Willi got out of the car and walked up the steps as Heinz turned to go inside. ‘Good evening, Herr Schleiffer,’ he said.
Heinz turned and stepped back in surprise. ‘Herr Juncker!’
‘Let’s go inside,’ said Willi. Heinz tried to see Willi’s hands, but they were in his jacket pockets. He backed into the building.
Willi emerged after half an hour. ‘What did you learn?’ Eberhardt said as they sped off. Willi shook his head and laughed. ‘What a piece of work is man.’
Schleiffer had been incoherent, ricocheting between terror, remorse, giddiness, and rage. He had rambled on about Frau Schimmel. Willi had thanked him for looking after her. ‘Why thank me?’ said Heinz. ‘I did what any human being would have done.’ By which he seemed to mean he had been very brave and noble.
Willi thanked him too for placing the package in his desk drawer, and praised him for helping stop a murderer. Heinz seemed unable to accept Willi’s thanks or praise without lapsing into meandering, sometimes abject, sometimes angry apology. One minute it was, ‘Please, don’t hurt me,’ the next it was, ‘How dare you undermine the Führer’s great work.’
Schleiffer knew nothing of Lola’s whereabouts, although he said Bertha Schimmel had been in touch with her until her death. He had found Bertha’s letters and burned them after she died. ‘I didn’t want them to fall into the wrong hands.’ He gave Willi a meaningful look. Heinz was still inclined to ascribe heroic motives to his own decent behavior.
Lola had moved several times since Frau Schimmel had died. Fedor Blaskowitz had learned the Gestapo was snooping around Murnau. He didn’t know whether they were there for Lola, but he and Lola had agreed it was no longer safe for her to remain in the green house by the Riegsee.
A car arrived one morning and drove Lola west to Bad Aibling where Fedor knew a young farm couple – the husband was a former pupil – willing to help out in exchange for a little money and some help with the farm chores. For several weeks Lola got up early each morning, fed the animals, gathered eggs and helped out in other ways. There was a dog too, and a large family of cats.
One morning the couple and Lola were having breakfast together, as they did each morning, when Hitler came on the radio and declared war on Poland. The young couple looked at one another and then went silent. Lola overheard them whispering later that morning about the danger of harboring a fugitive. The war changed everything, made everything more dangerous.
‘What can we do?’ said the husband.
‘We have to …’ Lola didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, but at lunch that day neither one of them spoke to her or met her eyes. And that afternoon the wife kept looking out the window as though she might be expecting someone. Probably it was nothing, but Lola couldn’t take the chance. She packed her small suitcase.
Early the next morning she left the house without telling anyone and walked to the train station. She took the first train to Salzburg where she changed to a train to Vienna. She had a cousin there who had offered a place to stay if Lola ever needed it.
She would be safe there. But at the same time, the chain of connections that would allow Willi to find her was now broken. How could he look for her? He wouldn’t even think to look for her in Vienna. And where should she look for him? She knew he was out of Dachau, but she had no idea where he might have gone.
Eberhardt drove Willi to Lola’s parents’ house. The two men watched for a while before Willi went to the door. Lola’s father didn’t recognize Willi at first, but once he did, he pulled him inside and embraced him.
‘We don’t know where she is, Willi, but a card came last week. She’s safe, I think.’
‘Can I see the card?’ said Willi.
‘Having a wonderful time,’ was all she had written. She hadn’t signed it. The stamp was Austrian, the postmark was Vienna, the picture was vineyards.
‘Our niece is there.’
‘You should destroy the card,’ said Willi.
The niece was in Vienna, and Lola was living in a hut in the vineyards above Grinzing. You could get there by streetcar from Vienna. It was as though she had been expecting him. When he knocked and she opened the door, she was wearing the green dress.
The Holy Fire
Willi read in the Nazi paper about Standartenführer Reinhard Pabst’s ‘martyrdom.’ A German hero, he had been brutally assassinated by a conspiracy of enemies of the German people. Pabst was given a state funeral, with a mounted guard and goose-stepping legions of SS men. And, in a fiery oration, the Führer himself warned Germany’s enemies to take note. The resolve Reinhard Pabst had shown in his devoted and relentless pursuit of Germany’s enemies would be repeated in the Reich’s pursuit of its enemies. The Führer promised that the despicable assassins of this great German hero would soon know the full fury of German justice.
Hauptsturmführer Altdorfer, at home in the loving collective bosom of his women, read the same account. His youngest daughter had just brought his morning chocolate and a sweet roll. Altdorfer was not surprised to learn that Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry had turned the murderer Reinhard Pabst into a symbol of German victimhood, a fallen hero of the Fatherland. The Führer and Goebbels always understood how to make full use of whatever cards they were dealt.
It did briefly give Altdorfer pause that such cynical use could be made of such a stone-cold killer’s deserved demise. But mainly Altdorfer felt grateful that Reinhard was dead and that German women no longer needed to fear for their lives when they left home. He was grateful also, and more than a little proud, that he had managed to bring that particular crime
