The Lady from Zagreb (21 page)

T
he S-Bahn train to Genshagen, about an hour south of Berlin, was packed with car workers and factory managers returning there from visiting relations, and officials from the German Labor Front, the SS, and the Luftwaffe. Eavesdropping on their cozy conversations, it was impossible to tell them apart, and this caused me to reflect on the long and close relationship the Nazis had enjoyed with Daimler-Benz AG. Jakob Werlin, one of the company’s directors, had been a personal friend of Hitler’s since before the 1923 putsch and, according to the
Munich Post
, on the leader’s release from Landsberg Prison in 1924, it was Werlin who collected him from the gates and drove him away in a new Mercedes-Benz that he subsequently gave to Hitler. So perhaps it was Daimler-Benz’s support for Hitler that had helped persuade the Nazis to eliminate taxes on German automobiles soon after they formed a government—a nice payback for all their support. But it wasn’t just cars that Daimler-Benz supplied to the Nazis. There was a huge number of airplane engines for Germany’s fighters and bombers, as well; the company was crucial to the country’s war effort. One day I hoped some thoughtful historian would point out the close connection between the Mercedes-Benz motor car and Germany’s favorite dictator and that the Lord would find a way to pay these bastards back for their help in bringing the Nazis to power and keeping them there.

One of the company directors, Max Wolf, met me at the train and drove me straight to the factory. He was in his late fifties—one of those very stiff, mustachioed Prussian Lutherans from Schwiebus, in Poland—and a man for whom the Daimler-Benz company was a way of life. The little gold Party badge glittering like a tiny satrap’s diadem on the lapel of his tailor-made suit seemed to indicate that his particular way of life had worked out well for him so far. He couldn’t have seemed more smug if he’d been a bull walrus at the end of a successful mating season.

“The director of the factory, Herr Karl Mueller, is a personal friend of General Schellenberg,” he informed me. “Herr Mueller has instructed me to provide you with all the cooperation you need in the completion of your orders, Captain.”

“That’s awfully kind of him, and you, Herr Wolf.”

“As you probably know, we’re mainly aircraft engines here at Genshagen,” he explained in the car. “The Mercedes-Benz automobile is made at Sindelfingen, near Stuttgart. That’s where General Schellenberg’s car is now. I’m to give you the export paperwork for that vehicle and then lend you another vehicle that you can drive south to Sindelfingen, where you can collect the new one, to drive to Switzerland.”

I winced a little; whenever people use the word “vehicle” it always reminds me of pompous traffic policemen, which, I now realized, was what Wolf most reminded me of.

We drove into a factory compound that was as big as a decent-sized town and surrounded with the very latest 88-millimeter antiaircraft guns. These were obviously effective as there wasn’t a lot of bomb damage to be seen. I also noticed the presence of several female SS troopers. Wolf saw me paying them attention.

“Given the makeup of the workforce, the SS guards are an unfortunate necessity, I’m afraid. Half of our twelve thousand car workers are foreign, many of them slave laborers—Jews, mostly, and all of them women—from the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück nearby. But they’re well fed and quite happy with the conditions here, I think.”

“I suppose that’s why the guards are carrying whips,” I said. “To keep them smiling through the day.”

“We don’t tolerate any ill treatment of our slave laborers,” said Wolf without a trace of embarrassment. “Our German workers wouldn’t stand for it. Well, you can guess what these fellows are like. Most of them are beefsteak Nazis—you know, brown on the outside and red in the middle. Our Jews work hard, and I’ve no complaints about any of them. Frankly, they’re the best workers anyone could wish for. Sure, sometimes we catch our German workers giving the Jews extra bread and sharing their coffee but that’s not so easy to stop in a factory this size.”

“Easy enough, I’d have thought. You could give the Jewish workers more to eat at dinnertime.”

Wolf smiled uncomfortably and shook his head. “Oh no. That’s really not for me to say. The policy on slave labor is set in Berlin by Reich Minister Speer and enforced by the SS. I just do what I’m told. It’s as much as I can do to supply enough interpreters to make sure the assembly line continues to move efficiently. We have Poles, Russians, French, Hungarians, Norwegians, Czechs, and Dutch working here—even a few English, I’m told. They’re the laziest, you know, along with the French. Your best worker is a Russian Jewess. She’ll work all day and half the night if you tell her. We’re producing nearly four thousand aircraft engines a year at this plant alone. So we must be getting something right.”

“You must feel very proud,” I observed.

“Oh, we are. We are. If you’d care to, you’re very welcome to join us for lunch in the executive dining room. You’ll find we have all sorts. Labor officials, officers like yourself—”

I thought about that for about a millisecond: I was hungry, all right, but after Jasenovac I couldn’t have thought of anything worse than eating lunch with men like Max Wolf, especially when German workers were sneaking bread to Jewish slave laborers. The food would have stuck in my throat.

“It’s kind of you, sir, but I’d best get on my way as quickly as possible. I’ve a long drive ahead of me.”

“That you have,” he said.

He drove me straight to where my car was parked. It was a 190, with a camouflaged paint job, exactly the same as the one I’d driven in Croatia. He handed me the keys and the paperwork. I expect he was keen to be rid of me. But not as keen as I was to be rid of him.

“You’ll want to take the road to Munich, of course,” said Wolf. “From there you can pick up the road to Stuttgart. It looks longer on the map to do it that way, but of course it isn’t. Thanks to the leader we have autobahns—the best roads in the world. In a Mercedes-Benz you can be in Munich in less than six hours from Berlin, with another two hours to Stuttgart. If you try to drive straight to Stuttgart from here it will take you at least eleven or twelve hours. Believe me, I’ve done it both ways and I know what I’m talking about.”

“Thanks. I appreciate the advice.”

And I did. I made good time on the autobahn. It just goes to show that even the most loathsome sort of pen-pushing nine-till-five Nazi can sometimes put you on the right road to exactly where you want to go.

After the roads in Croatia this one was a dream to drive on. I was almost enjoying the journey. All advertising was banned on the autobahn, which made the roads a pleasant escape from the seemingly endless propaganda posters that were such a blight in the cities. My only concern was that driving at high speed on a uniformly straight road with little to look at I might succumb to the highway-hypnosis that Fritz Todt—before Speer, Germany’s leading engineer, and the man who had done most to build these autobahns—had warned about, although frankly the speed limit was much lower than of old; to save on fuel it was just eighty kilometers an hour. But with two lanes on either side of an oak-planted median strip, the autobahn still ran as straight as an aircraft runway; and this was why, here and there, sections of these medians had been converted to auxiliary airstrips, with the aircraft that sometimes used them hidden in nearby woodlands. The other traffic was mostly trucks carrying tank parts and motorboats, although once I drove past a whole U-boat, which struck me as a little surreal.

On Schellenberg’s instructions I wasn’t wearing a uniform and, because all nonmilitary traffic was allowed on the autobahns only in exceptional circumstances, the Orpo pulled me over a couple of times to check my papers, which at least broke the monotony of the journey. About halfway to Munich I stopped at an Alpine-style filling station to fill up, get some coffee, and stretch my legs. But then I was straight back on the road, as I was hoping to reach the Swiss border before dark.

Somewhere on the journey south I thought about my new bride and our unconsummated marriage, although that particular fact had seemed of lesser importance. After the ceremony, it had felt to me as if I would have been taking advantage of Kirsten in those circumstances, especially since these circumstances certainly included a strong intention on my part to sleep with the lady from Zagreb again, either at my hotel in Zurich or at her matrimonial home in Küsnacht. But mostly I just felt glad to have kept Kirsten out of the Gestapo’s hands. Goebbels had given me his word that she wouldn’t be bothered by the SD again, and while I was reluctant to trust him, I had little alternative. Of course, being alone in a car like that for hours on end means you’re inside your own skull a lot and after a while you’re seeing marks on a white wall that maybe aren’t really there; I had the crazy idea that maybe Goebbels knew I’d slept with Dalia and that my being forced to marry Kirsten was his way of paying me back—twice over if he chose not to keep his word after all.

Another crazy idea I had was that I was followed all the way from Genshagen. Except that it wasn’t crazy at all. With so little automobile traffic, it’s not easy following someone unnoticed on the autobahn. Another Mercedes 190 in your rearview mirror, matching your speed for six or seven hundred kilometers, is hard to miss. Schellenberg had warned me I might get followed by the Gestapo in Switzerland. I suppose I wasn’t very surprised that they decided to follow me in Germany, too.

I arrived at the factory in Sindelfingen just before six in the evening. My replacement car—another 190, with a civilian paint job, black—was awaiting collection and I was soon on my way again, although with less pleasure than before. I was running the engine in, of course, but that shouldn’t have made the new car seem heavier and more sluggish than its predecessor. And soon after leaving Sindelfingen I stopped the car and opened the trunk just to make sure I wasn’t carrying anything illegal. I found nothing, but this still worried me all the way until Fort Reuenthal on the southern side of the river Rhine, where Swiss customs searched the car more thoroughly and, much to my relief, they found nothing illegal, either.

The fort wasn’t called that lightly. There were bunkers, tank barricades, infantry barracks, and artillery emplacements, including two 75-millimeter rapid-firing antitank guns. Seeing all of this for the first time, I realized just how seriously the Swiss took the matter of defending their borders against any foreign potential aggressor, namely Germany.

Sergeant Bleiker, a detective from the Zurich City Police, met me with my visa and some Swiss money, which I bought with the gold reichsmarks that Eggen had given me: the Swiss didn’t like taking our paper money and, even with Hitler’s head on them, preferred the hundred-mark coins. Gold has a jingle when you count your money, I suppose. The Swiss detective was in his forties, a tall quiet man with a small mustache. He wore a brown flannel suit and a brown felt hat with a wide brim. He had a firm handshake and looked a sporty type. But gregarious he was not. I’ve had longer conversations with a parrot.

“That’s quite a fortress you’ve got back there,” I said when at last we were on the road.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “Tell your Nazi friends in Germany.”

“When was it built? It looks modern.”

“Nineteen thirty-nine. Just in time for the beginning of the war. Otherwise, who knows what might have happened?”

“Right. And by the way, for the record, now that I’m in Switzerland, I don’t have any Nazi friends in Germany.”

“I certainly hope that doesn’t mean you’re going to claim asylum here, Captain Gunther. Because the boat is full. And I’d hate you to waste your time trying to stay and then get into trouble with your own people when we had to send you home again.”

“No, no. I just got married. So I have to go back. In fact, they insisted on it. The marriage, that is. You’ve heard of a shotgun wedding. Mine involved the threat of a falling ax.”

“Congratulations.”

“So you can relax, Sergeant. Our leader, Adolf Hitler, doesn’t like it when his citizens choose not to come home.”

Sergeant Bleiker sniffed. “I couldn’t even tell you the name of our leader. Or anything about him.”

He didn’t talk much after that except to issue directions from the passenger seat, and this happened all the way to Zurich, for which I was grateful, as most of the roads were small and windy.

We drove through the Talstrasse entrance of the Hotel Baur au Lac after dark. Bleiker oversaw my check-in, bowed gravely, and told me that Inspector Weisendanger would come to the hotel and meet me for breakfast first thing in the morning.

Exhausted after my long drive, I ate some supper and went to bed. But not before I had telephoned the lady from Zagreb.

I
n the morning I got up very early and took a short walk along the shore of Lake Zurich and watched a passenger ferry landing bespectacled, quiet men wearing even quieter suits as they disembarked and headed to work in banks and offices. I wasn’t sure I envied them their steady lives but there was a pleasing predictability about Swiss life in general. The water tasted sweet and the air tasted fresh, although that might only have been because Berlin’s air and water were always full of bomb dust and a permanent smell of cordite. Sometimes, after a heavy night from the RAF, Berlin’s famous air smelled like a sulfur mine.

I wouldn’t say I loved Zurich but it’s hard not to like a city that isn’t being bombed day and night and where no one is going to arrest you if you make a joke about your country’s leader. Not that there was anyone in Zurich who could have told you the name of the Swiss prime minister any more than there was someone who knew a joke. With government by direct democracy, the idea of having a leader simply was not important. You have to love a country like that, especially when you’re a German. There was also something very reassuring about a city with so many banks, where beer and sausage still tasted like beer and sausage, where the last person who made a speech was John Calvin, where even the best-looking women didn’t care enough about their appearances not to wear glasses. Another reason to feel reassured was that I had been booked into one of the best hotels in Europe. That’s something else the Swiss do very well: hotels.

My room overlooked an attractive canal off the Limmat, the river that ran through Zurich and into the lake. The Baur au Lac was a little like the Adlon in Berlin in that everyone famous seemed to have stayed there, including Richard Wagner, the Kaiser, and more recently, Thomas Mann. According to Hans Eggen, the Baron von Mannerheim, Finland’s head of state, was now in residence and, having recently signed an armistice with the Soviet Union after several years of war, he was trying to negotiate his country’s independence of Germany, too, much to Hitler’s fury.

In spite of the war, the atmosphere of the hotel remained elegant. Champagne was still in supply on the recently constructed rooftop terrace. Afternoon tea was served in the pavilion, and dinner dances took place regularly. But food was predictably scarce. The front lawn of the hotel, which had extended all the way down to the lakeside, was now a large potato field. These potatoes were protected with rolls of barbed wire that had once served to protect the hotel itself, although from whom was not obvious as it was impossible to imagine the luxury-loving German High Command treating Zurich’s finest hotel with anything but the utmost respect. There was also an air-raid shelter in case Switzerland’s neutrality was suddenly curtailed by the German Luftwaffe.

Inspector Weisendanger joined me in the restaurant for breakfast. He presented me with a business card using two hands, as if he had been giving me the keys to the city, and refused, ridiculously, to let it go until he had seen that I had read what was printed on it.

“My address and telephone number are here,” he said gravely. “And I am at your disposal for the duration of your stay in Zurich.”

Like Bleiker, he spoke German very well—at least to me—but when he spoke to other Swiss he used a dialect of yodeling German called Alemannic that would have been difficult to comprehend at the best of times but, through a gray-black mustache that, joined to his sideburns, was as big as a tart’s feather boa, seemed quite inscrutable.

“I get it. I’m to use this card if I get into trouble, right? I can get a taxi to this address. Or find a telephone and dial this number. This is going to be really useful.”

“I’m not sure how things are with policemen in Berlin,” he said. “But it’s usually best to assume that any Swiss policeman you’ll meet does not have a sense of humor.”

“Thanks for the tip, Inspector. I’ll try to remember that.”

“Please do. My superiors require me to meet with you at this hotel once a day to make sure that you are in compliance with the terms of your visa. Should you fail to attend this meeting, you will be subject to immediate arrest and deportation back to Germany. Is this clear to you, Captain Gunther?”

“Does that mean we’re having breakfast again tomorrow?”

“I’m afraid so. Shall we say eight o’clock?”

“I think nine would suit me better. I thought I might find a nice bar and have a late night.”

“We might as well say eight. We’re not much given to late nights in Zurich. And in the police, we like to get an early start.”

“I guess that means Germany should look to invade after lights-out.”

Weisendanger sighed. “Please try to remember what I said about a sense of humor, Captain. It doesn’t translate from the German into Alemannic.”

We finished a breakfast of boiled eggs, coffee, and toast, after which I gratefully bade him goodbye, collected my car from the hotel garage, and then drove along the north shore of Lake Zurich, toward the municipality of Küsnacht and Dalia Dresner’s Swiss home. I was very much looking forward to seeing Dalia again, especially as her husband, Dr. Obrenovic, was away in Geneva.

Fifteen minutes later I’d twice missed the quiet entrance to the house on Seestrasse, the number on the stone gatepost was so well hidden. It was only when I steered the Mercedes along a gravel drive that ran through a valley of high box hedge and around to the front of the house, where a long neat lawn gave onto the sparkling blue sapphire that was Lake Zurich, that I properly understood how Küsnacht hid itself from view like a reclusive oyster. Showing a keen appreciation of human psychology, the psychiatrist Carl Jung lived and worked in Küsnacht. Doubtless he understood well that the municipality’s pampered inhabitants have the same neuroses and phobias as everyone else, with a lot more money to indulge them. But the only way to truly understand Küsnacht itself was to see it from the lakeside. This revealed it to be a little like Wannsee, only with much larger houses and bigger waterfronts. Even the boathouses looked like elegant mansions. Some of the boathouses had smaller houses attached where probably their boatmen lived. Most of the homes in Wannsee don’t hide their size. The houses on Seestrasse hid everything except the numbers on the gatepost and the newspaper in the letter box. The little town’s coat of arms was a gold cushion on a red velvet background, and after seeing the home of Dr. Obrenovic, it was hard to see how this could have been anything else save perhaps a fat bag of gold coins. Like most Germans, I’m fond of home, but Dalia’s husband’s idea of home and mine had no more in common than Lake Zurich and a bucket of water.

I rang the doorbell and waited for someone to pay attention to it; as loud as a church bell, it was hard to imagine it being ignored by anyone. I was surprised to find it answered by Dr. Obrenovic, who introduced himself to me with the alacrity of an older man in possession of a much younger wife, as if meeting all of Dalia’s friends and acquaintances was necessary to his peace of mind; or not. Great wealth won’t shield a man from being the victim of jealousy, only from the pain of hearing his wife’s behavior discussed by a wide circle of friends. Men like Dr. Obrenovic don’t have a wide circle of friends, just an inner circle of trusted employees. Almost as soon as I felt him lay his keen blue eyes on me I knew that he knew—or at least suspected—that something had happened between Dalia and me, something outside the normal conventions of the professional, detective-client relationship. It was a curious sensation for me, like seeing my father again on the day I had almost failed my Abitur. But this certainly didn’t make me feel guilty, or even awkward, just unreasonably young—which is to say, more than a decade younger than a man who was probably in his mid-sixties—and perhaps curious as to the reason why a woman as beautiful as Dalia had married a creaking gate like him. It couldn’t have been money; as a young UFA starlet, Dalia was making a lot; then again, for some women, a lot is never quite enough. There’s a French novel about that, I think.

I went inside and took off my hat and followed him through a hallway that was as wide as the Polish Corridor and lined with more old masters than Hermann Göring’s cellar.

“My wife is just changing,” he said, leading me into the drawing room. “She’ll be down in a moment.”

“I see.”

“So you’re the detective who’s been looking for her father,” he said in a way that made me think he was almost amused by the very idea.

“That’s right. I just got back from Croatia.”

“How was it?”

“I’m still having nightmares about the place. I keep dreaming I’m back there.”

“That bad, eh?”

“Worse than bad. Awful. Like something from a horror film.”

“Did she tell you that I’m a Serb? That I’m from Sarajevo?”

“She might have mentioned it,” I said, uncertain if it had been Dalia or Goebbels who’d told me where Obrenovic came from. “I really don’t remember.”

“Of course, I haven’t lived there in a long time. Not since the king was assassinated.”

He didn’t mention which one, and I certainly didn’t ask. As far as I could see, Yugoslavian kings were a bit like taxis; it couldn’t be long before another one came to the head of the rank.

“If there’s one thing European history proves it’s that there’s nothing more disposable than a king,” I said.

“You think so?”

“They don’t seem to be in short supply.”

As tall as Leipzig’s Volki monument, Obrenovic had a full head of white hair, a pair of invisibly framed glasses, a bass tenor’s voice, and ears as large as bicycle wheels. He walked like an old man, as if his hips were stiff—the way I walked myself first thing in the morning, before the day had lent them some greater flexibility.

“You obviously don’t know who I am.”

“Your name is Obrenovic. Apart from the fact that you’re a doctor of something and married to Fräulein Dresner, I have no idea who you are.”

“Is that so?”

A little overawed by the size and luxury of the room, I nodded dumbly. It’s always a surprise when I encounter people like Obrenovic, who seem to own so much: good furniture, fine paintings, familiar bronzes, inlaid boxes, sparkling decanters, ornaments, chandeliers, rugs and carpets, a dog or two, and, outside the French windows, a Rolls-Royce. Not having anything very much myself is as near to feeling like a rich man as I’m ever likely to get, even if it is the kind of rich man in the gospels who actually took the advice of Jesus and sold all of his possessions to give the money to the poor. Perfection like mine never felt so shabby and, for a change, it made me more insolent. But this might just as easily have been caused by the disappointment of knowing I wasn’t about to make love to Dalia—at least not for the present.

“So, Captain Gunther,” he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee from a silver pot on a little tray. “Did you find him? That’s what we’re dying to find out.”

I waited for a moment, until I was quite sure that none of the coffee was coming my way, and said, “Did I find who?”

He frowned and put the coffee cup to his lips. Even from where I was standing it smelled better than the coffee in the hotel. Just as important, it looked hot, which is the way I like it.

“Dalia’s papa, of course. Father Ladislaus. Did you find him in Banja Luka?”

“Not in Banja Luka, no.”

“In Zagreb, perhaps?”

“Not there, either.”

“I see,” he said patiently. “In Belgrade, then.”

“I didn’t get to Belgrade. Or Sarajevo. Or the Dalmatian Coast. Which is a pity, as I believe the beaches are very nice there at this time of year. I could probably use a holiday.”

“You’re not telling me very much.”

“I certainly didn’t intend to.”

“My wife hadn’t told me your manners were so bad.”

“You’d best take that up with her, not me.”

“I don’t suppose I should be all that surprised. You Germans are not known for your courtesy.”

“Being a member of the master race has some social disadvantages, it’s true. But you can take my word for it, Dr. Obrenovic, I’m just as rude in Germany as I am in Switzerland. I get plenty of complaints from my superiors. I could paper my walls with them. But if you’d just come all the way from Zurich to Berlin, I might at least offer you a cup of coffee.”

“Help yourself,” he said, and stepped away from the tray.

I didn’t move except to turn the hat in my hands.

“You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?”

“Now you’re getting it.”

“Might I ask why?”

“What I have to say is between me and your wife. I don’t know you from the Swiss prime minister.”

He frowned. “I thought you wanted some coffee.”

“No. That’s not what I said, Doctor. I had coffee at the hotel. It was the offer I was keener on.”

“Well, I must say—I’m not accustomed to being spoken to in this way. Especially in my own house.”

I shrugged. “I can wait in the car if you’d prefer.”

“Yes, I think that might be best.”