The One from the Other

TEN

About a week later she came back. The tall one. Tall women are always better than short ones, especially the kind of tall women that short men seem to favor, who really aren’t that tall, they just seem that way. This one wasn’t quite as tall as the hoop on a basketball court, but a lot of her was just hair and a hat and high heels and hauteur. She had plenty of that. She looked as if she needed help as much as Venice needed rain. That’s something I appreciate in a client. I enjoy being pitched at by someone who’s not used to words like “please” and “thank you.” It brings out the ’forty-eighter in me. Sometimes even the Spartacist.

“I need your help, Herr Gunther,” she said, sitting down very carefully on the edge of my creaking green leather sofa. She kept hold of her briefcase for a moment, hugging it to her ample chest like a breastplate.

“Oh? What makes you think so?”

“You’re a private detective, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but why me? Why not use Preysings in Frauenstrasse? Or Klenze on Augustinerstrasse? They’re both bigger than me.”

She looked taken aback, as if I’d asked what color underwear she had on. I smiled encouragingly and told myself that so long as she was sitting on the edge of the sofa, I would just have to guess.

“What I’m trying to find out, Fräulein, is if someone recommended me. In this business, it’s the sort of thing you like to know.”

“Not Fräulein. It’s Frau Warzok. Britta Warzok. And yes, you were recommended to me.”

“Oh? By whom?”

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather not say.”

“But you were the lady who turned up at Herr Krumper’s last week. My lawyer. Asking about my hotel? Only you were calling yourself Schmidt then, I believe.”

“Yes. Not very original of me, I know. But I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to hire you or not. I had been here a couple of times and you were out and I didn’t care to leave a message in your mailbox. The concierge said that he thought you owned a hotel in Dachau. I thought I might find you there. I saw the ‘For Sale’ sign and then I went to Krumper’s office.”

Some of that might have been true, but I let it go, for now. I was enjoying her discomfort and her elegant long legs too much to scare her off. But I didn’t see any harm in teasing her a little.

“And yet when you came in here the other night,” I said, “you said you’d made a mistake.”

“I changed my mind,” she said. “That’s all.”

“You changed it once, you could do it again. Leave me out on a limb. In this business that can be awkward. I need to know that you’re committed to this, Frau Warzok. It won’t be like buying a hat. Once an investigation is under way it’s not something you can return. You won’t be able to take it back to the shop and say you don’t like it.”

“I’m not an idiot, Herr Gunther,” she said. “And please don’t speak to me as if I haven’t given any thought to what I’m doing. It wasn’t easy coming here. You’ve no idea how difficult this is. If you did you might be a little less patronizing.” She spoke coolly and without emotion. “Is it the hat? I can take the hat off if it bothers you.” Finally she let go of her briefcase, placing it on the floor by her feet.

“I like the hat.” I smiled. “Please, keep it on. And I’m sorry if my manner offends you. But to be frank, there are a lot of time-wasters in this business and my time is precious to me. I’m a one-man operation, and if I’m working for you I can’t be working for someone else. Someone whose need might conceivably be greater than yours, perhaps. That’s just how it is.”

“I doubt there is anyone who needs you more than I do, Herr Gunther,” she said, with just enough tremor in her voice to tug at the softer end of my aorta. I offered her a cigarette.

“I don’t smoke,” she said, shaking her head. “My . . . doctor says they’re bad for you.”

“I know. But the way I figure it, they’re one of the more elegant ways to kill yourself. What’s more, they give you plenty of time to put your affairs in order.” I lit my cigarette and gulped down a mouthful of smoke. “Now, what seems to be the trouble, Frau Warzok?”

“You sound like you mean that,” she said. “About killing yourself.”

“I was on the Russian front, lady. After something like that, every day seems like a bonus.” I shrugged. “So eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we might get invaded by the Ivans, and then we’ll wish we were dead even if we’re not, although of course we will be, because this is an atomic world we live in now and it takes just six minutes not six years to kill six million people.” I pinched the cigarette from between my lips and grinned at her. “So what’s a few smokes beside a mushroom cloud?”

“You’ve been through it, then?”

“Sure. We’ve all been through it.” I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there. The little piece of black fishnet on the side of her hat was covering the three scars on her cheek. “You, too, by the look of things.”

She touched her face. “Actually, I was quite lucky,” she said.

“That’s the only way to look at it.”

“There was an air raid on the twenty-fifth of April 1944,” she said. “They say that forty-five high-explosive and five thousand incendiary bombs fell on Munich. One of the bombs shattered a water pipe in my house. I got hit by three red-hot copper rings that were blown off my boiler. But it could just as easily have been my eyes. It’s amazing what we can come through, isn’t it?”

“If you say so.”

“Herr Gunther, I want to get married.”

“Isn’t this a little sudden, dear? We’ve only just met.”

She smiled politely. “There’s just one problem. I don’t know if the man I married is still alive.”

“If he disappeared during the war, Frau Warzok,” I said, “you would be better off inquiring about him at the Army Information Office. The Wehrmacht Dienststelle is in Berlin, at 179 Eichborndamm. Telephone 41904.”

I knew the number because when Kirsten’s father had died, I had tried to find out if her brother was alive or dead. The discovery that he had been killed, in 1944, had hardly helped her deteriorating mental condition.

Frau Warzok was shaking her head. “No, it’s not like that. He was alive at the end of the war. In the spring of 1946 we were in Ebensee, near Salzburg. I saw him for only a short while, you understand. We were no longer living together as man and wife. Not since the end of the war.” She tugged a handkerchief down the sleeve of her tailored suit jacket and held it crushed in the palm of her hand, expectantly, as if she was planning to cry.

“Have you spoken to the police?”

“The German police say it’s an Austrian matter. The Salzburg police say I should leave it to the Americans.”

“The Amis won’t look for him either,” I said.

“Actually, they might.” She swallowed a bolus of raw emotion and then took a deep breath. “Yes, I think they might be interested enough to look for him.”

“Oh?”

“Not that I have told them anything about Friedrich. That’s his name. Friedrich Warzok. He’s Galician. Galicia was part of Austria until the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, after which it was allowed its autonomy. Then, after 1918, it became part of Poland. Friedrich was born in Kraków in 1903. He was a very Austrian sort of Pole, Herr Gunther. And then a very German one, after Hitler was elected.”

“So why would the Americans be interested in him?” I was asking the question, but I was beginning to have a shrewd idea.

“Friedrich was an ambitious man, but not a strong one. Not intellectually strong, anyway. Physically he was very strong. Before the war he was a stonemason. Rather a good one. He was a very virile man, Herr Gunther. I suppose that was what I fell for. When I was eighteen, I was quite vigorous myself.”

I didn’t doubt it for a moment. It was all too easy to imagine her wearing a short, white slip and a laurel wreath in her hair and doing interesting things with a hoop in a nice propaganda film from Dr. Goebbels. Female vigor never looked so blond and healthy.

“I’ll be honest with you, Herr Gunther.” She dabbed her eye with the corner of her handkerchief. “Friedrich Warzok was not a good man. During the war, he did some terrible things.”

“After Hitler there’s none of us can say he has a clear conscience,” I said.

“It’s very good of you to say so. But there are things that one has to do to survive. And then there are other things that don’t involve survival at all. This amnesty that’s being discussed in the Parliament. It wouldn’t include my husband, Herr Gunther.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” I said. “If someone as bad as Erich Koch is prepared to risk coming out of hiding to claim the protection of the new Basic Law, then anyone might do the same. No matter what he had done.”

Erich Koch had been the gauleiter of East Prussia and the Reich commissioner for the Ukraine, where some dreadful things had been done. I knew that because I’d seen quite a few of them myself. Koch was banking on receiving the protection of the Federal Republic’s new Basic Law, which forbade both the death penalty and extradition for all new cases of war crimes. Koch was currently being held in a prison in the British Zone. Time would tell if he had made a shrewd decision or not.

I was beginning to see where this case, and my new business, were headed. Frau Warzok’s husband was my third Nazi in a row. And thanks to the likes of Erich Kaufmann and the Baron von Starnberg, from whom I had received a personal letter of thanks, it looked as if I was turning out to be the man to turn to if your problem involved a Red Jacket or a fugitive war criminal. I didn’t much like that. It wasn’t why I had gone back to being a private detective. And I might have brushed Frau Warzok off if she had been there telling me that her husband had nothing personal against the Jews, or that he was merely the victim of “historical value judgments.” But so far, she wasn’t telling me that. Quite the contrary, as she now proceeded to underline.

“No, no, Friedrich is an evil man,” she said. “They could never grant amnesty to a man like that. Not after what he did. And he deserves whatever is coming to him. Nothing would please me more than to know he’s dead. Believe me.”

“Oh, I do, I do. Why don’t you tell me what he did?”

“Before the war he was in the Freikorps, and then the Party. Then he joined the SS, and rose to the rank of Hauptsturmführer. He was transferred to the Lemberg-Janowska camp in Poland. And that was the end of the man I had married.”

I shook my head. “I haven’t heard of Lemberg-Janowska.”

“Be glad of that, Herr Gunther,” she said. “Janowska wasn’t like the other camps. It started out as a network of factories that were part of the German Armament Works, in Lvov. It used forced labor, Jews and Poles. About six thousand of them in 1941. Friedrich went there in early 1942 and, for a few days at least, I went with him. The commander was a man named Wilhaus, and Friedrich became his assistant. There were about twelve or fifteen German officers, like my husband. But most of the SS, the guards, were Russians who had volunteered for service with the SS as a way of escaping a prisoner of war camp.” She shook her head and tightened her grip on the handkerchief, as if squeezing tearful memories out of the cotton. “After Friedrich got to Janowska, more Jews arrived. Many more Jews. And the ethos—if I can use such a word about Janowska—the ethos of the camp changed. Making Jews produce munitions became of much less importance than simply killing them. It wasn’t systematic killing of the kind that went on at Auschwitz-Birkenau. No, this was just murdering them individually in whatever way an SS man felt like. Each SS man had his own favorite way of dispatching a Jew. And every day there were shootings, hangings, drownings, impalements, disembowelings, crucifixions—yes, crucifixions, Herr Gunther. You can’t imagine it, can you? But it’s true. Women were stabbed to death with knives, or chopped to pieces with hatchets. Children were used for target practice. I heard a story that bets were made as to whether a child could be cleaved in two with a single blow from an ax. Each SS man was obliged to keep a tally of how many he had killed, so that a list might be compiled. Three hundred thousand people were killed like this, Herr Gunther. Three hundred thousand people brutally murdered, in cold blood, by laughing sadists. And my husband was one of them.”

While she spoke she looked not at me but at the floor, and it wasn’t long before a tear rolled down the length of her fine nose and hit the carpet. Then another.

“At some stage—I’m not sure when, because Friedrich stopped writing to me after a while—he assumed command of the camp. And it’s safe to say he kept things going just as they were. He did write to me once, to say Himmler had visited and how happy he was with the way things were progressing at Janowska. The camp was liberated by the Russians in July 1944. Wilhaus is dead now. I think the Russians killed him. Fritz Gebauer, who had been camp commandant before Wilhaus, was tried at Dachau and sentenced to life imprisonment. He’s in Landsberg Prison. But Friedrich escaped to Germany, where he stayed until the end of the war. We had some contact during this time. But the marriage was over, and had it not been for the fact that I am a Roman Catholic, I would certainly have divorced him.

“In late 1945, he disappeared from Munich and I didn’t hear from him again until March 1946. He was on the run. He contacted me and asked for money, so that he could go away. He was in contact with an old comrades’ association—the ODESSA. And he was awaiting a new identity. I have money of my own, Herr Gunther. So I agreed. I wanted him out of my life, forever. At the time, it did not occur to me that I would marry again. My scars were not as you see them now. A surgeon has worked hard to make my face more presentable. I spent most of my remaining fortune paying him.”

“It was worth it,” I observed. “He did a good job.”

“It’s kind of you to say so. And now I’ve met someone. A decent man whom I should like to marry. So I want to know if Friedrich is dead or alive. You see, he said he’d write to me when he got to South America. That’s where he was going. That’s where most of them go. But he never did. There were others escaping with Friedrich who did contact their families and who are now safe in Argentina and Brazil. But not my husband. I’ve taken advice from Cardinal Josef Frings, in Cologne, and he tells me that there can be no remarriage in the Roman Catholic Church without there being some evidence of Friedrich’s death. And I thought, you having been in the SS yourself, you might have a better chance of finding out if he’s alive or dead. If he’s in South America.”

“You’re well informed,” I said.

“Not me,” she said. “My fiancé. That’s what he told me, anyway.”

“And what does he do?”

“He’s a lawyer.”

“I might have known.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” I said. “You know, Frau Warzok, not everyone who was in the SS is as warm and cuddly as I am. Some of these old comrades don’t like questions, even from people like me. What you’re asking me to do could be dangerous.”

“I appreciate that,” she said. “We’ll make it worth your while. I have some money left. And my fiancé is a rich lawyer.”

“Is there any other kind? In the future I’ve an idea that everyone will be a lawyer. They’ll have to be.” I lit another cigarette. “A case like this, it might take a bit of money at that. Expenses. Talking money.”

“Talking money?”

“A lot of people won’t say or do anything until they see a picture of Europa and her bull.” I took out a banknote and showed her the picture I was talking about. “This picture.”

“I suppose that includes you.”

“Me, I’m coin-operated, like everything and everyone else these days. Lawyers included. I get ten marks a day plus expenses. No receipts. Your accountant won’t like that but it can’t be helped. Buying information isn’t like buying stationery. I get something in advance. That’s for your inconvenience. You see, I might draw a blank and it always inconveniences a client when he finds himself paying for nothing very much.”

“How does two hundred in advance sound?”

“Two hundreds are better than one.”

“And a substantial bonus if you find any evidence that Friedrich is alive or dead.”

“How substantial?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t given it much thought.”

“Might be a good idea if you did. I work better that way. How much would it be worth to you if I did find something out? If you could marry, for example.”

“I’d pay five thousand marks, Herr Gunther.”

“Have you thought of offering that much to the cardinal?” I asked.

“You mean like a bribe?”

“No, not like a bribe, Frau Warzok. I mean a bribe, pure and simple. Five thousand marks buys an awful lot of rosaries. Hell, that’s how the Borgias made their fortune. Everyone knows that.”

Frau Warzok seemed shocked. “The Church is not like that anymore,” she said.

“No?”

“I couldn’t,” she said. “Marriage is a sacrament that is indissoluble.”

I shrugged. “If you say so. Do you have a photograph of your husband?”

From an envelope in her briefcase she handed me three photographs. The first was a standard studio portrait of a man with a twinkle in his eye and a large grin on his face. The eyes were a little too close together, but apart from that there was nothing about it that might have led you to suppose that this was the face of a psychopathic murderer. He looked like a regular nine-to-five guy. That was the frightening thing about the concentration camps and the special action groups. It had been the regular guys—the lawyers, the judges, the policemen, the chicken farmers, and the stonemasons—who had done all the killing. In the second picture, things were clearer cut: a slightly tubbier Warzok, his chins bulging over his tunic collar, was standing stiffly to attention, his right hand held in the clasp of a beaming Heinrich Himmler. Warzok was about an inch shorter than Himmler, who was accompanied by an SS Gruppenführer I didn’t recognize. The third picture was a wider shot, taken the same day, of about six SS officers, including Warzok and Himmler. There were shadows on the ground and it looked like the sun had been shining.

“Those two were taken in August 1942,” explained Frau Warzok. “As you can see, Himmler was being shown around Janowska. Wilhaus was drunk, and things were slightly less cordial than it seems. Himmler didn’t really approve of wanton cruelty. Or so Friedrich told me.”

She reached into her briefcase and took out a typewritten sheet of paper. “This is a copy of some details that were on his SS record,” she said. “His SS number. His NSDAP number. His parents—they’re both dead, so you can forget any leads from that direction. He had a girlfriend, a Jewess called Rebecca, whom he murdered just before the camp was liberated. It’s possible you might get something out of Fritz Gebauer. I haven’t tried.”

I glanced over the paper she had prepared. She’d been very thorough, I had to give her that much. Or perhaps her lawyer fiancé had. I looked at the photographs again. Somehow it was a little hard to imagine her in bed with the man shaking hands with Himmler, but I’d seen more unlikely-looking couples. I could see what Warzok got out of it. He was short, she was tall. In that he was conforming to type, at least. It was harder to see what had been in it for her. Tall women usually married short men because it wasn’t money the men were short of, just inches. Stonemasons didn’t make a lot of money. Not even in Austria, where the tombs are fancier than almost anywhere else in Europe.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why did a woman like you marry a squirt like him in the first place?”

“Because I got pregnant,” she said. “I wouldn’t have married him otherwise. After we married, I lost the child. And I told you. I’m a Catholic. We mate for life.”

“All right. I’ll buy that. But suppose I do find him. What happens then? Have you thought about that?”

Her nostrils narrowed and her face took on a hard aspect that hadn’t been there before. She closed her eyes for a moment, removed the velvet glove she’d been wearing, and let me see the steel hand that had been there all along.

“You mentioned Erich Koch,” she said. “It’s my fiancé’s understanding that since he came out of hiding, in May, the British—in whose zone of occupation he is now imprisoned—are considering the extradition requests of Poland and the Soviet Union, in whose countries Koch’s crimes were committed. Despite the Basic Law, and any amnesties the Federal Republic might push through, it is my fiancé’s opinion—his well-informed opinion—that the British will approve his extradition to the Russian Zone. To Poland. Should he be found guilty in a Warsaw court, he will undoubtedly face the maximum punishment under Polish law. A sentence that Germany is judicially inclined to disapprove of. We anticipate the same fate for Friedrich Warzok.”

I grinned at her. “Well, that’s more like it,” I said. “Now I can see what you two had in common. You’re really quite a ruthless woman, aren’t you? Kind of like one of those Borgias I was talking about. Lucrezia Borgia. Ruthless, and beautiful with it.”

She blushed.

“Do you really care what happens to a man like that?” she said, brandishing her husband’s photograph.

“Not particularly. I’ll help you to look for your husband, Frau Warzok. But I won’t help you put a noose around his neck—even if he does deserve it several thousand times over.”

“What’s the matter, Herr Gunther? Are you squeamish about such things?”

“It could be,” I said. “If I am it’s because I’ve seen men hanged and I’ve seen them shot. I’ve seen them blown to pieces and starved to death, and toasted with a flamethrower, and crushed underneath the tracks of a Panzer tank. It’s a funny thing, but after a while you realize you’ve seen too much. Things you can’t pretend you didn’t see because they’re always on the insides of your eyelids when you go to sleep at night. And you tell yourself that you’d rather not see any more. Not if you can help it. Which of course you can because none of the old excuses are worth a damn anymore. And it’s simply not good enough to say we can’t help it and orders are orders and expect people to swallow that the way they used to. So yes, I suppose I am a little squeamish. After all, just look where ruthless has gotten us.”

“You’re quite the philosopher, aren’t you?” she said. “For a detective.”

“All detectives are philosophers, Frau Warzok. They have to be. That way they can recognize how much of what a client tells them they can swallow safely and how much they can flush. Which of them is as mad as Nietzsche and which of them is only as mad as Marx. The clients, I mean. You mentioned two hundred in advance.”

She reached down for her briefcase, took out her wallet, and counted out four seated ladies into my hand. “I also brought some hemlock,” she said. “If you didn’t take the case, I was going to threaten to drink it. But if you do find my husband, maybe you could give it to him instead. Sort of a good-bye present.”

I grinned at her. I liked grinning at her. She was the type of client who needed to see my teeth, just to remind her that I might bite. “I’ll write you a receipt,” I said.

Our business concluded she stood up, shifting some of her perfume off her delectable body and up my airways. Without the heels and the hat, I figured she was probably only as tall as I was. But while she was wearing them I felt like her favorite eunuch. I imagined it was the effect she was looking for.

“Look after yourself, Herr Gunther,” she said, reaching for the door handle. Mr. Manners got there first.

“I always do. I’ve had an awful lot of practice.”

“When will you start to look for him?”

“Your two hundred says right now.”

“And how and where will you go about it?”

“I’ll probably lift some rocks and see what crawls out from underneath. With six million Jews murdered, there are plenty of rocks in Germany to choose from.”