“Danke,” the soldier said in a mechanical voice. “Dankeschön, Liebling.”
Sonny found Herr Doktor Fleck waiting for him when he returned to his room. Fleck was a tall man with perfect posture and a monocle in one of his oceanic blue eyes. There was a slight tremor in the cheek that held the monocle. That was the only sign of his rage.
“This will not do, Herr Sergeant Salinger. You have been frightening my other patients. You must not wear such a uniform at the clinic. You are my personal guest.”
“And yet you never visited me once—until now. I had to rattle you like a toy.”
“I am not your toy, Herr Salinger. I assure you. And why did you come here?”
Could he talk to this Nazi about his own collapse? For a moment he felt like Raskolnikov, an ax murderer.
“I came here,” he said, “to rest.”
“But we are not the Queen Mary. We are a Krankenhaus. I deal with mental traumas, wounds of the mind. And you mock us when you wear that uniform.”
Sonny was wild, wild. He couldn’t say what had gotten into him, like the demons in one of Dostoyevsky’s novels. He wanted to harm this healer who had served with the Nazis, was a Nazi himself.
“Herr Direktor, you cannot heal and walk among the murderers who built Kaufering Four.”
Fleck removed the monocle. “Then you have come here to arrest me. And that is why you wear your uniform. It is an Amerikanische game of cat and mouse. But I will not play. Come, arrest me in front of my staff. Did your forget your handcuffs, Herr Salinger?”
He had no handcuffs, and wouldn’t have used them even if he did. And then, without a bit of warning, he floundered in front of the director, lost his train of thought, as if he’d endured an eclipse and had been diminished somehow. Sonny started to speak. The words wouldn’t come. He was as forlorn as Alicja, without her tongue. He fainted, it seems, fell into Fleck’s arms. That’s the last he could recall.
He woke up in his bed at the clinic, wearing government-issue pajamas rather than his military tunic, and someone attended to him, a creature with bloodred nails. He wasn’t sure whether it was Fräulein Sylvia or not. He didn’t have all his marbles, as Papa had said. But she was tender with him, this nurse … or Nazi from another clinic.
Suddenly, Herr Fleck appeared with a flock of residents in white gowns. The doctor scribbled in a pad with blue lines.
“How long have you been considering suicide, Herr Salinger?”
“Since the war ended,” Sonny said. “I never felt like a real soldier, and I wouldn’t know how to be a civilian again.”
“And I suppose you meant to use a firearm,” the doctor said.
“My Colt.”
“Richtig. Your Colt—like a cowboy from the Colorado. But you’re not a cowboy, Herr Salinger.”
“I used to be.” He’d had a fight with Doris when he was four and decided to run away from home, to be free of all the Salingers forever. He put on the cowboy suit that Sol and Miriam had bought him for his birthday, with a child’s Stetson, boots, and a pair of cap pistols, and waited with the doorman until his mother came home from shopping at Saks. They were living on West End Avenue at the time in a seven-room apartment with so many winding hallways that Sonny often got lost.
He was crying in his Stetson and blue bandanna when his mother arrived.
“Mama,” he said, “I’m running away, but I wanted to give you plenty of clues, so you wouldn’t have to call a fire truck to look for me.”
Miriam observed him from her Olympian height, replete with wondrous bags from Saks Fifth Avenue. She didn’t seem startled at all.
“What happened, Sonny?”
“Doris bit my ear, and she said she would drown me in the toilet bowl … if I went into her closet again and put on her clothes.”
Miriam was perfectly reasonable, like Herr Doktor Fleck. “But why would you touch what belongs to her?”
“To be nasty. And now I’m running away. But I had to tell you, Mama, or it wouldn’t be fair.”
And they went into an elevator that rocked like a stagecoach….
The doctor scribbled voraciously as Sonny recapitulated his encounter with Miriam on West End Avenue when he was four and had so little fright. “That is a miracle, such a tale. And I beg your pardon, Herr Salinger. You were once the perfect little cowboy…. But you did not bring your Colt to the Krankenhaus.”
“I left it in Weißenberg.”
“And you do not have such a desire to shoot yourself—at the moment.” The doctor smiled after Sonny nodded. “Then that is progress.” And he left the room with all his disciples in their white gowns.
Sonny could hear a faint, prolonged murmur from the psychiatric ward below throughout the night.
His driver came to fetch him the very next day. He walked downstairs in his civvies and checked himself out of the clinic. Herr Fleck stood in the garden, smoking an American cigarette.
“You are my talisman, Herr Salinger. No one would dare arrest me while you were in residence. How much time do I have?”
“Very little,” Sonny said. “But tell me, Herr Direktor, why do the patients on the ward wear their uniforms in bed?”
“It comforts them. They still feel like soldiers, even as their minds wander. That is the last stability they have left—soldiers without a war…. And will you come back to arrest me yourself?”
“No, Herr Doktor,” Sonny said. “I doubt that I will have that privilege. The CIC won’t give me a second chance. My commandant is afraid you might capture me again.”
Herr Fleck’s eyebrows rose halfway up the garden wall. “But we did not capture you, Mein Herr. You came of your own volition.”
“Indeed I did.” And Sonny left Krankenhaus 31 with his driver.
PART NINE
The Grand Inquisitor
July–August 1945
1.
HE RETURNED TO THE INTERROGATION ROOM at the Villa Oberwegner and was the grand inquisitor again. One of his first “customers” was Frau Doktor Sylvia Welter, the ophthalmologist who had watched over him while he was delirious. She was suspected of having been a Gestapo informant while she studied medicine. It seems Sylvia had wandered from university to university—Erlangen, Munich, Prague, Königsberg, Freiburg, and Innsbruck. It was considered a typical Gestapo trick—gather information from fellow students and move on to yet another school.
“Why did you move around so much, Frau Doktor?” She smiled at him, wasn’t frightened of the naked bulb and the arid emptiness of the interrogation room—not a window or a picture on the wall. “You must call me Sylvia, Herr Interrogator. We have been intimate, I think. Do I have amnesia, or didn’t you kiss me at the clinic?”
“I did,” Sonny said. “And I believe you came back and nursed me while I was ill.”
“More than nursed you,” she said with the same wicked smile. “I bathed your little balls.”
“But I was delirious, Fräulein.”
“No,” she said. “Not all the time.”
Ah, he told himself, she’s much wilier than I am. But he wouldn’t permit Sylvia to turn the interrogation around.
“That was in a different place,” he said, “a hospital in Nuremberg.”
“And isn’t this a hospital?” she asked with a defiant air.
“How is it a hospital, how? You have a blinding light in your eyes. You cannot see my face, Fräulein.”
“But you deal with the same damaged souls,” she said. “And your voice can tell me what I cannot see.”
He wondered who was the real interrogator now. Had she been trained by her Gestapo masters to resist a naked bulb and a hard-backed chair? He would not win this contest with her—perhaps he didn’t want to win.
“You worked at a clinic run by a doctor who had once been with the SS.”
“Mensch, I didn’t have much of a choice,” she said with a sigh. “How many hospitals are there in Nuremberg that have a psychiatric clinic?”
“But you are an ophthalmol
ogist, a doctor of the eyes,” Sonny said.
“And where else could I deal with trauma cases?” she asked. “It was a golden chance, and Herr Doktor Fleck gave it to me.”
Sonny tossed her file onto the table. “We’re finished here,” he said.
“And will I be escorted to the cage by your military police?”
“You’re free to go, Fräulein,” he said, snapping off the light. “But I would advise you not to consider a sudden change of address.”
He couldn’t deal with her dark eyes and that regal beauty of hers—a princess among the ruins.
“We cannot kiss,” she said, “but may I clap my hands, Herr Interrogator?”
“Clap all you like,” he said.
But she didn’t clap her hands at all. She reached for her purse and left the interrogation room while his own corporal crept up behind him like a ghoul.
“Sarge, she’s a Fritzie. I can tell. She was trained …”
Sonny stared at the stark wall. “Maybe, maybe not.”
And he called in his next customer, Colonel Blunt, looking as skeletal as ever. Blunt wasn’t even in uniform at the Villa Oberwegner. Blunt was wearing a Hawaiian shirt in Weißenberg this afternoon. “Salinger, come with me.”
They went into the canteen, which was cluttered with CIC agents, with their armbands and bayonets. They were guarding a lone giant who sat in his SS colonel’s uniform, drinking schnapps from a paper cup. Sonny recognized the scar that rifled down his left cheek and the side of his mouth. Somehow, the CIC had captured Hitler’s favorite commando, Otto Skorzeny, the mastermind of Operation Greif in the Ardennes, which had utterly bamboozled the Allies and helped slaughter hundreds and hundreds of men. Otto the Terrible was an outlaw and shouldn’t have reigned at a CIC canteen with schnapps in a paper cup. His knuckles were as big as doorknobs.
“It’s a wonder,” Blunt said. “Nobody recognized him, and Otto landed in our lap. They haven’t much of an intelligence team at Division. Otto’s our gift.”
Sonny’s cheek began to twitch. He shouldn’t have been pulled out of the interrogation room so that Blunt could parade his elegant crocodile.
“Sir, do you know how many boys we lost on account of Skorzeny and his little battalion of jeeps?”
“You exaggerate,” Skorzeny said. “Only ten jeeps got through the lines.”
“Shut up, Otto,” Blunt said, clutching his own paper cup of schnapps. “We don’t need any more of your lies.” Then he turned on Sonny. “Sergeant, does this look like an interrogation room?”
“No, sir.”
“We’ve already interrogated the big fat fuck. That’s not why I brought you here. When Otto was training his saboteurs at Schloss Friedenthal, all he did was show American flicks. And I can’t answer a single one of his questions.”
Sonny couldn’t hide his twitch. “I don’t understand, sir. I have to give this butcher a lesson on Louis B. Mayer and MGM? What about his plan to kill Ike and bomb the Allied high command?”
“Pure fable,” Blunt said. “Half of Otto Skorzeny is our own invention.”
Sonny wanted to trace Otto’s scar with a finger, nick it if he could. Yet he barely contained himself, he was trembling so. “What about the other half? I witnessed the massacre, Colonel. Soldiers shot in the head because of Krauts in American uniforms, riding in one of our jeeps. I dug their graves.”
“Don’t be impolite,” Blunt said. “The fucker has confessed.”
Skorzeny appealed to Sonny as some strange comrade in arms. “Please. Plenty of Yanks crossed the lines in German trucks. We didn’t invent that trick. The Ardennes was our last push. It was really a suicide mission. And if I hadn’t been wounded, Sergeant, I would have died with my boys. But the war is over. And I have many questions.”
“I’m not in the mood, Herr Otto,” Sonny said. The Villa Weißenberg had become a madhouse, a haven for captured Kraut colonels who were treated like movie stars. But if Sonny was with lunatics, he’d have to talk the language of lunatics. “What would you like to know?”
Skorzeny grew pensive, suddenly absorbed. “Please. We watched movie after movie, and it was so fickle, a sea of faces, each face talking so fast. We could only catch every other word, and we had to mimic all the facial twists. Confusion upon confusion. We had little time to accomplish so much. Who is your favorite movie star, Mein Herr?”
“Groucho Marx,” Sonny said.
This butcher with a butcher’s hands started to giggle. “Groucho Marx? But he is not beautiful. He is a clown…. Ah, I love Deanna Durbin. And Gary Cooper, of course, as Marco Polo and Wild Bill Hickok. And don’t forget Tyrone Power as Zorro and the Black Swan … or Errol Flynn as Robin Hood and General Custer.”
Sonny heard a rumbling sound from deep within the giant’s chest—it was his show of laughter. “This Yankee general with the yellow gloves was a much bigger butcher than Otto Skorzeny. How many Red Indians did he slaughter, eh? But you cannot deny Hollywood’s interest in male beauty. That was the first thing we noticed at Schloss Friedenthal. Errol Flynn had much more charm than Olivia de Havilland. She could have been his nanny.”
The giant turned to Sonny with the cup of schnapps half-squeezed in his huge fist. “Be honest with a poor captured colonel. Were you not struck by this male beauty within the Hollywood calendar?”
“My favorite,” Sonny said, “was Darcy Doyle.”
The giant muttered to himself. Was ist das? I do not know from this Darcy Doyle.”
“He was the star of a silent serial, The Royal Whisperer.”
The giant seemed agitated now, as if Sonny had swindled him. “But this is foolish. How could my commandos at the Schloss learn American English from a silent serial? Colonel Blunt, why did you bring this man? Was it to mock me?”
“Salinger,” Blunt said, “I told you. This is not an interrogation.”
“Well,” Sonny said. “Herr Otto, I would like to know one thing. When your birdmen, your glider patrol, swiped Mussolini from La Maddalena, what did they see in his eyes?”
The giant ruminated for a moment. “There was nothing in the official report. But my boys said that Benito was scared to death—he wanted to remain on his island retreat. And now he would have to face the Führer. He was a pompous, lazy man.”
Blunt was waspish now. “Enough intrigue. Sergeant, you can return to your interrogations. I don’t like the sound of this Welter woman. I’ve seen her dossier. She could have been a Gestapo courier. I’m sure of it. Will you detain her?”
“We’ll see,” Sonny said. He didn’t like Colonel Blunt’s display of Skorzeny in the canteen, the commando prince with his telltale scar. He didn’t return to interrogation. He went outside the villa and smoked a Camel from an old, abandoned K pack. He wouldn’t arrest Fräulein Welter. She was a tiny flower compared to the Führer’s Errol Flynn—a tiny flower indeed.
2.
ONE AFTERNOON, WHILE FLOATING ALONG, he met Sylvia outside the Villa Oberwegner, almost by accident. Weeks after he’d interrogated her. And they went to her flat on the Kehler Weg, amid mounds of rubble and stalactites of exposed brick that looked more like a macabre stage set than the blurred design of a broken city.
Sylvia had several antiques, including a carved oak bed with a canopy, and a boarded-up window—there were no more glaziers in Weißenberg, no more glass. He was alarmingly passive. Sylvia undressed him, as if she were still his doctor-nurse at Krankenhaus 31. She stroked him, played with his balls. And yet she aroused a passion in him that was also alarming. He pinned Sylvia to her carved oak bed, like a brunette butterfly with gorgeous wings, while swirls of dust came through the boarded-up window.
He stayed with Sylvia in that tiny flat on the Kehler Weg, though he held on to his room in the Villa Oberwegner, as a kind of camouflage. And he continued to interview collabos under the inquisitive gaze of Lieutenant Colonel Blunt. He didn’t hang out at local beer halls, or spend much time at the CIC canteen and commissary. He was always with Sylvia when she wasn�
�t at the little hospital in Weißenberg, or at Krankenhaus 31 with that Nazi, Fleck. On weekends they rarely left the flat. She had some perverse hypnotic power over Sonny. He told her about Oona, detail upon detail, each nuanced moment of his desire, and he watched her strange metamorphosis, as she began to mimic Oona’s catlike walk, even the purr of her voice.
Soon Sonny was besotted, under Sylvia’s spell. Part of him had melted into her in some bizarre way. She was the interrogator now, and Sonny, the CIC man in tatters, was the collabo and courier of what had become their own private love and hate fest.
“And what are your plans, Herr Sonny?”
“I have none,” he said, “none at all.”
Sylvia smiled. “Won’t you marry Chaplin’s widow when you return to America?”
Sonny was shaking. “Never said Oona was a widow.”
She’d sat him down in a wicker chair and dug her knee into his chest. “But you Americans are wonderful widow makers—that is your most conspicuous talent. You could get rid of Herr Charlie.”
She was trying to goad him into warfare, a fistfight on the Kehler Weg. And Sylvia succeeded. Each gave the other a bloody nose. And then she would hurl Sonny onto her antique bed, undress him with a fierce deliberation. “Close your Gypsy eyes and pretend I’m your high school princess in her gym clothes. Call out to her.”
“Oona,” he whispered in spite of himself. And then he’d cast off Sylvia’s spell, just in time.
“What about your own suitors, Sylvia? I see them on the stairwell, like starved animals, waiting for a lick.”
There was a businessman from Berne who wanted to marry her and whisk her family out of Nuremberg.
Sergeant Salinger Page 16
