The Luzern Photograph

by William Bayer

  ‘Why would he turn on her if she was giving him what he wanted?’

  ‘Maybe because she was giving him what he wanted, too much of it. Maybe the scene they created was so shameful he couldn’t bear the thought he’d exposed his darkest desires to her. She’d have witnessed the most secret side of him, something his rational side believed was evil. So he did what some people do when there’s a witness who can really damage them, chilled her so no one else would ever find out.’

  ‘You see this as a psychological crime?’

  ‘I do. But of course there’s a problem with that, something Ramos keeps pointing out. Her body was in the trunk of a stolen car. That’s like a scene you see in a movie, an old-fashioned gang-style killing. My gut feeling is that this was a psychological crime, a crime of passion, and stashing her in the car trunk was an attempt to throw us off.’

  There’s something so disturbing about what he’s telling me that I have trouble coming to grips with it. While we sit there talking calmly and sipping coffee, I work hard to stay composed. But soon as we part on the street, I begin to shake. For me being Jewish has never been an issue. My family’s been secular for three generations. I had little experience with the anti-Semitism prevalent in my grandparents’ time. But still the notion of Jewish men paying to be humiliated by a domme decked out as an SS guard – on a rational level, there’s something appalling about that. And yet on the dark counter-intuitive level of psycho-erotic excitement, it makes a certain amount of sense. Thinking about it I’m repelled … and also, I admit, fascinated.

  I stride swiftly back to the Buckley. Soon as I’m home I go straight to the shelves where I’ve arranged Chantal’s books. Gazing at them anew, I view them as a research collection assembled by Chantal in order to learn how to effectively enact Nazi role play.

  My reaction to this verges on revulsion. A side of me wants to be done with Chantal. But I know that’s impossible. I’ve gone too far, probed too deep; she’s become part of me now. I recognize too that Dr Maude may be right – my obsession with her could be pathological.

  And yet as repelled as I am by what I learned from Scarpaci, I feel compelled to learn even more. Surely Josh knew about Chantal’s specialty. How could he not, since he monitored her sessions? And I don’t doubt that Lynx knew too. I decide to call her and put it to her straight.

  ‘Sure, I knew!’ Lynx tells me. ‘Everyone in the scene did. It wasn’t a secret. Chantal wanted other dommes to know so we’d send over clients who had that fetish.’

  ‘Is there some reason you didn’t tell me about this?’

  ‘For one thing, you didn’t ask.’ Lynx pauses. ‘I also figured you’d find it disturbing.’

  ‘I do, but never mind. The cops think it could be relevant.’

  ‘Then they should look into it.’ She pauses. ‘Actually, I didn’t mention it because it’s something of a sore point with me, part of the reason Chantal and I decided to go separate ways. I don’t like racial humiliation. I get requests for it – white guys who want to be enslaved by a black woman. Reverse plantation-slave treatment. Some black dommes get off on that, but for me race play cuts too close. Chantal was fascinated by what she called Nazi/Jewish dynamics. And that always struck me as deeply weird because Chantal’s mother was Jewish.’

  There it is again, more mirroring!

  ‘Did she try and cover it up?’

  ‘No way! She was proud of it. She identified as Jewish. Summer of her freshman year at SF State she signed on for some kind of birth-right tour of Israel. She told me she got a lot out of it.’

  I know about those free cultural enrichment visits. At one time I considered applying for one myself, but in the end opted for a summer theater workshop in the Berkshires. My secular background was typical for a participant, but I didn’t like the Israel-right-or-wrong orientation and I was turned off by rumors that the intention behind the tours was to groom future pro-Israel supporters.

  ‘I don’t get how she could play a sadistic Nazi if she really felt Jewish,’ I tell Lynx.

  ‘But, see, that’s not what she did. When clients said they wanted that, Chantal would act like she was willing to go along. Then she’d flip the script on them, put them through what she called a “denazification drill”. Say a Jewish guy wanted her to wear a swastika armband. Instead she’d dress up in one of her tailored Israeli paratrooper uniforms, interrogate him, then inscribe a Star of David on him, sometimes by dribbling hot wax. This was her way to work them through their fetish and instill Jewish pride. It was tough but in the end the guys loved her for it. They’d come to her for ethnic humiliation. Instead she’d give them an ethnic boost. I doubt anyone who played that game with her would ever want to harm her. I think he’d be too grateful.’

  ‘What if the guy wasn’t Jewish?’

  ‘Then she’d do some real denazification. Then she’d use the whip.’

  Lynx tells me that this denazification ritual was something Chantal learned during her apprenticeship with Gräfin Eva.

  ‘She said there were these real neo-Nazi types in Vienna. Eva taught her how to handle them. As for working with Jewish guys, she liked doing that. She felt like she was taking a sick desire and turning it into a healing experience.’

  Denazification – that at least is something I can relate to.

  Lynx goes on: ‘We had a number of conversations about this. You have to understand how Chantal viewed herself. “I’m a healer, Lynx,” she’d tell me. She told me that if she didn’t feel that way, didn’t feel she was helping people, she would never be able to do domme work. Not just the denazification stuff, but any of it.’

  Before ending our call, I ask Lynx if she knows what happened to Chantal’s chariot, the one she posed in for Josh’s Queen of Swords painting.

  ‘That old thing. I remember seeing it at her tag sale, but I don’t think anyone bought it. A couple of the ladies were intrigued, but it was too big and heavy. You’d need a van to haul it off. So maybe she just left it in the loft and the landlord kept it, or maybe put it out on the street.’

  I decide to give in and call Jerry. Now that Gräfin Eva’s name has come up again, I think it’s important to discover what’s in her letters, filed between the pages of a book about the traditional coffee houses of Vienna.

  Jerry’s cool at first, but he warms up when I explain why I’m calling.

  ‘It would take me too long to write out full translations,’ he says, ‘but I can read through the letters, summarize them, then orally translate the parts that interest you.’

  I’m so pleased by his willingness to help I decide to offer him a reward. Wealthy as he is, I remember how much he likes getting stuff free.

  ‘I’ll be performing in San Francisco fairly soon in the ballroom of a mansion in Presidio Heights. Tickets’ll run two hundred fifty, but if you want to come I can get you comped.’

  ‘Thanks. That’d be great!’ he says.

  Dr Maude, I can see, is restraining herself. I know her well enough to feel the degree of her revulsion even as she tries to conceal it.

  ‘Chantal was half-Jewish yet she played these scenes with her Jewish submissives because she thought they could be healing experiences! What do you really think about that, Tess?’

  ‘I find her denazification concept extremely fascinating. Maybe doing it was also healing for her.’

  ‘I think what she did was extremely dangerous. She was opening up serious wounds. Like the detective told you, something like that can spark a violent response.’

  ‘You think he could be on to something?’

  ‘I think it’s something he should investigate. But what concerns me is your reaction. If I understand you, you’re saying that when you first heard about this you were repulsed, but when you learned she “flipped the script” you saw some merit in it.’

  ‘Don’t know about seeing merit. What Chantal did was definitely perverse.’

  She nods. ‘It was. And as you’ve told me many times you’ve always been at
tracted to the perverse. What I’d like us to consider is where this fascination of yours comes from. I believe the more deeply we examine that, the more profitable our sessions will be. Please think about it.’

  I nod. Then I decide to engage with her.

  ‘OK,’ I tell her, ‘you’re Jewish, I’m Jewish. The Nazis are our worst nightmare. And here we have a half-Jewish woman who played around with that, reversed it, eroticized it. Troubled people paid her to play this game with them because by playing it they found some degree of peace. Detective Scarpaci quotes to me from Terence: “Nothing human is alien to me.” I’d think that as a humanist and an experienced shrink you’d be open to understanding my fascination.’

  ‘Oh I am, Tess. More than open to it. My hope would be to use this fascination you feel as a key to unlock an attic room in your mind. There are powerful unconscious feelings in you that drive your creativity. Let’s explore those feelings and everything that surrounds them. Much as I like and respect your performance work, I think with such an understanding you’ll be able to create even more powerful performances.’

  So, I think, getting up to leave, now the hunt is on. A double hunt actually: Scarpaci’s hunt for Chantal’s killer, in which I’m to participate as his confidential informant, and Dr Maude’s hunt for what drives my art.

  There’s a thunderstorm tonight. It comes suddenly, waking me up. Even though we’re entering the dry season, I know from years of living in the Bay Area how fierce these late-spring showers can be.

  I check my bedside clock: 1:20 a.m. I turn onto my back, look up at the skylight high above my bed. It’s not the bubble type you find on new structures, but the old-fashioned kind built like a little house with glass walls and a pitched glass roof. No leaks; the old panes are well grouted or I wouldn’t sleep beneath them. It’s exciting to stare up as sheets of rain splash across the glass like wild rivers in the night.

  Flashes of distant lightning are followed seconds later by thunder, the intervals narrowing as the storm moves toward downtown. In one sustained burst, a bolt of blinding light seems to crack the sky. My skylight goes all white. Then, perhaps a second later, as the light starts to fade and the roar unleashes a torrent of rain, I see a figure in a hood looming up there, lying flat spread-eagled across the skylight, hands grasping its edges, face pushed hard against the glass as if peering down at me lying twelve feet beneath.

  My reaction: sheer terror, followed by the thought that no one would go up on a roof in weather like this. So, an apparition, optical illusion, ghost? The image fades as quickly as it came. It can’t have been visible for more than a second, but an after-image burns my eyes: like an etching, a black silhouette in human form set against the roiling bleached-out sky. I didn’t see his face (if it is a ‘he’), just the outline of his splayed form. And then after the wind drives another wave of water across the skylight, the next crack of lightning reveals emptiness. If there was someone up there, he’s gone now or been blown away.

  Terrified, I phone Rex. His voice is groggy. I realize I’ve woken him up.

  ‘It’s Tess. I think I saw someone on the skylight above my bed.’

  ‘Come on! You’re spooked by the storm. Go back to sleep.’

  ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘Who was it? Did you recognize him?’

  ‘I think it was a man wearing a dark hooded slicker. He was clinging to the skylight, then he was gone.’

  ‘Want me to come over? I can be there in half an hour.’

  I thank him, tell him that isn’t necessary, that I’ll move my bedding to the living-room couch and call the building manager in the morning.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, Rex. Don’t know why I called you, really.’

  ‘I know why – we’re close and you know I’ll always be there for you.’

  In the morning I phone Clarence, tell him what I think I saw.

  ‘No, Tess, that couldn’t be. I keep the staircase door locked and the roof door bolted. But, really, I can’t imagine anyone climbing around on the roof in a lightning storm like that, let alone managing to get up there.’ He pauses. ‘I wish you’d called me last night. I’d have gone up there and checked. Like I keep telling everybody, I’m on call for my tenants day and night. You know that, right?’

  ‘I do. Thank you, Clarence.’

  ‘I’ll come up now and we’ll go look together.’

  Our expedition to the roof yields one clue: I’m able to open the door to the roof staircase which Clarence assured me he keeps locked. All I have to do is turn the knob. The door that opens to the roof isn’t bolted either.

  Clarence admits he’s embarrassed. I think he’s a lot more upset than he lets on. He sputters something about how the last person to whom he gave roof access was a TV dish installer, and that was two weeks before.

  ‘After workmen leave I usually check to make sure the roof’s locked up. I thought I’d done that, but maybe this last time I forgot. I apologize.’ He peers at me. ‘But that doesn’t explain why anyone would come up here during a storm. I mean, that’s totally crazy. And then to stay up here in the wind and the rain – why would anyone do that?’

  The roof, I note, is now barely wet, the May morning sun having already burned off most of the rainwater. Clarence escorts me on a tour. There are layers of dried guano from the night herons that perch in the neighborhood. I’m surprised the rain didn’t rinse the stuff away. We check out both my skylights. No sign of anyone having clung to the one over my bed – if the intruder did leave traces the storm would have washed them off.

  ‘You keep calling him an intruder,’ Clarence says. ‘But he didn’t really intrude. He stayed outside.’

  ‘If he came in through the building then he’s an intruder, Clarence. Unless you think he got up here by jumping from another roof.’

  We check the edges of the Buckley. The gap between it and the building to the east would be too dangerous for a leap. But the roof of the building to our west, the McCormick, is just a foot lower and separated by less than a yard.

  ‘Maybe he climbed up from there,’ Clarence says.

  ‘Pretty dangerous during a storm. He could have slipped.’

  ‘Yeah …’ Clarence has a far-away look in his eyes. He’s trying to figure the thing out. ‘You’re sure you saw somebody, Tess?’

  I tell him I’m pretty sure, but not one hundred percent. The vision was too quick, too shocking, and I was too frightened by it.

  ‘Might have been something like a newspaper blown onto the glass,’ he suggests. ‘Or a big bird. Maybe somebody’s old coat. Lots of stuff blowing around in a storm. Could have stuck onto the glass, then a second later got blown off.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe that’s what it was,’ I tell him. But the fact that both doors were unlocked making the roof accessible causes me to wonder if the rather creepy Josh Garske could have been up here last night.

  On our way back down the stairs, I ask Clarence if he knows anything about Chantal’s Roman chariot. He says he does, that she abandoned it when she moved out. When I ask him why he didn’t leave it in the loft like the jail cell and the X-frame, he says the chariot had wheels and was mobile while the other two apparatuses were built in.

  ‘I still have it stored in the basement.’ He giggles. ‘You know, in case I ever want to play Ben-Hur.’

  ‘Can I buy it from you?’

  ‘Are you serious?’ And when I nod: ‘Hey, you can have it. I’ll bring it up and leave it by your door.’

  THIRTEEN

  Extract from the Unpublished Memoirs of Major Ernst Fleckstein

  (AKA Dr Samuel Foigel)

  … at this point in my life, after my work on the Geli Raubal affair, and most particularly in the matter of the termination of Bernhard Stempfle (for which I still feel considerable regret), I was regarded by Hess and most particularly Bormann as a fixer of the first order. Both were aware of my background as a private detective in Munich specializing in matrimonial investigations, and after the Führer came to power I w
as the person they relied upon in circumstances when special work was required that ordinary operatives could not perform.

  My detractors called me a ‘hatchet-man’. I find that description offensive. I have always prided myself on being able to undertake difficult assignments with the required level of subtlety or severity depending on the requirements of the mission.

  In September 1934, shortly after I took care of the Stempfle matter, Bormann summoned me to his office in the Braunes Haus.1

  ‘You did a fine job resolving a difficult situation,’ he told me. ‘I can assure you the Führer is extremely pleased. As for party leader Hess, I believe he’s a bit concerned as Stempfle’s corpse was found not far from his residence.’ Bormann chuckled. ‘No matter! I have another assignment for you, one requiring considerable delicacy. It will take all your wit and guile to properly carry it out.’

  Bormann explained that officers working in the Party Archive were actively tracking down and collecting as many of Hitler’s early paintings as possible in order to collate them, document them, and more importantly, take them off the market. People buying and selling these pictures were making unconscionable profits and there were several forgers at work creating new ‘Hitler paintings’. The Führer found this extremely annoying and wanted it stopped. Furthermore (and Bormann lowered his voice when he said this) people in certain circles were speaking mockingly of the Führer’s youthful artistic aspirations. This was causing the Führer considerable personal hurt. My job would be to take possession of a particular drawing the Führer had made prior to the World War, which he had presented as a gift to a rather famous lady with whom he’d been slightly acquainted at the time, a certain Frau Lou Andreas-Salomé, now a practicing psychoanalyst in Göttingen.

  ‘Is this woman Jewish?’ I asked.

  ‘She is not,’ Bormann replied, ‘though in Göttingen there are people who refer to her as a Finnish Jewess, probably because she practices what we call “the Jewish Science”. Others do so following the lead of Elizabeth Förster, who makes no secret of the fact that she despises her.2 No matter, she is Aryan, from a fine Russian-German family, the daughter of a distinguished general. She is now seventy-three years old. The Führer is most particular that she not be harmed or threatened in any way. She is to be treated with the greatest respect. It’s possible that she no longer possesses this drawing, or that she doesn’t recall having received it. That’s for you to find out. If she does have it, you are to purchase it back from her on the Führer’s behalf. As for price, the sky’s the limit. You will judge her circumstances, then offer her whatever it takes. As I said, Fleckstein, this is a delicate mission. Of all my operatives, you’re the only one to whom I’d entrust it.’