Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

Berlin had a haunted look that summer, as if behind every tree and around each street corner was a screaming skull or some wide-eyed and shape-shifting alp . Sometimes when I woke in my bed at the flat in Fasanenstrasse, soaked with sweat, it was as if I’d had some demon sitting on my chest, crushing the breath out of me, and in my rush to draw a breath and check that I was still alive, I often heard myself cry out and reach to grab at the sour air I had exhaled during the day, which was when I slept. And usually I lit a cigarette with the alacrity of someone who needed the tobacco smoke to breathe a little more comfortably and to help overcome the omnipresent taste of mass murder and human decay that stayed in my mouth like an old and rotten tooth.

The summer sunshine brought no joy. It seemed to exercise a sinister effect, making Berliners irritable with the broiling heat because there was nothing but water to drink, and reminding them always of how much hotter it probably was on the dry steppes of Russia and Ukraine, where our boys were now fighting a battle that already looked like much more than we had bargained for. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows in the tenement streets around Alexanderplatz and played tricks on your eyes, so that the phosphenes on your retinas — the aftereffects of the mercilessly bright light — seemed to become the greenish auras of so many dead men. It was in the shadows where I belonged and where I felt comfortable, like an old spider that simply wants to be left alone. Only there wasn’t much chance of that. It always paid to be careful what you were good at in Germany. Once I’d been a good detective in Kripo, but that was a while ago, before the criminals wore smart gray uniforms and nearly everyone locked up was innocent. Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.

On Heydrich’s orders I’d been working nights at the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz, which suited me just fine. There was no proper police work to speak of but I had little or no appetite for the company of my Nazi colleagues or their callous conversation. The Murder Commission, what remained of it — which existed to investigate homicides — left me to my own devices, like a forgotten prisoner whose face meant death for anyone unwise enough to catch a glimpse of it. I was none too fond of it myself. Unlike Hamburg and Bremen, there were no nighttime air raids to speak of, which left the city sepulchrally quiet, so very different from the Berlin of the Weimar years, when it had been the noisiest and most exciting city on earth. All that neon, all that jazz, and more especially all that freedom when nothing was hidden and nobody had to hide who or what they were — it was hard to believe things had ever been like that. But Weimar Berlin had suited me better. The Weimar Republic had been the most democratic of democracies and yet, like all great democracies, it had been a little out of control. Prior to 1933, anything was permitted, since, as Socrates learned to his cost, the true nature of democracy is to encourage corruption and excess in all its forms. But the corruption and excesses of Weimar were still preferable to the biblical abominations now perpetrated in the name of the Nuremberg Laws. I don’t think I ever knew what mortal sin really meant until I lived in Nazi Germany.

Sometimes when I stared out my office window at night I caught sight of my own reflection staring back at me — the same but different, like another ill-defined version of myself, a darker alter ego, my evil twin or perhaps a harbinger of death. Now and then I heard this ghostly, etiolated double speak sneeringly to me: “Tell me, Gunther, just what will you have to do and whose arse will you kiss to save your miserable skin today?”

It was a good question.

From my office aerie in the east corner tower of police headquarters I could more often hear the sound of steam trains pulling in and out of the station on Alexanderplatz. You could just see the roof — what was left of it — of the old orthodox synagogue on Kaiser-Strasse, which I think had been there since before the Franco-Prussian war and was one of the largest synagogues in Germany, with as many as eighteen hundred worshippers. Which is to say, Jews. The Kaiser-Strasse synagogue was on a beat I’d patrolled as a young Schupo in the early twenties. Sometimes I would chat to some of the boys who attended the Jewish Boys’ School and who used to go trainspotting at the station. Once, another uniformed copper saw me talking to those boys and asked, “What do you find to talk about with these Jews, anyway?” And I’d replied that they were just children and that we had talked about what you talk about with any other children. Of course, all that was before I found out that I had a trickle of Jew blood myself. Still, maybe it explains why I was nice to them. But I prefer to think it doesn’t explain very much at all.

It had been a while since I’d seen any Jewish boys on Kaiser-Strasse. Since the beginning of June they’d been deporting Berlin’s Jews from a transit camp at Grosse Hamburger Strasse to destinations somewhere in the east, although it was becoming better known that the destinations were more final than some nebulous compass point. Mostly the deportations were made at night, when there was no one around to see it done, but one morning, at about five a.m., when I was checking out a petty theft at Anhalter Station, I saw about fifty elderly Jews being loaded into closed cars on an impatient train. They looked like something Pieter Bruegel might have painted back in a time when Europe was a much more barbarous place than it is now — when kings and emperors committed their black crimes in the open light of day, and not at a time when no one was yet out of bed to see them. The cars didn’t seem so bad but by then I had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen to those Jews, which I expect was more than they did, otherwise I can’t imagine they’d ever have boarded those trains.

I was on the point of being moved along by an old Berlin Schupo until I flashed him my beer-token and told him to go and fuck himself.

“Sorry, sir,” he said, touching his leather shako smartly, “I didn’t know you was RSHA.”

“Where’s this lot headed?” I asked.

“Somewhere in Bohemia. Theresienstadt, I think they said it’s called. You feel almost sorry for them, don’t you? But I reckon it’s better for them and for us, really. I mean, us Germans. They’ll have a better life there, living among their own in a new town, won’t they?”

“Not in Theresienstadt they won’t,” I told him. “I’ve just got back from Bohemia.” And then I told him all I knew about the place and a bit more besides, about what was happening in Russia and Ukraine. The look of horror on the man’s florid face was almost worth the risk I took in telling him the unvarnished and unpalatable truth.

“You can’t be serious,” he said.

“Oh, but I am. It’s fact that we’re systematically murdering people by the thousands out there, in the swamps east of Poland. I know. I’ve seen it for myself. And by ‘we’ I mean us, the police. The RSHA. It’s us that’s doing the murdering.”

The Schupo blinked hard and looked as if I’d said something incomprehensible. “It can’t be true, what you just said, sir. Surely you’re joking.”

“I’m not joking. What I just told you is the one true thing you’ll probably hear today. Just ask around, only try to do it discreetly. People don’t like talking about this, for obvious reasons. You could get into trouble. We both could. I’m telling you, those Jews are on a slow train to hell. And so are we.”

I walked away smiling sadistically to myself; in Nazi Germany truth makes a powerful weapon.