Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

He stopped the car in front of a high yellow-brick wall which enclosed a large, yellow-painted house and a garden that looked as if it had spent all day in the beauty parlour. The house itself was a tall, three-storey building with a high-dormered roof. Apart from its bright colour, there was a certain austerity of detail about the facade which lent the house an institutional appearance. It looked like a rather opulent son of town hall.

I followed König through the gates and up an immaculately bordered path to a heavy studded oak door of the kind that expected you to be holding a battle-axe when you knocked. We walked straight into the house and on to a creaking wooden floor that would have given a librarian a heart attack.

König led me into a small sitting-room, told me to wait there and then left, closing the door behind him. I took a good look round, but there wasn’t much to see beyond the fact of the owner’s bucolic taste in furniture. A rough-hewn table blocked the French window, and a couple of cartwheel farmhouse chairs were ranged in front of an empty fireplace that was as big as a mineshaft. I sat down on a slightly more comfortable-looking ottoman and re-tied my shoelaces. Then I polished my toes with the edge of the threadbare rug. I must have waited there for an indifferent half-hour before König came back to fetch me. He led me through a maze of rooms and corridors and up a flight of stairs to the back of the house, with the manner of a man whose jacket is lined with oak panelling. Hardly caring if I insulted him or not now that I was about to meet someone more important, I said, ‘If you changed that suit you’d make someone a wonderful butler.’

König did not turn around, but I heard him bare his dentures and utter a short, dry laugh. ‘I’m glad you think so. You know, although I like a sense of humour I would not advise you to exercise it with the general. Frankly, his character is most severe.’ He opened a door and we came into a bright, airy room with a fire in the grate and hectares of empty bookshelves. Against the broad window, behind a long library table, stood a grey-suited figure with a closely-cropped head I half recognized. The man turned and smiled, his hooked nose unmistakably belonging to a face from my past.

‘Hello, Gunther,’ said the man.

König looked quizzically at me as I blinked speechlessly at the grinning figure.

‘Do you believe in ghosts, Herr König?’ I said.

‘No. Do you?’

‘I do now. If I’m not mistaken, the gentleman by the window was hanged in 1945 for his part in the plot to kill the Führer.’

‘You can leave us, Helmut,’ said the man at the window. König nodded curtly, turned on his heel and left.

Arthur Nebe pointed at a chair in front of the table on which Belinsky’s documents lay spread out beside a pair of spectacles and a fountain pen. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Drink?’ He laughed. ‘You look as though you need one.’

‘It’s not every day I get to see a man raised from the dead,’ I said quietly. ‘Better make it a large one.’

Nebe opened a large carved-wood drinks cabinet, revealing a marble interior filled with several bottles. He took out a bottle of vodka and two small glasses, which he filled to the top.

‘To old comrades,’ he said, raising his glass. I smiled uncertainly. ‘Drink up. It won’t make me disappear again.’

I tossed the vodka back and breathed deeply as it hit my stomach. ‘Death agrees with you, Arthur. You look well.’

‘Thanks. I’ve never felt better.’

I lit a cigarette and left it on my lip for a while.

‘Minsk, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘In 1941. The last time we saw each other?’

‘That’s right. You got me transferred to the War Crimes Bureau.’

‘I ought to have had you put on a charge for what you asked. Even had you shot.’

‘From what I hear, you were keen on shooting that summer.’ Nebe let that one pass. ‘So why didn’t you?’

‘You were a damned good policeman. That’s why.’

‘So were you.’ I sucked hard at my cigarette. ‘At least, you were before the war. What made you change, Arthur?’

Nebe savoured his drink for a moment and then finished it with one swallow. ‘This is good vodka,’ he remarked quietly, almost to himself. ‘Bernie, don’t expect me to give you an explanation. I had my orders to carry out, and so it was them or me. Kill or be killed. That’s how it always was with the SS. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand – after you’ve calculated that to save your own life you must kill others then the number makes little or no difference. That was my final solution, Bernie: the final solution to the pressing problem of my own continued survival. You were fortunate that you were never required to make that same calculation.’

‘Thanks to you.’

Nebe shrugged modestly, before pointing at the papers spread before him. ‘I’m rather glad that I didn’t have you shot, now that I’ve seen this lot. Naturally this material will have to be assessed by an expert, but on the face of it you appear to have won the lottery. All the same, I’d like to hear more about your source.’

I repeated my story, after which Nebe said:

‘Can he be trusted, do you think? Your Russian?’

‘He never let me down before,’ I said. ‘Of course, he was just fixing papers for me then.’

Nebe refilled our glasses and frowned.

‘Is there a problem?’ I asked.

‘It’s just that in the ten years I’ve known you Bernie, I can’t find anything that can persuade me that you’re now a common black-marketeer.’

‘That shouldn’t be any more difficult than the problem I have persuading myself that you’re a war-criminal, Arthur. Or for that matter, accepting that you’re not dead.’

Nebe smiled. ‘You have a point. But with so many opportunities presented by the vast number of displaced persons, I’m surprised you didn’t return to your old trade and become a private investigator again.’

‘Private investigation and the black market are not mutually exclusive,’ I said. ‘Good information is just like penicillin or cigarettes. It has its price. And the better, the more illicit the information, the higher that price. It’s always been like that. Incidentally, my Russian will want to be paid.’

‘They always do. Sometimes I think that the Ivans have more confidence in the dollar than the Americans themselves.’ Nebe clasped his hands and laid both forefingers along the length of his shrewd-looking nose. Then he pointed them at me as if he had been holding a pistol. ‘You’ve done very well, Bernie. Very well indeed. But I must confess I am still puzzled,’

‘About me as a black Peter?’

‘I can accept the idea of that rather more easily than I can accept the idea of you killing Traudl Braunsteiner. Murder was never in your line.’

‘I didn’t kill her,’ I said. ‘König told me to do it, and I thought I could, because she was a Communist. I learned to hate them while I was in a Soviet prison-camp. Even enough to kill one. But when I thought about it, I realized I couldn’t do it. Not in cold blood. Maybe I could have done it if it had been a man, but not a girl. I was going to tell him that this morning, but when he congratulated me on having done it, I decided to keep my mouth shut and take the credit. I figured there might be some money in it.’

‘So somebody else killed her. How very intriguing. You’ve no idea who, I suppose?’

I shook my head.

‘A mystery, then.’

‘Just like your resurrection, Arthur. How exactly did you manage it?’

‘I’m afraid that I can’t take any of the credit,’ he said. ‘It was something the intelligence people dreamed up. In the last few months of the war they simply doctored the service records of senior SS and party personnel, to the effect that we were dead. Most of us were executed for our part in Count Stauffenberg’s plot to kill the Führer. Well, what were another hundred or so executions on a list that was already thousands of names long? And then some of us were listed as killed in a bombing raid, or in the battle for Berlin. Then all that remained was to make sure that these records fell into the hands of the Americans.