Mister Wolf

The sky was black and it started to rain even harder as Schlegel made the twenty-minute walk to the archive. He used the trees for cover to check he wasn’t being followed. The streets were full of umbrellas. He paused, sheltering under a tree, mesmerised by the rain, thinking about Geli Raubal’s death and whether the thugs had materialised because they had been asking too many questions about her. The deluge left him wondering at the point of any of it – the war, the streets, the trees, the traffic, the very existence of the scuttling passers-by. For a moment it was like a heavy weight being lifted, to realise there was only the endurance of a pointless existence. He saw how he had rarely amounted to more than being a guest in his own life, controlled perhaps all along by the long shadow of his missing father.

Schlegel ran on through the rain, reckoning if none of it mattered he could leave whenever he wanted. The thought rather cheered him up.

The archive was housed in one wing of the Residenz, an enormous old palace. Bits were missing from bomb damage and camouflage canopies hung over sections to disguise what from the air would be a glaring target. Schlegel checked that there was no sign of the dark saloon car before ducking into the hushed sanctuary of the archive.

The central reception area overlooked a court garden in a state of neglect. A display of posters from the early days of the Party hung on the walls. Most of the floor space was taken up with packing crates being organised by men in brown overalls who went about their business in a hushed manner.

Schlegel asked at the desk for Rehse and waited, staring at the puddle forming at his feet, until he was greeted by a tiny man with a disproportionately loud manner. Rehse was older than Schlegel was expecting, maybe even in his sixties. His mouth twisted up on one side, like half of an unsettling smile. He had what Schlegel thought of as a professor’s beard. His hair was like cut corn.

He came with a pretty secretary, presumably the same one that had been missing from her desk. She smiled at Schlegel and he decided perhaps life was not so bad after all, thinking how shallow he was.

In terms of proportion and scale, Rehse rather reminded Schlegel of Dr Goebbels in his equally palatial surroundings. Also like Goebbels, Rehse started conversations in the middle, offering a running commentary on the state of the archive. A lot was being moved out to safe storage, he said, raising his eyes towards the heavens. ‘Untold treasures. Fifty rooms!’ he exclaimed, with a sweep of his arm to show the size of the operation. ‘Not so many years ago it all had to be kept in my apartment.’

He made sure Schlegel admired the neo-classical surroundings before going on. ‘We’re a huge success. Exhibitions. Publications. Image copyright, that’s where Hoffmann was smart. Every time a photograph of his gets printed he takes a cut. I understand you are interested in purchase.’

‘Somebody would come from Berlin,’ said Rehse vaguely. ‘The white-haired one,’ he added with a hiccough of a giggle. ‘So not you.’

Rehse smirked, shooed the secretary away and took Schlegel’s arm in a show of friendliness, an awkward gesture given their difference in height and Schlegel’s wet sleeve. Rehse had tiny feet in patent leather shoes.

Impressive corridor one, followed by even more impressive corridor two, then a room the size of a small ballroom, with French windows and a terrace on which a wet peacock prowled, making its ghastly noise.

Rehse had a built-up chair behind a desk while the ones for guests were low. He sat and said, ‘I would rather you didn’t sit given the state of your clothes.’

Schlegel remained standing, sodden and uncomfortable. He said, ‘I am enquiring on behalf of a third party. So far, everything has been too unspecific.’

‘My client has a very narrow field of interest.’ He added, not quite knowing why, ‘Pertaining to Herr Wolf.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Rehse. Schlegel presumed Gestapo Müller had warned the man to expect them.

‘This is an interesting piece,’ Rehse said, producing a postcard wrapped in cellophane which he placed on the desk for Schlegel to inspect. ‘Don’t touch. I don’t want it getting wet.’

‘And on the other side?’ asked Schlegel. Rehse turned it over for him. It wasn’t stamped, dated or addressed, though the message section had been filled in; appalling handwriting, a scribbled urgency, that Schlegel read with difficulty:

Although I have braved gunfire in the trenches and charmed rich ladies in drawing rooms and roused huge crowds to frenzied cheering, I am sexually and emotionally bereft.

Obviously Herr Wolf had written it, though Rehse was not saying. It was presumably there without the author’s knowledge, or perhaps not. The man had made such a display of his life in terms of biography intersecting with political destiny; maybe in the early days he was less censored.

‘Don’t believe everything you hear,’ said Rehse. ‘Who told you about that?’

‘Rösti, no doubt.’ Rehse snorted. ‘He trades in such rumours to enable him to sell what little tat he has.’

Rehse reached into a drawer and produced two sets of books in slipcases identical to Anton Schlegel’s copy of Mein Kampf.

Rehse said, ‘These have recently been passed on to us, which makes me curious about why you are here. This copy is from the limited signed first edition of Mein Kampf dedicated to one Anton Schlegel.’

Schlegel, baffled by this turn of events, wondered if he were looking at a fake or whether Rösti was in the process of cheating him.

Schlegel asked, ‘Does that mean you are interested in purchasing it for the archive?’

‘It is of no particular value to us at the moment. Anton Schlegel is a forgotten figure and while the edition is rare the dedicatee is of no significance. Sorry to disappoint.’

‘But if Anton Schlegel did make a confession wouldn’t that give the book a certain cachet?’

‘I think you will find you have been misled. We acquired Anton’s papers after his death. Disappointing on the whole, although there was an unsent letter to his son that amounted to a sort of confession. I expect you will find that is what Rösti was referring to.’

‘To his son?’ asked Schlegel, thinking his father must be dead after all if Rehse had his papers. ‘Can this letter be seen?’ he asked, wondering to himself: Confessing what?

‘An application must be made in writing.’ Rehse smirked. ‘It takes time.’

Schlegel remembered Rösti saying he thought whatever was going on was part of a controlled exercise. He asked sarcastically, ‘What of the letter written by Herr Wolf to his niece, surely that is of academic interest as another unsent letter to a relative? Perhaps it would also be possible to see that too, if one were to apply in writing.’

Rehse steepled his hands, a rather absurd gesture for one so tiny, unable to resist showing off. ‘Let us say we were able to intervene when the letter came up for sale fifteen years ago. For performing that favour, we were rewarded with the first archive grant.’ Rehse looked around at his grand surroundings and said, ‘Every cloud has a silver lining. Our discretion was rewarded.’

Outside, the rain grew louder, with the first flashes of lightning and a rumble of thunder.

Rehse turned to the window and said they got quite a lot of storms at that time of year. ‘Big electrical ones, to do with the mountains. The gods getting angry. Have you done anything to offend?’

It was meant as both a joke and not a joke. Schlegel turned the question around by asking, ‘What did Anton Schlegel do to offend?’

‘He was a man who kept his head down, but perhaps not enough,’ Rehse said enigmatically.

Rehse shrugged. ‘It was said he had an unhealthy relationship with Herr Wolf’s late niece.’

‘And the point of any confession made by him, were it to exist, would be in connection with that?’

‘Fish all you like,’ Rehse said with a wave of his hand. ‘As you say, if it exists. Speaking hypothetically, perhaps it was given to protect the dead girl’s reputation. It would have been unacceptable if a Jew had subsequently confessed to having had a carnal relationship her. Whatever else Anton was, he was not Jewish.’ Rehse gave a whinny and asked, ‘Confessional enough for you?’

More flashes and a crash of thunder, closer, and the drumming of heavier rain. The peacock shrieked like a lost soul.

Yet Dreck the waiter had said that his father sat at the pansies’ table in the Bratwurst Glöckl.

It was bucketing down now, the gap between flashes and the reports closer as the storm moved overhead.

Rehse looked up in surprise. ‘Of no interest to us. He had a following in his day but what he wrote was of no lasting value.’

‘Didn’t his newspaper once show a mock-up of the Führer marrying a Negroid woman?’

‘Exactly. Stupid, juvenile stuff.’ Rehse looked out at the storm and said, ‘You can’t leave now until it passes. Perhaps I can get someone to show you around.’

A simultaneous flash and crash. Schlegel, tiring of this annoying little man, decided to assert himself. ‘It has come to the attention of a senior party in Berlin’ – lightning flash – ‘that a document might surface, which if exposed’ – thunder – ‘could cause huge collateral damage, some of it no doubt affecting the archive. It is our task to deliver said document to the relevant party so it is removed from circulation. Just as the letter you referred to’ – simultaneous flash and thunder crack – ‘played a part in your institution’s founding – and it is a magnificent institution – so the deliverance of this document should be seen perhaps as playing a similar role in your continuing existence.’

Rehse grunted. He didn’t look that bothered. ‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said.

Schlegel watched him leave the room. The man walked putting one foot so directly in front of the other that any trail would look like that of a monoped. The sky was purple. The cries of the drenched peacock were drowned by the storm. Schlegel could just hear Rehse talking on the telephone outside and wondered why he couldn’t have made the call in the room. He stood, still soaked through, and contemplated walking out of his life, going through the French windows into the rain, letting the grime of years wash away, trudging on until he reached the sea.

Rehse returned, looking thoughtful and waited for another round of thunder to pass.

‘Come with me, while you are waiting for the storm to end. I want to show you something.’

Schlegel obediently followed, curious. They went down a level to a basement. The sound of the storm grew muffled. Schlegel was reminded more of a prison or a bank with its security grilles and barred gates, controlled by combination locks.

‘The inner sanctum,’ said Rehse in a confidential tone, holding open another gate. Schlegel had quite lost any sense of direction. They had only made a couple of turns and walked down two or three long corridors but he doubted if he could find the way back.

‘Ah, here we are,’ said Rehse, opening another tall barred gateway, not giving on to a corridor as before, but a room. Rehse stepped aside for Schlegel who entered, realising too late that Rehse was locking the gate behind him.

He protested. The situation was absurd, being virtually kidnapped by this tiny man. He grabbed Rehse through the bars and lifted him off the ground. The man weighed next to nothing. Schlegel demanded to be released. The storm outside now seemed to be mocking him.

Schlegel did so and for a moment he thought Rehse might break into a malevolent jig, but he composed himself. Schlegel decided perhaps Rehse was an unlikely guardian angel, unwittingly protecting him from the return of the fat man and the cadaver; unless of course Rehse was holding him on their behalf.

Schlegel listened to Rehse’s departing footsteps. The room’s metal bars were like a jail in a Western film. The furnishings included a simple couch, suggesting it was sometimes used by night staff. The walls were lined with archive boxes, full of old receipts for accounts, of no interest. As he had no idea how long he would be there he stripped off his clothes, wrung them out as best he could, put on his damp underwear and arranged the rest to dry. He lay down shivering and a little feverish.

In isolation, Schlegel found he was able to visualise the niece clearly for the first time. He sensed it all had gone wrong very quickly. Wherever the final blame lay, he knew for sure that the relationship was responsible for her death.

He had a vivid image of standing next to her in the apartment, and realised he must be dreaming now, but very close to the surface, making everything appear almost tangible. She was teasing him about his white hair rather than the wretched dye. She said, ‘We’re not so different.’ A stone-deaf old woman wandered through the night-time rooms brandishing a knife and carrying a loaf of bread. The canary was out of its cage, flying around in a panic, and instead of being yellow or green, or whatever colour canaries were supposed to be, someone had dyed it black. Even in his dream, Schlegel laughed at such ridiculous symbolism. Muted voices came from the library and Schlegel knew her uncle was talking with Anton Schlegel; the girl was behind him, saying, ‘Don’t go in. We must be very quiet because there is great sickness in the house.’ She announced that she secretly loathed chrysanthemums; they were her uncle’s choice. The last thing he remembered her saying was, ‘We’re the little people. They kick us around like they kick everyone around.’ Then he was a small child again, standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs he didn’t recognise and looking up.

He woke deciding she had shot herself after all. If the dream had shown him anything it was suicide as a state of mind, which once entered became like a refuge beyond everything. He understood it gave her the choice of reclaiming herself in the moment of obliteration: See, this what I have done.

So that was that, Schlegel thought, until a complication suggested itself. He dismissed it but it refused to go away: that she was murdered while in a suicidal state , and was thus deprived of the right to determine her own fate.

Gradually in that entombed space a presence manifested itself. Schlegel heard the scrape of chair legs, then slow footsteps, pacing endlessly back and forth. He could not tell whether they were coming from above him or were on the same level. The pacing had a drag to it. Uneven and a tapping. Someone with a limp, using a stick.

He lay listening for what seemed like an age to their rhythmic monotony. He must have dozed off without realising because the footsteps were approaching. Schlegel hurriedly dressed. He had no idea what to expect; certainly not the sight that greeted him: a grotesque, shaven-headed man, wearing a powder blue suit, who unlocked the door and quietly said, ‘I am ready for you now.’

39