the One from the Other (2006)

by Kerr, Philip - Bernie Gunther 04

  “Talk of treasure might be good for business,” I said, heading back to the front desk. The money was still there. “It could bring people back to this town in a big way.”

  “And when they don’t find anything? Think about it. Things could get nasty. I’ve seen it happen.”

  I nodded. I can’t say I wasn’t tempted to take his money. But the truth was I didn’t want any part of anything connected with gold that had come out of someone’s mouth. So I pushed the banknotes back toward him. “You’re welcome to dig,” I said. “And you can do what the hell you like with whatever you find. But I don’t like the smell of your money. It feels too much like a share of the loot. I didn’t want any part of it then, and I certainly don’t want any part of it now.”

  “Well, well,” said the American. “Isn’t that something? A kraut with principles. Hell, I thought Adolf Hitler killed all of you guys.”

  “It’s three marks a night,” I said. “Each. In advance. There’s plenty of hot water, day and night, but if you want more than a beer or a cup of coffee, that’s extra. Food is still rationed, for Germans.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I was wrong about you.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, too.” I poured myself some more of his rye. “Every time I look at that line of trees, I remember what happened on the other side.”

  TWO

  The man from the car was of medium height, dark-haired with protruding ears, and shadowy, downcast eyes. He wore a thick tweed suit and a plain white shirt, but without a necktie, no doubt in case he tried to hang himself. He didn’t speak to me and I didn’t speak to him. When he came into the hotel his head seemed to shrink into his narrow shoulders as if—I can think of no other explanation—he was burdened with a sense of shame. But perhaps I’m just being fanciful. Either way I felt sorry for him. If the cards had been dealt differently it might have been me in the American’s Buick.

  There was another reason I felt sorry for the man. He looked feverish and ill. Hardly equal to the task of digging a hole in my garden. I said as much to the American as he fetched some tools from the cavernous trunk of the Buick.

  “He looks like he should be in hospital,” I said.

  “And that’s where he’s going after this,” said the American. “If he finds the box, then he’ll get his penicillin.” He shrugged. “He wouldn’t have cooperated at all if I didn’t have that kind of leverage.”

  “I thought you Amis were supposed to pay attention to the Geneva Conventions,” I said.

  “Oh we do, we do,” he said. “But these guys are not ordinary soldiers, they’re war criminals. Some of them have murdered thousands of people. These guys put themselves outside the protection of Geneva.”

  We followed Wolf into the garden, where the American threw the tools down on the grass and told him to get on with it. The day was a hot one. Too hot to be digging anywhere but in your pockets. Wolf leaned on a tree for a moment as he tried to get his bearings, and let out a sigh. “I think this is the spot, right here,” he whispered. “Could I have a glass of water?” His hands were shaking and there was sweat on his forehead.

  “Get him a glass of water, will you, Gunther?” said the American.

  I fetched the water, and returned to find Wolf, pickax in hand. He took a swing at the lawn and almost fell over. I caught him by the elbow and helped him to sit down. The American was lighting a cigarette, apparently unconcerned. “Take your time, Wolf, my friend,” he said. “There’s no hurry. That’s why I figured on two nights, see? On account of how he’s not exactly in the best of shape for gardening duty.”

  “This man is in no condition for any kind of manual work,” I said. “Look at him. He can hardly stand.”

  The American flicked his match at Wolf and snorted with derision. “And do you imagine he ever said that to any of the people who were imprisoned in Dachau?” he said. “Like hell he did. Probably shot them in the head where they fell. Not a bad idea at that. Save me the trouble of taking him back to the prison hospital.”

  “That’s hardly the point of this exercise, is it? I thought you just wanted what’s buried here.”

  “Sure, but I’m not going to dig. These shoes are from Florsheim.”

  I took the pickax from Wolf, angrily. “If there’s half a chance of getting rid of you before this evening,” I said, “I’ll do it myself.” And I sank the point of the pick into the grass as if it had been the American’s skull.

  “It’s your funeral, Gunther.”

  “No, but it will be his if I don’t do this.” I wielded the pick again.

  “Thanks, comrade,” whispered Wolf, and sitting underneath the tree, he leaned back and closed his eyes weakly.

  “You krauts.” The American smiled. “Stick together, don’t you?”

  “This has got nothing to do with being German,” I said. “I’d probably have done it for anyone I didn’t much like, including you.”

  I was at it for about an hour with the pick and then the shovel until, about three feet down, I hit something hard. It sounded and felt like a coffin. The American was quickly over to the side of the hole, his eyes searching the earth. I kept on digging and finally levered out a box that was the size of a small suitcase and placed it on the grass at his feet. It was heavy. When I looked up, I saw that he was holding a thirty-eight in his hand. A snub-nosed police special.

  “This is nothing personal,” he said. “But a man who’s digging for treasure is just liable to think he deserves a share. Especially a man who was noble enough to turn down a hundred marks.”

  “Now that you mention it,” I said, “the idea of beating your face to a pulp with the flat of a spade is rather tempting.”

  He waved the gun. “Then you’d best throw it away, just in case.”

  I bent over, picked up the spade, and launched it into the flower bed. I put my hand in my pocket and, seeing him stiffen a little, laughed. “Kind of nervous for a tough guy, aren’t you?” I brought out a packet of Luckies, and lit one. “I guess maybe those krauts who are still picking pieces of shell from their mouths were just careless with their eggs. Either that, or you tell a good story.”

  “Now, here’s what I want you to do,” he said. “Climb out of that hole, pick up the box, and carry it to the car.”

  “You and your manicure,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Me and my manicure.”

  I climbed out of the hole and stared at him, then down at the box. “You’re a bastard, all right,” I said. “But I’ve met a lot of bastards in my time—some of the biggest, bigger than you—and I know what I’m talking about. There are lots of reasons to shoot a man dead in cold blood, but refusing to carry a box to a car isn’t one of them. So I’m going into the house to wash up and fetch myself a beer, and you can go to hell.”

  I turned and walked back to the house. He didn’t pull the trigger.

  About five minutes later I looked out my bathroom window and saw Wolf carrying the box slowly to the Buick. Still holding his gun, and glancing nervously up at the windows of the hotel as if I might have a rifle, the American opened the trunk and Wolf dropped the box inside. Then the two of them got into the car and drove quickly away. I went downstairs, fetched a beer from the bar, and then locked the front door. The American had been right about one thing. I was a lousy hotel-keeper. And it was high time I recognized that in some practical way. I found some paper and, in large red letters, wrote on it “CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.” Then I taped the sign to the glass in the door and went back into the bar.

  A couple of hours, and twice as many beers later, I caught one of the new electric trains into Munich’s main railway station. From there I walked through the bomb-damaged city center to the corner of Ludwigstrasse, where, in front of the charred ruins of the Leuchtenberg Palais and the Odeon, once the best concert halls in Munich, I took a tram north, in the direction of Schwabing. Here, nearly all of the buildings reminded me of myself, wi
th only the housefronts standing, so that while the general appearance of the street seemed hardly impaired, everything was in reality badly damaged and burned out. It was high time I made some repairs. But I didn’t see how that was possible doing what I was doing. Working as the Adlon house detective in the early thirties, I had learned a little about running a grand hotel, but this had been very poor preparation for running a small one. The Ami was right. I had to go back to what I knew best. I was going to tell Kirsten that I intended to put the hotel up for sale, and that I planned to become a private detective again. Of course, telling her was one thing; expecting her to register any sign of comprehension was quite another. And whereas I still had a façade, Kirsten seemed like a complete ruin of her former self.

  On the north edge of Schwabing was the main state hospital. It was used as the American military hospital, which meant that Germans had to go somewhere else. That is, all except the lunatics, who went to the hospital’s Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. This was just around the corner from the main hospital, in Kraepelinstrasse. I visited her as often as I could given that I was running a hotel, which meant that lately I’d been coming only every other day.

  Kirsten’s room enjoyed a view of Prinz Luitpold Park to the southeast, but I could not have described her condition as comfortable. There were bars on the windows of the room and the three other women she shared it with were all severely disturbed. The room stank of urine and, from time to time, one of the other women would scream out loud, laugh hysterically, or throw something unspeakable in my direction. Also, the beds were verminous. There were bite marks on Kirsten’s thighs and arms, and on one occasion, I had been bitten myself. Kirsten herself was hardly recognizable as the woman I had married. In the ten months since leaving Berlin she had aged ten years. Her hair was long and gray and unwashed. Her eyes were like two spent lightbulbs. She sat on the edge of her iron bedstead and stared at the green linoleum floor as if it had been the most fascinating thing she had ever seen. She looked like some poor stuffed animal in the anthropological collection at the museum on Richard-Wagner-Strasse.

  After her father had died, Kirsten had fallen into a state of general depression and started drinking a lot and talking to herself. At first I had assumed she thought I was listening, but it was soon painfully clear to me that this was not the case. So I was actually pleased when she stopped talking to herself. The only trouble was that she stopped talking completely, and when it became apparent that she had withdrawn into herself, I summoned the doctor, who recommended immediate hospitalization.

  “She’s suffering from acute catatonic schizophrenia,” was what Dr. Bublitz, the psychiatrist treating Kirsten, had told me, about a week after her admission. “It’s not all that uncommon. After what Germany has been through, who can be surprised? Almost a fifth of our inpatients are suffering from some kind of catatonia. Nijinsky, the dancer and choreographer, suffered from the same condition as Frau Handlöser.”

  Because Kirsten’s family doctor had been treating her since she was a little girl, he had booked her into the Max Planck under her maiden name. (Much to my annoyance, it was a mistake that showed no sign of being rectified. And I had given up correcting the doctor when he called her Frau Handlöser.)

  “Will she get better?” I had asked Dr. Bublitz.

  “That’s a little hard to say,” he said.

  “Well, how is Nijinsky these days?”

  “There was a rumor that he had died. But that was false. He’s still alive. Although he remains in psychiatric care.”

  “I guess that answers my question.”

  “About Nijinsky?”

  “About my wife.”

  These days I rarely ever saw Dr. Bublitz. Mostly I sat beside Kirsten and brushed her hair and sometimes lit her a cigarette that I fixed in the corner of her mouth, where it stayed until I took it out, unsmoked. Sometimes the smoke trailing up her face made her blink, which was the only sign of life she ever showed, which was half of the reason I did it. Other times I read the paper to her, or a book; and once or twice, because her breath was so rank, I even cleaned her teeth. On this particular occasion I told her the plans I had for the hotel and myself.

  “I have to do something with my life,” I said. “I can’t stay at that hotel any longer. Otherwise we’ll both end up in here. So, after I leave here today, I’m going to see your family lawyer, and I’m going to put the place up for sale. Then I’m going to borrow a little money against it from Herr Kohl at Wechselbank, so I can start a little business of my own. As a private detective, of course. I’ve got no talent whatsoever for running a hotel. Police work is the only work I know. I’ll rent an office and a small apartment here, in Schwabing, so I can be near you. As you know this part of Munich always reminds me a little of Berlin. And it’s cheap, of course. Because of the bomb damage. Somewhere close to Wagmullerstrasse, at the south end of Englischerstrasse would be ideal. The Bavarian Red Cross has its offices there and that’s where everyone goes first when they’re looking for a missing person. I think there’s probably quite a decent living to be made specializing in that end of the business.”

  I didn’t expect Kirsten to say anything, and she certainly didn’t disappoint me in that respect. She stared at the floor as if my news was the most depressing thing she had heard in months. As if selling a failing hotel in Dachau was the worst business decision anyone could make. I paused and put her cigarette in my mouth and took a drag of it before stubbing it out on the sole of my shoe and dropping the butt into my jacket pocket—the room was dirty enough without my adding a cigarette end to the filth.

  “There are lots of people missing in Germany,” I added. “Just like when the Nazis were still in power.” I shook my head. “But I can’t go on in Dachau. Not on my own. I’ve had enough of that, forever. The way I feel right now, it’s me who should be in here, not you.”

  I jumped out of my skin as one of the other women let out a screech of laughter and then went to face the wall where she remained for the rest of my visit, rocking on her feet like some old rabbi. Maybe she knew something I didn’t. They say that insanity is merely the ability to see into the future. And if we knew now what we’ll know then, it would probably be enough to make any of us scream. In life the trick is all about keeping the two separate for as long as possible.

  THREE

  I had to get a denazification certificate from the Ministry of the Interior, on Prinzregentenstrasse. Since I had never actually been a member of the Nazi Party, this didn’t present too much of a problem. There were plenty of bulls at the Police Praesidium on Ettstrasse (where I had to have the certificate countersigned) who, like me, had been SS, not to mention quite a few who had been in the Gestapo or the SD. Fortunately for me, the occupation authorities did not hold the view that ex officio transfers from KRIPO, the criminal police, or ORPO, the uniformed police, into these Nazi police organizations were enough to disqualify a man from being a police officer in the fledgling Federal Republic of Germany. It was only younger men who had started their careers in the SS, the Gestapo, or the SD who faced any real difficulties. But even here there were ways around the Liberation Law of 1946, which, if it had ever been as rigidly enforced as had been intended, would have resulted in Germany having no policemen at all. A good cop is still a good cop even if he was a Nazi bastard.

  I found a small office in Galeriestrasse, which ran west off Wagmullerstrasse. It seemed just what I had been looking for. My premises were opposite a small post office and above an antiquarian bookshop; and they shared a floor with a dentist and a coin dealer. I felt about as respectable as it was possible to feel in a building that still had its camouflage painting against Allied air attacks. The building had been some minor outpost of the War Office on Ludwigstrasse and, in an old cupboard, I found mildewed portraits of Hitler and Göring, an empty grenade bag, a rifle bandolier, and an M42 “razor edge” helmet that happened to be my size (sixty-eight). Outside the front door were a cabstand and a kiosk selling newspapers
and tobacco. I had my name on a brass plate and a mailbox mounted on the wall on the ground floor. I was set.

  I walked around central Munich leaving my new business cards with offices and people who might conceivably put some business my way. The Red Cross, the German Information Bureau on Sonnenstrasse, the Israel Cultural Institute on Herzog-Max-Strasse, the American Express Company on Brienner Strasse, and the Lost Property Office at police headquarters. I even looked up a few old comrades. There was an ex-cop called Korsch who was working as a senior reporter at Die Neue Zeitung, an American newspaper; and a former secretary of mine called Dagmarr who helped look after the city archives on Winzererstrasse. But mostly I hit the offices of Munich’s many lawyers in and around the Justice Palace. If there was anyone doing well under the American occupation it was the lawyers. The world might end one day but there will still be lawyers to process the documents.

  My first Munich case was from a lawyer and, by a strange coincidence, it involved the Red Jackets at Landsberg. As it happened, so did the next case, which probably wasn’t a coincidence at all. And maybe even the one after that. Any one of them could have taken over my life, but only one of them did. And even now I find it a little hard to say that none of them were connected.

  Erich Kaufmann was a lawyer, a neoconservative, and a member of the so-called Heidelberg Circle of Jurists, which was the central coordinating body for freeing the prisoners at Landsberg. On September 21, 1949, I went to Kaufmann’s plush office near the Justice Palace on Karlsplatz, which was another public building under repair. The sound of cement mixers, hammers, saws, and empty hoist containers hitting the ground made Karlsplatz as noisy as any battlefield. I remember the date because it was the day after the right-wing populist Alfred Loritz had stood up in the new Parliament, demanding an immediate and general amnesty for all but the most serious war criminals—by which he meant those who were already dead or on the run. I was reading about it in the Süddeutsche Zeitung when Kaufmann’s sirenlike secretary came to fetch me into the palatial suite he modestly called an office. I don’t know what surprised me more: the office, the story in the paper, or the secretary; it had been quite a while since anyone as attractive as that little fräulein had caressed me with her eyelashes. I put it down to the new suit I had bought at Oberpollinger. It fit me like a glove. Kaufmann’s suit was better. It fit him like a suit.