Field Gray

by Philip Kerr

  “From now on,” said the man with the pipe, “this is your cell. Number seven.”

  “Recognize that number?” The other Ami—the one wearing the glasses—had short gray hair and looked like any college professor. The arms of the glasses were too short for his head, and the hooks stood off his ears so that they looked like two small umbrellas. Maybe the glasses were too small for his face. Or maybe he’d borrowed them. Or maybe his head was abnormally large to accommodate all the abnormally unpleasant thoughts—most of them about me—that were in it.

  I shrugged. My mind was a blank.

  “Of course you do. It’s the Führer’s cell. Where you’re eating your food is where he wrote his book. And I don’t know which I find more disgusting. The thought of him writing down his poisonous thoughts, or you eating with your fingers.”

  “I’ll certainly try not to let that thought spoil my appetite.”

  “By all accounts, Hitler had an easy time here in Landsberg.”

  “I guess you weren’t working here back then.”

  “Tell me, Gunther. Did you ever read it? Hitler’s book.”

  “Yes. I prefer Ayn Rand. But only just.”

  “Do you like Ayn Rand?”

  “No. I think Hitler would have liked her, though. He wanted to be an architect, too, of course. Only, he couldn’t afford the paper and the pencils. Not to mention the education. Plus he didn’t have a large enough ego. And I think you’ve got to be pretty tough to make it in that world.”

  “You’re pretty tough yourself, Gunther,” said the one with the glasses.

  “Me? No. How many tough guys do you have breakfast with when they’re naked?”

  “Not many.”

  “Besides, it’s easy to look tough when you’re wearing a bag over your head. Even if it does get you wondering what it might be like to have nothing under your feet.”

  “Anytime you want to find out for sure, we can help you.”

  “Sure, you can take Klingelhöfer’s place for the rehearsal.”

  “We were here when they executed those five war criminals in June ’fifty-one.”

  “I’ll bet you’ve got an interesting scrapbook.”

  “They died quite calmly. Like they were resigned to their fate. Which was kind of ironic when you remember that’s what they said about all those Jews they murdered.”

  I shrugged and pushed away my empty breakfast tray. “No man wants to die,” I said. “But sometimes it just seems worse to go on living.”

  “Oh, I think they wanted to go on living, all right. Especially the ones who applied for clemency. Which was all of them. I read some of the letters that McCloy received. They were all predictably self-serving.”

  “Ah, well,” I said. “That’s the difference between me and them. It’s just impossible for me to be self-serving. You see, I fired my own self a long time ago. These days I try to manage on my own.”

  “You say that like you don’t want to go on living either, Gunther.”

  “And you say that like I should be impressed with your hospitality. That’s the trouble with you Amis. You kick the shit out of people and then expect them to join in a couple of verses of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”

  “We don’t expect you to sing, Gunther,” said the Ami with the pipe. Was he ever going to light it? “Just to go on talking. The way you’ve been talking until now.” He tossed a packet of cigarettes onto the table where Hitler had written his bestselling book. “By the way. What happened to that sergeant who Ziemer and Mielke shot in the stomach?”

  “Willig?” I lit a cigarette and remembered that he had lived; three months after the shooting he had made lieutenant. “I forget.”

  “You joined Kripo again in September 1938, is that right?”

  “I didn’t exactly join,” I said. “I was ordered back in by General Heydrich. To solve a series of murders in Berlin. After the case was solved, I stayed on. Again, that’s what Heydrich wanted. There’s only one thing you have to understand about Heydrich: He almost always got what he wanted.”

  “And he wanted you.”

  “I had a certain reputation for getting the job done. He admired that.”

  “So you stayed on.”

  “I tried to get out of Kripo for good. But Heydrich made that more or less impossible.”

  “Tell us about that. About what you were doing for Heydrich.”

  “Kripo was part of Sipo, the State Security Police. I was promoted to Oberkommissar. A chief inspector. Most of the crime by then was politicized, but men carried on murdering their wives and professional criminals went about their business as normal. I conducted several investigations during that period, but in reality the Nazis cared very little about reducing crime in the usual time-honored way and most police could hardly be bothered to do what police do. This was because the Nazis preferred to “reduce” crime by declaring annual amnesties, which meant that most crimes never went to court at all. All the Nazis cared about was being able to say that the crime figures were down. In fact, crime—real crime—actually increased under the Nazis: Theft, murder, juvenile delinquency—it all got worse. So I carried on as normal at the Alex. I made arrests, prepared a case, handed the papers over to the Ministry of Justice, and in time the case was struck down, or dropped, and the accused walked free.

  “One day in September 1939, not long after war was declared and Sipo became part of the RSHA—the Reich Main Security Office—I went to see General Heydrich at his office in Prinz Albrechtstrasse. I told him I was wasting my time and asked his permission to put in my papers. He listened patiently but continued to write for almost a minute after I’d finished speaking before turning his attention to a rack of rubber stamps on his desktop. There must have been thirty or forty of these. He picked one up, pressed it onto an inkpad, and then carefully stamped the sheet of paper he’d been writing on. Then, still silent, he got up and closed the door. There was a grand piano in his office—a big black Blüthner—and, to my surprise, he sat down in front of it and started to play, and play rather well, I might say. While he was playing, he shifted his large arse on the piano stool—he’d put on some weight since last I’d seen him—and then nodded at the space he’d made to indicate that I should sit beside him.

  “I sat down, hardly knowing what to expect, and for a while neither of us said a word as his thin, bony, dead Christ hands rippled over the shiny keyboard. I listened and kept my eyes on the photograph on the piano lid. It was a picture of Heydrich in profile, wearing a fencer’s white jerkin and looking like the sort of dentist you might have nightmares about—the kind who would have pulled all of your teeth to improve your dental hygiene.

  “Kuan Chung was a seventh-century Chinese philosopher,” Heydrich said quietly. “He wrote a very great book of Chinese sayings, one of which is that ‘even the walls have ears.’” Do you understand what I’m saying, Gunther?”

  “Yes, General,” I said, and, looking around, tried to guess where a microphone might be hidden.

  “Good. Then I’ll keep playing. This piece is by Mozart, who was taught by Antonio Salieri. Salieri was not a great composer. He’s better known to us today as the man who murdered Mozart.”

  “I didn’t even know he’d been murdered, sir.”

  “Oh yes. Salieri was jealous of Mozart, as is often the way with lesser men. Would it surprise you to know that someone is trying to murder me?”

  “Who?”

  “Himmler, of course. The Salieri de nos jours. Himmler’s is not a great mind. His most important thoughts are the ones I’m yet to give him. He is a man who goes to the lavatory and probably wonders what Hitler would like him to do while he’s in there. But one of us will certainly destroy the other, and with any luck it will be him who loses the game to me. He is not to be underestimated, however. And this is the reason that I keep you in Sipo, Gunther. Because if by any chance Himmler wins our little game, I want someone to find the evidence that will help to destroy him. Someone with a proven track record in
Kripo as an investigating detective. Someone intelligent and resourceful. That man is you, Gunther. You are the Voltaire to my Frederick the Great. I keep you close for your honesty and your independence of mind.”

  “I’m flattered, Herr General. And rather horrified. What makes you think I could ever destroy a man like Himmler?”

  “Don’t be a fool, Gunther. And listen. I said help to destroy. If Himmler succeeds and I am murdered, it will of course look like an accident. Or that someone else was responsible for my death. In those circumstances, there will have to be an inquiry. As head of Kripo, Arthur Nebe has the power to appoint someone to direct that inquiry. That someone will be you, Gunther. You will have the assistance of my wife, Lina, and of my most trusted confidante—a man named Walter Schellenberg, of the SS Foreign Intelligence Service. You can trust Schellenberg to know the most politic way to bring the evidence of my murder to the Führer’s attention. I have enemies, it’s true. But so does that bastard Himmler. And some of his enemies are my friends.”

  I shrugged. “So you see, he made it almost impossible for me to leave Kripo.”

  “And that’s the real reason that Nebe ordered you back from Minsk to Berlin,” said the Ami with the pipe. “What you told Silverman and Earp—about Nebe being worried you might land him in the shit—that was only half the story, wasn’t it? He was protecting you, on Heydrich’s personal instructions. Wasn’t he?”

  “I assume so, yes. It was only when I got back to Berlin and I met Schellenberg that I was reminded of what Heydrich had said. And also, of course, when he was assassinated in 1942.”

  “Let’s get back to Mielke,” said the Ami with the ill-fitting glasses. “Was it Heydrich who made him your pigeon?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “Following the conversation at the piano,” I said. “A couple of days after the fall of France.”

  “So June 1940.”

  “That’s right.”

  15

  GERMANY, 1940

  I was summoned back to Prinz Albrechtstrasse, where the scene was frenetic to say the least. People were scurrying around with files. Phones were ringing almost continually. Couriers were running along corridors carrying important dispatches. There was even a gramophone playing the song “Erika,” as if we were actually with the motorized SS as they drove on toward the Normandy coast. And, most unusually, everyone was smiling. No one ever smiled in that place. But that day they did. Even I had a smile on my face. To defeat France as quickly as we did seemed nothing short of miraculous. You have to bear in mind that many of us sat in the trenches of northern France for four years. Four years of slaughter and stalemate. And then a victory over our oldest enemy in just four weeks! You didn’t have to be a Nazi to feel good about that. And if I’m honest, the summer of 1940 was when I came the closest to thinking well of the Nazis. Indeed, that was the time when being a Nazi hardly seemed to matter. Suddenly, we were all proud to be German again.

  Of course, people were also feeling good because they thought—we thought—that the war was over before it had even begun. Hardly anyone was dead in comparison with the millions who’d died in the Great War. And England would have to make peace. The Russian back door was secure. And America wasn’t interested in getting involved, as usual. All in all, it seemed like some sort of miraculous reprieve. I expect the French felt very differently, but in Germany there was national jubilation. And frankly, the last person on my mind when I walked into Heydrich’s office that morning was a stupid little prick like Erich Mielke.

  Seated at a table beside Heydrich was another uniformed SS man whom I didn’t recognize. He was about thirty, slightly built, with a full head of light brown hair, a fastidious, almost feminine mouth, and the sharpest pair of eyes I’d seen outside of the leopard’s enclosure at the Berlin Zoo. The left eye was particularly catlike. At first I assumed it was narrowed against the smoke from his silver cigarette holder, but after a while I saw that the eye was permanently like that, as if he had lost his monocle. He smiled when Heydrich introduced us, and I saw that there was more than a passing resemblance to the young Bela Lugosi, always supposing that Bela Lugosi had ever been young. The SS officer’s name was Walter Schellenberg, and I think he was a major then—much later on he became a general—but I wasn’t really paying attention to the pips on his collar patch. I was more interested in Heydrich’s uniform, which was that of a reserve major in the Luftwaffe. More interesting still was the fact that his arm was in a sling, and for several nervous minutes I supposed that my presence there had something to do with an attempt on his life he wanted me to investigate. “Oberkommissar Gunther is one of Kripo’s best detectives,” Heydrich told Schellenberg. “In the new Germany, that’s a profession not without some hazard. Most philosophers argue that the world is ultimately mind or matter. Schopenhauer states that the final reality is human will. But whenever I see Gunther I am reminded of the overriding importance to the world of human curiosity, too. Like a scientist or an inventor, a good detective must be curious. He must have his hypotheses. And he must always seek to test them against the observable facts. Is it not so, Gunther?”

  “Yes, Herr General.”

  “Doubtless he is even now wondering why I am wearing this Luftwaffe uniform and hoping secretly that it heralds my departure from Sipo so that he might enjoy an easier, quieter life.” Heydrich smiled at his little joke. “Come now, Gunther. Isn’t that exactly what you were thinking?”

  “Are you leaving Sipo, Herr General?”

  “No, I’m not.” He grinned like a very clever schoolboy.

  I said nothing.

  “Try to contain your obvious relief, Gunther.”

  “Very well, General. I’ll certainly do my best.”

  “You see what I mean, Walter? He remains his own man at all times.”

  Schellenberg just smiled and smoked and watched me with his cat’s eyes and said nothing. We had one thing in common, at least. With Heydrich, nothing was always the safest thing to say.

  “Since the invasion of Poland,” explained Heydrich, “I’ve been volunteering as aircrew on a bomber. I was a rear gunner in an air attack on Lublin.”

  “It sounds rather hazardous, Herr General,” I said.

  “It is. But believe me, there’s nothing quite like flying down on an enemy city at two hundred miles an hour with an MG 17 in your hands. I wanted to show some of these bureaucratic soldiers what the SS is made of. That we’re not just a bunch of asphalt soldiers.”

  I assumed he was referring to Himmler.

  “Very commendable, sir. Is that how you injured your arm?”

  “No. No, that was an accident,” he said. “I’ve also been training as a fighter pilot. I crashed during takeoff. My own stupid fault.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  Heydrich’s self-satisfied smile stalled midflight, and for a moment I wondered if I’d gone too far.

  “Meaning what?” he said. “That it wasn’t an accident?”

  I shrugged. “Meaning only that I imagine you would want to find out everything that went wrong before flying again.” I was trying to back up a little from what, unwisely perhaps, I’d already put in his mind. “What kind of plane was it, sir?”

  Heydrich hesitated, as if debating the idea in his own mind. “A Messerschmitt,” he said quietly. “The Bf 110. It’s not considered a very agile plane.”

  “Well, there are you. I can’t think why I mentioned such a thing. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that you aren’t a good pilot, General. I’m sure they wouldn’t let you get in the cockpit unless they were quite satisfied the airplane was airworthy. Me, I’ve never even been off the ground, but I should still want to be quite sure it wasn’t anything mechanical before I went up again.”

  “Yes, perhaps you’re right.”

  Schellenberg was nodding now. “It certainly couldn’t do any harm, Herr General. Gunther’s right.”

  He had a curious, high-pitched voice with
a slight accent I found hard to place; and there was something very neat and dapper about him that reminded me of a butler, or a menswear salesman.

  An attractive-looking SS secretary—what we used to call a gray mouse—came in carrying a tray with three coffee cups and three glasses of water, just like we were in a café on the Ku-damm, and thankfully we were distracted from the subject of Heydrich’s accident—Schellenberg by the woman herself and Heydrich by the sound of the gramophone that was coming through the open door. For a moment he stamped his boots on the floor in time with the song and grinned happily.

  “That’s a marvelous sound, isn’t it?”

  “Wonderful, Herr General,” said Schellenberg, who was still eyeing Heydrich’s secretary, and the comment might just as easily have been about her as the music.

  I could see his point. Her name was Bettina and she seemed too nice by half to be working for a devil like Heydrich.

  When she went out again, the three of us started to sing. It was one of the few SS songs I didn’t mind at all, since it couldn’t have had less to do with the SS or even fighting a war. And, for a moment, I forgot where I was and whom I was with.

  “On the heath there grows a little flower

  And its name is Erika.

  A hundred thousand little bees

  Swarm around Erika

  Because her heart is full of sweetness

  And her flowery dress gives off a tender scent

  On the heath there grows a little flower

  And its name is Erika.”

  We sang all three verses, and by the end we were in such a jolly mood that Heydrich told Bettina to fetch us some brandy. A few minutes later we were toasting the fall of France, and then Heydrich was explaining the real reason for my presence in his office. He handed me a file, waited for me to open it, and said: