The Lady from Zagreb

by Philip Kerr

  “Your speech has been rewritten by me and retyped by my secretary,” he explained.

  “That’s enormously kind of her,” I said. “Did you really do that for me?”

  I turned in my chair and smiled warmly at the woman who had brought me to Gutterer. Positioned behind a shiny black Continental Silenta as big as a tank turret, she did her exasperated best to ignore me but a touch of color appearing on her cheek told me that she was losing the battle.

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “It’s her job,” said Gutterer. “And I told her to do it.”

  “Even so. Thanks a lot, Miss—?”

  “Ballack.”

  “Miss Ballack. Right.”

  “If we could get on, please,” said Gutterer. “Here’s your original back, so you can compare the two versions and see where I’ve improved or censored what you wrote, Captain. There were several places where you allowed yourself to become a little sentimental about how things were in the old Weimar Republic. Not to say flippant.” He frowned. “Did Charlie Chaplin really visit the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz?”

  “Yes. Yes he did. March 1931. I remember it well.”

  “But why?”

  “You’d have to ask him that. I think he may even have been doing what the Americans call ‘research.’ After all, the Murder Commission used to be famous. As famous as Scotland Yard.”

  “Anyway, you can’t mention him.”

  “May I ask why?” But I knew very well why not: Chaplin had just made a film called The Great Dictator, playing an Adolf Hitler lookalike who was named after our own minister of culture, Hinkel, whose high life at the Hotel Bogota was the subject of intense gossip.

  “Because you can’t mention him without mentioning your old boss, the former head of Kripo. The Jew, Bernard Weiss. They had dinner together, did they not?”

  “Ah yes. I’m afraid that slipped my mind. His being a Jew.”

  Gutterer looked pained for a moment. “You know, it puzzled me. This country had twenty different governments in fourteen years. People lost respect for all the normal standards of public decency. There was an inflation that destroyed our currency. We were in very real danger from Communism. And yet you almost seem to imply that things were better then. I don’t say that you say it; merely that you seem to imply it.”

  “As you said yourself, Herr State Secretary, I was being sentimental. In the early years of the Weimar Republic my wife was still alive. I expect that would help to explain it, if not to excuse it.”

  “Yes, that would explain it. Anyway, we can’t have you even suggesting as much to the likes of Himmler and Müller. You’d soon find yourself in trouble.”

  “I’m relying on you to save me from the Gestapo, sir. And I’m sure your version will be a great improvement on mine, Herr State Secretary.”

  “Yes. It is. And in case you are in any doubt about that, let me remind you that I’ve spoken at a great many Party rallies. Indeed Adolf Hitler himself has told me that, after Dr. Goebbels, he considers me to be the most rhetorically gifted man in Germany.”

  I let out a small whistle that managed to sound as if I was lost for words and impertinent at the same time, which is a specialty of mine. “Impressive. And I’m absolutely certain the leader couldn’t be wrong—not about that kind of thing, anyway. I’ll bet you treasure a compliment like that almost as much as you do all of those medals put together. I would if I were you.”

  He nodded and tried to look through the veneer of a smile that was on my face as if searching for some sign that I was absolutely sincere. He was wasting his time. Hitler might have held Gutterer to be one of the most rhetorically gifted men in Germany but I was a grand master at faking sincerity. After all, I’d been doing it since 1933.

  “I expect you’d like a few tips on public speaking,” he said without a trace of embarrassment.

  “Now you come to mention it, yes, I would. If you feel like sharing any.”

  “Give up now, before you make a complete fool of yourself.” Gutterer let out a loud guffaw that they could have smelled back at the Alex.

  I smiled back, patiently. “I don’t think General Nebe would be too happy with me if I told him I couldn’t do this speech, sir. This conference is very important to the general. And to Reichsführer Himmler, of course. I should hate to disappoint him most of all.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  It wasn’t much of a joke, which was probably why he didn’t laugh very much. But at the mention of Himmler’s name Gutterer started to sound just a little more cooperative.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Let’s go along to the cinema theater and you can give me a read-through. I’ll explain where you’re going wrong.” He glanced around at Miss Ballack. “Is the theater free at this present moment, Miss Ballack?”

  Poor Miss Ballack snatched a diary off her desk, found the relevant date, and then nodded back at him. “Yes, Herr State Secretary.”

  “Excellent.” Gutterer pushed back his chair and stood up; he was shorter than me by a head, but walked like he was a meter taller. “Come with us, Miss Ballack. You can help make up an audience for the captain.”

  We walked toward the door of the vast, uncultivated acreage he called an office.

  “Is that wise?” I asked. “After all, my speech—there are some details about the murders committed by Gormann that might be unpleasant for a lady to hear.”

  “That’s very gallant, I’m sure, but it’s a little late to be thinking about sparing poor Miss Ballack’s feelings, Captain. After all, it was she who typed your speech, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.” I looked at Gutterer’s secretary as we walked. “I’m sorry you had to read some of that stuff, Miss Ballack. I’m a little old-fashioned that way. I still think murder is a subject best left to murderers.”

  “And the police, of course,” said Gutterer without turning around.

  I thought it best to let that one go. The very idea of policemen who’d killed more people than any lust murderer I’d ever come across was as challenging as watching a hopped-up Achilles failing to overtake the world’s slowest tortoise.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Miss Ballack. “But those poor girls.” She glanced at Gutterer for just long enough for me to know that her next remark was aimed right between her boss’s shoulder blades. “It strikes me that murder is a little like winning the German State Lottery. It always seems to happen to the wrong people.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Where are you going to make this speech, anyway?” asked Gutterer.

  “There’s a villa in Wannsee that the SS use as a guesthouse. It’s close to the IKPK.”

  “Yes, I know it. Heydrich invited me to a breakfast meeting he held there in January. But I couldn’t go, for some reason. Why was that, Miss Ballack? I forget.”

  “That’s the conference that was supposed to be held back in December, sir,” she said. “At the IKPK. You couldn’t go because of what happened at Pearl Harbor. And there was already something in the diary for the date they supplied in January.”

  “You see how well she looks after me, Captain.”

  “I can see a lot of things if I put my mind to it. That’s my trouble.”

  We went along the corridor to a handsomely appointed cinema theater with seats for two hundred. It had little chandeliers on the walls, elegant moldings near the ceiling, plenty of tall windows with silk curtains, and a strong smell of fresh paint. As well as the screen there was a Telefunken radio as big as a barrel, two loudspeakers, and so many stations to choose from they looked like a list of lagers in a beer garden.

  “Nice room,” I said. “A bit too nice for Mickey Mouse, I’d have thought.”

  “We do not show Mickey Mouse films in here,” said Gutterer. “Although it would certainly interest you to know that the leader l
oves Mickey Mouse. Indeed, I don’t think he would mind me telling you that Dr. Goebbels once gave the leader eighteen Mickey Mouse films as a Christmas present.”

  “It certainly beats the pair of socks I got.”

  Gutterer glanced around the cinema theater proudly.

  “But it is a wonderful space, as you say. Which reminds me. Tip number one. Try to acquaint yourself with the room where you’re to make your speech, so that you will feel comfortable there. That’s a trick I learned from the leader himself.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You know, if I’d thought about it, we could have filmed this,” said Gutterer, giggling stupidly, “as a sort of training film for how not to be a public speaker.”

  I smiled, took a long hit on another cigarette, and blew some smoke his way, although I would have much preferred a hot round from a tank gun.

  “Hey, Professor? I know I’m just a stupid cop but I think I’ve got a good idea. How about giving me an even chance to succeed before I fall flat on my face? After all, you said yourself, I’ve got the third best public speaker in Germany to teach me.”

  Three

  I took the S-Bahn train to Wannsee. The RAF had dropped a few token bombs near the station at Halensee, where there was now a large gang of railwaymen working on the track to keep the west of Berlin moving smoothly. The men stood back as the little red-and-yellow train passed slowly by, and as they did so a small boy in the carriage I was in gravely gave them the Hitler salute. When one of the track workers returned the salute, as if he had been saluting the leader himself, there was much mirth on and off the train. In Berlin a subversive sense of humor was never very far beneath the patriotic sham and counterfeit postures of everyday German life. Especially when there was a child to cover yourself; after all, it was disloyal to the leader not to return the Hitler salute, wasn’t it?

  It was the same journey I’d made when I’d had lunch with Arthur Nebe at the Swedish Pavilion, except that this time I was wearing a uniform. There was a line of cream-colored taxis parked in front of the Märklin train-set station but none of them were doing much business and about the only traffic around was on two wheels. A huge bicycle rack stood next to the entrance looking like a rest stop for the Tour de France. Some of the cabbies and the local florist were staring up at a man on a ladder who was painting one of the station’s church-shaped windows. In Wannsee, where nothing much ever happens, I suppose that was a performance of sorts. Maybe they were waiting for him to fall off.

  I crossed a wide bridge over the Havel onto Königstrasse and, ignoring Am Kleinen Wannsee to the south, which would have taken me to the offices of the International Criminal Police Commission at number 16, I walked along the northwest shore of the largest of Berlin’s lakes, onto Am Grossen Wannsee, past several yacht and boating clubs and elegant villas, to the address of the SS guesthouse Nebe had given me: numbers 56–58. In a road as exclusive as that it was easy enough to find. There was an SS armored car parked in front of a large set of wrought-iron gates and a guardhouse with a flag, otherwise everything was as quiet and respectable as a family of retired honeybees. If there was any trouble around there it certainly wasn’t going to come from the villa’s moss-backed neighbors. Trouble in Wannsee means your lawn mower has stopped working, or the maid didn’t turn up on time. Stationing an armored car in Am Grossen Wannsee was like ensuring a Vienna choirboy to sing Christmas carols.

  Inside a largish landscaped park was a Greek Revival–style villa with thirty or forty windows. It wasn’t the biggest villa on the lake but the bigger houses had bigger walls and were only ever seen by bank presidents and millionaires. The address had seemed familiar to me, and as soon as I saw the place I knew why. I’d been there before. The house had previously belonged to a client of mine. In the mid-thirties, before I got frog-marched back into Kripo by Heydrich, I tried my hand at being a private investigator, and for a while I’d been engaged by a wealthy German industrialist called Friedrich Minoux. A major shareholder in a number of prominent oil and gas companies, Minoux had hired me to subcontract an operative in Garmisch-Partenkirchen—where he owned another equally grand house—to keep an eye on his much younger wife, Lilly, who had chosen to live there, ostensibly for reasons of health. Maybe there was something insalubrious about the entitled air in Wannsee. It was too rich for her, perhaps, or maybe she just didn’t like all that blue sky and water. I didn’t know since I never met her and wasn’t able to ask her, but understandably, perhaps, Herr Minoux doubted the reasons she’d given him for not living in Wannsee, and once a month for most of 1935, I’d driven out to this villa in order to report on his wife’s otherwise blameless conduct. They’re the best kind of clients any detective can have, the ones with money enough to spend finding out something that just isn’t true, and it was the easiest two hundred marks a week I ever earned in my life. Previously Minoux had been a keen supporter of Adolf Hitler; but that hadn’t been enough to keep him out of jail when it was discovered he’d defrauded the Berlin Gas Company of at least 7.4 million reichsmarks. Friedrich Minoux was now doing five years in the cement. From what I’d read in the newspapers, his house in Wannsee had been sold to pay for his defense but until then I hadn’t realized that the buyer was the SS.

  The guard on the gate saluted smartly and, having checked his list, admitted me into the finely manicured grounds. I walked around to the front of the house and down to the lakeside, where I smoked a cigarette and pictured myself back in 1935, smartly dressed, with a car of my own, making a decent living and no one to tell me what to do. No one but the Nazis, that is. Back then I’d told myself I could ignore them. I’d been wrong, of course, but then so were a lot of other people smarter than me, Chamberlain and Daladier included. The Nazis were like syphilis; ignoring them and hoping everything would get better by itself had never been a realistic option.

  When I finished my cigarette I went into the one-and-a-half-story hallway at the center of the house. There everything was the same but different. At one end of the house was a library with a bay window and a table with plenty of copies of Das Schwarze Korps, but these days even the most fanatical Nazis avoided the SS newspaper as it was full of the death notices of dearest sons—SS men and officers who had fallen “in the east” or “in the struggle against Bolshevism.” At the other end of the house was a conservatory with an indoor fountain made of greenish marble. The fountain had been switched off; possibly the sound of something as clear and pure as Berlin water was distracting to the types who stayed there. In between the library and the fountain were several salons and drawing rooms, two of them with magnificent fireplaces. The best of the furniture and a rare Gobelin tapestry were gone but there were still a few pieces I recognized, including a large silver cigarette box from which I grabbed a fistful of nails to fill my empty case.

  They had three senior SS officers from Budapest, Bratislava, and Krakow staying at the villa and it seemed I was just in time to get some veal and potatoes and some coffee before they finished serving lunch. Very soon I regretted giving in to my hunger when these three engaged me in conversation. I told them I was not long back from Prague, and they announced that Berlin’s former chief of police, Kurt Daluege, was now the acting Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and that a whole month after Heydrich’s death the effort to find all of his assassins was still continuing. I already knew that Lidice, a village suspected of having harbored the killers, had been destroyed and its population executed. But these three officers now told me that, not content with this stupid act of reprisal, a second village called Ležáky had also been leveled—just a couple of weeks before—and the thirty-three men and women who lived there had been massacred, too.

  “They say Hitler ordered the deaths of ten thousand randomly chosen Czechos,” explained the colonel from Krakow, who was an Austrian, “but that General Frank talked him out of it, thank God. I mean, what’s the point of reprisal if you end up shooting yourself in the foot? Bohemian i
ndustry is much too important to Germany now to piss the Czechos off. Which is all you’d succeed in doing if you slaughtered that many. So they had to content themselves with Lidice and Ležáky. As far as I know, there’s nothing important in Lidice and Ležáky.”

  “Not anymore,” laughed one of the others.

  I excused myself and went to find a lavatory.

  Arthur Nebe had told me that the speeches to the IKPK delegates would all be given in the central hall and it was there I now went to see where my ordeal was to occur. I felt a little sick with nerves just thinking about it, although that might as easily have been something to do with what I’d just been told about Ležáky; besides, I knew that what I was facing wasn’t much compared to the ordeal that Friedrich Minoux now found himself subjected to. Five years in Brandenburg is certainly no weekend at the Adlon when you’re a career pen-and-desk man.

  One of the officers offered me a lift back into Berlin in his Mercedes, which I declined for all the reasons that I hoped weren’t obvious. I told him that there was a concert in the Botanic Garden in Zehlendorf I wanted to attend. I wasn’t in a hurry to enjoy the joke about Ležáky again. I walked back down to Königstrasse and headed back to the station, where, under the octagonal ceiling of the entrance hall, I met a man wearing olive-green lederhosen that I hadn’t seen for seven years.

  “Herr Gunther, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  The man was in his fifties with fair hair; the sleeves of his collarless blue shirt were rolled up to reveal forearms that were as big as fire hydrants. He looked tough enough so I was glad to see he was smiling.

  “Gantner,” said the man. “I used to drive the Daimler for Herr Minoux.”

  “Yes, I remember. What a coincidence. I’ve just been up at the villa.”

  “I figured as much, you being SD n’all. There’s plenty of your lot round that way now.”