by Philip Kerr
I started to thank him but he shrugged it off. “I might need your help some day, Herr Gunther.”
I hoped he was wrong. But then again it’s just a job, so maybe I would help him if he ever asked for my help. He’d been unlucky, that was all. For one thing, there was another officer, an SS Lieutenant Colonel Peiper, who had been in charge of that Waffen-SS unit at Malmedy. Executing the prisoners had been Peiper’s call, not Gebauer’s. For another—at least from what I’d read in the newspapers—the unit had already taken a lot of casualties and were under a lot of pressure. Under those circumstances, giving Fritz Gebauer a life sentence seemed a little harsh, to say the least. Gebauer was right. What choice did they have? Surrendering in a theater of war like the Ardennes was like asking a burglar to look after your house while you were on holiday. On the Russian front there was no one who expected to be take prisoner. Most of the time we shot theirs and they shot ours. I had been one of the lucky ones. Gebauer hadn’t, and that was all there was to it. War was like that.
I skipped out of Landsberg feeling like Edmond Dantès after a thirteen-year stretch in the Château d’If, and drove quickly back to Munich as if a fortune in gold and jewels awaited me at my office. Prisons affect me like that. Just a couple of hours in the cement and I’m looking for a hacksaw. I hadn’t been back very long when the phone rang. It was Korsch.
“Where have you been?” he asked. “I’ve been ringing you all morning.”
“It’s a nice day,” I said. “I thought I’d go to the English Garden. Have an ice cream. Pick some flowers.” That was what I felt like doing. Something ordinary and innocent and outdoors where you didn’t breathe the smell of men all day. I kept thinking about Gebauer, younger than me and facing life in prison, unless the bishop and the cardinal came through for him and the others. What wouldn’t Fritz Gebauer have given for a fistful of ice cream and a walk to the Chinese pagoda? “How did you make out with the Amis?” I asked Korsch, stabbing a cigarette into my mouth, and scarping a match along the underside of my desk drawer. “Anything on Janowska and Warzok?”
“Apparently the Soviets set up a special commission of inquiry into the camp,” he said.
“Isn’t that a little unusual? Why’d they do something like that?”
“Because while there were German officers and NCOs running the camp,” said Korsch, “it was largely Russian POWs who had volunteered for service with the SS who did most of the killing. I say most and I mean most. With them it was all about numbers. Killing as many as they could as quickly as possible because that’s what they were told to do, on pain of death. But with our old comrades, the officers, it was something else. For them killing was a pleasure. There’s very little in the file about Warzok. Most of the witness statements are about the camp’s factory commandant, Fritz Gebauer. He sounds like a right bastard, Bernie.”
“Tell me more about him,” I said, feeling my stomach turn into a pit.
“This sweetheart liked to strangle women and children with his bare hands,” said Korsch. “And he liked to tie people up and put them in barrels of water overnight, in winter. The only reason he’s doing life for what happened at Malmedy is that the Ivans won’t let the witnesses come to the American Zone for a trial. But for that, he’d probably have been hanged like Weiss and Eichelsdorfer, and some of those others.”
Martin Weiss had been the last commandant at Dachau, and Johann Eichelsdorfer had been in charge at Kaufering IV—the largest of the camps near Landsberg. Knowing that the man I had spent the morning with, a man I had considered to be a decent sort of fellow, was, in reality, as bad as these two others left me feeling disappointed not just with him, but also with myself. I don’t know why I was so surprised. If there was one thing I had learned in the war it was that decent, law-abiding family men were capable of the most bestial acts of murder and brutality.
“Are you still there, Bernie?”
“I’m still here.”
“After Gebauer left Janowska in 1943, the camp was run by Wilhaus and Warzok, and any pretense that it was a labor camp was abandoned. Mass exterminations, medical experiments, you name it, they did it at Janowska. Wilhaus and some of the others were hanged by the Russians. As a matter of fact they filmed it. Sat them on a truck with halters around their necks and then drove the truck away. Warzok and some of the others are still at large. Wilhaus’s wife, Hilde—she’s wanted by the Russians. So is an SS captain called Gruen. A Gestapo Kommissar called Wepke. And a couple of NCOs, Rauch and Kepich.”
“What did Wilhaus’s wife do?”
“She murdered prisoners to amuse her daughter. When the Russians got close, Warzok and the rest moved to Plaszow, and then Gross-Rosen—a quarry camp near Breslau. Others went to Majdanek and Mauthausen. After that, who knows? If you ask me, Bernie, looking for Warzok will be like looking for a pin in a hay-loft. If I were you, I’d be inclined to forget about it and get myself another client.”
“Then it’s lucky she asked me and not you.”
“She must smell really nice.”
“Better than you and me.”
“It goes without saying, Bernie,” said Korsch. “The federal government prefers us to keep downwind of the Amis. So as not to scare off the new investment that’s coming here. That’s why they want all these war crimes investigations to finish. So we can all get on and make some money. You know, I bet I could get you fixed up with something here at the paper, Bernie. They could use a good private investigator.”
“For those undercover stories that won’t spoil anyone’s breakfast? Is that it?”
“Communists,” said Korsch. “That’s what people want to read about. Spy stories. Stories about life in the Russian Zone and how terrible it is. Plots to destabilize the new federal government.”
“Thanks, Friedrich, but no,” I said. “If that’s really what they want to read about, I’d probably end up investigating myself.”
I put the phone down and lit a cigarette with the butt of the one I was finishing, to help me think things over in detail. It’s what I do when I work a case that starts to interest not just me but other people as well. People like Friedrich Korsch, for example. Some people smoke to relax. Others to stimulate their imaginations, or to concentrate. With me it was a combination of all three at once. And the more I thought about it the more my imagination was telling me not only that I’d just been warned off a case, but also that this had been swiftly followed up by an attempt to buy me off, with a job offer. I took another drag on the cigarette and then stubbed it out in the ashtray. Nicotine was a drug, wasn’t it? I was smoking way too much. It was a crazy idea. Korsch trying to warn me and then buy me off? That was the drug talking, surely?
I went out to get a coffee and a cognac. They were drugs, too. Maybe that way I’d see things differently. It was worth a try.
THIRTEEN
Wagmullerstrasse ran onto Prinzregentenstrasse, between the National Museum and the House of Art. On the English Garden side, the House of Art was now being used as an American Officers’ Club. The National Museum had just reopened following extensive repairs and now, once again, it was possible to see the city treasures that no one really wanted to look at. Wagmullerstrasse was in a district of Munich called Lehel, which was full of quiet residential streets built for the well-to-do during Germany’s industrial revolution. Lehel was still quiet but only because half of the houses were in ruins. The other half had been or were still being repaired and lived in by Munich’s new well-to-do. Even out of uniform the new well-to-do were easily recognizable by their buzz-cut hairstyles; their busy, gum-chewing mouths; their loud braying laughs; their impossibly wide trousers; their handsome cigarette cases; their sensible English shoes; their Kodak folding Brownies; and, above all, their semi-aristocratic air—that sense of absolute precedence they all gave off like cheap cologne.
The Red Cross building was four stories of yellowish Danubian limestone set between a rather fancy-looking shop selling Nymphenburger porcelain and a private art gal
lery. Inside, everything was in motion. Typewriters were being punched, filing cabinets opened and closed loudly, forms being filled out, people coming down stairs, and people going up in an open-grille elevator. Four years after the end of the war the Red Cross was still dealing with the human fallout. Just to make things more interesting they had let the painters in, and I didn’t have to look at the ceiling to know they were painting it white—there were spots of it all over the brown linoleum floor. Behind a desk that looked more like a counter in a beer hall, a woman with braids and a face as pink as a ham was brushing off an old man who might or might not have been a Jew. I never could tell the difference.
Most of her problem with him related to the fact that only half of what he was saying to her was in German. The rest, which was mostly spoken at the floor, just in case she understood the swear words, was in Russian. I buckled on my armor, mounted my white horse, and leveled my lance at the ham.
“Perhaps I can be of assistance,” I said to her before speaking to the man in Russian. It turned out that he was looking for his brother who had been in the concentration camp at Treblinka, then Dachau, before finally ending up in one of the Kaufering camps. He’d run out of money. He needed to get to the DP camp at Landsberg. He had been hoping that the Red Cross would help him. The way the ham was looking at him I wasn’t sure they would, so I gave the old man five marks and told him how to get to the railway station on Bayerstrasse. He thanked me profusely and then left me to be eaten by the ham.
“What was all that about?” she demanded.
I told her.
“Since 1945, a total of sixteen million tracing requests have been submitted to the Red Cross,” she said, answering the accusation that lay behind my eyes. “One point nine million returnees have been interviewed about missing persons. We’re still missing sixty-nine thousand prisoners of war, one point one million members of the Wehrmacht, and almost two hundred thousand German civilians. That means there are proper procedures to be observed. If we gave five marks to every heel who walks in off the street with a sob story we’d be broke in no time. You’d be surprised how many walk in here looking for their long-lost brother when what they’re really looking for is just the price of a drink.”
“Then it’s very lucky he took five marks from me instead of from the Red Cross,” I said. “I can afford to lose it.” I smiled warmly at her but she wasn’t near being thawed.
“What can I do for you?” she asked coolly.
“I’m looking for Father Gotovina.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No,” I said. “I thought I’d save him the trouble of meeting me at the Praesidium.”
“The Police Praesidium?” Like most Germans the ham was still apprehensive where the police were concerned. “On Ettstrasse?”
“With the stone lion in front of the entrance,” I said. “That’s right. Have you been there?”
“No,” she said, keen to be rid of me now. “Take the elevator to the second floor. You’ll find Father Gotovina in the Passport and Visa Section. Room twenty-nine.”
At first glance the man operating the elevator looked not much older than me. It was only after the second glance, when you’d finished taking in the one leg and the scar on his face that the third glance told you he was probably not much more than twenty-five. I got in the car with him, and said “two” and he went into action with the well-practiced air and grim determination of a man operating a 20mm Flak 38—the gun with the foot pedals and the collapsing seat. Stepping out onto the second floor I almost glanced up to see if he’d hit anything. It was just as well I didn’t, because if I had I’d have tripped over the man painting a skirting board that ran the length of a corridor as big as a bowling alley.
The Passport and Visa Section was like a state within a state. More typewriters, more filing cabinets, more forms to be filled, and more meaty-looking women. Each of them looked like she ate a Red Cross parcel, including the wrapping paper and string, for breakfast. There was a guy standing around beside a 50mm camera with a trip and hood. Outside the window there was a good view of the Angel of Peace monument on the other side of the River Isar. Erected in 1899 to commemorate the Franco-Prussian War, it hadn’t meant much then and it certainly didn’t mean much now.
Being a detective I spotted Father Gotovina within a few seconds of going through the door. There were lots of things that gave it away. The black suit, the black shirt, the crucifix hanging around his neck, the little white halo of collar. His was not a face that made you think of Jesus so much as Pontius Pilate. The thick, dark eyebrows were the only hair on his head. The skull looked like the rotating dome roof on the Göttingen Observatory, and each lobeless ear resembled a demon’s wing. His lips were as thick as his fingers, and his nose as broad and hooked as the beak on a giant octopus. He had a mole on his left cheek that was the size and color of a five-pfennig piece and walnut-brown eyes, like the walnut on the grip of a Walther PPK. One of them picked me out like a shoemaker’s awl and he came over, almost as if he could smell the cop on my shoes. It could just as easily have been the cognac on my breath. But I didn’t figure him for the teetotaler type any more than I could picture him singing in the Vienna Boys Choir. If the Medici had still been siring popes, Father Gotovina would have been what one looked like.
“Can I help you?” he asked in a voice like liquid furniture polish, with lips stretched tight across teeth that were as white as his collar in what, among the Holy Inquisition anyway, must have passed for a smile.
“Father Gotovina?” I asked.
He nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“I’m going to Peissenberg,” I told him, showing the rail ticket I had bought earlier. “I wondered if you know anyone there I could stay with.”
He glanced at my ticket for only a moment, but his eyes did not miss the way the name “Peissenberg” had been altered.
“I believe there’s a very good hotel there,” he said. “The Berggasthof Greitner. But it’s probably closed right now. You’re a little early for the ski season, Herr . . . ?”
“Gunther, Bernhard Gunther.”
“Of course there’s a fine church there which, incidentally, affords a remarkably extensive and panoramic view of the Bavarian Alps. As it happens the priest there is a friend of mine. He might be able to help you. If you come by the Holy Ghost Church at about five o’clock this afternoon, I’ll provide you with a letter of introduction. But I warn you, he’s a keen musician. If you spend any time in Peissenberg he’ll dragoon you into the church choir. Have you singing hymns for your supper, so to speak. Do you have a favorite hymn, Herr Gunther?”
“A favorite? Yes, probably ‘How Great Thou Art.’ I think it’s the tune I like more than anything.”
He closed his eyes in a poor affectation of piety and added, “Yes, that is a lovely hymn, isn’t it?” He nodded. “Until five o’clock, then.”
I left him and walked out of the building. I went south and west, across the city center, vaguely in the direction of the Holy Ghost Church but more precisely in the direction of the Hofbrauhaus, in the Platzl. I needed a beer.
With its red mansard roof, pink walls, arched windows, and heavy wooden doors, the Hofbrauhaus had a folkish, almost fairy-tale air, and whenever I passed it, I half expected to see the Hunch-back of Notre Dame swinging down from the roof to rescue some hapless Gypsy girl from the center of the cobbled square (assuming there were any Gypsies still left in Germany). But it could just as easily have been the Jew Süss swinging down into the medieval marketplace. Munich is that kind of a town. Small-minded. Even a bit rustic and primitive. It’s no accident that Adolf Hitler got started here, in another beer hall, the Burgerbraukeller, just a few blocks away from the Hofbrauhaus on Kaufingerstrasse. But Hitler’s echo was only part of the reason I seldom went to the Burgerbrau. The main reason was I didn’t like Löwenbräu beer. I preferred the darker beer at the Hofbrauhaus. The food there was better, too. I ordered Bavarian potato soup, followed by pork
knuckles with potato dumplings and homemade bacon-cabbage salad. I’d been saving my meat coupons.
Several beers and a sweet yeast pudding later, I went along to the Holy Ghost Church on Tal. Like everything else in Munich, it had taken a battering. The roof and vaulting had been completely destroyed and the interior decoration devastated. But the pillars in the nave had been re-erected, the church reroofed and repaired sufficiently for services to be resumed. There was one under way as I entered the half-empty church. A priest who wasn’t Gotovina stood facing the still impressive high altar, his fluting voice echoing around the church’s skeletal interior like Pinocchio’s when he was trapped inside the whale. I felt my lip and nose curl with Protestant abhorrence. I disliked the idea of a God who could put up with being worshipped in this reedy, singsong, Roman way. Not that I ever called myself a Protestant. Not since I learned how to spell Friedrich Nietzsche.
I found Father Gotovina under what remained of the organ loft, next to the bronze tomb-slab of Duke Ferdinand of Bavaria. I followed him to a wooden confessional that looked more like an ornate photo booth. He swept aside a gray curtain and stepped inside. I did the same on the other side, sat down and knelt beside the screen, the way God liked it I presumed. There was just enough light in the confessional to see the top of the priest’s billiard-ball head. Or at least a patch of it—a small, shiny square of skin that looked like the lid on a copper kettle. In the half darkness and close confines of the confessional his voice sounded particularly infernal. He probably laid it on a greased rack and left it to smoke over a hickory-wood fire when he went to bed at night.
