Gabriel had a day and, if necessary, a night in Munich to follow three lines of enquiry. He visited the brothel in the morning, as he wanted to be there when it wasn’t operating and full of SS officers wondering why he wanted time with the madam and not one of the girls. The establishment was in the commercial district, and looked as if it had once been a small hotel or inn. He went in via a wide-open door that was flung back. There was no sign of the working girls; it was early and Gabriel expected they’d still be upstairs sleeping. The smell of the previous night’s extravaganza was leaving out of the windows which, like the door, were all open. He was approached by a cleaner and then shown to a chair outside the madam’s parlour, where he sat listening to a conversation going on inside.
‘I will deliver you personally.’
‘Thank you, Madam Katarina.’
‘Not at all. I need to return to our business in Switzerland. One of the perks of our trade is the open border for the likes of us. The need for fresh meat overcoming the security and red tape of our customers. Now Irma, there is one small matter…’
‘Madam?’
‘You haven’t served in my Zürich establishment yet?’
‘No, this is my first posting, here with Madam Leonie.’
Prostitution wasn’t just the oldest profession in the world, Gabriel realised, it was also its oldest regiment. The conversation continued.
‘As it happens, my Zürich house already has a girl working under the name Irma. So, you must choose a different billing.’
‘I could use my own name.’
‘Which is?’
‘Brunhilde – I was named for my grandmother.’
Gabriel heard a tut of impatience. ‘And it sounds it. You will discover when you are further into the horizontal career that men, who can be aroused by almost anything, are nonetheless rarely excited by the prospect of a grandmother. Let me make a proposition?’
‘Please, Madam Katarina.’
Gabriel heard a chair scrape back and pictured the madam approaching the younger woman. ‘You have beautiful dark hair and creamy skin. You could pass for a Jew.’
‘I’m not, Madam, I can assure you.’
Gabriel could hear the fear in the young woman’s voice.
The madam laughed. ‘I know that, I’ve read your papers. That’s not the point. Let’s call you Sarah and let us pretend you’re a Jewess. A refugee.’
Gabriel felt the girl’s confusion through the door. ‘To what end, Madam?’
‘What did your father do?’
‘He worked on the railways, Madam.’
‘Let me tell you something about war, young lady. War allows men to have sex with women they could only dream about in peace. It’s one of the attractions of conflict for them. It increases their power and diminishes ours. So, you will be a beautiful, innocent Jewess whose father had been a surgeon and whose mother played a cello in the Vienna Tonkunstier Orchestra. A posh and spoiled little lady, destined for medical school and now, by dint of war, servicing hoi polloi. Men who, in peacetime, count themselves lucky to have sex with a barmaid now get to fuck way above their status; they get to have you, a real lady, and don’t they love it? Be shy, tremble a little, weep – they’ll adore you. They all want a victim.’
Gabriel wondered if that was true. Did he?
‘You’re a lucky girl; six months in Switzerland and hopefully all this mess will be over. You’ll arrive back here with the Yanks.’
‘The Americans? What will they be like?’
‘Like men. Be ready midday tomorrow.’
‘Yes, Madam.’
The door opened and the girl passed through. Through it the madam saw him and wondered who he was, just as the cleaner returned and answered the madam’s silent question.
‘He wants a word with Madam Leonie.’
‘I’d better see him.’
The madam called him into her parlour. Gabriel saw she was thirty-something, smartly dressed even for the morning, trim of figure and coiffured – not the blowsy slut beloved of the films. She might have been the cashier in a fashionable Salzburg chocolate shop.
‘I am Hauptsturmführer Zobel, officer in command of the Führer’s Leibstandarte. I was hoping to speak to the madam of this – place.’
A look crossed the madam’s face, almost as if she recognised him. For a second, Gabriel thought she was going to say something – but she didn’t and sat back, watching him carefully. He wondered if, during leave on some earlier service somewhere in the world, he’d had her. Hired her. But he told himself, if he couldn’t remember her, why should she remember him from the legion she’d serviced?
She spoke, ‘I’m afraid my colleague isn’t available, she had to go to her family in Hamburg. The terror bombers hit it again last night. Perhaps I can answer to your needs?’
Gabriel ignored the innuendo and got down to business. He asked about Bodo Gelzenleuchter and his visit to the establishment and furnished her with the dates. She went to an upright desk in the corner and produced a ledger.
‘The Guest Book,’ she said. ‘The Gestapo insist we keep one. It is the nature of government perhaps, to be overly curious in the bedroom habits of others. Ah yes, here he is – Bodo Gelzenleuchter. Took a guest room and was entertained by a number of ladies over his stay, including Fleur and Mimi, Madam Leonie’s French twins. Have you ever had twins, Hauptsturmführer? I can send for them…’
Gabriel ignored the question and the offer. ‘Did he leave your establishment at all that weekend?’
‘No, he didn’t leave – the house, as we call this sort of establishment. We too have our traditions. From the book I’d say Bodo is a regular; this was probably a home from home for him. The other place is where he breeds and is nagged. He didn’t set foot outside until it was time for him to return to his duties. Some men think a warm encounter with a Dakini will keep them safe, even from the bombing.’
Gabriel left thinking of the madam’s use of the word Dakini. He’d only ever met one person before who used it; Lorelei. Had the madam worked in an oriental brothel or hired someone who had? Where had she picked it up? She’d even floated it to him as if he might divine something from it. He shook it from his head and made his way to the Hofbrauhaus beer hall.
Hofbrauhaus was as Munich as a potato dumpling. Its interior might have been the gut of an eighteenth-century man-of-war, all scrubbed wooden boards cleared for action. Tables and benches in neat lines, like batteries of cannon. A quartet of elderly musicians, in hunting-green uniforms, cradled curious brass instruments that seemed to have mutated from more modest trumpets and horns. They talked quietly without music; it was still too early for the lunchtime crowd.
Waitresses, in impossibly low-cut dirndls, stood and gossiped. When Gabriel approached, they challenged him with their eyes, their cheekiness brimming over into giggles like a foaming stein. After they’d had their flirt, Gabriel was directed upstairs to the first-floor dance hall to see the manager, Willy Becker.
Becker was wearing a brown Party uniform, with Party badge, and sporting Great War ribbons on his chest. Around the circumference of the hall were tables, and the manager was putting out chairs around them with difficulty. One sleeve of his tunic was empty and pinned up to the shoulder. He seemed pleased to be able to postpone his chore and to talk.
‘We have a dance this afternoon for the pensioners. It’s good for morale. I’ll let the girls finish setting up.’ He patted the stump of his arm. ‘You’d think I’d be used to it by now. I lost it at Cambrai, nearly thirty years ago. Means I’ve lived longer without it than with it. Still pisses me off – taking twice as long to do a simple job.’
Gabriel asked his question and Becker answered without hesitation. ‘I know August, known him for years, since the early days.’ He touched his Party badge. ‘This is where it all began, this very hall. Over there on that little stage, Adolf Hitler spoke in public on behalf of the Party for the first time.’ He pulled his head up higher, as if the memory demanded respect. ‘And I was there,’ he said fiercely. ‘In my book that was like being present at the Sermon on the Mount.’
Gabriel looked around the beer hall. He took in the pillars and varnished wood that suggested an aristocrat’s hunting lodge and flattered the working men who came to it into partaking of that peculiar Bavarian pastime of beer and politics.
‘He came in and stood there and waited while the Reds howled at him. He didn’t care, you could see. Then, when he was ready and not before, he spoke and the world was never the same again. Barbarossa was back.’
Gabriel tried to imagine the empty, hushed hall; crowded and turbulent. Tried to imagine the noise and violence in the air. The crashing of steins onto the tables, as competing factions howled out their songs. The shrieks of the groped barmaids. One man stepping into that tornado and controlling it.
‘When he finished speaking, there was silence. He had made us listen. In the cheering that began, I saw men like August tearing up their Communist Party membership cards. Throwing them up in the air like confetti, like snow. We formed lines around the sides of the hall, waiting to join the new party, the National Socialists, so we could experience again what we had just heard – the Voice.’
Gabriel wondered if he would have been affected and he supposed he would. He banished the thought and gave Becker the dates of August Korber’s leave and asked if he’d seen him.
‘He was here, for the whole weekend. He was leading a course for the Hitler Youth. We’d set the hall up like a camp. He taught them weapons drill, let them handle a Panzerfaust. You should have seen their eyes shine. Thirteen years old and hot as a stiffy to get up close and fire their load into the belly of a Soviet T34.’ The old soldier lapsed into silence as he stared around the hall, and when he spoke again it was like the whispers in the corners. ‘The rotten thing is the poor little perishers are going to get the chance, aren’t they? Going to get the chance of going up against a Russian tank, all alone and clutching a tuppenny-ha’penny popgun. Cambrai was where I saw the Tommy tanks for the first time. Terrifying. Coming out of the smoke, going straight over our barbed wire like it wasn’t there. Coming for me, roaring and spitting out cannon shells, collapsing trenches on screaming comrades, burying them alive. I ran, threw away my rifle and ran. Ever tried running for your life through thick, sticky mud? It came up behind me, right up, up on its end, then dropped on me. I managed to get most of me out of the way, just left this fellow behind.’
He wagged the empty sleeve.
‘August Korber was here the whole weekend with me – putting shit into the heads of kiddies.’
As a child, Gabriel had spent many hours in church, but his god had not survived war. He wondered if it was the same for his father, who went to church not to meet a deity but the neighbours. It had always seemed to him that there were two sorts of churchgoer – the many who went out of habit and the few who were spiritual. The pastor at St Lukas was the latter, Gabriel could tell; the restless energy was there in his eyes, in his bearing the superiority, not humbleness, of faith. The arrogance of the priest. The Vatican had been full of men like the Protestant pastor, impatient with Gabriel’s questions. The men who wait on God seemingly have little time to wait on their fellow man.
Pretending preoccupation, Pastor Kalb supervised a party of church volunteers grading donated and salvaged clothes for the bombed-out of Munich. Some were tearing suitable material into bandages. He gave Gabriel a fraction of his attention.
‘Yes, he was here for the weekend retreat. A silent contemplation of what God’s will for each of us might be.’ He turned, almost in a temper, on one of the women helping. ‘Sonja, judge the clothes less harshly. The purpose is to keep the bombed-out warm, not to dress a fashion show.’
The resentful Sonja took the discarded coat from the rubbish pile and put it on the useful items stack. The flash of downcast eyes from the female team suggested they felt Sonja had been right in the first place, and they might get on faster and better without the pastor. He turned to Gabriel. ‘They’ll be back; the terror bombers will return. We have to be ready; it’s a terrible thing to witness a child bleed to death for want of a bandage.’
He spoke as if only he, and not Gabriel, had experienced war.
‘Tell me Pastor, who was the priest who led the retreat? Was it you?’
‘What?’ he said distracted, although he’d clearly heard.
‘Who led the retreat? Name?’ Gabriel snapped the question. He was tired of the churchman’s tedious performance.
Sighing at the huge burden his memory was being put through, he muttered, ‘Pastor Grunwald.’
The man that London said was part of the plot to kill Hitler. Emil Maurice had been with him on the weekend in question. Gabriel was finished with the polished brass and smugness of the church. He preferred the honesty of beer halls and brothels. He turned and went, ignoring the pastor’s last bleat. ‘Emil Maurice was with us for the whole weekend.’
Gabriel left the church and its invisible god and decided he didn’t need to stay the night in Munich. He drove himself back to Obersalzberg in an open-topped Kübelwagen. It seemed certain to him that the man who had fired the first shot at Hitler and missed was Emil Maurice, but could an SS officer also be so lacking in marksmanship? With the Old Hares it was possible, he decided. They hadn’t entered service in the universal way of soldiers, via basic training and then specialist training to arms. They had drifted into uniform as part of the Hitler gang. It was quite possible they’d never even taken a medical, the appropriateness for their service being based on their devotion to Hitler and their mutual history. Gabriel supposed that at some point he would need to kill Maurice, whether at the orders of Hitler, or secretly, he was undecided. That might be a decision for London or Lorelei to make. That brought Lorelei and her problem back into focus in his mind and chilled him more than the cold air rushing at him, as he left the plain and began to climb into the mountains.