the One from the Other (2006)

by Kerr, Philip - Bernie Gunther 04

  Geller was carrying a Spanish-German dictionary under his arm, and another lay open on the table in front of the chair where Eichmann—Ricardo Klement—had been sitting. The younger man smiled. “We were just testing each other’s Spanish vocabulary,” he explained. “Ricardo is much better at languages than I am.”

  “Really?” I said. I might have mentioned Ricardo’s knowledge of Yiddish, but thought better of it. I glanced around the sitting room noting the chessboard, the Monopoly set, the library full of books, the newspapers and magazines, the new General Electric radio, the kettle and the coffee cups, the full ashtray, and the blankets—one of these had been over Eichmann’s legs. It was plain to see that these two men spent a lot of time sitting in that room. Holed up. Hiding. Waiting for something. A new passport, or passage on a ship to South America.

  “We’re very lucky that there’s a priest from Buenos Aires here in the monastery,” said the Father. “Father Santamaría has been teaching Spanish to our two friends, and telling them all about Argentina. It makes a real difference going somewhere when you can already speak the language.”

  “Did you have a good journey?” asked Eichmann. If he was nervous at seeing me again he did not show it. “Where have you come from?”

  “Vienna,” I said. And then shrugged. “The journey was tolerable. Do you know Vienna, Herr Klement?” I offered my cigarettes around.

  “No, not really,” he said, with a flicker of an eyelid. I had to hand it to him. He was good. “I don’t know Austria at all. I’m from Breslau.” He took one of my cigarettes and let me light him. “Of course it’s now called Wrocław, or something, in Poland. Can you imagine it? Are you from Vienna, Herr—?”

  “Dr. Hausner,” I said.

  “A doctor, eh?” Eichmann smiled. His teeth hadn’t improved any, I noticed. No doubt it amused him to know that I wasn’t a doctor. “It’ll be interesting to have a medical man around, won’t it, Geller?”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Geller, smoking one of my Luckies. “I always wanted to be a doctor. Before the war, that is.” He smiled sadly. “I don’t suppose I shall ever be a doctor, now.”

  “You’re a young man,” I said. “Anything is possible when you’re young. Take my word for it. I was young once myself.”

  But Eichmann was shaking his head. “That was true before the war,” he said. “In Germany anything was possible. Yes. We proved that, to the world. But not now. I’m afraid it’s no longer true. Not now that half of Germany is ruled by godless barbarians, eh, Father? Shall I tell you the true meaning of the Federal Republic of Germany, gentlemen? We are simply a slit trench in the front line of a new war. A war waged by the—”

  Eichmann checked himself. And then he smiled. The old Eichmann smile. As if he objected to my tie.

  “But what am I saying? None of it matters now. Not anymore. Today has no meaning. For us, today does not exist any more than yesterday. For us, there is only tomorrow. Tomorrow is all that’s left.” For a moment his smile grew slightly less bitter. “Just like the old song says. Tomorrow belongs to me. Tomorrow belongs to me.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  The monastery beer was excellent. It was what they called a Trappist beer, which meant it was made under strictly controlled conditions and only by Benedictine monks. The beer they produced, which was called Schluckerarmer, was copper-colored, with a head like an ice cream. It had a sweet, almost chocolaty taste and a strength that belied its flavor and origins. And it was a lot easier to imagine it being drunk by American soldiers than austere and God-fearing monks. Besides, I had tasted American beer. Only a country that had once prohibited alcohol could have produced a beer that tasted like fortified mineral water. Only a country like Germany could have produced a beer strong enough to make a monk risk the wrath of the Roman Catholic Church by nailing ninety-five theses to a church door in Wittenberg. That was what Father Bandolini told me, anyway. Which was just one reason why he preferred wine.

  “If you ask me, the whole Reformation can be blamed on strong beer,” he opined. “Wine is a perfect Catholic drink. It makes people sleepy and complicit. Beer just makes them argumentative. And look at the countries that drink a lot of beer. They’re mainly Protestant. And the countries where they drink a lot of wine? Roman Catholic.”

  “What about the Russians?” I asked. “They drink vodka.”

  “That’s a drink to help you find oblivion,” said Father Bandolini. “Nothing to do with God at all.”

  But none of this was as interesting as what he told me next. Which was that the monastery’s beer truck was leaving for Garmisch-Partenkirchen later that same morning. And that I was welcome to accompany it.

  I fetched my coat and my gun, but I left the bag with my money in my room. It would have looked odd to have taken it with me. Besides, I had a key to the door. And I was coming back for my new passport. Then I followed the Father to the brewery where the truck was already being loaded with beer crates.

  There were two monks manning the truck, which was an old two-cylinder Framo. Each man was a testament to the mesomorphic, manly qualities of the beer. Father Stoiber, bearded and quite obviously bibulous, had a belly like a millstone. Father Seehofer was as burly as a kiln-dried barrel. There was room for the three of us in the cab of the truck, but only when we exhaled. By the time we reached Garmisch-Partenkirchen, I felt as thin as the sausage in a Saxon pastor’s sandwich. But it wasn’t just a tight squeeze. The Framo’s small, 490cc engine delivered only fifteen-brake horsepower and, with my extra weight, we struggled a bit on some of the icy mountain roads. And it was just as well that Stoiber, who had seen action in the Ukraine through the worst of a Russian winter, was an excellent driver.

  We drove into town, not from the north through Sonnenbichl, but up from the southwest, along Griesemer Strasse and in the cold shadow of the Zugspitze, to that part of Partenkirchen where most of the Americans were based. The two monks told me they had deliveries for the Elbsee Hotel, the Crystal Springs Hotel, the Officers’ Club, the Patton Hotel, and the Green Arrow Ski Lodge. They dropped me at the junction of Zugspitzstrasse and Bahnhofstrasse, and looked slightly relieved when I told them I would try to make my own way back to the monastery.

  I found the street of old Alpine-style villas where Gruen and Henkell had performed some of their more recent experiments. I couldn’t remember the number, but the villa, with its Olympic skier fresco, was easy enough to find. In the distance I heard the muffled gunshots from the skeet range, just like before. The only difference was that there was a lot more snow on the ground. It was heaped on top of and around the gingerbread houses like powdered icing sugar. There was no sign of Jacobs’s Buick Roadmaster, just a pile of horse dung on the street where it had been parked. I had seen several sleighs around town and I was banking on getting one to take me up to Mönch, at Sonnenbichl, when I’d finished snooping around the villa.

  I wasn’t exactly sure of what I thought I might find. From the tenor of my last conversation with Eric Gruen, it was hard for me to know if he and the others had already left the area. But the possibility that they hadn’t was strong, since they could hardly have expected me to effect an escape from Vienna so quickly. Vienna was a closed city and not easy to get in or out of. Gruen had been right about that. All the same, he would surely have been aware that the money he had given me, by way of compensation, made my return to Garmisch, at the very least, reasonably possible. And if they were still in the area they would certainly have taken some precautions with their security. I tightened my hand on the gun in my pocket and went around to the back of the house to look in the window of the laboratory. With the snow in the garden up to my knees, it was just as well I had bought boots and gaiters in Vienna. The snow around Mönch would be even deeper.

  There were no lights on in the villa. And there was no one in the lab. I pressed my nose closer to the window, close enough to see through the double glass doors into the office beyond. That was deserted, too. I selected a handy-looking log from a neat
pile of fire-wood underneath the balcony and glanced around for a window to knock in. The piles of snow behind me muffled the noise of breaking glass nicely. Deep snow is a burglar’s best friend. Carefully I chipped out a few jagged edges that had stayed in the frame and then put my hand in, lifted the catch, opened the window, and climbed inside. Glass crunched under my feet as I jumped down to the laboratory floor. Everything was just as it had been before. Nothing had been moved. All was hot and still. Except the mosquitoes, of course. These became more agitated as I laid the palm of my hand on the glass side of their habitat to check how warm it was. It felt just right, which is to say even warmer than the room, which was saying something, of course. They were all doing just fine. But I could fix that. And reaching behind each tank I switched off the heaters that kept these deadly little bugs alive. With a broken window letting freezing cold air into the lab, I figured they would all be dead in a few hours.

  I opened and closed both sets of glass doors and went into the office. Straightaway I understood that I had not come too late. Far from it. On the blotter in the center of Gruen’s desk were four new American passports. I picked one up and opened it. The woman I had known as Frau Warzok, Gruen’s wife, was now Mrs. Ingrid Hoffman. I looked at the others. Heinrich Henkell was now Mr. Gus Braun. Engelbertina was Mrs. Bertha Braun. And Eric Gruen was now Eduard Hoffman. I started to write down the new names. Then I just pocketed all four passports. They could hardly go anywhere without them. Nor without their air tickets, which were also on the blotter. These were U.S. military tickets. I checked the date, the time, and the destination. Mr. and Mrs. Braun and Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman were leaving Germany that night. They were all booked on a midnight flight to Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. All I had to do was sit down and wait. Someone—Jacobs, probably—would surely be along quite soon to collect these tickets and the passports. And when he came, I would make him drive me up to Mönch, where, with three fugitives from Allied Justice cornered, I would take my chances and call the police in Munich. Let them sort it out.

  I sat down, took out my gun—the one given to me in Vienna by Father Lajolo—worked the slide to put one up the spout, thumbed off the safety, and laid the weapon on the desk in front of me. I was looking forward to seeing my old friends again. I thought about smoking a cigarette and then decided against it. I didn’t want Major Jacobs smelling the smoke as he came through the front door.

  Half an hour passed and, becoming a little bored, I decided to poke around the filing cabinet; when, eventually, I spoke to the police, it might look better if I had some documentary evidence to support what I was going to tell them. Not that Gruen and Henkell had experimented on Jews at Dachau. But that they had continued their medical experiments on local German POWs. They wouldn’t like that any more than I did. If, by some chance, a court wasn’t inclined to indict Gruen, Henkell, and Zehner for what they had done during the war, no German court could have ignored the murders of German servicemen.

  The manila files were quite meticulous, being neatly arranged in alphabetical order. There were no records of what had happened before 1945, but for every person who had been infected with malaria since then, there was a detailed set of case notes. The first one I examined from the top drawer of the cabinet was for a Lieutenant Fritz Ansbach, who had been a German POW receiving treatment for nervous hysteria in the Partenkirchen hospital. He had been injected with malaria in the last days of November 1947. Within twenty-one days he had developed the full-blown disease, at which point the test vaccine, Sporovax, had been injected into his bloodstream. Ansbach was dead seventeen days later. Cause of death: malaria. Official cause of death: viral meningitis. I read several other files from that drawer. They were all the same. I left them out on the desk, ready to take with me when I went to Mönch. I had all that I needed. And I almost didn’t open the middle drawer in that evil filing cabinet at all. In which case I would never have come across the file labeled “Handlöser.”

  I read the file slowly. And then I read it again. It used a lot of medical words that I didn’t understand and one or two that I did. There were lots of graphs showing the “subject’s” temperature and heart rate before and after they had put her arms inside a box containing up to a hundred infected mosquitoes. I remembered how I had thought she had been bitten by fleas or bed lice. And all that time, Henkell had been turning up at the Max Planck psychiatric hospital with his little box of death. They had given her the test vaccine, Sporovax IV, but it hadn’t worked. The way it hadn’t worked for any of the others. And so Kirsten had died. It was easily done. And very easily explained. Malaria could be written off as influenza just as easily as viral meningitis, especially in Germany, in a hospital where facilities were few. My wife had been murdered. I felt my stomach collapse in upon itself like an imploding balloon. The bastards had murdered my wife, just as surely as if they’d put a gun to her head and blown out her brains.

  I looked again at her case notes. Mistakenly booked into the hospital as a single woman, and wrongly described as mentally retarded, it had been assumed that no one would really miss her. There was no mention of me. Only that she had been transferred to the General Hospital, where she had “succumbed” to the disease. “Succumbed.” They made it sound like she had just gotten tired and gone to sleep, instead of having died. As if they didn’t know the one from the other any more than they knew that I had been this poor woman’s husband. Otherwise they would surely have recorded my name in their damned file.

  I closed my eyes. Not fleas or bed lice at all. But mosquito bites. And the insect that had bitten me during one visit to the Max Planck? A single escaped mosquito, perhaps? Perhaps that explained the so-called pneumonia I had caught following my beating at the hands of Jacobs’s friends in the ODESSA. Perhaps it had not been pneumonia at all. Perhaps it had been a mild dose of malaria. Henkell wouldn’t have been able to tell the one from the other. There was no reason at all for him to have suspected that my own fever had an “entomological vector,” as they called it, any more than there was reason for him to have known that Kirsten Handlöser was my wife. Not under those circumstances. Which was probably just as well. They might have given me Sporovax.

  This put a very different complexion on things. Involving the police looked much too unpredictable now. I needed to know that these men would be properly punished for their crimes. And to know that for sure I would have to punish them myself. Suddenly it had become much easier to understand those Jewish avenger squads. The Nakam. What kind of punishment was a few years in prison for men who had committed such disgusting crimes? Men like Dr. Franz Six from the Jewish Department at the SD. The man who, back in September 1937, had sent me to Palestine. Or Israel, as we now had to call it. I had no idea what had happened to Paul Begelmann, the Jew whose money Six coveted. But I remembered seeing Six again, in Smolensk, where he had commanded a Special Action Group that had massacred seventeen thousand people. And for this he had received a sentence of just twenty years. If the new federal government of Germany had its way, he would be out on parole before he’d served even a quarter of that sentence. Five years for murdering seventeen thousand Jews. No wonder the Israelis felt obliged to murder these men.

  Hearing a sound above me I opened my eyes and recognized much too late that the sound had been the hammer on a snub-nosed thirty-eight-caliber Smith & Wesson being thumbed back. The nice thirty-eight with the J-frame and rubberized grip I had seen in the glove box of Jacobs’s Buick. Only now it was in his hand. I never forget a gun. Especially when it’s pointed at my face.

  “Lean back from the desk,” he said quietly. “And put your hands on your head. Do it slowly. This thirty-eight has a very light action and might easily go off if your hand goes within three feet of that Mauser. I saw your footprints in the snow. Just like Good King Wenceslas. You should have been more careful.”

  I sat back in the chair and placed my hands on my head, watching the black hole of the two-inch barrel as it got closer. We both knew I was a dead man if
he pulled the trigger. A thirty-eight provides a human skull with a lot of surplus ventilation.

  “If I had more time,” he said, “I might be real curious as to how you got yourself out of Vienna as quickly as you did. Impressive. Then again, I told Eric not to let you have the money. You used it to get out of the city, right?” He leaned forward, carefully, and picked up my gun.

  “As a matter of fact, I still have the money,” I said.

  “Oh? Where is it?” He eased the hammer off my automatic and tucked it under his trouser belt.

  “About forty miles from here,” I said. “We could go and get it, if you like.”

  “And I could pistol-whip it out of you, Gunther. Luckily for you, I’m rather pressed for time.”

  “Catching a plane?”

  “That’s right. Now hand over those passports.”

  “What passports?”

  “If I have to ask a second time, you’ll lose the ear. And don’t delude yourself that anyone will hear the shot and give a shit. Not with that skeet range around the corner.”

  “Good point,” I said. “Can I use my hand to get them? They’re in my coat pocket. Or would you prefer I tried for them with my teeth?”

  “Forefinger and thumb only.” He took a step back, grabbing hold of his wrist, and extended the hand holding the gun at my head. Like he was getting ready to fire. At the same time his keen eyes glanced down at the open file I had been reading. I said nothing about the file. There was no point in putting him on guard any more than he already was. I lifted the passports out of my pocket and tossed them on top of the file.