by Chris Petit
‘An application must be made in writing.’ Rehse smirked. ‘It takes time.’
Schlegel remembered Rösti saying he thought whatever was going on was part of a controlled exercise. He asked sarcastically, ‘What of the letter written by Herr Wolf to his niece, surely that is of academic interest as another unsent letter to a relative? Perhaps it would also be possible to see that too, if one were to apply in writing.’
Rehse gave a withering look and said, ‘Not for viewing.’
‘But it exists.’
Rehse steepled his hands, a rather absurd gesture for one so tiny, unable to resist showing off. ‘Let us say we were able to intervene when the letter came up for sale fifteen years ago. For performing that favour, we were rewarded with the first archive grant.’ Rehse looked around at his grand surroundings and said, ‘Every cloud has a silver lining. Our discretion was rewarded.’
Outside, the rain grew louder, with the first flashes of lightning and a rumble of thunder.
Rehse turned to the window and said they got quite a lot of storms at that time of year. ‘Big electrical ones, to do with the mountains. The gods getting angry. Have you done anything to offend?’
It was meant as both a joke and not a joke. Schlegel turned the question around by asking, ‘What did Anton Schlegel do to offend?’
‘He was a man who kept his head down, but perhaps not enough,’ Rehse said enigmatically.
‘Concerning what?’
Rehse shrugged. ‘It was said he had an unhealthy relationship with Herr Wolf’s late niece.’
‘And the point of any confession made by him, were it to exist, would be in connection with that?’
‘Fish all you like,’ Rehse said with a wave of his hand. ‘As you say, if it exists. Speaking hypothetically, perhaps it was given to protect the dead girl’s reputation. It would have been unacceptable if a Jew had subsequently confessed to having had a carnal relationship her. Whatever else Anton was, he was not Jewish.’ Rehse gave a whinny and asked, ‘Confessional enough for you?’
More flashes and a crash of thunder, closer, and the drumming of heavier rain. The peacock shrieked like a lost soul.
Yet Dreck the waiter had said that his father sat at the pansies’ table in the Bratwurst Glöckl.
‘Did you know him personally?’ Schlegel asked.
‘Never met the man.’
It was bucketing down now, the gap between flashes and the reports closer as the storm moved overhead.
‘And Fredi Huber?’
Rehse looked up in surprise. ‘Of no interest to us. He had a following in his day but what he wrote was of no lasting value.’
‘Didn’t his newspaper once show a mock-up of the Führer marrying a Negroid woman?’
‘Exactly. Stupid, juvenile stuff.’ Rehse looked out at the storm and said, ‘You can’t leave now until it passes. Perhaps I can get someone to show you around.’
‘Your secretary, perhaps,’ Schlegel said, feeling superficial.
‘Married,’ said Rehse, not amused.
A simultaneous flash and crash. Schlegel, tiring of this annoying little man, decided to assert himself. ‘It has come to the attention of a senior party in Berlin’ – lightning flash – ‘that a document might surface, which if exposed’ – thunder – ‘could cause huge collateral damage, some of it no doubt affecting the archive. It is our task to deliver said document to the relevant party so it is removed from circulation. Just as the letter you referred to’ – simultaneous flash and thunder crack – ‘played a part in your institution’s founding – and it is a magnificent institution – so the deliverance of this document should be seen perhaps as playing a similar role in your continuing existence.’
Rehse grunted. He didn’t look that bothered. ‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said.
Schlegel watched him leave the room. The man walked putting one foot so directly in front of the other that any trail would look like that of a monoped. The sky was purple. The cries of the drenched peacock were drowned by the storm. Schlegel could just hear Rehse talking on the telephone outside and wondered why he couldn’t have made the call in the room. He stood, still soaked through, and contemplated walking out of his life, going through the French windows into the rain, letting the grime of years wash away, trudging on until he reached the sea.
Rehse returned, looking thoughtful and waited for another round of thunder to pass.
‘Come with me, while you are waiting for the storm to end. I want to show you something.’
‘To do with?’
‘Of personal interest to you.’
Schlegel obediently followed, curious. They went down a level to a basement. The sound of the storm grew muffled. Schlegel was reminded more of a prison or a bank with its security grilles and barred gates, controlled by combination locks.
‘The inner sanctum,’ said Rehse in a confidential tone, holding open another gate. Schlegel had quite lost any sense of direction. They had only made a couple of turns and walked down two or three long corridors but he doubted if he could find the way back.
‘Ah, here we are,’ said Rehse, opening another tall barred gateway, not giving on to a corridor as before, but a room. Rehse stepped aside for Schlegel who entered, realising too late that Rehse was locking the gate behind him.
He protested. The situation was absurd, being virtually kidnapped by this tiny man. He grabbed Rehse through the bars and lifted him off the ground. The man weighed next to nothing. Schlegel demanded to be released. The storm outside now seemed to be mocking him.
Rehse shook his head, saying, ‘You have to stay here for your own good.’
‘Locked up?’
‘Please put me down.’
Schlegel did so and for a moment he thought Rehse might break into a malevolent jig, but he composed himself. Schlegel decided perhaps Rehse was an unlikely guardian angel, unwittingly protecting him from the return of the fat man and the cadaver; unless of course Rehse was holding him on their behalf.
Schlegel listened to Rehse’s departing footsteps. The room’s metal bars were like a jail in a Western film. The furnishings included a simple couch, suggesting it was sometimes used by night staff. The walls were lined with archive boxes, full of old receipts for accounts, of no interest. As he had no idea how long he would be there he stripped off his clothes, wrung them out as best he could, put on his damp underwear and arranged the rest to dry. He lay down shivering and a little feverish.
In isolation, Schlegel found he was able to visualise the niece clearly for the first time. He sensed it all had gone wrong very quickly. Wherever the final blame lay, he knew for sure that the relationship was responsible for her death.
He had a vivid image of standing next to her in the apartment, and realised he must be dreaming now, but very close to the surface, making everything appear almost tangible. She was teasing him about his white hair rather than the wretched dye. She said, ‘We’re not so different.’ A stone-deaf old woman wandered through the night-time rooms brandishing a knife and carrying a loaf of bread. The canary was out of its cage, flying around in a panic, and instead of being yellow or green, or whatever colour canaries were supposed to be, someone had dyed it black. Even in his dream, Schlegel laughed at such ridiculous symbolism. Muted voices came from the library and Schlegel knew her uncle was talking with Anton Schlegel; the girl was behind him, saying, ‘Don’t go in. We must be very quiet because there is great sickness in the house.’ She announced that she secretly loathed chrysanthemums; they were her uncle’s choice. The last thing he remembered her saying was, ‘We’re the little people. They kick us around like they kick everyone around.’ Then he was a small child again, standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs he didn’t recognise and looking up.
He woke deciding she had shot herself after all. If the dream had shown him anything it was suicide as a state of mind, which once entered became like a refuge beyond everything. He understood it gave her the choice of reclaiming herself in the moment of obliterat
ion: See, this what I have done.
So that was that, Schlegel thought, until a complication suggested itself. He dismissed it but it refused to go away: that she was murdered while in a suicidal state , and was thus deprived of the right to determine her own fate.
*
Gradually in that entombed space a presence manifested itself. Schlegel heard the scrape of chair legs, then slow footsteps, pacing endlessly back and forth. He could not tell whether they were coming from above him or were on the same level. The pacing had a drag to it. Uneven and a tapping. Someone with a limp, using a stick.
He lay listening for what seemed like an age to their rhythmic monotony. He must have dozed off without realising because the footsteps were approaching. Schlegel hurriedly dressed. He had no idea what to expect; certainly not the sight that greeted him: a grotesque, shaven-headed man, wearing a powder blue suit, who unlocked the door and quietly said, ‘I am ready for you now.’
Schlegel found himself staring at one of the oddest men he had ever seen.
40
Martin Bormann, June 1934
In that last hectic week of June 1934, almost three years after Geli Raubal’s death, Bormann spent his days getting rid of the loose ends still surrounding the affair: the scribblers, the badmouths, the intriguers and the ones that just wouldn’t shut up.
There was mordant humour to some of Bormann’s clear out. Zehnter and his head wine waiter at the Bratwurst Glöckl ostensibly went because they were fairies, though that wasn’t a capital offence. The real reasons were not keeping their mouths zipped about a drunken Führer and his niece in their restaurant the night before she died, and one too many references to Adolf’s ‘shit-eating grin’.
Distinguished local music critic Willi Schmid was carted off and killed in a case of ‘mistaken identity’. Grovelling apologies were made to his family; the ‘mistake’ because no one could come up with a good enough official reason for killing such a distinguished figure. It wasn’t as though there was a difference of musical opinion or that his reviews were so awful.
It went back to Geli. She had been reported plotting with Schmid behind the Führer’s back, planning to run away to Vienna to continue her so-called music career, even though she could barely hold a tune. Schmid, besotted, had promised introductions.
Anton Schlegel was always adamant there was no substance to the rumour, but it wasn’t enough to save Willi. In fact, the Schmid story was one of multiples of false information put out by Anton following the niece’s death: a feint here, a dummy there, a blizzard to obscure the facts.
Then there was Fredi Huber. Down on everybody’s list to go. Gutter press and what the man had written about the Führer vile enough to see him done in twice over. Yet Anton Schlegel made a point of coming to Bormann to plead Huber’s case.
‘What’s to plead?’ Bormann asked. These days he pretended he was busier than he was to Anton, whose falling star was typical of the Führer. Anyone to whom he felt over-indebted got the shove in the end. Ernst Röhm had made the double mistake of thinking he could stand up to the Führer and that old loyalties would save him.
Heady, pin-sharp glee became the mood of those days of tight plotting. The rest were too excited to notice Bormann’s stealth. However much Heini Himmler and Göring pored over the lists at Tempelhof Airport on the Sunday at the start of the great purge, the names were a foregone conclusion because Bormann, for ‘reasons of coordination’, had made sure that they all crossed his desk.
Bormann didn’t know whether to be impressed or annoyed by Anton Schlegel’s revelations about Fredi Huber.
Three years before, he and Anton had worked their arses off to control the chaos surrounding the girl’s death. It had been Anton’s idea to say she had shot herself in the heart: ‘More romantic than a bullet in the head.’ The pliant Doctor Müller recorded accordingly, with his drunkard’s shaking hand. Two deadbeat cops had been bribed to take witness statements and leave it at that, without viewing the body.
Bormann, still feeling his way, deferred to Anton, who insisted, ‘Push it right to the edge. Give them what they want, all the dirty hidden linen washed in public – the point being, none of it can be proven. All they will be able to conclude is the girl’s confused world was about to come crashing down, so she killed herself as the only way out.’
Anton Schlegel summarised for Bormann: ‘Cause chaos and control it, so that the Führer survives, and if the homos are seen as part of the problem so be it.’
Bormann asked if Anton wasn’t part of that same homo clique.
Anton shrugged. ‘If I have to I will acquire a wife. I have done so before. I am not unfond of women.’
Part of Bormann’s suspicion during the lead-up to the 1934 bloodbath concerned how much Anton had been running on the side and he hadn’t known. He had never got to the bottom of the man’s relationship with the Führer and his niece, and now Anton was trying to tell him that Fredi Huber, one of the Party’s most vociferous opponents, had secretly been working for them all along. Fredi fucking Huber! The Führer wanted the man’s guts for garters.
Bormann asked on what grounds had Fredi been amenable. Anton knew Fredi socially, he said, making it sound casual. Fredi had told him that Party law yers were threatening to sue over what he had already written about the suspicious nature of the niece’s death and feared his employers would cave under the pressure. Anton had suggested other targets to Fredi, as a way of taking the heat off.
What Anton didn’t tell Bormann was that blackmail had played its part. Family man Fredi trawled for boys in his spare time, so had no choice but cooperate.
Unlike others, Anton was looking beyond the immediate crisis to work out how what was universally being regarded as a complete disaster for the Führer’s public image could in fact be exploited for political advantage.
It was already plain to Anton that the Party’s internal schism with Ernst Röhm would have to be addressed in the end by violence, but he saw ground could be gained in the meantime through stealth. He steered Fredi Huber to go after Röhm and his brownshirts. Fredi obliged by turning to the wider picture.
One Fredi Huber exposé was accompanied by a cartoon of an overweight stormtrooper with a distinct resemblance to Röhm, wielding a whip and standing over a prone woman, her hands protecting her head. Wrong sex; it was boys Ernst liked knocking into shape but the point stood. Fredi reminded readers of Röhm’s homosexuality, exposed by The Munich Post the previous summer. Fredi gave dire warning of high-ranking ‘bachelors and homosexuals’ in the Party. Fredi thundered: What did the Party’s espoused sanctity of the family count for when it was led by corrupters of young boys or a man who drove women to suicide?
It was political war in the guise of grand scandal, but what no one saw, apart from Anton, was that Fredi’s broadening of the attack meant the real target was already becoming diffused.
Even if Fredi Huber’s material was controlled by a hidden agenda, no one would dream of mistaking the reporter for anything but a tough crusader. Anton was the only one to see that Fredi had a way of laughing up his sleeve, however much he lived in fear of exposure. Something else Bormann wasn’t told – and only later came to suspect – was Anton’s decision to play both ends against the middle by recommending that Fredi keep his suspicions about the Führer’s involvement in his niece’s death to himself, while implying he shouldn’t drop them altogether, just in case, as a possible insurance.
Bormann’s reaction to Anton’s plea for clemency was the reasonable one of saying if no one else knew about Fredi’s double role, what did it matter if he went down the pan?
Anton Schlegel’s approach to Bormann turned out to be a big mistake as it backfired on him because Bormann decided if Fredi stayed then Anton had to go. He’d had his fill of pansies. They were not sentimental days. Bormann told himself he would miss Anton even so, but it was time for the sorcerer’s apprentice to take over. As for Fredi, even if he was off the hook, he would still have to make a run for it
as a marked man in everyone else’s eyes.
41
The man standing before Schlegel in his dandy’s pale suit had a pampered air and appeared so gross it looked as though someone had taken an air-pressure pump and inflated him until he was in danger of splitting, leaving Schlegel to wonder at the prospect of watching him deflate like a punctured tyre.
Flash and vulgar were the only words that came to mind. A big ring on the pinky. Another, extraordinarily, on the man’s thumb, something Schlegel had never seen before. A fancy clip for the loud tie. The big shaven skull.
The man said, ‘I find it easier working at night. I would have come earlier but something came up. My apologies. Follow me.’
The voice Schlegel decided was the same as the one that had answered the secretary’s telephone when he had called the archive earlier.
He followed the man’s awkward, scything gait, the result of a damaged foot. Stairs he could manage only one at a time. They ended up in another windowless space, much larger than the one downstairs. The man locked the door behind them: more shelves crammed with box files, this one with a desk and two reading chairs and an air of monastic contemplation. Schlegel found himself staring stupidly at the man’s mismatched footwear. The left shoe was brown suede. The special built-up boot was made from extra-shiny black leather.
Seeing Schlegel looking, he said, ‘It’s special waterproof material. As you can see, it doesn’t match.’
Schlegel felt both drawn and repulsed by such ugliness. The man’s eyes appeared indifferent to the point of detachment. Schlegel couldn’t say what colour they were. Pupils didn’t come in black but that’s what he would have said.
The man asked, ‘What on earth happened to your hair?’
Schlegel couldn’t be bothered to explain. The joke was wearing thin.
The man rubbed his hands vigorously over his bald scalp, brushed his shoulders and said, ‘I didn’t know until I lost my hair that you could still get dandruff. What colour is your hair normally?