Greeks Bearing Gifts

PROLOGUE

This would seem like the worst story ever told if it had not happened, all of it, every detail, exactly as I have described.

That’s the thing about real life: it all looks so implausible right up until the moment when it starts to happen. I have my experience as a police detective and the events of my own personal history to confirm this observation. There’s been nothing probable about my life. But I’ve a strong feeling that it’s the same for everyone. The collection of stories that make us all who we are only looks exaggerated or fictitious until we find ourselves living on its stained and dog-eared pages.

The Greeks have a word for this, of course: “mythology.” Mythology explains everything, from natural phenomena to what happens when you die and head downstairs, or when, unwisely, you steal a box of matches from Zeus. As it happens Greeks have a lot to do with this particular story. Perhaps with every story, when you stop to think about it. After all, it was a Greek called Homer who invented modern storytelling, in between losing his sight and probably not existing at all.

Like many stories this one is probably much improved by taking a drink or two. So go ahead. Be my guest. Have one on me. Certainly I like a drink but honestly, I’m not a hopeless case. Far from it. I sincerely hope that one night I will go for a drink and wake up as an amnesiac on a steamer that’s headed for nowhere I’ve ever heard of.

That’s the romantic in me, I guess. I’ve always liked to travel even when I was quite happy to stay at home. You might say that I just wanted to get away. From the authorities, most of all. Still do, if the truth be told, which it seldom is. Not in Germany. Not for me and quite a few others like me. For us the past is like the exterior wall in a prison yard: chances are, we’ll never get over it. And of course we shouldn’t be allowed to get over it, either, given who we were and everything we did.

But how is one ever to explain what happened? It was a question I used to see in the eyes of some of the American guests at the Grand Hotel in Cap Ferrat where, until recently, I was a concierge, when they realized I was German: How was it possible that your people could murder so many others? Well, it’s like this: When you walk through a big fish market you appreciate just how alien and various life can be; it’s hard to imagine how some of the fantastic, sinister, slippery-looking creatures you see laid out on the slab could even exist, and sometimes when I contemplate my fellow man, I have much the same feeling.

Myself, I’m a bit like an oyster. Years ago—in January 1933, to be exact—a piece of grit got into my shell and started to rub me up the wrong way. But if there is a pearl inside me I think it’s probably a black one. Frankly, I did a few things during the war of which I feel less than proud. This is not unusual. That’s what war’s about. It makes all of us who take part in it feel like we’re criminals and that we’ve done something bad. Apart from the real criminals, of course; no way has ever been invented to make them feel bad about anything. With one exception, perhaps: the hangman at Landsberg. When he’s given the chance, he can provoke a crisis of conscience in almost anyone.

Officially, that’s all behind us now. Our National Socialist revolution and the devastating war it brought about is over and the peace we have since enjoyed has, thanks to the Americans at least, been anything but Carthaginian. We stopped hanging people a long time ago and all but four of the several hundred war criminals who were caught and locked up for life in Landsberg have now been released. I do believe that this new Federal Republic of Germany could be a tremendous country when we’ve finished fixing it up. All of West Germany smells of fresh paint and every public building is in a state of major reconstruction. The eagles and swastikas are long gone but now even the traces of them are being erased, like Leon Trotsky from an old Communist Party photograph. In Munich’s infamous Hofbräuhaus—there most of all, perhaps—they’d done their best to paint out the swastikas on the vaulted cream-colored ceiling, although you could still make out where they’d been. But for these—the fingerprints of fascism—it would be easy to believe the Nazis had never even existed and that thirteen years of life under Adolf Hitler had been some dreadful Gothic nightmare.

If only the marks and traces of Nazism on the poisoned, bivalve soul of Bernie Gunther could have been erased with such facility. For these and other complicated reasons I won’t go into now, the only time I’m truly myself these days is, of necessity, when I’m alone. The rest of the time, I’m obliged to be someone else.

So then. Hallo. God’s greeting to you, as we say here in Bavaria. My name is Christof Ganz.