Well, well.
It had been a very long time since I last signed a copy of one of those.
So horse-faced Anna Maria was a National Socialist. I barely remembered the woman—most of my attention on visiting Uffing that time was to my wound, and my fetching American-born hostess—but at some point I must have signed a copy for the help.
How the help turned up dead in London was still a mystery, but at least I was getting warmer.
There was no cash lying around, and I was sure Madame Blavatsky had already cleaned up anything of value. They always do, these landladies. They are as greedy as my old friend Goering, and usually just as fat.
Still, I tossed the room. I turned the sheets and looked under the thin mattress. I emptied the wardrobe. Anna Maria wore cheap clothes and even cheaper shoes.
It was when I bent down to look under the bed that I saw a small sheet of paper poking out from underneath the dresser. I cursed, straightened, and tried in vain to shift the heavy lump of wood. At last—with a creak that could have been the wardrobe and could have been my back—it moved. I reached down and stared at the page.
The Saturn-Film Company
Cordially Invites You
to a Night You Won’t Forget!
Exclusive Screening
Bar Service
Private and Discreet!
MEN ONLY
The Avenue Pavilion Picturehouse, Shaftesbury Avenue
I stared at the flyer.
This was not what I had expected at all.
***
“The cinema night is for members only, sir.”
The usher had the shiny face of an excited teenage boy who’d grown to a disappointing manhood. I’d seen faces like that in the trenches, during the war. Hairless rats, we called them. They never made it long out there in Ypres. Of the nearly four thousand men in my regiment, a mere six hundred survived that battle.
“How does one become a member?”
He looked at me dubiously. “There’s a process,” he said. “A committee and so on.”
“I just want to see the movie.”
He looked from side to side and then stared at me with those big bulging eyes of his. “You’re not with the pigs, are you?”
“Do I look like a policeman?”
“You look like a bum,” he said, and laughed, and it took all my willpower not to slap the teeth out of him. “And it’s ten shillings.”
“Ten!” I grabbed him by the shirt and pushed him against the wall. “You little weasel—”
“This isn’t an ordinary picture!” he squeaked.
“I don’t have ten shillings.”
I barely had the money for a slice of bread, and my rent was overdue.
“Five, if you let me go now.”
“You let me in and I don’t call the fuzz on you.”
He all but laughed in my face. “You think they give us trouble? This is a gentlemen’s club and gentlemen don’t get raided.”
I sighed and let him go.
“All right, then.”
“All right?”
“Sure.”
And I clocked him with a coal hammer straight out of the famous Frank Klaus-Billy Papke fight.
I dragged the unfortunate usher into the cloakroom and left him under a pile of evening coats. Then I sauntered into the cinema proper.
The room was dark and the show had already started. Men sat avidly in the rows. Their eyes were fixed on the screen. They wet their lips. They wriggled uncomfortably in their seats, much like an SS trooper trying to make room for his gun.
I watched the show. The movie was called Slave-Girls in the Harem. As a documentary it had little to recommend it. The movement was jerky and it was a silent picture. It was shot in a large room with a large bed by the wall and too many pillows. Four girls stepped into the room and quickly disrobed. They began to perform questionable actions on each other. Then a couple of young men joined them.
I’d seen worse in Vienna in ’13 when I was living on the Meldermannstrasse. This had no art. It was mere filth.
I turned my back on the screen. In my younger life I had wanted to be an artist. I was a decent enough painter, I thought. But I had not picked up a brush in years. The men in the audience grunted like the pigs they were. This was no use to me. I sidled past the curtain and made my way up the stairs. The manager’s door stood open and a thick cloud of cigar smoke wafted out.
How I loathed the smell!
I came and stood in the doorway. The man behind the desk was fat and had small greedy eyes.
“Hey,” he said, “you’re not supposed to be h—”
He squeaked in alarm as I went at him like Hermann Goering with a sponge cake.
“Are you ready to talk?”
He whimpered and spat out blood. It dribbled down his chin. I was kneeling on the floor, looking right into his eyes.
“Do you know Anna Maria Fischer?” I said.
He looked at me blankly.
“Who?”
“German, in her fifties, face like an Ascot winner?”
“No idea, mister.”
“Found dead behind your picture house, by the bins.”
“Oh, her.”
“What was she doing there?” I said.
“No idea, mister.”
I socked him a couple more punches, just as a reminder.
“Look, I don’t know nothing! She came round a couple of times asking for work. Or so she claimed. I tried to brush her off, but she made a nuisance of herself. Finally… Well, you’d be surprised, but there’s a market for everything. Some punters really get their kicks watching old ladies get it on, so I finally sent her to the studio.”
“The studio?”
“Saturn Films. They produce all our pictures.”
“And where can I find them?” I said.
He tried to crawl away then. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I’d get in trouble.”
“You’re in trouble now,” I pointed out.
“What you gonna do, beat me up some more?” he said. “Still better than a .43 in the back of the head.”
I had to acknowledge he had a point.
“Seems we’re at an impasse.”
He spat some more blood. “Seems so.”
I got up. His cigar was still burning in the ashtray and a box of matches sat on the desk. It bore the picture house’s advertisement. I shook it and it was half full. I stuck it in my pocket.
“Stay where I can see you,” I said.
“What are you—”
I smiled at him and started opening drawers.
“Hey, you can’t do tha—”
“Shut the f—k up!” I said. Then, “Hello… What do we have here?”
“I’m dead,” he said.
“I hope so,” I said. I smiled at him and waved the invoice at him. It is as I always say. One cannot conduct a criminal enterprise or a genocide without paperwork.
I looked at the address on the invoice, then back at the man.
“Surbiton?” I said. “Where the f—k is Surbiton?”
***
The Surbiton train station was a pleasant building done up the year before in an Art Deco style. I took a moment to appreciate the workmanship. The place itself was some fifteen miles out of London. It was a leafy sort of suburban village, with a greengrocer’s and a butcher’s on the high street, several pubs, and a picture house called the Coronation Hall directly opposite the station. It had a high stained glass window of a Star of David, for no reason I could see. It just went to show, Jews were everywhere. Had I had my way back in ’33, things would have turned out very different. But the Communists took control of my beloved Germany, and now Europe groaned under the heel of international Jewry and their Marxist faith.
; How I hated Jews! And gypsies, Poles, Slavs, mimes, smokers, and the French. I really hated the French! And British trains. I hated British trains. I had had to get one from Waterloo to reach Surbiton, though I dodged the fare.
“Excuse me,” I said to a passer-by. “Could you direct me to this address, please?”
The man stopped and glared at me. He wore mutton chops and a vest and had the ruddy complexion of a country drunk. He stared at me like I was a piece of dog s—t he’d found on his foot.
“Not from around here, are you?” he said.
I had nothing to say to that, so I didn’t.
“Word of advice, my friend. Go back to where you come from. We don’t like foreigners here, much, unless you’re here to cut the lawns.”
I glared at him in hatred. I used to be somebody!
Once upon a time, all of Germany marched to the beat of my drum!
“Up the hill,” he said, relenting. “Can’t miss it.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
With that he stalked off, no doubt to feed his pigs or screw the help—it was that kind of place.
I walked up St. Mark’s Hill. Oak trees grew thickly and hid stately Victorian homes. Who knew what kind of depravity they hid? A squirrel ran past me and climbed up a tree. Like Sherlock Holmes before me, I could not look at these scattered houses without the feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.
Surbiton! I thought, savagely. What a f—king sh—thole!
I found the house. It looked like an old hospital. The gates were closed. There was no sign to suggest an occupancy.
It is an old truism of the detective trade—when in doubt, try going through the back.
I went round until I found the entrance. There was a wide low gate for deliveries and I pushed it and went in. Then I jimmied the back door and let myself into the house.
It was the sort of grand old home the British love which is full of cold drafts and no one’s cleaned the carpet in years. The sash windows let in the murky gray sunlight. A mouse darted past me and vanished into a hole in the wainscoting.
I tiptoed along the corridor—and came straight to the orgy room.
It was the same room I had seen in the earlier picture. The four-poster bed was still there, only now it had two naked men with oiled bodies on it, and they were doing things to each other that would have made even Ernst Röhm blush.
Bright lights were set up around the room and they generated so much heat that everyone was sweating. Everyone was the film crew: there were several of them standing all about, and there was even a buffet table set against the far wall.
A camera mounted on a dais was pointed at the two rutting men, and a large, imposing man over six feet tall was barking orders.
“Thrust harder! Thrust harder! That’s it! Now turn him over, Carl! Now gently massage the buttocks!”
I recognized that voice, and the imposing figure, and the toothbrush moustache like I myself used to sport. He was as ugly as a mastiff with an erection.
“Putzi?” I said.
***
Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl turned and looked at me with utter surprise. It was as though one of his actors had suddenly sprouted a second schwanz.
“Adolf? But…but how?”
“It’s Wolf, now,” I told him. “Just Wolf.”
“But my dear fellow!” He went to embrace me. We had been close, back in Munich. Back then he had been a follower, another devotee of National Socialism and the cause.
Now he was just a pornographer.
“It is so good to see you!” he said. “But what are you doing here? How on earth did you find me?”
“Anna Maria,” I said, tiredly. The room smelled like a public bath. One of the actors turned and stared at us with his schwanz still in his hand.
“Mr. Hanfstaengl? I’m losing wood.”
“Take five, boys. There’s cold cuts and potato salad on the buffet tables.” He waved them away. The cameraman and the lighting technician and the actors and all the rest of them lit up cigarettes and went off for a bite to eat and a cup of tea. I guess all that hard work made them hungry.
“Anna Maria, Wolf?”
“Anna Maria Fischer. Your old maid.”
He grimaced. “What about her, Wolf? Come, come, dear fellow. Let’s adjourn somewhere we can talk.”
He led me out of the orgy room, down a corridor, and to a cool, dark storage room filled with film canisters. Posters on the walls advertised other Saturn pictures: Robin’s Wood, Gunga Dick, Triumph of the Willies, Follow The Yellow Prick Road, and Lust of the Swastika.
Warning signs said Do Not Smoke—Highly Flammable Material.
“Must you bring up this old business?” he said to me then. “Wolf! Forget this nonsense. Come and work with me! I am making money hand over fist!”
He gestured rudely with his fingers, miming an intimate act.
“She had my name on her person, Putzi,” I said. “I was visited by the pigs!”
He made a dismissive gesture. “She always had the hots for you, Wolf. Forget Anna Maria! Since when did you care for the help?”
“Who do you work for, Putzi? You do not have the sort of juice to run this kind of operation by yourself.”
At that he grew somber. “There are questions one should not be asking,” he said. “Not even you.”
I let it go. My silence drew him in.
“She just wasn’t no good, Wolf,” he said. A whiny note entered his voice. “The bitch was going to rat us out. I had no choice, you see? No choice at all.”
“Tell me.”
He shrugged. “What is there to tell? She followed me and Helene to London and somehow found out about my little enterprise. Next thing you know, she shows up here and starts blackmailing me. What was I to do, Wolf? You’ve always said it yourself, after all: there are few problems one can’t solve with a gun.”
I felt so very tired then. “How is Helene?” I said.
“Good, good,” he said, distractedly. “Misses the Fatherland, though, as do I. It is terrible, what happened, Wolf. Terrible.”
He looked less than upset at the humiliating defeat of National Socialism. Just imagine, had I won! I would have changed the world!
I took out the box of matches that I had liberated at the picture house. I shook it and it made a little rattling noise.
“Oh, there’s no smoking in here, Wolf. On account of the film stock. It’s the nitrates, you see.”
“I don’t smoke.”
A confused look came into his eyes. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “Then what—?”
I smiled at him almost kindly as I struck the match and held it. The flame was very bright. A look of horror came into his eyes then and he said, “You wouldn’t—”
I began to whistle the Horst Wessel song. Putzi barrelled past me in his haste to escape. I turned and tossed the match and, still whistling, left the room.
Behind me, without much fuss, the film stock caught fire.
***
I stood under a rather lovely oak tree that must have been standing there a hundred years or more, and watched the studio burn. It burned with all the dedication of a race theory scholar reading Hans Günther’s Short Ethnology of the German People for the first time. I mean, intensely.
I did not believe in justice, which is for the weak.
But I believed in order—order above all things.
I believed in the manifest destiny of the Aryan race, in Kaiserschmarrn and apple strudel, and that dogs were better than cats. I was definitely a dog person. I believed in vegetarianism, and that smoking was a filthy habit and that the only thing worse than a Pole was a Jew. I believed I should have won in 1933, and that the swastika flag should have hung over the Reichstag buildi
ng—but it wasn’t.
I believed in Geli Raubal until she killed herself to spite me. I believed I should have been paid a higher advance than the measly £300 my British publishers, Hurst and Blackett, paid me for My Struggle. And I believed the f—king trains should f—king run on time!
I believed in doing the right thing—whatever the cost.
I stood and watched the firemen arrive and the hoses go, and the black smoke rising. Then I crumpled the postcard from Uffing and let it drop to the ground, and I made my way back down the hill.
***
In another time and place there’s Shomer, walking back. The night is cold and there is no firewood with which to light a fire.
Meeting his friend Yenkl by the Yiddish Theatre, Shomer shows him the postcard from America. After a moment, his friend chuckles without mirth.
“There is a story told of the writer, Ödön von Horváth,” he says. “He was walking in the Bavarian Alps once when he discovered the skeleton of a hiker with his rucksack still intact. Von Horváth opened the bag and found a postcard that said “Having a wonderful time.”
Shomer nods, for all that he is distracted. He thinks of Fanya and the children, and of what the next winter will bring. If there is another winter.
If it is not, already, too late.
“What did he do with it?” he says.
“What?”
“With the postcard.”
Yenkl nods, sagely, and shrugs.
“He posted it,” he says.
Historical Afterword
The detective who calls himself Wolf first appeared in my 2014 novel, A Man Lies Dreaming. I never wanted to revisit him—or so I foolishly thought. This is his fourth outing since then—the interested reader may find his previous adventures in the pages of Apex Magazine. He seems to come back to me every Christmas. All I can say is, sometimes there is a man. He is the man for his time and place—and we live in a time that in many ways bears extraordinary similarities to the 1930s in which Adolf Hitler’s poisoned seed grew fruit.
The young Adolf Hitler spent several years in Vienna, where he lived for a time in a homeless shelter and then in a men’s dormitory. He was well familiar—though disgusted—with the red-light district, and would have likely been familiar with the Saturn Film Company. Cinema was effectively invented in 1895; almost immediately it gave rise to the pornographic movie. Saturn-Film, established by Johann Schwarzer in the early 1900s, was the first film production company in Austria. Among their pictures one can find Forbidden Bathing, At The Slave Market, Female Wrestlers, and In The Harem, all of which are listed in their 1907 catalogue. The films were regularly shown in herrenabende, or “night shows for men,” much as described here.
The Book of Extraordinary Amateur Sleuth and Private Eye Stories Page 28