condition as comfortable. There were bars on the windows of the room and the three other women she shared it with were all severely disturbed. The room stank of urine and, from time to time, one of the other women would scream out loud, laugh hysterically, or throw something unspeakable in my direction. Also, the beds were verminous. There were bite marks on Kirsten's thighs and arms, and on one occasion, I had been bitten myself. Kirsten herself was hardly recognizable as the woman I had married. In the ten months since leaving Berlin she had aged ten years. Her hair was long and gray and unwashed. Her eyes were like two spent lightbulbs. She sat on the edge of her iron bedstead and stared at the green linoleum floor as if it had been the most fascinating thing she had ever seen. She looked like some poor stuffed animal in the anthropological collection at the museum on Richard- Wagner-Strasse.
After her father had died, Kirsten had fallen into a state of general depression and started drinking a lot and talking to herself. At first I had assumed she thought I was listening, but it was soon painfully clear to me that this was not the case. So I was actually pleased when she stopped talking to herself. The only trouble was that she stopped talking completely, and when it became apparent that she had withdrawn into herself, I summoned the doctor, who recommended immediate hospitalization.
'She's suffering from acute catatonic schizophrenia,' was what Dr. Bublitz, the psychiatrist treating Kirsten, had told me, about a week after her admission. 'It's not all that uncommon. After what Germany has been through, who can be surprised? Almost a fifth of our inpatients are suffering from some kind of catatonia. Nijinsky, the dancer and choreographer, suffered from the same condition as Frau Handloser.'
Because Kirsten's family doctor had been treating her since she was a little girl, he had booked her into the Max Planck under her maiden name. (Much to my annoyance, it was a mistake that showed no sign of being rectified. And I had given up correcting the doctor when he called her Frau Handloser.)
'Will she get better?' I had asked Dr. Bublitz.
'That's a little hard to say,' he said.
'Well, how is Nijinsky these days?'
'There was a rumor that he had died. But that was false. He's still alive. Although he remains in psychiatric care.'
'I guess that answers my question.'
'About Nijinsky?'
'About my wife.'
These days I rarely ever saw Dr. Bublitz. Mostly I sat beside Kirsten and brushed her hair and sometimes lit her a cigarette that I fixed in the corner of her mouth, where it stayed until I took it out, unsmoked. Sometimes the smoke trailing up her face made her blink, which was the only sign of life she ever showed, which was half of the reason I did it. Other times I read the paper to her, or a book; and once or twice, because her breath was so rank, I even cleaned her teeth. On this particular occasion I told her the plans I had for the hotel and myself.
'I have to do something with my life,' I said. 'I can't stay at that hotel any longer. Otherwise we'll both end up in here. So, after I leave here today, I'm going to see your family lawyer, and I'm going to put the place up for sale. Then I'm going to borrow a little money against it from Herr Kohl at Wechselbank, so I can start a little business of my own. As a private detective, of course. I've got no talent whatsoever for running a hotel. Police work is the only work I know. I'll rent an office and a small apartment here, in Schwabing, so I can be near you. As you know this part of Munich always reminds me a little of Berlin. And it's cheap, of course. Because of the bomb damage. Somewhere close to Wagmullerstrasse, at the south end of Englischerstrasse would be ideal. The Bavarian Red Cross has its offices there and that's where everyone goes first when they're looking for a missing person. I think there's probably quite a decent living to be made specializing in that end of the business.'
I didn't expect Kirsten to say anything, and she certainly didn't disappoint me in that respect. She stared at the floor as if my news was the most depressing thing she had heard in months. As if selling a failing hotel in Dachau was the worst business decision anyone could make. I paused and put her cigarette in my mouth and took a drag of it before stubbing it out on the sole of my shoe and dropping the butt into my jacket pocket--the room was dirty enough without my adding a cigarette end to the filth.
'There are lots of people missing in Germany,' I added. 'Just like when the Nazis were still in power.' I shook my head. 'But I can't go on in Dachau. Not on my own. I've had enough of that, forever. The way I feel right now, it's me who should be in here, not you.'
I jumped out of my skin as one of the other women let out a screech of laughter and then went to face the wall where she remained for the rest of my visit, rocking on her feet like some old rabbi. Maybe she knew something I didn't. They say that insanity is merely the ability to see into the future. And if we knew now what we'll know then, it would probably be enough to make any of us scream. In life the trick is all about keeping the two separate for as long as possible.
THREE
I had to get a denazification certificate from the Ministry of the Interior, on Prinzregentenstrasse. Since I had never actually been a member of the Nazi Party, this didn't present too much of a problem. There were plenty of bulls at the Police Praesidium on Ettstrasse (where I had to have the certificate countersigned) who, like me, had been SS, not to mention quite a few who had been in the Gestapo or the SD. Fortunately for me, the occupation authorities did not hold the view that ex officio transfers from KRIPO, the criminal police, or ORPO, the uniformed police, into these Nazi police organizations were enough to disqualify a man from being a police officer in the fledgling Federal Republic of Germany. It was only younger men who had started their careers in the SS, the Gestapo, or the SD who faced any real difficulties. But even here there were ways around the Liberation Law of 1946, which, if it had ever been as rigidly enforced as had been intended, would have resulted in Germany having no policemen at all. A good cop is still a good cop even if he was a Nazi bastard.
I found a small office in Galeriestrasse, which ran west off Wagmullerstrasse. It seemed just what I had been looking for. My premises were opposite a small post office and above an antiquarian bookshop; and they shared a floor with a dentist and a coin dealer. I felt about as respectable as it was possible to feel in a building that still had its camouflage painting against Allied air attacks. The building had been some minor outpost of the War Office on Ludwigstrasse and, in an old cupboard, I found mildewed portraits of Hitler and Goring, an empty grenade bag, a rifle bandolier, and an M42 'razor edge' helmet that happened to be my size (sixty-eight). Outside the front door were a cabstand and a kiosk selling newspapers and tobacco. I had my name on a brass plate and a mailbox mounted on the wall on the ground floor. I was set.
I walked around central Munich leaving my new business cards with offices and people who might conceivably put some business my way. The Red Cross, the German Information Bureau on Sonnenstrasse, the Israel Cultural Institute on Herzog-Max-Strasse, the American Express Company on Brienner Strasse, and the Lost Property Office at police headquarters. I even looked up a few old comrades. There was an ex-cop called Korsch who was working as a senior reporter at
My first Munich case was from a lawyer and, by a strange coincidence, it involved the Red Jackets at Landsberg. As it happened, so did the next case, which probably wasn't a coincidence at all. And maybe even the one after that. Any one of them could have taken over my life, but only one of them did. And even now I find it a little hard to say that none of them were connected.
Erich Kaufmann was a lawyer, a neoconservative, and a member of the so-called Heidelberg Circle of Jurists, which was the central coordinating body for freeing the prisoners at Landsberg. On September 21, 1949, I went to Kaufmann's plush office near the Justice Palace on Karlsplatz, which was another public building under repair. The sound of cement mixers, hammers, saws, and empty hoist containers hitting the ground made Karlsplatz as noisy as any battlefield. I remember the date because it was the day after the right-wing populist Alfred Loritz had stood up in the new Parliament, demanding an immediate and general amnesty for all but the most serious war criminals--by which he meant those who were already dead or on the run. I was reading about it in the
