“Tell you what,” he said. “Let’s go along to the cinema theater and you can give me a read-through. I’ll explain where you’re going wrong.” He glanced around at Miss Ballack. “Is the theater free at this present moment, Miss Ballack?”
Poor Miss Ballack snatched a diary off her desk, found the relevant date, and then nodded back at him. “Yes, Herr State Secretary.”
“Excellent.” Gutterer pushed back his chair and stood up; he was shorter than me by a head, but walked like he was a meter taller. “Come with us, Miss Ballack. You can help make up an audience for the captain.”
We walked toward the door of the vast, uncultivated acreage he called an office.
“Is that wise?” I asked. “After all, my speech — there are some details about the murders committed by Gormann that might be unpleasant for a lady to hear.”
“That’s very gallant, I’m sure, but it’s a little late to be thinking about sparing poor Miss Ballack’s feelings, Captain. After all, it was she who typed your speech, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose so.” I looked at Gutterer’s secretary as we walked. “I’m sorry you had to read some of that stuff, Miss Ballack. I’m a little old-fashioned that way. I still think murder is a subject best left to murderers.”
“And the police, of course,” said Gutterer without turning around.
I thought it best to let that one go. The very idea of policemen who’d killed more people than any lust murderer I’d ever come across was as challenging as watching a hopped-up Achilles failing to overtake the world’s slowest tortoise.
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Miss Ballack. “But those poor girls.” She glanced at Gutterer for just long enough for me to know that her next remark was aimed right between her boss’s shoulder blades. “It strikes me that murder is a little like winning the German State Lottery. It always seems to happen to the wrong people.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Where are you going to make this speech, anyway?” asked Gutterer.
“There’s a villa in Wannsee that the SS use as a guesthouse. It’s close to the IKPK.”
“Yes, I know it. Heydrich invited me to a breakfast meeting he held there in January. But I couldn’t go, for some reason. Why was that, Miss Ballack? I forget.”
“That’s the conference that was supposed to be held back in December, sir,” she said. “At the IKPK. You couldn’t go because of what happened at Pearl Harbor. And there was already something in the diary for the date they supplied in January.”
“You see how well she looks after me, Captain.”
“I can see a lot of things if I put my mind to it. That’s my trouble.”
We went along the corridor to a handsomely appointed cinema theater with seats for two hundred. It had little chandeliers on the walls, elegant moldings near the ceiling, plenty of tall windows with silk curtains, and a strong smell of fresh paint. As well as the screen there was a Telefunken radio as big as a barrel, two loudspeakers, and so many stations to choose from they looked like a list of lagers in a beer garden.
“Nice room,” I said. “A bit too nice for Mickey Mouse, I’d have thought.”
“We do not show Mickey Mouse films in here,” said Gutterer. “Although it would certainly interest you to know that the leader loves Mickey Mouse. Indeed, I don’t think he would mind me telling you that Dr. Goebbels once gave the leader eighteen Mickey Mouse films as a Christmas present.”
“It certainly beats the pair of socks I got.”
Gutterer glanced around the cinema theater proudly.
“But it is a wonderful space, as you say. Which reminds me. Tip number one. Try to acquaint yourself with the room where you’re to make your speech, so that you will feel comfortable there. That’s a trick I learned from the leader himself.”
“Is that so?”
“You know, if I’d thought about it, we could have filmed this,” said Gutterer, giggling stupidly, “as a sort of training film for how not to be a public speaker.”
I smiled, took a long hit on another cigarette, and blew some smoke his way, although I would have much preferred a hot round from a tank gun.
“Hey, Professor? I know I’m just a stupid cop but I think I’ve got a good idea. How about giving me an even chance to succeed before I fall flat on my face? After all, you said yourself, I’ve got the third best public speaker in Germany to teach me.”
Three
I took the S-Bahn train to Wannsee. The RAF had dropped a few token bombs near the station at Halensee, where there was now a large gang of railwaymen working on the track to keep the west of Berlin moving smoothly. The men stood back as the little red-and-yellow train passed slowly by, and as they did so a small boy in the carriage I was in gravely gave them the Hitler salute. When one of the track workers returned the salute, as if he had been saluting the leader himself, there was much mirth on and off the train. In Berlin a subversive sense of humor was never very far beneath the patriotic sham and counterfeit postures of everyday German life. Especially when there was a child to cover yourself; after all, it was disloyal to the leader not to return the Hitler salute, wasn’t it?
It was the same journey I’d made when I’d had lunch with Arthur Nebe at the Swedish Pavilion, except that this time I was wearing a uniform. There was a line of cream-colored taxis parked in front of the Märklin train-set station but none of them were doing much business and about the only traffic around was on two wheels. A huge bicycle rack stood next to the entrance looking like a rest stop for the Tour de France. Some of the cabbies and the local florist were staring up at a man on a ladder who was painting one of the station’s church-shaped windows. In Wannsee, where nothing much ever happens, I suppose that was a performance of sorts. Maybe they were waiting for him to fall off.
I crossed a wide bridge over the Havel onto Königstrasse and, ignoring Am Kleinen Wannsee to the south, which would have taken me to the offices of the International Criminal Police Commission at number 16, I walked along the northwest shore of the largest of Berlin’s lakes, onto Am Grossen Wannsee, past several yacht and boating clubs and elegant villas, to the address of the SS guesthouse Nebe had given me: numbers 56–58. In a road as exclusive as that it was easy enough to find. There was an SS armored car parked in front of a large set of wrought-iron gates and a guardhouse with a flag, otherwise everything was as quiet and respectable as a family of retired honeybees. If there was any trouble around there it certainly wasn’t going to come from the villa’s moss-backed neighbors. Trouble in Wannsee means your lawn mower has stopped working, or the maid didn’t turn up on time. Stationing an armored car in Am Grossen Wannsee was like ensuring a Vienna choirboy to sing Christmas carols.
Inside a largish landscaped park was a Greek Revival — style villa with thirty or forty windows. It wasn’t the biggest villa on the lake but the bigger houses had bigger walls and were only ever seen by bank presidents and millionaires. The address had seemed familiar to me, and as soon as I saw the place I knew why. I’d been there before. The house had previously belonged to a client of mine. In the mid-thirties, before I got frog-marched back into Kripo by Heydrich, I tried my hand at being a private investigator, and for a while I’d been engaged by a wealthy German industrialist called Friedrich Minoux. A major shareholder in a number of prominent oil and gas companies, Minoux had hired me to subcontract an operative in Garmisch-Partenkirchen — where he owned another equally grand house — to keep an eye on his much younger wife, Lilly, who had chosen to live there, ostensibly for reasons of health. Maybe there was something insalubrious about the entitled air in Wannsee. It was too rich for her, perhaps, or maybe she just didn’t like all that blue sky and water. I didn’t know since I never met her and wasn’t able to ask her, but understandably, perhaps, Herr Minoux doubted the reasons she’d given him for not living in Wannsee, and once a month for most of 1935, I’d driven out to this villa in order to report on his wife’s otherwise blameless conduct. They’re the best kind of clients any detective can have, the ones with money enough to spend finding out something that just isn’t true, and it was the easiest two hundred marks a week I ever earned in my life. Previously Minoux had been a keen supporter of Adolf Hitler; but that hadn’t been enough to keep him out of jail when it was discovered he’d defrauded the Berlin Gas Company of at least 7.4 million reichsmarks. Friedrich Minoux was now doing five years in the cement. From what I’d read in the newspapers, his house in Wannsee had been sold to pay for his defense but until then I hadn’t realized that the buyer was the SS.