Death’s Head Read online

  Schwarzenbach waited for what seemed to him like several minutes with the gun pressed to Grunwald’s head. Why wasn’t the little Jew scared? Why was he dying with such nobility? Why wasn’t he begging?

  Schwarzenbach clenched the trigger. Suddenly, with a sense of horror, he saw Grunwald’s hand rise in the air and grip his own. He shrugged it aside desperately and stepped back. The Jew said something, words that he couldn’t catch.

  But they were unimportant now.

  He pulled the trigger and the revolver exploded.

  Grunwald jerked with the impact of the bullet. Slowly his body slipped down the wall and he fell over sideways, as if he were broken, and his face sank beneath the surface of the water. All that was visible of him now was the back of his head: and his hands were stretched out on the surface of the water, but sinking gradually, like those of someone too cold and too numb to swim any further.

  Schwarzenbach wiped the gun against his coat and then dropped it. It vanished under the water. Turning, he walked out of the cellar and up into the freezing night air.

  PART FIVE

  Berlin, November/December 1945

  21

  The journey from Munich was slow and tedious. The train was cold and he slept fitfully, waking sometimes in the middle of the night and staring out at the unresponsive landscape. Small towns, barely lit, hostile, drifted past like lights on a river. The deserted platforms of railway stations stretched endlessly backwards and it seemed that every time he opened his eyes the train had halted in some minor town or village, neither discharging old passengers nor accepting new ones. When dawn came he went into the corridor and threw open the window, letting the sharp morning air sting his face.

  There had been a sparse fall of snow in Berlin. It lay like the skeletal remains of white feathers on the ledges and rafters of bombed buildings – as if it were intended to mask the grotesque scenes of destruction. Yet it emphasized it. The thin white lines exaggerated the waste and the barrenness. He walked briskly through the streets. Underfoot the snow was already crisp.

  When he reached his apartment he tore down Herr Zollner’s notice from his door. He sat down in the kitchen, conscious of the heavy silence that seemed to lie between the rooms. He poured some cognac and carried it into the bedroom. He lay across the bed and shut his eyes. Relief flooded him. It was over now: it was finished. He had come to the end of his anxiety.

  From the bedroom window he saw a handful of winter birds pecking pointlessly at the frozen surface of the snow. He found some stale bread in the kitchen and threw it from the window. Suspiciously the birds circled the scraps for a time and then they swooped down to eat. He watched for a moment. The birds devoured the bread joyously and when the last crumb had been eaten they lingered, as if expecting more.

  He went into his surgery and sat behind the desk. Somehow he expected the place to have altered in his absence and although he looked round – and sifted through the papers in his drawer – everything was as it had been. It was unchanged – yet why did he feel a sense of difference? The room was a static entity: it could not alter by itself. He drew the blinds back from the window. He realized that he was the only thing that had changed. He was the single difference in the room. Liberated, free, suddenly aware of a future that was untrammelled by the demands of the past, he realized that he was simply seeing the room differently. It was as if Schwarzenbach had finally been killed and cremated, and only Lutzke remained alive.

  Herr Zollner gripped his hand: ‘It’s good to have you back, Herr Doktor. How was Hanover?’

  ‘Changed,’ Schwarzenbach said.

  Zollner sighed: ‘Ah, well, show me something that hasn’t.’ Zollner was making a pot of tea by the stove, his arm engulfed by the steam that rose from the kettle. ‘Did you walk along the Herrenhäuser?’

  ‘I didn’t get the chance,’ Schwarzenbach said. He paused a moment. Zollner had set out two cups. ‘Tell me – are there any messages for me?’

  Herr Zollner plucked at his green eyeshade. ‘Several. Look, I wrote them down.’ He wandered around the room, searching for them. At last he produced several scraps of paper from beneath a tea-caddy.

  Schwarzenbach took the papers and sifted through them. They were mainly routine: Herr Lachenbauer had finally passed away; Frau Kolakawski had a recurrence of her shingles; Fräulein Grassmüller was certain that this time she was pregnant; Herr Niedereder wanted some sleeping-pills. The final message was that Major Spiers had telephoned, and would call again.

  ‘Major Spiers? What did he want?’ Schwarzenbach asked.

  ‘He didn’t say,’ Herr Zollner answered. He poured tea and passed a cup to Schwarzenbach. The caretaker then sat down and removed his eyeshade. There was a white line, like a scar, across his forehead from the impression of the elastic band.

  ‘But he said he would call again?’ Schwarzenbach asked.

  ‘Precisely.’ Zollner sipped his tea fussily. ‘How is your tea?’

  ‘Enjoyable,’ Schwarzenbach said. What did Spiers want this time? For a split second he wondered if somehow he had been followed to Munich; if his every action there had been observed. An unlikely fantasy. No one had followed him to Munich.

  Herr Zollner said, ‘I wish we could walk through the streets without seeing great empty spaces and piles of rubble. And soldiers, come to that. I’m sick of seeing soldiers.’

  Schwarzenbach stared into his cup. A few leaves floated on the surface of the pale tea. The man called Peters. The waiter who had recognized him. Was there a connection between the two? Had they been placed there deliberately? Meaningless questions. They did not deserve consideration. He was free.

  He thought of the sight of Grunwald slipping beneath the surface of the water in the cellar; his blood spreading across the scum. He thought of the echoing gunshots in the dark emptiness. Again there was relief – but beneath that another and more nebulous feeling: a triumphant sense of having worked out his own salvation.

  Looking secretive, Herr Zollner began to rummage amongst the junk in his apartment. He produced a gramophone record and held it in the air. ‘Look what I found the other day. Let me play it for you. Do you mind?’

  Sweeping several soiled items of clothing from the top of his gramophone, Zollner began to wind the handle. He placed the record on the turntable and sat back, eyes closed. The music was the band of the Liebstandarte playing ‘Unter dem Doppeladler’. Schwarzenbach listened a moment and then got quickly to his feet. He removed the needle from the disc.

  Zollner opened his eyes: ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘Although I enjoy the music personally, Herr Zollner, it would be foolish to give any eavesdroppers the impression that you make a habit of harking back to the past.’

  ‘Eavesdroppers?’ Zollner seemed stunned by the suggestion. Sighing, he removed the record and held it against his chest. ‘Nothing is sacred any more,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ Schwarzenbach said. He finished his tea.

  But the echoes of the music remained faintly in his head even when he had returned to his own apartment. They invoked images that he knew he could no longer think about – the old things, the old scenes, all the fragments of the past. It had become a locked room, the key to which lay lost forever beneath the filthy water of a flooded Munich cellar.

  He would start afresh. Devotion to duty, caring for the sick, comforting the mourners – he would begin again in a new way.

  At the beginning of December Spiers and Eberhard came to his apartment. They exchanged remarks about the coldness of the weather. They spoke about the approach of the first Christmas since the end of the war and Spiers mentioned something about goodwill – and the word lay in the silent room like a stone dropped from a great height. Schwarzenbach could not take them seriously any longer. For the first time in their confrontations he felt in complete control of the situation. He was calm, relaxed, untouched by anxiety or suspense. He found some spare glasses and offered them cognac and they drank together, toasting t
he future at Spiers’s suggestion.

  Eberhard stood at the window, where his shadow fell across the room. Schwarzenbach waited as the silence dragged on and he wondered – even if he did not care – about the purpose of their visit. The Major coughed, a rattling sound deep in his chest.

  ‘You should take something for that,’ Schwarzenbach said.

  ‘I get the same damn thing every winter,’ the Major said.

  Spiers coughed again into his gloved hand. He wandered around the room while Eberhard picked up his briefcase and snapped it open. For a second Schwarzenbach was uneasy. The briefcase again. Always the bloody briefcase. Eberhard took out some papers and spread them across the desk. He shuffled them, rearranged them.

  ‘An army marches on its bureaucrats these days,’ he said as he fidgeted with his papers.

  Schwarzenbach, smiling politely at the feeble joke, wondered about the papers. However inexpert they might be in other ways, Spiers and Eberhard were gifted in the art of circling around the margins of whatever they wanted to say.

  Schwarzenbach leaned forward: ‘What can I do for you this time?’

  ‘It isn’t so much a question of that,’ Eberhard said. ‘It’s more what we can do for you.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘This Schwarzenbach business,’ Spiers said.

  ‘Schwarzenbach?’

  ‘Well, as you know, Dr Lutzke, for some time I’ve thought that you were the notorious doctor Schwarzenbach. I don’t have to go into the reasons for my suspicion –’

  ‘It’s preposterous anyway,’ Schwarzenbach said.

  Eberhard rattled his papers and suddenly produced one, holding it up in his fist. ‘The plain fact, Dr Lutzke, the plain fact is that we’ve received some fresh evidence that clears you.’

  ‘What evidence?’ Schwarzenbach felt a moment of tension. What evidence could there be?

  Eberhard said, ‘Several of the former SS guards at Chelmno were captured by the Soviets. Some escaped, but others weren’t so quick off the mark.’

  Eberhard paused. Schwarzenbach said, ‘And?’

  ‘According to the testimony of one of these guards, a man called Hörselberg, he witnessed the death of Schwarzenbach. Hörselberg claims that Schwarzenbach was murdered by an unknown prisoner during the final evacuation of the camp.’

  Schwarzenbach felt blank. ‘And this man’s evidence clears me entirely?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Major Spiers said. ‘It clears you completely. Without a blemish.’

  Eberhard stared at the sheet of paper a moment longer. ‘The prisoner apparently stole a pistol and gunned Schwarzenbach down in the camp compound.’

  He gathered his papers together and swept them back into the briefcase. Spiers said, ‘We’ve caused you a lot of trouble for nothing, Dr Lutzke.’

  Shrugging, Schwarzenbach got to his feet. ‘These things happen.’

  ‘What can we say?’ Eberhard asked, but the question was rhetorical. He looked across the room at Major Spiers. It seemed to Schwarzenbach suddenly that this glance was meaningful, even if he could not grasp the meaning. It was as if they were sharing a lie between them.

  Major Spiers beat his hands together. ‘I guess that just about wraps it up.’

  He lay on the bed and closed his eyes. The name Hörselberg meant nothing to him. Even if there had been a guard of that name there was no reason why he would have known the man. The more he reflected upon it, the more he felt that Eberhard and Spiers were playing new tricks. They had invented a false testimony because they wanted to induce a mood of false security. Hörselberg! It was exactly the kind of fatuous thing the Americans would do. The whole thing was an elaborate charade, designed – like all their other fabrications – to make Schwarzenbach feel dangerously secure. Hörselberg!

  The joke, finally, was made at the expense of Eberhard and Spiers. They did not know that Schwarzenbach felt completely secure now. They were like amateur conjurers totally unaware of the fact that Schwarzenbach was a master magician who knew all the tricks. The entire thing amused him. He was safe. They would not catch him now. Not now.

  A few days later he started to make tentative plans. He had become tired of Berlin. The time had come to move on, to get away from the brutality of the city to a place where war had been little more than a shadow on the horizon. He studied maps and considered places like Augsburg, Bad Tölz, Weingarten, Landsberg. He envisaged himself in a small country practice, walking the hills during his leisure time, growing old in peace, dying, being buried in the local churchyard.

  As he constructed these plans a new sense of peace overcame him, a new awareness of the future stretching out in front of him. Nothing could touch him now. He had finally transcended the fear of discovery and recrimination. Slowly he began to believe that Schwarzenbach had never existed, that he had been Lutzke all his life. He began to forget the past and sometimes wondered if his past actions had really occurred. There was no blood on his hands. He had no responsibility for events within the Third Reich. When he spoke to Herr Zollner or one of his patients he found himself denouncing the acts of National Socialism and the SS with enthusiasm. It had been a blind, bad time in the history of Germany, an age of pain. Now the suffering was over.

  He threw himself into his work. He slaved long hours on hopeless cases. He felt clean and pure. He experienced a strong desire to return to the Bavarian countryside. And so he made plans and began to believe that Schwarzenbach was truly dead.

  He had started all over again. He was beyond reproach.

  On Christmas Eve he decided to go to the late service in the church. It was many years since he had last done this: as a boy, holding his father’s hand, trailing after his father through the sharp iciness of the night. There had been a sense of wonder then, a feeling of being drawn into the elements of some supernatural experience. Would it be possible to recover some of this sensation? It was important for him to know the answer to the question. The process of purification was unlimited.

  Crossing the Kurfürstendamm, the wind whipping at his coat, he reflected on the last few weeks. He had become so involved in his work, so exhaustively sucked into the lives and illnesses of his patients that it sometimes seemed he had ceased to exist. This feeling of nothingness, of abstraction, acted upon him like a tonic. It made the rejection of the past complete. It made anticipation of the future sharply acute. He was Dr Lutzke, respected by his patients. He was considering an exploratory visit to Landsberg where – if things went according to plan – he would acquire a country practice. He was Dr Gerhardt Lutzke, walking-to church on Christmas Eve.

  He cut off the Kurfürstendamm and into the narrow streets that led away from the thoroughfares. The church wasn’t far away now. It would be filled with people who were his patients. They would worship together: they would pray and sing and the organ would play and perhaps he would afford himself the luxury of remembering the Christmas Eves of his childhood. Perhaps he would.

  Ahead he saw the church. Its front door was open, a square of yellow light. People were filtering towards it, thronging through the doorway. The spire, picked out by a solitary spotlight, rose upwards into shadow. He walked towards it slowly, his hands in the pockets of his coat. It was intensely cold. The yellow square of light suggested warmth.

  He paused to allow traffic to pass along the street.

  Something made him turn his head round. A dark car, moving slowly, had come around the corner and was approaching him. He tugged the collar of his coat against his face and stepped back. The car crept towards him and he stared at it as it went past.

  The face in the front was Eberhard’s. Frozen, immobile, indifferent. But that wasn’t what had interested Schwarzenbach. He crossed the street and reached the doorway of the church. There he paused. Inside an organ was playing.

  He watched the car disappear around a corner. It wasn’t Eberhard’s face that had interested him. In the rear of the car, half-hidden by shadow, momentarily illuminated by a streetlamp, there
had been someone else. Another familiar face. Another face he had seen before, long before Eberhard had come into his life. It was the face of the Sturmmann who had regularly, painfully, and with increasing pleasure, escorted the victims into the hut at Chelmno.

  Schwarzenbach went into the church and sat down in a pew at the back. The air was cold around him and he stared blindly at the faces of the worshippers.

  The Sturmmann. Could he have been mistaken? Could he have been confused by the mixture of light and shadow? There was a chance, a slight chance. But if he hadn’t made a mistake, if he had been correct, then what was the Sturmmann doing in Eberhard’s car? If he were being taken for questioning, how much was he likely to say?

  Someone nudged Schwarzenbach. It took a few seconds to realize that the congregation had risen to its feet. Stumbling upwards, paralysed by the dramatic chords of the organ, he opened his mouth and began to sing.

  About the Author

  Campbell Armstrong (1944–2013) was an international bestselling author best known for his thriller series featuring British counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan, and his quartet of Glasgow Novels, featuring detective Lou Perlman. Two of these, White Rage and Butcher, were nominated for France’s Prix du Polar. Armstrong’s novels Assassins & Victims and The Punctual Rape won Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards.

  Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Sussex, Armstrong worked as a book editor in London and taught creative writing at universities in the United States.