Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

And yet, tantalizingly, I could not touch her, nor would I touch her ever again, in all likelihood. Just the thought of that made me suddenly feel so weak and sick it was as if I’d lost the will to live. You never quite succeed in filling the space of a woman you have loved. But did she even remember me? Was there ever a moment in a day when something crossed her mind to remind her of Gunther and what had happened to us both? I rather doubted that, just as in the final analysis she had certainly doubted me. She could never have believed that I would assume some of the guilt that was hers. Probably she didn’t believe it until she was safely back home. Frankly I surprised myself at the time, and I fully expected to die for what I’d done; perhaps, without her, that was even what I wanted most in the world. To die. After I came back from Belarus I’d grown tired of survival at any cost. Usually, of course, I’m not quite so noble, but love does funny things to a man. Looking at her now, on screen opposite Rex Harrison, a man who represented everything I hate most about the English — smug, self-satisfied, snobbish, only vaguely heterosexual — I formed the conclusion that, most likely, I was just a small footnote to her more notorious relationship with Josef Goebbels, which, to be fair to her, Dalia had always denied but which continued to dog her footsteps. To the Yugoslavian authorities she had steadfastly maintained that, while Hitler’s propaganda chief had certainly pursued her, she had never succumbed and in evidence argued the fact that she’d seen out the last years of the war in Switzerland in preference to accepting the film roles that Goebbels had offered her in his capacity as the head of the UFA film studio at Babelsberg.

Did I believe those denials? I’d like to have done. Even at the time I had my doubts, although you could hardly blame Dalia for the priapic doctor’s interest in her. Not entirely. A woman can only choose who she tries to make fall in love with her, not who actually does. And I certainly didn’t blame Goebbels for being besotted with her, for, in many respects, he was no different from me. We both had an eye for a pretty face — two for a very beautiful one — and it was easy to find yourself obsessed with a woman like Dalia Dresner. An hour in the woman’s company was enough to make you fall for her. That sounds like an exaggeration and perhaps it is for some but not for me. I fell in love with her almost the moment I saw her, which is perhaps hardly surprising as she was completely naked in her Griebnitzsee garden at the time. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Stories should have a beginning, they should even have a middle, but I’m never sure that ones like this ever really have an end; not while I can still feel like this about a woman I haven’t seen, or touched, or spoken to in a thousand years.

It was almost exactly a year after the crime conference at the Villa Minoux when I found myself summoned once more to the Ministry of Truth and Propaganda. This time, it was not to see State Secretary Leo Gutterer but to meet with the minister himself. The Mahatma Propagandhi. In truth we’d met once or twice before. I’d recently returned from Belarus where, at his personal request, I’d been his eyes and ears during the Katyn Forest investigation. The bodies of four thousand Polish officers and NCOs had been discovered in a mass grave near Smolensk and, as an officer working for the German War Crimes Bureau, I’d helped facilitate the international investigation, the propaganda value of which Goebbels was still busy exploiting in the hope that it might drive some sort of wedge between the Soviets — who had murdered the Poles — and their embarrassed British and American allies. It was a faint hope but, on the whole, Goebbels was pleased with what I’d helped to achieve. Me, less so, although that was becoming something of an occupational hazard. After working for Heydrich, on and off, over the course of three years, I had grown used to the feeling of being used to good advantage by people who were themselves not good. If I’d been a little more imaginative, perhaps I might have worked out a way of withdrawing my labor, or even disappearing; after all, there were plenty of other people in Nazi Germany who disappeared. The trick was discovering how not to do this permanently.

I’d been in Joey’s office before but I’d forgotten how large it was. Henry Morton Stanley would have thought twice about mounting an expedition to try to find the washroom. And in that vast expanse of thick carpet and dense soft furnishings it would have been easy to miss completely the diminutive minister who occupied a small corner of a country-sized sofa like some malign and understandably abandoned child. Goebbels was wearing an immaculate, summer-weight, three-piece suit with lapels as wide as a Swiss guard’s halberd; his white shirt was brighter than a sunrise from Mount Sapo, and instead of a tie he was wearing a striped ascot with a pearl pin. It made him look like a pimp. Then again maybe the knot in a tie felt too much like a noose. He put down the novel by Knut Hamsun he’d been reading and stood up. The minister might have lacked stature but he didn’t lack charm or manners. He was all smiles and compliments and gratitude for a job well done. He even shook my hand with one that was smaller and somewhat clammier than my own.

“Sit down and make yourself comfortable.”

I sat at the opposite end of the sofa but I couldn’t have felt less comfortable in that vast office if there had been a Gaboon viper coiled on one of the silk cushions.

“Relax. Help yourself to a cigarette. To some coffee. I’ll fetch something to drink if you like.”

“Coffee’s fine, thank you.”

There was a silver pot with a saucepan handle and some Meissen cups on a small tray; I poured myself a black one but didn’t drink it. My bladder was already playing games with me and coffee wasn’t what it needed. I took a cigarette but just rolled it between my fingers. Relaxing was never so stressful. But then, my host was a man who counted himself an intimate of Adolf Hitler; not only that, but a clever man, too; a man who could have talked a flock of rock penguins into a sauna bath.

“When I gave you the job in Katyn I knew it wouldn’t be pleasant.”

It seemed that the doctor had a gift for understatement as well as for exaggeration. Every morning I woke up I could still smell those four thousand Polish corpses.

“And if you remember, I promised you that in return I would offer you an opportunity to work for me in a private capacity. Something that would be very much to your profit and advantage. This is why I asked you to come here and see me today. To offer you just such an opportunity.”

“Thank you, Herr Doctor. And don’t think I’m not grateful. Only, since I got back to Berlin from Smolensk my duties at the War Crimes Bureau have been keeping me very busy. I have a mountain of paperwork to complete and a couple of urgent investigations to undertake.”

This was true; it seemed that some top secret plans had gone missing from the army’s Strategic Planning Section in the Bendlerblock and, reluctant to involve the Gestapo, my boss, Judge Goldsche — who was friendly with the top bonzen — had asked me if I’d look into the matter. But the planning section had been hit by an RAF bomb and it was probable that these missing plans had been very likely destroyed.

“Nonsense. I’m sure they can spare you at the Bendlerblock for a few days on my account. I’ll speak to Judge Goldsche and ask him to lend you to me. There will be plenty of time to catch up with paperwork when you’ve performed this service for me. The job will not be without its pleasures but it’s a task that also requires some very special skills. In short, it requires the services of a real detective. No, it’s rather more than that. It requires the services of a detective with a proven reputation.”