Alighting the U-Bahn train near the eastern boundary of Wilmersdorf, they took the short walk towards the Bavarian quarter. It was quiet out—just another ordinary Thursday afternoon. An old man approached with a small mangy-looking, bearded grey dog on a length of frayed old rope.
“Have you seen my wife? She has short blonde hair. I have been looking for her.”
“I’m afraid not,” replied Jack. He looked quizzically at Bill, who just shrugged back.
“She has been out a long time. It’s not like her at all. Do you have some spare money so that I may buy some bread and cheese? I need the energy to continue the search.”
“Clever story, old man, here,” said Jack with a smirk as he handed him a few marks.
The old man nodded in appreciation and shuffled off toward the tram stop they had passed, all the while talking and wittering away to his canine companion.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he really was looking for her, you know, Jack?”
“Perhaps. This is the city of missing people, after all.”
Albie’s office was just past yet another old, destroyed church building. The various houses of faith hadn’t faired well in Berlin. Maybe even God dared not interfere with the self-proclaimed National Socialists’ right to rule. The Berlin Post’s main office was located elsewhere, but Albie had his own right here in Wilmersdorf, conveniently located in the same building as their archives, which were kept safely in the basement.
They arrived at the main door, and Jack rang the bell. After a few moments, a great mountain of a man appeared at the glass door, completely blocking it like an apocalyptic eclipse. He opened the door and then shook hands with Bill, enclosing his hand with a giant fist.
“Good to see you, Bill,” said Igor, “and you, Jack.”
“Hello, Igor. How are you finding life as a bodyguard?”
“Very relaxing. I sit and read and drink coffee. I think a job as a journalist would suit me well. Josef has been helping me with my German. I think he is bored too.”
“Well, it has certainly improved, pal,” Jack added.
The three of them entered the building. Igor led the way upstairs, with Jack close behind. Bill locked the door behind them and followed them up. Climbing the stairs in height and size order, all dressed in suits and long coats, they looked like characters in a bizarre children’s nursery rhyme. All they needed was their pantomime baddie, but Misselwitz still eluded them.
The wide, concrete stairs led up and around to the first floor. Through wooden double doors, the first room to the right had yet another door, with a frosted glass pane, ornately hand-painted in gold-and-black Germanic gothic lettering.
Albrecht Weber - Berlin Post - Editor of City Affairs.
While Igor returned to the open room next door and his newspaper, Bill opened the office door without knocking, and they stepped inside.
“Hello, gentlemen,” said Albie enthusiastically, as he lifted his eyes from the document he was reading.
“Good afternoon, Albie,” replied Bill.
“Are you keeping away from trouble?”
“I think that trouble is trying its best to prevent that. We are in it. Up to our ears. What do you have for us?”
“Doesn’t sound good. I’m glad I have Igor with me now. Please wait while I go and fetch my notes from downstairs. I won’t be a moment.”
Jack wandered over and took a look at the various documents scattered across Albie’s desk. He picked up and scan-read a few of them.
“Boring, boring, boring. They may as well be about cats stuck up trees.”
“Anything interesting in this city never makes the papers. One of the governments will stick its beak into any nugget of decent news. So, it’s all either boring or propaganda,” Bill replied.
“Not much has changed here in Berlin, after all, then.”
Bill turned and left Jack to his reading matter.
Entering the neighbouring office, he glanced around the filthy room and said, “I don’t reckon much to your new office, Igor.”
“It beats standing out in the cold at Anna’s. This is warm, and I get better conversation than with that fathead, Fabian.”
“Pleased to meet you, at last,” said the slight man standing on the other side of the desk from Igor.
He was lean and wiry. He reminded Bill of his old, unarmed combat instructor, Fairburn. This man had the same mean eyes. Even his slender body matched. Bill had long since stopped judging a man’s fighting ability by his build. He’d seen far smaller men turn out to be some of the most vicious fighters you’d never want to be on the wrong side of. This particular lean figure before him stuck out a hand to clasp Bill’s.
“Hello, Josef. Albie has told me all about you.”
“All good, I hope.”
When Josef spoke he had the air of a soldier, with the accent of a man from the officer class but the curt direct manner of a combat leader. You can spot them immediately once you’ve been around those sorts of men long enough. Bill liked him already.
“Good enough, I suppose, considering you were on the wrong bloody side!” Bill responded and laughed.
“Yes, sorry about that. It couldn’t be helped. Where did you serve, Bill?”
“All over, Europe mainly. I got around a fair bit. I believe you drove trucks?”
“Not to start with. I was in a combat unit but took some shrapnel from a tank shell during the invasion of Poland.”
Igor looked up from his paper and shook his head. “Motherfuckers.”
Josef nodded in agreement. “I didn’t want to be there. The whole war was a bloody stupid waste of lives if you ask me. All it needed was one to be ended, as it turned out. That pale Charlie-Chaplin-looking bastard should have stuck a gun in his mouth years earlier and saved us the trouble.”
“Yes, he should, although one of his equally psychotic friends would have taken over. Goebbels the cripple, or fat Hermann the cross-dresser. Timing is everything.”
The three men sat silently for a few moments. Bill knew each of them was running the war through in their heads. It was like some twisted life-flashing-before-your-eyes moment, without even the liberating death at the end of it all.
Bill thought about Irene. The finality of her existence felt nothing at all like liberation. She died half-naked on a bed in an apartment she didn’t own, in a city she didn’t much care for, and even he wasn’t there for her at the end when she needed him most. He felt so utterly deflated and guilty, too, that he now had to prioritise his own situation first.
“Are you a Berliner, Joe?”
“Yes. We grew up around here, Albie and I. Do you see that half-demolished building across the way?” he commented, pointing at the crumbling ruins out the window. “That’s the old synagogue. We used to play outside it when we were young, before the Nazis. We used to play war and pretend the grand brick synagogue was a castle that needed besieging. We were just little kids, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t know what a Jew was until the Brownshirts turned up and kept telling everyone.”
Jack had appeared in the doorway, having no doubt overhead the conversation. Igor sat and listened in solemn silence.
Josef gazed out the window at the ruined building. “We never spoke out when we should have. We all just laughed it off. Things like that don’t happen in Germany, we’d tell each other. Then came that night.”
“You couldn’t have known how far they would go.”
“I had spent the summer as an intern at one of the local papers here in Wilmersdorf. The tension was bubbling away. It was palpable in the street, among a certain section of society. What started as comments became violent. I was ashamed to be a German. That building, there, came down in one night. The firemen that attended just prevented the flames from spreading to the other buildings and allowed it to burn.”
Bill waited for a moment, then changed the subject.
“I hear you know our dead friend from the Jeep?”
“Well, I met him a few times. He was an arrogant bastard. A captain in the SS. Some kind of hunting party. A police battalion, they called it. It would be funny if it wasn’t so repugnant. Anyway, yes, that’s your guy. Any idea how long we need to stay holed up in here?”
“Not much longer, I’ll let you know. Maybe a few more days. Just until we know who we’ve pissed off.”
Albie appeared in the doorway next to Jack.
“I’ve got some interesting news on your Jeep jockey,” he said as he squeezed past Jack and put a small stack of papers down on the table, knocking Igor’s cup aside. Igor shot Albie a look of displeasure while Jack stifled his laughter.
“Sorry, friend,” Albie said, with a tremble in his voice. “Right, this is a lot of waffle,” he said, pointing at the pile, “but here are the highlights,” he added as he scanned through his page of notes. “First, let’s address the crash victim. So, we already know our late Jeep jockey was a certain Captain Grüning. I found a mention of him in our archives. It has a photo, which is hard to distinguish.” Albie found the articles and scan-read them. “Yadda, yadda … Here we are. Captain Grüning of the First SS Infantry Brigade awarded the War Merit Cross, Second Class, for exemplary leadership on the Eastern Front.”
“So, he got a medal for mass murder,” Bill said. “Sounds like a model National Socialist. Why would anyone want him dead?”
“I found something far more interesting,” Albie added as he hunted through the pile of papers.
Jack pulled out a chair from a nearby desk. “Where are the other staff?”
Albie continued sifting through the articles and type-written documents. Without lifting his head, he said, “Most don’t work out of this office anymore. The building needed renovation, even before the war started. It’s just a document library in the basement these days. I prefer to be in the quiet, so I look after the place, along with my secretary and the bookkeeper, but I have sent them home for a few days, with pay. They were mostly happy with that arrangement if a little confused. Any reservations they had were quickly dissolved when Igor walked in.” He looked up at Bill. “Thanks for sorting that, by the way.”
“No problem. You’re too useful to me alive, Albie, to let you come to harm. Igor wanted a second job anyway, and Anna let him take some leave.”
“Here it is!” Albie exclaimed. “The Stars and Stripes ran an article about the recent trials.” He again scanned down to the relevant parts. “Work continues gathering evidence for further trials, including hours of interviews from both leading Nazis and their subordinate network of officers and head of departments responsible for the mass murder of the Jews and other minorities in Europe. Blah, blah, blah … Among the witnesses were several leading members of the SS, responsible for so-called Einsatzgruppen units, who carried out widespread executions in the occupied Slavic regions. One such officer, Erich Grüning, a junior officer seconded into the SS, has been assisting the US government. After painstaking research in recovered Gestapo archives, Stars and Stripes can reveal that the regime had investigated Grüning for having possible Jewish heritage. In addition, one of our reporters tracked down his grandparents, who emigrated to the USA in 1924. They are both practising Jews, living a comfortable life in Florida. They are said to be deeply saddened by events in Europe and offer their sympathies to all victims of the Holocaust.”
Silence fell as Albie continued reading the rest to himself.
“Christ, who would have thought it?” Josef said, breaking the silence. “What a hypocrite!”
Bill looked at Jack. Neither man spoke.
Albie picked up the story further down the page. “Grüning later went on to work for the SD, the intelligence arm of the SS, in Lyon.”
Bill glanced back at Jack, who now had his eyebrows raised. Was that the connection they had been looking for?
“Grüning must have worked with Barbie in Lyon,” Jack muttered.
“Great work, Albie. What do you have on our other man with the moustache?”
“Only what you expected. Former Nazi Party member joined in thirty-three.”
“A March violet,” Josef interrupted. The others looked to him for an explanation. “There was a rush in applications to join the NSDAP in March of 1933 when Hitler took power. So many wanted to jump on the bandwagon of power, in any way possible.”
Albie nodded his confirmation. “I rang around a few of my contacts with the two sets of ID documents. Unfortunately, one of the identities had no matches at all. The other one matched the identity of a former SD officer from Berlin. He was based in Belgium and Holland during the war.”
“So, he got himself a new identity to avoid arrest,” Jack added.
“Not quite.” Albie turned and frowned at him. He cleared his throat and handed Bill the two ID documents he had left with him, plus the recovered documents and newspaper articles.
Bill took a moment to look through the papers. He paused and looked up at Albie, then back to Jack. Bill sat in silence.
Josef broke the tension. “Let’s go and make some coffee, eh, Igor?”
“Right you are.”
The giant man rose from his seat, which groaned in relief. The two men made their way to the open doorway, with Josef turning back briefly to nod at them before disappearing around the corner.
“Listen, Bill. Now that we trust each other, you are welcome to stay here if you need to. It’s only me using this whole building at the moment. There are a few rooms made up on the upper floors. It’s not the Adlon, but it’s comfortable enough.”
“Is this correct?” Bill asked as he continued to read.
“I’m afraid so.”
“What is it, brother?” Jack asked, leaning forward with concern across his face.
“The documents all check out, and … our fairy’s real identity … is on the new ID card. Captain Dale Bierhals. He wasn’t hiding his Nazi connections at all. He was already living in secret. He obtained this new ID to come out of hiding.”