“In the crowd of opera-goers?”
“Yes. He climbed into a taxi with two others, and they drove off.”
“Now listen, Herr Marx, this is very important. Was he absolutely sure it was Roschmann?”
“Yes, he said he was.”
“But it was almost nineteen years since he last saw him. He must have changed a lot. How could he be so sure?”
“He said he smiled.”
“He what?”
“He smiled. Roschmann sniffed.”
“That is significant?”
Marx nodded several times. “He said once you had seen Roscbmann smile that way, you never forgot it.
He could not describe the smile but just said he would recognize it among a million others, anywhere in the world.”
“I see. Do you believe him?”
“Yes. Yes, I believe he saw Roschmann.”
“All right. Let’s accept that I do too. Did he get the number of the taxi?”
“No. He said his mind was so stunned he just watched it drive away.”
“Damn,” said Miller. “It probably drove to a hotel. If I had the number I could ask the driver where he took that party. When did Herr Tauber tell you all this?”
“Last month, when we picked up our pensions. Here, on this bench.”
Miller stood up and sighed. “You must realize that nobody would ever believe his story?” Marx shifted his gaze off the river and looked up at the reporter.
“Oh yes,” he said softly. “He knew that. You see, that was why he killed himself.”
That evening Peter Miller paid his usual weekend visit to his mother, and as usual she fussed over whether he was eating enough, the number of cigarettes he smoked in a day, and the state of his laundry.
She was a short, plump, matronly person in her early fifties who had never quite resigned herself to the idea that all her only son wanted to be was a reporter.
During the course of the evening she asked him what be was doing at the moment. Briefly he told her, mentioning his intention to try to track down the missing Eduard Roschmann. She was aghast.
Peter ate away stolidly, letting the tide of reproach and recrimination flow over his head.
“It’s bad enough that you always have to go around covering the doings of those nasty criminals and people,” she was saying, “without going and getting mixed up with those Nazi people. I don’t know what your dear father would have thought, I really don’t.”
A thought struck him. “Mother.”
“Yes, dear?”
“During the war-those things that the SS did to people… in the camps. Did you ever suspect—did you ever think that it was going on?”
She busied herself furiously, tidying up the table. After a few seconds she spoke. “Horrible things. Terrible things. The British made us look at the films after the war. I don’t want to hear any more about it.” She bustled out.
Peter rose and followed her into the kitchen. “You remember in nineteen fifty when I was sixteen and I went to Paris with a school party?”
She paused, filling the sink for the dishwashing. “Yes, I remember.”
“And we were taken to see a church called the Sacre Coeur. And there was a service just finishing, a memorial service for a man called Jean Moulin. Some people came out, and they heard me speaking German to another boy. One of the group turned and spat at me. I remember the spittle running down my jacket. I remember I came home later and told you about it. Do you remember what you said?” Mrs. Miller was furiously scouring a dinner plate.
“You said the French were like that. Dirty habits, you said.”
“Well, they have. I never did like them.”
“Look, Mother, do you know what we did to Jean Moulin before he died? Not you, not Father, not me. But us, the Germans, or rather the Gestapo, which for millions of foreigners seems to be the same thing.”
“I don’t want to hear. Now, that’s enough of that.”
“Well, I can’t tell you, because I don’t know.
Doubtless it’s recorded somewhere. But the point is, I was spat on not because I was in the Gestapo, but because I’m a German.”
“And you should be proud of it.”
“Oh, I am, believe me, I am. But that doesn’t mean I’ve got to be proud of the Nazis and the SS and the Gestapo.”
“Well, nobody is, but there’s no point in keeping talking about it.” She was flustered, as always when he argued with her, drying her hands on the dishtowel before bustling back into the living room. He trailed after her.
“Look, Mother, try to understand. Until I read that diary I never even asked precisely what it was we were all supposed to have done. Now at least I’m beginning to understand. That’s why I want to find this man, this monster, if he’s still around. It’s right that he should be brought to trial.”
She sat on the settee, close to tears. “Please, Peterkin, leave them alone. Just don’t keep probing into the past. It won’t do any good. It’s over now, over and done with. It’s best forgotten.” Peter Miller was facing the mantelpiece, which was dominated by the clock and the photograph of his dead father, who was wearing his Army captain’s uniform, staring out of the frame with the kind, rather sad smile that Miller remembered. It was taken before he returned to the front after his last leave.
Peter remembered his father with startling clarity, looking at his photograph nineteen years later as his mother asked him to drop the Roschmann inquiry. He could remember before the war, when he was five years old, and his father had taken him to Hagenbeck’s zoo and pointed out all the animals to him, one by one, patiently reading the details off the little tin plaques in front of each cage to reply to the endless flow of questions from the boy.
He could remember bow his father came home after enlisting in 1940, and how his mother had cried and how he had thought bow stupid women are to cry over such a wonderful thing as having a father in uniform. He recalled the day in 1944 when he was ten years old, and an Army officer had come to the door to tell his mother that her war-hero husband had been killed on the Eastern Front.
“Besides, nobody wants these awful exposes anymore. Nor these terrible trials that we keep having, with everything dragged out into the open again. Nobody’s going to thank you for it, even if you do find him. They’ll just point to you in the street; I mean, they don’t want any more trials.
Not now, it’s too late. Just drop it, Peter, please, for my sake.” He remembered the black-edged column of names in the newspaper, the same length as every day, but different that day in late October, for halfway down was the entry: “Fallen for Fuhrer and Fatherland. Miller, Erwin, Captain, on October 11.
In Ostland.” And that was it. Nothing else. No hint of where, or when, or why. Just one of tens of thousands of names pouring back from the east to fill the ever-lengthening black-edged columns, until the government had ceased to print them because they destroyed morale.
“I mean,” said his mother behind him, “you might at least think of your father’s memory. You think he’d want his son digging around into the past, trying to drag up another war-crimes trial? Do you think that’s what he’d want?” Miller spun around and walked across the room to his mother, placed both hands on her shoulders, and looked down into her frightened china-blue eyes. He stooped and kissed her lightly on the forehead.
“Yes, Mutti,” he said. “I think that’s exactly what he’d want.” He let himself out, climbed into his car, and headed back into Hamburg, his anger seething inside him.