We set off in a jeep driven by a British corporal, making a long detour to cross the Rhine. Cologne in the darkness of its bumpy, bomb-cracked cobbles seemed in reasonable shape, and only when returning in daylight I found it a skeleton, every building roofless and gutted. The autobahn took us past the Bayer pharmaceutical works at Leverkusen, once with the huge blue advertisement which I had noticed from Jeff Beckerman's Cord. The factory was intact, spared by the Allied guns after Field Marshal Model changed his mind about using it in the final scramble as an artillery base.
'You gents got any cigarettes?' the corporal asked cheerfully over his shoulder.
'Neither of us smokes,' replied Greenparish coldly.
'You'll be entitled to a ration, or you can scrounge some. Fags is gold-dust in Germany. You can get anything for them. Listen, Governor-' The expert on the Nazi mind winced. 'You can get anything at all,' the corporal insisted. 'A bike, the family wireless, a grand piano.'
'I have no necessity for such luxuries,' said Greenparish.
'Length of cloth for the wife, bottle of schnapps, nice suite of furniture.' He drove single-handed, lighting one of his own inestimable valuables. 'You can get a Frдulein for ten Woodbines.'
'I do not indulge myself with young women,' Greenparish told him severely.
'Well, her mother then, if you prefer it,' the corporal returned accommodatingly. 'Best keep your heads down, gents. The ferries sometimes has the habit of stretching a steel cable across the autobahn. It's their Resistance Movement, what they calls the Werewolves. Though I don't think it adds up to much. A lot of them is as glad to be rid of Hitler as we are. Still, a wire would make a nasty mess of your haircut, wouldn't it?'
Greenparish glared at me uneasily.
We approached Wuppertal from the Dьsseldorf road. The streets were unlit and shattered, and I recognized nothing. But as we turned right, my excitement burst out with the cry, 'Why, it's the Zoo!'
'I reckon they've eaten all the animals,' said the driver, jumping out as we were halted by a sentry.
'That fellow's not very respectful,' complained Greenparish.
'He probably fought his way here from Normandy. We're only useless civilians.'
'I really don't understand why I should do without my dinner. After all, the war is over.'
I discovered the next morning that Wuppertal too was mostly demolished. The brewery had gone. The final air-raids had created a hurricane of fire which had boiled the tar from the streets. Like other embattled towns, parts of it were almost untouched. The Allied Armies had commandeered the entire fashionable area where twelve years before I lodged-furniture, paintings, grand pianos and all-simply evicting the inhabitants. We messed with the British Army, in a stone-built mansion which I faintly remembered. It had later belonged to the rich owner of an 'aryanized' textile works, everywhere now scratched by boots, filled with the sound of American Forces Network from Munich and somebody always playing ping-pong.
I went eagerly in search of the Dieffenbachs, but their house was one of the unlucky ones, blank eyed, burnt out, dead. I stood wondering sombrely what had happened to the family. Then I noticed the centipede's legs astride the river Wupper, and one of the familiar cars sailing peacefully beneath them. Having survived the Kaiser, the Schwebebahn had outlasted Hitler. I thought that Greenparish might be able to draw some parallel with German politics and German technology.
The first man it was my duty to interrogate was Gerhard Domagk.
I had been in Wuppertal a fortnight. One of the nearby commandeered houses had been turned into offices, with trestle tables and filing cabinets and metal-framed chairs. There were red-capped military policemen stamping about with revolvers, but I managed to shoo them away. Domagk had not changed greatly. His close cropped hair was no greyer and no thinner. He still wore his neat triangular bristle of moustache. He had lost weight, but so had everyone in Germany. He was poorly dressed, but he had worn old clothes even when the shops were full of new ones.
'You are Gerhard Johannes Paul Domagk?' I started reading formally in German from a manilla file. He stood facing me across the trestle table with understandable wariness. 'You were born at Lagow, in the Province of Brandenburg, on October 13, 1895? Your parents were Paul Domagk, schoolmaster, and his wife Martha, maiden name Reimer?'
He nodded silently. I motioned him to sit. 'You don't remember me?' I asked unsmilingly.
He stared, but shook his head. 'How is your daughter? She must be about sixteen now.'
Domagk looked at me with even more suspicion. It occurred to me that he imagined I was about to screw information from him by threatening his family. It was a fear well-justified by the rule just lifted from Germany. In the last stages of the war, the whole families of deserters were shot as a matter of course.
'Her arm recovered, so I heard,' I continued. 'Yes, I heard that after our countries were at war. I heard at the same time that you were arrested by the Gestapo.'
His blank stare was followed by a look of amazement and a slow smile. 'You and that American with the beautiful car-'
'You remember? Herr Elgar. I visited your labs.' I nodded in the direction of the I G Farben works. The factory had been bombed, but the research department was almost intact. 'I went in the American's car to fetch the 'Protosil' tablets for your daughter. Now I can make a confession. I stole a second phial of the tablets which I happened to find there.'
He was hugely relieved at being faced by an enemy he knew. 'I don't think the loss was noticed in the agonizing circumstances,' he replied.
The atmosphere thawed as we talked for a while about his child's illness. I offered him a Woodbine. 'I remember how I feared for my daughter's life,' he reflected. 'It still amazes me how the world now accepts complete recovery in such cases as a matter of course.'
'My loot ended in good hands. Yours was the first "Prontosil" ever used by Colebrook to treat puerperal fever. Though unfortunately without the success of your daughter's case.'
'Of course, I read everything Colebrook had to say about sulphonamide. His work at Queen Charlotte's Hospital was most impressive. The progress of his patients was closely checked by the bacteriological laboratory, which we never achieved with our earlier trials here in Wuppertal.'
'Have you still your painting by Otto Dix?'
Domagk smiled again. 'Otto Dix…he was called "subversive" by the Ministry of Propaganda, though I heard he went away somewhere and continued to paint exactly as he felt. Yes, I kept that picture from my laboratory. It remained discreetly in my home, even after my arrest. Though what has happened to the painting now…"
He had been evicted from his house in Walkьrieallee. When I had strolled to inspect it, half a dozen bored GIs were amusing themselves playing football in the garden, one of them wearing over his combat dress Domagk's evening tail suit.
Domagk stared with interest round the room which he could not leave without my permission. But before starting my interrogation, I had a more pressing question. 'Is Dr Dieffenbach still in Wuppertal?'
The answer was a look of horror. 'But didn't you know, Herr Elgar? Dr Dieffenbach and his wife were both taken away by the SS. It was in 1941, about Christmas time. They both died in a concentration camp.'
'Oh, God! And the daughter-'
'Frдulein Gerde kept her post in the school throughout the war. But last March or April, when everything started to disintegrate, she disappeared. Where she is now, who can say? Families are separated all over Germany. There are plenty of people here in Elberfeld whose relatives are in the Russian Zone, and there's no knowing if they'll ever meet again. I heard a rumour that she had been arrested by the British. But there are rumours everywhere about everyone. The boy was killed you know. In the attack on Liege in 1940.