“I think I would find it repellent, sir.”
“Thanks to God, most of your fellow beings feel as you do. Otherwise the women of the world would all end up dead.”
“But why the child?”
“Because she was there.” Roddewig stared at Berg with dead eyes. “No, Edith wasn’t my first Lustmord.” The barrel of the Mauser was now aimed under Britta’s chin. “Nor will she be the last.” A hand on her face. “But this one won’t be blamed on Schoennacht.” He started drooling with anticipation. “I’ve got it precisely planned, Berg.”
Again Berg heard the door creak. “Tell me how, sir.”
“Do you really want to know?”
“I am a curious fellow.”
“That is true.” Again his eyes narrowed. “Müller has been telling me how obsessed you’ve been with the murders. With your mistress dead, you had no place to go for relief. You had to depend on your wife. When she refused your advances . . . well, that was too much.”
Berg nodded. “Ah . . . I see.”
“No, you don’t see everything. So I will tell you. First, you had your way with her. . . .” Roddewig began to stroke Britta’s face. She was so quiet, so brave.
Berg’s eyes dared to engage hers.
I’m so sorry, darling, so very sorry.
Tears rolled down her cheeks.
Roddewig went on. “The police will find proof that you forced yourself on her.”
Another creak.
“You forced yourself on her with your children watching. They begged you to stop.”
Now there was silence.
“Then . . . under the strain of what you had done to your own wife . . . you couldn’t face her . . . you couldn’t face your children. You simply snapped.”
The door flew open with a gust of wind.
Instantly, Berg sprang up and slammed his family to the ground, shielding them with his body as the cross fire of bullets hummed over their heads. Instincts from his soldier days had taken over.
He remembered to duck.
FIFTY
Roddewig had fallen backward, two holes in his chest, one in his face.
Martin Volker was unscathed. “That’s the problem with those who have no combat experience.” He picked up the Kommandant’s guns and stowed them in his coat. “They don’t know how to cover themselves, and they shoot like girls.”
One by one, Berg brought his family to their feet. He hugged his children. To Britta he said, “Take them in the bedroom and shut the door.” He kissed her cheek, hugging her while whispering, “Hide under the bed. Don’t come out for anything.” Aloud he said, “Go.”
“I want to stay with you, Papa,” Joachim said.
“You can’t stay with him,” Britta answered angrily.
Berg took his son’s face and looked into his eyes. “It won’t be more than a few minutes. Besides, you have to take care of your mother and sister.” He kissed his forehead. “Always take care of your mother and sister.”
“Why?” Tears were trailing down the boy’s cheeks. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m losing patience,” Volker told him.
Britta grabbed the children and disappeared into the bedroom. Several seconds passed, then Berg heard furniture being moved. They were barricading themselves in.
Berg regarded the Kommissar. “How did you know the Kommandant was here?”
“No great deductive feat.” Volker held Roddewig’s Mauser in his hand. “I overheard Müller talking on the telephone, actually shouting into the mouthpiece. The static on the line must have been terrible. I’m surprised at you, Axel. You didn’t notice the motorcar parked across the street?”
“I did.”
“How many people in your neighborhood own a motorcar?”
Again Berg cursed his stupidity. “How long have you known about Müller?”
“I suspected it for a while. Several times in the past year, I’ve seen him leaving Roddewig’s office when the hour was very late. The man is a jellyfish—absolutely no spine. With the tiniest bit of provocation, he told me everything.”
“Did Müller know that Roddewig was the murderer before this afternoon?”
“I don’t know, Berg. He’s not a very truthful man, so any of his disclaimers would be suspect. Why you wanted to work with him has always eluded me.”
“I considered him a friend.” He steadied his shaking hands by slipping them in his pants pockets. “I was wrong.”
“Wrong about Müller, but right about Roddewig, the arrogant little worm. This is going to be the death of Max Brummer.” A hint of a smile. “It will not sit well with the politicians that Brummer appointed a mass killer to the position of Kommandant.”
“One would assume that you’ll be next in line.”
“One would assume . . . except that there are going to be those who question my wisdom in shooting a superior.”
“But he was a mass killer!”
“Yes, yes, of course. Still, someone’s going to think I did it for my own purposes.”
Berg met Volker’s eyes: They told him that his days were numbered.
Volker shook his head. “I have a very messy problem . . . explaining everything. And even though you would back me up, it would be wholly inconvenient. You’d always know the truth, just as you know the truth about Margot. Unfortunately for you, you simply know too much.”
Berg heard the click of a hammer being drawn back, the barrel of the Mauser on his forehead. “I saved your family, Axel. I saved you from being recorded in history as a mad killer, another German monster afflicted with Lustmord. I saved your wife, I saved your little daughter, and I saved your only son. It’s a pity that I can’t save you.”
Berg didn’t answer.
“One shot to the head from Roddewig’s gun. All your police work was not in vain. You shall die a hero.”
Berg was surprised by his steady heartbeat, his acceptance of the inevitable. Even if he could fight off Volker, he was living on borrowed time. With the death of two superiors in his living room and no support at all in the department, Müller would fabricate a story against him. He would be arrested, he would be tried, he would be condemned. He would die in jail or at the hands of an executioner. His family would be ostracized and excommunicated.
Right now, he was more dead than alive. It was time to write his will, assigning Volker the position of executor. “And my family?”
“I’ll take care of them.”
“How will you get them to trust you after you’ve murdered me?”
“Because I will tell them that I did not murder you . . . you did that yourself.”
Berg smiled. “Suicide?”
“Because of the guilt and shame you carried inside regarding Margot. You could no longer face your wife and children. You accomplished this one final act of bravery so your family would be spared humiliation.”
“Britta won’t believe you.”
“The shot will be at close range, Berg. Surely you would not allow me to kill you without a fight. Besides, Britta won’t care. She detests you.”
“She detests you as well.”
“But not as much as she despises you right now. You are responsible for putting her and the children in peril. I will tell her that you, Axel, invented a cover story to hide your shame and suicide. That, for your family, you bravely managed to wrest a gun away from Roddewig, but it was too late. Though you shot him in the breast and head, he wounded you mortally in the head.”
“I see.”
“I came in as you lay dying.”
“Yes, I think she’ll agree to that.” Berg rubbed his hands together. “Promise me you’ll get them out of the country.”
Volker raised an eyebrow.
“Roddewig was a good friend of Hitler’s,” Berg said. “The Austrian has lost a valued contact in the police department. When he comes to power, he will not deal kindly with my family.”
“Hitler has no power.”
It was Berg’s turn to smile. �
�Once I also was the optimist.” He shook his head. “Thugs beating me up . . . I still had hope. Not after that last rally, Kommissar, after I saw what his men are capable of. Not after I saw one hundred thousand cheering Germans supporting him. Surely you see it as well. The Austrian is as ruthless as he is relentless. It’s only a matter of time, Kommissar . . . or should I say Direktor.”
Again Volker lifted his brow.
“Eventually you’ll have to join him, sir. If you’re not actively with him, he’ll consider you against him. That’s the way it is with savages.” Berg shrugged. “I’ll not be around to see it. I need you to promise me that you’ll obtain visas for my entire family and spirit them out of the country. Then I’ll do what you ask.”
Volker kept the gun steady against Berg’s temple. “You have family in Denmark, don’t you?”
“I don’t want them in Denmark, sir. Get them visas for England or, even better, get them visas for The States.”
Volker was taken aback. “Do you have relatives in The States?”
“A distant cousin. Everyone has some distant relative in The States. But I have another idea. Contact a reporter named Michael Green. He works for a paper in London . . . the London Eagle or something like that. He’s originally from Boston. Tell him that you will give him the English exclusive on this mass-murder story in exchange for his support in securing United States visas for my family. Tell him that I wanted them to be far, far away from the dreadful memory. Leaving Germany is the only option. Have Green write it up and pull out all the stops. After all, the government would have to be heartless to deny the deathbed request of a hero. That’s what you must do. You must tell Green that it was my last wish . . . as I lay dying . . . in your arms.”
Volker shrugged. “I suppose that can be arranged.”
“No, you must promise me. You must swear to it.”
Volker shrugged. “I swear.”
“Vielen Dank.” Berg straightened his shoulders. “Where should I stand?”
“Well, I suppose that if you wrested the gun from Roddewig, you’d have to be close to where he went down.”
“Tell me where.”
“Right in front of the couch, I think.” Volker walked around to where Roddewig was standing before he fell backward, then looked Berg in the eye. “Stand still.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Volker pointed the gun at Berg’s head. “Why The States, Berg? Why send them so far away from their native land?”
“My son always wanted to see Josephine Baker dance.”
“He could go to Berlin for that.”
Berg stopped to formulate his words. “How many times have you heard Hitler say that there has to be a reason why two million Germans died on foreign soil?”
“Go on.”
“Of course, there was a reason, Volker. A very simple reason. We waged a war of territory and we lost. We pride ourselves on a brilliant history of conquests: Our shame of defeat is still too great to utter aloud. So we deny that we ever really lost the war. There are no physical reminders of combat, because no battles were fought here. The only remnants of the Great War are the lame and the wounded soldiers who are slowly dying off. Hitler doesn’t accept defeat. Neither does half the population of our country. There are many who demand revenge and who seek vengeance.
“In 1917, we were winning the Great War, Volker. We were so close. The Entente was in dire straits: Belgium was decimated; France was torn and tattered; England was straining at the seams, exhausted and overworked.”
Berg smiled wryly.
“Then the Yanks entered the war. Millions of fresh-faced soldiers shipped over with guns and ammunition and modern airplanes and bombs.”
He shook his head.
“The Entente didn’t win the war, Volker. America did. The people in The States returned home with the thrill of victory in their hearts, leaving us ignominy and embarrassment that have plagued this land for over a decade. I would like to think that if there ever was another war—in which millions of men died in open fields—at the very least, my son would die wearing the uniform of the victorious.”
“Dead is dead.”
“Ah, but one can be alive in body but dead in soul. Just look at Hitler. That man is the future of Germany. If you prove to be honest, Volker, at least he won’t be the future of my children. And that is why I will take your bullet with a smile on my face.”
EPILOGUE
New York, 2005
I did not die in an open field, although I was in the fields. True to my father’s dying wish, I was wearing American green. You see, I know all about my father’s final wishes because while my sister and mother acted as good Germans, obeying Father’s orders, I was rebellious and hotheaded. I insisted on listening through the keyhole. Mother did not protest. By that time, Mother had given up on all the males in her family.
I never did tell my mother or my sister what had transpired in the living room of our tiny apartment. But I confronted Martin about it soon after the Münchener Post ran the headlines. He kept his word, something I will never quite fathom. Maybe it was because my father had died honorably, fending off a fiend. Stefan Roddewig was declared the Munich Murderer, posthumously charged with the slayings of Anna Gross, Marlena Druer, and Edith and Johanna Mayrhofer. Anton Gross was posthumously declared innocent of the murder of his wife. The case of Regina Gottlieb remains officially unsolved. I suppose Martin needed Schoennacht for other purposes. The last I heard of Rolf, he had been convicted of war crimes and was murdered right before sentencing. Murdered most horribly, I heard.
By the time the Yanks entered the war, I had garnered a small reputation as an artist and photographer. I was drafted and sent overseas to record both in ink and in silver nitrate what went on during the bloodiest battles. I also witnessed death countless times on the beaches of Utah and Omaha, where the deceased lay honestly in a profusion of mangled bodies, gutted carcasses, and detached limbs—the result of guns, grenades, and combat.
I also witnessed the walking dead. Sent in with the Seventh Army—the Twentieth Armored Division to be exact—I recorded the skeletons, their skin infested with maggots, rotting in chunks from gangrene and infection. Their brains were feverish from typhoid and other horrible diseases. Hundreds of them—men, women, children—crammed into small spaces, peeking out from corners and crevices, staring at us, some daring to touch us with their bony hands and knobby fingers.
The prisoners in Dachau were emaciated from starvation. The Americans didn’t know better and tossed them canned goods and chocolate bars. Many of the inmates survived the treachery of the Nazis only to die from eating rich food that their stomachs couldn’t digest. “Canned-good” deaths, they were called. I photographed all of this along with the four charred ovens. The land of Bavaria was heavy with the stink of burning bodies, eyes burning from the smoke of the crematorium. The town claimed to know nothing.
We know only what we want to know.
It was 1945, and for the first time in almost a decade I dared to use my German. After Mother died of pleurisy in 1936, I had had no use for the language. Only my sister and I were left and, since we loathed being labeled greenhorns, we always spoke to each other in English. It was easy to forget my native language: The only time I heard it coming out of my mouth was in my nightmares. When I began to dream in English, the nightmares ceased.
So I was shocked by my fluency when those first Teutonic words escaped easily from my lips. The camp inmates wept when I spoke to them. My Bavarian accent pronounced and correct. They did not cry because I spoke to them in German. They cried because I told them I was a Jew. With Berg as my surname, I could pass for a Jew, although if the inmates had been healthier, surely they would have found my Semitic origins lacking in credibility. With my blond curly hair and my blue eyes, tall and muscular from lifting barbells, I was a poster boy for Hitler’s Aryan race.
My captain was stunned. Where had I learned such flawless German? You see, I had reinvented myself as
an orphan—which I was—but an American orphan—which I was not. I was immediately put to use as a translator, even though many of the prisoners weren’t German Jews, but Polish. Still, after a bit, I could easily understand their Yiddish as they recounted horror story after horror story. There were many in the United States who refused to acknowledge the veracity of such tales. What kind of human beings could have perpetrated such cruelty?
I, on the other hand, had no trouble believing them. Although we emigrated to the United States long before the extermination camps were built, there were those who were farsighted enough to have seen what was coming. Others, such as Martin, needed a direct threat. He emigrated to The States as soon as Heinrich Himmler became Kommissarischer Polizeipräsident of the Munich Police Department in 1933. It wasn’t because Martin was rabidly anti-Nazi. It was only because he and Himmler had hated each other ever since that fateful rally.
My mother signed papers for him, pretending to be a close relative, something I will never quite understand. Martin was responsible for my father’s death, but I suppose my father would have died a horrible death anyway. He would never have left Munich, and he certainly would not have allowed his only son to be drafted into the German army to fight for Hitler. So I think that even the terror that must have gone through his mind as Martin pulled the trigger was preferable to the torture and eventual murder he would have faced as a political dissenter in Dachau.
I paint in reds because red is the color of blood. The critics tell me that my paintings are saturated with war and death. This is partly true, but not exclusively. Blood represents death, but blood is life as well. Sometimes it is both simultaneously. Because my father chose death, he gave my sister and me a better chance at life without the guilt and shame and abasement that saddle and burden many of my boyhood friends. They have to face their children and explain what they and their nation did under the guise of being civilized. They have to explain why they stood by or even cheered while a segment of their indigenous population was beaten, gassed, burned in ovens, and shot without mercy—men, women, children . . . babies with their tiny bones melting into blood-soaked ground.
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