The Other Side of Silence

Captain Achim von Frisch must have been in his sixties, but he looked much older, desiccated even; his hair was pewter-colored and his once handsome face looked drawn and poorly shaven. He wore a dark gray coat with a thick fur collar, a monocle, and gray kid gloves, and he carried a silver-handled cane. But even the wax in his imperial-style, eagle’s-wing mustache looked spent and dried up, and there was a strong smell of mothballs around his person. His manner was exactly what you might have expected of an old Prussian cavalry officer, stiff and courteous, but I remembered him as a kind man who’d cared deeply about the welfare of the men under his command of whom, in 1918, I had been one. It might have been twenty years since I’d seen him, but you don’t forget that kind of comradeship. I’d have done anything for my old army captain. Once, he’d grabbed me by the collar of my tunic and pulled me clear as I blundered into a position on the line that was being scoped by an Australian sniper. A second later, a .303 bullet that was meant for my head hit the back wall of the trench.

We were in my suite of offices on the fourth floor of Alexander Haus. The premises were small but comfortable and I had a pretty good view of my old office window in the Police Praesidium on the opposite side of Alexanderplatz, where I’d spent many years as a detective until my politics obliged me to resign from the force. Thanks to the Nazis, the private investigator business was brisk-mostly missing persons. People were always going missing in Berlin under the Nazis.

My business partner, Bruno Stahlecker, lit his pipe noisily and shifted uncomfortably on his chair, but he wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as poor Captain von Frisch.

“I think I would prefer it if it was just you and I talking about this, Gunther,” he said.

“Herr Stahlecker is one of my operatives and enjoys my complete confidence. You can speak freely in front of him. I rely on him to carry out a lot of my investigative work.”

“I appreciate that. However, I really must insist. This is quite difficult enough as it is.”

I nodded. “Bruno, would you be kind enough to step outside for half an hour. Better still, could you fetch me a packet of Murattis?”

“Sure, boss, anything you say.”

Stahlecker grabbed his coat off the hat stand and, still smoking his foul-smelling pipe, he went out into the bitter January cold.

When he’d gone, I lit my last cigarette, stoked the fire, tidied my paper clips, polished my fingernails, and waited patiently for Captain von Frisch to come to the point. Patience is the key with every client who is being blackmailed. They’re so used to paying someone to keep their dirty little secret that it’s almost unthinkable they should just break the silence and start talking about it, and to someone they haven’t seen since the war.

“I don’t mind telling you that the last five years have been hell,” he said, and, taking out a handkerchief, he pressed it to the corner of his eye. “Often I have considered ending my life. But my old mother would be dreadfully upset if I did something like that. She’s ninety. And I am forced to employ a nurse to look after me, such has been the decline in my health. It’s my heart, you see. In time the worry of all this will certainly kill me. I just hope I don’t die before she does. That would break her heart.”

In his large gray military coat, which so far he had refused to remove-it wasn’t a great fire, and he’d said he felt the cold, abnormally so-von Frisch resembled an old and venerable German battleship about to be scuttled at Scapa Flow and even now he let out such a profound and hopeless sigh that it was as if this badly damaged ship were already plunging through the depths to a watery grave on the bottom of the freezing North Sea.

“You should have telephoned, sir. Or written. I’d have been glad to come to your house. Where are you living these days?” I picked up my pen and prepared to write down a few details.

“Southwest Berlin. Ferdinandstrasse, twenty-six, in East Lichterfelde. Just around the corner from the S-Bahn station. Thank you, it’s kind of you to say so, but the nurse is a sweet girl and I’d hate her to overhear anything of my own sordid past. A good nurse is hard to find these days. Although she is becoming rather expensive.”

“Surely the baron is still a rich man.”

“Not anymore. These terrible people have all but bled me dry.”

“I see. Then perhaps you’d better just tell me about it.”

He unbuttoned his coat and started to relax a little.

“I never married. Perhaps you knew that. And if you didn’t then perhaps you can understand why I didn’t, Gunther. When a man chooses not to marry he tells his mother that for all kinds of reasons he’s never met the right girl, but mostly there’s just one reason. The oldest reason of all. That there never could be such a thing as the right girl. If you know what I mean.” He smiled thinly. “I imagine that it can’t be the first time you’ve encountered this sort of thing.”