Field Gray

by Philip Kerr

  35

  GERMANY, 1954

  The following morning, I remained at the pension in Göttingen while Vigée and some of the others went to arrest the man posing as Kettenacher. I asked if I might be allowed to go to church, but Grottsch said that Vigée had given orders that we should remain indoors and await his return. He said, “I hope it’s him so that we can go back to Hannover. I really don’t like Göttingen anymore.”

  “Why? It’s a nice enough little town.”

  “Too many memories,” said Grottsch. “I went to university here. My wife, too.”

  “I didn’t know you were married.”

  “She was killed in an air raid,” he said. “In October 1944.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And you? Were you married before?”

  “Yes. She died, too. But much later on. In 1949. We had a small hotel in Dachau.”

  He nodded. “Dachau is very lovely,” said Grottsch. “Well, it was, before the war.”

  For a moment we shared a silent memory of a Germany that was gone and probably would never be again. Not for us, anyway. And certainly not for our poor wives. Conversations in Germany were often like this: People would just stop in the middle of a sentence and remember a place that was gone or someone who was dead. There were so many dead that sometimes you could actually feel the grief on the streets, even in 1954. The feeling of sadness that afflicted the country was almost as bad as it had been during the Great Depression.

  We heard a car draw up outside the pension and Grottsch went to see if they had our man. A few minutes later, he came back looking worried.

  “Well,” he said. “They’ve got someone. Yes, they’ve got someone, all right. But if it is Edgard de Boudel, then he speaks German better than any Franzi I ever met.”

  “Of course he would,” I said. “He was fluent even when I knew him. His German was better than mine.”

  Grottsch shrugged. “Anyway, he insists he’s Kettenacher. Vigée’s confronting him with the real Kettenacher’s documents now. Did you see Kettenacher’s party ID? The man had donation stamps going back to 1934. And did you see those dueling scars on his cheek in the photographs?”

  I nodded. “It’s true. He was everyone’s idea of what a Nazi should look like. Especially now that he’s dead.”

  “Why do I get the feeling that you weren’t a party member yourself?”

  “Does it really matter now? If I was or I wasn’t?” I shook my head. “As far as our new friends are concerned—the French, the Amis, the Tommies—we were all fucking Nazis. So it doesn’t matter who was and who wasn’t. They look at all those old Leni Riefenstahl movies, and who can blame them?”

  “There was never a moment when you believed in Hitler, like the rest of us?”

  “Oh yes. There was. For about a month in the summer of 1940. After we licked the French in six weeks. I believed in him then. Who didn’t?”

  “Yes. That was the best time for me, too.”

  After a while we heard raised voices, and a few minutes later, Vigée came into the room. He looked cross and out of breath, and there was blood on the back of one hand, as if he’d hit someone.

  “He’s not Richard Kettenacher,” he said. “That much is certain. But he swears he’s not Edgard de Boudel. So. It’s up to you now, Gunther.”

  I shrugged. “All right.”

  I followed the Frenchman down to the wine cellar where Wenger and Moeller were guarding our prisoner. The photographs the Amis had shown me had been black-and-white, of course, and blown up after being shot from a distance so that they were a little blurred and grainy. Doubtless the real de Boudel would have gone to great lengths to disguise himself. He would have lost some weight, dyed his hair, grown a mustache perhaps. When I’d been a uniformed policeman in the twenties, I’d arrested many suspects on the basis of a photograph or a police description; but this was the first time I’d been obliged to do it in order to save my own neck.

  The man was sitting in a chair. He was wearing handcuffs and his cheeks were red, as if he’d been struck several times. He looked about sixty, but he was probably younger. In fact, I was certain of it. As soon as he saw me, the man smiled.

  “Bernie Gunther,” he said. “I never thought I’d be pleased to see you again. Tell this French idiot I’m not the man he’s looking for. This Edgar Boudel he keeps asking me about.” He spat on the floor.

  “Why don’t you tell him yourself?” I said. “Tell him your real name and then perhaps he’ll believe you.”

  The man frowned and said nothing.

  “Do you recognize this man?” Vigée asked me.

  “Yes, I recognize him.”

  “And is it him? Is it de Boudel?”

  “Who is this Boudel fellow, anyway?” said the prisoner. “And what’s he supposed to have done?”

  I nodded. “Yes, that’s a good idea,” I told the prisoner. “Find out what this wanted man’s done, and if it turns out to be rather less heinous than what you did yourself, then put your hands up for it. Why not? I can see how you could think that might work.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Gunther. I’ve spent the last nine years in a Russian POW camp. Whatever it is I’m supposed to have done, I reckon I’ve paid for it several times over.”

  “As if I care.”

  “I demand to know this man’s name,” said Vigée.

  “How about it?” I told the prisoner. “We both know you’re not Richard Kettenacher. I suppose you stole his pay book and just swapped the photograph on the inside cover—stuck it on with some egg white. Russians didn’t usually pay too much attention to the corner stamps. You figured a new name and a different service would keep the dogs off your trail, because after Treblinka you knew that someone would be coming to look for you. You and Irmfried Eberl, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Neither do I,” complained Vigée. “And I’m beginning to get irritated.”

  “Permit me to introduce you, Émile. This is Major Paul Kestner. Formerly of the SS and deputy commander of the Treblinka death camp in Poland.”

  “Rubbish,” said Kestner. “Rubbish. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “At least he was until Himmler found out about what he was doing there. Even he was horrified by what he and the commandant had been up to. Theft, murder, torture. Isn’t that right, Paul? So horrified that you and Eberl were kicked out of the SS, which is how you found yourself in the Wehrmacht, defending Berlin, trying to redeem yourself for your earlier crimes.”

  “Nonsense,” said Kestner.

  “You may not have Edgard de Boudel in custody, Émile, but you do have one of the worst war criminals in Europe. A man who is responsible for the deaths of at least three quarters of a million Jews and Gypsies.”

  “Rubbish. Rubbish. And don’t think I’m unaware of what this is really about, Gunther. It’s about Paris, isn’t it? June 1940.”

  Vigée frowned. “What about it?”

  “He tried to have me murdered,” I said.

  “I knew it,” said Kestner.

  Vigée nodded at the door. “Outside,” he told me. “I need to speak with you.”

  I followed him out of the wine cellar, up the stairs, and into the little walled garden by the canal. Vigée lit us each a cigarette.

  “Paul Kestner, huh?”

  I nodded. “I imagine the UN War Crimes Commission will be pleased to have him in custody,” I said.

  “You think I give a fuck about any of that?” he said angrily. “How many fucking Jews he killed. I don’t care. I don’t care about Treblinka, Gunther. Or the fate of some lousy Gypsies. They’re dead. Too bad. It’s not my problem. What I do care about is finding Edgard de Boudel. Got that? What I care about is finding the man who tortured and murdered almost three hundred Frenchmen in Indochina.” He was shouting now and waving his arms in the air, but he didn’t grab me by the lapels, and I sensed that while he might have been angry a
nd disappointed, he was also wary of me now.

  “So we’re going back to that refugee camp at Friedland tomorrow and we’re going to look at every man there and we’re going to find de Boudel. Understand?”

  “It’s not my fault that he’s not our man,” I shouted back. “But it was the right call. And, assuming your information is correct and de Boudel really was on that fucking train, then it stands to reason he’s in the camp.”

  “You’d better pray he is, or we’re both in trouble. It’s not only your ass, it’s mine, too.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll do that.”

  “What?”

  “Pray. Pray to get out of this place for a while. To get away from you, Émile.” I shook my head. “I need some room to breathe. To clear my head.”

  He seemed to control himself and then nodded. “Yes. I’m sorry. It’s not your fault—you’re right. Look, take a walk around town. Go to church again. I’ll send someone with you.”

  “What about him? Kestner?”

  “We’ll take him back to the refugee camp. The German authorities can decide what to do with him. But me, I don’t have any time for the UN and their stupid War Crimes Commission. I don’t want to know about it.”

  Muttering in French, he walked off, probably before one of us felt obliged to try to hit the other again.

  I found Grottsch, who to my surprise tried to excuse the Frenchman with the explanation that his daughter was ill. We collected our coats and went outside into the autumn sunshine. Göttingen was full of students, which served to remind me that my own daughter, Dinah, was probably in her first year of university by now. At least I hoped she was.

  Walking around a bit, Grottsch and I found ourselves beside the ruins of the town’s synagogue on Obere-Masch Strasse, burned to the ground in 1938, and I wondered how many of Göttingen’s Jews had met their ends in Treblinka at the hands of Paul Kestner and if nine years in a Russian POW camp really was sufficient punishment for three quarters of a million people. Perhaps there was after all no earthly punishment that was equal to a crime like that. But if not here on earth, then where?

  Our footsteps took us back to St. Jacobi’s Church. I stopped to look in the window of a shop opposite, but when I walked away I found I was alone. I stopped and glanced around, expecting to see Grottsch coming toward me, but he was nowhere to be seen. For a moment I considered escape. The prospect of visiting the Friedland refugee camp and being seen by Bingel and Krause was no more appealing than it had been the previous day, and about the only thing that prevented me from walking straight to the railway station was a lack of money and the knowledge that my French passport was back at the Pension Esebeck. I was still debating my next course of action when I found I was closely accompanied by two men wearing neat little hats and short dark raincoats.

  “If you’re looking for your friend,” said one of the men, “he had to sit down and rest. On account of the fact that he suddenly felt very tired.”

  I was still looking around for Grottsch, as if I really cared what happened to him, when I realized that there were two more men behind me.

  “He’s sleeping it off in the church.” The man speaking had good German, but it wasn’t his first language. He wore heavy-framed glasses and was smoking a metal-stemmed pipe. He puffed, and a cloud of tobacco smoke obscured his face for a moment.

  “Sleeping it off?”

  “A hypodermic shot. Nothing to worry about. Not for him and not for you, Gunther. So relax. We’re your friends. There’s a car around the corner waiting to take us on a little ride.”

  “Suppose I don’t want to go for a ride?”

  “Why suppose anything of the kind when we both know that’s exactly what you want? Besides, I’d hate to have to give you a shot like your friend Grottsch. The effects of thiopental can linger unpleasantly for several days after injection.” He had my arm now and his colleague had the other, and we were already turning the corner onto Weender Strasse. “A new life awaits you, my friend. Money, and a new identity, a new passport. Anything you want.”

  The door of a large black saloon swung open ahead of me. A man wearing a leather jacket and a matching cap was standing behind it. Another man, walking a few steps ahead of me, stopped at the car door and turned to face me. I was being kidnapped, and by people who knew exactly what they were doing.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Surely you’ve been expecting us,” said the man beside me. “After your note.” He grinned. “You can’t imagine the excitement your information has caused. Not just here in Germany, but at headquarters, too.”

  I bent forward to get into the car and felt someone’s hand on the top of my head, just in case at the last moment I tried to resist and bumped my head on the door frame. Cops and spies all over the world were always thoughtful like that. Two men outside the car stayed on the alert, looking around nervously until everyone who was supposed to be in the car was in the car, and then the doors were closed and we were moving and it was all over, with no more fuss than if we were all going on an unexpected shopping trip to the next town.

  After a few minutes, I saw that we were driving west and breathed a sigh of relief. At least now I knew who was kidnapping me and why.

  “Just sit back and enjoy the journey, my friend. From here on in, you’re five-star all the way. Those are my orders, Gunther, old buddy. I’m to treat you like a very important person.”

  “That will make a pleasant change from when I was last a guest of you Americans,” I said. “Frankly, there was something about it I didn’t like.”

  “And what was that?”

  “My cell.”

  36

  GERMANY, 1954

  Two and a half hours later, we were in Frankfurt and heading across the Main into the north of the city. Our destination was an enormous curving, honey-colored marble office building with six square wings that lent the place a quasi-military aspect, as if any minute the clerks and secretaries inside might abandon their typewriters and comptometers and man some antiaircraft guns on the flat roofs. I hadn’t ever been there, but I recognized it from old newsreels and picture magazines. Completed in 1930, the Poelzig Ensemble, or Poelzig Complex, had been the largest office building in Europe and the corporate headquarters of the I. G. Farben conglomerate. This former model of German business and modernity had been the center for Nazi wartime research projects relating to the creation of synthetic oil and rubber, not to mention Zyklon B, the lethal gas used in concentration camps. It was now the headquarters of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany (the HICOG) and, it now seemed, of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  The car passed through a couple of military checkpoints before we parked and entered a temple-like portico. Behind this were some bronze doors and on the other side a capacious hallway with a large American flag, several American soldiers, and two curving staircases covered with sheet aluminum. In front of the paternoster elevator I was invited to step aboard and to disembark on the ninth floor. A little nervously—for I had never before ridden one of these intimidating elevators—I complied.

  The ninth floor was very different from those below. There were no windows. It was lit from skylights instead of banded glazing, which probably afforded the security-minded inhabitants yet more privacy. The ceiling was also much lower, which made me wonder if one of the qualifications to be an American spy in Europe might be a lack of height.

  Certainly, the man to whom I was now introduced was not tall, although he was hardly short, either. He wasn’t anything you could have described, being unremarkable in almost every way. He was, I suppose, like an American professor, albeit one who spoke fluent German. He wore a blazer, gray flannel trousers, a button-down blue shirt, and some sort of club or academic tie—maroon with little shields. The introduction was not, however, illuminating in that he appeared to have no name, just a title. He was “the Chief,” and that was all I ever knew about him. I did, however, recognize the two men who were also waiting for me in that window
less meeting room. Special Agents Scheuer and Frei—were those their real names? I still had no idea—waited until the Chief had acknowledged their presence before nodding at me with silent courtesy.

  “Have you been here before?” he asked. “I mean, when this building was owned by I. G. Farben.”

  “No, sir.” I shrugged. “As a matter of fact, I’m surprised to find it’s still here. Apparently undamaged. A building this size, of such importance to the Nazi war effort—I’d always assumed it was bombed to rubble, like almost everything else in this part of Germany.”

  “There are two schools of opinion on that, Gunther. Sit down, sit down. One school has it that the Americans forbidden to bomb it because of the building’s proximity to the Allied POW camp at Grüneburgpark. The other school would have you believe that Eisenhower had this building marked out as his future European headquarters. Apparently, the building reminded him of the Pentagon, in Washington. And I suppose, if I’m honest, it does look a little similar. So maybe that’s the real explanation after all.”

  I drew a chair out from a long, dark wood table and sat down and waited for the Chief to get to the point of my being there. But it seemed he hadn’t yet finished with Eisenhower.

  “The president’s wife wasn’t quite so enamored of this building, however. She took particular exception to a large bronze female figure—a nude that used to sit on the edge of the reflecting pool. She thought it wasn’t suitable for a military installation.” The Chief chuckled. “Which makes me wonder how many real soldiers she’s actually met.” He frowned. “I’m not sure where that statue went. The Hoechst Building, perhaps? That nude always did look like she needed some medicine, eh, Phil?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Scheuer.

  “You must be tired after your journey, Herr Gunther,” said the Chief. “So I’ll try not to fatigue you any more than I have to. Would you like some coffee, sir?”