by Peter Watson
These letters became a record, a means by which Rudolf could catch up on life in Mondsee when he came home. Konstanze might think, if anyone took the trouble to read her letters, as I was now doing, that she had written to a dead man before, as her way of grieving, and that she was now doing so again. I was not convinced. She might not know exactly where her husband was, might have to contact him through an intermediary, but she had access, of that I had not the slightest doubt.
The fact that she might be able to reach Rudolf only with difficulty suggested to me two things. First, that one of my hunches about him must be right—he was masquerading as someone else so that he had to contact her. Or he was hiding out in the mountains, part of the covey of exiles I had seen with Allie. Second, it began to look as though he was in charge of this conduit which ferried ex-Nazis to safety. He was an able administrator, a man who had access to the top echelons of the Nazi Party; he knew everyone. He had his hands on the funds; and, if he was not in some way involved in the running of the pipeline, surely he would have taken advantage of it himself by now, gone to South America and sent for his wife and child.
In 1946 it was not yet all that obvious that many ex-Nazis, or Nazi sympathizers, would retain their positions and their influence in postwar Germany. Rudolf possibly knew his Germany better than most and may have realized that, in running the conduit and helping some powerful people to safety, he, in his turn, would be looked after. It had occurred to me that this is why he had bought the house in Mondsee. Perhaps Bormann or Hitler himself had seen the end coming, put von Zell in charge of building up the pipeline and then authorized the confiscation of the gold coins.
I picked up the last letter, the last only in the sense that it had been written shortly before Lieutenant Bloch interrogated Konstanze and confiscated her papers. So there was no suggestion of this last letter being a final episode in a story I had been intrigued by and enchanted with, a tale which had spanned more than ten years and taken me thirty solid hours to read. There was no feeling of climax or conclusion. The letter simply went on for a couple of pages, then trailed off, as a run-of-the-mill letter does.
Dieter had started to learn English at school because Konstanze agreed with the local headmaster that English was the language of the future. The Salzburg festival, abandoned in 1944, was to be revived that year, though the new Strauss opera, Die Liebe der Danae, which had been in rehearsal when the cancellation had been announced, was not to be brought back. Having once been Strauss’ editor, she was disappointed. There were no elaborate endearments in this last letter, save for a brief “I miss you” at the very end. Presumably, Konstanze felt that was how it should be if Rudolf was supposed to be dead. But this one did have a P.S.
Dieter has at last mastered the bicycle. Better still, I have managed to wangle one which fits him from Herr Polten, that small, roly-poly man who helps the butcher. We have already ridden around the lake almost as far as Plomberg. What a pity we cannot make the ride together, the three of us. The road goes right by that spot on the lake where the good fish may be found. K.
I looked at the postscript again. Something—I couldn’t think what—was scraping at the back of my brain. I lay on the bed, chewing my lip. It would soon be light. The trees lining the river, a hundred meters away, were alive with the rustle and chatter of birds. The last sentence of the postscript was half familiar. No, that wasn’t quite true. Then it came to me.
After she had first started writing to Rudolf, while Bruno’s memory was still far from dead, he had used the word “never” in one of his letters when, strictly speaking, he had not meant it. Something like “It will never work,” meaning, “I’m not in favor of it.”
Konstanze had scolded him. “‘Never’ is an awful word if you don’t mean it. When I was a child, no more than six, I did something to annoy my father; in anger, he said he never wanted to see me again. Then, the next day, before I awoke, he left on tour for two weeks. I didn’t understand where he was. I was too young to know what a tour was, and, in any case, two weeks is an eternity to a six-year-old. For all that time I thought I was never going to see him again. I was desolate. He, of course, had forgotten what he had said, but I never did and I never have. Since then I have tried never to say the word except when I mean it.”
I pulled the letter containing this exchange from earlier in the correspondence and I recalled Konstanze’s letters to Bruno. She had used “never” when she wrote that they could never be married, never have children—when she had meant it. Throughout her last letters to him, when he was dead, she had used it quite a lot too. I now checked back to be doubly certain. Yes, I was right.
In her letters to Rudolf she hardly ever used the word. She never exaggerated the meaning and used the word only when the sense justified it; at all other times she used a simple negative. So when she wrote “What a pity we cannot make the ride together …” she emphatically did not mean “What a pity we can never make the ride together.…” That word gave her away. Rudolf wasn’t dead. He was alive. She was in touch with him, if not regularly then occasionally, and looked forward to a time when they could be together again.
I folded the letter and replaced it on the pile. I put the various packets together and carefully tied the blue ribbon around them. I slipped the bundle into my briefcase. Then I lay back on the bed and switched off the lamp. It was 5:30 A.M. and the light showing through the curtains was beginning to sweep away the shadows. I was tired and not a little sad that I had come to the end of the story. Bruno I wasn’t sure about. But I liked the Rudolf of the letters. As for Konstarze, I think I already felt more than liking. I couldn’t wait to meet her.
I fell asleep without taking off the rest of my uniform.
CHAPTER FOUR
1
I slept through lunch and reached the office only at three that same afternoon. On my desk top there was yet another envelope in my wife’s handwriting, which reminded me that I had still not opened her earlier letter or the one from my mother. I put the new one in my tunic pocket, promising myself that I would open it later.
I was also surprised to find a hand-scribbled note saying that a Lieutenant Ghent had phoned from Vienna.
“Dear boy,” he said, when I got through. “I called at noon and they said you were asleep and not to be disturbed. What on earth are you doing in bed at such an hour? Anything I should be jealous about?”
“You’ve got an easily aroused imagination, Maurice. Well, my friend, do we have anything?”
“Sorry, Walter, but we found Traeger easily and my man went down there first thing this morning. The place is closed up; it went out of business two years ago when the owners got permission to rezone the land. They promptly sold it and someone’s building on it now. Forty houses and a hospital. The main house is still there but closed, waiting for someone who wants to live in a large house surrounded by forty smaller ones.”
I groaned. My “cleverness” had really backfired this time. My theory about the vineyard had been wrong from the start and I should have known it. I had insisted on the search when all the evidence showed that I was reading too much into too little.
“Are you there, dear boy?” Maurice asked, after I had been silent for too long. “Show signs of life, will you?”
“Yes, I’m here,” I sighed. “But for how much longer, I don’t know. I haven’t got much to show for all my effort. The CO. here will not be pleased.”
“The future could be worse,” said Maurice, trying to sound cheerful. “Hermann might still lay her pups in your shirts.”
“You are about as comical as Mussolini, Maurice. And deserve the same fate. I know I owe you a favor but perhaps you’ll think I’ve repaid you already with that introduction to Sammy Hartt.” And I told him about the state of his shares and how far ahead of me he was.
“What can I say, dear boy? Splendid, absolutely splendid. No more than I deserve, of course, but keep your chin up. You’re not going to make a very good American after you return to Calif
ornia, are you? Don’t be so pessimistic. Where are we now?… April 3. Nearly two months to the finishing wire. Anything can happen, Walter. Anything.”
“Yes,” I joked. “You could recover those Italian old masters you’re looking for. That would put the lid on it for me.”
There was complete silence at the other end of the line.
“Maurice?” No reply.
“Maurice! You haven’t found them, have you? Tell me!”
His voice rustled as he breathed in. “I wasn’t going to tell you. Not yet anyway. I know how you’re feeling and it’s not good.”
Too right. “But you’ve found them? Yes?”
“’fraid so. Fourteen old masters, property of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, recovered yesterday by yours truly. Two Bellinis, a Vermeer, two Rubens, a Veronese and assorted others.”
“Fantastic! Congratulations!” I said, genuinely pleased for him. “Where did you find them?”
“Don’t ask. Very grisly. They had been buried and disguised as a new grave. Fortunately, we had a tip-off and the small cemetery had just three burials during the entire war. So we had to exume only two bodies, but that was bad enough.”
I shuddered. “A colorful story for your memoirs, Maurice. But seriously, very well done. I really am dropping behind.”
“Well, it’s about time you Americans came second at something.”
He told me it would take him a day or two to clean up in Vienna, then he would head back to the flat in Offenbach but would keep in touch. I took the opportunity to introduce him to Sammy, who had come into the office during my conversation with Maurice. There was no point in my being an intermediary between the two of them. Maurice might want to sell his shares and buy others while I was away. It turned out that Sammy had a brother at Cambridge, in the same college as Maurice, and they talked for ages.
I was, therefore, a shade irritated when Sammy finally came off the phone and said, “Hobel wants to see you. Sorry, I should have told you earlier but I forgot.”
I shoveled a weary hand through my hair, but instead of hurrying into Hobel’s office I picked up the phone again. I wasn’t quite ready to talk to the major, not yet.
“Yeeees?” said the voice that I recognized. Suspicious, doubting, uncertain.
“You don’t remember me, do you? It’s Walter Wolff. We sat next to each other at dinner, in the mess at Salzburg. You were there to arrest a man but having a rough time yourself. I’m an architect, too, of sorts.”
“Of course, of course.” He relaxed once he recognized my voice. “How are you, Walter? It’s good to hear from you.”
We exchanged pleasantries for a while. His case was coming along well and he expected to go back to Florence for the trial in about a month’s time. Then I brought the conversation around to business. “Saul, I need your help, your professional skills.”
“Oh yes?”
He was already familiar with the bones of the von Zell story, since I had filled him in when we sat together at dinner. I brought him up to date as quickly as I could, concentrating on the investigations by Maurice’s men. “So you see, Saul, I could be in better shape. However, I do have this one lead, this character named Franz-Josef Aubing, who did work in one of the vineyards but left to get married in Zurich. He answered the description of von Zell.”
“And you want me to trace him for you?”
“Could you, Saul? I would be so grateful if you could help. But have I given you enough to go on—a name, a description and a destination? It’s all I have.”
He thought. “The short answer, Walter, is that I don’t know. It ought to be easy enough to check the forthcoming marriages in Zurich. But if he was lying, and if he’s your man he will have been lying, it will be ten, a hundred times more difficult. Maybe impossible.”
To stress the urgency of my predicament I told Saul about the recent discovery of the pipeline for ex-Nazis across lake Geneva and von Zell’s alleged role in that. “And I’m worried, too, that his secretary, this Breker woman, might just have enough savvy to try to contact him, to alert him about me.”
Saul listened attentively. “Hhmmmnnn. All right. You’ve convinced me that he needs our attention. I’ll do what I can, I promise. It may take a few days, of course, so let me know where I can find you.”
I gave him my numbers at the office and at the hotel. “The minute you get anything positive, Saul, let me know, will you? I’ve got a commanding officer breathing down my neck. I’m sure you are familiar with the type.”
But he stifled my whining succinctly. “That’s what commanding officers are for, my friend.” And he hung up.
I looked at my watch. It was almost five o’clock. I could put if off no longer.
I got up, made a face at Sammy and headed along the corridor toward Hobel’s office. Lucy, his secretary, gave out a whelp of predatory recognition as I stepped through the doorway.
“We’ve been trying to get you for days,” she said, obviously delighted that she hadn’t been able to find me. “Where have you been?”
“Reading,” I said, and savored the puzzled look on her face.
“You’re to go straight in,” she said triumphantly, almost solicitously—the kind of concern that the guards in a prison reserve for the really important convicts.
Hobel was engrossed in the inevitable paperwork. As I entered he couldn’t help but flinch with anger. He steadied himself and finished what he was doing before he looked up again. It was as quiet as a hangman’s cell. You could have heard the noose drop.
I remained standing until Hobel finished what was in front of him and waved me to a seat. He sat back, almost entirely still save for his lower jaw, the teeth of which picked away at the inside of his cheek. His eyes were as gummy as lard.
The silence lengthened dangerously. It was colorless, but it had a texture like that of boiled rice, fluffy, gray, warm and damp, clinging. Hobel’s breath came in grunts, few and far between; he was wrestling to control himself. The attempt showed in little patches of sweat on his forehead, which caught the light. I was apprehensive, but not really nervous now that the confrontation had finally arrived.
At last he said one word:
“Speak.”
If he had not been in such a volcanic mood, it would have been comical. Looking back, it was comical, but not at the time.
I spoke. I gave him a slanted version of events, calculated to calm him, an optimistic interpretation of what had gone before. I concluded with the information that Saul Wolfert, an expert in finding people, had joined me on the case, and I told Hobel that I had read the entire correspondence of Konstanze von Zell and now felt I could do a better job of interrogating her than the others had.
“That’s why I have been closeted in my hotel room, sir. The letters took me days to read; there were more than two hundred of them. But they were full of vital information.”
“What sort of vital information?”
It would have sounded silly to say something like: her favorite color; her birthday; the fact that she likes Bruckner and yellow flowers; but that’s what I meant. “Difficult to say at this stage, sir. All sorts of personal details. But I know what kind of person she is now. I think I know how to build up a relationship with her. I feel fairly certain I can trick her into revealing that she does know where her husband is. I am convinced she does know, by the way. Once she admits that, the rest will be easy.” Put like that, I almost convinced myself that I was making progress.
But not Hobel. He shook his head. It was time he had his say. “You were foisted on me; I suppose you know that, Wolff. It was Wren’s idea. He was the one who convinced Eisenhower that you were the man for this job, not me. Oh, I know you recovered those Crown Jewels, but you were lucky, really, weren’t you? You were tipped off.”
I was surprised. That was the official version, that we had been tipped off by an anonymous informer, but it wasn’t true. It was just a line to protect the city official whom I had “broken” during interroga
tion. It was part of the deal, part of the exchange I had to arrange in order to extract his confession. I had assumed that Hobel knew that. If he didn’t, he wasn’t as much in touch as he thought.
“It’s disappointing, Wolff, isn’t it? After how many days—nine?—you are not really any further along. By your own admission you’ve scared off those renegade Nazis, if that’s what they really were. So we stand no chance of finding them, let alone von Zell, if I were mad enough to agree to your idea of a search of the mountains. Whoever heard of searching mountains? It’s crazy.”
He held up three fingers and folded one down. “So, there goes theory number one. Second, you’ve got a suspect, who may be von Zell but isn’t using his real name or the one alias that would make chasing him plausible, who may or may not be in Zurich.” He curled down the second finger. “And you have read a pile of letters which, you say, gives you an inside edge interrogating this woman.” He waggled his third finger, so that it trembled. “You will forgive me, I hope, if I do not regard that as a real theory. I don’t need to remind you that three people have interrogated Mrs. von Zell already. And failed.” He curled the third, quivering finger over. That left a fist, clenched and bald, staring at me across the desk. The sentiment was unmistakable.
