Hitler's Angel Read online

  ‘No.’ She speaks slowly, as if she is thinking. ‘No, I suppose not. But I thought you were investigating this as a way to discredit Hitler.’

  ‘I had many theories,’ he says. ‘Perhaps Gregor Strasser killed Geli to discredit Hitler and take over the party. Perhaps one of Hitler’s enemies killed her to discredit him. Perhaps the party killed her to get rid of a roadblock to his candidacy. Perhaps her death was accidental.’

  ‘Or someone in the house killed her,’ the girl says, caught up now.

  Fritz nods, once. ‘Or one of Hitler’s friends. Or Hitler himself.’

  ‘He would be the logical one,’ she says.

  ‘Because of his later history?’ Fritz asks.

  She nods.

  ‘History does not record him killing anyone with his bare hands.’

  ‘But he was a soldier and he killed millions. He ordered their deaths.’

  ‘He did,’ Fritz says. ‘You forget one detail.’

  ‘He was out of the city when she died.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Fritz smiles. The expression feels tight on his face. She stares at him, as if waiting for him to go on, as if he will tell her the result before he reaches the end of his story.

  ‘You were going to get Photostats of the articles.’ He does not mind letting her take those. He can get other copies. It is the letters he minds. The letters and the photographs.

  His remark makes her glance at her watch. ‘I’d have to leave now.’

  ‘Go,’ he says. Then more gently, ‘Go. I will still be here tomorrow.’

  She nods and packs her things. He watches her small movements, domestic and tidy. Now he wishes that he had watched her cook. Such a rare thing to have a woman take care of him. He cannot remember the last time – before the war, perhaps. His mother used to make soup when he was ill as a boy. His mother. She too died in the starvation after the war.

  The girl turns, seems about to say something but he shakes his head just enough to keep her silent. ‘Tomorrow I will provide the pastries,’ he says.

  She laughs and then lets herself out, taking the energy from the room with her. He sits in the fading sunlight, feeling alone for the first time since those awful days after Gisela left. Then the solitude was a physical thing, something to be fought with activity and rigorous exercise. And he has not been out of the apartment in days. Rigorous exercise – at least his old man’s version – is a good idea.

  He gets up, takes his dishes to the sink, and grabs his coat off the coat rack. He double-checks the pocket for his keys, finds them, and lets himself out.

  The hallway is dark and smells of cabbage. The building has aged since he moved in, years before. Then it had seemed smart to rent while owning land outside of Munich. Now he wonders if he shouldn’t have built that house, as he had once planned. He would not have the city for company, but he would not have loud loutish neighbours either. He takes the stairs two at a time, gripping the wobbly wood banister as he goes down. When he reaches the street, he stops, takes a breath, and blinks in the brightness.

  Munich has changed over the decades. Skyscrapers tower over buildings that have existed for hundreds of years. When the monks from Tegernsee settled on the Isar they never imagined that the site of their diocese would become a bustling place of wood, steel and glass. The sound of construction fills the city from morning to night. Munich will hold the Olympics, and the event will purify the city, wipe away the past.

  If only it were so easy.

  He glances down the concrete sidewalk to his favourite beer hall. It has changed ownership a dozen times since he first went inside in 1925, but it has not changed much. The food is the same: Weisswürscht, Brez’n, and sweet mustard served with good Bavarian beer. The inside has steel counters in the kitchen, but out front the wood is worn and the walls still covered with paintings from the reign of Ludwig the Second. Fritz stares at the sign, repainted a decade ago in nineteenth-century style but somehow having lost its charm, and he realises that he does not want to sit alone in a place of merriment. The disquiet that has haunted him since he saw Wilhelm’s picture the day before colours each waking moment. Fritz does not know when he stopped living. He became famous long after Wilhelm died, but his only hope for joy starved to death in 1919. If he closes his eyes, he can still see Wilhelm’s face, skin drawn tight against the skull, eyes too big, too pale and tired to even ask for help.

  Fritz sighs. Open the door to the past and all the memories crowd to the entrance. He should have stuck with Demmelmayer. He can recite the facts of the case in his sleep, explain his role in the simplest of terms. But he had to start telling the girl about Geli Raubal, digging through his boxes, and seeing his photographs again for the first time in years. It is bad enough that memories live on the streets of Munich, but now they also live in his own mind.

  Before he knows it, he is walking away from the beer hall. His unplanned steps, guided more by memory than by any rational purpose, take him around the English Garden. He stops in a neighbourhood he has not walked through in decades. Prinzregentenplaz.

  The building still stands. In fact, the street does not look much different. The cars are newer, smaller, and faster. Next door is a modern complex of glass and steel, looking to him like an American about to destroy a tradition. Boys with green and orange hair ride past on bicycles. The building has a layer of sooty grey it did not have in its glory years, the result of too many car exhausts, too much smog. Official signs mark the doorway. He crosses the street and stands before it.

  So many changes. The street has the same general feel, but it is not the same. Buildings once home to Munich’s elite now house clinics, solicitors, and advertising agencies. This building, though, whose residents he once envied for their comfort, this building which had seemed to him in his early days in Kripo, long before he became famous, a symbol of wealth he wanted to achieve is now owned by the government. Friends of his have worked inside. On the second floor, the sign says, is the traffic fines office for the city of Munich.

  He does not go inside. He cannot. He wonders about the man who works in Geli’s old room. Does he know that below the carpet, the furniture, on the formerly polished wood floor, lies the permanent stain of blood from a woman who died violently? Does her ghost appear to him? Does she wander through the offices, searching for her canary, Hansi, or does she yell in defiance when her uncle tries to imprison her again?

  Munich is an old city, full of ghosts. His apartment building dates from those dark days before the war. So much had happened before he moved in. He never looked under the threadbare grey carpet, never searched for blood spatters appearing through the paint coats on the walls. Someone could have died in his place and he would never know.

  The thought only adds to his melancholy. Men come out the door wearing overcoats despite the day’s warmth. Women emerge, looking preoccupied, carrying bags under their arms. They walk beside him as if it is common for an old man to stand on the sidewalk staring at a government building. Perhaps it is. No one wants to pay his fines, not even old men, especially not old men who should know better.

  He is like a ghost to them, already barely visible, and certainly unimportant to the hustle and bustle of their daily lives. No. Ghosts only become visible to the aging when they have a chance to reflect on their lives, their failures, and the chances they have missed.

  TWENTY-TWO

  He met Henrich in the English Garden, near the Chinese Tower. Because Fritz had not eaten much that day, he bought himself some sausage, sauerkraut, and a stein of beer to wash it down. He sat at one of the wooden tables in the shadow of the pagoda roof, and watched the crowd. Once he had enjoyed coming here. Now he came when he had business to do. It was a good place to meet other officers and to discuss things he did not want discussed in the precinct.

  The sun was warm, and since it was mid-morning, the crowd was slight. A Communist stood on a box in the meadow, speaking to a handful of people, his voice carried away by the wind. Women tugged tiny caps on
their babies. Men walked by in pairs, discussing the day. An old man leaned off the second floor railing in the tower and watched the crowd pass. Fritz saw no member of the NSDAP.

  Henrich arrived a few minutes later. He was wearing an overcoat, brown pants and regular shoes, his head covered with a beret. He licked his fingers and tossed away a food wrapper as he approached. He too had taken advantage of the Garden in order to eat his lunch.

  When he saw Fritz, he smiled.

  ‘That woman,’ Henrich said as he approached, ‘is one of the most difficult I have ever met.’

  ‘Wouldn’t she give you the letter?’

  ‘She wouldn’t even let me into the apartment. When she found out I came from you, she told me to give you a message: if you are to work with her, you are to work with her.’

  Fritz sighed. He had wanted that letter.

  ‘But,’ Henrich said with a smile, ‘I got the letter from her. I let her know I could make her life quite difficult. I could bring an entire team of political police down on them if I even implied the death of the girl had anything to do with politics.’

  In spite of himself, Fritz smiled. He hadn’t wanted to be so hard-handed with the witnesses, but he was finding he had no choice. They were not cooperating.

  ‘Did she tell you anything else?’ he asked, holding his hand out for the letter.

  ‘Only if I come again, I can go to hell.’ Henrich shrugged. ‘One little hausfrau does not frighten me.’ He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and removed a tattered piece of paper. It had been taped together quickly, leaving little tape patches where paper should have been. But it was still readable.

  Fritz took it from Henrich and studied it. It read:

  Dear Herr Hitler,

  Thank you again for the wonderful invitation to the theatre. It was a memorable evening. I am most grateful to you for your kindness. I am counting the hours until I may have the joy of another meeting.

  Yours,

  Eva

  ‘Did you think to get a sample of Frau Winter’s handwriting?’ Fritz asked.

  ‘We have her information at the precinct from when we brought her in. I had time, so I went and compared. If that old woman wrote this, she is very talented.’

  Fritz stroked the page. The tape nearly covered it all. Someone had shredded it, and someone else had taken a lot of work to piece it all together again. ‘Do we have any idea who Eva is?’

  Henrich rolled his eyes. ‘That took some wheedling. Frau Winter sees information as coin.’

  ‘You had to pay her?’

  Henrich shook his head. ‘We came to an understanding, the old woman and I. I would not ask her questions about Adolf Hitler or try to enter the apartment, and she would not withhold information from me. This was a tacit thing which evolved over the course of the morning.’

  Fritz let out a mouthful of air. He was lucky he had sent Henrich to see Frau Winter. Another detective, less versed in subtlety, would have ruined this lead altogether. ‘So tell me who this Eva is.’

  ‘She is a shopgirl that Hitler has been seeing on the side for two years. It is an on-again off-again thing, which Geli was quite jealous of, according to Frau Winter. When Hitler took out Eva, he did not have time for Geli.’

  ‘You know no more than that?’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Henrich smiled. He waved another small piece of paper at Fritz. ‘I have her address.’

  He has forgotten breakfast until five minutes before the girl is scheduled to arrive. She has never been late before, and she will be surprised to discover him away. He tacks a note to the door, and hurries down the stairs to the good bakery at the corner.

  The inside smells of küchen and freshly made bread. His mouth waters. In his wanderings the night before, he only managed to eat a bit of schweinswürstl at the Chinese Tower. There he thought of Henrich. Dear Henrich, who never completely understood those last few months of 1931, although he remained faithful until the end.

  Fritz orders some strudel and küchen, and watches as the woman behind the counter places the pastries in a white bag. He gets two coffees as well, and carries the entire package back to his apartment.

  The girl is inside, setting up her tape recorder. She smiles at him. ‘The articles are in the Münchner Post.’

  Of course they are, he wants to say to her. Do you think I was lying? Trying to make myself a big man? But he says nothing. He hands her a coffee, sets his near his chair, and puts the bag on the table between them.

  ‘But after September 25, they stop.’ She takes a piece of küchen and sits across from him. ‘I couldn’t find anything else. Not even in the histories. Hitler’s biographies mention this only in passing. One went so far as to say that Geli’s death made Hitler suicidal.’

  Fritz takes some strudel. Frosting will always be his downfall. Thick or glazed, white or dark, he loves liquid sugar on top of the sweets. ‘The answers you look for are not in the papers or in the histories. Historians do not know the truth.’

  ‘I assume they did research. I assume they did all the appropriate primary research.’ She takes a bite, and wipes a crumb from her lip.

  ‘They did not,’ he says.

  ‘How do you know?’

  He looks at her for a moment, then says, ‘None of them has spoken to me.’

  ‘Perhaps the case isn’t as important as you think.’

  ‘You have not heard it all,’ he says.

  ‘If it were important –’

  ‘Remember what I told you,’ he says. ‘No one speaks of important things.’

  She pulls another piece off her pastry, her brow furrowed. She hunches in her chair, thinking, worrying that this case is not worth all the time they have spent. He can see that in her eyes. She wants another Demmelmayer.

  Gustav Demmelmayer killed his wife and covered the murder very well. Fritz solved it using techniques not available before the war: comparing hairs from the killer to hairs found under his wife’s fingernails, taking fingerprints from the brass buttons on her coat, and matching the contents of her stomach to the meal in the trash behind Demmelmayer’s home. It was, in its own way, a simple case, no different from any other domestic murder in Munich that year. The husband suspects the wife of adultery, confronts her, kills her, and dumps the body. Hundreds of husbands did the same after the war, some with more cause. Some whose wives left, and sold themselves for bits of bread.

  Demmelmayer was different only in that he cleaned up the murder site instead of fleeing from it. He threw the body in the Isar, and managed to commit his crime unwitnessed. He made two mistakes: he destroyed and then replaced the kitchen knife he had used to kill her – and the woman who sold him the replacement remembered the date; and he placed his wife’s body in a leather garment bag weighted with stones but did not toss her deep enough in the river. The body was discovered, mostly dry, soon after it had been disposed of.

  Some men’s wives were never found. Some of those women became anonymous bodies at city morgues. Many of the detectives in the Kripos across Germany did not understand this scenario.

  But Fritz did, and thus his fame, and the case known as Demmelmayer was born.

  The Raubal case, on the other hand, had none of the common elements. It was a challenge, a special case, the kind most detectives never see, the kind with implications far beyond a family squabble. Hitler headed a political party. He had an alibi and many enemies. This case, not Demmelmayer, should have been the case Fritz was famous for.

  ‘Not important,’ he says as he takes another strudel. ‘No, child, it was so important the papers were afraid of it, afraid of what they might discover. Don’t you understand what we were dealing with here?’

  ‘Adolf Hitler before he came to power.’

  Fritz shakes his head. ‘Adolf Hitler as he came to power.’

  ‘What’s the distinction?’

  He pauses, pulls another piece of küchen apart with his unfamiliar fingers. ‘You will soon understand the distinction. If you listen.’
/>   ‘I just wish you wouldn’t be so mysterious.’

  ‘And I wish you wouldn’t be so impatient.’ He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes, biting back the rage that flares like a live thing inside him. He was a fool for choosing an ignorant American. A woman who might have been his granddaughter.

  He should have chosen a German who had family to go to, someone who could explain the horrible years after the war, the lack of food, the years that money became worthless, the influx of rich foreigners. The schiebers and their tricks getting wealthy off the pain of others. He should have chosen someone who understood that sometimes words were the only thing a man could believe in, when his future and his past lay in tatters at his feet. Someone who would understand the silences, the nuances, as much as he understood the culture itself.

  But he has not. He has chosen her, and she at least is interested. She simply wants to know his focus, where this story is going. She knows the end of Demmelmayer. She believes the ending of this case will be as simple.

  He opens his eyes and leans forward. She is watching him, the last bit of küchen between her thumb and forefinger.

  ‘This is not Demmelmayer,’ he says. ‘This is something more and something less. This is a case you cannot understand without understanding the details, without hearing the facts in the order that I learned them. I thought you wanted to know about the detective’s mind.’

  She eats the küchen. ‘I do,’ she says softly.

  ‘Then listen,’ he says. ‘And understand. The papers were silenced. Some with threats of lawsuit. Some with threats. And what could they do? The body was buried. The death was ruled a suicide. My investigation was unofficial, and I was only speaking to people involved in NSDAP. They would not run to the papers with news of my inquiry. Historians cannot know of this. I have the records.’

  ‘And no one has spoken to you?’

  ‘What would lead them to me? And why would they have interest? They do not know the importance of this case any more than you do.’

  She bows her head at the rebuke. Then she sighs, nods once, and presses the ‘record’ button on her tape machine.