by Michael Dean
‘Did she die quickly?’ He asked that one for poor Geli.
‘I’m sorry, Herr Glaser, anything but. A slow death, in pain.’ She looked at him sympathetically and dropped Mitzi a huge chunk of meat. ‘The deceased had leucocytes, white blood cells, round the area of bleeding. Lots of the little fellows. Very pretty under a microscope. That shows that life continued after the infliction of the injuries. As it would.’
‘Would it?’
‘Most certainly. The shot missed the heart completely. That’s even in Müller’s report, though damn all else is.’ Frau Brandl took some vigorous gulps of beer. She banged the empty mug down, meaningfully.
‘Would you like another one, Frau Bandl?’
‘Thank you.’
Glaser waved a waitress over. She was balancing a flat board with six brimming mugs of beer above her shoulder. Glaser nodded at his own beer mat, to say he was paying. The waitress put a beer down. As she walked off, she scored his beermat with a stroke from a stubby pencil.
‘Poor Geli!’ he said, when the waitress was out of hearing.
‘I don’t know if our friend knew this,’ Bandl said cautiously. She meant Hitler. ‘But if a doctor had been called immediately, she could have been saved.’
Glaser was suddenly tired. ‘I wish you hadn’t said that.’
‘You’re not the only one who’d rather remain in ignorance these days,’ Bandl said.
She gave a rare smile. She was a comrade-at-arms, Glaser thought warmly.
Bandl took a massive swig of beer.
‘Anything else?’
‘Plenty!’ said the pathologist, with a hint of irony. ‘The angle of entry of the bullet does not rule out suicide, but it makes it unlikely. It’s something like this.’
Putting her stein of beer down, Bandl took her knife in her left hand and held the blade almost under her armpit, pointing steeply downwards. ‘Damned uncomfortable,’ she said. ‘Very unlikely for self-inflicted. If you ask me, the deceased twisted her body sideways at the last moment, trying to get out of the way.’
Glaser nodded, leaving the rest of his food. ‘Yes. I see.’
‘And in any case,’ Bandl said, warming to the theme, ‘very few women shoot themselves. I can’t think of any, in my experience. Can you?’
‘Actually, no.’
‘As you surely know, Herr Glaser, women are killing themselves in Munich every day. Mainly Jewesses. They all use Veronal. You can get it easily, at any apothecary. And it’s painless. So why use a gun?’
‘Why indeed?’ Glaser sighed, the cares of the world on his shoulders. He was about to offer to drive Bandl home. He had a so-called Opel Frosch, converted so he could use his right leg only. He knew she didn’t drive.
‘There’s one more thing. Of possible interest.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Geli was pregnant. Just starting to show.’
Chapter Six
The Weintraub Gallery, in Lenbachplatz, was Munich’s leading gallery for Expressionist painting, but it was minute – one square whitewashed room. Ascher Weintraub unlocked the door to Glaser before he had time to knock, as he always did. Then he stood there, beaming, tiny, as he let his lawyer friend in.
The art dealer, when fully extended, reached the middle of the lawyer’s sternum. As ever, he was wearing a dark suit, too small even for him. The sleeves left not only his wrists but half his skinny arms bare. As ever, the soft wing collar and once-white shirt managed to look ancient without being actually grubby. The habitual black tie was permanently at half mast.
And above that, the remarkable face Glaser never tired of gazing at, beamed up at him, in welcome. His head was long but the bottom part was entirely hidden by a thorn bush of a beard, brown with chestnut highlights, too thick to let the welcoming smile change its shape much. The smile splayed the spatulate nose a bit. Above that, surprisingly small dark eyes glowed.
‘Gerhard! How are you?’
‘Ah! Ascher! I’m fine. It’s the world that’s the problem.’
The old man laughed, waving vaguely with one hand which was too big for its skinny bare arm, partly in welcome but partly to indicate the latest selection of Expressionist paintings, leaping out from the whitewashed walls with their glorious emotional colours.
‘Thanks!’ Glaser said heavily, as if the art dealer was actually giving him the paintings, which in a sense he was. ‘I need this!’
And he was not disappointed.
‘A Macke! An August Macke! An early work, surely?’
Glaser struggled out of his mac – it was warm in the gallery – as if about to perform some votive ceremony before the painting.
The art dealer’s smile grew wider, slightly thinning the foliage of his beard. ‘It’s called Anglers on the Rhine.’
And there it was, all subdued blues and greens, reminding Glaser of another image in his heart – Ensor’s The Poachers.
‘How does he do it?’ Glaser was speaking softly, his voice croaking slightly. He spoke like that to Lotte – his wife – before he made love to her. And that was not only out of love but because he still found Lotte naked movingly, unspeakably beautiful.
‘Oh, he does it from love.’ Ascher’s voice was surprisingly light, even for a small man. Youthful. Glaser still hadn’t got to the bottom of that accent. It might be Viennese.
But Ascher was speaking on: ‘You see, he isn’t painting anglers and he isn’t painting the Rhine – at least not only anglers and not only the Rhine. He’s painting the soul of the Rhine, the soul of the landscape. When he was painting, his darling Elisabeth was next to him. His soul is going out to her soul as he paints. So the colour of the anglers and the Rhine represents his love for Elisabeth, his soul and her soul in the shape of anglers and a river. He is painting love. He has unified the world he sees with the world he feels in one glorious loving pantheistic statement’
Glaser felt the feather touch of the old man’s hand on his jacket sleeve, indicating they should go through to his office now. Weintraub knew better than to try to lead him. Any touch Glaser was not ready for could overbalance him, because of the leg business.
They found themselves on either side of Weintraub’s desk, which, along with the large old-fashioned safe, took up most of his box-like office. Lemon tea was poured; a plate of kichlach stood ready to be nibbled but was being ignored.
‘Tell me about Elisabeth,’ Glaser said.
He knew Macke’s childhood sweetheart was called Elisabeth, but he knew no more than that. But that was always the case, in his discussions with Ascher Weintraub. The old man always knew more, understood more. It was the understanding Glaser wanted, more than the knowledge. He imbibed wisdom from the frail old man. It was nourishment to his heart and soul.
Weintraub nodded absently, taking a minute bite from the outer edge of the sugared biscuits stuffed with fruit and a matching dolls’-house-sized sip of tea.
‘They were so young. So young ...’
Tears sprang to Glaser’s eyes. August Macke was among the first casualties of the war, killed at Champagne seventeen years, almost to the day, before he and Ascher Weintraub sat discussing his amazing work.
‘He was at one with the seasons; he saw everything as if it were a Japanese woodcut.’ The old man was speaking as if intoning a prayer. Glaser was so rapt he was holding his breath. ‘You see, he and Elisabeth wandered the Rhine; Lengsdorf, Ippendorf, their favourite one, Messdorf, Grau-Rheindorf on the lower Rhine. All day. Endless summer days of youth. And all that time their youthful beautiful souls entered the landscape he was painting. They were physically beautiful, as well, of course, both of them.’
Glaser joined in. It was like a catechism. ‘So when Macke later came to paint masterpieces like Girls under Trees, it wasn’t necessary to paint the faces of the girls ...’
The old man was nodding. ‘Exactly. Because their souls had entered the trees around them and the souls of the trees had entered them. One of the girls has a diagonal formed by her hair and
part of her dress, down her back. Like the trunk of a tree. It’s the most glorious pantheistic statement in all art.’
‘All those curves!’
‘Full of love and beauty and youth. Have you seen any of Macke’s portraits of Elisabeth?’
‘No, never, could you ...?’
The old man nodded absently. ‘I’ll see if I can get you copies from Hanfstaengl or somebody. One of them was called Nude with a Coral Necklace. Painted in 1910, it was. The year art died according to Mein Kampf. Elisabeth was a very beautiful woman and in this one we see her naked. We see her bare breasts. But, Gerhard, nothing could be less lascivious than that portrait. Yes, she is aesthetically beautiful but what we see through the beauty is love. A love that blazes with quiet but beautiful fire.’
There was silence between them for a while. Silence but no unease. Glaser’s mind was spinning. Lotte. The children, Kaspar and Magda. Running through the maize fields in his boyhood in a little Swabian village.
‘Do you still ...?’ Glaser hesitated. It could have been a bright keen student asking a nervous question of his professor. ‘Macke and Franz Marc ...?’
The two knew each other so well that their conversations frequently covered some of the same ground before pushing off into new aspects, insights or directions. One of the oldest of their old chestnuts was the comparison between two great Expressionists, close friends, both killed in the war – August Macke and Franz Marc.
Glaser was the champion of Marc, the painter of many studies of blue horses, mainly, but also yellow horses, pink horses – all glorious colour. For all the fabulous Expressionist passion and sensitivity of Macke, Glaser saw Marc as harder, clearer, more masculine, if you will.
‘My Munich man,’ murmured Glaser with a smile. Marc had been born in Munich.
‘Oh, August and Elisabeth loved Munich, too,’ Weintraub said. ‘Elisabeth had an uncle here. She loved the Englischer Garten. Not that I hold any brief for Munich. Not at the moment anyway.’
Glaser’s mind raced. That was the nearest Weintraub had come to talking about the dire political situation. He could ask him about that. Or he could use the opening to probe, not for the first time, into where Weintraub was from and how he had ended up here.
But every moment with this man, with this wise magician from a fairy tale, was precious. Putting his forensic courtroom training into play, Glaser led the old man back to the path they loved to walk together, the Expressionists.
‘Marc’s colour theory ...’ Glaser began.
‘Pah!’ The old man did actually spit, though he had not intended to.
A flapping wave of a too large cuff and skinny arm brought Glaser to a halt. He would not have taken that from anybody else on earth. His colleagues at the Ministry of Justice, even Lotte, would have been amazed to see the splenetic, touchy, peppery Glaser behaving so meekly.
‘Marc’s colour theory!’ repeated the old man, packing scorn accumulated over decades into the phrase. ‘Yes, blue horses masculine, yellow horses feminine, pink ... It’s rubbish. Absolute rubbish. Never trust an artist when he talks about his own work. They know less than the well-attuned viewer. A lot less. Marc wrote that in a letter. Maybe he was drunk ...’ Glaser was laughing. ‘Listen! Marc’s horses are blue because blue horses are beautiful. And different. The unexpected is good art. The only thing you can say for Marc that is maybe above Macke is that he represented the beauty of the soul through shape as well as colour. But Marc is merely transformational. Macke is sublime.’
*
It was late in the evening before Glaser pulled the Münchener Post cutting from his pocket. As ever, or so it always appeared to him, Weintraub was ahead of him.
‘What’s that? The Post? Seen it.’ Arm flap, hand wave like a dying kipper.
‘And? What do you ...?’
‘Pah! S’rubbish!’
‘Don’t beat about the bush, Ascher, will you?’
‘Rubbish is rubbish, Gerhard.’
‘All right. Why?’
‘Why? Why? Ever the bloody lawyer. What do you mean, why? Have they given you Geli’s case?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oy vay!’
Glaser laughed. Weintraub had accompanied the Yiddish imprecation with a satirically Jewish shoulder shrug. All the Jews Glaser knew sent themselves up. It was one of the things Glaser liked about the Jews. One of the many things.
‘About Hitler, Ascher. Tell me.’ Glaser spoke softly, coaxingly. Now, nearer his own ground, they were public prosecutor and expert witness, no longer professor and student.
‘You are worried, Gerhard, aren’t you?’ Small hand flap.
‘Yes. How do you know?’
‘You’re breaking protocol. Stickler like you. Tut tut tut.’
Weintraub said the word, rather than tutting. Glaser laughed again.
‘All right, Gerhard. The Münchener Post ... It’s totally wrong, sad to say.’
They were both silent a moment, as if in tribute to the brave fight the newspaper had put up against the Nazis since the early 1920s. Their offices and printing presses had been attacked, time after time, their journalists libelled, threatened and beaten up, and calumny after calumny had been thrown at them, often in the courts.
Glaser sighed. ‘That was my impression, too. But go on.’
Ascher Weintraub suddenly looked tired, even a little afraid, his shoulders slumping.
‘It is just – just – conceivable that Hitler got Geli to beat him. But him beating her? Bruising her nose? Never!’
‘The pathologist said the same thing. But I’m curious, what makes you so sure?’
‘Hitler’s father beat his mother, the woman he loved above all others. Hitler identified with the mother, not the father.’
‘And how do you know that?’
‘It’s in Mein Kampf. You read it?’
‘No. Is it good?’
‘Terrific. They should make a film of it. I’ll be in touch with Sam Goldwyn in Hollywood.’
Glaser belly-laughed, big shoulders heaving.
Weintraub shook his head in mock sadness. ‘Hitler is a sexual submissive.’
‘Could he have shot Geli? Do you think?’
‘Yes. That’s conceivable. Provided it wasn’t premeditated. Heat of the moment. Very powerful reason, maybe. Something that threatens him in a big way.’
Glaser was nodding. He packed and lit a pipe. ‘Ascher, may I ask you something? How do you know so much about Hitler?’
‘Oh ... He used to be a client of mine.’
*
Glaser telephoned Lotte from Ascher’s office, to say he would be home very late. An unsurprised Lotte said she would go to bed and asked him to be quiet when he came in, so as not to wake the children.
Glaser nodded into the telephone receiver. ‘Lotte. I love you.’
There was a silence at the other end. Lotte Glaser knew that her husband loved her but it was first time he had said so since their courtship. The silence continued. Then: ‘I love you, too, Gerhard.’
She rang off.
‘Hitler ...’ Glaser prompted the witness.
‘I knew him in Vienna,’ Weintraub said flatly.
Glaser’s mouth went dry. He hardly dared breathe. Ascher had never spoken about his private life before, despite frequent prompting. Glaser knew he was not married. He knew he had a sister, Professor Zipporah Ballat from Munich University. He thought Ascher lived with her, but he was not sure even of that.
‘Go on.’
Glaser was afraid of breaking the spell but the art dealer was clearly in the mood to talk.
‘This was the golden age in Vienna, Gerhard. The time of Klimt and Kokoschka. Hitler was selling his drawings. Making a good living at it, too. Earning 100 marks a month. And that’s on top of his inheritance from his father and his orphan’s pension. All that down-and-out stuff he wrote about in Mein Kampf is laute Scheisse.’
‘And you ...?’
‘Yes, I bought his drawings and paintings. Most of
the dealers who did were Jews. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t talk about it. And no we didn’t do him down.’
‘You don’t have to say that to me, Ascher!’ Glaser spoke hotly, almost yelling, the temper that flared with everyone but Weintraub now seen in this office for the first time.
Weintraub was surprised, even shrinking back for a second. He smiled faintly, moving the beard-bush. ‘No. I know I don’t. You see ... Hitler imbibed the anti-Semitism from Schoenerer and the others on the streets of Vienna. It was all in pamphlet form. Ideal for him. He doesn’t read too much. Gives him a headache. Where was I?’
‘Tell me about Hitler’s art.’
Weintraub shut his eyes, in for a long talk. ‘Well, first of all he was unlucky not to get into the Academy. Very unlucky ... He passed Part I, the first time. That was ... 1907, I think. Yes. He failed Part II that year but so did some quite good people. You know Robin Christian Andersen?’
‘Heard of him.’
‘Well he failed Part II. Same year. And he ended up a teacher at the Academy.’
‘So ... this Part II is ...’
‘Part II is where the candidates present their own work. So Hitler works for the next year with a teacher. Good man. Name of Panholzer. A friend of mine found him for Hitler. And he worked hard for that whole year. I saw some of his portfolio.’
‘And?’
‘He’s a good draughtsman. A very good draughtsman. He’s got no depth and no soul, but he could easy make a living from architectural drawings, or technical drawings, maybe even landscapes. He does good competent work. Easy good enough to get in to any art academy.’
‘So what happened?’
Weintraub shrugged. ‘When he takes the examination again, next year, he fails Part I, the set subjects. The part he passed the previous year. Just bad luck. They choose some terrible subjects, you know, the Academy. The Blinding of Samson. That kind of thing. So he never got a chance to show all the very good stuff he had done with Panholzer. The work which would have been submitted in Part II and got him in.’
‘And if he had got into the Academy ...?’ Glaser mused.
‘Aaagh, well! He would have had a career as an artist in Vienna. No doubt. He would never have come to Germany.’
