Hitler's Angel Read online

  Fritz shook his head. ‘I have a reputation to consider, Herr Amann. I do not make accusations without evidence.’

  Amann’s eyebrows furrowed. ‘And whom would you accuse?’

  ‘No one. Is there someone I should be looking for?’

  They stared at each other for a moment. Finally, Amann said, ‘You realise that the Führer has many enemies.’

  ‘I am learning that life in the rarefied strata of the NSDAP is not all glory.’

  ‘We cannot let them think they could be successful in intimidating any part of the NSDAP.’

  ‘And you don’t think they feel successful just in your denials. If Geli was murdered, you are besmirching her reputation by claiming she killed herself. You are hurting your own party by saying a woman who lived with your Führer is so unhappy she has to kill herself.’

  ‘We don’t want an investigation.’ Amann said.

  ‘I believe an investigation is the least of your worries,’ Fritz said.

  ‘Now it is my turn to think you are threatening me.’

  ‘No threat,’ Fritz said. ‘Look at it outside the panic for a moment. Hitler was in Nuremberg. He was not involved. You might gain sympathy for your cause by claiming that Geli Raubal was murdered by rivals.’

  ‘It would show them that our security can be breached.’

  ‘I would think,’ Fritz said slowly, ‘they know that already.’

  Amann swallowed. He pursed his lips and tugged at his lapels again.

  Fritz let his arms fall to his side. ‘Let me see Hitler. Let me find out whom he believes could do such a thing. Then I will close the files, and if the papers want evidence, they can use mine.’

  ‘The Führer cannot talk to you,’ Amann said.

  ‘Why not?’ Fritz asked.

  ‘He will not see anyone. He is too shattered. We don’t –’ Amann stopped himself, swallowed, then tried again. ‘We don’t know if he will continue to head the party.’

  Fritz suddenly felt lightheaded. ‘Are you saying he is no longer competent to lead?’

  ‘She is the love of his life, Inspector. He cannot even tolerate visitors. I don’t know how he can go into public.’

  They also discussed who, if something were to happen, should be Hitler’s successor. Gregor Strasser was named… Fritz licked his dry lips. ‘How long will you wait for Hitler to heal?’

  ‘As long as we have to,’ Amann said. ‘He is our vision.’

  Fritz nodded.

  ‘So you see,’ Amann continued, ‘why we can’t have anything disturb him. We need him well. Time is short.’

  ‘Yes,’ Fritz said. ‘Time is very short.’ And getting shorter.

  ‘It seems odd,’ she says, ‘that he would come to you.’

  Fritz smiles. He can still see Max Amann’s face, the fire in his eyes when he spoke of his Führer. ‘It is not odd,’ Fritz says. ‘They had already spoken to the Chief Inspector. That hadn’t worked. I was getting close, and they were frightened.’

  ‘Did he really think he could scare you away?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Fritz sighs and leans back in his chair. ‘But I had seen so much, nothing frightened me.’

  ‘You were not afraid then?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘But you are afraid now?’

  He doesn’t look at her. ‘The memory, it brings with it the knowledge of the later years, of what happened to men like me when Hitler came to power.’

  ‘What happened?’ she asks.

  ‘They died,’ he says.

  THIRTY

  When Max Amann left, Fritz went to the precinct to use the hated telephone. He had little time, so he used it as wisely as he could. He called Berlin, spoke to the newspaper office where Otto Strasser worked, and discovered that Strasser spoke the truth, that he had come to Munich after hearing of Geli’s death.

  Or, at least, he had set up his alibi before he left.

  Fritz had too much to do. He needed Henrich. He found him going over a witness list.

  ‘I need you to go to Berlin,’ Fritz said. ‘You must check Otto Strasser’s alibi, then check on his followers.’

  ‘What of Gregor?’ Henrich asked.

  Fritz nodded. ‘Check on him when you return.’

  ‘What will you be doing?’ Henrich asked.

  ‘Following my only other lead,’ Fritz said.

  ‘Otto Strasser seems too important for you to have given him to Henrich,’ she says.

  Fritz smiles. ‘Otto Strasser was obvious,’ he says, ‘and many people discussed him. What I found important were the silences, the things not said.’

  ‘The denials,’ she says.

  ‘And the denials, where none were needed.’

  The drive to Nuremberg took two hours. Fritz timed it, deliberately going slow, then adding fifteen minutes to the total time. Hitler’s story, sent to the Kripo through his agents while Fritz was in Vienna, was that he had heard about Geli’s death on Saturday morning, and had hurried back so quickly that he had got a speeding ticket in Ebenhausen on the way back. Fritz had seen the ticket. It was issued on Saturday morning, after Geli’s body had been taken to Dr Zehrt.

  No one would talk about Hitler’s role in all of this. His chauffeur, the only other person who knew Hitler’s exact schedule, had disappeared as well.

  ‘So by this time, you believed Hitler killed her?’

  Fritz shakes his head. He does not want to give that impression. ‘I suspected someone in NSDAP, but I did not know who. I had nothing clear, no real reason for anyone to kill the girl.’

  ‘Except Eva.’

  ‘Not even Eva. She had no real way in.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you didn’t investigate those who hated him – the Communists, maybe.’

  He likes it better when she is silent. But as he gets deeper into the story, she is silent less and less. ‘It was clear from the first that Geli died at the hands of NSDAP, and not any other way.’

  She holds up one hand, then stops the tape and turns it over. As she presses ‘record’, she says, ‘It is not clear to me.’

  ‘A political murder, especially of a young and beautiful girl, would have helped the NSDAP. Had they been thinking clearly, they would have played it that way from the beginning. But something caused them to panic.’

  ‘A suicide, perhaps?’

  ‘With a broken nose?’

  ‘The nose could have happened in a different incident.’

  Fritz nods. ‘It could have. But it didn’t. I did not make those kinds of mistakes ever in my career. And you forget Father Pant.’

  ‘He was not the expert. You were.’

  ‘Yes, and I saw a murder victim.’

  ‘So someone in the NSDAP knew who killed her, and hid it.’

  ‘Ineffectively.’

  ‘But why kill a 23-year-old girl who had no interest in politics?’

  Fritz shrugs. ‘A hundred reasons. To frighten Hitler. To get him to resign.’

  ‘That would be the Strassers.’

  Fritz nods. ‘Or perhaps she knew something she wasn’t supposed to. She went on many important dinners with Hitler.’

  ‘What about the paintings?’

  ‘The paintings suggest blackmail, but who was blackmailing whom?’

  ‘Hitler’s sexual practices might have created attention.’

  ‘No.’ Fritz picks up his pack of cigarettes. ‘No, there you are wrong.’

  She frowns. ‘Wouldn’t the German people be shocked at what he was doing with his own unmarried niece?’

  ‘No.’ Fritz puts a cigarette in his mouth, grabs his lighter, and flicks the edge. The flame soars, leaving a butane stench in the air.

  ‘Come now,’ The girl says. ‘The Germans come from the same Western traditions as the rest of us. You can’t tell me that they were so liberal as to tolerate that kind of behaviour.’

  ‘It is not liberal.’ Fritz inhales, letting the tobacco cool his throat. He exhales in a big puff of white. ‘We all did things in
those days, things we were not proud of. There were live sex shows in Berlin in the Twenties. Good women sold their bodies for bread in the Great Inflation. We did not talk about our private behaviour. If we pointed the finger at one man, we might have to point it at ourselves.’

  She studies him for a long time, long enough for him to smoke the entire cigarette and stub the butt in the cut-glass ashtray. ‘You never explored the sexual evidence, did you? You never asked those questions. You let that information go right past you. I bet you never knew who sent you the paintings.’

  ‘It wasn’t important.’

  ‘It was important enough to tell me.’

  ‘It goes to motivation.’

  ‘Motivation?’ She clicks the top of her pen. ‘You solved the case then.’

  ‘You doubted that?’ He wonders if he should be offended. Perhaps he is offended too much.

  ‘You’ve been so cryptic, and then you retired after this case was closed. The more I listen to you, the more I know you are not the kind of man who would take money to remain silent. I thought perhaps you retired in disgrace.’

  ‘Perhaps I retired because I could no longer make money in my profession. There was a point when the city of Munich could not pay its employees.’

  ‘And a point when the banks closed. You don’t strike me as the kind of man who would leave then. It would give you even less security.’ Then she blinks. ‘Something robbed you of your security?’

  Fritz removes another cigarette from his pack. ‘Long before this,’ he says. ‘Long before this.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  He drove to the door of the Deutscher Hof hotel, and sat outside it for a long time before going in. The hotel was nice, but not extravagant, the sort of place a well-known man would stop for a short night. Again, Fritz checked his pocket watch. Two hours. No one had said if Hitler had business in Nuremberg. He would have arrived a little after three in the afternoon, too early to retire for the evening. If Fritz had been driving and planning to make a speech in Hamburg the following night, he would have stopped farther from Munich – Kassel perhaps, which was at least half way. The last thing Fritz would have done was leave the bulk of the driving for the day of the speech.

  He got out of the car and walked under the awning to the interior of the hotel. It smelled of mildew and dust, the cumulative effect being one of age, even though the furnishings looked new. The clerk behind the counter was a bespectacled man whose dark hair was slicked back and who filled his moments with movement so that he looked important.

  Fritz waited until the foyer was clear before approaching the desk. ‘I am looking for the clerk who was on duty Friday afternoon.’

  The man looked up. He was younger than Fritz had expected, in his early twenties, and poor. The cuffs of his white shirt were frayed. ‘I was.’

  ‘Were you also working on Saturday morning?’

  ‘No, sir. That would have been Erich.’

  ‘And is Erich here today?’

  ‘No, sir. May I help you with something, sir?’

  Fritz nodded. He pulled his papers from his pocket, then leaned across the desk. ‘I am Detective Inspector Stecher of the Munich Kripo. I would like to know if you remember a man registering on Friday afternoon.’

  ‘Many men registered on Friday. Have you a photograph?’

  ‘No.’ Fritz scanned the foyer. No one had entered. ‘Adolf Hitler, the head of NSDAP stayed here Friday night.’

  The clerk swallowed and slicked back his already perfect hair. ‘We’re not allowed to talk about the guests, sir.’

  ‘I don’t want to know about him,’ Fritz said. ‘I would just like to know what time he arrived.’

  The clerk nodded. He reached for the registry book beside him, opened it, and flipped to Friday’s page. ‘I have his man coming in here at 7 p.m., sir. I don’t remember him. I do know that I never saw Herr Hitler. He let his man do all the work.’

  ‘Seven p.m.?’ Fritz asked. ‘May I see your record?’

  ‘Certainly.’ The clerk spun the book around. ‘We have it twice, sir. See where the name is listed? Then we make a notation for the possession of the key. Erich recorded it returned at 10 a.m. the following morning.’

  ‘You never saw Herr Hitler?’

  The clerk shook his head. ‘And I wanted to. We don’t get well-known Bavarians here much.’

  ‘Would it have been possible for Herr Hitler to have checked in that afternoon?’

  ‘Not without a record, sir. And I do remember that afternoon. We had no rooms at all until five. It was causing problems with some of the other guests.’

  Fritz took a deep breath. ‘I see. Do you have a record of incoming phone calls as well?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And do you have one for Herr Hitler on Saturday morning?’

  The clerk spun the book back toward him. He ran a hand down the page, then took out another book and ran through that. ‘None, sir. We had no calls for guests all day.’

  Hess had said that he had contacted Hitler before Hitler left for Hamburg. Hitler’s official story claimed that someone had called the hotel, but Hitler had already left, so the hotel’s dispatch motorcycle courier had overtaken Hitler’s car.

  ‘Who is your motorcycle courier?’ Fritz asked.

  The clerk smiled as if Fritz had made a joke. ‘We use one of the services, Inspector. We have no courier of our own.’

  ‘Are the services open on Saturday?’

  ‘I believe they are, sir, but again, we have no record of anyone contacting them.’

  ‘You rely heavily on records,’ Fritz said. ‘Does everyone?’

  The clerk nodded. ‘Keeping track of the day-to-day dealings is part of my job. If I fail to note a transaction or a phone call, it is grounds for dismissal.’

  Fritz said nothing, although he had a sudden picture of the tedium of the clerk’s job, and the tyranny of a small-minded master.

  ‘So tell me,’ Fritz said. ‘If a man arrived early to this hotel on Friday, left on Saturday, also early, and then received a phone call, what would happen?’

  ‘If someone arrived early, we would have done our best to accommodate, but he would have been told to wait. His arrival would have been noted, and the time he was put into a room noted as well. Then his departure and payment would have been recorded, as would any phone call that came after he left.’

  ‘And how would you have forwarded a message if the phone call was an emergency?’

  The clerk shrugged. ‘We have never faced that situation. I suppose we would have tried to contact the person at his next stop, if we knew it.’

  Fritz nodded. ‘When will Erich be back?’

  ‘He works only the weekend, sir. We won’t see him until Saturday.’

  Fritz thanked the clerk for his time, and then left. Outside, he sat in his car and stared at the hotel. He would probably return on the weekend, to see if Erich confirmed the clerk’s story, but Fritz really had no doubt that he would. The Hitler camp had lied again, this time about Hitler’s whereabouts, and Fritz didn’t like where this was going.

  ‘So Hitler killed her.’

  ‘There was no proof of that,’ Fritz says. ‘Only discrepancies in a story filled with them. It really didn’t matter what time Hitler got to the hotel, if the girl died during the night as they claimed. He was still out of the way. The phone call the next morning, though, that had me baffled. I wasn’t certain why they lied about that.’

  She shakes her head, looks at him, her perplexity showing on her face. ‘I don’t understand. If everyone lies and the physical evidence is unimportant, how do you get at the truth?’

  ‘You hope you find someone who will not lie,’ he says. ‘Or you hope you can bluff your way to getting someone to confess.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  By the time he returned to Munich, it was late. He had timed the drive again, and again it had come out to two hours, subtracting the time he spent in Ebenhausen. The traffic police did have a record of the ticket gi
ven to Hitler’s Mercedes, but no one in the office remembered the man driving, or if he had a passenger.

  Fritz drove by the coroner’s office, and swung the car through the narrow alley between the buildings. The alley had once been a road, but it was barely big enough for an automobile, so it had became an alley in recent years. Zehrt used it for his coroner’s wagon, and often kept the road blocked. It was not blocked tonight.

  Fritz stopped his car near the rear door. A single light burned in the offices, in the examining room. Through the unshaded window, Zehrt worked over a corpse, alone.

  The Schupo had spoken to Zehrt about his unwillingness to cover the windows, saying it was both a breach of security and a danger for the coroner himself. But Zehrt had merely laughed. He claimed that only those with the strongest stomachs could watch him cut open a corpse, and he also maintained that it took an even stronger man to break into a place with a dead body already on the table.

  The years had proven him correct.

  Fritz, however, had watched many an autopsy. His stomach was not as strong as Zehrt’s, but it was close.

  Fritz got out of the car, and walked to the window. His feet crunched on the small parking space. Grass had grown over cobblestones so brittle that they had broken into tiny rocks. Still Zehrt did not look up. He was intent on the corpse in front of him, a beefy, balding man with a tattoo on his right forearm. Zehrt was examining the tattoo when Fritz rapped on the window.

  Zehrt looked up slowly, as if people knocked on his window every night. He shook his head when he saw Fritz, but Fritz knocked again. Finally Zehrt set his tools down, pulled off his gloves, and came to the window. He yanked it open. The odours of formaldehyde and death surrounded him.

  ‘I am in the middle of work,’ he snapped.

  ‘I have a few questions. It will only take a moment.’

  ‘I don’t have a moment,’ Zehrt said.

  ‘Looks like you have a Communist on the table.’

  ‘I don’t know what he is. He was knifed in the English Garden, but the wounds seem superficial. I am beginning to wonder if his heart went with the fear and shock.’