Hitler's Angel (9 page)

‘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.

T
he 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.

Inside, the mortuary smelled of decaying flowers. Father Pant bypassed the public rooms and took Fritz through a dark, unlit hallway. The air was cool here as well, as if someone had left the heat off, and the smell changed from dying flowers to the tang of formaldehyde. The smells seemed exaggerated, the silence heavy, and Fritz attributed his over reaction to his lack of sleep.

Finally, Father Pant led him to double doors made of cheap stained brown wood. The brown had faded near the knobs where pressure of hands had rubbed the stain away.
After Father Pant pushed the doors open, he reached for the light switch to the right.

Immediately a string of uncovered electric bulbs lit, banishing the dark. Fritz understood why Father Pant went for the light first. The room was the size of three normal rooms, with lockers standing against the far wall. There was a basin sink near the lockers, and counters ran along the remaining walls. Wooden tables filled the rest of the room, all stained dark, but even the colour could not hide the black blotches that irregularly marked each surface.

The body of an elderly woman, covered with a pale blue cloth, lay on a table closest to the lockers. Her silver hair draped across the side of the table, and the uneven ends brushed against the floor. Her eyes were open and sunken into her face, her mouth a silent ‘O’ of pain. Even the odour of formaldehyde could not hide the stench of rot.

Father Pant said nothing. Obviously he had been in the room before. He pointed to an unpainted wooden coffin beside one of the counters.

‘That should be Geli,’ he said.

‘Have you seen her recently?’ Fritz asked. ‘Would you be able to recognise her?’

Father Pant nodded, but didn’t move toward the coffin.

‘I’m sorry,’ Fritz said.

Father Pant shook his head and sighed. ‘Sometimes I think God has cursed me, asking me to do his work during the last twenty years. The things I have seen…’ His voice trailed away. Then he turned to Fritz, eyes dark with sorrow. ‘Geli Raubal was an energetic girl, lighthearted, given to easy
laughter. I cannot picture her dying by her own hand. I cannot picture her dying.’

The priest’s words echoed in the large room. Fritz hadn’t realised until then how much the other man’s voice carried.

Fritz walked over to the coffin. It was cheap, obviously hastily put together for transport. The men who had taken the body had not had a coffin with them – or had they? Frau Winter had been unable to answer his question about the way the men transported the body. He should have asked Frau Reichert, but he hadn’t thought of it. He would ask her, or the others, when he returned. He couldn’t imagine even the most grief-stricken being willing to put a blood-soaked corpse flat across the back seat.

Someone had taped a piece of paper to the top of the coffin. It read ‘Angela Marie Raubal’, and had the address of the Central Cemetery in Vienna. Across the top was a stamp, marking the transportation paid. He took a photograph of the coffin’s lid, then set the camera on the counter next to a pile of tools.

Fritz grabbed a hammer from the pile and prised the lid off the coffin. It took him a moment – the coffin had been sealed with a number of nails. Father Pant came up beside him and watched. The squeals of the wood and metal were the only sounds in the room.

The odour seeping from the coffin made Fritz’s eyes water. Father Pant crouched beside him and helped him pull the lid off. The smell was overwhelming. Fritz put a hand over his nose and mouth, but too late. The stench had already coated his tongue and the back of his throat. He
wouldn’t have expected this kind of odour on someone who had been dead a little less than 24 hours.

‘Merciful God,’ Father Pant said. He was staring into the coffin.

Fritz stared as well. Geli had been a tall woman. She filled the coffin. Her blue nightgown had been pulled down over her thighs. A small round hole surrounded by powder burns was beneath her left breast. Fritz had expected that much.

He had not expected her face.

The area around her open eyes and her nose was black and blue. Her nose was flat, the skin swollen but not, it appeared, from the after effects of death. A bit of blood had dried beneath her nostrils. Her lips were cut, and she had another bruise beneath her left ear.

He had seen a woman he loved look like that.

He had touched her.

Gisela
.

He closed his eyes for a brief moment, struggling for control. He had to think of the present, not the past. He had become a detective to blot the past from his mind.

He opened his eyes.

Zehrt had said that she had lividity in the back. The blood had settled. These wounds happened before she died.

Her hands were at her sides. Fritz leaned over the coffin. Three nails on her left hand had been broken, and had not been filed, even though the remaining two were perfect ovals. Her right hand hung at an unnatural angle from the wrist. Her bare legs were covered with yellow bruises above the knees, older bruises that had occurred days before her death.

‘Merciful God,’ Father Pant said again. ‘The poor child.’

The poor woman. For Geli was a woman full grown, with a slender body and long well defined legs. Fritz could not tell if she had been beautiful. The damage was too severe for that.

‘Father,’ he said softly. ‘I would like to check the rest of her body for injury.’

‘I think that would be wise, my son.’

The familiar form of address surprised Fritz. Father Pant had been careful to call him ‘Detective Inspector’ before. They had gone from antagonists to conspirators in solving a woman’s murder.

Fritz pushed up the nightgown, made of a soft satin, in a bizarre imitation of foreplay. Her skin beneath the satin was cold and rigid. His own action disgusted him. He was used to watching Dr Zehrt work on the corpses. He had never done so himself.

The bruises ran up Geli’s legs and disappeared into her small black pubic thatch. Her waist was cross-hatched with red welts and a few scars. Her breasts and upper body were untouched.

‘The doctor did not examine her,’ Father Pant said.

‘I think he had no choice but to sign that document,’ Fritz said. He stood, and took the camera off the countertop. Father Pant said nothing, watching silently, his expression softer than it had been near the church. Fritz took as many photographs as he could, some of Geli’s face, others focusing on her torso, still others on her legs. The flashes left red and green spots in front of his eyes. When he was finished, he set the camera back on the counter, then bent over and eased the nightgown back down, attempting to give Geli what dignity he could.

He had learned compassion since Gisela’s death.

He shook his head. It was Geli before him. Geli, not Gisela.

Gisela had been dead for years.

He turned Geli slightly and examined her back. The nightgown was black with blood, her limbs discoloured as the remaining blood settled, just like Zehrt had said.

The exit wound was as large as his fist.

But there was no gun. Not beside her body, not beneath it, and not in her hand.

He eased her down. There was no need to photograph her back. The evidence he needed was on her face and her legs.

He had just grabbed the coffin’s lid when Father Pant touched his shoulder.

‘What’s that?’ Father Pant asked. He crouched beside Fritz and pointed to the material near Geli’s right breast. There, stuck into the satin, was a small, yellow feather.

‘One of the servants said she had a canary,’ Fritz said.

Father Pant nodded, and without saying a word, the men replaced the coffin lid. Fritz also pounded the nails back in place. No sense in alarming the mortician or the unknown persons (if any) who had accompanied the body.

‘All morning I have worried about how to place her in consecrated ground,’ Father Pant said. He looked at Fritz, his face grey in the odd light. ‘I shall have no trouble doing so now.’ He ran a hand on the coffin. ‘Most merciful God.’

‘God has never been merciful,’ Fritz said. ‘And He never will be.’

F
 ritz smokes an entire pack of cigarettes before the girl arrives. He stands in the window and watches morning come to Munich, the first pedestrians on the sidewalks, the first cars speeding through the darkened streets. As the light comes, so does the laughter and loud conversation, faint but reassuring through the thick panes of his windows.

He slept only three hours, and during those hours he dreamed of Geli. Not the Geli who has haunted him for years, but the Geli he knew, the dead woman whom he touched ever so lightly so many years ago. He knows he cannot speak of this properly, of the elongated feel to the event, as if each minute lasted a day, nor can he describe the physical reality of the smell. It had been another presence in that room, a living reminder of the reality of death.

Father Pant had provided the only comfort, the only warmth, and that too Fritz cannot relay. How does he tell a girl he does not know about the faith he lost before the war? How does he explain that for a brief moment, Father Pant’s compassion revived that faith? The priest’s shock, horror, and concern revived similar emotions in Fritz, emotions he thought long dead, buried with his son, but dying since the war. He cannot explain how he needed to remind himself of
God’s essential lack of caring, how often and how well God had shown his complete lack of mercy.