“I beg your pardon?”
“The remains of the Baron Steighofen have been returned from the Eastern Front,” Kramer said. “They will be interred at the Schloss on December 28.
They’re making quite a do of it. The Prince of Hesse, in the name of the Fuhrer, will make a posthumous award of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. Steighofen’s not far from Marburg. I’m sure the Baroness would be pleased if you could find the time to attend.” Translated, Muxer thought, that means he is telling me it would be politically smart for me to attend. Does that mean I have to?
“The Steighofens are well connected, Johnny,” Kramer went on, immediately confirming what Muxer had guessed. “With Baron Fulmar of FEG, for one thing.”
“The twenty-eighth, you said?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sure I can make it,” Muller said.
“Then I look forward to seeing you there,” Kramer said. “And once again, my dear Johnny, my most warm congratulations on your promotion.
” I am your “dear Johnny,” Muller thought, because it has occumd to you that the only way a Hessian peasant policeman like myself could get himself promoted is because I have powerful friends. I was notyour’dear Johnny’before I went to Morocco.
“I wonder if I might use your phone before I go,” Muller said.
“Of course, Kramer said.
“Could you have me put through to Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz in the Foreign Ministry?” Muller asked. “I think he might wish to attend the Baron’s interment, and I’m sure he didn’t know about it either.” Kramer nodded at Geehr, who picked up the telephone and placed the call.
Calling von Heurten-Mitnitz from Kramer’s office, Muxer decided, served to buttress Kramer’s notion that he had highly placed friends.
But perhaps more important, the funeral would permit von Heurten-Mitnitz to talk to Fulmar’s father under unsuspicious circumstances. If Muller placed the call anywhere else, there might have been questions.
But there would be no questions if the call was made from the office of the commander of the Hessian Region of the SS-SD.
FOUR] The Autounion roadster turned out to be a sporty ye How convertible.
Muller drove it up the Autobahn as far as Giessen, and then along the tranquil Lahn River to the ancient university town of Marburg.
Under other circumstances, he thought, it would have been a very pleasant way for him to go home, at the wheel of a fancy car, and with the corded silver epaulets of a Standartenfuhrer on his shoulders.
He had been a lowly Wachtmann, an ordinary police patrolman, when he had left Kreis Marburg to go to Prussia. And he was thrilled then to be appointed a Kriminalinspektor, Grade Three. With a little luck and hard work, he’d thought at the time, he might make it to Kriminalinspektor, Grade One, or even Deputy Inspector.
It had never occurred to him then that he would go into the SS-SD, or that he would rise to Obersturmbannfuhrer if he did. It was quite as difficult to believe that he was now a Standartenfuhrer as it was to accept that he was engaged in treasonous activities against the German State.
Giessen had been bombed, probably as an alternate target when fog obscured Frankfurt am Main. But after he left Giessen, there was no sign of war damage, or, for that matter, of the war itself. Everything was in fact just about as he remembered it. There were fewer Christmas decorations than he expected, and there were Winterhilfe posters splattered all over, even on trees, appealing for warm clothing, both for bombed-out civilians and for the troops in Russia. But otherwise time seemed to have stopped.
As he turned off the main road onto Frankfurterstrasse, he allowed himself to dwell on the notion that there were men from Marburg at Stalingrad right now, doomed to surrender and probably death.
He drove past a barracks compound and pulled the ye How roadster onto the cobblestones before a three-story, turn-of-the-century building that housed both the headquarters of the Kreis Polizei for Marburg and the regional office of the SS-SD. He got out of the car and walked into the building. There was a small Christmas tree sitting on a table in the lobby.