by Philip Kerr
I had left my car parked a few blocks east of the Vier Jahreszeiten, pointed west toward Ramersdorf, in case I fancied the idea of checking out that address she’d given me. I didn’t fancy it much. Not on top of two Gibsons. Britta Warzok had been right about that much, at least. The Vier Jahreszeiten did serve an excellent cocktail. Near the car, Maximilianstrasse widens into an elongated square called the Forum. I guess someone must have thought the square reminded them of ancient Rome, probably because there are four statues there that look vaguely classical. I daresay it looks more like the ancient Roman Forum than it once did, because the Ethnographic Museum, which is on the right side of the square as you go toward the river, is a bombed-out ruin. And it was from this direction that the first of them came. Built like a watchtower and wearing a badly creased, beige linen suit, he walked meanderingly toward me with his arms spread wide, like a shepherd trying to intercept escaping sheep.
Having no wish to be intercepted by anyone, let alone someone as large as this fellow, I turned immediately north, in the direction of St. Anna’s and found a second man coming my way down Seitz-strasse. He wore a leather coat, a bowler hat, and carried a walking-stick. There was something in his face I didn’t like. Mostly it was just his face. His eyes were the color of concrete and the smile on his cracked lips reminded me of a length of barbed wire. The two men broke into a run as I turned quickly on my heel and sprinted back up Maximilianstrasse and straight into the path of a third man advancing on me from the corner of Herzog-Rudolf-Strasse. He didn’t look like he was collecting for charity either.
I reached for the gun in my pocket about five seconds too late. I hadn’t taken Stuber’s advice and left one in the barrel, and I would have had to work the slide to put one up the spout and make it ready to fire. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. No sooner was it in my fist than the man with the stick caught up with me and hit my wrist with it. For a moment I thought he’d broken my arm. The little gun clattered harmlessly onto the road and I almost went down with it, such was the pain in my forearm. Fortunately I have two arms, and the other drove my elbow back into his stomach. It was a hard, solid blow and sufficiently well delivered to knock some of my bowler-hatted attacker’s breath from his body. I smelled it whistle past my ear, but there wasn’t nearly enough of it to put him down on the ground.
The other two were on me by now. I lifted my paws, squared up to them, jabbed hard into the face of one and connected a decent right hook with the chin of the other. I felt his head shift against my knuckles like a balloon on a stick and ducked a fist the size of a small Alp. But it was no use. The walking stick hit me hard across the shoulders, and my hands dropped like a drummer’s arms. One hauled my jacket down over my shoulders so that my arms were pinned by my sides, and then another delivered a punch to my stomach that scraped against my backbone and left me on my knees, throwing up the remains of my cocktail-onion dinner onto the little Beretta.
“Aw, look at his little gun,” said one of my new friends, and he kicked it away, just in case I felt stupid enough to try to pick it up. I didn’t.
“Get him on his feet,” said the one with the bowler.
The biggest one grabbed me by my coat collar and hauled me up to a position that only vaguely resembled standing. I hung from his grip for a moment, like a man who had dropped his change, my hat slipping slowly off the top of my head. A big car drew up in a squeal of tires. Someone thoughtfully caught my hat as, finally, it tipped off my head. Then the one holding my collar tucked his fingers under my belt and shifted me toward the curbside. There seemed little point in struggling. They knew what they were doing. They’d done it many times before, you could tell. They were a neat little triangle around me now. One of them opening the car door and throwing my hat onto the backseat, one of them handling me like a sack of potatoes, and one of them with the stick in his hand, in case I changed my mind about going to the picnic with them all. Up close they looked and smelled like something out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch—my own pale, compliant, sweating face surrounded with a triad of stupidity, bestiality, and hate. Broken noses. Gap teeth. Leering eyes. Five-o’clock shadows. Beery breath. Nicotine fingers. Belligerent chins. And yet more beery breath. They’d had quite a few before keeping their appointment with me. It was like being kidnapped by a Bavarian brewers’ guild.
“Better cuff him,” said the bowler hat. “Just in case he tries anything.”
“If he does, I’ll tap him with this,” said one, producing a blackjack.
“Cuff him all the same,” said the bowler hat.
The big one holding me by the belt and collar let go for a moment. That was the moment I ordered myself to escape. The only trouble was, my legs were not obeying orders. They felt like they belonged to someone who hadn’t walked in several weeks. Besides, I would just have been sapped. I’ve been sapped before and my head didn’t care for it. So, politely, I let the big one gather my hands in his mitts and snap some iron around my wrists. Then he lifted me up a bit, grabbed my belt again, and launched me like a human cannonball.
My hat and the car seat broke my fall. As the big one got into the car behind me, the door on the other side opened in front of my face and the ape with the blackjack put his tire-size hip beside my head and barged me into the middle. It wasn’t the kind of sandwich I liked. The one with the bowler got into the front seat and then we were off.
“Where are we going?” I heard myself croak.
“Never mind,” said the one holding the blackjack, and crushed my hat on top of my face. I let it stay there, preferring the sweet, hair-oil smell of my hat to their brewery breath and the stink of something fried that hung on their clothes. I liked the smell on my hatband. And for the first time I got to understand why a small child carries a little blanket around, and why it’s called a comforter. The smell in my hat reminded me of the normal man I’d been a few minutes before and whom I hoped to be again when these thugs were finished with me. It wasn’t exactly Proust’s madeleine, but maybe something close.
We drove southeast. I knew that because the car had been pointing east, up Maximilianstrasse, when I was pushed into it. And soon after we drove off, we crossed the Maximilian Bridge, and turned right. The journey was over a little sooner than I had expected. We drove into a garage or a warehouse. A shutter that came up in front of us came down behind us. I didn’t need my eyes to know approximately where we were. The sweet-and-sour smell of mashed hops coming from three of Munich’s largest breweries was as much of a city landmark as the Bavaria statue in the Theresa Meadow. Even through the felt of my hat it was as strong and pungent as a walk across a newly fertilized field.
Car doors opened. My hat was swept off my face and I was half pushed, half pulled out of the car. The three from the Forum had become four in the car and there were another two waiting for us in a semi-derelict warehouse that was littered with broken pallets, beer barrels, and crates of empty bottles. In one corner was a motorcycle and sidecar. A truck was parked in front of the car. Above my head was a glass roof, only most of the glass was under my feet. It cracked like ice on a frozen lake as I was frog-marched toward a man, neater than the others, with smaller hands, smaller feet, and a small mustache. I just hoped his brain was large enough to know when I was telling the truth. My stomach still felt like it was sticking to my backbone.
The smaller man was wearing a gray Trachten jacket with hunter green lapels and matching oak-leaf-shaped pockets, cuffs, and elbows. His trousers were gray flannel, his shoes were brown, and he looked like the Führer ready to make a night of it at Berchtesgaden. His voice was soft and civilized, which might have made a pleasant change but for the fact that experience has taught me how it’s usually the quiet ones who are the worst sadists of all—especially in Germany. Landsberg Prison was full of quiet-spoken, civilized types like the man wearing the Trachten jacket. “You’re a lucky man, Herr Gunther,” he said.
“That’s how I feel about it, too,” I said.
“You really were in the SS, weren’t you?”
“I try not to brag about it,” I said.
He stood perfectly still, almost to attention, his arms by his side, as if he had been addressing a parade. He had a senior SS officer’s manner and bearing and a senior SS officer’s eyes and way of speaking. A tyrant, like Heydrich, or Himmler—one of those borderline psychopaths who used to command police battalions in the far-flung corners of the greater German Reich. Not the kind of man to be flippant with, I told myself. A real Nazi. The kind of man I hated, especially now that we were supposed to be rid of them.
“Yes, we checked you out,” he said. “Against our battalion lists. We have lists of former SS men, you know, and you are on it. Which is why I say that you are very fortunate.”
“I could tell,” I said. “I’ve been getting a strong feeling of belonging ever since you boys picked me up.”
All those years I had kept my mouth shut and said nothing, like everyone else. Perhaps it was the strong smell of beer and their Nazi manners, but suddenly I remembered some SA men coming into a bar and beating up a Jew and me going outside and leaving them to it. It must have been 1934. I should have said something then. And now that I knew they weren’t going to kill me, suddenly I wanted to make up for that. I wanted to tell this little Nazi martinet what I really thought of him and his kind.
“I wouldn’t make light of it, Herr Gunther,” he said gently. “The only reason you’re alive now is that you’re on that list.”
“I’m very glad to hear it, Herr General.”
He flinched. “You know me?”
“No, but I know your manners,” I said. “The quiet way you expect to be obeyed. That absolute sense of chosen race superiority. I suppose that’s not so very surprising given the caliber of men you have working for you. But that was always the way with the SS general staff, wasn’t it?” I looked with distaste at the men who had brought me there. “Find some feeble-minded sadists to carry out the dirty work, or better still, someone from a different race altogether. A Latvian, a Ukrainian, a Romanian, even a Frenchman.”
“We’re all Germans here, Herr Gunther,” said the little general. “All of us. All old comrades. Even you. Which makes your recent behavior all the more inexcusable.”
“What did I do? Forget to polish my knuckle-duster?”
“You should know better than to go around asking questions about the Web and the Comradeship. Not all of us have so little to hide as you, Herr Gunther. There are some of us who could be facing death sentences.”
“In the present company, I find that all too easy to believe.”
“Your impertinence does you and our organization no credit,” he said, almost sadly. “‘My honor is my loyalty.’ Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“As far as I’m concerned, General, those were just some words on a belt buckle. Another Nazi lie, like ‘Strength Through Joy.’” Another reason I said what I said to the little general, of course, was that I never had the brains to make general myself. Maybe they weren’t going to kill me. But perhaps I ought to have borne in mind the fact that they could still hurt me. Perhaps. Part of me always knew they were going to hurt me. I think I knew that was always what was on the cards. And under those circumstances I think I figured I had nothing to lose by speaking my mind. “Or the best lie of all. My own favorite. The one the SS dreamed up to make people feel better about their situation. ‘Work makes you free.’”
“I can see we will have to reeducate you, Herr Gunther,” he said. “For your own good, of course. So as to avoid any more unpleasantness in the future.”
“You can dress it up how you like, General. But you people always did prefer hitting people to—”
I didn’t finish my sentence. The general nodded to one of his men—the one with the blackjack—and it was like letting a dog off his lead. Immediately, without a second’s hesitation, the man took a step forward and let me have it hard on both arms, and then on both shoulders. I felt my whole body arch in an involuntary spasm as, still handcuffed, I tried to lower my head between my shoulder blades.
Enjoying his work he chuckled softly as the pain put me down on my knees and, coming around behind me, he hit near the top of my spine—a crippling blow that left my mouth tasting of Gibson mixed with blood. They were expert blows, I could tell, and they were meant to cause me the maximum amount of pain.
I collapsed onto my side and lay on the ground at his feet. But if I thought he would have been too lazy to bend down and keep hitting me, I was mistaken. He took his jacket off and handed it to the man with the bowler hat. Then he started to hit me again. He hit me on the knees, on the ankles, on the ribs, on the buttocks, and on the shins. Each time he hit me the blackjack sounded like someone beating a rug with a broom handle. Even as I prayed for the beating to stop someone started swearing, as if the ferocity of the blows to my body seemed remarkable, and it took several more agonizing seconds for me to realize that the curses were uttered by me. I had been beaten before, but never quite so thoroughly. And probably the only reason I felt it lasted as long as it did was that he avoided hitting me about the face and head, which might have rendered me mercifully unconscious. Most agonizing of all was when he started to repeat the blows, hitting where he had hit me already and there was now just a painful bruise. That was when I started to scream, as if angry with myself that I could not lose consciousness and escape from the pain.
“That’s enough for the moment,” the general said, finally.
The man wielding the blackjack stood back, breathing hard, and wiped his brow with his forearm.
Then the man with the bowler laughed and, handing him his jacket, said, “Hardest work you’ve done all week, Albert.”
I lay still. My body felt as if I had been stoned for adultery without the pleasure of the memory of the adultery. Every part of me was in pain. And all for ten red ladies. I’d had a thousand marks and I told myself there would be another thousand red marks when I looked at myself in the morning. Assuming I still had the stomach to look at myself ever again. But they were not yet finished with me.
“Pick him up,” said the general. “And bring him over here.”
Cracking jokes and cursing my weight, they dragged me over to where he was now standing, beside a beer barrel. On top of this lay a hammer and a chisel. I didn’t like the look of the hammer and the chisel. And I liked them even less when the big man picked them up with the look of someone who is about to start work on a piece of sculpture. I had the horrible feeling that I was this ugly Michelangelo’s chosen piece of marble. They backed me up to the barrel and flattened one of my handcuffed hands on the wooden lid. I started to struggle with what remained of my strength and they laughed.
“Game, isn’t he?” said the big one.
“A real fighter,” agreed the man with the blackjack.
“Shut up, all of you,” said the general. Then he took hold of my ear and twisted it painfully against my head. “Listen to me, Gunther,” he said. “Listen to me.” His voice was almost gentle. “You have been sticking your fat fingers in things that shouldn’t concern you. Just like that stupid little Dutch boy who stuck his finger into the hole in the dike. Do you know something? They never tell the whole story of what happened to him. And more importantly of what happened to his finger. Do you know what happened to his finger, Herr Gunther?”
I yelled out loud as someone took hold of my hand and pressed it down flat against the lid of the barrel. Then they separated my little finger from the others with what felt like the neck of a beer bottle. Then I felt the sharp edge of the chisel pressed against the joint and, for a moment, I forgot about the pain in the rest of my body. The big greasy paws holding me tightened with excitement. I spat blood from my mouth, and answered the general. “I get the message, all right?” I said. “I’m warned off, permanently.”
“I’m not sure that you are,” said the general. “You see, a cautionary tale only works as such if the caution is reinforced by a tast
e of what consequences might follow. Some sort of sharp reminder of the sort of thing that might befall you should you stick your fingers into our affairs again. Show him what I’m talking about, gentlemen.”
Something shiny flashed through the air—the hammer, I presumed—and then descended on the handle of the chisel. For a second there was an indescribable amount of pain and then a thick fog rolling in from the Alps enveloped me. I let go of my breath and closed my eyes.
SEVENTEEN
I ought not to have smelled so bad. I knew I had wet myself. But it ought not to have smelled so bad. Not as quickly as this. I smelled worse than the filthiest tramp. That cloying, sickly-sweet ammonia smell you get off people who haven’t bathed or changed their clothes in months. I tried to wrestle my head away from it, but it stayed with me. I was lying on the floor. Someone was holding me by the hair. I blinked my eyes open and found there was a small brown bottle of smelling salts being held beneath my nose. The general stood up, screwed the cap on the bottle of salts, and dropped it into the pocket of his jacket.
“Give him some cognac,” he said.
Greasy fingers took hold of my chin and pushed a glass between my lips. It was the best brandy I ever tasted. I let it fill my mouth and then tried to swallow but without much success. Then I tried again and this time some of it trickled down. It felt like something radioactive traveling through my body. By now someone had taken away the handcuffs and I saw that there was a large and bloody handkerchief wrapped around my left hand. My own.
