The Constant Man

by Peter Steiner

  ‘Well then, Doctor’ – she still called him doctor after all this time, as though that were his name and not Albert – ‘why wouldn’t I be happy to learn that, despite the dire political circumstances and the imminent threat to us Jews, despite the fact that our country is almost certainly headed into another terrible war, why wouldn’t I be thrilled to learn that I have a fair chance of dying a natural and peaceful death, maybe even in my own bed? I can hardly imagine better news. Can you?’

  ‘I take your point,’ said Albert.

  ‘Can you give me something for the pain?’ she said.

  ‘I can,’ said Albert.

  Bertha Schimmel felt liberated by the news of her impending death. She even felt rejuvenated in a sense. Her communist comrades were all either dead or scattered to the wind. Resistance to Hitler was pretty much non-existent. She yearned to take up the battle herself, or at least do whatever she could. Oh, to man the barricades again! Of course, there were no barricades to be manned. And given her illness, she could barely make her way up and down the stairs.

  ‘Good morning, Herr Schleiffer,’ she said one morning.

  Heinz had been mopping the floor and hadn’t heard her come down the stairs. ‘Good heavens, be careful, Frau Schimmel. It’s slippery.’ He took her shopping cart from her – how had she even managed? He took her by the arm, and walked her gently to the door. ‘Do you need me to come with you, Frau Schimmel?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Herr Schleiffer.’

  ‘Well, I’ll watch for you when you come back.’

  She was about to get on her way, when she had a thought. ‘By the way, Herr Schleiffer,’ her voice was now more of a whisper, ‘have they done a search of Herr Juncker’s apartment?’

  ‘They?’ said Schleiffer.

  ‘You know,’ she said. ‘They.’

  There was nobody else in the lobby, but Schleiffer looked in every direction anyway before he spoke. ‘Of course they have,’ he whispered.

  ‘Well, what did they find?’

  Schleiffer was a bit taken aback; she was not usually this direct. ‘I can’t say, Frau Schimmel.’

  ‘Can’t say because you don’t know, or because you’re not allowed?’

  ‘Of course I know, Frau Schimmel, but it’s official business.’

  ‘I was just wondering whether they found anything that indicated to you what crimes he is supposed to have committed. Whether anything they found put your own doubts to rest.’

  Schleiffer hadn’t thought of it that way. ‘They took some papers, that’s all. Police records, I think.’

  ‘Well, Herr Schleiffer, if you have cause to be in his apartment again, could you do me a favor? There’s a little green vase in there he borrowed from me. Would you please get it for me?’

  As guardian of the building, Heinz had a key for every apartment. And he had been tempted more than once to explore Karl Juncker’s apartment. But he hadn’t had any ‘legitimate’ reason to do so until now. A few days later he brought her the vase.

  ‘No, no, Herr Schleiffer, that’s not mine. That’s the wrong vase. Let me show you.’ Two minutes later they were both inside the apartment. ‘Where is that darn thing?’ she said. Before he could stop her, she was opening and closing drawers and cupboards. ‘Ah, here it is,’ she said finally, holding up a small vase triumphantly. ‘It’s more blue than green, isn’t it? It just shows how mistaken you can be, even about something you think you know. My mother gave this to me. What have you found there, Herr Schleiffer?’

  Heinz had been looking around too and had just pulled an intriguing small brass box from the top desk drawer. He opened it. It was full of medals in all colors and sizes, including an iron cross. Heinz leafed through the folder of citations that was in the same drawer: citations for valor in the war, for excellent police work, for outstanding service, citation after citation after citation.

  ‘My goodness,’ said Frau Schimmel. ‘That’s a surprise, isn’t it? Who could have known?’

  Heinz found he was unable to answer.

  The Second and Third Interrogations

  The striped clothes that had been too small when he had first arrived in Dachau were tattered and threadbare now, and much too large. After being beaten, Willi had been allowed one day in the infirmary to recover enough to be returned to his barracks and put back to work. He didn’t know how long he had been in Dachau. Trying to keep track of time was a fool’s errand. He thought it was probably now late February, early March of 1938. Some kept track, but he didn’t.

  Quite a few faces were gone from his room and new faces had arrived to take their place. The new prisoners brought news. Mobilization for war was in full swing. Hitler planned to invade to the east – Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia. Hitler said Germans needed Lebensraum, living space, room to expand. That’s what people were saying anyway.

  One morning Willi was marched, again by Neudeck, to an interrogation room more or less identical to the one where he had been beaten senseless. This time Neudeck was told to stay. He stood against the wall next to another kapo. A different SS interrogator, also a Hauptsturmführer, was seated at the table. He had his hat on, cocked at a rakish angle. Not a good sign, Willi thought. A file folder lay open in front of him. He looked at Willi for a long time.

  ‘You don’t recognize me, do you, Geismeier?’ He paused. Willi thought the voice sounded familiar. ‘From the precinct,’ said the Hauptsturmführer. Another pause. ‘Ah, well,’ he said, sounding a little disappointed.

  The interrogation did not go well. The Hauptsturmführer asked Willi again about various conspiracies within the police department against the government. Who besides Willi had wanted to overthrow the Third Reich? Who besides Willi had sabotaged Otto Bruck and brought about his death? He asked about Frau Schimmel. He asked about Lola, about various other people of Willi’s acquaintance. Willi knew nothing about most of what the captain asked, but in every case, whether he knew anything or not, he remained silent.

  Once the Hauptsturmführer stood up, Willi saw that he was a gigantic man, two meters in height easily and a muscular hundred kilos. He took off his hat. His head was shaved. Now Willi recognized him. He came around the table and stood in front of Willi. He put on his gloves, as though hitting Willi might damage his enormous hands. He slapped Willi’s face hard. ‘Why, Geismeier?’ he shouted. ‘Why make things harder for yourself? And for me?’ Willi tasted blood. The man slapped him again, then turned away in disgust.

  This time Willi was not whipped. Instead he was taken to a cell in the so-called Bunker where he was to be held in total darkness with only a tin of water and almost no food for an indeterminate length of time. The cell was small and filthy and pitch dark. Despite a small ventilator in the door, the air was thick and foul. There was no bed and no bedding. A slop bucket in the corner was the only furniture.

  After sitting against the wall or standing for the better part of his first day, Willi started walking around the periphery of the cell, his right hand on the wall to guide him. He had to be careful not to stumble over the slop bucket. The wall was mostly smooth stone; the floor was uneven, damp and slippery. There was a sharp metal burr on one edge of the door he had to be careful of. He had to walk slowly so he didn’t get dizzy. He counted his steps. One circuit took ten steps, so he counted each time he passed the door. Ten times was a hundred steps, a hundred times was a thousand. Every thousand steps he reversed direction.

  Deprived of liberty, food, and now even light, Shakespeare came to mind. ‘I must become a borrower of the night for an hour or twain,’ he said to himself. Willi began to recite as he marched around the cell. Of course, even having read the plays many times, Willi didn’t know them by heart. But he knew some bits – openings, soliloquies – and was familiar enough with the rest to assemble the characters and arrange the scenes into a facsimile of the original.

  So he set about writing the plays in his mind, reimagining them. He constructed dialogue, using the language he remembered, and improvising t
he rest out of the darkness in which he found himself, constructing a sort of amalgam of punishment and poetry. His steps around and around became the meter of his verse. Sometimes he spoke the words and sometimes he thought them. He wasn’t sure when he was doing one thing or the other. It seemed natural, to him at least, that he should begin with A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  ‘Now, fair Hippolyta,’ he whispered, ‘our nuptial hour draws on apace; four happy days bring in another moon. But I think how slow the old moon wanes. She draws out my desires.

  ‘Four days will soon become four nights and dream away the time. Why not seven indeed, since we are seven nights here? And the moon, unseen but yet there somewhere, shall see the nights of our solemnities.

  ‘Go Philostrate, stir up the Athenian youth to merriments, wake up the nimble spirit of mirth, send melancholy, dark melancholy, this my melancholy, send it to funerals. It is not fit for our inner light. Hippolyta, I woo’d thee with my pacing, remember? And I won thy love marching in circles, but I will wed thee differently, elsewhere and at a later time with triumphant reveling.’

  And so it went on.

  There were periods where he could not remember what came next, and he paused in his reciting to sort it out. But it mattered less and less, because as the play unfolded, it got further and further from Shakespeare’s version and closer and closer to his own. It took him many hours to finish his Midsummer Night’s Dream. He collapsed on the floor, not knowing whether it was night or day. He wept as he fell into a terrible sleep.

  He took on Macbeth next, then Hamlet, then The Tempest, each one seeming more appropriate to the moment than the last. Once – he didn’t know whether it was night or day, or how long he had been there – his madness was interrupted by the small trapdoor at the bottom of the entry door opening and spilling light into the cell. ‘Geismeier!’ someone whispered. ‘Geismeier!’

  ‘Yes,’ Willi said. It was more a croak than a voice.

  ‘Here,’ said the voice at the door, and two hands reached in with a tin of hot soup – real soup with vegetables and even bits of meat, and a large hunk of bread.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Willi, taking the food.

  ‘We’re not dogs, Geismeier!’ said the other voice. It was Neudeck, the kapo. ‘You and me, Geismeier. We’re not animals!’

  One day – it could have been a week or a month as far as Willi knew – the door opened. Willi was blinded by the light. He was taken by the arms – despite all the pacing, he was unsteady on his feet. He was taken to a shower room and told to wash himself, but the water was cold and there was no soap. He rinsed the feces and urine from his legs and feet, the filth from his hands and face as best he could. He was given no other clothes, so he put his filthy clothes back on.

  Willi was marched to the interrogation room and the gigantic Hauptsturmführer was there again, his hat cocked at the same rakish angle, as though he had been waiting the entire time. Muddled Shakespeare tumbled through Willi’s mind. ‘The hour’s now come; the very minute bids thee ope thine ear; obey and be attentive.’ He almost spoke the words, but recognized his own madness and kept silent.

  ‘Let’s try again, Geismeier, shall we?’ said the captain. He spoke almost gently, reacting to Willi’s physical state. Willi looked a wreck. His eyes were wild, his beard had grown, his hair had started falling out. And despite the shower, he stank. The two kapos moved to the corners of the room to be as far from Willi as they could get. The captain held a white handkerchief in front of his nose and mouth, a gesture that was both dainty and ridiculous. Nevertheless, now that he considered Geismeier’s state, he was satisfied with the results of the punishment and obviously with himself.

  ‘So, Geismeier, are you finally ready to talk?’

  To the captain’s surprise, Willi said, ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Well, Geismeier, now you’re behaving in a reasonable manner.’ He moved the handkerchief from his face, as though Willi’s reasonableness might make him stink less. But it didn’t, so he covered his nose and mouth again.

  ‘So, Geismeier, do you remember that you impersonated a detective?’

  ‘I do,’ said Willi.

  ‘You do what?’ said the captain, just to make sure he was talking to a rational man.

  ‘I remember impersonating a detective.’

  The captain was astonished and relieved that the admission had come so easily. He hated doing interrogations at Dachau. ‘And do you remember why you decided to impersonate a police detective, which I’m sure you know is a grave offense?’

  ‘I remember that as well,’ said Willi. ‘I was trying to do what the police had evidently been unable or unwilling to do, and that is to find the serial killer, the man who was killing all those women. He had already killed …’ Willi had momentarily forgotten how many women had been murdered. ‘Is it nine?’

  ‘No, it’s even more,’ said the Hauptsturmführer. ‘It’s thirteen.’ He knew because he had been paying close attention to this story. The Hauptsturmführer had been raised the only male in a house full of doting sisters and aunts. They had fussed over him like a collective of very attentive nursemaids, granting his every wish, ignoring his follies, and treating him like a prince. And now he lived a similar pampered life in a comfortable villa with his wife and their four daughters who saw to his every need, bringing him his cocoa in the morning and his cigar and brandy at night.

  His interrogation of Willi had originally been meant to discover Willi’s supposed political activities and criminal connections while he was a policeman. But Willi’s interest in the murder of these women now completely diverted his attention. He was by no means sympathetic toward the treacherous former policeman, but he was very sympathetic toward Geismeier’s professed desire to put this killer out of commission. The Hauptsturmführer was a man who loved women. All women.

  ‘But damn it, man, you’re no longer a cop,’ said the Hauptsturmführer. ‘If you had been a proper policeman you might have solved the case by now. But, damn it, Geismeier, you disgraced yourself. You threw away the right to investigate anything. So, tell me: on whose authority were you impersonating a police detective and investigating this crime? That’s what I want to know.’

  It was a rhetorical question, so the Hauptsturmführer was surprised when he got an answer. ‘Grosz,’ said Willi. ‘Friedrich Grosz.’

  ‘Friedrich Grosz?! Friedrich Grosz is the authority?’ said the Hauptsturmführer, sounding confused and indignant at the same time. ‘Who the hell is Friedrich Grosz?’

  ‘Friedrich Grosz is the killer, Hauptsturmführer Altdorfer.’ Willi had finally remembered the captain’s name.

  Altdorfer realized that all he knew about the murders of the thirteen women was what he had read in the paper. And Geismeier seemed to know more. And Willi was correct: the police were still no closer to solving the case than they had been when he had been arrested. And the Hauptsturmführer found himself wondering for the first time why they hadn’t caught the killer. Was this beast really that cunning that he could evade the Reich’s entire security apparatus? He had been murdering women for years; they certainly ought to have caught him by now.

  In fact, they probably would have solved the case if they had just followed the evidence. But they were completely distracted by other things – departmental politics for one – and Willi’s impersonation of a detective for another. That was politically safer to investigate than a murder that might involve one of their own, or worse, someone above them. And so, their investigation had veered off in the relatively harmless direction of Willi’s criminality. Some of the departmental higher-ups – superiors Willi had bedeviled when he was still a detective – believed, or pretended to believe, that his playing detective might be part of a plot against their departmental regime. Or maybe he had played detective just to show them up. Altdorfer had heard that argument and had thought it might be true.

  ‘Who is this Friedrich Grosz, Geismeier?’ he asked.

  ‘He is the murderer of those women, Ha
uptsturmführer, and an officer in the Gestapo.’

  Altdorfer jumped to his feet and left the room without another word. That allegation crossed the line. It just couldn’t be. The Gestapo would have rooted out and punished such a heinous malefactor long ago. The Führer wouldn’t stand for such a monster in his regime. And yet, the thought stayed in Hauptsturmführer Altdorfer’s mind and wouldn’t let go.

  Kristallnacht

  The clouds were low; it felt like snow. Heinz had a letter from Tomas. He took it up to show Frau Schimmel. He made a pot of tea and brought it to her along with the letter. He helped her sit up in bed and plumped the pillow behind her head. ‘Drink this, Bertha,’ he said. ‘It’ll warm you up.’ They had finally, after years of knowing each other, begun using first names.

  ‘Nothing warms me up any more,’ she said. ‘Other than your company.’

  ‘Drink it anyway,’ he said.

  She did as she was told, taking small careful sips. Her hand trembled and the cup rattled on the saucer as she set it down. ‘This was my mother’s china,’ she said. ‘Limoges. I never cared much for it, you know. But I always kept it. And now I’m glad I did. It seems important somehow.’

  He gave her the letter. The paper fluttered in her hand as she read it. ‘Tomas sounds well,’ she said.

  They sat silently for a while. The only sound was the radiator banging and the ticking of the clock on the dresser. ‘I need to bleed the radiators some day soon,’ said Heinz.

  ‘There’s no rush, Heinz.’

  ‘Still,’ said Heinz, but had nothing to add. The clock ticked.

  ‘You said you had something to tell me, Heinz.’

  ‘Yes. Maybe. I don’t know, Bertha. I don’t want to alarm you.’

  ‘What is it?’