WHEN ROLF RETURNED TO HIS OFFICE he found on his desk a pile of blue folders containing witness reports. He shut his door, turned his radio on, then twiddled the tuner slightly to the left and right in a relentless purgative war against static until “Casanova-Lied” came over the speakers clearly. Rolf missed hearing swing and jazz on the radio, but because Klara kept records in the house, which they played at low volume so that a noise complaint didn’t turn into something worse, he didn’t miss it that much. Besides, he’d never play it here, even if someone allowed it on the radio. He needed background music, boring music, music that demanded no thought and no attention. German radio was excellent at providing this.
Rolf picked up each folder and studied it. Most of the names belonged to people who’d been rubbernecking at the Epp Farm crime scene. The folders included their statements — how they heard about the crime, where they were the night before — along with corroborating statements. There were no promising suspects in here. Neither was there an answer to who had tipped Der Stürmer off about the body. Rolf had thought it might have been one of the onlookers, or perhaps the members of the family whose phone Epp had used to report the crime. But none of them seemed to be checking out. A twinge of pain chased the thought that he’d have to talk to Etzel again. Too bad he didn’t work for a Socialist daily (as if there were any left). Rolf could have dragged him in and sweated him for weeks.
The files also contained papers, presumably from the Gestapo, about everyone’s political connections. Most were prosaic. There were a couple of Social Democrats, and interestingly the elder Epp’s file indicated that he was at one time a Communist sympathizer (a portrait of Lenin, which Rolf would have noticed had it been there, apparently once hung on his wall). None of this excited Rolf too much, except insofar as it augured the approach of Heydrich and Himmler. They would, presumably, want the explanation of why Joachim Epp was released, and why his father wasn’t a suspect, to be exceedingly careful and convincing. He supposed it would take the full afternoon, and lots of consultations with Helmut, to get the phrasing just right. Such a waste of time.
Rolf probably wasn’t going to be able to get out of the office until well after 1500, which meant less time to interview the girls in Gretl Hofstengl’s BDM troop; unless he sent Hans-Josef to do it, and interviewing wasn’t yet one of his best skills. Rolf recruited him from the Order Police two years ago because he was a good shot, paid attention, and didn’t care much about ideology — all qualities that separated him from the SA-thugs who'd dominated police academy classes since 1933. All those jackasses knew how to do was hit a man from behind. Sometimes they put people in hospital with such awful injuries that it was weeks before they could be questioned. In that pack of nothings, Hans-Josef stood out for his simple competence and good nature. But he was a long way from being a polished investigator.
A song that Rolf had been ignoring ended. There was a brief fanfare before Josef Goebbels’s voice took over the speaker. Rolf thought of shutting it off, but the volume was on loud enough for some twit at the door to be listening, and a promotion hungry twit could make it a lot harder for Helmut to protect Rolf. So Rolf resolved to endure what he could not cure.
Goebbels harangued the radio listening several for a good five minutes about sacrifice and purity and noble blood against the godless Marxist horde. “Finally,” Goebbels said, “I want to leave you with the dying words of one of our comrades, who gave his life to defend us from Bolshevism: ‘I think that the day of revenge will come. I bleed gladly for my Führer and the freedom of the German people. I will stay true to my Führer even if I must bleed or die. I am fighting Marxism. I will fight harder than ever before. I will fight with all my might for a free Germany!’ We who carry on his fight, salute him. Heil Hitler!”
Rolf suppressed the urge to vomit because he saw that Hans-Josef had opened the door a crack and was knocking on the frame. Rolf waved him in. “Shut the door.”
Hans-Josef shut the door behind him and took a seat opposite Rolf’s. “I hear you weren’t satisfied with my report on the Hofstengl investigation.”
“On the contrary,” Rolf said, picking up the red folder, “it was an extremely convincing recitation of the hard facts as we know them.”
“So?”
“It won’t do.”
“Why?”
“Before we get into that, let’s have a few words on the case. Any word yet on the restaurants?”
Hans-Josef stammered slightly as he began. “Our guys haven’t come back with anything yet. They’ve hit about three dozen places so far. I’m thinking our suspect might live in the radius we’re searching. He could have fed her and killed her in privacy, you know.”
“I know,” Rolf said. “But keep trying. We might get lucky.”
“How much are we relying on luck, sir?”
“The normal ratio in a case like this is six parts smarts to four parts luck. But in these troubled times, brains are scarce, so we need to tap some vast resource of luck to make up the loss.”
“How was the party, sir?”
“The food and champagne were great. The less said about the rest the better. If you’re smart, you’ll learn to avoid the interest and attention of Kriminaldirektor Brüning’s bosses. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. There’s a lesson you need to learn.”
Hans-Josef raised an eyebrow. “What are you planning on teaching me, Kommissar?”
“The art of writing a report.”
“I know how to write reports, sir.”
“No you don’t. At least, you don’t know how to write this report. You’re about to learn. Pay attention. This is a vital component of any detective’s survival kit. We’ll start with me asking you this question: what is the purpose of KRIPO reports?”
“To provide accurate information in a concise fashion for our colleagues and superiors.”
Some chamber music Rolf couldn’t identify came on the radio. “Wrong,” Rolf said. “The purpose of the report you’re about to write is to keep our superiors and colleagues in the dark about what we’re doing so that we can do our jobs without their interference.”
“I don’t follow.”
“You don’t?”
“No, sir,” Hans-Josef said.
“Fine. Let’s take a specific. I’ve read over the reports you brought in for the witnesses and rubberneckers at the crime scene. I’m satisfied that none of them are suspects. However, should this get beyond Helmut’s desk and attract official attention from upper echelons, do you know what will happen?”
“What, sir?”
“They’ll start asking questions. Why aren’t the Epps suspects? The body was found on their property. The Gestapo says they’re communists. Don’t you think the Jews might have arranged for them to stage this murder? Don’t you?”
“Well, no. There’s no evidence…”
“Did you check their tires for mud?”
“What would it matter? That just means they drove, and…”
“You’d better go back and do a more thorough job, Inspector, if in fact you like being a Inspector .”
“But why would they ask me to do that if it impedes the investigation?”
“Because the people Helmut calls ‘sir’ are world class conspiracy fetishists.” Rolf tossed Hans-Josef a file. “See these Social Democrats you found among the rubberneckers? If this report gets to someone in the SD or Gestapo, they’re going to demand an exhaustive analysis of everyone they have social contact with. It’ll take no end of man-hours to trace them all down, interview them, and verify their statements. Do you want to do that?”
“No, sir. It’s a waste of time.”
“Exactly. So we have to let them believe we’re doing it, expand each report out until its file looks like a Tolstoy novel. Make it all vague, boring, and longwinded. They’ll wear out, but they’ll think that the weight of the file alone suggests that masses of work have been done.”
“Example?”
“First, start out with an exhaustive explanation of the crime, using exact legal terminology and shying away from anything violent or sexual—”
“Even though this is a violent sex crime?”
“Especially because it’s a violent sex crime. We want them bored. So we’d start out with something like, ‘At 0530 May 29th, 1936, units responded to a complaint that strongly suggested a violation of Reichstrafgesetzbuch Section 211 with implications of potential violations of Reichstrafgesetzbuch Sections 178, 180, and 227.’ Do you see?”
Hans-Josef nodded. “Yes, Kommissar. That was extremely boring.”
“Thank you. Use a great deal of passive voice as well. Instead of saying ‘I questioned Mr. Weiss,’ say, ‘Mr. Weiss was subjected to extensive questioning.’”
“Should I always use ‘extensive’?”
“Always.”
“Even if I just got his name and examined his papers?”
“Always. Say something like ‘His identity and official papers were subjected to the most thorough, extensive, and scrupulous analysis.’”
“Those three words all mean the same thing, Kommissar.” Hans-Josef said.
Rolf groaned. “Your reader probably doesn’t know that. All he knows is that the papers met with three imposing adjectives. And be particularly passive and vague when drawing conclusions. Instead of saying, ‘We found no evidence linking Mr. Weiss to the crime’, we say, ‘No significant evidence linking Mr. Weiss to the aforementioned violations of Sections 178, 180, 211, and 227 has emerged, but the investigation is ongoing.’”
“But doesn’t that leave things a bit open? Shouldn’t we say that there’s no evidence?”
“No. The word ‘significant’ is our best shield. After all, in this government, the merest mention of a communist or a Jew constitutes some evidence, so we can’t say there isn’t anything. By adding ‘significant’, whoever complains will have to come up with more than that, which they can’t do because we’ve been very careful not to tell them anything.”
“So we don’t discuss the specifics of the evidence at all?”
“We don’t discuss the specifics of anything at all. The moment you bring up actual evidence, they’ll look for gaps. If you fill in the gaps, they’ll look for gaps between the gaps. They can keep us playing that game from now until Doomsday. Besides, in a weird way, smudging it all over gives our bosses hope. We haven’t proven their conspiracy but we haven’t debunked it either. They can always hold onto the vague hope that someone will get drunk and confess something, or kill themselves and leave a letter. Our lords and masters carry hopes like that around as votives. So let them have their hope, so long as it doesn’t waste our time.”
“But won’t Kriminaldirektor Brüning want the facts?”
“Kriminaldirektor Brüning would sooner want the clap. Do you really think he got where he is today, with the flashy car, the tennis club, and the holiday villa on the Tegernsee by devoting himself to facts? Facts can be inconvenient. Facts implicate and impose responsibilities. Ignorance confers innocence and liberty. All Helmut wants is to hand a big stack of papers to his superiors that says, ‘The very weight of this file says that KD Brüning is doing a fantastic job and deserves promotion.’ You and I are the only ones stuck with the facts, Hans-Josef, because we’re the only ones who care who the real killer is.”
“What about Der Stürmer?”
“Der Stürmer never cared about facts either.”
Hans-Josef nodded. “Yes, yes, I know. But surely their story will be out by the middle of the week, pictures and all.”
“That is a problem, yes. But if we do this report right, no one will ever be sure we’re talking about the same case, or that we haven’t already done what they’d like us to do on it. Besides, have you ever read Der Stürmer?”
“No.”
“Me either,” Rolf said. “And from what Helmut tells me, few of our superiors have read it and of those that do almost none take it seriously. Göring apparently banned it from his offices. Frick hates it. Only Goebbels and teenaged boys read that stupid rag, and they don’t count. If the Völkischer Beobachter were telling the same story, we’d have a problem. But they’ve been low key, thanks to Helmut’s connections.”
Hans-Josef had the look of a man whose head wouldn’t stop twirling. “Kommissar.”
“Yes.”
“Why are our superiors so invested in these conspiracies?”
“My wife has a theory on that. Our lords and masters became our lords and masters through conspiracy... and the odd murder. The only way they can justify that to themselves, since they don’t want to think of themselves as greedy, power-hungry bastards, is to imagine that they have to conspire because there’s a much larger conspiracy trying to destroy them. The more they’ve killed, the more fervently they have to believe in evermore elaborate counter-plots. Otherwise they’d tear themselves apart with guilt.”
“Is that what you think?” Hans-Josef said.
“It does make sense, but for our purposes it’s not important. All that matters is that our lords and masters are convinced that we’re as excited about discovering the conspiracy as they are, and they’ll leave us alone to find the actual killer.”
“Why do you want me to do this, sir?”
“After I leave, which I hope happens very soon, someone here will need to do creditable work, in spite of the government. You’ve got the integrity, Hans-Josef, and the energy, but you need to learn how to survive, or they’ll bury you, figuratively or literally. Of course, if you’d rather spend your days in endless slogging frustration, I could leave off.”
“No, sir. I’ll rewrite,” Hans-Josef said. “I guess in later years I’ll thank you.”
“Good boy. Besides, I want to question those BDM girls before their memories go too soft, and Helmut will need to feed his bosses something on this soon. I can’t handle both jobs.”
Grinning like a Cheshire Cat, Hans-Josef said, "You needn't trouble yourself, sir."
Rolf leaned back in his chair. Hans-Josef seemed to have grown five centimeters in the last fifteen seconds. "You did it? It wasn't in the report."
"I took care of it this morning before you came in. I was going to add it, but you came in earlier than I thought you would. I figured the party would keep you hung over until the afternoon."
"What did you learn?"
"Her buddy on the outing, Edda Angstrom, passed her a note somewhere in the middle of Hitler's speech."
"Did she know who wrote the note?"
"No."
"Did she read it?"
"She said no. She thought it was just a bit of gossip or a joke, but when she next looked at Gretl, she was gone."
"Could anyone confirm the note?"
"Yes, five girls who passed it."
"Did anyone see the author?"
"Claudia Schmidt said the note was pressed into her hand. She was standing on the end of line. The name Gretl Hofstengl was written on it, but she didn't see the author."
"Our killer knew the girl, or her name anyway," Rolf said. "That could be a time saver. Did anyone else see Gretl leave?"
"Three of the BDM girls did, but they didn't see where she went."
"Did they see her direction?"
"To their left, as they were facing the podium."
"Did any of them remember what Hitler was saying at the time Gretl left?"
"No."
Rolf hadn't expected anyone to remember, but it was worth it to ask. "That rally was filmed, wasn't it?"
"I saw some cameras," Hans-Josef said. "But they were all pointed toward the speakers."
"I'll bet there were at least a few pointed to the crowd. The newsreels are always full of crowd shots. If we could get a hold of the raw footage of a long shot of the crowd, we might catch a glimpse of Gretl leaving. You do good work, Inspector. Now get out there and pretend to be incompetent."
"My pleasure, boss," Hans-Josef said.
Rolf got on the phone to the production companies that handled newsreels. Promises of raw footage soon followed. After that, Rolf put in calls to photographers who worked the event, starting with Heinrich Hoffmann's studio and working down through newspapers, magazines, and assorted freelancers. How brazen could this killer be? Not only had he taken the girl from a Nazi rally, but he'd taken one to whom he could be connected. They could narrow their focus to teachers, doctors, coaches, family members, neighbors, family friends, and boyfriends. What in the world would make such a person think he could take this girl and get away with it? Suddenly, a solution to this crime, which had seemed months or years in the distance, looked to be days or weeks away.