by Philip Kerr
“Bernie,” he said. “I was hoping you would call. So that I might have a chance to tell you how sorry I am for landing you in a tight spot. Really, I am.”
“A tight spot,” I said. “Is that what you call it when you try to put another man’s head in a noose that’s meant for you?”
“I’m afraid it has to be that way, Bernie,” he said. “You see, I can’t begin my new life in America until Eric Gruen is officially dead, or in prison for his so-called war crimes. You can blame Jacobs for that. He says the CIA won’t have it any other way. If it ever got out that they had allowed a Nazi doctor into the country there would be hell to pay. It’s really as simple as that.”
“That much I understand,” I said. “But why have two innocent women killed if all you wanted was for me to take your rap? You, or Jacobs, or whichever Ami does your dirty work here in Vienna, could have just arranged for my arrest at the hotel.”
“And if we’d done what you say? Think about it, Bernie. You would have told them you were Bernie Gunther. Even without a passport the Allied authorities would probably check out your story, find out who you really are. No, we had to make sure that Bernie Gunther had nowhere to go. And I mean nowhere. When you’re planning your next move, you might think about this, Bernie. The penalty for murder, especially the despicable murders you have committed, is death. They’ll hang Bernie Gunther if they catch him. But depending on who catches Eric Gruen, you might get away with life imprisonment. And the way things are going in the Federal Republic right now, you’ll probably be out in less than ten years. It could even be just five. You can do my time and then come out to some money in the bank. If you stop to think about it, Bernie, you’ll agree that I’ve been remarkably generous. I mean, you’ve got the money, haven’t you? Twenty-five thousand schillings is not a bad sum to have waiting for you when you come out of Landsberg. Really, Bernie, I could have left you without a groschen to your name.”
“You’ve been very generous,” I said, biting my lip and hoping that he might let something slip. Some crumb of information that might be useful to me in working my escape from Vienna.
“You know, if I were you, I’d give myself up. As Eric Gruen, of course. And you’d best do it before they catch Bernie Gunther and hang him.”
I shoved some more coins into the telephone and laughed. “I don’t see how things could be any worse than they already are,” I said. “You’ve made quite sure of that.”
“Oh, but they could,” he said. “Believe me. Vienna’s a closed city, Bernie. It’s not so easy to get out of it. And under those circumstances I don’t think it would take one of those squads of Israeli avengers very long to track you down. What do they call themselves? The Nakam? Or is it the Brichah? Some soap name, anyway. Did you know that they are based in Austria? No, probably not. In fact, Linz and Vienna are their center of operations. Major Jacobs knows some of these soaps quite well. For one thing, he’s a soap himself, of course. And for another, there are several of those soaps working for the Nakam who are also working for the CIA. As a matter of fact, it was a CIA soap who killed the real Frau Warzok. Hardly surprising after what she did at Lemberg-Janowska. Really terrible things. I know, I was there. She was a real beast, that woman. Killing Jews for sport, that kind of thing.”
“Whereas you only killed them to further the cause of medical science,” I said.
“Now you’re just being sarcastic, Bernie,” he said. “And I don’t blame you. But what you say is quite true. I never killed anyone for the pleasure of it. I’m a doctor. None of us did, as a matter of fact.”
“And Vera? What’s your justification for killing her?”
“I can’t say that I approved of that,” said Gruen. “But Jacobs thought it would help to put you on your toes.”
“Maybe I will give myself up as Bernie Gunther after all,” I said. “Just to spoil your plans.”
“You could do that, yes,” he said. “But Jacobs has some powerful friends in Vienna. Somehow I think they’ll make it stick that you’re Eric Gruen. Even you will get to see the sense of it when you’re in police custody.”
“Whose idea was this, anyway?”
“Oh, Jacobs. He’s a very devious sort of person, our Major Jacobs. He got the idea when he and Wolfram Romberg came to dig up your garden in Dachau. He noticed the similarity between us as soon as he met you, Bernie. Originally he was going to come back to Dachau and get things started to frame you there. But then, of course, you moved to Munich and returned to your former trade. And that’s when we hatched the scheme to have you go looking for Friedrich Warzok. Just to make you think you’d stepped on the toes of some old comrades. Enough to earn yourself a good beating, so we might effect some important alterations to the tailor-made suit we were making for you. Such as losing that all-important finger. Those old SS files are irritatingly precise in the way they describe all of one’s distinguishing characteristics. That was rather clever of him, don’t you think? It’s the first thing any Allied War Crimes investigator or Jewish avenger squad would look for. That missing finger of mine.”
“And the woman who hired me?”
“My wife. The first time she came to look for you was in Dachau, and of course you’d gone. Then she came to your offices to take a good look at you, to see if Jacobs was right about there being a resemblance. And she agreed, there was. Which is when we sat down with the major and helped him to cook up the whole plot. Which I have to say was the fun part. It was kind of like writing our own play, inventing our own parts. And making sure our stories all worked out. Then all we had to do was get you down here to Garmisch so that you and I could get to know each other better.”
“But you could hardly know that your mother was going to die,” I said. “Or could you?”
“She’d been ill for some time,” he said. “She could have died at any time. But as it happens, when the time was right, we did help to ease her passing. It’s not so difficult to kill people in a hospital. Especially when they’re in a private room. You know something? It was a real kindness to her.”
“You had her murdered,” I said, pushing yet more coins into the telephone. “Your own mother.”
“Not murdered,” insisted Gruen. “No. This was euthanasia. Preemptive triage. That’s the way most German doctors still look on that kind of mercy killing. It still goes on. More often than you might suppose. You can’t change the whole medical system, just like that. Euthanasia has been part of the normal hospital routine in Germany and Austria since 1939.”
“You killed your own mother to save your skin.”
“On the contrary, Bernie. I did it for the work. The ends do justify the means in this particular situation. I thought Heinrich explained all this. The importance of the work. A malaria vaccine really is something that’s worth everything that has been done in its name. I thought you understood that. What are a few hundred lives, maybe a couple of thousand, beside the millions that a vaccine will save? My conscience is clear, Bernie.”
“I know. That’s what makes this so tragic.”
“But for our work to proceed to the next stage, we simply have to have access to American medical research facilities. Laboratories. Equipment. Money.”
“New prisoners for experimentation,” I added. “Like those German POWs in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Who would have suspected that they had died of malaria in the Alps? I have to hand it to you, Eric. That was clever. So where will you go? Atlanta? New Jersey? Illinois? Or Rochester?”
For a moment, Gruen hesitated. “What makes you think I’ll go to any of those places?” he asked, carefully.
“Maybe I’m just a better detective than you think I am.”
“Don’t try to look for me, Bernie. For one thing, who’s going to believe you? You, a war criminal, against the word of someone like me. Someone who’s trusted by the CIA, no less. Believe me, Jacobs has done his homework on you, old friend. He found some very interesting photographs of you with Reichsführer Himmler, General Heydrich, and Arthur
Nebe. There’s even a picture of you with Hermann Göring. I had no idea you were so well connected. The soaps will like that. It’ll make them think you’re the real thing. That Eric Gruen was much more important to the Reich than he really was.”
“Eric, I’m going to find you,” I said. “All of you. And I’m going to kill you. You, Henkell, Jacobs, and Albertine.”
“Ah, so you know about her as well, do you? You’ve been busy, Bernie. I congratulate you. What a pity that your powers as a detective didn’t kick in earlier. Well, what am I to say to such an idle threat?”
“It’s no idle threat.”
“Only what I said before. My new friends are very powerful. If you try to come after me, it won’t just be the soaps who are after you. It’ll be the CIA as well.”
“You forgot to mention the ODESSA,” I said. “Let’s not leave them out.”
He laughed. “What do you think you know about the ODESSA?”
“Enough to know that they helped set me up. Them and your friend, Father Gotovina.”
“Then you don’t know as much as you think you do. As a matter of fact, Father Gotovina had nothing to do with what happened to you. He’s not part of the ODESSA at all. Or this. I wouldn’t like you to harm him. Really. His hands are clean.”
“No? Then why did your wife go and see him at the Holy Ghost Church, in Munich?”
“Well, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Father was involved with the Old Comradeship.” Gruen laughed again. “Not a bit. But he’s not part of the ODESSA, or connected with the CIA in any way. And my wife visiting him? That was quite innocent, I can assure you. You see, Father Gotovina goes to Landsberg Prison a great deal. He’s chaplain to all of the Roman Catholics at Landsberg. And occasionally I have him take a message to a friend of mine. Someone who’s serving a life sentence for so-called war crimes. He brings him medical journals. That kind of thing. For old time’s sake.”
“Gerhard Rose,” I said. “Your friend, I suppose.”
“Yes. You have been busy. I underestimated you—in that respect at least. That’s another thing my mother’s money is going to come in handy for, Bernie. Paying for a legal appeal against that man’s sentence. He’ll be out in five years. You mark my words. And you ought to. It’s in your interests, too.”
“Eric?” I said. “I’ve got to go now. I’ve run out of coins. But I will find you.”
“No, Bernie. We won’t see each other again. Not in this life.”
“In hell then.”
“Yes. In hell, perhaps. Good-bye, Bernie.”
“Auf Wiedersehen, my friend. Auf Wiedersehen.”
I put the phone down and stared at my new boots, reflecting on what I had just learned. I almost breathed a sigh of relief. It was the ODESSA and not the Comradeship that was behind everything that had happened to me. I wasn’t exactly out of the Vienna woods. Not yet. Not by a long shot. But if, as Fritz Gebauer had told me when I had visited him in his prison cell in Landsberg, the ODESSA and the Comradeship were not connected, then it was only the CIA and the ODESSA I had to fear. It meant there was nothing at all to stop me from seeking help from the Comradeship myself. I would ask my old comrades in the SS for their help in getting out of Vienna. I would go to the Web. Like any other common or garden Nazi rat.
THIRTY-SEVEN
It seemed somehow appropriate that Ruprechtskirche on Ruprechtsplatz should be the contact point in Vienna for old comrades who were on the run from Allied justice. Ruprechtsplatz lies just south of the canal and Morzinplatz, which was where the Gestapo had had its headquarters in Vienna. Perhaps that was why the church had been chosen. There was very little else to recommend it. The church was the oldest in Vienna and somewhat dilapidated. Unusually this was not, according to a sign inside the door, the result of Allied bombing, but because of the negligent demolition of a neighboring building. Inside, it was as cold as a Polish cowshed and almost as plain. Even the Madonna looked like a milkmaid. But there is a surprise in store for anyone visiting the church. Under a side altar, preserved in a glass casket, lies the blackened skeleton of Saint Vitalis. It’s as if Snow White had waited much too long for her prince to come and rescue her from a deathlike slumber with love’s first kiss.
Father Lajolo—the Italian priest named by Father Gotovina as someone who was connected to the Comradeship—was almost as thin as Saint Vitalis, and not much better preserved. As thin as a coat hanger, he had hair like wire wool and a face like a billhook. He was quite tanned and as gap-toothed as a Ming dynasty lion. Wearing a long black cassock, he looked very Italian to me, like a face in a crowd scene in a canvas by some Florentine old master. I followed him into a side apse and, in front of an altar, I handed him a railway ticket for Pressbaum. As in Munich, with Father Gotovina, I had crossed out all of the letters on the ticket, except the ss.
“I was wondering if you could recommend a good Catholic church in Pressbaum, Father,” I said.
Seeing my ticket and hearing my carefully worded question, Father Lajolo winced a little, as if pained by this meeting and, for a moment, I thought he would answer that he knew nothing at all about Pressbaum. “It’s possible I can help, yes,” he said, in a thick Italian accent. It was almost as thick as the smell of coffee and cigarettes with which it was coated. “I don’t know. That all depends. Come with me.”
He led me into the sacristy, which was warmer than the church. Here there were a holy-water font, a freestanding gas fire, a closet for various vestments in all the latest liturgical colors, a wooden crucifix on the wall, and through an open door, a lavatory. He closed the door through which we had come and locked it. Then he went over to a small table with a kettle, some cups and saucers, and a simple gas-ring.
“Coffee?” he asked.
“Please, Father.”
“Sit down, my friend.” He pointed to one of a pair of threadbare armchairs. I sat down and took out my cigarettes.
“Do you mind?” I asked, offering him a Lucky.
He chuckled. “No, I don’t mind.” Taking a cigarette, he added. “I think most of the disciples would have been smokers, don’t you? After all, they were fishermen. My father was a fisherman, from Genoa. All Italian fishermen smoke.” He lit the gas and then my cigarette and his own. “When Christ went aboard the fishing boat and there was a storm, they would have smoked then, especially. Smoking is the one thing you can do when you are afraid that doesn’t make you look like you’re afraid. But if you’re in a bad storm at sea and you start praying or singing hymns, well, that’s hardly something to inspire courage, is it?”
“I think that would depend on the hymn, don’t you? I asked, guessing that this was my cue.
“Perhaps,” he said. “Tell me, what’s your own favorite hymn?”
“‘How Great Thou Art,’” I answered, without hesitation. “I like the tune.”
“Yes, you’re right,” he said, sitting down on the chair opposite. “That’s a good one. Personally I prefer ‘Il Canto degli Arditi,’ or ‘Giovinezza.’ That’s an Italian marching song. For a while we did have something to march about, you know. But that hymn of yours is a good one.” He chuckled. “I have heard a rumor that the tune is very like the Horst Wessel Song.” He took a little puff on his cigarette. “It has been such a long while since I heard that song, I’ve almost forgotten the words. Perhaps you could remind me.”
“You don’t want me to sing it, surely,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “If you don’t mind. Humor me, please.”
I had always detested the Horst Wessel Song. And yet I knew the words well enough. There had been a time in Berlin when, just walking around the city, you would have heard it several times a day, and I could easily remember when it was almost impossible to go to the pictures without hearing it on the newsreels. I remembered Christmas 1935, and some people had started singing it in church, during a carol service. But I myself had sung the song only when not to have done so would have been to have risked a beating at the murderous hands of the SA.
I cleared my throat and began singing the words in my almost tuneless baritone:
“Flag high, ranks closed,
The SA marches with solid silent steps.
Comrades shot by the Red Front and Reaction
March in spirit with us in our ranks.
“The street free for the brown battalions,
The street free for the Storm Troopers.
Millions, full of hope, look up at the swastika,
The day breaks for freedom and for bread.”
He nodded and then handed me a small cup of black coffee. I wrapped my hands around it gratefully and inhaled the bittersweet aroma. “Do you want the other two verses as well?” I asked him.
“No, no.” He smiled. “There’s no need. It’s just one of the things I ask people to do. Just to help make sure who I am dealing with, you understand.” He fixed the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, screwed up his eye against the smoke, and took out a notebook and a pencil. “One has to be careful, you know. It’s an elementary precaution.”
“I’m not sure what the Horst Wessel Song could tell you,” I said. “By the time Hitler came to power, the Reds probably knew the words as well as we did. Some of them were even forced to learn it in concentration camps.”
He sipped his coffee loudly, ignoring my objections. “Now, then,” he said. “A few details. Your name.”
“Eric Gruen,” I said.
“Your Nazi Party number, your SS number, your rank, your place and date of birth, please.”
“Here,” I said. “I’ve written it down for you already.” I handed him the page of notes I had made while studying Gruen’s file in the Russian Kommandatura.
“Thank you.” He glanced over the paper and nodded while he read it. “Do you have any means of identification with you?”
I handed over Eric Gruen’s passport. He studied that carefully and then slipped it and the sheet of paper into the back of his notebook.
