Greeks Bearing Gifts

FOUR

I’d finished work at the hospital. I went to the washroom beside the mortuary to clean up but while I was there I examined my face without much enthusiasm. What I had against it was its air of disappointment and its lived-in look, the shifty red eyes and furtive expression, as if it was always expecting the tap on the shoulder that might usher its shy owner to a car and then a prison cell for the next ten years.

I went out the main entrance and walked between two concrete pillars with snakes wrapped around outsized censers on the top; they were much too high up to ask what they were doing there, but I was dimly aware that the ancient Greeks had regarded snakes as sacred, their venom as remedial, and maybe their skin shedding as symbolic of rebirth and renewal, which as an idea certainly worked for me. It might have been early morning but there were still one or two real snakes around and one of them was sitting in a newish BMW in front of the hospital. As I came out the hospital door, he leaned across the passenger seat and, with a cigar still in his face, shouted through the open passenger window.

“Gunther. Bernhard Gunther. As I live and breathe. I was just visiting an old friend in the hospital, and now you turn up. How are you, Gunther? How many years has it been since we saw each other last? Twenty? Twenty-five? I thought you were dead.”

I stopped on the sidewalk and looked inside, debating my choices and discovering what was obvious, which was that I really didn’t have any. Schramma was shouting so that other passersby could hear him and make me feel all the more uncomfortable. He was smiling gleefully while he did it, too, like a man who’d come to collect on a bet he’d won and I’d lost. If I’d had a gun I would probably have shot him or maybe myself. I used to be afraid of dying but now, on the whole, I find I’m looking forward to it, to getting far away from Bernie Gunther and everything to do with him, from his tangled history and uneasy way of thinking, from his inability to adjust to this modern world; but most of all I’m looking forward to getting away from all the people who knew him, or who claim to have known him, like Criminal Secretary Schramma. I’ve tried being someone else several times but who I am always comes back to kick me in the teeth.

“I told you I’d find out who you are. Hey, come on. Don’t be such a sore loser. You don’t know it yet, but I’m here to do you a favor, Gunther. Seriously. You’ll thank me for what I’m going to tell you. So hurry up and get in the car before someone realizes that you’re not who you say you are. Besides, it’s too cold to sit here with the window open. I’m freezing my plums off.”

I ducked into the car, closed the door, and wound up the window without saying a word. Almost immediately I wished I’d left the window alone; Schramma’s cigar smelled like a bonfire in a plague pit.

“You want to know how I found out who you are?”

“Go ahead and amaze me.”

“The Munich Police Praesidium came through the war pretty much unscathed. The records, too. Like I said, I knew we met sometime before Hitler. And that meant it was before Heydrich, too. Heydrich was chief of police in Munich for a while and changed the filing system. He was very efficient, as you probably know. All that cross-referencing he did still comes in handy sometimes. So it was relatively simple to find the name of a detective from the famous Alex, in Berlin, who was our guest for the night after assaulting our desk sergeant.”

“As I recall the incident, he hit me first.”

“I’m quite sure of it. I remember that sergeant. A right bastard, he was. It was 1932. Twenty-five years. How about that? My God. How time flies, eh?”

“Not at this present moment.”

“Like I said before, it doesn’t bother me what you did during the war. The Old Man says it’s all ancient history now, even in the GDR. But every so often the commies still feel obliged to make an example of someone, just so as they can distinguish their own tyranny from the fascist one that went before. Could be they want you. Could be they might have you, too. Old Nazis are about the only kind of criminals the West is disposed to send back across the border these days.”

“It’s nothing like that,” I said. “I’m not a war criminal. I didn’t kill anyone.”

“Oh, sure. Christof Ganz is just the name you write poetry under. Your nom de plume, as it were. I get that. I like to move under the radar a bit myself, sometimes. For a cop, I mean. Then there’s Interpol. I haven’t checked with them yet, but I wouldn’t mind betting they have a file on you. Of course, I can’t look at that one without putting a flag up. Once I’ve asked, they’ll want to know why I want to know and maybe they’ll try to take it a stage further. So from here on in it’s your call, Gunther. Only you’d better make sure it’s the right one, for your sake.”

“You’ve made your point, Schramma. You’ve found some leverage and you have my cooperation. But get to the part where you want to do me a favor, will you? I’m tired and I want to go home. I’ve spent all night ferrying corpses and if I stay here any longer I’m liable to search your big ugly mouth for a coin.”

He didn’t get it. Not that I cared. Mostly I’m talking for myself these days. And wit only sounds like wit when there’s someone around to appreciate it. Most of the time people like Schramma just talked too much. In Germany there was too much talk, too much opinion, too much conversation and none of it very good. Television and the wireless were just noise. To be effective, words have to be distilled as if they’ve arrived in your balloon via a retort and a cool receiver.

“Have you heard of a local politician called Max Merten? Originally from Berlin, but lives in Munich now.”

“Vaguely. When I was at the Alex there was a Max Merten who was a young district court counselor from the Ministry of Justice.”

“Must be the same Fritz. Done very nicely for himself, too. Nice house in Nymphenburg. Smart office on Kardinal-Faulhaberstrasse. He’s one of the co-founders of the All-German People’s Party—the GVP, which is closely associated with the socialist SED. The other founder is Gustav Heinemann, who used to be a prominent member of the CDU and the interior minister until he fell out with the Old Man. But money’s tight for politics right now. Funds for new parties are thin on the ground. I mean, who wants to be rid of our miracle-working Konrad Adenauer—apart from Heinemann, of course, and some oversensitive Jews?

“So a few weeks ago Max Merten hired me, privately, to check out the bona fides of a potential new Party donor—General Heinrich Heinkel, who’s offered to fund the GVP. But Merten has a not unreasonable suspicion that Heinkel is still a Nazi. And he doesn’t want the GVP taking any tainted money. Anyway it turns out that Merten was right, although not in the way he suspected. Heinkel’s ten thousand is actually coming from the GDR. You see, Merten’s business partner is a prominent German politician by the name of Walter Hallstein, who’s the Old Man’s foreign minister in all but name, and the fellow who’s been conducting our negotiations to set up this new European Economic Community. The GDR hates the idea of the EEC—and more particularly the European Defense Community, of which West Germany will be an important member—and has planned an elaborate undercover operation to discredit the GVP and Merten in the hope that some of the mud they throw will eventually stick to Professor Hallstein. Now, you might ask why an old Nazi is fronting money for the GDR. Well, Heinkel’s eldest son managed to get himself arrested in Leipzig, where he is currently languishing in a jail cell as a guarantor of his father’s cooperation. If he does exactly what he’s told, the young man will be released. That’s his deal.

“A few nights from now Heinkel is going to pay over the money in cash to Merten at the general’s house in Bogenhausen. There’s a room in Heinkel’s house that has been suitably decorated with swastikas and other evidence of the general’s continuing Nazism. While Merten is there the police will turn up to arrest Heinkel for various offenses, including selling Nazi memorabilia. And in order to save his skin Heinkel will tell the police that the money was actually meant as a bribe for Professor Hallstein.”

“And you found out all this how?” I asked.

“I’m a cop, Gunther. That’s what cops do. We find out stuff we’re not supposed to know about. Some days I do the crossword in twenty minutes. Others I dig up shit on people like you and Heinkel.”

“So why are you telling me all this, and not Max Merten?”

Schramma puffed his cigar silently and as his curious blue eyes narrowed I began to guess the whole dirty scheme, which is a bad habit of mine: I’ve always been possessed of a sneaking and uncomfortable feeling that underneath any evidence to the contrary I’m a really bad man—which makes me better able to second-guess other bad men. Maybe it’s the edge you need to be a good cop.

“Because you’ve told Max Merten that General Heinkel is on the level, haven’t you? That’s it, isn’t it? The cops aren’t going to come at all for the simple reason you’re planning to snatch the GDR’s money for yourself. You’re going to turn up an hour or two before Max Merten and rob this general.”

“Something like that. And you’re going to help me, Gunther. After all, it’s quite possible that Heinkel may have company. A man who robs alone is a man who gets caught.”

“There’s only one thing worse than a crook and it’s a crooked cop.”

“You’re the one with the false identity, Gunther, not me. In my book that says you’re dirty. So spare me any lectures about honesty. If I have to I’ll take care of the job myself. Of course, that will mean you’ll be in jail or, at the very least, on the run. But I’d much prefer it if you were there, backing me up.”

“I’m beginning to understand a little more about what happened to Paul Herzefelde back in 1932,” I said. “It was you who was squeezing that fraudster, wasn’t it? Kohl, was it? Did Herzefelde guess as much? Yes, that would fit. It was you who killed him. And you who let the Nazis take the blame because he was a Jew. That was smart. I’ve misjudged you, Schramma. You must be awfully good at pretending to be a good cop to get away with it for so many years.”

“Really, it’s not so difficult these days. The police are like everyone else in Germany. A little short on manpower after the war. They can’t afford to be so fussy about who they have back on the force. Now you, you really are a smart fellow, the way you figured all that out in just a few minutes.”

“If I was that smart I wouldn’t be sitting in this car talking to a bastard like you, Schramma.”

“You’re selling yourself short, Gunther. It’s not every day you solve a murder that’s twenty-five years old. Believe it or not, I like that about you. And it’s another reason I want you along for the ride. You don’t think like a normal person. If you’ve survived this long as someone else, I figure you can see things coming. Situations developing. I can use experience like that. Now, and in the future. There’s no one left in Munich I can really trust; most of my younger Ettstrasse colleagues are too honest for their own good, and more importantly, for mine.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I’d hate to think we lost a war just to keep scum like you in uniform.”

“Keep using your mouth if that helps. But I figure some money will shut you up. I’ll make it worth your while, Gunther. I’ll give you ten percent. That’s a thousand marks. Don’t tell me you couldn’t use a thousand marks. Fate looks like it’s been dogging your footsteps for a long time now with a length of lead pipe in its hand.”

As if to make the point there was now an automatic pistol in his own big hand and it was jammed up against my liver, which I figured I could ill afford to lose in spite of the damage it had already sustained after years of heavy drinking.

“Just don’t get too clever with me, Gunther,” he said, and nodded at the hospital’s front door. “Or it’ll be your corpse that’s short of a face in that stinking mortuary.”