The Austrian: Book Two Page 6

  “Quit it?” I couldn’t believe my ears. “But you’re a prima ballerina now. Your choreographers certainly consider you a talented dancer to trust you with such a position. Why quit?”

  She was looking straight ahead with a pensive look on her face, immersed into her own world.

  “That girl, who reported you, she’s not giving you any more troubles, is she?” I interpreted her silence as a sign that she didn’t want to discuss something with me.

  Her expression changed at once as if by magic and she smiled brightly as if nothing had happened.

  “Oh no, not at all. I heard you had quite a talk with her.”

  “Quite a talk is right,” I chuckled. “She should be grateful that I didn’t arrest her for giving false reports.”

  I remembered how passionately Frau Friedmann’s accuser, Gretchen Wolf, defended her position, swearing to all the gods that she did tear a necklace with a Jewish star off her fellow dancer’s neck.

  After all the threatening looks on my part didn’t seem to change her mind, I produced a torn golden chain with a little pointe pendant on it, the one that Frau Friedmann had handed me as evidence, saying that it was the necklace that Gretchen took off her.

  “Does this look like a Star of David to you?!” I yelled at the girl, holding the chain in front of her eyes. “Well, does it?!”

  “She had two necklaces on. This one and the one with the Jewish Star.” The stubborn girl just wouldn’t give up. I put the necklace back into my pocket and banged on the door so that the guard would open it. I came back inside the interrogation cell with Der Sturmer in my hands.

  “So you’re insisting that Annalise Friedmann is Jewish. Isn’t that so?!” I raised my voice again, making her gulp nervously.

  “Yes, she is.”

  I snapped the newspaper straight in my hands and held the picture on the front page before her eyes.

  “This, Fraulein Wolf, is a Jewish woman. That’s how they look.” I held the picture closer to her face making her lean backwards slightly. “They have black hair and black eyes. They’re short after all. Now tell me, does Annalise Friedmann look Jewish to you?! Does she look like this picture?! Answer me!”

  “No, sir.” I threw the newspaper across the table and sat back into my chair, preparing the papers that she was to sign, confessing to giving a false report, when Fraulein Wolf repeated barely audibly, “But she was wearing a Star of David.”

  “God dammit, woman!!!” I banged the table with my fist, making her jump in her seat. She looked petrified, but pursed her lips, clearly not giving up on her story. I took a deep breath trying to regain control over myself and picked out photocopies of Frau Friedmann’s documents from the file in front of me. “Look here. This is her passport. This is her birth certificate. This is her Aryan certificate. Every single one was checked by the Office of Reichsführer SS before her wedding. He found them to be authentic and in complete order. Now tell me, which one of you is wrong: you, with your audacious lies, or Reichsführer SS, who doesn’t know his own papers and racial policy?! Well?!”

  She opened and closed her mouth several times without saying anything.

  “I’m asking you for the last time, is Reichsführer SS Himmler wrong?!”

  “No, sir.”

  “So this leaves us with only one conclusion. You are lying. Isn’t it so?!”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied quietly, but still with defiant notes in her voice.

  “Sign the papers, get the hell out of here and make sure I don’t hear a word about you ever again. You committed a crime by giving false accusations against a fellow German citizen. I could have thrown you into jail for that.” I moved the paper with the confession to her and threw a pen on top of it. Fraulein Wolf picked it up and quickly signed it, without looking at me. “Good. And don’t ever think of doing something like this ever again. I won’t be so nice next time. Understood?!”

  “Yes, Herr Gruppenführer.”

  I still couldn’t understand why Gretchen Wolf was so stubborn about her words.

  “So has she been good since?” I addressed Frau Friedmann again.

  “Yes, Herr Gruppenführer. Thank you. And no, she has nothing to do with my doubts about ballet. It’s just that…” she became pensive again and then shook her head slightly, her radiant smile once again playing on her lips. “Let’s not talk about it. Let’s talk about something else.”

  I smiled back at her.

  “Let’s talk about something else inside, Frau Friedmann. We’re here.”

  I stopped in front of the restaurant, having recognized the name from the policeman’s directions, and handed the keys to the valet. I held my arm out to the beautiful Frau Friedmann, and she wrapped her delicate hand around my elbow.

  The maître-d greeted us with an enormous smile, obviously something to do with my Gruppenführer markings, and offered to take her coat.

  “Fraulein.”

  “Frau.” She corrected him sternly, and the poor man lost all color in his face, muttering his sincerest apologies under my very amused look. After he escorted us to his best table and disappeared to bring us a bottle of his best champagne on the house, I looked to Frau Friedmann, barely concealing a chuckle. “You shouldn’t have corrected him. He understood that you were my wife.”

  “Why, do you mind?” she asked innocently, without lifting her smiling eyes from the menu.

  Oh yes, gone was the innocent girl from the Gestapo jail. In less than a few minutes we raised our glasses in the first toast, and didn’t notice how time flew during the conversation that followed.

  “You’re not too fond of Gruppenführer Heydrich, are you?”

  My beautiful date was definitely very perceptive.

  “You’re right, Frau Friedmann. Just like he’s not too fond of me.”

  “I don’t blame you. He’s quite… a difficult person to be fond of.” With those words she gracefully lifted her glass and took a small sip of champagne.

  “How did you come to know him?”

  “Through my husband, of course. He takes me to the RSHA staff celebrations quite often.”

  Of course he does. If I were her husband, I’d be showing her off all the time too. Even now from the side of my eye I noticed several men stealing occasional glances in her direction. I grinned, straightening in my seat with a sense of satisfied pride that she was here with me.

  “I can’t believe he wasn’t nice to you though.” I liked her even more now, after revealing her dislike of Heydrich, much to my pleasure.

  Annalise put down her fork with a piece of asparagus on it and thought about her answer for a moment.

  “It’s not that he wasn’t nice. He just…” She squinted her eyes, thinking of the right word. “Gives me shivers. That’s what it is.”

  “What kind of shivers?” I sneered.

  “The bad kind, Herr Gruppenführer. He’s undoubtedly a highly intelligent and very poised man, but talking to him is like talking to a walking corpse. He emanates almost physical coldness, and when you’re looking into his eyes – there’s nothing behind them, besides emptiness. He’s a very, very cold man. I thought that maybe he was like that only at work, but I saw him with his wife several times during the receptions, and he barely ever speaks to her, ignoring her completely most of the time. It was very strange.” She bit on her asparagus, and continued after a pause. “My husband told me a story that Frau Heydrich was so miserable because of him constantly ignoring her that she developed a friendship with one of Gruppenführer Heydrich’s subordinates, Walther Schellenberg. He works in Amt VI, SD Ausland.”

  I raised my brow inquisitively, but Annalise quickly answered my unspoken question, making big eyes. “No, no, no, nothing like that! It was all very innocent between them.”

  I let out a disappointed grunt, and Frau Friedmann giggled.

  “Anyway, Herr Dirty Mind. They started taking walks in a park together, they were in public all the time, but he was never alone with her in her house or anything li
ke that. And she openly confided to him that her own husband wouldn’t even talk to her. But Gruppenführer Heydrich, as soon as he found out, went completely out of his mind and was absolutely furious with Schellenberg, even though the latter didn’t do anything besides being friendly with poor Frau Heydrich. He felt sorry for her only.” Annalise looked away for a moment, frowning. “My husband thinks that Herr Schellenberg had another motive behind it, that he was supposedly trying to get some inside information on Gruppenführer Heydrich, but I don’t want to speculate on that. The point is, Gruppenführer Heydrich almost killed him for that, and prohibited his wife from even going close to Schellenberg – or any other man – ever again. Isn’t it horrible?”

  “Yes, it really is. I can only say that I feel bad for his poor wife.”

  “Indeed. Can you imagine, not even talking to his own wife?”

  I shifted in my seat, pretending to be busy with my food, but she spotted it right away.

  “Herr Gruppenführer?”

  “Mm?” I asked innocently.

  “You do talk to your wife, don’t you?”

  I squirmed in my chair a little more, barely containing my grin in anticipation of her reaction. “My wife and I live in two different cities, I’m afraid. But I do call her every other week.”

  She dropped her fork with the most scornful face she could manage.

  “Herr Gruppenführer! I never expected that from you!”

  I laughed and raised both hands in the air in mock surrender.

  “In my defense allow me to say that I was actually forced to marry her.”

  “If you get a woman in a delicate position, it’s doesn’t mean that you were forced to marry her afterwards, it means that you should have thought better!”

  I made big eyes at her in play terror.

  “I did not get her in a delicate position, Frau Dirty Mind!” She chuckled after I called her what she called me before. “Himmler made me marry her.”

  “Reichsführer? Made you marry her?” She gave me a skeptical look.

  “Yes, he did.”

  “He put a gun to your head and said, marry that woman.”

  “Well, no… but believe me, I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Strange people you are, the SS, I swear!” she muttered under her breath and went quiet.

  “Are you wondering if Reichsführer made your husband marry you as well?” I asked her jestingly.

  Annalise chuckled. “No. I’m afraid I made my husband marry me.”

  “That’s a promise of a very interesting story, Frau Friedmann. Please, do continue!”

  She blushed slightly, smiling and hiding her eyes behind her long lashes.

  “It is an interesting story. I barely knew him when we got married. He was a longtime friend of my family, and I first met him when I was eleven years old. The second time I saw him was when I was seventeen, and he had just came back from Paris, where he was working at that time. Actually, we weren’t even dating technically speaking, prior to our engagement. He took me to the opera, and theatres, but it was all very innocent. I was his friend’s daughter, you understand?” She smiled embarrassingly. “So… before I met him, I never even went out on dates with anybody. Ballet was all that was on my mind, and I really couldn’t care less for any of the boys around me, even though they did quite often ask me out. But before Heinrich, there was one man… he was in the SS too, well, he… for some time he thought that we were dating.”

  “He thought? When in reality you weren’t?” It was my turn to give her a skeptical look. The story was getting very interesting.

  “Yes, I know how it sounds.” Annalise giggled again, drinking some more of her champagne. I’d never seen anyone blush so adorably. “But, Herr Gruppenführer, I was only seventeen. I didn’t have a slightest idea on how to behave with men, and certainly men who aren’t used to taking no for an answer. Ulrich Reinhard, Sturmbannführer SS, he basically ordered me to go here and there with him. I didn’t know how to refuse him the first time, but after that first dinner he assumed that we were a couple and… well, it didn’t end too well when I tried to tell him that we weren’t. You probably remember what I told you about him in the Gestapo. He ended up putting all kinds of dirt in the report that his new girlfriend Gretchen originally wrote, accusing me of being Jewish.”

  “Some men can’t handle refusal, huh?”

  “You don’t know the half of it, Herr Gruppenführer. One evening he actually locked the door to my dressing room in the theatre, God knows with what intentions! I was so scared that I told him the first thing that came to my mind – that I was getting married to Heinrich. He left me in peace afterwards, but, of course, being the noisy person he is he went and told the whole of the SS about it. So Heinrich didn’t have anything else to do but actually marry me.” She finished with a smile.

  “I’m sure he didn’t mind.”

  “No, he didn’t. We liked each other, but… everything just happened so quickly and unexpectedly. It was a very rushed marriage. We’re still getting to know each other.”

  “But you do love your husband, don’t you?” I held my breath, waiting for her to answer, hoping deep inside that maybe it was a mistake after all, her marriage, just like mine was.

  “Yes, of course I do.” Annalise nodded eagerly several times, to my major disappointment, but then added, “He’s very kind and nice.”

  I lifted my head from my plate again, a grin of relief touching the corner of my mouth again. Kind and nice. Not ‘I love him to death and can’t live without him,’ but ‘kind and nice.’

  “So, yes, if it wasn’t for Sturmbannführer Reinhard, I maybe wouldn’t be married now at all. It’s a common problem with you men, where you always imagine what’s not there, like Reinhard did with me. It’s next to impossible to understand you.” Annalise concluded with a coy smile.

  I burst out laughing. “I always thought it was women who are impossible to understand, Frau Friedmann.”

  “It’s very easy to understand women, unless you start giving meaning to our words or gestures that we didn’t intend to have there in the first place.”

  “Like what?” I tilted my head on one side, waiting for her further explanation with a curious smile.

  She looked up at the ceiling as if contemplating her reply, and then back at me. “Well, let’s say, when I am in my ballet school, I smile at my friends. Most of them are girls, you understand, right? I smile at them, they smile at me, and none of us ever come up with the idea that a smile is something more than just a way of expressing kindness or friendship. Now, when I was fifteen my mother all of a sudden told me not to smile at the boys or men who visited our house because they could get ‘the wrong idea.’ And there you go, if you’re a pretty girl and coming of age, you all of a sudden can’t smile anymore, because men around you can interpret your smile the wrong way, when all you wanted was to just be polite and nice. Do you see my point, Herr Gruppenführer?”

  “I most certainly do,” I said, trying to hide my amusement with her playful ‘accusations.’ “So, do you think that I’m imagining something here too?”

  “Of course you do!” She even furrowed her brow in fake indignation. “The fact that you lured me to this dinner speaks volumes. You are definitely sitting there scheming something in that mind of yours right now.”

  “Lured you?” I laughed again. “You could have refused to go!”

  “I was sitting in your car, when you informed me that we were going to dinner! What was I supposed to do, jump out and run away at one of the lights?”

  She was joking of course, but I still theatrically pressed my hand to my chest, and proclaimed solemnly, “My dear Frau Friedmann, I assure you, my intentions are most innocent.”

  “Right.” She mockingly squinted her blue eyes at me, suddenly resembling a Siamese cat.

  “I swear.” I even lifted two fingers on my right hand in the air. “On the honor word of an SS man.”

  This time she rolled her eyes, hardly r
estraining herself from laughing.

  “Frau Friedmann!” I exclaimed in mock terror. “You don’t believe the most solemn oath of an SS man?”

  Annalise studied me for a moment, looking more pensive this time. After a pause she finally said, very quietly, so only I would hear her, “I would, if it wasn’t you who pronounced it.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean by that.” I became serious as well.

  She took a deep breath, as if thinking of going into further explanations, and leaned even closer to me, almost whispering, “I don’t think it’s such a solemn oath for you like it is for the others, Herr Gruppenführer, that’s all.”

  “That’s quite a dangerous thought to say out loud, Frau Friedmann,” I said quietly in a warning tone.

  She nodded slowly, but nevertheless continued. “I didn’t mean to offend you, Herr Gruppenführer. I’m only trying to say that… I don’t think that you take it as seriously as, let’s say, Heydrich or Ulrich Reinhard would. You see, I know them both well enough to say that that oath of yours is the only thing that matters. It seems like it’s all that occupies their mind. They’re obsessed with their work and with serving their… leaders. You, on the other hand, have been talking to me for the past three hours about everything but the Party and politics. You know, how a normal human being would. So, my words about you not cherishing your oath as much as they do was not by any means intended as an insult, but as a compliment.”

  “You don’t think I cherish my oath?” I asked her once again.

  “I think you do, but… not like them,” she replied carefully. “I just think that… let’s say if you had to choose between something that’s very dear to you, and between your Party and the Führer… You would have chosen the first.”

  She went silent and looked at me intently, awaiting my reaction.

  “It’s almost an accusation of treason from your side, for which I can arrest you, Frau Friedmann. To say such things about me and my attitude to the Party… and the Führer.”