no lights on in the villa, but Kramer buzzes anyway. The time was agreed on; he should be home.
A voice talks to him out of the microphone grating of the house intercom, “That you, Sam?”
He tells him it is.
“Come on through to the back. I’m in the pool.” The lock clicks open, and Kramer enters the vestibule, being sure to leave the door partly open behind him. He follows the wood-cobbled vestibule out to another door leading to the gardens and the glass-covered pool. Green light shimmers eerily in the darkness and Kramer follows it. Underwater bulbs, like a marine world.
He enters the pool house, steam hovering over the chlorinated water like a drift of fog. Müller is doing laps again, long, smooth strokes cutting through the thick water almost soundlessly. Kramer stands for a time by the open door, then slides it closed, watching Müller some more. Finally, the man stops swimming, holding on to the edge of the pool at the deep end and blowing water.
“Come on in, Sam, if you like. I’ve got extra swim wear in the changing room.”
“No thanks.” Kramer looks around the pool room; they are alone. A white towel lays crumpled by a chaise longue; a drinks cart stands close at hand.
Müller pulls himself out of the water.
“And what is so urgent that it must be discussed tonight?” Müller says, picking up the towel, drying off, and then wrapping it about him like a toga. “Drink?”
Kramer shakes his head.
“Well, I believe I will,” Müller says. “I’ve earned one.” He goes to the drinks cart and pours a couple of fingers of single malt whiskey in a tumbler, turns to Kramer, and holds it up to him. “Cheers.”
“Long life,” Kramer says, his eye going to Müller’s left arm as the man tips the glass to drink. Kramer cannot see underneath the arm, but remembers clearly the bit of scar tissue there.
“You’re still at it then,” Müller says, stretching out on the chaise and crossing his thin legs at the ankles.
“Pretty much,” Kramer says. “Your word in the ear of the local police didn’t scare me off, if that’s what you want to know.”
Müller looks at his drink philosophically. “Sorry about that. But it’s better letting things just lie, believe me. Reni would not want her name dragged through any more mud. She was tired of the fight. Tired of all the turmoil. She just wanted a bit of peace.”
Kramer looks down at Müller lounging so complacently and has the sudden urge to tip him over, to kick him in the face, and wipe that arrogance off his features.
“That’s what she wanted, is it?” he says instead. “Just a little peace.”
Müller nods, finishes his drink, and then looks hard at Kramer. “Do I detect irony? Is that why you’ve come, to be ironic with me? At this hour?”
“No. That’s not why I’ve come. I want to ask you about a man named Semich.”
Müller squints at Kramer for an instant, then forces a smile.
“Semich? Am I supposed to know him?”
“I think so,” Kramer says, nodding slowly. “The Hangman of Sarajevo, he was called. Nice enough guy they say, but he took his job too damn seriously. Too successful routing out impure racial elements.”
“Sam, I don’t follow you at all. Who is this Semich fellow?”
Müller gets up and goes to the drinks table once again, pouring a stiffer shot of whiskey this time.
“He’s a war criminal. One of the last big ones unaccounted for.”
Müller has his back turned to Kramer as he speaks, “And what has he got to do with me?”
“Gorik found out, didn’t he? And he blackmailed you.”
Müller tosses off the drink in one gulp. When he turns to Kramer, he is holding an automatic pistol in his right hand, aimed straight at Kramer’s midsection. Kramer takes a slow breath; feels his mouth go dry and his stomach knot.
“You’re much too curious for your own good, Sam. You know that?”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” Kramer says, finding it difficult to speak with his tongue sticking to his suddenly dry palate. “You’re Semich.”
Müller looks at him with cold eyes, betraying no emotion. “There have been a lot of burglaries in this neighborhood lately. Did you know that, Sam? A man can’t be safe even in his own house any longer.”
“You are Semich,” Kramer forces himself to repeat it.
Müller’s thumb creeps up the side of the pistol, flicking the safety off.
“You seem to have all the secrets,” Müller says. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“It all fits,” Kramer says. “You were a wanted war criminal and changed your identity. No huge difficulty there,” Kramer says, looking around the pool room, trying to buy time, to keep the dialogue going. “There were plenty of poor bastards who never came back from the war whose identity you could take over as easily as slipping on a new suit. So Arno Semich disappears amid the flood of refugees returning from all over Europe and Russia, and Karl-Heinz Müller takes his place. He erases all trace of his past, even the SS identification under his left arm, the tattoo of his blood group, though he cannot avoid the ensuing scar.”
Müller momentarily looks down to his own left arm, then quickly back to Kramer.
“He hides out where he is least likely to be discovered,” Kramer continues. “Smack in the middle of the American denazification program, and makes a lucky marriage to an American woman with enough money to finance his investment schemes. They have a daughter together, business prospers during the postwar miracle of Germany, and everything is going beautifully until one day …”
Kramer stops, swallows hard, and stares down the barrel of the gun.
“Go on,” Müller says, waving the gun. “This is quite good. I find myself enjoying the story. Most entertaining for a common thief breaking and entering my villa.”
Kramer’s mind is racing, but there is no way out. He can only keep talking, spinning out the story, buying time.
“Until one day, he is contacted by a nasty sort of man, a representative of East Germany, as a matter of fact, who has learned the dirty little secret of Karl-Heinz Müller and offers a Faustian bargain to him. In exchange for not being turned into the authorities, Müller, or rather Semich, must act as an agent for the East. That is where Gorik fits into the mosaic. He becomes the controller of Semich/Müller. It is doubtful we will ever know what useful secrets Gorik received from his unwilling spy, but one certain result is a car bombing in Prague that was calculated to cause embarrassment to the West and take the heat off the Soviets.”
“No!” Müller’s face is contorted in anger. “She said she had told nobody. That she could not betray me, could not turn against her own father.”
“She didn’t,” Kramer says. “She never would have. Reni left it to me to piece things together. To follow the clues she lai
d for me. She said I would understand why she had to leave me in 1974, after I researched the identity of Arno Semich. And she was right. Reni found out about you in 1974, didn’t she? About your Nazi past, at any rate. And being Reni, she couldn’t turn you in back then, could she? And she could no longer face me if she didn’t. She couldn’t live that close to a lie.”
Müller shakes his head. “No. Sweet little Renata. She loved her father so. We were an unstoppable team, she and I.” Suddenly, his shoulders slump. “Something’s been lost for me with her death, Sam. I don’t care much anymore.”
“Then put the gun down. We can talk about it.”
Müller jerks himself upright again, gripping the gun tightly.
“Sure. With you and the police. Is that it?”
“Reni’s dead. It’s over, Herr Müller. All over.”
“No, Sam. Perhaps for you it’s over, but not for me. No one will fault me for shooting someone who broke into my home. Self-defense.”
“You don’t want to know how I traced you?” Kramer asks hurriedly.
“Does it really matter?”
“To me, it does. If I’m going to die for my troubles, I’d at least like to know if I figured it right.”
Müller waves the gun impatiently. “So?”
“So Reni never knew about your involvement with East German intelligence. Not until lately, that is. Until she got word from an old friend who believed Reni was responsible for the Prague car bombing. You see, this friend overheard Gorik on the phone to his master one time, saying that Müller was the one who had done it. Müller could be trusted. But Gorik didn’t mean Reni, did he? He meant you.”
Müller is silent; the pool heater kicks on, filling the room with a low hum.
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