by Chris Petit
If he lied, Fegelein wouldn’t believe him so Morgen said, ‘She works in propaganda now.’ He asked if they were still in touch.
‘Munich is like a village. The hard thing is avoiding people. The Chancellery and ministries aren’t so different. Berlin is just Munich on Spree.’
Fegelein laughed easily, leaving Morgen quite clear now on the point of the lunch. It was Fegelein’s way of announcing he was now at the table in whatever game was being played.
*
After leaving Fegelein, Morgen went and sat in a drab little park with yellow grass, dusty pathways and crisped horse chestnut leaves, watching an improbable future in the form of ferociously bad-tempered children being pushed around in perambulators. His main thought while lunching with Fegelein had been: We’re all in the same boat, however much I pretend otherwise. There wasn’t much difference between them in the end. Morgen served the same state. He abided by its laws, even if his luncheon companion didn’t. As for going after bad apples, what was the point when the whole barrel was rotten?
Still watching the squalling brats, Morgen thought the timing of the Raubal case had to be about buying exactly that: time. Hoffman’s revised version had suggested as much, except he fingered Bormann because it suited him. With the death not announced until late on the Saturday morning, it could be shown that the Führer’s elaborately detailed Friday afternoon departure had taken place before the stated time of death. Delaying any announcement also gave them the rest of Saturday and all Sunday to get their story straight and tidy away whatever was necessary before the first newspapers hit the stands on the Monday.
QED. Not that Morgen could prove it, unless Hitler was amenable to confessing.
38
The Nussbaumstrasse clinic kept its secrets. A date of discharge for Schlegel A., Room 202, was entered two months later, on 15 November 1931. Had his father really stayed that long? What had been wrong with him? It couldn’t have been cheap. Schlegel was sure the sisters’ discretion came at a price. There was no medical record for any Schlegel A. on file. Records for the deceased were destroyed after ten years or forwarded in any case of referral.
Another blank.
When he got back to the hotel the gloomy, shadowed street did nothing for Schlegel’s mood and Morgen wasn’t back. He hung around the station, drinking beer and watching trains until he decided to call the archive and try and speak to Rehse.
The bank of telephones was busy. Schlegel found himself waiting longer than everyone else for a gossipy young woman, who at last hung up and gave him a careless smile to say she was perfectly aware of having wasted his time.
Schlegel spoke to the archive switchboard and asked for Rehse’s office. The line rang unanswered and Schlegel was about to hang up when a man picked up.
Schlegel said he must have been given the wrong extension. He wanted Herr Rehse’s secretary.
The man said it was her desk; she just wasn’t there. Could he assist, he asked.
Schlegel said he wanted to speak to Rehse about an appointment. He gave his name. A long silence followed and Schlegel thought the other man had just walked off, but eventually he came back and told him to come now, if that was convenient. Schlegel was about to say it was, but the other man had hung up.
He decided to check the hotel to see if Morgen was back after all. Morgen had talked of Rehse as a possible connection, according to Gestapo Müller. On the other hand, Schlegel had not told Morgen about the so-called Anton Schlegel confession mentioned by Rösti. He supposed if anyone knew anything about that Rehse might, with his archive probably a hiding place for all kinds of old secrets. For that reason Schlegel rather fancied a private conversation with the man.
It started to rain, a heavy shower that took him by surprise.
A dark saloon car with its wipers on was now parked outside the hotel. Schlegel made out two men waiting inside, one outsize silhouette behind the wheel and in the back a thin one: the fat man and the cadaver. Schlegel turned on his heel, hoping he hadn’t been spotted, and quickly crossed the street, praying that his hurry would be put down to the rain.
He ran without thinking until he found himself halfway down the narrowest one-way street, too late to realise it was perfect for an ambush. He hurried on. The end of the street was in sight when he heard a car coming up behind him. As it drew level, the driver’s door swung open to block Schlegel’s path. The rear door swung open too: it was the sort that opened backwards, leaving Schlegel boxed in. But the cadaver was having to lean out awkwardly and without thinking Schlegel pulled him out onto the ground, kicked him out of the way, swiped the door shut and ran. At the end of the street he paused to look back and was greeted by the unintentionally comic sight of the fat man obediently reversing back down the tiny one-way street and not making a very good job of it.
*
The shower had stopped by the time Morgen arrived back at the hotel twenty minutes later to be greeted by the uncanniest sight: Anna Huber pacing up and down, her suitcase on the pavement. Morgen stood thinking how only a short time before he had been looking at an old photograph of her, revealing unsuspected links. Now there she was almost as though the photograph had undergone further stages of chemical development and animated her.
Whatever the reason for her delay she’d still had time to get her hair cut short, giving her the look of an Amazon warrior.
‘There you are,’ she said.
‘And here you are,’ Morgen said, trying not to sound disconcerted. ‘How did you know where to find us?’
She shrugged to say it was obvious. ‘The tourist office is bound to keep a record of all the bookings they make. Lucky me, it turned out to be close because I don’t have money for a taxi.’
She blew out her cheeks and asked, ‘Do you have a cigarette?’
Morgen gave her one, lit it and watched her greedily suck in smoke.
‘It tastes foul. I love it.’ She had quit a couple of years ago, she said. Her eyes glittered. Morgen wondered if she was high on something. He couldn’t make her out. He asked why she hadn’t come with them on the train, wondering why she was there now.
Her excuse was a delay in getting to the station because of transport problems and a feeling she was being followed.
‘I probably would have missed the train anyway with all the hold-ups and I didn’t want to jeopardise anything.’
She smiled sweetly.
Morgen didn’t remember any particular transport difficulties that evening.
‘Where are you staying?’
She didn’t say and asked instead, ‘Can we get a drink?’ Morgen suggested the station. She pulled a face and said she couldn’t remember if there was anywhere better around.
Morgen saw he was expected to offer to carry her case. Huber travelled light; it wasn’t heavy. He pictured a silk blouse, silk underwear.
Anna Huber drank a small beer, Morgen a large one. She turned the glass in slow circles. The place was full, the mood morose, nothing but departures and goodbyes. Morgen was in no hurry. Whatever misgivings he had about Anna Huber, it was a luxury to sit with a goodlooking woman.
He made small talk, about how he didn’t know Munich, while she continued to scrounge his cigarettes. She blew out smoke and gave him a look of complicity.
‘Luring me back into bad habits.’
‘I just had lunch with Hermann Fegelein,’ he said.
She didn’t seem thrown by the mention.
‘He showed me old pictures of you at the riding academy.’
‘I have known Hermann for years. I think it’s safe to say that he is a shit.’
She seemed rueful as she stubbed out her butt with a scribbling action. Fegelein had implied they still socialised. Did that mean they slept together?
‘Are you meeting him?’
She answered equivocally, saying, ‘He’ll be down for the racing. By the way, have you come across Toni Tieck while you were here?’
‘No. Why? Who is he?’
‘I just wond
ered.’ Her attention seemed to drift and her earlier glitter gave way to lethargy as she seemed to be trying to rouse herself to tell him something.
‘Take me to your hotel,’ she said. ‘I could do with putting my feet up.’
Morgen couldn’t tell if she was being suggestive.
They walked slowly saying nothing. The kid behind the hotel desk watched them come in and Morgen glared, daring her to say anything, as he picked up the key.
He took Anna Huber upstairs and apologised for the poky room.
She shook off her shoes and lay on his bed, with her hands behind her head. Unlike most women she shaved her legs. Morgen sat primly on the solitary chair watching her appear to drift off.
‘I don’t know whether I should be telling you this,’ she murmured with her eyes closed. ‘It is being said that this man Toni Tieck is in possession of a document that once belonged to Schlegel’s father, in which Hitler confesses to killing his niece.’
Interesting, thought Morgen, the first time it had been mentioned since Müller. It left him even more suspicious about where she fitted in. He asked how she knew.
‘My brother told me.’
‘And how did he come by this?’
‘He overheard Tieck. He drives him into town a couple of days a week to where he sometimes works at the archive.’
So there was a Rehse connection. Morgen couldn’t work her out. She was saying this fellow Tieck had what Gestapo Müller wanted, but why was she telling him?
‘What is the point of this?’ he asked.
‘Can you help me get it?’ she said, with pleading eyes.
‘Why should you want it?’
‘For Fredi Huber.’
‘Your father?’
She said it would vindicate him, confirming what he had spent years trying to prove. ‘He drove himself half mad. They persecuted him and all the other reporters who had written a word against them.’
‘Is he still alive?’
‘I can’t say.’
Morgen thought that probably meant he was.
‘He wrote a pamphlet while on the run,’ she went on. ‘It made use of a state attorney’s unofficial inquiry, showing that the niece was killed by, or on the order of, her uncle. This document has never surfaced. My father gave it to a friend for safekeeping and that was the last he heard of both. I don’t even need to see the original confession, just a copy to show my father. That would at least exonerate the pointlessness of his existence for the last ten years.’
‘So, he is alive?’
‘Oh, yes, and rather hiding in plain sight.’
Anna Huber closed her eyes and said, ‘I must rest now, if you don’t mind. Should I give your friend a consolation fuck because he seems so down about his girlfriend?’ Morgen wasn’t as blunt as she was and didn’t say give it to him instead. ‘Or do I even care about men?’ she added, with languid amusement, leaving Morgen even more undecided if her being there with him was an invitation. Anna Huber drifted off while Morgen studied the eye movement beneath her closed lids and experienced a strangely intimate half hour watching a woman he barely knew sleeping. It was difficult to credit people asleep with lying.
39
The sky was black and it started to rain even harder as Schlegel made the twenty-minute walk to the archive. He used the trees for cover to check he wasn’t being followed. The streets were full of umbrellas. He paused, sheltering under a tree, mesmerised by the rain, thinking about Geli Raubal’s death and whether the thugs had materialised because they had been asking too many questions about her. The deluge left him wondering at the point of any of it – the war, the streets, the trees, the traffic, the very existence of the scuttling passers-by. For a moment it was like a heavy weight being lifted, to realise there was only the endurance of a pointless existence. He saw how he had rarely amounted to more than being a guest in his own life, controlled perhaps all along by the long shadow of his missing father.
Schlegel ran on through the rain, reckoning if none of it mattered he could leave whenever he wanted. The thought rather cheered him up.
The archive was housed in one wing of the Residenz, an enormous old palace. Bits were missing from bomb damage and camouflage canopies hung over sections to disguise what from the air would be a glaring target. Schlegel checked that there was no sign of the dark saloon car before ducking into the hushed sanctuary of the archive.
The central reception area overlooked a court garden in a state of neglect. A display of posters from the early days of the Party hung on the walls. Most of the floor space was taken up with packing crates being organised by men in brown overalls who went about their business in a hushed manner.
Schlegel asked at the desk for Rehse and waited, staring at the puddle forming at his feet, until he was greeted by a tiny man with a disproportionately loud manner. Rehse was older than Schlegel was expecting, maybe even in his sixties. His mouth twisted up on one side, like half of an unsettling smile. He had what Schlegel thought of as a professor’s beard. His hair was like cut corn.
He came with a pretty secretary, presumably the same one that had been missing from her desk. She smiled at Schlegel and he decided perhaps life was not so bad after all, thinking how shallow he was.
In terms of proportion and scale, Rehse rather reminded Schlegel of Dr Goebbels in his equally palatial surroundings. Also like Goebbels, Rehse started conversations in the middle, offering a running commentary on the state of the archive. A lot was being moved out to safe storage, he said, raising his eyes towards the heavens. ‘Untold treasures. Fifty rooms!’ he exclaimed, with a sweep of his arm to show the size of the operation. ‘Not so many years ago it all had to be kept in my apartment.’
He made sure Schlegel admired the neo-classical surroundings before going on. ‘We’re a huge success. Exhibitions. Publications. Image copyright, that’s where Hoffmann was smart. Every time a photograph of his gets printed he takes a cut. I understand you are interested in purchase.’
‘What were you told?’
‘Somebody would come from Berlin,’ said Rehse vaguely. ‘The white-haired one,’ he added with a hiccough of a giggle. ‘So not you.’
Rehse smirked, shooed the secretary away and took Schlegel’s arm in a show of friendliness, an awkward gesture given their difference in height and Schlegel’s wet sleeve. Rehse had tiny feet in patent leather shoes.
‘Come to my office.’
Impressive corridor one, followed by even more impressive corridor two, then a room the size of a small ballroom, with French windows and a terrace on which a wet peacock prowled, making its ghastly noise.
Rehse had a built-up chair behind a desk while the ones for guests were low. He sat and said, ‘I would rather you didn’t sit given the state of your clothes.’
Schlegel remained standing, sodden and uncomfortable. He said, ‘I am enquiring on behalf of a third party. So far, everything has been too unspecific.’
‘In what way?’
‘My client has a very narrow field of interest.’ He added, not quite knowing why, ‘Pertaining to Herr Wolf.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Rehse. Schlegel presumed Gestapo Müller had warned the man to expect them.
‘This is an interesting piece,’ Rehse said, producing a postcard wrapped in cellophane which he placed on the desk for Schlegel to inspect. ‘Don’t touch. I don’t want it getting wet.’
The card showed an old picture of Munich.
‘And on the other side?’ asked Schlegel. Rehse turned it over for him. It wasn’t stamped, dated or addressed, though the message section had been filled in; appalling handwriting, a scribbled urgency, that Schlegel read with difficulty:
Although I have braved gunfire in the trenches and charmed rich ladies in drawing rooms and roused huge crowds to frenzied cheering, I am sexually and emotionally bereft.
Obviously Herr Wolf had written it, though Rehse was not saying. It was presumably there without the author’s knowledge, or perhaps not. The man had made such a d
isplay of his life in terms of biography intersecting with political destiny; maybe in the early days he was less censored.
‘There is supposed to be a confession too,’ said Schlegel.
‘Don’t believe everything you hear,’ said Rehse. ‘Who told you about that?’
‘A man in Berlin.’
‘Rösti, no doubt.’ Rehse snorted. ‘He trades in such rumours to enable him to sell what little tat he has.’
‘I am thinking about Anton Schlegel as the missing piece in all of this.’
‘You are a relative, I suppose?’ Rehse asked sharply.
‘A long-lost one. I am told Anton Schlegel made a confession too.’
‘Again Rösti, I presume. Let me show you something.’
Rehse reached into a drawer and produced two sets of books in slipcases identical to Anton Schlegel’s copy of Mein Kampf.
Rehse said, ‘These have recently been passed on to us, which makes me curious about why you are here. This copy is from the limited signed first edition of Mein Kampf dedicated to one Anton Schlegel.’
Schlegel, baffled by this turn of events, wondered if he were looking at a fake or whether Rösti was in the process of cheating him.
‘That’s my copy if you got it from Rösti,’ he protested.
Rehse said nothing.
Schlegel asked, ‘Does that mean you are interested in purchasing it for the archive?’
‘It is of no particular value to us at the moment. Anton Schlegel is a forgotten figure and while the edition is rare the dedicatee is of no significance. Sorry to disappoint.’
Schlegel presumed that was Rehse’s way of driving his price down.
‘But if Anton Schlegel did make a confession wouldn’t that give the book a certain cachet?’
‘I think you will find you have been misled. We acquired Anton’s papers after his death. Disappointing on the whole, although there was an unsent letter to his son that amounted to a sort of confession. I expect you will find that is what Rösti was referring to.’
‘To his son?’ asked Schlegel, thinking his father must be dead after all if Rehse had his papers. ‘Can this letter be seen?’ he asked, wondering to himself: Confessing what?