Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

“Keep it under your hat, Werner, but his real name is Heymann, and he’s half Jew.”

“Christ.”

“Heydrich knew that. He had a whole file on the Heymann family. The slippery bastard. Still, anyone could be forgiven for thinking Heydrich was a Jew. I mean, look at that fucking nose. It’s straight out of Der Stürmer .”

I’d never liked Heydrich, but I’d certainly feared him. It was impossible not to fear a man like Heydrich. And I wondered if these two would have made such openly critical remarks about the former Protector of Bohemia if the general had still been alive. I rather doubted it. At least I did until the senior officer looked around and I realized exactly who he was. I’d only ever seen a picture of him but he was a hard man to forget: there were so many scars on the bedrock of his craggy face that they might almost have been left there by a glacier retreating from the moraine of his forbidding personality. It was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the man rumored to be the next head of the RSHA. The Swiss clinic had dried him out sooner than anyone would have supposed possible.

I went up to the next floor to have a nose-around. There was a long narrow corridor of doors and on one of them were painted the words STIFTUNG NORDHAV and EXPORT DRIVES G.M.B.H. PRIVATE. I was just about to try the handle when an SS major came out the door. He was accompanied by a tall foreign-looking officer who, from the kepi under his arm, I thought might have been French, until I saw the little crosses on his buttons. I guessed he might be Swiss.

“As before, we’ll do the deal through Export Drives,” the major was saying. “That was the company we used for the purchase of the machine guns.”

“I remember,” said the Swiss.

Their conversation stopped abruptly when they saw me.

“Can I help you?” asked the SS major.

“No. I was just looking for somewhere quiet to gather my thoughts. I’m the morning’s first speaker, worse luck.”

“Good luck,” he said, and locked the door behind him.

The two men went downstairs and out onto the terrace and, at a distance, I followed.

Half a kilometer away to the east and across the lake, at Strandbad Wannsee, hundreds of Berliners were arriving at the city’s favorite lido for a day on the beach, reserving their wicker beach chairs, or spreading their towels on eighty meters of pristine white sand. There was a light breeze that stirred the blue flags on top of the two-story clinker-brick promenade and which carried the sound of the PA system already announcing a lost child to the unconcerned ears of those who were present at the villa: Frenchmen, Italians, Danes, Croatians, Romanians, Swedes, and Swiss. What was happening on the beach seemed a very long way from what I was there to talk about.

“Feeling nervous?” Arthur Nebe smiled and clapped me on the shoulder.

“Yes. I was just wishing I was over there, on that beach talking to some pretty girl.”

“Did you get anywhere with that schoolteacher we saw at the Swedish Pavilion? What was her name?”

“Kirsten? Yes. A little. I know where she works. And more importantly, where she lives. In Krumme Strasse. I even know that she goes swimming two nights a week at the local bathhouse.”

“As always you make romance sound like a murder inquiry.” Nebe shook his head and smiled. “If you’ll permit me. You have a piece of toilet paper stuck to your chin.” He picked it off my face and let it flutter to the ground.

“I wondered why people were looking at me so strangely on the S-Bahn. They were thinking, ‘Nobody else in this city seems to have any toilet paper, how come he does?’”

“You need a cognac,” said Nebe, and took me back into the villa, where he found a drink for us both. “We both do. It’s a little early, I know, even for me. But the truth is I’m feeling a little nervous myself. I’ll be glad when this is over and I get back to some real work.”

I wondered what that would amount to for a man like Arthur Nebe.

“Strange, isn’t it?” he said. “After all we went through in Minsk. Crazy Ivans all over the place trying to kill you and it’s something like this that really squeezes your guts.”

I glanced out the window where Reichsführer Himmler was now speaking to State Secretary Gutterer. Walter Schellenberg was talking to Kaltenbrunner and Gestapo Müller.

“That’s hardly a surprise when you consider the guest list.”

I took a large sip of the brandy.

“Relax,” insisted Nebe. “If your speech goes down like shit we’ll just blame the whole thing on Leo Gutterer. It’s about time someone took that awful man down a peg.”

“I thought you wanted me to fuck up, Arthur.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“You did.”

“I was joking, of course. Look, all I really want is never to be IKPK president again. Next year this is all going to be Kaltenbrunner’s problem. Not mine and not yours. You’ll be safely out of the way in the War Crimes Bureau and I’ll just be safely out of the way, I hope. Switzerland, if they’ll have me. Or Spain. I always wanted to go to Spain. Admiral Canaris loves it there. And by the way, just in case you were wondering, I’m still joking.”

“A sense of humor. That’s nice. I think we need that just to get up in the morning.”

Nebe threw back his cognac and then pulled a face. “Anyway, you’ll be fine. I’ve every confidence that you’re going to be the most interesting speaker of the day.”

I nodded and glanced around. “It’s a beautiful house.”

“Designed by Hitler’s favorite architect. Paul Baumgarten.”

“I thought that was Speer.”

“So did Speer, I think. But it seems he was wrong about that, too.”

“Who owns it now?”

“We do. The SS does. Although God knows why. We’ve got several houses around here. The Havel Institute. The Horticultural School.”

“Since when were the SS interested in horticulture?”

“I think it’s a home, for Jews,” said Nebe. “The forced laborers who work on the gardens round here.”

“That sounds almost benign. And the Havel Institute?”

“A radio HQ that directs spy and sabotage operations against the Soviet Union.” Nebe shrugged. “There are probably more houses that even I don’t know about. Frankly, the state has so many houses coming into public ownership that the Ministry of the Interior could open its own sales and lettings agency. Maybe I’ll do that instead of being a policeman.”

“So it’s not the Nordhav Foundation that owns this house.”

“What do you know about the Nordhav Foundation?”

“Not much. There’s an office upstairs with that name on the door. Apart from that, not much. That’s why I asked.” I shrugged.

“Where Nordhav is concerned, nothing is always the best thing to know. Take my advice, Bernie. Stick to homicide. It’s a lot safer.” Nebe glanced around as the delegates started to file into the central hall where the speeches were to be given. “Come on. Let’s get it over with.”

The irony of being introduced to the audience at an international crime commission conference by a man who had not long finished murdering forty-five thousand people did not escape me, or indeed Nebe himself. Arthur Nebe, who was ex — political police, when such men had still existed, had never been much of a detective. He colored a little around the ears as he talked, a little, about the Murder Commission, almost as if he recognized that the commission of murder was something in which he was rather more expert. I don’t think there was anyone in that room who could have looked death in the face more often than Arthur Nebe. Not even Himmler and Kaltenbrunner. I still remembered something Nebe had told me back in Minsk, about experimenting with blowing people up in the search for a more efficient and “humane” method of mass killing. I wondered what some of the Swedes and Swiss in our audience would have said if they’d known anything of the crimes that were being committed by German police in Eastern Europe and Russia, even as we spoke. Would they have cared? Maybe not. You could never quite predict how people would react to the so-called Jewish question.