Not that there had to be any Werewolves in the bar, of course … anyway, it all seemed unpropitious and I left. There were other places. Night clubs and girlie joints could often throw something up. With my mind on such places, I got a real shock as I walked through the foyer: just approaching the swing doors on his way out was a bulky man, an old man. He was walking in such a way that his front was reflected back in a large mirror beside the exit and I saw dead Ublick. Dead Ublick, in his coffin somewhere on the high seas, yet here he was, right ahead of me. There was no mistaking him even though I had seen him only in death and now he wasn’t wearing his uniform. Yet I fancied the man I was seeing was younger. I felt a sense of relief at not really seeing the dead walking. It must be a younger brother … but the likeness was extraordinary! A younger brother, come to welcome the ex-feldwebel back to the Fatherland. Or to welcome something else …
If this Ublick was staying in the hotel then someone was financing him. The families of feldwebels of the Hitler generation are not normally wealthy, though this one might have struck gold, or oil, or something. If he was here on someone else’s wallet, then why?
In any case, anyone who looked so like Ublick that I’d believed for a moment in the living dead could be considered close to the brain snatch, too close to be disregarded. This could mean all manner of things.
So I went out behind him, keeping a discreet distance, and followed.
The man didn’t go far, which was no doubt why he hadn’t taken a taxi. Just round the corner, then round another corner and a short way down the kind of sleazy street often found behind expensive hotels, and there we were. It was a girlie bar on the fringes of what I knew to be the red light district of the city.
The man went in. Not by the main door: he used a side one, opening off a rubbish-filled, stinking alley that ran down the left of the premises, which bore the name Der Kaiserhof. Some Kaiserhof; beneath the name a naked woman was portrayed invitingly. She had green glass eyes with a light behind them, and as I went past they followed me. It was grotesque; and it was far from all. As the eyes swivelled, the enormous breasts jiggled. They were in relief, standing out like balloons from the flat painted groundwork. I dare say it did something to some clients, but it failed with me. I had the feeling it might put me off sex for ever; I would always see that horrible jiggle and hear the faint rasp as the left breast reached its farthest point and jammed against the hardboard. I walked on past for some distance, not to look too eager if the Ublick-like man had happened to be aware of me though I was pretty certain he hadn’t been.
Then I came back and went in by the main entrance.
The place was filled with smoke from cigars and cigarettes and it was difficult to penetrate visually since the lights were low. There were a number of girls around, some chatting up clients and discussing fees, others waiting for a nibble. The free ones gave me the eye; I smiled back at them all, not taking sides. One approached me as I took a stool at the bar, dropping her breasts through to the open air. I thought of that jiggle. I said all I wanted was a drink.
“Not want?” she asked, looking angry.
“No, I don’t, thanks. Some other time, perhaps.”
“You English are all the same. Poufs!”
I shrugged and she went off. I bought myself a whisky, very pricey. Then through the gloom and the smoke I saw the man like Ublick. He was sitting at the bar like me, at the far end, in a corner up against the wail. And now he was in uniform. Just like the dead one, the possible brother. I wondered if I was going doolally. An unlit cigar dangled from his lips and he was just sitting and staring. That uniform: it had been a quick change, though certainly I’d walked quite a fair way past before turning back. A glass was at Ublick’s elbow on the bar, but I didn’t see him drink from it. I wondered why he had gone in at the side door, which judging from the state of the alley must have led into the kitchen or cellar quarters. It was probably not important. I stared back. He was Ublick’s double, Hitler aspect and all. It was incredible. He even managed to look dead, which was quite a feat. Now that I could study him, albeit through the smoke, he didn’t after all strike me as younger than Ublick, the dead one. He could be a twin.
There had to be something in this, some link with Chile and Klaus Kunze, but I couldn’t begin to imagine what it might be apart from sheer coincidence. I went back to my theory, yet again, of a welcome for a returned soldier after half a lifetime.
Ublick, if that was indeed the name, sat on. Some men, drunk men, were sitting or standing close to the old man, roaring with laughter and spilling their drinks as they gesticulated. They were gesticulating towards old Ublick and seemed to be taking the mickey, but he wasn’t responding, wasn’t taking a blind bit of notice, so far as I could see through the haze.
I had another drink. I intended to hang about. This Ublick might be worth following again, when he left the bar. In the meantime I might find out something about him. I had an idea, from the way the group round him was carrying on, that he was a regular. I turned in my stool and looked around; there were still a number of unoccupied girls and I attracted the attention of the nicest looking one. The woman who had first encountered me leaned across for a word with the girl, and I heard a loud snigger. Anyway, the girl came across.
“You want now?” she asked.
“I want company,” I said, “but — ”
“Upstairs there will be company with me.”
“But not in bed,” I finished. I brought out my wallet and flipped through a wad of West German notes. “I’ll pay the going rate and you can sit and chat.” I added, “It’s less tiring, isn’t it?”
The girl dimpled; she was really pretty, and very young. “Ja,” she said. “Less tiring, much. But all the English are so mad, so crazy.”
“Just bored,” I said. “And I’m able to afford it, so why not?” I gestured across the bar. “Soon I’ll be like that old guy, too old to enjoy money.”
“Oh, him,” she said.
“Know who he is?”
“Why?”
“He looks interesting.”
“I do not know who he is,” she said.
“Does he come often?”
“He came today only.”
“Yes,” I said. “I saw him going in by the side door, as a matter of fact. He wasn’t in uniform then.”
The girl stared at me with her eyes wide. I had been about to go on to ask if that was Ublick’s first-ever visit, but I didn’t, because she had burst out into raucous laughter, crude laughter that didn’t go with her face and the dimple. When she simmered down she said, “You saw him go in? You are sure?”
“I’m positive,” I said.
“Then you must be mad. Look at the old man again. What does he look like?”
I answered truthfully. “He looks as if he’s dead.”
“He is dead,” she said. “He was dead when he was brought in early this morning.”
*
It had been someone’s idea of a joke. A rather high one, I would have thought: despite ice packing, time would be catching up on Ublick. He had been brought in by some drunks and propped on the stool. That was all the girl knew. Just a minute or so after she had told me about it, one of the men in the roistering group gave Ublick an unintentional nudge and he fell off the stool. While the resulting panic amongst the clients took over, the barman, who had been polishing glasses and listening to our conversation, put his head through a serving hatch and within seconds of his doing so I felt the presence of someone else behind me and felt the pressure of a revolver barrel as well. I had no intention of being put in the bag again, whatever the risks, so I flung myself aside and ducked, and the bullet sped across the bar and smashed some bottles, and before the man could fire again I’d half pulped his face with my fist and had grabbed the revolver from him. By this time the customers were leaving, fast, and the girls were having hysterics. I left them to it and kept both the barman and the other man covered. Through the hatch I caught a glimpse of the other Ub
lick, the living one whom I had followed from my hotel. He was still the dead spit of old Ublick ex Chile but definitely younger; I hadn’t been mistaken about that. The whole thing was a mystery that I was determined to get to the bottom of and I began right away. Or tried to.
I pulled back the hammer of the revolver and was about to threaten to blow the man’s head off if he didn’t talk when there was a commotion at both entrances, front and side, and the police stormed in like a tidal wave. They were all armed and it didn’t take them any time to round up everyone who hadn’t already fled. The round-up included me to begin with, but my 6D2 pass got me out of that. I took the officer in charge aside and had a quiet word with him.
“Two men,” I said. “Old men, one dead as you can see, the other alive. Almost identical. The dead one’s name is Ublick, ex feldwebel of the old German Army. He’s been dead a few days now.”
“So?”
I said, “So there’s something very fishy going on.” I wasn’t prepared to say more than that. I went on, “I’m asking you to leave the gunman to me. Just for some questioning. After that, I’ll hand him over to you. All right?” The policeman had no objection; 6D2 was very much on the side of law and order even though it didn’t work by Establishment means. So I was allowed to take chummy, whom I’d guessed accurately was the boss of the joint, through to the back of the premises, still covered by his own revolver. Ublick number two was no longer there, but he wouldn’t have got away, so I expected to find him again, next time in police custody.
I sat the boss on a hard chair and let him see the hammer of the revolver drawn back. I could tell by his face that he wasn’t worried about that; I wouldn’t use it in the presence of the law. But I wasn’t worried either, because Willi Waldstein would be well able to pull a few strings and have the man transferred to the 6D2 building in Bonn, and once we had him there he would talk all right. But that might not be necessary. I started off by asking him about the two Ublicks. “I know nothing,” he said.
“Time will tell, won’t it? The live Ublick is probably talking at this moment. Bear that in mind.”
The boss, who was a nasty-looking runt with an unhealthy, pallid skin and a mean mouth, shrugged. “There is nothing to talk about.”
“But you know the name — Ublick. How? And what’s the story behind the dead one?”
The mean mouth became meaner, small, tight and shut. I said, “What about the Werewolves?”
He reacted to that with a very perceptible start; I had struck a raw nerve. Just for something to work on, I decided he was one of the Party, a conclusion not hard to come to considering the advent of Ublick. It was worth pressing on that nerve. I said, “If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I shall persuade the police to let you go.”
He stared, eyes wide, Then they narrowed; I believed he was getting there and didn’t like it. He didn’t utter, so I spelled it out for him. “You could be better off in custody, couldn’t you? It won’t take my organisation long to put the bool in and get you the chop from the Party. A word into the grapevine that you got yourself out by talking … even though you didn’t. And you know what happens. Remember Essen.”
Essen: it went right home. Waldstein had told me what had happened in a steel works at Essen just a couple of weeks earlier. One of the Werewolves had been suspected of giving information to the police under pressure. Just suspected — no proof; but that was enough. He was a steelworker and he’d been tipped into a white-hot cauldron of his own product. The heat had shrivelled him to a husk before he had hit the surface, so it was a quick enough death, but nasty to think about. Horrible to ponder on. I let chummy ponder for a while. I had the feeling he knew who I was and who I worked for, and if that was the case then he would know I could do exactly what I had said. In police custody he would be safe from Party vengeance, at any rate for a while.
I helped settle his mind. I said, “Co-operate and you’ll get help. Different words can be put around the grapevine. Word that YOU were a Nazi hero.” And I added, “We can even beat you up and send you out again with your honourable scars to show as proof. It’s worth considering.”
I believe it was all too much for him, the steel works tragedy and the threat of being beaten up, which could happen anyway if he didn’t talk; and clearly he wasn’t one of the big-time boys, just a very tiny fish and fairly gutless. He said, “All right, I will tell you what I know. It is little.”
*
It was little but interesting and in a horrible kind of way it tied in with the Werewolf mentality. Dead Ublick had been brought in from Chile by air and chummy, who was well known to Klaus Kunze, had been deputed to meet the corpse and take delivery of it accompanied by Ublick’s brother — the one I’d seen in the hotel. He was a genuine brother — in fact, as I’d suspected, a twin. The idea was that the ex-feldwebel should be taken home to his own one-time stamping-ground in West Belin and ceremonially interred; but things had gone wrong. There had been a fracas between rival groups of Werewolves, each competing for the honour of escorting the coffin to what was to be virtually a lying-in-state, or anyway a wake, in the brother’s home. After being cleared through customs and leaving the airport, the motor-hearse had been stopped by a gang of marchers and an altercation had taken place, and the coffin had been dragged out into the road. The Werewolves had been rather the worse for drink, I gathered. Anyway, the corpse had been borne along the streets in its coffin and had eventually been dropped. It had been split open on contact with the ground — apparently the customs hadn’t screwed it down very well after their inspection — and Ublick had rolled out in his feldwebel’s uniform. The roistering Werewolves had then carried the corpse through the night to chummy’s place and set it up so that poor old Ublick could in death take part once again in the girlie scene. Chummy had spent the morning agonising over the whole affair; the Werewolves, still drinking hard, wouldn’t let Ublick go and took no notice even of the brother’s pleas. Too young themselves to remember the war, they had the notion that anyone who had been in it had spent all off duty time roistering as they were currently doing, chinking, womanising. Three-German-officers-crossed-the-Rhine and all that jazz. Why shouldn’t the heroic Ublick go back to the days of his youth before the earth closed over him for ever?
That was all.
No mention of Herr Hitler’s brain, which in any case could hardly have escaped the customs if it had been in the coffin; I asked about the glass jar and its contents.
“I know nothing of that,” the girlie-joint boss said.
“But you’ve heard on the radio.”
“Oh yes, that. I know nothing more.”
I said cynically, “Think about Essen again.”
“Yes, yes.” There was a look of terror. “I know nothing about the brain, nothing.’
I was inclined to believe him. The proposed entry by coffin had been just a blind dreamed up by Klaus Kunze. I asked, “What’s your opinion of all that?”
“Of what?”
“The brain, coining back to Germany.”
The eyes glowed and he stiffened his body as though instinctively. He very nearly, I believe, heiled. He was transfixed; but he said, “It is horrible.”
I said, “You don’t really believe that, do you, you bastard.”
*
I handed chummy over to the law and they duly had him transported to the nick. Bodies in bars raise questions that need to be answered and chummy wasn’t in the clear yet. Nor did he want to be until matters had been squared for him through the grapevine as promised. That would be done; we honour our word. Even so, I didn’t give much for his chances, frankly. I was learning things about the Werewolves. I decided I might learn a little more by going through the private quarters of chummy’s little set-up. Small-timer he might be, just prominent enough to act as O.C. corpse movement, but he did know Klaus Kunze and there just might be something. So, together with a plainclothes policeman, I went through the lot. Cash books, stock room, personal papers, bedrooms, even the bat
hroom and lavatory. I didn’t find anything of interest, though I did find some porn, the hard stuff. I found letters, but my German companion, scanning them quickly, was of the opinion that they didn’t amount to anything. He shoved a selection in his pocket just the same; fingerprints, he said. There were just a couple of items amongst the letters that he took away with him that I had found curious, and these were a couple of Littlewoods football pool coupons covering the next two weekends’ matches. They didn’t seem to fit the scene. I got the plain-clothes man to check the letters again. He said there was nothing about football pools. I shrugged; perhaps chummy had intended paying a visit to Britain and wanted to know who was playing who — or something. I remembered, for what it might be worth, that the soccer terraces in Britain, so well accustomed to vandals and hooligans of various sorts, had in recent seasons suffered an increasing affront from yet another kind of vandalism: the giving of Nazi salutes during matches. The FA had got somewhat worried about such racist activities. I stored the matter in my mind, just in case.
The search finished, I went along to the West Berlin agency and rang through to Willi Waldstein in Bonn to make my report. Definitely negative coffin, I said, Ublick was back. I was assured that all ports and airfields were being very heavily watched and the Border Police were alert all along the land frontiers. Short of an unauthorised aircraft evading the radar screen successfully, it should be easy enough for experienced security men to spot a brain bobbing about in formaldehyde or whatever. On the other hand smuggling is easy too, when you know how. And I didn’t feel one hundred percent confident that there might not be some collusion somewhere. Even if not on account of Nazi sympathies; after all, the copper or customs man or security officer that stopped Hitler’s brain entering West Germany would be a marked man for all time in the future, the more so, of course, since that ruinous broadcast of the facts. I mentioned this to Waldstein and he fully agreed. But it was a risk that just had to be accepted.
Werewolf (Commander Shaw Book 16) Page 14