Hitler's Angel (6 page)

Frau Reichert opened the clasp of her bag and retrieved a wadded handkerchief. She wiped at her eyes. ‘She was on her back, her eyes open. She looked so surprised.’

‘Was it her gun?’

Frau Reichert shook her head. ‘It was one of Herr Hitler’s. He kept a collection in his room.’

‘Where is the gun now?’

She shrugged. ‘I do not know. I did not go back to her room after they took her away.’

‘Did you hear anything? A gunshot? Any shouting?’

‘Not in the night.’

‘In the morning?’

‘No,’ Frau Reichert said.

‘Was there a note?’

Frau Reichert shrugged. ‘I did not go into the room. The men went in.’

‘What made you call Herr Schwarz? Didn’t you have a key?’

She glanced up at him, quickly, then down again. ‘I – I was worried,’ she said.

‘But you didn’t care for Geli.’

‘She is – was – trouble.’ Frau Reichert opened her handbag and put the damp handkerchief back inside. Then she whispered, ‘God forgive me.’

‘Trouble?’ Fritz asked.

‘Herr Hitler did not permit her to go out. Munich is dangerous, he says, and he is right. And she would not listen to him. She said she had no one after the bird died.’

‘Bird?’

‘Hansi. Her canary. She wouldn’t let us bury it.’

‘When did the bird die?’

Frau Reichert snapped her bag closed. ‘Not long ago.’

‘Why do you think Geli died?’ He waited for the answer. He purposely did not mention suicide.

Frau Reichert stared at her hands. ‘She was willful. Capricious. She never listened.’

‘She killed herself because she never listened?’ Fritz asked.

Frau Reichert lifted her head. The tears had formed again. Her lower lip trembled.

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ she said, and he realised that from the way she spoke, she was not referring to the gunshot. Something had happened. Something else was going on, and she was trying, in her inefficient way, to hide it.

The trip to Vienna might not be wasted after all.

‘What happened after you found the body?’

‘I don’t know,’ Frau Reichert said.

‘You don’t know what you did?’

‘I went and told my mother. She heard nothing either.’

‘When did you come out of your room?’

‘When Frau Winter arrived with the constable.’

‘Frau Winter lives on site as well?’

‘No. She went home last night.’

‘Who called her?’

Frau Reichert shrugged. ‘I was with my mother.’

Fritz bit back his frustration. The woman was terrified, but he did not know if she was terrified of him. She was old enough to remember some of the excesses after the war, but not everyone viewed the police with fear.

‘Where was Herr Hitler this morning?’

‘I don’t know,’ Frau Reichert said. ‘He was to give a speech, but I don’t know where. Not Bavaria. They don’t let him speak in Bavaria. The restrictions are unfair, he says.’

‘Where can he speak?’

‘He spoke in Berlin.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know much about his business.’

‘When did he leave?’ Fritz asked.

‘Yesterday. Afternoon. After lunch.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Did he have lunch with Geli?’

‘Spaghetti,’ Frau Reichert said. ‘Geli said she was sick of spaghetti. But he loves it, you know.’

‘When did she say she was sick of spaghetti?’

‘Yesterday.’ Frau Reichert’s voice had lowered. She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.

‘Were they fighting?’

‘She wanted to go to Vienna. Ungrateful girl. She has everything right there.’

He noted the shift to present tense. Frau Reichert had said those words before. ‘Is that what they fought about?’

‘He didn’t want her to go. He had called her back from the last trip. But she was yelling at him.’

‘Did you hear what they said?’

Frau Reichert shook her head. ‘Not after I served the spaghetti. They yelled all through lunch.’

‘Then?’

‘He left. And she went into her room. I know because she slammed the door so hard the walls shook.’

She could hear a slammed door but not a gunshot. Fritz said nothing about that. ‘And then what happened?’

‘Nothing. I did not see her.’ Frau Reichert swallowed and looked at Fritz. ‘Until this morning.’

A tear ran down the side of her face and remained under her chin. She did not wipe it away.

‘Why are you crying?’ he asked softly.

The tears fell hard now. She bit her lower lip, then opened her bag and removed the crumpled handkerchief again. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know.’

F
 ritz takes a breath. ‘I need a cigarette,’ he says. He is out. He is hoping she will offer to buy him a pack, although he refuses to ask.

She looks at her watch. It is round and gold with tiny roman numerals on its face. A slender hand ticks away each second. He cannot read the watch upside down either. ‘We should probably have lunch.’

‘There is a deli down the block.’ He does not offer to buy them lunch. He wants her to bring the food back. He wants her to leave him alone for a few minutes.

She grabs her bag, stands. ‘I’ll buy.’

He does not rise. ‘I would like cold roast pork on salt rye. And a pack of cigarettes. Tell them the cigarettes are for me. They keep a carton for me under the counter.’

She opens her mouth, closes it, and smiles. The smile does not reach her eyes. ‘I thought perhaps we could talk.’

‘My dear,’ he says, ‘I have been talking.’

‘No, I mean, about me.’

He looks at her, really looks at her, in a way he hasn’t wanted to. Her pantsuit is umber polyester, her bag plastic. She has worn the same white platform shoes every day since he met her. She is not
part of the workers, the opportunists who have come here for the Olympics. Such a travesty that will be. They have ruined his city, rebuilt it with their ugly designs, and they think that such an event can erase the bloodstains of the past.

Just as Hitler thought in 1936.

But this woman, this Annie, she is not one of them. Despite her inadequate history, her poor education, she is here to discover things. To dig up the past. The Olympics made a trip to Munich affordable, she said to him on the telephone when she arrived. She is on sabbatical, she has told him that, but she probably came to Munich alone, studies alone, spends her time alone. Her grant is probably small, and her income from her teaching position smaller. After she leaves him, she returns to the apartment the university provides for her and studies in the silence, away from her friends, her family, her world.

He sighs, then pulls his wallet from the drawer of the end table. He hands it to her without counting the bills. He knows how much money is in it, knows how much lunch will cost.

‘I am an old man,’ he says softly, knowing it is an ersatz excuse. ‘I need a moment to rest.’

Her smile remains, but the edges of her eyes pinch. He has hurt her.

‘Please,’ he says, ‘buy whatever you like.’

‘I should pay. You’re helping me.’

He lets the words hang in the air for a moment. He is not sure who is helping whom. Then he smiles and waves her away. ‘You bought breakfast.’

She nods, turns, but not before her smile fades. She looks older today. She lets herself out, and he waits until he can no longer hear her footsteps on the stairs. Then he gets up, like a sleepwalker, and returns to his bedroom.

He has left the cardboard box in the middle of the floor. He crouches, and reaches inside. The cardboard squeaks as the back of his hands rub against the sides. His fingers brush mounting board, and even before he has a chance to think, the photograph is in his hands.

It is the wrong photograph. This one he has forgotten. It hits him like a fist in the belly. He stares at the posed photograph, taken of his family just before he left. His younger self stands straight and sombre, his uniform loose, its collar starched, the gold buttons looking white in the black-and-white print. His hat is tucked under his left arm, his chin is jutted forward. He has a young, hopeful look that disappeared in the trenches. None of his later photographs ever seemed so bright-eyed.

But it is not his younger self that hurts him. Nor is it Gisela. She is even more beautiful than he remembered, her brown hair piled on top of her head, her smile soft and serene. She wore no make-up in those days, and her black dress, although simple, accentuates the fullness of her figure in ways the cabaret clothes she favoured in the Twenties never did.

No. It is not his wife that stops his heart. It is the babe she cradles in her arms. Wilhelm. Fritz never lets himself think about Wilhelm.

Footsteps on the stairs. He tosses the photograph back in the box, then folds down the flaps and shoves the box back into the closet. He pauses, puts a hand over his forehead, presses against the bridge of his nose. Even then, the image will not go away. The one that he sees in his dreams. Little Wilhelm, named by an idealistic youth for his precious and misguided Kaiser. Wilhelm, whose face was so thin when he died that he looked like a skeleton already.

She knocks, then opens the door. He stands, almost losing his balance.

‘Frederich?’ she says. ‘Herr Stecher?’

He makes himself walk to the door. ‘Fritz,’ he says. ‘Since we are spending our days together.’

She smiles, a real smile this time. She pulls a box of cigarettes from the bag she carries, and hands them to him. Then she goes into his kitchen and takes dishes from the drying rack. She arranges the sandwiches on two plates as he watches. A woman has not worked in his kitchen, not in the two decades that he has lived here.

‘The deli is quaint,’ she says.

Quaint. The warmth he felt toward her recedes. Quaint. A condescending word. So that he cannot forget the political hegemony that separates them. He would never call anything American quaint.

‘It has stood on that corner longer than you have had a homeland,’ he says.

‘Well,’ she says, unconcerned by his tone, ‘it certainly seems authentic.’

She hands him his plate. He takes it and sets it beside his chair. She takes her sandwich and sits. He goes back into the kitchen and pours himself a beer. It is early to be drinking.

It is late to be thinking of Wilhelm.

But he does both.

‘So,’ the girl says, her mouth full of food. ‘Did the housekeeper confirm Frau Reichert’s story?’

He grips the counter, marvelling how one part of his past can save him from dwelling on another, darker, infinitely more terrifying part.

T
he housekeeper, Frau Annie Winter, did not hunch. Each movement she made had a military precision. The wary look she had had in the apartment had hardened into a craftiness that he trusted even less. She sat in the same chair Frau Reichert had, but Frau Winter used it like a battle station to counteract his every move.

During his brief interview with her in the apartment, she had seemed distracted. Here she had a sharp focus as if the few hours that had gone by solidified events in her mind.

Fritz did not sit when he spoke to her. Instead he stood over her, crossing his arms and standing as close as he could without touching her. Those who intimidate hated to be intimidated.

‘When did you go to the apartment today, Frau Winter?’ he asked.

She looked up, met his gaze evenly. ‘Frau Reichert called me. She wanted the keys to Geli’s room.’

‘Why didn’t Frau Reichert have keys?’

‘She is responsible for no one except her mother.’

‘What is their position in the household?’

‘They are guests of Herr Hitler.’

‘They are family then?’

‘No.’ Frau Winter’s mouth was tight with disapproval. ‘Frau Reichert was his landlady before he moved to Prinzregentenplaz. She was kind to him. He is kind in return.’

Fritz clasped his hands behind his back. The room had a chill dampness that seeped from the brick. ‘So she does nothing to help you.’

‘Oh, she helps. When it amuses her, ’Frau Winter said. Her tone was even, her face impassive.

‘You don’t like her.’

‘What I like or don’t like doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Geli is dead.’

She glanced at him again, as if to make certain he caught the rebuke. He did, and thought it interesting. Witnesses usually responded in anger or fear. Frau Winter merely added to the chill. ‘Did you see the body?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘They already had it in the car when I arrived.’

‘Whose car?’

She blinked and small frown lines appeared on her forehead. The pause was slight but, he felt, significant. ‘I do not know.’

‘Herr Schwarz’s car? Herr Amman’s? Herr Röhm?’

She brought her head up sharply. Behind the chill in her eyes was something else, something darker. Anger? Or fear? ‘Röhm was not there.’

Fritz nodded, once, formally. ‘My mistake. I had heard that a Brownshirt was present. I assumed it was Herr Röhm.’

‘Who told you a stormtrooper was there?’

No one had told him. He was guessing. But it seemed logical since one had appeared at Zehrt’s. Hitler’s people
trusted the Brownshirts more than they trusted anyone else, especially the Munich police.

Fritz moved closer, so close he could smell the soap she had used. ‘If you did not see the body, how do you know that Geli is dead?’

‘Frau Reichert saw it. She told me.’

‘Couldn’t she have been mistaken? She doesn’t seem like a very competent woman.’

‘She’s not. She is only in the household because of Herr Hitler’s generosity.’ The fact seemed to bother Frau Winter. She did not approve of Hitler’s living arrangements.

‘Frau Reichert and her mother are impoverished?’

‘No, they own still apartments on Thierschstrasse.’

He stored that piece of information as something to explore later. ‘But she is not very competent?’

‘She burned sausages yesterday. She blamed in on the Föhn.’