by Chris Petit
She took him to a room off the gallery, full of furniture, and dragged him through a rack of coats into a private corner draped with rugs and cushions.
They lay down and she recited as though in the grip of an erotic reverie: ‘At first it was a free-for-all. Show up and help yourself. Then there were Sunday rummage sales and after that shops opened in the garrison, run by some of the more enterprising wives, selling off stuff.’
‘Where did the money go?’
She touched her throat and told him to put his hand on her breast.
‘To various relief agencies, so seen as as in a good cause. That went on until one of the wives was found pocketing the money.’
‘And now?’
He moved his hand down. She told him not yet and said, ‘The store is run as part of the garrison and profits go towards various garrison trust funds.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘I went out with someone who worked in Canada.’
‘Went out with because he worked in Canada?’
‘You learn fast,’ she said. ‘Now you can.’
Ilse’s most attractive trait was a practical, clinical efficiency which made it clear she was there only for her pleasure, and if he hadn’t been available she would have found someone else, or, failing that, seen to herself. Her skin was as irresistible to the touch as he could have wanted. He knew he was in safe hands and let her guide him, making sure he was not too quick. She kept up a wry commentary, as she took him. ‘I am embarrassed by how much this place turns me on. I am as randy as anything. I think I am turning into a man-eater.’ She laughed a lot and treated the business less seriously than he did, taking him on her own amused terms. Towards the end she put aside the game and concentrated hard, telling him to stick three fingers in her mouth and pinch her nose. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Schlegel supposed he wasn’t up to much in terms of performance but he seemed to give her what she wanted. Despite the constant and surprising itch of sexual curiosity since coming to the garrison, he hadn’t felt compelled to act on it. She thanked him afterwards and said she had got what she came for. Schlegel felt grateful. She had fucked him with easy grace. He was nevertheless left confused by her blunt requests and supposed he was quite conventional in his thinking about women. He laughed at himself, as if all of a sudden he was a connoisseur. Still more wrought than relieved, all that connected in his head was Ilse’s possession of him and the taking of his wristwatch, both weirdly scrambled acts of being had.
They lay there enjoying their breaking the rules. Ilse looked around and said, ‘The novelty was like a drug at first. I saw two women have a catfight over a Schiaparelli. Was I one of them? Not told, don’t ask.’
‘I need to go again,’ she said, putting her hand under her dress. ‘Unless you want to help.’ She told him what to do and laughed at his straight ways.
‘What an upright young man!’ She said she would ask around about Ingeborg Tanner. ‘Stories about people always float close to the surface, especially the nasty ones . . .’ She broke off to instruct him and tell him he was getting better. ‘You can practise on me,’ she said with a gurgling laugh. Did he like her? He couldn’t say but he was captivated by her dreamy disobedience, knowing afterwards there would be the inevitable comedown and unwanted clarity of hangover, which would make him want only to go back to her.
The following morning, Schlegel took breakfast alone and did his best to tell himself if Morgen was in trouble he would know by now. He wondered whether the episode with Ilse was a one-off. Their parting had been as casual as the encounter. She mentioned another bar with music, on the other side of the railway, and said she might be there the next evening. No invitation was extended beyond the information given. Schlegel suspected that for her the circumstances counted for more than the partner.
He walked down the long road to the garrison, past Dr Wirths’ house, and was surprised to hear his name being called. He turned and saw the doctor standing in his shirtsleeves.
‘I was hoping you might pass. I was going to come and see you anyway.’
He invited Schlegel in and sent his Polish girl off to the shops.
Schlegel knew the doctor was having trouble getting supplies but he was still surprised how little had been managed. It was like living in a cave with a few bits of furniture. A dog lay on the floor, too depressed to rouse itself.
Wirths waited impatiently for the girl to be gone and turned eagerly to Schlegel.
‘Wait until you hear this. I have major evidence against the commandant . . .’
Wirths invited him to sit on one of two wooden chairs. Schlegel supposed the doctor had something medical in mind. The commandant’s wife had said how much pressure her husband was under.
‘A rather unsavoury case of obsession,’ Wirths went on. ‘The commandant has been besotted with a female prisoner . . .’
Schlegel faltered. He could only mean Sybil.
‘And now he has had her executed.’
‘Executed,’ Schlegel repeated hollowly.
‘Shot.’ The doctor’s lips were moist with excitement, strands of spittle stretched between his teeth as he spoke. He made a chopping motion with his hand and said the commandant would have to face a military tribunal.
Schlegel was assaulted by images of Sybil shot against the wall in the yard of the punishment block.
‘What happened?’ Schlegel asked, dreading what he would hear.
Wirths explained how a lot of his prisoner staff had been arrested during the recent big security crackdown.
‘It was a vendetta against me because I question the security police’s methods. The point is, one of my men managed to smuggle out the extraordinary story of the woman put briefly in the cell next to his.’
She had been fetched from detention, after being dismissed from her job in the commandant’s house, and put in the cells in the commandant’s block, where the commandant had taken to visiting her at night.
Schlegel thought already the story didn’t square with his information that Sybil hadn’t been held in the commandant’s block. Had the commandant been responsible for her being delivered and fetched in the household car? Was he the architect of Sybil’s fate? Clearly infatuated, but did that extend to sex? The man was surely too much of a stickler.
In Wirths’ version the commandant, after tiring of the woman, had her transferred to the police punishment block.
‘As a way of getting rid of her.’
The night before her execution, she had told Wirths’ supervisor her story.
In the next morning’s clear-out she was called into the corridor and taken up to the yard.
Wirths said he had checked. There was no record of any woman being on that day’s execution list.
‘Which means she must have been slipped in as an extra. They do it as a way of getting rid of troublemakers. Nor was there any record of her being in the cell next to my supervisor, which means it was done off the books.’
‘Does this happen often?’ Schlegel asked, helpless.
‘It is forbidden to have sexual relations with female prisoners but many do and when they tire of them . . .’
Wirths let the sentence hang. He was too taken up with his own excitement to notice Schlegel’s anguish.
‘In confidence, the commandant must go, and this is the ammunition. The affair is well documented.’
So Sybil was now dead, unofficially erased from the face of the earth.
Schlegel supposed it must be true, given how little exemption existed. Haas’s lethal despatches still burned in his head. Someone had done the same to Sybil, with a bullet and a gun. No cruelty, only utter indifference. No conscience involved. Human garbage. Was that what the commandant had thought, diverting her into the disposal system? What a way to die, staring at the wall, counting down. Yet part of him was incapable of believing it. He had always been certain they were destined to meet again. My God, he suddenly thought. It could have been Palitsch who pulled the trigger, or Broad. Would th
ey have even noticed, or was one back of the neck the same as the next?
Schlegel wandered the streets in a daze, only vaguely aware that he needed to get out of the sun. He found himself standing on the doorstep of the commandant’s house, not knowing what he would say.
Frau Hoess came to the door, assuming he was there for her husband. She appeared depressed, he thought. He said he had a garrison matter he wished to discuss with her.
She sighed. ‘I suppose, if you must.’
She didn’t offer to take him to a reception room and they stood in the hall.
‘I want to ask about one of the garrison women, Ingeborg Tanner.’
He thought: No, I want to ask about Sybil.
Frau Hoess stared into the distance, apparently uncomprehending.
‘Your husband,’ Schlegel prompted.
‘Yes. The poor woman. The men get demoralised and hit the bottle and then they hit the women.’
‘Why does that happen?’
He expected no answer – it was a weak question anyway.
‘You would have to ask them.’ She motioned him to follow her to her husband’s study where she instructed him to sit and seated herself opposite, leaning forward so their knees were almost touching, and whispered as though she were afraid of being overheard.
‘There’s no excuse. Even my husband has been known to raise his hand to the children. I think with the rest it’s because they don’t consider themselves soldiers, not in the fighting sense, and feel belittled, so take it out on us. Not my husband, of course. He’s a decorated soldier. He was the youngest sergeant in the army, at the age of seventeen. Anyway, it was one of two matters I raised with the Reichsführer-SS at the time of his inspection.’
‘Saying what?’
‘Telling about the battering of women, of course.’
Schlegel wasn’t sure what to make of what he was hearing.
‘What did he say to that?’
‘He said it went against the chivalric code for a man to hit a woman. He asked for evidence.’
‘In what form?’
‘He wanted to see photographs.’
‘So you were the one who organised the pictures.’
‘For forwarding copies to the Reichsführer’s office. You see, I had hoped you had been sent as a result to investigate the matter.’
There seemed no point in disabusing the woman.
‘And the second matter you raised with him?’ he asked, curious.
‘The special project.’
‘And what is that?’
‘I can’t possibly say. It was a private matter between myself and the Reichsführer-SS.’
‘Yet you are prepared to discuss the garrison women.’
‘That is a garrison matter.’
Schlegel found it hard to believe the woman had a confidential relationship with Heinrich Himmler.
‘Is there any news on the dismissed seamstress?’
Frau Hoess looked like she was trying to remember, to show that the subject had long since been discounted.
‘No,’ she said.
‘I am being told your husband managed to have her shot.’
She started to laugh, stopped, and spoke in a rush. ‘No, no. He may be under enormous stress but he is not going to jeopardise his position by doing that, when he can have the woman sent away, which he did.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I am certain.’
Schlegel could see she wasn’t. He wanted desperately to believe her.
‘To go back to last summer, what was the Reichsführer-SS’s response to the violence you reported?’
‘To appoint a psychiatrist to the garrison.’
‘Krick?’
‘Yes. He came a month or so after I spoke of the matter to the Reichsführer-SS.’
‘Did Krick say as much?’
‘No, but it’s obvious.’
Schlegel spent most of the rest of the day drinking. Up on the far edge of the commercial sector was an informal bar, known locally as a speakeasy, a rough place that stayed open during the day and was frequented by guards before night duty.
He didn’t particularly feel the need to get drunk, beyond making some space in his head. Just as it was the military way to guard everything, so everyone had learned to control their thoughts. No one made the connections any more, even obvious ones. People no longer questioned. Whatever inner rebelliousness that still existed in him had no outlet. He presumed in soldiers it was channelled into the fury of the battlefield. He did not think of himself as in any way extraordinary but knew enough to know he was living through remarkable times and, thanks to poor health and family influence, he had been spared the horror of becoming cannon fodder or disgracing himself on the battlefield – which he almost certainly would because he could see no sense in violence, probably because he had no talent for it. As it was, the chances were he would survive the war, for which he supposed he ought to feel more grateful.
He left the bar, still refusing to accept what Wirths had told him about Sybil, clinging to the forlorn hope that the commandant’s wife was right.
He rode out again that evening to look for Palitsch, whom he found at home in shirtsleeves and braces, drinking beer. As always he was friendly. Schlegel took a beer off him and asked about his sex parties.
Palitsch did a double take before deciding the question was harmless.
‘Aw, man! They went on for about three weeks. I was out of my head at the time.’
They were both drunk. Palitsch had had the afternoon off.
‘What about Ingeborg Tanner?’ asked Schlegel.
Palitsch too had that habit of looking like he was trying to remember. He sniggered. ‘Brief fling. She was up for it. Rode as hard as any jockey.’
He looked at Schlegel, as if to ask what more was there to say. Schlegel watched him go blank and suck reflectively on the top of his beer bottle, until he said, ‘I used to have an ordinary life here, with a wife and children. My wife was tall, with lovely eyes and the nicest smile. We raised geese and I rode my motorbike. The kids are with their grandmother now.’
He moved on seamlessly to say he’d had to let Tanner go. ‘She was crazy. She started turning up with this creep who didn’t fuck and liked to watch and take pictures. Tanner not only wanted an audience, she liked being photographed so she could look at herself afterwards. Then there was a fight involving the guy and he beat someone up. I had to tell her she and her friend weren’t welcome. Fuck parties were one thing, photographed fuck parties quite another.’
‘Is that why the men moved on to female prisoners?’
‘What is it that you are investigating?’
‘I will have to file a report on Tanner.’
‘I hope you aren’t stupid enough to come after me, or anyone else. No one takes kindly to that. And what will you say?’
‘Probably that she was killed by an unknown assailant unconnected to her private life.’
‘That sounds about right.’
‘I hear she became a rather embittered figure.’
Palitsch appeared on guard again.
Schlegel said, ‘I can only know what not to say if I have some idea of what went on.’
He related the story of Tanner’s jealousy and reporting her lover to the security police.
Palitsch opened a clasp knife lying on the kitchen table. ‘Do you ever do this?’
He splayed his left hand and in rapid succession stuck the point of the knife in the gaps between his thumb and fingers, until the blade was a blur. He appeared quite relaxed but Schlegel saw he was sweating from exertion.
Palitsch stopped as suddenly as he had started and held up his unblemished hand, saying he was about the only one who had never stuck a knife in his finger. Schlegel expected to be told it was his turn but instead Palitsch said, ‘Ask me anything. There have been others who were told to sort this or that and none succeeded.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because they either got sucked in and
gave up, or died.’
Schlegel repeated what he had been told about Tanner’s lover being a top organiser.
Palitsch snorted. ‘Who’s telling you? Fritz was low-level. A reconditioned carburettor, a dodgy bicycle . . .’
‘He could have paid someone to do it.’
‘He probably could have afforded it, because most people can, except Fritz was too dopey.’
‘What did the photographer look like?’
‘Thick neck.’
‘Name?’
Palitsch shook his head.
‘Medical orderly?’
Palitsch shook his head again. It sounded like Haas, thought Schlegel, moving on to the question he didn’t want to ask. He counted silently until he had Palitsch’s attention, noting the feral shift in his eye.
‘Did you shoot the commandant’s seamstress?’
Palitsch went blank again, then looked up from under his eyebrows, as if to say he had cottoned on to why Schlegel was really there.
Schlegel wondered whether the man’s pleasant, slightly stupid manner hid something altogether smarter and more dangerous.
Palitsch made a pistol of his finger and drew a bead on Schlegel.
‘She never made it to the wall, man.’
‘Meaning?’
‘She must have been sent back inside.’ He offered his braying laugh. ‘Rescued in the nick of time.’
He grew sober and reflective.
‘That is something, isn’t it?’ The question sounded almost pleading.
‘What is?’
‘You look for one thing, you often find another.’
Schlegel said he didn’t follow.
‘Don’t you see, man? You come to talk about fuck parties and find instead this woman is alive after all.’
He sat back looking pleased with himself, as though personally responsible for Schlegel’s good fortune.
‘I saw her in the yard but I didn’t shoot her.’
‘How many of you shooting?’
‘Two. Big clear-out that morning.’
‘Who was the other shooter?’
‘The Brazilian, Broad.’
‘Maybe he shot her.’