by Peter Watson
The Nazi’s Wife
Peter Watson
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
For Kathrine
CONTENTS
Prologue
Part One
WALTER
Part Two
THE LETTERS
Part Three
KONSTANZE
Epilogue
PROLOGUE
Like the skin on black plums, her dark eyes had red in them. That is memory number one. She shouldered her way into the room where I was waiting, barley-blond hair splashing about her head in wild yellow twists. But it is memory number two that counts. In her arms she was nursing a dozen fresh hen’s eggs—I can picture the shells now, rasping together, patchworked like pepper. In 1946, let me tell you, fresh eggs in Europe were scarcer than Winston Churchill’s cigars and worth their weight in nylon stockings. So at first those eggs eclipsed Konstanze’s striking looks; they advertised what a composed, clever, calculating character she was.
Konstanze. Nowadays, I suppose, that name is regarded as old-fashioned, plain and stuffy. But at that time, when a ragged Europe was enjoying the first peacetime spring anyone could remember, the name was appealing and popular—alive, attractive, optimistic even, in that it implied durability after a period when so many relationships had been cut cruelly short.
I met three Konstanze’s that year, either in Germany or Austria, where my military duties took me. There was Konstanze Steyr, a nurse from Mainz: she had the smallest—and yet the most disconcerting—cast in her brown eyes. It made her look as though she was always about to laugh or cry, one could never be sure which. There was Konstanze Faller, a bookbinder from Augsburg, who had the longest fingers and who bound for my thirtieth birthday a first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the colors of Ireland—gold on the outside, in honor of the fire in Jameson’s whiskey, and black endpapers, out of respect for Guinness stout. Third, there was Konstanze von Zell.
As she elbowed her way into the room—in her own home, I should stress—I stood up and introduced myself. “Mrs. von Zell. Good morning. I am Walter Wolff—Lieutenant, United States Army, art recovery unit. You can guess why I am here.”
She had been smiling as she passed through the doorway, chatting to her small son, who struggled with the rest of the shopping some paces behind her. The instant she saw me, however, the smile vanished, the motherly tenderness dropped from her eyes and all expression was wiped clean. She had stopped in her stride, too, when she had seen me but her son was busy with his load of vegetables, matches and milk, so that he now collided with the backs of his mother’s legs. I smiled as the matches fell to the floor, but not Konstanze. Those eyes were sharp as shrapnel.
She took in my uniform, the pipe, unlit in my hand, probably the fact that I spoke German with a Heidelberg accent. She may have registered that I was much the same age as she, a bit taller, a lot darker. Or she may simply have been waiting, for effect.
I watched, puzzled, as she worked her jaws together, coughed gently and, from where I was standing, seemed to swirl her tongue inside her mouth. I knew that she had once suffered from TB. These contortions only made me more conscious of her looks, so I was completely thrown when she parted her lips in a wet, faintly erotic pout and disgorged a knob of gummy spittle onto the lapel of my tunic.
The house where this … encounter took place was in Mondsee, a small town about twenty kilometers east of Salzburg, in Austria. It was the first time I had ever been there. In those days the town was a spruce collection of wooden houses and shops, gaily colored in greens, reds and purples. There was a superb baroque church, sand and cream on the outside, black and gold inside and, since Mondsee was on the lakeshore, there were scores of boat sheds and spindly piers, home for hundreds of ducks. That day Mondsee sparkled in the spring sunshine and, for what seemed the first time in living memory, the Austrian air felt warm to the touch. Throughout Europe the prospect of the months of sun and peace ahead was intoxicating.
I had not been a lieutenant for very long. In real life, or “civvy street” as our British colleagues used to say, I was a professor of art history at Berkeley, near San Francisco in California. I specialized in religious art and architecture and that is why, toward the end of the war, I had been assigned to the art recovery unit. Its real name was the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Commission, but that was such a mouthful we all called it the ARU. Our job in the ARU was to recover missing works of art that had been looted by leading Nazis. Konstanze was not a leading Nazi but she was the wife of one of them and, if what I had been told was true, this beautiful woman held the key to a sensational and politically important recovery.
Spittle would not put me off. Calmly—one might almost say phlegmatically—I took out a handkerchief and wiped myself dry.
Konstanze’s husband, Rudolf von Zell, had been Martin Bormann’s right-hand man during the war. He had also been commissioned by Hitler himself to take charge of the Führer’s unique collection of gold coins, looted from monasteries in Austria and worth millions of dollars. It had taken generations of monks to collect the coins. The collection contained every denomination in every currency known to exist and was irreplaceable.
After Germany’s victory in the war these coins were to have formed part of the Führermuseum, in Linz, Austria, to be exhibited alongside old master paintings, also looted, fabulous tapestries, ancient and exotic weapons and an opera house dedicated to Anton Bruckner, one of Hitler’s favorite Austrian composers and someone who, like himself, hailed from near Linz.
But no sooner had Hitler committed suicide, in the spring of 1945, than von Zell disappeared, and the coins with him. Worse, Eisenhower was worried that the coins were being melted down, destroying the collection, and the gold used to pay for leading Nazis, like Bormann, Mengele and Eichmann, to be ferried to safety in South America. We already had evidence that a secret conduit, running from south Germany or Austria, via Switzerland and France to northern Spain, was in place, and renegade Germans being passed along it. Von Zell knew all the leading Nazis who were missing and was a superb organizer. So more than art was at stake. My job, and the reason I was in Mondsee that day, was to interrogate Mrs. von Zell—Konstanze—so that she would reveal to us where her husband was hiding out.
Easier said than done. Konstanze von Zell was as strong and as clever as she was beautiful, as those eggs in her arms served to remind me. By the time I arrived in Mondsee, she had already disposed of three earlier interrogators, professional men trained in all manner of persuasive techniques. She had convinced each in turn that she didn’t know where her husband was, that she hadn’t heard from him in months, that he really was missing, might already be in South America for all she knew, or even dead.
I, however, had one advantage over the other interrogators who had preceded me. I knew that Konstanze was lying.
PART ONE
WALTER
CHAPTER ONE
1
I can only explain why I knew Konstanze was lying by going back to the very beginning. And that, I suppose, was the day I drove from Nuremberg to Frankfurt feeling just a little too pleased with myself. In Nuremberg I had recovered an entire collection of things which, I knew, would make all my colleagues emerald with envy. In an air-raid shelter, eight floors down, in the center of the city, I had located nothing less than the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, removed from Vienna in 1938. The collection included the Golden Scepter, the Imperial Sword, the Imperial Cloak, studded with diamonds, the Imperial Orb and Charlemagne’s crown itself, in all its eleventh-century glory, with raw sapphires, rubies, amethysts and tipped with a jeweled cross. I could talk about nothing else and, if the story I am about to relate had not intervened, I would no doubt be talking about it still.
&n
bsp; Frank Wren, my commanding officer, had congratulated me warmly on the phone when I had told him about the coup, and promptly relayed the facts to the press. Although I hadn’t seen the stories, I knew I had made the papers in England, New York and France, as well as Germany and Austria. For a day I was famous. Like many people, I had learned to drink seriously during the war, and as I drove my jeep too fast between Nuremberg and our headquarters in Frankfurt, I was looking forward to a celebratory glass or two of Wren’s wine. His job in real life was as a professor of classics at Harvard and he was a good deal smoother than I, a real New Englander. Tall and laconic, with that fine blond hair which, mysteriously, always stays in place, he wore a discreet blond mustache and the confident gentleness that comes from being raised among well-paid servants. And he always kept a stock of red Bordeaux, which, like the British, he referred to as claret.
It didn’t work out as I hoped. “Walter, I have some bad news and I have some good news,” Wren called out as I stepped into his office around five that afternoon. “The bad news is that I am requisitioning your jeep; I need it for someone more important.” Who could be more important than me? I wondered humorously. I was the man who had just restored the dignity of the Holy Roman Empire, single-handed. “The good news is parked just under that window.”
Our headquarters in those days were rather more sumptuous than they should have been. We were billeted in offices on the second floor of a building which had once belonged to the electrical giant I. G. Farben, and which, obligingly, the RAF had failed to bomb. The construction was made of pure white stone with lots of runnels and buttresses and that made it look rather like the bottom tier of an enormous wedding cake around a central courtyard. It was this courtyard which Frank Wren’s office overlooked.
I stepped over to the window and peered out. Underneath were a row of bicycles, a wheelbarrow and a lawnmower. Wren had a sense of humor for there was also a dark blue 1938 BMW convertible about a hundred yards away.
He chuckled. “It’s the one work of art I was allowed to loot. It used to belong to an SS man who’s missing. I hope your legs aren’t too long for it.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. And it was: a long low hood, shiny chrome radiator, those sweeping mud guards that you hardly see any more, a cream-colored leather top, what looked like a proper walnut dashboard and huge headlamps, each one about a foot across. All it lacked was Zelda Fitzgerald in the passenger seat.
But Wren never did anything without good reason, so I asked calmly, “Where am I going in it?”
“Aha!” he purred, pleased that his trap had worked. “Salzburg. Ever been?”
I shook my head.
“A beautiful city. Pretty river, dramatic gorge, baroque churches galore, snowy mountains, Mozart, of course, and saibling—a lake trout you must try. Lucky man.”
“There has to be a catch.”
He waved me toward a chair by his desk and held up a sheet of paper which I could see was a long telegram. “This is from my opposite number in Salzburg, a Major Hobel. Down there they call it the von Zell affair. If you can sort this one out, you might just get a medal. Three interrogators have failed already. Even Ike himself is interested in the outcome.”
In this manner I was introduced to the events which were to have such a profound effect on my life. At the time, which was late March, our intelligence people were just getting wind of stirrings in the Nazi underground to the effect that the conduit set up in the months following the end of the war was now active and that some leading characters who, until then, had been lying low, were now on the move, bound for safety in South America.
“If von Zell is running this conduit, and has melted the coins down to pay for it, then he has virtually unlimited funds. All sorts of people could get away. You can see why our side is so worried.” Wren handed me a sheaf of documents. “Eisenhower has signed your orders personally, giving you all sorts of power, should you need it.”
I looked down at the papers. Sure enough, the signature on the bottom of each sheet was General Eisenhower’s, a bold, flowing hand, in fountain-pen ink. I still have those orders, framed, here in my bedroom. Next to Konstanze’s picture.
“Why me?”
“The Crown Jewels. The general read the newspapers.”
Flattering. But it also meant I’d be watched. That there would be no room for failure. I would live to regret the notoriety which the Crown Jewels affair had brought me.
“When do I start?” I was still hoping to taste some of Wren’s claret.
He inspected his watch. “In your new car, it’s an eight or nine-hour drive to Salzburg. I told them you’d travel overnight and report to Hobel some time tomorrow morning.”
Terrific. But I was not exactly bashful in those days, not backward in coming forward, as our British colleagues used to say. “I was hoping I might have earned a glass or two of your Château Croque-Monsieur, sir. A celebration.”
Wren’s eyes sparkled wickedly. He stood up and walked to the window. “There is a claret known as Château Croque-Micholte, Wolff.” He looked at me sideways. “I have a case or two and delicious it is. But Croque-Monsieur, I believe, is a sandwich. Sorry.” He grinned as I hurried out, blushing despite myself.
I filled the BMW with gas from the depot and drove back to my quarters, still smarting. I would never be as smooth as Wren. At that time I had rooms with someone named Maurice Ghent, another art recovery type, an Englishman from Cambridge and an expert on Italian paintings. We lived in Offenbach, just outside Frankfurt, in the top half of a large, rambling house surrounded by conifers. The bottom half of the house was uninhabited but we shared the place with three squirrels—red ones, which are rare now but were less so then. One had a black smudge on its upper lip so we had named him Adolf. The other two, naturally, became Hermann and Eva.
After a day baking in the sun, the conifers gave off a sweet tang which permeated the house as I climbed the stairs. I let myself in with the key we kept hidden in a German SS helmet we had found in the attic of the house. The helmet was the only bone of contention between Maurice and me. SS helmets were quite rare and we both wanted to take it home as a souvenir. Sooner or later we would fight over it. As I opened the door I heard the panicky rustle of squirrel feet escaping through the hole underneath the washbasin in the kitchen.
There was a note from Maurice propped against the mantelshelf: “Congrats, on HRE Crown Jewels,” he had scrawled. “Shall be in Vienna for a few days or weeks, staying at the Palace Hotel. People at the Kunsthistorisches Museum have discovered yet more things missing. Phone me—sorry, call me—if you get the chance. Join me if, by some miracle, you get leave. I can get opera tickets and that gives a man, even you, sex appeal in Vienna.” It was signed “M” but there was a postscript. “Dear boy, have a good look at Hermann next time he comes over to eat our shirts. I’m no biologist but I’m sure he’s pregnant.”
Grinning, I packed fresh socks and underwear, and took some chocolate, cigarettes and nylons from a little store which Maurice and I kept in the house; in our line they often proved useful “gifts” when people were not being quite as cooperative as they might. There was a little whiskey left, two gulps of which swamped the memory of Wren’s Château Croque-whatever, and I took the rest to the bathroom, where I soaked myself for half an hour or more amid clouds of steam.
It was nearly dark when I left the key in the helmet and went back out to the car. Being March, the air was already cooling, although the smack of the conifers still hovered in the air, promising yet warmer days ahead.
I put up the convertible’s top, relishing my luck. I might have an all-night drive in front of me but the BMW was practically brand new. There were fewer than 10,000 kilometers on the clock and, once I was behind the wheel, my nostrils were swept with the smells of new leather and polish. The gear lever slid around in its box with smooth yet positive efficiency, like an elbow or a shoulder joint.
At that time, in Europe, the roads at night were just as busy
as in daytime, the only difference being that most of the traffic was army trucks, shaking the ground as they wound along in convoy. There was also a great deal of hitchhiking—soldiers rejoining their units at the last minute or civilians traveling around looking for work. A BMW was a luxury most of them had never known, so just before I joined the main autobahn outside Frankfurt, I stopped to pick up two figures holding a board with “München” written on it. As I drew alongside them my heart sank, for I noticed how small they were and concluded they must be Italians. I didn’t speak the language very well in those days and a six-hour journey in such company was not a pleasing prospect. I disliked Mussolini’s Italy almost as much as I loathed Hitler’s Germany. I was just about to accelerate off into the darkness when I noticed that one of the “Italians” had long hair, very long hair. They were both wearing trousers but they were women. That was quite different. I stopped the car.
The one with long hair spoke in German. “Anywhere toward Munich will help, sir.” Despite the “sir,” she wore a proud, rather arrogant expression on her face, which had high cheekbones, a pointed chin and a slightly crooked nose. But sensuous lips that never quite closed—an alluring if not a classically attractive face. She also had what, in the darkness, looked like an enormous bosom. As she leaned forward to talk to me, her breasts hung, beneath her white shirt, round and smooth and impossible to hide. She saw my eyes stray involuntarily from her face, and a strand of embarrassed contempt slid across her features.
“I am going to Salzburg,” I said quickly. “Via Munich. Please, get in.”
She turned and said something to her companion that I didn’t catch. Then she got in the front with me. The other girl, who had severely cropped blond hair and was as flat as the first girl was big, clambered into the back with their luggage, which, I noticed, wasn’t much. Perfume was hard to come by in Germany in those days, but as the girls got into the car, the BMW filled with the unmistakable odor of women, sweet, warm and, in some indefinable way, cleaner than it had been.
