Free Hitler's Angel by Kris Rusch Page A

called him ‘The Greatest Detective in the World’. Someone had discovered him, someone had claimed Fritz’s reputation was great, and people believed him. Hitchcock had tried to make his film in 1950, and when that became news, all the Berlin newspapers contacted him. They contacted him again in the 1960s, after that abysmal television movie aired worldwide. Scholars started knocking on his door. Everyone made money from his fame, even him.
    Yet that has not bothered him. The dreams bother him. They are not of Demmelmayer – he only thinks of Demmelmayer when someone asks – but of Geli. In his dreams, she is laughing, a beautiful young girl, the kind that once looked at him with admiration and longing. Then a cloud passes over her face, and when she cries his name, the cry is full of terror.
    He always awakens chilled, no matter how warm his rooms are. He makes himself tea, not coffee, after those dreams, and wraps himself in blankets, looking out of his windows at Munich after dark. With the chill comes a great guilt, a guilt he does not completely understand.
    Over the years, the dream’s frequency has increased. Soon he will have the dream every night. Every night, haunted by Geli. He willbecome as bad as Hitler whom, they say, made the dead girl his own private obsession. Fritz does not want that. He wants peace in his last few years. The only way he can have that peace, he believes, is to talk out the memory. Exorcise the dream. But try as he might, he has not found anyone who is willing to listen.
    Until now.
    This girl seems so frail, so fragile. Perhaps he asked her because she reminded him of Geli. But that can’t be true. He has asked other scholars, men, to listen. They refused. The Raubal case made no difference in modern police science – their specialty, all of them. Only Demmelmayer made that kind of difference. Demmelmayer. A routine murder gone awry. Gustav Demmelmayer murdered his wife in a fit of passion. He had, however, covered his crime very well. Another detective, in an earlier time, would not have solved the case.
    Fritz had, because he knew science. But more than that, he solved the case through his attention to detail, his interpretation of that detail, and his sideways knowledge of the human mind. Years later, when he had nothing to fill his days, he read the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, and was startled to discover that an English fiction writer had come up with the same idea decades before. Only he had never explained the techniques. They were accorded to Holmes’ brilliance, to his own special insights – insights the average man could not have. Fritz had brilliance, no one argued with that. But unlike Holmes, Fritz had shared that brilliance in a way the most common detective could understand. For that, Fritz had become famous. For that, Fritz would be remembered in the annals of crime history.
    Little comfort as he sits alone in his two rooms, in the dark, with dreams of a dead girl haunting his sleep. Little comfort at all.

TWELVE
    T he morning was grey and cold, reflecting Fritz’s mood. The Central Cemetery was also grey and cold, with its stone fences and wrought iron gates. The mortuary inside the gate was empty. Father Pant parked his car around the back, and used a gold key to open the unpainted wooden door. Fritz brought the camera with him. It was heavy and large, and he had to carry it carefully. Father Pant watched him without offering help. The camera itself had gained a withering glance from him earlier when Fritz had removed it from his own car.
    Inside, the mortuary smelled of decaying flowers. Father Pant bypassed the public rooms and took Fritz through a dark, unlit hallway. The air was cool here as well, as if someone had left the heat off, and the smell changed from dying flowers to the tang of formaldehyde. The smells seemed exaggerated, the silence heavy, and Fritz attributed his over reaction to his lack of sleep.
    Finally, Father Pant led