Hitler's Angel (17 page)

When he saw Fritz, he smiled.

‘That woman,’ Henrich said as he approached, ‘is one of the most difficult I have ever met.’

‘Wouldn’t she give you the letter?’

‘She wouldn’t even let me into the apartment. When she found out I came from you, she told me to give you a message: if you are to work with her,
you
are to work with her.’

Fritz sighed. He had wanted that letter.

‘But,’ Henrich said with a smile, ‘I got the letter from her. I let her know I could make her life quite difficult. I could bring an entire team of political police down on them if I even implied the death of the girl had anything to do with politics.’

In spite of himself, Fritz smiled. He hadn’t wanted to be so hard-handed with the witnesses, but he was finding he had no choice. They were not cooperating.

‘Did she tell you anything else?’ he asked, holding his hand out for the letter.

‘Only if I come again, I can go to hell.’ Henrich shrugged. ‘One little
hausfrau
does not frighten me.’ He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and removed a tattered piece of paper. It had been taped together quickly, leaving little tape patches where paper should have been. But it was still readable.

Fritz took it from Henrich and studied it. It read:

‘Did you think to get a sample of Frau Winter’s handwriting?’ Fritz asked.

‘We have her information at the precinct from when we brought her in. I had time, so I went and compared. If that old woman wrote this, she is very talented.’

Fritz stroked the page. The tape nearly covered it all. Someone had shredded it, and someone else had taken a lot of work to piece it all together again. ‘Do we have any idea who Eva is?’

Henrich rolled his eyes. ‘That took some wheedling. Frau Winter sees information as coin.’

‘You had to pay her?’

Henrich shook his head. ‘We came to an understanding, the old woman and I. I would not ask her questions about Adolf Hitler or try to enter the apartment, and she would not withhold information from me. This was a tacit thing which evolved over the course of the morning.’

Fritz let out a mouthful of air. He was lucky he had sent Henrich to see Frau Winter. Another detective, less versed in subtlety, would have ruined this lead altogether. ‘So tell me who this Eva is.’

‘She is a shopgirl that Hitler has been seeing on the side for two years. It is an on-again off-again thing, which Geli was quite jealous of, according to Frau Winter. When Hitler took out Eva, he did not have time for Geli.’

‘You know no more than that?’

‘Oh, no.’ Henrich smiled. He waved another small piece of paper at Fritz. ‘I have her address.’

He has forgotten breakfast until five minutes before the girl is scheduled to arrive. She has never been late before, and she will be surprised to discover him away. He tacks a note to the door, and hurries down the stairs to the good bakery at the corner.

The inside smells of küchen and freshly made bread. His mouth waters. In his wanderings the night before, he only managed to eat a bit of schweinswürstl at the Chinese Tower. There he thought of Henrich. Dear Henrich, who never completely understood those last few months of 1931, although he remained faithful until the end.

Fritz orders some strudel and küchen, and watches as the woman behind the counter places the pastries in a white bag. He gets two coffees as well, and carries the entire package back to his apartment.

The girl is inside, setting up her tape recorder. She smiles at him. ‘The articles are in the
Münchner Post.’

Of course they are, he wants to say to her. Do you think I was lying? Trying to make myself a big man? But he says nothing. He hands her a coffee, sets his near his chair, and puts the bag on the table between them.

‘But after September 25, they stop.’ She takes a piece of küchen and sits across from him. ‘I couldn’t find anything else. Not even in the histories. Hitler’s biographies mention this only in passing. One went so far as to say that Geli’s death made Hitler suicidal.’

Fritz takes some strudel. Frosting will always be his downfall. Thick or glazed, white or dark, he loves liquid sugar on top of the sweets. ‘The answers you look for are not in the papers or in the histories. Historians do not know the truth.’

‘I assume they did research. I assume they did all the appropriate primary research.’ She takes a bite, and wipes a crumb from her lip.

‘They did not,’ he says.

‘How do you know?’

He looks at her for a moment, then says, ‘None of them has spoken to me.’

‘Perhaps the case isn’t as important as you think.’

‘You have not heard it all,’ he says.

‘If it were important –’

‘Remember what I told you,’ he says. ‘No one speaks of important things.’

She pulls another piece off her pastry, her brow furrowed. She hunches in her chair, thinking, worrying that this case is not worth all the time they have spent. He can see that in her eyes. She wants another Demmelmayer.

Gustav Demmelmayer killed his wife and covered the murder very well. Fritz solved it using techniques not available before the war: comparing hairs from the killer to hairs found under his wife’s fingernails, taking fingerprints from the brass buttons on her coat, and matching the contents of her stomach to the meal in the trash behind Demmelmayer’s home. It was, in its own way, a simple case, no different from any other domestic murder in Munich that year. The husband suspects the wife of adultery, confronts her, kills her, and dumps the body. Hundreds of husbands did the same after the war, some with more cause. Some whose wives left, and sold themselves for bits of bread.

Demmelmayer was different only in that he cleaned up the murder site instead of fleeing from it. He threw the body in the Isar, and managed to commit his crime unwitnessed. He made two mistakes: he destroyed and then replaced the kitchen knife he had used to kill her – and the woman who sold him the replacement
remembered the date; and he placed his wife’s body in a leather garment bag weighted with stones but did not toss her deep enough in the river. The body was discovered, mostly dry, soon after it had been disposed of.

Some men’s wives were never found. Some of those women became anonymous bodies at city morgues. Many of the detectives in the Kripos across Germany did not understand this scenario.

But Fritz did, and thus his fame, and the case known as Demmelmayer was born.

The Raubal case, on the other hand, had none of the common elements. It was a challenge, a special case, the kind most detectives never see, the kind with implications far beyond a family squabble. Hitler headed a political party. He had an alibi and many enemies. This case, not Demmelmayer, should have been the case Fritz was famous for.

‘Not important,’ he says as he takes another strudel. ‘No, child, it was so important the papers were afraid of it, afraid of what they might discover. Don’t you understand what we were dealing with here?’

‘Adolf Hitler before he came to power.’

Fritz shakes his head. ‘Adolf Hitler
as
he came to power.’

‘What’s the distinction?’

He pauses, pulls another piece of küchen apart with his unfamiliar fingers. ‘You will soon understand the distinction. If you listen.’

‘I just wish you wouldn’t be so mysterious.’

‘And I wish you wouldn’t be so impatient.’ He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes, biting back the rage that flares like a live thing inside him. He was a fool for choosing an ignorant American. A woman who might have been his granddaughter.

He should have chosen a German who had family to go to,
someone who could explain the horrible years after the war, the lack of food, the years that money became worthless, the influx of rich foreigners. The schiebers and their tricks getting wealthy off the pain of others. He should have chosen someone who understood that sometimes words were the only thing a man could believe in, when his future and his past lay in tatters at his feet. Someone who would understand the silences, the nuances, as much as he understood the culture itself.

But he has not. He has chosen her, and she at least is interested. She simply wants to know his focus, where this story is going. She knows the end of Demmelmayer. She believes the ending of this case will be as simple.

He opens his eyes and leans forward. She is watching him, the last bit of küchen between her thumb and forefinger.

‘This is not Demmelmayer,’ he says. ‘This is something more and something less. This is a case you cannot understand without understanding the details, without hearing the facts in the order that I learned them. I thought you wanted to know about the detective’s mind.’

She eats the küchen. ‘I do,’ she says softly.

‘Then listen,’ he says. ‘And understand. The papers were silenced. Some with threats of lawsuit. Some with threats. And what could they do? The body was buried. The death was ruled a suicide. My investigation was unofficial, and I was only speaking to people involved in NSDAP. They would not run to the papers with news of my inquiry. Historians cannot know of this. I have the records.’

‘And no one has spoken to you?’

‘What would lead them to me? And why would they have
interest? They do not know the importance of this case any more than you do.’

She bows her head at the rebuke. Then she sighs, nods once, and presses the ‘record’ button on her tape machine.

‘So,’ she says, a bit too brightly, as if she is trying to make the tense moment pass, ‘who gave you the paintings?’

Fritz sighs and shakes his head. She is over-eager and undereducated. ‘In due time,’ he says. ‘We first had to solve the mystery of the letter.’

He tells her of Henrich and the mysterious Eva.

‘Eva Braun?’ the girl asks.

‘Eva Braun,’ he says, ‘long before she became famous.’

H
enrich took him to a photographic shop. The storefront was recessed against the neighbouring shops, and even from the doorway it looked dark and uninviting. The photographs in the two slim windows which flanked the door were varied. Some were tasteful art shots of Bavarian women: not too pretty but made striking by use of lighting and make-up. Others were of soldiers looking tall and proud in their uniforms, and families huddled stiffly and sombrely together. Only a photograph of Hitler – showing a thinner, younger man than the one Fritz had met, looking fierce and holding the passenger door of an automobile – gave any indication that Hoffman Photographic Studio did anything other than studio portraits.

Fritz went inside. To his right was a small sitting room. Lamps with umbrella-like shades and cameras on stands broke the illusion. In front of Fritz was a single desk with a middle-aged woman sitting behind it. She did not smile at him when he entered. Behind her were rows and rows of portraits, all expensively framed, all difficult to see in the dim light.

Henrich hesitated beside him. Fritz stuck his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and approached the woman. ‘I am looking for Eva Braun. I am told she works here.’

The woman said nothing. She stood and slipped through a curtain into the back room. Her movements filled the air with strong perfume and the sharp scent of emulsifier. Henrich glanced at Fritz and shrugged. After a moment, a short blonde with athletic grace entered the room. She wore a black A-line skirt and heels that accentuated her muscular legs. The black and white striped sweater made her appear slimmer than she was. She wore her hair in a modified marcel that revealed her youth. Fritz guessed her age to be 19.

‘I am Eva,’ she said.

Fritz nodded to her. ‘Fraulein, I am Detective Inspector Stecher. Is there a place we may talk privately?’

Eva’s eyes widened. She glanced at the woman who did not look at her.

‘In the back,’ Eva finally said.

The older woman took her seat behind the desk, as if she expected a flood of customers. Eva parted a curtain and waited for the two men. Fritz slipped around the desk and stepped into the back. It was half the size of the front with a door labelled ‘Darkroom’ on the left and a smaller room to the right. He waited for the girl. She led Fritz and Henrich into the smaller room. The walls were covered with cabinets, and they had to squeeze to get around the table in the centre.

Eva offered them some bread still sitting on a sideboard, but Fritz and Henrich declined.

‘Is it private back here?’ Henrich asked.

The girl bit her lower lip. She was obviously worried about herself. ‘Frau Hoffmann can’t hear.’

Fritz wasn’t certain if that statement meant that the older woman couldn’t hear at all or if she couldn’t hear what was being discussed in the back room. He supposed it didn’t matter.