Mister Wolf

by Chris Petit

  ‘The law may not agree with you on that,’ said Schlegel. ‘And if these young guest workers had not complied with your wishes, what would you have done?’

  Martin squirmed in his seat. ‘They were easy about it.’

  ‘And what did you and your friends do at the sight of these females?’

  Martin stared hard at the floor. ‘We wanked,’ he finally whispered.

  ‘Yourselves or each other?’

  ‘Ourselves.’

  Schlegel couldn’t care less, other than finding himself pitched back to the boy’s age, and he and Christoph fiddling with each other.

  ‘In summary, you are telling me that in the week before the fire the clinic’s patients and domestic staff moved out but its nursing staff and doctors stayed. Did anyone mention what was going on?’

  ‘The nurses told us to mind our own business and say the clinic was shut for holidays.’

  ‘Has anyone else where you live been asking about the clinic?’

  Two men, he was told.

  ‘Describe them.’

  The boy did. The two thugs from the night of the fire.

  ‘What did they want to know?’

  ‘If anyone else had been asking.’

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Schlegel.

  ‘We didn’t know anything.’

  ‘Have you told me everything?’

  Martin looked uncertain.

  ‘Think carefully,’ Schlegel warned. ‘If your companions were able to tell me more than you it would reflect badly. According to the law of juvenile punishment I can have you beaten in a way you would not forget for the rest of your life.’

  They sat in silence while Martin considered.

  Schlegel said, ‘The nearer we come to the end, the harder it is, not in terms of what has been said but what has not. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘A car came,’ the boy eventually said.

  The vehicle had driven down the driveway ramp and drawn up outside the back.

  ‘Then what?’ asked Schlegel.

  ‘A man with a completely bandaged head was taken into the building.’

  ‘A single patient?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me exactly what you saw.’

  ‘He was helped out of the car into the building.’

  ‘Walking or on a stretcher?’

  ‘Walking.’

  ‘Assisted or on his own?’

  ‘On his own.’

  ‘You just said he was helped into the building.’

  Martin corrected himself. ‘I mean the car door was held open for him, then the door to the clinic.’ He added that two white-coated men were in attendance.

  Medical orderlies. Schlegel dared not pause to think about the implications of what they were discussing. An invisible man, he thought. How would he report any of this? Would Dunkelwert be amenable to burying the story, or, and here came the hammer blow, was this what he was supposed to discover?

  ‘What vehicle did they come in? An ambulance?’

  ‘Not an ambulance. Grosser Offener Tourenwagen.’

  The boy’s answer cast everything in a new light.

  ‘Armour-plated and bullet-proof,’ he went on.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘By how they sit so low to the ground.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘About a week ago.’

  ‘Be more exact.’

  It was the previous Tuesday, two days before the bomb, and three days after the clinic officially closed.

  Schlegel thought: Even the Führer can’t be two places at once, so what the hell had been going on?

  *

  Dunkelwert’s feet barely touched the ground sitting down. Schlegel looked at her and slowly said, ‘I am told the clinic made preparations to receive a secret guest in the week the attempt was made on the Führer’s life . . .’

  He emphasised there was nothing to connect the two.

  ‘Apart from the letter,’ said Dunkelwert.

  They looked at each other. Schlegel was betting she was keen not to venture any deeper.

  ‘Why would anyone write a letter that is obviously a lie?’ asked Dunkelwert, unwilling to let it go.

  Because the whole thing is a lie, from top to bottom, Schlegel wanted to shout.

  If he walked the case back to secret bodies in a cellar he had conspiracy to murder, unless the killing was state-authorised. Schlegel was sure all the elements could be made to join up but it wasn’t in his interests – as a servant of said state – to do so.

  He tried stashing the bodies in the back of his mind, along with the falling man, but the foolish, persistent part of his brain kept returning to the puzzle. In any immediate historical context, it would make more sense if the guest had been received after the bomb, as a result of his wounds being worse than had been stated. A completely bandaged head: was it to protect injuries or to prevent anyone from seeing who he was? Or was he a decoy?

  The first news to come through on the Thursday stated the Führer was dead. Had someone decided the illusion of his being alive must be maintained to stop the country from being thrown into chaos? Schlegel supposed an actor could have reproduced the Führer’s speech on the night of the 20th. Perhaps that explained why it had taken so long to put together. Almost twelve hours passed before its broadcast.

  Schlegel chased all the arguments into dead ends. Had the bomb plot taken place before 20 July and the news been suppressed? Or had there been no bomb at all? Stuff was made up all the time. The point was, the upper echelon was now so detached it might as well exist on its own planet.

  None of this he shared with Dunkelwert.

  However hard Schlegel tried to shake off the idea, a sense of secret crisis persisted.

  *

  Curious about Herr K. Zehnter – on Schlegel’s list, next to his father, and Munich restaurant proprietor – Schlegel went down to the public telephone kiosks in the lobby.

  Dunkelwert had been bombarding them with memoranda. One stated no more private calls on office lines. He bought a pile of tokens from the cashier’s office. Sitting in the cramped booth, with its awkwardly folding door, Schlegel thought of space rockets, coffins and vacuum chambers.

  Long-distance connections took time. ‘Lines are busy, caller,’ the operator repeated in her dreary voice.

  At last the number rang. A man picked up. He spoke bad German with an Italian accent. Schlegel repeated Zehnter’s name and got nowhere. He said he was calling from Berlin, as in, ‘Get a move on.’ He supposed he was speaking to a waiter and the Bratwurst Glöckl was reducing to hiring anyone these days.

  Schlegel asked for the manager, repeating the word several times, loudly and ever more slowly.

  Someone came on the line after a wait long enough to be rude; Bavarian, thick accent, tetchy, and unwelcoming of any Berlin caller.

  Not Herr Zehnter, Schlegel suspected. He asked if he was and was met with silence.

  Schlegel persisted. ‘Herr Zehnter?’

  The name meant nothing said the man. The accent grew more curdled, as if to say fuck off, posh boy.

  Schlegel asked if he was speaking to the proprietor.

  Yes, but he was not Zehnter.

  Strange, thought Schlegel. Restaurants were usually family businesses, with traditions and continuity. Schlegel asked if he knew when Zehnter had been the listed proprietor.

  ‘Not for as long as I remember,’ said the man just as Schlegel’s tokens ran out and the call was cut off.

  *

  Outside, the weather had broken. It took a heavy shower for Schlegel to notice. It was like that these days. He barely looked up anymore, ignoring the dead sky full of vague dread, leaving him in a state of mounting unease.

  With a growing sense of premonition he took to sitting in cafés and scouring newspapers in anticipation of finding just such a report, which he eventually did: a small, innocuous agency bulletin at the bottom of an inside page, reporting an air crash on the Austro-Hungarian border involv
ing a specialist medical team on emergency relief work.

  No survivors. No names, pending relatives being informed, other than the team leader whose name matched the owner of the clinic. That was it. End of article. The cover story for the bodies in the cellar. Now they were officially written off and there wasn’t a thing anyone could do. Give them one death and now give them another, for the record.

  13

  Homicide cops reminded Schlegel of badly drawn cartoons, big men with little shading: thick necks, meaty hands, steel-hard paunches and years of hardbitten service. They played up to their image and answered to nobody, yet among themselves called each other ‘girl’.

  With no one he could turn to or trust, but desperate for someone to tell him what he should do, Schlegel thought of Stoffel. While he sneered at Dunkelwert for being out of her depth, his own feet were barely on the ground. Although bent, Stoffel was nobody’s fool and had been around long enough before the current mob took over not to be impressed.

  Schlegel had found Stoffel terrifying. If challenged, everything was dismissed as a joke. He once witnessed Stoffel rabbit punch a man and hold him almost tenderly after he doubled up. It was then Schlegel realised men like Stoffel had a superior appreciation of the art of terror and treated violence as almost balletic, compared to his own clumsy efforts to exert himself. However much of a bully, Stoffel stuck by his own and in that respect Schlegel knew he was bound to listen.

  Like 99 per cent of homicide, Stoffel was a man of regular habits: same bar, same time.

  Stoffel, comfortably drunk, his bowler hat tilted, glass halfway to his mouth, did a slow take and said, ‘Your round.’

  The waiter, a geriatric known as Puffing Billy, prided himself on remembering everyone, except Schlegel.

  Stoffel said, ‘Looking for me?’

  Schlegel wondered how Stoffel managed to get drunk on such watery piss until he saw it was supplemented with mouth-gargle-sized swigs from a flask.

  They were sitting in a large bar with deal tables, in a raised section that Stoffel had to himself. An ashtray contained several of Stoffel’s cigar butts. Eighteen months ago the man wouldn’t have been seen dead sitting with Schlegel. Now he seemed almost pleased. In the old days there was always a crowd in of Homicide braggarts needling all comers. Not any more.

  ‘Funny how things change,’ Stoffel said equably.

  They started with Nebe.

  ‘Who would have guessed?’ said Stoffel. ‘Von Helldorf too.’

  Stoffel had been part of von Helldorf’s poker school. They had all been grilled, he said. ‘But can those asking the questions be trusted any more than anyone else? Have they had you in yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘They will. Any dirt on your walking stick?’

  ‘They have their suspicions.’

  ‘I’m past caring. Drink up.’

  Puffing Billy was summoned for another round.

  Schlegel asked Stoffel, ‘How’s business?’

  ‘Whatever is going on in the rest of the world, it doesn’t stop people murdering each other. Thirty-four homicides last quarter. Thirty-five, if you count the dead theatrical agent.’ Stoffel mimed a high fall with his hand. ‘A jumper, officially.’

  ‘Unofficially?’

  ‘Who’s going to listen? ’

  Chucking someone out of a window; the dead staff at the clinic. Under normal circumstances Schlegel wouldn’t connect them.

  Stoffel leaned back, settling on the meat of his haunches. Schlegel thought the man must have run out of drinking companions, which was the only reason he was being tolerated.

  Schlegel showed Stoffel the list he had been sent.

  Stoffel needed reading glasses, carefully hooking the arms behind his ears with the belligerence of a man angry at having to wear them.

  He scanned the list and handed it back. ‘No names apart from the obvious. Is that you?’

  ‘Or my father.’

  Stoffel sat there, puddled, with the dazed look of a beaten-up boxer between rounds.

  ‘How fucked are you?’ he eventually asked.

  Schlegel took a deep breath, exhaled and said, ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Try me,’ said Stoffel and sat back trancelike, as though he wasn’t listening.

  Schlegel walked the case backwards.

  Stoffel raised his eyebrows when Schlegel got to the armour-plated Mercedes. ‘Not many of those.’

  And again when Schlegel told how the clinic had burned down.

  ‘With or without guest?’

  ‘A man fell off the roof, I think.’

  ‘What do you mean, “I think”?’

  ‘The smoke, the flames. It was night . . .’

  Stoffel grunted. ‘ “I think.” Don’t.’

  ‘Then an anonymous letter turns up saying the Führer was at the clinic.’

  Schlegel watched Stoffel process that.

  ‘What are you saying?’ asked Stoffel.

  That it was he who fell off the roof? Schlegel said, ‘I’d rather not for obvious reasons.’

  ‘What’s your business in this?’

  ‘I was told to find whoever wrote the letter.’

  ‘Say it’s bollocks.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Not enough, if I know you.’ Stoffel snorted. ‘ “I think!” ’

  Schlegel said he feared a secret agenda.

  ‘You don’t know that. Stick to the facts.’

  ‘There is a punchline.’

  Schlegel leaned forward. Stoffel smelled like a brewery. He cupped his ear and Schlegel told him about the plane crash.

  ‘Who knows about that?’ Stoffel asked sharply.

  ‘Me and whoever did it, as far as I know.’

  ‘Keep it that way, and you haven’t told me. And here’s something I haven’t told you. Is your stepfather’s name Rohrer?’

  Schlegel couldn’t see how Stoffel knew that.

  It concerned Nebe, Stoffel said, and a strange episode on the morning of the 20th when Stoffel passed him pacing in the corridor.

  ‘He had a list in his hand. He grabbed hold of me and said a coup was imminent and showed me the list, which was for members of a provisional government.’

  Stoffel had presumed Nebe was in the process of having the coup put down.

  ‘It never occurred to me he was bragging. Anyway, he said, “Do you remember Schlegel? That’s his stepfather.” ’

  Schlegel had just said he didn’t know what he was suspected of. Now it seemed he did: conspiracy at one remove. More suspect relatives.

  ‘This is not a conversation we ever had,’ Stoffel said.

  After that they talked about nothing of consequence, then didn’t talk much at all. Schlegel drank several more beers in a vain effort to feel in the slightest drunk. It turned out Stoffel’s wife had died of a malignant tumour, which was part of the reason he had gone back to work.

  They parted in the street. Stoffel gripped Schlegel’s neck, uncharacteristically avuncular, as though he even cared.

  ‘Let it go, son. No time to go sticking your hand in the fire.’

  14

  Schlegel continued to be visited by Gerda on some nights for what he supposed was a reasonable facsimile of a relationship. The sex on the whole made up for his anxious days. Despite the healthy noises she made in bed, he thought he probably failed to satisfy her. He found sex with her an approximate business, like fumbling with a combination lock, trying to guess its code.

  He supposed she would start coming to his apartment every second or third evening, making her usual joke of being breathless at the top of the stairs. There was talk of a larger bed and finding anyone able enough to carry it up all those stairs. Gerda wore summer frocks that showed off her figure. A wholesome, yet troubling young woman, Schlegel thought, showing her insecurity by always asking whether they were having a good time.

  If there was a bad omen or spell cast over them it came when they were walking in the street only a minute or so from the apartment
when a passing young man in uniform turned, punched Gerda in the back of the head and ran off. The pointlessness of the act stayed with Schlegel and he thought about it endlessly, probably as a way of distracting himself from the mess of all the rest.

  *

  Schlegel remained curious about Anna Huber, given that she had lied about her father. The man whose file Schlegel had just pulled was Frederick ‘Fredi’ Huber. Munich journalist, right age, relocated to Berlin in 1934. Although the information was incomplete, with no mention of marital status or dependents, or his death, it had to be Anna’s father. Trained as a typesetter, graduating to journalism via night school, suggesting Anna Huber had been evasive rather than entirely dishonest.

  Schlegel found it impossible to imagine working for newspapers in those days, with few reporting restrictions beyond the legal ones of libel, writing whatever you wanted without fear of censure, and not living in a world of madeup air crashes.

  He decided to call her back in. They sat in the same room as before. Anna Huber looked less sure of herself when Schlegel said, ‘You should have told me your father was a reporter.’

  She asked, ‘Are you investigating me?’

  He sat back and said, ‘There is something you might be able to do for me.’

  He didn’t say in return for letting her off. She regarded him warily as if he wanted a sexual favour, which was the usual way.

  ‘A very early edition of Mein Kampf has come to our attention, published in 1925 and limited to 25 dedicated copies. There must be a list of recipients somewhere.’

  He wondered why he was asking her, other than in the foolish belief that she could somehow help him find out more about his father just because she came from Munich and seemed smart.

  If Huber was surprised by his request she didn’t show it, but Schlegel sensed her unease turn to irritation. She looked the sort that had to put up with her share of pestering.

  *

  Whatever else Huber was, she was efficient and called back within an hour, obviously hoping this would be the end of the matter.

  She said, ‘I have a list of the names you wanted.’

  Good telephone manner, Schlegel thought.

  ‘There is a ministry library and archive, part of which is dedicated to Mein Kampf, with a record and details of all editions, including the one you mentioned. I can get the list sent over.’