by Philip Kerr
'Jesus Christ, Gunther,' exclaimed one of my American interrogators. 'Are you trying to tell us that you had that communist bastard Mielke in your power and you let him go?'
'Yes. I am.'
'What, are you crazy? That's twice you saved his bacon. Did you ever think about that? Jesus.'
'Of course I thought about it.'
'I mean, didn't you ever regret that?'
'I don't think I could have made myself clear,' I said. 'Even while I was doing it, even while I was pretending I didn't recognise him, I regretted it. Captain Anlauf s murder left three orphaned daughters. You see, what you've got to remember is that for a while back there, in the dog days of Weimar, the communists were every bit as loathsome as the Nazis. Maybe more so. After all, it was the Comintern that ordered the German communist party to treat the country's governing SPD as the main enemy, not the Nazis. Can you imagine it? In the Red Referendum of July 1931 the KPD and the Nazis marched together and voted together. That was the non-aggression pact in miniature. I always hated them for that. It was the Reds who really destroyed the Republic, not the Nazis.' I helped myself to another of the Ami's cigarettes. 'And if that wasn't enough, there's my own experience of Soviet hospitality to take into account as well. For why I hate the communists.'
'Well, we all hate the Reds,' said the man with the pipe.
'No. You hate the Reds because you've been told to hate them. But for five years they were your allies. Roosevelt and Truman shook hands with Stalin and pretended he was different from Hitler. Which he wasn't. I hate the Reds because I've learned to hate them the way a dog learns to hate the man who beats it regularly. During Weimar. During the war. On the Russian front. But most of the reason I hate them is because I spent almost two years in a Soviet labour camp. And until I met you boys I thought that was about as much hate as I could have for any one race of people.'
'We're not so bad.' The man with the pipe took it out of his mouth and started to refill it. 'When you get to know us.'
'You can get used to anything, it's true,' I said.
The man with the glasses tutted loudly. By now I vaguely recognised him from seven years earlier, at the Stiftskaserne Hospital, in Vienna.
'After all the trouble we had getting you this exclusive suite,' he said. He started to clean his glasses with the end of his tie. 'I'm hurt.'
'When you're done cleaning your glasses,' I said, 'the windows in here could use a wipe, too. I'm particular about windows. Particularly when I know who's been breathing on them. There's nothing about this cell I like now I know who was in here last.'
The man with the pipe was finally lighting up. Hitler would have hated his pipe. It looked as if I'd found one reason at last to like Adolf Hitler.
The Ami sucked at the stem, blew out some sweet smoke, and said, 'I watched an old newsreel the other day. Of Hitler making a speech at Tempelhof Field, in Berlin. There were one million people that day. Apparently it took twelve hours just to get everyone in there, and another twelve to get them all out again. I guess you were the only Berliner who stayed home that night.'
'Berlin nightlife was much better before the Nazis,' I said.
'That's what I hear. People say it was quite something. Degenerate but lively. All those clubs. Striptease dancers. Naked ladies. Open homosexuality. What were you people thinking? I mean no wonder the Nazis got an in.' He shook his head. 'On the other hand, Munich's kind of dull, I think.'
'It has some advantages,' I said. 'There are no Ivans in Munich.'
'Is that why you lived there, after you were in that POW camp? Instead of Berlin?'
'One reason, I suppose.'
'You were in and out of that camp relatively quickly.' He had finished cleaning his glasses and put them back on his head. They were still too small for him and I wondered if American heads were like American stomachs and kept on growing faster than those in Europe. 'In comparison with a lot of other guys. I mean, some of your old comrades are only just coming home now.'
'I was lucky,' I said. 'I escaped.'
'How?'
'Mielke was involved.'
'Then we'll pick it up there tomorrow, shall we? In here. Ten o'clock.'
'You'd better clear that with my secretary,' I said. 'Tomorrow's the day when I start writing my book.'
'What did I tell you? You know this is a great room for a writer. Maybe the spirit of Adolf Hitler will come and help you out with a few pages.'
'Seriously, though,' said the other Ami. 'If you need pen and paper to make a few notes, about Mielke, just ask the guard. Might help to jog your memory if you wrote a few things down.'
'Why now? Why not before?'
'Because things are starting to become more important. Mielke starts to become more important. So, the more details you can remember the better.'
'I know one spirit that might help a lot,' I said. 'And it isn't Hitler's.'
'Yeah?'
'I'm a little bit like Goethe,' I said. 'When I'm writing a book I find that a bottle of good German brandy usually helps.'
'Is there such a thing as a good German brandy?'
'I'll settle for some cheap vodka, only a man needs a hobby when he's got his feet in the cement. Something to take his mind off the present and put it somewhere in the past. About seven years ago, to be more accurate.'
'All right,' said the man with the glasses. 'We'll get you a bottle of something.'
'And I would like to catch up on my smoking. I'd given up until I left Cuba. Since I met you I've got a much better reason to kill myself.'
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 pose he always had of 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 Doctor 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 realisation 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 Léon 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 dare say 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 behaviour 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 Marseille 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 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 Wiirzburg. 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. For 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.
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: 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 grey 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 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 major- domo, 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 Goring'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 travelled.'
'No, just travelled. 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 Berne, if you'd ever met the girl next door, you know why I came to Paris.'
The maitre 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.'
&
nbsp; '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 favour, 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 moustache. 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 Fraulein 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 favourite dishes.'
'I'm interested in one of your lower-ranking customers,' I explained. 'Lieutnant Nikolaus Willms. Know him?'