A Night of Long Knives (Hannah Vogel)

by Cantrell, Rebecca

  I washed dust from my hands and face by moonlight and dried off with one of my unsuspecting host’s opulent towels. What a terrible houseguest I was. I broke the glass in the solarium door, and I dirtied the towels. I certainly would not be invited back.

  I ran a glass of lukewarm water and stationed myself near the front window. Standing, I ate the food that Ulli had packed for me, grateful for his thoughtfulness. I had to wait until everyone across the street slept soundly.

  When I was full, and the borrowed house restored to order as much as possible, I crept out the broken back door and circled round to the front yard. Dried grass crackled under my suitcase when I set it behind a stone pillar near the street. I laid the wedding dress atop the suitcase to keep the silk clean. I drew the Luger out of my satchel. If Mouse was in there, I would need it.

  I crept across the street carrying the gun and a damp towel I had borrowed. Hoping that no one watched, I hurried to the side of the Röhm house.

  Folly to try to break through the thick front door, but the servant’s entrance where the maid had put out the garbage might have possibilities. I tried the side door, hopeful. Locked. I expected that. But it did have a window. I wrapped the towel around the gun’s stock and used it to break the glass. I reached through the window frame and unlocked the door. Amazing that more people were not burglars. It was ridiculously easy. Then I remembered the dogs, grateful that they had been taken away.

  Once inside I swept up glass with the towel. Perhaps no one would notice. I smiled at my own naïveté. The maid would know when she came back to get the garbage cans in the morning. But by then I hoped to be long gone.

  Luger held in both hands, I crept down the hall and into the kitchen, dark shapes of the worktable and sink reassuring in the moonlight. Everything put away, surfaces wiped. Certain that no stray shards of broken glass flew this far, I took off my shoes and carried them in my left hand, the pistol in the other.

  My stocking feet pattered through the kitchen and into the dining room. The table was set for breakfast. One place, not two. If Anton was here, he was not expected to breakfast with his grandmother. And no place was set for Mouse either.

  I searched the front room, the bathroom, and the foyer. No sign of Anton.

  I walked up the stairs, back against the wall, each footfall careful and light. Still, a step squeaked. I froze, every muscle taut. No other sounds disturbed the night. Heart pounding, I skulked up the rest of the stairs.

  Three bedrooms and a bathroom, and none contained Anton. The room with a closed door I assumed must belong to Frau Röhm. I would check that last.

  I tiptoed up the narrow stairs to the attic. It contained a jumble of furniture, coatracks, steamer trunks, and a stuffed elk head, but no small boy was buried in the drifts of dust.

  I sneaked back downstairs. I had nowhere else to search. I set my shoes next to the door. I tightened my grip on the Luger and pressed down the door handle, slow and steady. A soft click told me when the catch released, and I pushed open the door. Frau Röhm lay on the bed, snoring, a white cap on her head, sweating in the heat.

  She was alone.

  My heart fell. Anton was not in the house, and I had seen no evidence that he ever had been, except for the twig. Mouse must have stashed him elsewhere.

  I backed out of the room and bent to pick up my shoes. The snoring stopped. I hurried down the stairs hugging the wall opposite the creaky step. Hard footsteps crossed the floor above.

  Caught.

  I tightened my sweaty fingers around the Luger. Was she armed too?

  8

  Frau Röhm’s quavery voice floated down. “I assume it is you, Fräulein Vogel. As your thorough search has revealed, he is not here. I cannot keep him in the house until this political situation is resolved. But have no fear. He is with someone I trust.”

  Mouse?

  “Be on your way, and do not come back without my son.” She cleared her old throat. “I sent the dogs to a neighbor after you left today, because I need you uninjured. I expected you to search the house. Tomorrow I bring the dogs back. I hope you understand what that means for intruders.” I thought of threatening her, but did not think she would tell me anything. She was every bit as tough as her son. If she told me anything under duress, I bet it would be lies. My best course was to stay on her good side. I thought of sneaking off without answering, but decided that only honesty would do.

  “Thank you, Frau Röhm. I will return, through the front door, as soon as I can.”

  Burning with embarrassment, I let myself out the back door, glad that I had at least cleaned up the glass.

  Refreshed after a good night’s sleep and a pilfered breakfast in the abandoned house, I was relieved to find the staff car where I had left it the night before. I drove back to the prison. I thought of ditching the car, but so many threads linked me to Röhm as Hannah Vogel, what was one more?

  I hoped to see Röhm before they executed him. I hoped to give him his mother’s message of her pride in his courage, and her love for him. Perhaps he would relent and tell me Anton’s location. Perhaps listening to the executions of his men had softened him up. If not, I had a plan for finding Mouse.

  I parked at the far corner of the lot away from the other cars, so I would have a good view from the front stairs of anyone fussing around the staff car. Here many might recognize it as Röhm’s, and I needed to make certain that no one watched when I returned.

  For the second time, I crunched across gravel to the guardhouse. The guard stood behind the wooden counter, back to me. Papers littered the table in front of him. Execution orders? Were they so organized?

  “Good morning, sir.” When he turned, I recognized him as the old man who had cleaned up after me the previous afternoon. His eyes also flickered with recognition, and a trace of anger.

  “I am here to see Ernst Röhm again.” I pulled Frau Röhm’s letter from my satchel. “I have additional messages from his mother. And she has authorized me to start the transfer of his body if he has been executed.”

  “He’s still alive, I think. But no one is allowed to see him.” The guard did not spare the letter a glance. “Orders.”

  “Has anyone visited him since I went in?” I rested my elbows on the counter and fanned myself with Frau Röhm’s letter. At least the letter was good for that much.

  He hesitated, then paged through a large black ledger. “Hans Frank.”

  I craned to read the entries, but he snapped the book closed.

  “Am I in there?” I dearly hoped not.

  “Your visit was unofficial.”

  My relief was short lived. If my visit was unofficial, then so might others have been. I might never know who else had visited Röhm. On the other hand, at least I was not listed in the book. A link between Röhm and myself rendered invisible. “Did he have official visitors, besides Minister Frank?”

  “I’m not supposed to be telling you that.” His eyes slid left and right, probably to check that no one overheard our conversation.

  “His mother wishes to know who has been with him. She wishes to know all she can of his last hours. Surely you can understand that.”

  He shuffled his feet, looking uncomfortable. At heart he was a good sort, and my conscience twinged, but the stakes were high. We stood in silence.

  “No one else since I’ve been on duty,” he answered finally.

  “A priest?” Röhm might pass messages out with a priest.

  “Not even a priest. That would be in the book.”

  I wondered how last night had been for Röhm, sitting alone in his cell listening to the executions, knowing that his turn would come soon enough. He was tough, but even he must have a breaking point. Another round of shots cracked through the air. The guard and I jumped.

  I put the letter flat on the counter upside down, for him to read if he chose. He kept his gaze on me. “Is there a way I may see him unofficially? For her?”

  “Not possible. I almost lost my post for letting you in b
efore.” He grimaced. “And it seems to me that you saw more than enough yesterday.”

  “I am sorry if I caused you trouble.”

  “I’ll tell you when he’s executed, Fräulein,” he said in a soft voice. “I’m sorry, but I can do no more than that.”

  I picked up the letter and looked around for a chair to sit and wait. They had been removed. No one was to linger here. If anyone, like me, was foolish enough to come, they were to leave again as soon as possible. Relatives were not welcome.

  I left the guardroom, feeling the heavy door pull itself closed behind me as I stepped into the hot clear air. Today promised to be hotter than yesterday, fine and beautiful. A day for sailing or walking in the park eating ices. A day that should have passed in simple frivolity for the young men in the prison. Instead it was their day to die.

  I sat on the hot stairs in a wide-brimmed hat I had brought from South America. Every twenty minutes a set of rifles popped, killing eight more boys. Even though it was quieter here than in the guardhouse, I flinched each time. If Röhm still lived, how did he feel? He knew many of them by name, had slept with more than several if rumors were to be believed. He must be imagining them standing, and dying, because they had followed him. Their young talent and energy wasted. I dropped my head into my sweaty hands.

  Throughout the long day I sat alone on the stairs. I stood when men came and went. Most dressed in SS-black, but a few wore civilian suits, looking as much like bankers as Boris. But they dealt in the figures of death, not the numbers of commerce. Most passed without notice, but a few looked surprised. None dared speak. Probably none wanted to know if they had murdered my husband, my brother, or my son.

  I passed the time between volleys by trying to keep my mind blank. I forced myself not to think of the mothers, the boys now gone, and the lives they might have led. Far away in her dark parlor, curtains drawn, I knew that Röhm’s mother sat his deathwatch with me, red thread flashing through yellow linen.

  I thought of leaving for lunch, but had no appetite. For reasons that I could not articulate, it felt important to stay and wait. Someone must listen. Soon the Nazis would forbid even that.

  A little after six a scattered volley of shots erupted from the part of the prison that housed Röhm. Unlike the firing squads, they were irregular. Two different weapons firing out of sequence, perhaps three. I counted nine rounds. It sounded as if at least two men had fired their guns empty. Something had not gone according to plan. I smiled bitterly. That sounded like Röhm.

  Minutes later Theodor Eicke, familiar from newspaper photographs, walked out the front door in SS dress uniform, hat tucked under his arm, a pair of leather gloves held in his right hand. A wet fleck clung to the knife crease of his trousers, near the hem. Blood?

  He inclined his barbered head toward me. His hair was parted on the left, temples a distinguished silver. With his square face and large eyes he looked like my old physics teacher, but his eyes were cold and dead. “Good evening.” He bowed in my direction.

  I shuddered and scrambled to my feet. This man had set up the concentration camp at Dachau, not far from here. More than anyone else, he bore responsibility for countless daily tortures and humiliations. In front of me stood the man who transferred soldiers out of his camps if they showed the slightest compassion for the prisoners. How could I make small talk with him? Yet I must.

  “Good evening,” I answered, mouth dry.

  He pulled a cigarette out of a gold case embossed with a swastika. He offered it to me, and I shook my head. “Waiting for someone?”

  “For news of someone.” I cleared my throat.

  He struck a match, and the smell of sulfur drifted over to me. I coughed.

  Well bred, he blew the smoke away from me. “News of whom?”

  “I am here representing Emilie Röhm, mother of Ernst Röhm.” I kept silent on my own connections with Röhm. I did not want someone like Eicke to know about me. Only anonymity might keep me alive.

  I held up Frau Röhm’s letter, wilted from the damp heat. He stepped close and skimmed the spidery words. The acrid smell of gunpowder clung to him, an undertone to the more familiar odor of cigarette smoke.

  “He died well. The Führer ordered that we send him in a pistol and let him do the honorable thing.”

  “Did he?” I asked. I had seen Röhm convince others to do the “honorable” thing, but I wagered his own survival instinct was too strong. I rather hoped he had used the revolver to take one of them with him. Someone should resist them.

  “Said he wouldn’t do Hitler the favor.” Eicke picked a shred of tobacco off his tongue. “The old bull had balls, to the end.”

  I nodded, staring at his long fingers as he flicked ash onto the steps. He smoked in silence, inhaling deeply before letting smoke trickle out of his mouth. I gave him a moment, then spoke. “Is there anything more I can tell his mother?” I stressed the word mother, to remind him that somewhere, someone mourned Röhm.

  He paused, perhaps deciding what to divulge. “Tell his mother that when we came back he was stripped to the waist. He stood at attention and offered a final salute before he was shot. An officer to the end.”

  I pictured Röhm clicking his heels and saluting his executioners as he had saluted Hitler in the hotel room at the Hanselbauer. Before I was twenty, I had lost my first fiancé, my real one, in the Great War. If I counted Röhm as a second fiancé, I had been made a widow before I became a bride, twice. I had not thought I would grieve at Röhm’s passing. Yet I did. He was human and, his faults notwithstanding, probably more humane than those who would replace him.

  “How many times was he shot?”

  “As many as necessary.” Eicke straightened his collar, smoothing the silver oak leaf patch sewn there.

  So, more than once. Nine, if I had counted correctly. I imagined Eicke and the other man dropping him with the first shot, then firing at him as he lay on the cement floor of his cell. I hoped that the first shot had killed him.

  Eicke dropped his cigarette on the steps and ground it out with his toe. A motor started nearby. A black automobile, expensive but not as fine as Röhm’s, pulled in front of us. A chauffeur with hair so blond that it looked white leaped out of the driver’s seat and hurried to open the rear passenger door. When he stood at attention next to the door, Eicke nodded to him.

  “How do you know these things?”

  Eicke settled his officer’s cap on his head, pulling the brim down with his thumb and forefinger. “Because I shot him myself.”

  9

  Eicke walked to the automobile, stride calm and unhurried. Minutes ago he had murdered another human being, but he seemed unshaken. He pulled on his gloves and waved one black hand at me before climbing into the backseat. I was too stunned to wave back. The chauffeur closed the door with a solid thunk. Eicke looked straight ahead, done with his business at the prison. The chauffeur shot me a curious look before climbing into the front seat and driving away.

  I watched until the automobile reached the trees and the sound of the engine died away. The gunpowder smell lingered. The smell of fireworks, picnics with my father, and death.

  I swallowed and returned to the guard desk. The guard raised his head when I came in, his blue eyes faded and dull. No shots had sounded since Röhm’s. Perhaps the Nazis were finished for the day.

  He shuffled papers. “Fräulein, I’ve been informed that Ernst Röhm has been executed.”

  I nodded. I had been informed too. For three years fear of Röhm had ruled my life. And it was over. I was free. Hannah Vogel could do whatever she wished, go wherever she pleased. Yet I was not happy with how I had won my freedom. I would never be fully free of Röhm. I pictured him on the floor of his cell, Eicke standing over him, firing his pistol empty.

  “You have my condolences.” The guard stared at the wall behind my head. He had witnessed Röhm’s performance, where he told me that he loved me. He had probably spun an elaborate story of my attachment to Röhm. Despite everything,
the old guard felt sorry for me, the first human feeling I had seen that day. I gave him a tired smile.

  “I wish to have his body released for burial in his family plot.” I pulled out the letter.

  This time he scanned the paper. “It looks in order. But I cannot help you.”

  “Cannot or will not?” Was he fishing for a bribe? Prison guards did not earn much salary, and I had bribed more than my share while working as crime reporter Peter Weill, but I was terrified to try it here, with Nazis all around.

  “Cannot.” He shook his head. “The bodies aren’t being released. Yet.”

  Did they need to make the bodies presentable for viewing? I closed my eyes and tried not to picture how Röhm must look, with nine rounds in him. “So, he is in no condition for his mother to see.” I was surprised that my voice sounded so calm.

  The guard grimaced. “If he was shot in the courtyard . . .”

  I shook my head. “He was shot in his cell. Nine times, I believe.”

  His eyes met mine for the first time. “It might be days before they release him.”

  “How do I claim his body?”

  The guard shrugged. “I can’t help you here. You must go to Berlin for official permission. There are signatures you will need.”

  I scribbled notes as he detailed the next steps. Berlin. I could be there in seven hours. It was my home, and Mouse’s. If he was on the run from the Nazis, it might be where he would go to ground. If he was there, I would find him.

  There had to be a train this evening. And even if I did not find Mouse, after I had the official signatures, I could trade them for Anton. If Frau Röhm kept her end of the bargain, we would be on our way back to Switzerland by Tuesday.

  It was still light by the time I reached the Munich train station. I abandoned Röhm’s staff car on the sidewalk, keys in the ignition. I hoped that the police would remove it before someone else stole it and got into trouble, although it would be better for me if it were moved elsewhere so that no one could trace me to the train station. I would have parked farther away, but I did not want to carry the suitcase and wedding dress any farther than I had to with my aching rib.