by Chris Petit
‘Zehnter,’ he prompted.
‘Was that his name?’
‘He no longer runs it.’
‘No, he wouldn’t. They carted him off years ago.’ Huber had no trouble remembering that. ‘It was something of a scandal. I don’t think I ever knew his name. He was just referred to as the owner.’
‘What did he do?’
‘At first it was said he had been taken ill. Then it was a nervous breakdown. Later it was said he had been interfering with a boy.’
‘When was this?’
‘Ten years ago.’
Was the Führer dedicating copies of his book to child molesters?
Huber said, ‘Be careful what you wish for regarding your father. In those early days there were said to be very disreputable elements, until they all went in the big clearout of 1934.’
Schlegel watched her walk back into the building and wondered what had really precipitated Zehnter’s fall and presumably his father’s, wiping their names from the record.
16
Schlegel was hoping it would be too late for Müller when he got back but Müller was keeping his evening watch in his little darkened office. Like Dr Goebbels, he kept a clear desk. Müller sat there, apparently staring into space, but giving off a discharge of energy like a machine for processing information.
He made a point of looking at the time when he finally noticed Schlegel and asked what he had been up to with Dr Goebbels.
Müller graced the answer with the ghost of a smile.
‘That British newsreel?’
Schlegel nodded.
‘He shows that to everyone.’
Müller held out his hand for the letter, noting it hadn’t been resealed. He raised an eyebrow.
‘Of course not, sir.’ Tempted, but hadn’t.
Müller read Goebbels’ reply and grunted.
Schlegel suspected the note was of little relevance and the point was to expose Schlegel to Goebbels, either as part of a hostile opening move or as a sacrificial pawn.
Schlegel waited to be dismissed. Instead Müller produced a file from a drawer, placed it on the desk and said, ‘You are familiar with Hermann Fegelein.’
It wasn’t a question. Schlegel groaned inwardly.
‘Yes, sir. He is the Reichsführer-SS’s special envoy to Chancellery.’
Müller looked at him as though he were an idiot. ‘Thank you for pointing that out. Fegelein has complained of false charges brought by you.’
‘We had a witness to a hit-and-run accident that left a woman dead. Fegelein was driving.’
‘The incident was a couple of years ago.’ Müller’s look said: ancient history. ‘You tried pressing charges last year. What about your witness?’
‘Unable to testify.’
Müller maintained his graveyard expression. ‘Your word against Fegelein’s and he is more important than you, by far. Your summary of Fegelein. Be candid.’
The question wasn’t as hard as it looked. Fegelein was widely loathed. Schlegel thought it unlikely Müller was in favour.
‘He has a bad reputation going back years but he enjoys a great deal of protection. Popular with the ladies.’
Schlegel had once believed men like Fegelein got their comeuppance, in the end.
Müller pondered before resuming in his dust-dry voice: ‘Fegelein claims he had agents who penetrated a conspirators’ cell. Which raises the question of why he did nothing about it.’
Schlegel cast around for something plausible and suggested events could have overtaken Fegelein, if his agents didn’t know the actual date of the plot. Realising what he was about to add, Schlegel dried.
Müller looked at him. ‘There are no microphones in this room.’
‘I was going to say everyone was overtaken by events.’
Müller looked about as friendly as a cobra as he said, ‘Fegelein maintains he kept quiet about his penetration for fear of compromise, because there are spies every where, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ He gave a thin smile. ‘Then a clinic burns down the day after the bomb. The question I want you to ask yourself as you go about your business is, which conspiracy?’
‘Are you saying there is more than one, sir?’
Müller merely said, ‘There is much opaque behaviour surrounding the events of the last days, regarding the motives of several parties, some senior. Do you understand what I am saying?’
Unfortunately it couldn’t be clearer: he was being dangled and had already been brought to the attention of Dr Goebbels.
Schlegel carefully asked Müller for an example of such behaviour.
Müller assumed an air of academic distraction. ‘What was Dr Goebbels most exercised about when showing you his silly newsreel?’
‘Its exact tone and whether—’
Müller interrupted. ‘Not interpretation. Content.’
‘How the film questioned the Führer’s existence.’
‘Then you have just answered your own question. Proceed, with caution. Take Fegelein’s file, sit outside in my secretary’s office, read it and leave it when you go.’
He picked up his pen in a way that suggested it was a far more valuable tool than Schlegel.
Schlegel took the file and crept out, hoping to reach the door without further ado.
Müller spoke as Schlegel grasped the handle.
‘Think of yourself as an astronaut. I can launch you but you won’t necessarily be able to come back if it is not in the interests of the opaque gentlemen.’
Not a dangle then; more an honorary sacrifice, on a plate.
‘Oh, and your father,’ said Müller. ‘No good can come of it. Heed the platitudes. Ignorance is bliss. Let sleeping dogs lie.’ Müller nodded and Schlegel turned away and was again about to grasp the handle when Müller said, ‘However, should you find yourself in Munich ask Emil Maurice. He might have a tale or two.’
Schlegel recognised the name: one of the twenty-five recipients of Mein Kampf.
‘Emil Maurice?’ he ventured, fearing he was exceeding his boundaries.
‘The Führer’s driver and bodyguard in the early days.’
Schlegel could see he wasn’t going to get more and left quietly.
*
Schlegel thought: the higher you climb, the fewer the shadows. He had entered the world of high intrigue that left him dangerously exposed. What was he supposed to do? He had no access to Fegelein and any request would result in the usual runaround.
He had an uncomfortable memory of the man’s superior smile, the moue of a pout, the moment of sloth before the insult. The flesh was not as taut as in his equestrian days. He was rumoured to be married to the sister of the Führer’s secret mistress, which was typical of the man’s selfadvancement. Fegelein had spoiling good looks, a weak chin and a nasty manner when crossed. His most disconcerting aspect was how the smile did extend to the eyes. Nothing gave more pleasure and amusement than the discomfort of others.
He sat and went through Fegelein’s file.
It started with a case involving a Munich man, referred to only as T.T., the receiver of stolen goods which were found located at the Fegelein family riding school after military transportation from Warsaw where Fegelein was stationed. A copy of Fegelein’s letter to the Reichsführer-SS claimed the goods were of legitimate origin, and that was the end of that, with a rubber stamp saying ‘Case Dismissed’.
The goods were connected to a Warsaw case which Morgen had pursued in vain. Following the confiscation and Aryanisation of an international Jewish fur company, a liquidator was appointed. The shock for Schlegel was seeing the man’s name, Becher – the same SS man to whom Schlegel had delivered Christoph’s documents for signing in Budapest the week before. According to the report, Becher was a cavalry officer in Fegelein’s regiment.
It meant the present tangle went back years, with all kinds of unsuspected backstitching. Small world, Morgen had said in Budapest; and about to get smaller, Schlegel suspected. Again, the higher you go, the fewer the faces,
until it is just the same men in the room.
Fegelein and Becher had taken two of the firm’s female employees as mistresses and proceeded to gut the company, passing on fur coats to society women at home, including the Führer’s secret mistress. Morgen’s investigation into ‘gifts from the firm to powerful members of the SS’ was blocked at the highest level. The name of Becher’s mistress was blacked out, suggesting she too had protection, despite it being noted she was almost certainly a Polish agent. Schlegel experienced the sensation of being lowered in a swinging bucket into pitch black as he asked himself whether Fegelein had been aware of the double role of the woman with the deleted name. He doubted if Fegelein was a foreign agent but criminal and intelligence activity grew so overlapping that blackmail was always a possibility, and Fegelein was vulnerable in that respect. It also made Fegelein’s claims of penetrating the recent conspiracy questionable in terms of his actual role.
Schlegel saw his own problem clearly: how to investigate a case he had no inclination to pursue against someone he had not the slightest chance of getting close to.
Müller had hinted at a second conspiracy, or a conspiracy within the conspiracy. Did that mean any questioning of the role of Fegelein must extend to his master and patron, Reichsführer-SS Himmler, who had a history of going out of his way to protect his protégé?
Müller had also implied Dr Goebbels was not above suspicion. In a world of infinite interpretations, there was always room for another reading, and in the palace of intrigue it was not out of the question that Müller himself was implicated and putting up a smokescreen. Schlegel suspected they all played the courtly game of pointing the finger, just to keep their hand in, and always at the expense of the little man.
*
Gerda was supposed to distract him, which she did but not how he wanted. They ate out. Soup of a sort. Bread of a sort. Thin beer. Schlegel was already a bit drunk and Gerda had gone moody on him. For a treat they had tinned tangerines for afters.
‘From where?’ asked Gerda, sulky.
Schlegel had no idea. Japan or Spain maybe.
‘South America?’ added Gerda, not interested.
The evening suddenly felt more like the start of a breakup, and out of nowhere.
They were in the large and dowdy Bollenmüller, which was more or less full, with pockets of liveliness. Not a haunt exactly, but Schlegel often went as it had a lot of people eating alone.
He couldn’t decide whether he was a passing fancy and Gerda was the type to move on. That evening he had little small talk. What did two people talk about, he wondered. He sensed she didn’t want to come back with him. He asked if she was all right.
‘Fine,’ she said. Always a bad sign.
‘How’s work?’
‘Fine.’
Tangerines of the brightest orange. Schlegel thought the manufacturer must add artificial colouring. They tasted of a sickly sweetness. Gerda pushed hers around while Schlegel imagined her writhing on his bed, the night saved.
‘There’s someone else,’ she said.
Schlegel affected nonchalance. ‘Does that matter?’
‘Maybe. He’s coming home.’
‘One of the fearless fliers?’ He didn’t mean to sound jealous.
‘At least he fought.’
Touché, Schlegel thought. The mean part of him rather relished the prospect of a row. Perhaps it would give him an excuse to dump her first. He nearly laughed out loud. All of thirty seconds from fantasising about her naked to chucking her.
Gerda thought he was laughing at her.
The boyfriend predated him by some time. He was returning minus an arm. Again Schlegel found himself on the brink of inappropriate laughter as he stared at his hands resting on the table.
‘When does he come back?’ he asked, trying to sound conciliatory.
‘In about a fortnight.’
It seemed tactless to ask if they could continue to see each other in the meantime, and even after that. But he sensed she was still available; it was just more complicated now.
‘I am not such good company,’ she conceded, and admitted to hating the Bollenmüller. She had been there once before. Schlegel expected some sad boyfriend story but she told him she had been eating alone when plainclothes police came and snatched a man at the table next to her.
‘He tried to run and when they jumped on him he made this high-pitched squealing over and over, which embarrassed even the policemen, and he messed his trousers and the waitresses didn’t bother to clean up because it wasn’t their job to tidy up after Jews. He left wet and the rest all over the floor.’
‘You should have said. We could have gone elsewhere.’
Schlegel couldn’t shake the feeling there was more she wanted to say. He guessed she was going to tell him she couldn’t see him again, and was saving it for last.
Again he was wrong. She in fact wanted to be talked out of going home. She confessed that the thought of crippling frightened her and she was not sure how she would cope, and more or less pleaded to go back with him. So Schlegel obliged. He sensed decorum should prevail and he didn’t kiss her on the walk back, or on the stairs, waiting until they were in the apartment, then suggesting they go straight to bed, but not how he wanted as it turned out: five minutes later, Gerda was in his bed and he was on the floor, after she had made a big show of apology, saying she was feeling off-colour.
‘And a bit blue.’
She called him darling. Maybe she would feel more like it in the morning, she offered, giving him a chaste goodnight kiss and asking if there was an alarm clock so they made sure they had time.
There wasn’t. Schlegel said he woke early.
‘Honestly, darling, you don’t mind, really?’ Darling again.
Of course he minded. ‘Not at all,’ he said.
He had trouble sleeping. He was very aware of Gerda in the room. She was a noisy, restless sleeper, tossing and turning, groaning and muttering, which was both distracting and frustrating because Schlegel couldn’t make out what she said.
He moved into the main room and must have slept because when he awoke Gerda was sitting at the table in the dark.
‘You should go back to bed,’ he said.
She wanted him to take her, so he did. For all the buck and tremor, he sensed her trying to blot something out, and he in turn was very aware of the armless boyfriend over his shoulder. She turned over straight after and he thought she was going to sleep.
Instead, after a long time, she said, ‘I saw something today at work I shouldn’t have done.’
So here we are, thought Schlegel. They had got there at last.
‘Saw what?’
‘A report.’
‘What kind of report?’
‘A recommendation.’
‘Where did you see it?’
‘It had been left lying in a laboratory at the University Medical School. In a folder. I didn’t mean to look. I wondered whose it was, in order to return it.’
If Gerda worked in a sensitive area, Schlegel supposed she had found out something unwelcome about the job. Experiments were rumoured to go on in cancer research using human guinea pigs.
She said she had seen a series of memos involving the case of a severely hydrocephalic child.
‘Hydrocephalic?’
‘Water on the brain.’
The child had been examined by the university head of psychiatry, who also worked at the Charité hospital, whose case the child was.
What exercised Gerda was that she knew the man, had attended some of his lectures and he was much admired, charming and professional, which made the whole thing much more difficult.
‘What thing?’ asked Schlegel.
‘He is saving children that shouldn’t be saved.’
Schlegel protested that he must know what he was doing.
‘Children beyond repair. There are channels. When the question arose whether this child should be transferred for full treatment this professor wrote: “He has to go
somewhere else.” ’
Full treatment? Schlegel said, ‘Forget what you have seen. It was only chance you saw it in the first place.’
Or snooping.
But Gerda was of the mind that how she knew was irrelevant. She knew and was therefore bound to inform.
‘He might be a secret Jew.’
‘I doubt that,’ said Schlegel.
‘Psychiatry is a Jewish pursuit, after all.’
Schlegel thought: And still I want to see her, and talk her out of seeing her disabled boyfriend.
17
Schlegel didn’t know what to tell Dunkelwert, to whom he still officially answered. She was insisting on a written report. Schlegel was a rotten typist, using two painfully slow fingers, hovering over the keyboard in search of the right letters.
He could say the ‘mystery’ of the clinic staff was solved. They had died in an aeroplane crash. He could say the ‘mystery’ of the anonymous letter was ‘ongoing’, not a word Schlegel cared for.
In fact, he had done some basic checking on the three ‘suspects’ given to him by Dark Martin. One of them, a carpenter, turned out to be the boy’s maternal grandfather. The man’s file showed arrests for drunkenness and suspicion of seditious comment. According to Martin, he was given to shouting, ‘Heil Moscow!’ when drunk. The boy had not revealed that the man was a relative.
Schlegel had found a harmless old sot sitting in his workshop surrounded by soft-lead pencils and coarse paper. The carpenter was a consumptive drunk, with a terminal cough, who didn’t look like he was capable of holding a thought from one moment to the next. Schlegel made the man write down his name and address. The writing was a match yet he was inclined not to pursue the matter. He was sure the letter was a prank at the old boy’s expense, dictated by Martin, with the help of his nasty little friends, when he was too drunk to know what he was doing. Let it go, Schlegel thought. The man looked on his last legs and would probably be dead in a few weeks.
Schlegel wasn’t under any pressure to solve the case in any normal sense, so he decided to make no mention of the carpenter. Besides, the author of the actual letter was of little consequence now it was being treated by Müller as a gambit in some altogether deeper game. Desperate not to get any more ensnared, Schlegel produced a couple of paragraphs of impeccable jargon: ‘central thrust’, ‘working through’.