by Philip Kerr
A couple of men came over to the billiard table and started a game. König drew his chair away and jerked his head at me to follow him. ‘It’s all right,’ said one of the players. ‘There’s plenty of room to get by.’ But we moved our chairs anyway. And when we were at a more discreet distance from the table I started to give him the story I had rehearsed with Belinsky. Only now König shook his head firmly and picked up his dog, which licked his ear playfully.
‘This isn’t the right time or place,’ he said. ‘But I’m impressed at how busy you have been.’ He raised his eyebrows and watched the two men at the billiard table with an air of distraction. ‘I learned this morning that you had been successful in procuring some petrol coupons for that medical friend of mine. The one at the General Hospital.’ I realized that he was talking about Traudl’s murder. ‘And so soon after we had discussed the matter too. It really was most efficient of you, I’m sure.’ He puffed smoke at the dog on his lap which sniffed and then sneezed. ‘It’s so difficult to obtain reliable supplies of anything in Vienna these days.’
I shrugged. ‘You just have to know the right people, that’s all.’
‘As you clearly do, my friend.’ He patted the breast pocket of his green tweed suit, where he had put Belinsky’s documents. ‘In these special circumstances I feel I ought to introduce you to someone in the company who will be better able than I to judge the quality of your source. Someone who, as it happens, is keen to meet you, and decide how best a man of your skills and resourcefulness may be used. We had thought to wait a few weeks before making the introduction, but this new information changes everything. However, first I must make a telephone call. I shall be a few minutes.’ He looked down the Café and pointed to one of the other free billiard tables. ‘Why don’t you try a few shots while I’m away?’
‘I’ve not much use for games of skill,’ I said. ‘I distrust a game that relies on anything but luck. That way I needn’t blame myself if I lose. I have a tremendous capacity for self-recrimination.’
A twinkle came into König’s eye. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said standing up from the table, ‘that seems hardly German.’
I watched him as he walked into the back of the Café to use the phone, the terrier trotting faithfully after him. I wondered who it was that he was calling: the one who was better able to judge the quality of my source might even be Müller. It seemed too much to hope for so soon.
When König returned a few minutes later, he seemed excited. ‘As I thought,’ he said, nodding enthusiastically, ‘there is someone who is keen to have immediate sight of this material, and to meet you. I have a car outside. Shall we go?’
König’s car was a black Mercedes, like Belinsky’s. And like Belinsky he drove too fast for safety on a road that had seen a heavy morning rain. I said that it would be better to arrive late than not to arrive at all, but he paid no attention. My feeling of discomfort was made worse by König’s dog, which sat on his master’s lap and barked excitedly at the road ahead for the whole of the journey, as if the brute had been giving directions on where we were going. I recognized the road as the one which led to Sievering Studios, but at that same moment the road forked and we turned north again on to Grinzinger Allee.
‘Do you know Grinzing?’ König shouted over the dog’s incessant barking. I said that I did not. ‘Then you really don’t know the Viennese,’ he opined. ‘Grinzing is famous for its wine production. In the summer everyone comes up here in the evening to go to one of the taverns selling the new vintage. They drink too much, listen to a Schrammel quartet and sing old songs.’
‘It sounds very cosy,’ I said, without much enthusiasm.
‘Yes, it is. I own a couple of vineyards up here myself. Just two small fields you understand. But it’s a start. A man must have some land, don’t you think? We’ll come back here in the summer and then you can taste the new wine yourself. The lifeblood of Vienna.’
Grinzing seemed hardly a suburb of Vienna at all, more a charming little village. But because of its proximity to the capital, its cosy country charm somehow appeared as false as one of the film sets they built over at Sievering. We drove up a hill on a narrow winding lane which led between old Heurige Inns and cottage gardens, with König declaring how pretty he thought it all was now that spring was here. But the sight of so much storybook provinciality merely served to stimulate my city-bred parts to contempt, and I restricted myself to a sullen grunt and a muttered sentence about tourists. To one more used to the perennial sight of rubble, Grinzing with its many trees and vineyards looked very green. However I made no mention of this impression for fear that it might set König off on one of his queer little monologues about that sickly colour.
He stopped the car in front of a high yellow-brick wall which enclosed a large, yellow-painted house and a garden that looked as if it had spent all day in the beauty parlour. The house itself was a tall, three-storey building with a high-dormered roof. Apart from its bright colour, there was a certain austerity of detail about the façade which lent the house an institutional appearance. It looked like a rather opulent sort of town hall.
I followed König through the gates and up an immaculately bordered path to a heavy studded oak door of the kind that expected you to be holding a battle-axe when you knocked. We walked straight into the house and on to a creaking wooden floor that would have given a librarian a heart attack.
König led me into a small sitting-room, told me to wait there and then left, closing the door behind him. I took a good look round, but there wasn’t much to see beyond the fact of the owner’s bucolic taste in furniture. A rough-hewn table blocked the French window, and a couple of cartwheel farmhouse chairs were ranged in front of an empty fireplace that was as big as a mineshaft. I sat down on a slightly more comfortable-looking ottoman and re-tied my shoelaces. Then I polished my toes with the edge of the threadbare rug. I must have waited there for an indifferent half-hour before König came back to fetch me. He led me through a maze of rooms and corridors and up a flight of stairs to the back of the house, with the manner of a man whose jacket is lined with oak panelling. Hardly caring if I insulted him or not now that I was about to meet someone more important, I said, ‘If you changed that suit you’d make someone a wonderful butler.’
König did not turn around, but I heard him bare his dentures and utter a short, dry laugh. ‘I’m glad you think so. You know, although I like a sense of humour I would not advise you to exercise it with the general. Frankly, his character is most severe.’ He opened a door and we came into a bright, airy room with a fire in the grate and hectares of empty bookshelves. Against the broad window, behind a long library table, stood a grey-suited figure with a closely-cropped head I half recognized. The man turned and smiled, his hooked nose unmistakably belonging to a face from my past.
‘Hello, Gunther,’ said the man.
König looked quizzically at me as I blinked speechlessly at the grinning figure.
‘Do you believe in ghosts, Herr König?’ I said.
‘No. Do you?’
‘I do now. If I’m not mistaken, the gentleman by the window was hanged in 1945 for his part in the plot to kill the Führer.’
‘You can leave us, Helmut,’ said the man at the window. König nodded curtly, turned on his heel and left.
Arthur Nebe pointed at a chair in front of the table on which Belinsky’s documents lay spread out beside a pair of spectacles and a fountain pen. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Drink?’ He laughed. ‘You look as though you need one.’
‘It’s not every day I get to see a man raised from the dead,’ I said quietly. ‘Better make it a large one.’
Nebe opened a large carved-wood drinks cabinet, revealing a marble interior filled with several bottles. He took out a bottle of vodka and two small glasses, which he filled to the top.
‘To old comrades,’ he said, raising his glass. I smiled uncertainly. ‘Drink up. It won’t make me disappear again.’
I tossed the vodka back and breathe
d deeply as it hit my stomach. ‘Death agrees with you, Arthur. You look well.’
‘Thanks. I’ve never felt better.’
I lit a cigarette and left it on my lip for a while.
‘Minsk, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘In 1941. The last time we saw each other?’
‘That’s right. You got me transferred to the War Crimes Bureau.’
‘I ought to have had you put on a charge for what you asked. Even had you shot.’
‘From what I hear, you were keen on shooting that summer.’ Nebe let that one pass. ‘So why didn’t you?’
‘You were a damned good policeman. That’s why.’
‘So were you.’ I sucked hard at my cigarette. ‘At least, you were before the war. What made you change, Arthur?’
Nebe savoured his drink for a moment and then finished it with one swallow. ‘This is good vodka,’ he remarked quietly, almost to himself. ‘Bernie, don’t expect me to give you an explanation. I had my orders to carry out, and so it was them or me. Kill or be killed. That’s how it always was with the SS. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand — after you’ve calculated that to save your own life you must kill others then the number makes little or no difference. That was my final solution, Bernie: the final solution to the pressing problem of my own continued survival. You were fortunate that you were never required to make that same calculation.’
‘Thanks to you.’
Nebe shrugged modestly, before pointing at the papers spread before him. ‘I’m rather glad that I didn’t have you shot, now that I’ve seen this lot. Naturally this material will have to be assessed by an expert, but on the face of it you appear to have won the lottery. All the same, I’d like to hear more about your source.’
I repeated my story, after which Nebe said:
‘Can he be trusted, do you think? Your Russian?’
‘He never let me down before,’ I said. ‘Of course, he was just fixing papers for me then.’
Nebe refilled our glasses and frowned.
‘Is there a problem?’ I asked.
‘It’s just that in the ten years I’ve known you Bernie, I can’t find anything that can persuade me that you’re now a common black-marketeer.’
‘That shouldn’t be any more difficult than the problem I have persuading myself that you’re a war-criminal, Arthur. Or for that matter, accepting that you’re not dead.’
Nebe smiled. ‘You have a point. But with so many opportunities presented by the vast number of displaced persons, I’m surprised you didn’t return to your old trade and become a private investigator again.’
‘Private investigation and the black market are not mutually exclusive,’ I said. ‘Good information is just like penicillin or cigarettes. It has its price. And the better, the more illicit the information, the higher that price. It’s always been like that. Incidentally, my Russian will want to be paid.’
‘They always do. Sometimes I think that the Ivans have more confidence in the dollar than the Americans themselves.’ Nebe clasped his hands and laid both forefingers along the length of his shrewd-looking nose. Then he pointed them at me as if he had been holding a pistol. ‘You’ve done very well, Bernie. Very well indeed. But I must confess I am still puzzled.’
‘About me as a black Peter?’
‘I can accept the idea of that rather more easily than I can accept the idea of you killing Traudl Braunsteiner. Murder was never in your line.’
‘I didn’t kill her,’ I said. ‘König told me to do it, and I thought I could, because she was a Communist. I learned to hate them while I was in a Soviet prison-camp. Even enough to kill one. But when I thought about it, I realized I couldn’t do it. Not in cold blood. Maybe I could have done it if it had been a man, but not a girl. I was going to tell him that this morning, but when he congratulated me on having done it, I decided to keep my mouth shut and take the credit. I figured there might be some money in it.’
‘So somebody else killed her. How very intriguing. You’ve no idea who, I suppose?’
I shook my head.
‘A mystery, then.’
‘Just like your resurrection, Arthur. How exactly did you manage it?’
‘I’m afraid that I can’t take any of the credit,’ he said. ‘It was something the intelligence people dreamed up. In the last few months of the war they simply doctored the service records of senior SS and party personnel, to the effect that we were dead. Most of us were executed for our part in Count Stauffenberg’s plot to kill the Führer. Well, what were another hundred or so executions on a list that was already thousands of names long? And then some of us were listed as killed in a bombing raid, or in the battle for Berlin. Then all that remained was to make sure that these records fell into the hands of the Americans.
‘So the SS transported the records to a paper mill near Munich, and the owner — a good Nazi — was briefed to wait until the Amis were on his doorstep before he started to destroy anything.’ Nebe laughed. ‘I remember reading in the newspaper how pleased with themselves the Amis were. What a coup they thought they had scored. Of course, most of what they captured was genuine enough. But for those of us who were most at risk from their ridiculous war-crimes investigations, it provided a real breathing space, and enough time to establish a new identity. There’s nothing quite like being dead for giving one a little room.’ He laughed again. ‘Anyway, that US Documents Centre of theirs in Berlin is still working for us.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked, wondering if I was about to learn something that would throw light on why Linden had been killed. Or perhaps he had simply found out that the records had been doctored before they fell into Allied hands? Wouldn’t that have been enough to justify killing him?
‘No, I’ve said enough for the moment.’ Nebe drank some more vodka and licked his lips appreciatively. ‘These are interesting times we live in, Bernie. A man can be whoever he wants to be. Take me: my new name is Nolde, Arthur Nolde, and I make wine on this estate. Resurrected, you said. Well you’re not so very far away from it there. Only our Nazi dead are raised incorruptible. We’re changed, my friend. It’s the Russians who are wearing the black hats and trying to take over the town. Now that we’re working for the Americans, we’re the good boys. Dr Schneider — he’s the man who set the Org up with the help of their CIC — he has regular meetings with them at our headquarters in Pullach. He’s even been to the United States to meet their Secretary of State. Can you imagine it? A senior German officer working with the President’s number two? You don’t get more incorruptible than that, not these days.’
‘If you don’t mind,’ I said, ‘I find it hard to think of the Amis as saints. When I got back from Russia my wife was getting an extra ration from an American captain. Sometimes I think they’re no better than the Ivans.’
Nebe shrugged. ‘You’re not the only one in the Org who thinks that,’ he said. ‘But for my part, I never heard of the Ivans asking a lady’s permission or giving her a few bars of chocolate first. They’re animals.’ He smiled as a thought came into his head. ‘All the same, I will admit that some of those women ought to be grateful to the Russians. But for them, they might never have known what it was like.’
It was a poor joke, and in bad taste, but I laughed along with him anyway. I was still sufficiently nervous of Nebe to want to be good company for him.
‘So what did you do, about your wife and this American captain?’ he asked when his laughter has subsided.
Something made me check myself before I replied. Arthur Nebe was a clever man. Before the war, as chief of the criminal police, he had been Germany’s most outstanding policeman. It would have been too risky to give an answer which suggested that I had wanted to kill an American Army captain. Nebe saw common factors worthy of investigation where other men only saw the hand of a capricious god. I knew him too well to believe that he would have forgotten how once he had assigned Becker to a murder inquiry I was leading. Any hint of an association, no matter how accidental, between the death of one America
n officer affecting Becker and the death of another affecting me and I didn’t doubt that Nebe would have given orders to have had me killed. One American officer was bad enough. Two would have been too much of a coincidence. So I shrugged, lit a cigarette and said: ‘What can you do but make sure it’s her and not him who gets the slap in the mouth? American officers don’t take kindly to being socked, least of all by krauts. It’s one of the small privileges of conquest that you don’t have to take any shit from your defeated enemy. I can’t imagine you’ve forgotten that, Herr Gruppenführer. You of all people.’
I watched his grin with an extra curiosity. It was a cunning smile, in an old fox’s face, but his teeth looked real enough.
‘That was very wise of you,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t do to go around killing Americans.’ Confirming my nervousness of him, he added, after a long pause: ‘Do you remember Emil Becker?’
It would have been stupid to have tried to affect a show of protracted remembering. He knew me better than that.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘It was his girlfriend that König told you to kill. One of his girlfriends anyway.’
‘But König said she was MVD,’ I frowned.
‘And so she was. So was Becker. He killed an American officer. But not before he’d tried to infiltrate the Org.’
I shook my head slowly. ‘A crook, maybe,’ I said, ‘but I can’t see Becker as one of Ivan’s spies.’ Nebe nodded insistently. ‘Here in Vienna?’ He nodded again. ‘Did he know about you being alive?’
‘Of course not. We used him to do a little courier work now and again. It was a mistake. Becker was a black-marketeer, like you, Bernie. Rather a successful one, as it happens. But he had delusions regarding his own worth to us. He thought he was at the centre of a very big pond. But he was nowhere near it. Quite frankly if a meteorite had landed in the middle of it, Becker wouldn’t even have noticed the fucking ripple.’
‘How did you find out about him?’
‘His wife told us,’ Nebe said. ‘When he came back from a Soviet POW camp, our people in Berlin sent someone round to his house to see if we could recruit him to the Org. Well, they missed him, and by the time they got to speak to Becker’s wife he had left home and was living here in Vienna. The wife told them about Becker’s association with a Russian colonel of MVD. But for one reason and another — actually it was sheer bloody inefficiency — it was quite a while before that information reached us here in Vienna section. And by that time he had been recruited by one of our collectors.’
