the One from the Other (2006)

by Kerr, Philip - Bernie Gunther 04

  “Tell me a little about you, Herr Gunther?” he said.

  “Before the war I was a Kommissar in KRIPO,” I told him. “Which is how I came to join the SS. I went to Minsk as a member of the special action group commanded by Arthur Nebe.” I left out my service with the War Crimes Bureau and my time as an intelligence officer with the Abwehr. The SS had never liked the Abwehr. “I held the rank of SS Oberleutnant.”

  “There was a lot of good work done in Minsk,” said Father Gotovina. “How many did you liquidate?”

  “I was part of a police battalion,” I said. “Our responsibility was dealing with NKVD murder squads.”

  Gotovina chuckled. “There’s no reason to be coy with me, Oberleutnant. I’m on your side. And it makes no difference to me whether you killed five or five thousand. Either way, you were about God’s work. The Jew and the Bolshevik will always be synonymous. It’s only the Americans who are too stupid to see that.”

  Outside the booth, in the church, the choir started to sing. I’d judged them too harshly. They were much sweeter on the ear than Father Gotovina.

  “I need your help, Father,” I said.

  “Naturally. That’s why you’re here. But we have to walk before we can run. I have to be satisfied that you are what you say you are, Herr Gunther. A few simple questions should suffice. Just to put my mind at rest. For example, can you tell me your oath of loyalty, as an SS man?”

  “I can tell you it,” I said. “But I never had to take it. As a member of KRIPO my membership in the SS was more or less automatic.”

  “Let me hear you say it, anyway.”

  “All right.” The words almost stuck in my throat. “I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Führer and Reich Chancellor, loyalty and bravery. I vow to you, and to those you have named to command me, obedience unto death, so help me God.”

  “You say it so nicely, Herr Gunther. Just like a catechism. And yet you never had to take the oath yourself?”

  “Things were always rather different in Berlin from the rest of Germany,” I said. “People were always a little more relaxed about such matters. But I can’t imagine I’m the first SS man to tell you he never took the oath.”

  “Perhaps I’m just testing you,” he said. “To see how honest you’re being. Honesty’s best, don’t you think? After all, we’re in a church. It wouldn’t do to lie in here. Think of your soul.”

  “These days I prefer not to think about it at all,” I said. “At least not without a drink in my hand.” That was being honest, too.

  “Te absolvo, Herr Gunther,” he said. “Feeling better now?”

  “Like something just got lifted off my shoulders,” I said. “Dandruff, probably.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “A sense of humor will be important to you in your new life.”

  “I don’t want a new life.”

  “Not even through Christ?” He laughed again. Or perhaps he was just clearing his throat of some finer feelings. “Tell me more about Minsk,” he said. His tone had changed. It was less playful. More businesslike. “When did the city fall to German forces?”

  “June 28, 1941.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Do you know, or do you want to know?”

  “I want to know that you know,” he said. “To make a little peep-hole into your persona to see if it is or it isn’t non grata. Minsk.”

  “Do you want to know details or broad brushstrokes?”

  “Paint the house, why don’t you?”

  “All right. Within hours of the occupation of the city, forty thousand men and boys were assembled for registration. They were kept in a field, surrounded by machine guns and floodlights. They were all races. Jews, Russians, Gypsies, Ukrainians. After a few days, Jewish doctors, lawyers, and academics were asked to identify themselves. Intelligentsia, so-called. Two thousand did. And I believe the same two thousand were then marched into a nearby wood and shot.”

  “And naturally you didn’t play any part in that,” said Father Gotovina. He spoke as if he had been speaking to a crybaby.

  “As a matter of fact I was still in the city. Investigating another atrocity. This one committed by the Ivans themselves.”

  In the church service proceeding outside the confessional, the priest said “Amen.” I muttered it myself. Somehow it seemed appropriate when I was talking about Minsk.

  “How soon after your arrival was the Minsk ghetto established?” asked Gotovina.

  “Less than a month,” I said. “July 20.”

  “And how was the ghetto created?”

  “There were about three dozen streets, I believe, including the Jewish cemetery. It was surrounded by thick rows of barbed wire and several watchtowers. And one hundred thousand people were transported there from places as far afield as Bremen and Frankfurt.”

  “In what way was Minsk an unusual ghetto?”

  “I’m not sure I understand the question, Father. There was nothing usual about what happened there.”

  “What I mean to say is, where did most of the Jews in that ghetto meet their deaths? Which camp?”

  “Oh, I see. No. I believe most of the people in Minsk were killed in Minsk. Yes, that’s what made it unusual. When the ghetto was liquidated in October 1943, there were just eight thousand left. Of the original one hundred thousand. I’m afraid I have no idea what happened to the eight thousand.”

  This was all proving much more difficult than I could have supposed. Most of what I had told him about Minsk I knew from my service with the War Crimes Bureau and, in particular, the case of Wilhelm Kube. In July 1943, Kube, the SS general commissioner in charge of White Ruthenia, which included Minsk, had made a formal complaint to the Bureau, alleging that Eduard Strauch, commander of the local SD, had personally murdered seventy Jews who were employed by Kube, and pocketed their valuables. I was charged with the investigation. Strauch, who was certainly guilty of the murders—and many others besides—had made a counterallegation against Kube, that his boss had let more than five thousand Jews escape liquidation. Strauch turned out to be right but he had not expected to be vindicated. And probably he murdered Kube, with a bomb planted under his bed, in September 1943, before I had a chance actually to form any conclusions. Despite my best endeavors, the crime was quickly blamed on Kube’s Russian maid, who was just as quickly hanged. Suspecting Strauch’s complicity in Kube’s murder I then started another investigation only to be ordered by the Gestapo to drop the case. I refused. Not long afterward I found myself transferred to the Russian front. But none of this I felt able to reveal to Father Gotovina. Certainly he did not want to hear of how I had sympathized with poor Kube. There but for the grace of God.

  “Come to think of it,” I said, “I do remember what happened to those eight thousand Jews. Six thousand went to Sobibor. And two thousand were rounded up and killed at Maly Trostinec.”

  “And we all lived happily ever after,” said Gotovina. He laughed. “For someone who was only dealing with NKVD death squads, you seem to know an awful lot about what happened at Minsk, Herr Gunther. You know what I think? I think you’re just being modest. For the last five years you’ve had to hide your lamp under a basket. Just like it says in Luke chapter eleven, verses thirty-three to thirty-six.”

  “So you have read the Bible,” I said, more than a little surprised.

  “Of course,” he said. “And now I’m ready to play the Good Samaritan. To help you. Money. A new passport. A weapon if you need one. A visa to wherever you want to go, just as long as it’s Argentina. That’s where most of our friends are, these days.”

  “As I told you already, Father,” I said. “I don’t want a new life.”

  “Then exactly what is it you do want, Herr Gunther?” I could hear him stiffening as he spoke.

  “I’ll tell you. These days I’m a private detective. I have a client who’s looking for her husband. An SS man. She ought to have had a postcard from Buenos Aires by now, but she’s heard nothing in more than three and a half year
s. So she’s hired me to help find out what happened to him. The last time she saw him was in Ebensee, near Salzburg, in March 1946. He was already on the Web. In a safe house. Waiting for his new papers and tickets. She doesn’t want to spoil anything for him. All she wants to know is if he’s alive or dead. She’d like to remarry if it’s the second. But not if it’s the first. You see, the trouble is she’s like you, Father. A good Roman Catholic.”

  “That’s a nice story,” he said.

  “I liked it.”

  “Don’t tell me.” The laugh took on an altogether different persona. This one sounded a little unbalanced. “You’re the schmuck she wants to marry.”

  I waited for him to finish laughing. Probably it was just shock. It’s not every day you meet a priest who peels his lips back and lets it go like Peter Lorre.

  “No, Father, it’s exactly the way I told you. In that respect at least, I’m like a priest. People bring me their problems and I try to sort them out. The only difference is that I don’t get much help from the guy on the high altar.”

  “Does this housewife have a name?”

  “Her name is Britta Warzok. Her husband’s name is Friedrich Warzok.” I told him what I knew about Friedrich Warzok.

  “I like him already,” said Father Gotovina. “Three years without a word? He could very well be dead.”

  “To be honest, I don’t think she’s looking for good news.”

  “So why not tell her what she wants to hear?”

  “That would be unethical, Father.”

  “It took a lot of guts speaking to me like this,” he said quietly. “I admire that in a man. The Comradeship is, shall we say, easily alarmed. This business at Landsberg with the Red Jackets. It doesn’t help. Not to mention the prospect of yet more executions. The war’s been over for four years and the Amis are still trying to hang people, like some stupid sheriff in a cheap Western.”

  “Yes, I can see why that would make some of my old comrades nervous,” I said. “There’s nothing quite like the gallows to make a man swallow his scruples.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” he said. “Meet me at the art gallery next to the Red Cross the day after tomorrow. At three p.m. If I’m late you’ll have something to occupy your attention.”

  People started to walk by the confessional. Father Gotovina drew back the curtain and went out, mingling with the faithful. I waited for a minute and then followed, crossing myself for no other reason than a wish not to be noticed. It felt silly. One more type of peculiar human behavior for the anthropology textbooks. Like rocking in front of a wall, kneeling down in the direction of a Middle Eastern city, or sticking your arm straight out in front of you and shouting “Hail Victory.” None of it meant anything except a lot of trouble for someone else. If there’s one thing history has taught me to believe it is that it’s dangerous to believe in anything very much. Especially in Germany. The trouble with us is that we take belief much too seriously.

  FOURTEEN

  A couple of days went by. A southerly wind bearing an area of intense high pressure started to bear down on the city. At least that’s what the weather man on Radio Munich said. He said it was the Föhn, which meant the wind was charged with a lot of static electricity, on account of it having already blown across the Alps before it got to us. Walking around Munich you could feel the warm, dehydrated wind drying your face and making your eyes water. Or maybe I was just hitting the bottle too much.

  Americans took the Föhn more seriously than anyone, of course, and kept their children indoors to avoid it, almost as if it had been carrying something more lethal than a few positively charged ions. Maybe they knew something the rest of us didn’t. Anything was possible now that the Ivans had exploded their atomic bomb the previous month. Possibly there were all sorts of things in the Föhn to really worry about. Either way, the Föhn served a very useful purpose. Müncheners blamed the Föhn for all kinds of things. They were always grousing about it. Some claimed it made their asthma worse, others that it gave them rheumatic pains, and quite a few that it caused them to have headaches. If the milk tasted funny, that was the Föhn. And if the beer came out flat, that was the Föhn, too. Where I lived, in Schwabing, the woman downstairs claimed that the Föhn interfered with the signal on her wireless radio. And on the tram I even heard a man claim he’d got into a fight because of the Föhn. It made a change from blaming things on the Jews, I suppose. The Föhn certainly made people seem cranky and more irritable than usual. Maybe that’s how Nazism got started here in the first place. Because of the Föhn. I never heard of people trying to overthrow a government who weren’t cranky and irritable.

  That was the kind of day it was when I went back to Wagmullerstrasse and stood in front of the art gallery window next door to the offices of the Red Cross. I was earlier than the appointed time. I’m usually early for things. If punctuality is the virtue of kings then I’m the kind of person who likes to get there an hour or two before, to look for a landmine underneath the red carpet.

  The gallery was called Oscar & Shine. Most of the city’s art dealers were in the Brienner Strasse district. They bought and sold Secessionists and Munich Post-Impressionists. I know that because I read it on a Brienner Strasse gallery window, once. This particular gallery looked a little different from those others. Especially inside. Inside it looked like one of those Bauhaus buildings the Nazis used to frown upon. Of course it wasn’t just the open staircase and the freestanding walls that looked futuristic. The paintings on exhibition were similarly modern-looking, which is to say they were as easy on the eye as a sharp stick.

  I know what I like. And most of what I like isn’t art at all. I like pictures and I like ornaments. Once I even owned a French Spelter banjo-lady. It wasn’t a sculpture, just a piece of junk that sat on my mantelpiece next to a photograph of Gath, my hometown in the land of the Philistines. If I want a picture to speak to me, I’ll go watch Maureen O’Sullivan in a Tarzan movie.

  While I shambled around the gallery I was closely tracked by the periscope eye of a woman in a wool black tailor-made, which, thanks to the Föhn, she was probably regretting having worn. She was thin, a little too thin, and the long, ivory cigarette-holder she was carrying might just as easily have been one of her bony, ivory-colored fingers. Her hair was long and brown and bushy, and it was gathered up at the back of her fine head in what looked like a twenty-five-pfennig loaf. She came up to me, her arms folded defensively in front of her, in case she needed to run me through with one of her pointy elbows, and nodded at the painting I was appraising with careful discrimination and good taste, like some queeny connoisseur.

  “What do you think?” she asked, waving her cigarette holder at the wall.

  I tilted my head to one side in the vague hope that a slightly different perspective on the picture might let me ante up like Bernard Berenson. I tried to picture the crazy sonofabitch painting it but kept on thinking of a drunken chimpanzee. I opened my mouth to say something. Then closed it again. There was a red line going one way, a blue line going the other, and a black line trying to pretend it had nothing much to do with either of them. It was a work of modern art all right. That much I could see. What’s more, it had obviously been executed with the craft and skill of one who had studied licorice-making carefully. Putting it on the wall probably gave the flies escaping the Föhn through the open window something to think about. I looked again and found that it really spoke to me. It said, “Don’t laugh, but some idiot will pay good money for this.” I pointed at the wall and said, “I think you should get that patch of damp seen to, before it spreads.”

  “It’s by Kandinsky,” she said, without batting a garden rake of an eyelash. “He was one of the most influential artists of his generation.”

  “And who were his influences? Johnnie Walker? Or Jack Daniel’s?”

  She smiled.

  “There,” I said. “I knew you could do it if you tried. Which is more than I can say for Kandinsky.”

  “Some p
eople like it,” she said.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so? I’ll take two.”

  “I wish you would buy one,” she said. “Business has been a little slow today.”

  “It’s the Föhn,” I told her.

  She unbuttoned her jacket and flapped herself with half of it. I sort of enjoyed that myself. Not just the perfumed breeze she made for us but also the low-cut silk blouse she was wearing underneath. If I’d been an artist I’d have called it an inspiration. Or whatever artists call it when they see a girl’s nipples pressing through her shirt like two chapel hat-pegs. She was worth a bit of charcoal and paper anyway.

  “I suppose so,” she said and blew a lipful of air and cigarette smoke at her own forehead. “Tell me, did you come in here to look or just to laugh?”

  “Probably a bit of both. That’s what Lord Duveen recommended, anyway.”

  “For an artless vulgarian, you’re quite well informed, aren’t you?”

  “True decadence involves taking nothing too seriously,” I said. “Least of all, decadent art.”

  “Is that really what you think of it? That it’s decadent?”

  “I’ll be honest,” I said. “I don’t like it one little bit. But I’m delighted to see it exhibited without any interference from people who know as little about art as I do. Looking at it is like looking inside the head of someone who disagrees with you about nearly everything. It makes me feel uncomfortable.” I shook my head sadly and sighed, “That’s democracy, I guess.”

  Another customer came in. A customer chewing gum. He was wearing a pair of enormous brogues and carrying a folding Kodak Brownie. A real connoisseur. Someone with lots of money, anyway. The girl went to squire him around the pictures. And a little after that Father Gotovina showed up and we went out of the gallery, to the English Garden, where we sat down on a bench beside the Rumford Monument. We lit cigarettes and ignored the warm wind in our faces. A squirrel came bounding along the path, like an escaped fur tippet, and stopped near us in the hope of some morsel. Gotovina flicked his match and then the toe of a well-polished black boot at the furry oscillation. The priest was obviously not a nature lover.