He drove to the door of the Deutscher Hof hotel, and sat outside it for a long time before going in. The hotel was nice, but not extravagant, the sort of place a well-known man would stop for a short night. Again, Fritz checked his pocket watch. Two hours. No one had said if Hitler had business in Nuremberg. He would have arrived a little after three in the afternoon, too early to retire for the evening. If Fritz had been driving and planning to make a speech in Hamburg the following night, he would have stopped farther from Munich – Kassel perhaps, which was at least half way. The last thing Fritz would have done was leave the bulk of the driving for the day of the speech.
He got out of the car and walked under the awning to the interior of the hotel. It smelled of mildew and dust, the cumulative effect being one of age, even though the furnishings looked new. The clerk behind the counter was a bespectacled man whose dark hair was slicked back and who filled his moments with movement so that he looked important.
Fritz waited until the foyer was clear before approaching the desk. ‘I am looking for the clerk who was on duty Friday afternoon.’
The man looked up. He was younger than Fritz had expected, in his early twenties, and poor. The cuffs of his white shirt were frayed. ‘I was.’
‘Were you also working on Saturday morning?’
‘No, sir. That would have been Erich.’
‘And is Erich here today?’
‘No, sir. May I help you with something, sir?’
Fritz nodded. He pulled his papers from his pocket, then leaned across the desk. ‘I am Detective Inspector Stecher of the Munich Kripo. I would like to know if you remember a man registering on Friday afternoon.’
‘Many men registered on Friday. Have you a photograph?’
‘No.’ Fritz scanned the foyer. No one had entered. ‘Adolf Hitler, the head of NSDAP stayed here Friday night.’
The clerk swallowed and slicked back his already perfect hair. ‘We’re not allowed to talk about the guests, sir.’
‘I don’t want to know about him,’ Fritz said. ‘I would just like to know what time he arrived.’
The clerk nodded. He reached for the registry book beside him, opened it, and flipped to Friday’s page. ‘I have his man coming in here at 7 p.m., sir. I don’t remember him. I do know that I never saw Herr Hitler. He let his man do all the work.’
‘Seven p.m.?’ Fritz asked. ‘May I see your record?’
‘Certainly.’ The clerk spun the book around. ‘We have it twice, sir. See where the name is listed? Then we make a notation for the possession of the key. Erich recorded it returned at 10 a.m. the following morning.’
The clerk shook his head. ‘And I wanted to. We don’t get well-known Bavarians here much.’
‘Would it have been possible for Herr Hitler to have checked in that afternoon?’
‘Not without a record, sir. And I do remember that afternoon. We had no rooms at all until five. It was causing problems with some of the other guests.’
Fritz took a deep breath. ‘I see. Do you have a record of incoming phone calls as well?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And do you have one for Herr Hitler on Saturday morning?’
The clerk spun the book back toward him. He ran a hand down the page, then took out another book and ran through that. ‘None, sir. We had no calls for guests all day.’
Hess had said that he had contacted Hitler before Hitler left for Hamburg. Hitler’s official story claimed that someone had called the hotel, but Hitler had already left, so the hotel’s dispatch motorcycle courier had overtaken Hitler’s car.
‘Who is your motorcycle courier?’ Fritz asked.
The clerk smiled as if Fritz had made a joke. ‘We use one of the services, Inspector. We have no courier of our own.’
‘Are the services open on Saturday?’
‘I believe they are, sir, but again, we have no record of anyone contacting them.’
‘You rely heavily on records,’ Fritz said. ‘Does everyone?’
The clerk nodded. ‘Keeping track of the day-to-day dealings is part of my job. If I fail to note a transaction or a phone call, it is grounds for dismissal.’
Fritz said nothing, although he had a sudden picture of the tedium of the clerk’s job, and the tyranny of a small-minded master.
‘So tell me,’ Fritz said. ‘If a man arrived early to this hotel on Friday, left on Saturday, also early, and then received a phone call, what would happen?’
‘If someone arrived early, we would have done our best to accommodate, but he would have been told to wait. His arrival would have been noted, and the time he was put into a room noted as well. Then his departure and payment would have been recorded, as would any phone call that came after he left.’
‘And how would you have forwarded a message if the phone call was an emergency?’
The clerk shrugged. ‘We have never faced that situation. I suppose we would have tried to contact the person at his next stop, if we knew it.’
Fritz nodded. ‘When will Erich be back?’
‘He works only the weekend, sir. We won’t see him until Saturday.’
Fritz thanked the clerk for his time, and then left. Outside, he sat in his car and stared at the hotel. He would probably return on the weekend, to see if Erich confirmed the clerk’s story, but Fritz really had no doubt that he would. The Hitler camp had lied again, this time about Hitler’s whereabouts, and Fritz didn’t like where this was going.
‘So Hitler killed her.’
‘There was no proof of that,’ Fritz says. ‘Only discrepancies in a story filled with them. It really didn’t matter what time Hitler got to the hotel, if the girl died during the night as they claimed. He was still out of the way. The phone call the next morning, though, that had me baffled. I wasn’t certain why they lied about that.’
She shakes her head, looks at him, her perplexity showing on her face. ‘I don’t understand. If everyone lies and the physical evidence is unimportant, how do you get at the truth?’
‘You hope you find someone who will not lie,’ he says. ‘Or you hope you can bluff your way to getting someone to confess.’