A Quiet Flame (28 page)

Normally I would have put up more of an argument. I might even have offered my resignation. But I was tired after the rail journey from Munich and very sore from the beating I had received. All I wanted to do was go home, have a bath and a drink, and sleep in a bed. Besides, there was still the small matter of a general election in a few days’ time, on July 31. I still held out some hope that the German people would come to its senses and make the Social Democrats the largest party in the Reichstag. After which the army would have little choice but to restore the Prussian government and throw the likes of Papen and Bracht and Melcher and Mosle out of their illegally held offices.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“That’s all, Gunther.”

“Permission to take a week’s leave of absence, sir.”

“Granted.”

I walked out slowly, with Ernst Gennat bringing up the rear. Mosle remained behind in what was, for a while, Melcher’s office.

“I’m sorry, Bernie,” said Gennat. “But there was really nothing I could do.”

“So you can talk, after all.”

Gennat smiled a small, weary smile. “I’ve been in the force for more than thirty years, Bernie. I was a commissar in 1906. One thing I’ve learned in that time is to know which battles to fight and which ones to concede. There’s no point in arguing with these bastards any more than there was a point in going up against the army. To my mind, Papen’s government is doomed one way or the other. We just have to hope and pray that the election turns out right. After which you can go back to being a homicide detective. Maybe Izzy and the rest of them as well. Although after what happened to your friend Herzefelde in Munich, I rather think he’s well out of it. Martial law will be lifted in days, I suspect. They won’t dare try to hold the elections with the army still on the streets. And the charges against Weiss and Heimannsberg will be dropped for lack of evidence. Grzesinski’s already planning a series of speeches around the city to defend his policy of nonviolence. So. Go home. Get well. Put your faith in German democracy. And pray that Hindenburg stays alive.”

BUENOS AIRES, 1950

I
WAS WORKING LATE in my office at the Casa Rosada. It wasn’t much more than a desk and a filing cabinet and a coatrack in the corner of the larger SIDE office overlooking Irigoyen and facing the Ministry of Finance. My so-called colleagues left me quite alone, which reminded me a little of Paul Herzefelde’s desk in the detectives’ room at police headquarters in Munich. It wasn’t that they thought I was Jewish, merely that they didn’t trust me, and I can’t say I blamed them. I had no idea what Colonel Montalbán had told people about me. Perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps everything. Perhaps something quite misleading. But that’s the thing about being a spy. It’s easy to get the idea you’re being spied on.

The KRIPO case files from Berlin were open on the desk in front of me. The box that had contained them was the nearest thing to a time machine I was ever likely to encounter. It all seemed so long ago. And it seemed like yesterday. What was it that Hedda Adlon used to say? The Confucian curse. May you live in interesting times. Yes, that was it. I’d certainly done that, all right. As lives went, mine had been more interesting than most.

By now I had a clear recollection of everything that had happened during the last months of the Weimar Republic, and it was plain to me that the only reason I hadn’t managed to solve the Anita Schwarz murder was that following my meeting with Kurt Melcher I never worked Homicide again. After I came back from a week’s leave, I took up my new post in the records department, hoping against hope that somehow the SDP would turn its fortunes around and that the republic might be restored to full health. It didn’t happen.

The elections of July 31, 1932, found the Nazis gaining more seats in the Reichstag but still without the overall majority that would have enabled Hitler to form a government. Incredibly, the Communists then sided with the Nazis in parliament to force a vote of no-confidence in Papen’s hapless government. After that, I disliked the Communists even more than I disliked the Nazis.

Once again the Reichstag was dissolved. And once again an election was called, this time for November 6. And, once again, the republic clung on by its fingernails as the Nazis failed to achieve an overall majority. It was now Schleicher’s turn to take a shot at being chancellor of Germany. He lasted two months. Another putsch was forecast. And, desperate for someone who could govern Germany with any authority whatsoever, Hindenburg sacked the incompetent Schleicher and asked Adolf Hitler, the only party leader who hadn’t had a turn at being chancellor, to form a government.

Less than thirty days later, Hitler made certain that there could be no more inconclusive elections. On February 27, 1933, he burned down the Reichstag. The Nazi revolution had begun. Not long after that, I left the police and went to work at the Hotel Adlon. I forgot all about Anita Schwarz. And I never again spoke to Ernst Gennat. Not even five years later, when I went back to the Alex at the request of General Heydrich.

It was all there in the box file. My notes, my reports, my police diary, my memoranda, Illmann’s forensic report, my original list of suspects. And more. Much more. Because it was only now I realized it wasn’t just the Anita Schwarz notes the box contained but the case notes on the murder of Elizabeth Bremer as well. After I had left Homicide, the Schwarz case had been handed to my sergeant, Heinrich Grund, and he had managed to have Herzefelde’s notes sent to him from Munich. Much to my surprise, I was now looking at the very case file I had traveled to see during that fateful July of 1932.

Most of Herzefelde’s inquiry had been focused on Walter Pieck, a twenty-two-year-old man from Günzburg. Pieck was Elizabeth Bremer’s skating teacher at the Prinzregenten Stadium in Munich. In summer he was a tennis coach at the Ausstellungspark. He was also a member of the right-wing Stahlhelm and a Nazi Party member since 1930. It was hard to see what a twenty-two-year-old man could have seen in a fifteen-year-old girl. At least it was until you looked at Elizabeth Bremer’s photograph. She looked just like Lana Turner and, just like Lana, filled every inch of the sweater she was wearing in the picture. The happiest moments of my life have been the few I passed at home in the bosom of my family. They would have been even happier if my family had been possessed of a bosom like Elizabeth Bremer’s. I’d seen a bigger chest, but only on a pirate ship.

Reading Herzefelde’s case notes, I was reminded that Pieck had maintained Elizabeth had binned him the week before her murder because she had caught him reading her diary. In Elizabeth’s eyes, this was an unpardonable sin, and to me, her upset was easy to understand: over the years I’ve read a few private diaries myself, and not always for the best. Hardly satisfied with this explanation, Grund had got hold of the diary, and noticed that Elizabeth was in the habit of noting her menstrual period with the Greek letter omega. In the weeks preceding her murder, a sigma had replaced the omega in Elizabeth Bremer’s diary, leading Grund to suppose that she may have been pregnant. Grund had interviewed Pieck and suggested that this had been the real reason why he had been in the habit of reading his young girlfriend’s diary, and that he had helped to procure her an illegal abortion. But, despite several days of questioning, Pieck had steadfastly denied this. What was more, Pieck had a cast-iron alibi in the shape of his father, who just happened to be the police chief of Günzburg, which is several hundred miles from Berlin.

Neither Elizabeth’s own doctor nor any of her school friends knew about a pregnancy. But Grund noted Elizabeth had inherited some money in her grandfather’s will, which she had used to open a savings account, and that the day before her death she had withdrawn almost half of this money and none of it had been found on her body. And he had concluded that even if Pieck had not helped her to procure an abortion, Elizabeth—by all accounts a resourceful and capable girl—must have managed to do so by herself. And that Anita Schwarz might have done the same. And that these abortions had been botched. And that the illegal abortionist had sought to cover his tracks by making their accidental deaths look like lust murders.

I couldn’t disagree with much of Grund’s conclusions. And yet no one was ever arrested for the murders. The leads seemed to dry up and, after 1933, there were only two more notes on the file. One was that in 1934, Walter Pieck joined the SS and became a guard at Dachau concentration camp. The other concerned Anita Schwarz’s father, Otto.

Having joined the Berlin police in 1933, as Kurt Daluege’s deputy assistant, Otto Schwarz was subsequently appointed as a judge.

I got up from my desk and went to the window. The lights were on in the Ministry of Finance. Probably they were trying to work out what to do about Argentina’s rampant inflation. Either that or they were having to work late to decide how they were going to raise the money to pay for Evita’s jewelry. The street below was busy with people. For some reason there was a long line of people outside the Ministry of Labor. And traffic. Buenos Aires was always full of traffic: taxis, trolleybuses, micros, American cars, and trucks, like so many unconnected thoughts in a detective’s brain. Outside my window, all the traffic was going in the same direction. So were my thoughts. I told myself that just maybe I had it all figured out, more or less.

Anita Schwarz must have got pregnant and, fearing the scandal that might result from the discovery of their disabled daughter’s amateur prostitution, Herr and Frau Schwarz must have paid the medicine man from Munich to carry out an abortion on her. Probably that was why she had been carrying so much money in her pocket. Only the abortion procedure had gone wrong and, anxious to cover up his crime, the medicine man had tried to make her death look like a lust murder. The same way he had done in Munich. After all, it was better for him that the police should be looking for some kind of crazed sex-killer than an incompetent doctor. Lots of women had died at the hands of illegal abortionists. They weren’t called backstreet angel-makers for nothing. I recalled the case of one man, a dentist in the Bavarian city of Ulm, who, during the 1920s, had actually strangled several pregnant women for sex while he was supposed to have been giving them abortions.

The more I thought about it, the more I liked my theory. The man I had been looking for was a doctor, or some sort of medicine man, most probably from Munich. My first idea was the jelly doctor, Kassner, until I remembered checking out his alibi: on the day of Anita Schwarz’s murder, he’d been at a urologists’ conference in Hannover. And then I remembered his estranged wife’s young friend, the Gypsy-looking type with a little open-topped Opel, from Munich. Beppo. That was his name. A strange name for a German. Kassner had said he was a student at Munich University. A medical student, perhaps. But how many students could have afforded a new Opel? Unless, of course, he’d been supplementing his income by carrying out illegal abortions. Possibly in Kassner’s own apartment, when he wasn’t there. And if, like many students who came to sample Berlin’s world-famous nightlife, this Beppo had contracted a venereal disease, who better than Kassner to help him out with a course of protonsil, the new magic-bullet cure? It would certainly have explained why Kassner’s own address had appeared on the suspect list I’d made using KRIPO’s Devil’s Directory and the patient list copied in Kassner’s office. Beppo, then. The man I’d met outside Kassner’s own front door. Why not? In which case, if somehow he was here, in Argentina, I might easily recognize him again. Of course, if he was in Argentina, that would have to mean that he’d done something criminal to have left Germany in the first place. Something in the SS, perhaps. Not that he’d seemed like the ideal SS type. Not in 1932. Back then they’d liked them to look Aryan, blond and blue-eyed, like Heydrich. Like me. Beppo had certainly not been that.

I tried to picture him again in my mind’s eye. Medium height, good-looking, but swarthy with it. Yes, like a Gypsy. The Nazis had hated Gypsies almost as much as they had hated the Jews. Of course, he wouldn’t have been the first person to have joined the SS who wasn’t the perfect Aryan type. Himmler, for one. Eichmann, for another. But if Beppo had been possessed of a medical qualification, and had been able to prove that his family had been free of non-Aryan blood for four generations, he might easily have got himself into the medical corps of a Waffen-SS unit. I decided to ask Dr. Vaernet if he could remember such a man.

“Working late, I see.” It was Colonel Montalbán.

“Yes. I do my best thinking at night. When it’s quiet.”

“Me, I’m more of a morning person.”

“You surprise me. I thought you people liked to arrest people in the middle of the night.”

He smiled. “Actually, no. We prefer to arrest people first thing in the morning.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

He came over to the window and pointed at the line of people outside the Ministry of Labor. “You see those people? On the other side of Irigoyen? They’re there to see Evita.”

“I thought it was a little late to be looking for a job.”

“She spends every evening and half the night in there,” he said. “Handing out money and favors to the country’s poor and sick and homeless.”

“Very noble. And during an election year, pragmatic, too.”

“That’s not why she does it. You’re a German. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. Was it the Nazis who made you so cynical?”

“No. I’ve been cynical since March of 1915.”

“What happened then?”

“The Second Battle of Ypres.”

“Of course.”

“I sometimes think if we’d won that, we’d have won the war, which would have been better for everyone, in the long run. The British and the Germans would have agreed on a peace, and Hitler would have remained in well-deserved obscurity.”

“Luis Irigoyen, who was related to our president and was our ambassador in Germany—he’s the one this street is named after—he met Hitler many times and admired him enormously. He told me once that Hitler was the most fascinating man he ever met.”