A Quiet Flame

Most of Herzefelde’s inquiry had been focused on Walter Pieck, a twenty-two-year-old man from Günzburg. Pieck was Elizabeth Bremer’s skating teacher at the Prinzregenten Stadium in Munich. In summer he was a tennis coach at the Ausstellungspark. He was also a member of the right-wing Stahlhelm and a Nazi Party member since 1930. It was hard to see what a twenty-two-year-old man could have seen in a fifteen-year-old girl. At least it was until you looked at Elizabeth Bremer’s photograph. She looked just like Lana Turner and, just like Lana, filled every inch of the sweater she was wearing in the picture. The happiest moments of my life have been the few I passed at home in the bosom of my family. They would have been even happier if my family had been possessed of a bosom like Elizabeth Bremer’s. I’d seen a bigger chest, but only on a pirate ship.

Reading Herzefelde’s case notes, I was reminded that Pieck had maintained Elizabeth had binned him the week before her murder because she had caught him reading her diary. In Elizabeth’s eyes, this was an unpardonable sin, and to me, her upset was easy to understand: over the years I’ve read a few private diaries myself, and not always for the best. Hardly satisfied with this explanation, Grund had got hold of the diary, and noticed that Elizabeth was in the habit of noting her menstrual period with the Greek letter omega. In the weeks preceding her murder, a sigma had replaced the omega in Elizabeth Bremer’s diary, leading Grund to suppose that she may have been pregnant. Grund had interviewed Pieck and suggested that this had been the real reason why he had been in the habit of reading his young girlfriend’s diary, and that he had helped to procure her an illegal abortion. But, despite several days of questioning, Pieck had steadfastly denied this. What was more, Pieck had a cast-iron alibi in the shape of his father, who just happened to be the police chief of Günzburg, which is several hundred miles from Berlin.

Neither Elizabeth’s own doctor nor any of her school friends knew about a pregnancy. But Grund noted Elizabeth had inherited some money in her grandfather’s will, which she had used to open a savings account, and that the day before her death she had withdrawn almost half of this money and none of it had been found on her body. And he had concluded that even if Pieck had not helped her to procure an abortion, Elizabeth—by all accounts a resourceful and capable girl—must have managed to do so by herself. And that Anita Schwarz might have done the same. And that these abortions had been botched. And that the illegal abortionist had sought to cover his tracks by making their accidental deaths look like lust murders.

I couldn’t disagree with much of Grund’s conclusions. And yet no one was ever arrested for the murders. The leads seemed to dry up and, after 1933, there were only two more notes on the file. One was that in 1934, Walter Pieck joined the SS and became a guard at Dachau concentration camp. The other concerned Anita Schwarz’s father, Otto.

Having joined the Berlin police in 1933, as Kurt Daluege’s deputy assistant, Otto Schwarz was subsequently appointed as a judge.

I got up from my desk and went to the window. The lights were on in the Ministry of Finance. Probably they were trying to work out what to do about Argentina’s rampant inflation. Either that or they were having to work late to decide how they were going to raise the money to pay for Evita’s jewelry. The street below was busy with people. For some reason there was a long line of people outside the Ministry of Labor. And traffic. Buenos Aires was always full of traffic: taxis, trolleybuses, micros, American cars, and trucks, like so many unconnected thoughts in a detective’s brain. Outside my window, all the traffic was going in the same direction. So were my thoughts. I told myself that just maybe I had it all figured out, more or less.

Anita Schwarz must have got pregnant and, fearing the scandal that might result from the discovery of their disabled daughter’s amateur prostitution, Herr and Frau Schwarz must have paid the medicine man from Munich to carry out an abortion on her. Probably that was why she had been carrying so much money in her pocket. Only the abortion procedure had gone wrong and, anxious to cover up his crime, the medicine man had tried to make her death look like a lust murder. The same way he had done in Munich. After all, it was better for him that the police should be looking for some kind of crazed sex-killer than an incompetent doctor. Lots of women had died at the hands of illegal abortionists. They weren’t called backstreet angel-makers for nothing. I recalled the case of one man, a dentist in the Bavarian city of Ulm, who, during the 1920s, had actually strangled several pregnant women for sex while he was supposed to have been giving them abortions.