A Quiet Flame

Gennat smiled a small, weary smile. “I’ve been in the force for more than thirty years, Bernie. I was a commissar in 1906. One thing I’ve learned in that time is to know which battles to fight and which ones to concede. There’s no point in arguing with these bastards any more than there was a point in going up against the army. To my mind, Papen’s government is doomed one way or the other. We just have to hope and pray that the election turns out right. After which you can go back to being a homicide detective. Maybe Izzy and the rest of them as well. Although after what happened to your friend Herzefelde in Munich, I rather think he’s well out of it. Martial law will be lifted in days, I suspect. They won’t dare try to hold the elections with the army still on the streets. And the charges against Weiss and Heimannsberg will be dropped for lack of evidence. Grzesinski’s already planning a series of speeches around the city to defend his policy of nonviolence. So. Go home. Get well. Put your faith in German democracy. And pray that Hindenburg stays alive.”

13 BUENOS AIRES, 1950

I WAS WORKING LATE in my office at the Casa Rosada. It wasn’t much more than a desk and a filing cabinet and a coatrack in the corner of the larger SIDE office overlooking Irigoyen and facing the Ministry of Finance. My so-called colleagues left me quite alone, which reminded me a little of Paul Herzefelde’s desk in the detectives’ room at police headquarters in Munich. It wasn’t that they thought I was Jewish, merely that they didn’t trust me, and I can’t say I blamed them. I had no idea what Colonel Montalbán had told people about me. Perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps everything. Perhaps something quite misleading. But that’s the thing about being a spy. It’s easy to get the idea you’re being spied on.

The KRIPO case files from Berlin were open on the desk in front of me. The box that had contained them was the nearest thing to a time machine I was ever likely to encounter. It all seemed so long ago. And it seemed like yesterday. What was it that Hedda Adlon used to say? The Confucian curse. May you live in interesting times. Yes, that was it. I’d certainly done that, all right. As lives went, mine had been more interesting than most.

By now I had a clear recollection of everything that had happened during the last months of the Weimar Republic, and it was plain to me that the only reason I hadn’t managed to solve the Anita Schwarz murder was that following my meeting with Kurt Melcher I never worked Homicide again. After I came back from a week’s leave, I took up my new post in the records department, hoping against hope that somehow the SDP would turn its fortunes around and that the republic might be restored to full health. It didn’t happen.

The elections of July 31, 1932, found the Nazis gaining more seats in the Reichstag but still without the overall majority that would have enabled Hitler to form a government. Incredibly, the Communists then sided with the Nazis in parliament to force a vote of no-confidence in Papen’s hapless government. After that, I disliked the Communists even more than I disliked the Nazis.

Once again the Reichstag was dissolved. And once again an election was called, this time for November 6. And, once again, the republic clung on by its fingernails as the Nazis failed to achieve an overall majority. It was now Schleicher’s turn to take a shot at being chancellor of Germany. He lasted two months. Another putsch was forecast. And, desperate for someone who could govern Germany with any authority whatsoever, Hindenburg sacked the incompetent Schleicher and asked Adolf Hitler, the only party leader who hadn’t had a turn at being chancellor, to form a government.

Less than thirty days later, Hitler made certain that there could be no more inconclusive elections. On February 27, 1933, he burned down the Reichstag. The Nazi revolution had begun. Not long after that, I left the police and went to work at the Hotel Adlon. I forgot all about Anita Schwarz. And I never again spoke to Ernst Gennat. Not even five years later, when I went back to the Alex at the request of General Heydrich.

It was all there in the box file. My notes, my reports, my police diary, my memoranda, Illmann’s forensic report, my original list of suspects. And more. Much more. Because it was only now I realized it wasn’t just the Anita Schwarz notes the box contained but the case notes on the murder of Elizabeth Bremer as well. After I had left Homicide, the Schwarz case had been handed to my sergeant, Heinrich Grund, and he had managed to have Herzefelde’s notes sent to him from Munich. Much to my surprise, I was now looking at the very case file I had traveled to see during that fateful July of 1932.