Nebe moved in. “Of course you didn’t, but you know who did.”
“Johann Georg Elser: Born 4th January 1903 in Hermaningen, out of wedlock. Parents married a year later. One brother, three sisters, only one of which he’s still talking to. Alcoholic father. Is very close to his mother.” Nolte did have a splendid sense of timing.
Georg shuddered. “Leave my mother out of this.”
“If we can, Georg. If we can.” Fear at last. Nebe smiled.
Elser gazed ahead of him pathetically. “My family has nothing to do with this.”
Nebe’s smile hardened. “Then tell us who does?”
Georg wet his lips. If he couldn’t talk, at least he could do something with his mouth. There was nothing to say, nothing at all.
Nebe pressed on, “I like it, Georg. Lying is not natural to you and that’s a pleasure. You wouldn’t believe the people we get in here. You having a good time? If you are, this might just go on forever.”
Nolte started to probe through Georg’s wallet. He found the photographs and held them up. There was one of a puckered, bitter old woman, lines around her mouth cut deep into her face. She was trying to smile but couldn’t raise the line of her lips past the horizontal. There was a picture of a woman, about thirty, with a strong resemblance to Georg, especially in the sharp angle of the jaw. Both pictures had been hand-tinted in ghastly pastels, confectioner’s pinks, blues, and yellows. They weren’t pictures; they were icons, something to be worshipped. “Your sister, Georg? Fine-looking woman.”
“Write it out, whatever it is, and I’ll sign it.” Georg’s tone was matter-of-fact.
“But Georg, you didn’t do anything. We need the names of the Englishmen who framed you. It was a beautiful job, but you couldn’t have done it alone.” Nolte seemed almost empathetic.
“Amateurs don’t plan things that well. Amateurs wade into a crowd with a little shit pistol, they’re very proud of what they’ve done. They don’t even try to escape. This was planned, by a pro, Georg, and that isn’t you.”
Georg looked baffled, not as though he didn’t understand the words in question, but as though he didn’t understand language, period. Nebe began to wonder if the man were some type of autistic savant.
“He may keep this up forever.” The centipede came to a halt and Brandt swiveled in his seat. “Shall we get on with …” He pantomimed breaking a pencil but Nebe held up a pawnbroker’s gently negating hand.
He turned his attention back to Georg, “Just tell us about it. Start anywhere.”
His eyes flashed from Nebe to the others and back again. “My mother, my sister, they’ve got nothing to do with this.”
Nebe nodded. “So you’ve told us, Georg.”
Georg’s face was anxious. “Then you’ll leave them out of it?”
Nebe smiled in encouragement. “As long as you cooperate.”
Georg sighed. “So what is it you want to know?”
“Please, God, let this be a dream. Has he got brain damage or what?” Even Brandt had passed the point of exasperation.
Nolte dutifully consulted the arrest report. “It doesn’t say so. The doctor looked at him last night.”
Nebe shrugged. “So, that means he’s drugged.”
Nolte twisted his face like a radio dial. “Only 25 milligrams of Methedrine to get him talking. But, I think this is natural. No fixed stare. He’s not even sweating.”
“Then what the hell is going on here?” Nebe asked.
For once Nolte had nothing to say, so he stood up and pulled a blackjack out of his back pocket, the one where he usually carried the brass knuckles, and thumped Georg across the shin with it. When Georg doubled up to clutch at his leg, Nolte cracked him behind the elbow and Georg fell face forward on the floor. He didn’t make a sound, they never did; the pain was too strong and they couldn’t get enough distance from it to comment on it.
Nebe didn’t feel compassion, he didn’t feel pity, but he did sometimes get disgusted. He stood up and pushed Nolte hard enough to stagger him back into his chair. He turned to Georg and said, “My colleague was just trying to get your attention. Now, get up and sit down.” He turned to the others. “Maybe, just maybe, we’re asking the wrong questions, questions so wrong that he doesn’t know what to say.”
The three detective inspectors waited for an answer to present itself, hands folded and faces twisted into configurations of attentiveness. Nebe wasn’t about to say anything and every time that Brandt or Nolte adopted a posture that indicated that they were about to speak, he cut them off with a gesture. Nebe scowled so hard that he was looking at Georg through his eyebrows.
Then, in a gesture he had learned from the movies, Nebe tapped his right forefinger to the side of his nose and then pointed to Georg. “Tell us, when was the exact moment you knew that you were going to do it?”
Georg looked up. It was a question he could answer and the Methedrine was making it easier for him to talk than not to.
“I was on the receiving dock of the Waldenmaier armament factory at Heidenheim. Ulrich and I were rolling crates on a dolly heading for the storeroom. Ulrich was tall and thin and uselessly fine featured. He was aging badly. At 27, he already had three-dimensional bags under his eyes and his skin was curdling. It wasn’t the thickened terracotta skin of a drinking man; he was going fish-belly white. He was clearly dying of something else. He unlocked the four-meter-high steel doors of the storeroom and I wheeled the dolly inside. Ulrich yanked on the hanging naked bulb. It put out a thick yellow light that made the pine shelves look like cake. He heaved the door shut. Then he leaned against it and said, ‘You almost got me killed last night.’ There was a strange lack of emotion in this, as though it were a minor breach of good taste that he had mentioned only because he was a friend.
“We had been drinking in a bar where we’d hoped to be safely ignored. There was a doddering old waitress whose breasts hung down below her belt and no one cared to look up from their beer. That was September 28, 1938, the day before the Munich Agreement was signed, and everyone was locked into some internal calculation and waiting for the signal that would tell them to stop being afraid. A group in Nazi uniforms were having a jubilantly obnoxious conversation at the end of the bar, tearing at the air like it was a piece of meat. Then the bartender waved and shouted for silence. He turned on the radio and the voice of Josef Goebbels announced that Adolf Hitler was about to speak from the Sportpalast in Berlin. Goebbels sounded crazier than usual, or maybe just happier; with him it’s the same thing. He had written a novel he couldn’t sell, but suddenly … Here he is with an audience that has no choice, happy at last. I listened to the frantic skirling voice for a while; it gibbered and squeaked. Then I got up and walked out. I hadn’t thought about what would happen next, but Ulrich filled me in of course, considering he survived the standoff.
“The Nazis at the end of the bar couldn’t believe what they were seeing. My disrespect was unthinkable and while they were unthinking it, I was already out the door and gone, peddling away on my bike. They did a slow take on Ulrich, spreading out in the defensive formation known as ‘the hedgehog.’
“They were all either gawkily thin or fat and egg shaped and their faces were as malformed as illustrations in a poorly drawn comic book, but there were a lot of them. Then the bartender intervened. There was a roll-down grate over the bar like it was a store window. The bartender slammed it down, locking himself in with the beer kegs and schnapps bottles. He peered out with one eye and poked his nose through the grill work.
“‘Hurry up and get it over with,’ he had said it helpfully, ‘the Führer is about to speak.’ Ulrich jumped up and gave the Nazi salute. ‘Heil Hitler!’ And he must have said it as though it were the answer to every problem because the point man on the formation returned the salute quite casually and said, ‘Heil Hitler?’ as though he’d never heard it before. ‘Who was your friend?’ he asked.
“‘Who? Him? I really don’t know.’ Ulrich said it holding up his em
pty hands to demonstrate his innocence, he did that quite often as I recall.
“‘He seemed to know you.’ That was the Nazi behind the one in front, peering over his shoulder.
“‘I’m just friendly, you know how people take advantage of that.’
“‘Quiet!’ the bartender shouted from behind the barricade. Then Adolf Hitler began to speak. The Nazis turned around to face the radio as if the speaker were in the same room and poor Ulrich stood there, stiffly at attention with eyes misting over with what he hoped was the appropriate emotion, all the while he listened to the Führer slowly and plausibly work himself into a rage fit. Ulrich told me that he had thought: Hitler is scared, this time he is actually scared, so he can’t be completely crazy.”
Nebe took a deep breath and raised his left palm like he were about to take an oath. Elser paused, sensing that was what he was meant to do while Nolte’s head swiveled Nebe’s direction as Brandt’s plodding fingers clambered to a halt and he did the same. All three men looked at Nebe with curious speculation.
“Georg, though your enthusiasm is almost inspiring, I am finding it extraordinarily difficult to believe that Ulrich, at least as you’ve described him thus far, actually related this tale to you in such vivid detail.” At which both Brandt and Nolte nodded in mute unison. Georg looked from face to face not comprehending what their problem was. He spoke when his gaze settled back on Nebe.
“But I always remember things as pictures. I mean, I was there, at least until I left, so I had all of their faces and the layout of the bar already in my head. When Ulrich told me what had happened I saw it, that’s how I can remember it to tell it to you now.”
Brandt glanced at Nolte for some confirmation that Elser was talking nonsense, he dreaded having to type up Georg’s staggering narrative, but Nolte had opted to put on his ‘not now, I’m in contemplation’ expression. Only Nebe had felt the full impact of Elser’s statement and registered its possible implications in regard to the investigation and all of their, now common, futures.
“My apologies for interrupting you Georg, I appreciate your having shared that with us. Now, by all means please continue.” And with that he rapped his knuckles firmly upon his desk to bring Brandt and Nolte back to the here and now. Georg nodded to each of them before resuming his tale of their woe.
“In the shipping and receiving office, Ulrich and I were counting the packets in a crate of cordite, or maybe picric acid. There was a ritual to it. If you kept your movements strictly mechanical, each motion an exact duplicate of the one before until only the spirit were free, the time passed pleasantly.
“Fritz, the ‘supreme supervisor’ of inventory, was bending over the books jerking his finger in time to some internal music. A roll of fat hung over the back of his collar. He was a devout Nazi, but since he was too old for the SS or even the army, it looked like a free ride. He looked forward to the war as though it were a movie: after all, Goebbles advertised it very much the same way.
“I turned to Ulrich and whispered, ‘You should have left too.’ We were having the same conversation for the third time and he just looked at me and smiled, ‘When among wolves, howl!’
“Then Fritz started yelling. ‘Gentlemen, perhaps I haven’t given you enough to do.’
“We stopped talking and kept counting. Fritz looked back and forth between us and watched with satisfaction. He smiled, ‘Procrastination was possible under the republic, but not now.’ He waited for a reply but we had none. That was the way it was going to be from then on: small-time sadists, dead-end menial jobs, and fat landladies suggesting ways to save on the rent. There were no other possibilities so there was nothing to think about. The days passed: the same deadly routine, again and again and again.
“That night I was drinking beer with Franz and Ulrich. It was a different bar than the night before, which was elementary caution. Franz had arms as thick as my legs and covered with wiry red hair. He was talking about opening his own carpentry shop. It was impossible to save that much money, but he had elaborate plans for getting it from his wife’s relatives. No one was listening.
“‘I’d kill him,’ said Ulrich. ‘I really would. But can you kill an adding machine? You can break it, you can turn it off, but can you kill it?’
“I asked ‘Who?’ and Franz said, ‘Do we have enough money for another pitcher of beer?’
“I told him ‘No,’ so he leered at me bitterly.
“‘Maybe, you could play your zither and we could pass the hat.’ I let my face go blank and Ulrich said to Franz, ‘Maybe, you could murder a prostitute and steal her money. Then we could drink all night.’
“Franz thought that over but ruled it out. ‘You have too much ambition,’ he said.
“‘Come on, work tomorrow.’ I had tired of them.
“Ulrich was getting maudlin. And the day after that. … And the day after that.’
“‘Let’s go,’ I repeated, and me and Franz got up and started to walk out. Ulrich lagged behind to steal the tip. We pretended not to notice. A fat man in a Nazi uniform walked by then, he had a pretty girl on his arm. She turned her head and gave me an imploring look. In profile she looked like a Neanderthal angel, the bright blonde hair was heartbreakingly sincere. Franz stuck a grapefruit-sized elbow in my ribs and gave me a stern parental glare. I nodded, but I had stopped walking. Franz frowned some more, then nodded too. When Ulrich caught up with us, Franz took him by the arm and steered him out the door with Ulrich complaining that no one ever told him what was going on.
“The girl’s room smelled of cockroaches and incense—a brown room with dim yellow light. I squatted in front of the huge Telefunken radio listening to the BBC German broadcast on the short wave band. The girl was standing behind me in silk stockings and a garter belt. She looked as though she were trying to appear patient. The BBC wasn’t much help.
“‘And we tender a very relieved set of thanks to Prime Minister Chamberlin who, with the Munich agreement, has secured peace in our time.’
“I looked at the window. It was covered with heavy drapes to keep the smell in, but it was almost dawn. I tried radio Moscow.
“‘We applaud Germany’s reorganization of Czechoslovakia. These small nations crowded between Germany and Soviet Union can survive only by pitting these two giants against each other. They must not be allowed to start a great war as they did in 1914. …’
“They would do nothing. They congratulated themselves on doing nothing; so they would continue to do nothing. Germany would continue to make demands on other countries to incorporate them. They would talk of complications and how each side had so much to be said for it that they couldn’t decide which side had more to be said for it and that, no matter what catastrophe fell down on top of them, they would muddle through untouched so it had nothing to do with them. It would end in war. It simply had to.
“I felt anger and disgust and anticipation and something else. … I had to stop it, even if the reason was still rather vague, I didn’t know the word for what I felt, at least not then. Actually I didn’t even know if there was a word for it. It felt like my life had become a song that someone else was singing. Putting a name to your emotions could be a useful skill, but it’s not really in our repertoire yet. Anger and disgust are easy, people explain them to you, they recognize the symptoms and they tell you what you’re feeling. But those are forms of desire and desire makes sense, desire has reasons, desire can be bought off, and most times eventually wears out on its own. Passion, on the other hand does not. Passion doesn’t need reasons; it just keeps getting stronger until it kills you. That is usually depicted as something melodramatic; lots of facial grimaces, large arm movements, and emphatic conversation. But it isn’t like that at all. Passion is untroubled and serene. An alley cat standing her ground against a Rottweiler to protect her kittens would understand it perfectly. The word is passion. Up till then I had felt passion about only one thing: not letting anything get too close. But war penetrates every aspect of life, there
is no safe distance, you can’t keep it away unless you stop it. So that’s what I had to do.
“Then the blonde got between me and the radio, turned it off, and pushed me backward until I fell across the bed. There were noises in the night, coal down a chute, crowds running through the streets, and they were shouting things out of a nightmare.
“I was getting dressed sometime before dawn when her bookshelf caught my eye. I had just finished Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel so I swapped it for Kafka’s Metamorphosis, it looked like she had read it so I figured she wouldn’t miss it.”
Nebe leaned his chin on his fist. Nolte looked at him with his eyebrows semaphoring a signal. Nebe gave him a sleepy half smile. Georg wondered whether he was afraid, and was only half surprised to find he wasn’t. Seeing as he was going to be killed no matter what he did or said; in essence, there was nothing to worry about.
“A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.” Nebe’s tone was strangely nostalgic and Brandt and Nolte looked at him as if waiting for some form of explanation. He ignored them and addressed Georg. “It doesn’t surprise me you chose Kafka, you two have a few things in common: he sired a child with his fiancée’s best friend.”
“You sure you want to hear all this?” asked Georg.
Nebe sighed. “You’re going to hurt my feelings, Georg. Are you suggesting I’m not giving you enough attention?”
Georg made faces that made Nebe think of someone fiddling with a radio dial trying to bring in a weak station.
“No, Georg, we decide what’s important. Tell us. We’re very interested in all of it. We’re very interested in everything you have to say, so please go on.” Georg shrugged and went on.
“Ulrich was filing while Fritz and I were going through the requisition slips and entering them into a ledger. I pulled the last one off the bill file. I told him, ‘This one says twelve dozen number 18 hexagonal nuts …’
“‘One gross,’ Fritz said and wrote it down. I looked at him to be sure he had heard me correctly.
The Führer Must Die Page 5
