by Chris Petit
‘More unthinking.’
‘And not eligible, in the end.’
Frau Winter was quick to agree. ‘However much she wished to better her station, she was out of her depth.’
Schlegel almost believed her.
Morgen went on. ‘The doctor’s report says Fräuein Raubal shot herself in the heart yet Fräulein Braun says she wrapped the gun in a flannel and put it in her mouth. You see why we are bound to question everything.’
Frau Winter grew discreet again and said she was sure Fräulein Braun had her reasons. ‘I wouldn’t know. I didn’t see the body.’
‘But by your own account you discovered it,’ said Morgen reasonably.
‘The room was dark. There was a shape on the floor and you could see something terrible had happened.’
‘Who did you call?’
‘The Brown House.’ Party Headquarters.
‘Who did you speak to?’ asked Morgen.
‘Party Secretary Bormann, except he wasn’t Party Secretary then.’
Schlegel thought: So Bormann answered. By arrangement? The strange thing in all of it was Schlegel had no clear impression of the niece. Sometimes he could almost hear her laughter filling the apartment but he couldn’t say how hollow it was.
36
The Bratwurst Glöckl was a six or seven minute ride back towards the centre. Schlegel thought they should see if there was an old reservations book showing that the niece and her uncle had dined there on the Thursday night. Morgen, bad tempered about Fegelein, grumbled, ‘It was thirteen years ago, man! You’re clutching at straws.’
The place was opening for business. They were told by a waiter with bad German that the manager wasn’t in. Morgen marched through to the kitchen, telling the waiter when he tried to stop them to fuck off back to Italy or wherever.
Morgen asked the kitchen staff if anyone was from the old days. They all looked either sixteen or sixty and incapable of cooking. A boy chopping onions sliced his finger and carried on, too nervous to stop. Schlegel watched blood mix with the onions.
The waiter hung around by the door, all obsequiousness now. Morgen asked for his papers, just to be nasty. He really was in a foul mood. The man produced them with shaking hands, bowing and scraping.
‘I was going to say,’ he volunteered. A woman who had been been there a long time came in twice a week to do the books and she was in the manager’s office now.
The waiter showed them to a windowless room whose main feature was a dull grey skylight, with a bucket on the floor where it leaked. Unlike the restaurant’s decorative antique panels, the walls were bare, suggesting there was no point in wasting money on what was not seen.
The elderly woman sitting at the desk looked up. Large spectacles with magnifying lenses gave her a startled look. She wore bright pink and had hands more like a man’s, but her voice was motherly and they immediately became her ‘boys’.
Co-operation at last. Schlegel could have kissed her.
The room was small and tidy, apart from a mess on the desk, which the woman had shoved aside to clear a space for her own neat ledgers.
She was from Zehnter’s time, it turned out, and she told them, ‘He was a stickler but a convivial man and proud of the place’s tradition. “Reservations are our history,” he was always saying.’
She opened a narrow filing cupboard and proudly showed them the order books, lined up by year, alongside bound copies of accounts.
There it was, among the reservations for 17 September, 1931, in the same Gothic script as the rest: Wolf plus one. Private. Ten o’clock.
The woman didn’t ask what they were doing. People knew when to keep their traps shut. Her magnified eyes were so pale they reminded Schlegel of oysters. You could still get them in Berlin, at a price. Funny what was still available, he thought.
Morgen asked, ‘Is there anyone you know who would have been working here then?’
The woman made a show of thinking and offered them a wine waiter from the old days. ‘An old boy. Not so well now.’ She tapped her head. ‘Some things he remembers. You can do worse than ask.’
He was in a rest home on Nussbaumstrasse where the woman visited him from time to time. Some days he was all right, she said, and on others he didn’t know her. His name was Dreck, which she said he had always complained about for some reason.
*
They looked at the private dining room on the way out: not a large room, single round table with seating for six, and depressing for having its curtains drawn. Trying the curtains, Schlegel found they were only for effect, with no windows behind them. Candelabra on the walls. He supposed with the right lighting it could appear romantic. If rooms could talk.
*
Just as merchants and guilds grouped together in a particular part of town, the medical profession had taken over Nussbaumstrasse. Clinics. Research centres. University blocks. Schlegel tried to imagine his father’s footsteps before him and what business might have caused him to underline the street name in the guide map, and what had brought him there, and what he looked like and what sort of contract he had made with life. Whenever Schlegel tried to picture the man, he saw only a blank. Perhaps he was resisting in case he found some strutting, swivelling, booted monster or snivelling courtier. He had no control over the reality, so why bother to imagine?
The rest home was more modest than most of the buildings in the street. A criss-cross little garden fence, a stretch of grass with a central path and a building as plain as a child’s drawing.
Nurses more like prison wardens, for all their surface politeness; tough middle-aged women who could apply a headlock. A home for old people waiting for death, some no doubt troublesome, but on the evidence most passed the time by losing their minds, a not completely unpleasant experience, from what Schlegel could see. Two women sat with the same look of vacant contentment, never mind the puddle on the floor beneath one. Dreck was pointed out, sitting in a neglected garden, with his back to the house, wearing a check dressing gown, and with wispy stickingup white hair. A few more like him sat dotted around, in solitary outcrops.
‘You will need chairs if you are staying,’ said the nononsense nurse, pointing to a stack in a conservatory whose corners still had last autumn’s blown-in leaves. Schlegel felt like crying. All these husks once would have drunk, flirted, fought, fallen in love, and lived according to somebody else’s plan. ‘And then one day you die,’ Schlegel wanted to shout. ‘Was that a contract you were willing to sign and seal?’
‘Hello, my young friends. Good to see you again,’ said Dreck as they joined him with their chairs. He wore little round sunglasses with scratched lenses.
Morgen played along. ‘How have you been keeping in the meantime?’
The old boy waggled his hand. He would have been tall once, now quite concertinaed in on himself. Dark hair grew along the ridge of his ears, like columns of tiny insects, in contrast to the snowy crown. Dreck was without teeth and had trouble with his consonants. Bulbous grey veins ran down the back of resting hands. In as much as Schlegel thought about waiters, he pictured them shorter rather than tall.
Morgen offered a cigarette, gratefully received. Dreck cupped his hands around the flame, lifted his head and inhaled deeply, looked at them and asked who on earth they were.
Morgen asked how he was doing.
Dreck gave a harsh laugh and said, ‘Waiting.’
He wanted to know why Schlegel dyed his hair.
Schlegel was aware of blushing and muttered he was too young for it to be white. The waiter waiting, he thought, or the waiting waiter. An elderly female raised herself out of a chair to totter round the garden. Dreck offered long silences and gaps and detours, his grasp of the present variable to the point of non-existent. Pitched back, however, he stumbled across shards of intact memory, repeated verbatim.
Dreck would not be hurried. He resisted questions about his working days. Sometimes when Dreck remembered a detail with no context, Schlegel was reminded of those
accidental photographs of nothing: a blur, a foot, sky. Dreck remembered the past, or bits of it, but was lost in the present. For the rest of them it was the other way round: washed away past, stuck in the present. The future didn’t bear thinking about. Any random memory of himself from ten or fifteen years before, Schlegel always thought: That was someone else. Perhaps everyone felt the same. He had never talked to anyone about it. Dreck asked him, ‘Why so glum?’
Schlegel said, ‘I want you to tell us about—’ He explained how once a long time ago the Führer had been reported drunk in the company of his niece at the Bratwurst Glöckl. Dreck’s eyes screwed up behind the dark lenses, in a show of furious anger at forgetting. His body seemed to expand as though being pulled up by invisible wires, then collapsed.
Schlegel thought of something, nothing to do with Dreck, and wanted to get out.
Dreck appeared to have dozed off. His head still slumped, he suddenly asked what they wanted to drink.
Schlegel, in a moment of rare inspiration, snapped his fingers, and called, ‘Herr Ober!’
Dreck looked at him and recited the wine list, with personal recommendations.
Morgen said he would have whatever Fräulein Raubal was having.
‘That would be a Spätlese, a sweetish white wine if you like that sort of thing.’
‘And her uncle?’
‘Mineral water and never Apollinaris, always Fachinger. Except that time when he was on the Hacker Pschorr, enough to float a battleship. “Keep them coming!” he said. A first in my history. She was pissed too, and could put it away. She had her hand under the table – private room – and gave me a look that said she knew I knew what was going on.’
They both had liver dumplings and she fed him, taking the food off his plate with her fork. So much for the Führer’s publicised vegetarianism, Schlegel thought. Turtle soup to start, not on the menu, specially made. A selection of sweet pastries and cream to end with.
Schlegel and Morgen exchanged glances: the man had to be talking about that last night, but when pressed Dreck faded on them.
‘Herr Ober! Same again,’ Morgen ordered, pointing at glasses, and they were back in the room. ‘How would you describe the mood between them?’
‘Like they both had a fever. Intense.’
‘How?’
‘As though they were plotting something.’
That didn’t make sense, Schlegel thought. They were supposed to have been arguing.
‘What sort of plotting?’
‘Like two kids with a secret.’
Schlegel suspected Dreck was muddled and recalling another occasion. People pay no attention to the waiter, he thought, not realising the waiter is permanent and the guest there under sufferance.
Dreck looked at them both as though he had no idea why any of them were there, then barked, ‘And that was the last we saw of her!’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Schlegel.
Dreck looked at him as though he were stupid. ‘She didn’t come back after that.’
So Dreck had been talking about that final night.
‘Private room,’ Morgen reminded Dreck. ‘We heard they were arguing.’
‘Later on they argued.’
Over what?’ insisted Morgen.
Dreck snapped back into the moment and gave Morgen a look of professional hauteur. ‘I may observe but I make a point of not listening.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Morgen. ‘Overall mood?’
‘Lovebirds, then not lovebirds.’
Impossible to picture, Schlegel found. That was as much as they were going to get. Dreck had lost interest.
‘Did Herr Schlegel dine there?’ Schlegel ventured.
‘Downstairs. On the pansies’ table. With Herr Röhm, usually.’
‘Was Herr Schlegel a pansy?’
‘None of my business. Herr Röhm was and didn’t care who knew. He went. Maybe Herr Schlegel did too. Night of the Long Knives. Night of settling any old score, if you ask me.’
A pansy? Was that possible? Schlegel asked himself.
‘My boss, gone too,’ said Dreck.
‘Herr Zehnter?’
‘Homo. Curtains. Head wine waiter. Homo. Curtains. Me. No homo. Are you homos?’ He gave them a gummy smile. ‘No dentures. They took them away. I bit a nurse last week. Herr Wolf didn’t tip. Paid on account by Mr Pig. No extras. Not classy people. Herr Schlegel classy.’
A classy father who consorted with pansies and was pally with the subsequently deposed and executed leader of the brownshirts. Anna Huber’s brother had been a brownshirt. He couldn’t see his father as one.
*
Morgen was late for Fegelein. He’d had enough of bicycles, he said. He would wait for a taxi, which were more plentiful than in Berlin where finding one was like winning the lottery, never mind not being able to afford it unless you had lottery winnings.
His decision turned out to be irrelevant. The bikes were gone anyway. They had not been given locks. Schlegel didn’t mind much. Munich was walkable, unlike Berlin.
Morgen lit up, smoked half the cigarette and.eventually said, ‘One thing that gets you killed is knowing too much.’
‘Are you speaking about us?’
‘Probably. The business with the niece is like a deadly parlour game. This version of what happened. That version of what happened. Oh, no, it didn’t happen like that at all. We were fortunate with Dreck. Come back tomorrow and we could get nothing. Everything wiped.’
Schlegel supposed Anton would have been among those to have clicked his fingers to summon Dreck. He thought ‘classy’ was probably more of a category than a compliment and Dreck in his heyday was a model of deferential contempt.
‘Gossip before the girl’s death,’ Morgen said. ‘Just because she’s dead doesn’t mean the gossip stops. It reaches fever pitch. But what if that were somehow the point?’
Schlegel couldn’t see what Morgen was getting at. The Raubal case was by definition insoluble. So many layers had been created that even if they did stumble across the answer it would be indistinguishable from the rest. In Gestapo Müller’s terminology, it was shot through with enough golden threads for a tapestry, leaving them with the official version that no one quite bought but everyone generally believed, and that was what had stuck: a young woman firing a bullet into her heart in a fit of something or other and bleeding to death.
*
Schlegel watched Morgen wait by the side of the road for a taxi: light traffic, another fine day, the sky sharper than in Berlin, but dark clouds were building. Out of the corner of his mind’s eye he saw Gerda fall through the night and his knees sagged.
Sitting with Dreck in the dreary garden, Schlegel had been struck by what he had already noticed: that the street was given over to clinics and suchlike. Was that why it had been underscored in the guide map, and did room 202 on the bus ticket refer to one of these buildings? It didn’t amount to much of a clue but as he was there . . .
His persistence was eventually rewarded when he was told of a convent hospital whose nursing staff were nuns. The woman telling him had a nephew who was a porter there and said the Party paid to keep it exclusive.
The convent hospital stood hidden behind a high wall capped with green Roman-style tiles, the same as the roof. Paint-washed walls gave it a Mediterranean air. Schlegel used his badge to gain admission and inside found himself in a deliciously cool, translucent arched corridor along which cowled nuns glided, their habits muffling their footsteps. Schlegel trod softly, feeling large and self-conscious.
He addressed himself to the registrar, an old nun with a pink face. He stumbled to come up with a reason for wanting to look through her admission records. He said it was complicated by having only a room number.
She made his job seem easier when she explained that room 202 was one of several private ones, logged separately from general ward admissions. She asked how far he wished to go back. To 1925, he said.
She led the way down to stack rooms even more si
lent than upstairs, into a maze of narrow walkways between tall shelves. She pointed to one too high for her to reach where private room admissions were kept. The spine of each book was marked by year and they went back to the turn of the century.
Schlegel watched her walk away and turned his attention to the books.
Room admissions and discharges were listed in columns, starting with the names and initials of patients on the left, with no reference to gender; perhaps the celibate sisters held it to be irrelevant, us all being God’s children. Next came the name of the referring doctor and date of admission, with the room number in a final column on the right. A space must have been left under each entry because the date of discharge was recorded directly beneath. The first examples showed name after forgotten name admitted in 1925 and released a week or so and sometimes months later.
Schlegel supposed the hospital had a reputation for discretion, being cloistered. By the time he got to the 1930s he started to recognise some of the more famous Party members. Göring H. several times, booking in for ten days.
As for Room 202: three admissions in 1930 where the name in the patient’s column was Wolf, no initial. Schlegel presumed recuperative bouts for the highly-strung Führer.
Moving on to 1931 and Room 202, Schlegel found no more Wolf.
The room had one long stay of a couple of months early in the year but no one he had ever heard of. July, August. Of no interest.
An admission into Room 202 on Monday, 21 September.
A tumultuous week, with the niece dead the Friday before. A busy time for Dr Müller, too, if it was the same police doctor who had made the referral. Schlegel felt like he was swimming in sand because of the name in the admissions column. Schlegel A.
37
Hermann Fegelein was immensely pleased with himself, living as he did in a world of justified smugness. Career and fun and plenty of both. Nothing else mattered. He could talk himself out of any corner, using his winning smile and silver tongue to convince his masters to overlook his bad boy pranks. His boss, Reichsführer-SS Himmler, a model of bourgeois probity – apart from a secretary mistress tucked away, but everyone had one of those – was jealous of how Fegelein flouted the rules. Letting him get away with it was Heini’s surrogate thrill.