The Lady from Zagreb

by Philip Kerr

  Also by Philip Kerr

  THE BERNIE GUNTHER BOOKS

  The Berlin Noir Trilogy

  March Violets

  The Pale Criminal

  A German Requiem

  •

  The One from the Other

  A Quiet Flame

  If the Dead Rise Not

  Field Gray

  Prague Fatale

  A Man Without Breath

  OTHER WORKS

  A Philosophical Investigation

  Dead Meat

  The Grid

  Esau

  The Five-Year Plan

  The Second Angel

  The Shot

  Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton

  Hitler’s Peace

  Prayer

  Research

  January Window

  FOR CHILDREN

  Children of the Lamp

  The Akhenaten Adventure

  The Blue Djinn of Babylon

  The Cobra King of Kathmandu

  The Day of the Djinn Warriors

  The Eye of the Forest

  The Five Fakirs of Faizabad

  The Grave Robbers of Genghis Khan

  •

  One Small Step

  The Winter Horses

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kerr, Philip.

  The lady from Zagreb / Philip Kerr.

  p. cm. — (Bernie Gunther ; 10)

  “A Marian Wood Book.”

  ISBN 978-0-698-14289-3

  1. Gunther, Bernhard (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Germany—Fiction. 3. Germany—History—1933–1945—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6061.E784L33 2015 2015002935

  823'.914—dc23

  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_1

  THIS BOOK IS FOR IVAN HELD, WITHOUT WHOSE ENCOURAGEMENT IT WOULD NEVER HAVE EXISTED.

  Contents

  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

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  INTERLUDE

  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

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  And if you ask again whether there is any justice in the world, you’ll have to be satisfied with the reply: Not for the time being; at any rate, not up to this Friday.

  —ALFRED DOBLIN

  I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.

  —REBECCA WEST

  It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.

  —JOSEPH CONRAD

  Prologue

  French Riviera, 1956

  Wolves are usually born with deep blue eyes. These lighten and then gradually fade to their adult color, which is most often yellow. Huskies, on the other hand, have blue eyes and because of this, people think that there must be blue-eyed wolves, too, but, strictly speaking, there aren’t any; if you ever meet a wolf with blue eyes, then it is very likely not a pure-blooded wolf but a hybrid. Dalia Dresner had the most strikingly blue eyes of any woman I ever saw; but I’ll bet that there was a small part of her that was wolf.

  Dresner had been a star of German cinema back in the thirties and forties, which was when I’d been involved with her, albeit briefly. She is almost forty now but even in unforgiving Technicolor she is still astonishingly beautiful, especially those slow-blinking, ray-gun blue eyes that look as if they might have destroyed a few buildings with a careless glance or a particularly wide-eyed stare. They certainly managed to burn a hole through my heart.

  Like the pain of parting, you never really forget the face of a woman you’ve loved, especially when it’s the face of a woman the press had called the German Garbo. Not to mention the way they make love; somehow that tends to remain in the memory, also. Perhaps this is just as well when the memory of making love is pretty much all you’ve got.

  “Don’t stop,” she would whimper on the few occasions when I was trying to please her in bed. As if I had any intention of stopping, ever; I’d happily have continued making love to Dalia until the end of time.

  I was seeing her again in the Eden Cinema in La Ciotat, near Marseilles, reputed to be the world’s oldest and possibly smallest movie theater. It’s where the Lumière brothers showed their first film, in 1895, and sits right on the seaside, facing a marina where lots of expensive boats and yachts are moored all year and just around the corner from the crummy apartment I’d been living in since leaving Berlin. La Ciotat is an old fishing village enlivened by an important French naval shipbuilding yard—if you can use words like important in the same sentence as the French Navy. There’s a nice beach and several hotels, in one of which I work.

  I lit a cigarette and as I watched the film I tried to recall all of the circumstances that had led up to our first meeting. When was it exactly? 1942? 19
43? Actually, I never thought Dalia looked much like Garbo. For me the actress she most resembled was Lauren Bacall. Germany’s Garbo was Josef Goebbels’s idea. He told me that the solitary Swede was one of Hitler’s preferred actresses and Camille one of the Führer’s favorite films. It’s a little hard to think of Hitler having a favorite film, especially one that’s as romantic as Camille, but Goebbels said that whenever the Führer saw this film there were tears in his eyes and he was glowing for hours afterward. For Goebbels, I don’t doubt that relaunching Dalia as German cinema’s answer to Greta Garbo had been another way of currying favor with Hitler, and of course with Dalia herself; Goebbels was always trying to make up to some actress or other. Not that I could blame him for trying to make up to Dalia Dresner. Lots of men did.

  She’d spent much of her life living in Switzerland but she was born in Pula, Istria, which, after 1918 and the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, was ceded to Italy; but this peninsula was always a natural part of Yugoslavia—indeed all of Dalia’s ancestors had been Croatian—and, in order to escape forced Italianization and the cultural suppression of Mussolini’s fascists, she was taken to live in Zagreb from a very early age. Her real name was Sofia Brankovic.

  After the war was over she’d decided to leave her home near Zurich and go back to Zagreb to find what remained, if anything, of her family. In 1947, she’d been arrested by the Yugoslavian government on suspicion of collaborating with the Nazis during the war, but Tito—who it was generally held was infatuated with her—intervened personally and arranged for Dalia’s release from custody. Back in Germany she attempted a comeback career but circumstances stalled her return. Fortunately for Dalia she was offered work in Italy and appeared in several well-received films. When Cecil B. DeMille was looking to cast Samson and Delilah in 1949 he considered Dalia Dresner before choosing to cast the more politically acceptable Hedy Lamarr. Hedy was good—she was certainly very beautiful—but I strongly believe Dalia would have been convincing. Hedy played the part like a thirty-five-year-old schoolgirl. Dalia would have played it like the real thing. As a seductive woman with brains that were as big as Samson’s muscles. By 1955 she was again working in German film when she won the Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice Film Festival in a film called The Devil’s General, where she played opposite Curd Jürgens. But it was the English who gave Dalia her most successful roles and, in particular, British Lion Films, which cast her in two films alongside Dirk Bogarde.

  I got all of this information from the program I bought in the Eden’s tiny foyer before the film started, just so as I could bring myself up to date with the details of Dalia’s life. Although less interesting than mine—and for the same reason—it also looked a lot more fun.

  The film I was watching her in now was a comedy with Rex Harrison called, in French, Le Mari Constante. It was curious—hearing a voice that wasn’t hers and speaking French, too. Dalia’s German had always been layered with honey and cigarettes. Maybe the film worked in English but it didn’t work in French, and I don’t think it was anything to do with the fact that it was dubbed or that it brought a lump to my throat to see her again. It was just a bad film and, gradually, my eyes closed in the warm Riviera darkness, and it seemed like it was the summer of 1942. . . .

  One

  I awoke from a long but agitated sleep to a world that was black and white but mostly black, with silver piping. I’d stolen some Luminal from General Heydrich’s country house outside Prague to help me sleep. He didn’t need it for the simple reason that he was dead, and I certainly wouldn’t have stolen it from him otherwise. But pills were even harder to get than booze, which, like everything else, was in short supply, and I needed them because as an officer in the SD I was a part of the horror now, much more than Heydrich. He was dead, buried the month before with full military honors with a clove of garlic in his mouth and a stake through his heart. He was well out of it, his last thoughts of revenge upon his Czech assassins still suspended inside his elongated El Greco head like so much frozen gray mud, and there was no more harm he could do anyone. But in my wretched efforts to stay alive at almost any cost I could still hurt and be hurt in my turn, and as long as death’s black barrel organ was playing it seemed I would have to dance to the cheerless, doom-filled tune that was turning inexorably on the drum, like some liveried monkey with a terrified rictus on its face and a tin cup in its hand. That didn’t make me unusual; just German.

  Berlin had a haunted look that summer, as if behind every tree and around each street corner was a screaming skull or some wide-eyed and shape-shifting alp. Sometimes when I woke in my bed at the flat in Fasanenstrasse, soaked with sweat, it was as if I’d had some demon sitting on my chest, crushing the breath out of me, and in my rush to draw a breath and check that I was still alive, I often heard myself cry out and reach to grab at the sour air I had exhaled during the day, which was when I slept. And usually I lit a cigarette with the alacrity of someone who needed the tobacco smoke to breathe a little more comfortably and to help overcome the omnipresent taste of mass murder and human decay that stayed in my mouth like an old and rotten tooth.

  The summer sunshine brought no joy. It seemed to exercise a sinister effect, making Berliners irritable with the broiling heat because there was nothing but water to drink, and reminding them always of how much hotter it probably was on the dry steppes of Russia and Ukraine, where our boys were now fighting a battle that already looked like much more than we had bargained for. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows in the tenement streets around Alexanderplatz and played tricks on your eyes, so that the phosphenes on your retinas—the aftereffects of the mercilessly bright light—seemed to become the greenish auras of so many dead men. It was in the shadows where I belonged and where I felt comfortable, like an old spider that simply wants to be left alone. Only there wasn’t much chance of that. It always paid to be careful what you were good at in Germany. Once I’d been a good detective in Kripo, but that was a while ago, before the criminals wore smart gray uniforms and nearly everyone locked up was innocent. Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.

  On Heydrich’s orders I’d been working nights at the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz, which suited me just fine. There was no proper police work to speak of but I had little or no appetite for the company of my Nazi colleagues or their callous conversation. The Murder Commission, what remained of it—which existed to investigate homicides—left me to my own devices, like a forgotten prisoner whose face meant death for anyone unwise enough to catch a glimpse of it. I was none too fond of it myself. Unlike Hamburg and Bremen, there were no nighttime air raids to speak of, which left the city sepulchrally quiet, so very different from the Berlin of the Weimar years, when it had been the noisiest and most exciting city on earth. All that neon, all that jazz, and more especially all that freedom when nothing was hidden and nobody had to hide who or what they were—it was hard to believe things had ever been like that. But Weimar Berlin had suited me better. The Weimar Republic had been the most democratic of democracies and yet, like all great democracies, it had been a little out of control. Prior to 1933, anything was permitted, since, as Socrates learned to his cost, the true nature of democracy is to encourage corruption and excess in all its forms. But the corruption and excesses of Weimar were still preferable to the biblical abominations now perpetrated in the name of the Nuremberg Laws. I don’t think I ever knew what mortal sin really meant until I lived in Nazi Germany.

  Sometimes when I stared out my office window at night I caught sight of my own reflection staring back at me—the same but different, like another ill-defined version of myself, a darker alter ego, my evil twin or perhaps a harbinger of death. Now and then I heard this ghostly, etiolated double speak sneeringly to me: “Tell me, Gunther, just what will you have to do and whose arse will you kiss to save your miserable skin today?”

  It was a good question.

  From my o
ffice aerie in the east corner tower of police headquarters I could more often hear the sound of steam trains pulling in and out of the station on Alexanderplatz. You could just see the roof—what was left of it—of the old orthodox synagogue on Kaiser-Strasse, which I think had been there since before the Franco-Prussian war and was one of the largest synagogues in Germany, with as many as eighteen hundred worshippers. Which is to say, Jews. The Kaiser-Strasse synagogue was on a beat I’d patrolled as a young Schupo in the early twenties. Sometimes I would chat to some of the boys who attended the Jewish Boys’ School and who used to go trainspotting at the station. Once, another uniformed copper saw me talking to those boys and asked, “What do you find to talk about with these Jews, anyway?” And I’d replied that they were just children and that we had talked about what you talk about with any other children. Of course, all that was before I found out that I had a trickle of Jew blood myself. Still, maybe it explains why I was nice to them. But I prefer to think it doesn’t explain very much at all.

  It had been a while since I’d seen any Jewish boys on Kaiser-Strasse. Since the beginning of June they’d been deporting Berlin’s Jews from a transit camp at Grosse Hamburger Strasse to destinations somewhere in the east, although it was becoming better known that the destinations were more final than some nebulous compass point. Mostly the deportations were made at night, when there was no one around to see it done, but one morning, at about five a.m., when I was checking out a petty theft at Anhalter Station, I saw about fifty elderly Jews being loaded into closed cars on an impatient train. They looked like something Pieter Bruegel might have painted back in a time when Europe was a much more barbarous place than it is now—when kings and emperors committed their black crimes in the open light of day, and not at a time when no one was yet out of bed to see them. The cars didn’t seem so bad but by then I had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen to those Jews, which I expect was more than they did, otherwise I can’t imagine they’d ever have boarded those trains.

  I was on the point of being moved along by an old Berlin Schupo until I flashed him my beer-token and told him to go and fuck himself.