The Lady from Zagreb

by Philip Kerr

  At least that’s what I’d told myself.

  I was heading toward the marble stairs when I spied the screening room where State Secretary Leopold Gutterer had had me read the speech I would make later at the Wannsee IKPK conference. Maybe it was my clown’s red nose, but even though I was worried about Dalia I was in the mood for some minor sabotage after that meeting with Goebbels. I went into the room, closed the door behind me, and walked over to the big Telefunken radio that stood up against one wall. From the size of it you might have thought that these were the controls to a cruise ship you could have steered up Wilhelmstrasse all the way north, to the Baltic Sea. As with all radios in Germany, this one carried a little warning sign over the plastic tuning knob to remind you that listening to forbidden radio stations was an offense punishable by death. With the radio not yet switched on, it took only a few seconds for me to quickly tune it to the BBC. I adjusted the volume to maximum before finally switching it on and then swiftly leaving the room. Like most radios—even one like this, which looked like it had ten or twelve tubes—the Telefunken would take almost a minute to warm up, by which time I would be safely away from the scene of the crime. As acts of resistance go, this wasn’t much, but at least it made me laugh. Where the Nazis are concerned, sometimes humor is the best weapon there is.

  I left the ministry and walked quickly back to the Mercedes. I was going to miss having that car when the time came to return it to Schellenberg. I put my foot down and started driving fast, through the Tiergarten, past the Victory Column, and into the west end of the city before turning south on the AVUS speedway. Goethestrasse was on my way to Griebnitzsee and it made sense to stop there first. If I found Colonel Dragan, I’d spin him some squelch about us going to the film studio in Babelsberg so that he could speak to his long-lost daughter. Instead I’d drive him deep into the Potsdam Forest and then just leave him there, abandoned like Snow White, miles from anywhere, while I went back to the house on Kaiser-Strasse and then took Dalia to the cottage near Pfaueninsel. We could probably hole up there for at least a week, or until Goebbels gave me the all-clear siren.

  Goethestrasse was a Gold Coast cobbled street with big cars and expensive houses; it certainly looked as though the Grand Mufti had landed on his leather sandals. The elegant mandarin-colored villa on the corner of Schillerstrasse wasn’t one of the biggest but it might just have been the nicest. It was the kind of place I’d have chosen to live myself if I’d had a good friend like Adolf Hitler. I parked the car in the shade of a tall birch tree, switched off the engine, and stepped onto the cobbled sidewalk. It was all a long away from Jerusalem. Six years ago—it must have been September 1937—the SD’s Jewish Department had sent me to Palestine and Egypt in the company of two SD NCOs as part of a fact-finding mission. In Cairo, I’d been present in a hotel room at the National Hotel when the two Germans I was with met the Grand Mufti, whose hatred of Jews was nothing short of pathological, and my most earnest hope now was that I could avoid meeting this mad mullah again. Not that I thought he’d remember me. And I didn’t think I’d like him any better now that he was living in Berlin.

  I gave a false name to the sullen Handschar guarding the gate just in case the colonel ever tried to find me again. I certainly wasn’t about to forget his fondness for cutting throats and severing heads. I still had bad dreams about his front garden at Jasenovac. The Handschar was wearing what looked like a field gray fez, with a Nazi eagle and an SS death’s head on the front. A black tassel dangled off the top like a hellish bellpull. He didn’t seem particularly Ottoman—for one thing he spoke goodish German. And he couldn’t have looked more bored if he’d been the life model in a class of blind draftsmen.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said politely as I presented myself at the gate. “How can I help you?”

  “I’m hoping to see Colonel Dragan,” I said. “He’s part of the Pog’s delegation from Croatia. I believe he’s a guest of the Grand Mufti. I need to speak with him on an urgent personal matter.”

  “I see.”

  “Is he here now?”

  “I don’t know. People come and go from this place all the time. Nobody tells me anything. I’m just the dog on the gate.”

  The gate remained closed and time was beginning to feel short. But I hardly wanted to start barking orders at him. He had the look of someone who wanted to bark back.

  “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you, sonny? Bosnia, isn’t it? Where you boys in the Muslim SS are from?”

  The Handschar nodded wistfully, as if he missed his country.

  “I was there a few weeks ago,” I said. “Place called Banja Luka.”

  “You were in Banja Luka?” He made it sound like I’d spent a wild weekend in Paris.

  “That’s right.”

  “I wish I was in Banja Luka,” he said. “My home is in Omarska. Which is near there.” He shook his head sadly. “I don’t know why I’m here. But I am. Next week we have to go on a training course in France. But I really don’t want to go on a training course in France. I just want to go home, sir.”

  “You’ll be back home before you know it,” I said. “With a story to tell. Not to mention a nice pair of boots that you can sell.”

  He smiled and opened the gate for me. “There are Ustaše staying here,” he confirmed. “But I think maybe some of them went out. You’d best ask at the house.”

  I walked along a short gravel path, between neatly clipped lawns, past a circular fountain, and up a flight of stairs to a portico with four Doric columns, where I knocked loudly on a big mahogany door and then turned to look back at the garden. To the right of the house was a public footpath that led across a small lake. In the big white house opposite, several dozen windows shone with an eye-catching glamor. Somewhere behind the trees I could hear the grass growing quickly and the squirrels breathing loudly and I felt the silence as strongly as if it had boxed my ears. Nature looked respectable enough, but it offended me that a fanatic like the mufti should have been living in such a nice part of Berlin as Zehlendorf. If I had been living across the road from such a beast I’d have held a party every night, with lots of alcohol and half-naked girls, just to annoy him. But now that I’d thought about it, I couldn’t see why a party like that wasn’t a good idea anyway.

  Unlike the guard on the gate, the man who answered the door was an Arab. He was wearing a white jalabiyah and a red tarboosh. In his hand was a set of prayer beads and he smelled lightly of cardamom seeds and Turkish cigarettes. His face was badly pitted, and poking out from under his long shirt was a colony of ugly brown toenails that looked as if it should have been kept in the insect house at Berlin Zoo. Behind him I could see a large round hall and a mosaic table with a glazed earthenware Persian-style vase of lilies. On one wall was a large black flag with some Arabic writing in silver-white that might have been designed for the SS by Hugo Boss. Then again, maybe it was supposed to be a picture of a snake pit. With modern art these days, it’s a little hard to tell. On another wall was a portrait of Adolf Hitler, which prompted me to wonder why he hated Jews but not Arabs. After all, some Jews are just Muslims with a better tailor.

  “I’m looking for Colonel Dragan,” I explained. “I believe he’s staying here?”

  “Yes, he’s staying here,” said the doorman. “But he has gone out, I believe. About twenty minutes ago.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “He did not tell me, sir.”

  “Was he on foot? Or in a car?”

  “He borrowed a bicycle, sir.”

  “A bicycle?”

  “And a map of Berlin.”

  “What kind of map? Pharus, or Schaffmann?”

  “I don’t know. It was just a map.”

  “A Pharus goes further south,” I said. “Makes a difference.”

  The doorman shrugged. “Shall I inform the colonel who called, sir?”

  “Captain
Geiger,” I said. “We both served in Croatia.”

  I turned to go back down the steps and then stopped. In a back room I could hear a man’s voice searching for the right musical note and never quite finding it. Then again, it might have been some kind of prayer.

  “What does it mean?” I asked, pointing over the doorman’s shoulder at the black flag on the wall. “The Arabic writing on your flag. What does it mean? I’m interested.”

  The doorman glanced at it for a second. “That’s the Shahada. It says, ‘I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammed is the Messenger of Allah.’”

  I nodded. “And how does that translate into ‘Kill all the Jews’?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sure you do. What have you people got against the Jews? I mean, is it in your book to hate them? The way it is in ours?”

  “Your book?”

  “Hitler’s book. My Struggle. You know?”

  “To my knowledge you are the first German who ever asked this question.”

  I shrugged. “Well, I’m a very nosy sort of fellow.”

  “I knew that just by looking at you, sir.”

  I touched my nose and smiled. It didn’t hurt anymore, but I kept forgetting how comical it made me look. But I didn’t feel very comical. If I’d been worried before I was even more worried now. It was just twelve kilometers from Goethestrasse to where Dalia was living on Griebnitzsee. A twenty-minute drive. A bit longer on a bicycle, but probably not much longer. Berlin is a very flat city, and excellent for cyclists. It’s possible to go from the Brandenburg Gate all the way to Potsdam—a distance of almost thirty kilometers—and not encounter a single hill. The fact was, the colonel might already be sitting in the drawing room with his daughter.

  “Yes, it’s in our holy Quran to kill all unbelievers, including Jews.”

  I nodded. “I just wanted to know. For future reference, you understand.”

  I ran back to the car and started her up.

  Forty-four

  While I drove the car I rehearsed some of the explanations I might give to Dalia for lying to her so egregiously. “I was only obeying orders” wasn’t going to do me any good, that was obvious. It was also obvious that Goebbels was right: if the colonel was already with Dalia, then no amount of special pleading was going to change her opinion, which was that I had deceived her, cruelly. Trying to justify what I had done in the name of her feelings simply wasn’t going to alter things for the better. Perhaps later on I might get a chance to offer an excuse for my behavior, but the nearer I got to the house on Griebnitzsee, the more I realized that if Dragan was there already, then the best thing I could probably do would be to withdraw quietly and leave them to their reunion. It was also becoming clear to me that, while I might have had the best of intentions, it had been very wrong of me to lie to her. Dalia was an adult, after all, not a child; she ought to have been given the opportunity to make up her own mind about what kind of man her father was. Protecting a grown woman from the truth was no kind of solution in a world that was already ruled by lies. That’s the thing about breathing the same air as the minister of Truth; after a while, truth is just another Paschal holy day you can move to suit the calendar. I felt disgusted with myself.

  I parked the car on Kaiser-Strasse and walked along to the big creamy house. There was no sign of a bicycle in the garden or leaning by the front door. It looked as if I had succeeded in getting there before Colonel Dragan. Dalia’s bedroom window was open and a net curtain was spilling out of the castellated turret as if a damsel were in there, signaling to her knight with a handkerchief to come and rescue her. Everything looked exactly as it did when I’d left the place a couple of hours earlier. I breathed a sigh of relief and looked up the street to see if I could see an approaching bicyclist but there was no one in sight, not even a gardener.

  I went around the back of the house to the kitchen door, which was rarely ever locked. Dalia preferred to leave it open to get a current of cool air through the house. There wasn’t a lot of crime in that part of Berlin and I couldn’t blame her for wanting some fresh air. It was almost thirty degrees and, at the bottom of the garden, I could see several boats moving up and down the river in the sunshine. It was a perfect day. Goebbels was right about that, too. The sky felt so big and blue and the few clouds looked so shapely I half expected to see the edge of a gilt frame over my head. Instead I saw a bicycle lying on the lawn under the lowest leaves of a weeping willow tree.

  I moved quickly to the kitchen door and went inside. White plates and saucers occupied the slots on a wooden draining board like the skeleton of some fossilized animal. A coffeepot stood on the cooker. It was cold to the touch. The tap was dripping cold water into the butler’s pantry sink. I started slowly up the creaking wooden stairs. For a few seconds I heard raised voices in a room above my head and then the sound of a single shot. The shot brought me up short; then I heard seven more.

  Gun in hand, I bounded up the rest of the kitchen stairs and into the hall. An officer’s peaked cap with a letter U around the Croatian flag lay next to Dalia’s unopened post on the table. A strong smell of gunpowder was drifting through the house. After eight shots, someone was dead. But who? I caught sight of my own reflection in the big mirror on the hall tree where the hat she’d been wearing in Munich was hanging next to some of her many handbags. I was wearing an anxious, puzzled look. Where was she? Was she all right?

  “Dalia?” I yelled. “It’s me, Gunther. Where are you?”

  I heard something hard fall on the floor. It might have been a gun. I ran into the drawing room.

  The black lyre-shaped clock on the mantelpiece was ticking loudly, as if to remind me that time could not be turned around and that in the ten seconds it took to fire eight pistol shots everything had changed forever. I hadn’t minded the paintings by Emil Nolde before, but there was one in particular that now seemed sinister: grinning, garishly colored grotesque masks that looked more Halloween than African. And it struck me now that they were laughing at me. What were you thinking? How could you have been so foolish? This is where your carelessness gets you. How did you think that this could end well?

  Wearing a plain white summer dress that accentuated her tan, Dalia was sitting on the piano stool with her back to the piano and facing the white leather Swan Biedermeier sofa where she and I had first kissed. She was lighting a cigarette with a fireside match. The P38 I’d left in her bedroom now lay empty but still smoking on the floor about a meter away from Colonel Dragan’s dead body. His light gray dress uniform was covered in blood from the several shots she’d fired at his body, although the one through his right eye would by itself certainly have killed him. The whole eyeball was hanging off his cheek like a carelessly served poached egg.

  She saw me look at the picture and smiled a sad smile. “I’m not so sure that Hitler wasn’t right when he told Joey to get rid of these paintings,” she said. “It’s not that they’re degenerate. I don’t know what that means in the context of something like art. It’s that the artist’s colors feel like they’re a part of the human soul. They feel as if they’re so much more than just colors. You know what I mean? But for that picture, I don’t know that I would have shot him. You see, it reminded me of who and what he was. I know that doesn’t sound like much of an explanation to a man like you. To a policeman. It’s not very logical, I’ll admit that. But looking at that picture now, that’s how I feel. Somewhere on the color spectrum between heaven and hell.”

  Her approach to art appreciation was more convincing than mine.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you,” I said. “About your father. When I told you he was dead I only meant to spare you the knowledge of who and what he was. To protect you from the truth.”

  “He’s dead now,” she said. “At least, I hope he is. I mean, that was certainly my intention. To kill this evil bastard.”

 
I supposed she had shot him because she’d believed exactly what I’d told her, which was that her father was dead, and that she’d assumed the man in her house was an impostor. He must have scared her. Something like that. I don’t know. People have been murdered for a lot less than that. I knelt to the side of the body with the least amount of blood on the carpet and pressed my fingers against the dead man’s neck, which was still warm to the touch. The hot metal grouped in his chest was making the shirt under his tunic smolder a little. Dark arterial blood was spreading quickly underneath him, like he was an animal lying on the floor of an abattoir.

  “He’s dead all right,” I said, standing up again.

  I had to admit that she’d made an excellent job of it. Colonel Dragan had cut his last throat and placed the last human head on his rockery at Jasenovac. If I was at all sad about what had happened it was only because no one should ever find themselves in a position where they end up killing their own father, no matter how terrible he might have been. You don’t ever get over something like that. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I could see that I now had the awful task of telling the woman I loved the unpalatable truth: that the man she had just shot and killed really was her own papa.