the One from the Other (2006)

by Kerr, Philip - Bernie Gunther 04

  Eliahu Golomb joined Polkes in Cairo for the meeting with Eichmann and Hagen. He only just made it before the British closed the border after a number of bomb attacks in Palestine by Arabs and Jews. Before the meeting, I met with Golomb and Polkes at their hotel and told them everything that had been said at the meeting with Haj Amin. For a while Golomb called down plagues from heaven on the Mufti’s head. Then he asked for my advice on how to handle Eichmann and Hagen.

  “I think you should make them believe that in any civil war with the Arabs, it’s Haganah that will win,” I said. “Germans admire strength. And they like winners. It’s only the British who like the underdog.”

  “We will win,” insisted Golomb.

  “They don’t know that,” I said. “I think it would be a mistake to ask them for military aid. It would look like a sign of weakness. You must convince them that, if anything, you’re actually much better armed than you are. Tell them you have artillery. Tell them you have tanks. Tell them you have planes. They’ve no way of finding out if that’s true or not.”

  “How does that help us?”

  “If they think you will win,” I said, “then they’ll believe that their continued support of Zionism is the right policy. If they think you’ll lose, then frankly there’s no telling where they might send Germany’s Jews. I’ve heard Madagascar mentioned.”

  “Madagascar?” said Golomb. “Ridiculous.”

  “Look, all that matters is that you convince them that a Jewish state can exist and that it would be no threat to Germany. You don’t want them going back to Germany thinking the Grand Mufti is right, do you? That all the Jews in Palestine should be massacred?”

  When it eventually took place, the meeting went well enough. To my ears, Golomb and Polkes sounded like fanatics. But as they had pointed out earlier, they didn’t sound like crazy, religious fanatics. After the Grand Mufti, anyone would have sounded reasonable.

  A few days later, we sailed from Alexandria, on the Italian steamer Palestrina, for Brindisi, stopping at Rhodes and Piraeus on the way. From Brindisi, we caught a train and were back in Berlin by October 26.

  I hadn’t seen Eichmann for nine months when, while working on a case that took me to Vienna, I bumped into him on Prinz-Eugen-Strasse, in the Eleventh District, just south of what later became Stalin Platz. He was coming out of the Rothschild Palais, which (after the Wehrmacht’s popular invasion of Austria in March 1938) had been seized from the eponymous Jewish family that owned it, and was now the headquarters of the SD in Austria. Eichmann was no longer a lowly noncommissioned officer, but a second lieutenant—an Untersturmführer. There seemed to be a spring in his step. Jews were already fleeing the country. For the first time in his life, Eichmann had real power. Whatever he had said to his superiors upon his return from Egypt had obviously made an impression.

  We only spoke for a minute or two before he stepped into the back of a staff car and drove away. I remember thinking, there goes the most Jewish-looking man who ever wore an SS uniform.

  After the war, whenever I saw his name appear in a newspaper, that was always how I thought of him. The most Jewish-looking man who ever wore an SS uniform.

  There’s one more thing I always remembered about him. It was something he told me on the boat from Alexandria. When he wasn’t being seasick. It was something of which Eichmann was very proud. When he lived in Linz, as a boy, Eichmann had gone to the same school as Adolf Hitler. Maybe it explains something of what he was to become. I don’t know.

  ONE

  Munich 1949

  We were just a stone’s throw from what had once been the concentration camp. But when we were handing out directions, we tended not to mention that, unless it was absolutely necessary. The hotel, on the east side of the medieval town of Dachau, was down a cobbled, poplar-lined side road, separated from the former KZ—now a residential settlement camp for German and Czech refugees from the communists—by the Würm River canal. It was a half-timbered affair, a three-story suburban villa with a steep saddle roof made of orange tiles, and a wraparound first-floor balcony overflowing with red geraniums. It was the kind of place that had seen better days. Since the Nazis and then the German prisoners of war had left Dachau, nobody came to the hotel anymore, except perhaps the odd construction engineer helping to supervise the partial erasure of a KZ where, for several very unpleasant weeks in the summer of 1936, I myself had been an inmate. The elected representatives of the Bavarian people saw no need to preserve the remnants of the camp for present or future visitors. Most residents of the town, including myself, were of the opinion, however, that the camp presented the only opportunity for bringing money into Dachau. But there was little chance of that happening so long as the memorial temple remained unbuilt and a mass grave, where more than five thousand were buried, unmarked. The visitors stayed away, and despite my efforts with the geraniums, the hotel began to die. So when a new two-door Buick Roadmaster pulled up on our little brick driveway, I told myself that the two men were most probably lost and had stopped to ask directions to the U.S. Third Army barracks, although it was hard to see how they could have missed the place.

  The driver stepped out of the Buick, stretched like a child, and looked up at the sky as if he was surprised that birds could be heard singing in a place like Dachau. I often had the same thought myself. The passenger stayed in his seat, staring straight ahead, and probably wishing he was somewhere else. He had my sympathies, and possessed of the shiny green sedan, I would certainly have kept on driving. Neither man was wearing a uniform but the driver was altogether better dressed than his passenger. Better dressed, better fed, and in rather better health, or so it seemed to me. He tap-danced up the stone steps and through the front door like he owned the place, and I found myself nodding politely at the hatless, tanned, bespectacled man with a face like a chess grandmaster who had considered every possible move. He didn’t look lost at all.

  “Are you the owner?” he asked as soon as he came through the door, without making much of an effort at a good German accent and without even looking at me while he awaited an answer. He glanced idly around at the hotel decor which was supposed to make the place feel more homey, but only if you roomed with a milkmaid. There were cowbells, spinning wheels, hemp combs, rakes, sharpening stones, and a big wooden barrel on top of which lay a two-day-old Süddeutsche Zeitung and a truly ancient copy of the Münchener Stadtanzeiger. On the walls were some watercolors of local rural scenes from a time when painters better than Hitler had come to Dachau, attracted by the peculiar charm of the Amper River and the Dachauer Moos—an extensive marsh now mostly drained and turned into farmland. It was all as kitsch as an ormolu cuckoo clock.

  “You could say that I’m the owner,” I said. “At least while my wife is indisposed. She’s in the hospital. In Munich.”

  “Nothing serious, I hope,” said the American, still not looking at me. He seemed more interested in the watercolors than in the health of my wife.

  “I imagine you must be looking for the U.S. military barracks, at the old KZ,” I said. “You turned off the road when you should have just driven across the bridge, over the river canal. It’s less than a hundred yards from here. On the other side of those trees.”

  Now he looked at me and his eyes became playful, like a cat’s. “Poplars, aren’t they?” He stooped to stare out of the window in the direction of the camp. “I bet you’re glad of them. I mean, you’d hardly know the camp was there at all, would you? Very useful.”

  Ignoring the implied accusation in his tone, I joined him at the window. “And here I was thinking you must be lost.”

  “No, no,” said the American. “I’m not lost. This is the place I’m looking for. That is, if this is the Hotel Schroderbrau.”

  “This is the Hotel Schroderbrau.”

  “Then we are in the right place.” The American was about five-feet-eight, with smallish hands and feet. His shirt, tie, pants, and shoes were all varying shades of brown, but his jacket was made of a li
ght-colored tweed and nicely tailored, too. His gold Rolex told me there was probably a better car than the Buick in his garage back home in America. “I’m looking for two rooms, for two nights,” he said. “For me and my friend in the car.”

  “I’m afraid we’re not a hotel that is approved for Americans,” I said. “I could lose my license.”

  “I won’t tell if you don’t,” he said.

  “Don’t think I’m being rude, please,” I said, trying out the English I’d been teaching myself. “But to be honest, we are almost closing. This was my father-in-law’s hotel, until he died. My wife and I have had very little success in running it. For obvious reasons. And now that she’s ill—” I shrugged. “I’m not much of a cook, you see, sir, and I can tell you’re a man who enjoys his comfort. You would be better off at another hotel. Perhaps the Zieglerbrau or the Hörhammer, on the other side of town. They are both approved for Americans. And they both have excellent cafés, too. Especially the Zieglerbrau.”

  “So am I to take it that there are no other guests in the hotel?” he asked, ignoring my objections and my attempts to speak English. His German accent may have been nonexistent, but there was nothing wrong with his grammar or his vocabulary.

  “No,” I said. “We’re empty. As I said, we’re on the verge of closing.”

  “I only asked because you keep on saying ‘we,’” he said. “Your father-in-law is dead and you said your wife is in the hospital. But you keep on using the word ‘we.’ As if there’s someone else here.”

  “Hotelier’s habit,” I said. “There’s just me and my impeccable sense of service.”

  The American pulled a pint of rye out of his jacket pocket and held it so I could see the label. “Might that impeccable sense of service run to a couple of clean glasses?”

  “A couple of glasses? Sure.” I couldn’t guess what he wanted. He certainly didn’t look like he needed a deal on two rooms. If there was a rat crawling over his well-polished wingtips, I couldn’t yet smell it. Besides, there was nothing wrong with the label on his rye. “But what about your friend in the car? Won’t he be joining us?”

  “Him? Oh, he doesn’t drink.”

  I stepped into the office and reached down a couple of glasses. Before I could ask if he wanted any water with his whiskey, the American had filled both glasses to the brim. He held his glass against the light and said, slowly: “You know, I wish I could remember who it is that you remind me of.”

  I let that one go. It was a remark only an American, or an Englishman, could have made. In Germany today nobody wants to remember anything or anyone. The privilege of defeat.

  “It’ll come to me,” he said, shaking his head. “I never forget a face. But it’s not important.” He drank his whiskey and pushed the glass to one side. I tasted mine. I was right. It was good whiskey, and I said so.

  “Look here,” he said. “It so happens that your hotel suits my purposes very well. As I said, I need two rooms for one or two nights. Depends. Either way I have money to spend. Cash money.” He took a fold of very new deutschmarks from his back pocket, slipped off a silver money clip, and counted five twenties on the desk in front of me. It was about five times the going rate on two rooms for two nights. “The kind of money that’s a little shy of too many questions.”

  I finished my drink and allowed my eyes to drift to the passenger still seated in the Buick outside and felt them narrow as, a little shortsighted these days, I tried to size him up. But the American was there ahead of me.

  “You’re wondering about my friend,” he said. “If perhaps he’s the lemon-sucking type.” He poured another couple of drinks and grinned. “Don’t worry. We’re not warm for each other if that’s what you were thinking. Anything but, as a matter of fact. If you ever asked him his opinion of me, I should imagine he would tell you that he hates my guts, the bastard.”

  “Nice traveling companion,” I said. “I always say, a trip that’s shared provides twice the happy memories.” I took my second drink. But for the moment I left the hundred marks untouched, at least by my hand. My eyes were on and off the five notes, however, and the American saw it and said:

  “Go ahead. Take the money. We both know you need it. This hotel hasn’t seen a guest since my government ended the prosecution of war criminals at Dachau last August. That’s almost a year, isn’t it? No wonder your father-in-law killed himself.”

  I said nothing. But I was starting to smell the rat.

  “It must have been tough,” he continued. “Very tough. Now that the trials are over, who wants to come and take a vacation here? I mean, Dachau’s not exactly Coney Island, is it? Of course, you could get lucky. You might get a few Jews who want to take a stroll down memory lane.”

  “Get to the point,” I said.

  “All right.” He swallowed his drink and palmed a gold cigarette case from the other pocket. “Herr Kommissar Gunther.”

  I took the offered cigarette and let him light me with a match he snapped into life with a thumbnail while it was still only halfway up to my face.

  “You want to be careful doing that,” I said. “You could spoil your manicure.”

  “Or you could spoil it for me? Yes?”

  “Maybe.”

  He laughed. “Don’t get hard-boiled with me, pal,” he said. “It’s been tried. The krauts who tried it are still picking pieces of shell out of their mouths.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You don’t look like a tough guy. Or is that just this season’s look for tough guys?”

  “What you know is of incidental importance to me, Bernie, old boy,” he said. “Let me tell you what I know, for a minute. I know a lot. How you and your wife came here from Berlin last fall, to help her old man run this hotel. How he killed himself just before Christmas and how she cracked up because of that. How you used to be a Kriminal Kommissar at the Alex in Berlin. A cop. Just like me.”

  “You don’t look like a cop.”

  “Thanks, I’ll take that as a compliment, Herr Kommissar.”

  “That was ten years ago,” I said. “Mostly I was just an inspector. Or a private detective.”

  The American jerked his head at the window. “The guy in the car is handcuffed to the steering wheel. He’s a war criminal. What your German newspapers would call a Red Jacket. During the war he was stationed here, at Dachau. He worked at the crematorium, burning bodies, for which he received a twenty-year sentence. You ask me, he deserved to hang. They all did. Then again, if he had been hanged he wouldn’t be outside now, helping me with my inquiries. And I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of meeting you.”

  He blew some smoke at the carved wooden ceiling and then picked a piece of tobacco off his eloquent pink tongue. I might have given him a short uppercut and then he’d have lost the tip of it. I was with the guy in the car. The one who hated the Ami’s guts. I disliked the Yank’s manner and the advantage he seemed to think he held over me. But it wasn’t worth punching him out. I was in the American Zone, and we both knew they could make trouble for me. I didn’t want trouble with the Americans. Especially after the trouble I’d had with the Ivans. So I kept my fists by my side. Besides, there was still the small matter of a hundred marks. A hundred marks was a hundred marks.

  “It seems the guy in the car was a friend of your wife’s father,” said the American. He turned and walked into the hotel bar. “I expect he and some of his SS pals were in and out of this place a lot.” I saw his eyes take in the dirty glasses on the bar top, the overflowing ashtrays, the beer spills on the floor. They were all mine. That bar was the one place in the hotel where I felt truly at home. “I guess those were better days, huh?” He laughed. “You know, you should go back to being a cop, Gunther. You’re no hotelier, that’s for sure. Hell, I’ve seen body bags that were more welcoming than this place.”

  “No one’s asking you to stay and fraternize,” I said.

  “Fraternize?” He laughed. “Is that what we’re doing? No, I don’t think so. Fraternize implies some
thing brotherly. I just don’t feel that way about anyone who could stay in a town like this, bud.”

  “Don’t feel bad about it,” I said. “I’m an only child. Not the brotherly kind at all. Frankly, I’d rather empty the ashtrays than talk to you.”

  “Wolf, the guy in the car,” said the American, “he was a real enterprising sort of guy. Before he burned the bodies, he used to take out any gold teeth with a pair of pliers. He had a pair of pruning shears to cut off fingers for the wedding rings. He even had this special pair of tongs so he could search the private parts of the dead looking for rolls of banknotes, jewels, and gold coins. It’s amazing what he used to find. Enough to fill an empty wine box, which he buried in your father-in-law’s garden before the camp was liberated.”

  “And you want to dig it up?”

  “I’m not going to dig anything up.” The American jerked his thumb at the front door. “He is, if he knows what’s good for him.”

  “What makes you think the box is still there?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “It’s a safe bet that Herr Handlöser, your father-in-law, didn’t find it. If he had, this place would be in a lot better shape. And probably he’d never have put his head on the Altomünster railway line, just like Anna Karenina. I bet he had less time to wait than she did. That’s the one thing you krauts do really well. The trains. I gotta hand it to you. Everything still runs like clockwork in this damned country.”

  “And the hundred marks are for what? To keep my mouth shut?”

  “Sure. But not the way you think. You see, I’m doing you a favor. You and everyone else in town. You see, if it ever gets out that someone dug up a box of gold and jewels in your back garden, Gunther, then everyone in town is going to have a problem with other people looking for treasure. Refugees, British and American soldiers, desperate Germans, greedy Ivans, you name it. That’s why this is being handled unofficially. Simple as that.”