the One from the Other (2006)

by Kerr, Philip - Bernie Gunther 04

  FORTY-ONE

  Everything was white. Excluded from the beatific vision, but purified from sin, I lay in a temporary place awaiting some sort of a decision about what to do with me. I hoped they would hurry up and decide because it was cold. Cold and wet. There was no sound, which is as it should have been. Death is not noisy. But it ought to have been warmer. Curiously, one side of my face seemed much colder than the other and, for a dreadful moment, I thought the decision about me had already been made and I was in hell. A small cloud kept visiting my head as if anxious to communicate something to me, and it was another moment or two before I realized that it was my own breath. My earthly torment was not yet over. Slowly I lifted my head from the snow and saw a man digging in the ground, just a few feet from my head. It seemed a curious thing to be doing in a forest in the middle of winter. I wondered what he was digging for.

  “Why’s it me who has to dig?” he moaned. This one sounded like the only real German of the three.

  “Because you’re the one who hit him, Shlomo,” said a voice. “If you hadn’t hit him we could have made him dig that grave.”

  The man digging threw down his spade. “That’ll have to do,” he said. “The ground is frozen solid. It’ll snow soon enough and the snow will cover it up, and that will be the end of him until the spring.”

  And then my head throbbed painfully. Most likely it was the explanation of why the man was digging striking a few brain cells. I pushed my arm underneath my forehead and let out a groan.

  “He’s coming around,” said the voice.

  The man who had been digging stepped out of the grave and hauled me to my feet. The big man. The man who had hit me. Shlomo. The German Jew.

  “For God’s sake,” said the voice, “don’t hit him again.”

  Weakly I glanced around me. Gruen’s laboratory was nowhere to be seen. Instead I was standing on the edge of the tree line on the mountainside just above Mönch. I recognized the coat of arms painted on the wall of the house. I put my hand on my head. There was a lump the size of a golf ball. One that had just been driven in excess of a hundred yards. Shlomo’s handiwork.

  “Hold the prisoner straight.” It was my interrogator speaking. His nose was not faring well in the cold. It looked like something from a song that was always on the radio these days. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

  Shlomo and Aaron—the younger one—each grabbed an arm and straightened me up. Their fingers felt like pincers. They were enjoying this. I started to speak. “Silence,” growled Shlomo. “You’ll get your turn, you Nazi bastard.”

  “The prisoner will strip,” said the interrogator.

  I didn’t move. Not much anyway. I was still swaying a bit from the blow on my head.

  “Strip him,” he said.

  Shlomo and Aaron went at it roughly, like they were looking for my wallet, flinging my clothes into the shallow grave in front of me. Shivering I folded my arms around my torso like a fur wrap. A fur wrap would have been better. The sun had dipped behind the mountain. And a wind was getting up.

  Now that I was naked the interrogator spoke again.

  “Eric Gruen. For crimes against humanity you are sentenced to death. Sentence to be carried out immediately. Do you wish to say anything?”

  “Yes.” My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. As far as these Jews were concerned, it did of course. They thought it belonged to Eric Gruen. No doubt they expected I would say something defiant like “Long live Germany” or “Heil Hitler.” But Nazi Germany and Hitler could not have been farther from my mind. I was thinking of Palestine. Perhaps Shlomo had hit me for not calling it Israel. Either way I had very little time left if I was going to talk my way out of a bullet in the back of the head. Shlomo was already checking the magazine of his big Colt automatic.

  “Please listen to me,” I said through chattering teeth. “I’m not Eric Gruen. There’s been a mistake. My real name is Bernie Gunther. I’m a private detective. Twelve years ago, in 1937, I did a job in Israel for Haganah. I spied on Adolf Eichmann for Fievel Polkes and Eliahu Golomb. We met in a café in Tel Aviv called Kaplinsky’s. Kaplinsky, or Kapulsky, I really don’t remember. It was near a cinema on Lilienblum Strasse. If you telephone Golomb he’ll remember me. He’ll vouch for me. I’m sure of it. He’ll remember that I borrowed Fievel’s gun. And what I advised him to do.”

  “Eliahu Golomb died in 1946,” said my interrogator.

  “Fievel Polkes, then. Ask him.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve no idea where he is.”

  “He gave me an address to write to, if ever I had some information for Haganah, and I couldn’t contact Polkes,” I said. “Polkes was Haganah’s man in Berlin. I was to write to an address in Jerusalem. To a Mr. Mendelssohn. I think it was Bezalel Workshops. I don’t remember the street. But I do remember that I was to place an order for a brass object damascened in silver, and a photograph of the Sixty-five Hospital. I’ve no idea what it means. But he said it would be a signal for someone in Haganah to get in contact with me.”

  “Maybe he did meet with Eliahu Golomb.” Shlomo spoke angrily to my interrogator. “We know he had contact with senior people in the SD. Including Eichmann. So what? You’ve seen the photographs, Zvi. We know he was chummy with the likes of Heydrich and Himmler. Anyone that shook that bastard Göring’s hand deserves a bullet in the head.”

  “Did you shoot Eliahu Golomb?” I asked. “Because he shook hands with Eichmann?”

  “Eliahu Golomb is a hero of the State of Israel,” Zvi said stiffly.

  “I’m very glad to hear it,” I said, shivering violently now. “But ask yourself this, Zvi. Why would he have trusted me with a name and address if he hadn’t trusted me? And while you’re thinking about it, here’s something else to consider. If you kill me, you’ll never find out where Eichmann is hiding.”

  “Now I’m sure he’s lying,” said Shlomo, and pushed me into the grave. “Eichmann is dead.” He spat into the grave beside me and worked the slide on his automatic. “I know because we killed him ourselves.”

  The grave was only a couple of feet deep and the fall didn’t hurt. Or at least I didn’t feel any pain. I was too cold. And I was talking for my life. Shouting for it.

  “Then you killed the wrong man,” I said. “I know, because yesterday I spoke to Eichmann. I can take you to him. I know where he’s hiding.”

  Shlomo leveled the gun at my head. “You lying Nazi bastard,” he said. “You’d say anything to save your own skin.”

  “Put the gun down, Shlomo,” commanded Zvi.

  “You don’t really buy that crap, do you, boss?” protested Shlomo. “He’ll say anything to stop us shooting him.”

  “I don’t doubt that for a moment,” said Zvi. “But as the intelligence officer of this cell, it’s my job to evaluate any information that comes our way.” He shivered. “And I refuse to do that on a mountainside in the middle of winter. We’ll take him in the house and question him some more. Then we’ll decide what to do with him.”

  They frog-marched me to the house, which was deserted, of course. I guessed it must have been rented. Either that or Henkell did not care what happened to it. For all I knew, the documents I had signed in Vienna, at Bekemeier’s office, had transferred all of Gruen’s wealth to the United States. In which case the two of them would be set up nicely for a good long while.

  Aaron made some coffee, which all of us drank gratefully. Zvi threw a blanket over my shoulders. It was the one that had been on Gruen’s legs while he had sat in his wheelchair, pretending to be a cripple.

  “All right,” said Zvi. “Let’s talk about Eichmann.”

  “Just humor me a minute,” I said. “And let me ask the questions.”

  “All right.” Zvi looked at his watch. “You have exactly one minute.”

  “The man you shot,” I said. “How did you identify him?”

  “We had a tip-off it was him,” said Zvi. “And he wasn’t surprised to see us. Nor did he deny that he w
as Eichmann. I think he would have denied it if he’d been someone else. Don’t you?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Did you check his teeth? Eichmann has two gold plates, from before the war. They would certainly have appeared on his SS medical record.”

  “There was no time,” admitted Zvi. “And it was dark.”

  “Do you remember where you left the body?”

  “Of course. There’s a maze of underground tunnels the SS planned to use for the secret murder of thirty thousand Jews from the Ebensee concentration camp. He’s under a pile of rocks in one of those tunnels.”

  “Did you say Ebensee?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the tip-off was from Jacobs, right?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Have you ever heard of Friedrich Warzok?”

  “Yes,” said Zvi. “He was the deputy commander of the Janowska Concentration Camp.”

  “Look, I’m pretty sure the man you shot wasn’t Eichmann but Warzok,” I said. “But it ought to be easy enough to check. All you have to do is go back to Ebensee and examine the body. Then you’ll know for sure that I’m telling the truth and that Eichmann is still alive.”

  “Why didn’t Warzok deny that he was Eichmann?” asked Zvi.

  “What would be the point?” I said. “To deny being Eichmann he would have had to have proved he was Warzok. And you’d have shot him anyway.”

  “True. But why would Jacobs sell us a dummy?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that Eichmann is about sixty miles from here. Right now. He’s in hiding. I know where. I can take you to him.”

  “He’s lying,” said Shlomo.

  “Anyone would think you don’t want to find Eichmann, Shlomo,” I said.

  “Eichmann is dead,” said Shlomo. “I shot him.”

  “Can you really risk being wrong about something like that?” I asked.

  “We would probably be walking into some kind of trap,” said Shlomo. “There’s only three of us. And supposing we did find Eichmann. What would we do with him?”

  “I’m glad you mentioned that Shlomo,” I said. “You let me go. That’s what you do. If you ask him nicely, Eichmann will even tell you my real name. He’ll also confirm part of my story. About being in Palestine before the war. Letting an innocent man go in return for helping you to find Eichmann seems like a very small price to pay.”

  Aaron said, “And what about those photographs? You were in the SS. You knew Heydrich and Himmler. And Nebe. Do you deny that?”

  “No, I don’t. But it’s not how it looks, that’s all. Look, it would take a long time to explain. Before the war I was a cop. Nebe was the boss of the criminal police. I was a detective. That’s all.”

  “Give me five minutes with him, Zvi,” said Shlomo. “I’ll find out if he’s telling the truth or not.”

  “So you do admit that it’s a possibility?”

  “Why did you say that the body in the tunnels must be Friedrich Warzok’s?” asked Zvi.

  “A priest I know, who works for the Comradeship, told me that Warzok disappeared from a safe house near Ebensee. He was supposed to go to Lisbon and get on a boat bound for South America. The same place that Eichmann is headed. They figure you killed Warzok the same way you killed Willy Hintze.”

  “Well, that’s true, at any rate,” agreed Zvi. “I was working for the CIA then. Or the OSS as we called it. And Aaron, he was British Army Intelligence. We did kill Willy Hintze. In the wood near Thalgau. A few months after Eichmann. The man we thought was Eichmann, anyway. Eichmann’s brother used to go to a small village in the Ebensee hills. His wife used to go to the same place. We went there in the dark. Kept the place under surveillance. There were four men staying in a chalet in the woods near the village. The man we killed matched the description we had of Eichmann.”

  “You know what I think?” I said. “I think Eichmann’s family were drawing you off, so that he could be somewhere else.”

  “Yes,” said Zvi. “That’s been done.”

  I’d said my piece. I was exhausted. I asked for a cigarette. Zvi gave me one. I asked for more coffee. Aaron poured me a cup. I was getting somewhere.

  “What are we going to do, boss?” Aaron asked Zvi.

  Zvi sighed irritably. “Lock him up somewhere while I think,” he said.

  “Where?” Aaron looked at Shlomo.

  “The bathroom,” said Shlomo. “There’s no window and there’s a key in the door.”

  I felt my heart leap in my chest. The bathroom was where I had hidden the gun that Engelbertina had given me. The one she claimed she wanted me to have in case Eric Gruen had used it on himself. But would it still be there?

  The two Jews escorted me to the bathroom. I waited until I heard the key removed from the lock on the other side of the door before opening the airing cupboard and reaching behind the hot-water tank. For a moment, the gun eluded me. The next second it was in my hand.

  The magazine in a Mauser is not much bigger than a cigarette lighter. I turned the gun upside down and, with frozen, nervous fingers, slid it up and out of the grip. Eight-millimeter ammunition is about the same size as the nib on a decent fountain pen. And it doesn’t look much more deadly. But there was an old saying in KRIPO: It’s not what you hit them with, it’s where you hit them. There were seven rounds in the magazine and one in the breech. I hoped I wouldn’t have to use any of them. But if I did I knew I would have the element of surprise. No one expects a naked man with just a blanket wrapped around him to be armed with a pistol. I pushed the magazine back into the grip and thumbed back the hammer. With the safety off, the gun was now ready to fire. There seemed little point in worrying about an accidental shot. These men were professional killers. If it came down to a gunfight I knew I would be lucky to get just one of them. I drank some water, used the lavatory, and then held the gun under the spot where my other hand held the blanket around my neck. At least I wouldn’t die like a dog. I had seen enough men shot on the edge of a ditch to know that I would shoot myself before I’d even allow that to happen. About half an hour passed, during which time I thought a lot about Kirsten and the men who had murdered her. If I managed ever to escape from these Israelis, I told myself, I was going to go after them. Even if it meant pursuing them all the way to America. At the very least I was going to follow them to the airbase. But which one? There were American airbases all over Germany. Then I remembered the letter I had found in Jacobs’s glove box. The letter from the Rochester Strong Memorial Hospital itemizing some medical equipment delivered to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, via the Rhein-Main Air Base. It seemed a safe bet that Rhein-Main would be where they were headed. I glanced at my wristwatch. It was almost six o’clock. The plane to Virginia was leaving at midnight. Finally I heard the sound of the key in the lock of the bathroom door. Even if he hadn’t been pointing a gun at me, Zvi’s face would have told me the worst.

  “No go, huh?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But what you say is just too fantastic. Even if you’re not who we think you are, you’re still SS. That much you have admitted. And then there are those photographs of you with Himmler and Heydrich. They were the sworn enemies of my people.”

  “In the wrong place at the wrong time,” I said. “Story of my life, I guess.”

  He stood back from the door and waved his gun at the corridor leading toward the door. “Come on,” he said grimly. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Gripping the gun tightly under my blanket, I came out of the bathroom and walked ahead of him. Aaron was waiting by the front door. Shlomo was outside. But so far only Zvi had a gun in his hand. Which meant I would certainly have to shoot him first. We came out of the house in darkness. Thoughtfully Shlomo switched on the outside light so that they could see what they were doing. We trudged up the slope toward the tree line and the open grave that awaited me. I had figured out when I would make my move.

  “I suppose this is your idea of poetic justice,” I said. “This kind of degrading execution.
” My voice sounded brave but my stomach was in knots. “To my mind this makes you as bad as one of those Special Action Groups.” I was hoping that at least one of them, Aaron perhaps, would start to feel a little disgusted with himself, and look away. I would shoot Zvi first, and then Shlomo. Shlomo was the only one of the three I really wanted to kill. The side of my head still ached miserably. At the edge of my grave I stopped and glanced around. All three of them were less than six feet away from me, within easy range of even a bad shot. It had been a while since I had killed a man. But there would be no hesitation. If necessary I would kill all three.

  FORTY-TWO

  It was bitterly cold. A wind whipped my blanket around my head for a moment. My clothes lay in the grave below me, dusted with a light covering of snow. But I was glad of the snow. The snow would show the blood if I hit a man. I’m a good shot—better with a pistol than with a rifle, that’s for sure—but with an eight-mill in the open air, it’s easy to think you’ve missed. Unlike a forty-five. If Zvi or Shlomo got one off I’d stay hit and look that way until I bled to death.

  “Any chance of a last cigarette?” I asked. Give a man something to think about before you take him on. That’s what they had taught us in the police academy.

  “A cigarette?” said Zvi.

  “You must be joking,” said Shlomo. “In this weather?”

  But Zvi was already reaching for his own packet when I dropped my blanket, turned, and fired. The shot hit Zvi on the cheek, just next to his left ear. I fired again and took the end of his nose off. Blood spattered onto Shlomo’s neck and shirt collar like a careless sneeze. At the same time the big man grappled, oxlike, for the gun under his armpit. And I shot him in the throat, dumping him on his backside in the snow like a heavy backpack. With one hand pressed to his Adam’s apple, and gurgling like a coffee machine, he found the handle of his gun and fumbled it out of his holster, pulling the trigger involuntarily as it appeared in front of his astonished-looking face, this shot killing Zvi stone dead. I pulled the trigger again and shot Shlomo between the eyes even as I stepped quickly toward Aaron and kicked him hard between the legs with a frozen foot. Despite the pain, he held onto my foot at least until I jabbed the gun into his eye. He yelled with pain and let go of my foot. I slipped on the snow and fell and then watched as Aaron staggered back for another second, tripped over Shlomo’s motionless body and fell down beside him. Scrambling up onto my knees I leveled my pistol at his head and yelled at him not to reach for his gun. Aaron didn’t hear me, or perhaps he chose to ignore me, but either way he pulled the Colt out of his holster and tried to make it ready to fire. But his fingers were cold. As cold as mine, probably, except that my finger was already on the trigger. And I had more than enough time on my side and feeling in my hand to adjust my aim and shoot the young Jew in the calf muscle. He yelped like a beaten dog, dropped his gun, and clutched his leg in agony. I thought I had fired five or six, perhaps more, I couldn’t remember for sure. So I picked up Zvi’s gun, and threw my own into the trees. Then I collected Aaron’s gun, and Shlomo’s, and quickly threw those after it. With Aaron effectively incapacitated, I went to the shallow grave, retrieved my half-frozen clothes and started to dress. And while I got dressed again, I spoke to Aaron: