Greeks Bearing Gifts

by Philip Kerr

  “If you give it to the police you’ll have to say where you got it. Or who gave it to you. The first looks awkward for you. The second looks just as bad for me. My advice would be to use it for the GVP after all. Like you always intended. It’s not like you can hand it back to the DDR.”

  “But if I do keep the money for the GVP, then that begs the question about what to do about Christian Schramma. We can’t just leave him there. Can we? With those men dead and Schramma locked in the cellar it’s quite possible the police may never arrive at the general’s house tomorrow expecting to make an arrest. Without Schramma or someone else to tell them, he could be there for a while. The general was a bit of a recluse. I’m not sure he even had a housekeeper.”

  “I have an idea about Schramma, too.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “You hired him. You can get rid of him. No, I don’t mean like that.”

  “Then how?”

  “We go back there and talk him into keeping his mouth shut.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “You’re right, of course. There’s no sense in putting this off and hoping it will go away. The devil’s favorite piece of furniture is the long bench. And you really think we should let him go?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “But he’s killed two people in cold blood.”

  “Informing the police won’t bring them back. And will only cause us both trouble. Once he’s in the police station there’s no telling what he’ll say. To men who are his friends. They won’t want to believe us.”

  “True. All the same, I don’t like it. He’s still got a gun, you said?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Suppose when we let him out of the cellar he shoots us? Or brings us both back here, takes the money for himself, like he intended, and then kills us both?”

  “I think I know a way of preventing him from doing that.”

  “How?”

  “Got a camera?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. This is what I think we should do.”

  EIGHT

  –

  We drove east in Merten’s Mercedes, along Maximilianstrasse, and crossed the Isar on Maximilian’s Bridge, before turning left and north up Möhlstrasse. Merten hadn’t been to the dead general’s home before so I was giving him directions. It was snowing again and in the car’s headlights the flakes resembled the bubbles in a glass of weiss beer.

  “I’m very grateful for this,” admitted Merten.

  “Don’t mention it, Max.”

  “Look, I don’t care what you did in the war. Really, it’s none of my business. But I am supposed to be an officer of the Bavarian court. So it might be best if at least I knew something about your present predicament. If I am going to be your lawyer you should tell me if you are wanted for anything in particular. Beyond the obvious.”

  “What’s obvious?”

  “I mean your past service, with the SD.”

  “There’s nothing really. I know how it looks—me having a false name—but my conscience is clear.” I wasn’t sure about that; but, for the moment at least, I didn’t feel inclined to tell him my whole life story. “The fact is, I’m an escaped Russian POW. I killed a man at a camp in the DDR while making my escape. A German. If they caught me they’d chop off my head. But more probably the Stasi would prefer to just have me quietly murdered.” This was true at least.

  “That’s all right then. For a moment I thought—well, you can guess what I was thinking. There were always lots of stories that were told around the Alex about the famous Bernie Gunther. That Himmler kicked you once. That you worked for the likes of Goebbels and Göring, but that you mostly worked for General Heydrich.”

  “Reluctantly.”

  “Was that even possible?”

  “It was if Heydrich decided it was.”

  “I guess so. The last I heard of you, they’d sent you to Russia as a member of a police battalion, working for that other murderer, Arthur Nebe, with Task Group B.”

  “That’s right. Only I didn’t murder anyone.”

  “Oh sure, sure, but how many did he kill? Fifty thousand?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Hard to believe that two or three years later he was part of the Stauffenberg Plot to kill Hitler.”

  “Actually, I find it harder to believe that he murdered fifty thousand people,” I said. “But he did. Nebe was full of contradictions. Mainly he was a cynical opportunist. In the early ’30s a die-hard Nazi; by ’38, part of an early plot to get rid of Hitler; after the miraculous fall of France, a committed Nazi prepared to do anything to advance himself, including mass murder; and by ’44, when he saw the way the wind was blowing, part of Stauffenberg’s incompetent plot. If he was a character in a book you wouldn’t believe him even possible.”

  “No, I suppose not. Anyway, there but for the grace of God. If it hadn’t been for your good advice I might be in the same position as you, Bernie.”

  “Why do you say so?”

  “What I mean is, it was you who talked me out of joining the Party and the SS. Remember? Just before the war I was an ambitious junior lawyer in the Ministry of Justice and keen to advance my career. At that time joining the SS and the Nazi Party was the quickest way to make that happen. Instead I stayed put at the ministry, thankfully. If you hadn’t put me off the idea, Bernie, I’d probably have ended up in the SD and in charge of some SS special action group in the Baltic States charged with killing Jewish women and kids—like so many other lawyers I knew—and now I’d be a wanted man, like you, or worse: I could have met the same fate as those other men who went to jail, or were hanged in Landsberg.” He shook his head and frowned. “I often wonder how I’d have handled that particular dilemma. You know—mass murder. What I would have done. If I could have done—that. I prefer to believe I would have refused to carry out those orders but if I’m really honest I don’t know the answer. I think my desire to stay alive would have persuaded me to do what I was told, like every other lawyer. Because there’s something about my own profession that horrifies me sometimes. It seems to me that lawyers can justify almost anything to themselves as long as it’s legal. But you can make anything legal when you put a gun to parliament’s head. Even mass murder.”

  “Turn right up ahead and then keep the river on your left.”

  “Okay.”

  “So what kind of war did you have, Max?”

  “Thankfully uneventful. I got drafted into the Luftwaffe when the war started and served for a while in an anti-aircraft battery in Bremen and then in Stettin. That was very quiet. Too quiet, really. I mean I was just plain bored. And so in 1942 I went to the War Board and volunteered for the army. Went through officer training, made captain, and got myself a nice quiet posting somewhere warm and sunny. Matter of fact, I had quite a good time, all things considered.”

  “Turn left on Neuberghauserstrasse and then pull up. It’s only a short walk but we’d best make sure that the cops aren’t there before we go inside. And don’t forget the camera.”

  He lit a new cigarette with the butt of the previous one and threw that away. “Good idea.”

  He parked the Mercedes up the street from the white house and then we stood beside the car for several minutes before I was satisfied the murders were, as yet, undiscovered.

  “I’ll go in first, alone,” I said. “Just in case. Give it a couple of minutes. I’ll go up to the second floor, switch a light on and off to let you know it’s all right before you follow. There’s no sense in us both getting arrested. But if I do get pulled, then make sure you come to the Praesidium as soon as you can. I’ve spent the night in there before and I didn’t like it.”

  “Thanks, Bernie. I appreciate it.”

  I walked toward the white house, past the church, and through the picket g
ate. The back door was still unlocked, and a few minutes later Max Merten and I were standing in the kitchen. Schramma’s cigar was still balanced on the edge of the kitchen table where he’d left it.

  “What’s that noise?” he asked. “Can you hear it?”

  “I imagine it’s Christian Schramma shouting for help.”

  We went downstairs where I found his blue eye staring out of the peephole, like before.

  “Let me out of here,” he yelled through the steel door.

  I went to the spy hole and peered back at him. He hammered the door as if he wished it had been my face and then took several steps back. It was clear he’d found a corkscrew; there were at least two bottles open that hadn’t been open before.

  “I’m prepared to let you out,” I yelled back. “But on three conditions.”

  “What are they?”

  “First that you write out a full confession in your notebook. I know you have one because I saw it in your coat pocket when you produced that .38. I can read what you write through the spy hole. The second is that I see you take the tape off the handle of that revolver and empty every chamber. I figure you have four rounds left. You can drop each one of them into a bottle of wine. When it’s nicely covered with your fingerprints you can put the gun on the table where I can see it.”

  “And the third condition?”

  “This is going to take a bit more time. I want to see you drink the contents of several bottles. Only when I’m satisfied you’re completely drunk and incapable will I open this door. If this all happens to my satisfaction, Dr. Merten and I will wheelbarrow you back to your car and drive it to the English Garden, where we’ll leave you for the night to sleep it off.”

  “What happens then?”

  “The deal is this: We’ll forget you had anything to do with these murders if you forget about me. And about the money. The money is going to the GVP after all. I’ll go back to my shitty job at the hospital mortuary and you can go back to yours, keeping law and order in this beautiful city. So long as you keep your big mouth shut about everything, no one is ever going to know that you killed these men. But if a cop in a silly hat so much as tells me off for whistling in the street, then I will conclude that all bets are off and the police are going to find that gun with your fingerprints and your confession.”

  I didn’t mention the camera. I wanted the existence of photographs of Schramma pictured beside two bodies to be an extra source of friendly persuasion, should I ever need one.

  “Fuck you, Gunther. You too, Merten. Fuck you both. I figure someone is bound to turn up here before very long, and then let me out; and when they do—”

  “No one’s coming. The general lived alone like you said.”

  “Someone will come. The cops will come. Tomorrow. That’s right. They’ll come because I told them to come, to arrest the general and Merten. Like I told you before.”

  “No. I think that’s what those two men you murdered believed was going to happen. But no. I think you hoped their bodies would lie there, undiscovered, for as long as possible. Enough time for you to distance yourself nicely, anyway.”

  “You can believe what you like. But I can tell you, they’ll be here tomorrow. And when they get here I’ll tell them you framed me. Sure, it looks awkward for me. But who do you think they’ll believe? Me, a cop with thirty years on my badge. Or you? A man with a false name.”

  “Fair enough. You make a good point. Only think about it. I could have left you here to starve to death, but I didn’t. I came back for you. However, I can see you’re not inclined to be reasonable. So I won’t be back again. I can’t take that risk. And this time I’ll be sure to switch off all the lights and lock up behind me. Bogenhausen is a very private area. People keep themselves to themselves. Could be months before they find you. Starvation is a rotten way to die. But maybe if you drink enough of that wine, you won’t notice the pain quite so much. I hope so, for your sake. There’s a small cemetery next door. Strikes me that buried alive in this cellar you’re already as good as there.”

  I switched off the basement light, which also controlled the light inside the wine cellar, and I pushed Max Merten toward the stairs, as if we really were leaving.

  “All right, all right,” shouted Schramma. “You win, Gunther. I’ll do it your way, you bastard.”

  I switched the light on and walked back to the spy hole ready to invigilate the whole laborious process of ensuring I had something closely resembling a future.

  NINE

  –

  It went to plan, almost. Even with four bottles of good Spätburgunder inside of him, Schramma still managed to find a gun in his pocket to try to shoot me—it was the one he’d been planning to use on me all along, after I’d shot the two dead men with the .38—and I was obliged to render him completely unconscious with a quick uppercut. After we’d taken his photograph with the dead men, we dragged him upstairs and out into the garden, where we loaded him onto the wheelbarrow and transported him back to his car. It was dark and snowing heavily and no one saw us. In Bogenhausen we could probably have carried him out of the house in the middle of a summer’s day and no one would have noticed.

  With Merten following I drove the BMW across the bridge to the English Garden and abandoned it and Schramma in a quiet spot close to the Monopteros, which is a sort of hilltop Greek temple to Apollo, one of the more popular gods in Munich. He is after all the god of prophecy, and the Bavarians like a bit of that. Hitler certainly thought so.

  “Suppose he freezes to death,” said Merten.

  “I doubt that’ll happen.”

  “I wouldn’t like to have any man’s death on my conscience.”

  “Don’t worry about it. He’ll be fine. When I was pounding the beat in Berlin I came across many a drunk who’d survived a colder night than Schramma’ll have in that BMW. Besides, this is my idea, not yours. So even if he does die, you needn’t blame yourself. I can live with it after what he had in mind for me.”

  “I need a drink.”

  “Me too.”

  “Somewhere jolly, I think. Those two dead men are stuck on my retinas. Come on. I’m buying.”

  Merten drove us south to the Hofbräuhaus on Platzl, a three-floor beer hall that dates back to the sixteenth century and where Hitler once made an important speech in the upstairs hall, only no one mentions that now. These days people are more appreciative of a small brass band. We took a corner table with a window ledge as wide as a coffin lid and ordered beers that were as tall as umbrella stands. I tried to keep count of the lawyer’s smokes, not from bland curiosity but out of a desire to feel better about my own habit; sitting beside Merten I felt better than I’ve felt in a long time. I even managed to convince myself I was in the peak of health. The man smoked like the Ruhr Valley. For a while we just drank and smoked and spoke not at all but gradually the music and the beer got to us and eventually I said, “Speaking as a Berliner, there’s a lot that’s wrong with Munich but it certainly doesn’t include the beer. Nowhere on earth has beer like this. Not even Asgard. At one time or another I must have sampled every beer in this place. Not much of a hobby, I know, but it beats collecting stamps. Tastes better, too.”

  “Do you ever miss Berlin, Bernie?”

  “Sure. But right now Berlin’s Amelia Earhart, isn’t it? Marooned on an island in the middle of a vast and hostile sea of red. So there’s no point in wishing we were with her.”

  “Yes, but there’s something about Munich that’s not as good as Berlin. Only I’m not sure what that is.”

  “If Berlin is Amelia Earhart, then Munich is Charles Lindbergh: rich, private, vain, and with a very questionable history.”

  Merten smiled into a beer that was the color of a good night already enjoyed and soon to be flushed away. “I owe you,” he said.

  “You said that. And you needn’t say it again. Just keep buying me beers.”
<
br />   “No, but really I’d like to help you, Bernie. For old times’ sake. You said you’re a mortuary attendant at the Schwabing Hospital?”

  “Did I?”

  “A man of your special skills is wasted doing that.”

  “To what skills are you referring, Max? Covering up a murder scene? Knocking a man out? Managing not to get shot?”

  “Being a cop, of course. Something you did for a great many years.”

  “That must be why I’m on such a generous police pension now.”

  “I happen to know of a job that’s going, here in Munich. You might be very good at it.”

  “I have a job I’m very good at. Looking after the dead. So far I’ve had no complaints. They don’t mind me and I don’t mind them.”

  “I mean a regular job. A job with a few prospects.”

  “All of a sudden everyone’s offering me work. Listen, Max, cops are not good people. All of our best qualities get poured into the job and life gets the dregs. Don’t ever mistake me for a decent guy. Nobody else does.”

  “Look, just listen to me, will you?”

  “All right. I’m listening.”

  “A respectable job.”

  “Ah. That lets me out then. I’ve not been respectable for a great many years. Probably never will be again.”

  “I’m talking about a job in insurance.”

  “Insurance. That’s when people pay money for peace of mind. I wouldn’t mind some of that myself. Only I doubt I could afford the premium.”

  “Munich RE is the largest firm in Germany. A friend of mine, Philipp Dietrich, is head of their claims adjustment department. It so happens he’s looking for a new claims investigator. An adjustor. And it strikes me you’d be very good at that.”

  “It’s true I know plenty about risks—I’ve been taking them all my life—but I know nothing about insurance, except that I don’t have any.”

  “‘Claims adjustor’ is just a polite way of describing someone who’s paid to find out if people are lying. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that what you used to do at the Alex? You were a seeker after the truth, were you not? You were good at it, too, if memory serves.”