by Philip Kerr
“You’ve made your point, Schramma. You’ve found some leverage and you have my cooperation. But get to the part where you want to do me a favor, will you? I’m tired and I want to go home. I’ve spent all night ferrying corpses and if I stay here any longer I’m liable to search your big ugly mouth for a coin.”
He didn’t get it. Not that I cared. Mostly I’m talking for myself these days. And wit only sounds like wit when there’s someone around to appreciate it. Most of the time people like Schramma just talked too much. In Germany there was too much talk, too much opinion, too much conversation and none of it very good. Television and the wireless were just noise. To be effective, words have to be distilled as if they’ve arrived in your balloon via a retort and a cool receiver.
“Have you heard of a local politician called Max Merten? Originally from Berlin, but lives in Munich now.”
“Vaguely. When I was at the Alex there was a Max Merten who was a young district court counselor from the Ministry of Justice.”
“Must be the same Fritz. Done very nicely for himself, too. Nice house in Nymphenburg. Smart office on Kardinal-Faulhaberstrasse. He’s one of the co-founders of the All-German People’s Party—the GVP, which is closely associated with the socialist SED. The other founder is Gustav Heinemann, who used to be a prominent member of the CDU and the interior minister until he fell out with the Old Man. But money’s tight for politics right now. Funds for new parties are thin on the ground. I mean, who wants to be rid of our miracle-working Konrad Adenauer—apart from Heinemann, of course, and some oversensitive Jews?
“So a few weeks ago Max Merten hired me, privately, to check out the bona fides of a potential new Party donor—General Heinrich Heinkel, who’s offered to fund the GVP. But Merten has a not unreasonable suspicion that Heinkel is still a Nazi. And he doesn’t want the GVP taking any tainted money. Anyway it turns out that Merten was right, although not in the way he suspected. Heinkel’s ten thousand is actually coming from the GDR. You see, Merten’s business partner is a prominent German politician by the name of Walter Hallstein, who’s the Old Man’s foreign minister in all but name, and the fellow who’s been conducting our negotiations to set up this new European Economic Community. The GDR hates the idea of the EEC—and more particularly the European Defense Community, of which West Germany will be an important member—and has planned an elaborate undercover operation to discredit the GVP and Merten in the hope that some of the mud they throw will eventually stick to Professor Hallstein. Now, you might ask why an old Nazi is fronting money for the GDR. Well, Heinkel’s eldest son managed to get himself arrested in Leipzig, where he is currently languishing in a jail cell as a guarantor of his father’s cooperation. If he does exactly what he’s told, the young man will be released. That’s his deal.
“A few nights from now Heinkel is going to pay over the money in cash to Merten at the general’s house in Bogenhausen. There’s a room in Heinkel’s house that has been suitably decorated with swastikas and other evidence of the general’s continuing Nazism. While Merten is there the police will turn up to arrest Heinkel for various offenses, including selling Nazi memorabilia. And in order to save his skin Heinkel will tell the police that the money was actually meant as a bribe for Professor Hallstein.”
“And you found out all this how?” I asked.
“I’m a cop, Gunther. That’s what cops do. We find out stuff we’re not supposed to know about. Some days I do the crossword in twenty minutes. Others I dig up shit on people like you and Heinkel.”
“So why are you telling me all this, and not Max Merten?”
Schramma puffed his cigar silently and as his curious blue eyes narrowed I began to guess the whole dirty scheme, which is a bad habit of mine: I’ve always been possessed of a sneaking and uncomfortable feeling that underneath any evidence to the contrary I’m a really bad man—which makes me better able to second-guess other bad men. Maybe it’s the edge you need to be a good cop.
“Because you’ve told Max Merten that General Heinkel is on the level, haven’t you? That’s it, isn’t it? The cops aren’t going to come at all for the simple reason you’re planning to snatch the GDR’s money for yourself. You’re going to turn up an hour or two before Max Merten and rob this general.”
“Something like that. And you’re going to help me, Gunther. After all, it’s quite possible that Heinkel may have company. A man who robs alone is a man who gets caught.”
“There’s only one thing worse than a crook and it’s a crooked cop.”
“You’re the one with the false identity, Gunther, not me. In my book that says you’re dirty. So spare me any lectures about honesty. If I have to I’ll take care of the job myself. Of course, that will mean you’ll be in jail or, at the very least, on the run. But I’d much prefer it if you were there, backing me up.”
“I’m beginning to understand a little more about what happened to Paul Herzefelde back in 1932,” I said. “It was you who was squeezing that fraudster, wasn’t it? Kohl, was it? Did Herzefelde guess as much? Yes, that would fit. It was you who killed him. And you who let the Nazis take the blame because he was a Jew. That was smart. I’ve misjudged you, Schramma. You must be awfully good at pretending to be a good cop to get away with it for so many years.”
“Really, it’s not so difficult these days. The police are like everyone else in Germany. A little short on manpower after the war. They can’t afford to be so fussy about who they have back on the force. Now you, you really are a smart fellow, the way you figured all that out in just a few minutes.”
“If I was that smart I wouldn’t be sitting in this car talking to a bastard like you, Schramma.”
“You’re selling yourself short, Gunther. It’s not every day you solve a murder that’s twenty-five years old. Believe it or not, I like that about you. And it’s another reason I want you along for the ride. You don’t think like a normal person. If you’ve survived this long as someone else, I figure you can see things coming. Situations developing. I can use experience like that. Now, and in the future. There’s no one left in Munich I can really trust; most of my younger Ettstrasse colleagues are too honest for their own good, and more importantly, for mine.”
“I’m glad to hear that. I’d hate to think we lost a war just to keep scum like you in uniform.”
“Keep using your mouth if that helps. But I figure some money will shut you up. I’ll make it worth your while, Gunther. I’ll give you ten percent. That’s a thousand marks. Don’t tell me you couldn’t use a thousand marks. Fate looks like it’s been dogging your footsteps for a long time now with a length of lead pipe in its hand.”
As if to make the point there was now an automatic pistol in his own big hand and it was jammed up against my liver, which I figured I could ill afford to lose in spite of the damage it had already sustained after years of heavy drinking.
“Just don’t get too clever with me, Gunther,” he said, and nodded at the hospital’s front door. “Or it’ll be your corpse that’s short of a face in that stinking mortuary.”
FIVE
–
A pewter-colored sky compressed the cold, even landscape; for a Bavarian town Munich is as flat as a mattress and just as comfortable, and there’s no part of Munich more comfortable than Bogenhausen, on the east bank of the Isar River. General Heinkel’s house was a white three-story villa with louvered green shutters, about thirty windows, and a vaguely fairy-tale stillness. You could hear the river in the drains and, in the little church that was opposite where Schramma had parked the BMW, the sound of an organist practicing a Bach cantata that might have been O lovely day, o hoped-for time, only that wasn’t how I regarded it. A green picket fence sloped gently down to an untidy line of deciduous trees that bordered the Isar. On the other side of the empty cobbled street was a small military hospital for soldiers whom the war had left maimed or horribly disfigured. I knew this because while we were sitting in
the car we watched in uncomfortable silence as a group of maybe ten or fifteen of them trooped out the gate to take their afternoon constitutional around Bogenhausen. One man glanced in our window as he passed by although, in truth, it was hard to believe that this had been his intention as a large part of his face was pointed in completely the opposite direction. The man behind him seemed to be wearing a pair of thick goggles or spectacles made of pink flesh that were the result, perhaps, of some plastic surgery that was intended to remedy extensive facial burns. A third man with one eye and one leg and one arm and two crutches appeared to be in charge, and I thought of Pieter Brueghel’s famous painting—The Blind Leading the Blind—and shuddered as I considered my own comparatively good fortune. It’s true what Homer says that sometimes it’s the dead who are the mighty lucky ones.
“Jesus Christ,” exclaimed Schramma, relighting his cigar. “Will you look at that goddamn hink? And I thought you were ugly, Gunther.” He took out a silver hip flask and bit off a large piece of the contents.
“Show a little respect,” I said.
“For what? That little hit parade? Better those limping hinks than me, that’s what I say.”
“In this particular case I’m forced to agree with you. They are better than you, Schramma. And always will be.” I shook my head. His company was beginning to become tiresome. “What are we waiting for anyway? You still haven’t said.”
“We’re waiting for the money to turn up, that’s what. As soon as it does we’re in business, but not until. So stop flapping your tongue and take a bite of this.”
He handed me the flask, on which were engraved the words Thank You, Christian Schramma, for being our Wedding Witness, 25.11.1947. Pieter and Johanna. I almost laughed at the idea of a snake like Schramma being the best man at anyone’s wedding; then again, it wasn’t just the German police who were short of good men, it was everyone these days. Pieter and Johanna included. I took a swig from the flask; it was cheap schnapps but nonetheless welcome. Alcohol is the best accomplice for almost any crime you care to mention.
“I’m just saying,” he said. “It’s a bit of a shock, that’s all. To see men like that walking around the streets, scaring the horses. They should wave a red flag or something, like they used to do when a train was coming.”
“The sea always looks nice until the tide goes out,” I said, “and then you see all the ugly things it hides. Germany’s a bit like that, I think. I mean, we’ve got more of that kind of thing than most. It’s to be expected and we shouldn’t be surprised when we find what’s really there. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Me, I’m more of a Darwinist, I guess. I tend to believe in a Germany in which only the strong will survive.”
“That’s a new idea.”
“Oh, I don’t mean politically. Politics are finished in this country. I mean survival not just of the fittest, but of the best, too. The best people to make the best cars and the best washing machines and the best vacuum cleaners. It seems so obvious that I wonder why Hitler didn’t think of it himself. Germany, the manufacturing powerhouse and the economic master of Europe. And with that, a new realism. Sure, human values will have importance but for a long while yet the cold numbers will have to take precedence if we’re going to be back on top where we belong.”
I took a second swig and handed back the flask. “Is this the speech you gave at the wedding or at Bretton Woods?”
“Fuck you, Gunther.” Schramma took a swig from the flask and swished it around like a mouthwash. He needed it with the cigar he was smoking. “As soon as I get enough money from this whole deal I’m going to buy myself a share of the economic miracle. I’m going to go into business for myself.”
“And this little caper is what? Pro bono publico?”
“I mean I’m going to become a manufacturer. I’m going to buy myself this nice little factory I know that makes cutlery.”
“What do you know about manufacturing?”
“Nothing. But I know how to use a knife and fork.”
“Now that is a surprise.”
“Seriously, though. This is what’s going to give Germany an advantage over England, for example. That bottom line on the balance sheet. The Tommies mistakenly believe that their victory has earned them the right to those human values first. That’s why they created their welfare state but history will prove they can’t afford it. You see if I’m wrong.”
There was more of this; maybe Schramma saw himself as the new Paul Samuelson, not that it mattered because after a few minutes I stopped listening. That’s probably good advice with all economists. After a few more minutes a man wearing a Gannex coat and a Karakul hat came up the slope from the river end and went through the gate of the white house.
“Here we go,” said Schramma.
He’d already given me a scarf with which to cover my face but now he took out a Walther PPK, worked the slide, thumbed the hammer down to make it safe, and handed it to me, but then held on to the pistol for a moment so that he could deliver a short lecture.
“Just so you know, I have to pay someone out of my share, and this person knows who you are.”
“Oh? Who’s that?”
“All you need to know is that if you double-cross me then you’ll be double-crossing him, too. So don’t go getting any bright ideas, Gunther. I want you watching my back, not putting a hole in it. Clear?”
“Clear.” But of course it wasn’t, not by a long chalk. I knew there was now a round in the chamber—it was impossible to work the slide on an automatic without putting some brass in there—but I had no idea if that round was live or blank. The way I saw things it was taking a risk, him giving me a loaded gun, so why would he? What was to stop me from robbing him of the ten thousand when he’d finished robbing the general?
I figured a blank would serve his purpose just as well as a live round; no one was going to argue with a pistol, and if I had to shoot, my making a loud noise would be almost as effective as putting a bullet in someone; safer for him that way, too. Of course, I might have worked the slide myself and dropped the round into the palm of my hand and found out one way or the other but, in a strange way, it suited us both for me to act as if the gun was loaded, even if it wasn’t. Naturally it had crossed my mind that the real purpose of his asking me along was not to watch his back but to see if he could really trust me or even to be the fall guy. I figured I had a better chance of coming through it all unscathed if I actively allowed Schramma to believe that I believed I was properly heeled.
He let the gun go and I thrust it quickly into my coat pocket.
We got out of the car and I followed him through the picket gate. We walked around to the side of the house and the back door. The organist had started playing another cantata, which the rooks and crows seemed to enjoy more than I did, the way they were joining in on the chorus. By now there were a few lights on in the house but only on the second floor.
Schramma stopped by a wheelbarrow that was leaning against the wall and glanced in the window through the back door, which wasn’t locked. A few moments later we were in the house. There was a strong smell of apples and cinnamon in the air as if someone had been baking strudel but it didn’t make me feel hungry. In fact, I felt a little sick; I couldn’t help but notice that the grip on the .38 in Schramma’s hand was Dekka-taped as if he planned on leaving it at the scene, which didn’t augur well for anyone, me least of all. You don’t plan to leave a gun behind unless you’ve used it. So I was feeling scared about what I’d let myself in for. But what choice did I have? Christof Ganz was just getting started in life and it wasn’t like there were any other new identities available to me. Not even in Germany. For the moment, at least, my foot was well and truly caught between the serrated steel jaws of Schramma’s mantrap.
Schramma balanced his half-chewed cigar on the side of the kitchen table, pulled the scarf over his nose and mouth, outlaw-style, and then nodd
ed at me to do the same. We walked quietly along a dimly lit corridor toward a room with voices at the front of the house.
SIX
–
Inside the room everything looked straightforward enough: a short man with a Kaiser Wilhelm waxed mustache and wearing a green leather waistcoat, the general was standing in the dining room, opposite a man in a Gannex coat who was younger than I’d supposed, with one of those little blond beards beloved of aspirant Leninists. The money, all ten thousand of it, lay on the red-checkered tablecloth under the eyes of a Northern Renaissance portrait of a young woman with a folded vellum letter in her hand. If it was good news her expression wasn’t giving anything away. Then again, she was losing the hair on her crown, so she didn’t have much to be cheerful about.
“Who the hell are you?” spluttered the general. “What’s the meaning of this?”
“The gun and the mask ought to be a bit of a clue, General,” said Schramma. “I mean to steal this money. But if you do exactly what you’re told you won’t get hurt.” He stood to one side and jerked the gun at the door. “Downstairs. Now.”
The general walked to the door but the other man stayed put as if Schramma hadn’t been speaking to him.
“You too,” added Schramma.
The man in the Gannex coat frowned as if this was somehow a surprise to him. “Me?”
Schramma put the gun against the man’s head and lifted the edge of the Karakul hat so that it now sat on the back of his blond-haired head like a skullcap. Quickly he frisked him for a gun and not finding one said, “What do you want, a memo? Yes, you too.”
The man in the hat gave Schramma an angry, bitter sort of look, almost as if they knew each other, and perhaps he would have said more but for the gun in the cop’s hand. It’s never a good idea to be brave around a .38. People have been shot for less. I expect the general knew that. And like me perhaps he’d noticed that the butt of the gun was taped, and the trigger, too, probably. So he bit his lip, wisely I thought, and walked ahead of us, with me bringing up the rear like some dumb postilion who looked like he was just along for the ride.