‘Y ou were kind to Adolf Hitler?’ The girl sounds stunned. Her posture has shifted subtly and he can’t quite read it.
‘I treated him as I would have treated any witness,’ Fritz says.
‘That’s not true,’ she says. ‘You wrote in the handbook you compiled after Demmelmayer that an inspector should never let a witness determine the time and place of questioning.’
The recorder clicks beside her. The tape is done.
Fritz sighs. He should never have compiled that handbook. Reporters, investigators, and rookie detectives have all quoted his words to him as if any violation of them was violation of sacred writ.
‘I had unusual problems in this case,’ he says. ‘If I pressured Hitler, he would contact the Minister of Justice, who would then wonder why I was pursuing a closed investigation.’
The girl grabs a tape from the top of her stack, and slips it into the recorder. Then she closes the lid and hits the record button. When she looks at him, she smiles, as if she has caught him at something.
‘That’s not why you didn’t pursue him,’ she says. ‘You didn’t pursue him because at that point, you thought Geli had committed suicide.’
‘No,’ Fritz says. ‘At that point, I hoped she had.’
He drove all night, across roads that were difficult for the alert driver. He pulled over for a short nap near the Austrian border, waking when the chill in the car grew too great. He arrived in the outskirts of Vienna before dawn and was at the church when the first mass of the morning had just ended.
It took no time to find Father Pant. The priest was younger than Fritz had expected – a thirtyish man, slender to the point of gauntness, with deep shadows under his eyes. He tried to hide his great height by slouching, which only made his body seem both tall and crooked. Father Pant was removing his vestments when Fritz entered the priest room behind the altar of the church, revealing a conservative black suit underneath.
‘Forgive me, Father,’ Fritz said, keeping his head down. He felt tired and rumpled. He had yet to find a hotel room and change. Instead, he had concentrated his efforts on finding the church. ‘One of the altar boys told me where you would be. I’m Detective Inspector Stecher from Munich. I am here about Geli Raubal.’
The priest adjusted the collar and cuffs of his suit, then smoothed his hair. ‘You arrived quickly, Detective Inspector. I am surprised at your haste. I thought that German police have no sway in Austria.’
Fritz nodded. He felt like an altar boy himself in this room, small and powerless next to the man before him. ‘Of course not, Father, but I was wondering if you could help me. The family removed Geli’s body before the police had a chance to see it, and we believe that the death may not have been a suicide.’
The priest was placing his robe on a hanger. He stopped when Fritz said the word ‘suicide’. For a moment, he stood with his back to Fritz, then turned his head slightly. ‘I have documents from the Bavarian Minister of Justice and from a police doctor. Are you saying these documents are false?’
‘No, Father. They’re authentic. But the circumstances were unusual, and the doctor suggested, in a roundabout way, that I look at matters myself. By the time the Kripo had even been informed of the death, the body was on its way here.’
The priest finished adjusting his robe, then he hung it on a peg behind the door. ‘I suppose you have papers?’
Fritz pulled out his identification papers, and showed them to the priest. The priest picked up a pair of half glasses off the table and held them in front of his eyes without attaching them to his ears. Then, with one hand, he folded the glasses, and with the other, he returned Fritz’s papers.
‘I have known the Raubals a long time,’ the priest said. ‘Angela, Geli’s mother, was quite upset when she spoke with me yesterday.’
‘She called you?’
The priest nodded. ‘She will be here this afternoon.’
‘Where is the body?’ Fritz asked.
‘At the Central Cemetery. No one arranged for a mortician, so I did.’ The priest put his glasses in their case and stuck the case in his breast pocket. His hands were sure, his manner calm. ‘The mortician will also arrive this afternoon.’
Fritz felt his mouth go dry. A mortician would alter the body – it was his job. Fritz waited for the priest to continue with his comments, but he did not. ‘Have you another mass this morning?’
Father Pant shook his head. ‘We have a nine a.m. mass and a noon mass, but I shall perform neither. I was going to use the time to prepare for tomorrow’s services.’ He took his long coat off the wall peg. ‘Come along. We shall take my car. No one will remark upon it.’
‘Thank you,’ Fritz said. For all his matter-of-factness, the Father seemed as curious about the circumstances of Geli’s death as Fritz was.
‘No thanks needed,’ Father Pant replied. ‘I do this for Geli. Her soul is still my responsibility.’
A click stops him. The girl smiles at him apologetically. ‘Something’s wrong with the tape,’ she says.
Fritz still wants a beer. A headache throbs at the back of his skull, has throbbed since he saw the photograph. ‘This is a fine place to end,’ he says. ‘I will see you in the morning then.’
‘Would you like me to bring breakfast again?’ She has not even begun to pack her equipment. He wishes she would move. He wants to be alone.
‘Yes, fine,’ he says. Their relationship seems to be based on food. Of course, all of his relationships with women seemed to have revolved around food.
She nods, places her tapes in her large bag, and slings it over her shoulder. Then she picks up the recorder. ‘Until tomorrow, then.’
‘Until tomorrow,’ he says.
She lets herself out, pulling the door closed quietly.
The endings of these sessions are awkward for him. He feels as if she expects something more from him. Entertainment? A quiet dinner? He does not know.
He stays in the chair as darkness grows around him. For years, he was afraid to speak of this, afraid to remind people that he was the one who had been forced to retire from the Kripo over the Raubal case. He had tried to speak then and was silenced. Then he did not speak at all. No one cared in London. When he returned to Germany, when he had his measure of fame, when he was ready to speak in the decades after the Second World War, no one wanted to listen. He had become a national hero, somehow, the man who had solved Demmelmayer, the man who had developed modern crime-solving techniques. The London Times had called him ‘Germany’s Sherlock Holmes’. The New York Times had called him ‘The Greatest Detective in the World’. Someone had discovered him, someone had claimed Fritz’s reputation was great, and people believed him. Hitchcock had tried to make his film in 1950, and when that became news, all the Berlin newspapers contacted him. They contacted him again in the 1960s, after that abysmal television movie aired worldwide. Scholars started knocking on his door. Everyone made money from his fame, even him.
Yet that has not bothered him. The dreams bother him. They are not of Demmelmayer – he only thinks of Demmelmayer when someone asks – but of Geli. In his dreams, she is laughing, a beautiful young girl, the kind that once looked at him with admiration and longing. Then a cloud passes over her face, and when she cries his name, the cry is full of terror.
He always awakens chilled, no matter how warm his rooms are. He makes himself tea, not coffee, after those dreams, and wraps himself in blankets, looking out of his windows at Munich after dark. With the chill comes a great guilt, a guilt he does not completely understand.
Over the years, the dream’s frequency has increased. Soon he will have the dream every night. Every night, haunted by Geli. He will become as bad as Hitler whom, they say, made the dead girl his own private obsession. Fritz does not want that. He wants peace in his last few years. The only way he can have that peace, he believes, is to talk out the memory. Exorcise the dream. But try as he might, he has not found anyone who is willing to listen.
Until now.
This girl seems so frail, so fragile. Perhaps he asked her because she reminded him of Geli. But that can’t be true. He has asked other scholars, men, to listen. They refused. The Raubal case made no difference in modern police science – their specialty, all of them. Only Demmelmayer made that kind of difference. Demmelmayer. A routine murder gone awry. Gustav Demmelmayer murdered his wife in a fit of passion. He had, however, covered his crime very well. Another detective, in an earlier time, would not have solved the case.
Fritz had, because he knew science. But more than that, he solved the case through his attention to detail, his interpretation of that detail, and his sideways knowledge of the human mind. Years later, when he had nothing to fill his days, he read the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, and was startled to discover that an English fiction writer had come up with the same idea decades before. Only he had never explained the techniques. They were accorded to Holmes’ brilliance, to his own special insights – insights the average man could not have. Fritz had brilliance, no one argued with that. But unlike Holmes, Fritz had shared that brilliance in a way the most common detective could understand. For that, Fritz had become famous. For that, Fritz would be remembered in the annals of crime history.
Little comfort as he sits alone in his two rooms, in the dark, with dreams of a dead girl haunting his sleep. Little comfort at all.