Europa Blues

32

ON COMPASSIONATE GROUNDS, we should skip over Sunday without comment, leaping forward in time to Monday instead.

Monday 15 May.

Monday mornings can vary greatly. For some, they represent nothing more than the pure joy of being able to get back to work again after a long, boring weekend of loneliness or matrimonial misery. For others, they represent the endless suffering of having to drag themselves up out of bed and face the meaningless, creativity-crushing week ahead of them. For others still, they are a torment, a reminder that everyone else is off to work, all those joyful souls who actually have a job to go to.

And then there is one final category. One which belongs to the happy few who, despite having had an extraordinarily pleasant weekend, look forward to getting back to work with the enthusiasm of a child.

Paul Hjelm belonged to this group.

It was time for him to return to Leonard Sheinkman’s diary from those awful days in February 1945. The diary was still at the police station – had he had it at home, Sunday wouldn’t have passed by in silence.

He managed to piece together rather a lot of things.

Though it had started slowly. Not that ‘slowly’ was really the right word. It started with self-contempt.

He felt like a rapist.

The ten or so yellowed pages of the diary were spread across his desk. Wherever the pencil had touched the paper, it had formed letters. Those letters weren’t simply a bank of information about an objectively reconstructable event from the past. They were words from the brink of death, and those words had reverberated through him and hurled him into the abyss. He had cried at those words, tears which had come from the very core of his being. The words had evoked a time and an experience that had started to pale away. They were almost holy, somehow.

He had the text in front of him now, splayed out like a victim, and he was planning on getting to work on it with the entire arsenal of rational structures which formed the basis of Western society: logic, analytical focus and stringent penetration.

He would, quite simply, be raping the text.

Like any good middle-aged, heterosexual, white, European man should.

To leave it untouched in its cocoon would be to shy away from the truth; it would be tantamount to renouncing knowledge, accepting a mystical and unchanging condition of fear, stepping back into a dark period of time and preparing the way for vague, inhuman forces.

Wasn’t there any way of analysing it soberly and critically and still – perhaps precisely by doing so – managing to keep the striking mystery alive?

That felt like the deciding question. And not just for Leonard Sheinkman’s diary, not just for this case in its entirety, not even just for Paul Hjelm’s entire working life, but for society as a whole.

What had Kerstin discovered?

Had she realised that without mystery we are all just empty shells?

At that moment, Paul Hjelm got the better of himself, as is often said when things return to the same old rut, and immersed himself in the text. Using logic, an analytical focus and stringent penetration, he took on Leonard Sheinkman’s diary from a week of decisive importance in 1945, not long before the end of the war.

Leonard Sheinkman hadn’t been in Buchenwald, Germany’s largest concentration camp, built on a desolate little hill named Ettersberg in 1937, just seven kilometres outside the cultured city of Weimar. A place where there definitely wasn’t a church just outside the window.

There were two possible explanations: either the church was just an image – something in which to ‘see time’, as Sheinkman had constantly written – or else it actually did exist, while simultaneously being an image used to ‘see time’. What spoke so clearly in favour of the latter was that the church had been described in such detail, and in combination with the Allied bombings, which had intensified in Germany during February 1945.

Everything pointed towards Sheinkman having been in a town, not on a desolate little hillside.

So why had he gone through life claiming to have been in Buchenwald? Why had he told his children that he had been held in Buchenwald of all places?

Once again, there were two possible explanations here: either whatever he had been subjected to in that town was so awful that even the nightmare of Buchenwald appeared a kinder and more manageable alternative, or else he had something to hide.

Paul Hjelm decided that could wait. The town could wait too – it was, at present, still seemingly unidentifiable. He took on the place itself instead.

It was clearly an institution. The prisoners were being kept in cells of some kind. There was a list, and when you reached the top of that list, you were subjected to something terrible. The result of whatever you were subjected to was that your personality was, in some way, erased. That was what had happened to his comrade Erwin. ‘When I speak to him, there is no one there. He is nothing but an empty shell. Over the spot where it has been running out of his head, an innocent little gauze dressing.’ That dressing appeared again. ‘Their bandages shine like lanterns on their empty skulls.’ And: ‘Soon, the little bandage will be pressed to my temple.’

Temple, Paul Hjelm thought, closing his eyes.

Of course.

A thin wall was separating Paul Hjelm from Kerstin Holm. On the other side of that wall, a conversation with Europe was currently under way. Or rather, a conversation with Professor Ernst Herschel from the history department at the University of Jena.

He was rather reluctant. A so-called challenge.

‘It was a mistake mentioning it to Josef,’ he said in academic-sounding English. Broken but grammatically sound.

‘Josef?’ asked Holm.

‘Josef Benziger in Weimar. He was a student here. A very promising student. I don’t understand how he could become a policeman.’

‘What was the context of you mentioning it to Josef?’

‘We met for a beer and I scolded him for not continuing his postgraduate studies. I was careless enough to mention my new research project. Mostly to show him what a titbit he was missing.’

‘So it’s your new research project?’

Silence from Jena. Kerstin continued.

‘What’s preventing you from talking about this new project?’

‘Several things, Frau Holm.’

‘Fräulein,’ Kerstin Holm said youthfully.

‘It’s an extremely sensitive project, Fräulein Holm. Within a few years, I hope that my research group will be ready to publish our results. But at this stage, the entire project is in quite an unsatisfying position, from a scientific point of view.’

The academic preserve, Kerstin Holm thought. It was obviously important to pick each word she said carefully here. Some well-paid American professor was probably hovering in the background somewhere, and Professor Herschel wasn’t ready to sacrifice him.

Not even to support an international murder investigation.

She could force him. She could take a hard line with him and get hold of a court order which would force him to talk. But there were two problems with that: firstly, it would take much too long, and secondly, most of the important information – the kind of thing people only told others in confidence – would be lost. She had no choice but to coax him.

‘We won’t reveal any of your research,’ she said.

Professor Ernst Herschel laughed.

‘Fräulein Holm,’ he said, ‘we are both employed by the state. We know how little we earn in comparison to every little errand boy in the private sphere. The world is, at present, incredibly unfair, and I wouldn’t hold it against you if you sold the information to Bild-Zeitung for a couple of million. We both know that public institutions leak like sieves. The police don’t know a thing that the press doesn’t also know within a few hours.’

‘You’re completely right,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘So what are we going to do now then? Do you have any suggestions?’

Yet more silence from Jena, though it felt different this time. A contemplative silence.

‘One more thing,’ said Herschel. ‘I know you think that this is just a case of academic preserve. I can hear it in your voice. But there is a more important aspect. Have you ever been to Hitler’s bunker in Berlin?’

‘No,’ said Holm.

‘Very few have. And that is the point. On no condition can it be allowed to become a place of pilgrimage for the emerging neo-Nazi groups. History and scientific truth must be weighed against experience. It is a pragmatic question. Which is of most benefit to democracy? The truth or silence?’

‘So we’re talking about a potential new shrine for neo-Nazis?’

‘Yes,’ said Ernst Herschel.

‘I understand,’ said Kerstin Holm.

Another moment’s silence. Herschel was thinking about the rapid rise of neo-Nazism in the undemocratically schooled former GDR. Holm was thinking about the Erinyes. She wondered whether her image of them was changing.

Eventually, she said: ‘I really do understand your concerns, Professor Herschel. It’s an entirely justified worry for the future. But surely the future also has to be weighed up against the present. And your professional secrecy against mine. What I’m about to tell you is highly classified.’

Again, silence from Jena. Yet another kind. A listening silence.

Kerstin Holm continued.

‘I’m currently working alongside a few other European countries within the framework of a joint investigation. So far, in just over a year, seven people have been murdered in Sweden, Hungary, Slovenia, England, Italy and Germany. Each was killed by being hung upside down from a rope, and having a very particular kind of sharp wire driven into their temples and wiggled around in the pain centre of their cerebral cortex.’

Silence from Jena. Gradually accepting, gradually becoming more willing.

‘I see,’ Ernst Herschel said finally. ‘The future is already here.’

‘You could put it that way, yes.’

‘Who is behind it?’

‘We don’t know, but we’ve been calling them the Erinyes.’

More silence from Jena. The silence of preparation. Then the floodgates opened.

‘Weimar was a dilapidated GDR city when the Wall came down,’ the professor began. ‘Ten years later it was – with sixty thousand inhabitants – the European capital of culture. It was where Cranach, Bach, Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland, Liszt, Nietzsche, Strauss, Böcklin and the Bauhaus architects lived and worked. It was the cradle of the first German democracy. It was where the Nazis held their very first meeting. It was where the Hitler Youth was born. It was where Buchenwald was built – initially Nazi Germany’s biggest concentration camp, and then the Soviet Union’s. The best and the worst of European culture has taken place here.’

The professor paused.

‘A few years after the Wall fell, some people entered a dilapidated and bombed-out building not far from the heart of Weimar, in Weimarhallen Park. It had been boarded up since the war. In the basement, they found the remains of a medical research institution. It was obvious that it had been abandoned in a hurry but that they had tried their utmost to remove all traces of themselves. The remaining archives had been torn up and some of them had been burnt. There were cells with extremely thick windowpanes and a couple of soundproofed research rooms. I was called in immediately and made sure that not a word got out to the press. I gathered together a small group of researchers. We went through every single inch of that place in minute detail; it took several years. What we are now working on is processing the results. The building was completely renovated a few years ago.’

‘What kind of institution was it?’ Kerstin Holm asked breathlessly.

‘It was called the Pain Centre,’ said Ernst Herschel.

On the other side of the thin wall, Paul Hjelm was reading on in Leonard Sheinkman’s diary.

It was all becoming much clearer.

The people in the building were in a queue, waiting to be subjected to an experiment which robbed them of their souls through a tiny hole in their temples, small enough for a dressing to cover the wound.

‘Erwin died of pain.’

At the same time, the Allies’ bombs were falling just round the corner. Leonard Sheinkman was coming closer and closer to the top of the list. Eventually, he reached it. The diary ended just as he was about to be taken away. Instead, he was liberated. He was saved by the bell. He emigrated to Sweden and obliterated his terrible past.

Two things of note were mentioned, Paul Hjelm thought with razor-sharp Western logic. Firstly, the church. Secondly, the tormentors.

There seemed to have been three of them. Sheinkman wrote about them on 19 February. They seemed to have had different characters. ‘I do not know their names. They give no names. They are three anonymous murderers. They are not alike. Not even murderers are alike.’

Sheinkman had had a kind of connection with one of them. ‘The kindest of them. He is less German than I, and very blond. He looks so sorrowful. He kills with sorrow in his eyes.’ That was the first one.

‘Not the other two. One kills out of curiosity. He is not cruel, simply cold. He watches, observes, writes.’ That was the second of them.

And then the third. ‘But the man with the purple birthmark on his neck, a mark in the shape of a rhombus, he is cruel. He wants to kill. I have seen that look before. He wants you to suffer. Then you can die. Only then is he happy.’

Paul Hjelm made notes, systematising it all.

Tormentor 1: Very blond, not German, sorrowful.

Tormentor 2: Ice cold, dedicated scientist.

Tormentor 3: Cruel, sadistic, purple rhombus-shaped birthmark on throat.

He couldn’t get anything else from it.

On to the church, then. Where had Leonard Sheinkman’s wife and son been killed? It was a camp. ‘They were being taken to their deaths at the execution spot.’ In all likelihood, that really was Buchenwald. And following that, he had been moved. ‘And I ended up here.’

Sheinkman had told his children it was in Buchenwald he was kept prisoner. If he wasn’t moved particularly far, then it could reasonably be assumed that he still considered himself to be in Buchenwald. An annexe of Buchenwald.

In other words, in Weimar.

The church. 18 February. That peculiar description of the physical appearance of time. ‘Time has a white base. That base may well be quadrangular. Then comes the black. The black is made up of three parts. The lowest of these is hexagonal. On three of these six surfaces, every other one, there are two windows set one above the other. The lower window is slightly larger than the upper. And immediately above the upper window, the next section begins; the middle. It is just as black and shaped like a small, domed cap. This is where the clock sits. Finally, the spire. The spire is black and looks to be needle-sharp.’

Paul Hjelm went online and searched for Weimar. Sure enough, Allied bombs had rained down on the city in February 1945. He found an overview of its churches. There were pictures of each of them.

The cathedral, Stadtkirche, was a big structure which had been destroyed during the war. It wasn’t the one. It wasn’t right at all. The city’s other big church was slightly further to the north. Jakobskirche. It was a white church with a black tower divided into three segments – first a hexagonal section with two windows above one another on each side, the lower one slightly bigger than the higher one. The next section was shaped like a little domed cap with a clock. At the very top, the spire, which looked as though it were needle-sharp.

There was no doubt.

It was Jakobskirche in Weimar that Leonard Sheinkman had been able to see from his window, likening it to time itself.

On the other side of the thin wall, Kerstin Holm’s increasingly worthwhile – and increasingly awful – conversation with Ernst Herschel in Jena was continuing.

‘The Pain Centre?’ she said.

‘They called it the Pain Centre. They experimented with the brain’s pain centre. The cerebral cortex. The objective was for their research subjects to feel the most acute pain possible.

‘They developed the procedure gradually. From what we can tell, it started with simple pain experiments up in Buchenwald. The results were so promising that a separate annexe was established, probably under direct orders from Himmler himself. That was when the experimentation really took off. They came to realise that increased blood flow to the brain contributed to an enhancement of pain and started hanging their research subjects upside down as a result. The long wire was a development from that. They were clearly near to a breakthrough of some kind when the Americans reached Weimar. The archives stopped suddenly at the end of March. The Americans arrived in early April. They had probably heard rumours that the end was close, packed up and disappeared into thin air. No one has ever been brought to account for it. In actual fact, we had no idea the institution ever existed before we opened the doors. All other traces of it had been obliterated.’

‘Have the people responsible been identified?’ asked Kerstin Holm. She didn’t recognise her own voice.

‘Not entirely,’ said Ernst Herschel. ‘What we do know has been sent on to the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna. Simon Wiesenthal, you know.’

‘Yes,’ Kerstin replied in the same peculiar cawing voice. ‘And what do you know?’

‘That there were three officers as well as guard soldiers. All from the SS.’

‘Names?’

‘Only two of the three, I’m afraid.’

‘What are the names you have?’

‘Let me start by explaining the order of command. Two of the three were doctors. SS doctors, if you grasp the full extent of that term. These men were doctors and officers. The third wasn’t a doctor. He was the boss. The entire institution, the whole Pain Centre, they were his work. His name was Hans von Heilberg.

‘Naturally, he made sure to burn all documents relating to himself and his existence is otherwise only sporadically recorded in various war archives. After the war, there isn’t a trace of him. We wouldn’t have known he existed at all, wouldn’t have known that he was in charge of the institution, if he hadn’t been treated for a certain complaint by one of the doctors. He had a birthmark that had started bleeding and he was worried it was skin cancer. That was in August 1944. His worries were described by the doctor as “chronic hypochondria”.’

‘A birthmark?’

‘A birthmark on his throat. According to reports, it was shaped like a rhombus. That’s all we know about Hans von Heilberg’s appearance.’

‘And the doctors?’

‘We know very little about one of them. He made sure to get rid of all written evidence, but oddly enough he forgot a photograph, so we do at least have a picture of him. It’s actually the only picture we have of any of the three.’

‘And the other?’

‘I’ve been hesitating slightly, and I know you’ve noticed, Fräulein Holm. He represents a problem for you. For your entire neutral nation. The other SS doctor was Swedish.’

‘Swedish?’

‘We have the most information about him. He wasn’t as careful in getting rid of the evidence as the others. Perhaps he didn’t think he would survive. Perhaps he was indifferent to it all. His name was Anton Eriksson.’

‘Jesus,’ said Kerstin.

‘I know that your country has finally started to get to grips with its national legacy from the Second World War, Fräulein Holm. You’ve unearthed some cannon fodder in the Waffen SS and things like that – but an SS man of that rank isn’t something you’ve come across yet. That was another of the reasons behind my initial reluctance. I asked myself whether I shouldn’t put the question to someone higher up first. But now I’ve said it. Do as you wish with it.’

‘I will,’ said Kerstin Holm.

‘I’ll fax the material over,’ said Herschel.

They met in the corridor, in line with the thin wall that separated their offices. Each pointed at the other.

‘Weimar,’ they said in unison.

Paul Hjelm and Kerstin Holm went into her office. They quickly recapped their respective discoveries for one another. Then they glanced at a fax which had just arrived. It was about Anton Eriksson. Accompanying it was an extremely blurry, almost completely black photograph of the third man.

‘Three men,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘Tormentor 3 seems to have been identified. “Cruel, sadistic, purple rhombus-shaped birthmark on throat.” Hans von Heilberg. The boss himself.’

‘This photo doesn’t give us much,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘But your summary of tormentor 1 could easily be the Swede, Anton Eriksson. “Very blond, not German, sorrowful.” It seems most likely that the sorrowful one was the only man not to wipe out all traces of himself. He was probably being eaten up by his conscience even then.’

‘So should we assume that tormentor 2 – “ice-cold scientist” – is the unidentified man in the photograph? The fact that he wiped out all other traces of himself surely suggests a certain cool rationality?’

They sat there for a moment, each of them thinking. Still, their thoughts were as one. It was as though nothing, no bones and no cartilage, separated their two brains from one another.

‘So what are we looking at here?’ Paul Hjelm asked eventually. ‘How did the Erinyes find out about this method of execution? Why are they using it to kill off pimps? And where the hell does Leonard Sheinkman come into all of this? He should’ve been executed – he was at the top of the list. But he made it. How?’

Kerstin stepped in. ‘And why did he never tell anyone about any of this? If he had just told the world that this horrible place existed, all three of them could’ve been locked up. Or they could’ve started searching for them right after the war at least. But he kept it quiet for over fifty years instead.’

‘He turned a new page in his life,’ said Paul. ‘He obliterated his past. He didn’t want anything to do with it. He just removed it. Like a tumour.’

‘They must’ve found out about it from Herschel,’ said Kerstin, getting to her feet.

‘Who?’

‘The Erinyes can only have had one single source of information about the hanging upside down and the nail in the brain, and that’s the research group in Weimar.’

‘Ring him back and see who knew about it. Absolutely anyone involved. Who was the first to go into the building? Who did they tell? How did Herschel find out? What happened when he gathered his research group together? Who was involved? Were there any other staff? What happened when the building was completely renovated?’

‘You’re right,’ said Kerstin, picking up the receiver.

‘But not quite,’ said Paul. ‘There are other possible sources. If Sheinkman survived, maybe others did too. The guard soldiers in the Pain Centre, for example. And then at least three others.’

‘Three war criminals who went underground over fifty years ago,’ Kerstin nodded.

‘Ring anyway,’ said Paul.

Kerstin spoke with Ernst Herschel. He promised to try to put a list of all possible names together, including how and when the Erinyes might have found out about the method.

‘One more thing,’ Kerstin said into the handset. ‘Was there any kind of register of the research subjects?’

‘Yes,’ said Ernst Herschel. ‘Though they’re just combinations of letters. No names. No individuals. Just letters. It must’ve been simplest that way.’

‘Probably,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Thanks again for your help. Prepare yourselves for a visit.’

‘What?’ asked the professor.

‘We’re sending a man,’ said Kerstin, hanging up.

‘Arto?’ asked Paul.

‘Our well-travelled friend.’

And so they began – with a single pair of eyes and four interconnected cerebral hemispheres – to read through the Swedish SS doctor’s documents.