The surveillance at Frau Keuler’s home extended into the early afternoon of the next day. Three different teams took up the watch in shifts. But the only male who appeared during that whole time was a late middle-aged man of meager build who lived in one of the flats above Frau Keuler. Stebbel looked over the brief reports of all three teams and clenched his lips.
“Do you think maybe she did get in touch with Brunner and warned him to stay away?” Dörfner asked.
“I have no idea. But it doesn’t really make any difference, does it? All that really matters is whether we get our hands on him or not. And at present, we don’t have him in our custody. He’s still out there. Somewhere.”
Dörfner shrugged. “Maybe he’s been reading the same newspapers we have, and decided that these sidewalks have become too hot for his feet. Maybe he’s already left Vienna, and he’s holing up somewhere else. Maybe he even … caught a train, went abroad.”
“Maybe. Though I think it’s more likely he would have read those newspapers and felt quite flattered at those comparisons to Jack the Ripper. And now he’s planning to become even more notorious than old Jack.”
“What we need … what we really need is to get his picture posted in every police station in town, let every cop know who it is we’re looking for. It can’t be just the two of us running around with that one sketch, showing it to people who will forget his face ten minutes later.”
“You’re right. You know, you’re all too right.” Stebbel’s mind was then working quickly. “Wait a minute – didn’t our Herr Hitler say that was a copy he was giving us? That he still had the original?”
“Yeah, now that you mention it … I think he did. I think he did.”
“OK, so we need to get in touch with Hitler and ask him to make more copies for us. As many as he can make. Remember, he said that it’s easy for him.”
“You think he’ll do it?”
“We’ll pay him. He says he’s a professional artist. Well, he doesn’t seem to be floating in a sea of financial success as an artist. So we’ll offer him a fee for every copy he makes.” Stebbel nodded at this own idea. “We have an address for him, right?”
“Ja, he’s at the hostel there on Meldemannstrasse. Number 27, I think it is.”
“I know the building. So we’ll send someone around to arrange another meeting. We’ll see if he can make those copies for us. Then we can distribute them here at headquarters, as well as at other divisions.”
Dörfner agreed whole-heartedly with the plan. They then headed over to Rautz to clear the idea with him and then get him to requisition some funds to pay the struggling artist for his work.
* * *
Although he was fully unaware of the commission he was about to receive from the Vienna constabulary, it had already been an unexpectedly successful day for Adolf Hitler the artist. In the late morning, he had set up at the Danube canal and managed to sell several of his cheesy watercolors to tourists. In the afternoon, he had gone to see two of his regular clients and his success there was much more thrilling.
First he had gone to see Jakob Altenberg for his regular weekly visit. He knew Altenberg was running low of sample paintings and he expected to sell him a few. But much to his surprise, Altenberg asked for a dozen as his business had been brisk that week and he expected it to stay that way through the late spring home-remodeling period.
Hitler’s next stop was to Samuel Morgenstern. Samuel and his wife Emma ran a popular glazier cum frame shop in the Liechtensteinstrasse. As Hitler entered the shop, Morgenstern gave him a friendly salute. He then came around to the end of the main counter while Emma and two assistants tended to the needs of the customers already there.
Business had obviously been good that week for the Morgensterns as well, and Samuel was in an especially buoyant mood. Though Hitler had just dropped in on a spec call to see if Morgenstern needed anything, his long-time client immediately said he’d like to see what Hitler had to offer. The young artist quickly pulled out the remaining pieces from his leather case. Morgenstern started going through the paintings rapidly, then selected seven of the ones he thought his customers would find appealing.
None of the customers of shopkeepers like Altenberg, Morgenstern or Herr Schiefer were actually purchasing the paintings as such. They were only buying the frames. The paintings of unknown and threadbare artists such as Hitler were inserted into the frames to let customers get an idea of what those handsome frames might look like when filled with a painting. But when they purchased the frames, they got the paintings as a little extra.
The shopkeepers didn’t really know what the customers would do with those frame-fillers when they got home and put in the paintings that were actually hung in their homes. They suspected that many of them simply used the sample artwork to wrap garbage before disposing of it in municipal bins.
But that day, after selecting his seven frame-fillers, Morgenstern went through the other paintings Hitler had laid out on the counter. Three of them caught his eye; these he held up to a better light and inspected closely. He started nodding slowly and Hitler had no idea what was going through his mind.
Morgenstern turned back to his “house artist” and smiled broadly. “My friend, I would like to buy these three paintings from you. But not to put in the frames I sell here. I want to keep these for myself, for my own private collection.”
Hitler didn’t know how to respond. In fact, at first he thought Morgenstern was making a light joke at his expense. But then he read the face more closely and saw that Morgenstern was sincere: he actually wanted the paintings. He would hang two of them, Viennese street scenes, in his shop here and another one, a portrait of a young girl, in his home.
Morgenstern then explained: he felt that Hitler had made quite an advance as an artist. Hitler had always been known as a competent craftsman, but his paintings were always seen as hopelessly superficial. That was one of the reasons given for his two rejections from Vienna’s art academy. But with these new paintings, which Hitler had actually done within the past month, he had clearly made a breakthrough.
“You’ve managed to catch something deeper here, my friend. These two street scenes … here you’ve found another dimension, a richer perception of the scenes. And in this girl’s face, the way she holds her head and her shoulders … damn, I think you’ve really caught the soul of your subject. Most of your portraits, I must say, don’t seem true at all. But here you’ve shown you’re really able to plumb the human spirit and bring that into the painting.”
Hitler was so exhilarated by this unexpected praise that he offered Morgenstern the three last paintings at a bargain rate. The shopkeeper accepted immediately and even threw in a few extra kroners to encourage this new turn in the young man’s art.
As he left the shop, Hitler was bursting with joy and energy. In fact, he bounded down the street for the first few minutes and even did a little dance of triumph at one corner when he was sure no one would be looking.
As tragic as the death of that young woman in the Spittelberg alley was, Hitler felt that the whole experience – banging into her killer and then discovering her still warm dead body – had unleashed something within him. As Morgenstern realized, Hitler was now becoming the serious artist he always knew he was destined to be.
That, anyway, is what he thought on that day of one fine triumph after another.