“He’s probably right about that,” I said. “Beautiful movie stars are in short supply these days.”
“All he really wants is for me to start this stupid picture as soon as possible.”
“I’m just guessing, but somehow I don’t think it’s all that he wants.”
“No, perhaps it isn’t. But trust me, I can handle him easily enough. If the leader ever heard about what Josef’s wife, Magda, gets up to — her ‘retaliatory affairs’ — there would be hell to pay.”
“Do you mean you’d tell him?”
“If I had to, I would. Indirectly, anyway. I’ve no wish to become another of Josef’s many conquests.”
“It almost makes me glad I’m not married myself.”
“If I could just know for sure that my father was alive. If he could only read a letter I’ve written to him. I’m sure I’d feel I’d done everything possible. But until then, my mind is elsewhere. I simply can’t concentrate on something as frivolous as a movie like Siebenkäs. I mean, have you read the novel?”
“No,” I said. “And somehow I don’t think I’m going to.”
She shook her head, as if the book were beneath contempt. “I know it’s a lot to ask of anyone — to go to Yugoslavia on my account — but if I could just know that everything that could be done to find him has been done, then I’d feel a whole lot better. Do you understand? Then I might actually be able to do this stupid picture.”
I nodded. “Let me get this straight, Fräulein Dresner. You want me to be your postman. To travel to Yugoslavia and deliver a letter, in person, to your father, if I can find him.”
“That’s right, Herr Gunther. To remind him he has a daughter who would like to see him again. I was thinking that Josef might be able to organize a visa for him to travel to Germany, and I could meet with him here in Berlin. It would mean so much to me.”
“And the minister’s prepared to do that? To facilitate my going there and your father coming here?”
“Yes.”
“This monastery in Banja Luka. Is that your father’s last known address?”
She nodded.
“Tell me about it.”
“Banja Luka is in Bosnia-Herzegovina, about two hundred kilometers south of Zagreb. It’s a largish town in the hands of the Ustaše. So quite safe for Germans, I think. You could probably drive there in a day, depending on the condition of the roads. The Petricevac Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity is run by Franciscans. I’ve only been there once, when I was a small child. It’s probably the biggest building in Banja Luka so I don’t think you could miss it.”
“What’s his name?”
“Antun Djurkovic. When he joined the order he took Ladislaus as his religious name. After the saint. He calls himself Father Ladislaus now. I have some pictures of him in the house, if you’d care to look at them.”
“Sure. But I might need to take them with me if I’m going to look for him.”
“Does that mean you’ll do it? That you’ll go to Yugoslavia?”
“Don’t rush me, Fräulein Dresner. It’s considered normal practice when you’re going to stick your head in a lion’s mouth to think about it first, even in the circus. Not least to check out the lion. See if he’s been fed. What his breath is like. That kind of thing.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning I shall probably go and speak to some of our people in Foreign Intelligence this afternoon. The kind of people who know the country and who can tell me how things are down there. And there’s a judge from my own department — Judge Dorfmüller — who’s handled many investigations in Yugoslavia. I expect he’ll have something useful to say, too. After that I’ll come back here and tell you what I propose to do. How does that sound?”
“It sounds fine if you let me cook you dinner at the same time. I’m an excellent cook considering that I’m never allowed to cook. Shall we say eight o’clock?”
I thought for a minute. On my way to the War Crimes Bureau offices on Blumeshof I could stop by Berkaerstrasse and speak to whoever it was in Schellenberg’s Foreign Intelligence department who knew anything about Yugoslavia. Of course, I’d have to return Joey’s car and come back to her house on the S-Bahn, but that would be all right. Then again maybe I could persuade Joey to let me keep the car for the night. Besides, it had been ages since a pretty girl had made me so much as a cup of coffee.
“Don’t say yes too soon,” she said. “I’ll get to thinking you actually like me.”
“Oh, I like you all right. I was just trying to work out if I could do what I need to do — that is, speak to the right people — and then be back here wearing a clean shirt having learned something useful.”
“And what’s the conclusion?”
“That I should leave. But I’ll be back here at eight. If your cooking is as good as you say it is, then I wouldn’t miss it for the world, a bit like your bathing costume. I’d certainly like to see that again sometime.”
Sixteen
I took the 540K back into Berlin. It was like driving a shiny new Messerschmitt. And Joey was right; the supercharger did whine when you started it. But once it was going, the car was magnificent. The ultimate driving machine.
At Department Six in Berkaerstrasse I asked to talk to one of Schellenberg’s people about the situation in Yugoslavia and found myself ushered upstairs into the presence of the little general himself. It wasn’t a large office like the minister’s. And the view from the window seemed relentlessly suburban. But it was easy to see why he preferred being here to somewhere closer to Prinz Albrechtstrasse; a man could be left alone out here in the sticks, with no one like Himmler to bother him. He stood up and came around his modern-looking desk. There was some gray in his neatly combed hair. He looked thinner than when last I’d seen him — his uniform was at least a size too big — and he confessed that he was suffering from problems with his liver and his gallbladder.
“These days I only seem to gain weight,” I said. “Although I think it’s mostly on my conscience, not my waistline.”
Schellenberg liked that one. We were off to a good start.
“This will be the second time this year I’m obliged to go back to Holter’s and have my suits and uniforms altered,” he said. “I’m even seeing Himmler’s masseur. He’s the only one who seems to make me feel better. But there’s nothing he seems to be able to do about my weight loss.”
From a man like Schellenberg this was quite a confession. In a department full of murderers, any one of whom would have wanted his job as the SD’s chief of Foreign Intelligence, what he’d told me almost counted as an admission of weakness and, but for knowledge that his offices had once been an old people’s home and the strong suspicion that he must have had a hand in the murder of Dr. Heckholz the previous summer, I might even have felt sorry for him. Of Horst Janssen, the man I presumed had done the actual killing, there was no sign, and when I asked Schellenberg about him, he said, “Safely back in Kiev, for the moment.”
“Doing what?”
Schellenberg shook his head as if he didn’t want to discuss it and rubbed the blue stone on his gold signet ring as if he hoped it might make the man disappear for good. And perhaps it wouldn’t be long before that came true: rumor had it that the Battle of Kursk wasn’t going well for the German forces; if we lost that front, Kiev would certainly be next.
“So what’s this war crime you’re investigating in Zagreb?” he asked. “You must be spoiled for choice in a place like Croatia.”
It suited me very well for Schellenberg to believe that my business in Zagreb was on behalf of the German Army’s War Crimes Bureau; but at the same time, I hardly wanted to tell him an outright lie. I was still an officer of SD, after all.