Field Gray

23

I sat up and blinked hard in the near darkness of cell number seven, wondering how long I’d been asleep. The shade of Hitler was gone, at least for now, and I was glad about that. I didn’t much like his questions or the mocking assumption that, deep down, I was as big a criminal as him. It was true that I might have shot Nikolaus Willms somewhere less lethal than his head, and that even when I’d been trying to put him under arrest, secretly I had probably wanted to kill him. Perhaps if Paul Kestner had pulled a gun on me I’d have shot him, too. But as it was I never saw him again, and the last I heard of him he’d been part of a police battalion in Smolensk, murdering Jews and communists.

I opened my window and put my face in the cool breeze of the Landsberg dawn. I couldn’t see the cows, but I could smell them in the fields across the river to the southwest and I could hear them, too. One, anyway; it sounded like a lost soul in a place far, far away. Like my own soul, perhaps. I almost felt like blowing my own breath in a solitary hot blast by way of an answer.

The Paris of 1940 seemed equally far away. What a summer that had been, thanks to Renata. The prefecture in the person of Chief Inspector Oltramare had accepted without demur my story of finding Willms dead after going to the maison with the intention of arresting him, although it was as plain as the Eiffel Tower that he believed not a word of it. Sipo proved only a little more troublesome, and I was summoned to the Hôtel Majestic, in the avenue des Portugais, to explain myself to General Best, the head of RSHA in Paris.

A dark-eyed, severe-looking man from Darmstadt, Best was in his late thirties and bore a strong resemblance to the Nazi Party’s deputy leader, Rudolf Hess. There was some bad blood between him and Heydrich, and because of that, I half expected Best to give me a rougher ride. Instead, he confined himself to delivering a light reprimand for my declared intent to arrest Willms without consulting him. Which was fair enough, and my apology seemed to put an end to the matter; as things turned out, he was much more interested in picking my brains for a book he was writing about the German police. On several occasions we met at his favorite restaurant, a brasserie on the boulevard de Montparnasse called La Coupole, and I told him all about life at the Alex and some of the cases I had investigated. Best’s book was published the following year and sold very well.

In fact, he turned out to be something of a benefactor. He and his damn book were the main reason I managed to stay on in Paris until June 1941, and so it was Best who effectively ensured I missed out on going to Pretzsch and Himmler’s pep talk for the SS and SD. I might have stayed on a bit longer and avoided going to the Ukraine altogether but for Heydrich. Now and then he liked to tug the line a little just to remind me that he had his hook in my mouth.

I lit a cigarette and lay down on the bed again, waiting for the gray light to strengthen and the room to take shape and the uncaring guards to rouse Landsberg’s inmates for exercise, breakfast, and then what was called “free association.” To my surprise, I was now allowed back into the general prison population. But to avoid Biberstein and Haensch with their worries about what I was telling the Americans and how that might affect their own chances of parole, I found myself seeking out the company of Waldemar Klingelhöfer. Since he had been cut by everyone else at Landsberg, my speaking to him was the best way of ensuring I was left alone—at least for the duration of our conversation. We talked in the garden, with the sun warming our faces.

Klingelhöfer had not aged well since our time together at Lenin House in Minsk, and he was perhaps the only prisoner at WCPN1 of whom it could have been said that he had some sort of conscience about what he had done. He looked like a man haunted by his actions with the Moscow commando. Martin Sandberger, watching us from a short distance away, merely looked psychopathic.

Looking at Klingelhöfer’s twitching, bespectacled face, it was hard to imagine the former opera tenor who owned it singing anything except perhaps the “Dies Irae.” But I was more interested in talking to him about what had happened in Minsk after I had returned from there to Berlin.

“Do you remember a man called Paul Kestner?” I asked him.

“Yes,” said Klingelhöfer. “He was active with a murder commando in Smolensk when I got there in 1941. I was supposed to obtain furs to use for German military winter clothing. Kestner had been in Paris, I think, and was bitter about his being posted to Russia. He seemed to be taking it out on Jews, that much was obvious, and my impression was that he was a really cruel man. After that I heard he got posted to the death camp at Treblinka. That must have been about July of 1942. He was the deputy commander, I think. There was some talk about Kestner and Irmfried Eberl, who was in charge, running the camp for their own pleasure and profit, using Jewish women for sex and embezzling Jewish gold and jewelry that was properly the property of the Reich. Anyway, the bosses found out about it and by all accounts dismissed the pair of them and some others besides before putting in a new man to clean the stables. Fellow named Stangl. Meanwhile, Eberl and Kestner were dismissed from the SS and, in 1944, I heard they joined the Wehrmacht in an attempt to redeem themselves. The Amis got Eberl a few years ago, and I believe he hanged himself. But I’ve no idea what became of Kestner. They say Stangl’s in South America.”

“Well, if he is, it’s not Argentina,” I said. “Or Uruguay.”

“You’re lucky,” said Klingelhöfer. “To have been to those places. Me, I expect I’ll die here.”

“You must be the only prisoner in Landsberg who believes that, Wally. Everyone else seems to be expecting a parole. They’ve already let go men who, in my opinion, were worse than you.”

“Thanks. Nice of you to say so. But I just hope that if I do die in here, they’ll allow my family to have my body. I wouldn’t want to be buried here in Landsberg. It would mean a lot to them. Nice of you to say so, yes. I mean, I’m not looking to get out. I mean, what would I do? What can any of us do?”

I left Klingelhöfer talking to himself. He did a lot of that in Landsberg. It looked easier than talking to the Americans. Or Biberstein and Haensch. Or Sandberger, who cornered me on the way back to my cell.

“Why do you speak to a bastard like that?” he demanded.

“Why not? I speak to you. Really, I’m not that particular.”

“Funny guy. I heard that about you, Gunther.”

“I don’t see you laughing. Then again, you used to be a judge, didn’t you? Before you went to Estonia? Not many laughs there, either, from what I heard.”

Sandberger had a ruffian’s face, with a jaw like a flat tire and a boxer’s hostile eyes. It was hard to imagine how anyone could have become a lawyer or a judge with a face like that. It was easier to imagine him murdering sixty-five thousand Jews. You didn’t need to be a criminologist to figure out a physiognomy like Sandberger’s.

“I hear the Amis have been giving you a hard time of it,” he said.

“You hear good with those things on the side of your head.”

“So I took the liberty of mentioning you to the evangelical bishop of Württemburg,” he said. “In my last letter to him.”

“As long as there are prisons there will be prayers.”

“There’s a lot more he can do than just pray.”

“A cake would be nice. Lots of cream and fruit, and a Walther P38 filling.”

Sandberger smiled a lopsided smile that wasn’t provoking any second thoughts in my mind about the descent of man.

“He doesn’t do prison breaks,” said Sandberger. “Just letters to influential people here and in America.”

“I wouldn’t want to put him to any trouble,” I said. “Besides, I just came back from America myself. But I certainly didn’t make any friends while I was there.”

“Which part?”

“The southern half. Argentina, mainly. You wouldn’t like Argentina, Martin. It’s hot. Lots of insects. Plenty of Jews. But you’re only allowed to kill the insects.”

“But lots of Germans, too, I hear.”

“No. Just Nazis.”

Sandberger grinned. Probably he meant it well, but it felt like seeing something unpleasant and atavistic toward the end of a séance. Evil flickering on and off like a faulty lightbulb.

“Well,” he said, full of patient menace. “Let me know if I can help. My father is a friend of President Heuss.”

“And he’s trying to help free you?” I tried to contain the surprise in my voice. “To get you a parole?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks.” I walked away before he could see the look of horror on my face. It was beginning to look as if the only way I was ever going to have any friends in the new Germany was to have friends I really didn’t like.

My American friends, both of them, were in cell seven when, after breakfast, I was returned there by one of the guards. This time they’d brought a little tape recorder in a leather case with a microphone not much bigger than a Norelco shaver. One was filling his pipe from a pouch of Sir Walter Raleigh; the other was adjusting his clip-on bow tie against his reflection in my cell window. There was a short-brimmed Stetson on my bed and both men smelled lightly of Vaseline hair tonic.

“Make yourself at home,” I said.

“Thanks, we already did.”

“If you’re here to record my singing voice, I should warn you fellows I already made a deal with Parlophone.”

“This is for our listening pleasure,” said the one puffing some heat into his Sir Walter Raleigh. “We’re not planning on a general release. Not this Christmas.”

“We think we’re getting to the interesting part,” said the other. “About Erich Mielke. At long last. The part that affects us now.” He snapped on the machine and the spools began to turn. “Say something for recording level.”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. But let’s just hope that the oral tradition is not yet dead in Germany.”

“If it isn’t, it must be the only thing in Germany that’s not dead.”

A few seconds later, I heard for the first time the sound of my own voice uttered by someone other than myself. There was something about it I didn’t like. Mostly it was the laconic way I had of speaking. It was five years since I’d seen my home city, but I still sounded as unhelpful as a Berlin grave digger. It was easy to see why people didn’t like me very much. If ever I was going to make a useful contribution to society I was going to have to fix that. Maybe take some lessons in courtesy and charm.

“Think of us like the Brothers Grimm,” said the Ami smoking the pipe. “Gathering material for a story.”

“I try not to think of you at all if I can help it. But the Brothers Grimm works for me. I never liked their stuff very much. I especially hated the story about the village idiot with the pipe and the bow tie and his wicked Uncle Sam.”

“So, then. After Paris. You went home to Berlin.”

“Briefly. I organized Renata a job at the Adlon and lived to regret it. The poor kid was killed in the first big bombing raid on Berlin, in November 1943. Some help I was.”

“And Heydrich?”

“Oh, he was killed much earlier than 1943. Only, he had it coming and on a silver salver. But that’s another story.”

“Did he believe you? About not finding Mielke?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. You never knew with Heydrich. We talked it over in his office at the Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Next thing I knew, I had orders to go to the Ukraine. I might have taken that personally except for the fact that everyone had the same orders.” I shrugged. “Well, I expect your friends Silverman and Earp told you all about that. Then I was in Berlin for a while before going to Prague. That was the summer of 1942. Let’s see, now. A year later, I was in Smolensk with the War Crimes Bureau. As an Oberleutnant. But after the Battle of Kursk we were out of that whole theater pretty quickly. The Red Army was in the driver’s seat, you might say. I got a leave. I got married. To a schoolteacher. Then I was recruited into the Abwehr—military intelligence—and promoted to captain again.”

“Why were you demoted?”

“Because of what happened in Prague. I stepped on someone’s corns, I guess.” I shrugged. “Anyway, February 1944, I joined General Schörner’s Northern Army as an intelligence officer. I spoke a fair bit of Russian by then. And a bit of Polish, too. The work was mostly interpreting. At least it was until the fighting started. Then it was just fighting. Kill or be killed. Tell me something. Did either of the Brothers Grimm see combat?”

“Nope,” said the man with the pipe. “I was flying a desk for the whole of the war.”

“I was too young,” said the man with the bow tie.

“I didn’t think so. You get to recognize that in a man’s eye. It might interest you to know that by 1944 there was no such thing as ‘too young’ for the German army. There was no ‘too old,’ either. And no one was left flying a desk, as you put it, when they could fly a plane, or sit in a tank, or man an antiaircraft battery. Boys of thirteen marched alongside men aged sixty-five and seventy. You see, it wasn’t until the Red Army reached East Prussia that German civilians began to suffer in the way Russian civilians had suffered. This meant that there was more for us to fight for; and it was why men and boys of all ages were conscripted into the army. Nothing and no one was to be spared, least of all ourselves. Total war was what Goebbels called it. And it means what it says, which was rare for him. Total means everything. All in, nothing left out.

“You Amis talk about this Cold War of yours with no understanding of what it means to fight a cold, pitiless war without mercy and against an enemy who never stops coming. Oh, believe me, I know. I was killing Ivans for fourteen months and I can tell you this—there’s no end to them. As many as you can kill, they keep on coming. So remember that if the time ever comes when you have to do the same. Not that anyone believes you’ll stop them. Why would you fight to save Europe, to save Germans? That’s the only reason we fought. To stop the Ivans from slaughtering the population of East Prussia. You might say that this was what we had done to the Jews, and you’d be right. But there were no war crimes trials for Soviet officers, no Ivans here in Landsberg. You would have to see what happens to a crowd of civilians when a Russian tank drives straight through its middle, or watch a fighter strafe a line of civilian refugees, to know what I’m talking about. Sepp Dietrich and his men shot how many Americans at Malmédy? Ninety? Ninety. A war crime you call it. For the Russians in East Prussia, ninety wasn’t even an infraction, it was a misdemeanor. Except that it’s hardly a misdemeanor when the general demeanor of your soldiery is one of barbarous cruelty.”

I was silent for a moment.

“Something wrong?”

“I never talked about this before,” I said. “It’s not easy. What does Goethe say? About sun and worlds I can tell you but little. All that I can see is the suffering of humanity. Still, it’s right that you should hear it. The trouble with you Amis is that you think it was you who won the war when everyone knows it was the Ivans. Without you and the British, they’d have taken longer to beat us. But they’d have beaten us all the same. Stalin’s maths, we used to call it. When there were just five of us left, there would be twenty Russians. And that was how Stalin was going to win. You’d better remember that if the Ivans ever invade West Berlin.”

“Sure, sure. Let’s talk about Königsberg. You were taken prisoner at Königsberg.”

“Don’t rush me. I have to tell this in my own way. When something has been asleep for this long, you don’t just shake it by the shoulder and shout in its ear.”

“Take your time. You’ve got plenty of time.”