The Nazi's Wife

by Peter Watson

  The police station, when I found it again, was crawling with activity even at that late hour. It was a six-story building in a sort of yellow stone and had those metal-framed windows that gave it the aspect of a middle-aged, plain, frumpish stenographer. Buildings often remind me of people.

  Yellow light came from almost all the windows and on the marble steps leading up to the main entranceway stood a knot of people like a wedding group waiting for the photographer. They could have been anything: police, criminals, journalists, drunks, judges.

  Everyone turned to look as the girls disembarked noisily and clattered up the steps and into the building. In German I asked for the station officer. After a couple of minutes a fat, red-haired man stepped out of an office at the back of the room and came forward. He eyed the girls.

  “Yes?” he said to me. I noticed that he needed a shave but you couldn’t tell until you were close. Blonds and redheads were lucky in that way. No matter how well I shaved, I looked swarthy again by lunchtime.

  I showed him my orders, drawing his attention to the general’s signature. “I need some cell space, urgently,” I said. “I must interrogate these girls as quickly as possible—tonight. And I must see each of them separately, so they cannot compare stories.”

  He turned back to the girls, inspecting them one by one. Pauline shivered under his look.

  “What have they done?”

  “Nothing. But one or more of them may have some information I need. It really is urgent.” Was he going to be difficult?

  “What sort of information?”

  “Sorry, I can’t tell you.” I waved the orders at him again. I didn’t want to tell him I was Nazi hunting. In those days you could never be too careful; there were still a lot of secret sympathizers around in all sorts of guises. In 1946 Germany still made my flesh creep.

  But the station officer didn’t like my approach. He wanted to know what I was up to, and if I wasn’t going to be cooperative, neither was he. He gave me a hard look.

  “This is a busy station, Lieutenant. There’s no free space.”

  The girls were looking at me now, curious as to the delay. They had to see I had some real authority or the interrogations would be that much more difficult. That’s one reason I opted for the police station rather than trying to make do with Frieda Breker’s flat. In real cells, whether they had been properly arrested or not, they would feel much more intimidated and, a not unimportant thing, much more uncomfortable physically. However, I judged that arguing with the redheaded captain would only make things more difficult. I turned so that my body was between him and the girls.

  “Are you a married man, Captain?”

  He looked at me sideways, suspicious. But he nodded his head.

  “I bet you don’t see a lot of her, eh? Not in this job. You’re right—I can see that it is a busy station and that you have a heavy responsibility.”

  “The hours are long,” he said gruffly, not giving yet. His tone implied that, in Germany just then, a lot of people were forced to work long hours.

  I lowered my voice so he had to lean toward me to hear. “In my car outside I have three pairs of nylons. They would make a gift for your wife, I think, on those nights when you arrive home late?” I made it a question. “All women like nylons.”

  He looked at me again, this time turning his head fully in my direction. I recognized with relief the series of expressions with which I had long ago grown familiar. His first look said that he couldn’t be bought in that way, and not to think that he could. The second look was a kind of startled realization that, yes indeed, his wife would be delighted with some nylons. And the third look was a kind of lost expression, as he realized that, like anyone else, he could be bought. But he would like to save face if he could and I knew that now was the time to give him a graceful way out.

  “You drive a hard bargain, Captain,” I lied. “But I also have a carton of American cigarettes; you could give your men a decent smoke.”

  It usually worked. The wonderful thing about nylons and cigarettes was that they weren’t big enough, as “gifts,” to be seen as bribes, as real corruption. The captain would get more than anyone else but that was only his due, he would tell himself, as the ranking officer. Even so, he might give one of his sergeants a pair of nylons for his wife. That would make him feel less guilty, spread it more thinly.

  I pressed him. “If you give the order, we can go out to my car together.”

  He spoke quietly to one of his sergeants. “How many prisoners tonight, Hans?”

  “Fourteen, sir.”

  “Anything serious?”

  Hans inspected a large book on the reception counter. “Four drunks, two drunken prostitutes, two soldiers in a fight—we’re waiting for the military police to collect them—and, oh yes, a robber caught red-handed, shinnying over a factory wall. The remainder are all vagrants.”

  The captain thought. “Leave the robber by himself, and the two whores, and the two soldiers. That’s three cells. Split the other nine into three groups of three and put them in the new wing.” He looked back at me. “We have ten cells; that leaves four for you. But the sooner I can have them back the better—if I should get a sudden rush, it could be embarrassing.”

  “Right,” I said, making briskly for the door. To the girls I called out, “I’ll be right back, my lovelies, I promise. Don’t move.”

  I opened the door so that the captain could sit in my car. Then I dipped into the trunk and took out the nylons and the cigarettes. Maurice and I had evolved what we thought was the perfect transaction of this kind. The nylons in all our packets were identical, but some were sealed in red wrappers and others in white. I handed the captain one of each. “The red ones were made in California, in Hollywood, and the white in New York. Take your pick.” It wasn’t true, but sometimes people balked at the last moment and wouldn’t accept the “gifts.” We had found that offering them a “choice” at this late stage took their minds off any objections or reservations they might have. Choosing red or white seemed to make acceptance less of a sin, as if they themselves had needed to employ some skill in obtaining the goods.

  The captain took two packets of red and one of white and I handed over a carton of two hundred cigarettes, king size. We got out of the car together, after he had stuffed the nylons inside his uniform, and went back into the station.

  The girls were led down a flight of stone steps to the basement of the building, into a plain gray corridor with a series of white steel doors. It struck me as cold and clinical enough to resemble what you would find if you could shrink enough to crawl inside the cells of a brain: colorless, tidy, efficient space. It was all very forbidding and, for my purposes, perfect. One by one the girls were shown into the cells, each room with white-painted brick walls, a safety light, a table, two chairs and nothing else.

  I had been observing the girls throughout the evening and, unobtrusively, trying to sort out how to approach the interrogations. In general, of course, what I wanted was any information that would lead to von Zell, but in practice I guessed that it would boil down to one thing: whether or not he had—or had had—a mistress, either among these girls or someone else.

  In my experience a man’s secretary was always the first suspect in the search for a mistress and von Zell had had four. If none of these women had slept with him, then one of them must at least know if he had a mistress. Over the years that sort of thing is impossible to hide. My guess was that, if von Zell did have someone, he would have been in touch with her recently. Her identity was, therefore, all-important.

  When the last of the girls had been deposited in the cells, the captain turned and gave me the keys. He looked at his watch.

  “Nearly midnight. It’s unlikely we’ll get very busy tonight, but you never know. The station brasserie closes at two and there’s sometimes a bit of trouble then. If you could be through by that time, it might avoid problems.…”

  I nodded and he retired back upstairs.

 
I started where my instincts told me to—not with Fräulein Breker, the senior secretary, but with Margaretta—Margaretta Posse was her full name. She was the better-looking of the two pianists and I reasoned that these two facts, as musician and good-looker, made her the most likely contender.

  As I entered her cell she was sitting not on one of the chairs but on the table, swinging her legs backward and forward. She looked like a large teenager.

  “This needn’t take very long, Margaretta,” I said, “but there are one or two things I have to be clear about.” She nodded and smiled and got off the table to sit on a chair opposite me. I placed a pack of cigarettes between us and sat down myself.

  “You are probably the prettiest of the four secretaries, Margaretta, and of course you play piano so well. Were you ever von Zell’s mistress?”

  Crude, but it appeared to have worked. For a while Margaretta stared at me, surprised and shocked. Eventually she blinked.

  “Oh no,” she stammered. “He was—is—a most charming man; we all liked him, but not … not in that way. At least as far as I was concerned, he was not really my type. And I … I’m sure I was not his type.” She threw a puzzled glance in my direction. “Wasn’t he happy with his wife? I thought he was.” She put her hand to her neck and massaged it lightly, closed her eyes and sighed, as if to herself. She was thinking back, but to what?

  I let the silence continue for a while. Then I shifted forward in my seat and opened the cigarettes. I half-offered them to her, my hand being outstretched but cradling the cigarettes on my side.

  “Tell me, Margaretta … that sigh … is it a happy memory? Or a sad one? What happened?”

  Her hand was still on her neck but not moving now. She looked down. I held out the cigarettes properly.

  Absently, she took one and held it tentatively to her lips. I got up out of my chair and went around the table to light it for her. I sat on the edge of the table, near her, looking down.

  “What happened, Margaretta? It might be important.”

  She sucked on her cigarette and inhaled deeply, shaking her head. “It wasn’t important. Not at all.” Nevertheless, she had remembered it.

  I said nothing. She was smoking greedily and usually that was a good sign. I lit my pipe, taking my eyes off her to do so. The pipe was useful for that, it sometimes eased the pressure. Margaretta took another cigarette, this time lighting it herself. Again, she sucked in ravenously.

  “Once, in 1943, I think, we were working late. Two of us girls and Dr. von Zell. On those occasions, to show his appreciation that we were working such long hours, he would open the door between his room and the large office outside where we all worked, and at eight o’clock he would switch on the radio in his office for the concert; it was his way of sharing something with us. We would all listen together.

  “Well, this particular night was a Thursday, that I remember very well, and the symphony was by Bruckner. It was at the time when Hitler wanted his museum to go ahead as planned in Linz and the opera house was to be dedicated to Bruckner, rather as Bayreuth is dedicated to Wagner. You understand?”

  I nodded. I hated Wagner, he’d offered too much inspiration to the Nazis.

  “A lot of Bruckner was being played just then, I suppose because he was one of Hitler’s favorites. He had lived near Linz for a while. Anyway, I remember it was Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony they were playing that evening, the long one. The music was loud, passionate, typical Bruckner, swelling then dying, rising then falling. Pauline, who was the other girl there that night, left after the first movement but I stayed on to finish what I was doing. So there was just the doctor and me. The music continued to ebb and flow, to fill the room at one moment, and then retreat the next. I think I was supposed to be filing some records in connection with Marshall Göring’s paintings but I found myself listening to the music instead. I got up and walked around, trying to recapture my concentration … and then I noticed that, inside his office, Dr. von Zell had unloosened his tie and taken his boots off. He was leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed, just listening.

  “The music had reached that point where the whole orchestra is straining, squeezing rapid bursts of thunder from every direction.” She looked up at me and smiled. “You know how it is sometimes with music, it gives you a cold sensation along your spine. As if champagne bubbles have spilled inside your vertebrae. That happened to me then; I can remember it so well. And, of course, I was keyed up—we had been on the go all day, since seven in the morning. Suddenly, suddenly I felt a huge desire to make love.” She paused, embarrassed now, avoiding my eye. “To be made love to. I went into Dr. von Zell’s room. I had taken off my shoes so he didn’t hear me come in, what with the strength of the music.

  “He looked rather boyish, with his tie undone. His hair was mussed and, with his eyes closed, he looked almost vulnerable, not at all the tough, controlled Nazi leader. I can remember it so well now. As I moved into his room, the feeling I had, the sexual feeling, became even stronger, there was such a mixture of manly smells about him—the leather from his boots, some kind of cologne from his hair, even the ink of his fountain pen. And still he didn’t hear me. The Bruckner had changed now and lush loops of strings filled his office.

  “And then I must have stepped in front of the lamp for a shadow was thrown across his face. That was when he opened his eyes. I must have looked pretty strange, creeping into his room like that without my shoes and, I think, holding my neck just like this, where the music affected me.”

  So that’s why she had massaged herself.

  “But, if he was surprised, he didn’t show it. He remained calm, calmer than me. He spoke softly and said something like, ‘Yes, Margaretta, what is it?’

  “At first I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. I just stood there, rubbing my neck. He didn’t make it any easier, for he closed his eyes again. I had to search for something to say—something, well, you know, appropriate. Simple and not embarrassing.”

  It was dreadfully uncomfortable on the edge of the table but I didn’t dare move, it might break the spell. My pipe had gone out but I left it. It was now past midnight, very quiet outside, and there was nothing to disturb Margaretta or stop her reliving the episode all over again.

  “I think … I think that … in the end I said something like, ‘The Bruckner is very moving. The sound seems to foam in places.’ I remember I used the word ‘foam’ deliberately. I wanted to suggest … For a long time Dr. von Zell continued to sit with his eyes closed. I remember that I couldn’t see him breathing. Then his eyelids opened. ‘My dear,’ he said, his tone friendly, easy but ever so slightly reproachful, ‘Do you know why I have my eyes closed, as I listen to the music?’ I stood in front of him and shook my head.

  “‘If I close my eyes and concentrate, and the music relaxes me enough, I can see my house in Mondsee. It’s a wooden house with a black roof and a balcony. There’s a broken shutter on the first floor and the lake is less than fifty meters away. We have a bathing hut and a boathouse. In that house, Margaretta, in a room with a rocking chair, is my wife, Konstanze. At this hour our son will be in bed. Konstanze is also listening to this music. Her eyes will be closed, too, for she is trying to imagine me, here.

  “‘Every Thursday and Sunday we listen to the radio concerts together in this way. Although we are miles apart this is one way we can be together.’ The music had faded by now, as Bruckner has a habit of doing, and the sound of my breathing seemed to fill the office. He picked up a pen or a ruler, I forget which, and began tapping his desk, trying to break the mood. ‘Why don’t you go home now,’ he said in a whisper. ‘We have an early start tomorrow.’

  “After what he had told me, I only wanted him more, but I knew it was hopeless and that I had to leave. As I crossed back through the door to the outer office, he called out, ‘Margaretta.’ It was still a whisper, confidential. I half-turned, looking back over my shoulder. ‘Thank you,’ he said.”

  Briskly, she lit a third cigarette, sn
apping visibly out of her reverie.

  “I can’t speak for the others, Lieutenant, but I was never Dr. von Zell’s mistress, although I did try that once. He and his wife must have been very fond of one another, to spend their nights listening to the same concert when they were miles apart. After I learned that, I grew to envy them.”

  I was fascinated by Margaretta’s story, but disappointed. It was always wrong to prejudge information collected in interrogations—the most unlikely facts sometimes turned out to be crucial. But it began to seem as if my grand plan to trace von Zell’s mistress might be misconceived.

  “Tell me one other thing, Margaretta, please.”

  “Yes?”

  “Who handled Dr. von Zell’s mail? Who opened his letters, who read them? How was the work organized in the office?”

  Margaretta was relieved to be on less emotional ground. She answered readily this time.

  “Well, of course, Frieda was his principal secretary, so she saw everything. His number two was the thin, very tall girl sitting next to you at dinner, Delia Hotter. She was also the secretarial link with Bormann’s private office, so she would have seen everything that came from there. That leaves Pauline Kletter—she was in charge of the material for the Führermuseum.”

  “And you?”

  “I was the archivist. I filed everything, not just letters but anything Dr. von Zell told me to—books, newspaper articles, photographs, anything and everything. I also had to read everything so that, from time to time, I could act as a kind of rapid reference system. I was a bit of a researcher too. When Bormann wanted Dr. von Zell to find something out, it was usually me who had to locate the experts who could provide the answers.”