‘Whichever way you want to cut it, I’m innocent, I tell you.’
‘That you may be,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t plane a piece of wood without dropping a few shavings. So, innocent or not, I’ve got to keep you for a while. At least until I can check you out.’ I picked up my jacket and walked to the door.
‘One last question for the moment,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose you own a car, do you?’
‘On my pay? You are joking, aren’t you?’
‘What about the furniture van. Are you the driver?’
‘Yes. I’m the driver.’
‘Ever use it in the evenings?’ He stayed silent. I shrugged and said: ‘Well, I suppose I can always ask your employer.’
‘It’s not allowed, but sometimes I do use it, yes. Do a bit of private contracting, that sort of thing.’ He looked squarely at me. ‘But I never used it to kill anyone in, if that’s what you were suggesting,’
‘It wasn’t, as it happens. But thanks for the idea.’
I sat in Arthur Nebe’s office and waited for him to finish his telephone call. His face was grave when finally he replaced the receiver. I was about to say something when he raised his finger to his lips, opened his desk drawer and took out a tea-cosy with which he covered the phone.
‘What’s that for?’
‘There’s a wire on the telephone. Heydrich’s, I suppose, but who can tell? The tea-cosy keeps our conversation private.’ He leant back in his chair underneath a picture of the Fuhrer and uttered a long and weary sigh. ‘That was one of my men calling from the Berchtesgaden,’ he said. ‘Hitler’s talks with the British prime minister don’t seem to be going particularly well. I don’t think our beloved Chancellor of Germany cares if there’s war with England or not. He’s conceding absolutely nothing.
‘Of course he doesn’t give a damn about these Sudeten Germans. This nationalist thing is just a cover. Everyone knows it. It’s all that Austro-Hungarian heavy industry that he wants. That he needs, if he’s going to fight a European war. God, I wish he had to deal with someone stronger than Chamberlain. He brought his umbrella with him you know. Bloody little bank manager.’
‘Do you think so? I’d say the umbrella denotes quite a sensible sort of man. Can you really imagine Hitler or Goebbels ever managing to stir up a crowd of men carrying umbrellas? It’s the very absurdity of the British which makes them so impossible to radicalize. And why we should envy them.’
‘It’s a nice idea,’ he said, smiling reflectively. ‘But tell me about this fellow you’ve arrested. Think he might be our man?’
I glanced around the room for a moment, hoping to find greater conviction on the walls and the ceiling, and then lifted my hands almost as if I meant to disclaim Gottfried Bautz’s presence in a cell downstairs.
‘From a circumstantial point of view, he could fit the laundry list.’ I rationed myself to one sigh. ‘But there’s nothing that definitely connects him. The rope we found in his room is the same type as the rope that was used to bind the feet of one of the dead girls. But then it’s a very common type of rope. We use the same kind here at the Alex.
‘Some cloth we found underneath his bed could be stained with blood from one of his victims. Equally, it could be menstrual blood, as he claims. He has access to a van in which he could have transported and killed his victims relatively easily. I’ve got some of the boys checking it over now, but so far it appears to be as clean as a dentist’s fingers.
‘And then of course there is his record. We’ve locked his door once before for a sexual offence – a statutory rape. More recently he probably tried to strangle a snapper he’d first persuaded to be tied up. So he could fit the psychological bill of the man we’re looking for.’ I shook my head. ‘But that’s more “could-be” than Fritz fucking Lang. What I want is some real evidence.’
Nebe nodded sagely and put his boots on the desk. Tapping his fingers’ ends together, he said: ‘Could you build a case? Break him?’
‘He’s not stupid. It will take time. I’m not that good an interrogator, and I’m not about to take any short-cuts either. The last thing I want on this case is broken teeth on the charge sheet. That’s how Josef Kahn got himself folded away and put in the costume-hire hospital.’ I helped myself from the box of American cigarettes on Nebe’s desk and lit one with an enormous brass table lighter, a present from Goering. The prime minister was always giving away cigarette lighters to people who had done him some small service. He used them like a nanny uses boiled sweets.
‘Incidentally, has he been released yet?’
Nebe’s lean face adopted a pained expression. ‘No, not yet,’ he said.
‘I know it’s considered only a small detail, the fact that he hasn’t actually murdered anyone, but don’t you think it’s time he should be let out? We still have some standards left, don’t we?’
He stood up and came round the desk to stand in front of me.
‘You’re not going to like this, Bernie,’ he said. ‘No more than I do myself.’
‘Why should this be an exception? I figure that the only reason there aren’t any mirrors in the lavatories is so that nobody has to look himself in the eye. They’re not going to release him, right?’
Nebe leant against the side of the desk, folded his arms and stared at the toes of his boots for a minute.
‘Worse than that, I’m afraid. He’s dead.’
‘What happened?’
‘Officially?’
‘You can give it a shot.’
‘Josef Kahn took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed.’
‘I can see how that would read nicely. But you know different, right?’
‘I don’t know anything for certain.’ He shrugged. ‘So call it informed guesswork. I hear things, I read things and I make a few reasonable conclusions. Naturally as Reichskriminaldirektor I have access to all kinds of secret decrees in the Ministry of the Interior.’ He took a cigarette and lit it. ‘Usually these are camouflaged with all sorts of neutral-sounding bureaucratic names.
‘Well then, at the present moment there’s a move to establish a new committee for the research of severe constitutional disease -’
‘You mean like what this country is suffering from?’
‘- with the aim of encouraging “positive eugenics, in accordance with the Fuhrer’s thoughts on the subject”.’ He waved his cigarette at the portrait on the wall behind him. ‘Whenever you read that phrase “the Fuhrer’s thoughts on the subject”, one knows to pick up one’s well-read copy of his book. And there you will find that he talks about using the most modern medical means at our disposal to prevent the physically degenerate and mentally sick from contaminating the future health of the race.’
‘Well, what the hell does that mean?’
‘I had assumed it meant that such unfortunates would simply be prevented from having families. I mean, that does seem sensible, doesn’t it? If they are incapable of looking after themselves then they can hardly be fit to bring up children.’
‘It doesn’t seem to have deterred the Hitler Youth leaders.’
Nebe snorted and went back round his desk. ‘You’re going to have to watch your mouth, Bernie,’ he said, half-amused.
‘Get to the funny bit.’
‘Well, it’s this. A number of recent reports, complaints if you like, made to Kripo by those related to institutionalized people leads me to suspect that some sort of mercy-killing is already being unofficially practised.’
I leant forward and grasped the bridge of my nose.
‘Do you ever get headaches? I get headaches. It’s smell that really sets them off. Paint smells pretty bad. So does formaldehyde in the mortuary. But the worst are those rotten pissing places you get where the dozers and rum-sweats sleep rough. That’s a smell I can recall in my worst nightmares. You know, Arthur, I thought I knew every bad smell there was in this city. But that’s last month’s shit fried with last year’s eggs.’
Nebe pulled open a drawer and took out a bottle and two glasses. He said nothing as he poured a couple of large ones.
