Authors: Paul Grossman
Streams of people moved in the direction of the Goethe School, a sense of solemnity hanging in the air. Until twelve years ago there hadn’t even been elections. They’d lived under iron-fisted tyranny. Now at least they had some voice in shaping their own destiny. Or had they?
Across the street Willi noticed a throng of people queued not for the polling place but a soup kitchen. Sometimes, he thought, it was hard to escape a feeling of being swept out to sea in currents no one had control over. Hard to believe just a year ago Germany, Europe, most of the world, had been thriving on an economic gusher that lifted whole populations. Now, international trade had shriveled. Production dried. It was as if the foundations of prosperity had collapsed, leaving the whole of humanity sinking.
Except, somehow, Willi. He’d managed to buck the current.
As they headed up sunny Brandenburgische Strasse he was still floating slightly off the ground. Full Inspektor at thirty-five was an honor few men achieved. It meant he’d have a whole team working under him eventually, in addition to a substantial salary increase. He couldn’t help toying with the idea of helping out the economy a bit, such as by buying a new car. They needed one now that the Opel was totaled.
In front of the old school, all the major parties had contingents out, distributing literature, chanting slogans. Among them, red-neckerchiefed Communists and brown-shirted stormtroopers kept to opposite sides of the street, a sober air of business prevailing. Even the brownshirts smiled politely, offering pamphlets to Vicki and Willi.
Hitler and his Nazis had waged a campaign unlike anything Germany’d ever seen. The “savior of the nation”—that barking voice still clanging through Willi’s brain—had traveled one end of the country to the other, delivering speeches, attending mass rallies, kissing babies. His chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, had organized torchlight parades and plastered Hitler’s face from the Baltic to the Alps. But all the latest straw polls, as well as the near-unanimous consensus of political journalists, Fritz included, was that the Nazis and the Communists both had undermined their mass appeal through violence, and that now the center would hold. Those most versed in German politics seemed to concur that when the tallies were announced tonight, the Social Democrats and their allies would receive enough votes to form a new government with a mandate to jump-start recovery.
With this hope Vicki and Willi entered the school they’d both attended as children, where their own child now went, and joined the queue to cast ballots.
* * *
Later they drove out to Fritz’s for dinner and to await the election results. Vicki’s father had lent them his Mercedes for the week, since he’d gone abroad on business, a Type 260 Stuttgart, the company’s most solid family car. After Willi’s rickety Opel it was like a magic carpet, floating them down busy avenues and out into the deep-green forests, landing them in Grunewald in record time. Fritz’s three-story villa was a riot of historical styles, built during the Wilhelmian period. He’d been bitching for years about how out-of-date it was and had just weeks ago commissioned one of Germany’s most avant-garde architects to build him a new one up the road.
Helping Vicki out of the car, Willi flashed on the dark, miserable hovel he’d seen a few days back, where Axel Köhler had lived, careful not to let his wife in on his thoughts. Like the rest of the world, Vicki felt relieved to think the case of
Der Kinderfresser
had been put to rest, which for expediency’s sake he preferred. In fact, though, after the tidal wave of news reports following Magda’s capture, people had come forth with all sorts of new information, including the superintendent of a lightless, airless basement apartment a mere two blocks from the
Viehof
.
“I knew there was something wrong with that guy,” the man said when he’d taken Willi in a few days ago.
The place was sparse, depressing. A bed and several chests of drawers. A thorough search, however, revealed plenty: not only half a dozen forged identity cards bearing Axel’s photo under various aliases, but also a leather account book at the bottom of a pile of dirty underwear. In meticulous pencil, starting in 1924, Axel had kept an exact record of all the boys delivered to something called Tower Labs, no address, phone number, or any other information. Only that for each child he was paid 150 reichsmarks. It was a fortune. Especially for otherwise “worthless” street urchins.
And then, for each “Pickup and Disposal,” another fifty marks.
In six years the total number delivered and disposed of, according to this ledger, was 244 boys.
If correct, it would be by far the largest mass murder in German history.
“By-Product” and “Leather Goods” sales, depending on the year, had increased Axel’s income handsomely. He probably took in as much as
Viehof
Direktor Gruber. But he hadn’t spent it. From the layers of crap under his bed they’d exhumed a cigar box stuffed with banknotes. Twenty-five thousand RMs.
The man should have worked for the government.
Approaching the high brick wall around Fritz’s property, Willi’s heart raced as he pictured the name in the ledger entered over and over in thick block letters, so similar to the ones on that wall of names in the dungeon under Bone Alley.
TOWER LABS.
Whatever it was, it had to be found.
As did Ilse.
Holding Vicki’s arm as they entered the front gate, they saw a gray hare pop its head from the flower bed. “Don’t tell me you’ve developed fear of rabbits?” Vicki laughed, feeling him tense. “What do they call that, leporiphobia?”
His wife read more psychology than his cousin Kurt.
“A little stitch in the side is all.” He pretended to smile.
He knew he’d nearly given himself away, though.
The maid let them in and Sylvie greeted them in a shimmering, low-cut cocktail gown, clearly having had a head start on the wine. Kissing them profusely, she ushered them in, complaining they never came to see her anymore.
The only other guest was Count Oldenburg, a veritable dinner party unto himself, one of the brightest stars in Fritz’s galaxy. A gap-toothed bon vivant clearly hyped up on some kind of stimulant this evening, he distracted them for hours with anecdotes about worlds they otherwise only read about in Sunday supplements. Tea with Virginia Woolf. Dinner with André Gide. Tonight he went on about how theater architecture in London and Paris was a quarter century behind Berlin’s. And then of course the Gropius Werkbund Exhibition at Le Salon des Artistes Décorateurs, German design light-years ahead of everyone else’s.
“Personally, I think Germany’s entering a sort of modern golden age of Greece.” The count’s face glittered in the candlelight. “Have you noticed, for example, how much more beautiful young people are than before the war? The whole national physique has toned up since people embraced nudism.”
After a while Willi retreated to the kitchen for some water. Fritz trailed him and cornered him by the sink. “Hey, what’s this I hear about a Shepherdess?” He was practically slurring his words. “Old blabbermouth Woerner let it slip over cocktails. Said the bitch was the most dangerous Köhler of all. That you were keeping it hush-hush so she wouldn’t know you were on her trail. Shhh!” He put a finger to his lips. “I won’t tell.”
But he had.
Halfway through a tall glass of water Willi saw Vicki walk in. She’d overheard Fritz and lost all her color. In a look that tore at Willi’s heart she seemed to wonder how he could betray her this way. Then before he could even finish swallowing, she strode back out crossing her arms and pretended to listen with fascination to Count Oldenburg.
By the time the election results were due in, the count had portrayed a dazzling odyssey of the nation’s future—not only the Depression reversing in ’31 but Germany soaring above all the other democracies, economically, scientifically, culturally.
If only the vote supported his prophetics.
All the experts, the straw polls, even Fritz, were completely wrong.
After hearing the numbers and listening to the breakdowns, nobody even moved.
“My God.” Sylvie finally threw back the rest of her drink, then stumbled over and switched off the radio. “What a horrible day for Germany.”
“For Europe.” Fritz fingered his mustache.
The center had held, but only barely. Social Democrats, still the largest party, had been anemically weakened, while KPD, the German Communists, had bulked up with another 23 seats in parliament to 77. It was the NSDAP, though, the Nazi Party, formerly one of the smallest in the Reichstag, that had seized the body politic like a fever, swelling nearly 800 percent, from a mere 12 to 107 seats—to become the second-strongest party. Whole districts had swung to Hitler. Eighteen percent of the electorate; 6.5 million votes. Huge numbers of the unemployed, women, and, most tellingly, youth. The Nazis themselves had never imagined such a show of support. Overnight, shrieking, delusional Adolf Hitler—who didn’t even have German citizenship—had gone from circus sideshow freak to one of the most powerful men in the nation.
“The impression abroad will be catastrophic,” the count stammered, turning to them all as if to confirm he wasn’t hallucinating. “I don’t even want to imagine the repercussions on foreign and financial affairs.”
“Not to mention here,” Fritz added.
If governing Germany had been purgatory before, Willi understood, it would be real hell now. The cauldron, rather than simmering down, had only started boiling. One-third of the legislature’s seats were in the hands of radicals—left and right—bent on dismantling the whole republic and replacing it with a dictatorship. The future, all of them with it, seemed thrust beneath a shadow.
“Here I’ve been sticking my head in the sand all this time.” Fritz stared as if seeing those hysterical mobs at the Sportpalast all over again. “Even after witnessing it, I didn’t want to acknowledge the spell this movement cast. Now it’s impossible to ignore.”
Sylvie fell back on the sofa with a whimper.
“What’s bred in the bones will out in the flesh.” She could barely pour straight. “Germans are addicted to tyranny. It’s all because of the way we raise our children. With such brutality. And don’t tell me I’m wrong, Fritz. If you had the least interest in the subject you’d agree. Ask Vicki. She’s read all the latest literature.” Sylvie raised her glass and smiled wanly, then hiccuped. “Dessert, anyone?”
* * *
“Liar! Stupid. Idiotic son of a bitch!”
Vicki started pounding him as soon as they climbed back in the Mercedes, punching his shoulder as hard as she could with both fists.
“How could you do this to me? To the boys? What if we’d let our guard down and something happened, huh?”
“I didn’t let my guard down.” He tried to block her.
“But I did!” She punched harder. “You don’t want this psychopathic killer to know you’re trailing her—so you keep it from me? What are you, a moron? You think I’d blab it in some bar?”
He felt like saying he simply forgot, but it seemed too absurd.
“I didn’t want to upset you, Vic. You’ve worried so much. I was only trying to—” She tried to smack his face, but he grabbed her hand. “Cut that out, damn it!”
She sat there panting, glaring at him, waiting for an explanation.
He had none. It just seemed easiest. That was all.
“How can I ever trust you again?” She was looking at him as if he were an addict, every idea warped by a single need. “Tell me, Willi. How?”
He swallowed, his entire consciousness striken as if by a sudden thunderbolt. Might she be right? he wondered, overwhelmed with a dizzying dismay. Had this terrible case with its kaleidoscope of horrors somehow transfixed him? Might he have actually put his family in harm’s way? The possibility so mortified him he was almost unable to breathe, and he yearned to throw himself at Vicki’s feet, begging forgiveness. Promising to quit his job. To join her father’s company.
“If you want, I can take you and the boys to your parents’ in the morning, Vic.”
She jolted him with another round of punches. “I don’t want to leave, goddamnit. I want you to tell me the truth!”
Collapsing in his arms, she cried harder than he’d ever seen.
“Oh, Willi, don’t you see? I’m terrified. Not just the Köhlers. The Depression. Nazis. Everything.”
“Shhh.” He tried his best to soothe her. “It’ll all work out one way or another. You’ll see.”
But the next morning it was hard to imagine how.
When he opened the apartment door to pick up the daily papers, Hitler’s face filled the front pages.
Twenty-eight
At breakfast they were surprised by a sharp rap against the terrace window. Opening the back door, still chewing toast, Willi found Otto staring at him grim-faced, Irmgard and Heinz right behind.
“We’d like a word with you all, if you would, out here.”
Willi shrugged—
I’ve no idea why
—as he and Vicki stepped out with the boys. When he saw the red, gold, and black
Hakenkreuz
pinned on Otto’s lapel, though, he knew it couldn’t be good.
The two families stood on the vine-covered terrace facing each other.
Willi remembered when the Winkelmanns had just moved in, a few months after he and Vicki. They’d sat with a bottle of cognac right here on a hot summer night, getting to know one another. Two young couples with boys the same age. Otto was saving to open his stationery shop, Irmgard supporting him by working as a seamstress. Vicki, home with Erich, volunteered to take Heinz in, five and a half days a week—for nearly two years.
“As you know”—Otto swallowed—“many things have changed in the past months.” He wiped beads of moisture from his forehead, although it was cool outside. “We’ve all had to make adjustments.” He coughed. “To survive. To secure even the most menial job, I had to join the National Socialists, as you can see. In doing so, much I’d not understood before was made abundantly clear. We’ve been neighbors, I daresay friends, a number of years now, but circumstance will no longer permit that. It’s my duty to inform you, therefore, henceforth, that the Winklemanns are breaking relations with the Krauses.”