by Philip Kerr
“You put that very nicely, Hennig. So nicely I wonder how I don’t see how many of your teeth I can make stick to my knuckles.”
“You don’t want to hit me, Gunther. That would spoil everything. For you. For your girl. And her invisible jockey.”
I bit my lip, which was momentarily better than biting a senior officer. I wasn’t sure what the military law on that one was, but I didn’t think it was a ticket home on the MS Wilhelm Gustloff.
“And where will you be? When the ship sets sail.”
“Oh, I’ll be on the ship, too. Someone has to oversee the transport of the Amber Room back to Germany. I’m sure you agree it’s much too valuable to let it travel by itself.”
“I’m impressed. How did you manage that?”
“Let’s just say that when the gauleiter was in the Ukraine—where he was also the governor, of course—he managed to spirit away the contents of four whole museums. And those are just the ones that I know about. I should say he now has an art collection to rival Hermann Göring’s.”
“And you threatened to tell Hitler or Himmler about them. Is that it?”
“It would have been my duty as a German officer.”
“And Koch? What about him?”
“He’s staying on in Königsberg. Bravely. As you might expect of a man like that. Right up until the very last minute, when I believe he has made plans to facilitate his own escape to a house on the coast and then on an icebreaker, to Flensburg. But you needn’t concern yourself with the governor’s safety. All you have to do is go and see your little lightning maid, show her this identity pass, and then tell her what to do. She won’t even have to endure the scrutiny of her colleagues as she carries out this important duty for the governor. As we speak, she’s probably the last one there. So, it couldn’t be simpler.”
“Suppose she says no.”
“You’d better make damn sure she doesn’t say no, hadn’t you? Not if you want to be a daddy in eight months. As soon as I’ve seen her give the signal—yes, I’m coming with you, Gunther, just to make sure—I’ll sign this pass and you can drive her to Gotenhafen yourself, where you can say your romantic good-byes. I’m afraid there’s no pass for you, my friend. Sorry about that. Not unless you’re part of the submarine training division; we need those boys to crew the U-boats. Or unless you’re badly wounded. Then again, I suppose we could always make that happen. Ordinarily, that might be the only alternative for a swine like you. For me to have those two thugs in the corridor take you outside and blow your brains out. But with you, Gunther, things are different, I think. You’d probably welcome a bullet in the back of the head. But failure to comply with the governor’s orders will only result in you being assigned to the concentration camp at Palmnicken, where your duties will include assisting the SS to dispose of three thousand Jewish female workers. Which I imagine you’ll probably think of as a fate worse than death. That’s what I can promise you. So, as you can no doubt see, you really don’t have a choice.” He looked around the room as if he expected that the fluff and the chairs were going to back him up. “Look, it’s not so bad what I’m asking you to do here. Anyone would think that I want something really difficult. All I’m trying to do is preserve the lives of everyone on that ship.”
“Including yours.”
“Naturally including mine. In a few months’ time, when the war is over, and you’re dead or in a Soviet labor camp, and Irmela and I are safely in Germany, you’ll wonder why you didn’t cooperate sooner. The fact is, we could have arranged for your passage home, too. I could have used a good man to help me guard all that priceless amber. So, do I have your cooperation, or not?”
Through all that he said, even through his white smiles and his smooth laughter and total confidence that I would meekly do exactly what he said, I knew that one day, in an unimaginable tomorrow’s world to which I knew I might never belong, I would see him again and pay him back in kind for everything he had done. For a moment the threat of some nebulous future revenge tried to form itself in my mouth and I even took a breath to give these futile words air. Instead, recognizing my impotence, I said nothing and I even think I must have nodded my quiet and spineless assent. The things you do for a woman.
Hennig buttoned up his tunic and then fetched his greatcoat and his cap.
“Shall we go?”
SIXTEEN
FRENCH RIVIERA
1956
The red beam from the lighthouse tracked across the Villa Mauresque as if searching the blue night sky for an enemy bomber to target but finding only me and Somerset Maugham seated side by side, next to the almost motionless swimming pool, and alerting each of us to the possibility that one of us might bring some as yet unknown harm to the other. He remained very still, and whenever the red light crossed his creased features, turning them the color of blood, he reminded me of a sort of vampire. I had been silent for a long moment and the old Englishman was sensitive enough to see that I had been much affected by the telling of this painful story—more affected than I could have imagined. It had been more than ten years, after all, and I hadn’t even got to the good bit.
“It’s been a while since I talked about it,” I told him. “If it comes to that, I don’t think I’ve ever talked about it. Frankly, it’s not the sort of thing you bring up over a beer and a sausage.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I tapped a fingernail against the cocktail gong. It sounded just like my heart. Or so I wanted to believe. How else was I going to finish my story? I swallowed hard and kept on going.
“Königsberg was surrendered to the Russians on April ninth, nineteen forty-five, after which I and ninety thousand other German soldiers were marched off into captivity. Me, I was one of the lucky ones. Someone helped me to escape, in nineteen forty-seven. Most of us died, however. I believe General Lasch was only repatriated about nine months ago. Meanwhile, the city was renamed Kaliningrad in July nineteen forty-six, in honor of some murderous Bolshevik, and cleansed of its entire German population. Many of those people unfortunate enough not to have fled the city were just forced into the countryside, where they starved or died of the cold. Today the only Germans left there are probably the statues of Immanuel Kant and Schiller.”
“But what happened to Irmela? What happened when she reached Germany? You can’t end the story there. Surely you haven’t finished.”
“I have if you want a happy ending.”
“I don’t like happy endings. I like an ending to be ambiguous because that’s the way life is. But wait a moment. Where’s the happy ending in you being sent off to a Soviet labor camp? That doesn’t make sense.”
“I’m still here, aren’t I? That’s about as happy as this story gets, I’m afraid.”
Maugham nodded. “Beginnings are much more enjoyable, it’s true. I sometimes think that novelists should never be allowed to write their own endings. Because this is where fiction p-parts company with reality. In real life we never actually recognize when something has truly ended. Which makes wrapping up a book in just one or two chapters almost impossible.”
I nodded and lit a cigarette. I’d smoked too much and my throat felt dry—too dry to continue speaking, but I knew he wasn’t going to let me stop there. I poured another gimlet from the pitcher and swallowed it—for medicinal purposes, of course.
“Nevertheless,” he said, “we both know there’s another ending to your story that you haven’t yet shared with me. After all these years there has to be.”
I nodded again. “Yes, there is.”
“I think you’d better tell me, don’t you?”
I took a breath and dived in.
“All right, sir. After Hennig and I met with Irmela and persuaded her to send the unencrypted signal—which was more difficult than might have been thought—he lent me a car and I drove her from Königsberg to Gotenhafen, a distance of about two hundred kilometers, al
ong a road that was sometimes jammed with civilians trying to escape from the Red Army. Some even chose to take a shortcut across the frozen sea, often with disastrous results. Meanwhile, the weather grew steadily worse with strong winds, snow, and below-freezing temperatures. Conditions on the road were so bad we almost didn’t reach the ship before it set sail, so there was little time for a proper good-bye. I wish I’d said more to her. You always do. I suppose given the speed with which we coupled, it makes just as much sense that we should have uncoupled so quickly. Everything we did back then was done in a hurry. A last-minute thing. She kissed me quickly and then bounded up the gangway of the Wilhelm Gustloff while I stood there like a useless capstan feeling a horrible mixture of relief that she was on board and real fear that I might never see her again.
“Not that the ship looked to me to be anything but seaworthy, although I’m no sailor. Much later on I learned that for the best part of five years the Gustloff had been docked at the pier in Gotenhafen, where it had been used first as a hospital ship for German soldiers wounded in Norway, and then as a floating barracks for trainees in the submarine division of the German navy. Consequently, the ship’s engines hadn’t been in operation for all that time and most of the skeleton crew wasn’t even German, but it was only supposed to be a three-day voyage, so this didn’t seem like a problem for a ship launched in nineteen thirty-seven. And certainly not as much of a problem as the sheer number of people who had boarded her. It was hard to say how many had crowded onto the ship to escape the Russians, but some estimates put it as high as twelve thousand, including a crew of one hundred and seventy-three. Back in the day it had been designed to accommodate fourteen hundred passengers and four hundred crew. So you can imagine what the scene at Gotenhafen was like. A vision of hell, perhaps. A Doré wood engraving of the Inferno. It goes almost without saying that there were not enough lifeboats, nor were there enough life vests, and in all respects, the ship was woefully ill-prepared for any kind of emergency. With so many people on board, nearly all of the exits and gangways were blocked and there was no time to practice any emergency drills. Also there were only two escort vessels to provide some sort of protection against Russian submarines. Because of the extreme cold, one of the two escort vessels—a torpedo boat—developed a crack in its hull and was forced to return to Gotenhafen. Which left just one escort vessel. The Löwe. Not only that, but a group of German minesweepers operating in the area of the Bay of Danzig was deemed to be in danger of colliding with the Gustloff, and so a decision was taken to turn on the ship’s navigation lights. Which went against all naval practice in wartime.
“Of course, all that would have been bad enough, but after the unencrypted message that Hennig forced Irmela to send on an open radio channel, there were already three Russian submarines heading for the area when the Gustloff set sail. At the submarine base in the Finnish port of Turku, they’d heard the same open-microphone message regarding the Gustloff and the Amber Room as the Russian Baltic naval headquarters in Kronstadt, and confusion now reigned about exactly what to do next. Eventually, the captain of one Russian submarine, the S-13, sighted the Gustloff lit up like a Christmas tree, radioed HQ for further instructions, and was ordered to shadow the ship but hold fire. Because it was night, the S-13 felt safe enough to surface, and then awaited clarification regarding the Gustloff and its priceless cargo from Kronstadt HQ, which had itself been desperately seeking a final decision from the Kremlin. Finally, the Kremlin responded: At all costs the Gustloff was not to be sunk.
“Unfortunately, the captain of the S-13 was a drunk named Alexander Marinesko, who was already facing a court-martial for a previous bender. He was probably drunk when he decoded the message from Kronstadt, and in the decryption of his orders it seems that he must have made a fatal flaw, probably omitting the word ‘not’ from his plaintext message. Minutes later, at eight forty-five p.m. on January thirtieth, nineteen forty-five, he ordered four torpedoes loaded into the S-13’s forward-firing tubes. At nine fifteen he gave the order to fire, and three of the torpedoes hit their target.
“I can hardly imagine what it must have been like. The snow, the cold, the freezing water, the high seas, the dark. All of the naval auxiliary women, including Irmela Schaper, were quartered in the empty swimming pool on the ship’s lowest deck, and they were probably killed instantly by the second torpedo. Others were not so lucky. Thousands of passengers were drowned inside the ship as water flooded in through the damaged hull. Thousands more jumped into the water and were drowned or quickly succumbed to hypothermia and died. The ship sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea less than an hour after the torpedoes hit, with the loss of over nine thousand lives, making the Gustloff the largest single loss of life in maritime history. Eight thousand of them were women and children. By contrast, just fifteen hundred people were lost on the Titanic.”
“Good God,” said Maugham. “I had no idea. I mean, I’ve never even heard of the Wilhelm Gustloff.”
“Two thousand people survived, among them Captain Harold Hennig—obviously—and many of the Gustloff’s worthless crew, including the ship’s captain, Friedrich Petersen. Hennig was one of almost five hundred men who managed to get into lifeboats and who were rescued by Gustloff’s escort vessel, the Löwe. Within less than forty-eight hours, these people were all safely landed in Kolberg, some two hundred and fifty kilometers to the west of Danzig. As for the Amber Room, it’s by no means certain it was on the ship. Later on there were rumors that this was just a lie—disinformation to try and dissuade the Russians from sinking the ship—and that the Amber Room was actually transferred onto a train for Germany. But if it was on the ship it went to the bottom of the Baltic Sea with all those people, including Irmela and her unborn child.
“Of course, if she hadn’t been on that ship she might easily have died on any of the other ships carrying German refugees that were sunk in the winter of nineteen forty-five. The Goya, on which seven thousand people lost their lives. The Cap Arcona, on which another seven thousand also died. And the Steuben, on which three and a half thousand Germans died. Six months later, the S-13’s captain, Marinesko, was dismissed from the Russian navy. And that’s as much as I know, most of it from a book about the Gustloff that was published about four years ago, which is the factual account of a survivor. Until I saw Harold Heinz Hennig checking into the Grand Hôtel in Cap Ferrat under the name of Harold Hebel, that was the last I’d seen or heard of him in more than ten years. Now you know why I hate him so much. And what kind of man we’re dealing with.”
“And after the war? What happened to him? Why was he never brought to justice?”
“He was much too small a fish for anyone to bother with. The Allies were after more important Nazis. Believe me, no one gave a damn about Harold Hennig. And that is especially true now as the Federal Republic of Germany tries to move on and become a good partner for America and Britain in the war against world Communism. These days, justice takes second place to pragmatism. But Erich Koch was arrested in nineteen forty-nine and is in a Polish prison awaiting trial for war crimes. The Poles have a different attitude than the Bonn Republic about the deaths of half a million Poles. Frankly, I don’t give much for his chances. My guess is that they’ll hang him and good riddance. If ever a man deserved to be hanged, it’s Erich Koch. Not that Hennig doesn’t deserve to be killed a hundred times over for what he did, too.”
“And yet in spite of what he did, you said you didn’t want to kill him. I think under the circumstances—if I’d lost what you lost—I would have killed him.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to kill him. I said I wasn’t going to kill him. There’s a big difference. I’m through with all that kind of thing. It’s me I’m thinking about now, not him. My own peace of mind versus my own tawdry revenge. I have to live with myself. Even at the best of times I can be poor company.”
“But if Hebel is Harold Hennig and was once a Nazi, how is it possible that he could be work
ing for the Communists now? For Soviet intelligence? Surely they must know about his Nazi past?”
“The KGB or the HVA doesn’t care about who you were and what you did any more than the American CIA does. What matters is how they can use you to their present advantage. After the war, the East German HVA—that’s the foreign intelligence service of the GDR—recruited lots of Nazis at the behest of the Russians. They perfected many of the Gestapo’s techniques. Almost nothing changed except the ideology. The fact is they’re still the Gestapo in all but name. And if you’re an enemy of the state who’s facing the guillotine or ten years in a labor camp, there’s nothing to distinguish between a Communist German tyranny and a Nazi one. It’s the same Fascism but with a different flag. If the shit looks and smells the same as it did before, it’s still shit.”
“I suppose so.”
“Take my word for it. I know these people.” I smiled. “I should, since they’re my people.”
“You scare me, Walter. I know that isn’t your real name but I can’t imagine you’d feel comfortable with me using that, so I will just go on calling you Walter, or Mr. Wolf. But the world you describe isn’t a world with which I am familiar. Not anymore. In nineteen seventeen it was all a bit of a lark, really—spying on the Russians. Look, what I’m saying is, I’d appreciate your help with all this. I’m an old man. And it strikes me that these people are playing a game I’m no longer qualified to play. My offer—that you should come and be my bodyguard—it still stands.”
