‘Y ou thought the political party killed her?’ The girl is shocked. She has only studied Demmelmayer, a crime of passion by an intelligent man who thought he could outwit the Kripo. ‘To further Hitler?’
‘It was not so unusual then.’ Fritz is too calm. Atrocity made him calm decades ago. It is a fact which disturbs him only when he thinks of it.
‘You thought Strasser killed him.’
‘I thought nothing. I was exploring the possibilities.’
‘But if the party killed her, it would have been a conspiracy. Against Hitler.’
‘Or for him,’ Fritz says.
‘My God,’she gasps. ‘My God.’
‘It is not so shocking,’ he says dryly, ‘when you consider how many people later died for Herr Hitler’s ambitions.’
‘No.’ She speaks slowly, as if she is thinking. ‘No, I suppose not. But I thought you were investigating this as a way to discredit Hitler.’
‘I had many theories,’ he says. ‘Perhaps Gregor Strasser killed Geli to discredit Hitler and take over the party. Perhaps one of Hitler’s enemies killed her to discredit him. Perhaps the party killed her to get rid of a roadblock to his candidacy. Perhaps her death was accidental.’
‘Or someone in the house killed her,’ the girl says, caught up now.
Fritz nods, once. ‘Or one of Hitler’s friends. Or Hitler himself.’
‘He would be the logical one,’ she says.
‘Because of his later history?’ Fritz asks.
She nods.
‘History does not record him killing anyone with his bare hands.’
‘But he was a soldier and he killed millions. He ordered their deaths.’
‘He did,’ Fritz says. ‘You forget one detail.’
‘He was out of the city when she died.’
‘Exactly.’ Fritz smiles. The expression feels tight on his face. She stares at him, as if waiting for him to go on, as if he will tell her the result before he reaches the end of his story.
‘You were going to get Photostats of the articles.’ He does not mind letting her take those. He can get other copies. It is the letters he minds. The letters and the photographs.
His remark makes her glance at her watch. ‘I’d have to leave now.’
‘Go,’ he says. Then more gently, ‘Go. I will still be here tomorrow.’
She nods and packs her things. He watches her small movements, domestic and tidy. Now he wishes that he had watched her cook. Such a rare thing to have a woman take care of him. He cannot remember the last time – before the war, perhaps. His mother used to make soup when he was ill as a boy. His mother. She too died in the starvation after the war.
The girl turns, seems about to say something but he shakes his head just enough to keep her silent. ‘Tomorrow I will provide the pastries,’ he says.
She laughs and then lets herself out, taking the energy from the room with her. He sits in the fading sunlight, feeling alone for the first time since those awful days after Gisela left. Then the solitude was a physical thing, something to be fought with activity and rigorous exercise. And he has not been out of the apartment in days. Rigorous exercise – at least his old man’s version – is a good idea.
He gets up, takes his dishes to the sink, and grabs his coat off the coat rack. He double-checks the pocket for his keys, finds them, and lets himself out.
The hallway is dark and smells of cabbage. The building has aged since he moved in, years before. Then it had seemed smart to rent while owning land outside of Munich. Now he wonders if he shouldn’t have built that house, as he had once planned. He would not have the city for company, but he would not have loud loutish neighbours either. He takes the stairs two at a time, gripping the wobbly wood banister as he goes down. When he reaches the street, he stops, takes a breath, and blinks in the brightness.
Munich has changed over the decades. Skyscrapers tower over buildings that have existed for hundreds of years. When the monks from Tegernsee settled on the Isar they never imagined that the site of their diocese would become a bustling place of wood, steel and glass. The sound of construction fills the city from morning to night. Munich will hold the Olympics, and the event will purify the city, wipe away the past.
If only it were so easy.
He glances down the concrete sidewalk to his favourite beer hall. It has changed ownership a dozen times since he first went inside in 1925, but it has not changed much. The food is the same: Weisswürscht, Brez’n, and sweet mustard served with good Bavarian beer. The inside has steel counters in the kitchen, but out front the wood is worn and the walls still covered with paintings from the reign of Ludwig the Second. Fritz stares at the sign, repainted a decade ago in nineteenth-century style but somehow having lost its charm, and he realises that he does not want to sit alone in a place of merriment. The disquiet that has haunted him since he saw Wilhelm’s picture the day before colours each waking moment. Fritz does not know when he stopped living. He became famous long after Wilhelm died, but his only hope for joy starved to death in 1919. If he closes his eyes, he can still see Wilhelm’s face, skin drawn tight against the skull, eyes too big, too pale and tired to even ask for help.
Fritz sighs. Open the door to the past and all the memories crowd to the entrance. He should have stuck with Demmelmayer. He can recite the facts of the case in his sleep, explain his role in the simplest of terms. But he had to start telling the girl about Geli Raubal, digging through his boxes, and seeing his photographs again for the first time in years. It is bad enough that memories live on the streets of Munich, but now they also live in his own mind.
Before he knows it, he is walking away from the beer hall. His unplanned steps, guided more by memory than by any rational purpose, take him around the English Garden. He stops in a neighbourhood he has not walked through in decades. Prinzregentenplaz.
The building still stands. In fact, the street does not look much different. The cars are newer, smaller, and faster. Next door is a modern complex of glass and steel, looking to him like an American about to destroy a tradition. Boys with green and orange hair ride past on bicycles. The building has a layer of sooty grey it did not have in its glory years, the result of too many car exhausts, too much smog. Official signs mark the doorway. He crosses the street and stands before it.
So many changes. The street has the same general feel, but it is not the same. Buildings once home to Munich’s elite now house clinics, solicitors, and advertising agencies. This building, though, whose residents he once envied for their comfort, this building which had seemed to him in his early days in Kripo, long before he became famous, a symbol of wealth he wanted to achieve is now owned by the government. Friends of his have worked inside. On the second floor, the sign says, is the traffic fines office for the city of Munich.
He does not go inside. He cannot. He wonders about the man who works in Geli’s old room. Does he know that below the carpet, the furniture, on the formerly polished wood floor, lies the permanent stain of blood from a woman who died violently? Does her ghost appear to him? Does she wander through the offices, searching for her canary, Hansi, or does she yell in defiance when her uncle tries to imprison her again?
Munich is an old city, full of ghosts. His apartment building dates from those dark days before the war. So much had happened before he moved in. He never looked under the threadbare grey carpet, never searched for blood spatters appearing through the paint coats on the walls. Someone could have died in his place and he would never know.
The thought only adds to his melancholy. Men come out the door wearing overcoats despite the day’s warmth. Women emerge, looking preoccupied, carrying bags under their arms. They walk beside him as if it is common for an old man to stand on the sidewalk staring at a government building. Perhaps it is. No one wants to pay his fines, not even old men, especially not old men who should know better.
He is like a ghost to them, already barely visible, and certainly unimportant to the hustle and bustle of their daily lives. No. Ghosts only become visible to the aging when they have a chance to reflect on their lives, their failures, and the chances they have missed.