The Constant Man

by Peter Steiner

  Willi did not hesitate to focus on peripheral characters, those who might be connected by only the slimmest of threads to whatever case he was working on and might appear, to themselves at least, not to be connected to it at all. He interviewed the patrolmen first called to the scene at what everyone took to be excessive length. He questioned the civilians who had first called in the crime and then questioned others connected to them, but not necessarily connected to the crime in any discernible way. Sometimes his method even required that he interview his own superiors: Willi was, after all, a character in this drama himself.

  ‘Damn it, Geismeier, this is ridiculous. Focus on the case.’

  ‘I am,’ he said. Higher-ups did not understand and did not like being questioned by a lowly police detective, but they could hardly refuse. Not given the fact that year after year Willi accumulated one of the best case-closure rates in the entire Munich police department.

  Eventually Willi was known throughout the department. And as the police department became more and more political, Willi began to be accused of investigating the police themselves. Willi denied this, but in fact it was true. Willi was hopelessly addicted – and addicted was not too strong a word – to justice. He had no choice but to follow every lead where it took him, and make certain, to the extent that he was able, that every injustice was brought to light.

  As Hitler rose in influence and power, the Munich police department was increasingly populated by Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. And crimes Willi found himself investigating increasingly involved police and political figures, not just as peripheral characters or witnesses, but often enough as perpetrators. And, because Munich was Hitler’s spiritual home, the place where his movement had been born, increasingly some of these police criminals were uncomfortably close to the Führer himself. Again and again, Willi insisted he was not political. It was just that politics was where his investigations sometimes took him.

  Even now, when Willi was no longer a detective, he did not – could not – stop thinking about such matters. For instance, he could not let go of the fact that the police had been so quick to drop their investigation of the attack on Lola. Willi knew too little so far to even suspect that the attack had a political aspect. At the same time, though, Lola had warned him of the SS’s interest in him. This made her his accomplice. It made her warning a treasonous act. That might, in itself, have made her a target for attack.

  The First Kiss

  Gerd Fegelein was a former cat burglar who had retired once he could no longer shinny up and down drainpipes as he once had, or navigate steep slate roofs when they were slick with rain. It was Willi who had informed Fegelein of his retirement on a snowy New Year’s Eve several years back. Fegelein had come through a third-floor apartment window onto a small wrought-iron balcony, had lowered himself to the balcony below, but had slipped on the icy iron rail and dropped hard into the alley, where Willi was waiting.

  Fegelein was crestfallen when he saw Willi there. His shoulders slumped. They had never met, but he knew Willi by reputation. Willi had caught countless villains who had eluded the police for years, so it was not exactly a disgrace to be caught by him. But Fegelein had his own reputation as uncatchable to maintain. And yet here he was: caught. He might still have outrun Willi, but when he tried to get up, he found that his ankle was badly sprained, and he crumpled back to the ground in pain. So he did the only thing he could think to do, and that was to offer Willi his hand. Willi took it. ‘Herr Fegelein,’ he said.

  ‘Herr Geismeier,’ said Fegelein, ‘will you help me?’

  This sudden and immediate accord was not as strange as it might seem. While the two men had been on opposite sides of the law for most of their careers, the law had gradually shifted until now they found themselves in the same boat: both enemies of the Third Reich.

  Willi was well known among Munich’s villains as an effective and honest cop, and now he was known among Munich’s Nazis as an impediment to the advancement of Hitler’s agenda, particularly as it applied to the criminal justice system. Fegelein was known mainly as a cat burglar, but also to some as a devoted Marxist. Like Willi, he had fought in the trenches during the war, and then afterwards had battled fascists as part of a red militia when Munich’s future was up in the air. And if that were not enough to doom him, he was also a Jew. So how could Willi arrest Fegelein when doing so would deliver him to the hands of the SS and likely mean his death? Willi walked to a nearby taxi stand, summoned a cab and helped Fegelein to his home.

  After that night, Fegelein disappeared. He waited weeks, then months, and in time the police lost interest in him. Now, years later, he owned and ran a bicycle shop out of the back of an industrial building in Lerchenau, far from Munich’s center. The small sign in the window read: LERCHENAU BICYCLES, SALES AND REPAIRS

  The shop was dingy and dimly lit and filled with an assortment of salvaged bicycles in various stages of repair. They were stacked against the walls around the front room. A few almost new and reconditioned bicycles were for sale and dangled from hooks screwed into the ceiling. The back room was a workshop with all the requisite work stands, benches, and spare parts. Willi, no longer a detective and looking for some other trade, had recently taken up bicycle repair at Fegelein’s urging and, thanks to his thorough and meticulous nature, had become good at it – so good, in fact, that he, under the pseudonym Karl Juncker, had been retained as the team mechanic by the Bavarian Wheelmen, a professional racing team.

  As a thief, Fegelein had been a big proponent of bicycle travel in the city. A well-tuned bicycle was part of the reason he had been so uncatchable. A bicycle was fast, maneuverable, and portable. A bicycle could go where cars couldn’t, and there were no papers or license plates to lead the police back to you.

  Until recently the shop had been exactly what the sign said it was. But thanks to the shifting social and political situation and to the circumstances of his new partner and part-time repairman, Lerchenau Bicycles came to be known among other misfits and enemies of the Reich as a sort of message center and rendezvous point where you could go for information or other forms of assistance.

  If one knew enough to slide a heavy workbench out from the back wall and then lift a wooden trapdoor, you could descend a rickety staircase and find yourself in the building’s basement, a large, low and secret space beneath heavy floor joists. Fegelein hadn’t even known there was a basement when he had opened his shop. It is doubtful the landlord knew, since the stairs had been blocked off and boarded up for many years.

  The basement was mostly empty when Fegelein discovered it, but with time it filled up. First he installed a bed and some other rudimentary furniture and used the space as a safe house for those who needed it. Willi had sheltered there the night of the teakettle. Next came various machines, tools and materials Fegelein had salvaged from all over, things which he thought might eventually come in handy. ‘Eventually,’ he said, ‘will come soon enough.’

  By the time the war began in September of 1939, the basement had a small engraving studio and print shop that, on relatively short notice, could turn out an excellent passport and other convincing personal papers. It remained a safe house, and eventually became a stopping point for fleeing Jews, downed English and American pilots, and members of the resistance. Lives that were saved and lives that were lost passed through that basement.

  After two nights in the Lerchenau basement, Willi had moved on to other hideouts. The Horvaths had an unused maid’s room in the attic of their building. Detective Hans Bergemann had access to a vacant garage across the alley from his apartment. From there he went to the cabin in the Bavarian Forest.

  Once he was back in Munich, he registered as Karl Juncker with the local police as every new resident was required to do and made Tullemannstraße 54 his home. He kept his things there, his beloved Shakespeare volumes, his clothes, his bits of furniture. More and more, though, he stayed with Lola.

  Lola’s small apartment had originally been a workshop belon
ging to a leather goods shop on Lindwurmstraße, a busy shopping street across town from Tullemannstraße. The door between the shop and workshop had been closed off years earlier when the workshop had been converted to an apartment. The apartment’s entrance was in the building’s courtyard. Next to the leather shop was a liquor store, with a large storeroom with two rear doors, one that opened into Lola’s courtyard and one that opened into the courtyard next door. And there was a profusion of doors around Lola’s courtyard leading off in various directions.

  Willi investigated this labyrinthine arrangement and found it extremely satisfactory. He found two stairways to different roofs – the older part of the building had four stories and a steep slate roof; the newer addition had six stories with a flat roof and connections to adjoining roofs. He also found inside passages to two different alleys and meandering hallways of apartments, closets, and storage rooms.

  Lola’s apartment was a single room of twenty-five square meters. There was a sink and a small gas stove in the kitchen alcove and a table and three upright chairs. The window beside the entry door faced south and actually got several hours of sun a day. Lola kept a few flowerpots with geraniums and forget-me-nots outside. The previous summer she had managed to grow a tomato plant and a cucumber, whose vine had climbed the green trellis nailed to her wall, giving the place the incongruent appearance of a country cottage.

  Lola had hung a curtain across the middle of the room to separate the toilet and bedroom with its dresser, mirror, and bed from the rest of the apartment. The flush toilet had been added after the war and was enclosed in what looked like a wooden cupboard.

  It was late evening the first time Willi stayed with Lola. He had a small canvas rucksack on his back. Lola was worried; she had expected him for supper. He apologized and explained he had been followed by a car. The driver had suddenly swerved to a stop in front of him, and two men had jumped out – thieves maybe, more likely Gestapo. Willi, still on the bike, swerved around them. The men jumped back in their car and gave chase. But Fegelein was right: in old Munich’s narrow, winding streets a car was no match for a bicycle. He took to the sidewalk, went through an alley too narrow for a car, and lost them.

  ‘I don’t think they knew who I was. They go after anyone and everyone these days. Anyone on the street after dark is prey for thieves or a suspect for the Gestapo. Anyway, I lost them, and here I am.’ Lola suspected Willi had been investigating her attack, and she didn’t like it. She knew he had somehow gotten his hands on the police report, and had been trying to find out what he could about the investigating officers, whether they were political and whether they were competent. But she threw her arms around him anyway and kissed him on the mouth.

  Willi and Lola were on the wrong side of forty. They had each experienced love and disappointment more than a few times, and neither had given the other much thought over the years, except perhaps to wonder now and then what had become of Willi, or where was Lola these days, and to hope that they were doing well and having a good life. On those few occasions when Willi had visited Lola’s parents, after her father was sick, for instance, he had asked about her, but only in the most general terms. He hadn’t known whether she was married or had children, and he hadn’t asked. And Lola too knew nothing about Willi, until she had set out to warn him about what she had heard at the bar in the Mahogany Room. As Lola said, their old friendship led her to want to help Willi. And Willi could have said, although he didn’t, that their old friendship led him to allow her to help.

  They were both surprised by the kiss and where it led. Willi lay on Lola’s bed later, his head resting on his arms. He watched Lola’s silhouette on the curtain as she washed herself at the sink. She stooped and rose and turned, raising her arms and legs. She’s dancing, a strange, exotic, wonderful dance, he thought, as he fell asleep.

  Operation Hummingbird

  The Black Parrot Cabaret dance floor was filled with gyrating, sweaty dancers. The orchestra was playing an uptempo version of ‘42nd Street.’ Storm trooper Lieutenant Walter Kempf was wriggling his hands into the pants of a pretty boy named Bobby, when the hard steel of a Luger on his neck stopped him cold.

  An hour later Walter found himself being marched into a walled courtyard with other men who had been rounded up in the city. Some wore brown uniforms; others were in suits or pajamas or whatever they had been wearing when they were arrested. Walter wore a tuxedo. The men were lined up in front of a brick wall. They weren’t the first; you could smell the spent gunpowder in the air.

  Walter shouted his last words, ‘Heil Hitler!’ just as the command ‘Fire!’ came. The bodies were dragged away, and the next group of men was lined up and shot. It went on that way through much of the night.

  In the early morning as the rising sun was burning away the fog, a half dozen black cars sped into Bad Wiessee, a picturesque village halfway to the Austrian border. Adolf Hitler stepped from the lead car while SS men spilled out of the others and ran into the Hanslbauer Hotel.

  Ernst Röhm and his comrades were mostly sleeping after a night of carousing. They were torn from their beds and dragged into the garden where most were shot. For the Führer their homosexuality was yet another abomination that made this action, Operation Hummingbird, necessary.

  Röhm was taken back to Munich. ‘I’ve been with the Führer longer than any of you,’ he shouted. ‘If I’m to be killed, let Adolf do it himself.’ Instead he was offered a pistol. When he refused to do the right thing, it was done for him. All over Germany Hitler’s enemies were being arrested and executed.

  Hitler had decided it was time to rein in his storm troopers. These thugs and brawlers had played a big part in bringing him to power, but there were too many of them now, and they were out of control. What is more, Ernst Röhm, the head storm trooper, had been pushing for a ‘second revolution.’

  ‘The Party needs to take on the capitalists,’ he said. ‘To do more for working people. After all, we’re National Socialists, aren’t we?’ His followers cheered. But Hitler needed the capitalists – he needed their money so there wouldn’t be any socialism.

  Röhm also wanted to get the regular army under his control. ‘The damned generals,’ he reminded Hitler, ‘they’re always getting in our way. They hate you. We need to come down hard on them.’

  ‘I know, Ernst,’ said the Führer.

  ‘They’re treacherous, arrogant shitheads, Adi. You’ve never trusted them. Believe me, they’re plotting your downfall.’ He and Hitler had been friends since the very beginning, so he could talk to the Führer that way.

  ‘Ernst, I said I know! But you can’t seem to understand that I need the generals on my side. If they wanted to, they could turn things against me in a minute.’

  ‘You’ve heard what they call you, haven’t you? “The Bohemian corporal?”’

  ‘Damn it, Ernst, that’s enough!’ Röhm never knew when to shut up.

  Adolf Hitler had been chancellor for barely a year. His hold on power was shaky. If he was going to survive, now was the moment to consolidate his power. Having the army high command behind him was essential. Unfortunately for Röhm, he was not.

  Operation Hummingbird was a stunning success. Several thousands of Hitler’s enemies, great and small, were done away with in one night. And amazingly, Paul von Hindenburg, Germany’s doddering president, who had been contemptuous of Hitler, now showered him with praise and thanked him for his courage and decisiveness in this murderous undertaking. Even General von Blomberg, Hitler’s defense minister, grateful that his rival Röhm was out of the picture, congratulated the Führer and swore his allegiance and the army’s.

  Willi heard about the killings on the BBC and then from Bergemann. Willi might have been a target if they had known where to find him. Bergemann was shaken. This was how those who got in Hitler’s way were going to be dealt with from now on.

  The killings were on the front pages of newspapers all over Germany. Margarete Horvath lowered the paper she had been reading a
nd turned to her husband. ‘What does it mean, Benno? How is this even possible here in Germany?’

  Benno Horvath stood gazing out the tall window at Munich, the city he loved but no longer understood. In the small park across the street the magnolias were in bloom. He listened to the sound of children laughing as they chased one another about. Red, white, and black Nazi flags fluttered in the summer breeze. The sun was warm on his face and the same breeze that riffled the flags lifted the curtains beside him. For a moment he had the sensation that it was he and not the curtains moving, as though he were drifting out into a new, more dangerous world. ‘I think, Gretl, it means that everything has changed.’

  ‘How could this happen, Benno? How could Hindenburg go along with this violence? How could he congratulate that terrible man? If all those people were traitors, why weren’t they arrested and brought to trial, the way things are supposed to happen in Germany? And General von Blomberg falling in line like that? It’s unbelievable. It’s just unbelievable.’

  ‘What was it Hitler said, Gretl? Read it to me again.’

  ‘Let’s see, where …’ She scanned down the page. ‘Here it is. Speaking before the Reichstag, the chancellor said, “If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and therefore I became the supreme judge of the German people. Everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his hand against the German state, then his lot is certain death”.’

  ‘My God. Think of it, Gretl. He proclaims himself the law, and Hindenburg and the army get behind him. Who could ever have imagined they would sell their souls so cheaply? They obviously have their own political reasons. I understand that. But they’ve just signed a pact with the devil.’