“Yes, sir,” said Georg and his voice cracked.
Nebe seemed pleased by that. “I understand,” he said. “I understand why it was important for you to tell me. But, let’s skip ahead. What did you do about the bomb?”
“I had tracked down Ulrich and we were walking to the railroad station. I no longer used the crutches but my foot was still in a walking cast and I had a decided limp. Ulrich was gallantly carrying my bags for me. He was wearing his Reicharbeitdienst uniform and it hung loosely on him. He’d lost weight, too much weight. The streets around the station were still cobble stoned and wet with late summer rain; they bounced twinkled reflections, filling the air with ambient light. It made Ulrich look as blue-gray as a corpse, but for once his features were working together in a coherent expression, eyes narrowed and lips compressed. He seemed to be clamping down on reality and it was finally penetrating his self-absorption.
“Ulrich was there because I needed him to be, not to carry my bags, just to keep me alive. I was short, poor and limping—I could have easily been taken for the leftovers of a Gestapo raid. With my foot in the cast I wouldn’t have been able to run from the crowd that would have assembled to finish me off. It would have been an inexcusable gamble when I was leaving left nothing else to chance. The preparation was complete and what remained was so straightforward it felt like it had already happened. I couldn’t stop running through my memory what was yet to happen.
“I smiled at Ulrich, his brown uniform was our passport through the street, identifying me by association as an injured worker, incompetent or unlucky but racially pure. He grudgingly smiled back. The corners of his mouth jerked up, more a signal than a smile. He was satisfied to be there and that was strange because it wouldn’t leave him with a story that he would ever be able to tell. Ulrich could be relied on not to endanger his life, even for a story as good as what I was about to do.
“A thin, cold breeze caught my attention. I decided that it was a beautiful night, then we turned a corner and there was Hannah, leaning against a building with her back and palms pressed flat against the wall, leaning back as if to let something pass.
“‘Don’t go,’ she said.
“‘Hannah, what are you doing here?’ I had tried to sound casual and surprised and pleased. Ulrich looked up at the sky, frowning belligerently at one star after another as though one of them had pissed on him.
“‘Don’t go,’ she said.
“‘I’ll be back when I get the cast off,’ I lied of course, ‘and I can work again.’
“‘Don’t go,’ she said it again so it wasn’t much of a conversation.
“‘I can take care of myself, I have to.’ I thought it made sense but she wouldn’t hear of it.
“‘My God! No you can’t.’ Hannah had her hands to her head and was tearing her hair like they did in old movies.
“I observed her sadly. ‘Well, I’ll listen to an argument.’
“‘The way I feel, that’s my argument. I haven’t asked you for anything else.’ She was passionate about it.
“I glanced at Ulrich who was staring straight up then back to Hannah. ‘How can I possibly have any idea how you feel? I have no idea how I feel! All you do is ask me to do things—ask, desire, need, demand … marry you … take you away!’
“Ulrich drew his eyes back to the planet earth. ‘I think I should meet you at the station,’ he said.
“‘You stay right here. We’re leaving together!’ I snapped at him and Ulrich started inspecting the sky again.
“‘Please?’ said Hannah.
“I spoke slowly and lightly with my charm on full. ‘I’m visiting my sister at Lake Konstanz.’
“‘With a suitcase full of dynamite,’ she said it in a way that wasn’t exactly a question. So Ulrich put down the suitcase and the tool chest and swallowed a mouth full of saliva. ‘What else does she know?’ he said, though that wasn’t really a question either.
“‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked. I thought hard for a moment and the words came.
“‘There are 40,000 Swiss francs waiting for me in Switzerland,’ I said. ‘I’ll send for you when I get to Geneva.’ I kissed her lightly on the mouth and then jerked away from her. I hobbled off fast toward the railroad station. Ulrich picked up the bags and followed me cursing.
“‘You son of a bitch! Is that true?’ asked Ulrich but I gave him a shy smile. ‘Of course not. … But you must have seen that I had to give her a reason she could accept. Now she’s dreaming of opening her own dental clinic in Geneva, and most importantly she won’t talk.’
“‘No, I don’t think she will,’ Ulrich seemed to be mulling something over and we walked in silence the rest of the way to the station. The platform was empty and the thick yellow light was so saturated it had a brownish tint. Ulrich put down the bags and turned around to face me, resuming the conversation of 20 minutes before.
“‘You also gave me a reason I’d accept. What’s the real reason? Why are we killing the Führer?’
“I was embarrassed and tried to laugh, which didn’t help. I tried to think up another reason that Ulrich could accept. ‘No one else will.’
As Elser paused for breath Nebe, Nolte, and Brandt were staring at him in something between disbelief, fury, and self-righteous indignation. Brandt was actually the first to react.
“Two accomplices! He actually named them, we have to bring them in!” his fervor was contagious.
“We torture the girlfriend! That might inspire him to tell us who promised the 40,000 Francs.” Nolte was being practical. Brandt was scandalized.
“Why should she pay for his crimes?”
Nolte sneered, “If she was stupid enough to get involved with this bum again she deserves whatever she gets.”
Nebe suddenly stood up and paced around his desk, stopping to glare down at Georg, who seemed genuinely alarmed at their reactions. Turning his fiery gaze toward his colleagues Nebe bellowed, “Have you two dolts been paying any attention at all?” The question achieved its desired effect and shut them up, at least temporarily, while they tried to realize what they might have missed. He turned back to Elser and leaned over him heavily, he hoped menacingly, his forehead nearly pressing against Georg’s and his eyes boring into his, which stared back into Nebe’s like those of an opossum caught on the road. Nebe roared in exasperation before returning to his chair. All three men stared back at him in solemn silence, waiting for some revelation.
Nebe turned slowly to Brandt, “How much of that did you type?”
Brandt gazed down at his typewriter as if seeing it for the first time, “Uh … just to the part about the suitcase full of dynamite.”
“Good.” Nebe nodded as if checking things off a mental list, “Shred it.”
“What!” Both men shouted in unison but Nebe held up both palms as if to hold them in their seats.
“I really don’t know whether our boy Elser here is actually some sort of evil genius, or just the most naive son of a bitch on the planet. Either way he is a fucking hazard to our health, gentlemen, so wake up! How many times have we been over the fact that, whatever the infuriating reality may be, it is officially politically impossible for an Aryan German worker to want to kill the Führer? Here he just blithely tosses out the fact that not one, but THREE Aryan German workers were in on it and you two morons start shouting ‘Stop the presses!’ He tells us the fabrication of a fabrication, that conveniently parallels the sort of rubbish we’ve been trying to get him to tell us since the beginning and you two get all emotional. Snap out of it and pay attention.” He turned to Elser, “As for you, focus, Georg, and stick to what happened after you got off the train in Munich.”
Georg nodded and you could almost see the gears turning as he wound his memory forward to his arrival. Brandt dutifully pulled the last sheets from the typewriter and carefully placed a fresh carbon between two fresh sheets of paper and fed them in. Nolte snatched up those Brandt had removed and proceeded to methodically tear them into pea-si
zed pieces.
Georg carried on, “The Nazis had an information booth set up in the railroad station. With all the flags and eagles and poster-sized photographs of the Party leaders, it reminded me weirdly of a booth at a craft fair. There was a huge sign over it, signs in all directions that announced: ‘ROOMS FOUND FOR TOURISTS TO MUNICH: CAPITOL OF THE MOVEMENT.’
“There was a rat-like little man in the booth, clad in the oily brown Nazi Party uniform. He had many gold teeth. I walked up and Heil Hitlered casually. ‘I need a room.’
“The ratlike man seemed unimpressed. ‘Why?’
“I drew a blank on that, I hadn’t thought I would need a reason.
“The little man went on, ‘I hold party membership number 763.’ That was supposed to make him sound important but he had to have been a total loser to be stuck with a job like this while having a party number that low.
“I clicked my heels to attention anyway and said, ‘I am honored.’ That was expected, and then I nodded and hummed in awe.
“The rat-man was sufficiently appeased. ‘I take jobs like this sometimes because it helps me stay in touch with the mood of the people.’
“‘Very shrewd.’ I kept nodding and scanning my surroundings with my peripheral vision.
“When he returned to his original question I was prepared. ‘Purpose of visit?’
“I pointed to the sign that said ‘Capitol of the Movement.’ Rat-man, looking oh so proud of his job, spun through a large roller card index. He wrote down an address and handed it over with an evil smirk that made strange sense that night. ‘I hope you find these accommodations comfortable.’
“I walked off with the address in hand. It had to have been September 2nd or perhaps 3rd as there were placards on a newsstand to announce that Germany had just invaded Poland to liberate East Prussia. …
“I thought that booth was only for overnight visitors,” said Nolte.
“I’m getting to that.” Georg said it with irritation and all three detectives nodded. At last, an emotional response!
Nebe urged him on with almost motherly approval. “Where were we?”
“I was limping through Munich looking for Franz’s place, that embittered drunken carpenter Ulrich and I used to drink with back in Heidenheim. I was lugging my tool chest and my extremely heavy suitcase and set them down at every corner to check the street signs against the return address on an envelope I carried in my pocket, then picked them up and kept hobbling. There was a sick lead-gray in the colors of the street as though one was seeing everything from a great distance. The slightly blue gray-black of slate, the slightly brown-black of trees, the pearl-gray bowlers and the grayed-out walls and eyes and overcoats. Only the metallic colors came through clear: steel and chrome and glass; they were clear but not quite real. The street had the glassed-in look of a street where people no longer lived, as if it existed only in somebody’s memory, a figment of the past even if it hadn’t happened yet. A broken umbrella hanging out of a garbage can caught my attention. I put down my bags, picked it up, and broke off the bent ribs. I managed to get it closed and hung it on my wrist in a most dapper fashion. I picked up the suitcase with the thirty kilos of explosives and the tool case with 25 kilos of sappers’ tools and kept walking.
“Franz had his own shop. He never did say how he’d managed to raise the money and I didn’t intend to ask. The two-room store was almost bare and some tattered bunting clung to the lintel of the front window. The opening had obviously been recent.
“He wasn’t necessarily happy to see me, yet he didn’t seem surprised either. I had considered writing to him first, to be polite, but was pretty sure it would be harder for him to refuse in person. I congratulated him ceremoniously on his independence but Franz said nothing and just looked at me with affectionate helplessness. ‘I could help you out with some joinery work.’ I volunteered and the idea genuinely appealed to me, a pleasant diversion from my task, but Franz shrugged sadly. ‘Not enough work for one man.’
“I couldn’t help but smile. ‘I’m not asking for a job.’ And then he was suddenly happy to see me. ‘Thank God for that!’
“I elaborated. ‘I could work in return for some space.’ Franz was still listening so I elaborated a bit more. ‘I’m working on an invention. I need a place to build the model.’ Franz looked like he would have liked to find something wrong with that but couldn’t.
“‘Well, yes, I guess that would be alright.’ He pointed to an unused work bench in the back. I marched up to it and sat down, opened my tool chest and placed the umbrella on the table as though it were a patient etherized for surgery. I clipped the ribs and tacked back the fabric so that it was shaped like a boat when open. I removed the umbrella shaft and threaded it to the base, replacing it so that it could be unscrewed. Franz had nothing better to do than sit down and watch. What he saw didn’t make sense but he didn’t dither; the seriousness of the work was beyond question. I was even beginning to sweat.
“‘I guess I shouldn’t ask what kind of invention, at least not until you get the patent.’ Even Franz had admirable qualities. He walked away.
“The work ahead of me was boring and repetitive, long over prepared. From memory, the work of that following month could be collapsed into a single action. But I could never forget that landlady. She told me she had once been in the chorus at the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth. Well, she certainly had the Brunhilde build for it or at least she had had it, once upon a time. She was fortyish and now too fat to be called luxurious. She could still be attractive though—at 4:00 a.m. when one was dead drunk and entirely sure that no one else would ever know. She led me up the stairs, keeping her shoulders back and her chin high. Discrete little rolls of fat squished out the top of her corset and the tops of her silk stockings. It all showed through her dress. I had to look away. Her living room held two large paintings: one showed the apotheosis of Franz Josef, who was being frog marched into heaven by three huge Brunhilde angels, and the other Mussolini leaning out of the sky to bring order to the Italian railroad system. Crossed spears hung on the wall. There was a bookshelf, even a Nietzsche title, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, but somehow I didn’t feel compelled. I would have to find an opportunity to peruse the thin-spined, cheaply printed plays and periodicals that showed more promise, and I was somehow sure such opportunities would be plentiful. There were gigantic dark-wood throne chairs that looked as if they had actually been stolen from the Bayreuth Festival, accompanied by lamp shades that were made out of horned brass helmets.
“‘The room is twelve marks a week. Can you pay it?’ she said it over her shoulder as she led me up the stairs. I knew she was trying for dramatic effect so I played along. ‘Yes.’ But my tone of voice inferred that I probably wouldn’t be able to for long. She paused on the landing and turned to appraise me, her eyes lingered on my hands and forearms, ‘A carpenter?’
“I smiled. ‘Cabinet maker.’
“Her voice was taking on an operatic lilt. ‘It will take some time to find a job.’
“I began to relax. ‘I had expected as much.’ My tone was warm, encouraging. She stopped at an empty room and led me in. The place was small and worn, the wallpaper bulging and peeling. The bed spread had been mended too many times and washed until it had acquired the fragility of smoke. But at least the room looked clean. She gazed at me over her shoulder again, ‘Don’t squash bugs on the wallpaper.’ She warned and I appeared appropriately scandalized.
“‘Oh, I’d never do anything like that.’
“Her tone became almost motherly. ‘Put them in an ash tray and burn them with a match.’
“I looked at her with eager attention. ‘Of course.’
“There was a silence then she sighed and straightened her shoulders again. Her corset creaked and moaned. ‘If you want to cut down your expenses, there may be a few things for you to do around the house.’
“I gave her my most gracious and enthusiastic smile. ‘I’m sure there will be. I’m Georg, b
y the way.’
“She actually blushed. ‘My name is Margit. Welcome Georg …’ and she closed the door with the sweetest of proprietary smiles.
“An hour later, I was in the bathtub washing myself with indecent pleasure, running the water through my fingers like a silver necklace. ‘Don’t use up all the hot water!’ Margit had shouted through the door. ‘Think of the other borders!’ There were two other borders, both men, both fat and bald with lumpy heads. They were completely different but they looked alike because each of them was going bald in an odd way. One had hair just on top and the other just over one ear.
‘It was a long train trip,’ I shouted back and slid down into the water until only my mouth and nose were sticking out.”
“So much for ideological purity,” said Nolte. “Your landlady must have gone through your things?”
Georg appeared completely guileless. “I kept my case locked.”
Nolte chortled evilly. “Like that would have stopped her! She had to know something.”
Nebe reined Nolte in. “I hate to interrupt but we skipped something. I’m losing the story in all these details. Can we get back to the reason why you had to kill so many people? This is not the usual assassination situation where you kill a man and he is immediately replaced by another man who is effectively his duplicate. The Führer is irreplaceable.”
“The Führer is brilliant,” said Brandt.
Nebe sighed. “Thank you. The Führer has divided up power between the Army, the Party, the police, and the SS. We all have overlapping and contradictory fields of authority. None of these organizations have the power base to replace him. The Führer has reduced us all to a kind of feudal ineffectuality.”
“It must be wonderful to have gone to college.” Nolte frowned. It was the one expression he did well.
Nebe shot him a withering stare. “You could wake up and find yourself directing traffic.”
Nolte perked up at once. “I’ll take the job. I’ll take it right now.”
Nebe diligently returned to the task at hand. “Why didn’t you place the bomb in the podium under his feet? What was it doing on the balcony?”
The Führer Must Die Page 12
