The House of Special Purpose

by Paul Christopher

  The shops were ostensibly those of dressmakers, hat-makers and lingerie sellers. Most of these Haas knew had special cubicles in the rear for a broad assortment of homosexual acts for a broad assortment of prices. The cubicles and their occupants were advertised in the leading newspapers of the city in ambiguous but well-known terminology.

  Haas turned down an unnamed alley and parked the motor car close to a bright green door with no indication of what lay behind it except a small peephole blocked by a sliding piece of metal, also painted green. Approaching the door, Haas saw that it was much heavier than it originally looked, the metal solid and studded with rivets all around.

  He knocked lightly on the door and the peephole slid back. The porter’s face, jowelled and angry-looking, like a bulldog, peered out. The porter, whose name Haas knew was Trost, had a huge scar running across his cheek, raised from his puckered skin like a writhing, multi-segmented worm.

  The peephole slammed shut, followed by the sound of several bolts being drawn back. This place, the so-called Aryan Cafe, was Berlin’s latest attraction, the ne plus ultra in Folter Kultur. The door opened and the porter stepped back, allowing Haas into a long, narrow corridor leading to a broad mahogany staircase sweeping steeply upward. Between the door and the stairs was a closet-sized booth, metal like the door, with a small thick window threaded with heavy wire with a narrow slot at the bottom. Sitting in the booth was a black man who called himself Victor Hugo, and who was expecting him. Haas brought a thick envelope out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket and pushed it through the slot and into Victor’s large hand, where it disappeared instantly.

  ‘Room thirty-six,’ said Victor in Alabama-accented German. ‘It’s all set.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘LuLu.’

  ‘Does she know she’s being paid extra?’

  ‘Yes. And she knows what you’ll say.’

  ‘Good.’ Haas showed a feral smile. ‘If everything goes well there’ll be a bonus in it for you.’

  ‘That’s fine.’ Victor nodded. ‘Just so long as no one knows I was involved. Worth my job, or these days maybe even more.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Haas. ‘I’ll keep you out of it.’

  ‘I always worry. That’s why I’m still alive.’

  Haas climbed the staircase, stepping out of the way of a clutch of richly dressed people coming down. At the top of the stairs was a gathering of more of Berlin’s pleasure seekers, most of them drinking champagne, their voices pitched nervously high as though they belonged in this place but were afraid to stay too long.

  From other rooms off the stairway landing came the sounds of shrill talk and shrill singing as well as cigar smoke as thick as any London fog. Without pausing Haas went through one of the rooms to the right. It was full of men in evening clothes sitting at small tables, looking for drink and women, prostitutes soliciting business, gold diggers looking for generous ‘squarehead’ sugar daddies, vamping demoiselles looking for their own victims and here and there the crooks and rouged dandies of the Berlin underworld, the so-called Robin Hoods of the Friedrichstrasse.

  From the smaller dining room Haas stepped into the Banquet Hall, its draperies a fantastic Prussian blue with paintings on the walls showing men and women engaged in every sordid act imaginable. There were photographs as well, mostly of women in the nude. A few people were eating from the large buffet but most stood against the walls and turned back the paintings and the photographs on hidden hinges, revealing small peepholes where patrons of the ‘cafe’ could spy upon their fellow revelers.

  Haas had seen all the place had to offer on previous visits. The first room showed a strange conglomerate of beautifully dressed women in gowns and underwear and lingerie of the finest materials. The women were made up and rouged like dolls and only careful inspection showed that this was a metamorphosis worthy of a story by Franz Kafka, perhaps even imagined by him in a place like this, for these women were not women at all. They were men, displayed through the peepholes in their freakish make-up for prospective customers.

  Haas, whose own sexual proclivities ran to the mundane, wasn’t offended by what he saw. Over the past decade he’d seen an entire country succumb to madness, of which this place was only a small representation and perhaps in its own way a healthier expression than the pounding, marching feet on the treeless Unter den Linden and the screaming hordes at the rallies in Nuremberg.

  The next room was for various masochistic pleasures and the third was for those who liked to inflict the pain rather than receive it. The room, Haas knew, was set up like a monstrous hospital ward complete with nail beds, drugs, racks, whips and chains of every kind, the patients screaming as the doctors did their pain-filled work.

  Stepping through a pair of long black curtains, Haas found himself in the last room on the floor, a dark chamber lit only from above, spotlighting a perfect blond Nordic couple on a bed, performing relatively tame demonstrations of sexual relations.

  From a phonograph in the centre of the floor, the disk spinning madly, came the voice of a woman, smooth and silky, her velvet tones describing what every newly wed Nazi should do on his or her wedding night as the demonstrating couple did her bidding, following her words exactly. Haas passed out into a short corridor leading to a winding set of stairs to the floor above and eased out of the way and allowed two women to pass, both dressed in silk lingerie.

  Haas moved slowly up the stairs, listening. There were eight or nine rooms on the upper floor, each one numbered, each with a red light above the door to announce whether the room was occupied. Haas heard all kinds of sound and movement on the other side of the doors but he ignored them and continued the length of the passageway to number thirty-six.

  Standing outside the door, he took a standard Parabellum pistol from its dangling holster under his arm. The only difference between it and the regular army-issue weapon was that the front sight had been filed off and the end of the barrel tapped for the first inch and a half. From his other pocket Haas brought out a short 1908 Maxim silencer and twirled it onto the end of the barrel.

  Haas rapped on the door. ‘LuLu?’ He paused. ‘You have a telephone call.’

  ‘Tell the person she’s busy.’ The voice that replied spoke German with a heavy Polish accent.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s very important.’ Haas cleared his throat. ‘You will be reimbursed for your time, Mein Herr.’

  There was a heartfelt sigh and then the squeaking of a bed. Haas heard bare feet padding across the floor and suddenly the red light went off and LuLu opened the door. She tried to edge past Haas but with his free hand he gently pushed her back into the room. The man in the bed, a look of irritation on his face, was a Pole named Juri de Sosnowski who had been ‘lucky’ enough to have a German mother, which allowed him to be employed at the big Maybach car showroom on Luetzow Platz a block or so away from Abwehr headquarters on Bendler Strasse. He also had a flat just around the corner from the five joined town houses between 72 and 76 Tirpitz Ufer, where he regularly received super-classified operations reports almost as soon as they were typed up, provided by a very willing secretary from the General Staff Office.

  ‘This isn’t right,’ said LuLu, pouting, an angry expression on her face. ‘I was to get a telephone call.’

  ‘Just what in the devil’s name is going on here!’ demanded the Pole. Haas could see that Sosnowski was edging over on the bed to get his hand within reach of a jacket hanging over a chair nearby. Haas took out the Parabellum and shot LuLu first, since she was closest to him and probably had a knife hidden somewhere close by. The bullet took her full in the mouth, blowing through her teeth and exiting through the top of her spine by way of the neck. She made a small squeaking noise and slipped down onto the floor. Sosnowski lunged for his jacket and Haas shot him twice, once through the chest and once through the forehead. The wall behind the bed was sprayed with blood in a huge rosette pattern that also began to broadly stain the sheet. Sosnowski slipped over the sid
e of the bed and crumpled naked on the bare floor. Staring down at him, Haas could see the large tempting organ that had initially seduced the secretary from Tirpitz Ufer.

  He listened for a few long moments as he replaced the Parabellum in its holster. There were no sounds of alarm or fear, which was reasonable enough since the automatic pistol with the silencer made a sound no louder than the muffled squeals and moans and slapping sounds that came from the rooms all around him.

  Haas flipped the switch beside the door and the light outside in the hall went on. The red light would give him more than enough time to get clear. He stepped out into the hall and paused, looking in both directions as he opened the cellophane on a fresh package of Junos. He lit one then headed back the way he’d come, eventually reaching the bottom of the stairs that led to the front door. He stopped in front of Victor’s booth.

  ‘How’d it go?’ said Victor.

  ‘Fine,’ said Haas, ‘no problems so far.’

  ‘So far.’

  ‘Not quite done,’ said Haas. ‘A few loose ends.’

  He took out the Parabellum again, slipped the barrel and the silencer under the slot in Victor’s bulletproof glass shield and fired three times, moving the weapon slightly from side to side, stitching across the black man’s chest. Two of the shots hit Victor squarely in the heart and pericardium, flooding the heart cavity with blood, and the third shot blew a ragged hole in the man’s right lung.

  By the time Haas had fired the second shot, the bulldog porter at the main door was already running forward, struggling to bring out his own weapon. Haas turned slightly and began to fire at the heavyset figure running towards him, picking chest and head shots until the man dropped to the floor six feet away from him, bleeding in several different directions. Given the man’s size, Haas made the prudent choice. As he passed on his way out the door he bent down and put a single shot through the back of the porter’s head. When he was done, he stepped out the door, climbed back into the BMW and drove off.

  He made his way past the crowds of waiting young men outside the sooty old Alexanderplatz Station and crossed the Spree at the Kaiser Wilhelm Bridge, finally reaching the Tiergarten Station and Berlinerstrasse. He turned off the main thoroughfare and its spotlit Hakken-kruze banners, turning down to the Landswehr Kanal and the narrow street that ran along it, the Tirpitz Ufer. Reaching the row of elegant five-storey town houses that ran from number 72 to 76, he pulled the BMW up onto the pavement on the canal side of the street and switched off the engine. He took out a large, white-enamelled medallion identifying his car as an official vehicle, climbed out of the BMW, then locked it. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was after one in the morning. Almost without thinking about it, his eye was drawn up to the fifth-floor window exactly in the centre of the row of buildings. The window was dimly lit and Haas could imagine the man in the room within bending over some strange document, the room lit only by his plain old gooseneck lamp.

  Haas crossed the empty street and ducked under a granite portico. He nodded to the pair of police guards who stood sentry at the door, then climbed two steps and entered the Fuchsbau – the Fox’s Lair, as everyone who worked in the Abwehr headquarters called it. He stopped at the guard’s cubbyhole and a weary night porter took his identification and then returned it with a stamped security pass. He bypassed the elevator and instead took the large, split staircase that curved up left and right to the mezzanine. He went down the dimly lit corridor on the left, then took several narrower flights of stairs to the high-ceilinged fifth floor and the large office of Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr.

  As predicted, the broad-shouldered, short little man was seated at his desk, poring over a document within a manila file folder with a bright red tab. Haas stood in the open doorway to the large room, waiting for a command to come farther. The office was as it always was, bare except for a pair of Japanese scrolls on the wall, a long black leather couch that was more for the use of Canaris’s two dachshunds, Sepell and Sabine, than it was for the admiral and a huge map of the world pinned up behind his desk. The large desk itself was barren except for the green gooseneck lamp and a trio of solid brass seated monkeys, one covering its eyes, the next its mouth and the third its ears. See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. Behind the desk, on a stand and behind glass, was a model of his old light cruiser, Dresden.

  Canaris finally slapped the file folder shut and swore under his breath. He looked up and waved Haas forward. ‘Come in, come in.’ He pointed to the single chair across from his desk. ‘It’s all been dealt with?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’ Canaris pushed the file into the exact centre of his desk. ‘One less leaking pipe in this old building.’

  Haas nodded. ‘But not the last.’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Canaris. ‘I often wonder if it wouldn’t be smarter to simply go out on the street and yell out every secret we have. We’ve been virtually emasculated in Mexico and the United States and our agents in England have always been of questionable value, perhaps even compromised.’ He sighed. ‘Ah, well, I can always trust you, though, can’t I, Haas?’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘Then let me ask you a question, old friend.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘What do you know about the Romanovs?’

  Chapter Nine

  Monday, November 24, 1941

  New York City

  They reached LaGuardia just after midnight and found Detective Dan Hennessy behind the wheel of an unmarked dark blue Chrysler Saratoga fitted with a set of two-way radio whip antennas fore and aft that would have identified it as a cop car to any kid or crook in New York City. Seeing Jane, Black and Fleming coming out of the terminal, he climbed out of the big car and pulled open the rear door.

  ‘Fancy meeting you here,’ said Jane, smiling at her old friend.

  ‘You got some pull, girlie,’ the Irish cop replied. ‘Commissioner Valentine says to use his personal car and I get an exhumation order within an hour of asking for it with no notification to next of kin.’ He frowned. ‘Rattling the police commissioner’s cage and stealing his car not to mention waking up a judge in the middle of the night to sign the order. I hope you know what you’re doing.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Jane. ‘But these two do.’ She gestured towards Black and Fleming, who introduced themselves. ‘Just don’t call them Limeys, they don’t take kindly to it.’

  ‘Then I’ll just be calling them English gentlemen,’ Hennessy answered, putting on a thick brogue that had nothing at all to do with being born and raised in Canarsie. Fleming and Black climbed into the back of the Chrysler and Jane got in beside Hennessy. They took the five-year-old Grand Central Parkway south, the three lanes on each side of the grassy boulevard empty at this time of night.

  ‘What about the dentist?’ asked Fleming.

  Hennessy threw an irritated glance up at the rear-view mirror. ‘Don’t worry, pally, he’ll be there. Our friends at the J. Edgar Hoover Benevolent Society will have tracked him down by now. We’re a little dim, us Mick coppers, but we get the job done.’

  ‘You’re on the outs with Maureen again, aren’t you?’ Jane said. ‘Sleeping in the coop at Centre Street.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Your pissy mood, Daniel.’ She grinned. ‘With you it’s either Judys or Jamesons.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s both,’ he grunted. He glanced into the rear-view mirror again. ‘Apologies, gentlemen, but I’m not in the best of moods as it is and digging up mouldy corpses after midnight isn’t any sane man’s fancy.’

  ‘Apology accepted,’ said Fleming.

  Black nodded as well. ‘Perhaps you should try Bushmills instead.’

  ‘Protestant sludge,’ Hennessy said with a grin. ‘No good Catholic would touch the stuff unless he had no other choice.’

  After ten minutes on the GCP, Hennessy pulled the Saratoga around the cloverleaf and put them on the Interborough, heading west, taking them deep into
the heart of Brooklyn. They left the Interborough at Highland Boulevard, the high brick walls of the huge cemetery on their right. There were iron gates at Conway Street but they were firmly padlocked so Hennessy kept on going, following the wall around to the main entrance on Central Avenue.

  ‘Good Christ!’ said Fleming.

  ‘Something, isn’t it?’ said Hennessy. The two men in the backseat stared out the windows as they approached the entrance. It was built of sandstone and carved like something from an ancient temple site in India, complete with stone minarets and carved figures, in this case various saints and angels rather than animals and naked women. The entranceway was also massive, rising at least three storeys, pierced by two tunnel-like openings, the left one with its iron gate open. Hennessy drove through and slowed as a uniformed cop stepped out from under the porch of a surprisingly modern-looking administration building and waved them to a stop.

  The cop shone his flashlight in through the window. ‘You Detective Hennessy?’ The uniform was young, barely old enough to shave.

  ‘You’re right about that, sonny boy, and if you don’t take that fucking light out of my eyes I’ll have you cleaning up horseshit at Pelham Bay!’ The kid jerked back as though he had a fishhook in his collar and the light snapped off.

  ‘Yes, sir!’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Prospect Hill, plot sixteen, sir. Just behind the mausoleum on your left, sir.’ He dug into the flap pocket of his uniform and brought out a folded map, thrusting it in the window at Hennessy. The detective took it and tossed it to Jane.