by Philip Kerr
They left me alone after that. Pencils and paper, a bottle of brandy, a clean glass, a couple of packets of cigarettes and some matches, and even a newspaper arrived, and I placed them all on the table and just watched them for a while, enjoying the freedom to have a drink or not have a drink. It’s the little things that can make prison tolerable. Like a door key. By all accounts, they’d let Hitler have the run of Landsberg and he’d treated the place more like a hotel than a penitentiary. Not that he was in any way penitent about the putsch of 1923, of course.
I lay down on the bed and tried to relax, but it wasn’t easy in that cell. Was this why they’d put me in here? Or was it just an American idea of a joke? I tried not to think about Adolf Hitler, but he kept on getting up from the desk and, full of impatience, going to the window and staring out through the bars in that way he had of always looking like a man chosen by destiny.
The curious thing was I’d never really thought about Hitler. For years when he was still alive I tried not to think of him at all, dismissing him as a crank before he was elected chancellor of Germany and, after that happened, merely wishing him dead. But now that I was lying on the bed where, for nine months, he had dreamed his autocratic dreams, it seemed impossible not to pay attention to the man with blue eyes at the window.
As I watched he sat down at the desk again, picked up the pen, and started to write, covering the sheets of paper with furious scribbling, and sweeping each page off the table and onto the floor as he finished so that I might pick them up and read what was written. At first, the sentences made no sense at all; but gradually these became more coherent, affording glimpses into the extraordinary phenomenon that was Hitler’s mind. Whatever he wrote was based on his own incontrovertible logic and served as a perfect guide for the commission of evil, worked out to the most minute detail. It was like sitting in the same asylum cell as the insane Dr. Mabuse, together with the ghosts of all those he had exterminated and watching him write his last criminal testament.
At last he stopped writing and, leaning back on the chair, turned to look at me. Feeling this was my chance to put him on the spot, I tried to frame a question of the kind that Robert Jackson, the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, might have asked. But this was more difficult than I might have imagined. There wasn’t any single question beyond a simple “Why?” that I could have asked, and I was still wrestling with this realization when he spoke to me:
“So, what happened next?”
I tried to stifle a yawn. “You mean when I left Le Vernet?”
“Of course.”
“We went back to Toulouse,” I said. “From there we drove to Vichy and handed our prisoners to the French. Then we drove to the border of the occupied zone—Bourges, I think it was—and waited for the French to deliver them back to us. A ridiculous arrangement, but one that seemed to suit the hypocrisy of the French. These prisoners included poor Herschel Grynszpan. From Bourges we drove back to Paris, where the prisoners were locked up before being flown to Berlin. Well, you probably know better than me what happened to Grynszpan. I know he was in Sachsenhausen for a while. And there never was a show trial, of course.”
“A trial was unnecessary,” said Hitler. “His guilt was obvious. Besides, it might have been embarrassing for Pétain. Just like the Riom trial, when that Jew André Blum gave evidence against Laval.”
I nodded. “Yes, I can see that.”
“I didn’t hear anything about what happened to him,” said Hitler. “At any rate, I cannot recollect. At the end, I had quite a lot on my mind. Himmler probably dealt with him. I daresay he was one of those whose hash got settled by the SS at Flossenburg in the last days of the war. But, you know, Grynszpan had it coming. After all, there’s no doubt that he really did murder Ernst vom Rath. No doubt at all. The Jew just wanted to kill an important German, and vom Rath was merely the unlucky man he killed. There were plenty of witnesses to the murder who came forward and told the truth about what happened. Not that you would know the meaning of truth. Your behavior at Le Vernet was a gross act of deceit and betrayal. To me and your fellow officers.”
“Yes, it was,” I said. “But I’ll live with it.”
“Did you go straight back to Berlin?”
“No, I stayed on in Paris for a while, pretending to make further inquiries about Erich Mielke. A lot of other German communists and men from the International Brigade had volunteered for the French Foreign Legion to escape from the Gestapo in France. The Legion never paid much attention to a man’s past. You enlisted in Marseilles and served in the French colonies, with no questions asked. It was easy to suggest in my report to Heydrich that this was how he had escaped us. The truth is rather more interesting.”
“Not to me,” said Hitler. “What I’m rather more interested in is what you did about the officer who tried to murder you.”
“What makes you think I did anything at all?”
“Because I know men. Go on. Admit it. You got even with him, didn’t you? This Lieutenant Nikolaus Willms.”
“Yes, I did.”
Hitler was triumphant. “I knew it. You sit there with your kangaroo court, Robert Jackson questions, but underneath you’re no different from me. That makes you a hypocrite, Gunther. A hypocrite.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“So what did you do? Denounce him to the Gestapo? The same way you helped denounce that other fellow? The Gestapo captain from Würzburg. What was his name again?”
“Weinberger.” I shook my head. “No, that’s not what happened.”
“Of course. You had Heydrich take care of him. Heydrich was always very good at getting rid of people. Considering he was a mischling, he was an excellent Nazi. I suppose he felt he had to try that much harder to prove himself to me.” Hitler laughed. “That’s the only reason we ever kept him on.”
“No, it wasn’t like that either. I didn’t involve Heydrich.”
Hitler turned his chair around to face me and rubbed his hands. “I want to hear it all. Every sordid detail.”
I yawned again. I was feeling tired. My eyes kept on closing. All I really wanted to do was go to sleep and dream of somewhere different.
“I order you to tell me.”
“Is that a Führer order?”
“If you like.”
I gave a little jolt, the way you do when sleep takes you for a ride and instead you get the crazy idea you just died. This little death is a wonderful sensation. It reminds you why it is that breathing feels so good.
22
FRANCE, 1940
It certainly felt good in the summer of 1940. And there was no better place to be breathing air than Paris. Especially when I had the little maid from the Lutetia hotel to keep me amused. Not that I took advantage of her. As a matter of fact, I was rather scrupulous where Renata was concerned. It was one of the ways I had of convincing myself I wasn’t as big a rat as the field gray said I was. This wasn’t Onegin’s sermon. I mean, I wanted her. And eventually I had her. But I took my time about it the way you do when you like what’s between a girl’s ears as much as you want what’s between her legs. And when it happened, it felt like it was something shaped by a higher motive than simple lust. It wasn’t love, exactly. Neither of us wanted to get married. But it was romance: courtship, desire, fear, and dread. Yes, there was fear and dread, too, because Renata always knew I would go and slay my fire-extinguishing dragon just as soon as I knew why he’d sought to put me out for good.
While I’d been away in the south of France, Renata had searched Willms’s room and once or twice even followed him to discover that he ate at Maxim’s almost every other night. On a general’s pay this would have been unusual enough, but for a mere lieutenant it was nothing short of miraculous, and I resolved to visit the restaurant myself in the hope that this might provide me with some clue as to why he had tried to kill me. And, in this respect, it was fortunate for me that Maxim’s was now run by Otto Horcher, who owned a restaurant in Berlin-Schöneberg. In the spring
of 1938, Otto Horcher had been a client of mine when I’d been running a successful business as a licensed private investigator. I’d worked undercover as a waiter in his place for a couple of weeks in order to find out who was stealing from him. As it turned out, everyone was stealing from him, but one man, the majordomo, was stealing a lot more than all of the others put together. After that we were friends, and even though he was a Nazi and a good friend of Goering’s—which was how he came to be managing the most famous restaurant in Paris—I could always count on him for a table when I needed to impress someone, because after Borchardt, Horcher’s was the best restaurant in Berlin.
Maxim’s was in the rue Royale, in the Eighth Arrondissement and a shrine to Art Nouveau, red velvet, and grande cuisine. Parked outside were several German staff cars, but you didn’t need to be German to eat at Maxim’s. When I went along there with Renata, Pierre Laval, one of Vichy’s leading politicians, was there; and so was Fernand de Brinon. All you needed was money—quite a lot of money—and some bismuth tablets. In 1940, Maxim’s was a good place for men and women who knew what they wanted and how to get it, no matter what the price. Probably still is.
We went through the door and were shown straight to a table—or at least as straight as the oleaginous and fawning waiter could manage.
“Can you afford this?” asked Renata, glancing over the menu with widening eyes.
“It makes me feel young again,” I said. “That was the last time I felt this poor.”
“So what are we doing here?”
“Looking for the one thing that’s not on this menu. Information.”
“About your friend Willms?”
“You know, if you keep on calling him that, even in the spirit of jest, I’m going to have to show you how much I dislike him.”
She shuddered visibly. “No, please. I don’t want to know.” She glanced around the restaurant. “I don’t see him in here.” She did a double take on Laval. “All the same, he should be. There are more snakes in here than in the whole of Africa.”
“I didn’t know you were so well traveled.”
“No, just traveled. Obviously, you haven’t seen Africa.”
“I’m beginning to think I made a mistake about you, Renata. I had the quaint idea that you were the girl next door.”
“Where my parents live, in Bern, if you’d ever met the girl next door, you know why I came to Paris.”
The maître d’ arrived with two menus and more attitude than a professor of aeronautics. Renata found him a little intimidating. Me, I’d been intimidated before, and usually by someone holding something more deadly than a wine list.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Albert, monsieur. Albert Glaser.”
“Well, Albert, it was my impression that Germany had stopped paying France war reparations, but I can see from the prices on this menu that I was wrong about that.”
“Our prices don’t seem to bother most of the other German officers who come in here, monsieur.”
“That’s what victory does for Nazis, Albert. It makes them profligate. Careless. Arrogant. Me? I’m just a humble German from Berlin who’s anxious to renew my acquaintance with a certain Monsieur Horcher. Do me a favor, will you, Albert? Go and whisper in his ear that Bernie Gunther is in the store. Oh, and bring us a bottle of Mosel. The nearer the Rhine, the better.”
Albert bowed stiffly and went away.
“You don’t like the French, do you?” said Renata.
“I’m doing my best,” I said. “But they make it so difficult. Even in defeat, they seem to persist in the belief that this is the best country in the world.”
“Maybe it is. Maybe that’s why they didn’t have the best army.”
“If you’re going to be a philosopher, you’re going to have to grow an enormous beard or a silly mustache. Those are the only people we take seriously in Germany.”
Horcher arrived bearing a bottle of Mosel and three glasses. “Bernie Gunther,” he said, shaking my hand. “Well, I’ll be.”
“Otto. This is Fräulein Renata Matter, a friend of mine.”
Horcher kissed her hand, sat down, and then poured the wine.
“So this is you teaching the hen to be as clever as an egg, is it, Otto?”
“You mean me, here in Paris?” Horcher shrugged. He was a big man with a face like a German general’s. Bavarian or Viennese by origin—I forget which—he always had the air of a man in search of a beer and a brass band. “If Fat Hermann asks you to do something for him, then you don’t say no, right?” He chuckled. “He likes this place a lot. It’s the snooty French waiters he’s got a problem with. Which is why I’m here. To make him and the red stripes feel at home. And to cook some of their favorite dishes.”
“I’m interested in one of your lower-ranking customers,” I explained. “Lieutenant Nikolus Willms. Know him?”
“He’s one of my regulars. Always pays cash.”
“You can’t get many lieutenants in here. Did he win the German lottery? Must have been the South German and the Sachsen with a first-class ticket at these prices, Otto.”
Horcher looked around and leaned toward me.
“This place gets a lot of joy girls, Bernie. High-end. Courtesans, they call them here in Paris. But they’re whores just the same. Your pardon, Miss Matter. It’s not a subject to discuss in front of a lady.”
“Don’t apologize, Herr Horcher,” she said. “I came to Paris for an education. So, please, speak frankly.”
“Thank you, miss. This fellow Willms seems to know an awful lot of these girls, Bernie. So I ask some questions. I mean, I like to know the customers. That’s just good business. Anyway, it seems this Willms has the power to close down any maison de plaisir in Paris. Apparently, he used to be a vice cop in Berlin and can bounce the ball off all the cushions. The word I heard was that the ones that pay he leaves open and the ones that don’t he closes down. A good old-fashioned shakedown.”
“That’s a nice little gold mine,” I said.
“There’s more,” said Horcher. “You see, there’s a diamond mine, too. Have you heard of the One Twenty-two and the Maison Chabanais?”
“Sure. They’re high-class houses that only the Germans can go to. I guess they paid up.”
Horcher nodded. “Like it was the Winter Relief. But Willms was clever. There’s a third high-class house where you need a code word to get through the door and which is by invitation only.”
“And Willms is printing the stationery?”
Horcher nodded. “Guess who got an invitation when he was on a flying trip to Paris?”
“The Mahatma Propagandi?”
“That’s right.” Horcher sounded surprised that I had guessed. “You should have been a detective, do you know that?”
“Surely Willms can’t be doing this on his own?”
“I don’t know if he is or not. But I do know who he often has dinner with. They’re both German officers. One of them is General Schaumberg. The other is a Sipo captain like yourself. Name of Paul Kestner.”
“That’s interesting.” I let that one sink in a long way before my next question. “Otto, you wouldn’t happen to have an address for this puff house, would you?”
“Twenty-two rue de Provence, opposite the Hôtel Drouot, in the Ninth Arrondissement.”
“Thanks, Otto. I owe you one.”
After dinner there was still an hour before the midnight curfew, and I told Renata to take the Métro back to her tiny apartment in the rue Jacob.
“Be careful,” she said.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I shan’t go in. I’ll just—”
“I didn’t say be good. I said be careful. Willms has already tried to kill you once. I don’t think he’d hesitate to try again. Especially now that you’re onto his racket.”
“Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.”
It would have been nice if this had been true. But I didn’t know what I was doing for the simple reason I still didn�
��t have a clue why Willms had tried to kill me.
I decided to walk to the rue de Provence in the hope that the exercise and the summer air might help me to figure things out. For a while I was racking my brains for something I might have said to Willms on the train from Berlin—something that might have made him think I was a threat to his nefarious little organization. And gradually I formed the conclusion that it was nothing I had said; it was what I was that might have alarmed him. At the Alex it was generally supposed that I was Heydrich’s spy, and Willms, who worked there for a while, would have known that; even if he didn’t, Paul Kestner would certainly have said as much. For his part, Kestner had hardly believed that I’d come all the way from Berlin to arrest just one man. If the two of them were partners, then getting rid of me might have looked like a wise precaution, and Willms was just the type to have taken the matter in hand. Of greater concern, perhaps, was how General Schaumberg was involved, and before my theory was complete I was going to need to know something more about him. This seemed more urgent when, arriving outside 22 rue de Provence, I discovered even more staff cars than had been parked in front of Maxim’s.
For several minutes I stood at a distance, in a doorway on the opposite side of the street, watching the comings and goings at what, on the face of it, was a smart address with a liveried doorman. Twice I saw a German officer arrive, utter a single word to the doorman, and be admitted inside, and it seemed obvious that unless I uttered the code word I had no chance of getting into the maison. I was just about to give up and return to my hotel when a staff car turned the corner and I caught a glimpse of the officer in the backseat. He was unremarkable in every way save the red and gold patches on his collar and the Blue Max he wore around his neck. The Pour la Merité—popularly known as the Blue Max—isn’t a common decoration and led me to think that this could be none other than the commandant of Paris, General Alfred von Vollard-Bockelburg himself. And seeing him headed to the maison gave me an idea. What you have to remember is that many of the general staff in Paris in 1940 were tremendous Francophiles, that relations with the French were good, and that German officers all went out of their way to avoid giving offense to the French or to tread on their administrative toes.