by Philip Kerr
“You mean that bastard Heydrich.”
“I do mean that bastard Heydrich.”
Not that Erich Mielke was any less of a bastard than Heydrich, but I thought it best to leave this left unsaid. We ordered breakfast and the train began to move, west toward Marseilles where it would turn north for Paris. One of the Stasi men groaned a little with pleasure as he tasted the coffee.
“This is good coffee,” he muttered as if he wasn’t used to that. And he wasn’t; in the GDR it wasn’t just freedom and toleration that were in short supply, it was everything.
“Without good coffee and cigarettes there would be a revolution in this country,” I said. “You know, maybe you should suggest that to the comrade-general, Friedrich. Exporting revolution might be easier that way.”
Korsch smiled a smile that was almost as thin as his pencil mustache.
“The regime must trust you a lot, Friedrich,” I said. “You and your men. From what I hear it’s not every East German who gets to travel abroad. At least, not without snagging his socks on the barbed wire, anyway.”
“We’ve all got families,” said Korsch. “My first wife was killed in the war. I remarried about five years ago. And I have a daughter now. So you can see there’s every reason to go home again. Frankly, I can’t imagine living anywhere else than Berlin.”
“And the general? What’s his incentive to go home again? He seems to enjoy things here even more than you do.”
Korsch shrugged. “I really couldn’t say.”
“No, perhaps it’s best you don’t.” I glanced sideways at our two Stasi breakfast companions. “You never know who’s listening.”
After breakfast, we went back to the compartment and talked some more. All things considered we were getting on very well now.
“Berchtesgaden,” said Korsch. “That was a hell of a case, too.”
“I’m not likely to forget. And a hell of a place, too.”
“They should have given you a medal for the way you solved that murder.”
“They did. But I threw it away. The rest of the time I was only ever a few steps ahead of a firing squad.”
“I got a police medal toward the end of the war,” admitted Korsch. “I think I still have it in a drawer somewhere in a nice blue velvet box.”
“Is that safe?”
“I’m a party member now. The SED, that is. Everyone who worked in Kripo was reeducated, of course. It’s not for pride I keep the medal but to remind me of who and what I was.”
“Talking of which,” I said, “you might like to remind me who I am, old friend. Or at least who I’m supposed to be. Just in case someone asks me. The sooner I get used to my new identity, the better, don’t you think?”
Korsch removed a manila envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to me. “Passport, money, ticket for the Golden Arrow. There’s a legend that comes with the passport. Your new name is Bertolt Gründgens.”
“He sounds like a communist.”
“Actually, you’re a traveling salesman from Hamburg. You sell art books.”
“I don’t know anything about art.”
“Nor does the real Bertolt Gründgens.”
“Where is he, by the way?”
“Doing ten years in the crystal coffin for publishing and distributing rabble-rousing propaganda against the state.”
The crystal coffin was what prisoners called Brandenburg Prison.
“We prefer to use real people if we can when we give someone a new identity. Somehow it gives the name a little more weight. In case someone decides to do some checking.”
“What about the thallium?” I asked, putting the envelope in the pocket of my trousers.
“Karl will hold on to it until we get to Calais,” Korsch explained, indicating one of the Stasi men. “Thallium is easily absorbed through the skin, which means that certain precautions are required to handle it safely.”
“That suits me very well.” I took off my jacket and threw it onto the seat beside me. “Aren’t you warm in those wool suits of yours?”
“Yes, but ministry expenses don’t run to a Riviera wardrobe,” said Korsch.
We talked more about Berchtesgaden and soon we’d almost forgotten the unpleasantness that had been the occasion for our renewed acquaintance. But just as often we were silent, smoking cigarettes and staring out the carriage window at the blue sea on our left. I’d become fond of the Mediterranean and wondered if I would ever see it again.
Once we were through Cannes the train started to pick up speed and within less than ninety minutes we were halfway to Marseilles. A few kilometers east of Saint-Raphaël I said I had to go to the toilet and Korsch ordered one of his men to accompany me.
“Frightened I’ll get lost?” I said.
“Something like that.”
“It’s a long way to Calais.”
“You’ll survive.”
“I hope so. At least that’s the general idea.”
The Stasi man followed me along the Blue Train to the washroom and it was about then, as the train entered the outskirts of Saint-Raphaël, that it started to slow. Fortunately they hadn’t searched me back in Nice and, alone in the washroom, I removed a leather blackjack from my sock and slapped it against my hand. I’d confiscated the sap off a visitor to the hotel a month or two before and it was a beauty, nice and flexible, with a wrist lanyard and enough heft to give you some real striking power. But it’s a nasty weapon—a villain’s tool because it often relies on a smile or a friendly inquiry to catch its victim unawares. When I was a young uniformed cop in Weimar Berlin, we took a dim view of it whenever we caught some Fritz with one in his pocket because those things can kill you. Which is why sometimes we’d use the Fritz’s own blackjack to save a bit of paperwork and dole out a bit of rough justice—on the knees and on the elbows, which is bad enough. I should know; I’ve been sapped a few times myself.
I kept it behind my back as, smiling, I emerged from the toilet a few minutes later with a cigarette in my other hand.
“Got a light?” I asked my escort. “I left my jacket in the compartment.” My villain’s smile faltered a little as I remembered he was Gene Kelly—the Leipzig man who’d lassoed my neck with the noose. This bastard had it coming, with all the strength in my shoulder.
“Sure,” said Gene, bracing himself against the carriage wall as the train began to brake noisily.
I put the cigarette between my lips expectantly as, glancing down at his jacket pocket, Gene started to retrieve his lighter. It was all the opportunity I needed and I had the blackjack swinging like a juggler’s wooden club in the blink of an eye. He saw it before it hit him the first time, but only just. The spatula-shaped weapon struck the top of his straw-colored head with the sound of a boot kicking a waterlogged football and Gene collapsed like a derelict chimney but, while he was still on his knees, I hit him hard a second time because I certainly didn’t forget or forgive his laughter as he’d watched me hang in Villefranche. I felt a spasm of pain in my neck as I hit him but it was worth it. And when he was lying, unconscious—or worse, I didn’t know and I didn’t care—on the gently moving corridor floor, I took his gun. Then, as quickly as I was able, because he was heavy, I dragged him into the washroom and closed the door, after which I ran to the opposite end of the train, opened a door, and waited for it to stop at a signal, right next to the Corniche in Boulouris-sur-Mer, as I knew it would. Over the years I’d taken that train to Marseilles several times; just the previous day I’d sat in my car after I’d given the Stasi the slip for a few hours and watched the train come to a halt at the very same light.
I jumped off the train onto the side of the tracks, reached up, slammed the carriage door shut, and ran in the direction of the Avenue Beauséjour, where I’d parked my car. Running away is always a better plan than you think; just ask any criminal. It’s only police who will sa
y that running away doesn’t solve anything; it certainly doesn’t solve crimes or make arrests, that’s for sure. Besides, running away was a much more appealing idea than poisoning some Englishwoman I’d once slept with, even if she was a bitch. I’ve got more than enough on my conscience as it is.
FIVE
October 1956
The train would not stop again until it reached Marseilles in a little over an hour’s time. I breathed a sigh of relief, almost. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and it promised to be a perfect late October day. A few French families with children on half-term holidays were walking down to the beaches of Saint-Raphaël, careless, relaxed, laughing, in search of some autumn sun before the long winter, and I looked at them with envy, wishing for a life more ordinary and less interesting than mine. Nobody paid me any attention but just in time I remembered the gun under my waistband and pulled my already sweat-stained shirttail out of my trousers to hide it. Then I climbed a low wooden picket fence and crossed a piece of dry waste ground onto the Avenue Beauséjour. My heart was beating like a small animal’s and if the bar on the corner had been open I might have gone in and swallowed a large one just to keep a lid on my fear, which was growing by the minute. When I was standing right next to my car I uttered a deep, desperate sigh and stared into the bright, prickling atoms of existence and asked myself if there was any real point to what I was doing. When you go on the run you have to believe it’s worth it, but I really wasn’t sure about that. Not anymore. I was already tired. I had no real energy left for life, let alone escape. My neck still ached and my eyes were two acid burns on my face. I just wanted to go to sleep for a hundred years, like Friedrich Barbarossa deep inside his mountain lair at Obersalzberg. Nobody cared if I lived or died—not Elisabeth, and certainly not Anne French—so why was I even doing this? I had never felt more alone in my life.
I lit a cigarette and tried to smoke some sense into those suddenly feeble organs that were shrinking inside my chest.
“Come on, Gunther,” I said. “You’ve been in some tight spots before. All you have to do is get in that crappy French car and drive. Do you really want to give those Bolshevik swine the satisfaction of catching you now? Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Where’s that Prussian backbone people are always on about? Only, you’d better hurry up. Because any minute now someone is going to go looking for you on that train and who knows what will happen when they find Gene Kelly reading the insides of his eyelids. So finish that cigarette, climb in that damn car, and get going before it’s too late. Because if they find you, you know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Hanging is going to sound like a picnic next to thallium poisoning.”
A few minutes later I was driving west along the Route Nationale, toward Avignon. I give a good pep talk even though I say so myself. It was now decided: I was going to survive if only to spite those communist bastards. I had a full tank of fuel and a Citroën that had recently been in the workshop—a four-hundred-franc grease-and-oil change—so I was confident it wouldn’t let me down, or as confident as you can be when it’s not a German car. In the trunk was some money, some warm clothes, another gun, and a few meager possessions from my flat in Villefranche. For a while I kept glancing seaward, where I now had the moving Blue Train in sight on my left, hoping that none of the Stasi were looking out of the compartment window. The road I was on ran parallel to the track. This gave me an anxious half an hour’s driving, but I had no choice about the route if I wanted to pick up the main highway north, along the Rhône. I didn’t really relax until I reached Le Cannet-des-Maures, where the rail track and the DN7 went in different directions, and it was there I finally lost sight of the train altogether. But despite the head start I’d made on my countrymen I didn’t fool myself that it would be beyond their abilities to find me again. Friedrich Korsch was smart, especially with a man like Erich Mielke driving him hard with the threat of what might happen to his wife and five-year-old daughter if he didn’t catch me. Like the Gestapo before them, the Stasi had been finding Germans who didn’t want to be found for almost a decade. That was what they were good at, perhaps the best in the world. The Mounties might have had a reputation for always getting their man but the Stasi always got the men and the women and the children, too, and when they got them they made them all suffer. There were thousands locked up in Berlin’s notorious Stasi prison at Hohenschönhausen, not to mention several concentration camps once run by the SS. Almost certainly they would now proceed to fabricate some reason to force me out of France, whether I wanted to leave the country or not. I had a shrewd idea I might have seriously disabled Gene Kelly with the blackjack, in which case Korsch might finish the job, leaving me wanted for murder by the French police. So I knew I had to get out of France, and soon. Switzerland was more or less impossible to get into, of course, England and Holland were too far away, and Italy probably wasn’t quite far enough. I might have tried Spain but for the fact that it was a Fascist country and I’d had enough of fascism to last me a lifetime. Besides, I’d already more or less made up my mind where I was going even before I’d jumped off the train. Where else could I go but Germany? Where better for a German to hide than among millions of other Germans? Nazi war criminals had been doing it for years. Only a few thousand had ever bothered to escape to South America, or ever needed to. Every year they seemed to find some wanted man who’d reinvented himself in some shithole no-account town like Rostock or Kassel. Once I was across the French border I could find a small town in Germany and disappear for good. Not being anyone particularly important, that had to be a reasonable possibility. Once I was in West Germany, I might get by without either one of my passports. I’d stand a better chance there than almost anywhere. But I bitterly regretted telling Korsch how much I wanted to return home, even if it had been done to convince him we were friends again; he wasn’t stupid and almost certainly he would put himself in my shoes and arrive at the same conclusions I had.
Where else could Gunther go but the Federal Republic? If he stays in France the French police will find him for us and then, when he’s in custody in some small provincial town, we’ll poison him with thallium just like we’ll poison Anne French. There is only West Germany for Bernhard Gunther. He’s been chased out of almost everywhere else.
I put my foot down hard on the gas pedal in an attempt to gain some time because every minute was precious now. As soon as he was at the station in Marseilles, Friedrich Korsch would telephone Erich Mielke at the Hotel Ruhl in Nice and the comrade-general would mobilize every one of those Stasi agents working undercover in France and Germany to start looking for me all along the border. They had my picture, they had the registration number of my car, and they had the almost limitless resources of the Ministry of State Security, not to mention a capacity for ruthless efficiency that would have been the envy of Himmler or Ernst Kaltenbrunner.
Not that I was without resources myself; as a detective with the Berlin Kripo I’d learned a thing or two about evading the law. Any cop will tell you that being one is excellent training for how to be a fugitive. Which is exactly what I was. Until a few days ago I’d been nothing more than a steady source of simple information wearing a tail coat behind the concierge’s desk at the Grand Hôtel in Cap Ferrat. I wondered what some of the guests would have thought if they’d seen me slugging a Stasi agent with a blackjack. The thought of what Gene’s friends might do if ever they caught up with me made me step harder on the accelerator and I sped north at a hundred kilometers an hour, until the memory of the sound of his thick skull receiving the hard blow began to fade a little. Perhaps he would live after all. Perhaps we both would.
I love driving, but France is a big country and its endless roads hold no pleasure for me. Driving is fine if you’re alongside Grace Kelly and in possession of a nice blue convertible Jaguar on a picturesque mountain road with a picnic basket in the trunk. But for most people, motoring in France is dull, and the only thing that stops it from being routine are the French, wh
o are among the worst drivers in Europe. Not without some justification, we used to joke that there were more Frenchmen killed by bad motorists during the fall of France in the summer of 1940—as the French desperately tried to escape the German advance—than there were by the Wehrmacht. For this reason I tried to keep my mind on my driving but, in almost inverse proportion to the relentless monotony of the road ahead, my mind soon began to wander like a lost albatross. It’s said that the prospect of being hanged concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully and I’m sure that’s true; however, I’m here to report that the actual experience of being hanged, and the lack of oxygen that a noose tightening against the two carotid arteries occasions, affects a man’s thinking in all sorts of adverse ways. It had certainly affected mine. Perhaps that was Mielke’s intention: to make me more dumbly compliant. If so, it hadn’t worked. Dumb compliance was never my strong suit. My head was full of mist and clouded with what had been long forgotten, as if the present was now obfuscated by the past. But that wasn’t quite it, either. No, it was more like everything below my line of sight was shrouded in mist and, beyond the desire to return to Germany, I could not see where I had to go and what I had to do. It was as if I were the man in that picture by Caspar David Friedrich and I was a wanderer above a sea of fog—insignificant, deracinated, uncertain of the future, contemplating the futility of it all, and, perhaps, the possibility of self-destruction.
Old and once familiar faces reappeared in the far distance. Snatches of Wagnerian music echoed between half-glimpsed mountaintops. There were smells and fragments of conversation. Women I’d once known: Inge Lorenz and Hildegard Steininger, Gerdy Troost. My old partner Bruno Stahlecker. My mother. But, gradually, as I left the French Riviera behind and headed determinedly north toward West Germany, I started to recall in detail what I’d been prompted to remember by Korsch. It was all his fault—reminiscing like that, in what was obviously, in retrospect, an attempt to put me off my guard. He’d been a decent cop back then. We both were. I thought about the two cases we’d worked together after I’d been drafted back into Kripo on Heydrich’s orders. The second of these cases had been even stranger than the first and I was obliged to investigate just a few months before Hitler invaded Poland. Clearly, as if it were yesterday, I remembered a dark and wintry night in early April 1939, and being driven halfway across Germany in the general’s own Mercedes; I remembered Berchtesgaden, and Obersalzberg, and the Berghof, and the Kehlstein; I remembered Martin Bormann and Gerdy Troost and Karl Brandt and Hermann Kaspel and Karl Flex; and I remembered the Schlossberg Caves and Prussian blue. But most of all I remembered being almost twenty years younger and possessed of a sense of decency and honor I now found almost quaint. For a while back there, I think I sincerely believed I was the only honest man I knew.