offence. To her husband she said, ‘Two men in some sort of uniform.’
Harald Winter said, ‘One of them is a fellow who calls himself “Captain” Graf, one of the ruffians who took his private army down to Munich to fight the communists.’
‘Pauli’s commander?’ said Veronica.
‘Yes, until our Pauli had enough sense to stay here and go to school.’
‘And the other?’ said Veronica.
‘Is there another?’ said Harald. He looked at Fischer, who shrugged, and then to Alex Horner.
Horner answered her. ‘His name is Fritz Esser. He’s a friend of Pauli’s, Mrs Winter. An old friend.’
‘The name is familiar,’ she said doubtfully.
Alex added, ‘Back before the war he lived at Travemünde. Pauli recruited him into his Freikorps and he stayed with them.’
‘The Essers,’ said Harald Winter. ‘Yes, I remember the family. They lived in the village, near Mother. It’s the little fellow who saved the children from drowning. Why do you want to know, darling?’
‘People are asking me who they are, Harald. They hardly look like friends of ours. And now this Captain Graf person has gone up to the servants’ rooms.’
Winter got to his feet. ‘Whatever for?’ he asked, but he guessed the answer before it came. There were two youngsters working in the house, and Captain Graf’s homosexual activities had been given considerable publicity. Some said that threats of police prosecution on this account were the reason he’d taken his battalion from Berlin.
Veronica blushed. ‘I’d rather not say, Harald.’
‘I’ll have the blackguard thrown out!’
Now the other two men were standing. Fischer put a hand out to touch Winter’s arm. ‘Let someone else go, Harry. Graf is a dangerous fellow.’
‘Please allow me to attend to it,’ said Alex Horner with studied casualness. ‘Graf is, I regret to say, a member of the Officer Corps. His behaviour directly concerns me.’
Harald Winter didn’t answer, nor did his wife. It was Fischer who replied to Horner’s offer. ‘Yes, Leutnant Horner. That would be the best way.’
There was a certain grim inevitability to the unfortunate business at Pauli’s birthday party. Inviting Captain Graf to such a party was undoubtedly a mistake, but no one had expected him to accept the invitation. It was only because Esser was coming that Captain Graf came, too.
Once inside the house, Captain Graf drank his first glass of champagne far too quickly. It was French champagne. Where Harald Winter had got it no one knew, but once Graf had downed one he had another and then another. Then Esser found the cognac. Captain Graf’s storm company had captured a French distillery during the 1918 offensives, and the bouquet brought happy memories of those exciting days so long ago. And Graf was a man as easily affected by memories as by alcohol. By the time he spotted the young under-footman and followed him upstairs, he was tight enough to miss his footing on the steps more than once.
Captain Graf afterwards maintained that he’d only been looking for a bedroom in which he could rest for an hour, but when Hauser – Harald Winter’s longtime valet and general factotum – stopped Graf from entering a servant’s room on the second floor, Captain Graf stabbed Hauser in the chest with a folding knife.
Hauser – in his mid-forties and gassed in the war – shouted and collapsed, bleeding profusely. One of the chambermaids heard the scuffle and found Hauser unconscious in a pool of blood. She screamed after Captain Graf, who was by then running down the back staircase with the bloody knife still in his hand.
It was Leutnant Alex Horner who intercepted Graf. He knew the house from his many visits there, and guessed Graf’s route of escape.
‘Captain Graf? I believe –’ Graf lunged at Horner with the knife, and Horner avoided the blade so narrowly that its tip slashed the front of his dinner jacket.
But Alex Horner was not the dressmaker’s dummy that Graf mistook him for. His years at the front with Pauli and the vicious trench raids that Leutnant Brand had repeatedly assigned him to had produced reactions that were as instinctive as they were effective.
Horner swung aside and, as Graf completed his unsuccessful knife thrust aimed a powerful blow at the captain’s head. It sent him reeling, but Graf was a fighter, too. He recovered his balance and lunged again, so that Alex had to retreat up the narrow servants’ corridor to avoid the slashes aimed at him. Graf grinned, but it was a drunken grin, and it encouraged Alex to take a chance. He kicked hard and high, knocking the knife aside. Horner grabbed the knife, and now it was Graf’s turn to flee.
Graf found his way down the servants’ stairs, through the pantry, and to the tradesmen’s entrance at the rear, and slammed the heavy door behind him. The wooden frame had swollen with the damp of winter, and by the time Alex had wrenched it open, run through the yard, and reached the street, there was no sign of Graf except some footprints in the newly fallen snow.
Alex Horner stopped and caught his breath. He knew enough about fighting to know when to stop. He looked up the moonlit street; there were coaches waiting to collect guests, their coachmen huddled against the cold night, faces lit by glowing cigarettes, the breath of the horses making clouds of white vapour. It was very cold, as only Berlin can be, with a few snowflakes drifting in the wind and a film of ice on everything. The city was silent, and yet it was not the empty stillness of the countryside; it was the brooding quiet of a crowded, sleeping city. From somewhere nearby came the sound of a powerful motorcar engine starting, and the squeal of tyres. That would be Graf; the fellow was often to be seen in his big motorcar.
Alex reached into his pocket for a cigarette and stood there on the street smoking as he thought about what had happened. Thank God, Graf had had plenty to drink – he’d have been a formidable adversary sober. Better to forget the whole business, he decided. Graf and his ilk had friends in high places and in the Bendlerblock the army bureaucrats were now referring to Röhm’s storm troops as the ‘Black Reichswehr’, treating them as a secret army reserve. Testifying against Graf might well mar his career prospects. Any last delusion that the army kept out of politics had long since gone. Getting promoted in this curious postwar army was like walking through a minefield.
By the time Alex Horner had finished his cigarette and returned to the party, it was almost as if nothing untoward had occurred. Hauser was in bed and being attended by a doctor, the bloodstains had been scrubbed from the carpet, the band was playing, and the guests were dancing as if nothing had happened. In fact, many of the guests were not aware of the murderous scuffie on the back stairs.
Peter Winter was dancing with a glorious girl in a decorative evening dress of a quality that was seldom seen in Germany in these austere times. The girl had brazenly approached Peter and asked him to dance. ‘I hear you’re a good dancer, Herr Winter. How would you like to prove it to me?’
Her German was not good. The grammar was adequate, but the accent was outlandish. Not the hard consonantal growl of the Hungarian or the Czech, this was a strange, flat drawling accent of a sort he couldn’t for a moment distinguish.
‘Are you Austrian?’ Peter asked.
She laughed in a way that was almost
