The elections of July 31, 1932, found the Nazis gaining more seats in the Reichstag but still without the overall majority that would have enabled Hitler to form a government. Incredibly, the Communists then sided with the Nazis in parliament to force a vote of no-confidence in Papen’s hapless government. After that, I disliked the Communists even more than I disliked the Nazis.
Once again the Reichstag was dissolved. And once again an election was called, this time for November 6. And, once again, the republic clung on by its fingernails as the Nazis failed to achieve an overall majority. It was now Schleicher’s turn to take a shot at being chancellor of Germany. He lasted two months. Another putsch was forecast. And, desperate for someone who could govern Germany with any authority whatsoever, Hindenburg sacked the incompetent Schleicher and asked Adolf Hitler, the only party leader who hadn’t had a turn at being chancellor, to form a government.
Less than thirty days later, Hitler made certain that there could be no more inconclusive elections. On February 27, 1933, he burned down the Reichstag. The Nazi revolution had begun. Not long after that, I left the police and went to work at the Hotel Adlon. I forgot all about Anita Schwarz. And I never again spoke to Ernst Gennat. Not even five years later, when I went back to the Alex at the request of General Heydrich.
It was all there in the box file. My notes, my reports, my police diary, my memoranda, Illmann’s forensic report, my original list of suspects. And more. Much more. Because it was only now I realized it wasn’t just the Anita Schwarz notes the box contained but the case notes on the murder of Elizabeth Bremer as well. After I had left Homicide, the Schwarz case had been handed to my sergeant, Heinrich Grund, and he had managed to have Herzefelde’s notes sent to him from Munich. Much to my surprise, I was now looking at the very case file I had traveled to see during that fateful July of 1932.
Most of Herzefelde’s inquiry had been focused on Walter Pieck, a twenty-two-year-old man from Gunzburg. Pieck was Elizabeth Bremer’s skating teacher at the Prinzregenten Stadium in Munich. In summer he was a tennis coach at the Ausstellungspark. He was also a member of the right-wing Stahlhelm and a Nazi Party member since 1930. It was hard to see what a twenty-two-year-old man could have seen in a fifteen-year-old girl. At least it was until you looked at Elizabeth Bremer’s photograph. She looked just like Lana Turner and, just like Lana, filled every inch of the sweater she was wearing in the picture. The happiest moments of my life have been the few I passed at home in the bosom of my family. They would have been even happier if my family had been possessed of a bosom like Elizabeth Bremer’s. I’d seen a bigger chest, but only on a pirate ship.
Reading Herzefelde’s case notes, I was reminded that Pieck had maintained Elizabeth had binned him the week before her murder because she had caught him reading her diary. In Elizabeth’s eyes, this was an unpardonable sin, and to me, her upset was easy to understand: over the years I’ve read a few private diaries myself, and not always for the best. Hardly satisfied with this explanation, Grund had got hold of the diary, and noticed that Elizabeth was in the habit of noting her menstrual period with the Greek letter omega. In the weeks preceding her murder, a sigma had replaced the omega in Elizabeth Bremer’s diary, leading Grund to suppose that she may have been pregnant. Grund had interviewed Pieck and suggested that this had been the real reason why he had been in the habit of reading his young girlfriend’s diary, and that he had helped to procure her an illegal abortion. But, despite several days of questioning, Pieck had steadfastly denied this. What was more, Pieck had a cast-iron alibi in the shape of his father, who just happened to be the police chief of Gunzburg, which is several hundred miles from Berlin.
Neither Elizabeth’s own doctor nor any of her school friends knew about a pregnancy. But Grund noted Elizabeth had inherited some money in her grandfather’s will, which she had used to open a savings account, and that the day before her death she had withdrawn almost half of this money and none of it had been found on her body. And he had concluded that even if Pieck had not helped her to procure an abortion, Elizabeth-by all accounts a resourceful and capable girl-must have managed to do so by herself. And that Anita Schwarz might have done the same. And that these abortions had been botched. And that the illegal abortionist had sought to cover his tracks by making their accidental deaths look like lust murders.
I couldn’t disagree with much of Grund’s conclusions. And yet no one was ever arrested for the murders. The leads seemed to dry up and, after 1933, there were only two more notes on the file. One was that in 1934, Walter Pieck joined the SS and became a guard at Dachau concentration camp. The other concerned Anita Schwarz’s father, Otto.
Having joined the Berlin police in 1933, as Kurt Daluege’s deputy assistant, Otto Schwarz was subsequently appointed as a judge.
I got up from my desk and went to the window. The lights were on in the Ministry of Finance. Probably they were trying to work out what to do about Argentina’s rampant inflation. Either that or they were having to work late to decide how they were going to raise the money to pay for Evita’s jewelry. The street below was busy with people. For some reason there was a long line of people outside the Ministry of Labor. And traffic. Buenos Aires was always full of traffic: taxis, trolleybuses, micros, American cars, and trucks, like so many unconnected thoughts in a detective’s brain. Outside my window, all the traffic was going in the same direction. So were my thoughts. I told myself that just maybe I had it all figured out, more or less.
Anita Schwarz must have got pregnant and, fearing the scandal that might result from the discovery of their disabled daughter’s amateur prostitution, Herr and Frau Schwarz must have paid the medicine man from Munich to carry out an abortion on her. Probably that was why she had been carrying so much money in her pocket. Only the abortion procedure had gone wrong and, anxious to cover up his crime, the medicine man had tried to make her death look like a lust murder. The same way he had done in Munich. After all, it was better for him that the police should be looking for some kind of crazed sex-killer than an incompetent doctor. Lots of women had died at the hands of illegal abortionists. They weren’t called backstreet angel-makers for nothing. I recalled the case of one man, a dentist in the Bavarian city of Ulm, who, during the 1920s, had actually strangled several pregnant women for sex while he was supposed to have been giving them abortions.
The more I thought about it, the more I liked my theory. The man I had been looking for was a doctor, or some sort of medicine man, most probably from Munich. My first idea was the jelly doctor, Kassner, until I remembered checking out his alibi: on the day of Anita Schwarz’s murder, he’d been at a urologists’ conference in Hannover. And then I remembered his estranged wife’s young friend, the Gypsy-looking type with a little open-topped Opel, from Munich. Beppo. That was his name. A strange name for a German. Kassner had said he was a student at Munich University. A medical student, perhaps. But how many students could have afforded a new Opel? Unless, of course, he’d been supplementing his income by carrying out illegal abortions. Possibly in Kassner’s own apartment, when he wasn’t there. And if, like many students who came to sample Berlin’s world-famous nightlife, this Beppo had contracted a venereal disease, who better than Kassner to help him out with a course of protonsil, the new magic-bullet cure? It would certainly have explained why Kassner’s own address had appeared on the suspect list I’d made using KRIPO’s Devil’s Directory and the patient list copied in Kassner’s office. Beppo, then. The man I’d met outside Kassner’s own front door. Why not? In which case, if somehow he was here, in Argentina, I might easily recognize him again. Of course, if he was in Argentina, that would have to mean that he’d done something criminal to have left Germany in the first place. Something in the SS, perhaps. Not that he’d seemed like the ideal SS type. Not in 1932. Back then they’d liked them to look Aryan, blond and blue-eyed, like Heydrich. Like me. Beppo had certainly not been that.