The Lady from Zagreb

Three

I took the S-Bahn train to Wannsee. The RAF had dropped a few token bombs near the station at Halensee, where there was now a large gang of railwaymen working on the track to keep the west of Berlin moving smoothly. The men stood back as the little red-and-yellow train passed slowly by, and as they did so a small boy in the carriage I was in gravely gave them the Hitler salute. When one of the track workers returned the salute, as if he had been saluting the leader himself, there was much mirth on and off the train. In Berlin a subversive sense of humor was never very far beneath the patriotic sham and counterfeit postures of everyday German life. Especially when there was a child to cover yourself; after all, it was disloyal to the leader not to return the Hitler salute, wasn’t it?

It was the same journey I’d made when I’d had lunch with Arthur Nebe at the Swedish Pavilion, except that this time I was wearing a uniform. There was a line of cream-colored taxis parked in front of the Märklin train-set station but none of them were doing much business and about the only traffic around was on two wheels. A huge bicycle rack stood next to the entrance looking like a rest stop for the Tour de France. Some of the cabbies and the local florist were staring up at a man on a ladder who was painting one of the station’s church-shaped windows. In Wannsee, where nothing much ever happens, I suppose that was a performance of sorts. Maybe they were waiting for him to fall off.

I crossed a wide bridge over the Havel onto Königstrasse and, ignoring Am Kleinen Wannsee to the south, which would have taken me to the offices of the International Criminal Police Commission at number 16, I walked along the northwest shore of the largest of Berlin’s lakes, onto Am Grossen Wannsee, past several yacht and boating clubs and elegant villas, to the address of the SS guesthouse Nebe had given me: numbers 56–58. In a road as exclusive as that it was easy enough to find. There was an SS armored car parked in front of a large set of wrought-iron gates and a guardhouse with a flag, otherwise everything was as quiet and respectable as a family of retired honeybees. If there was any trouble around there it certainly wasn’t going to come from the villa’s moss-backed neighbors. Trouble in Wannsee means your lawn mower has stopped working, or the maid didn’t turn up on time. Stationing an armored car in Am Grossen Wannsee was like ensuring a Vienna choirboy to sing Christmas carols.

Inside a largish landscaped park was a Greek Revival — style villa with thirty or forty windows. It wasn’t the biggest villa on the lake but the bigger houses had bigger walls and were only ever seen by bank presidents and millionaires. The address had seemed familiar to me, and as soon as I saw the place I knew why. I’d been there before. The house had previously belonged to a client of mine. In the mid-thirties, before I got frog-marched back into Kripo by Heydrich, I tried my hand at being a private investigator, and for a while I’d been engaged by a wealthy German industrialist called Friedrich Minoux. A major shareholder in a number of prominent oil and gas companies, Minoux had hired me to subcontract an operative in Garmisch-Partenkirchen — where he owned another equally grand house — to keep an eye on his much younger wife, Lilly, who had chosen to live there, ostensibly for reasons of health. Maybe there was something insalubrious about the entitled air in Wannsee. It was too rich for her, perhaps, or maybe she just didn’t like all that blue sky and water. I didn’t know since I never met her and wasn’t able to ask her, but understandably, perhaps, Herr Minoux doubted the reasons she’d given him for not living in Wannsee, and once a month for most of 1935, I’d driven out to this villa in order to report on his wife’s otherwise blameless conduct. They’re the best kind of clients any detective can have, the ones with money enough to spend finding out something that just isn’t true, and it was the easiest two hundred marks a week I ever earned in my life. Previously Minoux had been a keen supporter of Adolf Hitler; but that hadn’t been enough to keep him out of jail when it was discovered he’d defrauded the Berlin Gas Company of at least 7.4 million reichsmarks. Friedrich Minoux was now doing five years in the cement. From what I’d read in the newspapers, his house in Wannsee had been sold to pay for his defense but until then I hadn’t realized that the buyer was the SS.

The guard on the gate saluted smartly and, having checked his list, admitted me into the finely manicured grounds. I walked around to the front of the house and down to the lakeside, where I smoked a cigarette and pictured myself back in 1935, smartly dressed, with a car of my own, making a decent living and no one to tell me what to do. No one but the Nazis, that is. Back then I’d told myself I could ignore them. I’d been wrong, of course, but then so were a lot of other people smarter than me, Chamberlain and Daladier included. The Nazis were like syphilis; ignoring them and hoping everything would get better by itself had never been a realistic option.

When I finished my cigarette I went into the one-and-a-half-story hallway at the center of the house. There everything was the same but different. At one end of the house was a library with a bay window and a table with plenty of copies of Das Schwarze Korps, but these days even the most fanatical Nazis avoided the SS newspaper as it was full of the death notices of dearest sons — SS men and officers who had fallen “in the east” or “in the struggle against Bolshevism.” At the other end of the house was a conservatory with an indoor fountain made of greenish marble. The fountain had been switched off; possibly the sound of something as clear and pure as Berlin water was distracting to the types who stayed there. In between the library and the fountain were several salons and drawing rooms, two of them with magnificent fireplaces. The best of the furniture and a rare Gobelin tapestry were gone but there were still a few pieces I recognized, including a large silver cigarette box from which I grabbed a fistful of nails to fill my empty case.

They had three senior SS officers from Budapest, Bratislava, and Krakow staying at the villa and it seemed I was just in time to get some veal and potatoes and some coffee before they finished serving lunch. Very soon I regretted giving in to my hunger when these three engaged me in conversation. I told them I was not long back from Prague, and they announced that Berlin’s former chief of police, Kurt Daluege, was now the acting Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and that a whole month after Heydrich’s death the effort to find all of his assassins was still continuing. I already knew that Lidice, a village suspected of having harbored the killers, had been destroyed and its population executed. But these three officers now told me that, not content with this stupid act of reprisal, a second village called Ležáky had also been leveled — just a couple of weeks before — and the thirty-three men and women who lived there had been massacred, too.

“They say Hitler ordered the deaths of ten thousand randomly chosen Czechos,” explained the colonel from Krakow, who was an Austrian, “but that General Frank talked him out of it, thank God. I mean, what’s the point of reprisal if you end up shooting yourself in the foot? Bohemian industry is much too important to Germany now to piss the Czechos off. Which is all you’d succeed in doing if you slaughtered that many. So they had to content themselves with Lidice and Ležáky. As far as I know, there’s nothing important in Lidice and Ležáky.”

“Not anymore,” laughed one of the others.

I excused myself and went to find a lavatory.

Arthur Nebe had told me that the speeches to the IKPK delegates would all be given in the central hall and it was there I now went to see where my ordeal was to occur. I felt a little sick with nerves just thinking about it, although that might as easily have been something to do with what I’d just been told about Ležáky; besides, I knew that what I was facing wasn’t much compared to the ordeal that Friedrich Minoux now found himself subjected to. Five years in Brandenburg is certainly no weekend at the Adlon when you’re a career pen-and-desk man.

One of the officers offered me a lift back into Berlin in his Mercedes, which I declined for all the reasons that I hoped weren’t obvious. I told him that there was a concert in the Botanic Garden in Zehlendorf I wanted to attend. I wasn’t in a hurry to enjoy the joke about Ležáky again. I walked back down to Königstrasse and headed back to the station, where, under the octagonal ceiling of the entrance hall, I met a man wearing olive-green lederhosen that I hadn’t seen for seven years.

“Herr Gunther, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

The man was in his fifties with fair hair; the sleeves of his collarless blue shirt were rolled up to reveal forearms that were as big as fire hydrants. He looked tough enough so I was glad to see he was smiling.

“Gantner,” said the man. “I used to drive the Daimler for Herr Minoux.”

“Yes, I remember. What a coincidence. I’ve just been up at the villa.”

“I figured as much, you being SD n’all. There’s plenty of your lot round that way now.”

I felt myself smart at the idea that the SD was “my lot.”

“Really, I’m still just a policeman,” I said, keen to distance myself from the kind of SS who had destroyed Lidice and Ležáky. “I got called back onto the force in ’thirty-eight. And they put us all in uniform when we invaded Russia. There wasn’t much I could do about it.”

The number of times I’d heard myself utter this excuse. Did anyone believe it? And did it really matter to anyone but me? The sooner I was part of something worthwhile like the War Crimes Bureau the better.

“Anyway, they’ve got me on nights at the Alex, so I don’t offend anyone with my choice of cologne. What are you doing here anyway?”

“I live around here, sir. Königstrasse. Matter of fact, there’s several of us who used to work for Herr Minoux who are there now. Number 58, if you’re ever in the area again. Nice place. Owned by the local coal merchant. Fellow called Schulze, who used to know the boss.”

“I was very sorry to read about what happened to Herr Minoux. He was a good client. How is he dealing with bed and breakfast at German Michael’s?”

“He’s just started a stretch at Brandenburg at the age of sixty-five, so, not well. The bed’s a little hard, as you might expect. But the food? I mean, we’re all on short rations because of the war, right? But what they call food in there, I wouldn’t give it to a dog. So I drive out to Brandenburg every morning to take him breakfast. Not the Daimler, of course. I’m afraid that went south a long time ago. I’ve got a Horch now.”

“It’s allowed? You bringing in breakfast?”

“It’s not just allowed, it’s actively encouraged. Excuses the government from having to feed the prisoners. About the only food he’ll eat is what I take him in the car. Just some boiled eggs, and some bread and jam. Matter of fact, I was just in town to fetch some of his favorite jam from someone who makes it especially for him. I take the S-Bahn to save petrol. Frau Minoux, she’s still in Garmisch, although she also rents a house in Dahlem. And Monika, Herr Minoux’s daughter, she lives on Hagenstrasse, in Grunewald. I’ll tell the boss you said hello if you like.”

“You do that.”

“By the way, what are you doing over at the villa? Are you part of this conference they’re planning?”

“Yes, I am. Unfortunately. My boss, Arthur Nebe, the head of Kripo, he wants me to make a speech about being a Berlin detective.”

“That should be easy,” said Gantner. “Since you are a detective.”

“I suppose so. He’s ordered me to go to Wannsee and tell a lot of important foreign cops what a great detective I was. Bernie Gunther, the Berlin policeman who apprehended Gormann, the strangler.”

State Secretary Gutterer had exaggerated all that, of course, which was his job, I suppose. I rather doubted that any one man could ever have been the omniscient sleuth my speech now said I was. But you didn’t have to be Charlie Chan to figure out that it was this little speech of mine that was behind much of what happened in the summer of 1942, not to mention the summer of 1943.