John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

The offices of the SS were in a peach-colored building off the Königsplatz, a short stroll from the center of town, and I found it without much trouble. I was nervous, oddly enough, coming to the gate, and I stood awhile looking up at the yellow roof and marveling at its cheeriness. After a time, a guard came out of the gatehouse and asked me in an unconcerned tone of voice what I was looking at.

“Your building,” I answered. “It’s wonderfully put together.”

“Oh,” said the guard. “Student of architecture, are you?”

“Not exactly. I’m an Obersturmführer of Reichsführer Göring’s Grand Austrian Legion.” I clicked my heels as best I could in the low-cut spats I’d taken from the banker’s shoe closet. “I’m here for Brigadenführer Mittling.”

The guard straightened immediately and stared at me. “You’d best come right inside then, Obersturmführer.”

He took me through the gate, into the building through chipped fluted double doors, and up a broad unpainted staircase to a second pair of doors with a newly painted swastika-and-eagle-recumbent on each wing. He rapped once, waited, then rapped again and stepped back at attention. I fell in beside him, conscious suddenly of my rumpled suit.

A small bespectacled man stuck his head out. “Well, Peter? Who is this citizen?” I recognized the marzipan voice immediately.

“An Austrian, Brigadenführer. An Obersturmführer from the ‘Göring Legion,’ whatever in God’s name that is.”

“Is that so?” said the man with a faint flicker of interest. He looked me over more carefully. “Are those policeman’s castaways you have on under your jacket, Obersturmführer?”

“They are, Herr Mittling. Standartenführer Glass sends his regards.”

“Does he,” said Mittling, not smiling anymore.

I said nothing, unsure of myself suddenly. I’d thought for some reason that Glass’s name would be a welcome one in Munich in spite of the fiasco, that as oily as he was he’d naturally not be held accountable for any of it. But Glass was clearly in disfavor. I supposed I must be, now, as well. I cursed my luck.

“Come along inside,” said Mittling, heaving a little sigh. He looked like nothing so much as an underpaid, exhausted file clerk, waddling ahead of me with his self-pitying air. In spite of my new-found worries, I found myself grinning as I followed him down a narrow unlit corridor to a cramped, cluttered suite of thick-walled office rooms subdivided into alcoves, coated uniformly with plaster flakes and dust. “We’ve only just moved in,” said Mittling out of the corner of his mouth, motioning me toward a chair. “Charming, isn’t it?” he said, gesturing to a small leaded-glass window giving onto a tree-lined courtyard.

“It’s very charming in general, here in the Reich.”

“We like to think so,” Mittling said blandly. He sat down at his desk and began rifling through a drawer. “Now then: who did you say you were? Forstner? Galicek? Bauer?”

“Bauer, Brigadenführer.”

“Do you smoke, Bauer?”

“I do, Brigadenführer.”

“That’s a nasty habit,” he said, his face creasing slightly. I’d forgotten his particularly joyless sense of comedy.

“Yes. I suppose it is, Brigadenführer.”

“Well.” He paused. “Suppose you tell me how you managed it, then. I’m very curious.”

“Managed it, Brigadenführer?”

“Yes, Bauer: managed it. Made it from the chancellery in Vienna all the way to my office without getting hanged, shot or, as far as I can tell from the admittedly brief span of our acquaintance, made in any way untidy. How you managed it.”

I said nothing, thinking how to represent my part in the whole blessed farce. Mittling leaned forward, puckering his mouth.

“Unclench yourself, for Christ’s sake, Bauer. Herr Glass taught you wonderfully bad strategy, I’m afraid, and even worse manners.” He sighed again, gently, and offered me a cigarette from a brown Bakelite case. “Indulge me, Bauer. You’re among friends. Let’s have the unabridged version.”

I said nothing for a moment. Then, to my great surprise, I gave it to him, more or less in its entirety. I made no attempt to condense events or cast Spengler or anyone else in any particular light. Suspicious as he was of unadorned truth, Mittling was sharp enough to sense a lie three times out of four, and besides I felt for some reason at that particular moment like giving him exactly what he wanted. It took me less than an hour to tell it all. When I’d finished, Mittling fished out a cigarette for himself and lit it. “That’s quite an epic,” he said, exhaling. He looked at me expressionlessly for a time. “Some would call what you did desertion, Bauer. Most would.”

I returned his look as calmly as I could. “What’s to become of Spengler and the other boys?”

“What’s to become of them? They’re already dead by hanging, boy. This very morning, coincidentally, at six o’clock. With all attendant pomp and ceremony.” His eyes twinkled briefly. “A far better question, I’d say, is what’s to become of you, Kurt Bauer. Don’t you agree?”

We sat in silence again for perhaps half a minute. Mittling drummed on the desktop with his fingertips.

“Let them call it desertion then, if they like,” I said.

Mittling smiled at this. “That’s right. Let them call it desertion, Bauer,” he said quietly. “If they like.” He took a telephone from another drawer of his desk and leaned over to plug it into a socket. “Would you mind stepping into the hall for a moment, Obersturmführer?”

“Not at all, Brigadenführer.” I stepped into the corridor and shut the door behind me. I stood just outside, feeling light-headed, listening to the indecipherable buzz of Mittling’s voice and the sound of typing echoing from some other room, trying to form a theory as to what might happen to me. I was nervous at first, leaning uncomfortably against the wall, but my nervousness soon passed. I hadn’t yet had a chance to ask Mittling about the Führer’s disavowal and I had a premonition that chance might never come, but that didn’t matter any longer. When the door opened and Mittling waved me in I knew that chapter was a dead one for me now, my questions about it irrelevant, even morbid. A new chapter was beginning.

Mittling stood at the window, looking into the courtyard. “We’re in a bit of a predicament over you, Bauer, as I’m sure you can well imagine. You’re not a fool, clearly enough, whatever else you may be.” He dug a finger into his nose, held it there a moment, then drew it out, examining it absently. “The Führer has denied any complicity in the Dollfuss business, and therefore any connection to you.”

“I know that, Brigadenführer.”

Mittling appraised me coldly. “Do you? All the better.” He paused a long while, staring at a package of unopened stationery to the left of his folded hands. “We’re sending you to Berlin tonight on the nine-o’clock express.”

I swallowed hard to keep back my surprise. “I have no clothes but these, Brigadenführer—”

“They’ll do,” said Mittling, busy at his desk.

“Is there no uniform or clean shirt for me here?” I swallowed again.

Mittling arched his eyebrows. “You’re not going there to meet the Führer, Bauer, if that’s what you’re dirtying your pants over.”

Coming down from the reliquary in the failing light Voxlauer saw them, lolling at the edge of the spruce plantation in the high unbending grass, looking for all the world like a sketch from an album of country reminiscences. That they’d been lying in wait for him for some time he had no doubt. They were sprawled in the grass, caps tipped forward over their eyes, passing a wineskin back and forth between them. Voxlauer bowed to them as he went by. The younger brother took the skin and looking at Voxlauer took a long, calculated draft, letting the wine spray noisily against the back of his throat. The older one wasn’t looking at him at all but gazing instead back up the valley, scratching his bare and sunburnt belly in deliberate, lazy circles, as if hoping somehow to provoke him. Their rifles lay beside them in the grass. Voxlauer passed within a meter of where they lay and looked them both full in the face but they seemed suddenly not to see him. A few moments later he’d left them behind him to wait in the even, indifferent dark.