“How are you going to explain that?” asked Nebe.
“You’re in charge, you explain it,” said Nolte. He walked away from the window and poured himself a drink then he sat down on the edge of the table close to Georg. “Georg …,” he began.
“Yeah, play out your hand,” said Nebe.
Nolte just glared at him. “Georg,” Nolte began again, “looking at your face, I can tell you’ve won a fight once or twice in your life. You’re not a coward.”
Nebe nodded. “Yeah, that much we know.”
Nolte ignored him continuing, “And some things are worth dying for.” Nolte went on, “You of all people should understand that.”
“Losing is certainly not worth dying for,” Georg reflected.
“But you lost, Georg,” Nebe reminded him, “and you are going to die for it. How do you feel about that?”
Georg held his glass out to be refilled. Brandt poured him a triple, which killed the bottle. He held it upside down over the glass. “How many drops do you think I can get out of this bottle?”
“Twenty six,” guessed Nolte. They counted twenty three drops dripping into the glass and then watched Brandt holding the bottle upside down for a full minute with nothing happening.
“That was very worthwhile,” groaned Nebe. Brandt opened the last bottle, it was brandy since they were out of schnapps, and poured another round.
“A toast?” asked Nolte.
“To Germany!” Georg said happily.
“That’s dignified but a little dull,” said Nolte, putting his arm around him. “Can’t we do better than that?” he asked.
“Peace? Brotherhood? Love?” Brandt enumerated, waving his glass for emphasis, and managed to slop some on his pants.
Nolte dismissed the suggestions. “Even Clausewitz said: honor can be lost only once. So, I suppose, we might just as well relax. Come on, there must be something we can agree on.”
Georg suddenly remembered something. “War is not merely a political act but also a political instrument!”
The three men turned and stared at Georg; Nebe actually guffawed. “I’ve got a better one: ‘Many intelligence reports are contradictory; even more are false and almost all are uncertain. In short, most intelligence is bullshit!’”
Nolte was aghast. “Clausewitz couldn’t have written that!”
Nebe couldn’t repress his chuckle. “Maybe not exactly in those words, but believe me that was the message.”
“To youth!” Georg said decisively. The three men stared at him again.
“Aha!” said Nolte and nodded approval. “To youth!”
“Yeah,” conceded Brandt, “the children there’s still hope for.”
“Then I guess ‘To youth’ it is,” decided Nebe and they gulped the raw acid brandy. Brandt swallowed the wrong way and choked and spat until he could catch his breath.
“We’re all getting a little tired,” said Nebe, courteously. “Let’s all take a break.” He then got up and stretched, signaling that the session was at an end.
Georg stood up, yawned, fell over stiff in one piece with every joint locked and banged his head, knocking himself unconscious on the corner of a chair.
“Oh, Christ,” groaned Nebe. He bent over Georg and peeled back an eyelid. Sociably, the iris dilated. “No apparent brain damage. Get the guards to put him to bed.” Dutifully, Brandt and Nolte drifted toward the door, bumping into each other and concentrating hard on their balance.
Georg was in bed semiconscious; his face wasn’t swollen yet but his left eye was purple-black, the color branching out in bright red tributaries of blood lacing under the skin. Fritz was sitting on a stool next to the bed. “Georg, wake up,” ordered Fritz.
Georg opened his eye and thought about what he saw. He was vaguely annoyed. “You’re supposed to be dead,” Georg pointed out.
“Oh, I am. I am.” Fritz agreed. He looked healthier after death, people generally do. Georg had thought that was just the undertakers’ art.
“I’ve finally gone crazy,” Georg concluded. “It was that last knock on the head.”
“No, Georg, in essence you’re the only sane man on earth,” said Fritz and patted him comfortingly on the arm. Georg looked at his arm then closed his good eye hard and then opened it again.
“This is a dream,” Georg said, plausibly. “It was that last knock on the head.”
Fritz wobbled his head in gentle reproach. “Aren’t you trying to do to me what they’re trying to do to you? You don’t want to do that to an old friend, do you?”
“No, I suppose I don’t. Look, Fritz, I am sorry.” Georg sat up quickly, which was a mistake. He lay down again very slowly to avoid throwing up, even if it was a dream.
“It’s alright. Really, it is alright,” said Fritz, a little embarrassed. “You got a cigarette?”
“Sure.” Georg gave Fritz a cigarette and lit it for him. Fritz let the smoke trickle out his nose. He was delighted by what he saw. He blew a smoke ring.
“They let you have cigarettes?” asked Fritz.
“Yeah,” said Georg, holding his head again.
“They’re deeply confused,” Fritz evaluated. Some smoke began to leak out of the spot where the cleaver had made contact, but Fritz seemed happy nonetheless. “Beer too?”
Georg started to nod then thought better of it. “Behind the toilet… It’s warm.”
“That’s fine,” said Fritz and went for a beer. He came back and drained half of the bottle in one gulp. Some trickled out from the red ring of blood around his neck. Georg looked away in embarrassment, so Fritz pulled his head off his neck and poured the rest down his open throat. He replaced his head, fussing with it until he was satisfied with the fit.
“I had no right to get you killed, I feel like I sacrificed you.” Georg was watching Fritz with his one eye and pressing the other back into its socket with the heel of his hand.
“Don’t dwell on that now,” cheered Fritz. “I was going to get sacrificed no matter what I did. I’m glad it was by an old friend.”
“I should have asked you first,” Georg sorrowed.
“You’re talking shit.” Fritz laughed. “I would never have had the guts for that. No, you did right. Mind if I …?” He asked, indicating the beer.
“No, go ahead.”
Fritz came back with another beer.
“What’s it like over there?” asked Georg, making it sound like a casual question.
“A little dull,” Fritz acknowledged. “But exactly what I had expected. I think that’s what you get. You know what you want better than anyone else, right? That’s what you get.”
“Yuck,” Georg explained, touching his temple.
“You’ll do better,” Fritz said knowingly. “You’ve got more imagination. That’s the only thing I know about you, really, a little too much imagination. Whatever happened to that typist? You know the one I liked?”
Georg searched his memory. “Oh, yeah, that blonde with the big mouth … She tried to give herself an abortion with a knitting needle and managed to kill herself. Poked a hole through the uterine wall and hemorrhaged.”
Fritz regarded him sadly. “Were you responsible?”
Georg shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know.”
Fritz laughed. “I wonder if you’re really as different from Adolf as you like to believe.”
Georg jerked into a sitting position and swung his legs onto the floor, still holding one hand over his eye. “I’m right and he’s wrong,” he shouted.
“That’s true. But it’s only an accident, a roll of the dice. You mind?” Fritz pointed to the beer.
“Help yourself.”
Fritz came back with another.
“Look,” said Georg, “I’m getting killed trying to save a lot of fat asses. I’m paying my dues.”
“But you didn’t do it to save anyone, Georg. You did it for yourself.” Fritz had stopped smiling.
“What’s wrong with that?” Georg inquired.
Fritz smiled
again with his lips compressed. “Nothing really,” Fritz admitted. “It feels like there should be but there isn’t. I guess I’m a puritan.”
“You always were an asshole,” Georg reminisced.
“I never liked you either,” said Fritz, “but that doesn’t get in the way of friendship. That’s strange.” He got up to go and Georg called after him.
“What happens next?” George didn’t sound curious.
Fritz smiled in embarrassment. “Oh, you’re about to be killed, that’s why you can see me.”
Georg shook his head. He tried to blink his vision clear. Fritz was gone. So were the empty bottles. Georg passed out again.
Nebe and Nolte were smoking in the latrine, still drunk but getting rational fast. Brandt was there as the voice of the moral majority. “You’ve got to drink with him,” cried Brandt. “And drink. And drink! And sober up with a hangover in the middle of the afternoon. And we still don’t know shit.”
“We know he’s lying,” Nebe said lightly.
“How’s that?” Brandt grumbled.
“He has too many reasons,” Nebe told him. “The war, the church, the children, the Jews, the pay, the taxes. When a man has that many reasons for doing something it means that none of them are true.”
Nolte exhaled a billowing cloud of smoke. “You’re drunk, or insane.”
“So are you,” Nebe argued. “It will make sense when you sober up. All the reasons are vague, they’re not thought out.”
“He’s a carpenter.” Brandt shrugged.
Nebe pursed his lips. “I don’t mean in the sense of thinking well, I mean thinking at all. The reasons aren’t …,” he searched for a word, “elaborated in the way they would have been if he had lived with them for years.”
“Months,” Nolte protested.
“Months,” agreed Nebe. “He planned and executed it for months but he never thought about the reasons.”
Brandt had his drunken moment of extra dimensional clarity. “There’s only one way that makes sense: He was following orders.” He looked at Nebe wonderingly. “We got him.”
Nebe smiled back wide-eyed and started to laugh. “I guess we do.”
Nolte lit up like a kid on Christmas morning. “Fuck him; let’s go get him.” And they ambled out of the latrine, hangovers forgotten, delighted with themselves.
They had Georg back in the interrogation room and Nebe was speaking as gently as a lover. “We finally understand your motive. You were following orders. Just like us.” Georg looked sad and shook his head. Nebe smiled like a dog. “You didn’t do it for love, Georg. You’re a pro; you get paid for what you do. As one whore to another, tell me: Who paid you to act out this fantasy? Tell me and you’ll be in Switzerland tonight.” Georg shook his head and Nebe tried again. “You’re an embarrassment, Georg—alive or dead. We just want you to go away. Why won’t you go away? Tell us who paid you and then go away.”
“Oh, I’ll leave,” Georg said cheerfully.
“Who paid you?” Nebe demanded. Georg withdrew into himself, cold and sad. Nebe didn’t let up. “Who told you that you had to die for reasons you didn’t understand?”
Georg looked each of them in the face. “Hitler.”
“Who else?” Nolte probed, then put his fingers to his forehead and rolled his eyes slowly. It didn’t seem to help. He closed his eyes and stayed motionless. That didn’t help either.
“No one else,” said Georg.
“I have an authentic inspiration,” said Nebe. “It’s almost divine intervention. All the parts of the story have snapped together into a construction of crystalline sharpness. It’s giving me a pain behind the eyes like you get from eating ice cream too fast. I know I should pace this out over an hour but, the way things are going, none of us will live that long. So, here goes. Georg,” he said it tenderly, “you’re lying and I think I can prove that to you. You snuck into the BürgerBräuKeller 35 nights in a row. The last time, you slipped past the Party, the police, and the Gestapo. You even outwitted the Führer, but as soon as you were on your own, you couldn’t even sneak through a deserted border crossing. Can you explain that?”
“No,” said Georg even though he knew it needed an explanation.
“I can explain it,” said Nebe, hunching his shoulders and cocking his knees, ready to spring. “It proves that you couldn’t have planned it by yourself.”
Georg was puzzled. He didn’t have anything to say. Brandt had been following the argument with rising joy. His face said that this was the kill. “No plans, no money, no papers, no luggage, no tools,” Brandt elucidated. “You simply wandered off to the border, sleepwalking. The rest of it was planned so well. If you planned it yourself, why was your escape so totally unplanned?”
Georg shook his head, he was lost.
“Because you weren’t thinking of yourself?” said Nebe.
“Yes,” said Georg.
Nebe walked to the door and threw it open with an operatic gesture and shouted, “Guards!” They appeared instantly. “Get him out of here!”
The guards pounced on Georg, locked his arms behind his back and heaved him along to the door with his feet dragging. “I can walk,” said Georg. “I’m not drunk anymore.’
Nebe kicked the door shut. Brandt was completely lost. Nolte was mortified. “Why did you do that? You even gave him answers he couldn’t think of himself. Why?”
Nebe sat down heavily and pulled out a comb. He ran it through the fringes of hair on either side of his naked skull. “To get it over with. I offered him his life if he’d tell us what we wanted to hear and he couldn’t figure it out.” Nolte was watching him closely with a look of almost sexual frankness. “Nolte, go to the office and get me the diabolical plot file for this week.”
“I already have,” said Nolte and handed him a blood-red file with a white skull and cross bones on the cover. Nebe was dewy-eyed with affection.
“You’re a good man, Nolte. We like to get them bitter and disillusioned to start with, it avoids the rush later on,” he said and looked through the file, checking dates. Brandt was looking from one to the other, upset and baffled.
Nolte explained, “We keep contacting foreign agents and trying to involve them in a plot against the Führer. If and when they show up, we swallow them.”
Brandt had his mouth open. Joints creaked in the silence and Nebe glanced up from the file, talking in a lecturer’s leisurely tone. “Every organization of the secret police must justify its existence by proving that there are plots against the government. If there aren’t any, we have to manufacture them; it’s all about job security.” Brandt was outraged and gave the impression of being ready to do something about it. “Grow up, Brandt,” Nebe said dismissively. “We tried it by the rules and it didn’t work. So we match him up with one of our ready-made plots and the hell with it.”
“Don’t you care who’s really behind it?” Brandt was close to tears.
“No one is behind it! He thinks he’s the Bamberg Rider, the Nietzschian Superman, ‘The Man above the Law.’ When you’re above the law, you don’t need reasons. Nolte, I can’t read your writing here.” He handed the file back to him.
Brandt interrupted. “You can’t say that! At least, you can’t say that officially.”
Nolte read from the file. “A Major Stevens and a Captain Bast captured November 9th in … I can’t read my writing either … I think Holland. That’s the closest date.”
Nebe slapped the arms of his chair. “Fine, it happened on November 8th, they were there on the 9th to pay him off.”
“But that was in Holland,” begged Brandt. “He was caught trying to escape to Switzerland.”
“Write me a memo,” Nebe said through clenched teeth. “Right now let’s go home.”
Nebe, Brandt, and Nolte walked out of the building through the flags, swastikas, and eagles and into the black street. The sky was fogged over and held the reflections of the street lamps in gray suspension. There was a mild wind, barely more than a breeze, but
there was a cold wet edge to it. Nebe clamped his briefcase under one arm and methodically buttoned his overcoat. Brandt was thinking hard but none of his conceptual equipment fit the problem. If he couldn’t solve the problem though then it proved his intelligence that he recognized it as a trick question and the defeat was really a moral victory.
“History will prove that he was a British agent even if we couldn’t,” he said, showing Nebe his noble profile.
Nebe made a philosophical noise, halfway between a grunt and a sigh. “History has the time. We have to reach a verdict right now.”
They walked in silence. “But we have all the facts right now,” Nolte objected. “Or at least all the facts we can have, and there never will be any more, only fewer and fewer. Records get lost, witnesses die. How can history make sense out of it if we can’t?” He had stopped walking and Nebe stopped too with a courtesy that didn’t feel natural.
“I suppose they make it up as they go, sort of like we have been doing,” said Nebe and started walking again.
Nolte caught up with him. “Then why talk about it?”
“Because it is what it is, it’s over,” Nebe explained. “It’s their problem now. And history can’t be changed because some cuddly nonentity wanted to change it. That’s disorderly. It’s fucking undignified.”
Nebe had to stop, his fist clenched on the handle of his briefcase and his head was thrown back and snarling at the sky. Nolte and Brandt were cowed into silence. They stared at each other’s faces, looked away, and started walking again. They walked in silence for a while.
“It has to be something simple, maybe he has a crush on Eva Braun,” decided Nolte.
“Handsome woman,” Nebe agreed and Brandt nodded. They walked in silence until Nolte stopped and cursed.
“All this brain power wasted on a case this asinine. You were right; we should have faked it from the beginning.”
“Never too late to do that,” Nebe pointed out, “and we did have to go through the motions, it’s expected.” They walked again in silence. Nebe kept them on the edges of his vision. His face flashed on and off in the lights of oncoming traffic in a series of pain-filled grimaces. Then Nolte stopped under a street lamp, demanding attention.
The Führer Must Die Page 21