A Good German

by Joseph Kanon

  “He knew what to look for.”

  Jake sighed. “So did Tully. He came here. There has to be something. And I’m missing it.”

  Bernie shrugged. “You read the files.”

  “Yes,” he said, then looked up. “But I’m not the only one. Keep my seat warm, will you? I’ll be back later.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get a second opinion.”

  Shaeffer had moved from bed to chair, but the bandage was still in place, apparently itching now, because he was scratching himself when Jake walked in.

  “Well, my new partner,” he said, pleased to have a diversion. “Got something for me?”

  “No, you’ve got something for me.” Jake sat on the bed. “You went to the Document Center to read the A-4 files. What did you find?”

  Shaeffer looked at him, a boy surprised at being caught, then smiled. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s right, nothing.”

  “That must have been disappointing. After looking twice.”

  “Real shamus, aren’t you?”

  “Your name’s in the sign-in book. Tully’s there too. Same day. But you knew that.”

  Shaeffer looked up. “No.”

  “But you’re not surprised either.”

  Shaeffer scratched himself again, saying nothing.

  Jake stared at him, then sat back, folding his arms over his chest. “We could do this all day. Want to tell me what you were looking for, or should we play twenty questions?”

  “What? Something I didn’t already know, that’s what. I didn’t find it.”

  Jake unfolded his arms. “Talk to me, Shaeffer. This isn’t as much fun as you think. Man follows Tully to a place same day he’s killed, looks at the same files, carries the same kind of gun that killed himI’ve known people convicted on less.”

  “Now who’s being funny. For ten cents I’d pop you one. I told you, I didn’t know he was there.”

  “Let’s try it a different way. Brandt said something to Tully. I assume you picked this up on one of your taps?”

  Shaeffer nodded. “I didn’t think anything of it at first. You know, the monitors jot down things that might be of interest-when they’re listening. So you get these scraps. You have to figure out the rest yourself. Unless it’s technical-then they take down everything.”

  “And this wasn’t.”

  “One of their personal chats. This and that. And then he says, ‘Everything we did, it’s in the files.’ Words to that effect, anyway. Nothing funny about that-it was all there in Nordhausen, they didn’t hold anything back. Tons of the stuff. They want to use it themselves, right? So why hold anything back? And then he walks and I’m going through the transcripts and I thought, what if? Maybe he means the other files. It’s worth a check. But nothing new there, unless you saw something I didn’t. So I figured he did mean the Nordhausen files.”

  “But Tully didn’t think so. And he knew something you didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “The rest of the conversation.”

  Shaeffer considered this for a moment, then shook his head. “But there’s nothing there. I looked.”

  “Twice.”

  “So twice. Maybe my German’s not as good as yours.”

  “How’s Breimer’s? He’s in the book too. Is that why you asked him along? Or did he have reasons of his own?”

  “He’s out of this—”

  “Tell me or I’ll ask him myself. Partner.”

  Shaeffer glared at him, then dropped his shoulders and began picking at the adhesive tape. “Look, we’re walking a fine line here. These guys are the best rocket team in the world-there’s nobody else near them. We have to have them. But they’re German. And some people are sensitive about that. It’s one thing if they just followed orders-who the hell didn’t? — but if there’s anything else, well, we can’t embarrass Breimer. We need his help. He can’t—”

  “Give jobs to Nazis.”

  “To bad ones, anyway.”

  “And you thought there might be something embarrassing in the files.”

  “No, I didn’t think that.” He looked away. “Anyway, there wasn’t. I don’t know what the hell Brandt meant, if he meant anything. The important thing is what wasn’t there. These guys are clean.”

  “Teitel doesn’t think they’re so clean.”

  “He’s a Jew. What do you expect?”

  Jake looked over at him. “Maybe not to hear an American say that,” he said quietly.

  “You know what I mean. The guy’s on a fucking crusade. Well, he’s not getting these guys. There’s nothing there.”

  Jake stood up. “There must be. Something Tully figured he could sell to the Russians.”

  “Well, not that they were Nazis. The Russians don’t care.”

  “And neither do we.”

  Shaeffer raised his head, poster-boy chin out. “Not these guys.”

  Outside, the light had begun to fade, the lingering soft end of the day. In the billet they’d be getting ready for dinner, the old woman ladling soup. Jake left the jeep and walked down Gelferstrasse, thinking of that first evening when Liz had flirted with him in the bath. About the time Tully must have been reading files, waiting for someone. Or had he been surprised? Start the numbers over. Tully arriving at the airport. Somewhere in the blur of Liz’s pictures, unless they were just another empty file too.

  The old man was setting the table as he passed by the dining room avoiding the drinks crowd in the lounge. Upstairs, his room had been dusted and aired, the pink chenille spread stretched tight. Maid service. Liz’s photographs were stacked neatly on the vanity table, just as he’d left them, in no particular order. The wrecked plane in the Tiergarten, some DPs off in the corner. Churchill. The boys from Missouri. Another, but not a duplicate, the pose slightly shifted. Liz was like all the photographers he’d known-snap lots of pictures and pretend the good one was the only one you’d taken, a random art. One he’d missed before, him looking at the rubble in Pariserstrasse, shoulders slumped, his face slack with disappointment. In a magazine, without a caption, he might have been a returning soldier. He glanced up at his real face in the mirror. Somebody else.

  The airport. He pulled the glossy out of the pile and studied it, moving his eyes slowly over the picture as if he were developing it, trying to sharpen figures in the blur. The effect, oddly, was like looking at the shot in Pariserstrasse, a scene out of context. Had he really been there? A second of time he’d missed. Ron standing at the center with his cocky grin, the Tempelhof crowd swirling behind him. The back of a head that might be Brian Stanley’s, the bald spot catching the light. A French soldier with a pompom hat. Nothing. He picked up the next photograph, almost the same but angled, Liz having moved farther left. If you flipped from one to the other, the figures moved, like old posture pictures. Off to the right, a small gleam. Polished boots? He brought the photograph close to his face, fuzzier, then held it out again. Maybe boots, the right height, but the face was indistinct. He flipped them again, but the gleam didn’t move. If it had been Tully, he’d been standing still, his side to the camera, looking left.

  The knock was no more than a polite tap, scarcely audible. Jake swiveled to see the old man’s head poking around the door.

  “Excuse me, Herr Geismar. I don’t mean to disturb you.”

  “What is it?”

  For a second the old man just looked, blinking, and Jake wondered if he was seeing his daughter again in her usual seat, dusty with powder.

  “Herr Erlich said to ask you about the basement room. The photographic equipment? It’s not to hurry you, but you understand, we need the room. When it’s convenient.”

  “I’m sorry. I forgot. I’ll clean it out right away.”

  “When it’s convenient,” he said, backing out.

  Jake followed him down the stairs and was almost at the basement door when Ron came out of the lounge, glass in hand. “I thought I saw you slinking around. Dini
ng in tonight?” The same grin, as if he were still in the photograph.

  “Can’t. I’m just clearing out Liz’s things. Where should I send them?“

  “I don’t know. Press camp, I guess. Listen, don’t run away, I’ve got something for you.” He took a folded paper from his pocket. “Don’t ask me why, but they okayed it. She requested it, they said. There something between you two I don’t know about? Anyway, you’re in. Just show them this.” He held out the paper. “Don’t forget, you don’t own this one. Everybody gets a piece of this.”

  “A piece of what?”

  “The interview. Renate Naumann. The one you asked for, remember? Christ, here I’m turning cartwheels for the Soviets and you could care less. Typical.”

  “She asked to see me?”

  “Maybe she thought you’d catch her good side. I wouldn’t wait on this, by the way. The Russians change their minds every five minutes. Besides, you could use the story. The natives are getting restless.” He pulled a telegram from the same pocket and held it up.

  “You’ve read it?”

  “Had to. Regulations.”

  “And?”

  “‘Great mail response hero story,’” he quoted without opening it. “‘Send new copy ASAP. Friday latest.’” He tapped Jake’s chest with both papers. “Saved by the bell, hero. You owe me one.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said, taking them. “Put it on my bill.”

  Liz’s darkroom was a small, musty enclosure near the coal bin, with deep wooden crates in one corner for root vegetables. A table with three trays for solutions under a dangling light fixed with her portable red bulb. A few tins of developer and some prints hanging from a string like laundry. A box of matte paper. Why not let the old couple have it all? It was bound to be worth something in the market. But who took photographs these days? Were there weddings anymore in Berlin?

  Liz, at any rate, had taken a lot. The table was littered with contact sheets, the loose pile held down by a heavy magnifying glass, the kind librarians use to read small type. Jake looked through it, and the postage-stamp frames zoomed up to life size. Powerful enough to see if a gleam was coming off boots. He put it in his pocket, then stacked the rest of the equipment at one end of the table. Against the wall there was a side table with another set of prints. He flipped through. The same pictures he’d seen upstairs, but different shots, not quite as sharp-discards, the ones no editor would ever see. The Chancellery. The airport again, Ron still grinning, but the background even less clear. It was when he held it up to the dim light, looking for boots, that his eye caught the dull shine of the gun hanging on the wall.

  He put down the print, reached for the holster, and brought it over to the light. A Colt 1911. But everyone had one-standard issue. He took it out, surprised at its weight. The gun she should have been wearing in Potsdam. Three of them in the market. He stared at it for a minute, reluctant even now to let his mind follow the thought through. Had it been fired? They could match the bullet, the carbon firing marks as distinctive as fingerprints. But this was crazy. He opened the gun. An empty chamber. He lifted it to his nose. Only a hint of old grease, but what had he been expecting? Did the smell of firing hang in the chamber like ash, or did it drift away? But no bullets. Not even loaded, a showpiece to keep the wolves away. So much for Frau Hinkel, surrounding him with deception. He dropped the gun onto the prints, then scooped up the pile with both hands and carried it all back upstairs.

  The magnifying glass was small, but it did the trick-the background still wasn’t sharp, but at least the blurs took shape. Uniforms passing in front of other uniforms. Definitely boots. He followed the line up-an American uniform, a face that might have been Tully’s, had to be, anchored by the boots. So Liz had caught him after all. But so what? There was nothing he hadn’t known before. Tully had arrived and now stood looking left at something. Jake moved the glass across the picture. But there was only the back of Brian’s head, the same uniforms as before, none of them looking toward Tully, and then the white edge.

  He sat back and tossed the picture on the table, frustrated, Ron’s grin a kind of taunt. When his face fell on its double in the pile, he even seemed to move his head in a laugh. One more, Liz would have been saying, moving around for a better angle, Ron the fixed point in a stereoscope. How many had she taken? Jake leaned forward, grabbing up the prints. Enough for a small panorama? He collected the airport shots from the discard pile and laid them out with the others in a fan shape, ignoring Ron, piecing together the overlapping bits of background-Brian’s head on Brian’s head, moving left, matching the exit doors, until the edges were covered and he could look across the crowd with Tully.

  He picked up the magnifying glass and moved in a straight line left from Tully’s face-soldiers going about their business, the annoying bulk of Ron’s head blocking the view behind, but now more faces beyond the edge of the first picture, some sharper than others, a few looking back in Tully’s direction. Somebody waiting with a jeep. Jake forced himself to move the glass slowly-in the crowd you could miss a face in a blink-so that when he neared the edge he caught it, a shape out of place, narrow straight board patches across the shoulders, the wrong uniform. Russian. He stopped the glass. Body turned toward Tully, as if he had sighted him, and then the face, almost clear among the blurs because it was so familiar, the broad cheeks and shrewd Slavic eyes. Sikorsky had met him.

  Jake looked again, afraid the face would dissolve in the fuzzy crowd, something he only thought he saw. No mistake-Sikorsky. Who’d been interested in Nordhausen. Who’d had Willi watch Professor Brandt. It’s a common name, I think, he’d said to Lena outside the Adlon. Connected to Emil, where the numbers met. And now connected to Tully. Sikorsky, who’d been the greifer at Potsdam, a different connection. Jake stopped, letting the glass go and reaching without thinking across the table for the gun, feeling the same prickling unease he’d felt behind the Alex. Not different, maybe the same connection after all, a direct line to him, blundering after Tully, the only one unwilling to let it go. Not Shaeffer. Not Liz. He looked up into the mirror at the man Sikorsky had pointed out, standing behind Liz in the market.

  Now that he knew, what did he do with it? Call Karlshorst for an interview? He left the billet in an excited rush and then stood in the middle of Gelferstrasse, suddenly not sure which way to turn. A few lights had come on in the dusk, but he was alone in the street, as deserted as a western town before a shoot-out. He felt the gun, strapped to his hip. In one of Gunther’s stories he’d be facing down the posse until the cavalry arrived. With an empty gun. He moved his hand away, feeling helpless. Who could he go to? Gunther, shopping for a new employer? Bernie, absorbed in a different crime? And then oddly enough, he realized he was already where he needed to go. Don’t forget whose uniform you have on. The cavalry was just down the street, scratching at a bandage.

  Breimer had joined Shaeffer for dinner, the two of them sitting with trays on their laps. Jake stopped halfway through the door.

  “What?” Shaeffer said, reading his face.

  “I need to see you.”

  “Shoot. We don’t have any secrets, do we, congressman?”

  Breimer looked up expectantly, fork in hand.

  “Sikorsky has him,” Jake said.

  “Has who?” Breimer said.

  “Brandt,” Shaeffer answered absently, without looking at him. “How do you know?”

  “He met Tully at the airport. Liz took a picture-no mistake. Sikorsky’s had him all along.”

  “Fuck,” Shaeffer said, pushing away the tray.

  “That’s what you thought, isn’t it?” Breimer said to him.

  “I thought ‘might.’”

  “Well, now you know,” Jake said. “Has.”

  “Great. Now what do we do?” Shaeffer said, not really a question.

  “Get him back. That’s your specialty, isn’t it?”

  Shaeffer looked up at him. “It would be nice to know where.”

  “Moscow,” Breimer said.
“The Russians don’t have to go through the damn State Department to get things done-they just do it. Well, that’s that,” he said, leaning back. “And after all we—”

  “No, he’s in Berlin,” Jake said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “They’re still looking for his wife. Brandt’s no good to them if h^e won’t cooperate-they want to keep him happy.”

  “Any suggestions?” Shaeffer said.

  “That’s your department. Put some men on Sikorsky. It’s just a matter of time before he goes visiting.”

  Shaeffer shook his head, thinking. “That might be a little unfriendly.”

  “Since when did that stop you?”

  “You boys don’t want to go starting anything,” Breimer said unexpectedly. “Now that we’re in bed again.” He picked up the Stars and Stripes on the windowsill. Russia joins war on japs. “Just in time for the kill, the bastards. Who asked them?” He put his fork down, as if the thought had ruined his appetite. “So now we play nicey-nicey and they’d just as soon slit your throat as look at you. If you ask me, we picked the wrong fight.”

  Jake looked at him, disturbed. “Not if you read the Nordhausen files,” he said. “Anyway, maybe you’ll get another chance.”

  “Oh, it’s coming,” Breimer said, ignoring Jake’s tone. “Don’t you worry about that. Godless bastards.” He looked over at Shaeffer. “But meanwhile you’d better keep the cowboy stuff to a minimum, I guess. MG’ll be bending over for the Russians now.” He paused. “For a while.”

  “It’s no good anyway,” Shaeffer said, still thoughtful. “We can’t tail Sikorsky. They’d pick it up in a minute.”

  “Not if you had the right tail,” Jake said, leaning against the bookshelf, arms folded.

  “Such as?”

  “I know a German who knows him. Professional. He might be interested, for a price.”

  “How much?”

  “A persil”

  “What’s that?” Breimer said, but nobody answered. Instead, Shaeffer reached for a cigarette, staring at Jake.

  “I can’t promise that,” he said, flicking his lighter. “My signature doesn’t mean shit. He’d have to work on spec. Of course, if he actually located Brandt—”