A Quiet Flame (8 page)

Stahlecker looked at the man, who held the briefcase tightly to his chest as if he really did have something to hide. “Well, sir? How about it?”

Reluctantly, the man allowed Stahlecker to take the briefcase and then to open it. A few seconds later, a pile of pornographic magazines was lying on the desk sergeant’s blotter. The magazine was called
Figaro,
and on the cover of each copy was a picture of seven naked boys and girls, about ten or eleven years old, sitting in the branches of a dead tree, like a pride of small white lions.

“You old pervert,” snarled one of the boot girls.

“This puts rather a different complexion on things, sir,” Stahlecker told Koch.

“That is a naked-culture magazine,” insisted Koch. “Dedicated to the cause of free life reform. It doesn’t prove anything of what this vile man has alleged.”

“It proves one thing,” said the boot girl with the whip. “It proves you like looking at dirty pictures of little boys and girls.”

We left them all in a heated argument.

“What did I tell you?” said Grund as we went back to the car. “This city is a whore and your beloved republic is her pimp. When are you going to wake up to that fact, Bernie?”

 

 

 

ON BEHRENSTRASSE, I parked the car in front of a glass-covered arcade that led to Unter den Linden. The arcade was nicknamed the Back Passage, because it was a popular pick-up spot for Berlin’s male prostitutes. These were easily identifiable thanks to the short white trousers, sailor shirts, and peaked caps many of them wore to appear younger to the tree stumps—their middle-aged clients who, until they had made their selection, would walk up and down the passage pretending to look in the windows of the arcade’s antique shops.

It was a warm night. By my reckoning, there were at least eighty or ninety of the city’s sultriest boys milling around underneath the famous REEMTSMA sign—one of the few left unbroken by the Nazi SA. Storm troopers were supposed to smoke a Trommler brand called Story, so, being Nazis and, therefore, very brand-loyal, they often took exception to other brands of tobacco, of which Reemtsma was perhaps the best known. If the SA did show up, all of the sultry boys would take to their heels or risk a beating—perhaps worse. The SA seemed to hate queers almost as much as they hated Communists and Jews.

We found the apartment above a café in a smart-looking Romanesque building. I pulled the polished brass bell and we waited. A minute later we heard a man’s voice above our heads, and we stepped back on the sidewalk to get a better look at him.

“Yes?”

“Herr Schwarz?”

“Yes.”

“Police, sir. May we come up?”

“Yes. Wait there. I’ll come down and let you in.”

While we waited, Heinrich Grund fulminated against all the sultries we’d seen. “Russian fairies,” he said.

Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, many of Berlin’s prostitutes, male and female, had been Russians. But this was no longer true, and I did my best to ignore him. It wasn’t that I liked queers. I just didn’t dislike them as much as he did.

Otto Schwarz came to the door to let us in. We showed him our KRIPO warrant discs and introduced ourselves, and he nodded as if he had been expecting us. He was a big man with a belly that looked as if a lot of money had been poured into it. His fair hair was cut very short at the sides and wavy on top. Underneath a swinish nose that was almost divided in two by a thick scar was a nearly invisible toothbrush mustache. That he reminded me strongly of Ernst Röhm, the SA leader, was a first impression—reinforced by the uniform he was wearing, illegally. There had been a ban on Nazi uniforms since June 1930, and as recently as April, in a campaign to reduce Nazi terrorism in Berlin, Reich President Hindenburg had dissolved the SA and the SS. I wasn’t much good at recognizing the shoulder and collar insignia on their uniforms, but Grund was. The two of them made polite conversation as we tramped upstairs. That was how I came to learn not just that Schwarz was an Oberführer in the SA but also that this was the equivalent of a brigadier general. There was a small part of me that wanted to join in this polite conversation. I wanted to say I was surprised to find an SA Oberführer at home when there were Communists to lynch and Jewish windows to smash. But since I was about to tell Schwarz that his daughter was dead, I had to make do with an observation about his wearing the uniform of a proscribed organization. Half of the polenta in Berlin would have looked the other way, ignored it. But then half of the cops in Berlin were Nazis.

Many of my colleagues seemed quite happy to be sleepwalking their way to a dictatorship. I wasn’t one of them.

“You know that since April 14 of this year, it’s illegal to wear that uniform, don’t you, sir?” I said.

“Surely that hardly matters now. The ban on uniforms is about to be revoked.”

“Until then it’s still illegal, sir. However, under the circumstances, I’ll overlook it.”

Schwarz colored a little and then squeezed his fists, one after the other. These made a noise like a noose tightening. I imagine he was wishing there was one around my neck. He bit his lip. It was easier to reach than my face. He pushed open the apartment door. Stiffly, he said, “Please. Come in, gentlemen.”

The apartment was a shrine to Adolf Hitler. There was a portrait of him in an oval frame in the hall, and another, different portrait of him inside a square frame in the sitting room. A copy of
Mein Kampf
lay open on a book stand that was on the sideboard, next to a family Bible, and behind these was a framed photograph of Otto Schwarz and Adolf Hitler. They were wearing leather flying helmets and sitting in the front seat of an enormous open-top Mercedes with cheesy grins on their faces, as if they had just won the ADAC Eifelrennen, and in record time. By one of the armchairs on the floor lay a dozen or so copies of
Der Stürmer,
the vehemently anti-Semitic newspaper. I’d seen election posters for Adolf Hitler that were less obviously Nazi than the Schwarz family home.

In her own sweet, big-breasted, blond, and blue-eyed way, Frau Schwarz looked no less of a Nazi than her storm trooper of a husband. When she put her arm through her husband’s arm, I half expected them both to shout “Germany, awake!” and “Death to the Jews” before breaking up the furniture and then singing the “Horst Wessel Song.” Sometimes it was only these daydreaming little fantasies that made my job at all bearable. It certainly wasn’t two hundred fifty marks a month. Frau Schwarz wore a full, gathered dirndl skirt with traditional embroidery, a tight-laced-up blouse, an apron, and an expression that was a combination of fear and hostility.

Schwarz put his hand on top of the hand his wife had threaded through his ham hock of an arm, and then she put her other hand on his. But for their grim and resolute faces, they reminded me of a couple getting married.

At last they looked like they were ready to hear what they knew I was going to tell them. I’d like to say I admired their courage and that I felt sorry for them. The truth is, I didn’t, very much. The sight of Schwarz’s illegal uniform and the battalion number on his collar patch made me almost indifferent to their feelings. Assuming they had any. A very good friend of mine, POWM Emil Kuhfeld, a first sergeant with the SCHUPO, had been shot dead at the head of the detachment of riot police trying to disperse a large group of Communists in Frankfurter Allee. A Nazi commissar at Police Station 85, who had investigated the case, had managed to pin the murder on a Communist. But nearly everyone at the Alex knew he had suppressed the evidence of a witness who had seen Kuhfeld shot by an SA man with a rifle. The day after Kuhfeld’s murder, this SA man, one Walter Grabsch, was discovered dead in his Kadinerstrasse flat, having conveniently committed suicide. Kuhfeld’s funeral had been the biggest ever given to a Berlin policeman. I had helped carry the coffin. Which was how I knew that the battalion number on Schwarz’s blue collar patch was the same battalion to which Walter Grabsch had belonged.

I gave Herr and Frau Schwarz all of the hard words of grief straight from the holster. I didn’t even try to rub them in the snow first.

“We think we’ve found the body of your daughter, Anita. We believe she was murdered. Obviously I’ll have to ask you to come down to the station to identify her. Shall we say tomorrow morning, ten o’clock, at the Police Praesidium, on Alexanderplatz?”

Otto Schwarz nodded silently.

I had retailed bad news before, of course. Just the previous week I’d had to tell a mother in Moabit that her seventeen-year-old son, a schoolboy at the local Gymnasium, had been murdered by Communists who’d mistaken him for a brown shirt. “Are you sure it’s him, Commissar?” she asked me more than once during the course of my lachrymose time with her. “Are you sure there hasn’t been a mistake? Couldn’t it be someone else?”

Herr and Frau Schwarz seemed to be taking it on the chin, however.

I glanced around the apartment again. There was a little embroidery sampler in a frame above the door. It read WILLINGNESS FOR SELF-SACRIFICE and was stitched in red, with an exclamation point. I’d seen one before, and I knew the quotation was from
Mein Kampf.
I wasn’t surprised to see it, of course. But I was surprised that I could see no photographs of their daughter, Anita. Most people who are parents have one or two of their children around the place.

“We have the photograph you gave us, on file,” I said. “So we’re quite sure it’s her, I’m afraid. But it would save time if you could spare us some others.”

“Save time?” Otto Schwarz frowned. “I don’t understand. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Save time trying to catch her murderer,” I said coldly. “Someone may have seen her with him.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” Frau Schwarz said, and left the room, quite composed and less upset than if I’d told her that Hitler wouldn’t be coming to tea.

“Your wife seems to be taking it very well,” I said.

“My wife is a nurse at the Charité,” he said. “I suppose she’s used to dealing with bad news. Besides. We were sort of expecting the worst.”

“Really, sir?” I glanced at Grund, who stared balefully at me and then looked away.

“We’re very sorry for your loss, sir,” he told Schwarz. “Very sorry, indeed. Incidentally, there’s no need for both of you to come to the Praesidium tomorrow. And if tomorrow’s not convenient, we can always do it another time.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. But tomorrow will be fine.”

Grund nodded. “Best to get it over with, sir,” he said, nodding. “You’re probably right. And then you can get on with your grieving.”

“Yes. Thank you, Sergeant.”

“What was the nature of your daughter’s disability?” I asked.

“She was a spastic. It affected only the left side of her body. She had trouble walking, of course. There were also occasional seizures, spasms, and other involuntary movements. She couldn’t hear very well, either.”

Schwarz went over to the sideboard and, ignoring the Bible, laid his hand fondly on the open copy of Hitler’s book, as if his Führer’s warm words about the National Socialist movement might afford him some spiritual and philosophical solace.

“What about her capacity for understanding?” I asked.

He shook his head. “There was nothing wrong with her mind, if that’s what you mean?”

“It was.” I paused. “And I just wondered if you might be able to explain how she came to have five hundred marks on her.”

“Five hundred marks?”

“In her coat pocket.”

He shook his head. “There must be some mistake.”

“No, sir, there’s no mistake.”

“Where would Anita get five hundred marks? Someone must have put it there.”

I nodded. “I suppose that’s possible, sir.”

“No, really.”

“Do you have any other children, Herr Schwarz?”

He looked astonished even to be asked such a thing. “Good God, no. Do you think we would have risked having another child like Anita?” He sighed loudly, and suddenly there was a strong smell of something foul in the air. “No, we had quite enough to do just looking after her. It wasn’t easy, I can tell you. It wasn’t easy at all.”

Finally, Frau Schwarz returned with several photographs. They were old and rather faded. One was folded down at the edge, as if someone had handled it carelessly. “These are all that I could find,” she announced, still quite dry-eyed.

“All of them, did you say?”

“Yes. That’s all of them.”

“Thank you, Frau Schwarz. Thank you very much.” I nodded curtly. “Well, then. We had better be getting back to the station. Until tomorrow.”

Schwarz started to move toward the door.

“It’s all right, sir. We’ll see ourselves out.”

We went out of the apartment and down the stairs to the street. The Café Kerkau, beneath the apartment, was still open, but I was in the mood for something stronger than coffee. I cranked up the car’s two-cylinder engine and we drove east along Unter den Linden.

“I need a drink after that,” I said after a few minutes.

“I suppose it’s lucky you didn’t have a drink before,” observed Grund.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, you were a bit hard on them, sir.” He shook his head. “Christ, you didn’t even rub it with snow. You just gave it to them, grit and all. Right between the eyes.”

“Let’s go to the Resi,” I said. “Somewhere with lots of people.”

“And we all know how good you are with people,” Grund said bitterly. “Was it because he was a storm trooper that you treated him and his wife like they had no feelings?”

“Didn’t you see that collar patch? Twenty-first Battalion. That was the same SA battalion Walter Grabsch belonged to. You remember Walter Grabsch? He murdered Emil Kuhfeld.”

“That’s not what the local police said. And what about all the polenta the Commies have murdered? Those two police captains, Anlauf and Lenck. Not forgetting Paul Zankert. What about those fellows?”