Blood Flag: A Paul Madriani Novel (22 page)

“One of them was an older-model 1973 Olds,” says Herman. “It caught my eye because of the vintage. I thought it might be our vehicle. But it turned out to be a salvage car. It was declared totaled by the insurance company a couple of years ago after an accident. It’s been junked out, maybe shredded by now, we don’t know for sure. According to the DMV, that particular plate number is not assigned to any vehicle currently registered on the road.”

“So we can scratch that one,” says Harry.

“Not necessarily,” says Herman. “Old plates from salvage yards sometimes find their way onto other vehicles, especially if they’re gonna be used to commit a crime. They may change out the plates several times before the car is abandoned or dumped in a lake somewhere.”

“You said there were three?” I ask.

“One of the cars was resold to a new owner. The plates were changed and the old plates retired. The last one is a later-model Toyota Celica. It doesn’t fit the description of the car the neighbors saw that night. But here’s the interesting thing. The Celica was last registered and licensed three years ago. Later that year it was totaled in an accident and hauled to a wrecking yard. But when the report got to the DMV, the vehicle’s VIN number, the vehicle identification that’s stamped inside the door or under the hood, didn’t match the old plate number. According to DMV records, the car showed a different plate.”

“What does that mean?” says Harry.

“We don’t know. It could just be that the DMV screwed up, an error in data entry. Or maybe the wrecking yard sold the plates to somebody else. What we do know is that there’s no current registration under the old license number. It just seems to have disappeared.”

“If a traffic cop saw it on the street, especially if the license didn’t have a current tag, they’d run a check right from the squad car,” says Harry. “They’d nail them on the street.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” says Herman. “Remember the neighbor? The woman said the car looked like a wreck, all rusted out. A car like that would be a ticket magnet.”

“It doesn’t sound like there’s much else to go on. So maybe we work that angle.” I look at Herman. “Can we have the investigators run a check on moving and parking violations, say San Diego County, for any citations issued under that license number?” Herman has laid a DMV form on the table with the subject plate number.

“Might need some authority,” he says. “A subpoena would help.”

“We can issue it as part of the discovery in Emma’s defense. Do it,” I tell Harry.

“Got it.”

I look down at the plate number printed on the form, 5QPU783, and wonder if it’s connected to Sofia’s killer.

TWENTY-EIGHT

I
t’s after hours and the office is locked up. Harry finds me at my desk checking voicemail messages.

He sticks his head in the door and says, “Got a minute?”

“Come on in.”

“I’ve been researching the Internet. Something caught my eye. You remember the article from Joselyn’s iPad, the piece on Jakob Grimminger?”

“Yes.”

“There was something in the article, a word in German, that got lost in Herman’s translation when he skimmed the piece in our meeting.”

“What was that?” I place the receiver back on the phone’s base.

“I went back and read it,” says Harry. “It was the word
Blutfahne
. According to the piece, one of Grimminger’s duties was to carry the Blutfahne during ceremonial functions. And that wasn’t all. At the end of the article, Herman skipped something I think may be important. He read from the article that after the war Grimminger was put on trial for being a member of the German SS, that he wasn’t convicted, but they took away all his property anyway.”

“I remember.”

“But there’s more. There were two charges brought against Grimminger, according to the article: his SS membership
and
the fact that he carried the Blutfahne for nineteen years.”

“Well, don’t keep me in suspense,” I tell him.

“The word
Blutfahne
means ‘Blood Flag’ in English.”

“What? You mean like waving the bloody shirt?” It’s a tactic on the part of some politicians to refer to the blood of martyrs and heroes, often in the form of dead soldiers, to silence their opponents.

“In a way,” says Harry. “But in this case it was more than a metaphor. The item was real. You remember from the article, Grimminger goes way back. He had a long history with Hitler. What do you know about Adolf’s rise to power?” he asks.

“Not a lot. He rose up out of the Depression. Took power as chancellor after Hindenburg died. Took over two or three countries before the war started in ’39 with the invasion of Poland.”

“Before that,” says Harry. “The early days.”

I shake my head. “Is it important? Otherwise I’ve got some things . . .”

“It is if you want to know what we’re looking for. It’s very important,” says Harry.

This stops me cold in my tracks. I look at him. He is dead serious. “Go on.”

“Before the First World War, Adolf was a homeless itinerant. Transport him to modern times and he’d be sitting on a sidewalk outside a mall with a cardboard sign and a plastic bucket panhandling for change.

“He was a failed artist. He wandered from the small town where he was born in Austria to Vienna, the capital. There he was denied entrance to art school at the university. It was a rejection that many of the highborn Viennese would come to regret. He went from there to Munich, where he worked as a laborer, sold watercolors on the street, and survived in flophouses.

“Hitler didn’t find any kind of a groove until the First World War, when he joined the German army. There he found a cause even though he was Austrian, not German, by birth. During the war he served as a messenger on the front lines. He was wounded several times, won the Iron Cross, but never advanced beyond the rank of corporal, even though he was offered a promotion. He turned it down. Why? Nobody knows for sure, but according to some it was because he hated authority. That’s ironic, isn’t it?” says Harry. “The ultimate authoritarian rejecting a share of authority.”

“Maybe he didn’t want it unless he could have it all,” I tell him.

“Ah, so you did read history,” says Harry.

“No, psychology of the warped mind. Go on. I assume this is leading somewhere?”

“Bear with me,” says Harry. “Near the end of the First World War, Hitler gets gassed in the trenches. He loses his eyesight for a time. He’s sent to an army hospital for treatment, and while he’s there convalescing, the war ends. Germany surrenders, followed by the onerous Treaty of Versailles, where the Allies, mostly the French and British, take their pound of flesh from the Germans in the form of huge reparation payments and the transfer of territory. They set the table for World War Two.

“The German people were bitter. There was high unemployment, their economy was ravaged by hyperinflation, and in 1929 it went over the edge and into the abyss with the Great Depression. It became the perfect backdrop for the rise of a tyrant,” says Harry.

“But long before that, Hitler was given a job by the army. Way back when, in 1918, after the war, he had recovered his eyesight. He was still a corporal in the army. He was sent back to Munich. The army was the only place he’d ever been semi-successful. It was the only home he had, so he wasn’t about to muster out voluntarily. They needed to find him a job. You know what they say, idle hands are the devil’s workshop. In his case, they would have been wiser to chop them off. The job they found for him ultimately led the world to disaster.

“They assigned Hitler to an army intelligence unit. They sent him out to spy on various rabble-rousing political groups that were cropping up around the city of Munich.

“There was a lot of angry talk about how the army had been stabbed in the back by the politicians who sued for peace and signed the treaty. The German people were angry about how the war ended. So was Hitler. So it shouldn’t have come as any great surprise when Adolf showed up at one of these meetings and decided that he agreed with the fanatics who were up on the stage.

“They wanted to overthrow the government—the new Weimar Republic. Hitler figured why not, but only on one condition: if he could lead the parade. Hitler came to realize in a short time that he had an exceptional gift for speaking before large groups. He was especially skilled in the dialect of demagoguery. He could appeal to the basic instincts of the human heart in a single sentence, stick his tongue directly in the bull’s-eye and wiggle it.

“With a little manipulation and backstabbing, Adolf took over the group. At the time it was called the German Workers Party, the DAP. Later, he and some followers changed the name to the National Socialist German Workers Party, known to history as the Nazis. Hitler used his artistic skills to craft its emblem, the black swastika in a white circle on a red background. It’s rumored that he designed and commissioned the original flag himself.

“In 1919 he left the army and went to work full-time for the party. He spent the next four years speaking in beer halls where the group met, increasing its numbers, inflaming its members and organizing.

“By early November of 1923, he was getting impatient and ready to act. He had watched Mussolini take over Italy the previous year and thought he could do the same. Hitler decided to take over the German government by force, starting with the city of Munich. He planned out the coup, brought in a few necessary allies, including Ludendorff, a general from the First World War, and appropriated a couple of machine guns from a local armory. He had some former disaffected soldiers man the guns.

“Then Hitler, with a pistol in his hand, stormed a beer hall where the titular head of the Bavarian government and his entourage were meeting. He took them captive and tried to convince them to join his movement. When they pretended to negotiate but then escaped, Hitler didn’t have a lot of options left. He was already committed. He and his followers, including Grimminger, marched on the city hall in an attempt to take it over.

“They didn’t get far. The Munich city police opened fire on them in a narrow street. Thirteen of them were killed. Hitler went to the ground, his arm dislocated, when the man next to him was shot. The flag they were carrying, the one Hitler designed, fell on the street and was stained with the blood of one Andreas Bauriedl, who fell mortally wounded on top of it.”

“The Blood Flag,” I say.

Harry nods. “Hitler escaped, but he was caught two days later hiding in a house with a woman, the wife of one of his wealthy supporters. He was arrested and put on trial for treason. He used his skills as an orator to turn the trial into one against the government, and himself into a folk hero. As a result he received a very light sentence, just over a year in Landsberg Prison. He spent his time living in relative comfort with aides while he wrote his memoirs,
Mein Kampf
, meaning ‘My Struggle,’ in which he gave the world’s leader fair warning about what was to come. Of course, they didn’t listen to him. They never do.

“When Hitler got out of Landsberg, there was a gift waiting for him. One of his followers had managed to find their flag, blood and all. They presented it to Hitler as a memento of the Beer Hall Putsch, the incident that brought him to national prominence. To Hitler the putsch became a seminal event in terms of personal loyalty. Those involved with him were considered the patron saints of Nazism.

“In the early thirties, after his rise to power, Hitler used the flag as a talisman during the giant Nuremberg rallies, when he performed seeming acts of voodoo. He would grip the bloodstained flag in one hand while he touched the various flags of SS units in order to consecrate them. He would present a wreath to the immortal thirteen who died, shot down by the police. God help anyone who didn’t genuflect,” says Harry.

“The bloody shirt,” I say.

“In a word,” says Harry. “There were some who theorized that the entire ceremony was the result of Hitler’s own sense of guilt, because he not only survived the putsch, he ran. As for Grimminger, Hitler steered him away from brown-shirted SA to black-uniformed death’s-head of SS just in time. As a result, Grimminger survived the ‘Night of the Long Knives,’ which took place in June 1934. Hitler and his SS purged the SA and assassinated most of its leaders. But he saved his old comrade from the beer hall days, and then assigned him to carry the Blood Flag. There are pictures all over the Internet of Grimminger, standing like a statue, holding the flag at ceremonies and meetings. It’s a wonder pigeons didn’t crap all over him.”

“What happened to the flag?”

“Nobody knows,” says Harry. “Or if they do, they aren’t saying. According to what I could find, the flag was stored in a special area, a flag display in the Brown House, the Nazi headquarters in Munich. The building was bombed by the Allies in the late summer of 1944. The structure was heavily damaged. From that point on the flag disappeared. After the war, the Allies and the German authorities assumed that the flag was destroyed in the bombing. As far as they were concerned, it was good riddance. They didn’t want any Nazi shrines or relics to give rise to a Hitler cult. But it’s possible that they were wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“There have been rumors, very persistent rumors.”

“Rumors of what?”

“They date back to the end of the war,” says Harry. “And it’s possible that at the time, they had no idea as to the significance of what they found. But there are stories that American GIs who occupied Munich in the days following the German surrender found the Blood Flag and took it as a war trophy.”

TWENTY-NINE

F
or several days Nino had watched the house on Winona Avenue in hopes of going back in. But there were problems. The woman, the homeowner, was now represented by a law firm. Nino knew this because he had seen the lawyer’s name in the newspapers. His office was somewhere over in Coronado. Lawyers were always a pain in the ass. Her house was also now being watched by security. Nino had seen the cars drive by on a regular schedule, overhead light bars and the company’s logo on the doors.