“So what do you want?”
Weinberger shook his head. “Not here, eh? Let’s go for a coffee. Your hotel is not far. Let’s go there.”
“All right. If that’s how you want this.”
“I think it might be best. Given what you’re asking about.” He stood up and grabbed his belts and his cap. “Besides, I’m already doing you a favor. The coffee here is terrible.”
He said nothing more until we were out of the building. But then I could hardly stop him.
“This isn’t a bad town. I should know, I went to university here. I studied law, and when I graduated, I joined the Gestapo. It’s a very Catholic town, of course, which meant that, in the beginning, it wasn’t particularly Nazi. I can see that surprises you, but it’s true—when I first joined the Party, this town had one of the smallest Party memberships in the whole of Germany. It just shows you what can be achieved in a short period of time, eh?
“Most of the cases we get in the Würzburg Gestapo office are denunciations. Germans having sexual relations with Jews, that kind of thing. But here’s the anomaly: the majority of denunciations come not from Party members, but from good Catholics. Of course, there is no actual law against Germans and Jews conducting their sordid love affairs. Not yet. But that doesn’t stop the denunciations, and we’re obliged to investigate them if only to prove that the Party disapproves of these obscene relationships. Occasionally we parade a couple accused of race defilement around the town square, but it seldom goes much further than that. Once or twice we have run a Jew out of town for profiteering, but that’s it. And it goes almost without saying that most of the denunciations are groundless and the product of stupidity and ignorance. Naturally. Most of the people who live here are not much more than peasants. This place is not Berlin. Would that it were.
“My own situation is a case in point, Herr Gunther. Weinberger is not necessaily a Jewish name. I am not a Jew. None of my grandparents is a Jew. And yet I myself have been denounced as a Jew, and on more than one occasion, I might add. Which is not exactly helping my career here in Würzburg.”
“I can imagine.” I allowed myself a smile, but that was all. I hadn’t yet got the information I needed, and until then, I hardly wanted to upset the young Gestapo man walking along the street beside me. We turned onto Adolf-Hitler-Strasse and walked north, toward my hotel.
“Well, yes, it’s funny. Of course it is. Even I can see that. But somehow I feel it wouldn’t be happening in a more sophisticated place, such as Berlin. After all, there are people there with Jewish-sounding names who are Nazis, aren’t there? Liebermann von Sonnenberg? I ask you. Well, I’m sure he would understand my predicament.”
I hardly liked to tell him that Berlin’s assistant police commissioner might have been a Party member but he also despised the Gestapo and all that it stood for.
“What I feel is this,” he said earnestly. “That my name wouldn’t hold me back in a place like Berlin. Here in Würzburg there will always be the faintest suspicion that I’m not completely Aryan.”
“Well, who is? I mean, you go far enough back and, if the Bible’s right, we’re all Jewish. Tower of Babel. Right.”
“Hmm, yes.” He nodded uncertainly. “Besides all that, most of my caseload is so petty it’s hardly worth the effort of my investigating it. That’s why I became interested in Max Reles in the first place.”
“And you want . . . ? Let’s be a bit more specific here, Captain.”
“Nothing more than a chance. A chance to prove myself, that’s all. A word from the assistant commissioner to the Gestapo in Berlin would surely smooth my transfer. Don’t you think so?”
“It might,” I admitted. “It might, at that.”
We walked through the hotel entrance and made our way to the café, where I ordered us both coffee and cake.
“When I get back to Berlin,” I told him, “I’ll see what can be done. As a matter of fact, I know someone in the Gestapo myself. He runs his own department in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. He might be able to help you. Yes, it’s possible he might. Always supposing that you can help me.”
These days, that was how everything in Germany worked. For rats like Othman Weinberger, it was probably the only way to get on. And while personally I regarded him as something to be scraped carefully off the sole of my Salamanders, I could hardly blame him for wanting to get out of Würzburg. I’d been there for just twenty-four hours and already I felt as keen to leave the place as the wandering Jew’s stray dog.
“But you know,” I said, “this case. Together we might yet make something out of it. Something a man might base a career on. You might not need anyone’s kind word if this impresses your superiors.”
Weinberger smiled wryly and gave the pretty waitress a slow up-and-down as she stooped to serve our coffee and cake. “You think so? I doubt it. No one here seemed very much interested in what I had to tell them about Max Reles.”
“I’m not here to pour coffee in my ears, Captain. Let’s hear it.”
Ignoring his coffee and the excellent cake, Weinberger leaned forward excitedly. “This man is a real gangster,” he said. “Just like Al Capone and those other Chicago hoodlums. The FBI—”
“Hold up. I want you to begin at the beginning.”
“Well, then, you might know that Würzburg is the capital of the German quarrying business. Our limestone is highly prized by architects all over the country. But there are really only four companies that sell the stuff. One of them is a company called Würzburg Jura Limestone, and it’s owned by a prominent local citizen called Roland Rothenberger.” He shrugged, ruefully. “Does that sound any less Jewish than my name? You tell me.”
“Get on with it.”
“Rothenberger is a friend of my father’s. My father’s a local doctor and a town councillor. A few months ago, Rothenberger came to see him in his capacity as a councillor and told him that he was being intimidated by a man named Krempel. Gerhard Krempel. He used to be an SA man, but now he’s a heavy for Max Reles. Anyway, Rothenberger’s story was that someone called Max Reles had offered to buy a share in his company, and that this Krempel character started to get rough when Rothenberger told him he didn’t want to sell. So I started to check it out, but I’d hardly finished opening the file when Rothenberger contacted me to say that he wished to withdraw the complaint. He said that Reles had substantially improved his offer and that there had been a simple misunderstanding and that Max Reles was now a shareholder in Würzburg Jura Limestone. That I should forget all about it. That’s what he told me.
“But I’m afraid boredom got the better of me, and I thought I’d see what else I could find out about Reles. Right away I discovered he was an American citizen and, on the face of it, an offense had been committed right there. As you probably know, only German-owned companies are allowed to tender for Olympic contracts, and, it transpired, Würzburg Jura Limestone had just outbid the local competition to supply stone for Berlin’s new stadium. I also found out that Reles seemed to have important connections here in Germany, so I resolved to see what was known about him in America. Which is why I contacted Liebermann von Sonnenberg.”
“What did the FBI tell you?”
“A lot more than I bargained for, to be honest. Enough to persuade me to check him out with the Vienna KRIPO. The picture I’ve built of Reles is based on two separate sets of information. And what I’ve managed to work out for myself.”
“You have been busy.”
“Max Reles is from Brownsville, New York, and he’s a Hungarian-German Jew. That would be bad enough, but there’s a lot more. His father, Theodor Reles, left Vienna for America at the turn of the century, most likely to escape a murder charge. He was strongly suspected by the Vienna KRIPO of murdering someone—perhaps several people—with an ice pick. It was apparently a secret technique taught to him by a Viennese Jewish doctor by the name of Arnstein. When Theodor settled in America, he married and had two sons: Max and his younger brother, Abraham.
“Now, Max has no convictions, although he was involved in the Prohibition rackets, as well as in loan-sharking and gambling. Since the end of Prohibition in March of last year, he’s built connections with the Chicago underworld. Little brother, Abraham, has a conviction for juvenile crime and is similarly involved in organized crime. He’s also believed to be one of the most cold-blooded killers in the Brooklyn mob and is reputed to use an ice pick for his murders, like his father. So skilled is he with this weapon that in some cases he leaves no trace.”
“How does that work?” I asked. “You stab a man with an ice pick, you figure it leaves more than just a bruise.”
Weinberger was grinning. “That’s what I thought. Anyway, there was nothing about this technique in the information I had from the FBI. But the Vienna KRIPO still have an old case file on Theodor Reles. You know, the father. Apparently what he used to do was ram the ice pick through the victim’s ear, right into his brain; and he was so good at it that many of his victims were thought to have died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Something natural, anyway.”
“Jesus,” I muttered. “That must be how Reles killed Rubusch.”
“What’s that?”
I told Weinberger what I knew about the murder of Heinrich Rubusch, and how Würzburg Jura Limestone was now the new owner of the Rubusch Stone Company. “You said Max Reles has built connections with the Chicago underworld,” I said. “Such as what?”
“Until recently, Chicago was run by Capone himself. Who also came from Brooklyn. But Capone is now in jail, and the Chicago organization has branched out into other areas, including construction and labor racketeering. The FBI suspects that the Chicago mob was involved in fixing construction contracts for the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics.”
“That figures. Max Reles has a close friend on the American Olympic Committee who also owns a Chicago construction company. A fellow named Brundage. He’s getting some sort of kickback from our own committee in return for chasing off an American boycott.”
“Money?”
“No. He’s being drip-fed East Asian art treasures that were part of a collection donated to Berlin’s Ethnographical Museum by some old Jew.” I nodded appreciatively. “Like I said, you have been busy, Captain. I’m impressed at how much you’ve been able to find out. Frankly, I think the assistant commissioner is going to be as impressed as I am. With your talents, perhaps you ought to consider a career in the real police. In KRIPO.”
“KRIPO?” Weinberger shook his head. “No, thanks,” he said. “The Gestapo is the police force of the future. The way I see it, the Gestapo and the SS will have to absorb KRIPO in the long run. No, no, I appreciate your compliment, but from the point of view of my career, I have to stay in the Gestapo. But preferably the Berlin Gestapo, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Tell me, Herr Gunther, you don’t think we’re eggs trying to be smarter than the hen, do you? I mean, this Reles may be a Jew and a gangster. But he’s got some important friends in Berlin.”
“I’ve already spoken to Frau Rubusch about exhuming her husband’s body, which will prove he was murdered. I think I can even lay my hands on the murder weapon. Like most Amis, Reles likes a lot of ice in his liquor. There’s a lethal-looking ice pick on the sideboard of his hotel room. And if all that’s not enough, then there’s his being a Jew, like you said. I’d like to see what all of his important friends in the Party think about that. I don’t much like playing that domino, but in the end there might be no other way to nail the bastard. Liebermann von Sonnenberg was appointed by Hermann Goering himself. And possibly we’ll have to present all the salient facts to him. And since Goering isn’t on any Olympic committee, it’s hard to imagine him choosing to ignore corruption among the committee’s members, even if some others might.”
“You’d better be certain of all your evidence before you do that. What’s the saying? The cock that crows too early gets the twisted neck.”
“I suppose they teach you that at Gestapo training school. No, I won’t do anything until I have all the evidence. I can walk just as well as I can run.”
Weinberger nodded. “I’ll need to see the widow. To get her written permission to exhume the body. Probably I’ll have to involve the Würzburg KRIPO, too. Such as it is. And a magistrate. All of that could take a little time. At least a week. Perhaps longer.”
“Heinrich Rubusch has plenty of time, Captain. But he needs to rise up from the dead and start talking if this case is going to get anywhere. It’s one thing ignoring a construction racket. It’s quite another ignoring the murder of a prominent German citizen. Especially when he’s properly Aryan. You’re a little folksy for my taste, Weinberger, but we’ll make a first-rate policeman out of you yet. Back at the Alex, when I was police, we had a saying of our own. The bone won’t come to the dog. It’s the dog that goes to the bone.”
29
I
T WAS THREE HOURS TO FRANKFURT on the passenger train. We stopped at almost every town along the Main valley, and when I wasn’t looking out of the window and admiring the scenery, I was writing a letter. I wrote it several different ways. It wasn’t the kind of letter I had written before or which made me feel happy, but all the same it needed to be written. And somehow I managed to persuade myself that it was a way to protect myself.
I shouldn’t have been thinking of other women, but I was. At Frankfurt, I followed along the platform a woman who was built like a Stradivarius cello, and then felt a bow stroke of disappointment when she climbed up into the ladies’ compartment, leaving me in a first-class smoker beside a professional type with a pipe the shape of a tenor saxophone, and an SA leader who favored Zeppelin-sized cigars that smelled more lethal than the locomotive. In the eight hours it took the train to reach Berlin, we generated a lot of smoke—almost as much as the Borsig-built steam R101 itself.
It was raining from a bucket when finally I arrived back in Berlin, and with a hole in the sole of my shoe, I had to wait awhile for a taxi at the rank in front of the station. The rain hit the big glass roof like stair rods and leaked onto the head of the line. The cabdrivers couldn’t see it, which meant they always pulled up to exactly the same spot so that the next in line would have to take a shower before he or she could climb inside, like something out of a Fat and Stupid movie. When it was my turn I pulled my coat over my head and ducked into the cab; I was able to wash one whole sleeve of my shirt without a trip to the laundry. But at least it was too early in the winter for snow. Whenever it snows in Berlin, it reminds you that it’s nearer to Moscow than Madrid by more than two hundred kilometers.