A Quiet Flame

I think something happened to Germany after the Great War. You could see it on the streets of Berlin. A callous indifference to human suffering. And perhaps, after all those demented, sometimes cannibalistic killers we had during the Weimar years, we ought to have seen it coming: the murder squads and the death factories. Killers who were demented but also quite ordinary. Krantz, the schoolboy. Denke, the shopkeeper. Grossmann, the door-to-door salesman. Gormann, the bank clerk. Ordinary people who committed crimes of unparalleled savagery. As I was looking back at them now, they seemed like a sign of that which was to follow. The camp commanders and the Gestapo types. The desk murderers and the sadistic doctors. The ordinary fritzes who were capable of such dreadful atrocities. The quiet, respectable, Mozart-loving Germans among whom I was now cast away to live.

What did it take to murder thousands of children, week in week out? An ordinary person? Or someone who might have done it before?

Kurt Christmann had spent a whole year of his life gassing Russian and Ukrainian children. The feebleminded, the retarded, the bedridden, and the disabled. Children like Anita Schwarz. Perhaps, for him, there had been more to it than just obeying orders. Perhaps he had actually disliked disabled children. Maybe even enough to have murdered one in Berlin. I certainly hadn’t forgotten that he was from Munich. I’d always had a strong suspicion that the man I’d been looking for, in 1932, had come from Munich.

10 BERLIN, 1932

THERE WERE TWO MEN waiting by my car. They were wearing hats and double-breasted suits that were all buttoned up the way you do when you’ve got more than just a fountain pen in your breast pocket. I told myself they were a little far south to be Ricci Kamm’s. A little too smooth, too. Ring members tended to wear broken noses and cauliflower ears the way some men wear watch chains and carry canes. There was all that and the fact that they looked pleased to see me. When you’ve been in the zoo as long as I have, you kind of get to know when an animal is going to attack. It gets all nervous and agitated, because, for most people, it’s upsetting to kill someone. But these two were calm and self-assured.

“Are you Gunther?”

“That all depends.”

“On what?”

“On what you say next?”

“Someone wants to talk to you.”

“So why isn’t someone here?”

“Because he’s in the Eldorado. Buying you a drink.”

“Does this someone have a name?”

“Herr Diels. Rudolf Diels.”

“Maybe I’m the shy type. Maybe I don’t like the Eldorado. Besides, it’s a little early for a nightclub.”

“Exactly. Makes it nice and quiet. Somewhere private you can hear yourself think.”

“I get all sorts of strange ideas when I hear myself think,” I said. “Like maybe there’s some point to my existence. But since there isn’t, we’d better get along to the Eldorado.”

The Eldorado on Motzstrasse was on the ground floor of a modern building that was in the High Concrete style. Like the old Eldorado, which still existed on Lutherstrasse, the new was a he/she club popular with Berlin high society, expensive prostitutes, and adventurous tourists eager to get a taste of real Berlin decadence. Inside, the club was a facsimile of a Chinese opium-smoking den. Only it wasn’t just a facsimile. If sex was one reason to visit the Eldorado, then the ready supply of drugs was another. But at that hour of the day, the place was more or less deserted. The Bernd Robert Rhythmics had just finished rehearsing. In the corner, beside a copper gong as big as a truck tire, a youngish man with a largish scar on his face was sharing a bottle of champagne with two girls. I knew they were girls—not because of their womanly hands and manicured fingernails but because of their private parts, which were easy to see since both girls were also naked.

Seeing me arrive in the club with his two double-breasted scouts, the scar-faced man stood up and waved me toward him. He was dark, with a weak chin. I guessed his age was about thirty. His suit looked handmade and he was smoking a Gildemann cigar. He had a woman’s lips, and his eyebrows were so neat and fine that they almost looked plucked and then drawn in with a pencil. His eyes were brown, with long lashes. His hands were womanish, too, and but for the scar and the company he was keeping, I might have wondered if he was a bit warm. But he was polite and welcoming, which made me wonder how he’d come by his scar.

“Herr Gunther,” he said. “I’m glad you came. This is Fräulein Olafsson, and Fräulein Larsson. They are both on holiday from Sweden. Aren’t you, ladies?” He looked quickly around. “There’s another one somewhere. Fräulein Liljeroth. But I think she must have gone to powder her nose. If you know what I mean.”

I bowed politely. “Ladies.”

“They’re trying to behave like true Berliners,” said Diels. “Isn’t that right, ladies?”

“Nakedness is normal,” said one of the Swedes. “Desire is healthy. Don’t you agree?”