The Nazi's Wife

by Peter Watson

  The military governor in Berchtesgaden, a cocky young colonel from the Midwest, had listened to my story but said he could not help. He had very few people on his staff who could ski, he said, and nowhere near fifteen, which would be the minimum number needed to chase five fugitives who were armed. On top of that, he imagined that the Germans, being skilled skiers and familiar with the mountains, would easily outpace greenhorn Americans, so we wouldn’t get near them anyway. Furthermore, this being Hitler’s retreat, he said that the population of Berchtesgaden could not be relied upon to provide help—there were secret Nazi sympathizers everywhere. I explained about the conduit and I showed him Eisenhower’s orders but it did no good. The colonel didn’t have the men. He agreed with me that Muhlman would have moved on by the time any patrol he sent out reached the mountains and that there were all sorts of remote places where they could hide away forever. What he said made sense but it didn’t help.

  It was a clean, clear night for the drive back to Salzburg and, as usual, the roads were as jammed with traffic as the sky was cluttered with stars.

  To my depression could be added confusion. I now had not one but two theories about von Zell, both of which were plausible but, for the moment, hardly more than that. I had no real evidence to support either. Tomorrow Hobel would demand to know what progress I had made, what I had to show him. I had been away five nights. I had, I thought, gone a lot further in my reasoning than any of my predecessors but, when it came down to it, I still hadn’t produced von Zell. Worse, it now looked as though, if he was hiding in the mountains, I would never be able to get at him. Or, if we were to send a patrol after Muhlman and the others, in the hope of them leading us to von Zell, that patrol would have to be specially drafted for the purpose. I had no idea whether Hobel would sanction that, whether he had the power to do so. Even if he did, and the patrol was sent out, if it then drew a blank, as was quite likely given how many mountains there were, it would be such a spectacular failure on my part that it would more than wipe out any acclaim I had achieved with the Holy Roman Crown Jewels. There would be no medals. I just had to hope against hope that when I called him the next morning Maurice would have some good news for me.

  The yellow and green light over the main door of the Goldener Hirsch was a welcome sight when I reached it around ten that night. More, the staff acted like family, remembering my name, all smiles, solicitous of my welfare while I had been away. The restaurant was closing but they held it open for me, provided I had my bath afterward, and I treated myself to a whole bottle of wine with the roast chicken; I had been away five nights, hadn’t eaten properly on any of them, and had almost forgotten what it was like to be tipsy.

  After dinner I bathed, in clean, unlimited hot water, then crept in between fresh, cool, clean linen sheets. I didn’t think much about Allie. I hadn’t met Konstanze then and until that time I had always been able to put affairs behind me with little trouble—I suppose because I had never really fallen for anyone, rather, the reverse was true. But I did dream about Allie. We were back on the mountain and Muhlman was being far nastier than he had been in real life. He was wearing his Nazi uniform, my brother was there, also in uniform, telling all the others who I really was. Allie was stripped to her underwear (her mother’s) and tied to a tree that appeared to be growing inside the hut. One of her legs was in the deer trap and bleeding. A psychiatrist would no doubt make much of the fear, family jealousy and eroticism mixed into my dream, but I couldn’t have told him where the dream went for it didn’t go anywhere. Maurice called in the middle of it.

  I had dropped off so suddenly, so painlessly, so easily that, when I heard the phone, I thought it was still evening. In fact, it was 9:30 the next day.

  “Yes,” I said, wide awake as soon as I realized who it was. “Any news?”

  “I am afraid, dear boy, that so far we have drawn a blank.”

  “Damn. Tell me.”

  “Simply no sign of your man, either as von Zell or as von Haltern.”

  “Have they checked all the vineyards?”

  “Of course not, not yet. But they did find the most obvious ones, three vineyards near Zöbing, were those Benedictine monks you mentioned—the ones expelled from Kremsmünster—had been housed. The monks had gone back to their monasteries but there was no doubt they were the right vineyards. I’ve had a second man there since yesterday morning and they were allowed to search everywhere and to look at all the books. No one at the vineyards or in the surrounding villages has heard of your man.”

  “But there are still plenty of other vineyards to try?” I realized I sounded desperate.

  “Yes, Walter, but …”

  “But what? But what, Maurice?”

  “We’ll keep searching, Walter, of course. But you should know that, at two of the vineyards, the owners did know von Zell. They remembered that he had visited them before the war, for an article he was writing. Now, don’t you think that if he was going to stay anywhere, Walter, it would be with those people? People he knew well enough for them to remember him eight years later?”

  Maurice was right, damn him. I knew it, but the more I thought of my meeting with Hobel later that morning, the more desperate I became.

  “Keep looking, Maurice, please. Another day—no, two days. If you haven’t found him by tomorrow night you can call your people off, and many thanks. Okay?”

  I put the phone down before I realized that our stock market “race” had not even been mentioned. I was in such a state it felt as though the chicken I had eaten the night before was still alive inside my stomach, fluttering its wings and trying to get away. My dream had been bad enough, leaving me with a vague, unpleasant sensation; but the news from Maurice was worse, much worse. My theories about von Zell were fine, as theories. But if they didn’t check out, they were so much hot air, empty reasoning, as Hobel would be the first to tell me. I thought I had been so clever with my hunch about the vineyards of Austria, and it would have been such a coup if it had worked out. But it now began to seem that I had flattered myself into believing a silly theory, just because it was clever. Hobel would see that too. As for my other theory, about von Zell’s hideaway in the mountains, well, I had no way of knowing what he would think of that. I decided to take my time over breakfast and, since I could see that it was another beautiful day, walk to the office.

  I stopped on the Market Bridge; the sun was strong and the green waters of the Salzach were swollen with melted snow. There were two nuns shopping for vegetables on the Rudolfskai. I stood and watched as they felt everything carefully, badgered the greengrocer into fetching his freshest merchandise from the back of the store, then counted out their money very carefully. I was no further forward in working out how to catch von Zell, still dreading the I-told-you-so reception I knew I would get from Hobel. I envied the nuns their simple, straightforward, certain life.

  I was like a little boy who, having been to the dentist, delays his return to school for as long as possible. I looked in every shop window that morning and found something of interest in everything that was happening on the street—scenery being unloaded from a truck and carried into the theater, a choir progressing in purple cassocks from one church to another, a consignment of new bicycles on display outside a garage. Finally, I could put off my arrival no longer.

  I smile when I think back now—for Hobel wasn’t in the office that day and I still wonder if the whole investigation would have taken a different course if he had been, if he had heard what I had to say, laughed in my face, then fired me from the case, as he might have been able to do. But the major had gone to Munich, three or four hours away, and had left word that, should I show up, or call, he wanted to speak to me. I was not to leave Salzburg again before he had seen me and I was to study carefully the file from him which I would also find on my desk. He was getting impatient for results.

  Nonetheless, he was out of the way, temporarily, so despite his heavy-handed message I relaxed and was soon caught up in the details of o
ffice life. It appeared that a dance had been organized for the following Saturday and this was the single most important topic of conversation for most of the men in the building, Sammy not excluded. Army trucks were being sent out into the surrounding countryside to bring girls into Salzburg for the big occasion. A band was coming from Munich; in fact, that was one of the reasons Hobel had gone there, to choose the musicians and settle various other details.

  There was a pile of messages waiting for me on my desk, a letter in my wife’s handwriting, another in my mother’s and a cream-colored folder, presumably Hobel’s file. They could wait. “Well, Sammy,” I said, as cheerfully as I could. “What news from the bulls and the bears of Wall Street?”

  He was working at his typewriter and didn’t look up. “I sold.” He didn’t so much say it as sing it, his voice rising a note or two.

  “Oh yes?” But I meant “Oh, no!”

  “Yeah. But don’t worry. I bought some other stuff.”

  I sat down on top of my desk, directly across from him. “Very smart. But all this activity on my behalf must mean I’ve lost, right? It’s going to be that sort of day, I can feel it. Give me the gory details, Sammy, so I can swear and get to confession before lunch.”

  He finished a sentence on his typewriter, then finally looked up. “The rumor was true. The guy from Consolidated Automobiles was recruited by Truman and is coming to Germany.”

  “And?”

  “And so the shares dropped some more—”

  “How much? No—hold on. Let me get more comfortable.” I slumped into my chair, threw back my head and closed my eyes. Then I opened one and squinted at Sammy.

  He looked at his watch, pushing his eyeglasses back up his nose with the other hand. “This time yesterday, your original thousand dollars was worth”—he looked in his book—“eight hundred and seventy-two, plus forty-six cents. Each share dropped thirty-one points.”

  “Confession, here I come.… Shit!”

  “Remember,” said Sammy calmly, “that for every dollar you have lost, I have lost five.”

  “Shit!” I said again, more softly. “So what did you do, Sammy? What did you do with the money?”

  “Insurance. I bought into insurance.”

  “Why?”

  “Simple. In wars insurance companies have a hard time, especially this last war with its blitz bombing. Nothing, and no one, is safe. You can’t insure your house, or your furniture or your life, so it’s hardly Christmas and birthday time all at once for insurance companies. Not that I feel sorry for them. But now that the war’s over, it will be different. Life insurance, house insurance, health insurance, even jewelry insurance will all start up again.”

  He waved a sheet of paper as he put it fresh into his typewriter. “I bought you seven hundred shares of Atlantic Insurance, at one twenty-five a share. Grand total—eight hundred and seventy-five dollars. And that means you owe me two dollars fifty-four cents.”

  As I paid him the money, I took a deep breath. “And I suppose Confederate Paper went up yet again?”

  He reached across and took the notes and change before answering. “’fraid so. Steady rise—good share that, I reckon. Up six since you last asked. Your friend Ghent is now worth … one three four.”

  That meant Maurice was $159 ahead of me in no time. He would be unbearably cocky and the helmet was surely already his. A thought struck me. “Did you buy into Confederate Paper, Sammy?”

  He looked up, shoving his eyeglasses back yet again. “No. I put my spare cash into automobiles, with you.”

  “That’s some consolation.”

  Sammy grinned. “You need nerve in this game, Walter. You’ll get your money back, later or sooner.”

  “I don’t like the way you said that.”

  But he was already busy again with his paperwork.

  I turned wearily to the mail and the messages on my desk, thinking again of those nuns I had seen on the Rudolfskai. Were they really as content as they looked? Or did they, too, have their problems? Did a convent harbor all manner of jealousies and rivalries? Did each job—choirmistress, say, or librarian—carry with it responsibilities that gave the nuns sleepless nights? The nuns I had seen had both been attractive women and the thought occurred to me that they might enjoy the dance being planned for the following Saturday. The image of Major Hobel, his watery eyes bulging with lust, dancing with a nun cheered me as I picked up the papers.

  I put the letter from my wife, and the one from my mother, in my pocket. I would look at those when I was alone. Gingerly, I opened the folder that Hobel had left. It contained a single sheet, a newspaper clipping—in German—and no sooner had I read the headline than I groaned aloud. No wonder Hobel had passed it on to me. No wonder he wanted to talk. No wonder I was not allowed to leave Salzburg beforehand.

  The clipping described how, two days before—the day Allie and I had found the deer blood in the snow and sung those sickening songs with Muhlman and his troupe—a motor cruiser had been intercepted by the Swiss police on lake Geneva near midnight. It was found to contain three small-time ex-Nazis and, according to the police, had probably set out from Cully, in Switzerland, bound for Meillerie, in France. Neither the Germans nor the Swiss helmsman would talk. The newspaper speculated that this was a crossing point, from Switzerland to France, for the notorious secret conduit set up to help ex-Nazis escape. It suggested that, since the figures apprehended were relatively minor, this might have been the first time this route was used, that the three men were, in a sense, guinea pigs. All that was bad enough, but what had particularly drawn Hobel’s attention, and incensed him, was the last paragraph, which went something like this: “Police have traced the boat to the yard of M. Gilbert Lenoir, which is situated farther along the shore, at Château de Chillon. M. Lenoir says he sold the boat to a ‘tall, swarthy man, French-speaking, perhaps an Algerian,’ about two months ago. He said that there was nothing suspicious about the transaction, the man did not seem in a hurry to buy and came back several times to argue over the price. ‘The only thing that was remotely unusual or strange,’ said M. Lenoir, ‘was that the man paid in gold. He had several small bars of it in a briefcase. The last time that happened to me was in 1940.’” The boat had cost the equivalent of $1,200, a lot of money in 1946.

  Hobel, of course, had ringed the word “gold” several times with his pen. His eyes, I thought spitefully, must certainly have fallen from their sockets as he had done so.

  But, I had to admit, it stepped up the pressure on us, on me. This story, small enough in itself, would nonetheless wing its way around the news service wires across the world. With the Nuremberg trials still in full flood, with Kaltenbrunner on the stand at that very moment, Nazis and ex-Nazis were news. Almost certainly, Wren and General Eisenhower himself would see the item, or have it drawn to their attention. Questions would be asked about the progress I was making—whether I was in fact making any progress. I would be left to continue for a while but somewhere, in the recesses of Wren’s mind perhaps, or in one of those offices near Eisenhower’s, where smart staff officers from good families had enjoyed safe wars, a contingency plan would be drawn up. In case I should fail.

  I took out my pipe and sucked it for comfort, as I sometimes did, even though there was no tobacco in it. So far it was not proving to be a good day. I closed the folder and picked up the next thing, a telegram from Henry de Jaeger in Hamburg. More bad news, I supposed, and I was right.

  He had been unable to get hold of me while I was in the mountains so had wired the results of his investigations direct to Salzburg. He had contacted the von Halterns, as discussed, he said, and had spent two or three hours with the family at their farm in Tegernsee, just outside Hamburg. Von Zell was not there, he wrote. He was also convinced, he said, that no one was hiding out at the von Halterns. The Baroness claimed she had not seen von Zell since her own son, Eric, had been killed and “Rudi,” as she called him familiarly, had come to the funeral. De Jaeger was convinced by her story b
ut had searched the farm in any case and asked shopkeepers and policemen in the surrounding village. All told the same story: the Baroness, having lost her husband just before the war, then her son-in-law, and finally her son in the war, had been devastated by these events. She now went nowhere and saw no one. It was rare for her to go shopping, even in the village; most of the time the local traders made deliveries. De Jaeger added that the farmhouse itself was not large and that the various outbuildings had been searched simultaneously by the four men he had taken with him. So he felt pretty sure that von Zell was not at Tegernsee. I could just imagine him saying “Sure as shee-it.”

  What really made it seem as though the Baroness was telling the truth was her confession to de Jaeger that her son’s documents—army ID documents, passport, driver’s license—had survived the bombing in Koblenz but that she could not find them now. “So make of that what you will,” de Jaeger had concluded. “Good hunting.”

  That sign-off phrase “Good hunting” made me think of deer and my feast of venison in the mountains. And that reminded me of how little progress I was making. Both the Wachau and Hamburg leads had proven to be blind alleys that day and my third lead, Muhlman and the mountains, looked too difficult to follow up. Terrific! And, on top of it all, I was $125 poorer. It was only a little over a week since I had found the Holy Roman jewels and been the envy of all my colleagues. But it felt like a lifetime.

  I suddenly noticed on my desk a large bundle of papers that looked like letters but which obviously didn’t belong to me. They were wrapped untidily with a dark blue ribbon.