The Lady from Zagreb

Nineteen

The next morning, after a disturbed night due to the many trams that passed in an almost steady stream of light blue beneath the open window of my stiflingly hot second-floor room, I was up early and waiting outside the hotel, ready to leave Zagreb in the open-top Mercedes 190 that SD Sturmbannführer Emil Koob had lent to me with some alacrity after I gave him the parcel of money from Schellenberg. Waldheim was also there, to introduce me to the two SS officers who were recently returned from Germany and heading for Sarajevo and then Savnik, to rejoin their division. Banja Luka is almost halfway from Zagreb to Sarajevo and the two officers had been assured that there would be transport waiting for them at this ancient Bosnian city’s Ustaše headquarters. I could have wished for more congenial companions than the SS but Waldheim assured me that both men were ethnic volunteers — Croatian Germans who knew the country as well as the language. Besides, he added, there were rumors that the partisans had broken out of southeastern Bosnia and were headed toward the Dalmatian coast across the very region to which we were traveling. All of which meant that three armed men in a car were certainly better than just one.

Of the two officers, the sergeant was the first to arrive. He gave a casual sort of salute and said his name was Oehl. The left side of his face had been badly burned, which probably explained the Iron Cross 2nd Class he wore on his tunic and his taciturn manner; I’d have been a bit taciturn myself if half of my face looked like a plantation shutter. The hair on top of his head was short and gray and exactly matched the short gray hair on his enormous chin; his narrow blue eyes looked more like murder holes in the walls of an impregnable castle. Looking at him I felt as if I had just met a powerful gorilla while at the same time being in possession of the world’s last banana.

“Where is Captain Geiger?” Waldheim looked at his watch.

“We’re going to pick the boss up on the way out of town.”

“Where is he now?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“All right.”

I shook hands with Waldheim and wished him luck in Greece as the sergeant threw his kit into the back of the car and, nursing a daddy under his arm, climbed into the front seat and lit a cigarette.

“You’d best drive, sir,” he told me. “If we run into any trouble I might need to sweep the road with this.”

A daddy was a Russian-made Tokarev PPSh — the Papasha, which is Ivan for “daddy.” Oehl’s daddy had a drum magazine, the kind that holds seventy-one rounds as opposed to half as many in a box mag.

I started the car and drove off with Oehl giving me directions.

“Is that at all likely?” I asked.

“I reckon we’ll be all right until we get over the Sava River. After that, anything’s fucking possible. The First Proletarian Brigade has broken out of the encirclement. And there are Chetniks in the same area. Proles are the communists. Tito’s men. Chetniks are royalists. Some of them are friendly. Some are not. Some Chetniks are really Proles pretending to be friendly Chetniks so they can kill you. The only way you can be sure which they are is if they start shooting at you.”

His voice sounded vaguely irritable and tired. I recognized that sound; it’s what you sound like after people have been trying to kill you for a while.

“Have you seen much fighting down here?”

He let out a sigh that was almost as loud as the engine of the car I was driving and grinned patiently as if trying not to obey his first instinct which was to shove his daddy’s polished wooden butt in my face. The submachine gun was the only really clean thing about him.

“There is no fighting down here,” he said. “They kill us when we’re not expecting it, and we kill them when they’re not expecting it. That’s how it works with partisans. It’s just killing. And more killing. Except there’s more of them than us. Twenty thousand in the partisans. Probably more. It certainly seems that way to those of us who have to do the killing.”

At his request we stopped in front of a building near the new mosque on Franje Rackog Street; at the opposite end of the street could be seen the twin spires of Zagreb’s Catholic cathedral. The entrance of the building was busy with men wearing black uniforms and forage caps. Oehl said they were Ustaše and that our stuff would be safe enough in the car while we went to fetch Captain Geiger.

“We?”

“I might need your help getting him out.”

“Are you sure about our stuff? The gun?”

“No one would fucking dare to steal from a German car outside Ustaše headquarters,” he said. “That’s why we’re leaving it here. The banging hut’s only a minute away.”

We walked around the corner to a cream-colored building with a mock Doric entrance and, above the door, a double-width buttressed balcony as big as an armored car where several semi-clad girls were already enjoying the hot Croatian sun. We went up to the second floor and entered a warren of rooms. A soldier wearing just his pants was sitting at a little harmonium and having a go at playing “Bolle Lied” — a traditional Berlin song about a fellow called Bolle from Pankow who goes to the fair, loses his child, gets drunk, kills five people with a knife, comes home with a broken nose, torn clothes, and a missing eye and, after his wife has polished his skull with a rolling pin, chokes to death on his own vomit. It’s a jolly little number that every Berliner knows and loves but which seemed oddly appropriate for Croatia.

I followed Oehl through a warren of rooms that were busy with more half-naked girls and several soldiers until we finally found a tall, cadaverous man seated in an armchair smoking a cigarette. He was fully clad in an SS uniform but clearly drunk. By his leg was a bottle of cloudy spirit and all his kit, including another daddy. He looked at us through half-closed eyes and then nodded.

“Where the fuck have you been, Sergeant?”

“This is Captain Gunther,” said Oehl. “He’s going to drive us to Banja Luka.”

“Is he now? That’s very decent of him.”

“I told you last night. That lieutenant at the Esplanade fixed it for us to travel south with him. He’s from Berlin.”

“We were in Berlin, last week,” said the captain. “Or was it the week before? We only went because we thought there’d be women. Well, everyone knows about Berlin women. We thought there’d be nightclubs. But it wasn’t like that at all. Anyway, we stayed at some boring SS villa at a place called Wannsee. Do you know it?”

“The Villa Minoux? Yes, I know it.”

“It was very boring. There’s more nightlife in Zagreb than there is in Berlin.”

“On the evidence of this place, that’s probably true.”

Geiger smiled affably and proffered the bottle, and hardly wishing to start what I hoped would be our short association on the wrong foot, I took it and swigged at the contents: it was raki, or the milk of the brave, and believe me, you had to be brave to drink that stuff.

“I can tell that this is your first time in Croatia,” he said. “The way you drank the raki.”

“First time.” Thinking I’d better let them know I wasn’t a complete green beak, I added something about having just come from Smolensk.

“Smolensk, eh? This is better than Smolensk. Not as many Wehrmacht around to get in the way, with their sense of honor and fair play and all that shit.”

“I love it already.”

“You grab his kit,” Oehl told me, “and I’ll get him onto his feet.”

I returned Geiger’s bottle, hoisted his pack onto my back, and then picked up the daddy.

“Watch that,” said Geiger. “Trigger’s a bit light. You wouldn’t want to shoot anyone, would you? At least not until we’re across the border into Bosnia. Then it really doesn’t matter who you fucking shoot.” He laughed as if he were joking, and it was later on that day before I discovered that this was not a joke.

Oehl maneuvred Captain Geiger down the stairs behind me, with the captain still giving advice on how things were in Yugoslavia.

“The important thing to remember is that you shoot them before they shoot you. Or worse. Believe me, you wouldn’t want to be captured by these First Proletarian bastards. Not unless you want to find out what your own dick tastes like. They like to cut it off, you see, and make you eat it before you bleed out. Balls, too, if they’re in a mood to be generous with your provisions.”

“Good meat’s in short supply everywhere,” I said.

Geiger laughed loudly as we emerged onto the street. “I like him, Sergeant. Gunther, did you say? Well, Captain Gunther, you’re not as much of a cunt as you look. What do you think, Sergeant?”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

“Does this fellow Tito have a Second Proletarian Brigade?” I asked.

“Good point,” said Geiger. “I don’t know. But it makes you think, eh? Even when you’re a fucking Prole there’s some sort of class division. Marx would be disappointed.”

It wasn’t yet nine o’clock but already it was so hot my tunic was sticking to my back, and when we reached the Mercedes I dumped Geiger’s kit on the backseat and took off my tunic. Geiger removed his, too, and I caught sight of an enormous thick scar on his chest, as if someone had drawn a knife across it. His hooded, hollow eyes caught mine looking at it and he smiled a thin smile without feeling the need to offer any explanation as to how he had come by it. But I knew he hadn’t got it from helping old ladies across busy roads. Tall, thin, blond, distinguished even — in another life he might have been a student prince, or an actor; but now he had such a disappointed, corrupted look that he reminded me most of a fallen angel. He brushed off Oehl’s hands, swayed a little, vomited copiously into the gutter, and then climbed into the back of the car, where he uttered a loud groan and then closed his eyes.

“That way,” said Oehl, pointing around the windscreen. “Drive past the fucking mosque and then down past Gestapo HQ.”

We quickly left the city behind. The sun was strong, the land seemed to cower underneath its fierce effect. With the hood of the car folded down behind us like the bellows of an accordion we drove southeast from Zagreb, into Slavonia. The land was very flat and very fertile as a result of the Pannonian Sea, which had existed here about half a million years ago. Apparently, the sea lasted for nine million years, which was probably going to put what happened over the course of the next couple of days into some sort of perspective; but I knew that the sooner I was away from this place and safely back in Berlin, the better. And all I could think about was sleeping with Dalia Dresner again. Especially now that I’d met my two traveling companions. Every time I looked at them I had a bad feeling about this particular road trip. Geiger’s sergeant kept the machine gun over the edge of the door like a rear gunner in a Dornier and looked like he was keen to use it. After half an hour, Geiger opened his eyes and lit one cigarette after another as though the clean country air was an affront to his lungs. The machine gun on his lap might have been a briefcase, he looked so relaxed with it. The smile on his face was not a happy smile. It was more like Bolle’s smile, just like in the Berlin song, because, for all the terrible things that he does and that happen to him, Bolle still has a bloody marvelous time.