Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

“Sure. But I might need to take them with me if I’m going to look for him.”

“Does that mean you’ll do it? That you’ll go to Yugoslavia?”

“Don’t rush me, Fräulein Dresner. It’s considered normal practice when you’re going to stick your head in a lion’s mouth to think about it first, even in the circus. Not least to check out the lion. See if he’s been fed. What his breath is like. That kind of thing.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“Meaning I shall probably go and speak to some of our people in Foreign Intelligence this afternoon. The kind of people who know the country and who can tell me how things are down there. And there’s a judge from my own department — Judge Dorfmüller — who’s handled many investigations in Yugoslavia. I expect he’ll have something useful to say, too. After that I’ll come back here and tell you what I propose to do. How does that sound?”

“It sounds fine if you let me cook you dinner at the same time. I’m an excellent cook considering that I’m never allowed to cook. Shall we say eight o’clock?”

I thought for a minute. On my way to the War Crimes Bureau offices on Blumeshof I could stop by Berkaerstrasse and speak to whoever it was in Schellenberg’s Foreign Intelligence department who knew anything about Yugoslavia. Of course, I’d have to return Joey’s car and come back to her house on the S-Bahn, but that would be all right. Then again maybe I could persuade Joey to let me keep the car for the night. Besides, it had been ages since a pretty girl had made me so much as a cup of coffee.

“Don’t say yes too soon,” she said. “I’ll get to thinking you actually like me.”

“Oh, I like you all right. I was just trying to work out if I could do what I need to do — that is, speak to the right people — and then be back here wearing a clean shirt having learned something useful.”

“And what’s the conclusion?”

“That I should leave. But I’ll be back here at eight. If your cooking is as good as you say it is, then I wouldn’t miss it for the world, a bit like your bathing costume. I’d certainly like to see that again sometime.”

I took the 540K back into Berlin. It was like driving a shiny new Messerschmitt. And Joey was right; the supercharger did whine when you started it. But once it was going, the car was magnificent. The ultimate driving machine.

At Department Six in Berkaerstrasse I asked to talk to one of Schellenberg’s people about the situation in Yugoslavia and found myself ushered upstairs into the presence of the little general himself. It wasn’t a large office like the minister’s. And the view from the window seemed relentlessly suburban. But it was easy to see why he preferred being here to somewhere closer to Prinz Albrechtstrasse; a man could be left alone out here in the sticks, with no one like Himmler to bother him. He stood up and came around his modern-looking desk. There was some gray in his neatly combed hair. He looked thinner than when last I’d seen him — his uniform was at least a size too big — and he confessed that he was suffering from problems with his liver and his gallbladder.

“These days I only seem to gain weight,” I said. “Although I think it’s mostly on my conscience, not my waistline.”

Schellenberg liked that one. We were off to a good start.

“This will be the second time this year I’m obliged to go back to Holter’s and have my suits and uniforms altered,” he said. “I’m even seeing Himmler’s masseur. He’s the only one who seems to make me feel better. But there’s nothing he seems to be able to do about my weight loss.”

From a man like Schellenberg this was quite a confession. In a department full of murderers, any one of whom would have wanted his job as the SD’s chief of Foreign Intelligence, what he’d told me almost counted as an admission of weakness and, but for knowledge that his offices had once been an old people’s home and the strong suspicion that he must have had a hand in the murder of Dr. Heckholz the previous summer, I might even have felt sorry for him. Of Horst Janssen, the man I presumed had done the actual killing, there was no sign, and when I asked Schellenberg about him, he said, “Safely back in Kiev, for the moment.”

“Doing what?”

Schellenberg shook his head as if he didn’t want to discuss it and rubbed the blue stone on his gold signet ring as if he hoped it might make the man disappear for good. And perhaps it wouldn’t be long before that came true: rumor had it that the Battle of Kursk wasn’t going well for the German forces; if we lost that front, Kiev would certainly be next.

“So what’s this war crime you’re investigating in Zagreb?” he asked. “You must be spoiled for choice in a place like Croatia.”

It suited me very well for Schellenberg to believe that my business in Zagreb was on behalf of the German Army’s War Crimes Bureau; but at the same time, I hardly wanted to tell him an outright lie. I was still an officer of SD, after all.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t say what that is.”

“I respect that. I like a man who can keep his mouth shut. Pity there aren’t more like you, Gunther. I used to think you were Heydrich’s man. But I think I know different now. He was a master of case-based reasoning and mental reservation. Rather like a Jesuit. For him the end always justified the means. I don’t expect you ever had much choice but to work for him. But I have a different approach. I couldn’t ever trust a man I’d coerced to work for me.”

“I’ll remember you said that, General.”

“Please do. You know, your lecture at last year’s IKPK conference impressed me. As a matter of fact, there was something you said that I even wrote down. About how being a detective is a little like the traffic-control tower that stands in the center of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz: not only do its lights have to control traffic from five different directions, it also tells the time and, in bad weather, provides much needed shelter for a traffic policeman. That’s a pretty good analogy for what I do in this office, too.”

“Have you seen Potsdamer Platz lately? There’s hardly any traffic at all. No one has petrol to waste driving around Berlin.”

No one except Goebbels, it seemed.

“You impress me, Gunther. As a matter of fact, you also made an impression on Captain Meyer-Schwertenbach. You remember? The Swiss fellow you met at the conference? He said he thought you were a man who could be trusted. And so do I. It occurs to me now that you can do me a small service when you’re in Zagreb.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“Oh, it’s nothing much. And you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. You can call it a favor, if you like. I just need a man to deliver something — someone I can rely on. Believe me, that’s in rather short supply around here, what with Kaltenbrunner’s spies everywhere. You wouldn’t believe how paranoid that man is. But before I tell you what I want you to do, let me first tell you about the situation in Zagreb, which is what you came here to ask about. The situation is bloody awful, and likely to get even worse if — as seems likely — the fucking Italians capitulate this side of Christmas. As usual it’ll be us who has to go and tidy up after them. Just like in Greece. But I think you’ll be all right to go there for the present. With regard to going anywhere else, like Banja Luka, it’s really impossible to say from here how safe it will be. You could seek advice from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, of course — Haj Amin al-Husseini. He’s living just up the road from here in a very nice house on Goethestrasse that’s costing von Ribbentrop seventy-five thousand reichsmarks a month.”