‘Damn it, Geismeier, this is ridiculous. Focus on the case.’
‘I am,’ he said. Higher-ups did not understand and did not like being questioned by a lowly police detective, but they could hardly refuse. Not given the fact that year after year Willi accumulated one of the best case-closure rates in the entire Munich police department.
Eventually Willi was known throughout the department. And as the police department became more and more political, Willi began to be accused of investigating the police themselves. Willi denied this, but in fact it was true. Willi was hopelessly addicted – and addicted was not too strong a word – to justice. He had no choice but to follow every lead where it took him, and make certain, to the extent that he was able, that every injustice was brought to light.
As Hitler rose in influence and power, the Munich police department was increasingly populated by Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. And crimes Willi found himself investigating increasingly involved police and political figures, not just as peripheral characters or witnesses, but often enough as perpetrators. And, because Munich was Hitler’s spiritual home, the place where his movement had been born, increasingly some of these police criminals were uncomfortably close to the Führer himself. Again and again, Willi insisted he was not political. It was just that politics was where his investigations sometimes took him.
Even now, when Willi was no longer a detective, he did not – could not – stop thinking about such matters. For instance, he could not let go of the fact that the police had been so quick to drop their investigation of the attack on Lola. Willi knew too little so far to even suspect that the attack had a political aspect. At the same time, though, Lola had warned him of the SS’s interest in him. This made her his accomplice. It made her warning a treasonous act. That might, in itself, have made her a target for attack.
The First Kiss
Gerd Fegelein was a former cat burglar who had retired once he could no longer shinny up and down drainpipes as he once had, or navigate steep slate roofs when they were slick with rain. It was Willi who had informed Fegelein of his retirement on a snowy New Year’s Eve several years back. Fegelein had come through a third-floor apartment window onto a small wrought-iron balcony, had lowered himself to the balcony below, but had slipped on the icy iron rail and dropped hard into the alley, where Willi was waiting.
Fegelein was crestfallen when he saw Willi there. His shoulders slumped. They had never met, but he knew Willi by reputation. Willi had caught countless villains who had eluded the police for years, so it was not exactly a disgrace to be caught by him. But Fegelein had his own reputation as uncatchable to maintain. And yet here he was: caught. He might still have outrun Willi, but when he tried to get up, he found that his ankle was badly sprained, and he crumpled back to the ground in pain. So he did the only thing he could think to do, and that was to offer Willi his hand. Willi took it. ‘Herr Fegelein,’ he said.
‘Herr Geismeier,’ said Fegelein, ‘will you help me?’
This sudden and immediate accord was not as strange as it might seem. While the two men had been on opposite sides of the law for most of their careers, the law had gradually shifted until now they found themselves in the same boat: both enemies of the Third Reich.
Willi was well known among Munich’s villains as an effective and honest cop, and now he was known among Munich’s Nazis as an impediment to the advancement of Hitler’s agenda, particularly as it applied to the criminal justice system. Fegelein was known mainly as a cat burglar, but also to some as a devoted Marxist. Like Willi, he had fought in the trenches during the war, and then afterwards had battled fascists as part of a red militia when Munich’s future was up in the air. And if that were not enough to doom him, he was also a Jew. So how could Willi arrest Fegelein when doing so would deliver him to the hands of the SS and likely mean his death? Willi walked to a nearby taxi stand, summoned a cab and helped Fegelein to his home.
After that night, Fegelein disappeared. He waited weeks, then months, and in time the police lost interest in him. Now, years later, he owned and ran a bicycle shop out of the back of an industrial building in Lerchenau, far from Munich’s center. The small sign in the window read: LERCHENAU BICYCLES, SALES AND REPAIRS
The shop was dingy and dimly lit and filled with an assortment of salvaged bicycles in various stages of repair. They were stacked against the walls around the front room. A few almost new and reconditioned bicycles were for sale and dangled from hooks screwed into the ceiling. The back room was a workshop with all the requisite work stands, benches, and spare parts. Willi, no longer a detective and looking for some other trade, had recently taken up bicycle repair at Fegelein’s urging and, thanks to his thorough and meticulous nature, had become good at it – so good, in fact, that he, under the pseudonym Karl Juncker, had been retained as the team mechanic by the Bavarian Wheelmen, a professional racing team.
As a thief, Fegelein had been a big proponent of bicycle travel in the city.
