Philip Kerr - Field Grey

Both men had one or two German parents, which was why they spoke the language so fluently, although Earp was the more fluent of the two; but Silverman was cleverer.

They came armed with several briefcases that were full of files but they hardly ever referred to these; each man seemed to carry a whole filing cabinet in his head. They did however take copious notes: Silverman had small, very neat and distinguished handwriting that looked as though it might have been written by Volundr, the ruler of the elves.

At first I assumed they were interested in the workings of the RSHA and my knowledge of Department VI, which was the office of Foreign Intelligence; but it seemed they knew almost as much about that as I did. Perhaps more. And only gradually did it become clear that they suspected me of something far more serious than a couple of local murders.

'You see,' explained Silverman, 'there are some aspects of your story that just don't add up.'

'I get a lot of that,' I said.

'You say you were a Kommissar in Kripo until-?'

'Until Kripo became part of the RSHA in September 1939.'

'But, you say, you were never a Party member.'

I shook my head.

'Wasn't that unusual?'

'Not at all. Ernst Gennat was the deputy chief of Kripo in Berlin until August 1939 and he was to my certain knowledge never a Nazi Party member.'

'What happened to him?'

'He died. Of natural causes. There were others, too. Heinrich Muller, the Gestapo chief. He never joined the Party either.'

'Then again,' said Silverman, 'maybe he didn't need to. He was as you say head of the Gestapo.'

'There are others I could mention, but you have to remember that the Nazis were hypocrites. Sometimes it suited them to be able to use people who were outside the Party system.'

'So you admit you allowed yourself to be used,' said Earp.

'I'm alive, aren't I?' I shrugged. 'I guess that speaks for itself.'

'The question is, how much you allowed yourself to be used,' said Silverman.

'It's been bothering me, too,' I said.

He was clever but he couldn't ever have played poker; his face was much too expressive. When he thought I was lying his mouth hung open and he shifted his lower jaw around like a cow chewing tobacco; and when he was satisfied with an answer he looked away or made a sad sound like he was disappointed.

'Maybe you'd like to get something off your chest,' said Earp.

'Seriously,' I said. 'You don't want me.'

'That's for us to decide, Herr Gunther.'

'You could beat it out of me, like your friends in the Navy and the FBI.'

'It seems like everyone wants to hit you,' said Earp.

'I'm just wondering when you two are going to figure that it's your turn.'

'We're not like that in the Chief Counsel's Office.' Silverman sounded so smooth I almost believed him.

'Well, why didn't you say so before? Now I feel completely reassured.'

'Most of the people in here have talked to us because they wanted to talk,' said Earp.

'And the rest?'

'Sometimes it's hard to say nothing when all your friends have ratted on you,' said Silverman.

'That's okay then. I don't have any friends. And very definitely none in this place. So anyone who rats on me is probably a bigger rat himself.'

Silverman stood up and took off his jacket. 'Mind if I open a window?' he said.

The politeness was instinctive and he started to open it anyway. Not that I could ever have jumped out; the window was barred, just like the one in my cell. Silverman stood there looking out with his arms folded thoughtfully, and for a second I remembered a newspaper photograph of Hitler, in a similar attitude, on a visit to Landsberg after he'd become Reich Chancellor. After a moment or two he said:

'Did you ever meet a man called Otto Ohlendorf? He was a Gruppenfuhrer – a Major-General – in the RSHA.' Silverman came back to the table and sat down.

'Yes. I met him a couple of times. He was head of Department Three, I think. Domestic Intelligence.'

'And what was your impression of him?'

'Intense. A dedicated Nazi.'

'He was also head of an SS task force that operated in the Southern Ukraine and the Crimea,' said Silverman. 'That same task force murdered ninety thousand people before Ohlendorf returned to his desk in Berlin. As you say, he was a dedicated Nazi. But when the British captured him in 1945, he sang like a canary. For them and for us. Actually we couldn't shut him up. No one could figure it. There was no duress, no deal, no offer of immunity. It seems he just wanted to talk about it. Maybe you should think about doing that. Get it off your chest, as he did. Ohlendorf sat in that very chair you're sitting in now and talked his damn head off for forty-two days in succession. He was very matter-of-fact about it, too. You might even say "normal". He didn't cry or offer an apology, but I guess there must have been something in his soul that just bothered him.'

'Some of the guys here quite liked him,' said Earp. 'Up until the moment when we hanged him.'

I shook my head. 'With all due respect, you're not selling this idea of unburdening myself very well if the only reward comes in heaven. And I thought Americans were supposed to be good salesmen.'

'Ohlendorf was one of Heydrich's proteges, too,' said Silverman.

'Meaning you think I was?'

'You said yourself it was Heydrich who brought you back to Kripo, in 1938.1 don't know what else that makes you, Gunther.'

'He needed a proper homicide detective. Not some Nazi with an anti-Semitic axe to grind. When I came back to Kripo I had the unusual idea that I might actually be able to stop someone from murdering young girls.'

'But afterwards-'

'You mean after I solved the case?'

'-You continued working for Kripo. At General Heydrich's request.'

'I really didn't have much choice in the matter. Heydrich was a hard man to disappoint.'

'But what did he want from you?'

'Heydrich was a cold murdering bastard but he was also a pragmatist. Sometimes he preferred honesty to unswerving loyalty. For one or two people such as myself it wasn't so important that they stick to the official Party line as that they should do a good job. Especially if those people, like me, had no interest in climbing the SS ladder.'

'Oddly enough that's exactly how Otto Ohlendorf described his own relationship with Heydrich,' said Earp. 'Jost, too. Heinz Jost? Maybe you remember him? He was the man Heydrich appointed to take over from your friend Walter Stahlecker in charge of Task Force A, when he was killed by Estonian partisans.'

'Walter Stahlecker wasn't ever my friend. Whatever gave you that idea?'

'He was your business partner's brother, wasn't he? When you and he were running a private investigation business in Berlin, in 1937.'

'Since when has one brother been responsible for another's actions? Bruno Stahlecker couldn't have been more different from his brother Walter. He wasn't even a Nazi.'

'But you met Walter Stahlecker, surely.'

'He came to Bruno's funeral. In 1938.'

'On any other occasions?'

'Probably. I don't remember when, exactly.'

'Do you think it was before or after he organised the murder of two hundred and fifty thousand Jews?'

'Well, it wasn't afterwards. And by the way, he was Franz Stahlecker, never Walter. Bruno never called him Walter. But to come back to Heinz Jost for a moment, the man who took over Task Force A when Franz Stahlecker was killed. Would this be the same Heinz Jost who was sentenced to life imprisonment and then paroled from this place a couple of years ago? Is that the man you mean?'

'We just prosecute them,' said Silverman. 'It's up to the US High Commissioner for Germany who's released and when.'

'And then last month,' I said. 'I hear it was Willy Siebert's turn to walk out of here. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't he Otto Ohlendorf s deputy? When those ninety thousand Jews got killed? Ninety thousand and you people just let him walk out of here. It sounds to me that McCloy wants his head examined.'