The Constant Man

by Peter Steiner

  ‘I still wonder, Herr Schleiffer,’ said the tall man, ‘why you filed so many frivolous denunciations. I haven’t heard a reasonable explanation yet for that.’

  ‘Frivolous?’

  ‘You know it’s a crime to denounce someone falsely. Our dockets are virtually filled with false denunciations, which makes it all the more difficult for us to catch the real malefactors. Making a false denunciation is a serious misdemeanor, Herr Schleiffer.’

  ‘Very serious,’ said the short man. ‘A false denunciation is tantamount to obstruction of justice.’

  ‘Well, you caught Herr Juncker, didn’t you?’ said Heinz. He assumed still that Juncker had been arrested for his crimes.

  ‘Caught him?’ said the tall man. ‘Who said anything about having caught anyone?’

  ‘You mean he wasn’t arrested?’ said Schleiffer.

  ‘That is none of your business, Herr Schleiffer.’

  ‘The point is, you led us down many false trails with all your denunciations,’ said the short man.

  At that moment, as Heinz was wondering how he should respond to their accusations, he remembered Karl Juncker’s girlfriend, the redhead. What was her name? Lola! He had met Lola. Here was a name he could give them! And he was about to do so when he had the thought: how would it look now, right after they had accused him of making frivolous denunciations, if he mentioned Lola at what was obviously a convenient moment for him? And Lola who? He didn’t even know her last name. And not only that. What if she turned out to be a completely innocent bystander to whatever they were investigating? That would be another frivolous denunciation on his record. For the first time ever, but not the last, Heinz Schleiffer felt like the Gestapo was not his friend, and, instead of mentioning Lola, he remained silent.

  Three weeks later, when the papers reported that yet another woman had been attacked and murdered by the serial killer, Heinz, who by this time knew from Frau Schimmel that Karl Juncker was in custody, wondered whether his accusations of Juncker had not been wrong after all. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘at least Juncker or Geismeier or whatever his name is must be guilty of something.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’ said Frau Schimmel.

  ‘Well, he was using a false name.’

  ‘He was a policeman, Herr Schleiffer. Maybe he was undercover. They use false names all the time. Maybe he was actually investigating the murders of all those women.’

  ‘Well, they arrested him, didn’t they?’ said Heinz. ‘He must have done something wrong, or they wouldn’t have arrested him.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t tell you what he had done wrong, would they?’ said Frau Schimmel. ‘And you know as well as I do, Herr Schleiffer, they arrest people all the time these days for very flimsy reasons.’

  Even Heinz had heard those stories, and now he had come within a hair of being arrested himself, for what, he didn’t even know. And when he thought about it, he really had denounced Herr Juncker for what Frau Schimmel would have called flimsy reasons. ‘They must have their reasons, though, for asking me all those questions,’ said Heinz.

  ‘What reasons, Herr Schleiffer? They weren’t just asking you questions, were they?’ said Frau Schimmel. ‘They were interrogating you.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Heinz, trying, without success, to rehabilitate the Gestapo in his own mind and to make himself feel better at the same time.

  Frau Schimmel knocked on his door more often these days. She needed help getting up the stairs; the grocery cart had gotten too heavy for her to manage. The doctor had recently told her she didn’t have much longer to live. You could see that just by looking at her. She had gotten thinner and thinner until she looked like a twig. She could hardly walk, even with her cane.

  Heinz was always glad to help. He went to the grocery store for her now when she couldn’t go because of the pain. He looked in on her, to make sure she was all right. He always learned something useful when he did. Besides, he found that he actually enjoyed her company.

  ‘I haven’t done anything wrong, Frau Schimmel,’ he said. ‘I’ve been with the Führer since the very beginning.’ The Gestapo visit was weeks in the past, but it still stuck in his craw.

  ‘Well, we’ve all been with him since the beginning, Herr Schleiffer, haven’t we? Still, they did interrogate you … I worry about Herr Juncker,’ she added.

  Heinz said nothing.

  She slid another slice of strudel onto his plate. Pear again. His favorite. ‘I’m sure you had only the best intentions when you filed your reports,’ she said. ‘But I wonder what Herr Juncker was really up to. To me it’s hard to imagine it was anything criminal. You know I always think of him as a good man.’

  ‘I like to think he was up to no good,’ said Heinz, trying to convince himself all over again. But his certainty about both Karl Juncker’s guilt and his own virtue had abandoned him, and so he said, for the fifteenth time, ‘They wouldn’t have hauled him off if he hadn’t done something bad.’

  ‘Did they even admit they hauled him off?’ said Frau Schimmel.

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Heinz.

  ‘You said he was a policeman, didn’t you?’ said Frau Schimmel.

  ‘That’s what they told me when they showed me the photos, Frau Schimmel. Frankly, right now I don’t know what to believe.’

  ‘That’s understandable, Herr Schleiffer.’ She thought for a moment. ‘You know, your SA commandant Mecklinger’s office could help you there, Herr Schleiffer. Why don’t you ask them?’

  ‘Ortsgruppenleiter Mecklinger won’t give me the time of day …’

  ‘Which is why you befriended his Frau Kinski, isn’t it, Herr Schleiffer?’

  This was true. Thanks to Frau Schimmel’s reading of the situation, Heinz had found a way around Ortsgruppenleiter Gerhard Mecklinger and a reliable source of information. Frau Kinski knew everything that went on even better than Mecklinger himself, and was, it turned out, friendlier than she had at first appeared. Heinz had learned from her all about Mecklinger’s dalliance with the voluptuous Lorelei, who was now happily ensconced in police headquarters, and his very tenuous connection through his wife to Heinrich Himmler, which apparently had both its advantages and dangers. He learned a few other things too about meetings and planned actions and such. And Frau Schimmel always generously helped Heinz make sense of everything.

  The German army, supposedly limited to 100,000 men by the Versailles Treaty, had now swollen to over three million men. You didn’t need Frau Kinski to know that. It was no secret; it was in all the papers as cause for celebration. Soldiers in uniform were everywhere. The British and the French had let it happen, but short of going to war, there wasn’t much they could have done about it.

  Tomas stopped by one day to tell Heinz that he had been drafted. Tomas and his father were friends again. Tomas had shown up a month after their falling out to patch things up. Tomas said art and politics weren’t worth fighting over, and Heinz agreed. And now Heinz’s only son, whom he had only recently gotten to know, was probably going to war.

  ‘Mama told me I should desert, should leave the country,’ said Tomas. ‘Go to America or Canada or Australia.’

  ‘That’s just like her!’ said Heinz.

  ‘I just couldn’t do it,’ said Tomas.

  Heinz didn’t know what to say. Tomas stood before him, handsome in his gray uniform, a faint mustache on his lip, but now seeming still very much a boy, at least to Heinz. Heinz felt proud one minute and frightened the next.

  Tomas had orders to join a tank division near Dresden, hard by the Czech border. He would almost certainly be part of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, when it came. The thought of Tomas being wounded or, God forbid, dying, filled Heinz with fear, but the thought of him deserting filled him with shame.

  ‘Let’s go up and see Frau Schimmel,’ said Heinz. ‘I know she’d like to see you. She’s very sick, you know.’

  Heinz told Frau Schimmel what his ex-wife had said. ‘Well, that’s how mothers are,’ sa
id Frau Schimmel, and from the sound of her voice, Heinz wondered whether she might be speaking from experience. She had never said anything about having children, or, for that matter, about being married. But with her you never knew. The anguish in her voice sounded real.

  The Sudetenland

  The Gestapo had followed Edvin Lindstrom almost every day since he had been back in Germany. They did so in plain sight. If he went to a cafe to meet someone, they chose a table nearby and drank coffee or pretended to read the paper. Edvin had diplomatic immunity and couldn’t be arrested. But the Gestapo’s purpose was only to harass him and scare those he met, so it was better that he saw them and knew they were there.

  Most of the people Edvin met and spoke with had no immunity. And these days if they met with a foreign spy – and like every foreigner, Edvin was presumed to be a spy – they could expect to be arrested, or at least pulled in for questioning: How do you know him? Why did you meet? What did he want to know? What did you tell him? What did he tell you? When do you expect to meet again?

  It wasn’t that hard for Edvin to give the Gestapo the slip as long as he didn’t make a habit of it. He did so during off hours or on weekends. Then he met Benno Horvath to share some of what he had learned about political developments within the German government that might be news. And through Benno, Edvin connected with Willi.

  Edvin and Willi had met in the Westfriedhof not far from the Olympic stadium. Willi was carrying a bouquet of flowers. ‘Why else visit a cemetery?’ he said. They shook hands. ‘Everything you predicted has come to pass,’ said Willi.

  ‘I’m sorry to say it has,’ said Edvin. ‘Nonetheless, I’m happy to see you after all these years.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Willi. ‘I hoped it would be different. What can I help you with?’ Willi always got straight to the point.

  ‘It’s getting harder and harder for Jews to leave,’ said Edvin. ‘Where possible, my government wants to help them get out. We’re able to arrange for transportation and visas. But certain documents – passports, identity cards – are another matter.’ By now the Swedes and everyone else trying to help refugees were using illegal means. It was a matter of saving lives.

  Willi connected Edvin with Gerd Fegelein. The print shop in the basement of Lerchenau Bicycles was up and running.

  ‘On another matter,’ said Edvin, ‘what do you know about any organized resistance? Is there any?’

  ‘No,’ said Willi. ‘None. There isn’t any organized resistance that I know of. That’s not to say there’s no resistance at all. Only it’s mostly lone wolves, people operating on their own, slowing down production in factories, sabotage, that sort of thing. And there’s been some opposition among a few politicians. You probably know who they are. But one by one they’re being found out, arrested and hanged.’

  ‘What about among the police? Anything there?’

  ‘Nothing organized that I know of,’ said Willi. ‘Again, a few lone wolves is all. But what do you know? What about the army? Anything stirring there?’

  ‘Ah, the army,’ said Edvin, shaking his head. ‘That’s a pitiful case. They’re the one group that could overthrow him. Ella has some contacts there, and she’s heard rumblings. So have I. But it never comes to anything.

  ‘Officers tell me they’re horrified by Hitler; they find him reprehensible. But they can’t imagine rising up against him. They’re afraid, yes. But it’s more that they’re completely paralyzed by their idiotic Prussian code of honor, their nobility, the duties and loyalties of rank. He’s reprehensible, abominable, evil, they say, but he’s their Führer, their commander-in-chief, no matter what. Attacking him in any way would amount to treason, which is out of the question.

  ‘Besides that, and this is interesting, they are reluctant to turn against him because he’s been successful. Marching into the Rhineland, for instance. The generals warned him that was doomed. It wasn’t. Austria, last March, the same thing. He succeeds where he is bound to fail. And they embrace his successes.

  ‘He’s gotten rid of whatever opposition there might have been in the general staff, you know. Von Blomberg, von Fritsch, both damaged, yes, but they offered some opposition. And now even they’re gone.’

  There was a funny story making the rounds about General von Blomberg, the field marshal and minister of war. Blomberg was a widower and wanted to marry again. He proposed to his young secretary, Erna Gruhn, and she accepted his proposition. This, of course, scandalized the Prussian officer corps because Erna Gruhn was of the lower classes and not suited to be the wife of a general and a Prussian aristocrat. But the Führer gave the marriage his blessing – maybe he liked the fact that the Prussians objected – and he and Goering served as witnesses at the wedding.

  A short time later, rumors started flying, and then the story broke that General Field Marshal von Blomberg’s new wife was not just a commoner. She had once been arrested for prostitution and pornography. There were photos. ‘Doesn’t that make the Führer a pimp?’ someone said. It was a good joke, but too dangerous to repeat.

  Edvin and Willi met repeatedly. Edvin offered Willi help. Was there anything he could do? Willi said he was working on a case, which caused Edvin to raise his eyebrows. ‘A case?’ he said.

  Willi explained that he had been pursuing the serial killer who, he was all but certain, had attacked Lola years earlier. Willi was also fairly certain the killer was in the Gestapo. Certain other evidence indicated that he was also a senior SS officer. Willi thought he was getting close, but thought also that the Gestapo was getting close to him. He thought he would probably be warned by a contact in the SS when his arrest was imminent and it was time for him and Lola to leave the country. Edvin promised he would arrange their departure. Willi had never imagined he would be caught by Gruber. How could he have imagined that?

  A light rain began falling. Willi left his flowers by a stranger’s grave, and the two men went their separate ways. They arranged for another meeting two weeks later. The persecution of Jews was being stepped up; Edvin was trying to establish a network of safe houses and could use Willi’s help. The day of the meeting Edvin waited in vain for Willi to show up. Edvin had two Swedish visas in hand, but Willi was already in Dachau.

  Benno and Margarete Horvath listened every night to the BBC. You could hear the world unraveling and stumbling toward war. Chamberlain, the British prime minister, had made repeated trips to Germany to meet with Hitler to prevent an invasion of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain gave up the Sudetenland, a corner of Czechoslovakia with a German population, for vague promises by a known liar. Were the English that blind, Benno wondered, or desperate, or both? Chamberlain tricked himself into believing he was preventing a larger invasion of the entire country of Czechoslovakia and the war that would necessarily follow, when in fact he was enabling both.

  The Czech border with Germany had strong defenses, but thanks to Chamberlain’s Sudetenland concession, the German army got past them without firing a shot. The rest of Czechoslovakia lay there for the taking, defenseless and without allies. The French and the British had made it clear their promises weren’t worth the paper they were written on. Within five months Czechoslovakia ceased to exist.

  Hard Labor

  The Dachau kapos treated prisoners badly. The kapos’ survival depended in part on their brutality. A kapo who wasn’t sufficiently brutal could find himself back in the general prison population where he would be treated with particular contempt by SS and prisoners alike. Willi’s barracks kapo was a man named Franz Neudeck, a gang member whom Willi had arrested more than once. As a result of his many arrests Neudeck had been classified a habitual criminal. Even though it was not Willi who had landed him in Dachau, when Neudeck saw Willi for the first time, he turned his rage about being in Dachau in Willi’s direction.

  He came up behind Willi in the barracks early one morning. ‘Geismeier,’ he said, and when Willi turned, Neudeck hit him hard in the ribs with a short metal pipe he was carrying. Willi crumpled to the floor
. ‘Welcome to my world, Geismeier,’ said Neudeck. He spat and walked away.

  It was time for roll call. Two men helped Willi to his feet and out to formation. They marched beside him in the middle of the company, helping keep him upright. They sang a folk song as they marched.

  I love to go a-wandering

  Along the mountain track

  And as I go, I love to sing

  My knapsack on my back

  Val-deri, val-dera

  Val-deri, val-dera

  The two men were also in Willi’s work group of twenty men, so they helped him march to the work site. They were part of a crew building a road between the new barracks. Half the men carried rocks from a nearby pile while the other half used sledgehammers to pound the rocks into gravel.

  Despite his beating that morning, Willi was not in the worst condition of the men in his crew. One man could barely lift the sledgehammer overhead. He let it fall on the stone at his feet without having any effect on the stone at all. The kapo in charge came running, spitting and fuming at the man who stopped his efforts and stood at attention. The kapo punched the man in the arms and chest, shouting at him the whole time.

  The crew worked nonstop twelve hours a day with a ten-minute break for lunch which consisted of ‘soup’ with a few scraps of potato. In the evening they marched back to the Appelplatz for another roll call, then eventually back to the barracks for supper and sleep.

  One evening, Juergen Diehn, the man who been punched for not working hard enough, wouldn’t eat his supper. He lay on his thin mattress with his arms folded across his chest and refused to eat. Juergen had once been a professional soccer player and then a conservative member of the last democratically elected Reichstag. He had been imprisoned in Dachau right after Operation Hummingbird. He had been brimming with health and resolve, expecting to outlast this ridiculous Führer. But more than four years had passed and he had been turned into a tattered and ruined skeleton. His cheeks were caved in, his hair had fallen out, his neck was too thin to hold up his head. You could count his vertebrae and his ribs. His hips stuck out and his knees were swollen knobs.