unlike the many Lithuanian Jews whose deaths he had overseen, albeit only out of respect for his oath as an SS officer. By now I had little doubt that Erich Kaufmann was the author of this new client relationship.
'You say this happened in 1934, Baron?' I asked. He nodded. 'That's a lot of water under the bridge. How do you know this fellow Stumpff is still alive?'
'Because a couple of weeks ago my daughter, Helene Elisabeth, saw Wolfgang Stumpff on a tram in Munich.'
I tried my best to eliminate a note of surprise from my voice. 'Your daughter was on a tram?'
The baron smiled weakly as if perceiving the absurdity of such an idea. 'No, no,' he said. 'She was in her car. Leaving the Glyptothek, the Sculpture Gallery. She was at a traffic light and she looked up and saw him at the window of a tram. She's quite certain of it.'
'The Glyptothek,' I said. 'That's in the Museum Quarter, isn't it? Let's see now. A number eight from Karlsplatz to Schwabing. A number three and a number six, also to Schwabing. And a number thirty-seven from the Hohenzollernstrasse to the Max Monument. I don't suppose she remembers which number it was?' The baron shook his head, and I did the same. 'No matter. I'll find him.'
'I'll pay you a thousand marks if you do,' he said.
'Fine, fine, but after I find him it's down to you and your lawyers, Baron. I won't play advocate for your son. It's better that way. Better for your son but, more importantly, better for me. I'm finding it hard enough to sleep at night as it is without speaking up for a mass murderer.'
'People don't talk to me that way, Herr Gunther,' he said stiffly.
'You'd better get used to it, Baron,' I said. 'This is a republic now. Or did you forget? Besides, I'm the fellow who knows exactly how to find your son's ace in the hole.' That was just a bluff, to stop his fine nostrils from looking any more pinched than they already were. I had gone too far, waving my conscience in front of him like a matador's cape. Now I had to convince him that being blunt was just an idiosyncrasy of mine and that I was more than equal to the job. 'I'm glad you offered that bonus because this won't take more than a few days, and at ten marks a day, plus expenses, it might be hardly worth my while otherwise.'
'But how? I've already made a few inquiries of my own.'
'I could tell you. But then I'd be out of a job. Of course, I'll need to speak to your daughter.'
'Of course, of course. I'll tell her to expect you.'
The truth was that I had no idea where I was going to start. There were 821,000 people in Munich. Most of them were Roman Catholics and were pretty tight-lipped about everything, even in the confessional.
'Is there anything else you need?' he asked. By now my insolence was quite forgotten.
'You could pay me something in advance,' I said. 'For thirty marks, you get the rest of my week and the comfort of knowing that the petition for your son's release is as good as on the train to Landsberg.'
FIVE
In Germany there is a record of almost everything. We are a meticulous, observant, and bureaucratic people, and sometimes behave as if documentation and memorandum were the identifying hall-marks of true civilization. Even when it involved the systematic murder of an entire race of people, there were statistics, minutes, photographs, reports, and transcripts. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of war criminals might successfully have resisted conviction but for our very German obsession with numbers, names, and addresses. Many records had been destroyed in Allied air raids, it was true, but I was certain that somewhere I would find Wolfgang Stumpff's name and address.
I started at police headquarters, visiting both the Registration of Address section and the Passport Office, but found no trace of him there. Then I checked at the Ministry of the Interior on Prinzregentenstrasse. I even looked for his name at the Society of German Jurists. I knew that Stumpff was from Munich and that he had studied to be a lawyer. The baron had told me that much himself. And reasoning that it was highly unlikely he could have come through the war without doing military service, my next port of call was the Bavarian State Archives on Arcisstrasse, where there were records going back as far as 1265. These had suffered no damage at all. But I had no luck there either, except to discover that the archives of the Bavarian army had been moved, to Leonrodstrasse, and it was here, finally, that I found what I was looking for, in the Rank Lists--the officer rolls for Bavaria. Alphabetically listed, year on year. It was a beautiful bit of record-keeping, handwritten, in purple ink. Hauptmann Wolfgang Stumpff of the 1st Gebirgsdivision, which was formerly the Bavarian Mountain Division. I now had a name, an address, the name of Stumpff's regimental commander--I even borrowed his photograph.
The address in the Haidhausen district of East Munich was no more, having been completely destroyed on July 13, 1944. At least, that's what the sign on the ruins told me. And temporarily bereft of ideas, I decided to spend an afternoon riding the trams--specifically the three, six, eight, and thirty-seven, with the photograph of Stumpff I had borrowed from his file. But before I did I had an appointment to meet the baron's daughter outside the Glyptothek.
Helene Elisabeth von Starnberg was wearing a knee-length beige skirt, a yellow sweater that was just clingy enough to let you know she was a woman, and a pair of pigskin leather driving gloves. We had a pleasant conversation. I showed her the picture I had purloined from the army archives.
'Yes, that's him,' she said. 'Of course he was much younger when this picture was taken.'
'Didn't you know? This is at least a thousand years old. I know because that's how long Hitler said the Third Reich would last.'
She smiled and, for a moment, it was hard to believe she had a brother who had lived and worked in the lowest pit in hell. Blond, of course. Like she'd stepped down from the Berchtesgaden. It was easy to see where Hitler had developed his taste for blondes if he'd ever met a blonde like Helene Elisabeth von Starnberg. Either way she was a creature from another world. I might have misjudged her, but my first thought about her, that she'd never been on a tram, was not one I was able to dislodge. I tried to picture it, but the image wouldn't stick. It always came off looking like a tiara in a biscuit tin.
'Are you any relation to Ignaz Gunther?' she asked me.
'My great-great-grandfather,' I said. 'But please don't tell anyone.'
'I won't,' she said. 'He sculpted a lot of angels, you know. Some of them are rather fine. Who knows? Maybe you'll turn out to be our angel, Herr Gunther.'
By which I assumed she meant the von Starnberg family's angel. Maybe it was lucky it was a fine day and I was in a good mood, but I didn't reply with a rude remark about how, if I was going to help her brother, I'd have to be a black angel, which, of course, was what people used to call the SS. Maybe. More likely I just let that one slide by me because she was what people used to call a peach, in the days before they'd forgotten what one looked and tasted like.
'There's a fine group of guardian angels sculpted by Ignaz Gunther in the Burgersaal,' she said, pointing across Konigsplatz. 'Somehow they survived the bombing. You should take a look at them sometime.'
'I'll do that,' I said, and stepped back as she opened the door of her Porsche and climbed inside. She waved a neatly gloved hand from behind the split windshield, fired up the flat-four engine, and then sped away.
I walked south across Karlsplatz and the 'Stachus,' which was Munich's main traffic center, named after an inn that had once stood there. I walked along Neuhauser Strasse to Marienplatz, both of them badly damaged during the war. Special passages had been constructed for pedestrians beneath the scaffolding, and the many gaps between bomb-damaged buildings were filled with one-storied temporary shops. Scaffolding made the Burgersaal as inconspicuous as an empty beer bottle. Like everywhere else in that part of Munich, the chapel was being restored. Every time I walked around the city I congratulated myself for being lucky enough to spend most of 1944 with General Ferdinand Schorner's army in White Russia. Munich had been hit hard. April 25, 1944, had been one of the worst nights in the city's history. Most of the chapel had been burned out. The high altar had perished, yet Gunther's sculptures had survived. But with their pink cheeks and delicate hands these were hardly my idea of guardian angels. They looked like a couple of rent boys from a bathhouse in Bogenhausen. I didn't think I was descended from Ignaz, but after two hundred years who can be sure of anything like that? My father had never been entirely certain who his mother was, let alone his own father. Either way, I'd have sculpted the group differently. My idea of a guardian angel involved being armed with something more lethal than a supercilious smile, an elegantly cocked little finger, and one eye on the Pearly Gates for backup. But that's me. Even now, four years after the war ended, my first thought when I wake up is to wonder where I left my KAR 98.
