Berlin Noir, page 62
Somewhere, further up the street, a jeep grumbled off into the snow-charged blackness. I wiped the condensation off the window with my sleeve, and saw the reflection of a face that I recognized.
‘Herr Gunther,’ he said, as I turned in my seat, ‘I thought it was you.’ A thin layer of snow covered the man’s head. With its squared-off skull and prominent, perfectly round ears, it reminded me of an ice-bucket.
‘Neumann,’ I said, ‘I thought you were dead for sure.’
He wiped his head and took off his coat. ‘Mind if I join you? My girl hasn’t turned up yet.’
‘When did you ever have a girl, Neumann? At least, one you hadn’t already paid for.’
He twitched nervously. ‘Look, if you’re going to be – ’
‘Relax,’ I said. ‘Sit down.’ I waved to the waiter. ‘What will you have?’
‘Just a beer, thanks.’ He sat down and with narrowed eyes regarded me critically. ‘You haven’t changed much, Herr Gunther. Older-looking, a bit greyer, and rather thinner than you used to be, but still the same.’
‘I hate to think what I’d be like if you thought I looked any different,’ I said pointedly. ‘But what you say sounds like a fairly accurate description of eight years.’
‘Is that how long it’s been? Since we last met?’
‘Give or take a world war. You still listening at keyholes?’
‘Herr Gunther, you don’t know the half of it,’ he snorted. ‘I’m a prison warder at Tegel.’
‘I don’t believe it. You? You’re as bent as a stolen rocking-chair.’
‘Honest, Herr Gunther, it’s true. The Yanks have got me guarding Nazi war-criminals.’
‘And you’re the hard-labour, right?’
Neumann twitched again.
‘Here comes your beer.’
The waiter laid the glass in front of him. I started to speak but the Americans at the next table burst into loud laughter. Then one of them, a sergeant, said something else and this time even Neumann laughed.
‘He said that he doesn’t believe in fraternization,’ Neumann explained. ‘He said he doesn’t want to treat any fräulein the way he’d treat his brother.’
I smiled and looked over at the Americans. ‘Did you learn to speak English working in Tegel?’
‘Sure. I learn a lot of things.’
‘You were always a good informer.’
‘For instance,’ he lowered his voice, ‘I heard that the Soviets stopped a British military train at the border to take off two cars containing German passengers. The word is that it’s in retaliation for the establishment of Bizonia.’ He meant the merging of the British and American zones of Germany. Neumann drank some of his beer and shrugged. ‘Maybe there will be another war.’
‘I don’t see how,’ I said. ‘Nobody’s got much stomach for another dose of it.’
‘I dunno. Maybe.’
He set his glass down and produced a box of snuff which he offered to me. I shook my head and grimaced as I watched him take a pinch and slide it under his lip.
‘Did you see any action during the war?’
‘Come on, Neumann, you should know better. Nobody asks a question like that these days. Do you hear me asking how you got a denazification certificate?’
‘I’ll have you know that I got that quite legitimately.’ He fished out his wallet and unfolded a piece of paper. ‘I was never involved in anything. Free from Nazi infection this says, and that’s what I am, and proud of it. I didn’t even join the army.’
‘Only because they wouldn’t have you.’
‘Free from Nazi infection,’ he repeated angrily.
‘Must be about the only infection you never had.’
‘What are you doing here anyway?’ he sneered back.
‘I love coming to the Gay Island.’
‘I’ve never seen you here before, and I’ve been coming here a while.’
‘Yes, it looks like the kind of place you’d feel comfortable in. But how do you afford it, on a warder’s pay?’
Neumann shrugged evasively.
‘You must do a lot of errands for people,’ I suggested.
‘Well, you have to, don’t you.’ He smiled thinly. ‘I’ll bet you’re here on a case, aren’t you?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I might be able to help. Like I say, I come here a lot.’
‘All right then.’ I took out my wallet and held up a five-dollar bill. ‘You ever hear of a man called Eddy Holl? He comes in here sometimes. He’s in the advertising and publicity business. A firm called Reklaue & Werbe Zentrale.’
Neumann swallowed and stared dismally at the bill. ‘No,’ he said reluctantly, ‘I don’t know him. But I could ask around. The barman’s a friend. He might – ’
‘I already tried him. Not the talkative type. But from what he did say, I don’t think he knew Holl.’
‘This advertising mob. What did you say they were called?’
‘Reklaue & Werbe Zentrale. They’re in Wilmersdorfer Strasse. I was there this afternoon. According to them Herr Eddy Holl is at the offices of their parent company in Pullach.’
‘Well, maybe he is. In Pullach.’
‘I’ve never even heard of it. I can’t imagine the headquarters of anything being in Pullach.’
‘Well, you’d be wrong.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m ready to be surprised.’
Neumann smiled and nodded at the five dollars I was slipping back into my wallet. ‘For five dollars I could tell you everything I know about it.’
‘No cold cabbage.’
He nodded and I tossed him the bill. ‘This had better be good.’
‘Pullach is a small suburb of Munich. It is also the headquarters of the Postal Censorship Authorities of the United States Army. The mail for all the GIs at Tegel has to go through there.’
‘Is that it?’
‘What do you want, the average rainfall?’
‘All right, I’m not sure what that tells me, but thanks anyway.’
‘Maybe I can keep my eyes open for this Eddy Holl.’
‘Why not? I’m off to Vienna tomorrow. When I get there I’ll telegraph you with the address where I’ll be staying in case you get something. Cash on delivery.’
‘Christ, I wish I was going. I love Vienna.’
‘You never struck me as the cosmopolitan type, Neumann.’
‘I don’t suppose you fancy delivering a few letters when you’re there, do you? I’ve got quite a few Austrians on my landing.’
‘What, play postman for Nazi war-criminals? No thanks.’ I finished my drink and looked at my watch. ‘You think she’s coming, this girl of yours?’ I stood up to leave.
‘What time is it?’ he said, frowning.
I showed him the face of the Rolex on my wrist. I had more or less decided not to sell it. Neumann winced as he saw the time.
‘I expect she got held up,’ I said.
He shook his head sadly. ‘She won’t come now. Women.’
I gave him a cigarette. ‘These days the only woman you can trust is another man’s wife.’
‘It’s a rotten world, Herr Gunther.’
‘Yeah, well, don’t tell anyone, will you.’
10
On the train to Vienna I met a man who talked about what we had done to the Jews.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘they can’t blame us for what happened. It was preordained. We were merely fulfilling their own Old Testament prophecy: the one about Joseph and his brothers. There you have Joseph, a repressive father’s youngest and most favoured son, and whom we can take to be symbolic of the whole Jewish race. And then you have all the other brothers, symbolic of gentiles everywhere, but let’s assume they are Germans who are quite naturally jealous of the little velvet boy. He’s better looking than they are. He has a coat of many colours. My God, no wonder they hate him. No wonder they sell him into slavery. But the important point to note is that what the brothers do is as much a reaction against a stern and authoritarian father – a fatherland if you like – as it is against an apparently over-privileged brother.’ The man shrugged and started to knead the lobe of one of his question-mark shaped ears thoughtfully. ‘Really, when you think about it, they ought to thank us.’
‘How do you work that out?’ I said, with considerable want of faith.
‘Had it not been for what Joseph’s brothers did, the children of Israel would never have been enslaved in Egypt, would never have been led to the Promised Land by Moses. Similarly, had it not been for what we Germans did, the Jews would never have gone back to Palestine. Why even now, they are on the verge of establishing a new state.’ The man’s little eyes narrowed as if he had been one of the few allowed a peek in God’s desk-diary. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘it was a prophecy fulfilled, all right.’
‘I don’t know about any prophecy,’ I growled, and jerked my thumb at the scene skimming by the carriage window: an apparently endless Red Army troop convoy, moving south along the autobahn, parallel to the railway line, ‘but it certainly looks like we ended up in the Red Sea.’
It was well named, this infinite column of savage, omnivorous red ants, ravaging the land and gathering all that they could carry – more than their individual body weights – to take back to their semi-permanent, worker-run colonies. And like some Brazilian planter who had seen his coffee crop devastated by these social creatures, my hatred of the Russians was tempered by an equal measure of respect. For seven long years I had fought them, killed them, been imprisoned by them, learned their language and finally escaped from one of their labour camps. Seven thin ears of corn blasted with the east wind, devouring the seven good ears.
At the outbreak of the war I had been a Kriminalkommissar in Section 5 of the RSHA, the Reich Main Security Office, and automatically ranked as a full lieutenant in the SS. Apart from the oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, my being an SS-Ober-sturmfuhrer had not seemed much of a problem until June 1941, when Arthur Nebe, formerly the director of the Reichs Criminal Police, and newly promoted SS-Gruppenführer, was given command of an Action Group as part of the invasion of Russia.
I was just one of the various police personnel who were drafted to Nebe’s group, the aim of which, so I believed, was to follow the Wehrmacht into occupied White Russia and combat lawbreaking and terrorism of whatever description. My own duties at the Group’s Minsk headquarters had involved the seizure of the records of the Russian NKVD and the capture of an NKVD death-squad that had massacred hundreds of White Russian political prisoners to prevent them from being liberated by the German Army. But mass murder is endemic in any war of conquest, and it soon became apparent to me that my own side was also arbitrarily massacring Russian prisoners. Then came the discovery that the primary purpose of the Action Groups was not the elimination of terrorists but the systematic murder of Jewish civilians.
In all my four years’ service in the first, Great War, I never saw anything which had a more devastating effect on my spirit than what I witnessed in the summer of 1941. Although I was not personally charged with the task of commanding any of these mass-execution squads, I reasoned that it could only be a matter of time before I was so ordered, and, as an inevitable corollary, before I was shot for refusing to obey. So I requested an immediate transfer to the Wehrmacht and the front line.
As the commanding general of the Action Group, Nebe could have had me sent to a punishment battalion. He could even have ordered my execution. Instead he acceded to my request for a transfer, and after several more weeks in White Russia, during which time I assisted General Gehlen’s Foreign Armies East Intelligence Section with the organization of the captured NKVD records, I was transferred, not to the front line, but to the War Crimes Bureau of the Military High Command in Berlin. By that time Arthur Nebe had personally supervised the murders of over 30,000 men, women and children.
After my return to Berlin I never saw him again. Years later I met an old friend from Kripo who told me that Nebe, always an ambiguous sort of Nazi, had been executed in early 1945 as one of the members of Count Stauffenberg’s plot to kill Hitler.
It always gave me a strange kind of feeling to know that I very possibly owed my life to a mass-murderer.
To my great relief, the man with the curious line in hermeneutics left the train at Dresden, and I slept between there and Prague. But most of the time I thought about Kirsten and the abruptly worded note I had left her, explaining that I would be away for several weeks and accounting for the presence of the gold sovereigns in the apartment, which constituted half of my fee for taking Becker’s case, and which Poroshin had taken it upon himself to deliver the previous day.
I cursed myself for not writing more, for failing to say that there was nothing I wouldn’t have done for her, no Herculean labour I would not have gladly performed on her behalf. All of this she knew of course, made manifest as it was in the packet of extravagantly worded letters that she kept in her drawer. Next to her unmentioned bottle of Chanel.
11
The journey between Berlin and Vienna is a long time to spend brooding about the infidelity of your wife, so it was just as well that Poroshin’s aide had got me a ticket on a train that took the most direct route – nineteen and a half hours, via Dresden, Prague and Brno – as opposed to the twenty-seven-and-a-half-hour train which went via Leipzig and Nuremberg. With a screech of wheels the train drew slowly to a halt in Franz Josefs Bahnhof, mantling the platform’s few occupants in a steamy limbo.
At the ticket barrier I presented my papers to an American MP and, having explained my presence in Vienna to his satisfaction, walked into the station, dropped my bag and looked around for some sign that my arrival was both expected and welcomed by someone in the small crowd of waiting people.
The approach of a medium-sized, grey-haired man signalled that I was correct in the first of these calculations, although I was soon to be apprised of the vanity of the second. He informed me that his name was Dr Liebl and that he had the honour of acting as Emil Becker’s legal representative.
‘I have a taxi waiting,’ he said, glancing uncertainly at my luggage. ‘Even so, it isn’t very far to my offices and had you brought a smaller bag we might have walked there.’
‘I know it sounds pessimistic,’ I said, ‘but I rather thought I’d have to stay overnight.’
I followed him across the station floor.
‘I trust that you had a good journey, Herr Gunther.’
‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ I said, forcing an affable sort of chuckle. ‘How else does one define a good journey these days?’
‘I really couldn’t say,’ he said crisply. ‘Myself, I never leave Vienna.’ He waved his hand dismissively at a group of ragged-looking DPs who seemed to have camped out in the station. ‘Today, with the whole world on some kind of journey, it seems imprudent that I should expect God to look out for the kind of traveller who would only wish to be able to return from whence he started.’
He ushered me to a waiting taxi, and I handed my bag to the driver and climbed into the back seat, only to find the bag come after me again.
‘There’s an extra charge for luggage carried outside,’ Liebl explained, pushing the bag on to my lap. ‘As I said, it’s not very far and taxis are expensive. While you’re here I recommend that you use the tramways – it’s a very good service.’ The car moved away at speed, the first corner pressing us together like a couple of lovers in a cinema theatre. Liebl chuckled. ‘It’s also a lot safer, Viennese drivers being what they are.’
I pointed to our left. ‘Is that the Danube?’
‘Good God, no. That’s the canal. The Danube is in the Russian sector, further east.’ He pointed to our right, at a grim-looking building. ‘That’s the police prison, where our client is currently residing. We have an appointment there first thing tomorrow, after which you may wish to attend Captain Linden’s funeral at the Central Cemetery.’ Liebl nodded back at the prison. ‘Herr Becker is not long in there, as it happens. The Americans were initially disposed to treat the case as a matter of military security and as a result they held him in their POW cage at the Stiftskaserne – the headquarters of their military police in Vienna. I had the very devil of a job getting in and out of there, I can tell you. However, the Military Government Public Safety Officer has now decided that the case is one for the Austrian courts, and so he’ll be held there until the trial, whenever that may be.’
Liebl leaned forwards, tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him to make a right and head towards the General Hospital.
‘Now that we’re paying for this, we may as well drop your bag off,’ he said. ‘It’s only a short detour. At least you’ve seen where your friend is, so you can appreciate the gravity of his situation.
‘I don’t wish to be rude, Herr Gunther, but I should tell you that I was against you coming to Vienna at all. It isn’t as if there aren’t any private detectives here. There are. I’ve used many of them myself, and they know Vienna better than you. I hope you won’t mind me saying that. I mean, you don’t know this city at all, do you?’
‘I appreciate your frankness, Dr Liebl,’ I said, not appreciating it much at all. ‘And you’re right, I don’t know this city. As a matter of fact I’ve never been here in my life. So let me speak frankly. With twenty-five years of police work behind me I’m not particularly disposed to give much of a damn what you think. Why Becker should hire me instead of some local sniffer is his business. The fact that he’s prepared to pay me generously is mine. There’s nothing in between, for you or anyone else. Not now. When you get to court I’ll sit on your lap and comb your hair if you want me to. But until then you read your lawbooks and I’ll worry about what you’re going to say that’ll get the stupid bastard off.’
‘Good enough,’ Liebl growled, his mouth teetering on the edge of a smile. ‘Veracity becomes you rather well. Like most lawyers I have a sneaking admiration for people who seem to believe what they say. Yes, I have a high regard for the probity of others, if only because we lawyers are so brimful of artifice.’
