Hitler's Angel Page 6

  Her tone has a subtle shade of judgement. All Americans do when they speak of religion, as if Germans do not understand tolerance.

  Perhaps they don’t. The history doesn’t show it. In fact, very few people he knew showed tolerance. Even now.

  She leans forward. For a moment, he thinks she is going to touch him. He does not move.

  ‘So,’ she says. ‘What did she mean by family connections?’

  ‘To Catholics, suicide is an unpardonable act. The victims are placed in unconsecrated ground. Often a priest will not conduct the funeral. Angela Raubal’s family sent her body to a priest who knew her, who would probably be willing to, in the least, beg God’s mercy for her soul.’ Fritz is grateful to be talking again, grateful the awkward moment is over, grateful that she has given him a way to continue gracefully.

  ‘I think I read about that practice somewhere,’ she says, her smile back. ‘Religion makes people do strange things sometimes.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says with more sadness than he intends. ‘Yes, it does.’

  The daylight was fading when Fritz emerged from the precinct. If he wanted to find the body, he would have to go to Vienna. Even if he left now, he would drive all night.

  Fritz stopped beside his car and rubbed the tension in his neck. He would have to go now. The family would appear for the funeral. He needed to arrive first. He wanted to view the body privately, to examine it for any clues he could find.

  He had got another detective to use the precinct’s telephone to contact the priest. The parish apparently had a telephone as well, but the priest was as averse to its use as Fritz was. The detective’s conversation was short and loud, but he did manage to confirm a day and time for the funeral. It would take place on Monday in the morning.

  So few hours for Fritz to be alone with Geli, to see what secrets she would share before taking them with her to the grave. At least he had those few hours. Frau Winter’s mention of Father Pant meant that Fritz was not spending his evening with train schedules and porters, asking who had taken the body of Geli Raubal out of the country.

  Fritz got into the car, and placed his overnight bag beside him on the front seat. He kept extra changes of clothes at the precinct, often because he was not able to go home at night, and he preferred to wear clean clothes even if he had not slept. Those were the clothes he packed for his trip to Vienna. Next to the bag, he placed the department’s camera. It was large, awkward and square. It took both hands to hold it. But he had become accustomed to it. It had been useful in several other investigations. He had taken it for this investigation without asking.

  As he pulled away from the curb and flicked on the headlights, he felt more alone than he had felt since he joined the Kripo. To do this case properly, he should stay in Munich, interview the men who spirited the body away, find Hitler, see the letter Frau Winter had mentioned, speak to Frau Dachs, and discover the history of Geli’s relationships with the people around her. But he could do nothing without viewing the body. All he had so far were innuendoes of murder. If it became clear, after his trip to Vienna, that the girl’s death was an odd and politically embarrassing suicide, Fritz would speak to the Chief Inspector and asked to be released from the case.

  Without even realising what he had done, he found himself on Prinzregentenplaz. He glanced at the buildings, shadowy in the growing dark, then pulled over in front of Geli’s apartment building. If he left now, he would arrive in Vienna before dawn. The trip over the mountains was treacherous in the daytime. At night, it would be more so, and it would slow him down. But it did not matter if he arrived in Vienna at 3 a.m. or 5 a.m. Either way, he would get his work done. He had a few moments, then, to see if Frau Winter had returned to the apartment. If she had, she could give him the letter before he left. He might also be able to see Frau Dachs. It was better than waiting until he returned.

  A small crowd of curiosity seekers had gathered in front of the main door. They stood silently, almost worshipfully, as if expecting someone. He passed through the crowd and let himself in, surprised that the main entrance was not locked. The lights on the stairs were dim; the building’s owner had replaced gas lights with electricity but had tried to keep the same fixtures. The place looked ominous in the shadows.

  The door to Geli’s apartment was closed. Fritz listened, but heard nothing. He was not surprised; the apartments here were built for silence. He had noted that morning the door was as thick as his arm.

  He knocked. The sound was weak in the padded hallway, and he would have backed away at that moment if something in Frau Winter’s tale of the letter hadn’t nagged at him. Part of him was convinced that the letter did not exist.

  He was about to knock again when the door flew inward. A small man, his hair dark and slicked back, his face puffy and white, stared intently at Fritz.

  ‘Go away,’ the man said.

  Fritz nodded a greeting. ‘I am Detective Inspector –’

  ‘I don’t care if you are Hindenburg himself. Go away.’ The small man spoke with such force that spittle sprayed Fritz. He did not back away. Instead, he placed a hand on the door frame.

  ‘I am Detective Inspector Stecher. I am investigating the death –’

  ‘Of Geli,’ the little man finished. ‘There is nothing to investigate.’

  He started to close the door, but Fritz reached above the little man’s head and held the door open. As he looked down, he suddenly realised whom he was standing before.

  Adolf Hitler, head of the NSDAP, rumoured presidential candidate, and uncle to Geli Raubal. Fritz felt a shock run through him. Since he had last seen Hitler, the man had put on weight. His moustache was filled with food particles and his hair was dirty. His clothing was rumpled, and his eyes were swollen. It looked as if he had been crying.

  Fritz had never seen Hitler so distraught. The man had always been a fireball of anger and efficiency. Fritz left his hand on the door, but he softened his tone. ‘I beg your pardon, Herr Hitler. The Kripo would like to close this case as quickly as possible. I –’

  ‘Case? Case? There is no case. There is nothing for you here. Geli is dead.’

  ‘I know,’ Fritz said. ‘But the Kripo must investigate all unnatural cases of death. I know this is difficult, but –’

  ‘The Bavarian Minister of Justice has already determined that Geli committed suicide.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Fritz kept his tone even, although a great frustration was welling within him. ‘But there are certain protocols that must be followed, even if a ruling has been made. If you would allow me to come inside, I will explain the procedures, and get through them as quickly as possible.’

  Hitler’s lower lip trembled. He let go of the door, and backed away. For a moment, Fritz thought he was going to be allowed inside. He too let go of the door.

  Hitler shook his head and gazed down at the polished floor. He seemed very small, shrunken, as if the news had diminished him somehow. He was not the man Fritz had watched in the streets of Munich.

  ‘I am sorry, Detective Inspector,’ Hitler said. His voice had lost all the force he had used a moment ago. ‘I have only just returned. My niece is dead. I simply cannot face talking with you at this hour. Perhaps in the morning…’

  ‘I think it would be best for all of us to have this matter closed by tomorrow,’ Fritz said.

  ‘No,’ Hitler said. He looked up. His eyes were large and glistening. The hall was full of the scent of his cologne mixed with the faint odour of sweat. ‘No. We shall talk tomorrow, Inspector.’

  And then he closed the door so swiftly that Fritz barely had time to move his hand off the frame.

  Fritz stood before the door, staring at the carving in the wood. The apartment number had been etched in Gothic numerals. He could not hear any movement inside, and it almost felt as if Hitler were standing on the other side of the door, waiting for Fritz to move.

  Fritz raised a hand to knock again, then decided against it. Best to go to Vienna, and see if he had a case at all
.

  ELEVEN

  ‘Y ou were kind to Adolf Hitler?’ The girl sounds stunned. Her posture has shifted subtly and he can’t quite read it.

  ‘I treated him as I would have treated any witness,’ Fritz says.

  ‘That’s not true,’ she says. ‘You wrote in the handbook you compiled after Demmelmayer that an inspector should never let a witness determine the time and place of questioning.’

  The recorder clicks beside her. The tape is done.

  Fritz sighs. He should never have compiled that handbook. Reporters, investigators, and rookie detectives have all quoted his words to him as if any violation of them was violation of sacred writ.

  ‘I had unusual problems in this case,’ he says. ‘If I pressured Hitler, he would contact the Minister of Justice, who would then wonder why I was pursuing a closed investigation.’

  The girl grabs a tape from the top of her stack, and slips it into the recorder. Then she closes the lid and hits the record button. When she looks at him, she smiles, as if she has caught him at something.

  ‘That’s not why you didn’t pursue him,’ she says. ‘You didn’t pursue him because at that point, you thought Geli had committed suicide.’

  ‘No,’ Fritz says. ‘At that point, I hoped she had.’

  He drove all night, across roads that were difficult for the alert driver. He pulled over for a short nap near the Austrian border, waking when the chill in the car grew too great. He arrived in the outskirts of Vienna before dawn and was at the church when the first mass of the morning had just ended.

  It took no time to find Father Pant. The priest was younger than Fritz had expected – a thirtyish man, slender to the point of gauntness, with deep shadows under his eyes. He tried to hide his great height by slouching, which only made his body seem both tall and crooked. Father Pant was removing his vestments when Fritz entered the priest room behind the altar of the church, revealing a conservative black suit underneath.

  ‘Forgive me, Father,’ Fritz said, keeping his head down. He felt tired and rumpled. He had yet to find a hotel room and change. Instead, he had concentrated his efforts on finding the church. ‘One of the altar boys told me where you would be. I’m Detective Inspector Stecher from Munich. I am here about Geli Raubal.’

  The priest adjusted the collar and cuffs of his suit, then smoothed his hair. ‘You arrived quickly, Detective Inspector. I am surprised at your haste. I thought that German police have no sway in Austria.’

  Fritz nodded. He felt like an altar boy himself in this room, small and powerless next to the man before him. ‘Of course not, Father, but I was wondering if you could help me. The family removed Geli’s body before the police had a chance to see it, and we believe that the death may not have been a suicide.’

  The priest was placing his robe on a hanger. He stopped when Fritz said the word ‘suicide’. For a moment, he stood with his back to Fritz, then turned his head slightly. ‘I have documents from the Bavarian Minister of Justice and from a police doctor. Are you saying these documents are false?’

  ‘No, Father. They’re authentic. But the circumstances were unusual, and the doctor suggested, in a roundabout way, that I look at matters myself. By the time the Kripo had even been informed of the death, the body was on its way here.’

  The priest finished adjusting his robe, then he hung it on a peg behind the door. ‘I suppose you have papers?’

  Fritz pulled out his identification papers, and showed them to the priest. The priest picked up a pair of half glasses off the table and held them in front of his eyes without attaching them to his ears. Then, with one hand, he folded the glasses, and with the other, he returned Fritz’s papers.

  ‘I have known the Raubals a long time,’ the priest said. ‘Angela, Geli’s mother, was quite upset when she spoke with me yesterday.’

  ‘She called you?’

  The priest nodded. ‘She will be here this afternoon.’

  ‘Where is the body?’ Fritz asked.

  ‘At the Central Cemetery. No one arranged for a mortician, so I did.’ The priest put his glasses in their case and stuck the case in his breast pocket. His hands were sure, his manner calm. ‘The mortician will also arrive this afternoon.’

  Fritz felt his mouth go dry. A mortician would alter the body – it was his job. Fritz waited for the priest to continue with his comments, but he did not. ‘Have you another mass this morning?’

  Father Pant shook his head. ‘We have a nine a.m. mass and a noon mass, but I shall perform neither. I was going to use the time to prepare for tomorrow’s services.’ He took his long coat off the wall peg. ‘Come along. We shall take my car. No one will remark upon it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Fritz said. For all his matter-of-factness, the Father seemed as curious about the circumstances of Geli’s death as Fritz was.

  ‘No thanks needed,’ Father Pant replied. ‘I do this for Geli. Her soul is still my responsibility.’

  A click stops him. The girl smiles at him apologetically. ‘Something’s wrong with the tape,’ she says.

  Fritz still wants a beer. A headache throbs at the back of his skull, has throbbed since he saw the photograph. ‘This is a fine place to end,’ he says. ‘I will see you in the morning then.’

  ‘Would you like me to bring breakfast again?’ She has not even begun to pack her equipment. He wishes she would move. He wants to be alone.

  ‘Yes, fine,’ he says. Their relationship seems to be based on food. Of course, all of his relationships with women seemed to have revolved around food.

  She nods, places her tapes in her large bag, and slings it over her shoulder. Then she picks up the recorder. ‘Until tomorrow, then.’

  ‘Until tomorrow,’ he says.

  She lets herself out, pulling the door closed quietly.

  The endings of these sessions are awkward for him. He feels as if she expects something more from him. Entertainment? A quiet dinner? He does not know.

  He stays in the chair as darkness grows around him. For years, he was afraid to speak of this, afraid to remind people that he was the one who had been forced to retire from the Kripo over the Raubal case. He had tried to speak then and was silenced. Then he did not speak at all. No one cared in London. When he returned to Germany, when he had his measure of fame, when he was ready to speak in the decades after the Second World War, no one wanted to listen. He had become a national hero, somehow, the man who had solved Demmelmayer, the man who had developed modern crime-solving techniques. The London Times had called him ‘Germany’s Sherlock Holmes’. The New York Times had called him ‘The Greatest Detective in the World’. Someone had discovered him, someone had claimed Fritz’s reputation was great, and people believed him. Hitchcock had tried to make his film in 1950, and when that became news, all the Berlin newspapers contacted him. They contacted him again in the 1960s, after that abysmal television movie aired worldwide. Scholars started knocking on his door. Everyone made money from his fame, even him.

  Yet that has not bothered him. The dreams bother him. They are not of Demmelmayer – he only thinks of Demmelmayer when someone asks – but of Geli. In his dreams, she is laughing, a beautiful young girl, the kind that once looked at him with admiration and longing. Then a cloud passes over her face, and when she cries his name, the cry is full of terror.

  He always awakens chilled, no matter how warm his rooms are. He makes himself tea, not coffee, after those dreams, and wraps himself in blankets, looking out of his windows at Munich after dark. With the chill comes a great guilt, a guilt he does not completely understand.

  Over the years, the dream’s frequency has increased. Soon he will have the dream every night. Every night, haunted by Geli. He will become as bad as Hitler whom, they say, made the dead girl his own private obsession. Fritz does not want that. He wants peace in his last few years. The only way he can have that peace, he believes, is to talk out the memory. Exorcise the dream. But try as he might, he has not found anyone who is willing to listen.

/>   Until now.

  This girl seems so frail, so fragile. Perhaps he asked her because she reminded him of Geli. But that can’t be true. He has asked other scholars, men, to listen. They refused. The Raubal case made no difference in modern police science – their specialty, all of them. Only Demmelmayer made that kind of difference. Demmelmayer. A routine murder gone awry. Gustav Demmelmayer murdered his wife in a fit of passion. He had, however, covered his crime very well. Another detective, in an earlier time, would not have solved the case.

  Fritz had, because he knew science. But more than that, he solved the case through his attention to detail, his interpretation of that detail, and his sideways knowledge of the human mind. Years later, when he had nothing to fill his days, he read the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, and was startled to discover that an English fiction writer had come up with the same idea decades before. Only he had never explained the techniques. They were accorded to Holmes’ brilliance, to his own special insights – insights the average man could not have. Fritz had brilliance, no one argued with that. But unlike Holmes, Fritz had shared that brilliance in a way the most common detective could understand. For that, Fritz had become famous. For that, Fritz would be remembered in the annals of crime history.

  Little comfort as he sits alone in his two rooms, in the dark, with dreams of a dead girl haunting his sleep. Little comfort at all.

  TWELVE

  The morning was grey and cold, reflecting Fritz’s mood. The Central Cemetery was also grey and cold, with its stone fences and wrought iron gates. The mortuary inside the gate was empty. Father Pant parked his car around the back, and used a gold key to open the unpainted wooden door. Fritz brought the camera with him. It was heavy and large, and he had to carry it carefully. Father Pant watched him without offering help. The camera itself had gained a withering glance from him earlier when Fritz had removed it from his own car.