I walked back to Grunewald Station. I told myself that I’d gone as far as I could with my inquiries without ending up like Friedrich Minoux or even Dr. Heckholz, and I felt an enormous sense of relief that I could just walk away from it all. What did I care who was profiting from Stiftung Nordhav? Or Export Drives GMBH? It certainly wasn’t any of my business. I wouldn’t have minded a little taste of some real money myself. And as it happened there was even less chance of State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart at the Ministry of the Interior listening to their evidence of malfeasance and wrongdoing than even I had imagined. For I had since discovered Stuckart was also an honorary general in the SS.
Like so much of what happened with the Nazis, the whole thing was best left well alone. Life was already too short to go sticking my nose into the affairs of people like Walter Schellenberg and Werner Best. With any luck, no one would know that I’d ever been involved. All that mattered now was that I was away from the Alex and out of the RSHA and working for men to whom honor wasn’t just a word on a ceremonial belt. It wasn’t like the Murder Commission — at least not the one that used to exist when Bernhard Weiss was in charge of Kripo; and I didn’t honestly think that any of the cases I might be asked to handle would matter for very much in Justitia’s scales, but it would do for now.
Interlude
French Riviera, 1956
Up on the screen Dalia unzipped her beautiful red mouth to reveal a row of perfect teeth, laughed, and stared into the camera with those big blue eyes, and I was in love all over again. After more than ten years it was as if we had never been parted. Well, almost. Cinema is cruel like that. So cruel that it must have been invented by a German, or at least imagined by one. Nietzsche, perhaps, with his idea of eternal recurrence; I can’t think of a more cinematic idea than that because, to be honest, it’s highly probable that, for obvious reasons, I’ll see this film more than once. Well, why not? I could almost smell her.
And yet, tantalizingly, I could not touch her, nor would I touch her ever again, in all likelihood. Just the thought of that made me suddenly feel so weak and sick it was as if I’d lost the will to live. You never quite succeed in filling the space of a woman you have loved. But did she even remember me? Was there ever a moment in a day when something crossed her mind to remind her of Gunther and what had happened to us both? I rather doubted that, just as in the final analysis she had certainly doubted me. She could never have believed that I would assume some of the guilt that was hers. Probably she didn’t believe it until she was safely back home. Frankly I surprised myself at the time, and I fully expected to die for what I’d done; perhaps, without her, that was even what I wanted most in the world. To die. After I came back from Belarus I’d grown tired of survival at any cost. Usually, of course, I’m not quite so noble, but love does funny things to a man. Looking at her now, on screen opposite Rex Harrison, a man who represented everything I hate most about the English — smug, self-satisfied, snobbish, only vaguely heterosexual — I formed the conclusion that, most likely, I was just a small footnote to her more notorious relationship with Josef Goebbels, which, to be fair to her, Dalia had always denied but which continued to dog her footsteps. To the Yugoslavian authorities she had steadfastly maintained that, while Hitler’s propaganda chief had certainly pursued her, she had never succumbed and in evidence argued the fact that she’d seen out the last years of the war in Switzerland in preference to accepting the film roles that Goebbels had offered her in his capacity as the head of the UFA film studio at Babelsberg.
Did I believe those denials? I’d like to have done. Even at the time I had my doubts, although you could hardly blame Dalia for the priapic doctor’s interest in her. Not entirely. A woman can only choose who she tries to make fall in love with her, not who actually does. And I certainly didn’t blame Goebbels for being besotted with her, for, in many respects, he was no different from me. We both had an eye for a pretty face — two for a very beautiful one — and it was easy to find yourself obsessed with a woman like Dalia Dresner. An hour in the woman’s company was enough to make you fall for her. That sounds like an exaggeration and perhaps it is for some but not for me. I fell in love with her almost the moment I saw her, which is perhaps hardly surprising as she was completely naked in her Griebnitzsee garden at the time. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Stories should have a beginning, they should even have a middle, but I’m never sure that ones like this ever really have an end; not while I can still feel like this about a woman I haven’t seen, or touched, or spoken to in a thousand years.
Thirteen
It was almost exactly a year after the crime conference at the Villa Minoux when I found myself summoned once more to the Ministry of Truth and Propaganda. This time, it was not to see State Secretary Leo Gutterer but to meet with the minister himself. The Mahatma Propagandhi. In truth we’d met once or twice before. I’d recently returned from Belarus where, at his personal request, I’d been his eyes and ears during the Katyn Forest investigation. The bodies of four thousand Polish officers and NCOs had been discovered in a mass grave near Smolensk and, as an officer working for the German War Crimes Bureau, I’d helped facilitate the international investigation, the propaganda value of which Goebbels was still busy exploiting in the hope that it might drive some sort of wedge between the Soviets — who had murdered the Poles — and their embarrassed British and American allies. It was a faint hope but, on the whole, Goebbels was pleased with what I’d helped to achieve. Me, less so, although that was becoming something of an occupational hazard. After working for Heydrich, on and off, over the course of three years, I had grown used to the feeling of being used to good advantage by people who were themselves not good. If I’d been a little more imaginative, perhaps I might have worked out a way of withdrawing my labor, or even disappearing; after all, there were plenty of other people in Nazi Germany who disappeared. The trick was discovering how not to do this permanently.
I’d been in Joey’s office before but I’d forgotten how large it was. Henry Morton Stanley would have thought twice about mounting an expedition to try to find the washroom. And in that vast expanse of thick carpet and dense soft furnishings it would have been easy to miss completely the diminutive minister who occupied a small corner of a country-sized sofa like some malign and understandably abandoned child. Goebbels was wearing an immaculate, summer-weight, three-piece suit with lapels as wide as a Swiss guard’s halberd; his white shirt was brighter than a sunrise from Mount Sapo, and instead of a tie he was wearing a striped ascot with a pearl pin. It made him look like a pimp. Then again maybe the knot in a tie felt too much like a noose. He put down the novel by Knut Hamsun he’d been reading and stood up. The minister might have lacked stature but he didn’t lack charm or manners. He was all smiles and compliments and gratitude for a job well done. He even shook my hand with one that was smaller and somewhat clammier than my own.
“Sit down and make yourself comfortable.”
I sat at the opposite end of the sofa but I couldn’t have felt less comfortable in that vast office if there had been a Gaboon viper coiled on one of the silk cushions.
“Relax. Help yourself to a cigarette. To some coffee. I’ll fetch something to drink if you like.”
“Coffee’s fine, thank you.”
There was a silver pot with a saucepan handle and some Meissen cups on a small tray; I poured myself a black one but didn’t drink it. My bladder was already playing games with me and coffee wasn’t what it needed. I took a cigarette but just rolled it between my fingers. Relaxing was never so stressful. But then, my host was a man who counted himself an intimate of Adolf Hitler; not only that, but a clever man, too; a man who could have talked a flock of rock penguins into a sauna bath.