A voice like shaved ice, the timbre almost but not quite effeminate, whispered in his ear.
“Herr Obersturmbannführer.”
Nebe turned to gaze directly at the man’s Adam’s apple; he had to look up to meet the eyes. Von Eberstein had intentionally stood upon a section of broken wall to gain a height advantage. However ridiculous that might have made von Eberstein appear, Nebe responded formally, he was after all a civilized man.
“Baron! How might I be of service?”
The use of his civilian title as opposed to his SS rank caused von Eberstein’s rib cage to expand noticeably and an expression of benevolence to soften his upper lip.
“Artur, I consider you to be among the very few members of the Polizei possessed of intelligence, imagination, and integrity”.
Nebe’s given name followed by three flattering epithets all beginning with the same vowel. … The situation was far worse than he could have possibly imagined. A sudden vision of Pontius Pilate caused him to struggle somewhere between mirth and dread.
“Rest assured, Baron, that you will be the first to learn of any and every development.”
“I greatly appreciate your dedication. Herr Mueller has suddenly expressed an unusually personal interest in the outcome of this particular investigation. I’m sure you understand.”
The steel gray eyes were most adept at conveying the abyss awaiting both men in the event that the outcome should disappoint.
Nebe remembered Heinrich Mueller, he had abandoned the ranks of the regular police in order to accept an appointment to some Gestapo Special Department, aside from being an obvious example of extreme bad taste, it was a sign of insane ambition—nothing sacred and no-holds-barred ambition.
“No sense in wasting time then. Am I to contact you directly?”
“Day or night, without exception.”
Von Eberstein proceeded with as much dignity as one possibly could while stepping over corpses. Nebe watched him go with grim stoicism, comforted only by the affirmation seeking glances he received from his functionaries.
In the ballroom, the dead lay in awkward positions with their hair burnt away. Normally, the dead are so relaxed that they seem to be suffering only from sexual exhaustion. But the increased heat had caused muscles to tighten; the dead had shifted and crouched, faces hardened, and they slowly extended their arms toward each other. The movement was so gradual that it was impossible to say when it stopped. The firemen tried to pull the victims from the wreckage, but all they got were pieces that came off in their hands. At either end of that horrific tableau, transfixed and appalled, were Baron von Eberstein and Artur Nebe. Like a lot of people that night they had taken to wondering exactly how far it was to the Swiss border. The smell of roast meat was in the air. Many realized they were hungry.
NOVEMBER 9TH, 1939
BACK IN KONSTANZ, GEORG ELSER was dreaming.
In his dream, Georg was back in that dingily furnished room that had been grimly scrubbed clean. He was in bed twitching in his sleep like a cat dreaming of mice. He’d been sleeping with the girl he’d met the night before; A tall, ugly girl with a bad face but good legs.
It was her room and she was already up. Her name was Hannah and although it sounded Jewish, it was short for Hannahlehr, an ultimately German name. Still there was something Jewish in the angular face and sorrowful eyes. She watched the man in her bed with a motherly expression that had nothing to do with her feelings. She was determined to save the situation, no matter what, and she forced the expression onto her face to reassure herself that there was nothing wrong. It was her room and that gave her an animal confidence, but that situation had gotten her scared. She had always enjoyed feeling vulnerable as long as it had to do with sex, but this was sickness. The man jerked and twisted in her bed, arms and legs twitching all at the same time, a sure sign of a first-rate nightmare, if it wasn’t epilepsy.
Then he jerked himself awake and snapped into a sitting position, wide-eyed and staring, he shouted. …
“I didn’t do it!”
She reached for him professionally with the frank confidence of a nurse in her hard, narrow hands. She sat down beside him, took him by the wrists and pulled herself forward, leaning over him nose to nose.
“Of course you didn’t …”
She said it carefully.
“You didn’t do anything.”
Georg didn’t answer. He squinted into space, seeing something happen somewhere else. He seemed likely to remain that way for the moment and, while she waited for him to snap out of it, she walked to the window and looked at the dawn sky. It was dingy too, gray over the town of Heidenheim.
Like every small German town, it looked like a fairy tale gone wrong. In the easy days of the republic, arson had been popular among the landlords. In the 1850s, everything had been declared a national monument. To put up a new building, you had to first burn down the old one. It was the only way to get rid of it.
Hannah glanced back at the man in her bed, another fairy tale gone wrong.
“Bad dreams?”
Her question was conclusive, like a doctor delivering a prognosis. Georg didn’t answer.
“That bad!?”
He was still silent so she stomped over to the closet and threw it open. There were three white uniforms, a black worsted suit for funerals, and a cheap print dress. She reached behind them all to pull out a negligee that had cost her three months’ salary. She put it on and Georg woke up a little. It was much too frilly for her, very sad, but kind of sweet.
“Morning after horrors?”
It wasn’t actually a question but when Georg didn’t respond she spat out, “I’m not that ugly!”
Her voice had risen to a shriek but Georg had only heard the last part of it.
“What are you talking about?”
He had said it very quietly.
“I asked if you’ve ever been kicked down a flight of stairs before.”
“I’d better go …”
He started to get dressed but it was a complicated process. He had his pants under the mattress to maintain the crease. His coat and shirt were on the back of a chair. His shorts and under shirt were on a hanger in front of a partially open window. His shoes were lined up under the bed with the socks tucked inside. His shoes had been lined up under the bed every night of his life.
The inexplicable pressure he felt made him wildly uncomfortable. He scrambled out of bed and began skipping from one part of the room to another. Hannah turned on a hot plate and put on an Italian espresso pot.
She intervened gracefully.
“I think you had better sit down and have some coffee. A man is never responsible for anything he says in the morning before he’s had coffee.”
Georg was sitting on the bed with his right shoe on and the left one in both hands. To remove the right one would have insinuated a level of intimacy well beyond his emotional range. Being the sort of person who, having initiated an action found it impossible not to complete it, he really had no alternative but to put on his left shoe as well before tucking in his shirt.
“Did your mother tell you that?”
He sounded like he felt compassion and that annoyed him.
“As a matter of fact, yes!”
Her enthusiasm was not as comforting as he had hoped it would be. Georg fastened his belt and walked over to the small breakfast table. He sat down.
“You’re very hard not to like.”
Even as he said it, he simultaneously wondered if he should have.
He simply wasn’t equipped with the social filters most of us take for granted, perhaps that was another reason women were drawn to him, it gave him an inexplicable vulnerability that made them feel empowered.
“Good.”
Hannah’s tone was imperious. … Check and mate. Georg smiled competently and his eyes checked the distance to the door. She decided to push her luck.
“What did you dream?”
She still seemed worried that it might
concern her.
“I really don’t remember.”
He examined the tabletop while Hannah smiled shyly and ducked her head, watching him through her false eyelashes. She had made a decision as to what the dream must have been about: something sexual, something shameful.
“I do things too … like leaving with you. Yesterday, I was ashamed. But today I’ve reached the giggling stage. What about you?”
Her giddiness was obvious enough but Georg couldn’t think of anything to say and it was his turn to speak. He still had the taste of her on his tongue. She had perfumed her bush in preparation for love. That had been a mistake, but he couldn’t tell her. Her confidence was shaky enough as it was. She had told him she had finally found something she couldn’t do without. Now he had her, but what was he going to do with her? It was only complicated because he liked her for some unfathomable reason.
“Coffee ready?”
He had asked politely, and that had seemed to reassure her.
---
Georg woke up back in the detention cell in the two-room jail in Konstanz. He knew he’d been dreaming, if only it could have all been a dream. As an escape attempt, it hadn’t worked and it had finally occurred to him that he had given no thought whatsoever to what would happen next. He has simply resorted to a routine he had followed time and again—walking away from responsibility.
There was operatic shouting around him. A cop was holding a telex report and reading from it in a steady scream.
“A terrorist attack in Munich … the BürgerBräuKeller. The border is closed.”
Another cop opened his mouth and worked his jaw, but no words came.
“Why?”
“It doesn’t say…” screamed the cop with the telex report and then stared at Georg with speculation. “I’ll get you some coffee.”
He said it and strode out, having found a purpose. Meanwhile another picked up a new string of news and shouted, “Any and all suspicious individuals are to be sent to Munich!”
After that, things were a blur for what seemed like a very long time. First Georg was in a car, then he was in a black Mariah and then he was in Munich, in the Marienplatz jail, in a long line of prisoners being processed. A turnkey was shouting:
“Criminals to the right, political criminals to the left, relatives of political criminals 2nd floor to the right. Administrative detainees: 2nd floor to the left. Anonymous denunciations: straight ahead to the door at the end of the hall. Repeat: Criminals to the right. …”
Georg stopped, holding up the line. He seemed uncertain which way to go. A turnkey grabbed him and threw him into the cage of political prisoners on the left. In the opposite cell block, in the common prisoners’ cage, the wall was covered by a poster: “Join the Reicharbeitdienst” it said. It was a public works program, but mostly they spent a lot of time marching up and down. The poster showed a worker of heroic proportions carrying a shovel, his face lit with deadpan rapture. He was wedged between SS and Wehrmacht privates carrying slick art deco weapons. They were shown from a low angle looking up and they appeared to be over seventeen meters tall. As Georg was looking at it, a hand reached up and tore off a corner of the poster. A fat man who was squatting on the pot used it to wipe his ass. A political discussion about that ensued, but the fat man took a single-edged razor blade from under his tongue while a lean tattooed man pulled a sharpened bicycle spoke out of the hem of his coat. As they proceeded to murder each other, Georg looked away.
The political cage was full, the bunks and even the corners were taken. Georg lay down in the middle of the floor. In the dim light he started to fondle himself because that at least helped pass the time, but he couldn’t stay awake. He curled asleep like a cat.
There was the sound of booted feet running and everyone was yelling, but he didn’t seem to notice.
NOVEMBER 10TH, 1939
CHIEF DETECTIVE INSPECTOR NEBE SAT down behind his cigarette-scarred walnut desk—the Führer’s picture looming above—and made a show of studying an 8x10 matte photograph of the wreckage of the BürgerBräuKeller. There wasn’t much to it, just the burnt-out ballroom. The print showed the two pillars behind the Führer’s podium. The one on the right had been blown half away but it had held. Not much of a bomb, so it was surprising how much damage it had caused.
“Talented …”
Nebe said and looked around for a reaction. Inspectors Brandt and Nolte were displaying worry in their usual ways. Nolte sat with his elbows on his knees feeling sorry for himself; he’d been handsome once and still used his face theatrically. Brandt was standing, chin-up and looking dedicated. Nebe hated both of them quite cordially. They had known each other too long and, like most old friends, had too much to get even for. He envied the easy friendships of American gangster movies where no one seemed to have any memories. He summoned his authority and drew an X on the hole in the right hand pillar. He held up the print and asked:
“What’s the scale on this?”
“The pillars are one meter thick.”
Brandt answered, but Nolte didn’t want to be outdone.
“Some of them … The building was put up at different times. The ballroom was added in the 1850s.”
He was trying to impress as usual, but if Brandt said that it was one meter thick, then he had actually measured it.
“Just so …”
Nebe took out a pair of calipers and began measuring. He slid a draftsman’s rule out of the middle drawer of his desk and held the calipers against it, writing down the numbers on a yellow pad.
“You want to go back down there and take another look?” asked Brandt.
“Evidence you have to get that way isn’t worth the trouble.” Nebe picked up the slide rule and did a quick calculation, then came out from behind the desk, holding the ruler and scowling triumphantly. He measured a height from the floor against the desk and marked it with a stub of chalk.
“Kneel down.”
He said it to Brandt as he wiggled the ruler and smiled.
“What for?” asked Brandt in high voice.
“You are chiseling a hole in the side of a brick and concrete pillar.”
Brandt knelt down and began to pantomime hammer and chisel. Nebe crossed his arms and waited. Brandt was genuinely stupid, which made him a pleasure to command. Nebe thought about Heinrich Mueller; that brilliant yet crude man, so brutal and tasteless that he had left the police and was now head of some Gestapo department or other. This should have been a Gestapo case; it was political and yet the Gestapo wouldn’t touch it. Something was wrong and if they knew that when the case was but hours old then they had known about it in advance. Meaning what? The men gathered there had been Alte Kampfer, old fighters who had been with the Führer since the beginning, men to whom he owed an enormous debt but who were no longer useful.
Killing them off would have been an elegant solution … But, were that the case, then why then had the Führer bothered to show up at all? He had originally cancelled and then changed his mind, why? Again the answer came: so he could have one more miraculous escape. Goebbels was already claiming divine intervention. However, it still didn’t make sense. The Führer was a brave man, certainly, but to trust his life to an infernal machine ticking away in the pillar behind him, that was an insane and pointless risk; unless there had been no risk.
Nebe shrugged it off, analysis wasn’t getting him anywhere. If it were a Gestapo plot, that would be the best reason for keeping the investigation to themselves. A Gestapo plot would have the fall guy ready and waiting, as they had done at the Reichstag fire. Yet again an answer came to him: so that whoever might try to actually solve it could be brought down. He and his colleagues were middle-aged police inspectors and as apolitical as hedgehogs. Discrediting the police to the benefit of the SS? The police were now part of the SS. He himself was now Sturmbannführer. Having received his commission in the mail, he’d even had to go out and buy a new uniform. Having his measurements taken had been humiliating. He hadn’t realized
that his waist had crept up to 40 inches; his old pants were conveniently stretched out.
He shook his head. Discrediting the police to the benefit of the Gestapo? The police would fail, the case would be handed to the Gestapo and they would solve it. The case was obviously political so it rightfully belonged to them anyway. Why wouldn’t they touch it? He needed a drink. He needed a bottle. He needed to stay drunk for three days. Perhaps he was trying to get more information out of this than there was in it. The investigation manuals specifically warned against that: stick to the facts, don’t try to make sense out of human motivation or you’ll drive yourself crazy. One thing was clear: he had to get out of this fast. Perhaps he could find a doctor under indictment for insurance fraud who could recommend a drug that would mimic the symptoms of a heart attack. Insurance fraud was which department? Bunko squad? At least that would be a place to start. It would require some tact and if he moved fast he might actually get out of this alive and with his pension, which was basically the same thing.
The Führer Must Die Page 2
