Hermann stepped to his office door, full of new exuberance and hope. ‘Bergemann!’ he bellowed. ‘Come in here.’
Bergemann jumped. ‘What is it, Sergeant?’
‘I’d like you to get me whatever we have on former Detective Geismeier.’
‘Willi Geismeier? Boy, there’s a name from the past,’ said Bergemann. ‘I doubt we have much in our files, but I can check in Central Records. What are you thinking, Sergeant?’
‘How well did you know him, Hans?’
‘Not that well, Sergeant. I heard he’s in America.’
‘I don’t buy it,’ said Gruber.
‘What? You think he’s still in Germany?’
‘Not only that. I think he’s still in Munich,’ said Hermann triumphantly.
‘Really? That’s interesting,’ said Bergemann. ‘Do you have new information?’
‘Gut instinct,’ said Hermann, thumping his ample stomach.
‘I see,’ said Bergemann. ‘OK.’
Gruber was a big believer in his own instincts, despite the fact that they were usually based on a combination of his misreading a situation and wishful thinking. He had always been a terrible detective. He had hardly ever investigated a case on his own, unless it had been in order to impede it. His rare interrogations of perpetrators gave away more information than he ever gleaned. He telegraphed his intentions so that the dimmest of suspects could tell what he was after. And yet once in a while even a terrible instinct could turn out to be correct, and even a terrible detective could catch a break.
The Steins
It was time for one of the Horvaths’ Sunday evenings. Benno was polishing champagne glasses in the kitchen. Margarete sliced a cucumber, smeared some paté on each slice, and arranged them prettily on a china platter. They laid out French cheeses on another platter beside a porcelain bowl with small crisps and thin squares of pumpernickel bread. There was a crystal bowl of pickled herring in thick cream, and various other treats, both savory and sweet.
For as long they could remember, the Horvaths had been hosting occasional small Sunday evening buffets for a group of their friends where they talked about culture and politics and whatever else came up. Benno and Margarete both wanted to keep the Sunday evenings going, to keep something like normality alive. You really couldn’t tell what was going to happen next. And even Benno Horvath – who was later arrested, tortured, tried, and executed for being part of a plot to assassinate Hitler – still managed to believe, or maybe he just hoped, that Germany could somehow come to its senses. A lot of people thought that way. Somehow we’ll get out of this mess. The champagne was cold, the glasses shone in the candlelight, the hors d’oeuvres were spread on silver trays.
Recently, however, the gatherings had changed. Gerhardt Riegelmann, for instance, a longtime guest and an acquaintance of Margarete’s from her university days, had always been a true conservative, a royalist even. He brought with him interesting and strong opinions about world politics and the like. He had seemed to be a supporter, with reservations, of the Weimar Republic, but had recently let it be known that he had come to think of Hitler as ‘the right man for the moment, the leader we need,’ to defend the country against the rising tide of Bolshevism. ‘He has the Bolshis on the run. And just look at the economy,’ he said. ‘You can’t argue that we’re not all better off under the Führer.’
Bad enough, thought Benno, but then one Sunday, Riegelmann was suddenly castigating ‘world Jewry’ for seeking to undermine Germany’s rising well-being. ‘I don’t know why I tolerated his crap for so long,’ said Benno. Riegelmann was no longer invited and soon broke off relations with the Horvaths altogether. Subversives, he called them both, even though Margarete deplored politics of every sort.
Then there was Gottfried Büchner, the theater and book critic. He had also fallen in line with the Nazis, publishing the most ridiculous movie reviews, criticizing the ‘decadent Jewish tone’ of one movie, or praising the ‘Germanic grandeur’ of another. He was no longer invited either. Presumably neither man had known that the Steins, who had sat beside them at the Horvaths’ on more than one occasion, were Jews. Or maybe they did know and liked offending them. That sort of cowardice was common these days. In any case the Steins had sat there silently and let it pass, and Benno and Margarete had both apologized profusely afterwards for their uncouth guests.
In the old days Willi had sometimes come to the Horvaths’ Sunday evenings. He had mostly kept his opinions to himself. But then, once in a while, he had a way of unexpectedly and yet artfully skewering an ignorant remark so that the culprit could tell he had been skewered but couldn’t quite put his finger on how it had been done. Neither Riegelmann nor Büchner liked Willi and wondered to one another why a simple police detective was even invited to an intellectual evening. Of course, Willi could no longer be there anyway, now that he was a fugitive.
Edvin Lindstrom was back in Munich after a few years in Tokyo and then Stockholm, posted once again at the Swedish Consulate. He had Ella, his new wife, with him. Edvin was a friend of Willi’s. They had first met at the Horvaths’ and had stayed in touch after that. Edvin and Ella were welcome back at the Sunday
