“That same night I was drinking beer with the other quarry workers. We weren’t exactly drunk but we’d had enough to feel entitled to act like we were. The others were singing some hysterically self-pitying and sentimental song and I was accompanying them on the harmonica. They linked arms and began to rock back and forth in a paroxysm of nostalgia that could have gone on all night. I jumped up, bobbing and weaving explaining with gestures that I was about to throw up. There was general laughter as I wove a sinusoidal path across the floor and staggered out between the swinging doors. I kept lurching; hand over my mouth until I was out of sight of the front window. I was stone-cold sober and stood very still as I looked around, trying to act casual. The area was empty so I strode off fast toward the quarry.
“The night watchman was asleep in the shack so I walked straight into the unlit quarry pit, stumbling through the litter and darkness. The explosives chest was in plain sight with big red lettering to explain what it was. I knocked off the padlock with a sledgehammer, with one quick and efficient movement; it had been practiced many times in my head, in fact the entire theft had been over prepared to the point of boredom. When I opened the chest I closed my eyes in frozen reverence. I picked up a handful of dynamite cartridges, all in all I carried away twenty kilos of dynamite and plastic explosive called Donorit. That night, as I went to sleep, I started laughing at the thought of what was waiting under the bed. I was still giggling when I lost consciousness and found myself in a dream, the only man in a rooming house full of ballet girls.”
Nolte put his head in his hands, Nebe was more magnanimous. “Maybe when the war is over and none of us are at risk of getting our heads lopped off you can buy us some beer and tell us about the ballet girls, Georg. For the moment, just tell us what you did with the explosives under the bed.” Georg nodded obediently.
“The next day I withdrew my money from the bank. 400 DM was certainly not enough to evoke suspicion. I had sold my bicycle to Boltzman in the shipping yard at the Waldenmaier plant. He had given me five marks for it. That was the extent of my equity and I had nearly five months to support myself until November 8th.
“Monday I went to work at the quarry anxious to get it over with. I waited until nobody was looking before deliberately bringing the sledgehammer down in an overhand swing onto my left foot. I sat down howling, the pain seemed to explode through my body. Three gigantic quarry workers gathered around in a circle, watching and shaking their heads like farmers at the birth of a two-headed calf. The foreman walked up and said, ‘Alright, everybody get back to work.’ Then he saw me. ‘Oh Christ. I told you, you couldn’t handle the work.’ He picked me up and carried me, like a bride, back to the shack-office.
“After having been treated, splinted, and crutched, I found a sporting goods store and bought a box of eight mm Mauser rifle ammunition. ‘That’s a heavy round,’ the storekeeper had said. ‘You could bring down a bear with it. You hunting bear?’ I told him I was after elk. The storekeeper looked me over. ‘I wish I had time to hunt.’
“I smiled wistfully. ‘Ah, but you have to make time.’
“The following evening I pulled the bullets out of the cartridge cases and emptied out the powder. I sawed off the base of a brass cartridge case, the part that held the primer; I did it carefully, stopping to drip water onto the brass to cool if off, to keep the primer below flash point. It was like I was reinventing the Wheelock pistol, that overcomplicated weapon that was half flintlock and half cuckoo clock. In my version, the clockwork wound up the slack on a steel wire running through small pulleys, the kind that might be used on model boats, nailed to a board. The wire was strung to one of the detonators I’d stolen from the plant in Heidenheim. The wire wound slowly around the axle of the hour hand until it tripped the tier of the artillery fuse. There was a five-second wait and then the firing pin snapped out of the detonator with a nasty click.
“I walked up the basement stairs into the garden carrying my device, my pockets full of clockmaker’s tools. It was summer and the bushes had turned black-green like the sea under a storm. A burly orange cat was grumpily stalking a bird that fluttered around the garden fountain. Unfortunately for the cat, it had a bell hung round its neck so the birds always had sufficient warning. It was an old game for all of them but the cat learned and the birds didn’t. The cat was on his right side, holding the bell to his chest with his left paw to keep it from rattling. With his right paw he side stroked himself across the grass toward the fountain, his eyes wide with ancient innocence. I was still playing with my modular Wheelock, but this time I had a primer from a cartridge case in front of the firing pin. The clockwork wound the wire up slowly, with infinite patience, until the tension tripped the detonator and the firing pin exploded the primer with a startling pop. The birds scattered and the large orange cat stomped out of the shadows, hissing, the feline equivalent of I simply can’t work under these conditions. It swatted the detonator with its right paw; the extended claws clattered off the smooth metal, then the indignant animal whirled around and clumped off, with his tail in the air like a middle finger extended out of a fist. I tried to fix the picture in my head, consciously designing the memory, watching it become a memory, impenetrable as an old movie. My glance kept switching back to my work and it took a deliberate choice to keep my eyes fixed on the cat.
“The memory of the cat swatting at the detonator was projected onto what I saw and the cat turning away was projected onto that. The image became a blur of memories in multiple exposures and I was losing the memory by trying to hold it. This one time, I could put a name to my emotion: I was sad. Simple enough but the emotion wasn’t natural to me. It was strange, like something I remembered from out of a dream and that might have been the very essence of sadness, but like with love I had nothing to measure it against.”
“Touching image, Georg, but what the hell does that have to do with anything? Where the hell is this basement you’re coming out of into a garden all of a sudden?” Despite his well-deserved indulgence of the previous night, even Nebe was finally starting to lose his cool.
Nolte looked at him imploringly. “Just once more, a quick crack across the shins, it’ll get him to focus.”
Brandt simply sighed in resignation, he was once a religious man and if there was a purgatory, they were in it.
Nebe pressed. “Where are we, Georg?”
“Oh, Stuttgart … I only had 405 DM and had to make it last, so I went to my sister’s.”
Nolte sneered. “The freeloader who thinks he’s an idealist.”
Nebe couldn’t afford enough prostitutes to deal with this shit. “Fill in the blanks, Georg, quickly, before we all face a firing squad.”
“Anna-Sophie, my sister, and her husband, Werner, had a grim lower-middle-class house with a grim middle-class dining room crowded with Hummel figurines and brown fading photographs of dead relatives, the fetishism of the very poor. One of my cuckoo clocks hung on the wall, actually there was one in every room. The bleak despairing will to go on had worked itself into the walls. Hopelessness stiffened the air; it hung all around us, formless and pervasive as an odor or a moral concept. I looked out into the small living room. All the furniture was old and worn, hung onto for far too long and for no reason. But it was all dutifully slip covered with layer upon layer of antimacassar, as if to convince you that what was actually underneath was something different than what it appeared to be. My spoon made scraping blackboard noises against pink-flowered soup bowl. Then my twelve-year-old nephew marched through the dining room and into the kitchen, without speaking to anyone. My head swiveled to watch him go.
“Werner hissed, ‘You behave yourself in my house or you will leave.’ I was taken by surprise because I hadn’t done anything… I searched Anna-Sophie’s face but she kept her eyes on the table; Werner’s eyes kept moving from my face to the kitchen door, he looked terrified, he whispered frantically. ‘And watch how you talk in front of my son.’
“I tried to put him at ease. ‘W
erner, I appreciate your concerns but I didn’t say anything.’
“My sister threw her spoon into her dish with a noise like a pistol shot and glared at him. ‘You can’t ask Georg to leave. He’s out of work with a broken foot and he has nowhere to go.’
“Werner had stood up then, seeing an opportunity to exercise his spousal authority. ‘So that means he can freeload off us?’
“Sophie’s eyes took on the hue of glacial ice. ‘Yes. That’s exactly what it means. Now do sit down and shut up.’ Werner considered his options then sat down and shut up. She turned to me tenderly. ‘Does your foot hurt?’
“I didn’t want her to fawn so I played it down, ‘It’s just some broken toes. I don’t really need the cast. I could just tape them up.’ She had squeezed my arm reassuringly then. ‘Don’t try to be a hero.’ If I’ve ever loved anyone it is her, I mean of course without any sexual connotation. My mother was always sort of pathetic in her tenderness, but Sophie meant it. That’s when my nephew came back out of the kitchen gnawing on a large clumsy sandwich and inspecting us all with careful eyes. I couldn’t remember his name but I knew I had to say something so I pushed back from the table and folded my hands on my stomach. ‘I’m moving to Munich.’ I said it directly to him. ‘I think it will be an inspiration to work near the birthplace of the Party.’ The boy lowered his face shyly then turned and ran out. Werner and Anna-Sophie watched him go out the door, staring at the closed door for a long moment to make sure he was really gone then looked at each other in relief. They exhaled slowly in a low sigh; they’d both been holding their breath.
“‘Jäger Schnitzel!’ said Anna-Sophie, brightly, over her shoulder as she went to the kitchen. I sing-songed back, ‘My favorite!’ and took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ even Werner nodded and grinned, even he was cheerful.
“Most of my tools were already stored in their basement, ever since I had left them in 1929. That was when the world went bang and I’d started a random tour of the small towns of Bavaria and Schleswig-Holstein, to wherever I thought I might find work. The tools had been used carelessly over the years, used and left un-oiled. They were speckled and caked with the rust of long neglect. I braced myself for the jolt of anger when I saw them but nothing came. It just didn’t matter anymore. I had worked hard to collect them, yet there was no nostalgia or sentiment of any kind. Suddenly they belonged to my past. I lit a blowtorch with a pack of matches that said BürgerBräuKeller in black letters on the red flap, and took down the rack that held the wood chisels. They were stainless steel so it had taken devoted abuse to get them to rust. For the first time, I looked at rust without anger, without feeling betrayed, and its colors varied from pink to orange to black-red in patterns intricate as that of a snowflake. It was pretty if you didn’t know what it meant. Then I started to make digging tools out of my cabinet maker’s chisels, heating the hafts red-hot in the flame and bending them into shape. The metal was losing its temper but that didn’t matter either. I used a brick for an anvil. I knew I should have been crying but felt nothing at all. The cellar door opened and Werner came down the stairs. His son, clearly in command, stood in the doorway and looked down at the two of us; his Hitler Youth uniform was a brown smear in the yellow light of the hall. Werner’s pants were open and the tail of shirt stuck out of his fly. His son had gotten him out of bed. According to my watch, it was 3:00 a.m.
“Werner’s voice was groggy, ‘It’s been a week, hasn’t your foot healed yet?’
“My smile only reached halfway up my face. ‘Werner, it doesn’t pay to take chances with something like this.’
“‘I suppose not,’ then he saw the surgical steel of the chisels bent into crude claw like shapes. ‘What are you doing?’ His voice betrayed his alarm. I was numb. ‘I’m making special tools to help me find a job in Munich.’
“His eyes met mine warily. ‘Those don’t look like carpentry tools.’ There was a sudden certainty in his voice.
“I kept smiling steadily. ‘I know my job and I can be trusted to do it.’
“Werner shuffled and scowled, he clearly wanted an excuse to go back to bed and apparently I wasn’t giving it to him. ‘Well, as long as you’re here, you can repair some of the furniture. At least half of it is chipped or broken.’ He retreated up the stairs, muttering reassurances to his son. I called after them saying how thoughtless I had been not to offer. When Werner slammed the door I set aside my best chisel to deal with their furniture then went back to work.
“I had managed to stretch my stay another month, conserving my funds, but the sixth week even my sister was giving me significant looks across the dinner table; it was time for me to go. …”
The detectives were showing signs of boredom, showing it theatrically enough even for Georg to notice. They yawned and stretched, playing it crude and wide as though they were signaling to him from across a football stadium. Maybe they thought that he’d try harder if he thought they were losing interest.
Nolte yawned and sat up straight again. “Aw, let him talk, you can never tell what’s going to turn out to be important.”
“I can,” said Brandt, looking at the typewriter with the expression of a man who just found a cockroach swimming in his beer.
Nebe sighed, leaned his elbows on the desk, and made a tent with his fingers. He smiled as comfortingly as a doctor in a laxative advert. “Georg,” he said, “you’re new at this. Getting caught, I mean. You clearly don’t understand the function of interrogation. People do horrible things, but that’s not so bad as long as they make sense. Of course, they usually don’t make sense. Nothing really makes sense. People have jumped into bed or out the window together and they have never known why. But that doesn’t change history so it doesn’t matter. Georg, you’re not a great man; you’re not a political or economic force, yet you almost changed history. That’s horrible. But, as long as there’s a logical explanation, we can live with it. If we can put a name to it, we can control it, it can be categorized and the case neatly closed. If it’s pure random horror, that’s unbearable. You’re going to drive a lot of people crazy or to execution and you don’t want to do that, do you, Georg?”
“No sir,” said Georg, more than a little lost. “I never meant to hurt innocent people.”
Nebe leaned a bit closer. “All you wanted to do was kill the Führer. Tell us about that.”
Georg thought that over. “Maybe I should start from the beginning,” he said.
“No!” All three men shouted in unison.
Nebe shouted solo, “Good Christ! This is our ‘master’ assassin and he can only tell a story in one piece like a string of phlegm? This one isn’t smart enough to be framed for the Reichstag fire! No … that is untrue, he is smart enough; in fact he’s the smartest idiot I’ve ever encountered. Is identification positive?”
“Yes and you did it,” said Nolte.
Nebe rubbed his face as though it were the only way he could change expression. It seemed his face had been locked in a rigid grimace for hours. He got a smile going then ran his knuckles down the tops of his thighs. “No,” said Nebe. “No, take it up from where you were, but skip the family problems.”
“Oh … well … Then I was packing my equipment into the double-bottomed wooden chest. The explosives were already in my suitcase, wrapped in my shirts and underwear. Anna-Sophie watched me as I packed, I kept my face adverted. There was nothing to say but I wanted to say it anyway, to put it into words so I could leave her with something, but the words wouldn’t come.
“She asked me why it had a double bottom and it was a relief to have something to say at last. ‘For my most valuable tools, so they won’t get stolen.’ I opened a trunk and took out three clock movements, wound them in rags and put them on top of the tools. The clocks had been left over from my three months work in Switzerland. The company had gone bankrupt and couldn’t pay, so they’d given me the clockworks instead. From the corner of my eye, I could see her looking worried and scared. It’s hard to keep a secret from a woman
who knows you that well. ‘They’re for making cuckoo clocks.’ I tried a smile but she was still wary.
‘I know.’ Anna-Sophie was almost whispering. ‘But why are you taking them now?’
I replied casually, ‘Oh, it may take months to find a job. Maybe I can make the little houses for the clocks and sell them while I’m searching.’ She looked more worried. Then I saw that it would be easier than I had thought because she wanted to be lied to, she was determined to believe whatever I said. ‘Yeah, I’m worried too. Talent just isn’t enough these days.’ I took a brown paper package from under the workbench where I had hidden it, I couldn’t remember when. I cut the string to unwrap a rosewood box, inlaid with ebony and mother of pearl, the kind of things that used to be made in Damascus before they started faking it. I’d made it for some girl, I couldn’t remember which one, but luckily the affair had broken off before I could give it to her. I gave it to my sister and that changed the subject neatly. She held it in front of her making happy Christmas morning noises. ‘It’s beautiful!’ She was almost singing. Seeing my ability from a distance brought on a strange melancholy. ‘Yes. I know it is.’ She laughed at my seriousness at first but then looked frightened. …”
“Who cares?” asked Nolte.
“I do,” said Brandt.
Nolte and Nebe turned their heads, creakingly, to look at him but there were no signals. He really seemed to mean it.
“OK, I care too,” said Nebe. “You had no future and no past worth remembering. You knew you’d never see her again so you wanted to leave her with something and your skill was the only precious thing you had.”
The Führer Must Die Page 11
