‘Y ou are nothing like Hitler,’ the girl says. ‘Nothing.’
Fritz does not look at her.
Slowly, very slowly, he took the file from Hindenburg. ‘I am sorry to have wasted your time,’ Fritz said.
Hindenburg bowed his head slightly. ‘It is an honor to meet one of Germany’s heroes.’
‘I am not one of Germany’s heroes,’ Fritz said. ‘I never have been.’
‘That’s it?’ she says. ‘You went to Hindenburg and nothing happened?’
‘He apparently did not think it was important enough. Perhaps we did not have enough proof. Perhaps the unorthodox nature of the investigation made him leary.’
‘But you let it end there. And then you ran away.’
‘I did not run away,’ Fritz says.
‘You left. You left Germany. You had the power to change history and you did not use it.’
‘Tell me how I could have.’ His voice is low. Mean. He does not let himself move. He knows he cannot. ‘You seem to know all. You tell me how I could have.’
‘You could have brought the information to the press.’
‘The press already had the information. They did nothing.’
‘You could have given the information to the Strassers, let them fight it out within the NSDAP.’
‘They already had the information too. Gregor Strasser lost his power struggle with Hitler. Within a year, he resigned.’
‘Then you should have taken it to the foreign press.’
‘Why?’ Fritz says. ‘They could have done nothing. They knew of the violence against Jews. They even knew of the camps. If that didn’t stop Hitler, this murder of a single girl could not have either.’
‘Then why did you tell me about it?’
He stops, takes a breath. The air in the room is close, and smells of sweat, and fear. She is afraid of him, afraid of his anger.
As she should be.
‘You asked,’ he says. ‘You want to know the mind of a detective and how it solves crimes.’
‘Yes, but I had Demmelmayer. I did not need this.’
‘But you did,’ he says. ‘You need to know how a detective’s mind works, both for him and against him. I failed on this case, but not where you think.’
She crosses her arms. ‘Where, then?’
‘I underestimated the man I faced. From the start, I underestimated him. I would have acted differently if I had known how much power he already had.’
‘You would have turned down the case.’
‘Perhaps,’ he says. His fists are shaking. ‘You no longer respect me, do you? I am a failure to you. The man who could have stopped Hitler.’
She is standing, packing her things with excitement. She is like a reporter on a hot story, ready to send the lead to her paper. ‘How can you live with yourself?’
‘That is the question, isn’t it?’ he says.
She looks at him, her eyes narrowed in contempt. She picks up the last of her things, shakes her head, and then she disappears out his door.
He sits.
He doesn’t move until the apartment gets dark. He stares at the door, expecting it to open again, expecting her to come back, to understand. He has just emptied himself to her, and she rejected him, and all he tried.
She didn’t understand after all.
He is not sure he does.
Finally, he gets up. He picks up the phone, begins to dial, and puts it down. He cannot. He cannot be alone, but he cannot have company.
He goes into the bedroom, with his ghosts.
As he flicks on the light he sees the photographs where he left them. He picks up the last, the clipping taped to cardboard. Gisela’s face stares back at him, her eyes ringed in kohl, her leg up, showing the shapeliness of her thigh. The stocking is perfect, its seam a straight line down the back of her leg. The sailor who bends over her has his hand on her breast.
The caption reads, in English, ‘Berlin matrons sell sex for bread’.
He found the clipping during his exile in London after the Raubal case broke. He ripped it out of a book on the history of inflation in Germany after the war. Then he went from library to library, tearing out that page, so that no one else would see his wife that way. No one had to know the depths her desperation took her.
And him.
He hears a sound behind him, a latch catching, footsteps.
‘Fritz?’
He gets up, his breath caught in his throat. Her voice has a tremble of worry, as if she thinks he won’t forgive her. He sets the clipping on the bed and comes out of the room.
She stands in the light. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I had to come back. I don’t know what came over me –’
He flies from the bedroom and grabs her by the throat, shoving her against the wall. ‘It is too late,’ he says. She is flailing at him with her fists. They don’t hurt. She has no strength. ‘You think you can come back now? It is too late.’
She coughs and he lets her throat go. She rubs it, then looks up at him and opens her mouth. He slaps her before she has a chance to say a word. He cannot hear her apologies. Not now. Not after so long. He went through it all too. He did. She has to understand that.
‘Fritz,’ she says, her voice rasping. She brings up a hand to protect her face.
‘You cannot come back here. You don’t belong here. You left!’
She pushes herself against the wall, uses her one hand to lever herself up. He reaches out to strike her again, but she catches his wrist.
‘Fritz, it’s Annie. Annie. The American. Annie. You know?’
She has a new name now. She comes back, older, used, expecting him to forgive her, and she has a new name. Damn her. Didn’t she know that he needed her then as much as she needed him? They all starved. His children died too.
He wrenches his hand free. He will teach her to deny him, to turn her back on him.
‘My God,’ she says. ‘Who do you see? Who do you see when you look at me?’
‘Gisela,’ he says. ‘Stop this.’
‘My name is Annie,’ she repeats. ‘I am from Boston. Harvard. You spent the last few days telling me about Geli Raubal.’
Geli’s name makes him freeze. Geli. Gisela did not know about her. He gropes for the light switch, turns on the lights. Annie’s cheek is swelling.
‘I hurt you,’ he says, his voice small.
He had said the same thing to Gisela, only she had not moved. He had gone to her, held her in his arms, and she had still not moved.
Annie is cringing. She is keeping her body as far away from his as she can.
He does not blame her.
He goes into the kitchen, gets ice, and wraps it in a cloth, then hands it to her. His fingers left bruises on her neck.
She takes the cloth and presses it against her cheek. ‘Who is Gisela?’
‘My wife.’
Annie pushes away from the wall, and goes into the kitchen, away from him. ‘I came to see if you were all right. I shouldn’t have left that way. You have been living alone with this. You needed to tell someone –’
‘I am not well,’ he says. ‘I hurt you.’
‘We need to get you help.’
She is different from anyone he has ever met. The hooker he beat up cringed from him. Gisela ran away, and he went to the police academy to learn discipline.
‘I am too old for help.’
‘Nonsense,’ she says, but she does not come any closer to him. She keeps her distance. Always will, now. ‘No one is too old for help.’
‘I am.’ He picks up the chair he knocked over in his rush from the bedroom.
‘Hindenburg said you were a hero,’ she says. ‘You are one of the most brilliant detectives of all time. This has to be some kind of stress –’
‘I am not a hero,’ he says. ‘I am like them.’
‘Them?’
‘Demmelmayer. Hitler. I am like them.’
‘You are nothing like that. You didn’t kill your wife.’
His breath catches in his throat. He turns from her, unable to look at her bruises, at the face so similar to Gisela’s. He staggers to his chair, the place where he confesses.
‘You asked,’ he says. ‘You asked what makes a detective great.’
She remains by the door.
‘You asked.’
It is why he no longer sleeps. He cannot bear to see Gisela’s face imprinted on all those other faces, her nose broken like Geli’s, her voice pleading with him like the hooker’s.
‘It is the secret, you know,’ he says. ‘You all come, looking for that secret. How does the great detective solve his cases? He solves them by understanding the criminal mind. By possessing one himself.’
‘You’re distraught,’ she says.
‘No.’ He backs away from her, keeping the chair between them. ‘I finally understand. Frau Dachs was right. A tyrant is a man who destroys the people around him. Like Demmelmayer did. Like Hitler did. Like me.’
‘You are nothing like Hitler,’ she says again. ‘He killed millions.’
Fritz studies his hands. Unfamiliar hands. Hands with great strength. Enough strength to close on a woman’s neck and choke the life from her.
‘He started,’ Fritz says slowly, ‘with the woman he loved.’
She takes the cloth from her cheek. Her eyes are dark; Gisela’s were blue. She is thin, but fashionably so. Gisela was bony with starvation. Her hair is more blonde than brown. Gisela was a brunette. They do not look alike in any way.
Her face knows joy. Gisela’s never did.
He wonders how many years it has been since he saw women as themselves, and not as Gisela.
How many years since he saw himself with any kind of clarity.
He doubts he ever did.
Annie is watching him. Her eyes hold a compassion he does not deserve. ‘You never told that story about Hitler to anyone else,’ she says. ‘Why now?’
‘It needs to be told. Someone needs to remember.’
‘But why did you tell it to me?’
He looks at her, the poorly dressed daughter of a country he does not understand, with her need, her desires, her fears etched on her features like writings on glass. The fact that she stands in his kitchen after he has hurt her shows that she has more courage than he has ever had in all of his life.
‘Why did you tell me?’ she asks again.
‘Because,’ he says, ‘I was hoping that someone would forgive me.’
He shakes his head. ‘Many of us share the blame for that. No. For Gisela.’
‘You killed her?’ She sounds like she does not believe, like she cannot.
‘Like I nearly killed you.’ He stands, gets out of the confessional and goes to the window. Then he waves his hand at the bedroom door. ‘The box in there. It has the whole story. You tell it all. You tell the world about the mind of a man who catches great criminals. You tell them. But you tell them that catching them is not enough. You must stop them.’
He leans his head against the cool glass. ‘I could not even stop myself.’
The apartment is silent. When he turns, she is gone. Perhaps she thought he meant to kill her. He did not. Gisela was his last victim.
Except for the indirect ones. The ones he failed when he fled Hindenburg’s office, when he disappeared from Germany for decades.
Millions of victims.
How can he live with this?
Because he has to. Because death will bring no peace. They wait for him on the other side, their faces blurred and indistinct. Only Gisela’s face will be clear. Gisela, gaunt and starving, surviving only as she knew how, making the best of a world in which nothing remained.
He leans his head on the glass. He can see the street below, see the American girl running to her cab. She flees him like he fled Germany.
‘Running is not the answer,’ he whispers. ‘Closing your eyes is not the answer.’
For what she fails to realise is that he is not unique. Demmelmayer was not unique.
And neither was Hitler.
Perhaps that is what Fritz was trying to tell her. Perhaps that is what he wanted her to see. How easily monsters are formed –
– and how difficult it is to stop them.