“Yes. He is Vulkan. Now you see the importance of this man and what he is doing. For that reason there is one other instruction to you. Here.” General Glucks took a photograph from his breast pocket and handed it to the man from Germany.
After a long, perplexed gaze at the face, he turned it over and read the name on the back. “Good God, I thought he was in South America.” Glucks shook his head. “On the contrary. He is Vulkan. At the present time his work has reached a most crucial stage. If by any chance, therefore, you should get a whisper of anyone asking inconvenient questions about this man, that person should be—discouraged.
One warning, and then a permanent solution. Do you follow me, Kamerad? No one, repeat, no one is to get anywhere near exposing Vulkan for who he really is.” The SS general rose. His visitor did likewise.
“That will be all,” said Glucks. “You have your instructions.”
4
“But you don’t even know if he’s alive.”
Peter Miller and Karl Brandt were sitting side by side in Miller’s car outside the house of the detective inspector, where Miller had found him over Sunday lunch on his day off.
“No, I don’t. So that’s the first thing I have to find out. If Roschmann’s dead, obviously that’s the end of it.
Can you help me?” Brandt considered the request, then slowly shook his head. “No, sorry, I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Look, I gave you that diary as a favor. Just between us. Because it shocked me, because I thought it might make a story for you. But I never thought you were going to try and track Roschmann down. Why can’t you just make a story out of the finding of the diary?”
“Because there’s no story in it,” said Miller. “What am I supposed to say? ‘Surprise, surprise, I’ve found a looseleaf folder in which an old man who just gassed himself describes what he went through during the war’? You think any editor’s going to buy that? I happen to think it’s a horrifying document, but that’s just my opinion. There have been hundreds of memoirs written since the war. The world’s getting tired of them. Just the diary alone won’t sell to any editor in Germany.”
“So what are you going on about?” asked Brandt.
“Simply this. Get a major police hunt started for Roschmann on the basis of the diary, and I’ve got a story.” Brandt tapped his ash slowly into the dashboard tray. “There won’t be a major police hunt,” he said. “Look, Peter, you may know journalism, but I know the Hamburg police. Our job is to keep Hamburg crime-free now, in nineteen sixty-three. Nobody’s going to start detaching overworked detectives to hunt a man for what he did in Riga twenty years ago. It’s not going to happen.”
“But you could at least raise the matter?” asked Miller.
Brandt shook his head. “No. Not me.”
“Why not? What’s the matter?”
“Because I don’t want to get involved. You’re all right. You’re single, unattached. You can go off chasing will-o’-the-wisps if you want to. I’ve got a wife and two kids and a good career, and I don’t intend to jeopardize that career.”
“Why should this jeopardize your career with the police? Roschmann’s a criminal, isn’t he? Police forces are supposed to hunt criminals. Where’s the problem?”
Brandt crushed out his stub. “It’s difficult to put your finger on. But there’s a sort of attitude in the police, nothing concrete, just a feeling. And that feeling is that to start probing too energetically into the war crimes of the SS can do a young policeman’s career no good.
Nothing comes of it anyway. The request would simply be denied. But the fact that it was made goes into a file. Then bang goes your chance of promotion. Nobody mentions it, but everyone knows it. So if you want to make a big issue out of this, you’re on your own. Count me out.”
Miller sat and stared through the windshield. “All right. If that’s the way it is,” he said at length.
“But I’ve got to start somewhere. Did Tauber leave anything else behind when he died?”
“Well, there was a brief note. I had to take it and include it in my report on the suicide. By now it will have been filed away. And the file’s closed.”
“What did he say in it?” asked Miller.
“Not much,” said Brandt. “He just said he was committing suicide. Oh, there was one thing; he said he left his effects to a friend of his, a Herr Marx.”
“Well, that’s a start. Where’s this Marx?”
“How the hell should I know?” said Brandt.
“You mean to say that’s all the note said? Just Herr Marx? No address?”
“Nothing,” said Brandt. “Just Marx. No indication where he lives.”
“Well, he must be around somewhere. Didn’t you look for him?”
Brandt sighed. “Will you get this through your head? We are very busy in the police force. Have you any idea how many Marxes there are in Hamburg?
Hundreds in the telephone directory alone. We can’t spend weeks looking for this particular Marx.
Anyway, what the old man left wasn’t worth ten pfennigs.”
“That’s all, then?” asked Miller. “Nothing else?”
“Not a thing. If you want to find Marx, you’re welcome to try.”
“Thanks. I will,” said Miller. The two men shook hands, and Brandt returned to his family lunch table.
Miller started the next morning by visiting the house where Tauber had lived. The door was opened by a middle-aged man wearing a pair of stained trousers supported by string, a collarless shirt open at the neck, and three days’ stubble around his chin.
“Morning. Are you the landlord?” The man looked Miller up and down and nodded. He smelled of cabbage.
“There was a man gassed himself here a few nights back,” said Miller.
“Are you from the police?”
“No. The press.” Miller showed the man his press card.
“I ain’t got nothing to say.” Miller eased a ten-mark note without too much trouble into the man’s hand.
“I only want to look at his room.”
“I’ve rented it.”
“What did you do with his stuff?”
“It’s in the back yard. Nothing else I could do with it. The pile of junk was lying in a heap under the thin rain. It still smelled of gas. There were a battered old typewriter, two scuffed pairs of shoes, an assortment of clothes, a pile of books, and a fringed white silk scarf that Miller assumed must be something to do with the Jewish religion. He went through everything in the pile, but there was no indication of an address book and nothing addressed to Marx.
“Is that all?” he asked.
“That’s all,” said the man, regarding him sourly from the shelter of the back door.
“Do you have any tenant by the name of Marx?”
“Nope.”
“Do you know of any Marx?”
“Nope.”
“Did old Tauber have any friends?”
“Not that I knew of. Kept himself to himself. Came and went at all hours, shuffling about up there. Crazy, if you ask me. But he paid his rent regular. Didn’t cause no trouble.”
“Ever see him with anybody? Out in the street, I mean.”
“No, never. Didn’t seem to have any friends. Not surprised, the way he kept mumbling to himself. Crazy.”
Miller left and started asking up and down the street. Most people remembered seeing the old man shuffling along, head down, wrapped in an ankle-length overcoat, head covered by a woolen cap, bands in woolen gloves, from which the fingertips protruded.
For three days he quartered the area of streets where Tauber lived, checking through the dairy, the grocer, the butcher, the hardware store, the bar, the tobacconist, intercepting the milkman and the postman. It was Wednesday afternoon when he found the group of urchins playing football up against the warehouse wall.