The former owner, having prospered and bought the building, had installed his family on the second floor, in a large apartment of eight rooms. After he left, the furniture had been sold, and the apartment had become an office. It was now the Glogau station of the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence service of the SS, originally part of the security section of the early National Socialist party, now grown up to stand beside the Abwehr, the military intelligence section of the General Staff. The Nazi party, having come to power in 1933, required a service more responsive to its particular political objectives, so the SD became an official department, concerning itself with foreign counterintelligence, while its brother Gestapo functioned as the state security police. The Glogau office, an outstation of the SD Breslau office, worked against Poland and was staffed by two secretaries, two filing clerks, three lieutenants, and a supervisor, an SS Sturmbannfuhrer-major-named August Voss, known by his underlings as Frogface.
Why? What was so froglike about him? Really, not that much. He did have pouchy cheeks and slightly bulging eyes, which stared out at the world from behind thick eyeglasses, but there was more, a certain predatory fury in the set of his mouth, as though he were eager to snap up a bug but could find no bugs in the water that flowed past his rock. Well, he found one every now and again, but never enough and, if he didn’t find more, he’d remain on this Glogau rock forever. In his youth, as an economics instructor in Dresden, he’d joined the ambitious young lawyers, engineers, and journalists in the fledgling Nazi party, which was determined, after a lost war, to raise the nation to supremacy in Europe. They joined the SS, the Black Order, pledged to secrecy, pledged to obedience, and to whatever violence and terror might be required to bring them to power. And, in time, it did.
For August Voss, that meant a position in the SD and, on a wet October morning in Glogau, news of a potential bug. His office door stood open, but his senior lieutenant, making sure of the knot in his sober tie-the SD, a secret organization, wore civilian clothing-knocked politely on the jamb.
“Yes?” Voss said. Born angry, August Voss, even a single word from his mouth threatened consequence.
“We are in receipt, sir, of a report from the Glogau police.”
“Which says?”
The lieutenant glanced over the form, making very sure he got it right. “Which says, that a woman from Glogau has observed suspicious behavior by a German citizen. On the Warsaw/Glogau Express.”
“What did he do?”
“Acted in a suspicious manner, not described, and possibly evaded the passport kontrol at Glogau station.”
Voss extended a hand and snapped his fingers. He read over the form and said, “It doesn’t say how. Just that one minute he was on the line, and the next he disappeared.”
“Yes, sir.”
Voss read it again. The lieutenant stood silent. In the quiet office, with only the clacking of typewriters and the hiss of the steam radiators, the sound of Voss drumming his fingers on the metal desktop was sharp and loud. “Mm,” he said. “The Gestapo has this?”
“No, sir. Only us.”
“Why?”
“Because the police supervisor is persuaded that, for him, it’s better so.”
From Voss, a faint tightening at the corners of the mouth, which the people around him had learned to understand as a smile. “Very good.” He paused, placed the report flat on his desk, and read it yet again. Perhaps next he will roll around on it, the lieutenant thought. “Let him know,” Voss said, “that we appreciate his good sense.”
“I will, sir.”
“And get her in here, this Frau Schimmel. She knows more than what’s written in this report.”
“Yes, sir. This afternoon, sir?”
“Now.”
“Yes, sir. A bulletin to the Glogau kontrol office?”
“No, not yet.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Dismissed, lieutenant.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The two lieutenants did not leave immediately; they first checked the registries-suspected communists, socialists, homosexuals, free-masons, and persons of interest-to make certain that Frau Schimmel’s name did not appear there. Then they drove to the shabbier part of Glogau: sad old three-story tenements from the last century.
Frau Schimmel, when she heard the knock on the door, an official knock, was in housedress and hairnet. A widow with grown children, she preserved her good dress by leaving it in the closet until it was time to go outside. She’d been in the midst of preparing breakfast for her dachshund-meat scraps, a dab of precious lard to improve the shine on the dog’s coat-when she heard the knock. She dropped what she was doing and hurried from the kitchen, her heart beating hard. It beat harder still when she opened the door, to reveal two young men in hats and coats, because they looked exactly like what they were. “Yes?”
“Frau Berta Schimmel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your identity papers, Frau Schimmel.”
She went to her purse and, hands trembling, retrieved the card.
The lieutenant handed it back to her and said, “We are from the security services, Frau Schimmel, you will please accompany us to our office.”
She now suspected this had to do with the report she’d made to the police, the police in the person of a fat, paternal sergeant at the Glogau police station, a report she’d been forced to make. Innocently enough, she’d mentioned the man on the train to a neighbor, who had first suggested, then insisted, in a delicately threatening way, that she inform the authorities. Well, now see what that had brought down on her head. The dog, at her ankles, whined for her breakfast. “Later, Schatzi,” she said. “Be good, now.” She knew these men were not going to stand there while she fed a dog. She threw her coat over her housedress and pulled the net off her hair-she looked frightful, she thought, but when men like these came to the door, one did what one was told.
A new Glogau, for Frau Schimmel, who’d lived there all her life, the wet streets seen from the backseat of a Grosser Mercedes automobile. She had to resist the urge to make conversation, wanting to persuade them that she was a good, decent citizen who obeyed every law, but she knew to keep her mouth shut. A few minutes later, the car rolled to a stop in front of the toy shop on Heimerstrasse. Then she was taken up to the second floor.
In the office, she perched on a chair by a secretary’s desk, and there she waited. The secretary was the youngest daughter of a local seamstress, and Frau Schimmel, occasionally employed for needle-work when the woman had too much to do, had met her more than once, but neither woman acknowledged the other. At last, she was led into another office, where one of the men who had arrested her-so she thought of it-sat behind a bare desk. He was almost immediately joined by a second man, a frightening man with heavy glasses, who drew a chair to a position just to one side and behind her, so that she couldn’t quite see him.
Questions, and more questions. She did her best to answer, her voice breathless with anxiety. “Speak up, Frau Schimmel,” said the man sitting behind her. First of all, who was she? Who had her husband been, what work had he done, and her children: where were they, what did they do? How long had she lived at her present address? And, before that, where? And before that? Next, what had she been doing in Warsaw? A visit to her sister, married to a German Pole, who she saw twice a year, the only times she traveled anywhere-her pension did not permit her more than that, and her sister helped with the money. So then, her Polish brother-in-law, what did he do? On and on it went.