the One from the Other (2006)

by Kerr, Philip - Bernie Gunther 04

  “Because I got pregnant,” she said. “I wouldn’t have married him otherwise. After we married, I lost the child. And I told you. I’m a Catholic. We mate for life.”

  “All right. I’ll buy that. But suppose I do find him. What happens then? Have you thought about that?”

  Her nostrils narrowed and her face took on a hard aspect that hadn’t been there before. She closed her eyes for a moment, removed the velvet glove she’d been wearing, and let me see the steel hand that had been there all along.

  “You mentioned Erich Koch,” she said. “It’s my fiancé’s understanding that since he came out of hiding, in May, the British—in whose zone of occupation he is now imprisoned—are considering the extradition requests of Poland and the Soviet Union, in whose countries Koch’s crimes were committed. Despite the Basic Law, and any amnesties the Federal Republic might push through, it is my fiancé’s opinion—his well-informed opinion—that the British will approve his extradition to the Russian Zone. To Poland. Should he be found guilty in a Warsaw court, he will undoubtedly face the maximum punishment under Polish law. A sentence that Germany is judicially inclined to disapprove of. We anticipate the same fate for Friedrich Warzok.”

  I grinned at her. “Well, that’s more like it,” I said. “Now I can see what you two had in common. You’re really quite a ruthless woman, aren’t you? Kind of like one of those Borgias I was talking about. Lucrezia Borgia. Ruthless, and beautiful with it.”

  She blushed.

  “Do you really care what happens to a man like that?” she said, brandishing her husband’s photograph.

  “Not particularly. I’ll help you to look for your husband, Frau Warzok. But I won’t help you put a noose around his neck—even if he does deserve it several thousand times over.”

  “What’s the matter, Herr Gunther? Are you squeamish about such things?”

  “It could be,” I said. “If I am it’s because I’ve seen men hanged and I’ve seen them shot. I’ve seen them blown to pieces and starved to death, and toasted with a flamethrower, and crushed underneath the tracks of a Panzer tank. It’s a funny thing, but after a while you realize you’ve seen too much. Things you can’t pretend you didn’t see because they’re always on the insides of your eyelids when you go to sleep at night. And you tell yourself that you’d rather not see any more. Not if you can help it. Which of course you can because none of the old excuses are worth a damn anymore. And it’s simply not good enough to say we can’t help it and orders are orders and expect people to swallow that the way they used to. So yes, I suppose I am a little squeamish. After all, just look where ruthless has gotten us.”

  “You’re quite the philosopher, aren’t you?” she said. “For a detective.”

  “All detectives are philosophers, Frau Warzok. They have to be. That way they can recognize how much of what a client tells them they can swallow safely and how much they can flush. Which of them is as mad as Nietzsche and which of them is only as mad as Marx. The clients, I mean. You mentioned two hundred in advance.”

  She reached down for her briefcase, took out her wallet, and counted out four seated ladies into my hand. “I also brought some hemlock,” she said. “If you didn’t take the case, I was going to threaten to drink it. But if you do find my husband, maybe you could give it to him instead. Sort of a good-bye present.”

  I grinned at her. I liked grinning at her. She was the type of client who needed to see my teeth, just to remind her that I might bite. “I’ll write you a receipt,” I said.

  Our business concluded she stood up, shifting some of her perfume off her delectable body and up my airways. Without the heels and the hat, I figured she was probably only as tall as I was. But while she was wearing them I felt like her favorite eunuch. I imagined it was the effect she was looking for.

  “Look after yourself, Herr Gunther,” she said, reaching for the door handle. Mr. Manners got there first.

  “I always do. I’ve had an awful lot of practice.”

  “When will you start to look for him?”

  “Your two hundred says right now.”

  “And how and where will you go about it?”

  “I’ll probably lift some rocks and see what crawls out from underneath. With six million Jews murdered, there are plenty of rocks in Germany to choose from.”

  ELEVEN

  Detective work is a little like walking into a movie that’s already started. You don’t know what’s happened already and, as you try to find your way in the dark, it’s inevitable that you’re going to stand on someone’s toes, or get in their way. Sometimes people curse you, but mostly they just sigh or tut loudly and move their legs and their coats, and then do their best to pretend you’re not there. Asking questions of the person seated next to you can result in anything from a full plot and cast list to a slap in the mouth with a rolled-up program. You pay your money and you take your chances.

  Chance was one thing. Pushing my luck was quite another. I wasn’t about to go asking questions about old comrades without a friend to keep me company. Men who are facing the gallows are apt to be a little jealous about their privacy. I hadn’t owned a gun since leaving Vienna. I decided that it was time I started to dress for all occasions.

  Under National Socialism’s law of 1938, handguns could be purchased only on submission of a Weapons Acquisitions Permit, and most men of my acquaintance had owned some kind of firearm. But at the end of the war General Eisenhower had ordered all privately owned firearms in the American Zone to be confiscated. In the Soviet Zone things were even stricter: A German in possession of so much as a single cartridge was likely to be summarily shot. A gun was as difficult to get hold of in Germany as a banana.

  I knew a fellow named Stuber—Faxon Stuber—who drove an export taxi, who could get hold of all kinds of things, mostly from American GIs. Marked with the initials E.T., export taxis were reserved for the exclusive use of people in possession of foreign exchange coupons, or FECs. I wasn’t sure how he had got hold of them, but I had found some FECs in the glove box of Kirsten’s father’s Hansa. I supposed he had been saving them to buy gasoline on the black market. I used some of them to pay Stuber for a gun.

  He was a small man in his early twenties, with a mustache like a line of ants, and, on his head, an SS officer’s black service cap from which all the insignia and cap cords had been removed. None of the Americans getting into Stuber’s E.T. would ever have recognized his cap for what it was. But I did. I’d damn near had to wear a black cap myself. As it was, I’d been obliged to wear the field gray version only as part of the M37 SS uniform, which came along after 1938. I figured Stuber had found the cap or someone had given it to him. He was too young to have been in the SS himself. He looked too young to be driving a cab. In his small white hand the weapon he’d brought me was recognizably a firearm, but in my own sixteen-ounce glove it looked more like a water pistol.

  “I said a firearm, not a spud gun.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said. “That’s a twenty-five-caliber Beretta. That’s a nice little gun. There’s eight in the clip and I got you a box of pills to go with it. It’s got a hinged barrel so you can slide the first one in, or take it out with ease. Five inches long and just eleven ounces in weight.”

  “I’ve seen bigger lamb chops.”

  “Not on your ration card, Gunther,” said Stuber. He grinned as if he ate steak every night of the week. Given his passengers, he probably did. “That’s all the gun you’ll need around this city, unless you’re planning a trip to the O.K. Corral.”

  “I like a gun people can see,” I said. “The sort of gun that gives a man some pause for thought. With this little popgun no one will take me seriously unless I shoot them first. Kind of defeats the purpose.”

  “That little gun packs more of a punch than you might think,” he insisted. “Look, if you want something bigger, I can get it. But it’s going to take more time. And I got the impression that you were in a hurry.”

  We drove
around for a few minutes while I thought about it. He was right about one thing. I was in a hurry. Eventually, I sighed and said, “All right, I’ll take it.”

  “You ask me, that’s a perfect town gun,” he said. “Businesslike. Convenient. Discreet.” He made it sound more like a membership of the Herrenklub than a snapper’s rattle. Which was what it was. The rhinestone holster it came in told me that much. Some GI had very likely confiscated it from the slot he’d been feeding. Maybe she’d got him on the trap with it, intending to drop him for a few extra marks and he’d wrestled it off her. I just hoped it wasn’t a gun that the ballistics boys at the Praesidium were looking for. I tossed the holster back at Stuber and got out of his cab on Schellingstrasse. I figured a free ride to my next port of call was the least he could do after selling me some party-girl’s belly gun.

  I went through the doors of Die Neue Zeitung and had the hatchet-faced redhead behind the desk call up Friedrich Korsch. I glanced over the front page while I waited for him to come down. There was a story about Johann Neuhausler, the Protestant auxiliary bishop of Munich who was involved with the various groups that were trying to free the Red Jackets in Landsberg. According to the bishop, the Americans “did not lag behind the Nazis in sadism,” and he spoke about an American prison guard—not named—whose description of conditions at Landsberg “beggared belief.” I had a shrewd idea of who this American soldier was, and it infuriated me to see, of all people, a bishop repeating the lies and half-truths of PFC John Ivanov. Evidently my efforts on behalf of Erich Kaufmann had been wasted.

  Friedrich Korsch had been a young Kriminalassistent with KRIPO when I had been a Kommissar at the Alex, in Berlin, back in 1938-39. I hadn’t seen him in almost ten years until, one day the previous December, I had bumped into him coming out of Spöckmeier, a Bierkeller on Rosenstrasse. He hadn’t changed a bit, apart from the leather eye patch. With his long chin and Douglas Fairbanks-style mustache, he looked like a swashbuckling buccaneer, which might have been a good thing in a journalist working for an American newspaper.

  We went to the Osteria Bavaria—once Hitler’s favorite restaurant —and argued about who was going to pick up the bill while at the same time we reminisced about old times and made a tally of who was dead and who was alive. But after I had told him of how I suspected Bishop Neuhausler’s source inside Landsberg Prison was a liar and a crook, Korsch refused to hear any more talk of me paying. “For a story like that, the paper will cover lunch,” he said.

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “Because I was hoping to get some information out of you. I’m looking for a war criminal.”

  “Isn’t everyone?”

  “Name of Friedrich Warzok.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He was the sometime commander of a labor camp near the ghetto at Lvov. A place called Lemberg-Janowska.”

  “It sounds more like a type of cheese.”

  “It’s in southeastern Poland, near the Ukrainian border.”

  “Miserable country,” said Korsch. “I lost my eye there.”

  “How does one go about it, Friedrich? How do you set about trying to find such a man?”

  “What’s your angle?”

  “My client is the wife. She wants to get married again.”

  “Can’t she just obtain a declaration from the Wehrmacht Information Office? They’re quite obliging, really. Even for ex-SS.”

  “He was seen alive in March 1946.”

  “So you want to know if there’s been some kind of investigation.”

  “That’s right.”

  “All war crimes committed by our old friends and superiors are currently investigated by the Allies. Although there is some talk that in the future they will be investigated by the state attorneys general offices. However, right now, the best place to start is with the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, set up by SHAEF. The so-called CROWCASS registers. There are about forty of them. But those are not open to the public. Actual investigative responsibility lies with the Directorate of Army Legal Services, which deals with offenses committed in all military theaters during the war. Then there’s the CIA. They have some sort of central registry. But neither Army Legal Services nor the CIA are readily available to a private individual like yourself, I’m afraid. There is the American Documents Center, in West Berlin, of course. I believe it is possible for a private person to get access to documents there. But only by permission of General Clay.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “The blockade may be over, but I’d rather keep away from Berlin if possible. Because of the Russians. I had to leave Vienna to get away from a Russian intelligence colonel who had his eye on recruiting me to the MVD, or whatever it is they call the Soviet Secret Police these days.”

  “It’s called the MVD,” said Korsch. “Of course, if you don’t want to go to Berlin there’s always the Red Cross. They run an international tracing service. But that’s for displaced persons. They might know something. Then there are the Jewish organizations. The Brichah, for example. It started out as a refugee-smuggling organization but, since the establishment of the State of Israel, they’ve become much more active in the hunt for old comrades. It seems they don’t trust the Germans or the Allies to do the job. Can’t say I blame them. Oh yes, and there’s some chap in Linz who runs his own Nazi-hunting operation with private American money. Name of Wiesenthal.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I’ll be troubling any Jewish organizations,” I said. “Not with my background.”

  “That’s probably wise,” said Korsch. “I can’t imagine a Jew wanting to help someone who was in the SS, can you?” He laughed at the very thought of it.

  “No, I’ll stick to the Allies for now.”

  “Are you absolutely sure Lvov is in Poland? I think you’ll find it used to be in Poland but now it’s part of the Ukraine. Just to make things a little more complicated for you.”

  “What about the paper?” I asked. “You must have some sort of access to the Amis. Couldn’t you find out something?”

  “I suppose I could,” said Korsch. “Sure, I’ll take a look.”

  I wrote Friedrich Warzok’s name on a piece of paper and, underneath it, the name of the labor camp at Lemberg-Janowska. Korsch folded it and slipped it into his pocket.

  “Whatever happened to Emil Becker?” he asked. “Remember him?”

  “The Amis hanged him in Vienna about two years ago.”

  “War crimes?”

  “No. But as it happens, if they’d looked they’d have certainly found evidence of some war crimes.”

  Korsch shook his head. “We’ve all got some kind of dirty mark on our faces, if you look closely enough.”

  I shrugged. I hadn’t asked what Korsch had done during the war. I only knew that he’d come out of the war as a Kriminalinspektor in the RSHA, which meant he’d had something to do with the Gestapo. There seemed no point in spoiling a perfectly affable lunch by asking him about all that now. Nor did he exhibit any curiosity about what I had done.

  “So what was it?” he asked. “What did they hang him for?”

  “For murdering an American officer,” I said. “I heard he was heavily involved in the black market.”

  “That much I can believe,” he said. “That he was into the black market.” Korsch raised a glass of wine. “Here’s to him, anyway.”

  “Yes,” I said, picking up my glass. “Here’s to Emil. The poor bastard.” I drained the glass. “As a matter of curiosity, how is it that a bull like you turns into a journalist, anyway?”

  “I got out of Berlin just before the blockade,” he said. “Had a tip from an Ivan who owed me a favor. So I came down here. And got offered a job as a crime correspondent. The hours are much the same, but the pay is a lot better. I’ve learned English. Got myself a wife and son. Nice house in Nymphenburg.” He shook his head. “Berlin is finished. It’s only a matter of time before the Ivans take it over. The war seems like a thousand years ago, quite frankly. A
nd if you don’t mind my saying so, all this war crimes stuff, soon it won’t matter a damn. Any of it. Not when the amnesty kicks in. That’s what everyone wants now, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. Who was I to argue with what everyone wanted?

  TWELVE

  I drove west out of Munich, toward the medieval town of Landsberg. With its town hall, Bavarian Gothic gate, and famous fortress, it was a historic place, and largely undamaged because, during the war, Allied bombers had given it a wide berth, to avoid killing thousands of foreign workers and Jews held in as many as thirty-one concentration camps in the surrounding area. After the war these same camps had been used by the Americans to take care of displaced persons. The largest of these was still in existence with over a thousand Jewish DPs. Although it was much smaller than Munich and Nuremberg, the Nazi Party had considered Landsberg one of the three most significant towns in Germany. Before the war it had been a place of pilgrimage for German youth. Not for the architecture or religious reasons, unless you counted Nazism as a kind of religion, but because people were intent on seeing the cell in Landsberg where Adolf Hitler, imprisoned there for almost a year after the abortive Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, had written Mein Kampf. By all accounts Hitler had been very comfortable in Landsberg Prison. Built in 1910, within the walls of the medieval fortress, the prison had been one of the most modern in Germany, and Hitler seems to have been treated more like an honored guest than some dangerous revolutionary. The authorities had afforded him every opportunity to meet with friends and to write his book. Without his time in Landsberg, the world might never have heard of Hitler.

  In 1946, the Americans had renamed Landsberg Prison War Criminal Prison Number One and, after Spandau in Berlin, it was the most important penal facility in Germany, with over one thousand war criminals from the Dachau trials, almost a hundred from the Nuremberg trials, and more than a dozen from the trials of Japanese POWs in Shanghai. Over two hundred war criminals had been hanged at WCP1 and many of their bodies were buried nearby in the cemetery of Spottingen Chapel.