The Nazi's Wife

by Peter Watson

  “The buildings of America are awful to look at, but much more pleasant to be inside, compared with those in Europe. They tend to be larger, airier, warmer, lighter. It’s a different world, a different psychology, a different mood. I don’t think one grows to like America, not usually. Either you love it or you hate it.”

  “But you are an art historian, Walter. Interested in the past. What are you doing in America?”

  “It’s a mistake to think that historians only look back. The past is a tool to use for a better future. Sorry if that sounds pompous, but it’s true.”

  I talked. I talked for ages. I talked through the saibling and through the second bottle of wine that I ordered. That second bottle is probably why I don’t remember the details of what I talked about. But I do remember the gist.

  We had finished eating. In fact, Konstanze had finished some time before—I had just caught up because I was talking so much. I lit my pipe.

  Konstanze leaned forward, her elbows on the table. “I have always wanted to live by the ocean, Walter. It would be so mysterious. A lake is … not as romantic. You can see to the other side.”

  For some ridiculous reason I felt gratified by this. Her response was vague but, I felt, on the right track.

  The coffee came and I asked for the bill. The cups, I remember, were a creamy yellow—her favorite color. The other concertgoers were leaving and it was getting late. It would be one in the morning before we were back at Mondsee.

  “I can see to the other side of this table,” I said softly. “That’s far enough for me.”

  She smiled and moved her head a fraction in a way that touched me. She wasn’t embarrassed by my compliment—rather she was gracious in accepting it. And that, I have always found, is a rare talent.

  She patted her stomach. “I shan’t be able to see as far as my feet if I eat like this too often. That was a lovely dinner, Walter, a lovely evening.” She patted her stomach again. “You have satisfied one appetite in me but,” and she looked at me levelly, “stimulated others.”

  We went out into the dark. In those days people seemed to travel by train an awful lot at night. In the middle of deserted towns the railway station would be brilliantly lit, alive with purpose, licensed to make noise. And so it was at Innsbruck. As we walked back to my car we could hear the bark of the platform speakers announcing deep into the night the imminent departure of a train for Munich. Steam from the trains clotted the air. In the distance, beyond the river Inn, which flowed like black blood under the railway bridge, the solitary complaining whistle of a train could be heard above the scratchy screams of shunting engines.

  Away from the station Innsbruck already slept. The railway noises faded quickly, like ocean waves which fail to carry beyond the narrow strip of beach. It was too late for other restaurants and cafés, too early for tomorrow’s newspaper delivery. The concert hall was closed up, like a birthday cake after the candles had been blown out.

  We walked in silence, but it was an easy silence. Our two sets of footsteps, echoing off the street, proved that we were alone. My car looked very small in the square.

  “I’m tired,” said Konstanze, dipping into her seat. “All that wine, I suppose.”

  I was in no hurry to get back to Mondsee that night but the black roads were empty and we made good time, crossing and recrossing the river. I was enjoying the feel of the car and, when we reached the open road, neither of us spoke for a while. The easy silence continued until I felt a nudge on my shoulder.

  It was Konstanze’s head; she had fallen asleep and was leaning against me. I let it rest where it was. I could smell her powder as it rubbed off on my tunic. Not until we came to Mondsee and I had to change gears several times in rapid succession, as I negotiated the twists and curves in the village, did she wake up. She brushed back her hair. “I hope I didn’t talk in my sleep.”

  “I wish you had,” I murmured.

  I pulled the car into the side of the road by the house. There was a light on in the kitchen. By the glow that came from the dashboard I could see that Konstanze was looking crossly at the house.

  “Why don’t we go and sit in the summerhouse for a moment?” I suggested.

  She hesitated. “All right, but just for a minute. It’s late.”

  From the balcony of the summerhouse we could see Plomberg, marked by a fragile scoop of white-yellow lights at the rim of the lake.

  “I like having a view,” I said, waving toward the lights. “Don’t get me wrong, I love the ocean. But a lake like this takes some beating. And, right now, it’s very romantic. Don’t you think?”

  Konstanze pulled her coat about her. Her dress was lace and it was still April, however unseasonably warm the weather. Nonetheless, her movement was involuntary and had to do with more than the temperature. “If you lived here a lot, Walter, you would find the lake and the mountains beyond it claustrophobic. Yes, it is beautiful. But you would be surprised to know how well one gets to know every peak, every dip in the tree line, every shade of light on the snowcaps. I even know there are sixteen lights on that string over in Plomberg. I have sat here so often and counted them. There should be eighteen, but two blew out last week and have yet to be replaced. I wish sometimes that there was a man in Plomberg who could change the mountains just like he changes the lights.”

  Involuntarily I counted the lights. She was, of course, right.

  “All we ever get here are breezes. We are so hemmed in by the Schafberg, the Hoher Zinken and the Feuerkogel that a good, strong, cleansing wind cannot get through. The air is always sweet but that tends to cloy too. Everything is so tidy, so neat here, so very, very pretty. This will sound odd but, after a few years in Mondsee, you yearn for a bit of untidiness, for the occasional blot or blemish somewhere, for space and even for ugliness. The buildings here fit so perfectly with the landscape that when you talk of American architecture as more concerned with insides than outsides, I long to go, to see for myself what you mean. When you talk about space I think of some giant hand flattening all the mountains around here so that I can see as far as Vienna or Munich. The countryside here has been tended by people for hundreds of years, it has had care lavished on it. I need a break from that, a bit of neglect, something that is natural and rough.”

  Konstanze was expressing her ambivalence, not just about Mondsee but also, I thought, about the life she was leading. There was a part of her that wanted to go to America, to break from the old life. It had never occurred to me before that Germans should take so personally their defeat in the war. Politicians, generals, countries lost wars. Not ordinary people. But maybe Konstanze felt that, in being married to a Nazi, however nice a man he was, she had suffered a personal loss in Germany’s defeat. I don’t know, for we never discussed it, not then or later. But it might well have explained her desire for change, her attraction to America. I was a catalyst, of course. But I had merely sparked something that was dormant within her. It explained why she had let our relationship continue, although she could have sent me packing at any minute.

  “It’s cold,” she said. But it wasn’t.

  “Don’t go. Not yet. I want to give you this.” I held up my pen. I wanted her to stay, more than anything. The pen might delay her.

  She looked from me to the blue thing in my hand. Then, just as she had done with the statue I had given her the day before, she took it and touched her lips to it.

  “Yes,” she said after a moment. “I like writing.”

  She turned. The breeze from the lake carried the smell of her soap, clean, sweet, anything but cloying. I wanted to drown in that smell. She was facing away, looking along the lake, to Salzburg and America.

  “You know … I’ve read the letters, Konstanze. Your letters, I mean. Rudolf’s. Bruno’s.”

  In the gloom I saw her nod.

  “Please look at me.” Slowly, she turned back. It was too dark to be sure, but she may have been crying.

  “I shouldn’t have read them. I see that now. But … you we
re … the enemy … then. I didn’t know … I couldn’t know that—that I would ever … love you.”

  Konstanze was looking at me, but I still couldn’t make out her features.

  “Forgive me.”

  The breeze from the lake suddenly gusted into the summerhouse and we both shivered. “Come for me tomorrow, Walter. Take me somewhere special. I want to forgive you. You said you love me, but maybe we are still enemies.” She turned and was gone.

  I waited, breathing out regularly, deliberately, to relax. I heard the latch gate open and close, then voices as she let herself into the house. Then … it fell silent.

  I sat down, took out my pipe and involuntarily counted again the lights at Plomberg. I didn’t want to go back to Salzburg, not yet. The night was warm for April, whatever Konstanze might say, and I felt closer to her in the summerhouse than I would at the hotel.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1

  The next morning I was awakened very early by the ringing of the telephone. It was Hobel’s secretary, the prissy one. “The major wants you here. Now.”

  “Good news or bad?”

  “He wants to tell you himself.”

  Bad.

  “Now, I can’t do. Twenty minutes, maybe. Half an hour, certainly.”

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t waste time telling me what you can and can’t do. I’d get on over here.”

  God, what a bitch! I put the phone down and skipped into my uniform as though I was frightened of Hobel. I was, I suppose, frightened of his news. And with good reason.

  It was bad. I knew it was bad because, having made me rush over, he then kept me waiting in his outside office, in front of his goddamn secretary. She sat typing, putting phone calls through to Hobel while I boiled in the seat opposite her desk.

  The minute I was allowed into Hobel’s office I knew it was not just bad, it was catastrophic. He was relaxed, for christ’s sake. Not smiling exactly, but there was a definite lightness to his manner.

  “Thank you for coming over so quickly,” he said. I think this meeting must count as my fourth most vivid memory, the oily poison which he packed into that ordinary sentence.

  In front of him he had a long sheet of yellow paper. A telegram. He played with it.

  “This came overnight. Bad news for you I’m afraid.” He put on, or tried to, an expression of pity. But he failed.

  “Two nights ago, a small force of highly trained men—fourteen of them to be precise—commandeered an eighteen-thousand-ton ship in Santander Harbor, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, in the north. The ship has disappeared but our intelligence boys believe it is bound for South America, with a precious cargo of leading Nazis. It is a German ship and the first officer and wireless officer have disappeared with it. It had refueled just before being taken and was due to leave twenty-four hours later. So inside information can be assumed. Four people, including the captain, were killed in the raid.”

  “Why does the intelligence branch think the ship is bound for South America? And how do they know the ship was taken by ex-Nazis or Nazi sympathizers? How do we know leading Nazis will be put aboard?”

  “Nothing is certain,” said Hobel as sweetly as sugar on a bad tooth. “But I spoke with our side in Spain less than an hour ago. The raiders were native German speakers and carried maps of the South Atlantic, all this according to some of the crew who were put safely ashore. Moreover, the first officer was someone called Moering, a relative of the Moering who was in charge of munitions in Hamburg. Almost certainly a Nazi sympathizer and as yet unaffected by the de-Nazification program.” He paused. “There is no doubt in my mind, or the general’s”—it was “the general” now, not Eisenhower—“that the ship was stolen for the purposes which the intelligence branch says. I did tell you, Wolff, that if this sort of thing were to happen, you would be taken off the case and we would play it my way. So you cannot say you have not had fair warning. As of now, your role in this investigation is finished.” He drew his flat hand across his throat in a garroting movement. “Caput.”

  “What are your plans?” I said in as civil a tone as I could muster.

  He pushed back his chair. He was Patton, or Montgomery, the wily old general confiding in a cub reporter covering his first war.

  “One needs to know a little bit about human nature in this job.” God, he was sickening. “You, Wolff, have been too reasonable, too civilized, too—if I may say so—European. You think you can persuade people to do things against their best interests. Well, you can’t. No one can. Lieutenant Bloch had the right idea, to my way of thinking. Oh, I know you’re going to bleat, and say that he failed, but look at how long he had—just a few hours. You’ve had weeks and have gone no further. All you have are just a few fancy theories. Fear, that’s what makes people sit up and take notice, that’s what they expect from a war, for Christ’s sake. Americans, real Americans understand that. War’s no different from business, for God’s sake.

  “First, I’m going to raid that warehouse in Krumau. Tonight, with everyone inside. Something’s going on there and we’re gonna find out what it is. If von Zell is there, all well and good. It will only prove you should have raided it days ago.”

  “And if he’s not?”

  “No matter. If that happens we send Lieutenant Camman to Stockerau.”

  “Stockerau?”

  I had played into his hands. “You don’t remember what’s at Stockerau? I see. It’s where the boy—von Zell’s son—is at school.”

  “So?” Those knobs of nervousness were beginning to congeal again, somewhere in front of my liver and above my groin. Hobel was like some deadly upside-down alchemist, able to convert the golden feelings I had about Dieter into this base, gummy sediment in my stomach.

  “We shall hold off, until tomorrow anyway, to see if von Zell is holed up at Krumau. But if he isn’t I’m going to hold the boy.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “Don’t raise your voice to me, Lieutenant. You have precious little to show for your efforts. In the first place, the boy, if he is properly interrogated, at length, and by a professional, will tell us whether his father is still in touch with his mother; and, if so, where he is hiding out. But, probably more effective, we are going to release one of the Nazis captured on the Lake of Geneva—you remember the incident. He will be told that we are holding von Zell’s child and he is to tell von Zell that we shall continue to hold the boy until he gives himself up. Clever, eh?”

  It wasn’t clever, it was wicked. “How can you hold a child like that, without good reason? It’s illegal.”

  “Don’t be silly, Wolff. We are the victors in this war. There is a military government here. We can do what we like.”

  “But that’s the mistake the Nazis made. They thought they could disregard justice. That’s why they were so reviled.”

  “Don’t go over the top, Wolff. This is just an exception for a very special case. An important case.… We have an army psychologist who will say the father’s continued absence is having an adverse effect on the child, that he needs to be observed by doctors.”

  “What if von Zell isn’t involved in this conduit? Have you thought of that? It would be cruel to the boy to hold him. And if the father is not in charge of the underground, you are no further along.”

  “Yes we are. We shall know that von Zell is not the man we want, but that issue won’t arise. He took the coins. If he gives himself up, he will be able to explain their disappearance at the very least.”

  “What if the press finds out, the Austrian or German press? You are behaving very callously, in my view. A clever editor could really go to town on this. Grown men—soldiers—picking on an eight-year-old. You could be crucified.”

  “Let me worry about that Wolff. We shan’t take the boy until after we’ve raided Krumau tonight, and only then if we don’t find his father there. Now, I haven’t quite finished with you, not yet. My plan depends on the von Zells thinking that everything is proceeding normally. I want
no suspicions aroused. So, for the next two days at least, until I tell you otherwise, I want you to behave normally. Whatever you had planned for Mrs. von Zell, do it. It goes without saying that you must not mention what is in the offing. More than that, she must have no inkling from your behavior that anything untoward is about to happen. She must have no chance to alert anyone at Krumau, or her boy at Stockerau. Is that clear, Wolff?”

  I was appalled at what Hobel was telling me, but what could I do? He was my superior officer; I had to agree. But I didn’t tell him about Sieveringer, the wine that came from Krumau and which I had found in Konstanze’s house. It might be a clue and I was damned if I was going to help Hobel.

  “You don’t need to know any more, so you can go now. Incidentally, the art recovery unit is being closed down and you may as well clear your desk when you can. It’s all over for you. Now remember, not a word, nothing, to Mrs. von Zell.”

  I returned to my office in a daze. It was not yet 8:00 A.M. and, therefore, still fairly quiet in the building. Sammy was nowhere to be seen. I slumped into my seat, my attention taken by an envelope among my mail. It was in a child’s hand: Dieter’s. I tore at it. As Konstanze had predicted, the boy was very responsible and rather formal. He had given some thought to his words.

  Dear Professor Wolff, All the boys here, and even some of the masters, are mad with jealousy at my binoculars. Tober—he’s nine, a year older than me—even said that American equipment is better than German. That made him very unpopular. The best thing about binoculars is that you can lend them out for chocolate or apples. Thank you very much. If you are still there in the summer may we go to the Löser again, please? As I broke my other glasses, I would like to see all the lakes through my new ones. And maybe by then I will reach the pedals on your car and can drive it properly. Yours respectfully, Dieter von Zell.