Author: Gomery Kimber is the author of six novels, including the Big Shilling hitman trilogy, the Justin Martello adventures (‘A New Kind of Hero’), and the Wyvern series of historical novels (esotericism and espionage). In 2023, Gomery Kimber was chosen by best-selling author Mark Dawson as the winner of the SPF Foundation Thriller Award. Subscribe to his Substack: Gomery’s Substack | Gomery Kimber | Substack 

When James Valentine returned to his lodgings, it was late afternoon. The sky had darkened, and the hallway with its portrait of the Fuehrer, its dark brown walls and heavy curtains, appeared gloomy. Someone was coming downstairs. Valentine paused, a hand on the balustrade. He looked up and saw the figure of a man slowly descending. He did not recognise him at first, then he realised with a shock that it was the Italian nobleman Lustgarten had brought along to lunch at the Osteria.

Valentine’s first thought was that Baron Andrea had escorted Clarissa home, but this he dismissed almost at once. One did not escort an unmarried woman to her room, after all. No, Clarissa had invited Andrea upstairs. Valentine experienced a sickening of the stomach at the realisation, swiftly followed by anger. How could she!

It was only then that Giulio Andrea saw him. He’d almost been slouching down the stairs, leaning heavily on the banister with one hand, his hat held limply in the other. When he realised he was not alone, Andrea pulled himself together. Automatically, he smoothed back his dark hair, which was in some disarray, and put on the soft felt hat. He picked up the pace and trotted down the final few steps which only served to emphasise his former lethargy.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said, looking at Valentine as though nothing were wrong.

Valentine swivelled round. If the Italian hadn’t already been out of reach and heading for the front door, Val thought he might have grabbed him and knocked him to the ground.

‘I’m giving a talk tomorrow evening,’ said the Italian, casually. ‘Why don’t you come along? Your cousin has the details.’

Valentine did not trust himself to speak.

‘I think you’ll find my friends interesting,’ said Andrea. ‘As a writer, I mean. Well, goodbye.’

Without undue haste, Andrea let himself out into the street and closed the door quietly behind him. Valentine stood there breathing heavily, face flushed, his heart pounding. He looked up the stairs, wondering if he should go out again rather than go up to his room. He dismissed the idea immediately. It wasn’t in his nature to turn away. On leaden legs, he climbed the stairs.

His room was on the top floor at the back. Clarissa occupied the best room on the first floor, at the front overlooking Osterwaldstrasse. He paused and looked along the corridor. Her door was shut. Just then he heard another door open further along, and saw Clarissa appear from the bathroom. She was dressed in a robe, and carried a sponge bag and towel. When she saw him, she smiled, and Valentine felt all the anger drain out of him. She was beautiful and he loved her, and there was nothing she could do that would ever change his feelings for her. He walked a few paces towards her.

He wondered if he should just head upstairs and try to forget all about it, but he was still standing there when Clarissa reached the door to her room. She looked at his face. He could smell the scented soap she used. Her long white neck was reddened, he thought from washing, and it was obvious that she was naked under the robe.

‘You saw him,’ she said, ‘and you’re terribly jealous.’

‘Yes, I am.’

Clarissa regarded him kindly. ‘Poor Jimmy,’ she said. ‘But why? There’s no need to be jealous. Love-making is as natural as eating when one’s hungry.’

The anger returned, but not as fiercely as before. He remembered the way Giulio Andrea had stared at Clarissa during luncheon, as though he were fascinated by her. In a way, Valentine could sympathise, because he was fascinated by Clarissa as well, and so was almost every man who saw her. If only Professor Lustgarten had been as well. If he had, Clarissa might have accompanied them to the Institute, rather than go off alone with Andrea.

Then Clarissa held out her hand to him. He hesitated. The thought of Clarissa being used by other men as nothing more than a repository for semen was repulsive to him, but evidently not repulsive enough, for the next thing he knew he was reaching for her, slipping his hand into hers.

‘Oh Jimmy,’ she said, pulling him closer so that she could kiss his lips.

As they went into her room and she closed the door and turned the key, he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to last, but he was wrong: she was so well-lubricated that he felt barely any sensation at all as he entered her and began to move. Clarissa took his right hand and placed it around her throat. It puzzled him.

‘Silly goose,’ she said. ‘Don’t stop.’

He began to thrust.

‘Like this,’ she said, pressing his fingers tight.

‘I don’t want to throttle you.’

‘You won’t do.’

‘But why?’

‘Because it gives me pleasure.’

Tentatively, he increased the pressure on her throat. Now he knew why Clarissa’s neck was reddened. But not even the realisation that Giulio Andrea had been choking her only minutes before could dampen his ardour as Clarissa became more and more excited. Her orgasm was explosive, and so too, immediately after, was his.

He remembered the talk the Italian baron gave in the private room at the Four Seasons Hotel, remembered it because of the baron’s icy hauteur, his disdain for the plebeian.

Andrea explained that although he was associated with the Italian Fascist Party and on good terms with Mussolini, he did not consider himself to be a fascist: no, he said, I am super-fascist. By which he meant that he was a reactionary, a monarchist and an aristocrat, who criticised fascism from the right.

The audience was small, exclusively male, and appeared to be composed of reactionaries like Andrea. This was confirmed after the talk when Andrea introduced Valentine to a succession of barons, counts, and hereditary knights. This is the nephew of Sir Henry Wyvern, Andrea said, much to Val’s amusement. How had the audience received the Italian’s views? As far as Val could remember, with some surprise.

Andrea called his beliefs Perennial Traditionalism, but the tradition he had in mind was not Roman Catholicism – something which Bavarian aristocrats might have approved of – but what he called ‘pagan Imperialism.’ Andrea dreamed of nothing less than the restoration of the Imperial Roman Empire – minus the Church. The baron did not entirely despise Christianity, he said, for it had retained elements of pagan Rome within itself, but he believed that it was an effeminate foreign religion which had poisoned the wellspring of European masculinity.

His worldview was essentially Manichaean. A virile hierarchical North stood in opposition to the feminine democratic South. The Nordics stood in opposition to the Hebrews, and Europe opposed the African. He spoke of his admiration for the SS, which he saw as a nascent military-religious Order, along the lines of the Templars and the Teutonic Knights. He had visited an SS training school, and said how impressed he was by the men he met there, youngsters in the peak of health and physical fitness, intelligent, indoctrinated and orientated towards that which is above. But Valentine was unimpressed. He remembered Hitler’s SS bodyguards, whom he’d encountered the previous day at the Osteria Bavaria, criminal types, not demigods.

Val’s general impression of Germany, in spite of the air of confidence he encountered almost everywhere, was of an undercurrent of violence. Its source was the Fuehrer himself, of course. Valentine said as much when he and Andrea were left alone for a few moments.

‘He is a man possessed,’ agreed Andrea. ‘And not by the transcendent.’

Val remembered thinking that Andrea’s days in Germany must be numbered. Surely the police knew of his views, and would soon ban him from speaking, perhaps even ban him from Germany itself.

‘By dark forces, you mean?’

‘Not demonic forces,’ came the answer. ‘Chthonic, I think. Almost everything about him is directed downwards. He has an obsession with the Earth, with blood and soil, with the workers, man in the mass. A leader who believes a street sweeper, merely because he is German, is of higher rank than a foreign monarch is a fool. No, Hitler is essentially a plebeian, which is why I have no time for him.’

Valentine had to agree. He remembered seeing Hitler. He’d been close enough to touch. Clarissa had an obsession too. If only she could make Hitler fall in love with her, she believed, then war between England and Germany could be prevented.

On Monday morning, when Clarissa failed to appear at breakfast, James went and knocked on her door, but there was no answer. He tried the handle. The door was unlocked, and he opened it but there was no sign of her. He supposed she had spent the night elsewhere. It was only when she did not turn up for her morning class that he started to become worried. Clarissa was deeply serious about learning German, and whatever she got up to, she had never missed a single day before.

At lunchtime, he went and rang the Institute, and after a great deal of difficulty was finally allowed to speak to Lustgarten. The Professor sounded perplexed. He said that he had driven Clarissa back to Munich early Sunday evening, dropping her off in the city centre. Clarissa told him she was meeting a friend for dinner. Lustgarten did not know who but inferred that it was a man.

James felt somewhat reassured, if a little jealous at the thought that Clarissa had gone off with another man. But when he returned to the hotel in the late afternoon and Clarissa still had not appeared, he began to think he ought to go to the police station and report her missing. He did not do it immediately, hoping that she would finally return, and it was nine o’clock before he walked up the steps of the Police Presidium. A bored desk sergeant took the details, said she’d probably turn up by morning and sent James back to his room to wait. On the way there, James visited every bar, café and restaurant he could think of, but could not find her anywhere. No one had seen her since Saturday.

That night he lay awake in bed for hours worrying. It seemed like he’d only just fallen asleep when the door burst open, the light was snapped on, and a man in black came in. James was too dazed to object.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Get dressed, youngster,’ said the man, bullishly. ‘You’re coming with me.’

James realised he had seen the SS officer before. He was one of Hitler’s cronies, the ox face from the Osteria Bavaria.

‘Have you found her?’

‘I won’t tell you again, English. Get fucking dressed.’

Waiting outside was a black Mercedes with the engine running. It wasn’t far to Brienne Strasse. He’d walked along it with Clarissa more than once. James guessed their destination – the Brown House, Munich headquarters of the NSDAP. He didn’t ask any questions. He was confused and frightened. The SS officer dragged him out of the car and marched him through the front door into the neo-classical building.

‘Heini wants a word,’ the thug explained, propelling him across the echoing foyer.

Nazi Party standards flanked a door which opened as they approached. James blinked as he recognised the face of the man who stood revealed.

‘The English boy, Reichsfuehrer.’

‘Thank you, Kahn,’ said Heinrich Himmler.

Despite the elaborate black uniform worn by the leader of Hitler’s SS and chief of the German Police, James found Himmler bland and unimpressive. The face was weak, like that of a bank clerk or petty bureaucrat. Criminal Inspector Heinrich Mueller was altogether more formidable. He came into the room by a side door, a cardboard folder in his hand. His gaze was hard and shrewd.

‘Do you recognise this man?’ Mueller asked.

James looked at the freshly printed photograph the policeman took out of the file. ‘Yes, I’ve seen him,’ he said. ‘I can’t think where, though.’

‘Have you spoken to him?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know his name?’

‘No.’

James looked more closely at the photograph. It smelt of darkroom chemicals and had obviously been taken in a police station. The face was oddly misshapen. One of the man’s eye sockets sat noticeably higher than the other, the unshaven chin as weak as Himmler’s.

‘Yes, I remember now. He works in the bar across the road.’

‘Which bar?’

But James couldn’t remember its name. Annoyed that he felt so nervous, he said, ‘Across the road from where we’re staying, on Osterwaldstrasse.’

‘Correct,’ said Mueller to Himmler. ‘He’s the pot boy and cellarman. His name is Merkmann, Albert.’

James looked at Himmler, asking in a clear voice, ‘Has Clarissa been found?’

‘No,’ said Himmler, gravely. ‘Your cousin has not been found. Merkmann claims that he killed her, and disposed of her body in the Isar. A search of the river will begin at first light. He also claims responsibility for five other joy-murders.’

James, who had until now been standing before Himmler’s desk, reached out for a chair and sat down.

‘Oh God,’ he said.

He remembered before going to the police station asking at reception if Clarissa had been seen. She had not. Instead of returning to his room, he’d gone across the road for a drink. Seeing one of Clarissa’s friends, he went and told her everything. Albert Merkmann had been wiping down tables nearby. He must have been gloating as he overheard the anxious conversation.

It seemed that almost every big city in Germany had its vampire. Peter Kurten, Vampire of Düsseldorf. Fritz Haarmann, Vampire of Hanover. And now Munich had its vampire as well, Albert Merkmann. Not that everyone was convinced. The London newspapers, obsessed with the case, ran stories that the accused had made a false confession, that the Munich police had put pressure on him. But this ignored the fact that Merkmann had walked into a police station of his own volition and confessed. James remembered that there were no signs of a beating on the face in the photograph.

To confess to a murder you had not committed – it seemed nonsensical. Why on earth would anyone do that? James had tried to put himself in Merkmann’s place. Merkmann the itinerant, Merkmann the odd job man, moving from place to place, with no family, no roots, no prospects. Here was a man without talent, without merit, without qualities. James remembered him clearing tables, downtrodden, with the look of the rodent about him. Here was a worthless man, a man lacking a sense of purpose, a man disgusted with himself because he had found nothing to do with his life.

It wasn’t hard to imagine a man like that feeling envious of the sex-murderer, a man too frightened to imitate the crimes of rape and murder and dismemberment that everyone was reading about in the newspapers. (Everyone but James, that is. He had no idea Munich was in the grip of a sexual serial killer). No, Merkmann didn’t have the nerve to attack a woman in the park beside the river, he didn’t have what it took to be a killer. But what he did have was an urge to tell stories. James imagined Merkmann arriving in a new town. No one knew him, it was a fresh start, he could be whatever he claimed to be. Yes, Merkmann was an accomplished liar, a fantasist. He must have spent many nights lying awake, fantasising about being the Munich Vampire.

And now he had his chance. Here was a girl who’d gone missing, a girl he’d seen, a real beauty, a girl who’d never so much as looked at him, a girl right out of his league, just the type of girl he’d go for if he really had been the Vampire.

Yes, it was easy for James to put himself into the mind of Merkmann, and find him an improbable murderer.

There were many other suspicious elements, not least Himmler’s night-time summons. Clarissa’s body was not recovered from the dragged river. It was never found. Lustgarten, even though he was the last person known to have seen her, did not take the stand and give evidence at the trial. Merkmann’s connection to the other murders of which he was convicted was equally unconvincing. And the judicial proceedings were hurried, as though the National Socialists wanted the case closed as quickly as possible. Less than ten weeks after Clarissa’s disappearance, Albert Merkmann had already been executed, in the yard at Munich Gaol, decapitated by the falling axe.

Valentine remembered the basement room at Lustgarten’s villa, the strange blue light, the riding crop, and the volume of de Sade. Thought of the illustration of the woman with her throat cut repulsed him. He also remembered something else Baron Andrea had mentioned at the Four Seasons about Lustgarten, that he had not only cured Hitler of gas blindness but had created him, guiding his early career. Creation. Val understood that impulse, for he was an artist himself, but to have created someone like Hitler, a ranting gangster, was perverse.

‘Vampire of Munich’ is a novelette taken from Gomery Kimber’s novel ‘The Nazi Alchemist’. You can purchase a copy of the novel here. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nazi-Alchemist-Wyvern-Gomery-Kimber-ebook/dp/B0CGNRT81B