Contents
Cover
Also by Peter Steiner
Title Page
Copyright
PART ONE
Willi
Schloß Barzelhof
The First Kiss
Operation Hummingbird
And It Didn’t Stop There
Tullemannstraße 54
Heinz Schleiffer
The First Report
The Gestapo
The Blood Flag
The Second Report
Frau Schimmel
Detective Sergeant Hermann Gruber
The Steins
Lili Marlene
The Logbooks
Corpus Delicti
Erna Raczynski
Briennerstraße 20
The Green Dress
Degenerate Art
The Ninth Victim
The Mind of a Killer
The Third Report
The Lion and the Hyenas
PART TWO
Dachau
Outside
Schleiffer in Trouble
The Sudetenland
Hard Labor
The First Interrogation
The Riegsee
Frau Schimmel Again
The Second and Third Interrogations
Kristallnacht
Friedrich Grosz
Escape
The Man Who Loved Women
Altdorfer Investigates
The Bavarian Forest
Heinz Schleiffer Gets a Letter
The Evidence
The Arrest
The Woodcutter
The Holy Fire
Also by Peter Steiner
The Louis Morgon mysteries
LE CRIME
L’ASSASSIN
THE TERRORIST
THE RESISTANCE
THE CAPITALIST
The Willi Geismeier mysteries
THE GOOD COP *
* available from Severn House
THE CONSTANT MAN
Peter Steiner
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First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2021
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
This eBook edition first published in 2021 by Severn House,
an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
severnhouse.com
Copyright © Peter Steiner, 2021
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Peter Steiner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-9074-0 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-782-8 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0520-9 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
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PART ONE
Willi
In the Munich police department Willi Geismeier had been known either as a pain in the ass or a brilliant detective, depending on who you asked. He had been a thorn in the side of his superiors, flouting regulations, doing investigations in his own way, but always following the facts no matter where they led. That was the problem. More and more often these days the facts led where you didn’t want a detective to go.
‘Maybe you’re just not cut out to be a detective, Geismeier.’ Willi had heard that over and over again. And maybe it was true. The trouble was he loved the work and he was good at it. And he loved justice, both the idea of it and the fact of it. Hans Bergemann always said Willi was obsessed with justice.
Willi’s discovery and pursuit of the perpetrator of multiple murders and rapes had led him directly to a high-ranking Nazi official, a man named Otto Bruck. And once Otto Bruck, one of Hitler’s favorites, came to harm, Willi had no choice but to disappear. The police, the SS, the Gestapo were all looking for him, and he’d gotten out of his apartment in the nick of time, thanks to Bergemann and to Lola. After a couple of nights in various safe houses, Willi left Munich. But he left reluctantly. He did not like to leave Lola to fend for herself, even for a short time. But both she and Bergemann had argued he was in imminent danger if he stayed, and if he was in danger, he placed them in danger too. So Willi hid out in the Bavarian Forest near the Austrian and Czech borders, in a hut belonging to Eberhardt von Hohenstein, an old schoolfriend.
Then came the attack on Lola.
Once a week Lola Zeff went to supper at her mother and father’s house. Afterwards – sometimes it was after midnight – she took the streetcar home, changing at Karolinenplatz and then getting off at Rennstraße, from where it was a five-minute walk to her apartment. That night it was raining and a strong wind was blowing as she got off at Rennstraße. She had to turn toward the wind to open her umbrella so that it wouldn’t turn inside out. As she turned, a man standing right there – maybe the noise of the departing streetcar had allowed him to get so close – lunged at her. His hand and arm ripped through the umbrella half open in front of her. And because she let go and the wind caught it, the man was momentarily caught by the umbrella, his arm tangled in the spokes. Lola screamed and fell backwards, hitting her head, and the man ran off, his arm still caught in the umbrella. She got up and ran in the opposite direction. She found a night watchman, making his rounds, just outside a factory. Lola told him she had been attacked, and he took her inside and called the police.
‘You’re injured, Fräulein,’ he said, pointing to his own head. She touched her head and her hand came away bloody. She sat down heavily in the watchman’s chair. He folded up a spare shirt he kept in his locker and made a compress for her to hold against the wound and stanch the bleeding until the ambulance arrived. He gave her a sip of the brandy he kept in his desk. ‘For emergencies,’ he said.
Willi learned from Hans Bergemann about the attack and rushed back to Munich, cursing himself for having left. He had already acquired the necessary
