Heller shook his head and kept running his hands over the table. Klaus leaned forward and placed his hands on his father’s. His boy’s hands were rough and calloused.
“The Leutholdts?” Klaus asked.
Heller shook his head.
“Frau Porschke? Frau Zinsendorfer?”
Heller tried to pull his hands away, but Klaus held on tight.
“They’re dead,” Heller whispered.
“Frau Zinsendorfer was always so nice to us. Odd, but nice. She gave us chocolate.”
“I know, Klaus.”
“The Müllers, the Kaluweits? Henkels? What about their girls?”
Heller rocked back and forth.
“Old Frau Müller, the Eschweinlers? And the twins? The Reichs? Your friend Armin?”
“Dead. All of them.”
“The Missbachs? And Trude? Daughter of Herr Schreiner?”
“Klaus, please!” An intense pain had overtaken Heller and made his chest cramp. Like it had all happened yesterday. And that was just how it was. There had been so much to do. No time to reflect. There was no one to talk to about it. Only the ones who’d made it out, the survivors, who too had suffered more than enough loss and yet believed they could heal their wounds through silence. Nobody wanted to look back, nobody wanted to think back. Only now, here with his son, did the memories of that night roll right over Heller with full force.
Klaus pulled his hands back. He poured another schnapps.
He spoke deliberately, as if having to force every word out. “How did you two survive?”
“I wasn’t home. I had to . . .” Heller’s voice broke. It didn’t matter what he had gone through; it was bad enough that he wasn’t able to be with Karin that night. “Your mother, she had to make it on her own . . .” He saw her standing there before him again, like a phantom, in her partly scorched cardigan, in slippers, surrounded by a world destroyed. The way she said his name, once, twice, as if she didn’t believe her own eyes.
Klaus placed a hand on Heller’s arm. “It’s okay. You’re both alive, and that’s what counts.”
The two of them fell into silence again.
“Heinz Seibling—he’s still alive!” Heller blurted out as the silence threatened to stretch on too long. “He’s missing a leg. You remember him, right?”
Klaus nodded, but Heller couldn’t read his face. It was too dark for that. They stared at the strange shadow patterns on the curtains.
“Well, I guess a person should try not to think about it too much,” Heller said. Then he shut up. What was he talking about? There was no way not to think about it, of course there wasn’t.
Klaus didn’t respond.
Heller wondered how it must feel for him. Everyone he’d known was dead or missing; his home didn’t exist, nor did anything that had ever belonged to him, not one piece of clothing, no schoolbook, no drawing, no photo, no toy, no book.
But that wasn’t all. Heller knew Klaus well enough. Klaus wasn’t attached to material things. There was another reason why he’d needed to ask. All that had happened here must have seemed so horrendous and surreal to him that he’d wanted to confirm it all—that the man opposite him truly was his father, and the place where they were truly was his city, that this home he’d come back to was not just some fever dream.
Heller scooted a little closer, so his son could touch him.
Klaus had apparently been waiting for that. He grabbed Heller’s hand and stared at him. “Father,” he whispered almost inaudibly, “I’ve seen things that, that . . .”
Heller waited.
“I saw people, who . . .” Klaus stopped talking for a moment, but he kept looking at Heller without lowering his eyes, their foreheads nearly touching. “People who did things . . .”
Heller nodded. He knew the things that people did. And the way they could force others to do things.
“I had to . . .”
Heller gently patted his shoulder. “You had to do it, Klaus. You had promised your mother something. You promised you would make it back home. And you kept that promise.” When he tried taking his hand away, Klaus grabbed it again.
“But shouldn’t there be rules in war too? You shouldn’t be allowed to simply kill indiscriminately. I mean, isn’t that right?”
“It is.”
Klaus nodded and released his father’s hand now. Heller looked his son in the eyes. Searching them. Searching for that pensive little boy.
“Klaus, what is it?” he finally asked. “What was it you had to do?”
He didn’t want to know, but it was his duty to ask.
Klaus nodded again. “In the POW camp. January ’45. I ratted them out,” he whispered. “They were dressed like ordinary privates, but I knew them. They were from the SS.”
Heller was patient, silent. Klaus was searching for the words.
“I reported them to the heads of the camp. They pulled those two out the very same day and shot them dead.”
Heller took a deep breath. Klaus must have known that would happen if he betrayed them. But he wouldn’t have done so without good reason.
Heller sensed that they needed to discuss this somehow. His son was struggling with it. “Were you forced to blow the whistle on them, or were you maybe hoping to gain favor?”
Klaus didn’t answer for a long time. He eventually shook his head. “No. No one made me do it. When we first got to the camp, we were all interrogated. Those two came later. But I knew them. I had seen them, in Vitebsk, them and many others. Father, I had seen what they did there, and I went to report it. I wasn’t looking for anything! You have to believe me.” He stared at Heller in near despair.
“But two days later the Russians gave me a job in the camp kitchen, and I was recommended for training. You can imagine what happened then. To the others, I was a traitor. And I was one too. I could’ve just let it go, couldn’t I, Father? It couldn’t have helped anyone at that point. And the two of them are dead now. They needed to be punished, but they had worried mothers too!” Klaus’s voice nearly gave out.
Heller shook his head. “One day you will know why you acted,” he said.
He’d always seen that Klaus never tolerated injustice. Erwin wouldn’t have betrayed those two. The fact that Klaus was calling himself a traitor revealed how irreconcilable the conflict was.
“They were criminals, Father!” Klaus cried out and feebly let his head drop onto Heller’s shoulder. “They were murderers. Not soldiers, real murderers!”
It had long been clear to Heller that people like that rarely received just punishment. And Klaus knew it too. He could not bear the thought of those murderers living on. “You did the right thing, Klaus,” Heller said, stroking his son’s hand. “You did the right thing, considering the circumstances.”
Klaus gently sobbed. “They pulled them out of the barracks and beat them half to death, then shot them dead. Not even an hour after I reported their names.”
Here was another price Klaus had to pay. And he was likely paying a far higher price than those two dead men. “It’s never easy. It’s never simple,” Heller said.
Klaus straightened up and wiped his face on his sleeve. “Please don’t tell Mother.”
Heller nodded. “It stays between us.”
Klaus straightened up again. He had something else on his mind, it seemed. He cleared his throat. “I applied for the police,” he said. “That’s why they let me come home.”
February 9, 1947: Morning
Public Prosecutor Speidel was angry. He directed Heller to sit with a gruff swipe of his hand. Heller reluctantly complied. He wasn’t feeling well. He had slept for barely three hours, and the schnapps hadn’t helped. His head was aching, and his temples pulsed. The cold was especially unbearable today. Klaus was accustomed to even worse. This morning he’d walked to the water pump to get water for Karin, wearing only a light jacket.
Heller’s bag held two slices of bread spread with Russian liverwurst. He couldn’t think about anything else.
Speidel finally looked up, glowering at Heller through his wire-framed glasses. He was clean-shaven, the little Hitler mustache that had adorned his upper lip for a decade long gone, and he wore his hair somewhat longer than he used to, though with a clean part.
“Comrade Oberkommissar, were you trying to insult me by entering the Schlüter family’s home without an authorized search warrant?”
“There was imminent danger. I arrived in the afternoon, as arranged with Frau Schlüter, to pick up a list of her former employees. I noticed suspicious activity in the yard and investigated. Something had obviously been removed from the cellar, and I made the decision to act. I obtained access to the cellar and seized evidence. In doing so I surprised a young man, likely Friedel Schlüter. When he fled, I took chase.”
“You shot at him!”
“I fired warning shots into the air.”
“The patrol officers at the scene described the situation differently. You entered through the front door after inquiring about Frau Schlüter’s whereabouts.”
Heller forced himself to remain calm. He didn’t want to show that he was tense. He crossed his legs and folded his arms. “I knocked, and a resident of the house opened the door. It was cold. I asked to wait inside for Frau Schlüter.”
“Thereupon you entered Frau Schlüter’s apartment?” Speidel eyed him over his glasses.
“No, because I had no search warrant.”
“So you secured evidence in the cellar and informed Colonel Ovtcharov of the MVD. Why? Don’t you think the public prosecutor should be informed first?”
“I was given explicit instructions. The order was signed by the SMAD and Police Chief Opitz.”
Speidel clearly didn’t want to hear this. “And then you let our Soviet friends go and plunder Frau Schlüter’s apartment?”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“Be that as it may, Comrade Oberkommissar, it seems you’re making that family pay as part of your personal vendetta against the Nazis. You surely know what a manhunt for Friedel Schlüter means for the boy. He’ll either be shot or end up in a camp.”
Heller gritted his teeth. He kept control of himself. “Herr Prosecutor, first off—”
“It seems to me that your sense of fairness and justice needs a little refreshing—”
“Don’t you dare cut me off,” Heller thundered. “And don’t you dare allege that I have no sense of justice. If anyone needs their sense of right and wrong examined, it’s you!”
Speidel made a point of leaning back in his chair and acting calm, yet a nerve twitched below his left eye. “Control yourself, Heller. I possess a clean record; I have nothing to apologize for. My case has been reviewed. I’ve been rehabilitated. I was only in the Nazi Party so I could earn a living.”
Heller burst forward, propped his fists on the prosecutor’s desk, and pointed at Speidel. The man had already recoiled so far back in his chair he had no more room to move. He squinted at Heller as if looking down a gun barrel. Heller no longer saw any reason to keep it together. What Speidel needed was a dose of reality.
“It was only luck that you ended up passing their review. You were a Nazi of the first degree. And you headed countless criminal investigations against anyone who resisted, anyone found ‘hostile to military power.’ They were all executed!”
“That was my job, and those were the laws. I didn’t create them; I merely carried them out. And stop acting so high and mighty! You also had to have your record cleared at some point.” Speidel’s face had turned bright red.
Heller pounded his fist on the desk. “Goddamn it, how many times do I have to tell people? I’ve never been in any party, either as a fellow traveler or real National Socialist!”
Right then he noticed Speidel glancing past him. Heller turned around and saw the prosecutor’s secretary standing in the doorway. Only now did he realize how much of a rage he had worked himself into, and that it must have sounded as if he were about to really let loose. He thought better of it now, stood up straight, and pulled his overcoat down tight. Then he looked the secretary in the eye until Speidel waved at her to withdraw.
“I could make a formal complaint against you,” Speidel told him in a low voice.
“You do that.” What a poor attempt at saving face, Heller thought.
“And I could take the case away from you. Both cases.”
“You’d be doing me a favor, Herr Prosecutor.” Heller knew this was all ridiculous, both Speidel’s threat and Heller’s reply, but it was apparently the only way to reach Speidel. “Feel free to discuss it with Lieutenant General Igor Medvedev.”
He detested throwing the commandant’s name around. After all, he was the one who had never wanted to be dancing to the Russians’ tune. People lost their posts so easily these days, even people like Medvedev. Then he’d be left without connections, with no one to have his back, and at the mercy of Medvedev’s enemies. At best he’d lose only his job.
“For your information, Herr Prosecutor, once I’ve questioned Frau Schlüter, I’ll move on to questioning witnesses about events surrounding the Schwarzer Peter bar. By the way, the severed head belongs to one Franz Swoboda, a disabled vet working for Josef Gutmann. But I assume Officer Oldenbusch has already informed you of that. Have a nice day.”
As if Medvedev knew his every move, the general called the police headquarters on Schiessgasse right as Heller arrived. Niesbach’s secretary found Heller in the hallway and informed him that the general wanted to see him in his office at Soviet HQ. Heller nodded, then went into his office. Oldenbusch was waiting for him. Crossing back over the Elbe again would take a half hour or more, so a few minutes wouldn’t matter.
Oldenbusch rose from his chair.
“Mornin’, boss. Been plenty going on with you, huh? You send me home on purpose just so you could have all the fun?”
Heller ignored being called boss again. He had to sit down. His altercation with Speidel worried him. He needed a moment to compose himself, and he tried to stop thinking about it, drumming his fingers on his desk. His dark office, not much bigger than a prison cell and no more comfortable, wasn’t helping. But then a smile flashed across his face. He looked at Oldenbusch.
“Guess what, Werner? Klaus is back!”
Oldenbusch bounded over to Heller and shook his hand heartily. “Congrats! He safe and sound?”
Heller nodded. “Yes, but he’s got plenty on his mind.”
Oldenbusch waved it aside. “That’ll pass, I can assure you.”
How would he know? Heller wondered. Typical Oldenbusch, always speaking off the cuff.
“The way I heard it,” Oldenbusch said, “you went and waylaid Frau Schlüter.”
Heller didn’t mind Oldenbusch changing the subject. He always felt more comfortable keeping things on a professional level.
“Speaking of, take a few men and head over to her place. The cellar needs to be combed for evidence, her apartment too, even if the Soviets have already gone through it. I want fingerprints of everyone living there. Anything new about Swoboda?”
“Investigations are under way. I should know more today.”
Heller nodded. “I actually wanted to go see Frau Schlüter myself, but Medvedev needs to speak to me. I’ll come find you later at her place.”
Lieutenant General Medvedev had coffee and cake waiting for Heller. It was only a simple pound cake, but it was covered with a chocolate glaze, something akin to a miracle these days. The commandant had it all set out on his desk and waved Heller over.
“Now don’t hold back, Heller. Help yourself.”
“Thank you very much.” Heller wasn’t sure how to proceed. He waited for Medvedev to take a piece.
“Sugar, cream?” Medvedev pointed to a sugar bowl and a little pot. Medve
dev apparently thought nothing of offering up what people had been missing most, and in excess, though Heller also got the sense that he was being played with.
“What can you tell me about this case concerning that woman and her son?” the commandant asked.
“It’s still unresolved. We’ve barely secured evidence. The hand grenades are the same type used in the attack on the Münchner Krug—German model 43 stick grenade. Solid wood stick, not hollow like the 39.”
Medvedev stuck half a piece of cake in his mouth and chewed but couldn’t keep the crumbs from covering his mouth, then took a loud slurp of coffee.
“I’m looking for your opinion, Heller,” he said once he’d swallowed it all down.
Heller pried his eyes away from the enticing plate of cake and sighed. “This Friedel is just a misguided boy who thinks he’s standing up for a good cause. Kids like him will be plaguing us for years to come. His mother’s a committed Nazi. But if he was the attacker, I don’t believe she knowingly supported him.”
“He can’t be connected to those two dead officers?”
Heller didn’t like Medvedev’s probing tone. “When you put it like that, most likely not.”
Medvedev took another piece of cake and carefully nibbled away at the chocolate glaze. “How, then, do you explain those items that were found?”
Heller, having no idea what the general was talking about, didn’t hesitate to make his point. “I can crack these cases, but I need to be allowed to do my job properly.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just had an altercation with our rehabilitated new public prosecutor.”
Medvedev set the partially eaten piece of cake on his plate. He looked Heller in the eye. “Speidel.” The Russian wiped the crumbs off his hands, then planted his elbows on his armrests. “I wish to be candid, Herr Oberkommissar. There are some of us who feel that denazification needs to proceed more radically. In which case you wouldn’t be seeing anyone in office with a Nazi past. But circumstances demand a few compromises that you must live with as well. We need capable people, or else it will be decades before the Germans are able to run their own affairs again.”
A Thousand Devils (Max Heller, Dresden Detective Book 2) Page 12