A Quiet Flame

by Philip Kerr

  Pedro Olmos was from Dresden. He had met and married Geralda in Buenos Aires. They had several dogs and cats but no children. They were a good-looking couple. Geralda didn’t speak German, which was probably why Pedro felt able to confess that he’d been a lot more than just friendly with Coco Chanel while he was stationed in Paris. He was certainly smooth enough. He spoke excellent Spanish, French, and some Polish, which, he said, was why he was working in Osram’s travel department. Both he and Geralda were much exercised about the city’s stray-dog population, which was considerable, and they had a grant from the city authorities to round them up and gas them. It seemed an unusual occupation for a woman who described herself as an animal lover. She even took me to their basement and showed me the humane-killing facility she used. This was a simple metal hut with a rubber-sealed door that was attached to a petrol generator. Geralda carefully explained that when the dogs were dead, she burned the bodies in their household incinerator. She seemed very proud of her “humane service” and described it in a way that made me think she’d never heard of such a thing as a gas van. Given Olmos’s SS background, it wasn’t too difficult to imagine that perhaps she had got the idea from her husband.

  I asked him the same question I had asked Vaernet: Was there anyone among our old comrades in Argentina whom he considered to be beyond the pale?

  “Oh, yes.” Olmos spoke with alacrity, and I was beginning to realize that there was not much loyalty among the old comrades. “I can give you the name of just such a man. Probably the most dangerous man I’ve ever met, anywhere. His name is Otto Skorzeny.”

  I tried not to look surprised. Naturally, I knew of Otto Skorzeny. Few Germans had not heard of the daring author of Mussolini’s mountaintop rescue in 1943. I even remembered seeing photographs of his heavily scarred face in all the magazines when Hitler had awarded him the Knight’s Cross. He certainly looked like a dangerous man. The trouble was, Skorzeny did not appear on the list of names that the colonel had given me. And until his name came up, I’d had no idea that he was still alive, let alone that he now lived in Argentina. A ruthless killer, yes. But a psychopath? I decided to ask Montalbán about him when next I saw him.

  Meanwhile, Pedro Olmos had thought of someone else he considered a person undeserving of a good-conduct pass. The ratline, as the Americans called organizations like the ODESSA and the Old Comrades, which existed to help Nazis escape from Europe, was beginning to look well named. The man Olmos thought of was called Kurt Christmann.

  Christmann was interesting to me, because he was from Munich and born in 1907, which made him twenty-five at the time of Anita Schwarz’s murder. He was forty-three years old, once a lawyer who now worked for the Fuldner Bank on Avenida Córdoba. Christmann lived in a comfortable apartment on Esmeralda and, within five minutes of meeting him, I had marked him down as a definite suspect. He had commanded a killing detail in Russia. For a while, I’d been in the Ukraine myself, of course. It gave us something to talk about. Something I could use to help gain his confidence and get him talking.

  Fair-haired, with rimless glasses and a musician’s slender hands, Christmann wasn’t exactly the kind of blond beast you’d have seen striding across the screen in a Leni Riefenstahl movie. He was more the sort you’d have seen walking quietly through a law library with a couple of books under his arm. Until he’d joined the SS in 1942, he’d worked for the Gestapo in Vienna, Innsbruck, and Salzburg, and I marked him down as the kind of promotion-hungry, medal-seeking Nazi I’d often met before. Not so much blood and iron as bleach and Bakelite.

  “So you were out in Ukraine, too,” he said, going all comradely on me. “Which part?”

  “White Ruthenia. Minsk. Lvov. Lutsk. All over.”

  “We were in the southern part of Russia, mainly,” he said. “Krasnodar and Stavropol. And in the northern Caucasus. The action group was headed by Otto Ohlendorf, and Beerkamp. My unit was commanded by an officer named Seetzen. Nice fellow. We had three gas vans at our disposal. Two big Saurers and a little Diamond. Mostly it was clearing out hospitals and asylums. The children’s homes were the worst. But don’t think these were normal healthy kids, mind. They weren’t. They were gimps, you know? Feebleminded, retarded kids. Bedridden, disabled. Better off out of it, if you asked me. Especially given the way the Popovs looked after them, which was to say hardly at all. The conditions in some of these places were appalling. In a way, gassing them like we did was a bloody kindness. Putting them out of their misery, we were. You’d have done the same for an injured horse. Anyway, that’s the way we looked at it.”

  He paused, as if recalling some of the terrible scenes that he had witnessed. I almost pitied him. I wouldn’t have had his thoughts for anything.

  “Mind you, it was still hard work. Not everyone could stick it. Some of the kids would catch on as to what was happening and we’d have to throw them in the vans. That could be pretty rough. We had to shoot a few who tried to escape. But once they were inside the van and the doors were shut, it was pretty quick, I think. They’d hammer on the sides of the truck for a few minutes and that would be it. Over. The more of them we managed to squeeze into the truck, the quicker it would be. I was in charge of that detail between August 1942 and July 1943, by which time we were in general retreat, of course.

  “Then I went to Klagenfurt, where I was chief of the Gestapo. Then Koblenz, where I was also head of the Gestapo. After the war I was interned in Dachau, by the Amis, only I managed to escape. Hopeless, they were, the Amis. Couldn’t guard a fire. Then it was Rome, and the Vatican, before I ended up here. Right now, I’m working for Fuldner, but I’m planning to try the real estate business. There’s plenty of money to be made in this city. But I do miss Austria. Most of all I miss the skiing. I was the German police ski champion, you know.”

  “Really?” Clearly, I had misjudged him completely. He might have been a murdering bastard but he was a sporting murdering bastard.

  “You are right to look surprised, Herr Hausner.” He laughed. “I’ve been ill, you see. I was in Brazil before coming here to Argentina and managed to pick up a case of malaria. Really, I’ve still not recovered full health.” He went into the kitchen and opened the door of a new-looking Di Tella refrigerator. “Beer?”

  “No, thanks.” I was particular about whom I drank with. “Not while I’m on duty.”

  Kurt Christmann laughed. “I used to be like you,” he said, opening a beer bottle. “But now I try to be more like the Argentines. I even take a siesta in the afternoon. People like me and you, Hausner. We’re lucky to be alive.” He nodded. “A passport would be good. But I don’t think I’ll be going back to Germany. Germany’s finished, I think, now that the Popovs are there. There’s nothing there for me, except perhaps a hangman’s noose.”

  “We did what we had to do,” I said. “What we were told to do.” I knew this speech well enough by now. I’d heard it often during the last five years. “We were just carrying out orders. If we’d refused to obey, we would have been shot ourselves.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Christmann. “That’s right. We were only obeying orders.”

  Now that I’d let him run a bit, I decided to try to reel the line in.

  “Mind you,” I said. “There were some. A few. A few rotten apples who enjoyed the killing. Who went beyond the normal course of duty.”

  Christmann pressed the beer bottle to his cheek and thought for a moment; then he shook his head. “You know something? I really don’t think that’s true. Not that I saw, anyway. Maybe it was different in your outfit. But the men I was with, in the Ukraine. All of them handled themselves with great courage and fortitude. That’s what I miss most. The comradeship. The brothers in arms. That’s what I miss most.”

  I nodded, in seeming sympathy. “I miss Berlin, most of all,” I said. “Munich, too. But Berlin most of all.”

  “You know something? I never went to Berlin.”

  “What? Never?”

  “No.” He chuckled and drank some mo
re beer. “I don’t suppose I shall ever see it now, eh?”

  I went away, full of satisfaction at having done an excellent day’s work. It’s the people you meet that make being a detective so rewarding. Once in a while you meet a real sweetie, like Kurt Christmann, who restores your faith in medieval justice and vigilantism and other, thoroughly sensible Latin American practices like strappado and the garrote. Sometimes it’s hard to walk away from people like that without shaking your head and wondering how it ever got to be that bad.

  How did it ever get to be that bad?

  I think something happened to Germany after the Great War. You could see it on the streets of Berlin. A callous indifference to human suffering. And perhaps, after all those demented, sometimes cannibalistic killers we had during the Weimar years, we ought to have seen it coming: the murder squads and the death factories. Killers who were demented but also quite ordinary. Krantz, the schoolboy. Denke, the shopkeeper. Grossmann, the door-to-door salesman. Gormann, the bank clerk. Ordinary people who committed crimes of unparalleled savagery. As I was looking back at them now, they seemed like a sign of that which was to follow. The camp commanders and the Gestapo types. The desk murderers and the sadistic doctors. The ordinary fritzes who were capable of such dreadful atrocities. The quiet, respectable, Mozart-loving Germans among whom I was now cast away to live.

  What did it take to murder thousands of children, week in week out? An ordinary person? Or someone who might have done it before?

  Kurt Christmann had spent a whole year of his life gassing Russian and Ukrainian children. The feebleminded, the retarded, the bedridden, and the disabled. Children like Anita Schwarz. Perhaps, for him, there had been more to it than just obeying orders. Perhaps he had actually disliked disabled children. Maybe even enough to have murdered one in Berlin. I certainly hadn’t forgotten that he was from Munich. I’d always had a strong suspicion that the man I’d been looking for, in 1932, had come from Munich.

  10

  BERLIN, 1932

  THERE WERE TWO MEN waiting by my car. They were wearing hats and double-breasted suits that were all buttoned up the way you do when you’ve got more than just a fountain pen in your breast pocket. I told myself they were a little far south to be Ricci Kamm’s. A little too smooth, too. Ring members tended to wear broken noses and cauliflower ears the way some men wear watch chains and carry canes. There was all that and the fact that they looked pleased to see me. When you’ve been in the zoo as long as I have, you kind of get to know when an animal is going to attack. It gets all nervous and agitated, because, for most people, it’s upsetting to kill someone. But these two were calm and self-assured.

  “Are you Gunther?”

  “That all depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what you say next?”

  “Someone wants to talk to you.”

  “So why isn’t someone here?”

  “Because he’s in the Eldorado. Buying you a drink.”

  “Does this someone have a name?”

  “Herr Diels. Rudolf Diels.”

  “Maybe I’m the shy type. Maybe I don’t like the Eldorado. Besides, it’s a little early for a nightclub.”

  “Exactly. Makes it nice and quiet. Somewhere private you can hear yourself think.”

  “I get all sorts of strange ideas when I hear myself think,” I said. “Like maybe there’s some point to my existence. But since there isn’t, we’d better get along to the Eldorado.”

  The Eldorado on Motzstrasse was on the ground floor of a modern building that was in the High Concrete style. Like the old Eldorado, which still existed on Lutherstrasse, the new was a he/she club popular with Berlin high society, expensive prostitutes, and adventurous tourists eager to get a taste of real Berlin decadence. Inside, the club was a facsimile of a Chinese opium-smoking den. Only it wasn’t just a facsimile. If sex was one reason to visit the Eldorado, then the ready supply of drugs was another. But at that hour of the day, the place was more or less deserted. The Bernd Robert Rhythmics had just finished rehearsing. In the corner, beside a copper gong as big as a truck tire, a youngish man with a largish scar on his face was sharing a bottle of champagne with two girls. I knew they were girls—not because of their womanly hands and manicured fingernails but because of their private parts, which were easy to see since both girls were also naked.

  Seeing me arrive in the club with his two double-breasted scouts, the scar-faced man stood up and waved me toward him. He was dark, with a weak chin. I guessed his age was about thirty. His suit looked handmade and he was smoking a Gildemann cigar. He had a woman’s lips, and his eyebrows were so neat and fine that they almost looked plucked and then drawn in with a pencil. His eyes were brown, with long lashes. His hands were womanish, too, and but for the scar and the company he was keeping, I might have wondered if he was a bit warm. But he was polite and welcoming, which made me wonder how he’d come by his scar.

  “Herr Gunther,” he said. “I’m glad you came. This is Fräulein Olafsson, and Fräulein Larsson. They are both on holiday from Sweden. Aren’t you, ladies?” He looked quickly around. “There’s another one somewhere. Fräulein Liljeroth. But I think she must have gone to powder her nose. If you know what I mean.”

  I bowed politely. “Ladies.”

  “They’re trying to behave like true Berliners,” said Diels. “Isn’t that right, ladies?”

  “Nakedness is normal,” said one of the Swedes. “Desire is healthy. Don’t you agree?”

  “Here, sit down and have a drink,” said Diels, and pushed a glass of champagne toward me.

  It was a little early for me, but, noting the label and the year on the bottle, I drank it anyway.

  “What can I do for you, Herr Diels?”

  “Please. Call me Rudi. And by the way, you can speak quite freely in front of our two lady friends. They don’t speak very good German.”

  “Neither do I,” I said. “Only that might have something to do with the fact that my tongue is hanging out of my mouth.”

  “Ever been here before?”

  “Once or twice. But I don’t get any kick out of guessing whether someone’s a man or a woman.” I nodded at Fräulein Olafsson. “It makes a pleasant change to have any doubts on that score removed so unequivocally.”

  “You’d better enjoy it while you can. In just a month or two a lot of these clubs are going to be closed down by the new government. This one is already earmarked to be the Nazi Party headquarters in Berlin South.”

  “You’re taking a lot for granted. There’s the small matter of an election to be fought first.”

  “You’re right. It is a small matter. The National Socialists may not manage to win an outright majority in the Reichstag, but it seems more than probable that they will be the largest party.”

  “They?”

  “I’m not a party member, Herr Gunther. But I am broadly sympathetic to the cause of National Socialism.”

  “Is that how you got those scars on your face? By being broadly sympathetic to the Nazis?”

  Diels touched his cheek without any trace of self-consciousness. “This?” He shook his head. “No. I’m afraid there wasn’t much honor in the way they were earned. I used to drink a lot. More than was good for me. Sometimes, when I wanted to amuse or intimidate someone, I would chew a beer glass.”

  There was a bowl of fruit on the table. I nodded at it.

  “Me, I prefer a nice apple.” I lit a cigarette and, leaning back in my chair, took a good look at our two naked companions. I didn’t mind looking at them any more than they minded being looked at.

  “Help yourself.”

  “No, thanks. Some of my concentration is still caught up with the fate of the republic.”

  “That’s too bad. Because the republic’s days are numbered. We’re going to win.”

  “So it’s ‘we’ now. A minute ago you weren’t even in the party. I guess you must be what’s called a floating voter.”

  “You mean like Rosa Luxemb
urg?” Diels smiled at his own little joke. “Oh, I’m not much of a Hitlerite,” he said. “But I do believe in Hermann Goering. He’s a much more impressive figure than Hitler.”

  “He’s certainly a larger one.” It was my turn to smile at my little joke.

  “Hitler cares nothing for human life,” continued Diels. “But Goering is different. I work for him, in the Reichstag. After the Nazis come to power, Goering is going to be in overall charge of the police in Germany. Kurt Daluege is going to be in charge of the uniformed police. And I’m going to be in charge of a much-expanded political police.”

  “The number of people wanting to join the police these days. And we haven’t even had a recruiting drive.”

  “We’re going to need men we can trust. Good men who are prepared to devote body and soul to the fight against Jewry and Bolshevism. But not just against Jewry and Bolshevism. It’s imperative that the power of the SA be curtailed, too. Which is where you come in.”

  “Me? I don’t see how I can be of any use to you. I don’t even like the political police we’ve got now.”

  “You’re well known in KRIPO as someone who dislikes the SA.”

  “Everyone in KRIPO dislikes the SA. Everyone who’s worth a damn.”

  “That is what I’m looking for. To get rid of the SA we’ll need men who aren’t afraid. Men like you.”

  “I can see your dilemma. You need the SA to strong-arm the election. But once you’re elected, you need someone else to strong-arm it back into line.” I grinned. “I have to hand it to you. There’s sophism and then there’s Nazism. Hitler adds a whole new section to that part of the dictionary that deals with specious argument and dirty dealing.” I shook my head. “I’m not your man, Herr Diels. Never will be.”