Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

“You’ll forgive me for asking, sir, but who the hell are you? I’m not under your command. Exactly who do you work for? Foreign Intelligence? Stiftung Nordhav? With that manicure I know you’re not police. It was General Nebe who asked me to be here today. I’m sure he wouldn’t like it very much if I went off the farm before we’ve finished making hay here and slipped away into town like you’re asking. It’s not good manners to make a speech and then quit before some of my colleagues have had a turn at the lectern.”

“I work for the Reich Ministry of Economic Affairs,” he explained. “And if I square it with Nebe, will you do as General Schellenberg asks?”

“Well, I hate to drag myself away from this crime conference. Usually I’m very good at concealing my boredom. But if it’s all right with Nebe, it’s all right with me. Frankly I’ve already heard enough billy goat shit for one day. I know. I could take him to a couple of shops to see if we can find some of his books. Marga Schoeller’s Bookshop, perhaps. I expect he’d like it there, being an author.”

Marga Schoeller’s, on the Ku’damm, was the only bookshop in Berlin that still refused to sell Nazi literature.

“I don’t care where you take him, as long as he has a good time. Understood?”

Half an hour later I was walking down Am Grosser Wannsee again, only this time with a bit of a spring in my step. Frankly I was glad to be away from the Villa Minoux, even though it meant missing out on a lunch of mustard eggs and a pig knuckle with pea puree, not to mention more free cigarettes. The thought of meeting Himmler a second time was much too daunting; my shins couldn’t have taken it. The smile on my face lasted for precisely a hundred meters, at least until I came past the SS Horticultural School, where three undernourished young men were toiling in the sun with rakes and hoes. I walked up to the wrought-iron gate and watched them work. I’m good at that, too. But I never did like gardening very much, not even when there was a well-stocked window box on the sarcophagus-sized balcony outside my living room. I have green fingers only when I dip them in a Berliner Weisse with woodruff syrup — the champagne of the North. The three didn’t look up. Not even to wipe their brows, and the blue sky might as well have been gray for all the interest they had in looking at it.

There didn’t seem to be anyone in a uniform keeping guard so I whistled to one of the men and, seeing my uniform, he came running over to the gate, snatched off his cap, and then bowed his head, like someone in the SS had taught him that little show of respect with the toe of a boot and the end of a quirt. Now that he was near I could see that he wasn’t much more than a boy; perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old.

“Jewish?”

“Yes, sir.”

“From Berlin?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What were you, son? I mean, before they got you doing such vital war work for your country?”

“I was studying for my Abitur,” he said.

“Which school?”

“The Jewish School, on Kaiser-Strasse.”

“I know it. I used to know it well.” I swallowed uncomfortably, and removing a fist from my breeches pocket, I pushed it through the bars of the wrought-iron gate. “Take it quickly,” I said. “Before someone sees you.”

He looked at the banknotes and the cigarettes I’d dropped into his hand with astonishment and then pocketed them swiftly. Too surprised to say thank you, he just stood there with his cap in his bony hand, sweating uncomfortably, with eyes that were as hollow as a half-empty catacomb.

“An Abitur isn’t much good these days if you end up wearing a uniform like this one. Take my word for it, my boy. At least you have the scent of those nice flowers in your nostrils. Not like me. I get to smell shit all day long. And sometimes I even have to eat it, too.”

I caught the S-Bahn north to Grunewald Station and walked southwest, along Fontanestrasse onto Hohenzollerndamm. Department Six of the RSHA was located in a modern, four-story building on Berkaerstrasse that looked more like apartments than the headquarters of the Foreign Intelligence Service, with only a flagpole on the flat roof and a few official cars parked in front of the curving façade to suggest that it was any different from the sleepy residential bricks-and-mortar surrounding it. Short of having the SD’s Foreign Intelligence conducted from a back room in a small suburban theater, number 22 couldn’t have been more anonymous and out of the way, and was quite a contrast to the kinds of grand, intimidating buildings that Schellenberg’s sinister masters preferred. Just looking at it now told me a lot about Schellenberg. A German who cares nothing for show is someone with a lot to hide, and as I approached the modest, unguarded entrance I wondered just how it was that Schellenberg had also avoided service in one of Heydrich’s murderous operation groups. That was clever, too. I had to hand it to Walter Schellenberg; it seemed that he’d made a much better job of pretending to be a Nazi than I had.

An SD captain called Horst Janssen came down to the reception area to hand me a set of keys for one of the cars parked outside.

“Nice place you have here,” I observed as I followed him outside.

“It used to be a Jewish old people’s home,” he said without a trace of embarrassment; then again he was just back from Kiev, where he’d probably done something even more dreadful than kick a few old people onto the streets — you could see it in his blue eyes — the kind of thing that people like me and Schellenberg had so neatly sidestepped. An international crime conference can sharpen up your instincts like that.

“That explains why it’s so quiet around here,” I said.

“It is now they’re all in the Lublin Ghetto,” Janssen said, and tossed me the keys. “That one there,” he said, pointing to a Mercedes 170.

“Has it got petrol?”

“Sure we’ve got petrol. That’s why we invaded the Caucasus.”

“Comedian. What’s he like to work for? Schellenberg.”

“He’s all right.”

“Where does he live? Round here, I suppose. In some fancy big villa. Like Heydrich’s place in Schlachtensee.”

“Not at all. He’s a very modest man, our general. Listen, can you give me a lift as far as the West End?”

“Sure. Where in particular?”

“The military court in Charlottenburg,” he said. “I’m a witness in a trial.”

“Oh?”

“An SS man accused of cowardice.”

“That shouldn’t take long.”

But Janssen wasn’t the talkative type. He said nothing on the way to the court and short of asking him a question directly about Schellenberg and the Stiftung Nordhav, I figured that was it with him.

I dropped Janssen off outside the court on Witzlebenstrasse, just a couple of blocks south of the German Opera House, and spent the rest of the morning and the larger part of the afternoon just driving in Berlin. It had been a while since I’d had a chance to motor around the city with no particular place to go, even though I did have somewhere I was supposed to be; then again that’s the best way to see any city — I mean when you should be doing something else. Stolen pleasure beats anything.

Around five I drove back to the villa. In the main hall they were busy listening to someone else performing a long solo about modern policing and I took advantage of this diversion to go upstairs again to check out the Stiftung Nordhav office. The door was still locked, of course, but a quick glance outside revealed that if I stepped out onto the curving balcony that occupied the space above the Greek Revival entrance I might get in there through the third-floor window. A couple of minutes later I was sitting at a little wooden desk and going through the drawers looking for some useful tasty mouthful concerning the sale of the Villa Minoux I might feed to Dr. Heckholz and his charming client, Frau Minoux.