by Chris Petit
Schlegel told him Haas’s photographs put Fegelein even more clearly in the picture.
Morgen said, ‘But why give a girl from the local motor pool direct access to him. One of the top men in the Chancellery, not short of girls.’
‘We know he is corrupt. What did Kattowice say?’
‘An old cop with bad lungs, one of the morning drinkers, he groused about how uncooperative the garrison is in cases of drunk driving on public highways, throwing up so much red tape.’
‘Where are we going?’ asked Schlegel.
They were walking down the main street. Schlegel’s shirt was sticking to his back, his shoes full of sweat.
‘Motor pool. The old cop has a civilian witness and half a car number plate, which matches no local vehicles. Any enquiry to see if it fits any in the garrison comes back access denied.’
They spoke to a female clerk in charge of vehicle leasing, who sat fanning herself, looking sticky enough to eat.
She glanced at the detail of the number plate Morgen had written down and said it almost certainly matched one of theirs.
She went off to fetch the vehicle’s record.
Morgen said, ‘There’s a league and Kattowice are bottom of it.’
‘What are you talking about? Football?’
‘Drink-drive homicides. Heini oversees all such traffic offences, referring every case to his office. There is a district league table of cases solved, with Kattowice a notoriously poor performer thanks to the garrison.’
The woman returned with the file. Morgen flicked through it.
‘So much for bureaucracy.’
Most of the entries were patchy and incomplete.
‘But on the date in question we can see the vehicle was signed out for three days to one Hermann Fegelein.’
There were no further users after Fegelein, with no record of the vehicle being damaged, but six weeks later it was dismantled for spares, and on the last page a stamp said account closed.
Morgen left in high spirits, saying, ‘The car doesn’t exist but the record does, to say it doesn’t. That’s bureaucracy for you!’
Schlegel waited while Morgen fugged up the telephone booth again, calling the old cop to say he should put in a formal request to the Reichsführer’s office to interview his special envoy to the Chancellery about a traffic homicide.
With that, and the prospect of Haas blackmailing him, Schlegel thought it looked like Fegelein was in for a busy time.
That night Schlegel walked over to the party house where he had run across the woman with the jade brooch, on the off chance, but it was closed. He wandered around until he reached an area where the buildings were fewer. The moon cast a shadow. A party announced itself by music coming from the end of a lane. Steps took him up to a crowded kitchen. The joint looked like a thieves’ den of hard drinkers and tough women, probably guards, where privileged criminal elements mixed freely with rowdy soldiers cutting deals.
In the squash Schlegel recognised the fancy waistcoat belonging to the big young brute he had seen disappearing from the commandant’s house. He was in close conversation with another man. When Schlegel saw who, he beat a hasty retreat, despite an urgent need to get drunk, until a heavy hand fell on his shoulder. It was the man in the waistcoat, insisting he stay.
‘Sepp wishes to be reacquainted.’
The need for drink won out. Schlegel was expected to buy. The only alcohol on offer was a clear liquid in a flat bottle. The price was exorbitant until Sepp stepped in, after which it was halved. Sepp appeared amused by Schlegel’s predicament.
‘An uncomfortable fraternisation, no?’
They drank out of cardboard cups. Sepp stuck to mineral water. ‘Just Mattoni these days. I only meet the devil in drink. Cheers!’
The room was raucous, the underlying spirit mean.
Sepp introduced the other man as Böhner, all very formal and correct, and the more disturbing for it.
Böhner was canteen supervisor at the local Bata shoe factory.
With that, the reason for the man’s presence in the commandant’s household became clear to Schlegel. Shoes and leather meant the factory was almost certainly part of Groenke’s empire. Böhner’s job would be of value in terms of what he could supply. Schlegel remembered the smell of frying fish. He checked the man’s shoes. The ones he had been cleaning. Top quality. He took a slug of drink, pleased with his observations, and asked, ‘Do you provide the commandant’s wife with shoes for her kiddies?’
Böhner frowned, not sure what to answer.
Schlegel went on. ‘Well, they would be new, wouldn’t they, whereas the ones she could get from Erich Groenke are more likely to be used. I expect she insists her children have proper new shoes or their feet might become deformed.’
Whatever rotgut he was drinking had a hell of a kick.
‘Or racially infected,’ he added.
‘Yes, ha-ha!’ Böhner said, confused. He changed the subject and asked how Schlegel and Sepp knew each other.
Sepp sniffed the air and said, ‘I smell copper.’
Böhner looked disconcerted.
‘Don’t worry. He’s out of his depth here. Our friend didn’t approve of our methods.’ Sepp turned to Schlegel and said sweetly, ‘I am sure we can arrange a good tanning for you. You will make a pretty lamp shade.’
Schlegel looked around the noisy smoky room, throbbing with the prospect of violence.
Sepp said to Böhner, ‘We carried out our orders and did our patriotic duty but when we continued to do so on our own initiative he and his fat pal objected.’
Schlegel protested. ‘You were feeding human flesh into the food chain.’
Böhner found that funny and roared with laughter.
Sepp shrugged. ‘Only Jews. We were licensed bandits.’
‘Called to account. Was that Baumgarten I saw riding with the posse?’
‘Who’s Baumgarten?’ asked Böhner.
‘Baumgarten could tear you in two with his bare hands – well, maybe not you, Böhner, you’re a big boy – whereas I look like I wouldn’t hurt a fly. Do you enjoy pain?’ Sepp sniggered. ‘Me, I never really understood pleasure until I discovered pain.’
Böhner looked too stupid to appreciate pain beyond dishing it out.
‘Anyway, what brings you to the party?’ Sepp asked Schlegel.
The drink was rough, filthy stuff. Schlegel stared at his cup, wildly drunk already, lost for an answer.
Böhner said to Sepp, ‘How come you’re talking to him? I would be killing him.’
‘The Lord works in mysterious ways. I can’t complain. This is a good billet, if you know how to work it. I still slaughter the beast. I’m clean of the demon drink. I have seen the error of my ways. I asked what brings you?’
‘More of the same. Berserkers and werewolves.’
Sepp turned to Böhner. ‘We were Wotan’s outriders.’
‘Wotan?’
‘The avenging spirit of the hunter god. Storm and frenzy.’ He told Schlegel, ‘We will ride again and then you and your friend’s number will be up.’
Schlegel could never get over how harmless Sepp looked, with a lisping voice that gave everything an air of sinister comedy, but he didn’t sound so funny when he said, ‘I have seen the light of the Lord retreat in haste when the devil rides out. The devil’s best trick is to persuade us he doesn’t exist, don’t you think?’
Schlegel fell into a funk under the man’s cobra stare. Sepp pulled a face and started miming sexual ecstasy with grunts and squeaks that sent Böhner into fits of laughter. Sepp leaned in and whispered under the din, ‘This is the face I will pull when I terminate your sorry existence, for it is written.’
Sepp’s hand gripped Schlegel’s arm. ‘The difference between us is you are drunk and I am not. Remember that as you stagger home through the dark night of your soul.’
Schlegel pulled free, pushing through the crowd, earning himself a punch in the back on the way out.
He hung around
outside, too idiotic and far gone to go to his room, needing more drink, to write the night off.
Böhner and Sepp came out after about twenty minutes, chatted briefly under a streetlight, went their different ways. When Schlegel saw Böhner drinking from his bottle he decided to follow, in the preposterous hope of sharing the rest. All he knew was he was drunker than usual, which meant very.
Böhner was lurching, not yet staggering. Schlegel had to keep one eye closed to focus. Böhner paused, as if aware of being followed. Schlegel hung back. The night was bright and soft. The streets still had people.
Schlegel watched Böhner enter the commandant’s garden via the door in the wall, using his own key. He waited and followed. The door had been left open and he slipped through and stood under a fig tree, mesmerised by the double moon reflected in the black pond. He closed one eye, making the moon slide into one.
Some grand, inebriated carelessness made him want to violate the household and be caught in the act of smothering children in their sleep.
The back door to the house was locked. The entrance under the steps was open. Böhner’s way in, he supposed. Was the woman so abandoned as to receive him as her husband and children slept? It was obvious they were lovers. It explained his earlier presence and why he had disappeared before the commandant found him.
Schlegel felt around for a switch, which lit the short flight to the cellar. He listened to the blood drum in his head.
He stuffed his pockets with Ibar. His resolve hardened and he determined to mount an assault on Frau Hoess’s secretaire. There was bound to be more evidence. But the door from the cellar to the house was locked. Thwarted, he relieved the shelves of more Ibar and left, remembered the string bags and took one.
He circled the house in the expectation of finding what he saw: the lit windows of the office, revealing the commandant drunk and insensible on the sofa, muttering in his sleep, naked from the waist down, trousers around his ankles.
Schlegel went back, paused in the walled garden, beguiled by the reflected moon. He heard a woman sigh, then again, and was slow to realise he was listening to the approach of her sexual climax.
His first thought was they must be in the garden, then he saw Frau Hoess, face squashed against the summerhouse window, her mouth an ecstatic circle, breath misting the glass. She seemed to be looking straight at him as he listened transfixed by the sexual grunting being dug out of her and thought of their lives as a tangle of threads.
‘Have you heard?’ asked Schulze as Morgen arrived in the office.
‘What?’ She looked pretty, he thought.
The garrison’s jungle drums had been beating hard.
‘Palitsch has been arrested for racial defilement and Dr Wirths for stealing morphine.’
Morgen found the arrest of Palitsch no surprise. He had been caught compromised with a famous beauty from the Gypsy camp.
‘Is he so careless?
‘The word is he was set up by a jilted lover of the woman, a prisoner supervisor. She was in on it too, and the security police.’
Morgen thought of trapped wasps struggling in sticky jam jars and said news travelled fast.
Palistch was known to be heading for a fall but the arrest of Dr Wirths was a shock. The security police had raided his house and found a quantity of morphine in the chimney of a stove.
‘Nobody would have believed it of the man. He is always so righteous and indignant.’
Morgen presumed the evidence was planted, the latest move to discredit the doctor in the war going on.
‘Are you so surprised?’ asked Morgen.
Schulze said instead that so many security roundups were having an adverse effect on the workforce. A recent move to break up the camp underground had seen the transfer without warning of hundreds of skilled workers overnight, leaving huge shortages and departmental chaos.
Morgen hadn’t heard about that and valued her knowledge.
‘There’s something else,’ she said, hesitant.
It was obviously personal. ‘Yes?’ he asked.
‘I am under pressure to stop working for you and return to my old job because of the mess.’
‘How do feel about that? You said we weren’t popular.’
‘That wasn’t really for me to say.’
Morgen sensed she was putting distance between them. He presumed she was reporting to Kammler, though he had no evidence. He suspected she considered him negligent towards Schlegel, and felt protective. The man was becoming a walking disaster. That said, his lack of method, beyond blind instinct, was producing results. His snoop around the commandant’s house, however foolish, was inspired.
The stone of heaven was jade, Morgen had since learned. Libraries were wonderful things: a book on precious stones in the garrison’s extensive children’s section had told him so.
Pohl was thanking Frau Hoess for her gift of jade.
As for the meaning of the mine, plenty of regional coal pits existed, using labour from the camps, but he couldn’t see Pohl or the commandant’s wife getting excited about anything so dirty.
Schulze said she had typed up some notes as he had asked. It took him five minutes to read them. He was aware of her nervousness and could tell she had done it against her better judgement. He supposed they were part of the reason for her pulling back.
He burned them in his ashtray and said she didn’t have to look so anxious. No one would know.
Her account told of her time there, who she had worked for, and some of the main events. As a document it was entirely innocuous, almost pathetically so, but Morgen was sure it was loaded with significance if he could read between the lines.
A key date that seemed to be emerging was the two-day inspection by the Reichsführer-SS fourteen months before, in the July of 1942.
Schulze mentioned all the panic for its preparation. Otherwise, Morgen’s sole source was the wretched garrison bulletins, written up in such drearily upbeat terms that he hadn’t paid much attention. The visiting cortege was welcomed by a prisoner orchestra playing the triumphal march from Aida, blah, blah, and two happy, fruitful days followed examining the many projects close to Reichsführer Himmler’s heart, especially the herb farms and plantations, followed by a succession of splendid social entertainments.
Looked at more objectively – in terms of politics and the garrison’s fate – Morgen saw that the visit had marked a change that may have been pivotal.
The following month Schulze’s department was flat out building the new crematoria, which were finally green-lit after five months of what she described as dithering and tinkering with plans to little avail.
‘Plans for five months?’ asked Morgen.
She said there had been blueprints from the start. Blueprints for this and that, including a new crematorium from the word go. Efficiency on paper, they called it. They had got used to plans going nowhere. What got drawn up bore less and less resemblance to what was built.
‘How so?’
‘Drawings for brick prisoner barracks. No bricks to build them with.’
She said everyone had been caught on the hop when the crematoria were commissioned. They’d thought them just another set of drawings and were even more surprised materials were forthcoming, because it was already a time of extreme shortages.
Morgen supposed she had never discussed any of this with anyone in terms of her own life. Nobody did. He understood why Krick was popular with the wives; it was all about them.
Schulze told him the place had been a boom town at the beginning. Her arrival in February 1941 coincided with the announcement of a massive redevelopment programme. Morgen said he had read of no such plans in the garrison bulletin.
‘You wouldn’t. It was a civilian project, to provide a modern town for the big new petrochemical plant that was announced at the same time. The garrison was involved only as the provider of labour. It had no say in the plans.’
She said they had all gone off to lectures given by star architects and landscape
gardeners, who talked about quality of life and the huge improvements in store. Everyone was impressed because the standard of living was terrible.
‘My first digs were horrible.’
They had all been quite proud in the beginning. The place was a backwater. The garrison and original camp were very make-do. Things could only improve. But the mood quickly soured. Schulze remembered meetings between town and garrison where the camp was objected to as an eyesore for being in the wrong place, too close to town, an embarrassment, and needed to be moved.
Morgen wondered if his answer lay somewhere in all these bureaucratic wrangles.
‘Yet the camp is still here and expanded.’
She told him the new camp had been meant as quite a grand project, with special building manuals, intended to set standards and complement the town’s development. Where the town would have estates for chemists and their families, the new camp was planned as a labour colony to be built by Russian prisoners, except the national construction programme was immediately cancelled and they were all transferred elsewhere to work in weapons manufacture.
‘So they went. This was when?’
‘The new year of 1942. They had been here only a couple of months.’
‘Which left the construction department with no one to build its camp and nobody to put in it.’
‘That’s what it looked like.’
‘It must have been a nerve-racking time.’
She agreed. ‘And we weren’t popular with the commandant’s office.’
‘Because you answered to Kammler.’
‘Yes. Endless attempts were made by the garrison to shut us down. We were told we were a waste of money. The whole project was considered redundant. We were building a ghost town.’
‘But that didn’t happen.’
‘Everything was very tense until the end of February when Dr Kammler came for an inspection and told us the work would carry on, which was a great relief.’
‘Of course. Your jobs were secure. So the purpose of the camp changed. What was it for now?’
‘What they called a new civilian influx. One of the first tasks was preparing the Russian quarters in the old camp for the first women that were sent at the end of March. A wall had to be built where there was fencing before.’