Inside a heavy wood-and-glass door is a large hallway with a stone floor and a marble staircase. Next to the desk are a Nazi flag and a full-length portrait of Adolf Hitler. Behind the desk is another man wearing a black uniform and the same unhelpful expression you see all over Germany. It is the face of totalitarian bureaucracy and officialdom. This face does not seek to please. It is not there to serve you. It cares not if you live or die. It regards you not as a citizen but as an object to be processed, up the stairs or out the door. It is how a man looks when he stops behaving like a human being and becomes a kind of robot.
Unquestioning obedience. Orders to be carried out without a second thought. This is what they want. Ranks upon serried ranks of steel-helmeted automatons.
My appointment is checked off on a neatly typed list that lies on the well-polished desk. I am early. I should not be early any more than I should be late. Now I will have to wait, and the robot does not know what to do with someone who is early and has to wait. There is an empty wooden chair beside the elevator cage. Normally there is a guard sitting there, I am told, but until the appointed time I may sit there.
I sit. A few minutes pass. I smoke. At precisely ten o’clock the robot lifts the telephone receiver, dials a number, and announces my arrival. I am ordered into the elevator and up to the fourth floor, where another robot will meet me. I enter the elevator. The robot operating the machinery has heard the order and assumes temporary responsibility for my movement within the building.
On the fourth floor, a group of people are waiting to take the elevator down. One of these is a man whose arms are supported by two more robots. He is manacled and half conscious, and there is blood streaming from his nose and onto his clothes. No one looks at all ashamed or embarrassed at my being there or seeing any of this. This would be to admit the possibility that what has been done is wrong. And since what has been done to him has been done in the name of the Leader, this simply cannot be the case. The man is dragged into the elevator, and the third robot, who remains standing on the fourth-floor landing, now leads me down a long, wide corridor. He stops in front of a door numbered 43, knocks, and then opens it without waiting. When I enter, he closes the door behind me.
The room is furnished but empty. The window is wide open, but there is a smell in the air that makes me think that perhaps this is the place where the man with the bloody nose has just been interrogated. And when I see a couple of spots of blood on the brown linoleum, I know I am right about this. I go over to the window and look out onto Ludwigstrasse. My hotel is just around the corner, and although it is foggy outside, I can see its roof from here. On the other side of the street from Wurzburg’s Gestapo HQ is the office building of the local Nazi Party. Through an upper window I can see a man with his feet up on a desk, and I wonder what gets done in there, in the name of the Party, that doesn’t get done in here.
A bell starts to toll. The sound drifts across the red rooftops from the cathedral, I presume, only it sounds more like something out at sea, something to warn ships approaching rocks in the fog. And I think of Noreen, somewhere on the North Atlantic, standing in the stern of the SS
The door opens behind me, and a strong smell of soap is carried into the room. I turn as a smallish man closes the door and rolls down the sleeves of his shirt. I guess that he has just washed his hands. Perhaps there was some blood on them. He says nothing until he has fetched his black SS tunic from a hanger in the closet and puts it on as if the uniform will help to compensate for his lack of centimeters.
“You’re Gunther?” he said in a voice that sounded folksy and Franconian.
“That’s right. And you must be Captain Weinberger.”
He carried on buttoning his tunic without bothering to answer. Then he pointed at the chair in front of his desk. “Sit down, please.”
“No, thanks,” I said, sitting down on the windowsill. “I’m a bit like a cat. I’m very particular where I sit.”
“What ever do you mean?”
“There’s blood on the floor underneath that chair and, for all I know, there’s some on it as well. I don’t make enough money to risk spoiling a good suit.”
Weinberger colored a little. “Please yourself.”
He sat down behind the desk. His forehead was the only tall thing about him. On top of it was a shock of thick brown curly hair. His eyes were green and penetrating. His mouth was insolent. He looked like a defiant schoolboy. And it was hard to imagine him being rough with anything other than a collection of toy soldiers or a fairground coconut toss. “So, how can I help you, Herr Gunther?”
I didn’t like the look of him. But that hardly mattered. A display of good manners would have struck the wrong note. Clipping the tails of young pups in the Gestapo was, as Liebermann von Sonnenberg had said, almost a sport among senior police officers.
“An American called Max Reles. What do you know about him?”
“And you’re asking in what capacity?” Weinberger put his boots up onto the desk like the man in the office across the street and clasped his hands behind his head. “You’re not Gestapo, and you’re not KRIPO. And I think we can take it you’re not SS.”
“I’m conducting an undercover investigation for Berlin’s assistant police commissioner, Liebermann von Sonnenberg.”
“Yes, I got his letter. And his telephone call. It’s not often that Berlin pays much attention to a place like this. But you still haven’t answered my question.”
I lit a cigarette and flicked the match out of the window. “Don’t piss me around. Are you going to help me, or am I going back to my hotel to call the Alex?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of pissing you off, Herr Gunther.” He smiled, affably. “Since this doesn’t appear to be an official matter, I just want to know why I’m going to help you. That is right, isn’t it? I mean, if this was an official matter, the assistant commissioner’s request would have come down through my superiors, wouldn’t it?”
“We can do it that way if you’d prefer,” I said. “But then you’d be wasting my time. And yours. So why don’t you just count this as a favor to the head of Berlin KRIPO.”
“I’m glad you mentioned that. A favor. Because I’d like a favor in return. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
“So what do you want?”
Weinberger shook his head. “Not here, eh? Let’s go for a coffee. Your hotel is not far. Let’s go there.”
“All right. If that’s how you want this.”
“I think it might be best. Given what you’re asking about.” He stood up and grabbed his belts and his cap. “Besides, I’m already doing you a favor. The coffee here is terrible.”
He said nothing more until we were out of the building. But then I could hardly stop him.
“This isn’t a bad town. I should know, I went to university here. I studied law, and when I graduated, I joined the Gestapo. It’s a very Catholic town, of course, which meant that, in the beginning, it wasn’t particularly Nazi. I can see that surprises you, but it’s true-when I first joined the Party, this town had one of the smallest Party memberships in the whole of Germany. It just shows you what can be achieved in a short period of time, eh?
“Most of the cases we get in the Wurzburg Gestapo office are denunciations. Germans having sexual relations with Jews, that kind of thing. But here’s the anomaly: the majority of denunciations come not from Party members, but from good Catholics. Of course, there is no actual law against Germans and Jews conducting their sordid love affairs. Not yet. But that doesn’t stop the denunciations, and we’re obliged to investigate them if only to prove that the Party disapproves of these obscene relationships. Occasionally we parade a couple accused of race defilement around the town square, but it seldom goes much further than that. Once or twice we have run a Jew out of town for profiteering, but that’s it. And it goes almost without saying that most of the denunciations are groundless and the product of stupidity and ignorance. Naturally. Most of the people who live here are not much more than peasants. This place is not Berlin. Would that it were.
“My own situation is a case in point, Herr Gunther. Weinberger is not necessaily a Jewish name. I am not a Jew. None of my grandparents is a Jew. And yet I myself have been denounced as a Jew, and on more than one occasion, I might add. Which is not exactly helping my career here in Wurzburg.”
“I can imagine.” I allowed myself a smile, but that was all. I hadn’t yet got the information I needed, and until then, I hardly wanted to upset the young Gestapo man walking along the street beside me. We turned onto Adolf-Hitler-Strasse and walked north, toward my hotel.
“Well, yes, it’s funny. Of course it is. Even I can see that. But somehow I feel it wouldn’t be happening in a more sophisticated place, such as Berlin. After all, there are people there with Jewish- sounding names who are Nazis, aren’t there? Liebermann von Sonnenberg? I ask you. Well, I’m sure he would understand my predicament.”
I hardly liked to tell him that Berlin’s assistant police commissioner might have been a Party member but he also despised the Gestapo and all that it stood for.
“What I feel is this,” he said earnestly. “That my name wouldn’t hold me back in a place like Berlin. Here in Wurzburg there will always be the faintest suspicion that I’m not completely Aryan.”
“Well, who is? I mean, you go far enough back and, if the Bible’s right, we’re all Jewish. Tower of Babel. Right.”
“Hmm, yes.” He nodded uncertainly. “Besides all that, most of my caseload is so petty it’s hardly worth the effort of my investigating it. That’s why I became interested in Max Reles in the first place.”
“And you want…? Let’s be a bit more specific here, Captain.”
“Nothing more than a chance. A chance to prove myself, that’s all. A word from the assistant commissioner to the Gestapo in Berlin would surely smooth my transfer. Don’t you think so?”
“It might,” I admitted. “It might, at that.”
We walked through the hotel entrance and made our way to the cafe, where I ordered us both coffee and cake.
“When I get back to Berlin,” I told him, “I’ll see what can be done. As a matter of fact, I know someone in the Gestapo myself. He runs his own department in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. He might be able to help you. Yes, it’s possible he might. Always supposing that you can help me.”
These days, that was how everything in Germany worked. For rats like Othman Weinberger, it was probably the only way to get on. And while personally I regarded him as something to be scraped carefully off the sole of my Salamanders, I could hardly blame him for wanting to get out of Wurzburg. I’d been there for just twenty-four hours and already I felt as keen to leave the place as the wandering Jew’s stray dog.
“But you know,” I said, “this case. Together we might yet make something out of it. Something a man might base a career on. You might not need anyone’s kind word if this impresses your superiors.”
Weinberger smiled wryly and gave the pretty waitress a slow up-and-down as she stooped to serve our coffee and cake. “You think so? I doubt it. No one here seemed very much interested in what I had to tell them about Max Reles.”
“I’m not here to pour coffee in my ears, Captain. Let’s hear it.”
Ignoring his coffee and the excellent cake, Weinberger leaned forward excitedly. “This man is a real gangster,” he said. “Just like Al Capone and those other Chicago hoodlums. The FBI-”
“Hold up. I want you to begin at the beginning.”
“Well, then, you might know that Wurzburg is the capital of the German quarrying business. Our limestone is highly prized by architects all over the country. But there are really only four companies that sell the stuff. One of them is a company called Wurzburg Jura Limestone, and it’s owned by a prominent local citizen called Roland Rothenberger.” He shrugged, ruefully. “Does that sound any less Jewish than my name? You tell me.”
“Get on with it.”
“Rothenberger is a friend of my father’s. My father’s a local doctor and a town councillor. A few months ago, Rothenberger came to see him in his capacity as a councillor and told him that he was being intimidated by a man named Krempel. Gerhard Krempel. He used to be an SA man, but now he’s a heavy for Max Reles. Anyway, Rothenberger’s story was that someone called Max Reles had offered to buy a share in his company, and that this Krempel character started to get rough when Rothenberger told him he didn’t want to sell. So I started to check it out, but I’d hardly finished opening the file when Rothenberger contacted me to say that he wished to withdraw the complaint. He said that Reles had substantially improved his offer and that there had been a simple misunderstanding and that Max Reles was now a shareholder in Wurzburg Jura Limestone. That I should forget all about it. That’s what he told me.
“But I’m afraid boredom got the better of me, and I thought I’d see what else I could find out about Reles. Right away I discovered he was an American citizen and, on the face of it, an offense had been committed right there. As you probably know, only German-owned companies are allowed to tender for Olympic contracts, and, it transpired, Wurzburg Jura Limestone had just outbid the local competition to supply stone for Berlin’s new stadium. I also found out that Reles seemed to have important connections here in Germany, so I resolved to see what was known about him in
