Some of the faces broke into looks of admiration. And some of the youthful faces remained as emotionless as the face of the fat dead man in Dresden Alley.
“I need your assistance in the furtherance of National Socialism. A matter of the highest priority.” He looked at a young blond boy, who had been introduced to him as Helmut Gruber, who, Kohl recalled, was the leader of the Hindenburg brigade. He was smaller than most of the others but he had an adult confidence about him. A steely look filled his eyes as he gazed back at a man thirty years older than he. “Sir, we will do whatever is necessary to help our Leader and our country.”
“Good, Helmut. Now listen, everyone. You may think this is an odd request. I have here two bundles of documents. One is a map of an area near the Tiergarten. The other is a picture of a man we are trying to identify. Written on the bottom of the man’s picture is the name of a particular dish one would order at a restaurant. It’s called coq au vin. A French term. You don’t need to know how it’s pronounced. All you need to do is go to every restaurant in the circled area on the map and see if the establishment was open yesterday and if that dish is on the luncheon menu. If it is you will ask if the manager of the restaurant knows the person in this picture or remembers him dining there recently. If so, contact me at Kripo headquarters at once. Will you do this?”
“Yes, Inspector Kohl, we will,” Squad Leader Gruber announced, not bothering to poll his troops.
“Good. The Leader will be proud of you. I will now distribute these sheets.” He paused and caught the eye of one particular student in the back, one of the few not dressed in a uniform. “One other matter. It is necessary that you all be discreet regarding something.”
“Discreet?” the boy asked, frowning.
“Yes. It means you must refrain from mentioning a fact I am about to share with you. I have come to you for this assistance because of my son Günter, in the back there.” Several dozen eyes swiveled toward the boy, whom Kohl had called at home not long before and instructed to come to his headmaster’s house. Günter blushed fiercely and looked down. His father continued. “I suspect you do not know that my son will in the future be assisting me in important matters of state security. This, by the way, is why I cannot let him join your fine organization; I prefer that he remain behind the scenes, as it were. In this way he will be able to continue to help me work for the glory of the fatherland. Please keep this fact among yourselves. You will do that?”
Helmut’s eyes grew still as he glanced back at Günter, thinking perhaps of recent Aryan and Jew games that possibly should not have been played. “Of course, Mr. Inspector Kohl,” he said.
Kohl looked at his son’s face and its repressed smile of joy and then said, “Now line up in a single queue and I will distribute the papers. My son and Squad Leader Gruber will decide how you divide the labor.”
“Yes, sir. Hail Hitler.”
“Hail Hitler.” Kohl forced himself to offer a firm, outstretched-arm salute. He gave the handouts to the two boys. He added, “Oh, and gentlemen?”
“Yes, sir?” Helmut responded, standing to attention.
“Mind the traffic. Look carefully when crossing streets.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
He knocked on the door and she let him into her room.
Käthe seemed embarrassed by her living space in the boardinghouse. Bare walls, no plants, rickety furniture; she or the landlord had moved all the better items into the rooms to be let. Nor did anything here seem personal. Maybe she’d been pawning off her possessions. Sunlight hit the faded carpet but it was a small, solitary trapezoid and pale; the light was reflected from a window across the alley.
Then she gave a girlish laugh and flung her arms around him. She kissed him hard. “You smell of something different. I like it.” She sniffed his face.
“Shaving soap?”
“Perhaps that’s it, yes.”
He’d used some he’d found in the lavatory, a German brand, rather than his Burma Shave, because he was afraid a guard at the stadium might smell the unfamiliar scent of the American soap and grow suspicious.
“It’s nice.”
He noticed a single suitcase on the bed. The Goethe book was on the bare table, a cup of weak coffee next to it. There were white lumps floating on the surface and he asked her if there was such a thing as Hitler milk from Hitler cows.
She laughed and said that the National Socialists had plenty of asses among them, but to her knowledge they’d created no ersatz cows. “Even real milk curdles when it’s old.”
Then he said, “We’re leaving tonight.”
She nodded, frowning. “Tonight? When you say ‘immediately,’ you mean it.”
“I will meet you here at five.”
“Where are you going now?” Käthe asked him.
“Just doing one final interview.”
“Well, good luck, Paul. I will look forward to reading your article, even if it is about, oh, perhaps the black market, and not sports.” She gave him a knowing look. Käthe was a clever woman, of course; she suspected he had business here other than writing stories – probably, like half the town, putting together some semi-legal ventures. Which made him think she’d already accepted a darker side to him – and that she wouldn’t be very upset if he eventually told her the truth about what he was doing here. After all, his enemy was her enemy.
He kissed her once more, tasting her, smelling lilac, feeling the pressure of her skin against him. But he found that, unlike last night, he wasn’t the least stirred. This didn’t trouble him, though; it was the way things had to be. The ice had taken him completely.
“How could she have betrayed us?”
Kurt Fischer answered his brother’s question with a despairing shake of his head.
He too was heartsick at the thought of what their neighbor had done. Why, Mrs. Lutz! To whom they took a loaf of their mother’s warm stollen, lopsided and overfilled with candied fruit, every Christmas Eve, whom their parents had comforted as she cried on the anniversary of Germany’s surrender – that date a surrogate for the day her husband was killed during the War, since no one knew exactly when he died.
“How could she do it?” Hans whispered again.
But Kurt Fischer was unable to explain.
If she had denounced them because they had been planning to post dissident billboards or to attack some Hitler Youth, he might have understood. But all they wanted to do was leave a country whose leader had said, “Pacifism is the enemy of National Socialism.” Like so many others, he supposed, Mrs. Lutz had become intoxicated by Hitler.
The prison cell at Columbia House was about three by three meters, made of rough-hewn stone, windowless, with metal bars for a door, opening onto the corridor. Water dripped and the young men heard the scuttle of rats nearby. There was a single bare, glaring bulb overhead in the cell, yet none in the corridor so they could see few details of the dark forms that occasionally passed. Sometimes the guards were alone, other times they escorted prisoners, who were barefoot and made no sound except their occasional gasps or pleas or sobs. Sometimes the silence of their fear was more chilling than the noises they uttered.
The heat was unbearable; it made their skin itch. Kurt couldn’t understand why – they were underground and it should have been cool here. Then he noticed a pipe in the corner. Hot air streamed out fiercely. The jailors were pumping it in from a furnace to make sure the prisoners didn’t get even a small respite from their discomfort.
“We shouldn’t’ve left,” Hans muttered. “I told you.”
“Yes, we should have stayed in our apartment – that would have saved us.” He was speaking with sharp irony. “Until when? Next week? Tomorrow? Don’t you understand she’s been watching us? She’s seen the parties, she heard what we’ve said.”