McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  Now Hitler began to mumble in a monotone. “She loved life. She loved her Uncle Alf. We had so much in common. She would never have killed herself. Somebody shot her!”

  “It is a possibility we’re looking into, Herr Hitler. Do you have any suspicions?”

  “Naturally, I am convinced who killed her, but how can we hope to bring them to justice? They are masters of this kind of conspiracy. Oh, Geli, Geli, my perfect angel.” He began to weep then, with tears streaming from those mad eyes. He spoke with sudden clarity and force. “They’ll get me next, you know. They killed her with my gun. It was to make it seem as if I had done it. And where are they now, these traitors and saboteurs? Returned to Berlin and Moscow. You’ll never catch them. They come and go like poisoned gas. They couldn’t kill me, so they killed poor Geli. You waste your time, Englishman. Already there have been serious attempts on my life. I am doomed. I carry too great a burden on my shoulders. I am a lone voice against chaos and Bolshevik Jewry.”

  “Quite a responsibility!” agreed Sir Seaton, backing toward the door. “We’ll take up no more of your time, Herr Hitler.”

  As they walked down the stairs, strange, mewling noises continued to come from Hitler’s room. Hess had remained with his master. Strasser shook his head, speaking softly. “You wouldn’t believe it, gentlemen. Hitler’s a different creature on a public platform.”

  They had returned to the fireplace, where Röhm still lounged, and he agreed vigorously. “It’s as if the crowd feeds its energy to him. He stands there sometimes for minutes before he speaks, drawing in that energy. He’s a kind of vampire, I suppose.” The SA leader drained his glass and sighed.

  Strasser interrupted. “He’s our best bet for chancellor. We all know that. He has something the crowd responds to. But once we are in power, we’ll find him a more suitable position—head of propaganda, perhaps.” He started as, softly, upstairs, a door closed.

  Strasser dropped his voice still lower. “In a few days Hitler has an appointment with Chancellor Hindenburg. It looks as if, so long as we keep our noses clean, old Hindenburg will name Alf as his successor. But if Alf remains like—like what you saw upstairs—he won’t make any other impression than the obvious one. So you don’t have much time, I’m afraid, Sir Seaton.”

  “I’ll do my best, Captain Röhm. And, of course, I’ll be grateful for any help.” Sir Seaton reached to shake hands, but Röhm was taking his cap and greatcoat down from the antlered peg.

  “Give me a lift back to Munich. I might have a lead for you.” Sinclair was astonished at how rapidly Röhm had sobered.

  Hess decided that he should remain at his leader’s side, and Strasser had also decided to spend the night, so Röhm joined Sir Seaton in the front while Taffy again found himself in the profoundly comfortable leather of the back. Against his will, he began to doze and did not hear the whole exchange between Röhm and Begg.

  “She had only one lover, you know that?” announced Röhm. “I think he might have been assigned to guard her. My chaps were keeping a watch. She had a lot of guards, but this one was special. I think she was infatuated with him. A tall SS captain, by all accounts. Blond. Always wore dark glasses. He’s disappeared out of the picture since the shooting. They say he was Himmler’s spy, but he didn’t seem to be following anyone’s orders much. Himmler hated old Geli, you know. I had a soft spot for her. Bit of a whore, like myself. Maybe she died because she knew too much. Maybe that’s what’ll happen to me, too.” Again that monstrous, grunting laugh, far too big for the size of the soft, battle-scarred face.

  Captain Röhm was staying at the Brown House that night. His own flat, he reported with a laugh, was full. It was dusk as they dropped him off. “Where to, now, Seaton? Bed?” Sinclair asked hopefully.

  “I’m afraid not, Taffy. There’s just time to catch the last few musical numbers and get a decent glass of Russian tea at the Carlton Tea Rooms! You remember I was studying the entertainment pages on the way over. This will help take the taste of that schnapps out of your mouth, eh?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE VIOLINIST OF THE CAFÉ ORCHESTRA

  As Taffy Sinclair enjoyed the strange mixture of black Russia tea and a plate of small weisswürst, he relaxed to the strains of Ketalby’s “In a Persian Market,” played by the group of musicians on the stand. It was their last performance of the evening. All the players were seated save for their leader, a tall man with close-cropped hair and wearing impeccable evening dress. He stood in the shadows of the curtain and played the violin with extraordinary beauty and skill. When Begg tipped the waiter heavily and put a folded note on the plate, Sinclair thought his friend was asking for one of his favorite sentimental tunes, such as “The Gypsy” or “The Merry Widow Waltz,” but neither of these was played before the musicians brought their performance to an end.

  Sinclair was surprised when the tall violinist, having replaced his instrument in its case, strolled over to their table. Then, when the albino removed his dark glasses, Sinclair realized with a shock that he sat across the table from Sir Seaton Begg’s cousin and archenemy, the notorious Count Zodiac, wanted for countless daring crimes throughout the Empire. More than once the two had crossed swords on the Continent and only a few months earlier Count Zodiac had been thwarted by Begg in his daring attempt to rob the New York–bound aerial express. In London, where Zodiac commanded an almost fanatical loyalty from the crooks of Smith’s Kitchen, the most notorious den of thieves in Christendom, they had fought many times. A year earlier Zodiac had succeeded in stealing the British Crown Jewels, only to have them snatched back by Begg as he tried to make his underwater escape from the city.

  The red-eyed albino had a charming, crooked smile. “So, gentlemen, you have discovered how I earn my living, these days. . . .”

  Begg grinned almost boyishly at this. “Good evening, Count Zodiac. Perhaps I am too familiar with your aliases. The Tarot Tea Orchestra rather betrayed you? But I hear you work for Heinrich Himmler now. . . .”

  For a split second Zodiac’s expression changed to one of anger. Then again he was all urbane affability. “Is Himmler claiming that? Scum like him can’t employ me, Sir Seaton.” He sat back in his chair, lighting a pungent, black cigarette. “However, you might find that Himmler and the others have all been playing my game. . . .” He chuckled with deep pleasure.

  Sinclair, who had been up for too long and drunk too much schnapps, lost his usual discretion then. He leaned across the table. “Look here, Count von Bek, did you kill Geli Raubal? You seem to be the only one who had the opportunity, if not the motive! You are the mysterious SS man, eh?”

  “Captain Zeiss,” said Begg.

  Zodiac drew a deep, ennui-ridden sigh. Ignoring Sinclair, he addressed Begg directly, reaching across the table and handing him a pasteboard card. “I was at this address until yesterday. You might find it interesting. Even useful.” He turned, bowing, to Sinclair. “We all work in the ways which best suit our temperaments, I think, Mr. Sinclair? Who is to say in our good or our evil intentions we unknowingly serve the causes of law or chaos?”

  With that, the albino turned on his heel, picked up his violin case, and disappeared into the night.

  Sinclair, stunned for a moment, leapt to his feet and pursued the albino, but he soon returned, shaking his head: lost him. Begg continued to sip his tea, studying the card. “We don’t need to follow him, Taffy. He has left us his most recent address.”

  Begg frowned down at the card in his hand. “Do you feel like making a visit to the Hotel Rembrandt? It’s just around the corner. We can walk.”

  “Oh, good heavens, Begg! This is unbelievable!” Taffy Sinclair was staring aghast at a handful of papers and photographs. He had just opened the writing bureau in Room 25. Count Zodiac’s room at the Hotel Rembrandt looked as if it had been hastily vacated.

  Sir Seaton Begg was inspecting the wardrobe. He picked up and put back a black Mauser rifle with a telescopic sight. “There’s our red herring. Zodiac was no d
oubt trying to sow further suspicion amongst the Nazis. And look at this!” On hangers hung a complete SS captain’s uniform. The metatemporal detective offered it to his friend. “And look here, Taffy. Bloodstains. They fit perfectly with the suspected shooting.”

  “And these—these—letters from Himmler to Captain Zeiss, asking him to seduce that poor girl, compromise her, then kill her, so that Himmler could continue his blackmailing of Hitler through a third party. There’s a note here that even suggests Himmler was responsible for the initial blackmail a couple of years ago! The most damning evidence! So your cousin, von Bek, is a common murderer, after all! And in Captain Himmler’s employ?”

  “It certainly appears so.” Begg looked around for a bag. “Come on, Taffy. We’d better take these togs to Hitler.”

  “Surely we should get them to Inspector Hoffmann as soon as possible? Zodiac must be captured!”

  “I remind you again, Taffy, that Herr Hitler is our paying client and it is our duty to show him the evidence before it is presented to the police.”

  “But Great Jehovah, Begg, this overrides any client loyalty!”

  “I’m afraid not, Taffy. I remember the way to Berchtesgaden. You’d better come with me, old man, whatever your scruples. I need a witness and someone at my shoulder if the client decides to kill the messenger.”

  Only this persuaded the pathologist to accompany his friend, but he did so in brooding silence. Begg seemed completely insouciant, whistling fragments from musical comedies as the great car bore them relentlessly up toward Hitler’s retreat.

  Only because Rudolf Hess was convinced they had good news for Hitler were the Englishmen allowed into the fusty stench of the Nazi leader’s lair. Again he greeted them in nothing but his mackintosh, his eyes as mad as ever. He moved between gross self-pity and rage against his niece’s killers, sometimes in seconds. But when he at last looked at the evidence Begg and Sinclair had brought with them, he was stunned into a cold, sudden pseudo-sanity.

  “Himmler! He was behind the assassination attempts. Failing to kill any of us, he made his victim an innocent young girl! He always hated her. He has grown closer and closer to me, building up the SS on my behalf, he says. They warned me he had Jewish blood, but I laughed at them. And all the time he plotted against me in this subtle way, getting at me through Geli, using one of his own men to— ugh!” He stood up suddenly, bowing with both hands at his sides, and brought his bare heels together. “I am most grateful to you gentlemen. You have done everything Hess promised. Naturally you will receive your fee. Herr Hess will take you to the Brown House at once.”

  Even Hess seemed surprised by this sudden volte-face.

  “No need, old boy.” Sir Seaton Begg lifted his hat. “Have this one on me. I am happy to serve the cause of justice.”

  Though dressed only in a mackintosh, Hitler visibly grew an inch or two. “You have served not only my interests and those of my great party, Sir Seaton. You have served the interests of the entire free world. Hess. We shall need the Mercedes. There is something I must take care of at once. Thank you again.” He lifted his arm in his familiar salute.

  “Only too happy to oblige, old chap.” And with that Begg steered an open-mouthed Sinclair into the fir-rich air of the subAlpine forests.

  “Take a good gulp, Taffy,” he murmured.

  “Are you out of your mind, Begg? That chap’s about as unbalanced as it’s possible to be without falling off the planet. You’ve no idea what notions you’ve given him.”

  “Oh, I think the ones he was meant to be given, Taffy. Perhaps you already suspect the truth? In this case we served a client other than we thought!”

  By now Dolly’s headlights were piercing the dark shadows of the German night. Taffy, still deprived of his usual amount of sleep, began to doze in the seat beside his friend. He was awakened to realize that Begg was driving far slower than usual and that the headlamps of another car were coming from behind. He watched in some astonishment, as if dreaming. The great Mercedes swept past them, overtaking at almost one hundred miles an hour. Sinclair made out Herr Hitler in the backseat. Hess was with him. Strasser appeared to be driving. Before he began to fall back to sleep, he remembered noticing that Hitler appeared to be wearing a suit and a tie and asking Begg where Hitler was going at this time of night.

  “Berlin, I’d guess.” Sir Seaton kept Dolly at a steady pace.

  “We’re going to Berlin?”

  “Good Lord no, old boy. Our work’s done here. We’re going home. If I put on a little speed at the crossroads, we should be just in time to catch the dawn zeppelin for London.”

  Without Sinclair’s knowledge, Begg had already stowed the luggage. There had been no hotel bill to settle. By dawn they reached the great Munich Aerodrome and were soon installed in a comfortable suite. Through the portholes came floods of intermittent sunshine caused by the movement of the ship in her cables. A radio bulletin playing on the State Radio took on a rather excited air, and as soon as he had disrobed, washed, and settled in his seat, Begg turned the volume up.

  He listened in some amusement, but Sinclair was aghast at the news. He even failed to notice the almost effortless lifting of the huge liner as she uncoupled from her masts and began her journey to London.

  There had effectively been a complete disintegration of the Nazis. Already the Reichstag party seemed divided into opposing camps headed by Strasser and Göring. Nazi officials were issuing contradictory statements since the arrest earlier that morning of Adolf Hitler, self-confessed murderer of the man he termed the “Jew Fifth Columnist Himmler,” hitherto his trusted aide and an ex–chicken farmer. Hitler understood that he could no longer hope to be vice-chancellor, but now it scarcely mattered, since he had in his own words “torn out the heart of the hydra sucking the life from Germany, keeping the nation safe against injustice and horror for a thousand years.”

  “You effectively put the gun into Hitler’s hand and killed Himmler!” cried Sinclair. “Really, Begg, sometimes . . .”

  “I told you, Taffy, that I did what I was supposed to do. Zodiac knew only too well that there are few better and more trustworthy messengers than you and me. So he sent us to Hitler with the evidence he had carefully manufactured over months. Those papers were enough to convince almost anyone and in a bad light they were even harder to detect. But they were forgeries, old man. Planted for someone to find. Just as those apparent sniper shots which always missed their targets were intended to distract attention from what was actually being accomplished. Zodiac had been looking for a good way to make the Nazi leadership fall out. When he knew we were on to him, he simply made us his cat’s-paws. Pretty audacious, eh.”

  “But Zodiac killed that poor creature, Fräulein Raubal,” insisted Taffy.

  “Not at all, Taffy, though you could argue Hitler effectively drove her to her death. She killed herself, as everyone insisted. She tested the poison first. You smelled that distinctive odor as readily as I did.”

  “Cyanide!”

  “Exactly. The smell of cyanide, if taken by mouth, lingers on the lips long after the taker has gone to the hereafter. That dead canary the young lady carried around all day. She had already tried the stuff on the bird and saw that it worked. She took a pretty heavy dosage, I’d say. The police remained deceived by the gunshot. The way she lay on the floor made it seem to others that she had died in the throes of passion. But I believe she died in the throes of death.”

  “But she was shot, Begg. Shot by Zodiac!”

  “True.”

  “So Zodiac is the real murderer. . . .”

  “No.”

  There was a knock at their door and Begg called, “Come in!” A busboy with a salver presented him with a card which he glanced at; then he smiled and tucked it into his upper waistcoat pocket. He offered the boy a silver coin. “Ask Countess von Bek to join us at her pleasure.” He beamed across at a bewildered Taffy.

  “No?”

  “No. Zodiac was, of course, Fräulein Raub
al’s lover. He played the violin by night and courted her by day. By whatever clever devices, he had provided himself with the assignment of keeping guard on her, knowing that he planned to seduce her. But I think he also planned to save her. He took some conventional ‘glamour’ pictures of her. He made those Himmler forgeries we showed Hitler. I don’t think he had any plan to kill the girl. But he did want her to run away with him. So he suggested they go to Vienna together. He told her to demand of Hitler that she be allowed to stay with her relatives and study singing there. It was a plan she had already toyed with. So she did as she was told. But Hitler, as we know, had reached the end of his tolerance.” Begg rose to his feet to open their door, bowing Countess Rose into their rather cramped quarters. Offering her his chair, he brought her rapidly up-to-date and then, leaning beside the porthole, continued.

  “Someone, probably an SA spy, had reported the ‘secret lover,’ even if they had not been able to say who it was. So Hitler refused. Under no circumstances could she go to Vienna. She again threatened suicide. He did not believe her. Neither, I suspect, would ‘Captain Zeiss’ have believed her. But when he let himself into the apartment late that night, he found poor Geli Raubal on the floor, having tasted the torments of cyanide. She had left a note, no doubt. This went against his plans, but he had to go through with the rest of it. He pocketed the note. He found Hitler’s gun, shot the already dead Geli through the heart in a way deliberately to draw suspicion on someone, placed the gun in her hand with equally deliberate clumsiness, then left the police and investigators, like ourselves, to conclude that the young woman had been murdered, either by Hitler or one of his lieutenants.”

  The Countess Rose sat back in her seat, her eyes gleaming with admiration. “So Hoffmann and myself were completely fooled. Only the fact that Hitler had an ironclad alibi stopped us from arresting him.”

  “Zodiac already had his original plan, which he modified. He knew that Hitler could not be ‘framed.’ So he planned to let his men discover the clothing and documents at the Hotel Rembrandt. Since I caught up with him so much sooner than he expected, he merely decided to use me as his messenger! He was always a clever customer. Even those pictures, released to the press, would be enough to threaten the fortunes of Hitler and his party. But Zodiac wanted to be dead certain. That was why he had forged some Himmler documents to make sure all in the party were suspect. He hoped they would find their way to Hitler. I made sure that they did. The consequences then followed like clockwork. Leading to a satisfactory resolution, I think you’ll agree, Taffy. Sometimes it is just about possible for two wrongs to make a right.”