the One from the Other (2006)

by Kerr, Philip - Bernie Gunther 04

  “Good-bye,” said the voice. “And please don’t call again.”

  The phone went dead. So I called again. What else could I do? But this time there was no reply. And the next time the operator told me that the number was out of order. Which left me sitting in the ink and without a change of trousers.

  I was still pondering the possibility that Britta Warzok had kicked some sand in my eyes and was now a perfect stranger to me when another stranger came out of the bathroom. He was sitting in Gruen’s wheelchair, which was being pushed, as usual, by Engelbertina but, already confounded by my telephone conversation with Wallace Beery and friend, it was a few seconds before I realized the stranger was Eric Gruen.

  “What do you think?” he said, stroking his now smoothly shaven face.

  “You’ve shaved off your beard,” I said, like an idiot.

  “Engelbertina did it,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “You look much better without it,” she said.

  “I know what you think,” he said. “I was asking Bernie.”

  I shrugged. “You look much better without it,” I said.

  “Younger,” she added. “Younger and better-looking.”

  “You’re just saying that,” he said.

  “No, it’s true,” she said. “Isn’t it, Bernie?”

  I nodded, studying the face more carefully now. There was something familiar in its features. The broken nose, the pugnacious chin, the tight mouth, and the smooth forehead. “Younger? Yes, I believe so. But there’s something else I can’t quite put my finger on.” I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe you were right, Eric. When you said that you thought we’d met before. Now that you’ve got rid of the face guard, there’s something about you that does strike me as familiar.”

  “Really?” He sounded vague now. As if he wasn’t quite sure himself.

  Engelbertina uttered a loud tut of exasperation. “Can’t you see it?” she said. “You pair of idiots. Isn’t it obvious? You look like brothers. Yes, that’s it. Brothers.”

  Gruen and I looked at each other and straightaway we knew that she was right. We did look quite alike. But she still fetched a hand mirror and obliged us to bow our heads together and view our reflection. “That’s who each of you is reminded of when you look at the other,” she announced, almost triumphantly. “Yourself, of course.”

  “I always did want an older brother,” said Gruen.

  “What’s with the older?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s true,” he insisted, and started to fill his pipe. “You look like an older version of me. A little more gray and worn-looking. Harder-bitten, certainly. Perhaps even a little coarser, on the edges. And I think you look less intelligent than me. Or maybe just a little puzzled. Like you can’t remember where it was you left your hat.”

  “You forgot to mention taller,” I said. “By about two and half feet.”

  He looked at me squarely, grinned, and lit his pipe. “No, on second thought, I do mean less intelligent. Perhaps even a little stupid. The stupid detective.”

  I thought of Britta Warzok and how it didn’t make any sense her retaining me if she had any idea that Father Gotovina was part of the Comradeship. Unless she did know all along and I was just too stupid to see through what she had been up to. Which of course I didn’t. The stupid detective. It had a nice ring to it. Like it might just have been true.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The next day Heinrich Henkell turned up for the weekend and declared he was going straight on to his laboratory. Gruen wasn’t feeling very well and had stayed in bed, so Henkell offered to take me with him.

  “Besides,” he added, by way of an extra reason for me to accompany him. “You’ve not really seen anything of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, have you, Bernie?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Well then, you must come along and have a look. It would do you good to get out of here for a while.”

  We drove slowly down the mountain, which was just as well, since, around a bend, we encountered a small herd of cattle crossing the road that ran parallel to the railway track. A little farther on, Henkell explained just how significant the railway track was in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

  “The railway line provides the clearest division between the two old towns,” he said. “Garmisch, on our left and to the east of the track, is a little more modern. Not least because that’s where the Olympic ski stadium is. Partenkirchen, to the west of the track, feels a lot older. It’s also where most of the Amis are based.”

  As we drove onto Bahnhofstrasse and along Zugspitzstrasse, he pointed out the façades of houses that were decorated with what were called “air paintings,” some of them resembling the façades on some of Munich’s elaborate rococo churches. Garmisch-Partenkirchen could not have seemed more Catholic if the pope had owned a ski chalet there. But the town also looked prosperous, and it was easy to see why. There were Americans everywhere, as if the war had only just ended. Most of the vehicles on the roads were Jeeps and U.S. Army trucks and, on every second building, was hanging the Stars and Stripes. It was hard to believe we were in Germany at all.

  “My God, look at it,” I exclaimed. “Next thing, they’ll be painting frescoes of Mickey Mouse on the buildings they’ve requisitioned.”

  “Oh, it’s not that bad,” said Henkell. “And you know, they mean well.”

  “So did the Holy Inquisition,” I said. “Pull up at that tobacconist’s. I need to get some Luckies.”

  “Didn’t I warn you about smoking?” he said, but he pulled up anyway.

  “With all this fresh air around?” I said. “Where’s the harm?”

  I stepped out of the car and went into the tobacconist’s. I bought some cigarettes and then walked several times around the shop, enjoying the sensation of behaving like a normal person again. The shopkeeper eyed me suspiciously.

  “Was there something else?” he asked, pointing at me with the stem of his meerschaum.

  “No, I was just looking,” I said.

  He pushed the pipe back in his smug little face and rocked on a pair of shoes that were decorated with edelweiss, oak leaves, and Bavarian blue-and-white ribbons. They lacked only a Blue Max or an Iron Cross to be the most German-looking shoes I had ever seen. He said, “This is a shop, not a museum.”

  “Not so as you’d notice,” I said, and went out quickly, the shop bell ringing in my ear.

  “I bet this place is real cozy in winter,” I said to Henkell when I was back in the car. “The locals are about as affable as a cold pitchfork.”

  “They’re really quite friendly when you get to know them,” he said.

  “Funny. That’s the same thing people say after their dog has bitten you.”

  We drove on toward the southwest of Partenkirchen, toward the foot of the Zugspitze, past the Post Hotel, the American Officers’ Club, the General Patton Hotel, the headquarters of the U.S. Army Southeastern Area Command, and the Green Arrow Ski Lodge. I might as well have been in Denver, Colorado. I had never been in Denver, Colorado, but I imagined it probably looked a lot like Partenkirchen. Patriotic, affected, overornamented, unfriendly in a friendly kind of way, and, ultimately, more than a little absurd.

  Henkell drove down a street of typical old Alpine houses and pulled into the driveway of a two-story white stucco villa with a wraparound wooden balcony and an overhanging roof that was as big as the deck on an aircraft carrier. On the wall was a fresco of a German Olympic skier. I knew he was German because his right arm appeared to be reaching for something, but just what this might be there was no way of telling, as someone had painted over his hand and wrist. And perhaps only a German would now have realized what the skier’s right hand had really been up to. Everything in Garmisch-Partenkirchen looked so committed to Uncle Sam and his welfare that it was hard to believe Uncle Adolf had ever been here.

  I stepped out of the Mercedes and glanced up at the Zugspitze that hung over the houses like a petrified wave of gray seawater. It was a hell of a lot
of geology.

  Hearing gunshots I flinched, probably even ducked a bit, and then looked behind me. Henkell laughed. “The Amis have a skeet range on the other side of the river,” he said, walking toward the front door. “Everything you see around here was requisitioned by the Amis. They let me use this place for my work. But before the war it was the science lab for the local hospital, on Maximilianstrasse.”

  “Doesn’t the hospital need a lab anymore?”

  “After the war the hospital became the prison hospice,” he said, searching for his door key. “For incurably sick German POWs.”

  “What was wrong with them?”

  “Psychiatric cases, most of them, poor fellows,” he said. “Shell shock, that kind of thing. Not my line really. Most of them died following an outbreak of viral meningitis. The rest they transferred to a hospital in Munich, about six months ago. The hospital is now being turned into a rest and recreation area for American service personnel.”

  He opened the door and went inside. But I stayed where I was, staring at a car parked across the street. It was a car I had seen before. A nice, two-door Buick Roadmaster. Shiny green, with whitewall tires, a rear end as big as an Alpine hillside, and a front grille like a dentist’s star patient.

  I followed Henkell through the door and into a narrow hallway that was noticeably warm. On the walls were several photographs of winter Olympians—Maxi Herber, Ernst Baier, Willy Bognor taking the Olympic oath, and a couple of ski jumpers who must have been thinking they could make it all the way to Valhalla. The air in the house had a chemical edge to it, as well as something decayed and botanical, like a pair of wet gardening gloves.

  “Shut the door behind you,” yelled Henkell. “We have to keep it warm in here.”

  As I turned to close the door I heard voices and when I turned back, I found the corridor blocked by someone I recognized. It was the American who had persuaded me to dig up my back garden in Dachau.

  “Well, if it isn’t the kraut with principles,” he said.

  “Coming from you, that’s not much of a compliment,” I said. “Stolen any Jewish gold lately?”

  He grinned. “Not lately. There’s not so much of it about these days. And you? How’s the hotel business?” He didn’t wait for my answer and, without taking his eyes off me, inclined his head back across his shoulder and shouted, “Hey, Heinrich. Where did you find this kraut? And why the hell is he here?”

  “I told you.” Henkell stepped back into the corridor. “This is the man I met at the hospital.”

  “You mean he’s the detective you were talking about?”

  “Yes,” said Henkell. “Have you two met before?”

  The American was wearing a different sports coat. This one was gray and cashmere. He wore a gray shirt, a gray woolen tie, gray flannels, and a pair of black wingtips. His glasses were different, too. These were tortoiseshell. But he still looked like the cleverest boy in the class.

  “Only in my previous life,” I said. “When I was a hotelkeeper.”

  “You had a hotel?”

  Henkell looked as if he found the idea of that absurd. Which it was, of course.

  “And guess where it was?” said the American, with amused contempt. “Dachau. About a mile from the old camp.” He laughed out loud. “Jesus, that’s like opening a health spa in a funeral parlor.”

  “It was good enough for you and your friend,” I remarked. “The amateur dentist.”

  Henkell laughed. “Does he mean Wolfram Romberg?” he asked the American.

  “He means Wolfram Romberg,” said the American.

  Henkell came along the corridor and put a hand on my shoulder. “Major Jacobs works for the Central Intelligence Agency,” he explained, guiding me into the next room.

  “Somehow I didn’t figure him for an army chaplain,” I said.

  “He’s been a good friend to me and Eric. A very good friend. The CIA provides this building and some money for our research.”

  “But somehow it never seems to be quite enough,” Jacobs said pointedly.

  “Medical research can be expensive,” said Henkell.

  We went into an office with a neat, professional, medical look. A large filing cabinet on the floor. A Biedermeier bookcase with dozens of medical texts inside, and a human skull on top. A first-aid cabinet on the wall next to a photograph of President Truman. An Art Deco drinks tray with a large selection of liquor bottles and mixers. A rococo walnut writing desk that was buried under several feet of papers and notebooks, with another human skull being used as a paperweight. Four or five cherry-wood chairs. And a bronze of a man’s head with a little plaque that said the likeness was of Alexander Fleming. Henkell pointed through two sets of sliding glass doors at a very well equipped laboratory.

  “Microscopes, centrifuges, spectrometers, vacuum equipment,” he said. “It all costs money. The major here has sometimes had to find several unauthorized streams of revenue in order to keep us going. Including Oberscharführer Romberg and his Dachau nest egg.”

  “Right,” growled Jacobs. He drew aside the net curtain and stared suspiciously out of the office window into the back garden of the villa. A couple of birds had begun a noisy fight. There is a lot to be said for the way Nature handles itself. I wouldn’t have minded taking a sock at Jacobs myself.

  I smiled. “It’s certainly none of my business what the major did with all those poor people’s stolen valuables.”

  “You got that right,” said Jacobs. “Kraut.”

  “What exactly are you working on, Heinrich?” I asked.

  Jacobs looked at Henkell. “For Christ’s sake, don’t tell him,” he said.

  “Why not?” asked Henkell.

  “You don’t know anything about the guy,” he said. “And have you forgotten that you and Eric are working for the American government? I would use the word ‘secret,’ only I don’t think you guys know how to spell it.”

  “He’s staying in my house,” said Henkell. “I trust Bernie.”

  “I’m still trying to figure out why that is,” said Jacobs. “Or is it just an SS thing? Old comrades. What?”

  I was still wondering a little about that myself.

  “I told you why,” said Henkell. “Eric gets a bit lonely, sometimes. Possibly even suicidal.”

  “Jesus, I wish I was as lonely as Eric is,” snorted Jacobs. “That broad who looks after him, Engelbertina, or whatever her name is. How anyone could be lonely with her around sure beats me.”

  “He does have a point,” I said.

  “You see? Even the kraut agrees with me,” said Jacobs.

  “I wish you wouldn’t use that word,” said Henkell.

  “‘Kraut’? What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s like me calling you a kike,” said Henkell. “Or a yid.”

  “Yeah, well, get used to it, buddy,” said Jacobs. “The yids are in charge now. And you krauts will have to do what you’re told.”

  Henkell looked at me and, quite deliberately, as if to irritate the major, said, “We’re working on finding a cure for malaria.”

  Jacobs sighed loudly.

  “I thought there was a cure for that,” I said.

  “No,” said Henkell. “There are several treatments. Some of them are more effective than others. Quinine. Chloroquine. Atebrin. Proguanil. Some of them have rather unpleasant side effects. And of course, in time, the disease will become resistant to these drugs. No, when I say a cure, I mean something more than that.”

  “Give him the keys to the safe, why don’t you?” said Jacobs.

  Henkell continued, hardly deterred by the Ami’s obvious displeasure. “We’re working on a vaccine. Now that really would be something worthwhile, wouldn’t you say so, Bernie?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Come and have a look.” Henkell ushered me through the first set of glass doors. Jacobs followed.

  “We have two sets of glass doors to keep things extra warm in the lab. You may find you have to remove your jacket.” H
e closed the first set of glass doors before opening the second set. “If I’m in here for any length of time, I usually wear just a tropical shirt. It really is quite tropical in here. Like a hothouse.”

  As soon as the second set of doors was open, the heat hit me. Henkell had not exaggerated. It was like walking into a South American jungle. Jacobs had already started to sweat. I removed my jacket and rolled up my sleeves.

  “Every year almost a million people die of malaria, Bernie,” said Henkell. “A million.” He nodded at Jacobs. “He just wants a vaccine to give to American soldiers before they go to whichever part of the world they intend to occupy next. Southeast Asia, possibly. Central America, for sure.”

  “Why don’t you write an article for the newspapers?” said Jacobs. “Tell the whole goddamn world what we’re up to here.”

  “But Eric and I want to save lives,” said Henkell, ignoring Jacobs. “This is his work as much as it is mine.” He took off his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt collar. “Think of it, Bernie. The idea that Germans could do something that would save a million lives a year. That might go a long way to balancing the books for what Germany did during the war. Wouldn’t you say so?”

  “It might at that,” I admitted.

  “A million lives saved every year,” said Henkell. “Why, in six years, even the Jews might have forgiven us. And in twenty, perhaps the Russians, too.”

  “He wants to give it to the Russians,” murmured Jacobs. “Beautiful.”

  “That’s what drives us forward, Bernie.”

  “To say nothing of all the money they’ll make if they do manage to synthesize a vaccine,” said Jacobs. “Millions of dollars.”

  Henkell shook his head. “He doesn’t have the first idea of what really drives us,” he said. “He’s a bit of a cynic. Aren’t you, Jonathan?”

  “If you say so, kraut.”

  I glanced around the hothouse laboratory. There were two work benches, one on either side of the room. One was home to a variety of scientific equipment, including several microscopes. On the other were ranged a dozen or so heated glass cases. Under a window looking out onto another part of the neat garden were three sinks. But it was the glass cases that drew my attention. Two of them were teeming with insect life. Even through the glass you could hear the whining sound of the many mosquitoes, like tiny opera singers trying to sustain a high note. It made my flesh creep just to look at them.