‘After four weeks? Come on, they had just resigned themselves to it, that’s all.’
Becker frowned and scratched the top of his untidy head.
‘No,’ he said slowly, ‘it was stronger than that, sir. Like they already knew, for sure. I’m sorry, sir, I’m not explaining it very well. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it at all. Perhaps I am imagining it.’
‘Do you believe in instinct?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Good. Sometimes it’s the only thing a bull has got to go on. And then he’s got no choice but to trust in it. A bull that doesn’t trust a few hunches now and then doesn’t ever take any chances. And without taking them you can’t ever hope to solve a case. No, you were right to tell me.’
Sitting beside me now, as I drove south-west to Steglitz, Herr Hanke, an accountant with the AEG works on Seestrasse, seemed anything but resigned to his only daughter’s death. All the same, I didn’t discount what Becker had told me. I was keeping an open mind until I could form my own opinion.
‘Irma was a clever girl,’ Hanke sighed. He spoke with a Rhineland accent, with a voice that was just like Goebbels’. ‘Clever enough to stay on at school and get her Abitur, which she’d wanted to do. But she was no book-buffalo. Just bright, and pretty with it. Good at sports. She had just won her Reich Sports Badge and her swimming certificate. She never did any harm to anyone.’ His voice was breaking as he added: ‘Who could have killed her, Kommissar? Who would do such a thing?’
‘That’s what I intend to find out,’ I said. But Hanke’s wife sitting in the back seat believed she already had the answer.
‘Isn’t it obvious who is responsible?’ she said. ‘My daughter was a good BdM girl, praised in her racial-theory class as the perfect example of the Aryan type. She knew her Horst Wessel and could quote whole pages of the Fuhrer’s great book. So who do you think killed her, a virgin, but the Jews? Who else but the Jews would have done such things to her?’
Herr Hanke turned in his seat and took his wife by the hand.
‘We don’t know that, Silke, dear,’he said. ‘Do we, Kommissar?’
‘I think it’s very unlikely,’ I said.
‘You see, Silke? The Kommissar doesn’t believe it, and neither do I.’
‘I see what I see,’ she hissed. ‘You’re both wrong. It’s as plain as the nose on a Jew’s face. Who else but the Jews? Don’t you realize how obvious it is?’
‘The accusation is loudly raised immediately, anywhere in the world, when a body is found which bears the marks of ritual murder. This accusation is raised only against the Jews.’ I remembered the words of the article in Der Stürmer which I had folded in my pocket, and as I listened to Frau Hanke it occurred to me that she was right, but in a way she could hardly have dreamt of.
11
Thursday, 22 September
A whistle shrieked, the train jolted, and then we pulled slowly out of Anhalter Station on the six-hour journey that would take us to Nuremberg. Korsch, the compartment’s only other occupant, was already reading his newspaper.
‘Hell,’ he said, ‘listen to this. It says here that the Soviet foreign minister, Maxim Litvinoff declared in front of the League of Nations in Geneva that his government is determined to fulfil its existing treaty of alliance with Czechoslovakia, and that it will offer military help at the same time as France. Christ, we’ll really be in for it then, with an attack on both fronts.’
I grunted. There was less chance of the French offering any real opposition to Hitler than there was of them declaring Prohibition. Litvinoff had chosen his words carefully. Nobody wanted war. Nobody but Hitler, that is. Hitler the syphilitic.
My thoughts returned to a meeting I had had the previous Tuesday with Frau Kalau vom Hofe at the Goering Institute.
‘I brought your books back,’ I explained. ‘The one by Professor Berg was particularly interesting.’
‘I’m glad you thought so,’ she said. ‘How about the Baudelaire?’
‘That too, although it seemed much more applicable to Germany now. Especially the poems called “Spleen”.’
‘Maybe now you’re ready for Nietzsche,’ she said, leaning back in her chair.
It was a pleasantly furnished, bright office with a view of the Zoo opposite. You could just about hear the monkeys screaming in the distance.
Her smile persisted. She was better looking than I remembered. I picked up the solitary photograph that sat on her desk and stared at a handsome man and two little boys.
‘Your family?’
‘Yes.’
‘You must be very happy.’ I returned the picture to its position. ‘Nietzsche,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘I don’t know about that. I’m not really much of a reader, you see. I don’t seem to be able to find the time. But I did look up those pages in Mein Kampf — the ones about venereal disease. Mind you, it meant that for a while I had to use a brick to wedge the bathroom window open.’ She laughed. ‘Anyway, I think you must be right.’ She started to speak but I raised my hand. ‘I know, I know, you didn’t say anything. You were just telling me what is written in the Führer’s marvellous book. Not offering a psychotherapeutic analysis of him through his writing.’
‘That’s right.’
I sat down and faced her across the desk.
‘But that sort of thing is possible?’
‘Oh, yes indeed.’
I handed her the page from Der Stürmer.
‘Even with something like this?’
She looked at me levelly, and then opened her cigarette box. I helped myself to one, and then lit us both.
‘Are you asking me officially?’ she said.
‘No, of course not.’
‘Then I should say that it would be possible. In fact I should say that Der Stürmer is the work of not one but several psychotic personalities. The so-called editorials, these illustrations by Fino — God only knows what effect this sort of filth is having on people.’
‘Can you speculate a little? The effect, I mean.’
She pursed her beautiful lips. ‘Hard to evaluate,’ she said after a pause. ‘Certainly for weaker personalities, this sort of thing, regularly absorbed, could be corrupting.’
‘Corrupting enough to make a man a murderer?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think so. It wouldn’t make a killer out of a normal man. But for a man already disposed to kill, I think it’s quite possible that this kind of story and drawing might have a profound effect on him. And as you know from your own reading of Berg, Kurten himself was of the opinion that the more salacious kind of crime reporting had very definitely affected him.’
She crossed her legs, the sibilance of her stockings drawing my thoughts to their tops, to her garters and finally to the lacy paradise that I imagined existed there. My stomach tightened at the thought of running my hand up her skirt, at the thought of her stripped naked before me, and yet still speaking intelligently to me. Exactly where is the beginning of corruption?
‘I see,’ I said. ‘And what would be your professional opinion of the man who published this story? I mean Julius Streicher.’
‘A hatred like this is almost certainly the result of a great mental instability.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Can I tell you something in confidence?’
‘Of course.’
‘You know that Matthias Goering, the chairman of this institute, is the prime minister’s cousin?’