the One from the Other (2006)

by Kerr, Philip - Bernie Gunther 04

  “Wouldn’t that be against the Hippocratic Oath, or whatever you pill pushers call it when you’re taking yourselves too seriously? Something Greek anyway.”

  “Maybe I’ll make an exception in your case and strangle you with my stethoscope.”

  “Then I wouldn’t get to hear about why you like me,” I said. “You know, if you really liked me you’d find me a cigarette.”

  “With your lungs? Forget it. If you take my advice you’ll never smoke again. The pneumonia’s very likely left a scar on your lung.” He paused for a moment and then added: “A scar as pronounced as the one under your arm.”

  Outside my room someone started drilling. They were repairing the hospital, just like the women’s hospital where Kirsten had died. Sometimes it seemed like there wasn’t anywhere in Munich that wasn’t having some building work done. I knew Dr. Henkell was right. A chalet in Garmisch-Partenkirchen would be a lot more peaceful and quiet than the builder’s yard I was in now. Just what the doctor ordered. Even if it was a doctor who was beginning to sound suspiciously like an old comrade.

  “Maybe I never got around to telling you about the men who put their paws on me,” I said. “They had hidden qualities, too. You know, like honor and loyalty. And they used to wear black hats with funny little signs on them because they wanted to look like pirates and frighten children.”

  “As a matter of fact, you told me that they were cops,” he said. “The ones who beat you up.”

  “Cops, detectives, lawyers, and doctors,” I said. “There’s no end to what old comrades can turn their hands to.”

  Dr. Henkell did not contradict me.

  I closed my eyes. I was tired. Talking made me tired. Everything seemed to make me feel tired. Blinking and breathing at the same time made me feel tired. Sleeping made me feel tired. But nothing made me feel quite so tired as the old comrades.

  “What were you?” I asked. “Inspector of concentration camps? Or just another guy who was obeying orders?”

  “I was in the Tenth SS Panzer Division Frundsberg,” he said.

  “How the hell does a doctor end up in a tank?” I asked.

  “Honestly? I thought it would be safer inside a tank. And, for the most part, it was. We were in the Ukraine from 1943 until June 1944, when we were ordered to France. Then we were at Arnhem and Nimegen. Then Berlin. Then Spremberg. I was one of the lucky ones. I managed to surrender to the Amis, at Tangermünde.” He shrugged. “I don’t regret joining the SS. Those men who survived with me will be my friends for the rest of my life. I’d do anything for them. Anything.”

  Henkell did not question me about my own service with the SS. He knew better than to ask. It was something you either talked about or you didn’t talk about. I never wanted to talk about it again. I could see that he was curious. But that just made me all the more determined not to say anything about it. He could think what he liked. I really didn’t care.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “you would be doing me a huge favor. If you went to Mönch. That’s the name of my house in Sonnenbichl. A friend of mine is living there at the moment. You could keep him company. He’s been in a wheelchair since the war and he gets rather depressed. You could help him to keep his spirits up. It would be good for you both, you see. There’s a nurse and a woman who comes in to cook. You’d be very comfortable.”

  “This friend of yours—”

  “Eric.”

  “He wouldn’t be an old comrade, too, would he?”

  “He was in the Ninth SS Panzer Division,” said Henkell. “Hohenstaufen. He was also at Arnhem. His tank got hit by a Tommy armor-piercing seventeen-pounder in September 1944.” Henkell paused. “But he’s no Nazi, if that’s what you’re worried about. Neither of us was ever a Party member.”

  I smiled. “For what it’s worth,” I said, “neither was I. But let me give you some free advice. Don’t ever tell people that you were never a Party member. They’ll think you’ve got something to hide. It beats me where all those Nazis disappeared to. I guess the Ivans must have them.”

  “I never thought of it like that,” he said.

  “I’ll just pretend I didn’t hear what you said and then I won’t be too disappointed when he turns out to be Himmler’s smarter brother, Gebhard.”

  “You’ll like him,” said Henkell.

  “Sure I will. We’ll sit by the fire and sing each other the Horst Wessel Song before we turn in at night. I’ll read him some chapters of Mein Kampf and he’ll delight me with Thirty War Articles for the German Volk by Dr. Goebbels. How does that sound?”

  “Like I made a mistake,” Henkell said grimly. “Forget I ever mentioned it, Gunther. I just changed my mind. I don’t think you’d be good for him, after all. You’re even more bitter than he is.”

  “Take your foot off the Panzer’s gas pedal, Doc,” I said. “I’ll go. Anywhere would be better than this place. I’ll need a hearing aid if I stay here any longer.”

  NINETEEN

  One of the nurses was from Berlin. Her name was Nadine. We got along just fine. She’d lived on Güntzelstrasse, in Wilmersdorf, which was very close to where I had once lived, on Trautenaustrasse. We had been practically neighbors. She had worked at the Charité Hospital, which is where she had been raped by twenty-two Ivans in the summer of 1945. After that she lost her enthusiasm for the city and moved to Munich. She had a rather refined, almost noble face, a high-set neck, big shoulders, and a long, strong back and correctly formed legs. She was built like an Oldenburg mare. She was calm, with a pleasant temper, and, for some reason, she liked me. After a while I liked her, too. It was Nadine who got a message to little Faxon Stuber, the export cabdriver, asking him to visit me in hospital.

  “My God, Gunther,” he said. “You look like last week’s sauerkraut.”

  “I know. I should be in hospital. But what can you do? A man has to earn a living, right?”

  “I couldn’t agree more. And that’s why I’m here, I hope.”

  Without further ado I directed him to the closet where my clothes were hanging and the wallet in the inside pocket and the ten red ladies that were waiting there.

  “Find them?”

  “Red ladies. My favorite kind of gal.”

  “There are ten of them and they’re yours.”

  “I don’t kill people,” he said.

  “I’ve seen the way you drive and it’s only a matter of time, my boy.”

  “But assume you’ve got my attention.”

  I told him what I wanted to do. He had to sit close to my bed to hear what I was saying because my voice was sometimes very faint. I sounded like a frog in the Flying Dutchman’s throat.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “As well as the other, I wheel you out, drive you to where you want to go, and drive you back here. Right?”

  “It’ll be visiting time so no one will even know that I’m gone,” I told him. “Plus, we’ll be wearing builder’s overalls. I’ll just slip them over my pajamas. Builders are invisible in this city. What’s the matter? You look like a cat creeping around the milk.”

  “If it tastes funny it’s because I don’t see you going out of here in anything other than a wooden box, Gunther. You’re a sick man. I’ve seen stronger-looking crane-flies. You wouldn’t make it as far as the car park.”

  “I already thought of that,” I said and showed him a little bottle of red liquid I had been hiding under the bedclothes. “Methamphetamine. I stole it.”

  “And you think this will put you back on your feet?”

  “Long enough to do what I need to do,” I said. “They used to give it to Luftwaffe pilots during the war. When they were exhausted. They were flying and they didn’t even need a plane.”

  “All right,” he said, folding away the red ladies. “But if you wander off or tip over don’t expect me to handle the porterage. Sick or not you’re still a big man, Gunther. Josef Manger couldn’t pick you up. Not if his Olympic gold medal depended on it. And another thing. From what I’ve he
ard, that ox-blood is apt to make a man gabby. But I don’t want to know, see? Whatever it is that you’re hatching, I don’t want to know. And the minute you tell me, I’ll feel free to brush you off. Clear?”

  “As clear as a half bottle of Otto,” I said.

  Stuber grinned. “It’s all right,” he said. “I didn’t forget.” He took a half liter of Fürst Bismarck out of his pocket and slipped it under my pillow. “Just don’t drink too much of that stuff. Grain schnapps and an armful of ox-blood might not mix too well. I don’t want you throwing up in my taxi like some stinking Popov.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me, Faxon.”

  “I’m not worried about you. If I look like I’m worried about you it’s because I’m worried about me. It doesn’t look like it, but there’s a big difference, see?”

  “Sure, I understand. It’s what the shrinks call a gestalt.”

  “Yeah, well, you’d know more about that than me, Gunther. From what I’ve heard so far, you probably want your head examined.”

  “We all do, Faxon, my boy. We all do. Haven’t you heard of collective guilt? You’re as bad as Joseph Goebbels, and me, I’m just as bad as Reinhard Heydrich.”

  “Reinhard who?”

  I smiled. It was true, Heydrich had been dead for more than seven years. But it was just a little disconcerting to discover Stuber had never heard of him. Maybe he was younger than I had supposed.

  Either that or I was a lot older than I felt. Which hardly seemed possible.

  TWENTY

  The ox-blood in my veins left me feeling like it was my twenty-first birthday. It was plain to see why they’d given the stuff to Luftwaffe pilots. With enough of that whiz-juice in your blood you wouldn’t have thought twice about landing a Messerschmitt on the roof of the Reichstag. I felt better than I looked, of course. And I knew I wasn’t nearly as vigorous as the dope told me I was. I walked like someone learning to walk again. My legs and hands felt as if I had borrowed them from one of Geppetto’s rejected puppets. With my pale face, dirty ill-fitting black overalls, sweaty hair, and unaccountably heavy shoes, I told myself I lacked only a bolt through my neck to make the final casting in a Frankenstein movie. It was worse when I spoke. My voice made the monster sound like Marlene Dietrich.

  I walked as far as the elevator and then sat in a wheelchair. The hospital was full of visitors and no one paid me or Stuber any attention, least of all the doctors and nurses who commonly took advantage of visiting time to have a break or catch up with some paperwork. All of them were overworked and underpaid.

  Stuber wheeled me quickly to his Volkswagen taxi. I got into the passenger seat and, conserving my energy, let him close the door. He ran around the front, jumped inside, and was already revving the garden-mower engine before I had told him where we were going. He lit two cigarettes, fed one between my lips, let out the clutch, and then drove quickly onto the Maximilianstrasse roundabout, from where we could have gone in any direction. “So where to?” he asked, holding the steering wheel hard to the left so that we kept on going round and round.

  “Across the bridge,” I said. “West along Maximilianstrasse and then down Hildegard Strasse, onto Hochbruchen.”

  “Just tell me where we’re going,” he growled. “I’m a taxi driver, remember? That little license you see there from the Municipal Transport Office means I know this city like I know your wife’s pussy.”

  My ox-blood let that one go. Besides, I preferred him like this. An apology or embarrassment might have slowed him down. Speed and efficiency were what was required, before the whizz-juice and my malice gave out. “The Holy Ghost Church, on Tal,” I said.

  “A church?” he exclaimed. “What do you want to go to a church for?” He thought about that for a moment as we raced across the bridge. “Or are you having second thoughts about this? Is that it? Because if you are, then Saint Anna’s is nearer.”

  “So much for your knowledge of gynecology,” I said. “Saint Anna’s is still closed.” As we came through the Forum, I caught sight of the street corner where the comrades had given me an early taste of the blackjack before bundling me into their car. “And I’m not having second thoughts. Besides, didn’t you tell me I wasn’t to get gabby? What do you care what I want in a church? It’s none of your business. You don’t want to know. That’s what you said.”

  He shrugged. “I just thought you was having second thoughts about this. That’s all.”

  “When I have second thoughts, you’ll be the first to know,” I said. “Now, where’s the rattle?”

  “Down there.” He nodded at my feet. There was a leather tool bag on the floor. I was so ragged up I hadn’t noticed it. “In the bag. There are some spanners and screwdrivers in there to give it some respectable company. Just in case anyone gets nosy.”

  I leaned slowly forward and lifted the bag into my lap. On the side of the bag was the city coat of arms and “Post Office Motorbus Services, Luisenstrasse.”

  “It belonged to a bus mechanic, I figure,” he said. “Someone left it in the cab.”

  “Since when did bus mechanics start taking export taxis?” I asked.

  “Since they started screwing American nurses,” he said. “She was a real peach, too. I’m not surprised he forgot his tools. They couldn’t keep their faces off each other.” He shook his head. “I was watching them in the rearview mirror. It was like her tongue was looking for her door key inside his flap.”

  “You paint a very romantic picture,” I said and opened the bag. Among all the tools was a U.S. government-issue Colt automatic. A nice pre-Great War .45. The sound suppressor attached to the muzzle was homemade but most of them were. And the Colt was the ideal gun for a silencer. The only trouble was its length. Wearing the pipe the whole thing was almost eighteen inches long. It was as well Stuber had thought to supply a tool bag. A rig like that might sound quiet but to look at was about as inconspicuous in your hand as Excalibur.

  “That gun is as cold as Christmas,” he said. “I got it off a shit-skin sergeant who does guard duty at the American Officers’ Club in the Art House. He swears on his black momma’s life that the gun and the pipe were last used by a U.S. Army Ranger to assassinate an SS general.”

  “So it’s a lucky gun, then,” I said.

  Stuber gave me a sideways look. “You’re a strange one, Gunther,” he said.

  “I doubt it.”

  We drove down Hochbruchen in sight of the Hofbrauhaus, which, unusually for that time of day, was doing brisk business. A man wearing lederhosen staggered drunkenly along the pavement and narrowly avoided colliding with a pretzel cart. The smell of beer was in the air—more so than seemed normal, even for Munich. A posse of American soldiers ambled along Brauhstrasse with a proprietorial swagger, turning the air blue with their sweet Virginia tobacco. They looked too large for their uniforms, and their boozy laughter echoed down the street like small-arms fire. One of them started to dance a buck-and-wing as, somewhere, a brass band began to play “The Old Comrades March.” The tune seemed appropriate for what I had in mind. “What’s all the fuss about?” I growled.

  “It’s the first day of Oktoberfest,” said Stuber. “Lots of Amis wanting taxis and here I am driving you around.”

  “You’ve been paid very handsomely for the privilege.”

  “I’m not complaining,” he said. “It just sounded that way. Me using the wrong tense to tell you what I was thinking. The present progressive, I think.”

  “When I want you to tell me what you’re thinking, sonny, I’ll twist your ear. Future conditional.” We reached the church. “Turn left toward Viktualienmarkt and pull up at the side door. Then you can help me get out of this walnut shell. I feel like a pea in a street game of three-card monte.”

  “That’s the sucker move you’re describing, Gunther,” he said. “Where I get the pea out and nobody notices me doing it.”

  “Shut up and get the door, beetle jockey.”

  Stuber stopped the car, jumped out, ran around the
front, and threw open the door. It exhausted me just watching him.

  “Thanks.”

  I sniffed the air like a hungry dog. Down on the market square they were roasting almonds and warming pretzels. Another brass band was launching into “The Clarinet Polka.” If I’d had one leg I couldn’t have felt less like dancing a polka. Listening to it made me want to sit down and take a breather. Over at the festival meadow on Theresienwiese, the revels would be in full swing. Big-breasted girls in dirndls would be demonstrating the Charles Atlas course by lifting four beer steins in each hand. Brewers would be parading with their usual mix of bombast and vulgarity. Small children would be eating their way through gingerbread hearts. Fat stomachs would be filling up with beer as people tried to forget all about the war and others tried, sentimentally, to remember it.

  I remembered the war only too well. That was why I was here. Mostly, I remembered that awful summer of 1941. I remembered Operation Barbarossa, when three million German soldiers, myself included, and more than three thousand tanks had crossed into the Soviet Union. I remembered with an all-too-painful clarity the city of Minsk. I remembered Lutsk. I remembered everything that had happened there. Despite all my best efforts, it seemed I wasn’t ever likely to forget it.

  The speed of the advance took everyone by surprise—ourselves as much as the Popovs. That’s what we called the Ivans in those days. On June 21, 1941, we had grouped on the Soviet border, full of trepidation for what was to follow. Five days later we had traveled an astonishing two hundred miles and were in Minsk. Bombarded by a massive artillery barrage and hammered by the Luftwaffe, the Red Army had taken a severe mauling and many of us thought the war was more or less over at that point. But the Reds fought on where others—the French, for example—would certainly have surrendered. Their tenacity was at least in part because NKVD security detachments had checked a wholesale panic with the threat of summary executions. Doubtless the Reds knew that this was no idle threat, for they were certainly aware of the fate that had befallen thousands of Ukrainian and Polish political prisoners in Minsk, Lvov, Zolochiv, Rivne, Dubno, and Lutsk. So swift had been the progress of the Wehrmacht in the Ukraine that the retreating Soviets had no time to evacuate the prisoners held in the NKVD jails. And they hardly wanted to let them fall into our hands, where they could become SS auxiliaries, or German partisans. So before abandoning these cities to their fate, the NKVD set the prisons on fire—with all the prisoners still locked up inside. No, that’s not true. They took the Germans with them. I suppose they intended to swap them for Reds later on. But it didn’t turn out that way. We found them later, in a clover field on the road to Smolensk. They’d been stripped and machine-gunned to death.