Munich Party HQ was in an ancient office building of the utmost respectability and poorest maintenance. They’d stripped it bare. The Party had to be uncluttered and efficient but the five-meter ceiling had oppressed them. It made the rooms look unoccupied, almost as though they were squatters and transients. As such, they had filled the office with Scandinavian Art Nouveau, Viking Art Deco, thick-legged desks, and straight-backed chairs that would support a hippopotamus made in slabs of exotic wood that had been hand polished and glowed, entrapping the light under ten layers of buffed lacquer. As Nebe took it all in yet again, it appeared to him like the set from Kriemhilde’s Revenge, the last bounce of the Siegfried Cycle. He kept walking until he reached the end of the foyer, then cringed and then straightened himself before knocking on the massive door. Even the four-inch-thick hardwood couldn’t muffle the shrill voices emanating from within.
You could always tell the difference between the cops and the Party even without their costumes. The Police were in plain clothes and looked like cops anywhere: tired, bored, and dangerous. The Nazis were in Party uniforms or expensive suits and posturing with the histrionics of men convinced that they could get away with anything, which was perfectly true. Von Eberstein was caught in the guff, somewhere in between. He was an appointee, in other words he wielded political clout, yet refused to go Gestapo, suspiciously altruistic.
As Nebe entered von Eberstein had just completed a phone call and was waving the phone at Weber for emphasis. “Your negligence endangered the Führer! You are an anarchist and very possibly a Jew!” He was shouting, trying to catch the mood.
“Then let’s examine the evidence!” Weber shouted back and began to unbutton his fly. Von Eberstein raised his hands in a prohibitive gesture, lowering his voice several decibels, which was still too loud considering that they were standing nose to nose.
“I meant politically!”
“What you mean to say,” said Weber as he tried to re-button his pants, “is that I’m a threat to your authority! You value your career more than the safety of the Führer. You’d rather lose a war than your job! Like the men who stabbed him in the back in 1918!”
Polizei Prasident von Eberstein shook his head incredulously, stage whispering now, trying to entrain Weber into calmness. “You do have tremendous sincerity, but it is now plainly obvious that you lack technical competence.”
Weber replied in a voice more suitable to a bayonet charge, “Every minor bureaucrat tries to protect his job by the claim that it requires some special skill that they’ve learned from years of mindless routine! The functionaries of bureaucracy claim to be a priesthood that demands that all bow before their mysteries! To protect the Führer all that is required is the will.” The Nazis cheered and von Eberstein threw his hands in the air.
“Does this fool not realize he is a dead man? The will of God, may He help us all,” von Eberstein said, drowned out by the applause. Only Nebe caught it, half reading his lips. For a second, Nebe almost liked him. He was simply trying to do his job and that was a shock. The other Nazis were still shouting “Sieg Heil” to each other when Nebe noticed that von Eberstein was fingering a rosary. Despite everything and to his own amazement, Nebe patted von Eberstein reassuringly on the back.
When Nebe finally returned to his own office he found Georg with a series of intricate sketches laid out before him pointing out important points to his eager audience of Brandt and Nolte.
Nebe called them to attention. “It seems, Georg, that several factors were working in your favor that you, alas, were totally unaware of. The squabble, as most these days, was about who was ultimately responsible for your successful failure. It went something like this: Adolf had decided, and I quote: ‘Here in this gathering, I will be protected by my Old Fighters led by Christian Weber; police authority ends at the entrances. Overall responsibility for the event at the BürgerBräuKeller, for receiving the Führer and the guests of honor, for control of the participants, for security inside, and for the arrangements of seating: SS Brigadeführer Christian Weber!’ So you see Georg? He was actually your enabler. Had von Eberstein been allowed to organize security you would have found no room at the inn. You owe your failed success to one Christian Weber.” Nebe sat back and waited for Georg to speak.
“What’s going to happen to him?” asked Georg.
Nebe looked at a note on his desk. “That is really of no consequence to your case one way or the other. Maybe nothing, he’ll probably just disappear, like so many others, and some clever Party people will start the rumor that he turned out to be a Jew after all.” As he talked Nolte was frantically scribbling a note, looking up at him between each word to make sure he had his attention. Nebe stopped and waited for Nolte to finish. There was an empty silence and Georg could hear the insect-like scratch of graphite on paper for a painfully long time. Nolte handed the note across. Nebe sneered politely and showed the note to Georg. Georg couldn’t make sense out of it and looked to Nebe for a translation. “It says: ‘YOU ARE BREAKING THE FIRST RULE OF INTERROGATION.’ See, I’m not supposed to tell you anything you don’t already know,” Nebe said gently as he turned to Nolte. “Don’t go handing me notes like that. It kicks the hell out of trust.” Then he returned to Georg with his eyebrows semaphoring paternal encouragement. “You think you might have had a more difficult time if we had been in charge?”
Georg didn’t want to hurt his feelings so he waited longer than usual to answer, but he just couldn’t find another way to say it. “No, not really. No difference. If there’s a standard procedure, then there’s always a way of getting around it.”
“Strike that!” said Nebe.
Brandt seemed frozen in place. “I didn’t type it.”
“Thank you,” said Nebe. He looked at Georg with affection. “The speech had been cancelled. You had to have known that, so you couldn’t have been plotting to kill the Führer because he wasn’t going to be there. Who was it you were trying to kill?”
Georg was baffled. “But it did happen. He was there.”
Nebe was calmly persistent. “In the end he was. But you had no way of knowing that. The Führer wasn’t supposed to be there.”
“Really?” asked Georg and a vague memory came back to him. He had dumped an umbrella load of concrete chips and walked out of the yards into the street. When he passed a newsstand, there was a headline on the Volkischer Beobachter: the Führer had cancelled his speech at the BürgerBräuKeller. “I remember seeing something, but I didn’t believe it. All the previous papers, since 1935, had written that it had to be the same every year. Exactly …”
“I’ll explain,” said Nebe. The way he related the tale he had learned from the horse’s ass himself played like a cartoon with animated mice: FührerBrigadeFührer Christian Weber had just put down the phone. Four other Nazis were positioned around him, twitching their noses, ears working up and down in anticipation. Weber announced, “Adolf isn’t coming, cancel the canapés and the champagne. It’s Rhine wine for the first round and beer after that.”
One Nazi picked up the phone across the room. Another Nazi pushed it back into the cradle. They wrestled back and forth like a Fitzliputzli show.
“Hold it, so what did he actually say?” asked a third.
“He’s busy designing his war. There will be some extension of the war effort. Hess will speak instead.”
“This has to be a political move,” said the one who was holding down the phone with both hands, “because everything is. He’s saying that we’re no longer important.” There was heartbreak in his voice. “That means Heydrich can do what he likes with us.”
“He can’t have meant that,” said Weber.
“But that’s what it will mean to Heydrich and Dietrich and any of those young punks surrounding him. It’s a death warrant!” said the one who was tugging on the phone.
Weber froze and somebody shouted, “Call him back and tell him that it is essential for the unity of the Party that he speaks at the beer hall.”
The Nazi who’d been tugging at the extension dove for the phone. The one who’d been holding it down jumped him and they fell out of sight behind the side of the desk.
They were all so terrified that they finally found a safe compromise. It was Weber’s idea. “If we write him a letter, a careful letter, explaining that we are heartbroken and desolate, that we were counting the days until we see him again, he’d have to come, just have to!” It was like a squabble among nightclub waiters.
Brandt, Nolte, even Georg fidgeted with nothing to say. They all smiled faintly at Nebe.
“I didn’t know,” said Georg. “You told the story well,” he added trying to be supportive.
“It improves with each retelling,” Nolte said through his teeth.
“Thank you,” said Nebe. “The nice thing about this quasi-feudal system is that you can always get the perpetrator to agree on a common set of enemies: the bureaucrats, the SS, or the Gestapo. It’s a four-sided war with no partnerships.”
“True,” said Georg, again trying to comfort him.
“But something’s wrong here,” said Nebe. “You’re not really confessing, you’re writing your memoirs. The purpose of confession is to objectify guilt, to turn it into a solid object that can be grasped like a chess piece. I have to admit that you’re doing everything you’re supposed to, but nothing is happening because your attitude is wrong. You killed a bunch of people, yet you don’t feel guilty and you’re not crazy. That’s most irritating.”
“I’m sorry,” said Georg. “I’m trying.”
Nebe groaned. He pulled out a cigarette and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. He pulled it out and looked at it as if he wondered how it got there. He wanted to put it back, but that would undermine his authority even further. He offered it to Georg who accepted it with a grateful smile. Nebe lit it for him. Georg inhaled and closed his eyes in dreamy ecstasy. Nebe urged him on.
“You were saying?”
“I had managed to build a metal box, lined it with cork, put a ticking clock mechanism inside, and closed the lid. When I leaned my cheek against the side of the box the sound of the clock couldn’t be heard.
“The next day I was sitting on the bed in my shorts. My knees had gone septic. They were purple-red with infection. In the middle of each was a black spider shape that gave off the sickly sweet odor of rotting meat. I heated a putty knife red hot in the flame of a kerosene lamp and cauterized my knees. I couldn’t feel the pain at first, they were that far gone. It took three tries to burn off the rot. When I finally felt the pain I grinned with relief. I covered the burns with machine oil: that would deprive infectious microbes of oxygen and keep the scab dissolved. I’d burned the skin off most of the knee cap, in one place a white spot of bone showed through. The scab would break again whenever I knelt, but the oil would lessen the pain. I re-bandaged my knees thickly but it didn’t make much difference.
“Most of the time I’d spent kneeling in front of the pillar the pain was continual so I just stopped thinking about it. The time to worry would be when the pain stopped because that would mean gangrene. I was chiseling away, slowly and lovingly, when suddenly there was a sound, like a key turning in a heavy lock or a weapon being cocked. I froze and put down my tools in slow motion with a grace that surprised me. I worked my way around the pillar away from the light. There was the sound of heavy footsteps, leather heels that rang on the polished wood of the ballroom floor. The steps went round but nothing happened. Finally, whoever it was left and closed the door. I waited a long time, suspecting a trap, suspecting that the door had been locked from the inside and that my visitor was still there. I waited. Half an hour of anonymous alertness then I snake bellied my way to the other end of the balcony. From there, the entire ballroom was illuminated by the moon. The ballroom was empty. I got up slowly and walked back. I took a final look around and cautiously resumed work. I quit early that night and couldn’t sleep. I left at 7:00 a.m. with the breakfast crowd and walked out the front door.
“It happened the following night. I’d been in the storeroom, napping. When I lit a match to check my watch and started out the door, I was met by the blinding white of a flashlight being aimed straight into my eyes. Courteously, the holder of the flashlight turned it to one side so that the light bounced off the walls and I could see his face. It was the manager and he didn’t look angry, just ordinarily annoyed at a breach of routine. I felt a rush of hope. He looked me over stoically. “I knew you were here,” he said wearily.
“I tried to seem like a respectable bum and told him, ‘I’m out of work. I have no place to go.’
“The manager had wheezed, ‘I know, just stay out of sight and stop making so much noise.’ He left me standing there and walked out. I heard the ballroom door close and the latch click shut. I waited an hour, checking my watch repeatedly, before I went back to work.
“The door to the pillar was open and I had slid in the sheet metal box holding the explosives. It fit a little too snugly and I had to jiggle it patiently before it slid down to the base of the pillar. It never occurred to me at all that the floor boards under it would turn into shrapnel with the force of the blast, that half the ceiling would lose its support and, pivoting on one end, would scythe down through the Führer’s audience, decapitating them, smashing them together, killing them by hitting them against each other. The stamped tin ceiling would make the world’s largest guillotine. I kept my eyes on the pillar. There was a separate cavity for the detonator, three bricks high by three bricks deep and five bricks wide. Being of sound mind, I was keeping the detonator away from the explosives until I was ready to use the bomb. I measured the detonator cavity with a carpenter’s folding rule. I checked the measurements against the numbers on a pad. My body relaxed and I gave a wan smile of satisfaction. I was just going to make it by the narrowest of margins.
“I slept past noon and left with my digging tools in my coat pockets. When I got to the dining room it was almost three in the afternoon so I skipped lunch and had three desserts.
“‘What’s her name?’ the waiter had asked with more than polite interest, but I just grinned and shook the question off. I was goofy and half in shock from the quantity of sugar I’d eaten. I walked out the front door and down Tal to Isartorplatz into Zweibrückenstrasse to Steindorfstrass and a railing walk along the Isar River. It was a gray day. The wind was causing the water to bristle into spikes, but the air was full of fog. It leached the colors out of everything. The day was as gray and black as an English movie about having an affair with a married woman. I always wondered why that was supposed to be romantic. I’d had a married woman, a rich one with a telephone. Every time her husband answered, I had had to pretend to be a faggot hairdresser, indignant that she’d missed an appointment. It was demeaning.
“I pulled the bent chisels I’d used as digging tools out of my pocket and arced them into the water, one by one, as slowly as I could and still make them fly, making the moment last. Each was a piece of my past and I was suddenly tossing them away and leaving it behind. My past didn’t matter anymore because it didn’t affect what was going to happen next. All the sad, dead-end, unskilled, or menial jobs, the worn out determinedly dignified rooming houses, and the cunning fat landladies, they were all behind me. I was young again, almost a virgin, and felt very optimistic probably for the first time in my life. I strutted into the fog, leaving the umbrella hanging over the railing in front of the river. A sharp-nosed man in a gray gabardine overcoat scurried up and surreptitiously stole it. He minced off rapidly and then opened the umbrella with a great flourish. Through an oversight, it was still full of debris and a fist-sized piece of jagged concrete caught him on top of the head at the junction of the four sutures of the skull. The sharp-nosed man dropped to his knees in an attitude of prayer.
“I found myself laughing and that didn’t make sense. I had no morals, my poverty had made them an unaffordable luxury, but
I did have ethics, spiky and incomplete and played so much to myself that they felt almost like a moral code: you kept your word when it was the only equity you had. As such, you used it carefully. There was a dumb, blind loyalty to my friends, when I’d had friends. And there was something in it about hating cruelty and that was a gut response indistinguishable from moral outrage. But I was laughing and that didn’t make sense, the contradiction could not be resolved so I forgot it. I went home to Margit. Now that I wouldn’t need to see her again, ethics demanded that I muster some faint affection for her. I couldn’t feel anything and that worried me as well. I allowed myself to drift slowly to sleep, and napped until 9:00 p.m. I got to the BürgerBräuKeller just before closing and worked my way through the maze of dining rooms with the weary ease of routine.
“The ballroom door was locked. I started to force my way in then stopped, realizing that it would be a decisive mistake. I lacked the tools to slip the lock. There was no way to force the lock that wouldn’t leave marks and, if I did it, that would be the end of the adventure. Suddenly the detonator in the suitcase was very heavy. There was nothing to do but go back the way I had come. A waiter shouted, ‘Just closing, sir.’ But I ignored him. I reached the main hall and the cashier widened her eyes inquiringly.
“‘I guess I’m too late,’ I said and walked outside. I walked to the English Gardens and back, repeatedly starting and stopping the same thoughts. When I came back, the beer hall was closed and the street was empty. I inspected the French windows to the ballroom and hoisted myself up two meters to the ledge. The windows were locked, thin glass in a wrought iron frame. There was no procedure to open them that didn’t leave the cracked glass and scratched metal that would explain itself as a forced entry and that would mean I wouldn’t be able to come back; they’d be waiting.
“I turned back and stopped again. I could have finished the work then and there, and not come back, but if I broke in a week before the Führer’s speech the ballroom would be searched; any serious search would find the bomb. I got down off the ledge and picked up my suitcase, standing there in the moonlight like a gravy spot on a lace doily. Then I trudged off back to the rooming house on Leopoldstrasse. I allowed myself to worry; it was too late to do anything else. I had to finish it. There was no way back and nothing to go back to. I thought of Margit. I’d have to deal with her one more time and the fondness I’d faked in the afternoon was an obsolete weapon. Just maybe, she would know where to find a lock picker. She seemed like the type. I looked back once. The windows gleamed as impenetrable as mirrors in the fuzzy glare of the street lamps and the silvery moon.
The Führer Must Die Page 14