The One from the Other

FIVE

In Germany there is a record of almost everything. We are a meticulous, observant, and bureaucratic people, and sometimes behave as if documentation and memorandum were the identifying hall-marks of true civilization. Even when it involved the systematic murder of an entire race of people, there were statistics, minutes, photographs, reports, and transcripts. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of war criminals might successfully have resisted conviction but for our very German obsession with numbers, names, and addresses. Many records had been destroyed in Allied air raids, it was true, but I was certain that somewhere I would find Wolfgang Stumpff’s name and address.

I started at police headquarters, visiting both the Registration of Address section and the Passport Office, but found no trace of him there. Then I checked at the Ministry of the Interior on Prinzregentenstrasse. I even looked for his name at the Society of German Jurists. I knew that Stumpff was from Munich and that he had studied to be a lawyer. The baron had told me that much himself. And reasoning that it was highly unlikely he could have come through the war without doing military service, my next port of call was the Bavarian State Archives on Arcisstrasse, where there were records going back as far as 1265. These had suffered no damage at all. But I had no luck there either, except to discover that the archives of the Bavarian army had been moved, to Leonrodstrasse, and it was here, finally, that I found what I was looking for, in the Rank Lists—the officer rolls for Bavaria. Alphabetically listed, year on year. It was a beautiful bit of record-keeping, handwritten, in purple ink. Hauptmann Wolfgang Stumpff of the 1st Gebirgsdivision, which was formerly the Bavarian Mountain Division. I now had a name, an address, the name of Stumpff’s regimental commander—I even borrowed his photograph.

The address in the Haidhausen district of East Munich was no more, having been completely destroyed on July 13, 1944. At least, that’s what the sign on the ruins told me. And temporarily bereft of ideas, I decided to spend an afternoon riding the trams—specifically the three, six, eight, and thirty-seven, with the photograph of Stumpff I had borrowed from his file. But before I did I had an appointment to meet the baron’s daughter outside the Glyptothek.

Helene Elisabeth von Starnberg was wearing a knee-length beige skirt, a yellow sweater that was just clingy enough to let you know she was a woman, and a pair of pigskin leather driving gloves. We had a pleasant conversation. I showed her the picture I had purloined from the army archives.

“Yes, that’s him,” she said. “Of course he was much younger when this picture was taken.”

“Didn’t you know? This is at least a thousand years old. I know because that’s how long Hitler said the Third Reich would last.”

She smiled and, for a moment, it was hard to believe she had a brother who had lived and worked in the lowest pit in hell. Blond, of course. Like she’d stepped down from the Berchtesgaden. It was easy to see where Hitler had developed his taste for blondes if he’d ever met a blonde like Helene Elisabeth von Starnberg. Either way she was a creature from another world. I might have misjudged her, but my first thought about her, that she’d never been on a tram, was not one I was able to dislodge. I tried to picture it, but the image wouldn’t stick. It always came off looking like a tiara in a biscuit tin.

“Are you any relation to Ignaz Gunther?” she asked me.

“My great-great-grandfather,” I said. “But please don’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t,” she said. “He sculpted a lot of angels, you know. Some of them are rather fine. Who knows? Maybe you’ll turn out to be our angel, Herr Gunther.”

By which I assumed she meant the von Starnberg family’s angel. Maybe it was lucky it was a fine day and I was in a good mood, but I didn’t reply with a rude remark about how, if I was going to help her brother, I’d have to be a black angel, which, of course, was what people used to call the SS. Maybe. More likely I just let that one slide by me because she was what people used to call a peach, in the days before they’d forgotten what one looked and tasted like.

“There’s a fine group of guardian angels sculpted by Ignaz Gunther in the Burgersaal,” she said, pointing across Königsplatz. “Somehow they survived the bombing. You should take a look at them sometime.”

“I’ll do that,” I said, and stepped back as she opened the door of her Porsche and climbed inside. She waved a neatly gloved hand from behind the split windshield, fired up the flat-four engine, and then sped away.

I walked south across Karlsplatz and the “Stachus,” which was Munich’s main traffic center, named after an inn that had once stood there. I walked along Neuhauser Strasse to Marienplatz, both of them badly damaged during the war. Special passages had been constructed for pedestrians beneath the scaffolding, and the many gaps between bomb-damaged buildings were filled with one-storied temporary shops. Scaffolding made the Burgersaal as inconspicuous as an empty beer bottle. Like everywhere else in that part of Munich, the chapel was being restored. Every time I walked around the city I congratulated myself for being lucky enough to spend most of 1944 with General Ferdinand Schorner’s army in White Russia. Munich had been hit hard. April 25, 1944, had been one of the worst nights in the city’s history. Most of the chapel had been burned out. The high altar had perished, yet Gunther’s sculptures had survived. But with their pink cheeks and delicate hands these were hardly my idea of guardian angels. They looked like a couple of rent boys from a bathhouse in Bogenhausen. I didn’t think I was descended from Ignaz, but after two hundred years who can be sure of anything like that? My father had never been entirely certain who his mother was, let alone his own father. Either way, I’d have sculpted the group differently. My idea of a guardian angel involved being armed with something more lethal than a supercilious smile, an elegantly cocked little finger, and one eye on the Pearly Gates for backup. But that’s me. Even now, four years after the war ended, my first thought when I wake up is to wonder where I left my KAR 98.

I came out of the church and stepped straight onto a number six heading south down Karlsplatz. I like trams. You don’t have to worry about filling them up with gasoline, and it’s safe to leave them parked down some insalubrious backstreet. They’re great if you can’t afford a car, and in the summer of 1949, there were few people, other than Americans and the Baron von Starnberg, who could. Also, trams go exactly where you want them to go, provided you’re wise enough to choose a tram that’s going somewhere near where you’re going. I didn’t know where Wolfgang Stumpff was going, or where he was coming from, but I figured there was a better chance of seeing him on one of those trams instead of some others. Detective work doesn’t always require a brain the size of Wittgenstein’s. I rode the number six as far as Sendlinger-Tor-Platz, where I got off and caught a number eight going the opposite way. It went up Barer Strasse, to Schwabing and I rode this one as far as Kaiser-platz and the Church of St. Ursula. For all I knew, there were more sculptures by Ignaz Gunther in there, too, but seeing a thirty-seven coming along Hohenzollernstrasse, I hopped on that one.

I told myself there was no point in riding each tram to its terminus. My chances of spotting Wolfgang Stumpff were improved by riding them around the center of Munich, where there were many more people getting on and off. Sometimes being a detective involves playing statistician and figuring out the probabilities. I rode them on top and I rode them down below. Up top was better because you could smoke, but it meant you couldn’t see who was getting on and off inside, which was what people called that part of a tram that wasn’t upstairs. It was nearly all men on top because nearly all men were smokers, and if women did smoke they preferred not to do it on a tram. Don’t ask me why. I’m a detective, not a psychologist. I didn’t want to take a chance that Stumpff wasn’t a smoker, but I figured the baron’s daughter would never have seen Stumpff if he had been upstairs on a tram. Not from the window of a Porsche 356—it was too low. She might have seen him on the top deck if she had been in a cabriolet, but never from a coupe.

Why am I going into such detail? Because it was these little, routine things that made me remember what it was like to be a cop. Sore feet, some sweat in the small of my back and on the inside of my hat, and exercising my peeper’s eye. I had started to look at faces again. Searching apparently standard faces on the seat opposite for a distinguishing characteristic. Most people have one if you look hard enough.

I almost missed him coming downstairs. The tram had been full inside. He had intense dark eyes, a high forehead, thin mouth, chin dimple, and a canine nose that he carried in a way that made you think he was on the scent of something. He reminded me a lot of Georg Jacoby, the singer, and, for a brief moment I half expected him to break into “The Woman Who’s My Dream.” But Wolfgang Stumpff’s distinguishing characteristic was easy. He was missing an arm.

I followed him off the tram and into Holzkirchner railway station. There he caught a suburban train south to München-Mittersendling. So did I. Then he walked about a mile west along Zielstattstrasse to a pleasant, modern little villa on the edge of some trees. I watched the house for a moment and then saw a light go on in an upstairs room.

I didn’t care if Vincenz von Starnberg spent twenty years in Landsberg or not. I didn’t care if they hanged him in his cell with weights tied to his ankles. I didn’t care if his father died of a broken heart. I didn’t care if Stumpff was inclined to give his old university comrade a character reference or not. But I rang the doorbell all the same, even though I had told myself I wouldn’t. I wasn’t going to make a pitch for the sake of SS Sturmbannführer von Starnberg, or for his father the baron. No, not even for a thousand marks. But I didn’t mind making a pitch for the sake of the peach. Being considered as some kind of angel in the pale blue eyes of Helene Elisabeth von Starnberg was something I could live with.