Dan Fesperman - The Arms Maker of Berlin

Stuckart shook his head. He still looked exasperated, but he backed into the hall.

“Fifteen minutes. No more.”

He led Nat to a sitting room. A tiny woman with white hair and sparkling blue eyes peeped around the corner from the rear. She looked terrified.

“It’s all right, Marlene. No need to phone anyone. Why don’t you take Snowflake for her walk?”

A white toy poodle, immaculately groomed, showed its face at the mention of its name. The woman called after it and the two of them disappeared. Stuckart remained on his feet as they listened to the jangling of a leash, the click of tiny paws on a tile floor, the back door opening and shutting. Stuckart then settled into the middle of a grand old couch and glared at Nat.

A lot of old money was on display here-mostly in heavy oil paintings from the nineteenth century in gilded frames. Mounted high on a far wall was the head of a stag, flanked by fierce-looking boars, tusks shining in the gloom. Nat wondered if they had been killed in the Grunewald. Stuckart’s father had almost certainly held conversations beneath their gaze as well, perhaps even with Hitler, and almost certainly with Himmler. Bad spirits galore. The glass eyes of those dead beasts had witnessed it all.

“You disapprove of me living this well, don’t you?” Stuckart said. “I can tell by the way you look at everything. Your smug superiority. Well, let me tell you something, I am not afraid of your threats. I, too, have friends in the news media, and certainly with the police. If you fail to keep your word, you will hear from them, and for a long time.”

“It sounds like we have an understanding, then. In that case we should begin.”

Nat took out his notebook.

“You and Bauer. You were school chums, correct?”

“In fact, we are still friends. Not everyone is so narrow-minded as some people.”

“What was he like then?”

“The same as now. Smart. Sober. A careful man who decides what he wants and then goes and gets it. He also knows the value of loyalty. We both do. In fact, if you really want to talk about Kurt Bauer, it would be much more productive to speak with the man himself. I am sure he would be quite happy to arrange an appointment.”

“Maybe. Although I’m told he isn’t too eager to discuss the war years.”

“Of course not. No German knows how to have that discussion properly. Not anymore, because everyone has already made up their minds about how to feel about you. Before you even say a word they decide what you must have been like, and their judgment is always final.”

“Let’s not talk about Germany, then. What about Switzerland in the summer of ’44? You and Kurt were in Bern, weren’t you?”

Stuckart eyed him carefully and said nothing. He reached into his shirt pocket for a lighter and a pack of West cigarettes. The lighter chirped, and he inhaled deeply.

“Yes. We were in Bern. But we hardly saw each other. We were too busy for fun by then. Too preoccupied. I might have seen him in passing once or twice, but that was all.”

A lie, of course, but Nat decided to save his ammunition and revisit the question later. No sense pissing the old man off just as he was warming up.

“Preoccupied with what?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Everything was coming down upon our heads, and upon the heads of our families. We were doing all we could to secure our futures.”

“Kurt’s future seemed to end up a little brighter than yours.”

“Because he is wealthier, you mean? That is not everything, you know. Even the Nazis didn’t believe that.”

“Not just wealth. Power, influence. Stature. Kurt Bauer can go out in public under his own name and everyone is fine with that. A Stuckart, on the other hand-”

“You’d be surprised how much of that so-called stature is because of the money. And he is part Jew, you know, which is an advantage nowadays. Not that it shouldn’t be, of course.”

“Bauer is Jewish?”

“Not Jewish. But he has Jewish blood. There was that whole thing with his sister’s marriage.”

Nat had never heard a word of this, and he suspected Berta hadn’t either. The odd thing was the way Stuckart seemed to revel in the information, as if he had just brought the man down a few pegs. The two men’s relationship seemed complex, to say the least, and Nat wondered what lay at the heart of it.

“His sister’s marriage? I’m afraid I’m not familiar with that.”

“She was supposed to marry an SS man. But it was called off after the background check by the Racial Office. Some ancestor turned up, ages earlier, a great-great-grandmother or something, who turned out to be a Jew. So, naturally-”

“Were there other consequences?”

“Not any real ones. There was never any question of that. His family was far too valuable to the war effort. There must have been thousands of those marriage background checks, and I never heard of a single one that led to anything beyond a few broken hearts. But of course Kurt’s father didn’t know that. The poor man panicked, nearly had a breakdown. And once you let certain people in the Gestapo see this sort of fear, well, I’m sure you can imagine how they might choose to take advantage.”

“Bribes?”

Stuckart shrugged, but a sly grin said he knew better. Maybe Göllner also knew better.

“Was that why the family left for Switzerland?”

Stuckart shrugged again, and this time he didn’t smile. He took another long drag from his cigarette before speaking.

“As I said, Kurt and I hardly saw each other in Bern. I never had a chance to ask.”

“This news about the Jewish ancestor, then-you heard that from other people?”

“I may have seen Kurt in Berlin just before he left. We were both still too young for the draft, so we had time for socializing, such as it was, with the blackout and all. They even closed the beer gardens, you know. Worst decision the Cripple ever made.”

“Did your father know about this problem with the Bauers’ ancestry?”

“Of course.”

“And he didn’t order you to stop seeing him?”

“You know, people always assume that any German in those days would have simply been appalled to find out that a friend had even a drop of Jewish blood.”

“Can’t imagine why they’d think that.”

“See? You are the same. And in my case, it is only because of my father, and some meeting he supposedly attended, and a single law that bears his signature. Say what you will, but I am not at all ashamed of my father. He was a legal technician, nothing more. They asked him to draft laws and he did so, just as he was obligated to do. Not by the German Reich, but by his professional code of conduct. The same way that any lawyer would defend some criminal, some murderer, to his very last breath if that was his duty. Does that mean the lawyer is complicit in the murder? Of course not.”

“Yes, I see your point.” The last thing Nat wanted to encourage was further lecturing. “So his Jewishness didn’t bother anybody, then-is that what you’re saying?”

“It was merely some old blood, a mistake made long ago by a distant relative. Or not a mistake, but you know what I mean. I suppose there was some reaction among a few people. But no one of importance. His girlfriend, for example. If anything, she was probably pleased by it. Not because she was a Jew, of course. More because of her politics. I always suspected that deep down she was a little Bolshevik.”

Stuckart laughed, the smoke issuing in bursts.

“What makes you say that? Because of this little group they were mixed up in, the White Rose?”

Stuckart’s smile disappeared.

“I don’t know a thing about any of that.”

“Nothing?”

“Quite right.”