Mister Wolf

by Chris Petit

  The cadaverous one said, ‘We’ll take over now.’

  The fat man opened his wallet showing documentation. Stoffel looked unimpressed. The cadaverous one took a step forward. Schlegel flinched, thinking he was about to be gutshot. Stoffel showed his gun first. The two thugs checked and looked undecided.

  Stoffel said, ‘Now step aside.’

  The men shrugged and stared at Schlegel. The fat one smiled amiably and said, ‘Catch you later.’

  *

  When the desk sergeant wrote down the charges, Stoffel said, ‘Throw him in the drunk tank. Can’t be seen to be doing favours.’

  Typical Stoffel. He may have helped out but he would always find a way of telling Schlegel he didn’t hold him in any more regard than before.

  ‘You get one phone call.’

  Schlegel said he wanted to speak to Morgen.

  Stoffel knew Morgen and asked where he was.

  ‘Budapest,’ said Schlegel.

  ‘Fuck off, son. I’m not paying for an international call. Local only.’

  Schlegel couldn’t think of anyone. Not Christoph. They had grown too distant. By a simple process of elimination he arrived at Anna Huber.

  The next morning he used his one local call to ring her at the ministry. She answered sounding cool and efficient. He said he had a favour to ask and wasn’t sure how best to explain it.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, sounding ironic.

  ‘I am unable to make calls abroad at the moment and urgently need to contact a friend and thought perhaps I could ask you to ring on my behalf.’

  ‘An unusual request,’ she said drily. ‘As long as you are not asking me to do anything illegal.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said quickly, thinking it must all sound very questionable.

  The telephone was attached to the wall in a grey corridor and was without any booth. Schlegel felt exposed and ridiculous standing there; they had taken away his belt, tie and shoe laces, for the obvious reason. Stoffel was waiting nearby, whistling as he smoked, and looking amused by Schlegel’s predicament.

  ‘Spot of trouble?’ echoed Anna Huber.

  She could mean only one thing: that he had got swept up in the reprisals.

  ‘Nothing to do with recent events,’ Schlegel offered; well, not really. ‘If you contact Morgen, he will know what to do.’

  ‘Where are you at the moment?’ she asked.

  ‘Quite safe for the time being, staying with old friends.’ She probably thought he meant he was on the run and quickly added, ‘You can call Inspector Stoffel in Berlin Homicide. He will vouch for me.’

  Stoffel laughed out loud at that and told him his two minutes was up.

  Schlegel said he had to go. Hoping he didn’t sound too desperate, he asked Huber to call the Budapest Astoria as Morgen’s likeliest point of contact. He wondered what she was thinking.

  ‘Will you pay me back for the call?’ she asked, making it sound ambiguous, as though he were putting himself in her debt for more than just the cost of telephoning Budapest.

  25

  Stoffel came to Schlegel’s cell and said, ‘Upstairs!’ Schlegel suspected Stoffel had tired of the charade and it was the two thugs come for him.

  ‘Visitor,’ Stoffel said, seeing his alarm.

  Schlegel had been transferred to his own cell. Already he was losing any sense of time. They had taken his watch. He had slept a lot and woken disorientated. He had no idea if Huber had managed to contact Morgen. He supposed thirty-six or even forty-eight hours had passed. As they walked upstairs Stoffel told him that the thugs had put in the paperwork for his transfer.

  ‘Under whose authority?’ Schlegel asked.

  ‘Fire Protection Police, according to the docket.’ Stoffel snorted. ‘It says you are wanted for questioning about burning down a clinic.’

  Schlegel supposed the fat man and the cadaver could hide behind whatever bureaucracy they wanted – Ministry of Works one day, Fire Protection Police the next. Schlegel was forced to admit a grudging admiration for the cleverness of the charge. It was a perfect frame.

  Stoffel said, ‘Apparently you have previous form.’

  It was true. The year before he had been accused of starting a fire in Auschwitz to destroy evidence.

  ‘It was a fit-up, like this,’ he protested. ‘Morgen got me off and there’s no record of it on my file.’

  ‘Tell that to the judge!’ said Stoffel.

  As to whom the two thugs really answered, Schlegel supposed it was Bormann. The Party Secretary was the great manipulator when it came to scene shifting, and a lot of that had been going on since 20 July. No doubt the clean sweep was an excuse for settling many old scores. They were all bound to have their lists: Bormann, Goebbels, Himmler . . .

  Schlegel asked Stoffel, ‘How long do you think before my transfer?’

  ‘They appear in no hurry. I doubt if you’re top of anyone’s list. They know where you are and will be happy to let you sweat.’

  Stoffel showed Schlegel into a private visiting room rather than the common area. He found Anna Huber when he was expecting Morgen and stood tongue-tied. Huber looked even more beautiful in such grubby surroundings. She surprised him by stepping forward and putting her hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I am so sorry to hear about your friend,’ she said.

  What had she been told?

  ‘Morgen said there was a terrible accident,’ she went on, stepping back.

  ‘How much do you know?’ he asked. ‘About everything.’

  The worry lines above her nose deepened.

  ‘Only that you have a habit of getting into trouble and it falls to Morgen to bale you out. But that’s not why I am here. I want to tell you about your father. You had better sit down.’

  She was smartly turned out and Schlegel wondered if she was on her way to meet a man.

  Huber sat. She said nothing for a moment, and then: ‘After everything that has happened, I hope this doesn’t come as too much of a shock.’

  *

  If there was one thing Schlegel was convinced of it was that his father’s existence had long since ceased, and if he had not drowned in an Argentinian river in 1934 then he had met his end around that time in Munich.

  ‘Alive?’ he repeated after Anna Huber.

  ‘Might be. I didn’t know whether to tell you. Nothing is certain.’ She trailed off. ‘He’s not the most reliable, my brother, but I tell it for what it is.’

  Having given so little thought to his father in all those years, Schlegel could not absorb the fact that the man might not be dead. The idea of him still living and breathing was almost too much.

  Anna Huber said, ‘Anton Schlegel was not a Party member so I made some discreet enquiries.’

  Schlegel couldn’t imagine what form they took.

  Huber brightened. ‘Next year is the twentieth anniversary of the publishing of Mein Kampf. I said we were thinking of doing a ‘where are they now’ for the twenty-five dedicated recipients of the signed limited edition. Quite clever, I thought.’

  Schlegel agreed. Suitably innocuous and the kind of idea the ministry would come up with.

  ‘And your brother? The one you said was a brownshirt.’

  ‘Do you know who I mean by Emil Maurice?’

  Gestapo Müller had first made the connection, suggesting Maurice might have a tale to tell about Anton Schlegel.

  ‘My brother told me Emil Maurice was supposed to have shot your father, but, for whatever reason, let him off.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘In 1934, after the brownshirt putsch failed.’

  It was a long way from drowning in Argentina. Schlegel wondered if his mother had known and made up the other story in denial of the dishonour.

  ‘How does your brother know?’

  ‘He was friendly with one of the two men who did the job with Emil Maurice.’

  Schlegel found it hard to imagine his father caught up in a revolution, then had to ask himself what did he know of anyone
? He never would have guessed that his stepfather was plotting against the government. Gerda he had known only two or three things about. Morgen remained an enigma and Schlegel was a stranger to himself most of the time. And the woman opposite, although she no doubt led a real life, appeared more like a screen for a phantom projection of his own flimsy imaginings.

  ‘Why was Anton Schlegel down for execution, does anyone know?’ It seemed presumptuous to say his father.

  ‘For the same reason as everyone else. He probably knew too much.’

  Schlegel watched her watching him as they realised they were in dangerous waters.

  ‘Does Morgen know?’

  ‘I thought I should tell you first.’

  26

  Schlegel continued to exasperate Morgen, looking at everything as if it didn’t quite belong, or he to it, with the dazed wonder of a man stumbling through a party to which he hasn’t been invited and doesn’t know how to leave.

  Or perhaps Morgen’s own sense of order and propriety had taken such a kicking that he rather envied Schlegel’s lackadaisical approach. The law Morgen was there to uphold was repeatedly shown to be meaningless.

  For two years his casework had amounted to exposing rot for others to cover up. In Warsaw 1942, Fegelein, Becher and others, steeped in corruption, became mysteriously protected. Ditto Auschwitz 1943, a racket from top to bottom. Deportation trains brought hundreds of thousands, turning up with their baggage allowance of fifty kilos, confiscated on arrival. What happened next was state-sanctioned, Morgen was told in no uncertain terms. Piles of money, piles of bodies, death factory politics – there was an actual reformist movement, Morgen was staggered to learn – and shopping in Auschwitz. The commandant and his wife were in it up to their necks, with her jewellery ‘enterprise’ servicing her husband’s boss in Berlin. Threatened with exposure, the commandant got kicked upstairs, a makeweight replacement was sent to appease the reformists, and, in an act of apparently spontaneous combustion, for which they tried to blame Schlegel, all Morgen’s collected evidence went up in flames.

  That was eight months ago. The bitter footnote was that the commandant had since been restored to his post, with extended powers not unconnected to that summer’s influx of trains from Hungary.

  Morgen found it increasingly hard to ignore the voice shouting in his ear that there was nothing he could do because nothing mattered.

  They would all be running soon. As to what he believed or did: who would care in six or nine months? Even his selfestimation he saw as the vanity of wanting to think well of himself in the mirror, but who was to judge? In five hundred years the whole debacle would be no more than a speck on the historical horizon.

  *

  Schlegel’s summons came more as an irritation than a distraction. Morgen had paused hard, wondering whether to bale him out again. If he had snubbed Schlegel in Budapest it was because the man never seemed quite to trust him, and seeing him with the smooth and dubious Becher had no doubt only confirmed that. The trouble was it was true. Morgen had found himself unable to decide whether he was exploiting situations to expose them or was just following suit. Budapest was a case in point. He could pretend he was on the job rather than in retreat from his own failures and living well into the bargain.

  When Anna Huber contacted him because, as she put it, present circumstances prevented Schlegel from making calls abroad, Morgen decided he was wasting his time in Budapest. With no real dirt on Becher, and intrigued by the sound of Anna Huber, he packed his bags and flew back to Berlin, ready to give Schlegel short shrift, only to find a broken and bewildered man.

  *

  It took Schlegel the best part of a day to explain how he had ended up in a prison cell. Morgen often had to get him to go over things he didn’t understand. Schlegel was like that. Ambiguous in his interpretation of events. Afterwards, Morgen was not sure what to make of it all. Schlegel appeared to be trying to rewrite history while having his own family history rewritten into the bargain.

  Morgen supposed Schlegel’s young woman had been there when it should have been Schlegel. The two thugs weren’t done for the night either. Morgen checked: the drama agent’s wife or sister or whatever she was had also taken the high dive. Stoffel told him they were being instructed to treat the case as self-inflicted. Suicides by then were commonplace.

  *

  The other half of Schlegel’s account Morgen didn’t know what to make of either: the long-lost father, spectacularly re-emerged as an old Führer darling, about whom everyone was unwilling to utter a word, though that wasn’t so unusual these days. The problem was getting anyone to remember. But if Schlegel had a gift, it was to stumble across some wild connection that he, Morgen, being more methodical, would have missed. Schlegel had come up with a dubious bomb plot, unresolved, and the scandal of the dead niece, also unresolved. What strange bookends, Morgen thought.

  When Schlegel first brought up the business of the niece, Morgen wondered if the spectre of Schlegel’s father was inviting them to expose the present by digging up the past.

  Morgen remembered at the time of the niece’s death being a podgy, gauche young man, completing his studies at the Institute for World Economy and Ocean Traffic in Kiel. Even then the story struck him as blown out of proportion: a sensational, distant provincial scandal, involving a man known for public hysteria and barely able to contain himself on stage. The death’s occurrence during the hothouse of Munich’s Oktoberfest was noted, suggesting dark undercurrents of collective frenzy.

  Munich was a long way from Kiel, a tough, blowhard navy town, where it was regularly pointed out that Hitler had barely seen the sea. It was fashionable anyway to ignore the noisy squabbles of a thuggish provincial minority. Morgen could not picture a man as sexless as Hitler obsessing over anything as inconsequential as a female. Back then he saw only a comic figure – his mistake – a bogus faith healer who should be peddling miracle cures and religious crackpotism, and a weird super-narcissist who, however noisy and effective on a soapbox, would turn out to be a political damp squib.

  As for pursuing the no doubt sordid business of the niece, there were plenty of unanswered questions, but if he couldn’t nail someone as openly corrupt as Fegelein, what chance of bagging the biggest tiger of all? But then, if none of it mattered, what did he have to lose?

  It would be enough even to have the man in his sights.

  *

  Morgen had it in mind to go to Munich and not take Schlegel. The two thugs seemed in no hurry to remove Schlegel, and Morgen had discussed with Stoffel whether to transfer him to somewhere remote and lose him in the system. Morgen couldn’t decide who, precisely, wanted Schlegel dead, and Schlegel was doing himself no favours trying to resurrect Anton Schlegel, who belonged in a locked drawer marked: Things We Keep Quiet About.

  The question was whether Morgen gravitated towards Bormann or Müller, to neither of whom could he say: I want to expose a big skeleton in the Führer’s closet.

  Morgen made a simple bet with himself: that Bormann knew more than Gestapo Müller, but Müller was always keen to learn more and he would see him on the same day when others had to wait weeks.

  The problem with dredging up former lives was the regime’s talent for unwriting the past. In terms of who was who in Munich in the old days, the Führer’s driver, Emil Maurice, was the most curious because he hadn’t moved to Berlin with the rest. Emil Maurice was listed in the Party register as chairman of the Munich Chamber of Commerce. His record showed years of loyal service. He was among the first hundred Party members in 1919. By 1923, he was head of Hitler’s elite new bodyguard, which two years later became the SS. Maurice seemed to be something of a local hero yet it was an odd career. Although in effect the SS’s actual founder, immediately after Hitler, he now ran a local Chamber of Commerce, which could be taken for a sideways shunt, a fall from grace, or a sinecure.

  Then Morgen stumbled across the undreamed-of connection. Thinking how paperwork always held its own secrets and bei
ng curious, he went back to company records for the clinic. If life had taught him anything it was that there was no such thing as coincidence. The clinic had four major shareholders. The deceased surgeon, two others and Emil Maurice.

  *

  Müller received Morgen in his more formal office. Morgen disagreed with Schlegel’s description of Müller as the ultimate grey man. Müller always struck him as full of fizz, like a cheap brown drink.

  Morgen got straight to the point, wanting to know if the case of the burned clinic was closed.

  ‘I can’t see why not,’ Müller said, taking care not to look surprised by Morgen’s angle.

  Morgen explained about Emil Maurice being one of the shareholders. A lesser dissembler would have recoiled in surprise. Müller blinked and his eyes travelled across the ceiling.

  Müller said, ‘Emil Maurice is a Jew, you might like to know.’

  That didn’t make sense. Morgen was careful to say nothing.

  ‘Protected by the Führer’s benevolence. Up to a point. You will find the clinic shares are a reward for past loyal service. The Führer is not as intolerant as is sometimes made out if he befriends a Jew like Emil. But this is not really about the clinic.’

  Müller was not a man to bluff, so Morgen remained silent.

  ‘It’s about the niece,’ Müller went on.

  ‘The niece?’

  ‘Let me explain. I sometimes think we never got to the bottom of it. Girls of twenty-three don’t usually shoot themselves with pistols as far as I know, not held at such an angle.’

  Müller demonstrated with his fingers, pointing down towards his heart. He appeared amused. ‘I know Fräulein Braun subsequently managed to shoot herself unsuccessfully, but that was the act of a copycat, in imitation of her rival. Anyway, she is more the cry-for-help type.’

  ‘Fräulein Braun?’

  ‘A friend of the Führer. You can ask her. She’s around, with nothing to do.’

  Müller stared at his desktop in mild disbelief at the ways of women before going on. ‘It might not be a bad time to review the Raubal case to show a Jew was responsible. Of course that Jew could be Emil Maurice.’