The Pale Criminal (29 page)

‘Tell her that I shall personally see to it that it happens tonight,’ said Himmler. ‘The child has my own word on that.’

‘What’s that you said? All right. Emmeline says to thank you for trying to help her. And she says to tell mother and father that she loves them very much indeed, but not to worry about her now. Nothing can bring her back. You should both get on with your lives and put what has happened behind you. Try and be happy. Emmeline has to go now.’

‘Goodbye, Emmeline,’ sobbed Hildegard.

‘Goodbye,’ I said.

Once again there was silence, but for the sound of the blood rushing in my ears. I was glad of the darkness because it hid my face, which must have shown my anger, and afforded me an opportunity to breathe my way back to a semblance of quiet sadness and resignation. If it hadn’t been for the two or three minutes that elapsed from the end of Weisthor’s performance and the raising of the lights, I think that I would have shot them all where they sat: Weisthor, Rahn, Vogelmann, Lange — shit, I’d have murdered the whole dirty lot of them just for the sheer satisfaction of it. I’d have made them take the barrel in their mouths and blown the backs of their heads on to each other’s faces. An extra nostril for Himmler. A third eye-socket for Kindermann.

I was still breathing heavily when the lights went up again, but this was easily mistaken for grief. Hildegard’s face was shiny with tears, which provoked Himmler to put his arm around her. Catching my eye he nodded grimly.

Weisthor was the last to get to his feet. He swayed for a moment as if he would fall, and Rahn took hold of him by the elbow. Weisthor smiled, and patted his friend’s hand gratefully.

‘I can see by your face, my dear lady, that your daughter came through.’

She nodded. ‘I want to thank you, Herr Weisthor. Thank you so much for helping us.’ She sniffed loudly and found her handkerchief.

‘Karl, you were excellent tonight,’ said Himmler. ‘Quite remarkable.’ There was a murmur of assent from the rest of the table, myself included. Himmler was still shaking his head in wonder. ‘Quite, quite remarkable,’ he repeated. ‘You may all rest assured that I shall contact the proper authorities myself, and order that a squad of police be sent immediately to search the Schultheiss Brewery for the unfortunate child’s body.’ Himmler was staring at me now, and I nodded dumbly in response to what he was saying.

‘But I don’t doubt for a minute that they will find her there. I have every confidence that what we have just heard was the child speaking to Karl in order that both your minds may now be put at rest. I think that the best thing for you to do now would be to go home and wait to hear from the police.’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said and, walking round the table, I took Hildegard by the hand and led her away from the Reichsfuhrer’s embrace. Then we shook hands with the assembled company, accepted their condolences and allowed Rahn to escort us to the door.

‘What can one say?’ he said with great gravitas. ‘Naturally I am very sorry that Emmeline has passed on to the other side, but as the Reichsfuhrer himself said, it’s a blessing that now you can know for sure.’

‘Yes,’ Hildegard sniffed. ‘It’s best to know, I think.’

Rahn narrowed his eyes and looked slightly pained as he grasped me by the forearm.

‘I think it’s also best if for obvious reasons you were to say nothing of this evening’s events to the police if they should come to say that they have indeed found her. I’m afraid that they might make things very awkward for you if you seemed to know that she had been found before they did themselves. As I’m sure you will appreciate, the police aren’t very enlightened when it comes to understanding this sort of thing, and might ask you all sorts of difficult questions.’ He shrugged. ‘I mean, we all have questions concerning what comes to us from the other side. It is indeed an enigma to everyone, and one to which we have very few answers at this stage.’

‘Yes, I can see how the police might prove to be awkward,’ I said. ‘You may depend on me to say nothing of what transpired this evening. My wife as well.’

‘Herr Steininger, I knew you would understand.’ He opened the front door. ‘Please don’t hesitate to contact us again if at some stage you would wish to contact your daughter. But I should leave it for a while. It doesn’t do to summon spirit too regularly.’

We said goodbye again, and walked back to the car.

‘Get me away from here, Bernie,’ she hissed as I opened the door for her. By the time I had started the engine she was crying again, only this time it was with shock and horror.

‘I can’t believe people could be so — so
evil,’
she sobbed.

‘I’m sorry you had to go through that,’ I said. ‘Really I am. I’d have given anything for you to have avoided it, but it was the only way.’

I drove to the end of the street and on to Bismarkplatz, a quiet intersection of suburban streets with a small patch of grass in the middle. It was only now that I realized how close we were to Frau Lange’s house in Herbertstrasse. I spotted Korsch’s car, and pulled up behind it.

‘Bernie? Do you think that the police will find her there?’

‘Yes, I think they will.’

‘But how could he fake it and know where she is? How could he know those things about her? Her love of dancing?’

‘Because he, or one of those others, put her there. Probably they spoke to Emmeline and asked her a few questions before they killed her. Just for the sake of authenticity.’

She blew her nose, and then looked up. ‘Why have we stopped?’

‘Because I’m going back there to take a look around. See if I can find out what their ugly little game is. The car parked in front of us is driven by one of my men. His name is Korsch, and he’s going to drive you home.’

She nodded. ‘Please be careful, Bernie,’ she said breathlessly, her head dropping forwards on to her chest.

‘Are you all right, Hildegard?’

She fumbled for the door-handle. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’ She fell sideways towards the pavement, vomiting into the gutter and down her sleeve as she broke her fall with her hand. I jumped out of the car and ran round to the passenger door to help her, but Korsch was there before me, supporting her by the shoulders until she could draw breath again.

‘Jesus Christ,‘ he said, ‘what happened in there?’ Crouching down beside her I mopped the perspiration from Hildegard’s face before wiping her mouth. She took the handkerchief from my hand and allowed Korsch to help her sit up again.

‘It’s a long story,’ I said, ‘and I’m afraid that it’s going to have to wait awhile yet. I want you to take her home and then wait for me at the Alex. Get Becker there as well. I’ve a feeling we’re going to be busy tonight.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Hildegard. ‘I’m all right now.’ She smiled bravely. Korsch and I helped her out and, holding her by the waist, we walked her to Korsch’s car.

‘Be careful, sir,’ he said as he got behind the driving wheel and started the engine. I told him not to worry.

After they had driven away, I waited in the car for half an hour or so, and then walked back down Caspar-Theyss Strasse. The wind was getting up a bit and a couple of times it rose to such a pitch in the trees that lined the dark street that, had I been of a rather more fanciful disposition, I might have imagined that it was something to do with what had taken place in Weisthor’s house. Disturbing the spirits and that sort of thing. As it was I was possessed of a sense of danger which the wind moaning across the cloud-tumbling sky did nothing to alleviate, and indeed, this feeling was if anything made all the more acute by seeing the gingerbread house again.

By now the staff cars were gone from the pavement outside, but I nevertheless approached the garden with caution, in case the two SS men had remained behind, for whatever reason. Having satisfied myself that the house was not guarded, I tiptoed round to the side of the house, and to the lavatory window I had left unlocked. It was well that I stepped lightly, because the light was on and from inside the small room could be heard the unmistakable sound of a man straining on the toilet-bowl. Flattening myself in the shadows against the wall, I waited until he finished, and finally, after what seemed like ten or fifteen minutes, I heard the sound of the toilet flushing, and saw the light go off.

Several minutes passed before I judged it safe to go to the window and push it up the sash. But almost immediately upon entering the lavatory, I could have wished to have been elsewhere, or at least wearing a gas-mask, since the fecal smell that greeted my nostrils was such as would have turned the stomachs of a whole clinicful of proctologists. I suppose that’s what bulls mean when they say that sometimes it’s a rotten job. For my money, having to stand quietly in a toilet where someone has just achieved a bowel-movement of truly Gothic proportions is about as rotten as it can get.

The terrible smell was the main reason I decided to move out into the cloakroom rather more quickly than might have been safe, and I was almost seen by Weisthor himself as he trudged wearily past the open cloakroom door and across the hallway to a room on the opposite side.

‘Quite a wind tonight,’ said a voice, which I recognized as belonging to Otto Rahn.

‘Yes,’ Weisthor chuckled. ‘It all added to the atmosphere, didn’t it? Himmler will be especially pleased with this turn in the weather. No doubt he will ascribe all sorts of supernatural Wagnerian notions to it.’

‘You were very good, Karl,’ said Rahn. ‘Even the Reichsfuhrer commented on it.’

‘But you look tired,’ said a third voice, which I took to be Kindermann’s. ‘You’d better let me take a look at you.’

I edged forward and looked through the gap between the cloakroom door and frame, Weisthor was taking off his jacket and hanging it over the back of a chair. Sitting down heavily, he allowed Kindermann to take his pulse. He seemed listless and pale, almost as if he really had been in contact with the spirit world. He seemed to hear my thoughts.

‘Faking it is almost as tiring as doing it for real,’ he said.

‘Perhaps I should give you an injection,’ said Kindermann. ‘A little morphine to help you sleep.’ Without waiting for a reply he produced a small bottle and a hypodermic syringe from a medical bag, and set about preparing the needle. ‘After all, we don’t want you feeling tired for the forthcoming Court of Honour, do we?’

‘I shall want you there of course, Lanz,’ said Weisthor, rolling back his own sleeve to reveal a forearm that was so bruised and scarred with puncture marks, that it looked as if he had been tattooed.

‘I shan’t be able to get through it without cocaine. I find it clarifies the mind wonderfully. And I shall need to be so transcendentally stimulated that the Reichsführer-SS will find what I have to say totally irresistible.’

‘You know, for a moment back there I thought you were actually going to make the revelation tonight,’ said Rahn. ‘You really teased him with all of that stuff about the girl not wanting to get anyone into trouble. Well, frankly, he more or less believes it now.’

‘Only when the time is right, my dear Otto,’ said Weisthor. ‘Only when the time is right. Think how much more dramatic it will be to him when I reveal it in Wewelsburg. Jewish complicity will have the force of spiritual revelation, and we will be done with this nonsense of his about respecting property and the rule of law. The Jews will get what’s coming to them and there won’t be one policeman to stop it.’ He nodded at the syringe and watched impassively as Kindermann thrust the needle home, sighing with satisfaction as the plunger was depressed.

‘And now, gentlemen, if you will kindly help an old man to his bed.’

I watched as they each took an arm and walked him up the creaking stairs.

It crossed my mind that if Kindermann or Rahn were planning to leave then they might want to put on a coat, and so I crept out of the cloakroom and went into the L-shaped room where the bogus seance had been staged, hiding behind the thick curtains in case either one of them should come in. But when they came downstairs again, they only stood in the hall and talked. I missed half of what they said, but the gist of it seemed to be that Reinhard Lange was reaching the end of his usefulness. Kindermann made a feeble attempt to apologize for his lover, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it.

The smell in the lavatory was a hard act to follow, but what happened next was even more disgusting. I couldn’t see exactly what took place, and there were no words to hear. But the sound of two men engaged in a homosexual act is unmistakable, and left me feeling utterly nauseated. When finally they had brought their filthy behaviour to its braying conclusion and left, chuckling like a couple of degenerate schoolboys, I felt weak enough to have to open a window for some fresh air.

In the study next door I helped myself to a large glass of Weisthor’s brandy, which worked a lot better than a chestful of Berlin air, and with the curtains drawn I even felt relaxed enough to switch on the desk-lamp and take a good long look around the room before searching the drawers and cabinets.

It was worth a look, too. Weisthor’s taste in decoration was no less eccentric than mad King Ludwig’s. There were strange-looking calendars, heraldic coats of arms, paintings of standing stones, Merlin, the Sword in the Stone, the Grail and the Knights Templar, and photographs of castles, Hitler, Himmler, and finally Weisthor himself, in uniform: first as an officer in some regiment of Austrian infantry; and then in the uniform of a senior officer in the S S.

Karl Weisthor was in the SS. I almost said it aloud, it seemed so fantastic. Nor was he merely an NCO like Otto Rahn, but judging from the number of pips on his collar, at least a brigadier. And something else too. Why had I not noticed it before — the physical similarity between Weisthor and Julius Streicher? It was true that Weisthor was perhaps ten years older than Streicher, but the description given by the little Jewish schoolgirl, by Sarah Hirsch, could just as easily have applied to Weisthor as to Streicher: both men were heavy, with not much hair, and a small moustache; and both men had strong southern accents. Austrian or Bavarian, she had said. Well Weisthor was from Vienna. I wondered if Otto Rahn could have been the man driving the car.