the One from the Other (2006)

by Kerr, Philip - Bernie Gunther 04

  “Put him on his feet,” said the general.

  Once more I was hauled up. The pain of standing made me feel faint so that I wanted to sit down again. Someone put the glass of brandy in my right hand. I put it to my mouth. The glass clattered against my teeth. My hand was trembling like an old man’s. That was no surprise. I felt like I was a hundred years old. I swallowed the rest of the brandy, which was quite a lot, and then dropped the glass onto the floor. I felt myself sway as if I had been standing on the deck of a ship.

  The general stood in front of me. He was close enough for me to see his Aryan blue eyes. They were cold and unfeeling and as hard as sapphires. A little smile was playing on the corner of his mouth, as if there was something funny he wanted to tell me. There was. But I didn’t yet get the joke. He held something small and pink in front of my nose. At first I thought it was an undercooked prawn. Raw and bloody at one end. Dirty at the other. Hardly appetizing at all. Then I realized it wasn’t anything to eat. It was my own little finger. He took hold of my nose and then pushed the upper half of my little finger all the way into one of my nostrils. The smile became more pronounced.

  “This is what comes of sticking your fingers into things that ought not to concern you,” he said, in that quiet, civilized, Mozart-loving voice of his. The Nazi gentleman. “And you can think yourself lucky we decided it wasn’t your nose that got you into trouble. Otherwise, we might have cut that off instead. Do I make myself clear, Herr Gunther?”

  I grunted feebly. I was all out of impertinence. I felt my finger start to slip out of my nostril. But he caught it just in time and then tucked it into my breast pocket, like a pen he had borrowed. “Souvenir,” he said. Turning away, he said to the man in the bowler hat, “Take Herr Gunther to wherever he wants to go.”

  They dragged me back to the car and pushed me into the backseat. I closed my eyes. I just wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Just like Hitler and the rest.

  Car doors closed. The engine started. One of my comrades elbowed me properly awake. “Where do you want to go, Gunther?” he asked.

  “The police,” said someone. To my surprise it was me. “I want to report an assault.”

  There was laughter in the front seat. “We are the police,” said a voice.

  Maybe that was true, and maybe it wasn’t. I hardly cared. Not anymore. The car started to move and quickly gathered speed.

  “So where are we taking him?” someone said after a minute or two. I glanced out of the window with half an eye. We seemed to be heading north. The river was on our left.

  “How about a piano store?” I whispered.

  They thought that was very funny. I almost laughed myself except that it hurt when I tried to breathe.

  “This guy is very tough,” said the big man. “I like him.” He lit a cigarette and, leaning over me, put it in my mouth.

  “Is that why you cut my finger off?”

  “’S right,” he said. “Lucky for you, I like you, huh?”

  “Friends like you, Golem, who needs enemies?”

  “What did he call you?”

  “Golem.”

  “It’s a soap word,” said the bowler hat. “But don’t ask me what it means.”

  “Soap?” I was still whispering but they could hear me all right. “What’s that?”

  “Jew,” said the big man. And then he jabbed me painfully in the side. “Is it a soap word? Like he said?”

  “Yes,” I said. I didn’t want to provoke him anymore. Not with nine fingers still on my paws. I liked my fingers and, more importantly, so did my girlfriends, back in the days when I had had any girlfriends. So I backed off telling him that the Golem was a big, stupid, only vaguely human monster that was as ugly as it was evil. He wasn’t ready for that level of honesty. And neither was I. So I said, “Means big guy. Very tough guy.”

  “That’s him, all right,” said the driver. “They don’t come much bigger. And they sure don’t come any tougher.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” I said.

  At this the big guy grabbed the cigarette out of my mouth, opened the window and threw it out, then pushed me toward the cool night air rushing past the car. “You need some fresh air is all,” he said. “You’ll be all right in a minute.”

  “Is he all right?” The driver glanced around nervously. “I don’t want him throwing up in this car.”

  “He’s all right,” said the big man. He unscrewed a hip flask and poured some more brandy into my mouth. “Aren’t you, tough guy?”

  “Doesn’t matter now,” said the bowler hat. “We’re here.”

  The car stopped. “Where’s here?” I asked.

  They got me out of the car and dragged me into a well-lit doorway where they propped me up against a pile of bricks. “This is the state hospital,” said the big man. “At Bogenhausen. You rest easy awhile. Someone will find you in a minute, I expect. Get you fixed up. You’ll be all right, Gunther.”

  “Very thoughtful,” I said, and tried to collect my thoughts, enough to focus on the registration number of the car. But I was seeing double and then, for a moment, nothing at all. When I opened my eyes again the car was gone and a man with a white coat was kneeling in front of me.

  “You’ve been hitting it rather hard, haven’t you, mister?” he said.

  “Not me,” I said. “Someone else. And the ‘it’ was me, Doc. Like I was Max Schmeling’s favorite punch bag.”

  “You sure about that?” he asked. “You do stink of brandy.”

  “They gave me a drink,” I said. “To make me feel better about cutting off my finger.” I waved my bloody fist in his face by way of an affidavit.

  “Mm-hmm.” He sounded like he had yet to be convinced. “We get a lot of drunks who injure themselves and come here,” he said. “Who think we’re just here to clean up their mess.”

  “Look, Mr. Schweitzer,” I whispered. “I’ve been beaten to a pulp. If you laid me flat on the ground you could print tomorrow’s newspaper on me. Now, are you going to help me or not?”

  “Maybe. What’s your name and address? And just so I won’t feel like an idiot when I find the bottle in your pocket, what’s the name of the new chancellor?”

  I told him my name and address. “But I have no idea what the name of our new chancellor is,” I said. “I’m still trying to forget the last one.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Maybe as far as a wheelchair, if you can point one out.”

  He fetched one from the other side of the double doors and helped me sit in it.

  “In case the ward matron asks,” he said, wheeling me inside. “The new German chancellor is Konrad Adenauer. If she gets a sniff of you before we’ve had a chance to remove your clothes, she’s liable to ask. She doesn’t like drunks.”

  “I don’t like chancellors.”

  “Adenauer was the mayor of Cologne,” said the man in the white coat. “Until the British dismissed him for incompetence.”

  “He should do nicely then.”

  Upstairs he found a nurse to help me strip. She was a nice-looking girl, and even in a hospital, there must have been more pleasant things for her to look at than my white body. There were so many blue stripes on it I looked like the flag of Bavaria.

  “Jesus Christ,” exclaimed the doctor when he returned to examine me. As it happened, I now had a better idea of what he had felt like, after the Romans had finished with him. “What happened to you?”

  “I told you,” I said. “I got myself beaten up.”

  “But by whom? And why?”

  “They said they were policemen,” I said. “But it could be they just wanted me to remember them kindly. Always thinking the worst of people. That’s a character defect of mine. Along with not minding my own business and my smart mouth. Reading between the bruises, I’d say that’s what they were trying to tell me.”

  “That’s quite a sense of humor you have there,” observed the doctor. “I’ve a feeling you’re going to need it in the morning.
These bruises are pretty bad.”

  “I know.”

  “Right now, we’re going to get you X-rayed. See if there’s anything broken. Then we’ll fill you full of painkillers and take another look at that finger of yours.”

  “Since you ask, it’s in the pocket of my jacket.”

  “I guess I mean the stump.” I let him unwrap the handkerchief and examine the remains of my little finger. “This is going to need some stitches,” he said. “And some antiseptic. Having said all that, it’s a nice neat job, for a trauma injury. The two upper joints are gone. How did they do it? I mean, how did they cut it off?”

  “Hammer and chisel,” I said.

  Both doctor and nurse winced in sympathy. But I was shivering. The nurse put a blanket around my shoulders. I kept on shivering. I was sweating, too. And very thirsty. When I started to yawn, the doctor pinched my earlobe.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said, through clenched teeth. “You think I’m cute.”

  “You’re in shock,” he said, lifting my legs onto the bed and helping me to lie down. They both heaped some more blankets on top of me. “Lucky for you you’re here.”

  “Everyone thinks I’m lucky tonight,” I said. I was starting to feel pale and gray about the gills. Agitated, too. Even anxious. Like a trout trying to swim on a glass coffee table. “Tell me, Doc. Can people really catch the flu and die in summer?” I took a deep breath and let out a mouthful of air, almost as if I’d been running. Actually I was dying for a cigarette.

  “Flu?” he said. “What are you talking about? You haven’t got the flu.”

  “That’s odd. I feel like I have.”

  “And you’re not going to die.”

  “Forty-four million died of flu in 1918,” I said. “How can you be so sure? People die of flu all the time, Doc. My wife, for one. And my wife for another. I don’t know why. But there was something about it I didn’t like. And I don’t mean her. Although I didn’t. Not lately. In the beginning I did. I liked her a lot. But not since the end of the war. And certainly not since we got to Munich. Which is probably why I deserved the hiding I took tonight. You understand? I deserved it, Doc. Whatever they did, I had it coming.”

  “Nonsense.” The doctor said something else. He asked me a question, I think. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand anything. The fog was back. It rolled in like steam from a sausage kitchen on a cold winter’s day. Berlin air. Quite unmistakable. Like going home. But just the smallest part of me knew that none of it was true and that for the second time that evening I had only passed out. Which is a little like being dead. Only better. Anything is better than being dead. Maybe I was luckier than I thought. Just as long as I could tell the one from the other everything was more or less all right.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was day. Sunshine was streaming through the windows. Dust motes floated in brilliant beams of light like tiny characters from some celestial movie projector. Perhaps they were just angels sent to conduct me to someone’s idea of heaven. Or little threads of my soul, impatient for glory, intrepidly scouting out the way to the stars ahead of the rest of me, trying to beat the rush. Then the sunbeam moved, almost imperceptibly, like the hands of a giant clock, until it touched the bottom of the bed and, even through the sheet and the blankets covering them, warmed my toes, as if reminding me that my worldly tasks were not yet done.

  The ceiling was pink. A great glass bowl was hanging from it on a brass chain. At the foot of the bowl lay four dead flies, like a whole squadron of downed fighters in some terrible insect war. After I was done staring at the ceiling, I stared at the walls. They were the same shade of pink. Against one of the walls was a medical cabinet full of bottles and dressings. Beside it was a desk with a lamp where the nurses sometimes sat. On the opposite wall was a large photograph of Neuschwanstein Castle, the most famous of the three royal palaces built for Ludwig II of Bavaria. He was sometimes referred to as Mad King Ludwig, but since entering that hospital, I found I had a better understanding of him than most people. Not least because for a week or more I had been raving myself. On several occasions I had found myself locked in the topmost tower of that castle—the one with the weather vane and the eagle’s-eye view of fairyland. I’d even had visits from the Seven Dwarfs and an elephant with big ears. A pink one, of course.

  None of this was at all surprising. Or so the nurses told me. I had pneumonia. I had pneumonia because my resistance to infection had been low on account of the beating I had taken and because I was a heavy smoker. It came on like a bad dose of flu and, for a while, that was what they thought I had. I remembered this because it seemed very ironic. Then it got worse. For around eight or nine days I had a temperature of 104, which must have been when I went to stay at Neuschwanstein. Since then my temperature had returned to near normal. I say near normal, but in view of what happened next I must have been anything but normal. That’s my excuse, anyway.

  Another week passed, a long weekend in Kassel, with nothing at all happening and nothing to look at. Not even my nurses were diverting. They were solid, German housewives with husbands and children and double chins and powerful forearms and skin like orange peel and chests like pillows. In their stiff, white pinafores and caps they looked and behaved like they were armor-plated. Not that it would have made any difference if they’d been better-looking. I was as weak as a newborn. And it puts a brake on a man’s libido when the object of his attention is the one who fetches and carries and, presumably, empties his bedpan. Besides, all of my mental energy was reserved for thoughts that had nothing to do with love. Revenge was my abiding preoccupation. The only question was, revenge on whom?

  Apart from the certainty that the men who beat me to a pulp had been put up to it by Father Gotovina, I knew nothing at all about them. Except that they were ex-SS men like myself, and possibly policemen. The priest was my only real lead and, gradually, I resolved to be revenged on the person of Father Gotovina himself.

  I did not, however, underestimate the gravity and difficulty of such a task. He was a big, powerful man and, in my much weakened state, I knew I was not equal to the task of taking him on. A five-year-old girl with a roll of sweets in her fist and a good right hook would have wiped the kindergarten floor with me. But even if I had been strong enough to tackle him, he would certainly have recognized me and then told his SS friends to kill me. He didn’t strike me as being the kind of priest who would be squeamish about such a thing. So whatever I did to the priest was obviously going to require a firearm and, as soon as I understood this, I also realized that I was going to have to kill him. There seemed no alternative. Once I pointed a gun at him there would be no room for half measures. I would kill him or he would surely kill me.

  Killing a man because he had counseled other men to hurt me may look disproportionate, and perhaps it was. The balance of my mind could have been disturbed by all that had happened to me. But perhaps there was also another reason. After all I had seen and done in Russia, I had less respect for human life than of old. My own included. Not that I would ever have made much of a Quaker. In peacetime I had killed several men. I’d taken no pleasure in it. But when you have killed once it becomes easier to kill again. Even a priest.

  Once I had resolved who, the questions turned into when and how. And these questions led me to the realization that if I did manage to kill Father Gotovina, it might be a good idea to leave Munich for a while. Perhaps permanently. Just in case some of his finger-chopping friends in the Comradeship put two and two together and made me. It was my doctor—Dr. Henkell—who offered me a solution to the problem of where I would go if I did leave Munich.

  Henkell was as tall as a lamppost, with Wehrmacht-gray hair and a nose like a French general’s epaulette. His eyes were a milky shade of blue with irises the size of pencil points. They looked like two lumps of caviar on Meissen saucers. On his forehead was a frown line as deep as a railway cutting; a dimple made his chin look like the badge on a Volkswagen. It was a grand, commanding sort of fac
e that belonged properly on some fifteenth-century bronze duke, astride a horse cast from melted cannons and set in front of a palazzo with hot-and-cold-running torture chambers. He wore a pair of steel-framed glasses that were mostly on his forehead and rarely on his nose and, around his neck, a single Evva key that was for the medicine cabinet in my room and several others like it elsewhere in the hospital. Drugs were often being stolen in the state hospital. He was tanned and fit-looking, which wasn’t surprising given that he had a chalet near Garmisch-Partenkirchen and went there nearly every weekend—hill-walking and climbing in summer, and skiing in winter.

  “Why don’t you go and stay there?” he said while he was telling me about the place. “It would be just the thing for someone recuperating from an illness like yours. Some fresh mountain air, good food, peace, and quiet. You would be back to normal in no time.”

  “You’re kind of caring, aren’t you?” I remarked. “For a doctor, I mean.”

  “Maybe I like you.”

  “I know. I’m real easy to like. I sleep all day and half the night. You’ve really seen me at my best, Doc.”

  He straightened my pillow and looked me in the eye.

  “It could be I’ve seen more of Bernie Gunther than he thinks,” he said.

  “Aw, you’ve found my hidden quality,” I said. “And after all the trouble I took to hide it.”

  “It’s not so well hidden,” he said. “Provided one knows what to look for.”

  “You’re starting to worry me, Doc. After all, you’ve seen me naked. I’m not even wearing makeup. And my hair must be a mess.”

  “It’s lucky for you you’re flat on your back and weak as a kitten,” he said, wagging a finger at me. “Any more remarks like that and my bedside manner is liable to turn into a ringside manner. I’ll have you know that at university I was considered to be a very promising boxer. Believe me, Gunther, I can open a cut just as quickly as I can stitch one.”