the One from the Other (2006)

by Kerr, Philip - Bernie Gunther 04

  I guessed that he was about sixty. But I didn’t have to guess very hard to know that he was a Jew. For one thing, there was something written in Hebrew on a little plaque by the door. I felt pleased about that. Things in Germany were getting back to normal. It made a very pleasant change from a yellow Star of David daubed on his window. I had no idea what had happened to him under the Nazis, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you asked. But in the few years since they’d been gone it was plain he’d done very well for himself. It wasn’t just his suit that was better than mine, it was everything else as well. His shoes looked handmade, his fingernails were beautifully manicured, and his tie pin looked like a birthday gift from the Queen of Sheba. Even his teeth were better than mine. He was holding my card in his chubby fingers. And he came straight to the point without any of the time-wasting courtesies that can plague Munich business life. I didn’t mind that one bit. I’m not big on courtesies. Not since my time in a Russian POW camp. Besides, I was in a hurry to be in business myself.

  “I want you to interview an American soldier,” said Kaufmann. “A private in the U.S. Third Army. His name is John Ivanov. He’s a guard in War Crimes Prison Number One. You know where that is?”

  “Landsberg, I imagine,” I said

  “That’s right. That’s exactly where it is. Landsberg. Check him out, Herr Gunther. Find out what kind of character he is. Reliable or not reliable. Honest or dishonest. An opportunist or sincere. I take it you respect the confidentiality of your clients?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I couldn’t be more close-lipped if I were Rudolf Hess.”

  “Then in confidence I tell you that PFC Ivanov has made a number of allegations regarding the treatment of Red Jackets. Also that the executions of so-called war criminals in June of last year were deliberately botched by the hangman so that it would take longer for the men to die. I’ll give you an address where you can make contact with Ivanov.” He unscrewed a gold fountain pen and started to write on a piece of paper. “By the way, à propos of your remark about Hess. I don’t have a sense of humor, Herr Gunther. It was beaten out of me by the Nazis. Quite literally, I can assure you.”

  “Frankly, my own sense of humor isn’t up to much, either,” I said. “Mine was beaten out of me by the Russians. That way you’ll know I’m not joking when I tell you my fees are ten marks a day, plus expenses. Two days in advance.”

  He didn’t bat an eyelid. The Nazis had probably done quite a bit of that to him. They were good at batting eyelids. But it was enough to persuade me that I might have priced myself too low. Back in Berlin I had always preferred it when people complained a little about my fees. That way I avoided the clients who wanted me to go on fishing trips. He tore the page off his pad and handed it to me.

  “It says on your card that you speak some English, Herr Gunther. You do speak some English?”

  “Yes,” I said, in English.

  “The witness speaks basic German, I believe, so some English might help you to get to know him better. To gain his confidence, perhaps. Americans are not great linguists. They have an island mentality, like the English. The English speak good German when they speak it at all. But the Americans regard learning all foreign languages as essentially a waste of time. Akin to playing football when they themselves play a strange variety of catch.”

  “Ivanov sounds like a Russian name,” I said. “Maybe he speaks Russian. I speak excellent Russian. I learned it in the camp.”

  “You were one of the lucky ones,” he said. “I mean, you came home.” He looked at me for a long moment, as if sizing me up. “Yes, you’ve been lucky.”

  “Definitely,” I said. “My health is good although I took a piece of shrapnel in the leg. And I had a bump on the head a couple of years ago. It gives me an itchy scalp sometimes. Usually when something doesn’t make sense. Like now, for example.”

  “Oh? What doesn’t make sense?”

  “Why a Jew cares what happens to a few lousy war criminals?”

  “That’s a fair question,” he said. “Yes, I’m a Jew. But that doesn’t mean I’m interested in taking revenge, Herr Gunther.” He got out of his chair and went over to the window, summoning me to his side with a peremptory nod of the head.

  On my way over I took in the photograph of Kaufmann in the uniform of a German soldier in the first war, and a framed doctorate from the University of Halle. Standing beside him I saw that his light gray pinstripe suit was even better than I had imagined. It rustled silkily as he removed his light tortoiseshell-framed glasses and polished them vigorously on a white handkerchief that was as immaculate as his shirt collar. I was more interested in him than in the bird’s-eye view of Karlsplatz his office window afforded him. I felt like Esau standing next to his smoother brother, Jacob.

  “That’s the Justice Palace and the New Law Courts,” he said. “In a year or two—maybe less, God willing, because the noise drives me mad—they’ll be just like they were before. You’ll be able to walk in there and see a trial and not know that the building was ever destroyed by Allied bombs. That might be okay for a building. But the law is something different. It grows out of people, Herr Gunther. Placing mercy ahead of justice, with an amnesty for all war criminals, will foster a new beginning for Germany.”

  “Does that include war criminals like Otto Ohlendorf?”

  “It includes all prisoners,” he said. “I’m just one of a number of people, Jews included, who believe that the political purge imposed upon us by the occupation authorities has been unjust in virtually every respect, and has failed monstrously. The pursuit of so-called fugitives needs to be ended as quickly as possible, and the remaining prisoners released so that we can all draw a line through the sad events of an unfortunate era. I and a group of like-minded lawyers and church leaders intend to petition the American high commissioner regarding these prisoners at Landsberg. Gathering any evidence of prisoner ill-treatment is a necessary prelude to our doing so. And my being Jewish has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Do I make myself clear?”

  I liked the way he cared enough to give me a little lecture on the new Federal Republic. It had been a while since anyone had taken that kind of trouble with my education. Besides, it was a little early in our professional relationship to get smart with him. He was a lawyer, and sometimes, when you get smart with a lawyer, they call it contempt and throw you in jail.

  So I went to Landsberg and met PFC Ivanov and came back to meet Kaufmann again, and as it happened, that was time and opportunity enough to work in every smart remark I could think of. He had to sit there and take it, too. Because it was what we private detectives call a report, and coming from me a report can sound a lot like contempt if you’re not used to my manner. Especially when none of it was what he really wanted to hear. Not if he was ever going to save the likes of Otto Ohlendorf from hanging. Because Ivanov was a liar and a cheat and, worst of all, a doper—a worthless gorilla who was looking to settle a cheap score with the U.S. Army and get paid for it in the bargain.

  “For one thing I’m not convinced he’s ever worked in Landsberg,” I said. “He didn’t know that Hitler had been imprisoned there in 1924. Or that the castle had been built as recently as 1910. He didn’t know that the seven men hanged at Landsberg in June 1948 were Nazi doctors. Also, he said the hangman was a guy named Joe Malta. In fact, Malta left the army in 1947. They have a new hangman at Landsberg and his identity is kept a secret. Also, he said the gallows is located indoors. In fact it’s outside, near the rooftop. These are the kind of things you’d know if you really did work there. My guess is that he’s only ever worked at the displacement camp.”

  “I see,” said Kaufmann. “You’ve been very thorough, Herr Gunther.”

  “I’ve met more dishonest men than him,” I told Kaufmann, concluding my report with just a lick of relish. “But only in prison. The only way Ivanov would make a convincing witness was if you made sure there was a hundred dollars inside the Bible when he took the oath.”

 
Kaufmann was silent for a moment. Then he opened his desk drawer and took out a cash box from which he paid me the balance of what he owed, in cash. Finally, he said, “You look pleased with yourself.”

  “I’m always pleased when I’ve done a good job,” I said.

  “You’re being disingenuous,” he said. “Come now. We both know it’s more than that.”

  “Maybe I am a little pleased with myself at that,” I admitted.

  “Don’t you believe in a fresh start for Germany?”

  “For Germany, yes. Not for people like Otto Ohlendorf. Being a bastard wasn’t a necessary condition of joining the SS, although it certainly helped. I should know. For a while, I was in the SS myself. Maybe that’s part of the reason why I’m out of step with your new Federal Republic. And maybe it’s just that I’m a bit old-fashioned. But you see, there’s something about a man who massacred a hundred thousand men, women, and children that I just don’t like. And I tend to think that the best way of getting the new Germany off to a flying start is if we just get on and hang him and his ilk.”

  FOUR

  Kaufmann didn’t strike me as spiteful man at all. Merely a pompous one, and I think it irked him a little that I ticked him off about helping the Red Jackets. So I suspected it was he who steered my next client to me, knowing that I would dislike him, and knowing also that I couldn’t afford to turn him away. Not when I was just getting started in business again. Maybe he even hoped to change my mind about how we were going to ensure the best beginning for the Federal Republic.

  The phone call told me to catch a train to Starnberg, where a car would pick me up. All I knew about the client was that he was the Baron von Starnberg, that he was extremely rich, and that he was the retired director of I. G. Farben, once the largest chemical manufacturing company in the world. Some of directors of I. G. Farben had been put on trial at Nuremberg for war crimes, but von Starnberg wasn’t one of them. I had no idea of the job he wanted me to do.

  The train climbed through the Würm Valley and some of the loveliest countryside in Bavaria before arriving after thirty minutes in Starnberg. It made a very pleasant change from breathing the builder’s dust of Munich. Starnberg itself was a smallish town built in terraces at the north end of the Würmsee, a lake twelve miles long and a mile wide. The sapphire blue water was studded with yachts that shone like diamonds in the morning sunlight. It was overlooked by the ancient castle of the dukes of Bavaria. “Scenic” hardly covered it. After only a minute looking at Starnberg, I wanted to lift the lid and eat the strawberry crème.

  There was an old Maybach Zeppelin at the station to collect me. The chauffeur was kind enough to put me in the backseat instead of the trunk, which was probably his first inclination with someone getting off a train. After all, there was enough silver in the back to keep the Lone Ranger in bullets for the next hundred years.

  The house was about a five-minute drive west of the station. A brass plaque on one of the obelisk-shaped gateposts said it was a villa, but probably only because they were a little shy about using a word like “palace.” It took me a whole minute to climb the steps to the front door, where a fellow dressed to go cheek-to-cheek with Ginger Rogers was waiting to take my hat and act as my scout across the marble plains that lay ahead. He stayed with me as far as the library, then wheeled around silently and set off for home again before it started to get dark.

  In the library was a small man who turned out to be quite tall by the time I got near enough to hear him shouting an offer of schnapps at me. I said yes and got a better look at him while he fussed with a huge decanter of glass and gold that was so big it looked like it was guarded by seven dwarfs. He wore glasses and an eccentric sort of white beard that made me suspect I might have to drink my schnapps in a test tube.

  “The old parish church in our town,” he was saying, in a voice with about a half ton of gravel heaped on top of his larynx, “has a late-rococo high altar by an Ignaz Gunther. Would he be a relation of yours?”

  “Ignaz was the black sheep of the family, Herr Baron,” I said brightly. “We never talk about him in polite society.”

  The baron chuckled his way up into a cough that lasted only until he had lit a cigarette and got his breath. Along the way he somehow managed to shake my hand with only his fingertips, offer me a nail from a gold box as big as a dictionary on the library table, toast me, sip his schnapps, and draw my attention to the studio photograph of a baby-faced young man in his early thirties. He looked more like a movie star than an SS Sturmbannführer. The smile was pure porcelain. The frame was solid silver, which, next to the gold cigarette box, made me suspect that someone had been forcing some economies on the Starnberg household.

  “My son, Vincenz,” said the baron. “In that uniform it would be all too easy to think of him as my own black sheep. But he’s anything but, Herr Gunther. Anything but. Vincenz was always such a gentle boy. In the choir at school. So many pets when he was young you’d have thought his rooms were a zoo.”

  I liked that: rooms. It said a lot about the childhood of Vincenz von Starnberg. And I liked the way the baron talked German the way people used to talk German before they started using words like “Lucky Strike,” “Coca-Cola,” “okay,” “jitterbug,” “bubble gum,” and, worst of all, “buddy.”

  “Are you a father, Herr Gunther?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, what’s a father supposed to say about his only son? I know this much: He’s not nearly as black as he’s been painted. I’m sure you of all people would understand that, Herr Gunther. You were an SS man yourself, were you not?”

  “I was a policeman, Herr Baron,” I said, smiling thinly. “In the KRIPO until 1939 when, in order to increase efficiency—at least that’s what they told us—we were combined with the Gestapo and the SD into a new office of the SS called the RSHA—the Main Office of Government Security. I’m afraid none of us had much choice in the matter.”

  “No, indeed. Giving people choice was not something Hitler was good at. We all had to do things we didn’t much care for, perhaps. My son, too. He was a lawyer. A promising lawyer. He joined the SS in 1936. Unlike you, it was by his own choice. I counseled caution, but it is the privilege of being a son to pay no attention to his father’s advice until it’s too late. We fathers expect that of our sons. Indeed, it is why we grow old and gray. In 1941, he became the deputy leader of a mobile killing unit in Lithuania. There. I’ve said what it was. They called it something else. Special Action, or some such nonsense. But mass murder was what it was charged with. In all normal circumstances Vincenz would have had nothing to do with such a terrible thing. But like many others, he felt duty-bound by reason of the oath he had taken to the person of the Führer as the highest organ of the German state. You must understand that he did what he did out of respect for that oath and the state, but always with acute inner disapproval.”

  “You mean he was only obeying orders,” I said.

  “Exactly so,” said the baron, ignoring or just not noticing the sarcasm that was carried in my voice. “Orders are orders. You can’t get away from that fact. People like my son are the victims of historical value judgments, Herr Gunther. And nothing besmirches the honor of Germany more profoundly than these prisoners at Landsberg. Of whom my son is one. These Red Jackets, as the newspapers call them, present the greatest obstacle to the restoration of our national sovereignty. Which we must have if we are ever going to contribute, as the Americans want, to the cause of Western defense. I am referring, of course, to the forthcoming war against communism.”

  I nodded politely. It was my second lecture in as many weeks. But this one was easier to understand. Baron von Starnberg didn’t like the communists. That much was plain from our surroundings. If I’d lived there I wouldn’t have liked the communists either. Not that I did like the communists. But having very little myself, I had more in common with them than with the baron, who had so much. And who wasn’t about to put his hand in his pocket and help win America’s wa
r on communism as long as America treated his son like some common criminal.

  “Has he been tried yet?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said the Baron. “He was sentenced to death, in April 1948. But following a petition to General Clay, that sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.”

  “Then I really don’t see what I can do,” I said politely, neglecting to add that, as far as I was concerned, the baron’s “black sheep” had already been luckier than he could ever have reasonably expected. “After all, it’s not as if he denies doing what he did. Does he?”

  “No, not at all,” said the baron. “As I have explained, his defense was based on force majeure. That he could not act but as he did act. We now wish to draw the governor’s attention to the fact that Vincenz had nothing personal against the Jews. You see, after graduating, Vincenz became a reader in law at the University of Heidelberg. And in 1934, he saw to it that measures taken by the Gestapo against a student who had been sheltering Jews at his home were brought to a halt. His name was Wolfgang Stumpff, and I want you to find him, Herr Gunther. You must find him so that we might attach his testimonial regarding the Heidelberg Jewish affair to a petition for Vincenz’s early release.” The baron sighed. “My son is only thirty-seven, Herr Gunther. He still has his whole life in front of him.”

  I helped myself to some more of the baron’s excellent schnapps to take away the taste in my mouth. It also helped to prevent me from making the tactless remark that at least Vincenz still had a life to have in front of him, unlike the many Lithuanian Jews whose deaths he had overseen, albeit only out of respect for his oath as an SS officer. By now I had little doubt that Erich Kaufmann was the author of this new client relationship.