Legacy of War

by Wilbur Smith

  Riel let his partner, Jaco Maier, ask the questions. He watched and listened while his sharp, intuitive, streetwise mind recorded, sorted and analysed the information provided by the interviewees, and, just as significant, what they left out. He and Maier had come away from their meeting with the so-called Frank Schmidt feeling both intrigued and frustrated. The man was clearly hiding something, but they had no grounds for pursuing it.

  Then Schmidt had been killed by a hit-and-run driver as he was leaving the hospital. Both detectives felt certain that it had been a planned execution. Of course, they had no evidence. But it did not matter. The driver of the car had committed a crime by fleeing from the scene of a death he, or she, had caused. Now they had something to investigate.

  It took no time to establish that both Schmidt’s name and address were false, and the hospital receptionist was quick to confirm that the name had been given, not by ‘Schmidt’ himself, but by one of the men who had brought him in and subsequently visited him.

  So who was he? The dead man had been carrying no identification when he left the hospital, which was both unusual and highly suspicious. But the accident was dramatic enough to make the local papers and the following morning the puzzle was solved.

  A woman burst into a police station in Lindau, about twenty minutes’ drive down the Bodensee lake shore from Friedrichshafen, waving a newspaper and wailing, ‘That’s my Fritzi!’

  Her name was Maria Grasse. She was interviewed by local police and she told them that the dead man’s name was Fritz Werner, that he worked at the Meerbach Motor Works and that she was his fiancée. The ring on her finger and the pictures in her handbag proved she was telling the truth. When she was taken to the mortuary at Friedrichshafen, Fraülein Grasse was able to identify the mangled remains of her dead lover before fainting.

  She wasn’t the only one to put a name to the face. Riel and Maier were having a beer after work at a bierkeller known for being a police watering hole when another veteran, smaller than Riel but equally battle-scarred, approached them.

  ‘Willi!’ Riel grinned. ‘Good to see you. Can I get you a beer? Jaco, this is Willi Roth. When I was winning all my heavyweight titles, Willi was king of the middleweights.’

  ‘And if I’d been the same size as this old gorilla, I’d have beaten him, believe me,’ Roth growled.

  The two old friends threw a couple of air punches at one another. Riel ordered more beers. Then Roth’s face grew serious.

  ‘I never talk about Russia, the things that happened there. You know that, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ Riel said.

  He drank some more beer, knowing that his friend had something to get off his chest, letting him do it in his own time. Maier, too, remained silent. Roth pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit up.

  ‘That man who was run over . . .’ he said.

  ‘Fritz Werner?’ said Maier.

  Roth grunted, blew out a trail of smoke and said, ‘His name wasn’t Werner. That man was Kriminaldirektor Heinrich Schraub and . . .’ Roth shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you the things he did. I mean, I know what they were, but . . .’

  Riel reached out his arm and laid a hand on Roth’s shoulder.

  ‘I understand, old man. Just tell us what you can.’

  ‘He was a fanatic. Most of us did everything we could to get out of . . . you know, the orders we were given. And if we had to do it, we were drunk . . . I mean, off our heads. It was the only way . . . But Schraub was one of the true believers, a Nazi to the bone. He didn’t have to be persuaded. He wanted to do it . . . all of it.’

  ‘Christ . . .’ Maier gasped. ‘I think I need a schnapps. We all do.’

  ‘Here’s the thing, though . . . Schraub didn’t come from this part of the world. He was a Dresdener. But somehow he managed to get away from the Ivans in ’45 and he escaped the big round-up of SS and Gestapo types by the Tommies and Amis. Someone got him a new name, clean papers. I bet they fixed him up with a decent job, too.’

  ‘Meerbach Motor Works,’ Riel said.

  Roth gave a shake of the head. ‘Ja, that makes sense. The place was owned by a damn SS general.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a whole nest of them there,’ Maier said.

  ‘Maybe,’ Riel shrugged. ‘But the SS man’s brother was sent to the camps for rebelling against Adolf and these days the place is run by the family lawyer. He’s a Jew. Can’t imagine either of them wanting their business infested by the SS.’

  ‘A Jew and a traitor . . .’ Maier mused. ‘Listen, I’m no Nazi, but I don’t like the sound of that.’

  ‘The Jew won the Blue Max in the first war and the traitor was a fighter ace with more than a hundred kills to his name,’ Riel pointed out. ‘They did their bit for the Fatherland. And the company always gives generously to the police benevolent fund.’

  ‘You thinking of tipping them off?’ Roth asked.

  ‘Might as well,’ Riel said. ‘You lads know as well as I do that this investigation isn’t going to go anywhere officially. This is the new Germany, we’re supposed to have put the bad old days behind us. Now one SS veteran turns up murdered by others just like him. Nazis all over the place. No one upstairs wants to know about that.’

  Isidore Solomons and his wife Claudia lived in a hillside villa close to the Zurich golf and country club. The house had been built in the twenties by a Modernist architect and decorated in the art deco style that was all the rage at the time. The floors were laid with the finest marble and intricately patterned parquet oak floors. The reception rooms were reached through a succession of Chinese lacquer doors. The outer walls were pierced by floor-to-ceiling windows that led onto a terrace from which there were spectacular views across the city towards Lake Zurich.

  ‘You’ve done well for yourself, Izzy,’ Gerhard said as he leaned against the terrace balustrade, taking in the scenery. ‘I’m glad it all turned out for the best.’

  ‘Yes, it did,’ Isidore agreed. ‘But how sad that we had to come here to find peace and prosperity. I should much preferred to have enjoyed those things at home.’

  ‘Hmm . . .’ Gerhard nodded. ‘I know how you feel. But we are still here when so many are not.’

  ‘Very true. Now, when you called me from St Moritz you said that there had been developments. I have news of my own, but you tell me yours first.’

  They sat at a table, shaded by a parasol, where glasses, an ice bucket and a jug of freshly made lemonade were waiting. In these civilised surroundings, Saffron and Gerhard described the grim events on the Meerbach Motor Works airfield. Isidore stopped them occasionally to ask questions that gently obliged them to think harder and provide more detail about exactly what had happened. Every so often he would jot down a short note in a leather-bound book.

  When they had finished, Isidore thanked them. He flicked back through his book, found the page and perused its contents.

  ‘Yes, I thought so,’ he murmured. To his guests he said, ‘That man you . . . ah, incapacitated. The one who’d been spying on you—’

  ‘You mean Werner?’

  ‘Actually his name was . . .’ Isidore glanced at his notes again and said, ‘Heinrich Schraub. He was a former Kriminaldirektor in the Gestapo.’

  Saffron frowned. ‘You said his name “was” . . . as if he were dead.’

  ‘He is, killed as he was leaving hospital, a hit-and-run attack. The police believe that Schraub-alias-Werner was a member of an SS veterans’ gang. Their theory is that he was killed by his comrades as a warning to others that failure would not be tolerated.’

  ‘You’d think they’d have got used to failure by now,’ Saffron remarked.

  ‘Indeed. But the question for us now is, how much did Werner tell them before they killed him. Or, more importantly, how much could he have told them?’

  ‘He must have known who we were,’ Gerhard said. ‘Our visit to the Motor Works was public. He knew where we went, obvi
ously, since he followed us to the airfield.’

  ‘Could he have identified Ferdinand Posch, the man you spoke to out there?’

  ‘Yes, but we got Ferdi to safety. He’s not in the area any more.’

  ‘Suppose the SS men have worked out that Posch was working at the airfield when Francesca and Konrad escaped. He might have told you.’

  ‘Only if they knew we were asking him about them,’ Saffron said.

  ‘Men like that survive by being paranoid,’ Isidore replied. ‘They always assume the worst. That way nothing takes them by surprise.’

  ‘Maybe now we should be paranoid,’ Gerhard said. ‘What is the worst thing that we can assume?’

  ‘That diehard Nazis believe you and Saffron know what happened to Konrad at the end of the war,’ Isidore said. ‘And that Konrad discovers, through them, that you are looking for him.’

  ‘If I were in his shoes, I’d take that for granted,’ Saffron said. ‘After all the things he’s done to us, he’d expect us to want our revenge.’

  ‘But revenge for what, exactly? We have spoken of the things that you two are supposed to have done to Konrad and Francesca. But what is the worst he has done to you? I mean, the thing he knows would give you a motive for revenge.’

  ‘He had Gerhard arrested, put on trial and sent to Sachsenhausen. Isn’t that enough?’ Saffron asked.

  ‘Yes . . . but I think there is more than that, something you are not telling me.’

  ‘There is,’ Gerhard said. ‘He had me tortured.’

  ‘Can you tell me how?’ Isidore asked.

  ‘No . . .’ Gerhard closed his eyes, bent his head and shook it from side to side, muttering, ‘I can’t . . . I can’t.’ Then he straightened his neck, a simple action that seemed to require a huge effort, and said, ‘I won’t take myself back to that place again.’

  Saffron crouched beside Gerhard. ‘It’s all right,’ she told him. ‘No one’s going to make you say anything.’

  But Isidore was not giving up. He took Gerhard’s right hand in his own two hands, like a priest giving comfort, and said, ‘Try. It’s hard. I know. But you have been carrying a terrible burden of pain. Let us share the weight with you.’

  Gerhard looked at him. ‘I’ll need something stronger than lemonade. Vodka would be good, or schnapps. Neat.’

  ‘Of course,’ Izzy said.

  He went into the house and Saffron asked Gerhard, ‘Are you sure about this?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Gerhard replied. ‘But maybe Izzy’s right about sharing the burden. I’ve been so afraid of telling you – scared of what you might think of me . . .’

  ‘Oh, my darling, there’s no need to be afraid,’ Saffron said. ‘I know you. And I love you.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t know Konrad.’

  Isidore returned with a bottle of vodka and a glass. He handed them to Gerhard. He filled the glass, emptied it, then filled it again before he looked at Saffron.

  ‘You remember how cold it was in the first months of ’45?’

  ‘Germany was still freezing when I got there in late April,’ she replied.

  ‘This would have been March, I suppose – I’d lost any idea of actual dates by then. I was sick, starved, not much better than when you found me. But that was what the camp doctors were looking for. You see, they liked to do experiments to test the limits of human survival and find ways of making our soldiers keep going without sleep or food, but fighting like maniacs, right till the second they died.’

  ‘And I thought the first war was the lowest depth of misery that humans could ever reach,’ Isidore said.

  ‘Humans are clever. We find ways to get better at everything, including making life hell.’ Gerhard emptied his glass a second time and refilled it again. The alcohol appeared to have had no effect on him. ‘The docs wanted to test a new drug, a cocktail of cocaine, amphetamine and an opioid painkiller.’

  ‘So it got you high, it filled you with energy and you never felt a thing,’ Saffron observed. ‘Any army in the world would buy that.’

  ‘It worked,’ Gerhard said. ‘All we had to eat every day was a small lump of buckwheat bread. I was so malnourished the doctor could barely find any fat to stick the needle in. But one shot of this drug and I was bouncing around like a spring lamb. They took me and the other test subjects outside and gave us the usual Sachsenhausen treatment, a forced march of forty kilometres around and around that parade ground. On any normal day it was hell from the first step. But this day, with the drug inside me, it was like a Sunday stroll in the park. There was a guy in front of me whistling as he walked. My feet were so blistered my boots were filling with blood. But there was no pain. And then . . .’

  Gerhard stopped. He drank more vodka and slammed the glass on the table. He grimaced and went on.

  ‘I saw Konrad. He drove into the camp in a big black staff car, with motorcycle outriders. He got out and was greeted by Kaindl, the camp commandant. The two of them watched us. They were so close I could hear Konrad tell Kaindl, “You must be feeding him too well,” as I marched by them. They had a laugh about that and they went off for a tour of the camp.’

  ‘I’ve heard enough,’ Isidore said. ‘We can stop now if you like.’

  ‘Stop?’ Gerhard replied. ‘I haven’t even started. You see, the drug only worked for a certain amount of time. And when that time was over, the person who’d taken it had burned up so much energy, there was nothing left. That’s what happened to us that day. One minute we were marching, the next . . . bang! It was like a balloon being popped. Some guys’ hearts exploded. They died instantly, like they’d been shot. The others took a while longer.

  ‘God knows how, but I survived. I collapsed on the ground, couldn’t move a muscle. My mind was as shattered as my body, but somewhere there was this voice telling me to keep going. I started crawling on my hands and knees in the mud. I had no idea where I was heading. I’d lost all sense of where I was, or even who I was – I mean, you had no name in the camp. I was Prisoner No. 57803. I wasn’t even human. The guards thought it was great sport. They threw stones at me to make me go faster. They had a dog. They were about to set it on me, just for fun. Then Konrad returned.’

  Gerhard gave a mirthless smile and said, ‘One more drink,’ as he refilled the glass. Saffron and Isidore were silent, appalled and yet, despite themselves, gripped by Gerhard’s revelations. Neither dared break the spell that had transported him from this delightful terrace in Switzerland to the unspeakable horror of a concentration camp caught in the death throes of the Third Reich.

  ‘Konrad walked up to me,’ he continued. ‘I don’t know how I remember this because I was barely conscious at the time, and yet I can see his face as clearly as if he were sitting here now. He had a look that was the same as when we were little boys. I used to make little buildings with our toy bricks and he would always have a smile on his face as he got ready to kick them to pieces, because he knew I couldn’t stop him . . . That was the smile he had that day.

  ‘He was carrying a riding whip. He flicked the whip across my cheek, cutting it so I bled. I raised a hand to stop the blood, and because I was so weak that made me lose my balance and I fell flat on the ground.

  ‘Konrad burst out laughing. The guards joined in. So now he knew he had an audience, he thought he should put on a show. I got up on to my knees, but I was pointing away from Konrad. So he hit me with his whip, slap-slap-slap, making me crawl around until I was facing him, on my hands and knees, with my head hanging low. And then . . .’

  Tears began to stream from Gerhard’s eyes, but he seemed unaware of them. His mind was occupied by his memory of that day as he said, ‘Konrad told me to lick his boot.’

  Saffron gave a little gasp, but Gerhard did not react.

  ‘I tried so hard not to lick Konrad’s boot. But he whipped my back, and kept whipping. After a while he stopped and he used the tip of the whip to lift my chin, so that he could look me in the eye. He said it
again, “Lick my boot.” And . . . and . . . oh, God help me . . . I . . . I licked his boot. And then he patted me on the head, like a dog and said, “Good boy.”

  ‘Konrad told the men that even the dumbest animal could be trained to obey a command. He stepped a little way from me and commanded me to crawl to him and lick his boot again – and I did. I couldn’t help myself. I guess he was right. He’d trained me. After that Konrad had to go back to Berlin. He ordered the guards to lead me around the parade ground on my knees, licking their boots all the way. And they did . . . and I did.

  ‘So you see, Izzy . . .’ Gerhard acknowledged that he had been crying and wiped a hand across his face as he concluded, ‘That was how my brother tortured me.’

  Silence fell upon the terrace, broken only by birdsong and the distant roar of a passing aeroplane. Saffron was the first to speak. She had not shed a single tear. There was no trace of emotion in her voice.

  ‘I’m going to kill him.’ It was a calm statement of fact. ‘Tell me where he is and I will terminate his existence.’

  Isidore laughed nervously, unable to reconcile the warm, vivacious Saffron Courtney he thought he knew with the cold-faced woman threatening murder. He tried to make light of her words.

  ‘As your lawyer, I certainly couldn’t advise such an extreme course of action.’

  She fixed her sapphire eyes on him, a look as cold as the deepest ocean.

  ‘Why not? I’ve done it before.’

  ‘Please, my love, don’t lower yourself to his level,’ Gerhard said.

  He knew that Saffron had been trained to kill. When he saw what she had done to Werner, he had understood her ability to survive a threat to her own life. But never before had he understood her capacity for cold-blooded, calculated violence.

  ‘I wouldn’t be lowering myself,’ she retorted. ‘When I was growing up, my father taught me to love and respect the living creatures around us. But he also taught me that when a lion goes rogue and starts killing cattle, or even people, then it has to be dealt with. What I’m suggesting is no different.’