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Earl of Coventry.
Lord Viscount Cobham.
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Charles Cæfar, Esq;
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D.
DUKE of Devonshire, Lord President of the Council.
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Lord Delaware.
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Lord Dupplin.
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Mr. Henry Flitcroft.
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DUKE of Hamilton, &c.
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Mr. Thomas Kynaston.
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Q.
DUKE of Queensbury and Dover. Queen's College Library at Oxford.
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T.
LORD Viscount Townfhend, Principal Secretary of State.
Earl of Thomond.
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V.
LORD Vane.
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Mr. George Vertue.
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EARL of Wymes.
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Thomas Walker, Esq;
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William Wenman, Esq;
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Hon. Sir Thomas Wentworth, Knight of the Bath.
Sir Anthony Westcomb, Bart.
Mr.——Wexham.
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Mr. Henry Williams.
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George Wright, Esq;
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Matthew Wymondefold, Esq;
Sir William Wyndham, Bart.
Watkin Williams Wynn, Esq;
Y.
Hitch Young, Esq;
THE PLATES
A Perspective View of St. Martins Church
The Plan of the Church of St Martin.
The West front of St Martins Church.
Section from South to North
The Eaft End
The section from East to West of St. Martins Church.
The Ceiling of the New Church of St Martin.
The North Side of St Martins Church.
The West End.
The North Side.
The East End
Section from South to North
The section from East to West.
West End
South Side.
Plan of the Upper Order.
Plan of the Under Order.
The West end
The East end
The South side.
Prospectŭs Templi Stæ Mariæ Londini in vico dicto the Strand, Architectura Jacobi Gibbs.
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Plan of the Upper Order.
Plan of the under Order.
The West end.
The North Side.
The West Front
The Section from South to North.
Australe latus Ecclesiœ Omnium Sanctorum apud Derbienfes, mox ab imis instaurandœ, una cum Sepulchrali Monumento inquo Reliquiœ Pranobilis Devoniœ Prosapiœ conduntur, Stante adhuc Furri magnificâ, quœ ad 178 pedes caput sublime attollit, Minister & Paro, chiani ejusdem Ecclesiœ Duci Devaniensi, Viro non minus integris moribus, quam splendidis Natalitijs illustri, humillime dedicant.
The Section.
The East end of the New Church att Derby.
The West Side fronting the River.
The upright of the South Side of Kings College fronting the Chapel.
The middle parte of the West Side upon a larger Scale
The halfe of the Section of the Hall of Kings College longrvise
The Section for the end of the Hall.
The Publick Building at Cambridge in Perspective
A The Royal Library
B The Consistory & Register Office
C The Senate house
The Principal Front towards the Court
The Garden Front
Front towards the Garden
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Principal Front
Fronting yf. Garden.
Fronting yt Court
Plan of the principal Story.
Plan of the Cellar Story
Section.
Front towards the Garden.
Plan of the principal Story.
The Cellar Story.
The one pair of Stairs
The Ground Plan
Section of the fore going house.
The Plan of the second floore.
To the Right Honble the Lady HENRIETTA CAVENDLSHEHOLLES Countess of OXFORD & Countess MORTIMER This Design being made & executed by your Ladyships Special Direction is new humbly presented by your Ladyships most Dutyfull & Obedient Servant.
Gibbs
To the RP Honble Edward Eart of Oxford & Eart Mortimer, This Plate is humbly Dedicated by his Lordships most Obedient Sert. Ja: Gibbs.
</s>
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Greeks Bearing Gifts - Philip Kerr
Identifiers: LCCN 2017037137 | ISBN 9780399177064 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Gunther, Bernhard (Fictitious character)—Fiction. | World War, 1939–1945—Germany—Fiction. | Private investigators—Germany—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6061.E784 G74 2018 | DDC 823/.914—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037137
p. cm.
Ebook ISBN: 9780698413146
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1This book is for Chris Anderson and Lisa Pickering, to whom I am very grateful.
CONTENTS
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_ALSO BY PHILIP KERR_
_TITLE PAGE_
_COPYRIGHT_
_DEDICATION_
_EPIGRAPH_
_PROLOGUE_
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
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CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
_AUTHOR'S NOTE_
_ABOUT THE AUTHOR_They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger . . . they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor. . . . They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.
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—TACITUS, _The Agricola and the Germania_
PROLOGUE
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JANUARY 1957
This would seem like the worst story ever told if it had not happened, all of it, every detail, exactly as I have described.
That's the thing about real life: it all looks so implausible right up until the moment when it starts to happen. I have my experience as a police detective and the events of my own personal history to confirm this observation. There's been nothing probable about my life. But I've a strong feeling that it's the same for everyone. The collection of stories that make us all who we are only looks exaggerated or fictitious until we find ourselves living on its stained and dog-eared pages.
The Greeks have a word for this, of course: "mythology." Mythology explains everything, from natural phenomena to what happens when you die and head downstairs, or when, unwisely, you steal a box of matches from Zeus. As it happens Greeks have a lot to do with this particular story. Perhaps with every story, when you stop to think about it. After all, it was a Greek called Homer who invented modern storytelling, in between losing his sight and probably not existing at all.
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Like many stories this one is probably much improved by taking a drink or two. So go ahead. Be my guest. Have one on me. Certainly I like a drink but honestly, I'm not a hopeless case. Far from it. I sincerely hope that one night I will go for a drink and wake up as an amnesiac on a steamer that's headed for nowhere I've ever heard of.
That's the romantic in me, I guess. I've always liked to travel even when I was quite happy to stay at home. You might say that I just wanted to get away. From the authorities, most of all. Still do, if the truth be told, which it seldom is. Not in Germany. Not for me and quite a few others like me. For us the past is like the exterior wall in a prison yard: chances are, we'll never get over it. And of course we shouldn't be allowed to get over it, either, given who we were and everything we did.
But how is one ever to explain what happened? It was a question I used to see in the eyes of some of the American guests at the Grand Hotel in Cap Ferrat where, until recently, I was a concierge, when they realized I was German: How was it possible that your people could murder so many others? Well, it's like this: When you walk through a big fish market you appreciate just how alien and various life can be; it's hard to imagine how some of the fantastic, sinister, slippery-looking creatures you see laid out on the slab could even exist, and sometimes when I contemplate my fellow man, I have much the same feeling.
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Myself, I'm a bit like an oyster. Years ago—in January 1933, to be exact—a piece of grit got into my shell and started to rub me up the wrong way. But if there is a pearl inside me I think it's probably a black one. Frankly, I did a few things during the war of which I feel less than proud. This is not unusual. That's what war's about. It makes all of us who take part in it feel like we're criminals and that we've done something bad. Apart from the real criminals, of course; no way has ever been invented to make them feel bad about anything. With one exception, perhaps: the hangman at Landsberg. When he's given the chance, he can provoke a crisis of conscience in almost anyone.
Officially, that's all behind us now. Our National Socialist revolution and the devastating war it brought about is over and the peace we have since enjoyed has, thanks to the Americans at least, been anything but Carthaginian. We stopped hanging people a long time ago and all but four of the several hundred war criminals who were caught and locked up for life in Landsberg have now been released. I do believe that this new Federal Republic of Germany could be a tremendous country when we've finished fixing it up. All of West Germany smells of fresh paint and every public building is in a state of major reconstruction. The eagles and swastikas are long gone but now even the traces of them are being erased, like Leon Trotsky from an old Communist Party photograph. In Munich's infamous Hofbräuhaus—there most of all, perhaps—they'd done their best to paint out the swastikas on the vaulted cream-colored ceiling, although you could still make out where they'd been. But for these—the fingerprints of fascism—it would be easy to believe the Nazis had never even existed and that thirteen years of life under Adolf Hitler had been some dreadful Gothic nightmare.
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If only the marks and traces of Nazism on the poisoned, bivalve soul of Bernie Gunther could have been erased with such facility. For these and other complicated reasons I won't go into now, the only time I'm truly myself these days is, of necessity, when I'm alone. The rest of the time, I'm obliged to be someone else.
So then. Hallo. God's greeting to you, as we say here in Bavaria. My name is Christof Ganz.
ONE
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There was a murderous wind raging through the streets of Munich when I went to work that night. It was one of those cold, dry Bavarian winds that blow up from the Alps with an edge like a new razor blade and make you wish you lived somewhere warmer, or owned a better overcoat, or at least had a job that didn't require you to hit the clock at six p.m. I'd pulled enough late shifts when I'd been a cop with the Murder Commission in Berlin so I should have been used to bluish fingers and cold feet, not to mention lack of sleep and the crappy pay. On such nights a busy city hospital is no place for a man to find himself doomed to work as a porter right through until dawn. He should be sitting by the fire in a cozy beer hall with a foaming mug of white beer in front of him, while his woman waits at home, a picture of connubial fidelity, weaving a shroud and plotting to sweeten his coffee with something a little more lethal than an extra spoonful of sugar.
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Of course, when I say I was a night porter, it would have been more accurate to say that I was a mortuary attendant, but being a night porter sounds better when you're having a polite conversation. "Mortuary attendant" makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable. The living ones, mostly. But when you've seen as many corpses as I have you tend not to bat an eyelid about being around death so much. You can handle any amount of it after four years in the Flanders slaughterhouse. Besides, it was a job and with jobs as scarce as they are these days you don't look a gift horse in the mouth, even the spavined nag that had been bought for me, sight unseen, outside the doors of the local glue factory by the old comrades in Paderborn; they got me the job in the hospital after they had given me a new identity and fifty marks. So until I could find myself something better, I was stuck with it and my customers were stuck with me. I certainly didn't hear any of them complaining about my bedside manner.
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You'd think the dead could look after themselves but of course people die in hospital all the time and, when they do, they usually need a bit of help getting around. It seems the days of patient defenestration are over. It was my job to go and fetch the bodies off the wards and take them down to the house of death and there to wash them before leaving them out for collection by the undertakers. In winter we didn't worry about chilling the bodies or spraying the place for flies. We didn't have to; it was just a few degrees above freezing in the mortuary. Much of the time I worked alone and, after a month at the Schwabing Hospital, I suppose I was almost used to it—to the cold, to the smell, and to the feeling of being alone and yet not quite alone, if you know what I mean. Once or twice a corpse moved by itself—they do that sometimes, wind usually—which, I'll admit, was a little unnerving. But perhaps not surprising. I'd been alone for so long that I'd started talking to the radio. At least I assumed that's where the voices were coming from. In the country that produced Luther, Nietzsche, and Adolf Hitler, you can never be absolutely sure about these things.
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On that particular night I had to go up to the emergency room and fetch a corpse that would have given Dante pause for thought. An unexploded bomb—it's estimated that there are tens of thousands of these buried all over Munich, which often makes reconstruction work hazardous—had gone off in nearby Moosach, killing at least one and injuring several others in a local beer hall that took the worst of the blast. I heard it go off just before I started my shift and it sounded like a standing ovation in Asgard. If the glass in the window in my room hadn't already been Scotch-taped against drafts it would certainly have shattered. So no real harm done. What's one more German killed by a bomb from an American flying fortress after all these years?
The dead man looked like he'd been given a front row seat in some reserved circle of hell where he'd been chewed up by a very angry Minotaur before being torn to pieces. His jiving days were over, given that his legs were hanging off at the knees and he was badly burned, too; his corpse gave off a lightly barbecued smell that was all the more horrifying because somehow it was also, vaguely and inexplicably, appetizing. Only his shoes remained undamaged; everything else—clothes, skin, hair—was a sight. I washed him carefully—his torso was a piñata of glass and metal splinters—and did my very best to fix him up a bit. I put his still shiny Salamanders in a shoe box, just in case someone from the deceased's family turned up to identify the poor devil. You can tell a lot from a pair of shoes but this couldn't have been a more hopeless task if he'd spent the last twelve days being dragged through the dust behind someone's favorite chariot. Most of his face resembled a half kilo of freshly chopped dog meat and sudden death looked like it had done the guy a favor, not that I'd ever have said as much. Mercy killing is still a sensitive subject on a long list of sensitive subjects in modern Germany.
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It's small wonder there are so many ghosts in this town. Some people go their whole lives without ever seeing a ghost; me, I see them all the time. Ghosts I sort of recognize, too. Twelve years after the war it was like living in Frankenstein Castle and every time I looked around I seemed to see a pensive, plaintive face I half-remembered from before. Quite often these looked like old comrades, but just now and again they resembled my poor mother. I miss her a lot. Sometimes the other ghosts mistook me for a ghost, which was hardly surprising, either; it's only my name that's changed, not my face, more's the pity. Besides, my heart was playing up a bit, like a difficult child, except that it wasn't so young as that. Every so often it would jump around for the sheer hell of it, as if to show me that it could and what might happen to me if it ever decided to have a break from taking care of a tiresome Fritz like me.
After I got home at the end of my shift I was extra-careful to turn the gas off on my little two-ring cooker after I'd finished boiling water for the coffee I usually had with my early-morning schnapps. Gas is just as explosive as TNT, even the splutteringly thin stuff that comes squeaking out of German pipes. Outside my dingy yellow window was an eighty-foot-high heap of overgrown rubble, another legacy of the wartime bombing: seventy percent of the buildings in Schwabing had been destroyed, which was good for me, as it made rooms there cheap to rent. Mine was in a building scheduled for demolition and had a long crack in the wall so wide you could have hidden an ancient desert city in there. But I liked the rubble heap. It served to remind me of what, until recently, my life had amounted to. I even liked the fact that there was a local guide who would take visitors to the summit of the heap, as part of his advertised Munich tour. There was a memorial cross on top and a nice view of the city. You had to admire the fellow's ingenuity. When I was a boy I used to climb to the top of Berlin's cathedral—all 264 steps—and walk around the dome's perimeter with only the pigeons for company; but it hadn't ever occurred to me to make a career out of it.
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I never liked Munich all that much, with its fondness for traditional Tracht clothes and jolly brass bands, devout Roman Catholicism and the Nazis. Berlin suited me better and not just because it was my hometown. Munich was always a more compliant, governable, conservative place than the old Prussian capital. I got to know it best in the early years after the war, when my second wife, Kirsten, and I were trying to run an unfeasibly located hotel in a suburb of Munich called Dachau, now infamous for the concentration camp the Nazis had there; I didn't like it any better then, either. Kirsten died, which hardly helped, and soon after that I left, thinking never to return and well, here I am again, with no real plans for the future, at least none that I would ever talk about, just in case God's listening. I don't find he's nearly as merciful as a lot of Bavarians like to make out. Especially on a Sunday evening. And certainly not after Dachau. But I was here and trying to be optimistic even though there was absolutely no room for such a thing—not in my cramped lodgings—and doing my best to look on the bright side of life even though it felt as if this lay over the top of a very high barbed-wire fence.
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For all that, I took a certain amount of satisfaction in doing what I did for a living; clearing up shit and washing corpses seemed like a suitable penance for what I'd done before. I was a cop, not a proper cop, but a useful stooge in the SD for the likes of Heydrich, Nebe, and Goebbels. It wasn't even a proper penance like the one undertaken by the old German king Henry IV, who famously walked on his knees to Canossa Castle to obtain the Pope's forgiveness, but perhaps it would do. Besides, like my heart, my knees are not what they once were. In small ways, like Germany itself, I was trying to inch my way back to moral respectability. After all, it can hardly be denied that little by little can take you a long way, even when you're on your knees.
In truth, that process was working out for Germany a little better than it was working out for me, and all thanks to the Old Man. This was what we called Konrad Adenauer, on account of how he was seventy-three when he became West Germany's first postwar chancellor. He was still in power at eighty-one, leading the Christian Democrats and, unless you were a radical Jewish group like Irgun, who'd tried to assassinate the Old Man on more than one occasion, it had to be admitted he'd made a pretty good job of it, too. Already people were talking about "the Miracle on the Rhine" and they weren't referring to Saint Alban of Mainz. Thanks to a combination of the Marshall Plan, low inflation, rapid industrial growth, and plain hard work, Germany was now doing better economically than England. This didn't surprise me that much; the Tommies always were too bolshy for their own good. After winning two world wars they made the mistake of thinking the world owed them a living. Perhaps the real miracle was how the rest of the world seemed to have forgiven Germany for starting a war that had cost the lives of forty million people—this in spite of the Old Man having denounced the whole denazification process and brought in an amnesty law for our war criminals, all of which certainly explained why there was a lingering and general suspicion that many old Nazis were now back in government. The Old Man had a useful explanation for that, too: he said you needed to make sure you had a good supply of clean water available before you threw out your dirty water.
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As someone who washed dead Germans for a living, I couldn't disagree with this.
Of course, I had more dirty water in my bucket than most and above all else I was appreciating my newfound obscurity. Like Garbo in _Grand Hotel_ , I just wanted to be alone and loved the idea of being anonymous more than I liked the short beard I'd grown to help make this work. The beard was yellowish gray, vaguely metallic; it made me look wiser than I am. Our lives are shaped by the choices we make, of course, and more noticeably by the choices that were wrong. But the idea that I had been forgotten by the cops, not to mention the world's major security and intelligence agencies, was pleasing, to say the least. My life looked good on paper; indeed it was the only place it looked as if it had been well spent, which, speaking as someone who'd been a cop for many years, was in itself suspicious. And so, to facilitate my life as Christof Ganz, in my spare time I would often go back over the bare facts of his life and invent some of the things he'd done and achieved. Places I'd been, jobs I'd had, and, most important of all, my wartime service on behalf of the Third Reich. In much the same way that everyone else had done in the new Germany. Yes, we've all had to become very creative with our résumés. Including, it seemed, many members of the Christian Democrats.
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I took another drink with my breakfast, just to help me sleep, of course, and went to bed, where I dreamed of happier times, although that might just as easily have been a prayer to the god of the black cloud, dwelling in the skies. Since prayers are never answered it's hard to tell the difference.
TWO
–
When I went into work the following evening the Moosach bomb victim was still there, laid out on the slab like a vulture's abandoned banquet. Someone had tied a name tag to his toe which, given the fact that his leg was no longer attached to his body, seemed imprudent to say the least. His name was Johann Bernbach, and he was just twenty-five years old. By now I knew a little more about the bomb from what was in the _Süddeutsche Zeitung_. A five-hundred-pounder had exploded on a building site next door to a beer hall in Dachauerstrasse, less than fifty meters from the municipal gasworks. The gasometer contained over seven million cubic feet of gas, so the feeling expressed in the newspaper was that the city had had a lucky escape with just two people killed and six injured and I said as much to Bernbach when I saw him.
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"I hope you had a few beers tucked away when you got your ticket punched, friend. Enough to take the edge off the shrapnel. Look here, it won't matter much to you now, but your unexpected death is not being treated with quite the reverence it warrants. To put it bluntly, Johann, it seems everyone's glad it's only you who's burnt toast. There was a gasometer near where that giant marrow went off. It was full of gas, too. More than enough to keep my little department in this hospital busy for weeks. Kind of fitting you should end up here, given it was an Ami bomb that killed you. Until last year this was the American hospital. Anyway, I've done my best for you. Pulled most of that glass out of your corpse. Tidied up your legs a bit. Now it's up to the undertaker."
"Do you always talk to your customers like this?"
I turned around to see Herr Schumacher, one of the hospital managers, standing in the doorway. He was an Austrian, from Braunau am Inn, a small town on the German border, and although he wasn't a doctor, he wore a white coat anyway, probably to make himself look more important.
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"Why not? They seldom answer back. Besides, I have to talk to someone other than myself. I'd go mad otherwise."
"My God. Oh, Jesus. I had no idea he looked as bad as this."
"Don't say that. You'll hurt his feelings."
"It's just that there's a man upstairs on Ward 10 who's prepared to formally identify this poor wretch before he's discharged this evening. He's one of the other people who were caught up in yesterday's bomb blast—he's now a patient in this hospital. The man's in a wheelchair but there's nothing wrong with his eyes. I was hoping you could wheel him down here and help take care of it. But now that I've seen the corpse—well, I'm not so sure he wouldn't faint. Jesus Christ, I know I almost did."
"If he's in a wheelchair maybe that won't matter so much. Afterwards I can always wheel him somewhere to recover. Like another hospital, perhaps." I lit a cigarette and steered the smoke back out through my grateful nostrils. "Or at least somewhere they have clean laundry, anyway."
"You know you really shouldn't smoke in here."
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"I know. And I've had complaints about it. But the fact is I'm smoking for sound medical reasons."
"Name one."
"The smell."
"Oh. That. Yes, I do see your point." Schumacher took one from the packet I waved under his nose and let me light him. "Don't you usually cover them up with something? Like a sheet?"
"We weren't expecting visitors. But while the laundry guys are on strike all the clean sheets are for the living. That's what I've been told, anyway."
"Okay. But isn't there anything you can do about his face?"
"What would you suggest? An iron mask? But that's not going to help with the formal identification process. I doubt this poor Fritz's mother would recognize him. Let's certainly hope she doesn't have to try. But given his more obvious similarity to nothing you can put into words that don't take the name of the Lord in vain the way you just did, I think we're probably into the more hermetic realm of other distinguishing marks, don't you agree?"
"Does he have any?"
"He has one. There's a tattoo on his forearm."
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"Well, that should help."
"Maybe. Maybe not. It's a number."
"Who gets themselves tattooed with a number?"
"Jews did, in the concentration camps. For identification."
"They did that?"
"No, actually we did that. Us Germans. The countrymen of Beethoven and Goethe. It was like a lottery ticket but not a lucky one. This fellow must have been in Auschwitz when he was a kid."
"Where's that?"
Schumacher was the kind of stupid Austrian who preferred to believe that his country was the first free nation that had fallen victim to the Nazis and hence was not responsible for what had happened, but it was a harder argument to make on behalf of Braunau am Inn, which was rather more famous as the birthplace of Adolf Hitler and quite possibly why Schumacher had left in the first place. I couldn't blame him for that. But I wasn't disposed to argue with anything else he believed. He was my boss after all.
"Poland, I think. But it doesn't matter. Not now."
"Well, look, see what you can do about his face, Herr Ganz. And then go and fetch the witness, would you?"
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When Schumacher had gone, I searched around for a clean towel and in a cupboard I found one the Amis must have left behind. It was a _Mickey Mouse Club_ towel, which was less than ideal but it looked a lot better than the man on the slab. So I laid it gently over his head and went upstairs to collect the patient.
He was dressed and expecting me and while I'd been expecting him I wasn't expecting the two cops who were with him, although I should have been because he'd agreed to help identify a dead body, and that's what cops do when they're not directing traffic or stealing watches. The smaller of the cops was in uniform and the other was dressed like a civilian; what was worse, I vaguely recognized the big Fritz in plainclothes and, I suppose, he vaguely recognized me, which was unfortunate as I'd hoped to avoid the Munich cops until my beard was a better length, but it was too late for that now. So I grunted a general-purpose good evening, which was a couple of consonants short of being sullen, took hold of the chair, and wheeled the patient toward the elevator with the two cops in tow. I didn't worry about them minding my manners as I was just a night porter after all, and they didn't have to like me, they just had to follow me down to the mortuary. It wasn't a good wheelchair since it had a definite bias to the left but that was hardly surprising, given the size of the injured man. Of greater surprise, perhaps, was the fact that the chair managed to roll at all. The patient was a fattish man in his late thirties, and his beer belly sat on his lap like a bag containing all his worldly goods. I knew it was a beer belly because I was working on getting one myself, just as soon as I had a pay rise. Besides, his clothes stank of beer, as if he'd had a two-liter stein of Pschorr in his lap when the bomb went off.
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"How well did you know the deceased, Herr Dorpmüller?" asked the detective as he tailed us along the corridor.
"Well enough," said the man in the wheelchair. "For the last three years he was my pianist at the Apollo. That's the cabaret theater I run in the Munich Hotel, just up the road from the beer house. Johann could play anything. Jazz or classical. To some extent my wife and I were all the family he had, given what had already happened to him. It's too bad that it should be Johann who was killed like this, of all people. I mean after what he'd gone through in the camps as a boy. What he survived."
"Do you remember anything at all?"
"Not really. We were just about to leave to open the cabaret for the evening when it happened. Do you know exactly what happened yet? With the bomb, I mean."
"It looks as if one of the men working on the building site next door to the beer hall where you were drinking must have struck the bomb with a pickax. Only we've yet to find anything of him left to ask about that. Probably never will, either. My guess is that the local smokers will be inhaling his atoms for the next few days. You're a lucky man. A meter nearer the door and you'd have been killed for sure."
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As I wheeled the man along I couldn't help but agree with the detective. I was looking down at two burned ears that looked like the petals on a poinsettia, and there was a long length of stitching on the man's neck that put me in mind of the Trans-Siberian Railway. His arm was in plaster and there were tiny cuts all over him. Clearly Herr Dorpmüller had enjoyed the narrowest of escapes.
We took the elevator down to the basement where, outside the mortuary door, I lit another Eckstein and like Orson Welles narrated a few somber words of warning before taking them inside to see the main feature. If I cared about their stomachs that was only because I was the one who was probably going to have to mop the contents of their stomachs off the floor.
"All right, gentlemen. We're here. But before we go in I feel I ought to tell you that the deceased isn't looking his best. For one thing, we're a little short of clean laundry in this hospital. So there's no sheet over his body. For another, his legs are no longer attached to his body, which is quite badly burned. I've done all I can to tidy him up a bit but the fact is you aren't going to be able to identify the man in here in the normal way, which is to say, from his face. He doesn't have a face. Not anymore. From the look of it his face was shredded by flying glass, so it bears no more relation to the photograph in his passport than a plate of red cabbage would. Which is why there's a towel covering his head."
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"Now you tell me," said the detective.
I smiled patiently. "There are other ways of identifying a man, I think. Distinguishing marks. Old scars. I even heard of something they've got now called fingerprints."
"Johann had a tattoo on his forearm," said the man in the wheelchair. "A six-figure identification number from the camp he was in. Birkenau, I think. He only showed it to me a couple of times but I'm more or less sure the first three numbers were one four zero. And he'd just bought a pair of new shoes from Salamander."
While he inspected the tattoo I found the shoes and let him inspect them, too. Meanwhile I stood beside the uniformed cop and nodded when he asked if he could smoke.
"It's the smell," he confessed. "Formaldehyde, is it?"
I nodded again.
"Always sets me off."
"So is it him?" asked the detective.
"Looks like," said Dorpmüller.
"You're sure?"
"Well, as sure as I can be without looking at his face, I suppose."
The detective looked at the Mickey Mouse towel covering the dead man's head and then, accusingly, at me.
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"How bad is it really?" he asked. "His face."
"Bad," I said. "Makes the Wolf Man look like the Fritz next door."
"You're exaggerating. Surely."
"No, not even a little. But you can feel free to ignore my advice any time you like. Nobody else listens to me down here, so why should you?"
"Goddamn it," he snarled, "how do they expect me to positively ID a body without a face?"
"It's a problem all right," I said. "There's nothing like a mortuary to remind you of the frailty of human flesh."
For some reason the detective seemed to hold me accountable for this inconvenience, as if I was trying to frustrate his inquiry.
"What the hell's the matter with you people in here, anyway? Couldn't you have found something else to cover his face? Not to mention the rest of him? I've heard of naked culture in this country but this is ridiculous."
I shrugged an answer, which didn't seem to satisfy him but that wasn't my problem. I never minded disappointing cops that much. Not even when I was a cop.
"This stupid towel is disrespectful," insisted the detective. "And what's worse is you know it is."
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"It was the American hospital," I said by way of an explanation. "And the towel was all I had."
"Mickey Mouse. I've a good mind to report you, fellow."
"You're right," I said. "It is disrespectful. I'm sorry."
I snatched the towel away from the dead man's head and threw it in the bin, hoping to make the detective shut up. It almost worked, too, except that all three men groaned or whistled at once and suddenly it sounded like the South Pole in there. The cop in uniform turned on his heel to face the wall and his plainclothes colleague put a big hand over his bigger mouth. Only the injured Fritz in the wheelchair stayed looking, with horrified fascination, the way a rabbit stares at a snake that is about to kill it, and perhaps recognizing for the first time the micrometer-thin narrowness of his own escape.
"That's what a bomb does," I said. "They can erect all the monuments and statues they want. But it's sights like this poor fellow that are the real memorials to the futility and waste of war."
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"I'll call an undertaker," whispered the man in the wheelchair, almost as if, until that very moment, he hadn't quite believed that Johann Bernbach was actually dead. "As soon as I get home." And then he added: "Do you know any undertakers?"
"I was hoping you might ask me that." I handed him a business card. "If you tell Herr Urban that Christof Ganz sent you he'll give you his special discount."
It wasn't much of a discount, but it was enough to cover the small tip I'd receive from Herr Urban if he got the business. I figured the only way I was ever going to get out of that mortuary was by looking out for my own future.
THREE
–
It was ten o'clock that night when Adolf Urban, the local undertaker, showed up to take Johann Bernbach away to his new and more permanent home. Urban rarely said very much but on this occasion—moved by the sight of the dead man's face, some new business, and perhaps a few drinks he'd enjoyed before coming to the Schwabing Hospital—he was gabby, at least for an undertaker.
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"Thanks for the tip," he said, and handed me a couple of marks.
"I don't know that it was such a good one, maybe. You've got your work cut out with this one."
"No. It will be a closed casket, I should think. Be wasting my time trying to make this fellow look like Cary Grant. But your face interests me more, Herr Ganz."
I almost winced, and hoped I hadn't been recognized. From previous conversations I knew Urban had cremated some of the less important Nazis the Amis had hanged at Landsberg in 1949. Not that any of them were telling tales but in my experience you can't be too careful when it comes to a past you're trying to shake off like a bad cold.
"The fact is I'm short of a pallbearer. I was thinking—you being here on nights n'all—you could come and make a bit of extra cash working for me during the day. Come on. What else are you going to do in the daytime? Sleep? There's no money in that. Besides, you've got the face for it, I think, Herr Ganz. Mine's a business that requires a poker face and yours looks like it was grown under the felt on a card table. Doesn't give anything away. Same as your mouth. Man in my business needs to know when to keep his trap shut. Which is nearly always, _always_."
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His own face was a lopsided, almost obscene thing, like a piece of melted plastic, with a permanently wet nose that resembled a very red and stubby cock and balls, and eyes that were almost as dead as his clients.
"I'll take that as a compliment."
"It is in Germany."
"But while my face might fit your requirements, I don't have the wardrobe for it. No, not even a tie."
"That's not a problem. I can kit you out, suit, coat, tie, just as long as you like black. You might have to get rid of that wispy beard. Makes you look a bit like Dürer. On second thought, keep it. Without it you'll be too pale. That's no good in a mourner. You don't want to look like someone who'll come back after dark and feast on one of the bodies. We get a lot of that in Germany. So. What do you say?"
I said yes. He was right, of course; quite apart from being almost nocturnal I needed the cash and there was no money to be made staying in bed all day. Not with my figure. So a week or two later found me wearing a black tailcoat and tie, with a shiny top hat on my head, and an expression on my lightly trimmed face that was supposed to convey sobriety and gravitas. The sobriety was debatable: the early morning schnapps was a habit I was finding hard to control. Fortunately for me it was the same expression I used for dumb insolence and skepticism and all the other winning qualities that I possess, so it didn't require me to be Lionel Barrymore to pull it off. Not that I put much store by my qualities; any man is just made up of some deportment and behavior that have met with the silent approval of a very small number of women.
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It was snowing heavily when I climbed out of a car in the Ostfriedhof Cemetery as one of four men employed to carry Bernbach's casket into the crematorium where, Urban said, the Amis had secretly cremated the twelve top Nazis they'd hanged at Nuremberg in 1946. Less well known was the fact that the ashes of my second wife, Kirsten, were also to be found in Ostfriedhof. When it was all over and Urban came to give me my pay and my tip I said nothing about this, largely out of shame that I hadn't visited the place in the cemetery wall where the urn with her remains was to be found—not once since her death. But now I was there I intended to remedy that. Suddenly I felt properly uxorious.
"I thought the dead man was a Jew," I said to Urban as we watched the mourners file out of the neo-Gothic Holy Cross Church where we'd just committed his body to the flames. These included most of the people from the Apollo cabaret, as well as the big irritable detective I'd recognized in the mortuary at the hospital.
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"Not practicing."
"Does that make a difference? If you're a Jew?"
"I wouldn't know. But these days it's not so easy finding someone to conduct an ikey funeral in this town. Last time I did one the family had to send to Augsburg for a rabbi. Also there's the fact that Jews prefer to be buried, not cremated. And with the ground this hard that makes things doubly difficult. Not to mention that there's still a lot of unexploded ordnance in the old Jewish cemetery over at Pfersee. There's no telling what's buried in that ground, especially under all this snow. So I persuaded his friends, who have very generously paid for everything, that for the purposes of this funeral, the deceased should be buried as a Christian. After all, it'd be a shame to have anyone else blown up by an old American bomb, don't you think?" He shrugged. "Besides, what does it matter what happens to you when you're dead?"
"There speaks the undertaker."
"It's a business, not a vocation."
"I'm sure I don't care what becomes of me."
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Urban looked around. "Besides, there are plenty of Jews in Ostfriedhof already. Many of the prisoners from Dachau were cremated and their ashes scattered here."
"Along with those top Nazis you mentioned?"
"Along with those top Nazis." He shrugged. "I'm sure we can trust the Lord to sort out who's who." He handed me an envelope. "Can I count on you tomorrow? Same time. Same place."
"If I'm alive, I wouldn't miss it."
"You will be. I'm sure of it. When you've been in the trade as long as I have, you get a feeling for that kind of thing. You might not think it but you've got a few years left in you, my friend."
"You should run a clinic in Switzerland. There are people who'd pay handsomely for a positive diagnosis like that." I lit a cigarette and looked up at the sky. "I kind of like this place. One day I might move here permanently."
"I'm sure of it."
"Need me anymore?"
"No. You're through for today. Go home, get into your casket, and get some sleep."
"I will. But first I have to go and see someone. Dracula once had a bride, you know."
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With my envelope in my pocket I walked away and, after a great deal of searching—some of it inside my own soul—I found Kirsten's stoic remains. I stood there for a while, apologized profusely for not having visited before—not to mention a host of other things—and generally took a walk to the far end of memory's rickety and probably unreliable pier. I'd have stayed out there longer but BELOVED WIFE OF BERNHARD GUNTHER was chiseled on the stone panel in front of the urn, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the big detective from the hospital heading my way. By now I'd remembered his name, but I was still hoping to prevent him from discovering mine. So I took off at an angle, lingered in front of another memorial tablet in a pathetic attempt to throw him off the scent, and then headed toward the main gate, only he was hiding in ambush for me behind the tomb of Grand Duke Ludwig Wilhelm of Bavaria. It was large enough, just about. The big cop was even bigger than I remembered.
"Hey, you. I want to talk to you."
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"Well, as you can see, I'm in mourning."
"Nonsense. You were one of the pallbearers, that's all. I asked about you. At the hospital."
"That was kind. But I'm making a good recovery now, thank you."
"They said your name was Ganz."
"That's right."
"Only it's not. My wife's maiden name is Ganz. And I'd have remembered that the first time we met. A long time ago. Before Hitler came to power, I think. Before you grew that beard."
I was tempted to make a remark about his wife's maidenhood and thought better of it; it's not just conscience that makes cowards of us all but false names and secret histories. "Maybe your memory is better than mine, Herr—?"
"It's not. Not yet, anyway. On account of how I haven't yet remembered your real name. But I'm more or less sure you were a cop back then."
"Me a cop? That's a laugh."
"Yeah. I remember thinking that, too, because you were a Jew-loving Berlin cop looking for this detective I used to know at the local Praesidium. My old boss."
"What was his name? Charlie Chan?"
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"No. Paul Herzefelde. He was murdered. But as I recall, we had to lock you up for the night because you nobly thought we weren't doing enough to find out who killed him."
He was right, of course. Every word of it. I never forget a face and especially a face like his, which was made for denouncing heretics and burning books, probably both at the same time, one on top of the other. Laugh lines as hard and lacking laughs as a wire coat hanger were etched on either side of a nose that looked like the thorn on a halberd. Above the hooked nose were the small, expressionless blue eyes of a giant moray eel. The jaw was unfeasibly wide and the complexion vaguely purplish, although that might have been the cold, while the man's height and build and white hairs were those of a retired heavyweight boxer. I felt that at any moment he might feel me out with his jab or plant his big right fist deep in what still remained of the solar part of my plexus. I remembered his name was Schramma and he'd been a criminal secretary at the Munich Police Praesidium and while I didn't remember much more about him I did remember the night I'd spent in the cells.
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"That's what was funny, see? Nobody liked Paul Herzefelde. And not just because he was a Jew the way you thought. People thought he was a crook. On the take. You could have seen that just looking at his clothes. It was strongly suspected that one of Munich's biggest fraudsters—a fellow named Kohl—had bribed him to look the other way. People thought it was Nazis that killed Herzefelde but it probably wasn't. My guess is that, not satisfied with the bribe, Herzefelde tried to squeeze Kohl for more and he didn't like it."
"I think you're mistaking me for someone else. I've never met anyone by that name. And I was never a policeman in Berlin. I hate cops." I thought about the résumé I'd been writing for myself and chided myself for neglecting the Weimar Republic years. "I _did_ work in Berlin for a while. But I was a doorman at the Adlon Hotel. So maybe that's where you saw me. Herr—?"
"Schramma, Criminal Secretary Schramma. Look, friend, it doesn't bother me if you've got yourself a new Fritz Schmidt. Lots of people have these days and for all kinds of smart reasons. Believe me, a cop who lives in this town needs two simultaneous telephone directories just to know who the hell he's talking to. But if you _were_ looking for a job, then maybe I can help you. For old times' sake."
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"I don't think you really mean to help me, do you? My impression is that you're trying to shake me down in the hope that something might fall from my pockets. But I'm a man with two jobs, which means I'm broke, see? That should be obvious. And any apples left on my branches are probably half-eaten or rotten by now."
Schramma grinned sheepishly. "Knowledge is power, right? I don't know who said that but I bet it was a German."
I didn't contradict him. Nor did he see the irony in his last remark.
"Look, what the hell do you care who I am? I'm so down on my luck I have casinos offering me a job to come and jinx their high rollers. I tell you again, I'm nobody, you big ape. You're wasting your time. There are blackboard monitors in school classrooms who are more important than me."
"Maybe. Maybe not. But I can promise you this. As soon as I figure out who you really are, Ganz, you're mine. Like you, I have to do one or two other jobs just to make ends meet. Security work. Private investigations. Most of the work is tedious and time-consuming but sometimes it's also dangerous. Which means I can use an ex-copper like you in all sorts of ways I'm quite sure you can easily imagine."
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I could see that was true. I wasn't sure what he had in mind but I'd intimidated enough lowlifes as a policeman in Berlin myself to know that none of this was likely to be to my own advantage.
"And don't even think of disappearing. If you do that I'll just have to name Christof Ganz as a suspect in some old case that nobody gives a crap about. You know I can make you fit all kinds of descriptions. Probably done that shit yourself."
I flicked my cigarette butt at the smooth green ass of the angel who was looking out for the soul of the Grand Duke and gave an exasperated sigh, which sounded a lot less exasperated than I was actually feeling.
"Go ahead and do your worst, copper. But I'm leaving now. I'm late for an appointment with my favorite barman."
It was all a bluff, of course. I might have been possessed of a poker face but I had nothing in my hand.
FOUR
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I'd finished work at the hospital. I went to the washroom beside the mortuary to clean up but while I was there I examined my face without much enthusiasm. What I had against it was its air of disappointment and its lived-in look, the shifty red eyes and furtive expression, as if it was always expecting the tap on the shoulder that might usher its shy owner to a car and then a prison cell for the next ten years.
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I went out the main entrance and walked between two concrete pillars with snakes wrapped around outsized censers on the top; they were much too high up to ask what they were doing there, but I was dimly aware that the ancient Greeks had regarded snakes as sacred, their venom as remedial, and maybe their skin shedding as symbolic of rebirth and renewal, which as an idea certainly worked for me. It might have been early morning but there were still one or two real snakes around and one of them was sitting in a newish BMW in front of the hospital. As I came out the hospital door, he leaned across the passenger seat and, with a cigar still in his face, shouted through the open passenger window.
"Gunther. Bernhard Gunther. As I live and breathe. I was just visiting an old friend in the hospital, and now you turn up. How are you, Gunther? How many years has it been since we saw each other last? Twenty? Twenty-five? I thought you were dead."
I stopped on the sidewalk and looked inside, debating my choices and discovering what was obvious, which was that I really didn't have any. Schramma was shouting so that other passersby could hear him and make me feel all the more uncomfortable. He was smiling gleefully while he did it, too, like a man who'd come to collect on a bet he'd won and I'd lost. If I'd had a gun I would probably have shot him or maybe myself. I used to be afraid of dying but now, on the whole, I find I'm looking forward to it, to getting far away from Bernie Gunther and everything to do with him, from his tangled history and uneasy way of thinking, from his inability to adjust to this modern world; but most of all I'm looking forward to getting away from all the people who knew him, or who claim to have known him, like Criminal Secretary Schramma. I've tried being someone else several times but who I am always comes back to kick me in the teeth.
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"I told you I'd find out who you are. Hey, come on. Don't be such a sore loser. You don't know it yet, but I'm here to do you a favor, Gunther. Seriously. You'll thank me for what I'm going to tell you. So hurry up and get in the car before someone realizes that you're not who you say you are. Besides, it's too cold to sit here with the window open. I'm freezing my plums off."
I ducked into the car, closed the door, and wound up the window without saying a word. Almost immediately I wished I'd left the window alone; Schramma's cigar smelled like a bonfire in a plague pit.
"You want to know how I found out who you are?"
"Go ahead and amaze me."
"The Munich Police Praesidium came through the war pretty much unscathed. The records, too. Like I said, I knew we met sometime before Hitler. And that meant it was before Heydrich, too. Heydrich was chief of police in Munich for a while and changed the filing system. He was very efficient, as you probably know. All that cross-referencing he did still comes in handy sometimes. So it was relatively simple to find the name of a detective from the famous Alex, in Berlin, who was our guest for the night after assaulting our desk sergeant."
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"As I recall the incident, he hit me first."
"I'm quite sure of it. I remember that sergeant. A right bastard, he was. It was 1932. Twenty-five years. How about that? My God. How time flies, eh?"
"Not at this present moment."
"Like I said before, it doesn't bother me what you did during the war. The Old Man says it's all ancient history now, even in the GDR. But every so often the commies still feel obliged to make an example of someone, just so as they can distinguish their own tyranny from the fascist one that went before. Could be they want you. Could be they might have you, too. Old Nazis are about the only kind of criminals the West is disposed to send back across the border these days."
"It's nothing like that," I said. "I'm not a war criminal. I didn't kill anyone."
"Oh, sure. Christof Ganz is just the name you write poetry under. Your nom de plume, as it were. I get that. I like to move under the radar a bit myself, sometimes. For a cop, I mean. Then there's Interpol. I haven't checked with them yet, but I wouldn't mind betting they have a file on you. Of course, I can't look at that one without putting a flag up. Once I've asked, they'll want to know why I want to know and maybe they'll try to take it a stage further. So from here on in it's your call, Gunther. Only you'd better make sure it's the right one, for your sake."
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"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."
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"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.
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"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.
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"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."
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"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."
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"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
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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.
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"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.
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"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."
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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."
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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?
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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.
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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 nodded 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.
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SIX
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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.
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"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.
I followed the three men down the creaking wooden stairs. At the end of a long stone-flagged corridor was a big gray metal door with two lock handles. Underneath a spy hole was the word PANZERLIT. It was an old bomb shelter.
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"Open it," Schramma told the general.
"What are you going to do?" asked the general, turning the handle. He opened the door and switched on the light to reveal a largish wine cellar. A rich smell of mildewed bottles and damp filled the air. I didn't know much about wine, but I estimated there must have been almost a thousand bottles in there. It was the best-equipped bomb shelter I'd ever seen.
"I'm going to lock you in here so you can't call the police," said Schramma. He jerked the pistol again. "Get inside. Both of you."
"You won't get away with this," said the man in the hat. He snatched it off his head and held it between his hands like he was about to pray.
"No?"
"No. You're making a big mistake. You know who this money belongs to? To the foreign intelligence division of the East German Ministry for State Security, that's who."
"Shut up and get in the cellar," said Schramma.
"The MfS will come after you. You know that, don't you? This money is only going to buy you a lot of sleepless nights."
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"That's all right. I don't sleep much anyway."
The two men walked into the wine cellar and turned to face Schramma as he followed them a short way inside. Then he put his forefinger in one ear and what with the tape on the butt of the gun I knew for certain that he was going to kill them both. Instinctively I took a step back as he took one forward—so that he didn't miss his target, I guess—and, the next moment, he shot the general and then he'd shot the man in the hat as well, both of them at close enough range to do some fatal damage. In the earsplitting second's gap between the two gunshots I decided I might very well be his third victim and, stepping quickly back again, I slammed the steel door behind me and jammed it shut with a large ax handle that someone had left lying on the floor.
I snatched the mask from my face and took a deep breath of the combusted air. My ears were whistling from the gunshots and it was a second or two before I even heard Schramma hammering on the door and shouting. Through the peephole I could see one of his bright eyes fixed on me like a piece of blue topaz. Meanwhile I managed to jam the other handle with half a brick. The aroma of strudel in the house was gone; now it was just gunpowder and death I could smell.
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"What the hell do you think you're doing, Gunther?" he shouted quietly. "Let me out of here."
"I don't think so," I said.
"Don't be an idiot. We don't have time for this. We need to get out of here in case someone reported hearing those shots."
"I'm glad you mentioned that." I dropped the magazine from the Walther and inspected the ammunition quickly. Blanks. Like I'd thought. "Why did you kill them? You didn't need to do that."
"Why take the risk of them identifying us? That's the way I look at it."
"Oh, I get that. Only the way I figure it, you were going to shoot me, too. Why not? Right now I'm more expendable than a stick of celery."
"What makes you say that?"
"Well, for one thing, you're a corrupt cop who knows how to dress up a murder scene. And for another, this gun you gave me is loaded with blanks."
"Sure. I wanted to see if I could trust you. Look, listen to me. Let me tell you about these two Fritzes I just shot. The one with the hat was Stasi. The other was a Nazi war criminal. Got away with it for years. No one's going to weep about these two. They both had it coming."
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"I've pulled the trigger a couple of times on some people who had it coming. At least, that's what I told myself at the time. Now I realize that all of us have got it coming. Me, probably. You, especially."
"Forget that. They're dead now. Look, maybe ten percent of the take wasn't fair of me. I get that. So how about half? I'll give you half the money. Only don't leave me in here. What do you say, Gunther?"
"I say no deal."
"I'll even give you a job in my new cutlery business."
"You've got nothing I want, Schramma."
The blue eye in the spy hole narrowed and then disappeared. "If you look through the spy hole you can see me unload my revolver before you open the door. How about that?"
"I doubt that would work, either. My guess is there's a third gun in your coat pocket. The one you were going to use on me and then leave behind in that Stasi man's hand."
The eye returned to the spy hole.
"Think about it, Gunther. You can't call the cops. Because who do you think they're going to believe? Me, a local cop with thirty years' service? Or you, a man who's living under a false name? Right now we can both walk out of this place like we were never here."
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"You make a good point. And of course I'm not going to call the cops. Who said anything about me calling the cops?"
"So what are you going to do? You can't just leave me here."
"Sure I can. Someone will turn up. Maybe."
"The general lives alone."
"Then I'd say you'd better hope there's a corkscrew in there. All that wine. Be a shame to waste it. Might be a while before someone shows up and lets you out."
"And you." The single blue eye narrowed again. "You'd better hope I never get out of here," he yelled. "Because if I do I'm going to kill you, Gunther."
My ears were still ringing like an alarm bell; an alarm bell that was warning me that the longer I stayed there the more likely I was to be in serious trouble; not that my leaving there would be the end of it either. I had the traces of a plan half-formed in my head but it went against all my instincts.
"This is a bad idea, I know. But it was you who backed me into this corner. Besides, we both know that you were going to kill me anyway. That's why you had the grip on that gun taped. So you could leave it behind and make it look like I was shot while trying to rob these two. I figure I've bought myself some breathing space for now. With ten thousand marks I can get a long way from Munich. By the time someone finds you in there I'm going to be far away from this city. Maybe out of the country. You just worry what happens if the cops do show up and find you with a murder weapon and two bodies. Even the Munich cops aren't so dumb they can't figure this one out. What we have here is a locked-room mystery where the only mystery is how you were dumb enough to get yourself caught in the first place."
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"Don't you believe it, Gunther. In spite of any evidence to the contrary I'm good at my job. They'll listen to me."
"Mister, you're good. Very persuasive. I bet you could sell a butcher a steak. But I'll take that risk. That just happens to be what I'm good at."
SEVEN
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I tucked the gun under my waistband, ran upstairs, filled my pockets with the money, and stepped, cautiously, outside the white house. No one was around and, according to my ears, the organist was still playing Bach as if nothing had happened. Maybe that's why people like his stuff. I didn't return to the car. It wasn't mine. Instead I walked down the slope through the trees and then up the street onto Max-Joseph Bridge to cross the Isar, pausing in the center to stare down at the turbulent, coffee-colored waters in an effort to clear my head of some of what had just taken place. There's nothing like the sound and sight of a river in spate to help flush the human spirit of what ails it, and if that doesn't work you can always drown yourself. When I was sure no one was around on the bridge I dropped the Walther into the river and then walked west, as far as the English Garden. I wasn't sure why it was called that. To me there seemed nothing particularly English about it—unless it was the number of snotty-looking people riding tall horses or walking big dogs; then again, it might have been the presence of a huge Chinese pagoda. I'm told no English garden is complete without one. There was a beer garden next to the pagoda, where I had a quick one to steady my nerves; it was getting close to the time when I was supposed to report at the Schwabing Hospital for work, but with ten thousand marks in my coat pocket and a couple of bodies in my wake I figured I had more urgent things to do if I wanted to stay out of jail. So I went to a small taxi rank and asked the driver to take me to Kardinal-Faulhaberstrasse in the center of the city. Once there, I walked up and down a while, inspecting names on the shiny brass plaques on the doorways until, next to a bank, I found the one I was looking for—the one Schramma had thoughtfully informed me about: _Dr. Max Merten, Attorney at Law_. Trusting a lawyer didn't seem like much of a plan and it went against all my instincts—some of the worst war criminals I'd ever met had been lawyers and judges—but I could see little alternative. Besides, this was a lawyer with a special interest in my case.
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There was a cage elevator but it wasn't working so I climbed up a wide marble staircase to the third floor, where I stopped for a minute to catch my breath before going in; I needed to look and, more important, sound calm—even if I wasn't—before telling a lawyer I hadn't seen since before the war that we were both of us connected with a double murder. A woman I presumed was Merten's secretary was getting ready to go home, and catching sight of me, she winced a little as if she knew I was going to delay her. Her bright yellow hair had probably been styled by a whole hive of bees and seemed to act as a crucial counterweight to her chest, which seemed both remarkable and appetizing at the same time. You can call me cynical but I had an idea that maybe her typing and shorthand skills weren't the main reasons why she'd been hired.
"Can I help you?"
"I'd like to see Dr. Merten."
"I'm afraid he's about to go home for the night."
"I'm sure he'll want to see me. I'm an old friend."
I wasn't wearing my best clothes so I could see her wondering about that.
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"If I could have your name?"
I was reluctant to use my real name and I didn't think there was any point in giving my new one; it wouldn't have meant anything to Merten; nor did I want to mention Schramma's name, for the simple reason that he was now a murderer. Even the most loyal of secretaries can find that kind of thing a little too much.
"Just say I'm from the Alex, in Berlin. He'll know what that is."
"The Alex?"
"Since you ask, it was the Police Praesidium. Like the one you have here in Munich. But bigger and better. Or at least it was until Karl Marx came to town. I used to be a policeman, which is how we know each other."
Slightly reassured now that she knew I had once been a policeman, Merten's secretary went to find her boss. She stepped into a back office, leaving me with the expensive view out the corner window. Merten's offices were opposite the Greek Orthodox church on Salvatorstrasse. Built of red bricks in the Gothic style, the church looked oddly out of step with everything else in that otherwise uniformly Baroque street. I was still looking at it when the secretary came back and informed me that her boss would see me now. She showed me into his office and then closed the door behind us, as Max Merten came around his desk to greet me.
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"My God, I never expected to see you again. Bernie Gunther. How long has it been? Fifteen years?"
"At least."
"But not a cop, I think. Not anymore. No, you don't look like a cop. Not with that beard."
"It's been a while since I carried a badge."
"Have a seat, Bernie. Have a cigarette. Have a drink. Would you like a drink?" He checked his watch. "Yes, I think it's time." He went over to a big Biedermeier sideboard and lifted up a decanter the size of a streetlamp. "Schnapps? It's that or nothing, I'm afraid. It's the only thing I drink. That and anything alcoholic."
"Schnapps."
He was much bigger than I remembered, in almost every way: taller, louder, broader, fatter; his silver-haired head was huge and looked as if it belonged on a stone lion. Only his hands were small. He didn't look younger than me, but he was, by at least a decade. He wore a good-quality thick tweed suit, ideal for a Munich winter, and while this didn't fit him well—the waist of his trousers was positioned just below his breast, like a life belt—he was in more urgent need of a dentist than a good tailor; one of his front teeth was gold but the rest weren't so good, perhaps a result of the large number of cigarettes he smoked. The office was pungent with the smell of Egyptian cigarettes. I smoke a lot myself, but Max Merten could have smoked for West Germany. His cigarettes arrived between his thick pink lips from a packet of Finas on his desk, one after the other, in an almost unbroken thin white line, one passing on a tiny flame to the next, like the baton in a never-ending relay race. He handed me a glass and then ushered us both to some comfortable armchairs beside the window, where he drew the heavy curtains and sat down opposite me.
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"So what have you been doing with yourself?"
"Trying to stay out of trouble."
"And not succeeding if I know you."
"That's why I'm here, Max. I need a lawyer. It's just possible we both do."
"Oh dear. That sounds ominous."
"You hired a cop to do some freelance work for you. Christian Schramma."
"That's right."
"You wanted him to check out the bona fides of a potential donor for this political party you've started. The CVP."
"GVP. That's right. General Heinkel. I wanted to find out where his campaign money was coming from."
"Well, Schramma hired me. Not so much hired, perhaps. I didn't have much choice in the matter."
"To check out the money?"
"I thought so, but as things turned out he wanted me to help him steal it. I didn't have much choice in the matter, either. I'm living here in Munich under a false name. For the obvious reasons."
"The war."
"Exactly."
"So what precisely has happened? You're not a thief."
I told him everything that had taken place inside the general's house. And then placed the money on his desk, all ten thousand marks of it.
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"Then General Heinkel is dead."
I nodded.
"But who's the other man that's been murdered?"
"I don't know his name. But I think he worked for the East German foreign intelligence service. The MfS."
"What's the DDR have to do with this?"
"You were going to go to the general's house tomorrow morning, to collect the money for the GVP, right?"
"Yes."
"The MfS planned to have the local police turn up to arrest the general who, in order to clear himself, was then going to allege that the money was a bribe for you and your friend Professor Hallstein."
"Why would the general do such a thing?"
"Because, according to Schramma, the Stasi have his son in a Leipzig prison cell. My guess is that the fellow from the MfS was in this with Schramma. But that Schramma double-crossed him."
"I see. This is all very disturbing."
"For me, too."
"I had no idea that Christian Schramma was such a dangerous man."
"Cops have guns. And they mix with all kinds of bad people. That makes them dangerous."
"And Schramma is still there? Locked in the general's wine cellar with the two bodies?"
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"That's right." I sipped some of the schnapps and helped myself to a cigarette. "Given that it was you who hired him in the first place, I thought you might have an idea about what to do next. But for the fact that I'm living under a false name, and your friend's a cop who's put a lot of years into the job, I'd have called the police myself and left them to it. I was hoping you might do it instead of me."
"You did the right thing coming to me, Bernie. I mean from what you've said, it looks like an open-and-shut case: two bodies and the killer and the murder weapon all in one locked room. But experience tells me that even cases that look open-and-shut have a habit of not closing properly, from an evidentiary point of view. And then there's the Munich police, of course. If Schramma's corrupt, then there's every chance that there are others who are also corrupt. That they'll pretend to believe his story and just let him go. No, this needs very careful thought about who to call, and when. It may be that I shall have to inform the Bavarian State Ministry of Justice."
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"That's up to you, of course. But whoever you tell, please bear in mind that if it should come to my needing a lawyer, I can't afford to pay you. I'm hoping my coming here and putting you in the picture about everything that's happened would be enough for you to take me on as your client for free."
"Oh, surely. And I do appreciate it. Very much. After all, you could easily have disappeared with the money and I'd have been none the wiser about any of this."
"I'm glad you see it that way, Max."
"By the way, what do you expect me to do with all this cash?"
"That's up to you. No one but me knows you have it."
"How much is here, anyway?"
"Ten thousand."
"I suppose I'll have to give it to the police."
I took a long drag on the cigarette and narrowed my eyes against my smoke. If it made me look cagey and thoughtful that was always my intention.
"I get the feeling you have a few ideas of your own about what should happen to the money," said Merten.
"If you give it to the police you'll have to say where you got it. Or who gave it to you. The first looks awkward for you. The second looks just as bad for me. My advice would be to use it for the GVP after all. Like you always intended. It's not like you can hand it back to the DDR."
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"But if I do keep the money for the GVP, then that begs the question about what to do about Christian Schramma. We can't just leave him there. Can we? With those men dead and Schramma locked in the cellar it's quite possible the police may never arrive at the general's house tomorrow expecting to make an arrest. Without Schramma or someone else to tell them, he could be there for a while. The general was a bit of a recluse. I'm not sure he even had a housekeeper."
"I have an idea about Schramma, too."
"Let's hear it."
"You hired him. You can get rid of him. No, I don't mean like that."
"Then how?"
"We go back there and talk him into keeping his mouth shut."
"Now?"
"Now."
"You're right, of course. There's no sense in putting this off and hoping it will go away. The devil's favorite piece of furniture is the long bench. And you really think we should let him go?"
"That's about the size of it."
"But he's killed two people in cold blood."
"Informing the police won't bring them back. And will only cause us both trouble. Once he's in the police station there's no telling what he'll say. To men who are his friends. They won't want to believe us."
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"True. All the same, I don't like it. He's still got a gun, you said?"
"Mmm-hmm."
"Suppose when we let him out of the cellar he shoots us? Or brings us both back here, takes the money for himself, like he intended, and then kills us both?"
"I think I know a way of preventing him from doing that."
"How?"
"Got a camera?"
"Yes."
"All right. This is what I think we should do."
EIGHT
–
We drove east in Merten's Mercedes, along Maximilianstrasse, and crossed the Isar on Maximilian's Bridge, before turning left and north up Möhlstrasse. Merten hadn't been to the dead general's home before so I was giving him directions. It was snowing again and in the car's headlights the flakes resembled the bubbles in a glass of weiss beer.
"I'm very grateful for this," admitted Merten.
"Don't mention it, Max."
"Look, I don't care what you did in the war. Really, it's none of my business. But I am supposed to be an officer of the Bavarian court. So it might be best if at least I knew something about your present predicament. If I am going to be your lawyer you should tell me if you are wanted for anything in particular. Beyond the obvious."
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"What's obvious?"
"I mean your past service, with the SD."
"There's nothing really. I know how it looks—me having a false name—but my conscience is clear." I wasn't sure about that; but, for the moment at least, I didn't feel inclined to tell him my whole life story. "The fact is, I'm an escaped Russian POW. I killed a man at a camp in the DDR while making my escape. A German. If they caught me they'd chop off my head. But more probably the Stasi would prefer to just have me quietly murdered." This was true at least.
"That's all right then. For a moment I thought—well, you can guess what I was thinking. There were always lots of stories that were told around the Alex about the famous Bernie Gunther. That Himmler kicked you once. That you worked for the likes of Goebbels and Göring, but that you mostly worked for General Heydrich."
"Reluctantly."
"Was that even possible?"
"It was if Heydrich decided it was."
"I guess so. The last I heard of you, they'd sent you to Russia as a member of a police battalion, working for that other murderer, Arthur Nebe, with Task Group B."
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"That's right. Only I didn't murder anyone."
"Oh sure, sure, but how many did he kill? Fifty thousand?"
"Something like that."
"Hard to believe that two or three years later he was part of the Stauffenberg Plot to kill Hitler."
"Actually, I find it harder to believe that he murdered fifty thousand people," I said. "But he did. Nebe was full of contradictions. Mainly he was a cynical opportunist. In the early '30s a die-hard Nazi; by '38, part of an early plot to get rid of Hitler; after the miraculous fall of France, a committed Nazi prepared to do anything to advance himself, including mass murder; and by '44, when he saw the way the wind was blowing, part of Stauffenberg's incompetent plot. If he was a character in a book you wouldn't believe him even possible."
"No, I suppose not. Anyway, there but for the grace of God. If it hadn't been for your good advice I might be in the same position as you, Bernie."
"Why do you say so?"
"What I mean is, it was you who talked me out of joining the Party and the SS. Remember? Just before the war I was an ambitious junior lawyer in the Ministry of Justice and keen to advance my career. At that time joining the SS and the Nazi Party was the quickest way to make that happen. Instead I stayed put at the ministry, thankfully. If you hadn't put me off the idea, Bernie, I'd probably have ended up in the SD and in charge of some SS special action group in the Baltic States charged with killing Jewish women and kids—like so many other lawyers I knew—and now _I'd_ be a wanted man, like you, or worse: I could have met the same fate as those other men who went to jail, or were hanged in Landsberg." He shook his head and frowned. "I often wonder how I'd have handled that particular dilemma. You know—mass murder. What I would have done. If I could have done— _that_. I prefer to believe I would have refused to carry out those orders but if I'm really honest I don't know the answer. I think my desire to stay alive would have persuaded me to do what I was told, like every other lawyer. Because there's something about my own profession that horrifies me sometimes. It seems to me that lawyers can justify almost anything to themselves as long as it's legal. But you can make anything legal when you put a gun to parliament's head. Even mass murder."
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"Turn right up ahead and then keep the river on your left."
"Okay."
"So what kind of war _did_ you have, Max?"
"Thankfully uneventful. I got drafted into the Luftwaffe when the war started and served for a while in an anti-aircraft battery in Bremen and then in Stettin. That was very quiet. Too quiet, really. I mean I was just plain bored. And so in 1942 I went to the War Board and volunteered for the army. Went through officer training, made captain, and got myself a nice quiet posting somewhere warm and sunny. Matter of fact, I had quite a good time, all things considered."
"Turn left on Neuberghauserstrasse and then pull up. It's only a short walk but we'd best make sure that the cops aren't there before we go inside. And don't forget the camera."
He lit a new cigarette with the butt of the previous one and threw that away. "Good idea."
He parked the Mercedes up the street from the white house and then we stood beside the car for several minutes before I was satisfied the murders were, as yet, undiscovered.
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"I'll go in first, alone," I said. "Just in case. Give it a couple of minutes. I'll go up to the second floor, switch a light on and off to let you know it's all right before you follow. There's no sense in us both getting arrested. But if I do get pulled, then make sure you come to the Praesidium as soon as you can. I've spent the night in there before and I didn't like it."
"Thanks, Bernie. I appreciate it."
I walked toward the white house, past the church, and through the picket gate. The back door was still unlocked, and a few minutes later Max Merten and I were standing in the kitchen. Schramma's cigar was still balanced on the edge of the kitchen table where he'd left it.
"What's that noise?" he asked. "Can you hear it?"
"I imagine it's Christian Schramma shouting for help."
We went downstairs where I found his blue eye staring out of the peephole, like before.
"Let me out of here," he yelled through the steel door.
I went to the spy hole and peered back at him. He hammered the door as if he wished it had been my face and then took several steps back. It was clear he'd found a corkscrew; there were at least two bottles open that hadn't been open before.
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"I'm prepared to let you out," I yelled back. "But on three conditions."
"What are they?"
"First that you write out a full confession in your notebook. I know you have one because I saw it in your coat pocket when you produced that .38. I can read what you write through the spy hole. The second is that I see you take the tape off the handle of that revolver and empty every chamber. I figure you have four rounds left. You can drop each one of them into a bottle of wine. When it's nicely covered with your fingerprints you can put the gun on the table where I can see it."
"And the third condition?"
"This is going to take a bit more time. I want to see you drink the contents of several bottles. Only when I'm satisfied you're completely drunk and incapable will I open this door. If this all happens to my satisfaction, Dr. Merten and I will wheelbarrow you back to your car and drive it to the English Garden, where we'll leave you for the night to sleep it off."
"What happens then?"
"The deal is this: We'll forget you had anything to do with these murders if you forget about me. And about the money. The money is going to the GVP after all. I'll go back to my shitty job at the hospital mortuary and you can go back to yours, keeping law and order in this beautiful city. So long as you keep your big mouth shut about everything, no one is ever going to know that you killed these men. But if a cop in a silly hat so much as tells me off for whistling in the street, then I will conclude that all bets are off and the police are going to find that gun with your fingerprints and your confession."
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I didn't mention the camera. I wanted the existence of photographs of Schramma pictured beside two bodies to be an extra source of friendly persuasion, should I ever need one.
"Fuck you, Gunther. You too, Merten. Fuck you both. I figure someone is bound to turn up here before very long, and then let me out; and when they do—"
"No one's coming. The general lived alone like you said."
"Someone will come. _The cops will come_. Tomorrow. That's right. They'll come because I told them to come, to arrest the general and Merten. Like I told you before."
"No. I think that's what those two men you murdered believed was going to happen. But no. I think you hoped their bodies would lie there, undiscovered, for as long as possible. Enough time for you to distance yourself nicely, anyway."
"You can believe what you like. But I can tell you, they'll be here tomorrow. And when they get here I'll tell them you framed me. Sure, it looks awkward for me. But who do you think they'll believe? Me, a cop with thirty years on my badge. Or you? A man with a false name."
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"Fair enough. You make a good point. Only think about it. I could have left you here to starve to death, but I didn't. I came back for you. However, I can see you're not inclined to be reasonable. So I won't be back again. I can't take that risk. And this time I'll be sure to switch off all the lights and lock up behind me. Bogenhausen is a very private area. People keep themselves to themselves. Could be months before they find you. Starvation is a rotten way to die. But maybe if you drink enough of that wine, you won't notice the pain quite so much. I hope so, for your sake. There's a small cemetery next door. Strikes me that buried alive in this cellar you're already as good as there."
I switched off the basement light, which also controlled the light inside the wine cellar, and I pushed Max Merten toward the stairs, as if we really were leaving.
"All right, all right," shouted Schramma. "You win, Gunther. I'll do it your way, you bastard."
I switched the light on and walked back to the spy hole ready to invigilate the whole laborious process of ensuring I had something closely resembling a future.
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NINE
–
It went to plan, almost. Even with four bottles of good Spätburgunder inside of him, Schramma still managed to find a gun in his pocket to try to shoot me—it was the one he'd been planning to use on me all along, after I'd shot the two dead men with the .38—and I was obliged to render him completely unconscious with a quick uppercut. After we'd taken his photograph with the dead men, we dragged him upstairs and out into the garden, where we loaded him onto the wheelbarrow and transported him back to his car. It was dark and snowing heavily and no one saw us. In Bogenhausen we could probably have carried him out of the house in the middle of a summer's day and no one would have noticed.
With Merten following I drove the BMW across the bridge to the English Garden and abandoned it and Schramma in a quiet spot close to the Monopteros, which is a sort of hilltop Greek temple to Apollo, one of the more popular gods in Munich. He is after all the god of prophecy, and the Bavarians like a bit of that. Hitler certainly thought so.
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"Suppose he freezes to death," said Merten.
"I doubt that'll happen."
"I wouldn't like to have any man's death on my conscience."
"Don't worry about it. He'll be fine. When I was pounding the beat in Berlin I came across many a drunk who'd survived a colder night than Schramma'll have in that BMW. Besides, this is my idea, not yours. So even if he does die, you needn't blame yourself. I can live with it after what he had in mind for me."
"I need a drink."
"Me too."
"Somewhere jolly, I think. Those two dead men are stuck on my retinas. Come on. I'm buying."
Merten drove us south to the Hofbräuhaus on Platzl, a three-floor beer hall that dates back to the sixteenth century and where Hitler once made an important speech in the upstairs hall, only no one mentions that now. These days people are more appreciative of a small brass band. We took a corner table with a window ledge as wide as a coffin lid and ordered beers that were as tall as umbrella stands. I tried to keep count of the lawyer's smokes, not from bland curiosity but out of a desire to feel better about my own habit; sitting beside Merten I felt better than I've felt in a long time. I even managed to convince myself I was in the peak of health. The man smoked like the Ruhr Valley. For a while we just drank and smoked and spoke not at all but gradually the music and the beer got to us and eventually I said, "Speaking as a Berliner, there's a lot that's wrong with Munich but it certainly doesn't include the beer. Nowhere on earth has beer like this. Not even Asgard. At one time or another I must have sampled every beer in this place. Not much of a hobby, I know, but it beats collecting stamps. Tastes better, too."
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"Do you ever miss Berlin, Bernie?"
"Sure. But right now Berlin's Amelia Earhart, isn't it? Marooned on an island in the middle of a vast and hostile sea of red. So there's no point in wishing we were with her."
"Yes, but there's something about Munich that's not as good as Berlin. Only I'm not sure what that is."
"If Berlin is Amelia Earhart, then Munich is Charles Lindbergh: rich, private, vain, and with a very questionable history."
Merten smiled into a beer that was the color of a good night already enjoyed and soon to be flushed away. "I owe you," he said.
"You said that. And you needn't say it again. Just keep buying me beers."
"No, but really I'd like to help you, Bernie. For old times' sake. You said you're a mortuary attendant at the Schwabing Hospital?"
"Did I?"
"A man of your special skills is wasted doing that."
"To what skills are you referring, Max? Covering up a murder scene? Knocking a man out? Managing not to get shot?"
"Being a cop, of course. Something you did for a great many years."
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"That must be why I'm on such a generous police pension now."
"I happen to know of a job that's going, here in Munich. You might be very good at it."
"I have a job I'm very good at. Looking after the dead. So far I've had no complaints. They don't mind me and I don't mind them."
"I mean a regular job. A job with a few prospects."
"All of a sudden everyone's offering me work. Listen, Max, cops are not good people. All of our best qualities get poured into the job and life gets the dregs. Don't ever mistake me for a decent guy. Nobody else does."
"Look, just listen to me, will you?"
"All right. I'm listening."
"A respectable job."
"Ah. That lets me out then. I've not been respectable for a great many years. Probably never will be again."
"I'm talking about a job in insurance."
"Insurance. That's when people pay money for peace of mind. I wouldn't mind some of that myself. Only I doubt I could afford the premium."
"Munich RE is the largest firm in Germany. A friend of mine, Philipp Dietrich, is head of their claims adjustment department. It so happens he's looking for a new claims investigator. An adjustor. And it strikes me you'd be very good at that."
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"It's true I know plenty about risks—I've been taking them all my life—but I know nothing about insurance, except that I don't have any."
"'Claims adjustor' is just a polite way of describing someone who's paid to find out if people are lying. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what you used to do at the Alex? You were a seeker after the truth, were you not? You were good at it, too, if memory serves."
"Best leave those memories alone. If you don't mind. They belonged to a man with a different name."
"The splash around the Alex was that for a while you were the best detective in the Murder Commission. An expert."
"I certainly saw a lot of murders. But take my advice, if you're looking for truth, don't ask an expert on anything. What you'll get is an opinion, which is something very different. Besides, cops and detectives aren't experts, Max, they're gamblers. They deal in probabilities, just like that French fellow Pascal. This guy is probably guilty and this guy is probably innocent, and then we leave it to you lawyers. The only people who will always say they're telling you the truth are priests and witnesses in court, which gives you a pretty good idea of what truth is worth."
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"Working for MRE has more of a future than working in a mortuary, I'd have thought."
"I'm not so sure about that, Max. We're all going to end up there sooner or later."
"I'm serious. Look, give me a few days to speak to Dietrich about you. And let me stake you to a new suit. Yes, why not? For an interview. It's the least I can do after what you've done for me. Tell me that you'll consider this. And give me an answer in the morning. But don't leave it any longer than that. Like the saying goes, the morning has gold in its mouth."
"All right, all right. Just as long as you stop being so damned grateful to me. Kindness might seem like the golden chain that holds society together but it breaks me up. I can't take it. Not anymore. I know just where I am when people are cruel or indifferent. That never disappoints. But for Christ's sake don't be kind to me. Not without a parachute."
TEN
–
A short walk from the English Garden, Munich RE was headquartered on Königinstrasse, close by the German Automobile Club, in an ochre-colored four-story building of some antiquity that was the size and shape of a small university, with an Ionic colonnade and lots of trompe l'oeil stucco. The rusticated wooden doors and tall iron railings looked like an insurance man's dream with all security risks covered: a Gypsy parliament couldn't have broken into the place. One of the two wings at either side of a paved courtyard was being renovated and several gardeners were sweeping the snow away from the main door, probably in case anyone slipped on it and fell and made a claim. Most of the cars parked out front were new Mercedes-Benzes or BMWs, without so much as a scratch on any of them. Clearly there were some very careful drivers in that part of Munich, unlike the rest of the city, and all of them insured. If you'd told me the building was the police headquarters or the central criminal court or an archbishop's palace I'd have believed you; and from the ritzy look of the place I concluded that it had been a while since they'd paid out on a suspect policy.
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I went along to the side entrance on Thiemstrasse. Above another robust-looking door was the stone head of a woman badly scarred by flying shrapnel, like many others in Munich. Inside the door was a reception area where tradesmen were welcome and that was almost true; it was staffed by two women who were just as stone-faced as the one outside. Behind them were two fire extinguishers, a bucket of sand, a fire hose, and a substantial fire alarm. Just being in that building felt as if it was going to add at least a year to my life.
Herr Dietrich came down and fetched me up to his second-floor office himself, which was decent of him. He was tall and substantially overweight and like everyone else in there—me included, thanks to Max Merten—he wore a granite-gray suit that, I soon learned, reflected his attitude to insurance claimants. He had very large ears and walked in a neat, girlish way, with his wrists pointed at the ground as if balancing on a tightrope or—and more likely—as if he'd been told to walk and not run in case his gray bulk caused an accident. In his modern office overlooking the extensive back gardens, he offered me a seat and then served me his entire worldview along with a cup of good coffee and a glass of water on a little steel tray.
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"Insurance is all about statistics," he said. "And in this department, those statistics are, more often than not, little more than crime figures, on account of how a great many customers are crooks. Not that Herr Alzheimer likes me to come right out and say as much. Herr Alzheimer is the chairman of Munich RE and diplomatic, to say the least. It's bad business to mention all the crooks we insure. But my job is to call a spade a spade even when most people will argue that it's a heart or a diamond. They don't seem to realize that by putting in a false insurance claim they're committing a serious fraud. But that's what it is. And it happens every day. If I told you half of the outrageous lies that some of the most respectable citizens expect us to believe you'd say I was exaggerating."
"No, not even if I thought so. You see, as it happens, I'm a bit of a cynic myself, Herr Dietrich."
"Cynicism is a very respectable school of philosophy. For the ancient Greeks there wasn't anything shameful about saying you were a cynic. In my humble opinion there's nothing wrong with a good dose of cynicism, Herr Ganz, and you'll soon find out that Diogenes is the patron saint of the claims adjustment business. As long as my department continues to think that way then this remains a profitable company. But please don't think we're hard-hearted. We're not. We're actually performing a valuable public service. That's the way I look at it. By not paying out on fraudulent claims we keep premiums low for honest customers. But right now I'm short of good men with keen noses for dishonesty. I need a claims adjustor who can think the same way as I do.
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"I'm sure you've noticed my prominent ears, Herr Ganz," said Dietrich. "My nickname around this office is Dumbo. You know, like the little elephant in the Walt Disney cartoon? Most people think my ears are funny. And this is all right with me because, like that little elephant, these big ears are my fortune. They're why I'm running this department. Now I certainly can't fly, but I do have the advice of Timothy Q. Mouse, who whispers things that only these big ears can hear. Ideas that go straight into my subconscious mind. You see, Timothy says when he thinks there's something wrong with a particular claim. Dr. Merten tells me you were once a very good detective. In what is now East Berlin. Which is why you can't provide a written reference."
"That's about the size of it, Herr Dietrich."
"So it's fortunate that Dr. Merten is prepared to vouch for you personally. In my opinion that makes you a very good risk. A very good risk indeed."
"I'm grateful for his confidence in me."
"Did you enjoy police work?"
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"Most of the time."
"Tell me about the part you didn't enjoy."
"The hours. The money."
"Not enough?"
"Not nearly enough for the hours. But I knew it would be like that when I started so I was prepared to live with that. For most of the time. Expecting a wife to live with all that was something else."
"Would you call yourself a trusting sort of man, Herr Ganz?"
"Well, now, here's the thing about trust. There's nothing to it. Trusting people is simply a matter of ignoring your best instincts and all your experience and suspending disbelief. The fact is, the only way you can ever be sure if you can rely on someone or not is to go ahead and rely on them. But that doesn't always work out so well. People usually behave like people and let you down and that's that. Of course, if you know they're going to let you down then you won't be disappointed."
He grinned and made a noise deep in his large belly I assumed was something like approval.
"Tell me, Herr Ganz, are you fit?"
"Sure," I lied. "Just don't ask me to dance around a streetlight with an umbrella."
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"Dangerous things," he said. "Every year almost a hundred people in West Germany are seriously injured as a result of someone who was careless with an umbrella."
Suddenly I had a glimpse into the hazardous world he inhabited, in which everything a human being did came with its own inherent risk. It was like having a conversation with an atomic scientist: Nothing was too small to be significant. "Is that a fact?"
"No, it's a statistic," he said. "There's a difference. You can't always put a price on a fact. So. I have another question. Just how cynical are you, Herr Ganz?"
"I have twenty-five years' experience of living in a tub on the streets of Berlin. Is that what you mean?"
He smiled. "Not quite. What I mean is, give me an example of _how_ you think."
"About what, for instance?"
"I don't know. Tell me something about politics. Modern Germany. The government. Anything at all."
"You know it could just be that I'm a bit _too_ cynical for your tastes, Herr Dietrich. With my mouth I could be talking myself out of a job here."
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"You can talk quite freely. It's _how_ you think I'm interested in, not _what_ you think."
"All right. Try this on, sir. We live in a new era of international amnesia. Who we were and what we did? None of that matters now that we're on the side of truth, justice, and the American way of life. The only thing that's important in Germany today is that the Americans have a canary in the European mine so that they'll have enough time to get out if the Russians decide to come across the border. And we're it. Tweet, tweet."
"You don't think the Amis will defend us?"
"After what we did? Would you?"
Herr Dietrich chuckled. "You're the man for me, Herr Ganz. I like the way you think. Skepticism, yes. This is essential in the claims-adjustment bureau. Don't believe what you've been told to believe. Expect the unexpected. That's our motto. I pride myself on being an excellent judge of human nature. And it's my opinion that you're my sort of man, sir. When can you start work?"
"What's wrong with February first?"
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"All right then. Now you're talking. But first I have to ask Herr Alzheimer to approve your appointment. He's the chairman of the board but he takes a special interest in my department, so he'll want to meet you himself. Is that agreeable to you, Herr Ganz? Are you prepared to endure a moment of scrutiny in Alois Alzheimer's office?"
I was on my best behavior so I said it would be an honor and Dietrich must have believed me because he picked up the telephone and made a call. A few minutes later we were walking upstairs into a more rarefied atmosphere. Certainly the gray carpets were thicker. There was a lot of wood paneling on the walls, too, which, while nice, struck me as a potential fire hazard. I might even have pointed out the lack of a safety net in the stairwell; someone could easily have fallen over the banister from the fourth-floor landing, especially if someone hit him first, or waved a gun around. Calculating risks was already second nature to me.
According to Max Merten, Munich RE had insured all of the Nazi concentration camps against fire, theft, and other risks. They'd also been in business with the SS. I certainly wasn't about to look for any moral high ground where that was concerned. Besides, I actually believed what I'd told Dietrich about international amnesia. Nobody was losing any sleep about what Germany did in the war. Nobody but me, perhaps.
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The chairman's office was an aerie fit for some giant bird of prey and the small thin man who occupied the premises was no less keen-eyed than any mythical hawk or eagle. Alzheimer was a smooth, rich-looking Bavarian with a tailor-made gray suit, a light tan, dark hair, darker eyebrows, and a face as shrewd as an actuary's life table. If Josef Goebbels had stayed alive he might have looked like Alois Alzheimer. While Dietrich went about the task of recommending me, the chairman gave me an appraising sort of look as if he were calculating how long I had to live and what the premium on my policy ought to be. But even Pollyanna could have seen that I was a risk too far. In spite of that, the chairman of Munich RE approved my appointment. I was now a claims adjustor making twenty-five deutschmarks a week, plus bonuses. It wasn't a fortune but it paid a lot better than the mortuary; like my mother used to say, it's good to make ends meet but sometimes it's nice to have enough to tie a bow. And I owed it all to Max Merten. I walked out of the building feeling almost happy with myself. Insurance seemed no less obscure than what I'd been doing at the hospital and therefore every bit as appealing. More so, perhaps. Even the word "insurance" seemed to underwrite a desirable element of safety. It was hard to imagine a disgruntled claimant putting a gun to my ear while he argued the finer points of the small print in his policy.
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