The Lady from Zagreb (11 page)

T
he deputy prison governor was an ex-cop from the Alex named Ernst Kracauer. He’d been a lawyer and then a
Schupo
commissar for twenty years, and although he was a die-hard Nazi, he had the reputation of being hard but fair, if such a thing is possible in a place like that. I went to see him in his office and waited alone for him to return from one of his many duties. A rolltop was up against the yellow wall and a partners desk by the window; on this was an oak and brass inkwell set that looked more like a Habsburg coffin, and hanging on the wall, a Tiergarten scene of a Wilhelmine family by a bandstand; in my mind’s eye they were probably listening to “The Song of Krumme Lanke.” The dusty office window was as big as a church triptych but the room still needed the piano desk lamp to see through the gloom. Outside, some prisoners were tending a large vegetable patch, which boasted a scarecrow but that might have been another prisoner.

When Kracauer returned I greeted him affably, but he said nothing; instead he removed his pince-nez, fetched a bottle from a cupboard in the rolltop, poured two glasses of brandy and handed me one, silently. The jacket of his gray suit looked more like the curtain in front of a crime scene than anything a tailor might have made. He was overweight and clearly under pressure but not as much as the mahogany chair behind the partners desk that creaked ominously when he sat down.

“I need this,” he said, and tossed the brandy down his throat like it was a fruit cordial.

“I can tell.”

“Part of my duties here are to attend executions. Right now that’s one every day. Sometimes more. You’d think I’d be used to it by now. But I don’t think one can ever get used to it.”

“Siegfried Gohl.”

“My nerves are as tight as the strings on a zither. What the hell is a Christadelphian, anyway?”

“Brothers in Christ, I imagine. I think they don’t believe in the immortality of the soul.” I sipped the brandy. It tasted better than my breakfast.

“Then in that respect they’re just like the Nazis.” He shook his head. “I mean if the Nazis believed in the immortality of a soul—in a heaven and in a hell—then—” He shrugged.

“They couldn’t do what they do,” I offered.

“Yes.” He poured another for himself as if the idea of meeting his maker was troubling him.

We talked old times for several minutes and he even managed a smile when he told me that for obvious reasons the prisoners called him “the Pole,” but I wasn’t fooled; clearly the man had learned to hate his job.

“You see that telephone,” he said, pointing to one of two telephones that stood on his desk. “It’s connected to Franz Schlegelberger’s office.”

Schlegelberger was the latest Reich Minister of Justice.

“He’s going to retire soon, I believe. Otto Thierack is to be the new minister. Not that Schlegelberger’s been in the job for very long. Anyway, that telephone is supposed to ring if a death sentence is ever commuted to life imprisonment. But in all the years I’ve been here it’s rung just once, and that was someone who thought this was the Schwarzer Adler Hotel.” He laughed. “Christ, I wish it was.”

“You’re not alone in that wish, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“What can I do for you, Bernie?”

“I was just visiting one of your prisoners. Friedrich Minoux.”

“The Gas Company fraudster. I know. I’m supposed to write your name down in the log of people who’ve been to see him.” He opened a file. “This log, here.”

“Minoux is not doing so well.”

“Better than his partners. Max Kessler and Hans Tiemessen are both doing a five stretch in Luckau, and from what I hear, they’re having a tough time.”

“He’s sixty-five years old, Ernst. I’m not sure I could do five years in this place.”

“There’s nothing I can do, Bernie. I can’t make his time any easier. A lot of people on the outside are watching to make sure he doesn’t get any special treatment because of his wife’s wealth. Perhaps, when the attention on him dies down a bit, I’ll see what I can do, but until then, my hands are tied.”

“Thanks, Ernst.” I shrugged. “One more thing. When I saw him just now, he seemed nervous about something. Scared, even.”

“Scared?”

“Is he being bullied, do you think?”

Kracauer shook his head. “Discipline in this place is good. If he was being bullied, believe me I’d know about it. The punishment for that kind of thing is harsh, to say the least.”

“What about pressure from the outside? Has he had any visitors—apart from his driver, Gantner, the one who brings him his breakfast every day? Someone who might have threatened him, perhaps?”

“Is this official?”

“No.”

“Then you know I’m not allowed to tell you. But I tell you what. I won’t write your name down in this file. How’s that?”

“Thanks, Ernst. I appreciate it.” I smiled. “How are the wife and kids?”

“Fine. Fine. My eldest has just joined the Luftwaffe.”

“You must be very proud of him.”

“I am. Look, would you excuse me for just a minute? I have to use the men’s room. Help yourself to another drink if you want it.” He pointed vaguely at the bottle on the desk. It was beside Friedrich Minoux’s still-open file.

“Thanks,” I said. “I think I will.”

I waited until he was out of the room and poured myself another brandy and, while I was doing so, I took a look at Minoux’s file, as Kracauer had meant me to, of course. There wasn’t time to do much more than check the visitor’s log. The previous morning, Minoux had received two visitors: Gantner, bringing him his breakfast, and then Captain Horst Janssen, of the RSHA.

I sat down and lit a cigarette, and a few minutes later, Ernst Kracauer returned.

“Well, I must get on,” he said, rubbing his hands. “I trust your visit here has been satisfactory?”

“Yes, Ernst. Thanks. And look after yourself.”

With much to think about, I drove slowly back to Berlin and the offices of the RSHA’s Foreign Intelligence section, on Berkaerstrasse. Janssen, who was probably already a mass murderer, worked for Schellenberg, who was a director of Stiftung Nordhav. Had Janssen put the
Schreck
on Minoux? It seemed highly likely. Not only that, but hadn’t I dropped him off at the military court in Charlottenburg the very same day? There was that to consider, too. Witzlebenstrasse was a fifteen-minute walk from Heckholz’s office on Bedeuten Strasse. He could have given evidence in a trial and then murdered Heckholz on his way home for the day. All in a day’s work for a man like Janssen. I certainly liked him better for Heckholz’s murder than my only other suspect, who was Lieutenant Leuthard. I liked Janssen better for it because, in spite of himself, I liked Leuthard. Any man who could fall asleep during an opera was all right by me. Besides, if you’ve just killed a man in cold blood it’s not easy to take a nap, even at the German Opera House. It spoke of a clear conscience. By contrast it was all too easy to see Captain Janssen murdering Dr. Heckholz on Schellenberg’s orders. I knew a bit about doing someone else’s dirty work myself. I’d done my fair share of it for Heydrich and Nebe.

I walked the keys into the office and met Janssen coming down the stairs.

“You finished taking those two Swiss around Berlin with my car?” he said.

“Finished.”

“What did you do with them anyway?”

“Took them to the German Opera.”

“The opera? That’s nice.”

“It might have been but there was a murder around the corner on Bedeuten Strasse and the police sirens got in the way of the music. At least I think it did. I’m never too sure with modern opera. Some lawyer got his head bashed in with a length of lead pipe. I mean, for real. This wasn’t in the opera.”

I was never much of a card player but I can bluff a bit, and I can tell when, just for a second, a man checks his mouth.

“Is that so?” Janssen frowned. “Only, the way I heard the splash this morning, the killer used a bust of Hitler to smash the man’s head in. Kind of funny when you think about it. Killed by Hitler like that. And the victim wasn’t even a Jew.”

“Hilarious, when you put it like that.” I smiled.

“Are you the investigating officer?”

“No. As it happens I’m leaving Kripo and the RSHA. I have a new job. I’m joining the War Crimes Bureau next week.”

“You surprise me. I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

“You mean such a thing as a war crime? Or a bureau that investigates them?”

“Both.”

“I’ve a feeling it’s going to be more important than you think.” I smiled patiently. “Anyway, thanks for the car.”

“Can I give you a lift somewhere?”

“No, I’ll walk. Around this time of day I generally need some air. Especially when I’m in uniform.”

“It is rather warm today,” he said.

I walked back to Grunewald Station. I told myself that I’d gone as far as I could with my inquiries without ending up like Friedrich Minoux or even Dr. Heckholz, and I felt an enormous sense of relief that I could just walk away from it all. What did I care who was profiting from Stiftung Nordhav? Or Export Drives GMBH? It certainly wasn’t any of my business. I wouldn’t have minded a little taste of some real money myself. And as it happened there was even less chance of State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart at the Ministry of the Interior listening to their evidence of malfeasance and wrongdoing than even I had imagined. For I had since discovered Stuckart was also an honorary general in the SS.

Like so much of what happened with the Nazis, the whole thing was best left well alone. Life was already too short to go sticking my nose into the affairs of people like Walter Schellenberg and Werner Best. With any luck, no one would know that I’d ever been involved. All that mattered now was that I was away from the Alex and out of the RSHA and working for men to whom honor wasn’t just a word on a ceremonial belt. It wasn’t like the Murder Commission—at least not the one that used to exist when Bernhard Weiss was in charge of Kripo; and I didn’t honestly think that any of the cases I might be asked to handle would matter for very much in Justitia’s scales, but it would do for now.

French Riviera, 1956

U
p on the screen Dalia unzipped her beautiful red mouth to reveal a row of perfect teeth, laughed, and stared into the camera with those big blue eyes, and I was in love all over again. After more than ten years it was as if we had never been parted. Well, almost. Cinema is cruel like that. So cruel that it must have been invented by a German, or at least imagined by one. Nietzsche, perhaps, with his idea of eternal recurrence; I can’t think of a more cinematic idea than that because, to be honest, it’s highly probable that, for obvious reasons, I’ll see this film more than once. Well, why not? I could almost smell her.

And yet, tantalizingly, I could not touch her, nor would I touch her ever again, in all likelihood. Just the thought of that made me suddenly feel so weak and sick it was as if I’d lost the will to live. You never quite succeed in filling the space of a woman you have loved. But did she even remember me? Was there ever a moment in a day when something crossed her mind to remind her of Gunther and what had happened to us both? I rather doubted that, just as in the final analysis she had certainly doubted me. She could never have believed that I would assume some of the guilt that was hers. Probably she didn’t believe it until she was safely back home. Frankly I surprised myself at the time, and I fully expected to die for what I’d done; perhaps, without her, that was even what I wanted most in the world. To die. After I came back from Belarus I’d grown tired of survival at any cost. Usually, of course, I’m not quite so noble, but love does funny things to a man. Looking at her now, on screen opposite Rex Harrison, a man who represented everything I hate most about the English—smug, self-satisfied, snobbish, only vaguely heterosexual—I formed the conclusion that, most likely, I was just a small footnote to her more notorious relationship with Josef Goebbels, which, to be fair to her, Dalia had always denied but which continued to dog her footsteps. To the Yugoslavian authorities she had steadfastly maintained that, while Hitler’s propaganda chief had certainly pursued her, she had never succumbed and in evidence argued the fact that she’d seen out the last years of the war in Switzerland in preference to accepting the film roles that Goebbels had offered her in his capacity as the head of the UFA film studio at Babelsberg.

Did I believe those denials? I’d like to have done. Even at the time I had my doubts, although you could hardly blame Dalia for the priapic doctor’s interest in her. Not entirely. A woman can only choose who she tries to make fall in love with her, not who actually does. And I certainly didn’t blame Goebbels for being besotted with her, for, in many respects, he was no different from me. We both had an eye for a pretty face—two for a very beautiful one—and it was easy to find yourself obsessed with a woman like Dalia Dresner. An hour in the woman’s company was enough to make you fall for her. That sounds like an exaggeration and perhaps it is for some but not for me. I fell in love with her almost the moment I saw her, which is perhaps hardly surprising as she was completely naked in her Griebnitzsee garden at the time. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Stories should have a beginning, they should even have a middle, but I’m never sure that ones like this ever really have an end; not while I can still feel like this about a woman I haven’t seen, or touched, or spoken to in a thousand years.

I
t was almost exactly a year after the crime conference at the Villa Minoux when I found myself summoned once more to the Ministry of Truth and Propaganda. This time, it was not to see State Secretary Leo Gutterer but to meet with the minister himself. The Mahatma Propagandhi. In truth we’d met once or twice before. I’d recently returned from Belarus where, at his personal request, I’d been his eyes and ears during the Katyn Forest investigation. The bodies of four thousand Polish officers and NCOs had been discovered in a mass grave near Smolensk and, as an officer working for the German War Crimes Bureau, I’d helped facilitate the international investigation, the propaganda value of which Goebbels was still busy exploiting in the hope that it might drive some sort of wedge between the Soviets—who had murdered the Poles—and their embarrassed British and American allies. It was a faint hope but, on the whole, Goebbels was pleased with what I’d helped to achieve. Me, less so, although that was becoming something of an occupational hazard. After working for Heydrich, on and off, over the course of three years, I had grown used to the feeling of being used to good advantage by people who were themselves not good. If I’d been a little more imaginative, perhaps I might have worked out a way of withdrawing my labor, or even disappearing; after all, there were plenty of other people in Nazi Germany who disappeared. The trick was discovering how not to do this permanently.

I’d been in Joey’s office before but I’d forgotten how large it was. Henry Morton Stanley would have thought twice about mounting an expedition to try to find the washroom. And in that vast expanse of thick carpet and dense soft furnishings it would have been easy to miss completely the diminutive minister who occupied a small corner of a country-sized sofa like some malign and understandably abandoned child. Goebbels was wearing an immaculate, summer-weight, three-piece suit with lapels as wide as a Swiss guard’s halberd; his white shirt was brighter than a sunrise from Mount Sapo, and instead of a tie he was wearing a striped ascot with a pearl pin. It made him look like a pimp. Then again maybe the knot in a tie felt too much like a noose. He put down the novel by Knut Hamsun he’d been reading and stood up. The minister might have lacked stature but he didn’t lack charm or manners. He was all smiles and compliments and gratitude for a job well done. He even shook my hand with one that was smaller and somewhat clammier than my own.

“Sit down and make yourself comfortable.”

I sat at the opposite end of the sofa but I couldn’t have felt less comfortable in that vast office if there had been a Gaboon viper coiled on one of the silk cushions.

“Relax. Help yourself to a cigarette. To some coffee. I’ll fetch something to drink if you like.”

“Coffee’s fine, thank you.”

There was a silver pot with a saucepan handle and some Meissen cups on a small tray; I poured myself a black one but didn’t drink it. My bladder was already playing games with me and coffee wasn’t what it needed. I took a cigarette but just rolled it between my fingers. Relaxing was never so stressful. But then, my host was a man who counted himself an intimate of Adolf Hitler; not only that, but a clever man, too; a man who could have talked a flock of rock penguins into a sauna bath.

“When I gave you the job in Katyn I knew it wouldn’t be pleasant.”

It seemed that the doctor had a gift for understatement as well as for exaggeration. Every morning I woke up I could still smell those four thousand Polish corpses.

“And if you remember, I promised you that in return I would offer you an opportunity to work for me in a private capacity. Something that would be very much to your profit and advantage. This is why I asked you to come here and see me today. To offer you just such an opportunity.”

“Thank you, Herr Doctor. And don’t think I’m not grateful. Only, since I got back to Berlin from Smolensk my duties at the War Crimes Bureau have been keeping me very busy. I have a mountain of paperwork to complete and a couple of urgent investigations to undertake.”

This was true; it seemed that some top secret plans had gone missing from the army’s Strategic Planning Section in the Bendlerblock and, reluctant to involve the Gestapo, my boss, Judge Goldsche—who was friendly with the top
bonzen
—had asked me if I’d look into the matter. But the planning section had been hit by an RAF bomb and it was probable that these missing plans had been very likely destroyed.

“Nonsense. I’m sure they can spare you at the Bendlerblock for a few days on my account. I’ll speak to Judge Goldsche and ask him to lend you to me. There will be plenty of time to catch up with paperwork when you’ve performed this service for me. The job will not be without its pleasures but it’s a task that also requires some very special skills. In short, it requires the services of a real detective. No, it’s rather more than that. It requires the services of a detective with a proven reputation.”

By now I was starting to guess which one of the two people in the room to whose advantage this job really was; and it didn’t look like it was going to be me.

“It’s been a while since anyone described me like that.”

“Really? As I recall, it was only last year that you were being offered up to the various guests at an international criminal police conference as Berlin’s answer to Sherlock Holmes. Or had you forgotten that speech you gave at the Villa Minoux? The one State Secretary Gutterer helped you to write.”

“As a matter of fact I had forgotten about that. I’d also formed the impression that that would be the last place Dr. Gutterer’s exaggerations regarding my abilities as a policeman would actually be taken seriously.”

“Did you, by God?” Goebbels laughed harshly. “Well, you’d be wrong. Any lingering doubts we might have had about your unique talents were removed when you managed to unfuck things so well at Katyn. I wasn’t wrong about you, Gunther. I realize we might have had one or two differences back there. I may even have left you in an awkward situation. But you’re a good man in a tight spot. And that’s what I’m in right now.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said with very little sincerity. Too little for a man with ears that were so carefully tuned to meaning, like the Mahatma’s.

He picked a tiny piece of thread off the trouser of his suit and dropped it onto the thick carpet, as if it had been me.

“Oh, I know you’re not a Nazi. I’ve read your Gestapo file—which, by the way, is as thick as a DeMille screenplay and probably just as entertaining. Frankly, if you were a Nazi you’d be held in rather better odor at RSHA headquarters and then you’d be no fucking good to me. The fact is I want this matter handled off the books. Which means to say I certainly don’t want bastards like Himmler and Kaltenbrunner finding out about it. This is a private matter. Do I make myself clear?”

“Quite clear.”

“Nevertheless they will try to find out what we’re doing. They can tell themselves all they like that it’s in the country’s best interests to know the private affairs of everyone in government. But it’s not. It’s in their best interest to get the dirt on everyone so they can use that to cement their own positions with the leader. Not that there’s any actual wrongdoing here, you understand. It’s just that they might easily imply that there is. Insinuation. Rumor. Gossip. Blackmail. That’s second nature to people like Müller and Kaltenbrunner. You may not be able to tell them to go to hell, exactly, but I’m confident that you’re the kind of fellow who can outfox them. With total discretion. Which is also why I’m prepared to pay you, out of my own pocket. How does a hundred reichsmarks a day sound?”

“Frankly? It sounds much too good to be true. Which is a habit of yours, after all.”

Goebbels frowned, as if he were unable to decide if I was being insolent or not. “What did you say?”

“You heard me. You’ll forgive me, sir, but in the event that I do end up working for you, then I have to be straight. Believe me, if this job does require the discretion you say it does, then you wouldn’t want it any other way. I never yet met a client who wanted me to put some syrup on top of a piece of hard cheese.”

“Yes,” he said uncertainly. And then with greater certainty, he added, “Yes, you’re right. I’m not used to people being straight with me, that’s all. Truth is in rather short supply in this day and age—when you have to rely on German civil servants. But then even the British have become experts in twisting the facts. Their reports of a night raid on the city of Dresden were a triumph of lies and obfuscation. You would think that there had been not one civilian casualty, that they bombed this city without a single civilian casualty. But that’s another matter. Thank you for the lesson in pragmatism. And since they do say that money talks, then perhaps it might be best if I were to pay you in advance.”

Goebbels put his hand inside his jacket and removed a soft leather wallet from which he proceeded to count five one-hundred-mark notes onto the table in front of us. I left the money there, for the moment. I was going to take the money, of course, but I still had my pride to take care of first; this residual feeling of my own dignity—which was not much more than a small shard of self-respect—was going to need some careful last-minute handling.

“Why don’t you tell me what the problem is and then I’ll tell you what can be done?”

Goebbels shrugged. “As you wish.” He paused and then lit a cigarette. “I take it you’ve heard of Dalia Dresner.”

I nodded. Everyone in Germany had heard of Dalia Dresner. And if they hadn’t they’d certainly heard of
The Saint That Never Was
, one of the more sensational films in which she’d starred. Dalia Dresner was one of UFA-Babelsberg’s biggest film stars.

“I want her to be in
Siebenkäs
, my next picture for UFA. Based on the classic novel by Jean Paul,
Married Life, Death, and Wedding of Siebenkäs, Poor Man’s Lawyer
. Have you read it?”

“I haven’t, no. But I can see why you felt you had to change the title.”

“She’s perfect for the leading role of Natalie. I know it, she knows it, the director—Veit Harlan—knows it. The trouble is she won’t do it. At least she won’t until her mind has been put at rest about her father, with whom she appears to have lost contact. I believe they’ve been estranged for a long time, but her mother died quite recently and she’s decided she wants to make contact with him again. It’s a fairly typical story of our age, really. Anyway, she insists she needs a detective to help her find him. And since it’s Dalia Dresner, it can’t be just any detective. He has to be the best. And until she speaks to such a man and he does whatever it is that she wants him to do, it’s clear that her mind is going to be on other things than the making of this motion picture.”

“And you don’t want the Gestapo doing it.”

“Correct.”

“May I ask why?”

“I really don’t see that it’s any of your damn business.”

“And it can certainly stay that way. Frankly the less I know about your personal affairs the better I’ll feel. I certainly didn’t ask for this job. I didn’t ask to come here and be offered an opportunity for profit and advantage. If I was interested in either of those things, then by your own admission I wouldn’t be sitting beside you on this sofa. But I won’t work for you with a patch over one eye and one hand tied behind my back. If I am going to outfox the likes of Kaltenbrunner and Müller, then I can’t be treated like your poodle, Herr Doctor. That’s not how foxes operate.”

“You’re right. And I have to trust someone. Recent events have taken their toll on my health and I was obliged to cancel a badly needed holiday. This whole affair isn’t helping me, either. I should get myself in shape but I can see no possibility of that happening. Frankly it’s all left me feeling rather depressed.”

He crossed his legs and then nervously hugged his right knee toward him so that I had a good view of his famously deformed right foot.

“Do you have a sweetheart, Herr Gunther?”

“There’s a girl I see, sometimes.”

“Tell me about her.”

“Her name is Kirsten Handlöser and she’s a schoolteacher at the Fichte Gymnasium on Emser Strasse.”

“And are you in love with her?”

“No. I don’t think so. But lately we’ve become quite close.”

“But you’ve been in love, Herr Gunther?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And what was your opinion of being in love?”

“Being in love is like being on a cruise, I think. It’s not so bad if you’re sailing on a smooth sea. But when things start to get rough, it’s easy to start feeling lousy. In fact it’s amazing how quickly that can happen.”

Goebbels nodded. “You put it very well. Most of the policemen I’ve met have been blunt instruments. But I see you have a subtler side. I like that. The fact is, I am in love. This is not an unusual situation for me. I like women. Always have. And they seem to like me. I’m married, of course, with several children. Sometimes I forget how many. But, before the war, there was another actress. Her name was Lída Baarová. You’ve probably heard of her, too.”

I nodded and finally lit the cigarette in my fingers. It’s not every day that the Reich Minister of Propaganda opens up to you about his love life, and I wanted to give this my full concentration.

“I wanted to leave my wife and live with her but the leader wouldn’t hear of it. Lída is a Slav, you see, and considered to be racially inferior. So is Dalia Dresner.” He nodded. “For Dalia’s sake, I have tried not to become too involved with her. Himmler and Kaltenbrunner would dearly love to cause trouble for me by being able to tell the leader that I’m involved with another Slavic woman. And of course he’d be furious. The leader takes a very dim view of anything but total monogamy. So I’ve tried to keep a distance. But I am in love with her. And the plain fact of the matter is that she very much reminds me of Lída.”

“Now you come to mention it, there is a certain similarity.”

“Exactly. I’ve even tried to sell her as the German Garbo just to make Hitler forget about that. The similarity between her and Baarová, I mean. Just to deflect any hint of suspicion that this is why I’m advancing Dalia’s career.”