Field Gray

by Philip Kerr

  By now, the general, who couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, even in his boots, had got out of the car and was repeating the code word to the doorman.

  I took off my hat and sprinted toward this diminutive hero as the puff house door opened. Seeing me near the general, an aide-de-camp blocked my path. This man was a colonel with a monocle.

  “General,” I said. “General von Vollard-Bockelburg.”

  I put on my cap and saluted smartly.

  “Yes,” said the general, and returned my salute. His head was almost hairless. He looked like a baby with a mustache.

  “Thank God, sir.”

  “Willms, is it?”

  This was better than I had hoped for. I glanced nervously at the doorman, wondering if he spoke much German, and risked clicking my heels, which, to a German officer at least, always meant “Yes.”

  “I’m so glad I caught you, Herr General. Apparently, there’s a detachment of French gendarmes on their way here to raid this place.”

  “What? General Schaumberg assured me that this establishment was beyond reproach.”

  “Oh, I’m sure the general is right, sir. But the Prefecture of Paris has been given orders by the German Morality Commission that maisons de plaisir employing coloreds or Jews are to be closed down, the women arrested, and any German officers found on the premises checked for venereal disease.”

  “I signed that order myself,” said the general. “That order was for the protection of the ordinary rank and file. Not for senior German officers. Not for maisons like this.”

  “I know, sir. But the French, sir. It would appear that they didn’t appreciate that, sir. Or at least have chosen not to appreciate it, if you receive my meaning.” I glanced urgently at my watch.

  “What time is this raid to take place?” asked the general.

  “Well, that all depends, sir. Not everyone in Paris has bothered to set clocks to German time, as per your orders, sir. And that includes the French police. If the raid takes place according to Paris time, then it might happen at any minute. But if it’s Berlin time, then there might yet be time to get everyone else in the maison out before an embarrassing incident occurs.”

  “He’s right, sir,” said the aide. “There are still a great many French paying no attention to official German time.”

  The little general nodded. “Willy,” he said to the aide. “Go in there and discreetly inform all general staff officers you can find that the story is out on this place. I’ll wait for you in the car.”

  “Would you like me to help, Herr Colonel?”

  “Yes, thank you, Captain Willms. And thank you for your presence of mind.”

  I clicked my heels again and followed the colonel through the door while the little general explained things to the doorman in what sounded like excellent French.

  I went up a curving cast-iron staircase and found myself in a tall, elegant room with a chandelier as big as the underside of an iceberg, and several rococo murals that might have been painted by Fragonard if ever he’d been asked to illustrate the memoirs of Casanova with extreme obscenity. The vaulted gilt ceiling looked like the inside of a Fabergé egg. There were plenty of chairs and sofas that had been upholstered with the aid of an air compressor; they had long legs and narrow ankles with ball-and-claw feet. The girls seated on the chairs and sofas had long legs and narrow ankles and, for all I knew, ball-and-claw feet as well, only I wasn’t paying that much attention to their feet because there were other details of their appearance that commanded my attention first. All of them were naked. The angle of this gold-plated puff house was that every man with a red stripe on his trouser leg might sit in leisurely judgment of these Olympian beauties, like Paris with his specially inscribed apple. There was even a bowl of fruit on the table.

  These were attractive thoughts, but I was in a hurry, and before the temps-perdu patronne could give me her couple-mother spiel, I had grabbed a natural blonde and herded her toward a bedroom with a couple of well-placed slaps on her well-placed derriere. It wasn’t that I was interested in having her, but I was in urgent need of a door to lock and wait behind while the general’s aide set about raising the alarm. Already I could hear him warning other officers that the police were on their way to raid the place. And it wasn’t very long before the sound of many boots was heard on the stairs as the maison’s exclusive clientele left the building hurriedly. Meanwhile, I tried to reassure my beautiful naked companion that there was nothing at all to worry about and asked her questions about Willms, Kestner, and Schaumberg. Her name was Yvette and she spoke excellent German, as did nearly all of the girls at number twenty-two. Probably that was why they’d been selected to work there in the first place.

  “General Schaumberg is the deputy commander of Berlin,” she explained. “He seems to spend most of his time touring Parisian brothels. Him and his adjutant, who’s a German count. The Graf Waldersee. And there’s a prince in tow as well: the Prince von Ratibor. The prince and his dog are here at least twice a week. All brothel certificates are issued by Schaumberg’s office, and together with Kestner and Willms they’ve already made it into a nice little racket. The Germans win both ways. They get paid off for a certificate. They get laid by the best whores. But the brains of the outfit is Willms. He used to be a flic, so he knows how a maison works. A bastard, too. Takes a slice of everything. Most evenings he’s in his office here up on the top floor, cooking the books to show Schaumberg.”

  “Is he here now?”

  “He was. I expect he’s already on the phone to Schaumberg’s office trying to find out what the hell’s going on. What is going on?”

  I thought it best not to tell her any more than she needed to know.

  After about half an hour, I went upstairs. There was no one to be seen, but I could hear someone on the floor above shouting in French. I quickened my steps and arrived on a landing outside an open office door. Willms was on the telephone behind a desk. He was sitting next to an open safe as if he thought it might keep him warm. Perhaps it would have done, too—there was enough money in it.

  Seeing me there, he put down the phone and nodded.

  “I suppose it was you,” he said. “The person who gave out that the gendarmerie was coming to raid this place.”

  “That’s right. I didn’t want to embarrass any of those red stripes when I put you under arrest, Willms.”

  “Me? Under arrest?” He chuckled. “It’s you who’s going to be in trouble, Gunther. Not me. Half of the general staff in Paris are sharing in this particular bottle, my friend. Some very important heads are going to feel sore about what you’ve done here tonight.”

  “They’ll get over it. In a few days those Wehrmacht counts and princes will forget a rat like you ever even existed, Willms.”

  “The amount of coal they’re raking back from this place? I don’t think so. See, you’re trying to flood a very nice little money pit here. The only question is, why? Or maybe you’ve got something against your brother officers having a thump now and again.”

  “I’m not arresting you for being a pimp, Willms. Though that’s what you are. Personally, I’ve got nothing at all against pimps. A man can’t help what he is. No, I’m arresting you for attempted murder.”

  “Oh? And whose murder is it that I’m supposed to have attempted?”

  “Mine.”

  “You can prove that, can you?”

  “I’m a detective, remember? I’ve got a little thing called evidence. Not to mention a witness. And if I’m right, a motive, too. Not that I’ll need any of these things when Himmler finds out what you’ve been up to here in Paris, Willms. He’s rather less understanding than me when it comes to the conduct of men wearing the uniform of his beloved SS. Somehow I get the feeling that his opinion of your conduct is going to matter a lot more than General Schaumberg’s.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “I always take it seriously when someone tries to gas me with the contents of a chemical fire ex
tinguisher. And by the way, I checked back with the Alex. It seems that before you joined the police, you worked for the fire brigade.”

  “I don’t see that that proves a thing.”

  “It proves you know something about fire extinguishers. And it would account for how it was that the missing plug from the extinguisher that almost killed me was found in your hotel room.”

  “Says who?”

  “The witness.”

  “You think that a court-martial will accept the word of a Frenchman against the word of a German officer?”

  “No. But they might accept it against the word of a greasy little pimp.”

  “You might be right,” said Willms. “We’ll have to see, won’t we?”

  Uttering a weary sort of sigh, he sat back in his chair and, in the same movement, pulled open the drawer of his desk. Even before I saw the gun I knew it was there, and after that it was simply a question of who could shoot first, him or me. On my SS soft-shell holster there was just a brass stud to keep the flap down, but even so I was no Gene Autry and the Luger was in his hand before the Walther P38 was in mine. It was the Walther’s double-action trigger that probably saved my life. Like most policemen, I was in the habit of carrying it with one in the chamber and the hammer down. All I had to do was squeeze the trigger. Willms ought to have known that. The toggle-lock action on his Luger was much more cumbersome, which was why cops didn’t carry them, and by the time his pistol was ready to fire I was already shouting a warning. I might have finished the warning, too, if he hadn’t started to straighten his arm and point the gun at me, at which point I fired at the side of his head.

  For a moment I thought I’d missed.

  Willms sat down, only he didn’t sit on the chair but on the floor, like a Boy Scout dropping onto his backside beside a campfire. Then I saw the blood boiling out of his skull like hot mud. He collapsed onto his side and lay still except for his legs, which straightened slowly, like someone trying to get comfortable enough to die; and all the time his head painted the beige carpet a very dark shade of red as if an indifferent claret had been poured onto the floor by a truculent guest in an unsatisfactory restaurant.

  With shaking hands, I made my Walther safe and then holstered it, asking myself if I couldn’t have aimed at something other than his head. At the same time, I told myself that one of the easiest ways to end up dead is to leave your wounded adversary with an opportunity to shoot you.

  I bent down and made sure the Luger was safe, too, and it was then I started to see how much of a jam I was in, what with all the generals and counts and princes who were in league with Willms. And thinking it might be better if Willms’s death at least looked a bit less like a murder, I swapped the Luger for my own Walther. Then, seeing Willms’s tunic and belt, I took his Walther and put it in my holster before replacing the cold Luger in the desk drawer. Things only looked like a mess. Suicide was actually a nice, tidy solution for the French police, for Sipo, and for the red stripes over at the Majestic hotel. I wondered if they’d even bother to look for a powder burn on Willms’s head. Because cops all over the world love suicides; they’re nearly always the easiest homicides to solve. You just lift the rug and brush them underneath.

  I picked up the telephone and asked the operator for the Préfecture de Police, in the rue de Lutèce.

  23

  GERMANY, 1954

  I sat up and blinked hard in the near darkness of cell number seven, wondering how long I’d been asleep. The shade of Hitler was gone, at least for now, and I was glad about that. I didn’t much like his questions or the mocking assumption that, deep down, I was as big a criminal as him. It was true that I might have shot Nikolaus Willms somewhere less lethal than his head, and that even when I’d been trying to put him under arrest, secretly I had probably wanted to kill him. Perhaps if Paul Kestner had pulled a gun on me I’d have shot him, too. But as it was I never saw him again, and the last I heard of him he’d been part of a police battalion in Smolensk, murdering Jews and communists.

  I opened my window and put my face in the cool breeze of the Landsberg dawn. I couldn’t see the cows, but I could smell them in the fields across the river to the southwest and I could hear them, too. One, anyway; it sounded like a lost soul in a place far, far away. Like my own soul, perhaps. I almost felt like blowing my own breath in a solitary hot blast by way of an answer.

  The Paris of 1940 seemed equally far away. What a summer that had been, thanks to Renata. The prefecture in the person of Chief Inspector Oltramare had accepted without demur my story of finding Willms dead after going to the maison with the intention of arresting him, although it was as plain as the Eiffel Tower that he believed not a word of it. Sipo proved only a little more troublesome, and I was summoned to the Hôtel Majestic, in the avenue des Portugais, to explain myself to General Best, the head of RSHA in Paris.

  A dark-eyed, severe-looking man from Darmstadt, Best was in his late thirties and bore a strong resemblance to the Nazi Party’s deputy leader, Rudolf Hess. There was some bad blood between him and Heydrich, and because of that, I half expected Best to give me a rougher ride. Instead, he confined himself to delivering a light reprimand for my declared intent to arrest Willms without consulting him. Which was fair enough, and my apology seemed to put an end to the matter; as things turned out, he was much more interested in picking my brains for a book he was writing about the German police. On several occasions we met at his favorite restaurant, a brasserie on the boulevard de Montparnasse called La Coupole, and I told him all about life at the Alex and some of the cases I had investigated. Best’s book was published the following year and sold very well.

  In fact, he turned out to be something of a benefactor. He and his damn book were the main reason I managed to stay on in Paris until June 1941, and so it was Best who effectively ensured I missed out on going to Pretzsch and Himmler’s pep talk for the SS and SD. I might have stayed on a bit longer and avoided going to the Ukraine altogether but for Heydrich. Now and then he liked to tug the line a little just to remind me that he had his hook in my mouth.

  I lit a cigarette and lay down on the bed again, waiting for the gray light to strengthen and the room to take shape and the uncaring guards to rouse Landsberg’s inmates for exercise, breakfast, and then what was called “free association.” To my surprise, I was now allowed back into the general prison population. But to avoid Biberstein and Haensch with their worries about what I was telling the Americans and how that might affect their own chances of parole, I found myself seeking out the company of Waldemar Klingelhöfer. Since he had been cut by everyone else at Landsberg, my speaking to him was the best way of ensuring I was left alone—at least for the duration of our conversation. We talked in the garden, with the sun warming our faces.

  Klingelhöfer had not aged well since our time together at Lenin House in Minsk, and he was perhaps the only prisoner at WCPN1 of whom it could have been said that he had some sort of conscience about what he had done. He looked like a man haunted by his actions with the Moscow commando. Martin Sandberger, watching us from a short distance away, merely looked psychopathic.

  Looking at Klingelhöfer’s twitching, bespectacled face, it was hard to imagine the former opera tenor who owned it singing anything except perhaps the “Dies Irae.” But I was more interested in talking to him about what had happened in Minsk after I had returned from there to Berlin.

  “Do you remember a man called Paul Kestner?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” said Klingelhöfer. “He was active with a murder commando in Smolensk when I got there in 1941. I was supposed to obtain furs to use for German military winter clothing. Kestner had been in Paris, I think, and was bitter about his being posted to Russia. He seemed to be taking it out on Jews, that much was obvious, and my impression was that he was a really cruel man. After that I heard he got posted to the death camp at Treblinka. That must have been about July of 1942. He was the deputy commander, I think. There was some talk about Kestner and Irmfried Eb
erl, who was in charge, running the camp for their own pleasure and profit, using Jewish women for sex and embezzling Jewish gold and jewelry that was properly the property of the Reich. Anyway, the bosses found out about it and by all accounts dismissed the pair of them and some others besides before putting in a new man to clean the stables. Fellow named Stangl. Meanwhile, Eberl and Kestner were dismissed from the SS and, in 1944, I heard they joined the Wehrmacht in an attempt to redeem themselves. The Amis got Eberl a few years ago, and I believe he hanged himself. But I’ve no idea what became of Kestner. They say Stangl’s in South America.”

  “Well, if he is, it’s not Argentina,” I said. “Or Uruguay.”

  “You’re lucky,” said Klingelhöfer. “To have been to those places. Me, I expect I’ll die here.”

  “You must be the only prisoner in Landsberg who believes that, Wally. Everyone else seems to be expecting a parole. They’ve already let go men who, in my opinion, were worse than you.”

  “Thanks. Nice of you to say so. But I just hope that if I do die in here, they’ll allow my family to have my body. I wouldn’t want to be buried here in Landsberg. It would mean a lot to them. Nice of you to say so, yes. I mean, I’m not looking to get out. I mean, what would I do? What can any of us do?”

  I left Klingelhöfer talking to himself. He did a lot of that in Landsberg. It looked easier than talking to the Americans. Or Biberstein and Haensch. Or Sandberger, who cornered me on the way back to my cell.

  “Why do you speak to a bastard like that?” he demanded.

  “Why not? I speak to you. Really, I’m not that particular.”

  “Funny guy. I heard that about you, Gunther.”

  “I don’t see you laughing. Then again, you used to be a judge, didn’t you? Before you went to Estonia? Not many laughs there, either, from what I heard.”