Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 151, Nos. 1 & 2. Whole Nos. 916 & 917, January/February 2018

Burg’s Hobby Case by Matthew Wilson

A high-school English teacher from Portland, Oregon, Matthew Wilson grew up in a family with a GI father and a German mother and spent six years in Germany, three in Bad Kissingen, the spa town of this story. He told EQMM that witnessing East and West Germany face off at the border and tensions between the aged and the young helped to inspire this story.

On his day off, Hans Burg went to a junk shop. Some people called them antiques or memorabilia or collectibles, but Burg knew it was all just old junk. In their spring cleaning, people were smart about what to keep and what to get rid of, so most shops that dealt in antiques, according to Burg, were only fooling themselves and their customers. But Bad Kissingen was a good place for just such a shop. There were lots of tourists passing through for a spa, a Kur, and they could be seduced by material things from the past. A banker’s wife could fall for a token she could put on her mantel, something none of her rivals would ever find in a department store in Frankfurt or Munich.

For Burg, a day off was a relief. The murder case he’d been working had filled too much of his time. It was the first murder in Bad Kissingen in a decade. The last one was a domestic case practically closed the day it was opened by a man named Schmidt. That was back in ’67, when both Schmidt and Burg were only junior detectives, before Schmidt became Polizeihauptkommissar Schmidt, Burg’s chief. It was something to get used to, Burg thought at the time, a boss ten years younger.

Now Schmidt had assigned Burg the biggest case of his career, and Burg couldn’t understand why. He’d been slipping at work for a long time. There were too many late arrivals smelling of Katerfruhstück, the hangover remedy consisting of raw pickled herring, onions, and sour pickles. There were too many over-long lunches, with Burg returning to work in shirts and ties stained by Currywurst and Schweinsehaxen.

Any man in the station would have bet the murder case would go to Trautman or Waigl. They were competent men, not Burg. Sure, Burg could track down a pickpocket, one of those working the well-healed spa tourists, or a shoplifting American teenager, one of the children of the soldiers stationed at the nearby Daley Barracks. But not a dead girl in the park. And not just any park, but the Kurpark, where all those spa tourists strolled through a manicured landscape flowing between the resort hotels. The Kurpark, where Bad Kissingen made its money.

The junk shop, on the other hand, was on the very fringe of Bad Kissingen, far from the spa district, far from the gardens, the fountains, the mud baths, the massage tables. This particular shop wasn’t tidy enough, or profitable enough, to exist in the heart of Bad Kissingen, so it survived on the edge of it, like a scavenger.

Entering the shop, Burg could leave behind the murder case for another he’d been working in his spare time, his hobby case. It was not something on his actual caseload, but something on his mind, a little mystery he wanted to solve, to satisfy his own curiosity about someone. He was often distracted by these hobby cases, and he sometimes thought he’d be better off putting the energy he spent on them into his real cases. But there was something too attractive to Burg about a mystery no one cared about except for him.

When Burg pushed the door open, he heard the tinkle of the shopkeeper’s bell. The door and the bell, like the contents of the shop itself, were unwanted remnants of the bygone. The clerk or proprietor, Burg wasn’t sure, gave a “Grufi Gott” barely looking up from the morning’s paper. He appeared as worn-out and used up as his merchandise.

Burg paced through the crowded and grimy shop. Only in a junk shop would people tolerate the dust and the unkempt displays. Any other shop and the neighbors would complain about the grit and hazard of the place, shaming the proprietor with scowls if not lodging an actual civil complaint. But this shop seemed not to care about such social pressure. It did have a kind of logic to its layout, even if the merchandise was haphazardly thrown around. There were whole sections dedicated to various classes of junk. There were shelves of ceramic figurines, dancers and maidens and farmers and cows. There was a corner for defunct or obsolete machinery for sewing and typing, and thrown in with those were old radios and simple Agfa box cameras. A collection of nutcrackers sat high up on a shelf to keep children from handling them. They stood lined up like florid sentinels, soldiers in lousy camouflage. There were shelves for old dolls and dishes, for binders of discarded stamp collections, and in another corner stood a beaten-up wardrobe, the doors open to reveal stacks of old magazines. A menagerie of beer steins cluttered up against another wall, and next to them were random pieces of silver — platters, knives, spoons, forks, coffee and tea sets. Burg was interested in none of this.

What he wanted to find, if it was here, would have to be kept in the back room. He browsed for ten minutes, attempting to give the impression of a tourist hoping for a random treasure. At a point that felt right, he approached the old man and his newspaper.

“I’m looking for something a little special,” Burg said, “something for my history-buff grandson in the States.”

The old man didn’t look up, his eyes still on the newspaper. “One of those.”

“One of what?”

“Your daughter run off with one of the GIs? Make another soldier for America?”

Burg paused. Take offense or share the outrage? After the war, how many German men watched their sisters or daughters rush off with dollar-rich American GIs while they scratched out a life in the rubble of the postwar economy? He began to imagine a little chess match to enlist the old man’s help. The daughter was a fiction, so it was easy to allow her abuse. Burg said, “You think you raise the child right, but she has a mind of her own.”

The old man looked up from the paper. “Mine too. She’s in Kentucky, a place called Radcliff.”

Burg shrugged his shoulders, as if to say What can a man do? He patted his breast pocket and pulled out a red box of Marlboros. He flipped the top open and slid out a cigaret with his thumb, offering it to the old man. “They’ve got my grandson, but I’ve got their cigarets.”

The old man took the offer, grabbing a heavy brass tabletop lighter priced at ten marks. He lit up then passed the lighter to Burg. Before lighting his cigaret, Burg examined the lighter, a chunk of brass shaped like a horse’s head, the filament jutting out of the top between flares of mane.

“So what have you got for a boy who wants to collect historical artifacts?” Burg said.

“Look around this place. It’s all history. You want to know which film star dated a prince, check those old magazines over there. You want to pretend there’s no electricity, try one of those old oil lamps. Over there in the beer steins, see if you can find a keepsake. Avoid the cheap ones, though. You’ll have to open them up to tell. See if there’s a relief at the bottom, maybe of a farmer and his sweetheart. That’s very nineteenth century. Your boy might like that.”

Burg tapped his cigaret into the ashtray on the counter, a kitsch piece of ceramic shaped like a pool with a naked mermaid swimming up out of it. “My grandson, I think, is interested in more recent history, not so long ago as the nineteenth century.”

“Weimar? I’ve got some Weimar stuff right over here. Come, have a look.” The old man led Burg over to a drawer at the other end of the counter. He opened it and pulled out a few notes of currency. “Here, he might like this. One thousand marks.” He held up a single note, then shuffled some more, looking for another. “Here, how about this one. One million marks. In nineteen twenty-three it could buy you a loaf of bread. Now that is a piece of history. A real story behind it.”

Burg remembered his parents and grandparents telling him of the hyperinflation in the 1920s. He was just a boy then. But Weimar wasn’t what he was after. The old man handed him the bill, and Burg looked it over.

“My grandson might find this interesting. But to be honest with you, he knows nothing about Weimar. It would require a whole history lesson, and still the novelty would wear off quickly. Now, he’s not like most of the Americans, completely ignorant about Germany. He knows a lot about—”

“The Third Reich time, you mean?”

Burg paused, reading the man. “Yes, that’s his interest.”

“Come on. That’s all those people know about Germany. Your boy knows about as much as the rest of them... and besides, that stuff’s illegal. I couldn’t help you if I wanted to.”

Too far, Burg thought. Or maybe this old man really didn’t keep any of the outlawed memorabilia Burg was after. He thought about giving up, or at least retreating.

The old man drew on his cigaret and gave Burg a sideways glance. “You’re not a cop, are you?”

Burg coughed and looked down at his overgrown belly protruding through his open jacket. “Do I look like a cop? I’m just an old man like you. Except I have even less to keep me interested. Retired. And anyway, cops today are useless.”

“That’s God’s truth.” The old man paused before smashing his cigaret into the mermaid’s blue pool. “Come over here, let me show you something.”

He waved Burg back behind the counter. Burg stepped around the end of the counter and the old man led him through the door behind it. It opened into a small living space, as unkempt as the shop itself. There was a refrigerator and a small electric range in the corner, an electric bread slicer next to it with a half-consumed loaf of grey bread pressed against the blade. A table dominated the center of the room. Dishes and glasses, both clean and soiled, mingled on its surface. There was a couch doubling as a bed along one wall. In one corner was an old trunk. The old man went to the refrigerator, pulled out his last bottle of beer, searched the table for two clean glasses, found them, and filled each with equal parts of the beer. He turned one of the wooden chairs at the table out, offering it to Burg, and Burg sat and took the glass the old man had set in front of him.

“You and I,” the old man said, “we are the same, aren’t we?”

“What do you mean?” Burg said.

“The old days. Still remembering the old days. This whole country wants to forget. Put it behind them. Lock it away and forget it. Like a retarded child kept in the closet.”

“Hmm,” Burg said, uncommitted.

“What we were willing to give for our country. None of these young people today understand that commitment.”

He flipped open his newspaper and spread it on the table. “Look at this.” The headline in big block letters screamed, “RED ARMY FACTION STRIKES AGAIN: PROMINENT INDUSTRIALIST MURDERED.”

Burg glanced at the headline.

“First we saved this country from the communists. Then, after the war, we rebuilt it from the ashes, and what do we get in return? A generation that spits in our face.” The old man moved to the trunk, still talking as he did. “It’s a disgrace, really. These young people... leftists, communists, like our sworn enemies... killing good citizens for something we fought against in Russia and Poland, our brothers dying all around us.” He began working the padlock on the trunk. “They think we were all just mindless automatons. Nazis. That’s all wrong. We weren’t Nazis. We were patriots.”

“But some were Nazis.”

“Well yes, some, sure. There are bastards wherever you go. But I was in the Wehrmacht. I saw my friends die in the Crimea. Good young men who loved their country, drowned in the Black Sea. They weren’t Nazis. For God’s sake, the Nazis betrayed them, just as they betrayed all of Germany.”

The trunk was opened and from it the old man pulled a couple of shoeboxes. He brought the shoeboxes over to the table, crowding dishes and glasses over to one corner to make room.

“Here, what do you want? How about this, maybe your grandson will like this?” He pulled out a shiny butter knife from one of the boxes. He handed it to Burg and Burg examined the engraving on the handle. The classic German eagle motif with the swastika crest, the year below that — 1943.

“Or how about this one?” From the other box the old man pulled a tarnished silver ring with the same eagle and swastika emblazoned on it. Burg turned it over in his hand.

“And these?” The old man held out a handful of lapel pins. He dropped them on the table like worthless pennies. Burg took one up and examined it. A swastika lay in the center against a white background. A red circle surrounded the swastika, with black words emblazoned in the red: NATIONAL-SOZIALISTISCHE-D.A.P.

Burg said, “They must have made a million of these.”

“Ten million — a hundred million. Every damn man and his mother wore one—”

“If you wanted to keep your job.”

“Yes, you remember too. They made loyalty to Germany and loyalty to the party inseparable. That was a clever trick they played on us. My friends died thinking it was for Germany... but it was only for Hitler’s folly.”

“But every con man needs his mark. And we were willing to be marks for the party.”

“Yes, well. They played on our sense of honor, and we fell for it. Young people today don’t understand that, because they don’t know what honor is.”

“Honor got us shot. Honor sent us to Russian gulags. Honor turned our cities into rubble. Maybe these kids are smarter than we were about what to die for.”

“You think? Even these radicals in the papers, killing decent businessmen?”

Burg shrugged his shoulders.

The old man said nothing for a long time. He took a long drink from his beer before saying, “I’ve got some coins, some old documents with Third Reich stamps on them. They loved stamping documents. I’ve got a few small embroidered military patches. But that’s about all.” He pushed the boxes over to Burg. “Here, look for yourself. Let me know if your grandson wants any of this.”

Burg sifted through the boxes while the old man stood up and started clearing dishes from the table, placing them in the sink over in the corner that served as a kitchen. This guy was a lousy housekeeper, Burg thought. It was something else they had in common. Burg picked out one of the lapel pins as a gift for his fictional grandson. He also selected a small document with a fancy official stamp featuring the eagle and swastika. It was a draft deferment for a deaf man. In the picture the man had a shock of thick black hair and a handsome face. The lucky bastard, Burg thought. The lucky deaf bastard. No war for him. No hellish Russian front, no deadly African desert.

Burg negotiated a price with the old man and readied himself to leave. Still, he had not gotten what he came for. He took one last shot at it. “Any chance you know someone with a more... well, with a more extensive collection?”

The old man found a soiled and torn envelope among some scattered papers. He pulled a ballpoint from his breast pocket and wrote down a name and address. Handing the envelope to Burg, he said, “This man has what you’re looking for. Just be careful. None of your defeatist talk, or he’ll throw you out. And if you’re a cop, I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

As Burg drove away from the junk shop, the radio broadcast the news and the weather, but Burg ignored it. He was thinking of the old man and of his complaints. Young people today. It was a time-honored grievance of the old. He caught himself sometimes trapped in these same thoughts. The young uniformed officers at the station, they didn’t understand him. He sensed their contempt for him, for old Burg, with his fat belly and stained lapels. No doubt they eyed his job — Kriminalkommissar — and believed they could do it better. But what did they know of the world? They had no memory of dead comrades, no recollection of cities turned to piles of stones, no acquaintance with killing and death.

Then there were the radicals in the papers. People like Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. Baader with his bank robberies and Meinhof with her manifestos. Meinhof, she condemned all the old bald-headed Germans, men like him. She said they never really did give up their fascist ways, that they took the Marshall Plan money and built a soulless new Germany, one without enough shame, a consumerist dystopia, one with old Nazis still pulling all the strings. He could see how the old man at the shop, with his tabloid newspaper gripped in his fist, would resent such juvenile upstarts.

But Burg tried to turn off his resentment, because he remembered his own young self, full of ideas and hopes, of longings and disappointments. He occasionally went soft on pickpockets and shoplifters for this reason. Once, a skinny American kid caught with a box of candy in his pants fell onto Burg’s caseload. It was like that — they always gave him the least important work. Burg watched the kid’s limbs tremble at the thought of his tough soldier father meting out punishment, so Burg brought the kid over to Daley Barracks, the American family housing area, and quietly dropped him at his mother’s door, and somehow all the paperwork for this minor offense disappeared.

As Burg drove on, the news and weather switched to music. Some brass, an accordion, and a woman’s voice came out of the radio. For a moment his mind drifted to the dead girl in the park. He wondered what kind of young person she was — a scared child, like the shoplifting kid, or something else?

Burg checked the address the old man had written on the envelope just to be sure, then stepped out of his Volkswagen and walked up to the cottage. The facade of the cottage was grey and faded, and there were spots where the plaster had disintegrated, crumbling away from the surface and leaving gouges, so that the front of it resembled a pockmarked face. The Kur tourists would be surprised to encounter such a cottage only a village over from Bad Kissingen, only a Sunday drive from the luxury suites of the spa district.

At the door, Burg was greeted by a man with a single arm. His name was Jochim Fuchs. He wore a mustard-colored cardigan with the right sleeve pinned up. It was awkward to shake his hand. People who met Fuchs would naturally reach with the right hand for a greeting, and Fuchs had to shake it with his left, and it wasn’t quite a proper handshake. It felt like holding hands, like a parent and a child — or, even more awkward, like young lovers. Because Germans were so big on handshaking, Fuchs could never escape the discomfort that came with routine encounters with neighbors and acquaintances. Except if he didn’t go out, if he stayed in. Then he didn’t have to shake anyone’s hand. And that’s how Burg found him, all alone at home, avoiding the bother of people, of greetings and pleasantries, of Guten Morgens and Grüß Gotts.

When Fuchs answered the door, Burg told him who sent him — the old man in the junk shop — and Fuchs asked if he was a cop, and Burg told the same story, about the uselessness of cops, and Fuchs believed him, but with more reluctance than the old man at the shop. Fuchs showed Burg in, and they sat on old furniture and drank strong coffee and made small talk. The house was not such a mess as the last one. There wasn’t the clutter of the old man’s place, and the aged furniture was in better shape, as if it had been cared for with dedication.

When the coffee was done, Fuchs went right to business. He took Burg down to his cellar. They walked past the oil furnace, past a decrepit washing machine and sagging laundry lines, past shelves of root vegetables, to a door with a padlock. Fuchs unlocked the door, turned the old-fashioned light switch, and said, “Come in.”

It was like a small, windowless shop. Lining the shelves to the left were neat displays of cutlery, buttons, badges, armbands, belt buckles, hats, and jewelry. There were framed propaganda posters and vibrant red pennants on the far wall, and on the right was a floor-to-ceiling display case with pull-out drawers.

“It may seem like a small collection,” Fuchs said, “but let me assure you it’s the best you will find around here. I’m sure you remember how it was in forty-five. All the cowards who burned their flags and threw out white sheets at the first sight of a Sheridan.”

Burg feigned agreement.

There was something that puzzled Burg. It took effort and wit to find his way to this man’s illicit shop, so how did he attract customers to make it worth keeping up such an inventory? His curiosity distracted him for the moment from his initial purpose.

Burg said, “I cannot believe you have such a fine collection. I thought for sure my poor grandson was going to have to settle for a plastic Messerschmitt from the hobby shop. They won’t even put a swastika on those things, only the iron cross. Very inauthentic. But this...” and Burg swung his hands around as he said it, “...you have a real gold mine here. A collector’s dream, an historian’s dream, really.”

Fuchs looked pleased.

Burg continued, “You must have good contacts with scholars and military historians, since you cannot really advertise, can you?”

“Are you kidding me? People today, they want as far away as possible from my collection. The scholars, if they are interested in the Third Reich, all they write about is the so-called ‘Final Solution.’ Nothing about the bravery of the men in Stalingrad or Bastogne. No, the only Germans I see are old men like us. A little piece to remind them of those days. For whatever reason. Everything else, I sell by mail order. Mostly to England. They can’t get enough of swastikas.”

Burg looked over at the display case. Fuchs invited him to browse, so he did. He pulled out drawers and examined old documents. He found flags and banners folded neatly, as if waiting for the season to change so they could be brought out. In drawers he found more personalized items. Pieces with names on them, letter openers and regimental steins, and Burg asked Fuchs about them, and Fuchs said the personalized stuff always went for more money, especially if you could place the original owner somewhere historical. The Luger of an officer in Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The last love letter of a hero fallen at Stalingrad, stamped with a censor’s approval. A dish from Hitler’s dining room at Berchtesgaden. The monogrammed cuff links of a well-known Munich gestapo chief.

Burg picked up something close to what he was after. It was a lighter made of brass, its shape falling somewhere between a cylinder and a rectangle. One side was blank, the other adorned with the twin lightning bolts of the Waffen-SS. Above the lightning bolts was a year, 1941, and above that the initials L.F. He pulled the cap end off to reveal a flint wheel. He pictured a man in the rain in Poland or Russia, working the wheel with his thumb, flicking away, fighting the damp and the wind... and the pleasure of the smoke, a little break from his grim work. “This is nice,” Burg said.

“Yes, the lightning bolts are a good touch. Not everyone appreciates them as much. Everyone wants the eagle and the swastika.”

Burg looked it over, making a show of considering it. “Any others like this? This one’s in a bit of bad shape.”

Burg depended on Fuchs’s pride, and his German sense of order. Fuchs pulled out several more lighters and set them with care on a velvet display mat. From the adjacent drawer several Third Reich ashtrays appeared. And from the drawer under that came what Burg was after. Three mint-condition silver cigaret cases.

“Ah,” Burg said, “these are lovely.” He began examining the cigaret cases. The first was a plain rectangle with a thin blue framing line, a thin circle in the same blue, and a black swastika in the center. The second was more detailed and quite a find for a collector. In the center of it was the ubiquitous eagle with its wings draped down dramatically over a swastika. Below that was an inscription in initials of the National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, with a place and date:

Impressive, but it wasn’t really what Burg was after.

The third case was a rectangle like the others, but rounded at the top and bottom. In the center was a crest with the Waffen-SS lightning bolts. The bottom corners below that featured two other decorations. In one corner lay a small eagle, the wings spread, the talons resting on a round crest with a swastika. Out of the other corner grew a small flower. Burg patted around his pockets for his reading glasses to get a better look. Coming up empty, he took a magnifying glass Fuchs kept at the ready. Burg held the glass between his face and the cigaret case, stretching his arm out to hold the case farther out, shifting the glass back and forth until the image of an edelweiss blossom came into perfect, brilliant view.

This third cigaret case was the one he wanted. He had seen it before, or at least he had seen a near copy of it, coming out of the jacket of Polizeihauptkommissar Gunter Schmidt.

Later, Burg found himself in front of a machine that made little sense and frustrated him. He’d wanted to look through old newspapers, so he’d driven to the university library in Wurzburg. It seemed the logical receptacle for old back issues of Bild, Suddeutstches Zeitung, Frankfurter Algemeine, Main-Post. He had spent so many years licking his index finger, making it tacky to lift the bottom corner of a page, to separate it from the others underneath it. But this machine... damn this machine.

Microfilm, they called it. The newspaper became tiny images on strips of celluloid, and a man had to feed these strips into a machine to enlarge these images back to the size they once were when they were perfectly good newspapers. Spools of this stuff threading through this machine. Attach the end to a receiving spool, turn a little handle and watch the images spin past on the screen, and stop and look, and notice you’ve gone too far, a week or a month past what you were looking for, and then turn the little handle on the other side to back up, and then maybe you would find the page with the date and the headline you were looking for. There had to be a better way.

At first, Burg had started with back issues of magazines, three-year-old copies of Der Spiegel, something he could still put his hands to. In an issue from 1974, he read about the release of the Maschke Commission report on German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. The report was a horror show — a million dead or more, forced labor, a prolonged vengeance for years after the end of the war. Burg knew most of this, or guessed at it based on the talk among old men at Eberman’s Keller and other places he drank. He had himself been a POW in England after he was captured in France in 1944. In England, he’d worked on farms, he’d had little to eat, and once a guard cracked a rifle butt across his head. He’d been kicked in the groin and old women spat on him. But still, the stories of the East were far worse.

What he was really after was information on those prisoners kept long after the rest returned. While he came home to rubble and food shortages, to girls turning tricks to GIs for salt and butter, thousands of Germans stayed prisoners of a war that was over. Burg had no time to read the entire Maschke report, but the Spiegel story would do. Yes, there were plenty of men released in 1946, but many were kept until 1949, four years after the end. And then there were the 85,000 or so kept even longer, until as late as 1956. A war over for eleven years and finally a man comes home. What kind of man could he be?

In a sidebar of the Spiegel story there was a timeline indicating key dates of the German POW experience in the Soviet Union. This was the shortcut Burg needed and it’s what led him to the microfilm collection. He guessed that the release and return of these long-lost soldiers would have made front-page news in 1949, 1953, and 1956.

He had been following a hunch for the last three years, ever since the Maschke report had first appeared and an acquaintance at Eberman’s had that same edition of Der Spiegel on the bar opened to the same story. Burg was ignoring the news that day, like most days he spent at Eberman’s. His mind was on other things more pressing, like how he was going to report all the hours he spent at the bar as if he were out in the field on assignment, investigating the petty crimes of Bad Kissingen. But the acquaintance at the bar mentioned the name of someone Burg knew. He said this fellow, the one Burg knew, was in one of those camps for years, long after most of the regular Wehrmacht soldiers were released in 1949. The Soviets claimed these fellows were war criminals, troublemakers, not just regular soldiers caught up in the grind of the German war machine, and so they had to serve long sentences handed down by Soviet tribunals. But then how did you square that with the case of Karl Heinz Vogeley, released in 1953 at age twenty-four? It was right there, a little human interest follow-up right after that hard journalism on the Maschke report. Little Karl Heinz would have been all of sixteen in 1945. How was this kid a hardened anticommunist, a die-hard National Socialist? He toiled for eight years in a copper mine in Kazakhstan, purgatory for the sins of the German high command, for the Waffen-SS, for the Battle of Moscow, for the Siege of Leningrad. Little Karl Heinz paid for all the wounds his country had inflicted on Mother Russia.

And now Burg was looking for another long-lost boy in the monochromatic frames of the microfilm. The Donaukurier. It was the daily paper of Ingolstadt, a city two hours south by autobahn from Bad Kissingen.

The frames moved by, Burg stopping to scan the front page of each daily edition.

Stop. Burg read the headline. “Returned from Russia: A Joyous Reunion.” Below the headline a photo of a thin, wan young man. On his left, a reserved delight beaming from his father’s hard and cracked face. On his right, his mother wrapped in a long wool coat, dark handbag hooked into the crook of her elbow, her soft face betraying sorrow, her tears lost in the poor resolution of the microfilm.

Burg’s eyes went back to the young man in the middle, just to make certain. Burg read the caption below the photo, growing confident in his certainty. It was a young, broken, and reborn Gunter Mathäus Schmidt.

So much of detective work is looking for the truth among lies. Finding a true fact about Schmidt nearly elicited a feeling of pride in Burg. Ever since Schmidt rose to the rank of Polizeihauptkommissar, Burg wondered about the mystery of his past. Maybe it was resentment in Burg. To have a younger boss, someone still in short pants when Burg was already in boots and helmet. Now he was the chief, passing around orders, calling Burg into the office, the field marshal to the underling.

But Burg knew Schmidt didn’t deserve his resentment. Burg himself had never aspired to Hauptkommissar, so why hold Schmidt’s ambition against him? Over the years, Burg was content to punch the clock at the end of the day, spend his wages at Eberman’s, direct his energy toward leisure rather than rank. Once, a girlfriend asked him why he wasn’t more ambitious. Her question provoked the rare occasion when Burg would even consider the topic. He supposed that it had to do with the war. There were too many men dead for what seemed like nothing. Let Schmidt have his office. Give me life, Burg thought, just give me life. He would be content with good food, schnapps, and the company of a favorite woman. And a pension to carry him to the grave, but only after he was finished with living.

Burg couldn’t gather all the evidence on Schmidt, but it was always his way to guess at the truth after collecting insufficient evidence. That was the kind of detective he was. And what did Burg guess?

He guessed Schmidt was one of those teenagers called up in the waning days of defeat. Well indoctrinated but poorly trained, they were true believers to the end, dying easily for a lost cause. If Schmidt had been sixteen in 1945, that would have made him four in 1933, making the Third Reich all he would have known. It made sense for boys like him to fight to the end. They had no other Germany to dream of. No Weimar before, no Wirtschaftswunder — the postwar economic miracle — after. Harder to guess was why, of all those captured, Schmidt was held longest by the Soviets? Were these boys like Schmidt the best workers, or the most recalcitrant? Were their Third Reich ways too hard to work out of them — or too hard to beat out?

All of these thoughts floated through Burg’s mind as he faded in and out in his armchair. After wrestling with the microfilm machine for several hours, he’d driven back to Bad Kissingen and gorged himself at Eberman’s on half a roast chicken, washing it down with several beers. Afterwards, he’d called Ursula and then Traudl but got only the buzz of unanswered phones. His third choice for company that night was the remains of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s he’d scored off an American source at Daley Barracks, and now that sat empty in his lap as his head dropped in sleep, then snapped back up awake. He was in the in-between world.

Later, he found himself in his bed, his body horizontal, his clothes still on. How he’d gotten there he wasn’t sure, but true sleep was coming on.

In his sleep he dreamed. It was the dream of a dead girl. Not the one in the park, his murder case, but a different girl. She is walking through a snowy forest in Poland. It is 1939. Burg is a private. He is slim and handsome. He carries his rifle, his Karabiner 98K. This is the first of six years of war that will take him to Poland, to Greece and Italy, and finally to France, where it will end for him, his hands raised high with hope as he steps out from a French farmhouse, greeted by boys from Kansas and Missouri restraining with all their might the desire to shoot down this damn Kraut.

But first, Poland. In the dream, Burg walks the girl through the woods. He watches the snowflakes catch in her brown hair. He sees her frozen pink hands raised in the air, her fingers trembling with the fear. He shifts the bolt on his rifle, sets the Mauser cartridge into the chamber. He tells her to stop at the ditch. Halt. A single word, German, but these Poles know its meaning. He raises his rifle. Sets his finger on the trigger...

In the dream he takes his finger off the trigger. In the dream. He looks around to see that all his comrades have retreated back into the town. It’s just Burg and the girl. He points his rifle up in the air and fires. The girl startles from the noise. He steps up to her, turns her around, stares in her face, and says, Run! He gestures with his hand into the forest, away from the village, away from where his comrades are gathering her friends, her cousins, her uncles, her grandparents. She moves at first with caution, her eyes not leaving him, and then soon she sprints between the trees and disappears.

In his dream, Burg has saved the dead girl.

Monday morning and there was the hangover again, the late arrival, and the young officers noticing. Schmidt called Burg into his office and wanted to know about the progress on the murder case. “It was the weekend,” Burg said, and how could he possibly make progress on the case on his day off. Without saying it exactly, Schmidt made it clear to Burg there were no days off on murder cases.

Burg went back to his desk and looked over the file on the dead girl in the park. Two gunshot wounds through the back. Exit wounds through the front, staining red the good green grass of the Kurpark. A university student from Hamburg, her parents surprised to find her spending the season in Bad Kissingen. Wasn’t she supposed to be in Berlin working jobs in the pubs and cafes during a long break from studies? Instead of cleaning hotel rooms in a Bavarian spa town. Not like a northern girl to choose provincial Bavaria over Berlin. One suspect — a GI from Daley Barracks seen taking her to a film the night before. Logan’s Run, a science-fiction fantasy playing at the cinema they had over there in their little American village. A pretty German girl on a date with a GI among all those Yanks — she stood out, and there were witnesses who watched her leave with the lucky GI, the two of them walking out into Bad Kissingen while a hundred other GIs retreated to the lonely beds of the barracks.

Burg flipped back to the first few pages, the crime-scene data. There it was, a number that puzzled him — nine millimeter. The ballistics report. Over at Daley Barracks the Americans had every weapon you could imagine. Rifles, tanks, artillery, nuclear-tipped shells. Pistols too, but not the nine millimeter. If that lucky GI killed the girl in the park, if he were to shoot her, it wouldn’t be with a nine millimeter. The Americans had their own pistols, their own special cowboy caliber, distinct from every German gun available to criminals and cops. The .45-caliber. The Colt 1911. They’d carried that pistol through two wars here, and more in other parts of the world.

Burg leaned back in his chair, the springs moaning against his great weight. He glanced over at the other two detectives. Waigl was typing, the coffee on his desk shaking in the cup as he banged at the machine. Trautman cradled a phone in his shoulder and dug in his pocket for a cigaret or a pen. Burg pulled out his Marlboros, walked over to Trautman, and pushed a cigaret up out of the box. Trautman took it with a head nod, never breaking from his phone conversation. Burg pulled one out for himself, lit it, then walked over to the window and gazed out into the street.

Across the way there were apartments with flower boxes, bright bougainvillea lighting up the day. If he looked at the scene just right, he saw a checkered pattern, splotches of magenta against a yellow plaster facade. For a moment his mind drifted to a chess match he had nearly lost. In the match, he had saved himself when he imagined a solution inconsistent with the inevitable. He played to a draw, and that draw was more satisfying than any checkmate.

For the girl in the park, the inevitable solution was for her to die for love — a troubled American soldier she was leaving, a young man wound up with jealousy and violence. A domestic case one could wrap up in a single day... if the case belonged to any other detective than the incompetent Hans Burg. But for Burg, the numbers didn’t add up: 9—.45— 1911—2. The calibers, the pistol, and the two shots that were more execution than lover’s rage.

Once, Burg had scolded a young officer for obsessing too much over the details of paperwork. He had said, “We are investigators, not accountants.” And now he was ready to eat his words.

A week went by. Schmidt made arrangements for the arrest of the young GI. It was a delicate situation. There was a treaty, the Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA. The Americans protected their soldiers, requiring their own jurisdiction and custody when at all possible. It wasn’t so easy for German policemen to arrest American soldiers, so Schmidt waited on Burg, expecting an airtight case. As Burg dragged on, the officers at the station became more and more baffled. How could Schmidt let this go on, leaving Waigl and Trautman to minor burglaries and stolen mopeds?

Burg was chasing a lead, and it was like he was a young man again, alive with purpose. His lead had nothing to do with the GI over at the American garrison. His lead ran through the daily tabloid called Bild. It was the same newspaper the old man from the shop read, the most popular newspaper in Germany, known for its enormous, inflammatory headlines. For this lead Burg didn’t need the microfilm machine, just the back issues stacked up in the corner of his kitchen. He took his long lunches there, hunched over grey bread and cold meat — Blutwurst and Leberkase — poring over the newsprint and clipping out stories on the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. Their leaders were in jail now, rotting at the prison in Stammheim, but still their disciples were active. First he clipped a story only a month old, of a kidnapping gone wrong. September 5, 1977. Hanns Martin Schleyer, an industrialist, was snatched from his chauffeured Mercedes by Red Army Faction commandos. They killed the chauffer and three police officers, and Schleyer was still missing. Then a story of a banker killed in his home, a failed kidnapping — July 30, 1977. Jurgen Ponto, when confronted in his home by three would-be kidnappers, resisted, and they shot him. There were more stories of bombings and bank robberies. There were editorials accusing the communists in East Germany of supplying the Red Army Faction with training and weapons. It went like that for the first few long lunches, working backwards, until, to Burg’s embarrassment, he realized he had nearly two years’ worth of Bild he had failed to dispose of. The clippings ran back all the way to July 1975, to a story on the occupation of the West German embassy in Stockholm, also ending badly — four killed, two of them the young radicals carrying out the mission. Burg would spread the clippings out on his floor, leave for the office, and continue on at his desk, figuring. He’d bang away at his typewriter now and then to make it look like he was writing up the perfect investigative report for the GI’s arrest, but mostly he was just thinking. Sometimes he imagined Schmidt peering through the glass of the door to his office, watching him, and Burg wondered how long it would be before he was caught loafing. Linking paper clips together, sharpening pencils, twirling the grey dust of the ashtray with the latest cigaret stub.

Nights he’d go to Eberman’s Keller, drink beer, eat schnitzel and sauerbraten, work chess puzzles from newspapers better than Bild, and think about the dead girl in the park. He put it together in his head why she was in Bad Kissingen instead of Berlin, where a smart Hamburg girl on a break from university should have been. It all started with one of his clippings. At first he glanced past it, in a hurry to collect as many clippings as possible on the Red Army Faction. But then it stared at him from the floor, confirming a hunch he’d had since the day he’d discovered the girl was from Hamburg. No big-city girl like her would want to spend a season in Bad Kissingen tending to the needs of hypochondriacs with money. The clipping, dated January 7, 1977, told the story of an attack on the U.S. installation at Giessen. Bild described a band of “leftist urban terrorists” attacking the “unconfirmed” nuclear arsenal, with all known assailants killed in the action. It was tough going trying to break onto an American military base when you were, as Bild described them, “dead-end gangsters playing at revolution.” But what if you could simply walk on to such a place? Invited? And a pretty girl?

Schmidt was at his wit’s end with Burg. “Have the report done now, no excuses. Don’t let me see you leave this office until it’s finished.” That’s what he told Burg at five o’clock on a Friday. So Burg stayed in the office instead of initiating his usual weekend of drinking and eating too much. The station emptied out, leaving only Burg in the detectives’ office. There were a few men out in town on patrol, and a single officer at the duty desk downstairs. It was a quiet Friday evening, like most nights in Bad Kissingen. Burg could hear the phone ringing, hear the officer downstairs answer it, listen, hang up, then say something into the radio, dispatching the men in town to some minor trouble.

Burg opened the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a small bottle. It was a pint of Jim Beam a GI from Daley Barracks had given him. Burg had kept quiet about some small trouble the GI had in town, trouble the GI didn’t want getting back to his commanding officer, and the whiskey was a gift, a thank you. Burg began to unscrew the top, but then thought better of it. He put the bottle back in the drawer, pulled out a sheet of paper, and loaded it into his typewriter. A report, that’s what Hauptkommissar Schmidt wanted. Burg looked at the clock, six now. He began typing, poking at the keys with just his two index fingers, the little hammers splashing ink onto the page, the quiet of the office broken by a rhythmic ticking, the machine echoing out like a noisy clock. By nine o’clock he was finished. He gathered up the papers and slipped them neatly into a folder. He thought about that bottle in his desk, began to pull the drawer open, then heard voices from downstairs. Someone talking to the duty officer. Footsteps up the stairs after that, and, before he could think, there was Schmidt at the edge of his desk.

Schmidt whipped out his arm dramatically and gazed at his watch. “Well, what is it, Herr Burg? Have you finished the report?”

Burg lifted the folder from his desk. “Here it is, Herr Schmidt.”

With a quick jerk, Schmidt snapped the folder out of Burg’s hand. “Wait here. I’m going to my office to read through it. I’ll call for you when I’m through. This had better be in order.”

Burg watched Schmidt enter his private office. The door closed and he saw the desk lamp come on. Now was the time for that drink. He pulled out the bottle of Jim Beam and took a long pull on it. He read the label, “Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey.” He thought about the old man in the shop, and his grandson somewhere over there in Kentucky — Radcliffe, the old man had said. He waited, knowing Schmidt was reading his own indictment and certainly not liking it.

After about twenty minutes, he heard the door open, heard Schmidt’s voice, the chief’s voice. “Herr Burg. A word in my office.”

Burg stood up, his back stiff from the long day in the chair. He walked through the dark office, the only light from the lamp on his desk and the one glowing in Schmidt’s office. He crossed the threshold into Schmidt’s office and there was the shadow of a gunman against the desk lamp, Schmidt behind his desk, the nine-millimeter pistol gripped in his hand, and it was pointing at Burg.

“Herr Burg, you are not the detective I thought you were.”

Burg looked at the pistol. “Is that the one you used to kill the girl in the park?”

Schmidt twisted the pistol up, gazed at its profile. “This thing. It was mine during the war. When I went off to Russia, I left it with my parents. I told them to shoot looters with it.”

“Is that a Luger? I thought after the war they were all bought up by GIs looking for souvenirs. You remember, people were hungry and they’d sell anything, and the GIs had money and cigarets.”

“My father never did shoot any looters. But he swore to return this pistol to me when I returned from Russia. He had no idea how long it would take. I think holding on to it gave him hope of my return.” Schmidt pointed the pistol back at Burg. “Sit down, Herr Burg.”

Burg moved to the chair opposite the desk, the one he jokingly called the interrogation chair, because every meeting he’d had with Schmidt felt that way.

“That girl, she was one of those radicals. When she came into town, an old friend working in the Federal Intelligence Service called me. Did you know these little delinquents are getting direction from the Stasi in Berlin? Going around robbing banks, kidnapping good citizens, and God knows what she was up to with the Americans over there.” Schmidt pointed the pistol in the direction of Daley Barracks. “Stealing guns... or bombs, maybe.”

“But you didn’t have to kill her. Couldn’t you just have arrested her?”

“Twelve years I spent in a labor camp in Russia to come home to children collaborating with the same people who kept me there. Come on, you have to feel the same. Did the two of us watch so many of our friends die fighting the communists on the Eastern Front just to see these children play at leftist games? Calling us criminals because we were willing to die for our country? This generation, they have no idea.”

“She would have gone to prison.”

“Prison? I know something about prison. What these radicals get, with their lawyers and their special treatment and the newspapers covering their every word, that’s not prison. The Russians, now they know how to imprison a man. Punish you for your thoughts. Our jailors today, they are too afraid to punish — not like before.”

“Not like the Gestapo?”

Schmidt fell silent. With the gun still on Burg, he lifted a sheet from Burg’s report and gazed at it. “I picked you to investigate this case because—”

“Because you thought I would fail.”

“That’s right. The drunk slob. Smelling of liquor after lunch, leaving early, arriving late. I was certain you would just go through the motions.”

Burg shrugged his shoulders. “What can I say?”

“What put you on my trail? That’s what I can’t figure out.”

“It was purely a coincidence.”

“Explain.”

“I guess it started when you became my boss. Taking orders from someone ten years younger, it can bother a man. One day, I saw that old silver cigaret case of yours. I remembered it from before. I’d had one myself. I got to thinking about why a man would carry around an old Third Reich relic like that in his pocket. Day in and day out reaching for it, pulling out a cigaret, what, ten or twenty times a day?... and with each occasion to be reminded of something the whole country would rather forget.”

“There’s no forgetting. Spend a decade digging ditches, picking at rocks in dirty Russian mines, and you would understand.”

“You are right, Herr Schmidt. The girl, you know, and all those leftist radicals, they agree with you. What is it Meinhof says, they strike at the ‘old fascists still running the country’? See, they haven’t forgotten. They won’t let go of the past either.”

“That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about all the sacrifices we made to beat back the communists. And these children embracing their ideas. It’s an insult.”

“Maybe you’re right. But an execution? For some silly girl with her head full of ideas?”

“That’s what we did to partisans.”

“...and children and grandmothers too.”

Another silence hit the room, both men twisting in their separate memories. Sitting there, Burg wondered if the nightmare would visit him again that night. The girl with the snowflakes in her hair. Would she die again, or would she escape into the woods, the version he preferred, the nightmare revised?

Schmidt said, “You’ll never be able to prove any of this. It’s all speculation. All you have are the ballistics from the bullets, and I’ve got the gun. There is no tracing it, so that’s easy to take care of.”

“So maybe you were right to choose me. I’m a lousy detective after all.”

“I’ll give the case to Trautman or Waigl. One of them will determine the case against the GI boyfriend is a dead end, so the murder will go unsolved.”

“You could do that.”

“But then what am I to do with you?”

Burg paused for a long moment. He thought about all the life he still wanted to live. “As you wish... But if you’re going to shoot me, I would like to at least request one last cigaret.”

Schmidt pulled out the old silver case and offered a cigaret to Burg. Burg pulled up from his chair, leaned over the desk, and Schmidt reached up to light the cigaret. Before Burg could sit again, he said, “May I?” his hand out to the cigaret case. Schmidt passed it to him and Burg sat back in the chair to enjoy the smoke and examine the case. The lightning bolts and the eagle were much faded, but the edelweiss in the corner seemed to swell as if it had bloomed only yesterday.

Burg set the case down on Schmidt’s desk and sat back to pull on his cigaret. Schmidt took the case, drew his own cigaret, and added a second point of red light to the dim illumination of the desk lamp. A cloud of smoke gathered on the ceiling. Before too long there was nothing left for Burg to smoke, so he leaned over to kill the stub in the crystal ashtray on Schmidt’s desk. Now there was just the picture of Schmidt for Burg to look at — the gun still trained on him, Schmidt slowly smoking his own cigaret, his face and all that it expressed lost in the shadow of the lamp. Burg thought, will he wait to finish his cigaret before he shoots me? And then Schmidt’s hand moved toward the ashtray, pressing the remains of the cigaret on the glass.

“You’ve got a bottle in your desk,” Schmidt said.

“You know about that?”

“Of course. Go get it. We’ll have a drink.”

Burg stood up, and again his back ached. He walked out of Schmidt’s private office, and he thought of those other occasions he’d escaped death. In Kursk, when his own artillery managed to kill all the men in his squad save for him. In Normandy, when he raised his arms in surrender, never sure if he would be shot in the back by his own, or in the front by trigger-happy GIs.

Move to the desk, he thought, take out the bottle, then make a dash for the stairs. Surely, Schmidt won’t risk shooting me then. He stepped over to the desk, rolled open the bottom drawer, lifted the Jim Beam from its hiding spot, and almost dropped it when the snap of gunfire startled him. A single shot and he hadn’t fallen, wasn’t bleeding, wasn’t dead. He twisted in the direction of Schmidt’s office. He paused in wonder, then heard the steps of the duty officer, his shoes rapidly slapping the stairs.

Out of breath, the duty officer appeared from the light of the stairway. “What’s going on?”

“Over there,” Burg said. “It came from Schmidt’s office.”

The duty officer looked at Burg, expecting him to do something. When Burg failed to move, the duty officer shook his head. The incompetent Kommissar Burg, once again. He dashed to Schmidt’s office, and Burg followed slowly behind.

In the office, Schmidt slumped forward, his face on the desk, an exit wound at the back of his head, the pistol still smoking in his hand.

“Go call an ambulance,” Burg said.

“But—”

“Just do it. Don’t touch anything here. Use the phone on my desk.”

The duty officer seemed to be trembling. “But—”

Burg gripped him around the arm to steady him. “Yes, I know. He’s probably dead. But just in case. Go now. Call the ambulance.”

The duty officer did as he was told. Burg realized he still had the bottle of Jim Beam in his hand. He unscrewed the cap and took a long drink.

He imagined that in the end Schmidt must have done some of his own accounting. If he let Burg live, he was caught for the murder of the girl. If he killed Burg, Trautman or Waigl, better detectives than Burg, would find something fishy in a dead Burg with a gunshot wound in Schmidt’s office. Either way, prison was certain, and Schmidt had already given enough years to that.

Burg could hear the duty officer now speaking frantically into the phone and knew he didn’t have much time. He put the bottle into his pocket and stepped over to Schmidt’s desk. He tugged on the folder under Schmidt’s head, pulling the report out. Schmidt’s blood smeared the pages. He carefully folded it all together to contain the stains and slipped the whole thing into his jacket. One last thing to do: He walked around the desk, lifted Schmidt slightly, pulled the cigaret case from his pocket, and placed it in his own.

When the duty officer returned, Burg said, “I heard he’d been depressed lately. Something about his wife... or cancer... or maybe his wife had cancer... I’m not sure.”

There are some things, Burg thought, that all the spas in Bad Kissingen couldn’t cure. Cancer was one. A broken heart was another. And certain soldier’s wounds... especially those of the mind.