Hitler's Angel (2 page)

‘At this time,’ he says, uncertain now about her level of knowledge, ‘the Bavarian police had three divisions. The Schutzpolizei or the –’

‘Schupo,’ she says, as if to prove herself. ‘They were what my country would call the beat police officers, the street patrol.’

‘They were more than that,’ he says, ‘but it will do.’ Then he waits. She smiles
.

‘There was also the political police or the Abteilung IA –’

‘That was Berlin,’ he says. ‘Each German region had different laws, different organisations.’

‘Not that different,’ she says. ‘There were political police in Bavaria.’

He nods. ‘Indeed, but we had another name for them.’

She frowns. ‘What?’

‘Assholes.’

Her grin is crooked. It makes her face her own. ‘You were in the criminal police, and I know it was called Kriminalpolizei or the Kripo.’

‘It was,’ he says
.

‘So the Kripo and the Schupo were there, and you were expecting the assholes.’

‘But they had not yet arrived.’ He leans back in his chair and continues
.

The building was imposing: five storeys high, with oriel windows and balconies from the second storey up. Gargoyles
hung over the windows on the second floor, their grinning faces malevolent, their stone eyes taking in all around them. The curtains were closed on all but the attic windows: he could see nothing inside.

Fritz took a deep breath before entering. He had had six homicide rotations since he solved the most famous case in Munich. Each time, everyone from the Government Councilor to the Chief Inspector had expected him to catch the murderer within hours of the crime’s commission. He had, much to his own surprise – never confessed to the toll the job was taking on his dreams, and his nightmares. In his waking moments, he feared the next case, worried that he would not solve it, worried that this time it would steal his sanity completely.

This one was making him even more uncomfortable. Each case they handed him had a different degree of difficulty. The location of this one alone brought it into a whole new level.

Four stairs led to the main door. A constable blocked it, as he would in a crowded crime scene. Only here he fended off no one. Fritz took the stairs two at a time, his new boots shiny despite the dust. ‘Where?’ he asked.

‘Second floor,’ the constable said.

Fritz nodded and entered. The building smelled of polish, boot black and leather. The first floor held offices and smaller apartments. Another constable blocked the formal staircase. From somewhere above Fritz, a woman’s voice rose and fell, not keening but nearly so. The voice held so much anguish, he could feel an echo in his own bones.

He passed the second constable, gripped the polished railing, and climbed wide staircase like the young man he no longer was. He remained trim, although he no longer had to qualify for police athletics. Still, he felt that someday his great physical condition would save his life – and it nearly had in August, when he lost his footing in a riot sparked by a Communist rally outside the Hofbrauhaus.

When he reached the second floor he let go of the railing and paused a final time. His heart was pounding. He would fail this investigation if he did not concentrate, but he did not want to concentrate. The woman’s cry had awakened ancient ghosts in him as well.

The apartment covered the entire second floor. The landing was a brief stop for the other tenants to take before climbing to their own
gran luxe
apartments on the upper floor. The door to the second floor apartment was open, though, and from inside came the wail. The woman was actually speaking to someone in the sing-song voice of grief. He could hear mumbled male replies, barely audible, in response.

Fritz slipped inside the open door and nearly gasped at the richness before him. The floor was so well polished that it shined. Deep blue Oriental carpets began inside the foyer. Heavy curtains covering the nearest windows were in a matching blue, as were the deep-cushioned sofas. Oil paintings hung on the wall, the work dark and realistic. A few amateurish watercolours were mixed in, looking childish and out of place. The tables were made of mahogany – as highly polished as the floor. A pair of black leather
gloves had been tossed onto the occasional table beside the door. They provided the only clutter in the otherwise pristine room.

A stout woman in her late forties sat on the couch, her hands over her face. A sergeant Fritz did not recognise sat across from her, speaking softly. She was sobbing now, her wails having ceased.

Another woman stood behind the sofa, hands on its back. She watched Fritz, her eyes dark in her wrinkled face. Her hair was piled on her head, and her mouth was a flat line.

The sergeant looked up. His expression was much more open than the woman’s.

‘Detective Inspector Stecher,’ Fritz said.

‘I know who you are,’ the sergeant said. ‘Your problem is down the hall.’

Fritz frowned at the choice of words, but said nothing. Instead he followed the dark blue runner, looking for, and finding, traces of blood.

The unease he had felt on the street grew.

The rooms on the street side of the apartment were spacious and echoed the same design as the foyer. All of the curtains were closed, and some of the lights were on, making it feel like night indoors.

The drops of blood grew into blots as he approached the end of the corridor. Another constable stood near the door, arms crossed, straining the shoulders of his greatcoat. He stared straight ahead as if the watercolour above the mahogany table fascinated him. Fritz glanced at the painting: buildings and stairways in old Vienna, done in
stone browns and greens. The precise lettering on the posters hanging from a gate suggested a young artist’s reluctance to use his imagination.

The trail on the runner ended near the constable’s scuffed black boots. The blood went inward, through the door itself, into what appeared to be a bedroom.

‘Detective Inspector –’

‘Yes,’ the constable said. He was young, the neck strap from his helmet pushing up his chin. He smiled as if the movement hurt him. ‘You won’t like this.’

Fritz didn’t like it. He hated that the Schupo knew him and he didn’t know them. It made him wonder how many people on the street recognised him from the stiff drawings of him the papers had printed when they covered his cases.

He stepped inside, braced for the smell. Blood, sickly sweet and pungent, but not nearly as strong as he had expected. Old. A dead body had an odour all its own, but blood, blood was the scent of a newly minted crime scene.

The blood trail led to a stain at the base of a dark blue fainting couch. He crouched. The stain was huge – almost three feet in width and two in length. The edges were dry, but when he pressed on the middle of the stain, blood welled, black and moist. Someone had died here. No one could lose this much blood and live.

He stood. Curtains covered a single window next to a bed made with military precision. Flowers stood on the nightstands. A door adjoined this room with the one next to it, and in the space between the extra door and the wall stood another end table, this one older and made of cheap
wood. Above it hung a formal photograph of Adolf Hitler, head of the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. The man’s face was thinner than it appeared in person, but the camera had managed to capture the intensity of the eyes. Fritz turned away, hating this reminder that the political police would want a piece of this investigation.

A dressing table stood beside the fainting couch. Perfume bottles crowded against a wavy mirror. A matching hairbrush and comb still had strands of dark brown hair clinging to them. In the centre of the dressing table, a fountain pen lay across a curling piece of paper. The chair was pushed back at an odd angle, making it appear as if whoever sat in it had been interrupted.

Fritz turned to the constable. ‘Where’s the body?’

The constable bit his lower lip. ‘Gone, sir.’

‘Gone?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Colour stained the constable’s cheeks. ‘It was gone when we arrived.’

‘And the gun?’

‘There was no gun, either, sir.’

Fritz sucked in a mouthful of the heavy air, wishing for a cigarette. ‘All right, Constable. Bring me your sergeant.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The constable walked along the edge of the runner, careful to avoid the blood stains.

Fritz rubbed a hand over his face. Now he knew why they had sent him, even though he was one case away from his rotation in Inspectorate A, the Homicide unit. No other detective on the force had the reputation he had for solving difficult crimes. The techniques he had used first in
Demmelmayer had become standard in Munich, but they were
his
techniques – no one else on the force seemed to have the ability to see details and piece them together the way Fritz did.

All he had been told was that a woman had been shot to death at 16 Prinzregentenplaz. The Chief Inspector had stared at Fritz with an urgency, an intensity, as if he had expected Fritz to gather information just from the address. Fritz had shrugged and said that he was always cautious about crimes committed in wealthy neighborhoods.

He clasped his hands behind his back and walked around the sofa, noting that small traces of blood – too tiny to be called drops; more like a fine mist – had landed on the carpet behind. He avoided those and stopped beside the dressing table. Keeping his hands behind his back, he peered at the piece of paper beneath the fountain pen.

The pen had left a blot of ink on the bottom of the sheet. Above it someone had written in a flowing script:
When I come to Vienna, hopefully very soon – we’ll drive together to Semmering an–

Not a suicide note. He wasn’t even sure it was written by the dead woman. He wasn’t sure who the dead woman was – or if she was.

‘Sir?’ The sergeant he had seen earlier blocked the doorway, making the room seem dark. Fritz realised then that the only light came from one of the nightstands.

‘Tell me why we were called here.’

The sergeant was a large man. His blond hair stood in tufts, as if removing his helmet had pulled up the strands. His
eyes were small and buried in the flesh that threatened to overwhelm his face. ‘The housekeeper says a girl was shot. Such cases always go to the criminal police.’

‘You never saw the body?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You were first on site?’

‘No, sir. Constable Wolfermann, whom you saw at the door below, he arrived first. When the housekeeper said someone had been shot, he sent for me. I called the Kripo.’

‘Did Constable Wolfermann see the body?’

‘No, sir.’

Fritz let out a hiss of air. Behind his back, he clenched his fists. ‘So we have blood and a supposed body. With all the deaths and riots in Munich, you believed this to be important?’

The sergeant licked his lips, swallowed, and then said, ‘The dead girl, sir. The dead girl, she is Herr Hitler’s niece.’

‘I
  don’t understand,’ the girl says. ‘When you started telling me this story, you said no one thought it was important. This is about Hitler’s niece!’

This will be more difficult than he thought. ‘In those days,’ Fritz says, ‘Hitler was one of many small political leaders. We did not know what he would become.’

‘But clearly the sergeant understood this case is important. So is it? Or isn’t it?’

Fritz clenches his left hand. He doesn’t like Americans. They are so blunt and so demanding. ‘You said you would let me tell the whole story.’

‘But what is this about?’ she says. ‘It can’t be about Hitler.’

‘You said you would listen.’

‘But if he’d done such a thing, he would never have been elected to office.’

‘You are such an American,’ Fritz snaps. Then he makes himself take a deep breath, makes himself calm down. ‘This story is not about elections. It is about a crime. The most difficult crime I was ever assigned.’

‘More difficult than Demmelmayer.’

‘Infinitely.’ He runs a hand through his thinning hair. ‘I would like a beer. Would you like a beer?’