The Pale Criminal (34 page)

‘You’ll be more comfortable like that,’ I said. ‘But so much as pick your nose and you’ll get this.’ I started the car and drove on.

‘What is the hurry?’ Kindermann said exasperatedly. ‘I fail to understand why you’re doing this. You could just as easily stage your performance on Monday, when everyone arrives back in Berlin. I really don’t see the need to drive all this way.’

‘It’ll be too late by then, Kindermann. Too late to stop the special pogrom that your friend Weisthor’s got planned for Berlin’s Jews. Project Krist, isn’t that what it’s called?’

‘Ah, you know about that do you? You have been busy. Don’t tell me that you’re a Jew-lover.’

‘Let’s just say that I don’t much care for lynch-law, and rule by the mob. That’s why I became a policeman.’

‘To uphold justice?’

‘If you want to call it that, yes.’

‘You’re deluding yourself. What rules is force. Human will. And to build that collective will it must be given a focus. What we are doing is no more than a child does with a magnifying-glass when it concentrates the light of the sun on to a sheet of paper and causes it to catch alight. We are merely using a power that already exists. Justice would be a wonderful thing were it not for men. Herr–? Look here, what is your name?’

‘The name is Gunther, and you can spare me the Party propaganda.’

‘These are facts, Gunther, not propaganda. You’re an anachronism, do you know that? You are out of your time.’

‘From the little history I know it seems to me that justice is never very fashionable, Kindermann. If I’m out of my time, if I’m out of step with the will of the people, as you describe it, then I’m glad. The difference between us is that whereas you wish to use their will, I want to see it curbed.’

‘You’re the worst kind of idealist: you’re naive. Do you really think that you can stop what’s happening to the Jews? You’ve missed that boat. The newspapers already have the story about Jewish ritual murder in Berlin. I doubt that Himmler and Heydrich could prevent what is going on even if they wanted to.’

‘I might not be able to stop it,’ I said, ‘but perhaps I can try and get it postponed.’

‘And even if you do manage to persuade Himmler to consider your evidence, do you seriously think that he’ll welcome his stupidity being made public? I doubt you’ll get much in the way of justice from the Reichsführer-SS. He’ll just sweep it under the carpet and in a short while it will all be forgotten. As will the Jews. You mark my words. People in this country have very short memories.’

‘Not me,’ I said. ‘I never forget. I’m a fucking elephant. Take this other patient of yours, for instance.’ I picked up one of the two files I had brought with me from Kindermann’s office and tossed it back over the seat. ‘You see, until quite recently I was a private detective. And what do you know? It turns out that even though you’re a lump of shit we have something in common. Your patient there was a client of mine.’

He switched on the courtesy light and picked up the file.

‘Yes, I remember her.’

‘A couple of years ago, she disappeared. It so happens she was in the vicinity of your clinic at the time. I know that because she parked my car near there. Tell me, Herr Doktor, what does your friend Jung have to say about coincidence?’

‘Er ... meaningful coincidence, I suppose you mean. It’s a principle he calls synchronicity: that a certain apparently coincidental event might be meaningful according to an unconscious knowledge linking a physical event with a psychic condition. It’s quite difficult to explain in terms that you would understand. But I fail to see how this coincidence could be meaningful.’

‘No, of course you don’t. You have no knowledge of my unconscious. Perhaps that’s just as well.’

He was quiet for a long while after that.

North of Brunswick we crossed the Mittelland Canal, where the autobahn ended, and I drove south-west towards Hildesheim and Hamelin.

‘Not far now,’ I said across my shoulder. There was no reply. I pulled off the main road and drove slowly for several minutes down a narrow path that led into an area of woodland.

I stopped the car and looked around. Kindermann was dozing quietly. With a trembling hand I lit a cigarette and got out. A strong wind was blowing now and an electrical storm was firing silver lifelines across the rumbling black sky. Maybe they were for Kindermann.

After a minute or two I leant back across the front seat and picked up my gun. Then I opened the rear door and shook Kindermann by the shoulder.

‘Come on,’ I said, handing him the key to the handcuffs, ‘we’re going to stretch our legs again.’ I pointed down the path which lay before us, illuminated by the big headlights of the Mercedes. We walked to the edge of the beam where I stopped.

‘Right that’s far enough,’ I said. He turned to face me. ‘Synchronicity. I like that. A nice fancy word for something that’s been gnawing at my guts for a long time. I’m a private man, Kindermann. Doing what I do makes me value my own privacy all the more. For instance, I would never ever write my home telephone number on the back of my business card. Not unless that someone was very special to me. So when I asked Reinhard Lange’s mother just how she came to hire me in the first place instead of some other fellow, she showed me just such a card, which she got out of Reinhard’s jacket pocket before sending his suit to the cleaners. Naturally I began to start thinking. When she saw the card she was worried that he might be in trouble, and mentioned it to him. He said that he picked it off your desk. I wonder if he had a reason for doing that. Perhaps not. We’ll never know, I guess. But whatever the reason, that card put my client in your office on the day she disappeared and was never seen again. Now how’s that for synchronicity?’

‘Look, Gunther, it was an accident, what happened. She was an addict.’

‘And how did she get that way?’

‘I’d been treating her for depression. She’d lost her job. A relationship had ended. She needed cocaine more than seemed apparent at the time. There was absolutely no way of knowing just by looking at her. By the time I realized she was getting used to the drug, it was too late.’

‘What happened?’

‘One afternoon she just turned up at the clinic. In the neighbourhood, she said, and feeling low. There was a job she was going for, an important job, and she felt that she could get it if I gave her a little help. At first I refused. But she was a very persuasive woman, and finally I agreed. I left her alone for a short while. I think she hadn’t used it in a long time, and had less tolerance to her usual dose. She must have aspirated on her own vomit.’

I said nothing. It was the wrong context for it to mean anything anymore. Revenge is not sweet. Its true flavour is bitter, since pity is the most probable aftertaste.

‘What are you going to do?’ he said nervously. ‘You’re not going to kill me, surely. Look, it was an accident. You can’t kill a man for that, can you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t. Not for that.’ I saw him breathe a sigh of relief and walk towards me. ‘In a civilized society you don’t shoot a man in cold blood.’

Except that this was Hitler’s Germany, and no more civilized than the very pagans venerated by Weisthor and Himmler.

‘But for the murders of all those poor bloody girls, somebody has to,’ I said.

I pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger once; and then several times more.

From the narrow winding road, Wewelsburg looked like a fairly typical Westphalian peasant village, with as many shrines to the Virgin Mary on the walls and grass verges as there were pieces of farm-machinery left lying outside the half-timbered, fairy-story houses. I knew I was in for something weird when I decided to stop at one of these and ask for directions to the SS-School. The flying griffins, runic symbols and ancient words of German that were carved or painted in gold on the black window casements and lintels put me in mind of witches and wizards, and so I was almost prepared for the hideous sight that presented itself at the front door, wreathed in an atmosphere of wood smoke and frying veal.

The girl was young, no more than twenty-five and but for the huge cancer eating away at one whole side of her face, you might have said that she was attractive. I hesitated for no more than a second, but it was enough to draw her anger.

‘Well? What are you staring at?’ she demanded, her distended mouth, widening to a grimace that showed her blackened teeth, and the edge of something darker and more corrupt. ‘And what time is this to be calling? What is it that you want?’

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ I said, concentrating on the side of her face that was unmarked by the disease, ‘but I’m a little lost, and I was hoping you could direct me to the SS-School.’

‘There’s no school in Wewelsburg,’ she said, eyeing me suspiciously.

‘The SS-School,’ I repeated weakly. ‘I was told it was somewhere hereabouts.’

‘Oh that,’ she snapped, and turning in her doorway she pointed to where the road dipped down a hill. ‘There is your way. The road bends right and left for a short way before you see a narrower road with a railing rising up a slope to your left.’ Laughing scornfully, she added, ‘The school, as you call it, is up there.’ And with that she slammed the door shut in my face.

It was good to be out of the city, I told myself walking back to the Mercedes. Country people have so much more time for the ordinary pleasantries.

I found the road with the railing, and steered the big car up the slope and on to a cobbled esplanade.

It was easy enough to see now why the girl with the piece of coal in her mouth had been so amused, for what met my eyes was no more what one would normally have recognized as a schoolhouse, than a zoo was a pet-shop, or a cathedral a meeting hall. Himmler’s schoolhouse was in reality a decent-sized castle, complete with domed towers, one of which loomed over the esplanade like the helmeted head of some enormous Prussian soldier.

I drew up next to a small church a short distance away from the several troop trucks and staff cars that were parked outside what looked like the castle guard-house on the eastern side. For a moment the storm lit up the entire sky and I had a spectral black-and-white view of the whole of the castle.

By any standard it was an impressive-looking place, with rather more of the horror film about it than was entirely comfortable a proposition for the intendant trespasser. This so-called schoolhouse looked like home from home for Dracula, Frankenstein, Orlac and a whole forestful of Wolfmen — the sort of occasion where I might have been prompted to re-load my pistol with nine millimetre cloves of snub-nosed garlic.

Almost certainly there were enough real-life monsters in the Wewelsburg Castle without having to worry about the more fanciful ones, and I didn’t doubt that Himmler could have given Doctor X quite a few pointers.

But could I trust Heydrich? I thought about this for quite a while. Finally I decided that I could almost certainly trust him to be ambitious, and since I was effectively providing him with the means of destroying an enemy in the shape of Weisthor, I had no real alternative but to put myself and my information in his murdering white hands.

The little church bell in the clock-tower was striking midnight as I steered the Mercedes to the edge of the esplanade and beyond it, the bridge curving left across the empty moat towards the castle gate.

An S S trooper emerged from a stone sentry-box to glance at my papers and to wave me on.

In front of the wooden gate I stopped and sounded the car horn a couple of times. There were lights on all over the castle, and it didn’t seem likely that I’d be waking anyone, dead or alive. A small door in the gate swung open and an S S corporal came outside to speak to me. After scrutinizing my papers in his torchlight, he allowed me to step through the door and into the arched gateway where once again I repeated my story and presented my papers, only this time it was for the benefit of a young lieutenant apparently in command of the guard-duty.

There is only one way to deal effectively with arrogant young SS officers who look as though they’ve been specially issued with the right shade of blue eyes and fair hair, and that is to outdo them for arrogance. So I thought of the man I had killed that evening, and fixed the lieutenant with the sort of cold, supercilious stare that would have crushed a Hohenzollern prince.

‘I am Kommissar Gunther,’ I rapped at him, ‘and I’m here on extremely pressing Sipo business affecting Reich security, which requires the immediate attention of General Heydrich. Please inform him at once that I am here. You’ll find that he is expecting me, even to the extent that he has seen fit to provide me with the password to the castle during these Court of Honour proceedings.’ I uttered the word and watched the lieutenant’s arrogance pay homage to my own.

‘Let me stress the delicacy of my mission, lieutenant,’ I said, lowering my voice. ‘It is imperative that at this stage only General Heydrich or his aide be informed of my presence here in the castle. It is quite possible that Communist spies may already have infiltrated these proceedings. Do you understand?’

The lieutenant nodded curtly and ducked back into his office to make the telephone call, while I walked to the edge of the cobbled courtyard that lay open to the cold night sky.

The castle seemed smaller from the inside, with three roofed wings joined by three towers, two of them domed, and the short but wider third, castellated and furnished with a flagpole where an SS penant fluttered noisily in the strengthening wind.

The lieutenant came back and to my surprise stood to attention with a click of his heels. I guessed that this probably had more to do with what Heydrich or his aide had said than with my own commanding personality.

‘Kommissar Gunther,’ he said respectfully, ‘the general is finishing dinner and asks you to wait in the sitting-room. That is in the west tower. Would you please follow me? The corporal will attend to your vehicle.’