‘Yeah, maybe,’ Tayte said, but recalling how ashen and drawn Langner had looked as they left his hospital room, he somehow doubted it.
As they continued their taxi ride through the busy streets of Munich, Tayte turned his thoughts to their destination: the registered offices of Die Freunde der Waffen-SS Kriegsveteranen—The Friends of the Waffen-SS War Veterans—or the FWK as the organisation was commonly known. It was close by and their bags were light and few. Now that he was in Munich, rather than going to their hotel to check in, Tayte was all the more keen to push on and piece his own family history puzzle together.
‘Hopefully we can fill in the rest of Langner’s story some other way,’ Tayte said. ‘The FWK might be able to tell us a thing or two.’
‘That’s if they’ll talk to us.’
‘True, but we’ve nothing else planned until tomorrow. It’s worth a shot.’
Jean pulled out her tablet PC. ‘I made some more notes about them. While you were staring at the back of the seat in front of you on the plane this morning, I found a newspaper article from the Guardian a few years ago.’
Tayte caught Jean’s wink as she teased him about the flight and he threw her a playfully sarcastic smile. ‘So what have you got, hotshot?’
‘Well, it seems that the German government has had a close eye on the FWK for some time. They were established as a non-profit and thus charitable organisation in 1945, but the Federal Finance Court denied them their non-profit status in the early 1990s, when it was discovered that they were not only raising funds to help Waffen-SS war veterans and their families, but that they were also assisting families of convicted war criminals. The report goes on to allege that the FWK are even supporting wanted war criminals who are still at large today.’
Tayte scoffed. ‘If that’s true then I’m not surprised they lost their charitable status. I wonder if they’ve been helping Volker Strobel. Maybe they know where he is.’
‘I’m sure you’re not the first person to wonder that.’
‘No,’ Tayte said, thinking ahead to tomorrow’s meeting with Munich’s foremost specialist on the Demon of Dachau—an eminent Nazi hunter called Tobias Kaufmann.
The taxi turned off the main road into a narrow street, and out of the window Tayte saw that they had arrived in Maxburgstrasse. He gave the driver the number of the building, thankful that the driver spoke English, as did many of the people he had so far encountered in Munich. As the car crawled along between continuous lines of parked cars, Tayte saw that the area was a hotchpotch of buildings old and new with a few shops here and there, and because the street was narrow, the tall buildings that lined the pavement threw everything into shade. The taxi pulled up in front of a featureless grey wall of offices, whose many dark windows dominated the fa?ade.
Tayte paid the driver and refused the change. ‘Danke,’ he said as he and Jean got out, determined as he was to try a few of the more common phrases he’d learned from the app Jean had downloaded to her computer for the trip.
As the taxi pulled away, Tayte wished he’d thought to ask the driver to wait. The dark windows he and Jean were now looking up at made the place look ominously vacant. Jean slung her backpack over her shoulder and Tayte picked up his suit carrier and briefcase. He’d given up offering to carry Jean’s bag for her, however much he wanted to. They went closer, taking the few steps that ran up to the aluminium framed double doors. They were closed, and through the glass there was no light to be seen beyond.
Tayte sighed. ‘This doesn’t look good.’
He tried the door, and as expected, it was locked. There was a letterbox and a doorbell to his right. He pressed the button and heard a buzzer sound somewhere inside, thinking that during office hours it would have brought a security guard to the door.
‘At least it’s a nice afternoon,’ Jean offered. ‘I’d like to see the city centre as we’re so close. Do you want to get something to eat?’
Tayte had been trying to ignore the groans his stomach was making for the last couple of hours. A kind of brunch had been served on the plane, but however much he liked his food, he was always so tense during a flight that he could never face the in-flight meals. Something to eat sounded good, but a part of him just wanted to check in at the hotel and get on with his research. Several strands of interest had come out of their conversation with Johann Langner that he wanted to explore, but that part of him was the old part—the loner who rarely had anyone with him that he wanted to sit down and share a meal with.
He turned away from the building and gave Jean a smile. ‘That sounds great,’ he said, thinking it was what couples did on city breaks, but more importantly because he knew it was what Jean wanted to do. He caught a voice in his head then, telling him that the research could wait a few hours, and he almost laughed to himself. Before he’d met Jean such a thought would never have crossed his mind.