Louise's Chance

by Sarah R. Shaber

  ‘You’ve made some interesting comments on the evidence,’ Williams said. ‘But they aren’t facts. They aren’t substantiated. We can’t arrest anyone. That lame excuse for an alibi for the stoning, the business about the target, is just barely tenable,’ he continued. ‘And if what you suspect of Kapp is true, he’s killed the two men who could have revealed his sexual interests to the other SS men in the camp. Though if he gave Marek his ribbon bar and other trinkets as a payment for keeping silent, we’ll never be able to substantiate that.’

  ‘What about Thomas Hanzi?’ I asked. ‘Can’t you do something to protect him?’

  ‘What?’ Rawlins said. ‘We could send him to the infirmary for a few days, that’s about it. Hanzi will just have to take care of himself. I expect he’s used to it. Let’s eat, and get this meal over with so we can go to the officers’ club and get a real drink, instead of that bloody sherry the quartermaster puts out before dinner.’

  The meal was a quiet and orderly affair. The only thing I found disturbing was the way Thomas Hanzi waited on Kapp. Refilling his water glass, lighting his cigarette, clearing his plate away so he could eat his dessert and finally pouring his coffee. I was afraid for the man.

  Miss Osborne and I skipped the officers’ club in favor of having another libation in our own billet.

  ‘I wonder if we can catch a lift back to DC by plane tomorrow, or if we’ll need to go by car,’ Miss Osborne said.

  I wasn’t surprised to hear we were leaving. With Major Kapp, a Waffen SS officer who might be a killer, in charge of this camp we wouldn’t be able to recruit anyone for our operation. They would be too frightened of reprisals to volunteer. We were done here. Any recruits for our propaganda mission to the German army in Italy would need to come from other camps.

  Miss Osborne noticed my disappointed expression. She patted my shoulder. ‘Don’t take it so hard,’ she said. ‘There were circumstances beyond our control here. There’s plenty of other work to do back in DC.’

  McVey pulled up to the curb and got out of the sedan.

  ‘Do you know if we’re taking an airplane?’ Merle asked him.

  ‘Not today,’ McVey said. ‘I’ll help you get your luggage back inside the barracks and then I have orders to take you to the stockade.’

  ‘What for?’ Miss Osborne said.

  ‘I don’t know, ma’am,’ he answered. ‘I just know my orders. But I can tell you all hell has broken loose.’

  We dumped our luggage and cases inside our barracks and were back inside the car in five minutes. The MPs at the gate waved us inside and we stopped outside the stockade gate, where Lt Rawlins, Agent Williams and Lucien Chantal waited for us. When they saw us all three of them dropped their cigarettes and crushed them into the dirt.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Miss Osborne said.

  ‘I’d rather get your first impressions,’ Rawlins said.

  I could tell by the look on Merle’s face that he would rather not go inside the camp at all.

  I walked at Chantal’s side as we passed by the prisoners’ tents. None of them was in sight; they were all confined to their quarters. MPs stood guard outside the door to each tent.

  ‘Tell me what’s happened,’ I whispered to Chantal.

  ‘It changes everything,’ he answered.

  We stopped outside the shower tent.

  ‘Prepare yourselves,’ Rawlins said. He led the way inside.

  The canvas tent had a long pipe stretched across the ceiling with several shower heads affixed to it. One dripped rhythmically on to the dirt floor. An overturned chair from the mess tent rested in a corner.

  One of the prisoners of war hung from the pipe, a noose fashioned from clothesline around his neck, his head lolling over his chest, his neck snapped. His features were so contorted I couldn’t recognize him. His face was almost black and the tip of his black swollen tongue protruded from his mouth. The man’s hands hung loose at his sides.

  Merle rushed out of the tent, gagging. Chantal followed him, white as a sheet.

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Major Kapp,’ Rawlins answered. ‘Looks like he wasn’t as all-powerful as we thought.’

  ‘Suicide?’ Miss Osborne asked.

  ‘I think so,’ Rawlins said, ‘he wasn’t restrained. It would have been easy for him to use that chair to rig the noose, place it around his neck and kick the chair out of the way.’

  ‘But why would he do it?’ Williams asked.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Lt Rawlins said. ‘This ball is in your court. I’m glad he’s dead. Just send me a copy of your report for my files when you’re done.’

  An MP entered the tent and spoke to Rawlins. ‘Sir, the Mortuary Services truck is here.’

  ‘Cut down Major Kapp’s corpse and transport it to the medical officer,’ Rawlins said.

  ‘I’ll need to see the body too,’ Williams said.

  ‘You’re welcome to it,’ Rawlins said. ‘Now let’s get the hell out of this place.’

  Outside the shower tent Miss Osborne and I found Merle leaning against McVey’s car. His color was good and he was smoking a cigarette, so he must have recovered from the shock of seeing Kapp’s corpse. ‘What now?’ he asked Miss Osborne.

  ‘Now we go back to our rooms and unpack again,’ she said. ‘In half an hour let’s meet for coffee in the mess and decide which prisoners to interview next.’

  It looked like our work here wasn’t finished after all.

  THIRTEEN

  I was stirring a lavish second teaspoon of sugar into my coffee when Agent Williams joined us at our table in the officers’ mess. He slid into a chair next to Merle with his own coffee and reached for the cream.

  ‘I have a favor to ask you, Miss Osborne,’ he said, after a few sips from his coffee cup. ‘I’d like to borrow Mrs Pearlie from you today. I need help investigating Major Kapp’s death. I can’t requisition another agent, and Mrs Pearlie and I have worked together before.’

  The last thing I wanted to do was spend any time with Agent Williams and give him another opportunity to learn more about me. I had a vision of my FBI file getting thicker by the minute. But I doubted I’d have a choice, and I was correct.

  ‘Of course,’ Miss Osborne said, ‘Merle and I can manage the rest of the day without her. Do you think you’ll need more than one day? Kapp committed suicide, after all.’

  ‘One day will probably be enough,’ Williams said. ‘We’ll see.’ I didn’t like the sound of that either.

  I gave Miss Osborne the documents case full of papers but kept my notebook and pen, stuffing them into my pocketbook. Williams drained his coffee.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said to me.

  Williams opened the door to the same Quonset hut where Marek’s body had lain. A different medic sat at the desk, writing in a notebook.

  ‘We need to see Major Kapp’s body,’ Williams said.

  The medic looked up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but no one can view the body until the medical officer has seen it.’

  Williams flashed his FBI badge at him.

  ‘Oh,’ the medic said. ‘OK.’

  In the back room the medic pulled the center drawer out of the field morgue. Kapp was still dressed. I focused on that instead of his bloated face.

  The medic helped us lay Kapp out on a metal gurney. ‘I need to see his personal effects too,’ Williams said.

  ‘They just brought over his footlocker,’ the medic said, nodding at the olive drab metal suitcase on the floor. ‘It’s not locked, but no one’s touched it.’

  After the medic left Williams rolled up his sleeves. ‘This is what I like,’ he said, ‘an untouched body. Before some Dr Frankenstein cuts it into pieces. Look at this. I noticed it in the shower tent.’ He raised one of Kapp’s hands. ‘Check out his wrist.’ I caught my breath. A band of light bruising, almost invisible to the naked eye, circled the thin wrist. ‘And the other one too,’ Williams said.

  I raised Kapp’s other hand and checked it. It, too, s
howed light bruising around the wrist.

  ‘His hands were tied,’ I said. ‘By something fairly soft, so it wouldn’t leave much of a mark.’

  ‘A napkin, or a handkerchief, was used to tie Kapp’s hands,’ Williams said. ‘Then he was cut loose after he died.’

  ‘So it wasn’t suicide,’ I said. I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised. Kapp didn’t seem like a man who would kill himself.

  ‘He was murdered,’ Williams said. ‘We need to call the photographer back to get snaps of Kapp’s wrists. These bruises are the only evidence we have so far.’

  I scratched ‘Who isn’t a suspect?’ in my notebook while Williams went to ask the medic to call a photographer. Kapp had been a cruel and dangerous man. I hadn’t been fazed, didn’t even startle, when I realized he’d been murdered. When I looked at his ghastly face, almost black with blood trapped by the noose, I was repelled, but felt no sympathy for the man himself at all. Where I grew up the best defense to a murder charge was always ‘He needed killin’.’ If anyone needed killing it was Major Kapp. Despite the slim evidence I was almost positive he’d murdered the two prisoners of war on board the Abel Stoddard, and I was sure he’d arranged the death of Hans Marek. Who knew who would have been next?

  When Williams returned we searched Kapp’s body, patting him down and emptying his pockets. We found only a folded, pristine handkerchief, a package of cigarettes and a box of ‘V’ matches.

  Next we went through Kapp’s footlocker. Like Marek’s, most of its contents were items he would have gotten from the quartermaster or bought at the commissary.

  A pair of pajamas, socks, a second shirt, a winter coat (so far unused), a second pack of cigarettes, and so on.

  ‘There’s nothing personal here at all,’ Williams said. ‘No militaria. He kept nothing from his German uniform.’

  I told Williams what Miss Osborne, Merle and I had learned from the militaria we’d retrieved from Marek’s possessions.

  ‘So,’ Williams said, ‘you think Kapp gave his ribbon bar and badges to Marek to sell? To keep him quiet about the death of the two men on the ship?’

  ‘I do,’ I said, ‘and so does Miss Osborne. The ribbon bar from Marek’s locker matched Kapp’s service details perfectly. Merle bought a trench lighter embossed with the SS death’s head from Marek. Kapp smoked, Steiner doesn’t. We can place all three men – Aach, Muntz and Kapp – there in 1938 and part of l939.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean they knew each other,’ he said.

  I dived into the deep end of the pool and explained that I thought there might be a homosexual connection between the three men in Reichenberg. The FBI was notoriously biased against subcultures of any kind, whether they were sexual, cultural or political. I didn’t know how this might affect Williams’ attitude toward this puzzle.

  Williams didn’t blink at my suggestion, but wasn’t impressed with it either. ‘That’s not evidence,’ he said, his arms crossed, gazing down at Kapp’s face. ‘That’s speculation.’ At this point we were standing over Kapp’s body, as unconcerned as if it were a rug on the floor. ‘Just because those two men lived near a male red-light district doesn’t mean they were fags. We know Kapp was because of his attentions to Hanzi. But we don’t know that he frequented the Reichenberg red-light district. Considering the Nazi attitude toward that kind of pleasure-seeking he would have been smart to stay away.’

  While Williams went to instruct the medic to keep Kapp’s body on ice after the medical officer’s examination, I unthinkingly began to fold Kapp’s clothing and repack his footlocker. As my hand brushed against the pocket of his winter coat I felt a tiny rectangular box. When I removed it I saw that it was a matchbox from a nightclub, the Tiger Club. Its emblem was a tiger cub wrapped around a martini glass, the same one I’d seen decorating the nightclub advertisement that so grabbed my attention in the Reichenberg file at the Registry. I had proof here in my hand that Major Kapp had enjoyed the sybaritic pleasures of the Tiger Club. And proof that he cherished the memory of it by concealing the matchbox in the pocket of an unused garment.

  When I heard Williams returning I instinctively shoved the matchbox into my skirt pocket. I don’t know why exactly, just that I wasn’t quite ready to share this discovery with him.

  ‘Let’s go outside and talk about suspects,’ Williams said.

  Williams and I sat on a bench outside the stockade wall and watched the German prisoners at their exercises through the barbed wire. He lit a cigarette, throwing the match on to the gravel. I thought of Kapp’s matchbox and fingered it in my pocket, still unwilling to show it to Williams.

  ‘So who do you like for this?’ I asked.

  ‘Steiner,’ he said. ‘No question. The guy is a hardcore Nazi. He hates fags – look at how he treated Hanzi. Kapp humiliated him at dinner the other night. And he would revel in being the senior SS officer in the camp.’

  ‘Do you think he could have done it alone?’

  ‘Sure, if he caught Kapp unawares and tied his hands behind his back. I’m thinking he waited until Kapp went into the shower room and overpowered him there. Wouldn’t take long.’

  ‘Maybe Steiner gagged him too; we might not see the marks considering the current state of Kapp’s head.’

  ‘Let’s check his alibi,’ Williams said. ‘We’ll start with the guards.’

  ‘Sorry,’ MP Steesen said. ‘Nothing I’d rather see than that pig Steiner locked up. But Lt Rawlins put special guards on the man’s tent every night after he had that dust-up with the late Major Kapp.’

  ‘You’re sure he couldn’t have sneaked out?’ I asked.

  ‘Two guards, one with a war dog, in front and back of Steiner’s tent. He didn’t go nowhere last night.’

  ‘There’s no point in asking his tent-mates if he left in the middle of the night, then?’ Williams asked.

  ‘No, sir,’ Steesen said. ‘I’d bet my next leave he didn’t.’

  ‘Now what?’ I asked Williams.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ he said. ‘I was so sure it was Steiner. I guess we should talk to Lt Bahnsen next. He hated Kapp. And he was protecting Hanzi.’

  I didn’t want it to be Bahnsen. I liked him. Even admired him. It was odd to think of an enemy soldier in that way, but I did.

  ‘What about Hanzi himself?’ I asked. ‘From the expression on his face when we saw him in Kapp’s tent I’d say he loathed the man. He must have abhorred Kapp’s interest in him, whether he shared his sexual predilections or not. It would just draw attention to him, and he already had plenty because of his gypsy blood.’

  ‘This isn’t Hanzi’s MO,’ Williams said. ‘He’s survived this long by lying low, not by taking action. He’ll stay on the defensive, probably for the rest of his life.’

  We found Bahnsen sitting cross-legged on his cot writing in a spiral notebook, chomping on M&Ms he was shaking out of a tube. One of his tent-mates snored on his cot nearby.

  ‘Don’t worry about him,’ Bahnsen said to us, closing the notebook and nodding toward his sleeping tent-mate. ‘He’s sleeping off the beer we brought back from the PX last night.’

  Williams grabbed two chairs and pulled them up to Bahnsen’s cot, holding one out for me to sit in and then pulling the other one around, straddling it backwards with his arms crossed over the back.

  ‘We’re here to talk about Major Kapp’s death,’ Williams said.

  ‘His suicide,’ Bahnsen said. ‘Yes. That surprised me.’

  ‘He was murdered,’ Williams said.

  Bahnsen raised an eyebrow. ‘Ich glaub’, mein Schwein pfeift!’ he said. ‘How do you know he didn’t kill himself?’

  ‘There were faint bruises around his wrist where he was bound by something soft,’ I said. ‘And we expect the medical officer to find evidence of a gag when he examines Kapp’s corpse.’

  ‘What did you say just then?’ Williams asked. ‘The German phrase, what does it mean?’

  Bahnsen swung his legs and turned to sit on the edge of his cot. He g
rinned at us.

  ‘Literally, it means, “I think my pig whistles”. It’s an expression of surprise,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t seem worried to learn that Kapp was murdered,’ I said.

  Bahnsen shrugged. ‘Why should I be? I didn’t kill him. But I’m glad he’s dead.’

  ‘Because of your friend Hanzi?’ I asked.

  ‘If you mean am I glad Thomas is safe from the major’s attentions, yes. I’m happy to be safe too.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ Williams said.

  ‘You know about the charred chicken bones found in Thomas’s bed? Well, there were other threats that weren’t reported. Thomas woke up one morning to find a noose hanging over his head. As for me, let me show you.’ Bahnsen picked up his notebook and shook a card out of it, handing it to Williams.

  ‘It’s called a death card,’ Bahnsen said. ‘German families print them up and give them out as a remembrance when a soldier dies. They usually show a picture of the soldier and have pretty poetry and such printed on them. This one calls me a traitor.’

  ‘So you were threatened yourself,’ Williams said.

  ‘Of course,’ Bahnsen said. ‘I led the anti-Nazi faction in the camp, everyone knows this. But I didn’t murder Kapp.’

  ‘Why should we believe that?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m almost a priest, as everyone reminds me so often,’ Bahnsen said. ‘The fifth commandment says “Thou shalt not kill”. I wouldn’t kill anyone. It’s against God’s law and I’m committed to His Word, even if I’m not ordained.’

  ‘You were a Luftwaffe officer,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t kill anyone,’ he said. ‘I was a navigator on a reconnaissance plane.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Williams said, ‘I need a real alibi.’

  ‘He’s not lying,’ the doctor said. The infirmary the German prisoners used wasn’t far from Bahnsen’s tent. The only person we’d found on duty was this elderly doctor in an army captain’s uniform with reading glasses stuck in his breast pocket and a stethoscope wrapped around his neck. I guessed he’d been trained during World War I and had volunteered to patch up prisoners of war so younger men could go to the front. ‘Bahnsen and that friend of his, the real dark fellow, the gypsy?’