the One from the Other (2006)

by Kerr, Philip - Bernie Gunther 04

  Poor Begelmann looked pained. “No, no, no, no, no,” he said. “That’s not it at all.”

  But I was enjoying myself too much to let go of this bone. “And I can’t say as I blame you. It’s one thing to get robbed. It’s quite another when the robber asks you to help carry the loot to the getaway car.”

  Six bit his lip. I could see he was wishing it was the vein on the side of my neck. The only reason he wasn’t saying anything was because I hadn’t yet said no. Probably he guessed that I wasn’t going to. A thousand pounds is a thousand pounds.

  “Please, Herr Gunther.”

  Six looked quite happy to leave the begging to Begelmann.

  “My whole family would be extremely grateful for your help.”

  “A thousand pounds,” I said. “I already heard that part.”

  “Is there something wrong with the remuneration?” Begelmann was looking at Six for guidance. He wasn’t getting any. Six was a lawyer, not a horse dealer.

  “Hell no, Herr Begelmann,” I said. “It’s generous. No, it’s me, I guess. I start to itch when a certain kind of dog cozies up to me.”

  But Six was refusing to be insulted. So far in this, he was just a typical lawyer. Prepared to put aside all human feelings for the greater good of making money. “I hope you’re not being rude to an official of the German government, Herr Gunther,” he said, chiding me. “Anyone would think you were against National Socialism, the way you talk. Hardly a very healthy attitude these days.”

  I shook my head. “You mistake me,” I said. “I had a client last year. His name was Hermann Six. The industrialist? He was less than honest with me. You’re no relation to him, I trust.”

  “Sadly not,” he said. “I come from a very poor family in Mannheim.”

  I looked at Begelmann. I felt sorry for him. I should have said no. Instead I said yes. “All right, I’ll do it. But you people had better be on the level about all this. I’m not the type who forgives and forgets. And I’ve never turned the other cheek.”

  It wasn’t long before I regretted becoming involved in Six and Begelmann’s Jewish peddler scheme. I was alone in my office the next day. It was raining outside. My partner, Bruno Stahlecker, was out on a case, so he said, which probably meant he was propping up a bar in Wedding. There was a knock at the door and a man came in. He was wearing a leather coat and a wide-brimmed hat. Call it a keen sense of smell, but I knew he was Gestapo even before he showed me the little warrant disk in the palm of his hand. He was in his mid-twenties, balding, with a small, lopsided mouth and a sharp, delicate-looking jaw that made me suspect he was more used to hitting than being hit. Without saying a word he tossed his wet hat onto my desk blotter, unbuttoned his coat to reveal a neat, navy-blue suit, sat in the chair on the other side of my desk, took out his cigarettes, and lit one—all the while staring at me like an eagle watching a fish.

  “Nice little hat,” I said, after a moment. “Where’d you steal it?” I picked it off my blotter and tossed it onto his lap. “Or did you just want me and my roses to know that it’s raining outside?”

  “They told me you were a tough guy at the Alex,” he said, and flicked his ash on my carpet.

  “I was a tough guy when I was at the Alex,” I said. The Alex was police headquarters, on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. “They gave me one of those little disks. Anyone can pretend he’s tough when he’s got KRIPO’s beer token in his pocket.” I shrugged. “But if that’s what they say, then it must be true. Real cops, like the cops at the Alex, don’t lie.”

  The little mouth tightened into a smile that was all lips and no teeth, like a newly stitched scar. He put the cigarette back in his mouth as if sucking a length of thread to poke in the eye of a needle. Or even my eye. I don’t think he would have cared which. “So you’re the bull who caught Gormann, the strangler.”

  “That was a very long time ago,” I said. “Murderers were a lot easier to catch before Hitler came to power.”

  “Oh? How’s that?”

  “For one thing, they weren’t nearly as thick on the ground as they are now. And for another, it seemed to matter more. I used to take a real satisfaction in protecting society. Nowadays I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Sounds suspiciously like you disapprove of what the Party’s done for Germany,” he said.

  “Not at all,” I said, careful with my insolence now. “I don’t disapprove of anything that’s done for Germany.” I lit one of my own and let him fill in the double meaning and entertained myself with a mental picture of my fist connecting with the kid’s pointy jaw. “Have you got a name, or is that just for your friends? You remember those, don’t you? All the people who used to send you a birthday card? Always supposing you can remember when that is.”

  “Maybe you can be my friend,” he said, smiling. I hated that smile. It was a smile that said he knew he had something on me. There was a sort of twinkle in his iris that came off his eyeball like the point of a sword. “Maybe we can help each other. That’s what friends are for, eh? Maybe I’ll do you a favor, Gunther, and you’ll be so damned grateful you’ll send me one of those birthday cards you were talking about.” He nodded. “I’d like that. That would be nice. With a little message inside.”

  I sighed some smoke his way. I was growing weary of his hard act. “I doubt you’d like my sense of humor,” I said. “But I’m willing to be proved wrong. It might make a nice change to be proved wrong by the Gestapo.”

  “I am Inspector Gerhard Flesch,” he said.

  “Pleased to meet you, Gerhard.”

  “I head up the Jewish Department in SIPO,” he added.

  “You know something? I’ve been thinking of opening one of those in here,” I said. “Suddenly everyone seems to have a Jewish Department. Must be good for business. The SD, the Foreign Office, and now the Gestapo.”

  “The operational spheres of the SD and the Gestapo are demarcated by a functions order signed by the Reichsführer-SS,” said Flesch. “Operationally, the SD is to subject the Jews to intense surveillance and then report to us. But in practice the Gestapo is locked in a power struggle with the SD, and in no area is this conflict more hotly contested than in the area of Jewish affairs.”

  “That all sounds very interesting, Gerhard. But I don’t see how I can help. Hell, I’m not even Jewish.”

  “No?” Flesch smiled. “Then let me explain. We have heard a rumor that Franz Six and his men are in the pay of the Jews. Taking bribes in return for facilitating Jewish emigration. What we don’t yet have is proof. That’s where you come in, Gunther. You’re going to get it.”

  “You overestimate my resourcefulness, Gerhard. I’m not that good at shoveling shit.”

  “This SD fact-finding mission to Palestine. Exactly why are you going?”

  “I need a holiday, Gerhard. I need to get away and eat some oranges. Apparently sunlight and oranges are very good for the skin.” I shrugged. “Then again, I’m thinking of converting. I’m told they give a pretty good circumcision in Jaffa, if you get them before lunchtime.” I shook my head. “Come on, Gerhard. It’s an intelligence matter. You know I can’t talk about it with anyone outside of the department. If you don’t like that, then take it up with Heydrich. He makes the rules, not me.”

  “The two men you’re traveling with,” he said, hardly batting an eye. “We would like you to keep an eye on them. To see that they don’t abuse the position of trust in which they find themselves. I’m even authorized to offer you some expenses. A thousand marks.”

  Everyone was throwing money at me. A thousand pounds here. A thousand marks there. I felt like an official in the Reich Ministry of Justice.

  “That’s very handsome of you, Gerhard,” I said. “A thousand marks is quite a slice of sugarloaf. Of course, you wouldn’t be the Gestapo if you didn’t also have a taste of the whip you’re offering me in the event I don’t have the sweet tooth you were counting on.”

  Flesch smiled his toothless smile. “It would be unfortunate if yo
ur racial origins were made the subject of an inquiry,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette in my ashtray. As he leaned forward and then back again in the chair, his leather coat creaked loudly, like the sound of heavy raindrops, as if he had just bought it from the Gestapo gift shop.

  “Both my parents were churchgoing folk,” I said. “I don’t see that you’ve got anything like that to throw at me.”

  “Your maternal great-grandmother,” he said. “There’s a possibility she might have been Jewish.”

  “Read your Bible, Gerhard,” I said. “We’re all Jewish if you want to go back far enough. But as it happens, you’re wrong. She was a Roman Catholic. Quite a devout one, I believe.”

  “And yet her name was Adler, was it not? Anna Adler?”

  “It was Adler, yes, I believe that’s correct. What of it?”

  “Adler is a Jewish name. If she were alive today she would probably have to add Sarah to her name, so that we could recognize her for what she was. A Jewess.”

  “Even if it was true, Gerhard. That Adler is a Jewish name? And, to be honest, I have no idea if it is or not. That would only make me one-eighth Jewish. And under section two, article five of the Nuremberg Laws, I am not, therefore, a Jew.” I grinned. “Your whip lacks a proper sting, Gerhard.”

  “An investigation often proves to be an expensive inconvenience,” said Flesch. “Even for a truly German business. And mistakes are sometimes made. It might be months before things returned to normal.”

  I nodded, recognizing the truth in what he had said. No one turned the Gestapo down. Not without some serious consequences. My only choice was between the disastrous and the unpalatable. A very German choice. We both knew I had little alternative but to agree to what they wanted. At the same time, it left me in an awkward position, to put it mildly. After all, I already had a very strong suspicion that Franz Six was lining his pockets with Paul Begelmann’s shekels. But I had no wish to be caught up in the middle of a power struggle between the SD and the Gestapo. On the other hand, there was nothing to say that the two SD men I was accompanying to Palestine were dishonest. As a matter of course, they would surely suspect that I was a spy, and, accordingly, treat me with caution. The chances were strong that I would discover absolutely nothing. But would nothing satisfy the Gestapo? There was only one way to find out.

  “All right,” I said. “But I won’t be a mouth for you people and say a lot of stuff that isn’t true. I can’t. I won’t even try. If they’re bent then I’ll tell you they’re bent and I’ll tell myself that that’s just what detectives do. Maybe I’ll lose some sleep about it and maybe I won’t. But if they are straight, that’s an end of it, see? I won’t frame someone just to give you and the other hammerheads at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse an edge. I won’t do it, not even if you and your best brass knuckles tell me I have to. You can keep your sugarloaf, too. I wouldn’t like to get a taste for it. I’ll do your dirty little job, Gerhard. But we let the cards fall where they fall. No stacked decks. Clear?”

  “Clear.” Flesch stood up, buttoned his coat, and put on his hat. “Enjoy your trip, Gunther. I’ve never been to Palestine. But I’m told it’s very beautiful.”

  “Maybe you should go yourself,” I said brightly. “I bet you’d love it down there. Fit right in, in no time. Everyone in Palestine has a Jewish Department.”

  I left Berlin sometime during the last week of September and traveled by train through Poland to the port of Constanţa, in Romania. It was there, boarding the steamer Romania, that I finally met the two SD men who were also traveling to Palestine. Both were noncommissioned officers—sergeants in the SD—and both were posing as journalists working for the Berliner Tageblatt, a newspaper that had been Jewish-owned until 1933, when the Nazis had confiscated it.

  The sergeant in charge was Herbert Hagen. The other man was called Adolf Eichmann. Hagen was in his early twenties and a fresh-faced intellectual, a university graduate from an upper-class background. Eichmann was several years older and aspired to be something more than the Austrian petroleum salesman he had been before joining the Party and the SS. Both men were curious anti-Semites, being strangely fascinated with Judaism. Eichmann had the greater experience in the Jewish Department, spoke Yiddish, and spent most of the voyage reading Theodor Herzl’s book about the Jewish State, which was called The Jewish State. The trip had been Eichmann’s own idea and he seemed both surprised and excited that his superiors had agreed to it, having never been out of Germany and Austria before. Hagen was a more ideological Nazi who was an enthusiastic Zionist, believing, as he did, that there was “no greater enemy for the Party than the Jew”—or some such nonsense—and that “the solution of the Jewish question” could lie only in the “total de-Jewing” of Germany. I hated listening to him talk. It all sounded mad to me. Like something found in the pages of some malignant Alice in Wonderland.

  Both men regarded me with suspicion, as I had imagined they would, and not just because I had come from outside the SD and their peculiar department, but also because I was older than them—by almost twenty years in the case of Hagen. And jokingly they were soon referring to me as “Papi,” which I bore with good grace—at least with a better grace than Hagen, who in retaliation, and much to Eichmann’s amusement, I quickly dubbed Hiram Schwartz, after the juvenile diarist of the same name. Consequently, by the time we reached Jaffa on or about October 2, Eichmann had a greater liking for me than his younger, less experienced colleague.

  Eichmann was not, however, an impressive man, and at the time, I thought he was probably the type who looked better in uniform. Indeed, I soon came to suspect that wearing a uniform had been the principal reason he had joined the SA and then the SS, for I rather doubted he would have been fit enough to have joined the regular army, if army there had been at that time. Of less than medium height, he was bow-legged and extremely thin. In his upper jaw he had two gold bridges, as well as many fillings in his long, widow’s teeth. His head was like a skull, almost exactly like the death’s head on an SS man’s cap-badge, being extremely bony with particularly hollow temples. One thing that struck me was how Jewish he looked. And it occurred to me that his antipathy for the Jews might have had something to do with this.

  From the moment the Romania docked at Jaffa, things did not go well for the two SD men. The British must have suspected that Hagen and Eichmann were from German intelligence and, after a great deal of argument, gave them leave to come ashore for just twenty-four hours. I myself encountered no such problems, and I was quickly issued a visa allowing me to remain in Palestine for thirty days. This was ironic as I had only intended staying for four or five days at most, and caused much chagrin to Eichmann, whose plans were now in complete disarray. He railed on about this change of plan in the horse-drawn carriage that carried the three of us and our luggage from the port to the Jerusalem Hotel, on the edge of the city’s famous “German colony.”

  “Now what are we going to do?” he complained loudly. “All of our most important meetings are the day after tomorrow. By which time we’ll be back on the boat.”

  I smiled to myself, enjoying his consternation. Any setback for the SD was fine by me. I was pleased if only because it relieved me of the burden of inventing some story for the Gestapo. I could hardly spy on men who had been refused visas. I even thought the Gestapo might find that amusing enough to forgive the lack of any more concrete information.

  “Perhaps Papi could meet them,” said Hagen.

  “Me?” I said. “Forget it, Hiram.”

  “I still don’t understand how you got a visa and we didn’t,” said Eichmann.

  “Because he’s helping that yid for Dr. Six, of course,” said Hagen. “The Jew probably fixed it for him.”

  “Could be,” I said. “Or it could be that you boys just aren’t very good at this line of work. If you were good at it then perhaps you wouldn’t have chosen a cover story that involves you both working for a Nazi newspaper. Moreover, a Nazi newspaper that was stolen from its Jewish own
ers. You might have picked something a little less high profile than that, I think.” I smiled at Eichmann. “Like being a petroleum salesman, perhaps.”

  Hagen got it. But Eichmann was still too upset to realize he was being teased.

  “Franz Reichert,” he said. “From the German News Agency. I can telephone him in Jerusalem. I expect he will know how to get hold of Fievel Polkes. But I haven’t a clue how we’re going to get in touch with Haj Amin.” He sighed. “What are we going to do?”

  I shrugged. “What would you have done now?” I asked. “Today. If you’d got your thirty-day visa after all.”

  Eichmann shrugged. “I suppose we would have visited the German Freemason colony at Sarona. Gone up Mount Carmel. Looked at some Jewish farming settlements in the Jezreel Valley.”

  “Then my advice is to go ahead and do exactly that,” I said. “Call Reichert. Explain the situation and then get back on the boat, tomorrow. It sails for Egypt tomorrow, right? Well, when you get there, go to the British embassy in Cairo and apply for another visa.”

  “He’s right,” said Hagen. “That’s exactly what we should do.”

  “We can apply again,” cried Eichmann. “Of course. We can get a visa in Cairo and then travel back here overland.”

  “Just like the children of Israel,” I added.

  The carriage left the narrow, dirty streets of the old town and picked up speed as we headed along a wider road, to the new town of Tel Aviv. Opposite a clock tower and several Arabian coffee-houses was the Anglo-Palestine Bank, where I was supposed to meet the manager and give him the letters of introduction from Begelmann, and from the Wassermann Bank, not to mention the camel-back trunk Begelmann had given me to take out of Germany. I had no idea what was in it, but from the weight I didn’t think it was his stamp collection. I could see no advantage in delaying my going into the bank. Not in a place like Jaffa, which seemed full of hostile-looking Arabs. (Possibly they thought we were Jews, of course. There was little liking for Jews among the local Palestinian population.) So I told the driver to stop and, with the trunk under my arm, and the letters in my pocket, I got out, leaving Eichmann and Hagen to carry on to the hotel with the rest of my luggage.