The Grave of Truth (9 page)

The restaurant was full, the food excellent; he enjoyed the wine. West Berlin was blooming with prosperity. The luxury shops along the Kurfürstendamm were as opulent as anything in Paris. The women he saw were expensively dressed, well made-up, escorted by men with money. There was a lot of laughter round them. Priem was being a good host, but he was uneasy. If there was a feature to be written about West Berlin, then he didn't see why a man from the Paris office should be sent over his head to do it.

Max leaned forward. ‘Have a look at this,' he said. He pushed a folded sheet of paper towards Priem. ‘I want to find out where they are.'

Priem read the few names, and then looked up. ‘Why—what's the angle? Nobody wants to know about the Bunker now—certainly not in Germany. It's been hashed over till people are sick to death of it. Besides, the Russians caught most of them. These three—' he put his finger against the names—‘these were released. I remember that. In the sixties. They wouldn't talk to anyone then. The others could be dead or still in prison in Russia.'

‘How can we find out?' Max asked him. ‘And don't think I'm stepping on your feet. This is part of an investigation into the Sigmund Walther killing.

‘What the hell would the end of Hitler and the people in the Bunker have to do with that?' Priem stared at him.

‘I'm not sure,' Max said carefully. ‘But there is a link. How good are your contacts in the police?'

‘Very good. I make sure they are. I've got an expense account to prove it.' He laughed. ‘And there's nothing but praise for the good job they do when I write anything. Which happens to be true. They're a good force, and a clean one.'

‘Including the expense account?' Max lit a cigarette.

Priem shrugged. ‘Lunch now and then, dinner with the wives, the odd tickets for this and that. Anyway, you want help. And the best way of getting it is to go to the headquarters on Tempelhoferdamm and see one of my friends. He'll know whether you can contact any of these people, and what records we have of them.'

The Inspector took them down to the records office. A computer operated the filing system. The names were fed in one by one. Erich Kempka, SS Standartenführer, serial no. 1877438, chauffeur and bodyguard to Adolf Hitler. Herbert Schmidt, valet to Adolf Hitler, Gunther Mühlhauser, SS Obergruppenführer, chief liaison officer with Reichsführer Himmler, serial no. 335150. Sturmbannführer Otto Helm, serial no. 977430. SS Scharführer Josef Franke, serial no. 400896. Fraulein Gerda Christian, secretary to Adolf Hitler. Fraulein Johanna Wolf, secretary to Adolf Hitler. Albert Kramer, Hitler Jugend, last known address Hildebrandstrasse 33, Berlin.

They sat round smoking cigarettes; the Inspector was a large, pleasant man in his mid-forties. He was obviously on good terms with Priem. To Max he said, ‘What's the object of this inquiry, Herr Steiner—Hugo says your paper is doing an investigation. It's not another Bormann story, is it? War criminals again?' He stubbed out his cigarette and didn't wait for an answer. He looked hard at Max. ‘Personally, I think it's time we Germans stopped rubbing our own noses in the shit. It's a long time ago and we ought to forget about it.'

‘It's nothing to do with war crimes,' Max said. ‘Or Bormann.'

Priem shouldn't have said it, but he did. He wanted to protect his own interest with the Inspector. ‘Steiner's doing a piece on the Walther assassination.'

He saw the disbelief on the policeman's face, and raised his hands in a gesture which was mockingly Semitic. ‘Don't ask me what all these dead heads have got to do with it; ask him. He doesn't know either.'

‘Just so long as it's not an anti-German angle,' the Inspector said.

‘I am a German,' Max said, suddenly angry. ‘When will we get those answers?'

‘Now,' the Inspector said. The computer assistant came up to them, carrying a sheaf of papers. The policeman didn't hand them to Max; he read through them quickly first. ‘Best of luck,' he said. ‘Excuse me, I've got work to do. I'll sign you out.'

Max went back to his hotel; Priem offered an invitation to dinner with his wife, said he knew of a nice girl if Max was interested. He wasn't and he refused the dinner. Priem didn't quite conceal his relief, shook him hard by the hand, and drove off.

There was a bar and grill in the hotel; Max found a corner table and ordered a steak. He had brought the computer's answers with him; he wasn't sure why but he didn't want to leave the papers in his room.

Kempka, the chauffeur; Schmidt, the valet; Mühlhauser, Himmler's assistant: all three returned alive from captivity in Russia. Kempka was dead, lung cancer in a Stuttgart hospital three years ago. Schmidt was alive, living at Berchtesgaden, Max noted that: the Führer's favourite ‘Eagle's Nest', perched high in the Bavarian Alps, Berchtesgaden was a Nazi shrine. He made a red pencil mark against Schmidt's name. Günther Mühlhauser. He had served fifteen years in a Russian prison, spent two years in hospital, was now employed in the personnel section of A. G. Hoechst, Hamburg. Address Goethe Allee 18, Hamburg, tel. no. 768029. Married, the second time, Hilde Ploetz, one child, female, aged six. Mühlhauser. There was a red mark against his name. Otto Helm, officer in the elite SS guarding the Bunker. Surrendered to the Americans, tried and was convicted of war crimes, sentenced to life imprisonment, released five years ago on compassionate grounds after two strokes. Living in West Berlin, Apartment 2, Regensdorfstrasse, home of daughter and son-in-law, Dr Heinz Mintzel, tel. no. 967252.

The two women, Gerda Christian and Johanna Wolf, secretaries to Hitler, were no longer traceable by the computer. Both had left Germany for Central America, in 1951 and 1952, and vanished.

But Josef Franke was, by the luckiest coincidence, working in a department store as a security man, also in Hamburg. Franke, who had pulled him out of the Chancellory yard and, together with the skinny girl who worked in the kitchen, guided him through the shattered streets of Berlin away from the encircling Russians. He had very clear memories of Josef Franke, and they were all good. He had saved Max's life. Franke had taken him and the girl out of the Bunker that same night. According to the records Max had been investigating, the main group, including the secretaries and Martin Bormann and Artur Maxmann, had waited until I May, when it had been virtually impossible to escape the Russian patrols or survive the bombardment. He circled Franke's name in red.

Albert Kramer was adviser on industrial relations to the Social Democratic government in Bonn. He was a director of one of the largest banks, chairman of a plastics company, on the boards of three major nationalized industries, gas, electricity and the railways. He was married, with two children, and his address was in the exclusive residential suburb of Puppelsdorf, just outside Bonn.

Albert Kramer. The steak arrived, with a bottle of red wine, and Max began to eat. He hardly noticed the food. It was a big steak, popular with tourists, too large to eat before a third of it got cold. Albert Kramer. He could remember him as if it were the day before that they last saw each other. The cropped fair hair, the blue eyes with the aggressive stare, the Hitler worship. He had jumped forward to take Max's place as officer in charge of the execution squad. Half stunned as he was, Max could see him standing over the man lying, still tied to the chair, on the ground, pointing a revolver at him and firing.…

Albert Kramer was a powerful businessman, and high in the council of the Social Democratic government of West Germany. That was going to be a very interesting interview. He put the paper away in his inside pocket; he had memorized one telephone number. He went to the foyer to telephone; the directory checked with the address on the list in his pocket. Heinz Mintzel, Regensdorfstrasse.

A woman answered him; he sensed the wariness of the doctor's wife against a call in the middle of his supper.

‘Is that Frau Mintzel speaking?'

‘Yes; what can I do for you? I'm afraid the doctor's not available at the moment.'

Max smiled, his intuition proved right. ‘I'm not making a sick call,' he said. ‘My name is Steiner. I wondered if I could call and see your father. I used to know him in the old days.'

There was a long pause; he heard muffled sounds and knew she had covered the telephone with her hand and was speaking to someone. ‘My father's an invalid,' she said. ‘He's partially paralysed. I don't think it would do any good your coming to see him, Herr Steiner. But I could tell him you called.'

‘I'd like to come,' Max insisted. ‘I'm trying to trace a cousin of mine. They were together in Berlin in forty-five. If your father could help me at all, I'd be very grateful. There's some family money involved. And I'd like to see him again. Could I come round for ten minutes?'

He waited, while she mumbled in the background. The doctor mightn't be available to a patient, but he was certainly there beside her.

‘All right,' she said. ‘But I doubt if he'll be able to help you. His memory's very bad. If you can come round in half an hour we'll have finished our supper.'

It was a modest street, tree-lined and the houses built within the last ten years. Each had a small patch of garden in the front and a garage. The house where Otto Helm lived with his daughter and son-in-law was on the corner, and it had been converted into three self-contained flats. Max pressed the bell for the second floor, and the door opened. The stair was narrow, carpeted and the walls were papered in a cheerful yellow. It was a good conversion, and he decided that it must belong to the doctor. He could imagine the type; frugal, honest, very hard-working, a man who had risen by his bootstraps after the debacle of the war to a profession and a small property. The kind of man who wouldn't let space go to waste when it could earn him money. He had his father-in-law, the war criminal and ex-convict, to support.

He had formed a character in his imagination, and when the door opened he was so wrong that he hesitated. A young man in his thirties stood there; grinned at him, held the door open and offered him his hand. ‘I'm Heinz Mintzel. Come in.' He was untidily dressed, in a sweater and a badly tied tie, which he had loosened; his hair was on end. Max realized with a start that his impressions of his countrymen were long out of date. This was not the starched
Herr Doktor
of his youth, whom his patients treated with respect and children with positive awe. This was a young German. ‘Trudi! Herr Steiner's here—' He turned to Max and the friendly grin was rueful. ‘I've got to rush out, I'm afraid. I've got a call. My wife'll look after you. I'm afraid the old man won't be much help, but it'll cheer him up to have a visitor.' Trudi Mintzel didn't fit in with his notion of her either. She was about the same age as her husband, a little plump, wearing jeans and a bright shirt, and round spectacles with heavy frames. She shook hands with him; a little frown appeared as she looked at him. ‘I thought you'd be much older,' she said. ‘You couldn't have known my father, surely?'

‘I did,' Max said. ‘I was only a boy, but I knew him.'

‘He didn't remember you,' she said, ‘but then he wouldn't. Half the time he doesn't know who he is himself. Come on in; he's looking forward to seeing you.'

It was quite a large bedroom; the bed was an iron-framed hospital type; there were bright reproduction prints on the walls and a big bowl of greenhouse plants on the table. Sturmbannführer Otto Helm sat in a chair by the side of the bed, with a blue rug over his knees. His daughter raised her voice.

‘Dad, here's your friend come to see you. Herr Steiner. Sit down, won't you? I'll bring you a beer, or would you rather have coffee?'

‘Nothing, thanks,' Max said. He perched on the side of the bed. Otto Helm looked up at his daughter, and then at Max. He had thin hands, with veins standing out under the pallid skin. One lay palm upward, like a withered claw, in his lap. The hair on his head was white and translucent as candyfloss; it crowned a skull-like face, which was tilted in a frozen grimace on the left side. Then he spoke, the words slurring but still intelligible. ‘I don't remember you,' he said. ‘Trudi says you knew me in the old days.… I don't remember you.'

‘I was in the Bunker,' Max said.

‘They jailed me,' the old man said. ‘It wasn't my fault. I only did my duty.'

‘Yes,' Max answered. ‘I know that.'

A thread of saliva slipped down one side of the old man's mouth. Max felt a sudden nausea. He wanted to get up and leave the room and the pitiful wreck in the chair, telling himself that it was useless, that Otto Helm couldn't possibly help him.

‘I forget things,' the sludgy voice went on. ‘I had a stroke and then another but I didn't die.' The lips twisted in a terrible smile, showing the teeth and gums on one side. ‘They let me out,' he said.

‘The Führer died, though.'

Max waited in the silence; there was a smell of antiseptic in the room. He felt he could have heard a leaf fall from one of the plants in the bowl. ‘Yes,' he said at last very slowly.

‘The Führer died. He had a man shot that day. By a firing squad. Don't you remember that, Otto?'

‘No.' The lids closed over the eyes like a tortoise going to sleep.

‘Think,' Max said. ‘Think about the day the Führer died. There was a man; you said he was a traitor. You told me about him; I was there. With the Hitler Jugend. You can remember that, can't you?'

The eyes opened again. ‘He was shot,' Otto Helm murmured, as if Max wasn't there and he was thinking aloud. ‘Swine. She tried to get him off, but no—the Chief wouldn't listen. Didn't listen to her.…'

‘Who tried to get him off?' Max leaned close to him, he put a hand on his arm and gave it a little shake. ‘Who was it? Tell me.…'

‘E.B.,' Helm sniggered. ‘But the Chief wouldn't listen.'