The Arms Maker of Berlin (28 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

E
RICH STUCKART WALKED
into the rain to retrieve his morning paper from a mailbox marked “Schmidt,” a stooped old man on a soggy lawn. Nat recognized him from the photo in Berta’s portfolio, the one shot he hadn’t been able to identify until now. The two of them watched from across the street through the streaked windshield of a rental car. Nat had picked it up that morning expressly for this trip.

The way Berta had explained it the night before, Stuckart had faked his fatal car accident with the help of a Munich policeman. Another cop had let her in on the secret. Supposedly West German intelligence was in on the scheme, doing a favor for a Cold War source. Now you could visit his headstone at a local cemetery, where an urn of ashes was stored in a small vault. Nat wondered if the irony of using a crematorium as a stage prop had enhanced Stuckart’s satisfaction with the ruse. A whole new life, and he didn’t even have to change his monogram.

In fact, he’d barely changed his neighborhood. Hohengatow was just across the Havel River from the Grunewald. Sail four miles downstream and you could dock at his father’s old villa on the Wannsee. A few blocks farther and you’d be at the house where the Wannsee Conference was held. Talk about balls. It was the one detail that had finally convinced Nat that Berta’s story must be true. Because who would ever make up anything so bizarre: that a fellow so desperate to escape his past would nonetheless settle just upstream from the site where his father had earned eternal infamy as an architect of Hitler’s Final Solution.

“Nice house,” Nat said to Berta, as they watched Stuckart shut the door behind him.

“He still has the family’s old motorboat. It’s considered a vintage model now.”

“You say he slammed the door in your face?”

She nodded.

“Hard to believe you only tried once. By your standards that’s practically sane.”

“He threatened me with the police.”

“Well, I’ll threaten him with the CIA. Or better still, the
New York Times
. You wait here.” They had already agreed he would go it alone, even though she was still pouting about it. “Don’t worry. I take very good notes.”

“As long as you’re willing to share them.”

“Here’s something else I’ll share. Gollner wants to see you when we go back this afternoon. He seems to think you have something to do with the people who’ve been poking around his place lately.”

She frowned and wrinkled her nose.

“I work alone. You should know that as well as anyone.”

Nat watched her reaction carefully. She seemed genuinely puzzled by the accusation. Good. Also, to his relief, no one had followed them on the drive out to Hohengatow. The lonely road had been quite empty at this early hour. Qurashi’s death must have left the Iranians shorthanded.

“Well, you can take that up with Gollner. At least this time he’ll let you in the door. Now if I can just get Stuckart to do the same for me.”

Nat stepped into the chilly rain.

Stuckart answered his knock. Even at his advanced age, his resemblance to photos of his father was striking—the long face, the narrow, sloping nose, the undersized mouth, the wide-awake eyes, like those of a lurking owl, watching for prey. There was a calmness to his demeanor that was hard to reconcile with the monstrosities he had engineered. But, no, Nat reminded himself, that was his father’s doing, not the son’s. No real guilt here, except by association. As far as he knew.

“Herr Schmidt?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Dr. Nathaniel Turnbull, a historian from the United States. I was wondering if I might have a few minutes of your time?”

The door was already closing. Nat put his foot forward like a pushy salesman and held out his hands. He wasn’t usually so aggressive, but he wasn’t often this close to such valuable memories.

“I’m aware of your real identity, so that’s not an issue. I have no wish to make it public knowledge.”

Stuckart pushed harder and raised his voice.

“If you please, sir. I have nothing to say to you and I never will.”

“I haven’t come to ask about you. It’s about Kurt Bauer.”

This at least made him stop shoving the door against Nat’s foot.

“Look,” Nat said, “just let me tell you exactly what this is and isn’t about.”

Stuckart let go of the door, but didn’t back away. He was breathing heavily. Nat dropped his hands to his sides, but kept his foot in place.

“Whatever you tell me will go no further than my notebook,” Nat said. Stuckart began shaking his head.
“Unless—”
Nat raised a finger in warning. He felt like a bully, but what the hell. No matter how young Stuckart had been during the war, he had nonetheless been a Nazi, and from the looks of his house he was still living off the bounty of his father’s high rank.
“Unless
you choose not to speak with me. In which case I know quite a few other historians who would love to know where you live and what your real name is. There are also a few journalists who would find the story of your so-called death quite amusing, although I doubt your friends in law enforcement would care for the publicity.”

“I did
nothing!
I was a damned boy, and I only wish to be left in peace.”

“I understand. And Kurt Bauer was only a boy, too. But he’s not anymore, is he? And he has gotten to keep his name without ever having to disappear.”

Stuckart shook his head. He still looked exasperated, but he backed into the hall.

“Fifteen minutes. No more.”

He led Nat to a sitting room. A tiny woman with white hair and sparkling blue eyes peeped around the corner from the rear. She looked terrified.

“It’s all right, Marlene. No need to phone anyone. Why don’t you take Snowflake for her walk?”

A white toy poodle, immaculately groomed, showed its face at the mention of its name. The woman called after it and the two of them disappeared. Stuckart remained on his feet as they listened to the jangling of a leash, the click of tiny paws on a tile floor, the back door opening and shutting. Stuckart then settled into the middle of a grand old couch and glared at Nat.

A lot of old money was on display here—mostly in heavy oil paintings from the nineteenth century in gilded frames. Mounted high on a far wall was the head of a stag, flanked by fierce-looking boars, tusks shining in the gloom. Nat wondered if they had been killed in the Grunewald. Stuckart’s father had almost certainly held conversations beneath their gaze as well, perhaps even with Hitler, and almost certainly with Himmler. Bad spirits galore. The glass eyes of those dead beasts had witnessed it all.

“You disapprove of me living this well, don’t you?” Stuckart said. “I can tell by the way you look at everything. Your smug superiority. Well, let me tell you something, I am not afraid of your threats. I, too, have friends in the news media, and certainly with the police. If you fail to keep your word, you will hear from them, and for a long time.”

“It sounds like we have an understanding, then. In that case we should begin.”

Nat took out his notebook.

“You and Bauer. You were school chums, correct?”

“In fact, we are still friends. Not everyone is so narrow-minded as some people.”

“What was he like then?”

“The same as now. Smart. Sober. A careful man who decides what he wants and then goes and gets it. He also knows the value of loyalty. We both do. In fact, if you really want to talk about Kurt Bauer, it would be much more productive to speak with the man himself. I am sure he would be quite happy to arrange an appointment.”

“Maybe. Although I’m told he isn’t too eager to discuss the war years.”

“Of course not. No German knows how to have that discussion properly. Not anymore, because everyone has already made up their minds about how to feel about you. Before you even say a word they decide what you must have been like, and their judgment is always final.”

“Let’s not talk about Germany, then. What about Switzerland in the summer of ‘44? You and Kurt were in Bern, weren’t you?”

Stuckart eyed him carefully and said nothing. He reached into his shirt pocket for a lighter and a pack of West cigarettes. The lighter chirped, and he inhaled deeply.

“Yes. We were in Bern. But we hardly saw each other. We were too busy for fun by then. Too preoccupied. I might have seen him in passing once or twice, but that was all.”

A lie, of course, but Nat decided to save his ammunition and revisit the question later. No sense pissing the old man off just as he was warming up.

“Preoccupied with what?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Everything was coming down upon our heads, and upon the heads of our families. We were doing all we could to secure our futures.”

“Kurt’s future seemed to end up a little brighter than yours.”

“Because he is wealthier, you mean? That is not everything, you know. Even the Nazis didn’t believe that.”

“Not just wealth. Power, influence. Stature. Kurt Bauer can go out in public under his own name and everyone is fine with that. A Stuckart, on the other hand—”

“You’d be surprised how much of that so-called stature is because of the money. And he is part Jew, you know, which is an advantage nowadays. Not that it shouldn’t be, of course.”

“Bauer is Jewish?”

“Not Jewish. But he has Jewish blood. There was that whole thing with his sister’s marriage.”

Nat had never heard a word of this, and he suspected Berta hadn’t either. The odd thing was the way Stuckart seemed to revel in the information, as if he had just brought the man down a few pegs. The two men’s relationship seemed complex, to say the least, and Nat wondered what lay at the heart of it.

“His sister’s marriage? I’m afraid I’m not familiar with that.”

“She was supposed to marry an SS man. But it was called off after the background check by the Racial Office. Some ancestor turned up, ages earlier, a great-great-grandmother or something, who turned out to be a Jew. So, naturally—”

“Were there other consequences?”

“Not any real ones. There was never any question of that. His family was far too valuable to the war effort. There must have been thousands of those marriage background checks, and I never heard of a single one that led to anything beyond a few broken hearts. But of course Kurt’s father didn’t know that. The poor man panicked, nearly had a breakdown. And once you let certain people in the Gestapo see this sort of fear, well, I’m sure you can imagine how they might choose to take advantage.”

“Bribes?”

Stuckart shrugged, but a sly grin said he knew better. Maybe Gollner also knew better.

“Was that why the family left for Switzerland?”

Stuckart shrugged again, and this time he didn’t smile. He took another long drag from his cigarette before speaking.

“As I said, Kurt and I hardly saw each other in Bern. I never had a chance to ask.”

“This news about the Jewish ancestor, then—you heard that from other people?”

“I may have seen Kurt in Berlin just before he left. We were both still too young for the draft, so we had time for socializing, such as it was, with the blackout and all. They even closed the beer gardens, you know. Worst decision the Cripple ever made.”

“Did your father know about this problem with the Bauers’ ancestry?”

“Of course.”

“And he didn’t order you to stop seeing him?”

“You know, people always assume that any German in those days would have simply been appalled to find out that a friend had even a drop of Jewish blood.”

“Can’t imagine why they’d think that.”

“See? You are the same. And in my case, it is only because of my father, and some meeting he supposedly attended, and a single law that bears his signature. Say what you will, but I am not at all ashamed of my father. He was a legal technician, nothing more. They asked him to draft laws and he did so, just as he was obligated to do. Not by the German Reich, but by his professional code of conduct. The same way that any lawyer would defend some criminal, some murderer, to his very last breath if that was his duty. Does that mean the lawyer is complicit in the murder? Of course not.”

“Yes, I see your point.” The last thing Nat wanted to encourage was further lecturing. “So his Jewishness didn’t bother anybody, then—is that what you’re saying?”

“It was merely some old blood, a mistake made long ago by a distant relative. Or not a mistake, but you know what I mean. I suppose there was some reaction among a few people. But no one of importance. His girlfriend, for example. If anything, she was probably pleased by it. Not because she was a Jew, of course. More because of her politics. I always suspected that deep down she was a little Bolshevik.”

Stuckart laughed, the smoke issuing in bursts.

“What makes you say that? Because of this little group they were mixed up in, the White Rose?”

Stuckart’s smile disappeared.

“I don’t know a thing about any of that.”

“Nothing?”

“Quite right.”

“But wasn’t Bauer arrested? Surely you heard about that. He was interrogated by the Gestapo, even put into prison for a while.”

“I don’t know.”

“Your best friend goes to jail for five months and you don’t know about it?”

“We were friends, not
best
friends. And if these things indeed happened, then it must have been during a period when I didn’t see him much. There were a lot of bombings of the city in that period. Life wasn’t exactly proceeding in a normal fashion. So when people went missing from your life for a while, it didn’t seem out of the ordinary.”

“I see.” Lying son of a bitch. But why cover for Bauer on a matter that, presumably, would make the man look good, even noble? “What else do you remember about Bauer’s girlfriend?”

“Not so much. It was a poor match. My father detested her. But all the same he was fine with letting her dine in his house, because that is the kind of man he was.”

“Tolerant.”

“Of course. His duties and his work he kept to one side, his friendships and his hospitality he kept to another. As is only proper.”

“Of course.” Nat wished he had all this on tape, if only for the circuitous marvel of Stuckart’s rationalizations. He had heard some splendid examples over the years from Germans of that era, but this was a virtuoso performance.