The Nussbaumstrasse clinic kept its secrets. A date of discharge for Schlegel A., Room 202, was entered two months later, on 15 November 1931. Had his father really stayed that long? What had been wrong with him? It couldn’t have been cheap. Schlegel was sure the sisters’ discretion came at a price. There was no medical record for any Schlegel A. on file. Records for the deceased were destroyed after ten years or forwarded in any case of referral.
Another blank.
When he got back to the hotel the gloomy, shadowed street did nothing for Schlegel’s mood and Morgen wasn’t back. He hung around the station, drinking beer and watching trains until he decided to call the archive and try and speak to Rehse.
The bank of telephones was busy. Schlegel found himself waiting longer than everyone else for a gossipy young woman, who at last hung up and gave him a careless smile to say she was perfectly aware of having wasted his time.
Schlegel spoke to the archive switchboard and asked for Rehse’s office. The line rang unanswered and Schlegel was about to hang up when a man picked up.
Schlegel said he must have been given the wrong extension. He wanted Herr Rehse’s secretary.
The man said it was her desk; she just wasn’t there. Could he assist, he asked.
Schlegel said he wanted to speak to Rehse about an appointment. He gave his name. A long silence followed and Schlegel thought the other man had just walked off, but eventually he came back and told him to come now, if that was convenient. Schlegel was about to say it was, but the other man had hung up.
He decided to check the hotel to see if Morgen was back after all. Morgen had talked of Rehse as a possible connection, according to Gestapo Müller. On the other hand, Schlegel had not told Morgen about the so-called Anton Schlegel confession mentioned by Rösti. He supposed if anyone knew anything about that Rehse might, with his archive probably a hiding place for all kinds of old secrets. For that reason Schlegel rather fancied a private conversation with the man.
It started to rain, a heavy shower that took him by surprise.
A dark saloon car with its wipers on was now parked outside the hotel. Schlegel made out two men waiting inside, one outsize silhouette behind the wheel and in the back a thin one: the fat man and the cadaver. Schlegel turned on his heel, hoping he hadn’t been spotted, and quickly crossed the street, praying that his hurry would be put down to the rain.
He ran without thinking until he found himself halfway down the narrowest one-way street, too late to realise it was perfect for an ambush. He hurried on. The end of the street was in sight when he heard a car coming up behind him. As it drew level, the driver’s door swung open to block Schlegel’s path. The rear door swung open too: it was the sort that opened backwards, leaving Schlegel boxed in. But the cadaver was having to lean out awkwardly and without thinking Schlegel pulled him out onto the ground, kicked him out of the way, swiped the door shut and ran. At the end of the street he paused to look back and was greeted by the unintentionally comic sight of the fat man obediently reversing back down the tiny one-way street and not making a very good job of it.
*
The shower had stopped by the time Morgen arrived back at the hotel twenty minutes later to be greeted by the uncanniest sight: Anna Huber pacing up and down, her suitcase on the pavement. Morgen stood thinking how only a short time before he had been looking at an old photograph of her, revealing unsuspected links. Now there she was almost as though the photograph had undergone further stages of chemical development and animated her.
Whatever the reason for her delay she’d still had time to get her hair cut short, giving her the look of an Amazon warrior.
‘There you are,’ she said.
‘And here you are,’ Morgen said, trying not to sound disconcerted. ‘How did you know where to find us?’
She shrugged to say it was obvious. ‘The tourist office is bound to keep a record of all the bookings they make. Lucky me, it turned out to be close because I don’t have money for a taxi.’
She blew out her cheeks and asked, ‘Do you have a cigarette?’
Morgen gave her one, lit it and watched her greedily suck in smoke.
‘It tastes foul. I love it.’ She had quit a couple of years ago, she said. Her eyes glittered. Morgen wondered if she was high on something. He couldn’t make her out. He asked why she hadn’t come with them on the train, wondering why she was there now.
Her excuse was a delay in getting to the station because of transport problems and a feeling she was being followed.
‘I probably would have missed the train anyway with all the hold-ups and I didn’t want to jeopardise anything.’
She smiled sweetly.
Morgen didn’t remember any particular transport difficulties that evening.
‘Where are you staying?’
She didn’t say and asked instead, ‘Can we get a drink?’ Morgen suggested the station. She pulled a face and said she couldn’t remember if there was anywhere better around.
Morgen saw he was expected to offer to carry her case. Huber travelled light; it wasn’t heavy. He pictured a silk blouse, silk underwear.
Anna Huber drank a small beer, Morgen a large one. She turned the glass in slow circles. The place was full, the mood morose, nothing but departures and goodbyes. Morgen was in no hurry. Whatever misgivings he had about Anna Huber, it was a luxury to sit with a goodlooking woman.
He made small talk, about how he didn’t know Munich, while she continued to scrounge his cigarettes. She blew out smoke and gave him a look of complicity.
‘Luring me back into bad habits.’
‘I just had lunch with Hermann Fegelein,’ he said.
She didn’t seem thrown by the mention.
‘He showed me old pictures of you at the riding academy.’
‘I have known Hermann for years. I think it’s safe to say that he is a shit.’
She seemed rueful as she stubbed out her butt with a scribbling action. Fegelein had implied they still socialised. Did that mean they slept together?
‘Are you meeting him?’
She answered equivocally, saying, ‘He’ll be down for the racing. By the way, have you come across Toni Tieck while you were here?’
‘No. Why? Who is he?’
‘I just wondered.’ Her attention seemed to drift and her earlier glitter gave way to lethargy as she seemed to be trying to rouse herself to tell him something.
‘Take me to your hotel,’ she said. ‘I could do with putting my feet up.’
Morgen couldn’t tell if she was being suggestive.
They walked slowly saying nothing. The kid behind the hotel desk watched them come in and Morgen glared, daring her to say anything, as he picked up the key.
He took Anna Huber upstairs and apologised for the poky room.
She shook off her shoes and lay on his bed, with her hands behind her head. Unlike most women she shaved her legs. Morgen sat primly on the solitary chair watching her appear to drift off.
‘I don’t know whether I should be telling you this,’ she murmured with her eyes closed. ‘It is being said that this man Toni Tieck is in possession of a document that once belonged to Schlegel’s father, in which Hitler confesses to killing his niece.’
Interesting, thought Morgen, the first time it had been mentioned since Müller. It left him even more suspicious about where she fitted in. He asked how she knew.
‘My brother told me.’
‘And how did he come by this?’
‘He overheard Tieck. He drives him into town a couple of days a week to where he sometimes works at the archive.’
So there was a Rehse connection. Morgen couldn’t work her out. She was saying this fellow Tieck had what Gestapo Müller wanted, but why was she telling him?
‘What is the point of this?’ he asked.
‘Can you help me get it?’ she said, with pleading eyes.
‘Why should you want it?’
‘For Fredi Huber.’
‘Your father?’
She said it would vindicate him, confirming what he had spent years trying to prove. ‘He drove himself half mad. They persecuted him and all the other reporters who had written a word against them.’
‘Is he still alive?’
‘I can’t say.’
Morgen thought that probably meant he was.
‘He wrote a pamphlet while on the run,’ she went on. ‘It made use of a state attorney’s unofficial inquiry, showing that the niece was killed by, or on the order of, her uncle. This document has never surfaced. My father gave it to a friend for safekeeping and that was the last he heard of both. I don’t even need to see the original confession, just a copy to show my father. That would at least exonerate the pointlessness of his existence for the last ten years.’
‘So, he is alive?’
‘Oh, yes, and rather hiding in plain sight.’
Anna Huber closed her eyes and said, ‘I must rest now, if you don’t mind. Should I give your friend a consolation fuck because he seems so down about his girlfriend?’ Morgen wasn’t as blunt as she was and didn’t say give it to him instead. ‘Or do I even care about men?’ she added, with languid amusement, leaving Morgen even more undecided if her being there with him was an invitation. Anna Huber drifted off while Morgen studied the eye movement beneath her closed lids and experienced a strangely intimate half hour watching a woman he barely knew sleeping. It was difficult to credit people asleep with lying.