Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

“Then I went to Klagenfurt, where I was chief of the Gestapo. Then Koblenz, where I was also head of the Gestapo. After the war I was interned in Dachau, by the Amis, only I managed to escape. Hopeless, they were, the Amis. Couldn’t guard a fire. Then it was Rome, and the Vatican, before I ended up here. Right now, I’m working for Fuldner, but I’m planning to try the real estate business. There’s plenty of money to be made in this city. But I do miss Austria. Most of all I miss the skiing. I was the German police ski champion, you know.”

“Really?” Clearly, I had misjudged him completely. He might have been a murdering bastard but he was a sporting murdering bastard.

“You are right to look surprised, Herr Hausner.” He laughed. “I’ve been ill, you see. I was in Brazil before coming here to Argentina and managed to pick up a case of malaria. Really, I’ve still not recovered full health.” He went into the kitchen and opened the door of a new-looking Di Tella refrigerator. “Beer?”

“No, thanks.” I was particular about whom I drank with. “Not while I’m on duty.”

Kurt Christmann laughed. “I used to be like you,” he said, opening a beer bottle. “But now I try to be more like the Argentines. I even take a siesta in the afternoon. People like me and you, Hausner. We’re lucky to be alive.” He nodded. “A passport would be good. But I don’t think I’ll be going back to Germany. Germany’s finished, I think, now that the Popovs are there. There’s nothing there for me, except perhaps a hangman’s noose.”

“We did what we had to do,” I said. “What we were told to do.” I knew this speech well enough by now. I’d heard it often during the last five years. “We were just carrying out orders. If we’d refused to obey, we would have been shot ourselves.”

“That’s right,” agreed Christmann. “That’s right. We were only obeying orders.”

Now that I’d let him run a bit, I decided to try to reel the line in.

“Mind you,” I said. “There were some. A few. A few rotten apples who enjoyed the killing. Who went beyond the normal course of duty.”

Christmann pressed the beer bottle to his cheek and thought for a moment; then he shook his head. “You know something? I really don’t think that’s true. Not that I saw, anyway. Maybe it was different in your outfit. But the men I was with, in the Ukraine. All of them handled themselves with great courage and fortitude. That’s what I miss most. The comradeship. The brothers in arms. That’s what I miss most.”

I nodded, in seeming sympathy. “I miss Berlin, most of all,” I said. “Munich, too. But Berlin most of all.”

“You know something? I never went to Berlin.”

“What? Never?”

“No.” He chuckled and drank some more beer. “I don’t suppose I shall ever see it now, eh?”

I went away, full of satisfaction at having done an excellent day’s work. It’s the people you meet that make being a detective so rewarding. Once in a while you meet a real sweetie, like Kurt Christmann, who restores your faith in medieval justice and vigilantism and other, thoroughly sensible Latin American practices like strappado and the garrote. Sometimes it’s hard to walk away from people like that without shaking your head and wondering how it ever got to be that bad.

How did it ever get to be that bad?

I think something happened to Germany after the Great War. You could see it on the streets of Berlin. A callous indifference to human suffering. And perhaps, after all those demented, sometimes cannibalistic killers we had during the Weimar years, we ought to have seen it coming: the murder squads and the death factories. Killers who were demented but also quite ordinary. Krantz, the schoolboy. Denke, the shopkeeper. Grossmann, the door-to-door salesman. Gormann, the bank clerk. Ordinary people who committed crimes of unparalleled savagery. As I was looking back at them now, they seemed like a sign of that which was to follow. The camp commanders and the Gestapo types. The desk murderers and the sadistic doctors. The ordinary fritzes who were capable of such dreadful atrocities. The quiet, respectable, Mozart-loving Germans among whom I was now cast away to live.

What did it take to murder thousands of children, week in week out? An ordinary person? Or someone who might have done it before?

Kurt Christmann had spent a whole year of his life gassing Russian and Ukrainian children. The feebleminded, the retarded, the bedridden, and the disabled. Children like Anita Schwarz. Perhaps, for him, there had been more to it than just obeying orders. Perhaps he had actually disliked disabled children. Maybe even enough to have murdered one in Berlin. I certainly hadn’t forgotten that he was from Munich. I’d always had a strong suspicion that the man I’d been looking for, in 1932, had come from Munich.

THERE WERE TWO MEN waiting by my car. They were wearing hats and double-breasted suits that were all buttoned up the way you do when you’ve got more than just a fountain pen in your breast pocket. I told myself they were a little far south to be Ricci Kamm’s. A little too smooth, too. Ring members tended to wear broken noses and cauliflower ears the way some men wear watch chains and carry canes. There was all that and the fact that they looked pleased to see me. When you’ve been in the zoo as long as I have, you kind of get to know when an animal is going to attack. It gets all nervous and agitated, because, for most people, it’s upsetting to kill someone. But these two were calm and self-assured.

“Are you Gunther?”

“That all depends.”

“On what?”

“On what you say next?”

“Someone wants to talk to you.”

“So why isn’t someone here?”

“Because he’s in the Eldorado. Buying you a drink.”

“Does this someone have a name?”

“Herr Diels. Rudolf Diels.”

“Maybe I’m the shy type. Maybe I don’t like the Eldorado. Besides, it’s a little early for a nightclub.”

“Exactly. Makes it nice and quiet. Somewhere private you can hear yourself think.”

“I get all sorts of strange ideas when I hear myself think,” I said. “Like maybe there’s some point to my existence. But since there isn’t, we’d better get along to the Eldorado.”

The Eldorado on Motzstrasse was on the ground floor of a modern building that was in the High Concrete style. Like the old Eldorado, which still existed on Lutherstrasse, the new was a he/she club popular with Berlin high society, expensive prostitutes, and adventurous tourists eager to get a taste of real Berlin decadence. Inside, the club was a facsimile of a Chinese opium-smoking den. Only it wasn’t just a facsimile. If sex was one reason to visit the Eldorado, then the ready supply of drugs was another. But at that hour of the day, the place was more or less deserted. The Bernd Robert Rhythmics had just finished rehearsing. In the corner, beside a copper gong as big as a truck tire, a youngish man with a largish scar on his face was sharing a bottle of champagne with two girls. I knew they were girls-not because of their womanly hands and manicured fingernails but because of their private parts, which were easy to see since both girls were also naked.

Seeing me arrive in the club with his two double-breasted scouts, the scar-faced man stood up and waved me toward him. He was dark, with a weak chin. I guessed his age was about thirty. His suit looked handmade and he was smoking a Gildemann cigar. He had a woman’s lips, and his eyebrows were so neat and fine that they almost looked plucked and then drawn in with a pencil. His eyes were brown, with long lashes. His hands were womanish, too, and but for the scar and the company he was keeping, I might have wondered if he was a bit warm. But he was polite and welcoming, which made me wonder how he’d come by his scar.