Greeks Bearing Gifts

EIGHT

We drove east in Merten’s Mercedes, along Maximilianstrasse, and crossed the Isar on Maximilian’s Bridge, before turning left and north up Möhlstrasse. Merten hadn’t been to the dead general’s home before so I was giving him directions. It was snowing again and in the car’s headlights the flakes resembled the bubbles in a glass of weiss beer.

“I’m very grateful for this,” admitted Merten.

“Don’t mention it, Max.”

“Look, I don’t care what you did in the war. Really, it’s none of my business. But I am supposed to be an officer of the Bavarian court. So it might be best if at least I knew something about your present predicament. If I am going to be your lawyer you should tell me if you are wanted for anything in particular. Beyond the obvious.”

“What’s obvious?”

“I mean your past service, with the SD.”

“There’s nothing really. I know how it looks—me having a false name—but my conscience is clear.” I wasn’t sure about that; but, for the moment at least, I didn’t feel inclined to tell him my whole life story. “The fact is, I’m an escaped Russian POW. I killed a man at a camp in the DDR while making my escape. A German. If they caught me they’d chop off my head. But more probably the Stasi would prefer to just have me quietly murdered.” This was true at least.

“That’s all right then. For a moment I thought—well, you can guess what I was thinking. There were always lots of stories that were told around the Alex about the famous Bernie Gunther. That Himmler kicked you once. That you worked for the likes of Goebbels and Göring, but that you mostly worked for General Heydrich.”

“Reluctantly.”

“Was that even possible?”

“It was if Heydrich decided it was.”

“I guess so. The last I heard of you, they’d sent you to Russia as a member of a police battalion, working for that other murderer, Arthur Nebe, with Task Group B.”

“That’s right. Only I didn’t murder anyone.”

“Oh sure, sure, but how many did he kill? Fifty thousand?”

“Something like that.”

“Hard to believe that two or three years later he was part of the Stauffenberg Plot to kill Hitler.”

“Actually, I find it harder to believe that he murdered fifty thousand people,” I said. “But he did. Nebe was full of contradictions. Mainly he was a cynical opportunist. In the early ’30s a die-hard Nazi; by ’38, part of an early plot to get rid of Hitler; after the miraculous fall of France, a committed Nazi prepared to do anything to advance himself, including mass murder; and by ’44, when he saw the way the wind was blowing, part of Stauffenberg’s incompetent plot. If he was a character in a book you wouldn’t believe him even possible.”

“No, I suppose not. Anyway, there but for the grace of God. If it hadn’t been for your good advice I might be in the same position as you, Bernie.”

“Why do you say so?”

“What I mean is, it was you who talked me out of joining the Party and the SS. Remember? Just before the war I was an ambitious junior lawyer in the Ministry of Justice and keen to advance my career. At that time joining the SS and the Nazi Party was the quickest way to make that happen. Instead I stayed put at the ministry, thankfully. If you hadn’t put me off the idea, Bernie, I’d probably have ended up in the SD and in charge of some SS special action group in the Baltic States charged with killing Jewish women and kids—like so many other lawyers I knew—and now I’d be a wanted man, like you, or worse: I could have met the same fate as those other men who went to jail, or were hanged in Landsberg.” He shook his head and frowned. “I often wonder how I’d have handled that particular dilemma. You know—mass murder. What I would have done. If I could have done—that. I prefer to believe I would have refused to carry out those orders but if I’m really honest I don’t know the answer. I think my desire to stay alive would have persuaded me to do what I was told, like every other lawyer. Because there’s something about my own profession that horrifies me sometimes. It seems to me that lawyers can justify almost anything to themselves as long as it’s legal. But you can make anything legal when you put a gun to parliament’s head. Even mass murder.”

“Turn right up ahead and then keep the river on your left.”

“Okay.”

“So what kind of war did you have, Max?”

“Thankfully uneventful. I got drafted into the Luftwaffe when the war started and served for a while in an anti-aircraft battery in Bremen and then in Stettin. That was very quiet. Too quiet, really. I mean I was just plain bored. And so in 1942 I went to the War Board and volunteered for the army. Went through officer training, made captain, and got myself a nice quiet posting somewhere warm and sunny. Matter of fact, I had quite a good time, all things considered.”

“Turn left on Neuberghauserstrasse and then pull up. It’s only a short walk but we’d best make sure that the cops aren’t there before we go inside. And don’t forget the camera.”

He lit a new cigarette with the butt of the previous one and threw that away. “Good idea.”

He parked the Mercedes up the street from the white house and then we stood beside the car for several minutes before I was satisfied the murders were, as yet, undiscovered.

“I’ll go in first, alone,” I said. “Just in case. Give it a couple of minutes. I’ll go up to the second floor, switch a light on and off to let you know it’s all right before you follow. There’s no sense in us both getting arrested. But if I do get pulled, then make sure you come to the Praesidium as soon as you can. I’ve spent the night in there before and I didn’t like it.”

“Thanks, Bernie. I appreciate it.”

I walked toward the white house, past the church, and through the picket gate. The back door was still unlocked, and a few minutes later Max Merten and I were standing in the kitchen. Schramma’s cigar was still balanced on the edge of the kitchen table where he’d left it.

“What’s that noise?” he asked. “Can you hear it?”

“I imagine it’s Christian Schramma shouting for help.”

We went downstairs where I found his blue eye staring out of the peephole, like before.

“Let me out of here,” he yelled through the steel door.

I went to the spy hole and peered back at him. He hammered the door as if he wished it had been my face and then took several steps back. It was clear he’d found a corkscrew; there were at least two bottles open that hadn’t been open before.

“I’m prepared to let you out,” I yelled back. “But on three conditions.”

“What are they?”

“First that you write out a full confession in your notebook. I know you have one because I saw it in your coat pocket when you produced that .38. I can read what you write through the spy hole. The second is that I see you take the tape off the handle of that revolver and empty every chamber. I figure you have four rounds left. You can drop each one of them into a bottle of wine. When it’s nicely covered with your fingerprints you can put the gun on the table where I can see it.”

“And the third condition?”

“This is going to take a bit more time. I want to see you drink the contents of several bottles. Only when I’m satisfied you’re completely drunk and incapable will I open this door. If this all happens to my satisfaction, Dr. Merten and I will wheelbarrow you back to your car and drive it to the English Garden, where we’ll leave you for the night to sleep it off.”

“What happens then?”

“The deal is this: We’ll forget you had anything to do with these murders if you forget about me. And about the money. The money is going to the GVP after all. I’ll go back to my shitty job at the hospital mortuary and you can go back to yours, keeping law and order in this beautiful city. So long as you keep your big mouth shut about everything, no one is ever going to know that you killed these men. But if a cop in a silly hat so much as tells me off for whistling in the street, then I will conclude that all bets are off and the police are going to find that gun with your fingerprints and your confession.”

I didn’t mention the camera. I wanted the existence of photographs of Schramma pictured beside two bodies to be an extra source of friendly persuasion, should I ever need one.

“Fuck you, Gunther. You too, Merten. Fuck you both. I figure someone is bound to turn up here before very long, and then let me out; and when they do—”

“No one’s coming. The general lived alone like you said.”

“Someone will come. The cops will come. Tomorrow. That’s right. They’ll come because I told them to come, to arrest the general and Merten. Like I told you before.”

“No. I think that’s what those two men you murdered believed was going to happen. But no. I think you hoped their bodies would lie there, undiscovered, for as long as possible. Enough time for you to distance yourself nicely, anyway.”

“You can believe what you like. But I can tell you, they’ll be here tomorrow. And when they get here I’ll tell them you framed me. Sure, it looks awkward for me. But who do you think they’ll believe? Me, a cop with thirty years on my badge. Or you? A man with a false name.”

“Fair enough. You make a good point. Only think about it. I could have left you here to starve to death, but I didn’t. I came back for you. However, I can see you’re not inclined to be reasonable. So I won’t be back again. I can’t take that risk. And this time I’ll be sure to switch off all the lights and lock up behind me. Bogenhausen is a very private area. People keep themselves to themselves. Could be months before they find you. Starvation is a rotten way to die. But maybe if you drink enough of that wine, you won’t notice the pain quite so much. I hope so, for your sake. There’s a small cemetery next door. Strikes me that buried alive in this cellar you’re already as good as there.”

I switched off the basement light, which also controlled the light inside the wine cellar, and I pushed Max Merten toward the stairs, as if we really were leaving.

“All right, all right,” shouted Schramma. “You win, Gunther. I’ll do it your way, you bastard.”

I switched the light on and walked back to the spy hole ready to invigilate the whole laborious process of ensuring I had something closely resembling a future.