A Small Town in Germany

by John le Carré

  ‘They called them patients,’ Bradfield said, with intense distaste.

  ‘It seems that now and then certain selected patients were set aside and put to medical uses. Children as well as adults.’

  Bradfield nodded, as if he knew that too.

  ‘By the time the Hapstorf case broke, the Americans and Germans had done a fair bit of work on this Euthanasia programme. Among other things, they’d unearthed evidence of one busload of “hybrid workers” being set aside for “dangerous duties at the Chemical Research Station of Hapstorf”. One busload was thirty-one people. They used grey buses by the way, if that reminds you of anything.’

  ‘Hanover,’ Bradfield said at once. ‘The transport for the bodyguard.’

  ‘Karfeld’s an administrator. Everyone admires him for it. Then as now. It’s nice to know he hasn’t lost the old touch, isn’t it? He’s got one of those minds that runs in grooves.’

  ‘Stop stringing beads. I want the whole thing, quickly.’

  ‘Grey buses then. Thirty-one seats and room left over for the guard. The windows were blackened from the inside. Where possible, they moved them at night.’

  ‘You said there were thirty-two bodies, not thirty-one –’

  ‘There was the Belgian labourer, wasn’t there? The one who worked under the cliff and talked to the French trusty? They knew what to do about him all right. He’d found out a bit too much, hadn’t he? Like Leo, now.’

  ‘Here,’ said Bradfield, getting up and bringing the coffee over to him. ‘You’d better have some more of this.’ Turner held out his cup and his hand was fairly steady.

  ‘So when they’d pulled him in they took Karfeld up to Hamburg and confronted him with the bodies and the evidence, such as they had, and he just laughed at them. Bloody nonsense, he said, the whole story. Never been to Hapstorf in his life. He was an engineer. A demolitions man. He gave a very detailed account of his work at the Russian front – they’d even given him campaign medals and Christ knows what. I suppose they did that for them in the SS and he made a great spiel about Stalingrad. There were discrepancies but not that many, and he just held out all the time against interrogation and denied ever having set foot in Hapstorf or possessing any knowledge of the plant. No, no, no all the way. For months on end. “Okay,” he kept saying, “if you’ve got the proof, bring a case. Put it to the Tribunal. I’m not bothered; I’m a hero. I never administered anything in my life except our family factory in Essen, and the British have pulled that to pieces, haven’t they? I’ve been to Russia, I haven’t been poisoning hybrids; why should I? I’m a little friend of all the world. Find a live witness, find anybody.” They couldn’t. At Hapstorf, the chemists had lived in complete segregation, and presumably the desk-men had done the same. The records were destroyed by bombing, and everyone was known by his Christian name or an alias.’ Turner shrugged. ‘That seemed to be that. He even threw in a story about helping the anti-Nazi resistance in Russia, and since the units he mentioned were either taken prisoner en masse or shot to pieces, they couldn’t get any further with that either. He doesn’t seem to have come out with that since, the resistance bit.’

  ‘It’s no longer fashionable,’ said Bradfield shortly. ‘Particularly in his sphere.’

  ‘So the case never reached the courts. There were plenty of reasons why not. The War Crimes investigation units themselves were near to disbandment; there was pressure from London and Washington to bury the hatchet and hand over all responsibility to the German courts. It was chaos. While the Unit was trying to prepare charges, their Headquarters were preparing amnesties. And there were other reasons, technical reasons for not going ahead. The crime was against French, Belgians and Poles if anyone, but since there was no method of establishing the nationality of the victims, there were problems about jurisdiction. Not material problems, but incidental ones, and they contributed to the difficulty of deciding what to do. You know how it is when you want to find difficulties.’

  ‘I know how it was then,’ Bradfield said quietly. ‘It was bedlam.’

  ‘The French weren’t keen; the Poles were too keen and Karfeld himself was quite a big wheel by then. He was handling some big Allied contracts. Even sub-contracting to competitors to keep up with demand. He was a good administrator, you see. Efficient.’

  ‘You say that as if it were a crime.’

  ‘His own factory had been dismantled a couple of times but now it was running a treat. Seemed a pity to disturb it really. There was even some rumour,’ Turner added without changing the tone of his voice, ‘that he’d had a head start on everyone else because he’d come by a special consignment of rare gases, and stored them underground in Essen at the end of the war. That’s what he was up to while the RAF was bombing Hapstorf. While he was supposed to be burying his poor old mother. He’d been pinching the goods to feather his own nest.’

  ‘As you have described the evidence so far,’ Bradfield said quietly, ‘there is nothing whatever which attaches Karfeld to Hapstorf, and nothing at all to associate him with the complicity in a murder plot. His own account of himself may very well be true. That he fought in Russia, that he was wounded –’

  ‘That’s right. That’s the view they took at Headquarters.’

  ‘It is even unproven that the bodies came from Hapstorf. The gas may have been theirs; it hardly proves that the chemists themselves administered it to the victims, let alone that Karfeld knew of it, or was in any way an accessory to –’

  ‘The house at Hapstorf had a cellar. The cellar wasn’t affected by the bombing. The windows had been bricked in and pipes had been run through the ceiling from the laboratories above. The brick walls of the cellar were torn.’

  ‘What do you mean: “torn”?’

  ‘By hands,’ Turner said. ‘Fingers, it could have been.’

  ‘Anyway they took your view. Karfeld kept his mouth shut, there was no fresh evidence. They didn’t prosecute. Quite rightly. The case was shelved. The unit was moved to Bremen, then to Hanover, then to Moenchengladbach and the files were sent here. Together with some odds and sods from the Judge Advocate General’s Department. Pending a decision regarding their ultimate disposal.’

  ‘And this is the story Harting has got on to?’

  ‘He was always on to it. He was the sergeant investigating. Him and Praschko. The whole file, minutes, memoranda, correspondence, interrogation reports, summaries of evidence, the whole case from beginning to end – it has an end now – is recorded in Leo’s handwriting. Leo arrested him, questioned him, attended the autopsies, looked for witnesses. The woman he nearly married, Margaret Aickman, she was in the unit as well. A clerical researcher. They called them headhunters: that was his life … They were all very anxious that Karfeld be properly arraigned.’

  Bradfield remained lost in thought. ‘And this word hybrid –’ he asked finally.

  ‘It was a Nazi technical term for half Jewish.’

  ‘I see. Yes, I see. So he would have a personal stake, wouldn’t he? And that mattered to him. He took everything personally. He lived for himself; that was the only thing he understood.’ The pen remained quite still. ‘But hardly a case in law.’ He repeated it to himself: ‘But hardly a case in law. In fact hardly a case by any standards. Not on the merest, most partisan analysis. Not any kind of case. Interesting of course: it accounts for Karfeld’s feelings about the British. It doesn’t begin to make a criminal of him.’

  ‘No,’ Turner agreed, rather to Bradfield’s surprise. ‘No. It’s not a case. But for Leo it rankled. He never forgot; but he pressed it down as far as it would go. Yet he couldn’t keep away from it. He had to find out; he had to take another look and make sure, and in January this year he went down to the Glory Hole and re-read his own reports and his own arguments.’

  Bradfield was sitting very still again.

  ‘It may have been his age. Most of all, it was a sense of something left undone.’ Turner said this as if it were a problem which applied to his own case, and to whi
ch he had no solution. ‘A sense of history if you like.’ He hesitated. ‘Of time. The paradoxes caught up with him and he had to do something about it. He was also in love,’ he added, staring out of the window. ‘Though he might not have admitted it. He’d made use of somebody and picked up more than he bargained for … He’d escaped from lethargy. That’s the point, isn’t it: the opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s lethargy. Nothingness. This place. And there were people about who let him think he was in the big league …’ he added softly. ‘So for whatever reasons, he reopened the case. He re-read the papers from beginning to end. He studied the background again, went through all the contemporary files, in Registry and in the Glory Hole. Checked all the facts from the beginning, and he began making his own enquiries.’

  ‘What sort of enquiries?’ Bradfield demanded. They were not looking at one another.

  ‘He set up his own office. He wrote letters and received replies. All on Embassy paper. He headed off the Chancery mail as it came in and extracted anything addressed to him. He ran it like he ran his own life: secretly and efficiently. Trusting nobody, confiding in nobody; playing the different ends off against each other … Sometimes he made little journeys, consulted records, Ministries, church registers, survivor groups … all on Embassy paper. He collected press cuttings, took copies, did his own typing and put on his own sealing wax. He even pinched an official seal. He headed his letters Claims and Consular, so most of them came to him in the first place anyway. He compared every detail: birth certificates, marriage, death of mother, hunting licences – he was looking for discrepancies all the time: anything to prove that Karfeld hadn’t fought at the Russian front. He put together a bloody great dossier. It’s hardly surprising Siebkron got on to him. There’s scarcely a Government agency he hasn’t consulted under one pretext or another –’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Bradfield whispered, laying down his pen in a momentary gesture of defeat.

  ‘By the end of January, he’d come to the only possible conclusion: that Karfeld had been lying in his teeth, and someone – it looked like someone high up, and it looked very much like Siebkron – someone had been covering up for him. They tell me Siebkron has ambitions of his own – hitch his wagon to any star as long as it was on the move.’

  ‘That’s true enough,’ Bradfield conceded, lost in private thoughts.

  ‘Like Praschko in the old days … You see where we’re getting, don’t you? And of course before long, as he very well knew, Siebkron was going to notice that the Embassy was making some pretty way-out enquiries, even for Claims and Consular. And that somebody was going to be bloody angry, and perhaps a bit rough as well. Specially when Leo found the proof.’

  ‘What proof? How can he possibly prove such a charge now, twenty or more years after the crime?’

  ‘It’s all in Registry,’ Turner said, with sudden reluctance. ‘You’d do better to see for yourself.’

  ‘I’ve no time and I am used to hearing unsavoury facts.’

  ‘And discounting them.’

  ‘I insist that you tell me.’ He made no drama of his insistence.

  ‘Very well. Last year, Karfeld decided to take a doctorate. He was a big fellow by then; he was worth a fortune in the chemical industry – his administrative talent had paid off in a big way – and he was making fair headway in local politics in Essen, and he wanted to be Doctor. Maybe he was like Leo; he’d left a job undone and he wanted to get the record straight. Or maybe he thought a handle would be a useful asset: Vote for Doctor Karfeld. They like a doctorate here in a Chancellor … So he went back to school and wrote a learned thesis. He didn’t do much research and everyone was very impressed, specially his tutors. Wonderful, they said, the way he found the time.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s a study of the effects of certain toxic gases on the human body. They thought very highly of it apparently; caused quite a little stir at the time.’

  ‘That is hardly conclusive.’

  ‘Oh yes it is. Karfeld based his whole analysis on the detailed examination of thirty-one fatal cases.’

  Bradfield had closed his eyes.

  ‘It is not proof,’ Bradfield said at last; he was very pale but the pen, once more in his hand, was as firm as ever. ‘You know it is not proof. It raises suppositions I agree. It suggests he was at Hapstorf. It is not even half-way to proof.’

  ‘Pity we can’t tell Leo.’

  ‘The information came to him in the course of his industrial experience; that is what Karfeld would argue. He acquired it from a third party; that would be his fall-back position.’

  ‘From the real bastards.’

  ‘Even if it could be shown that the information came from Hapstorf, there are a dozen explanations as to how it came into Karfeld’s hands. You said yourself, he was not even engaged in research –’

  ‘No. He sat at a desk. It’s been done before.’

  ‘Precisely. And the very fact that he made use of the information at all would tend to exonerate him from the charge of acquiring it.’

  ‘The trouble is, you see,’ Turner said, ‘Leo’s only half a lawyer: a hybrid. We have to reckon with the other half as well. We have to reckon with the thief.’

  ‘Yes.’ Bradfield was distracted. ‘And he has taken the Green File.’

  ‘Still, as far as Siebkron and Karfeld are concerned, he seems to have got near enough to the truth to be a pretty serious risk, doesn’t he?’

  ‘A prima facie case,’ Bradfield remarked, examining his notes once more. ‘Grounds for reinvestigation, I grant you. At best, a public prosecutor might be persuaded to make an initial examination.’ He glanced at his telephone directory. ‘The Legal Attaché would know.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ Turner said comfortingly. ‘Whatever he’s done or hasn’t done, Karfeld’s in the clear. He’s past the post.’ Bradfield stared at him. ‘No one can prosecute him now, even with a cast-iron confession, signed by Karfeld himself.’

  ‘Of course,’ Bradfield said quietly. ‘I was forgetting.’ He sounded relieved.

  ‘He’s protected by law. The Statute of Limitations takes care of that. Leo put a note on the file on Thursday evening. The case is dead. There’s nothing anyone can do.’

  ‘There’s a procedure for reviving it –’

  ‘There is,’ Turner conceded. ‘It doesn’t apply. That’s the fault of the British as it happens. The Hapstorf case was a British investigation. We never passed it to the Germans at all. There was no trial, no public report, and when the German judiciary took over sole responsibility for Nazi war crimes we gave them no note of it. Karfeld’s whole case fell into the gap between the Germans and ourselves.’ He paused. ‘And now Leo’s done the same.’

  ‘What did Harting intend to do? What was the purpose of all this enquiring?’

  ‘He had to know. He had to complete the case. It taunted him, like a messed-up childhood or a life you can’t come to terms with. He had to get it straight. I think he was playing the rest by ear.’

  ‘When did he get this so-called proof?’

  ‘The thesis arrived on the Saturday before he left. He kept a date-stamp, you see; everything was entered up in the files. On the Monday he arrived in Registry in a state of elation. He spent a couple of days wondering what to do next. Last Thursday he had lunch with Praschko –’

  ‘What the devil for?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought about it. I don’t know. Probably to discuss what action they should take. Or to get a legal opinion. Maybe he thought there was still a way of prosecuting –’

  ‘There is none?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’

  Turner ignored him: ‘Or perhaps to tell Praschko that the pace was getting too hot. To ask him for protection.’

  Bradfield looked at Turner very carefully. ‘And the Green File has gone,’ he said, recovering his strength.

  ‘The box was empty.’

  ‘And Harting has run. Do you know the reason for that
as well?’ His eyes were still upon Turner. ‘Is that also recorded in his dossier?’

  ‘He kept writing in his memoranda: “I have very little time.” Everyone who speaks of him describes him as being in a fight against time … the new urgency … I suppose he was thinking of the Statute.’

  ‘But we know that, under the Statute, Karfeld was already a free man, unless of course some kind of stay of action could be obtained. So why has he left? And what was so pressing?’

  Turner shrugged away the strangely searching, even taunting tone of Bradfield’s questions.

  ‘So you don’t know exactly why? Why he has chosen this particular moment to run away? Or why he chose that one file to steal?’

  ‘I assume Siebkron has been crowding him. Leo had the proof and Siebkron knew he had it. From then on, Leo was a marked man. He had a gun,’ Turner added, ‘an old army pistol. He was frightened enough to take it with him. He must have panicked.’

  ‘Quite,’ Bradfield said, with the same note of relief. ‘Quite. No doubt that is the explanation.’ Turner stared at him in bewilderment.

  For perhaps ten minutes Bradfield had not moved or said a word.

  There was a lectern in a corner of the room made of an old Bible box and long, rather ugly metal legs which Bradfield had commissioned of a local blacksmith in Bad Godesberg. He was standing with his elbows upon it, staring out of the window at the river.

  ‘No wonder Siebkron puts us under guard,’ he said at last; he might have been talking about the mist. ‘No wonder he treats us as if we were dangerous. There can hardly be a Ministry in Bonn, not even a journalist, who has not by now heard that the British Embassy is engaged in a blood-hunt for Karfeld’s past. What do they expect us to do? Blackmail him in public? Reappear after twenty-five years in full-bottom wigs and indict him under the Allied Jurisdiction? Or do they simply think we are wantonly vindictive, and propose to have our revenge on the man who is spoiling our European dreams?’