The One from the Other

FOURTEEN

A couple of days went by. A southerly wind bearing an area of intense high pressure started to bear down on the city. At least that’s what the weather man on Radio Munich said. He said it was the Föhn, which meant the wind was charged with a lot of static electricity, on account of it having already blown across the Alps before it got to us. Walking around Munich you could feel the warm, dehydrated wind drying your face and making your eyes water. Or maybe I was just hitting the bottle too much.

Americans took the Föhn more seriously than anyone, of course, and kept their children indoors to avoid it, almost as if it had been carrying something more lethal than a few positively charged ions. Maybe they knew something the rest of us didn’t. Anything was possible now that the Ivans had exploded their atomic bomb the previous month. Possibly there were all sorts of things in the Föhn to really worry about. Either way, the Föhn served a very useful purpose. Müncheners blamed the Föhn for all kinds of things. They were always grousing about it. Some claimed it made their asthma worse, others that it gave them rheumatic pains, and quite a few that it caused them to have headaches. If the milk tasted funny, that was the Föhn. And if the beer came out flat, that was the Föhn, too. Where I lived, in Schwabing, the woman downstairs claimed that the Föhn interfered with the signal on her wireless radio. And on the tram I even heard a man claim he’d got into a fight because of the Föhn. It made a change from blaming things on the Jews, I suppose. The Föhn certainly made people seem cranky and more irritable than usual. Maybe that’s how Nazism got started here in the first place. Because of the Föhn. I never heard of people trying to overthrow a government who weren’t cranky and irritable.

That was the kind of day it was when I went back to Wagmullerstrasse and stood in front of the art gallery window next door to the offices of the Red Cross. I was earlier than the appointed time. I’m usually early for things. If punctuality is the virtue of kings then I’m the kind of person who likes to get there an hour or two before, to look for a landmine underneath the red carpet.

The gallery was called Oscar & Shine. Most of the city’s art dealers were in the Brienner Strasse district. They bought and sold Secessionists and Munich Post-Impressionists. I know that because I read it on a Brienner Strasse gallery window, once. This particular gallery looked a little different from those others. Especially inside. Inside it looked like one of those Bauhaus buildings the Nazis used to frown upon. Of course it wasn’t just the open staircase and the freestanding walls that looked futuristic. The paintings on exhibition were similarly modern-looking, which is to say they were as easy on the eye as a sharp stick.

I know what I like. And most of what I like isn’t art at all. I like pictures and I like ornaments. Once I even owned a French Spelter banjo-lady. It wasn’t a sculpture, just a piece of junk that sat on my mantelpiece next to a photograph of Gath, my hometown in the land of the Philistines. If I want a picture to speak to me, I’ll go watch Maureen O’Sullivan in a Tarzan movie.

While I shambled around the gallery I was closely tracked by the periscope eye of a woman in a wool black tailor-made, which, thanks to the Föhn, she was probably regretting having worn. She was thin, a little too thin, and the long, ivory cigarette-holder she was carrying might just as easily have been one of her bony, ivory-colored fingers. Her hair was long and brown and bushy, and it was gathered up at the back of her fine head in what looked like a twenty-five-pfennig loaf. She came up to me, her arms folded defensively in front of her, in case she needed to run me through with one of her pointy elbows, and nodded at the painting I was appraising with careful discrimination and good taste, like some queeny connoisseur.

“What do you think?” she asked, waving her cigarette holder at the wall.

I tilted my head to one side in the vague hope that a slightly different perspective on the picture might let me ante up like Bernard Berenson. I tried to picture the crazy sonofabitch painting it but kept on thinking of a drunken chimpanzee. I opened my mouth to say something. Then closed it again. There was a red line going one way, a blue line going the other, and a black line trying to pretend it had nothing much to do with either of them. It was a work of modern art all right. That much I could see. What’s more, it had obviously been executed with the craft and skill of one who had studied licorice-making carefully. Putting it on the wall probably gave the flies escaping the Föhn through the open window something to think about. I looked again and found that it really spoke to me. It said, “Don’t laugh, but some idiot will pay good money for this.” I pointed at the wall and said, “I think you should get that patch of damp seen to, before it spreads.”

“It’s by Kandinsky,” she said, without batting a garden rake of an eyelash. “He was one of the most influential artists of his generation.”

“And who were his influences? Johnnie Walker? Or Jack Daniel’s?”

She smiled.

“There,” I said. “I knew you could do it if you tried. Which is more than I can say for Kandinsky.”

“Some people like it,” she said.

“Well, why didn’t you say so? I’ll take two.”

“I wish you would buy one,” she said. “Business has been a little slow today.”

“It’s the Föhn,” I told her.

She unbuttoned her jacket and flapped herself with half of it. I sort of enjoyed that myself. Not just the perfumed breeze she made for us but also the low-cut silk blouse she was wearing underneath. If I’d been an artist I’d have called it an inspiration. Or whatever artists call it when they see a girl’s nipples pressing through her shirt like two chapel hat-pegs. She was worth a bit of charcoal and paper anyway.

“I suppose so,” she said and blew a lipful of air and cigarette smoke at her own forehead. “Tell me, did you come in here to look or just to laugh?”

“Probably a bit of both. That’s what Lord Duveen recommended, anyway.”

“For an artless vulgarian, you’re quite well informed, aren’t you?”

“True decadence involves taking nothing too seriously,” I said. “Least of all, decadent art.”

“Is that really what you think of it? That it’s decadent?”

“I’ll be honest,” I said. “I don’t like it one little bit. But I’m delighted to see it exhibited without any interference from people who know as little about art as I do. Looking at it is like looking inside the head of someone who disagrees with you about nearly everything. It makes me feel uncomfortable.” I shook my head sadly and sighed, “That’s democracy, I guess.”

Another customer came in. A customer chewing gum. He was wearing a pair of enormous brogues and carrying a folding Kodak Brownie. A real connoisseur. Someone with lots of money, anyway. The girl went to squire him around the pictures. And a little after that Father Gotovina showed up and we went out of the gallery, to the English Garden, where we sat down on a bench beside the Rumford Monument. We lit cigarettes and ignored the warm wind in our faces. A squirrel came bounding along the path, like an escaped fur tippet, and stopped near us in the hope of some morsel. Gotovina flicked his match and then the toe of a well-polished black boot at the furry oscillation. The priest was obviously not a nature lover.

“I made a few inquiries regarding your client’s husband,” he said, hardly looking at me at all. In the bright afternoon sunshine his head was amber-colored, like a good bock beer, or maybe a Doppel. While he spoke, the cigarette stayed in his mouth, jerking up and down like a conductor’s baton bringing to order the riotous orchestra of hydrangeas, lavender, gentian, and irises that was arrayed in front of him. I hoped they would do what they were told, just in case he tried to kick them the way he had tried to kick the squirrel.

“At the Ruprechtskirche, in Vienna,” he said, “there’s a priest who performs a similarly charitable function for old comrades like you. He’s an Italian. Father Lajolo. He remembers Warzok only too well. It seems he turned up with a rail ticket for Güssing just after Christmas 1946. Lajolo got him to a safe house in Ebensee while they waited for a new passport and visa.”

“A passport from whom?” I asked, out of curiosity.

“The Red Cross. The Vatican. I don’t know for sure. One of the two, you can bet on that. The visa was for Argentina. Lajolo or one of his people went to Ebensee, handed over the papers, some money, and a rail ticket to Genoa. That was where Warzok was supposed to get on the boat for South America. Warzok and another old comrade. Only they never showed up. No one knows what happened to Warzok, but the other guy was found dead in the woods near Thalgau, a few months later.”

“What was his name? His real name.”

“SS Hauptsturmführer Willy Hintze. He was the former deputy chief of the Gestapo in a Polish town called Thorn. Hintze was in a shallow grave. Naked. He’d been shot through the back of the skull while kneeling on the edge of his grave. His clothes were tossed in on top of him. He’d been executed.”

“Were Warzok and Hintze in the same safe house?”

“No.”

“Did they know each other from before?”

“No. The first time they ever met would have been on the boat to Argentina. Lajolo figured both safe houses had been blown and closed them down. It was decided that what happened to Hintze had been what happened to Warzok. The Nakam had got them.”

“The Nakam?”

“After 1945, the Jewish Brigade—volunteers from Palestine who had joined a special unit of the British army—was ordered by the fledgling Jewish army, the Haganah, to form a secret group of assassins. One group of assassins, based in Lublin, took the name of Nakam, a Hebrew word meaning ‘vengeance.’ Their sworn purpose was to avenge the deaths of six million Jews.”

Father Gotovina pulled the cigarette from his lips as if to more effectively give them up to a curling sneer that ended by including his nostrils and his eyes. I daresay if there had been any muscle groups to control the ears, he would have brought them into it, too. The Croatian priest’s sneer had Conrad Veidt beat into a poor second, and Bela Lugosi a sly, broken-necked third.

“No good thing cometh out of Israel,” he said, sulfurously. “Least of all the Nakam. An early plan of the Nakam was to poison the reservoirs of Munich, Berlin, Nuremberg, and Frankfurt and murder several million Germans. You look disbelieving, Herr Gunther.”

“It’s just that there have been stories about Jews poisoning Christian wells since the Middle Ages,” I said.

“I can assure you I’m perfectly serious. This one was for real. Luckily for you and me, the Haganah command heard about the plan and, pointing out the number of British and Americans who would have been killed, the Nakam was forced to abandon the plan.” Gotovina laughed his psychopathic laugh. “Maniacs. And they wonder why we tried to eliminate the Jew from decent society.”

He flicked his cigarette end at a hapless pigeon, crossed his legs, and adjusted the crucifix around his muscular neck before continuing with his explanation. It was like having a chat with Tomás de Torquemada.

“But the Nakam were not quite ready to abandon their plans to use poison on a large number of Germans,” he said. “They devised a plan to poison a POW camp near Nuremberg where thirty-six thousand SS were interned. They broke into a bakery supplying bread to the camp and poisoned two thousand loaves. Mercifully this was many fewer than they had planned to poison. Even so, several thousand men were affected and as many as five hundred died. You can take my word for that. It’s a matter of historical record.” He crossed himself and then looked up as, momentarily, a cloud crossed the sun, placing us both in a little pool of shadow, like some damned souls from the pages of Dante.

“After that they stuck to murder, pure and simple. With the help of Jews in British and American intelligence they set up a documents center in Linz and Vienna and started to track down so-called war criminals, using the Jewish emigration organization as a cover. At first they followed men as they were released from POW camps. They were easy to watch, especially with tip-offs from the Allies. And then, when they were ready, they started with the executions. In the beginning they hanged a few. But one man survived and after that it was always the same modus operandi. The shallow grave, the bullet in the back of the head. As if they were seeking to copy what all those Order battalions had done in eastern Europe.”

Gotovina allowed himself a thin smile of something close to admiration. “They’ve been very effective. The number of old comrades assassinated by the Nakam is between one and two thousand. We know this because some of our Vienna group managed to catch one of them and, before he died, he told them what I just told you. So you see, it’s the kikes you have to be careful of now, Herr Gunther. Not the Brits, or the Amis. All they care about is communism, and on occasion, they’ve even helped to get our people out of Germany. No, it’s the Jew boys you have to worry about, these days. Especially the ones who don’t look like Jew boys. Apparently the one they caught and tortured in Vienna, he looked like the perfect Aryan. You know? Like Gustav Froelich’s better-looking brother.”

“So where does all this leave my client?”

“Weren’t you listening, Gunther? Warzok’s dead. If he was still alive he’d be doing the tango and that’s a fact. If he was there, she’d have heard, believe me.”

“What I mean is, where does all that leave her in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church?”

Gotovina shrugged. “She waits a while longer and then petitions for a formal judicial process, to determine whether or not she is considered free to enter into a second marriage.”

“A judicial process?” I said. “You mean with witnesses and stuff like that?”

Gotovina looked away in disgust. “Forget it, Gunther,” he said. “The archbishop would have my collar if he knew even a tenth of what I just told you. So there’s no way I’m ever repeating any of this. Not to a tribunal of canon law. Not to her. Not even to you.” He stood up and stared down at me. With the sun behind him he looked hardly there at all, like a silhouette of a man. “And here’s some free advice. Drop it now. Drop the whole case. The Comradeship doesn’t like questions and they don’t like sniffers—even sniffers who think they can get away with it because they once had a tattoo under their arms. People who ask too many questions about the Comradeship end up dead. Do I make myself clear, sniffer?”

“It’s been a while since I was threatened by a priest,” I said. “Now I know how Martin Luther felt.”

“Luther nothing.” Gotovina was beginning to sound more irate. “And don’t contact me again. Not even if David Ben-Gurion asks you to dig a hole in his garden at midnight. Got that, sniffer?”

“Like it came from the Holy Inquisition with a nice little ribbon and a lead seal with Saint Peter’s face on it.”

“Yeah, but will it stick?”

“That’s why it’s lead, isn’t it? So people stay warned?”

“I hope so. But you’ve got the face of a heretic, Gunther. That’s a bad look for someone who needs to keep his nose out of things he should leave alone.”

“You’re not the first person to tell me that, Father,” I said, standing up. I’m more equal to the task of being threatened when I’m on my feet. But Gotovina was right about my face. Seeing his basilica-like head, and his cross, and his collar made me want to go straight home and type out ninety-five theses to nail on his church door. I tried to appear grateful for what he had told me, even a little contrite, but I knew it would just come out looking recusant and unfearing. “But thanks anyway. I appreciate all your help and good advice. A little spiritual guidance is good for us all. Even unbelievers like myself.”

“It would be a mistake not to believe me,” he said coldly.

“I don’t know what I believe, Father,” I said. Now I was just being willfully obtuse. “Really, I don’t. All I know is that life is better than anything I’ve seen before. And probably better than anything I’ll see when I’m dead.”

“That sounds like atheism, Gunther. Always a dangerous thing in Germany.”

“That’s not atheism, Father. That’s just what we Germans call a worldview.”

“Leave such things to God. Forget the world and mind your own business, if you know what’s good for you.”

I watched him walk as far as the edge of the park. The squirrel came back. The flowers relaxed. The pigeon shook its head and tried to pull itself together. The cloud shifted and the grass brightened up. “Saint Francis of Assisi he is not,” I told them all. “But you probably knew that already.”