A few steps from the bottom of the stairs were two soldiers of the RSD. They were older men in their middle thirties and forties. After a word from Balter, the pair at the bottom of the stairs passed them through into the end of a long concrete corridor barely two meters wide. At the far end of the hall was a doorway leading to another exit, probably within the New Chancellery building. A third doorway was on the right halfway down the passage. Next to that door against the wall was a paper-littered wooden table behind which was a seated RSD lieutenant. Two RSD guards armed with Schmeissers stood opposite the door leaning back against the wall. The lieutenant was a slender balding fellow in his fifties wearing rimless glasses. He looked a bit haggard and seemed anxious to be someplace else. Looking up first at Kurt, he shifted his gray-eyed gaze to Balter.
“What have you got for me, Oh Bringer of Victory?”
Balter glanced at Kurt. “My first name is Odin,” he explained sheepishly. Turning to the lieutenant, he said, “This is Herr Wolff.” “Hentschel asked for him to help fix the ventilators.”
The lieutenant’s face blossomed into smiles as he faced Kurt. “Herr Wolff, if you can accomplish that I can promise you the Iron Cross First Class with chocolate bar.” He nodded and held out his hand. “Papers, please.”
Kurt took the old leather wallet from his coat’s inside breast pocket, removed his papers from it, and handed them to the lieutenant. As he did so the remainder of his documents fell from his wallet to the floor. Stooping, he picked them up and replaced them in the wallet, cursing himself for his nervousness. When he stood and looked again at the lieutenant the man was frowning at him. The lieutenant held out his hand a second time. “All of your documents. Let me see your wallet.”
The lieutenant merely glanced at one document, then abruptly came to attention, his heels clicking together. If an officer comes to attention, enlisted racial memory causes sergeants on down to respond accordingly. Not only Balter and the two guards but Kurt, too, all snapped to attention. The lieutenant grinned and held out his hands. “Please, Herr Wolff, I only meant to show respect. Please. No need to stand at attention. Please.” The officer looked at Balter and the two guards. “Brothers, may I introduce to you Inspector Wolff, the fellow who helped the citizens of Hanover to improve their diets.” He laughed at the confused expressions he received. “This is the man responsible for the arrest of Fritz Haarmann.”
“The butcher of Hanover,” whispered one of the guards.
Sgt. Balter looked Kurt square in the face. “Your father is Josef Wolff ? Inspector in Munich until he retired?”
“Yes.” Kurt faced the lieutenant. “You are quite gracious, sir. I am no longer in the police.”
“Former detective Ernst Senger, Herr Wolff. I knew your father from Munich.” He gestured to the two guards and Sgt. Balter. “Schmidtke, Jansen, Balter—we’re all Bavarian Police—just about the entire RSD is.”
Kurt grinned. “I thought you boys seemed familiar.”
“All the flat feet,” joked the guard named Schmidtke. He was tall and rawboned, black hair and blue eyes.
“Your father’s name goes a long way with us,” said Lt. Senger. His face grew somber. “Is your father well?”
“As far as I know, thank you, Lieutenant. He and my mother went abroad in ‘31. And to be quite honest, I didn’t arrest Fritz Haarmann.”
“No,” said the squat lantern-jawed guard who had been identified as Jansen. “You and the Kriminalpolizei from Berlin came down and simply pointed out that Haarmann was a Hanover police informant, which is why the Saxony cops refused to identify him. You broke the case, sir.”
“Terrible pork shortage in Hanover’s black market ever since, though,” quipped Schmidtke.
After a pained glance at Schmidtke, Lt. Senger gathered up Kurt’s documents to replace them in the wallet. As he came to a small brown booklet, he paused. “Your army paybook from when you were in the Great War.”
“Hentschel told me Herr Wolff was in the Fuhrer’s old regiment, the 16th Bavarian,” said Balter.
The lieutenant nodded and glanced up at Kurt. “The Iron Cross First Class.”
“The paybook helps ease my way past the street courts up there,” Kurt said, glancing in the general direction of the surface.
“The mad dogs are running things, Herr Wolff. Only for the present,” said the lieutenant in a lower tone. “We’ll have law and order to protect all of us again someday,” he remarked as he glanced around nervously and handed Kurt his wallet. He faced Balter. “Take Herr Wolff to the engineer.” he glanced at Kurt, “Good luck, sir—with the ventilation system, as well as other things.” He held out his hand and Kurt shook it.
Past the thick gas door, signs and smells to left and right indicated shower rooms and water closets. Straight ahead through another door Kurt saw a long hallway, naked bulbs down the center illuminating a seemingly permanent haze hanging in the air. It wasn’t cigarette smoke. Adolph Hitler wouldn’t tolerate that. It was more a mixture of dust, humidity, and air fouled with diesel fumes. The sound of a massive detonation came from above, shaking the walls, adding to the dust. The lights dimmed momentarily, but the men and women in the hall space seemed hardly to notice.
There was a large table in the center of the hall. On it were trays of food, several open and unopened bottles of champagne, and—as advertised—chocolate cake. Two of them, both half eaten. Farther down the hall, through a dividing partition, there was a man and a woman dancing to a slow tune, the scratchy lyrics in English. The man was in a Luftwaffe uniform, the woman in a black skirt and white blouse. Two beautiful blond-haired children—both girls hardly school age—were looking through stacks of phonograph records next to a makeshift bar made from a metal locker that had been placed on the seats of two straight-backed chairs. On the black and white checkered linoleum floor were drifts of papers. Two men—both SS officers—were arguing loudly at the bar. Their volume had less to do with their subject of discourse than it had to do with alcohol and the background noise consisting of whining ventilators, music, and artillery shells exploding above. The one with a black eye patch was rambling incoherently about Army Group Nine while the other one, who had no hair, defended his side in an unrelated argument about the possible mental effects of Eisenhower’s baldness.
The girls put on another record, one that Kurt recognized: Benny Goodman’s “Down South Camp Meeting.” As the joint began jumpin’ and others looked on from chairs and leaning places, two couples attempted jitterbugging in the cramped space while the original couple continued slow dancing. Kurt glanced at Balter, but the sergeant appeared to notice nothing as he led the way through the children and dancing couples to a closed door in another partition near the end of the hall. Opening the door, he entered first and pulled it shut behind Kurt. Curiously, the music seemed even louder. They were at yet another guard station before the top of a staircase that led deeper beneath the surface.
The small room was illuminated by a single naked bulb. At the table against the left wall was an RSD sergeant in his mid-thirties, blond-and-blue, well built, all polished and sitting in Aryan splendor with a sour expression on his face. He glanced up at the speaker which was blaring out the Benny Goodman selection. “Not exactly Bach’s ‘Air on the G String,’ is it?” he said to Balter.
“Few pieces are, Brinkmann.” He nodded toward Kurt. “This is the fellow I was sent to get.”
Sgt. Brinkmann nodded and waved off Kurt’s offered papers. “Go ahead. Balter, if you run across that idiot Pvt. Apel down in the Fuhrerbunker, please tell him I am still waiting for Dr. Stumpfegger’s aspirins.” He looked at Kurt with an expression of sudden recognition. “Are you the fellow who’s going to fix the ventilation system?”