Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

Wannsee is on the way to Brandenburg and in a decent car, alone on the AVUS speedway, I put my foot down as if the sensation of speed might erase the disquiet I was feeling about visiting the biggest and most secure prison in Europe. For a long time I had often felt that one day it would be offering me room and board, too.

The coal merchant’s house on Königstrasse was a modest little villa between an apothecary and a gas station, with shutters and a little wooden balcony. There was a Horch parked out front and a dog lying on a small patch of lawn in the front garden. The dog regarded me suspiciously out of the corner of one eye and growled quietly as I approached the front door. I didn’t blame the animal. If I’d seen a man wearing a field-gray SD uniform anywhere near my front door I’d probably have bitten him, especially at that hour. I knocked and waited and eventually the door opened to reveal a woman of about thirty-five wearing a dressing gown and a whole heap of blond hair on top of her head. A bit blowsy, but nice. She yawned in my face and scratched a little; I could still smell the sex on her, which smelled just fine to me. I like the smell of sex in the morning.

“I’m sorry to disturb you so early,” I said. “But I need to speak with Herr Gantner. Is he here?”

“You’d be Gunther,” she said.

I nodded.

“Then you had better come in.”

I walked into a parlor as neat as a Swiss banker’s drawer and waited while she went to fetch Gantner. The dog had followed me in and went into the kitchen to look for something to drink; at least that’s what it sounded like. Either that or they had a very loud goldfish. I lit a cigarette and walked around the room, which took about two seconds. There was a sideboard that looked like a cathedral altarpiece and beside it a nicely carved tavern chair that was a lot more interesting to admire than to sit on. The wall was home to a large aquarelle of a corner bouncer leaning on his local beer house. It was hard to tell if he was waiting to go in the beer house or if he had already come out, which, given the shortage of beer in Berlin, is a problem most of us have these days. After a while I heard footsteps on the stairs and then Gantner was standing in front of me wearing just his trousers and climbing into his braces. It must have been earlier than I had imagined.

“What’s up?” He rubbed a face that was as rough as the scales on a coelacanth and just as ugly and then explored his mouth with a big yellow tongue.

“Dr. Heckholz is dead,” I said. “Murdered. I went to see him around eight o’clock last night and found him lying on the floor of his office with his head stove in. It wasn’t about money. His safe was open and there was plenty of cash in there. So I figure it was to do with business. Maybe the same business that made him and Frau Minoux ask me to see what I could find out about the sale of the villa to Stiftung Nordhav. In which case you might be in danger yourself.” I paused, awaiting some sort of reaction. “Sure. Don’t mention it.”

He sighed. “You want some coffee, Herr Gunther?”

“No, thanks. I thought I’d take a drive out to Brandenburg and speak with Herr Minoux. Get it all from the authorized mouth, so to speak. And maybe save you a journey in the Horch with the bread and jam.”

He nodded at the cigarette in my hand. “You got another nail like that one?”

I gave him one from my case and lit it. He smoked it with more interest than seemed appropriate in the circumstances. Then again maybe he was just looking for the right words.

“He was a good man, Dr. Heckholz,” said Gantner.

A little underwhelmed by this reaction, I shrugged. “I liked him.”

“Any idea who did it?”

“I have a couple of ideas. Stiftung Nordhav is, as I’m sure you know, a company which has five senior figures from the SS on the board of directors. So I don’t think we’re going to run short of suspects here. I warned him and Frau Minoux that this was probably something best left alone. I’m just sorry to have been proved right. I get that a lot these days. Anyway, it might just be that Herr Minoux can shed some more light on what happened to Dr. Heckholz. In any event, someone needs to tell him the news and it might as well be me because there’s my own position to consider here.”

“What position is that?”

“It might sound a bit late given that the cat is already down the drain here but I’d like to know just a little more how it got there. In short, I want to understand a bit more about what you got me into so that I’ll know the best way to get out of it.”

“Fair enough.”

“That goes for you, too, by the way, Herr Gantner. Anything you can tell me. When you see the danger you can flee the danger, right?”

“There’s not much I can tell you. Me, I’m just the driver. When I saw you again outside the station the other day I thought you were the right man to help them. You being in the SD n’all, and knowing the boss and everything. He always liked you, Herr Gunther. Look, the details I don’t know, beyond the name of the company you mentioned. The Nordhav Foundation. Plus the fact that Minoux is spending time with his German Michael for something that there are plenty of others doing, only worse, if you ask me.”

“What, you expect honesty from these people? That’s how the world works these days, you dumb Fritz. The Nazi world we’ve made for ourselves. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve got hypocrisy running out of every orifice in this golem we call a country. Wake up.” I shook my head. “Better still, get me the bread and jam and then go back to bed. That’s a nice-looking girl you’ve got there, son. Go back and enjoy her. Hell, I wish I could.”

Five minutes later I was heading west alongside the Havel with Minoux’s breakfast on my passenger seat.

There are three buildings of note for tourists visiting Brandenburg: the cathedral, the Catherine Church, and the old state town hall with its famous statue of Charlemagne’s nephew, Roland, who according to the Baedeker is a symbol of civic liberty. But these days the only reason anyone came down from Berlin to Brandenburg was to visit one of the four thousand people who were locked up in the most notorious prison in Nazi Germany. So much for Roland. There’s been a prison in the Görden quarter of Brandenburg since 1820, but it wasn’t until 1931 that a new building was erected and a couple of years after that before it became what it is now: a so-called house of discipline and an execution site, with as many as two people a day going to the guillotine, which, by all accounts, is housed in the old garage, alongside an equally busy gallows. I’m not sure how it’s decided who gets topped and who gets a haircut. It’s the kind of nice detail that they could probably explain better in the People’s Court on Elssholzstrasse, in Schöneberg, and very probably do. It’s said that the court president, Roland Freisler — himself a former Bolshie — screams out the death sentences at the top of his voice, no doubt to escape any suspicions regarding his own loyalty.

A gray stone Noah’s Ark of a building, Brandenburg-Görden is full of creatures every bit as desperate. Surrounded with forests and poorly maintained lakes, there are plenty of mosquitoes around in summer to add to a prisoner’s daily torments. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s the airport just a couple of miles to the north where German bombers and supply planes come and go at all hours of the night. It’s as if the local air was ruled by Beelzebub.

I parked my car and walked to the head of the visitors’ line. The uniform was good for that, at least. A prison guard took me to a gloomy room with a nice view of the prison yard. After about ten minutes, Friedrich Minoux was brought in. A smallish man with a hatchet face and a small mustache, he’d always been slim, but now he looked emaciated, and my first thought on seeing him was that even with someone bringing him breakfast every day, he wasn’t going to make it; the combination of poor diet and hard labor was going to kill him just as surely as any guillotine.