by Philip Kerr
“Sorry, sir,” he said, touching his leather shako smartly, “I didn’t know you was RSHA.”
“Where’s this lot headed?” I asked.
“Somewhere in Bohemia. Theresienstadt, I think they said it’s called. You feel almost sorry for them, don’t you? But I reckon it’s better for them and for us, really. I mean, us Germans. They’ll have a better life there, living among their own in a new town, won’t they?”
“Not in Theresienstadt they won’t,” I told him. “I’ve just got back from Bohemia.” And then I told him all I knew about the place and a bit more besides, about what was happening in Russia and Ukraine. The look of horror on the man’s florid face was almost worth the risk I took in telling him the unvarnished and unpalatable truth.
“You can’t be serious,” he said.
“Oh, but I am. It’s fact that we’re systematically murdering people by the thousands out there, in the swamps east of Poland. I know. I’ve seen it for myself. And by ‘we’ I mean us, the police. The RSHA. It’s us that’s doing the murdering.”
The Schupo blinked hard and looked as if I’d said something incomprehensible. “It can’t be true, what you just said, sir. Surely you’re joking.”
“I’m not joking. What I just told you is the one true thing you’ll probably hear today. Just ask around, only try to do it discreetly. People don’t like talking about this, for obvious reasons. You could get into trouble. We both could. I’m telling you, those Jews are on a slow train to hell. And so are we.”
I walked away smiling sadistically to myself; in Nazi Germany truth makes a powerful weapon.
But it was one of those RSHA murderers who brought me in from the cold. An Austrian, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, was rumored to be the next chief of the Reich Main Office for Security—the RSHA—but the same rumor said that his appointment could not be approved by Hitler until the man had finished drying out at a sanatorium in Chur, Switzerland. This left Kripo in the forensically capable if thoroughly murderous hands of General Arthur Nebe, who, until the previous November, had commanded SS Operation Group B in Byelorussia. Group B was now commanded by someone else, but if what was bruited about the Alex was correct—and I had good reason to think it probably was—Nebe’s men had killed more than forty-five thousand people before he finally earned his ticket back to Berlin.
Forty-five thousand. A number like that was hard to comprehend in the context of murder. Berlin’s Sportpalast, where the Nazis held some of their rallies, had a capacity of fourteen thousand. Three whole Sportpalasts full of people who were there to cheer a speech by Goebbels. That’s what forty-five thousand looked like. Except none of those murdered had cheered, of course.
I wondered what Nebe told his wife, Elise, and his daughter, Gisela, about what he’d been doing out in Ivan’s swamps. Gisela was a beautiful young woman of sixteen now, and I knew Arthur doted on her. She was intelligent, too. Did she ever ask him about his work in the SS? Or did she see something elusive in her father’s fox-like eyes and then just talk about something else, the way people used to do when the subject of the Great War had come up in conversation. I never knew anyone who was comfortable talking about that, certainly not me. If you hadn’t been in the trenches there was no point in expecting anyone even to imagine what it was like. Not that Arthur Nebe had anything to feel ashamed about back then; as a young lieutenant in his pioneer battalion with the 17th Army (1st West Prussian) Corps on the Eastern Front, he’d been gassed twice and won a first-class Iron Cross. Nebe was none too fond of the Russians as a result but it was unthinkable that he would ever have told his family that he’d spent the summer of 1941 murdering forty-five thousand Jews. But Nebe knew that I knew and somehow he could still look me in the eye; and while we didn’t talk about it, what was surprising to me more than him was the fact that I could tolerate his company, just about. I figured that if I could work for Heydrich, I could work for anyone. I wouldn’t say we were ever friends, Nebe and me. We got along all right, although I never understood how someone who had plotted against Hitler as early as 1938 could have become a mass murderer with such apparent equanimity. Nebe had tried to explain this, when we were in Minsk. He’d told me that he needed to keep his remarkable nose clean long enough for him and his friends to get another opportunity to kill Hitler; I just didn’t see how that justified the murders of forty-five thousand Jews. I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now.
At Nebe’s suggestion we met for Sunday lunch in a private room at Wirtshaus Moorlake, a little southwest of Pfaueninsel, on the Wannsee. With an attractive beer garden and an orchestra, it looked more Bavarian than Prussian and was very popular with Berliners in the summer. This summer was no exception. It was a beautiful day and neither of us was wearing a uniform. Nebe was dressed in a three-piece, belt-back Knickerbocker suit made of light gray houndstooth tweed, with button pockets and peak lapels. With his light gray stockings and polished brown brogues, he looked like he was planning to shoot something with feathers, which would certainly have made a welcome change. I was wearing my summer suit, which was the same three-piece, pin-striped navy suit I wore in winter except that I had neglected to wear the vest as a concession to the warmer weather; I looked as sharp as a seagull’s feather and I didn’t care who knew it.
We ate lake trout with potatoes and strawberries with cream, and enjoyed two bottles of good Mosel. After lunch we took a longish sort of boat or shell on the water. Because of my extensive naval experience Nebe let me row, of course, although it might have had as much to do with me being a captain and him a general; and while I applied myself to the oars he smoked a large Havana cigar and stared up at an unblemished Prussian blue sky as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Perhaps he didn’t. Conscience was a luxury that few officers in the SS and SD could afford. The Wannsee looked like an impressionist painting of some idyllic scene on the River Seine at the turn of the century, the kind that looks like the picture is suffering from a severe case of spots. There were canoes and outrigged shells, sailing boats, and sloops, but no boats that required petrol: petrol was even harder to get than pills and booze. There were plenty of young women around, too—which was one of the reasons Nebe liked it there—but no young men; they were all in uniform and probably fighting for their lives in some Russian shell hole. The women in the long narrow shells wore white singlets and the briefest of shorts, which were an improvement on corsets and French bustles because they showed off their breasts and behinds to anyone like me who was interested in that kind of thing; they were tanned and vigorous and sometimes flirtatious, too; they were only human, after all, and craved male attention almost as much as I craved the chance to give it to them. Some of them rowed alongside us for a while and made conversation until they realized just how old we were; I was in my forties and I think Nebe must have been almost fifty. But there was one girl who took my eye. I recognized her as someone who lived not so far away from me. I knew her name was Kirsten and she was a schoolteacher at the Fichte Gymnasium on Emser Strasse. Seeing her row, I resolved to see a little more of Emser Strasse and perhaps, by some happy accident, her. After she and her lithe companions pushed off I kept an eye on their boat, just in case; you never know when a beautiful girl is going to fall in the water and need rescuing.
Another reason Nebe liked it on the Wannsee was because you could be absolutely sure that no one was eavesdropping on your conversation. Ever since September ’38 and the failed Oster coup, of which he’d been an important part, Nebe had suspected that he was suspected, of something; but he always spoke very freely with me, if only because he knew I was held in even greater suspicion than he was. I was the best kind of friend anyone like Nebe could ever have had; the kind of friend you could and would give up to the Gestapo without a second’s thought if it meant saving your own skin.
“Thanks for lunch,” I said. “It’s been a while since I bent the elbow for something as decent as that Mosel.”
“What’s the point in being head of Kripo if you can’t get an extra supply of food and drink coupons?” he said.
Coupons were needed for Germany’s rationing system, which seemed increasingly draconian, especially if you were a Jew.
“Mind you, what we ate, it was all local stuff,” he said. “Lake trout, potatoes, strawberries. If you can’t get that in Berlin during the summer then we might as well surrender now. Life wouldn’t be worth living.” He sighed and puffed a cloud of cigar smoke into the sky above his silver-gray head. “You know, sometimes I come here and take a boat out on my own, slip the mooring and then just drift across the lake without a thought to where I’m going.”
“There is nowhere to go. Not on this lake.”
“You make it sound like there’s something wrong with that, Bernie. But this is the nature of lakes. They’re for looking at and enjoying, not for anything as practical as what you imply.”
I shrugged, lifted the oars and looked over the side of the boat into the warm water. “Whenever I’m on a lake, like this one, it’s not long before I start to wonder what’s underneath the surface. What undiscovered crimes lie hidden in the depths? Who’s down there at the bottom wearing a pair of iron jackboots? If there’s a Jewish U-boat hiding from the Nazis, perhaps. Or some lefty who got put there by the Freikorps back in the twenties.”
Nebe laughed. “Ever the detective. And you wonder why you continue to be useful to our masters.”
“Is that why we’re here? So you can flatter me with an assurance of my utility?”
“It might be.”
“I fear my days of being useful to anyone are long past, Arthur.”
“As usual, you underestimate yourself, Bernie. You know, I always think of you as a bit like one of those people’s cars designed by Dr. Porsche. A little blunt, perhaps, but cheap to run and very effective. Built to last, as well, to the point of being almost indestructible.”
“Right now, my engine could use some air-cooling,” I said, resting on the oars. “It’s hot.”
Nebe puffed his cigar and then allowed one hand to drag in the water. “What do you do, Bernie? When you want to get away from it all? When you want to forget about everything?”
“It takes a while to forget everything, Arthur. Especially in Berlin. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve got an awful feeling it’s going to take the rest of my life to forget as much as that.”
Nebe nodded. “You’re wrong, you know. It’s easy to forget if you put your mind to it.”
“How do you manage it?”
“By having a certain view of the world. That’s a concept that’s familiar to all Germans, surely. My father was a teacher and he used to say, ‘Find out what you believe in, Arthur, what your place in it is, and then stick to that. Use that view of the world to order your life, no matter what.’ And what I’ve concluded is this: life is all a matter of chance. That’s the way I look at things. If it hadn’t been me out there in Minsk, in charge of Group B, it would have been someone else. That bastard Erich Naumann, probably. He’s the swine who took over from me. But sometimes I think that I was never really there. At least not the real me. I have very little memory of it. No, I don’t.
“You know, back in 1919, I tried to get a job at Siemens selling Osram lightbulbs. I even tried to become a fireman. Well, you know what it was like back then. Any kind of a job looked like it was worth having. But it wasn’t meant to be. The only place that would have me after I left the army was Kripo. That’s what I’m talking about. What is it about life that takes a man one way, selling lightbulbs or putting out fires, or that takes the same man in quite another way so that he becomes a state executioner?”
“Is that what you call it?”
“Why not? I didn’t wear a tall hat, it’s true, but the job was the same. The fact of the matter is that quite often these things have very little to do with the man himself. I didn’t end up in Minsk because I’m a bad man, Bernie. I sincerely believe that. It was an accident that I was ever there at all. That’s the way I look at it. I’m the same man I always was. It’s just fate that took me into the police instead of the Berlin fire department. The same fate that killed all those Jews. Life is nothing but a random series of events. There’s no logic to anything that happens, Bernie. Sometimes I think that’s your real problem. You keep looking for some sort of meaning in things, but there isn’t any. Never was. All of that was a simple category mistake. And trying to solve things doesn’t solve anything at all. After what you’ve seen, surely you know that by now.”
“Thanks for the philosophy seminar. I think I’m beginning to.”
“You should thank me. I’m here to do you a favor.”
“You don’t look like a man who’s carrying a gun, Arthur.”
“No really, I am. I’ve got you a job with the War Crimes Bureau at the Bendlerblock, starting in September.”
I laughed. “Is that a joke?”
“Yes, it is rather amusing, when you think about it,” admitted Nebe. “Me, finding a job for you there, of all places. But I’m perfectly serious, Bernie. This is a good deal for you. It gets you out of the Alex and into somewhere your skills will be properly appreciated. You’re still SD, there’s not much I can do about that. But according to Judge Goldsche, to whom you will report, your uniform and investigative experience will open a few investigative doors that remain closed to the people who currently work there. Von this and von that, lawyers most of them, the wing-collar kind whose scars were earned in university societies rather than on the battlefield. Hell, you’ll even make more money.” He laughed. “Well, don’t you see? I’m trying to make you respectable again, my friend. Semi-respectable, anyway. Who knows, you might even make enough to afford a new suit.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Of course. You don’t think I’d waste my time lunching you without a damn good reason. I’d have brought a nice girl here, or even a girl who isn’t so nice, not a stinger like you. You can say thank you now.”
“Thank you.”
“So, now that I’ve done you a favor, I want you to do something for me in return.”
“In return? Perhaps you’ve forgotten our dirty weekend in Prague, Arthur. It was you who asked me to investigate Heydrich’s death, wasn’t it? Less than a month ago? You didn’t like my conclusions. When we met and had a conversation at the Esplanade Hotel, you told me we never had that conversation. I never did collect on that favor.”
“That was a favor to us both, Bernie. You and me.” Nebe started to scratch the eczema on the backs of his hands; it was a sign he was beginning to get irritable. “This is different. This is something that even you can do without causing trouble.”
“Which makes me wonder if I’m the right person to do it.”
He put the cigar in his mouth and scratched some more, as if there might be a better solution to his problem under the skin. The boat turned slowly in a circle so that we were pointing in the direction we had just come; I was used to that feeling. My whole life had been going in a circle since 1939.
“Is this something personal, Arthur? Or is this what we detectives laughingly call ‘work’?”
“I’ll tell you if you’ll just shut your beer hole for a minute. I don’t know. How did someone with a mouth like yours manage to stay alive for so long?”
“I’ve asked myself the same question.”
“It’s work, all right? Something for which you’re uniquely qualified, as it happens.”
“You know me, I’m uniquely qualified for all sorts of jobs it seems most other men wouldn’t touch with a pair of oily pliers.”
“You’ll remember the International Criminal Police Commission,” he said.
“You don’t mean to say that it still exists?”
“I’m the acting president,” Nebe said bitterly. “And if you make a joke about making a gardener out of a bi
lly goat, I will shoot you.”
“I’m just a little surprised, that’s all.”
“As you may know, it was based in Vienna until 1940, when Heydrich decided that it should be headquartered here, in Berlin.”
Nebe pointed west, across the lake to a bridge across the Havel that was just a little way south of the Swedish Pavilion.
“Over there, as a matter of fact. With him in charge, of course. It was just another neon-lit showcase for the Reinhard Heydrich Show, and I had hoped that now the bastard’s dead, we might use that as an excuse to wind up the IKPK, which has outlived any usefulness it ever might have had. But Himmler is of a different opinion and wants the conference to go ahead. Yes, that’s right—there’s a conference in a week or two’s time. The invitations to all the various European police chiefs had already gone out before Heydrich was murdered. So we’re stuck with it.”
“But there’s a war on,” I objected. “Who the hell is going to come, Arthur?”
“You’d be surprised. The French Sûreté, of course. They love a good feast and any chance to air their opinions. The Swedes. The Danes. The Spanish. The Italians. The Romanians. Even the Swiss are coming. And the Gestapo, of course. We mustn’t forget them. Frankly, it’s almost everyone except the British. Oh, there’s no shortage of delegates, I can assure you. The trouble is that I’ve been given the task of organizing a program of speakers. And I’m scratching around for some names.”
“Oh, no. You don’t mean—”
“I do mean. It’s all hands on deck for this one, I’m afraid. I thought you might talk about how you caught Gormann, the strangler. Even outside Germany that’s a famous case. Forty minutes, if you can manage it.”
“That’s not scratching, Arthur. That’s scraping. Gormann was almost fifteen years ago. Look, there must be someone else in your new police building on Werderscher Markt.”
“Of course there is. Commissioner Lüdtke is already drafted in. And before you suggest them, so are Kurt Daluege and Bernhard Wehner. But we’re still a couple of speakers short for a conference that lasts for two whole days.”
