The Good Cop

by Peter Steiner

  ‘Maybe. A criminal in any case,’ said Gruber.

  ‘OK,’ said O’Connor. ‘The MPs have to pick him up.’

  ‘There’s no address on the application. He left almost everything blank. So how do we pick him up?’ said Veroni.

  ‘We put him on the list of hires,’ said O’Connor. ‘When he shows up for work, the MPs are waiting.’

  WILLI GEISMEIER

  Willi arrived as instructed at police headquarters for his first day of work, only to be arrested by four American military policemen. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it.

  ‘Take him to the brig,’ said Major Becker.

  ‘Wait a minute, Major,’ said Lieutenant O’Connor. ‘Give me some time with this guy, would you?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Something’s not quite right,’ he said. O’Connor couldn’t say what it was, but something about Gruber’s reaction had seemed off, and seeing the guy now, well, it just felt wrong.

  ‘OK, Lieutenant. Ten minutes.’

  The major and the MPs went outside and lit up cigarettes.

  ‘Have a seat, Mr Geismeier. I understand you speak English.’

  ‘I do,’ said Willi.

  ‘How is that?’ said the lieutenant.

  ‘Many years ago, I was a student of English literature. Shakespeare in particular.’

  ‘Really? Did you spend time in England?’

  ‘I spent two summers in London doing research at the British Museum.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Before the first war.’

  ‘Do you know why you were arrested just now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Were you ever a member of the Nazi Party?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘And yet, I have reliable information that you were a Nazi, and an active one with some rank in the Party. How do you explain that?’

  ‘My experience has taught me, Lieutenant, that when one says “reliable information” or other phrases like that, it often means that the information isn’t reliable at all. If I had to guess where your reliable information comes from, I’d guess it was one or more of my former police colleagues. Am I right?’

  Lieutenant O’Connor had been caught off guard. He gave Willi a long, hard look. ‘You were part of the Munich police department? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Willi.

  ‘You didn’t say so on your application, or to the officers interviewing you.’ O’Connor didn’t like being surprised this way.

  ‘No, I didn’t. They didn’t ask, and it was long ago. I left the department fifteen years ago, before Hitler was Chancellor, and have been a laborer ever since then.’

  ‘Why did you leave the department?’

  ‘I had been suspended once, and I was about to be arrested.’

  ‘That would be when?’ said Lieutenant O’Connor.

  ‘1932,’ said Willi.

  ‘And you were about to be arrested for …?’

  ‘I don’t know what the charges would have been, but it was serious. I had been in pursuit of a well-connected murderer. He had friends in the police force.’

  ‘Well connected how?’

  ‘He was an elected NSDAP member of the Reichstag, and he had friends throughout the ranks of the Munich police.’

  O’Connor snorted. ‘This is really a fabulous story, Mr Geismeier.’

  ‘Everything I told you is in the police records, Lieutenant.’

  ‘The records, which were right downstairs, have all been conveniently destroyed, Mr Geismeier. I suppose you know that.’

  ‘My last job,’ said Willi, ‘was in police records, Lieutenant, and I’m not surprised they have been destroyed.’

  ‘So, it’s pretty convenient, isn’t it? For you, I mean?’

  ‘Listen, Lieutenant. I’m not an idiot. I’ve been at this a lot longer than you have. I wouldn’t have brought it up if I didn’t have proof of what I just told you.’

  ‘You mean you made copies of police records?’

  ‘No. Not copies. I have the originals. As I said, I worked downstairs, and I took what I needed.’

  ‘You stole police records.’

  ‘I did, Lieutenant. I saw it as part of my job.’

  ‘Your job?’

  ‘To catch criminals, Lieutenant. That was my job.’

  Lieutenant O’Connor called Major Becker back in and asked Willi to tell his story again. ‘I’ll be damned,’ said the major. ‘Where are the records now?’

  ‘At my home,’ said Willi.

  Major Becker, Willi, and Lieutenant O’Connor drove in a jeep through the rubble-strewn streets of Munich past Neuhausen-Nymphenburg, Moosach in the direction of Dachau. They turned west on Ludwigsfelderstraße then past the rail yards torn up by bombs. They threaded their way through Untermenzing. What was left of shipping depots and warehouses gave way to potato and wheat fields.

  ‘This better be good, Geismeier,’ said the lieutenant. They had been driving half an hour.

  ‘Turn left here,’ said Willi. It was a dirt track that led through a small wood. Beyond the wood they stopped in front of a concrete hangar with a steel door big enough to drive a truck through. It was a warehouse that had once belonged to Geismeier Ceramics. You could still make out the name on the side in faded blue paint. The large steel door had a smaller door in the middle, and they went in through that. It was empty inside except for a bicycle leaning against the wall by the door. At the back of the building another door led to a small apartment. ‘You live here, Geismeier?’ said the lieutenant.

  ‘I do now,’ said Willi. ‘Before this I pretty much kept moving.’

  Willi had been on the run for the last thirteen or so years, scavenging a life where he could find it, working odd jobs in Munich, but elsewhere too when he had to leave. He repaired bicycles in his nephew’s shop. He collected scrap and sold it. He picked up and moved when the SS got interested in him again. He still had friends in the police, and they kept him apprised of the situation.

  Willi got about by bicycle. He slept in garden sheds and country houses when they were offered. Benno von Horvath and, after he was gone, Margarete welcomed Willi for a meal whenever he could manage it. Others helped too, all of them at great risk to themselves. You never knew who was going to have the courage. Bergemann was steadfast. And Fedor Blaskowitz, the Latin teacher, hid Willi in his tiny apartment more than once at great risk to himself.

  ‘You don’t owe me anything,’ said Willi.

  ‘I owe it to myself,’ said Fedor. He did not survive the war.

  The SS only stopped pursuing Willi once the Americans crossed the Rhine. They had other things to worry about now. For the first time in years Willi could stay in one place, which turned out to be the old Geismeier Ceramics plant.

  A door next to Willi’s apartment led downstairs to a concrete bunker, now a storage room with a table in the center and cabinets around the four sides of the room. Willi opened a drawer and took out a folded sheet of paper. He unfolded it onto the table. ‘This is a map of the Munich police in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power,’ he said. ‘The numbers by the names are file numbers, files that are in these drawers.’

  ‘All these drawers have files in them?’ said Lieutenant O’Connor, looking around.

  ‘Holy Christ,’ said Major Becker.

  Willi turned back to the map and pointed. ‘Here is Detective Sergeant Hermann Gruber.’ No one had told him that Gruber was Willi’s accuser, but based on what he had heard about Lieutenant O’Connor’s ‘reliable source’, Willi thought he knew. And now, so did the Americans.

  THE AMERICAN CEMETERY

  No matter how long you live, early childhood memories stay with you, even after other memories fade. For instance, Maria Christine recalled with great clarity a children’s playground in the Parc Monceau in Paris. All she had to do was close her eyes and she could feel the swing’s steel seat and rough ropes in her small hands. Sh
e could hear the sound of the children playing. She was five when they left. She also remembered sitting on a hard wooden bench between her mother and father on a long train ride that seemed to go on all night, then being on a boat on rough seas. She was the only one who wasn’t sick. The wind had tossed salt spray in her face, and that had made her laugh.

  She remembered her father and his pure joy. Until she was an old lady she remembered him holding her high over his face smiling up at her, like the sun. She remembered sitting by his side while he was drawing his famous pictures of New York: women hanging clothes from their tenement windows, Bowery flophouses, soldiers on leave lounging on the stoop. Maria Christine was thirteen when Maximilian went away in an army uniform, a forty-eight-year-old infantry private, and then fourteen when word came that he had died on Omaha Beach. She especially remembered that pain because, in fact, it never went away.

  Maximilian’s last minute was the longest of his life, longer maybe than all the years until then put together. He lay on his back on the sand, seeing only the clouds overhead. He did not hear anything even though there were men shouting and shells exploding all around him. He did not exactly think of Sophie or Maria Christine, but he felt them there beside him, on top of him, under him, embracing him. He felt them in the rippled sand he lay on, in the salty water lapping at his head and shoulders.

  Early in their life on the Lower East Side of New York, Sophie and Maximilian received a letter from Munich. It was written in English in a careful sloping hand on airmail stationery. The postage stamp had Hitler on it.

  15 May 1938

  Dear Mrs Auerbach and Mr Wolf,

  I hope this finds you and your daughter well. I am no longer in police service, but rather have been earning my living as a laborer. I do all sorts of manual labor. I prefer work that takes me outdoors.

  I am writing to let you know that Otto Bruck, the second man behind the bombing that injured you so grievously, Mrs Auerbach, is dead. He was a Nazi and a vicious criminal (is that redundant?) and was serving (if that is the word) in the Reichstag. He was shot dead by the grieving husband of another of his victims.

  The husband, Ludwig Marschach, a police sergeant, was tried and sent to a prison camp that was recently constructed out near Dachau. I do not know his fate beyond that. I still have a connection or two within the Munich police, but they provide me with information at their peril.

  If I can be of service to you in any way, please send a letter addressed to Karl Juncker at Tullemannstraße 54, Munich.

  Sincerely yours,

  Willi Geismeier

  Sophie replied to Willi in German, thanking him for telling her about Otto Bruck and Sergeant Marschach, telling him a little about their life in New York, and asking if he knew anything about Elizabeth Grynbaum. Sophie had written to Elizabeth but had not had an answer. Willi wrote back that he had been able to discover that Elizabeth Grynbaum had recently celebrated her ninetieth birthday and was still living in her same apartment. She still gave music lessons, and had a great-granddaughter, a university student, living with her and looking after her.

  Willi and Sophie continued to correspond occasionally until 1940 when mail to Europe was interrupted and suspended. Ships carrying mail were torpedoed and sunk, and post offices were bombed. Willi stopped hearing from Sophie, and she and Maximilian stopped hearing from him. Then, when she thought she would never hear anything again, Sophie received a short letter.

  January 26, 1946

  Dear Sophie and Maximilian,

  I will keep this short. I don’t know whether it will find its way to you. Please write and tell me if you get this. I hope you, Sophie, Maximilian, and Maria Christine are all well.

  Elizabeth Grynbaum was transported to Auschwitz sometime in late 1944. Her son and his family had been transported earlier. Frau Grynbaum was nearly 100 and frail, and one can only hope that she did not survive the trip.

  I am well. I was recently hired by the Munich police department as a detective.

  Sincerely yours,

  Willi Geismeier

  Willi received a reply two weeks later, a long letter that began with Maximilian’s death. Maria Christine, Sophie explained, had her father’s artistic gift. She was sixteen years old and drew beautifully and was already an accomplished photographer.

  Sophie had been working as a journalist for the last five years, first as a freelance reporter for the Herald, and then as a political reporter for the New York Times covering the American election of 1944. Now, she wrote, she had just gotten an assignment from Life Magazine to go to France and do a story on the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial at Omaha Beach. She had persuaded Life to hire Maria Christine as the photographer. The editors had looked through Maria Christine’s pictures. ‘They’re terrific,’ said the pictures editor. ‘No denying that, but she’s sixteen. She’s just a girl.’ The editor might have had a point if he hadn’t said, ‘She’s just a girl.’

  ‘Her father’s buried there,’ Sophie told the editor. ‘My husband and her father.’

  ‘So, Willi,’ Sophie wrote, ‘Maria Christine and I are going to France. Visiting Maximilian’s grave means more to us than words can describe.

  ‘We land in Le Havre June fourth and from there a driver will take us to Omaha Beach where we will spend two days, including the second anniversary of the landing and of Maximilian’s death.

  ‘I don’t think I could set foot in Europe without visiting Munich. I dread this visit and yet yearn for it. It would please me greatly if we could meet then. Would that be possible?’

  On the morning of June 9, 1946, Willi was at his desk working on a case in which a so far unidentified German had killed an American GI. According to treaty, the case came under American jurisdiction. But the Americans had asked that Willi be part of the investigation.

  ‘Geismeier,’ the desk sergeant popped his head in the door, ‘you have a visitor.’

  ‘I’ll be right out, Sergeant.’ Willi put together the files he had been working on and slid them into a drawer so that the top of his desk was bare. Then he opened another drawer and took out two bunches of flowers. He looked in the mirror by the door and adjusted his tie, which was something Willi Geismeier almost never did.

  Sophie and Maria Christine stood up as he came out into the waiting room. Willi and Sophie looked at one another for a long minute. Maria Christine couldn’t help herself. She took a picture.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In a historical novel, such as this, one hangs a story on a historical framework and then takes liberties along the way. The object is to do this all seamlessly so that fact and fiction become indistinguishable, offering a clearer and deeper view than facts by themselves can afford.

  Some of the language Hitler uses in this book is, despite its currency, taken from his actual speeches. His most clownish behavior also happened. He really did jump on a table in a beer hall and fire a pistol into the ceiling to begin his Putsch. And he scurried away like a frightened crab the next day when the Putsch was put down.

  A more important historical part of this book, and one that surprised me, is the story of the Munich Post newspaper. The real Munich Post sounded the alarm about Hitler, calling him out as a thug and criminal through the thirteen or so years of his rise.

  When Hitler took power in 1933, one of his first acts was to shut down the paper, arresting reporters and editors, and sending them to the recently opened camp in nearby Dachau, where many of them were tortured and killed. It is even true, as unlikely as it sounds, that Hitler then had the presses hauled off and melted down. He even had the house number of the building suppressed forever, so savage was his hatred.

  News reporters are under attack again around the world. They are being disparaged as ‘enemies of the people.’ They are arrested, harassed, and killed for reporting the news. The news media – television, radio, print, internet – are the main instrument of our liberty. We allow their suppression at our peril.

 

  Peter Steiner, The Good Cop