Philip Kerr - Field Grey

'Yeah?'

'I'm a little bit like Goethe,' I said. 'When I'm writing a book I find that a bottle of good German brandy usually helps.'

'Is there such a thing as a good German brandy?'

'I'll settle for some cheap vodka, only a man needs a hobby when he's got his feet in the cement. Something to take his mind off the present and put it somewhere in the past. About seven years ago, to be more accurate.'

'All right,' said the man with the glasses. 'We'll get you a bottle of something.'

'And I would like to catch up on my smoking. I'd given up until I left Cuba. Since I met you I've got a much better reason to kill myself.'

They left me alone after that. Pencils and paper, a bottle of brandy, a clean glass, a couple of packets of cigarettes and some matches and even a newspaper arrived and I placed them all on the table and just watched them for a while, enjoying the freedom to have a drink or not have a drink. It's the little things that can make prison tolerable. Like a door key. By all accounts they'd let Hitler have the run of Landsberg and he'd treated the place more like a hotel than a penitentiary. Not that he was in any way penitent about the putsch of 1923, of course.

I lay down on the bed and tried to relax, but it wasn't easy in that cell. Was this why they'd put me in here? Or was it just an American idea of a joke? I tried not to think about Adolf Hitler but he kept on getting up from the desk and, full of impatience, going to the window and staring out through the bars in that pose he always had of a man chosen by destiny.

The curious thing was I'd never really thought about Hitler. For years when he was still alive I tried not to think of him at all, dismissing him as a crank before he was elected chancellor of Germany, and after that happened, merely wishing him dead. But now that I was lying on the bed where, for nine months, he had dreamed his autocratic dreams it seemed impossible not to pay attention to the man with blue eyes at the window.

As I watched he sat down at the desk again, picked up the pen and started to write, covering the sheets of paper with furious scribbling and sweeping each page off the table and onto the floor as he finished so that I might pick them up and read what was written. At first the sentences made no sense at all; but gradually these became more coherent, affording glimpses into the extraordinary phenomenon that was Hitler's mind. Whatever he wrote was based on his own incontrovertible logic and served as a perfect guide for the commission of evil, worked out to the most minute detail. It was like sitting in the same asylum cell as the insane Doctor Mabuse, together with the ghosts of all those he had exterminated, and watching him write his last criminal testament.

At last he stopped writing and, leaning back on the chair, turned to look at me. Feeling this was my chance to put him on the spot, I tried to frame a question of the kind that Robert Jackson, the Chief American Prosecutor at Nuremberg, might have asked. But this was more difficult than I might have imagined. There wasn't any single question beyond a simple 'why' that I could have asked; and I was still wrestling with this realisation when he spoke to me:

'So, what happened next?'

I tried to stifle a yawn. 'You mean, when I left Le Vernet?'

'Of course.'

'We went back to Toulouse,' I said. 'From there we drove to Vichy and handed our prisoners to the French. Then we drove to the border of the occupied zone – Bourges, I think it was – and waited for the French to deliver them back to us. A ridiculous arrangement, but one that seemed to suit the hypocrisy of the French. These prisoners included poor Herschel Grynszpan. From Bourges we drove back to Paris, where the prisoners were locked up before being flown to Berlin. Well, you probably know better than me what happened to Grynszpan. I know he was in Sachsenhausen for a while. And there never was a show trial, of course.'

'A trial was unnecessary,' said Hitler. 'His guilt was obvious. Besides, it might have been embarrassing for Petain. Just like the Riom Trial, when that Jew Leon Blum gave evidence against Laval.'

I nodded. 'Yes, I can see that.'

'I didn't hear anything about what happened to him,' said Hitler. 'At any rate I cannot recollect. At the end I had quite a lot on my mind. Himmler probably dealt with him. I dare say he was one of those whose hash got settled by the SS at Flossenburg in the last days of the war. But, you know, Grynszpan had it coming. After all, there's no doubt that he really did murder Ernst vom Rath. No doubt at all. The Jew just wanted to kill an important German and vom Rath was merely the unlucky man he killed. There were plenty of witnesses to the murder who came forward and told the truth about what happened. Not that you would know the meaning of truth. Your behaviour at Le Vernet was a gross act of deceit and betrayal. To me and your fellow officers.'

'Yes, it was,' I said. 'But I'll live with it.'

'Did you go straight back to Berlin?'

'No, I stayed on in Paris for a while, pretending to make further inquiries about Erich Mielke. A lot of other German communists and men from the International Brigade had volunteered for the French Foreign Legion to escape from the Gestapo in France. The Legion never paid much attention to a man's past. You enlisted in Marseille and served in the French colonies, with no questions asked. It was easy to suggest in my report to Heydrich that this was how he had escaped us. The truth is rather more interesting.'

'Not to me,' said Hitler. 'What I'm more interested in is what you did about the officer who tried to murder you.'

'What makes you think I did anything at all?'

'Because I know men. Go on. Admit it. You got even with him, didn't you? This Lieutenant Nikolaus Willms.'

'Yes, I did.'

Hitler was triumphant. 'I knew it. You sit there with your kangaroo court, Robert Jackson questions, but underneath you're no different from me. That makes you a hypocrite, Gunther. A hypocrite.'

'Yes, that's true.'

'So what did you do? Denounce him to the Gestapo? The same way you helped denounce that other fellow? The Gestapo captain from Wiirzburg. What was his name again?'

'Weinberger.' I shook my head. 'No, that's not what happened.'

'Of course. You had Heydrich take care of him. Heydrich was always very good at getting rid of people. For a Mischling, he was an excellent Nazi. I suppose he felt he had to try that much harder to prove himself to me.' Hitler laughed. "That's the only reason we ever kept him on.'

'No, it wasn't like that either. I didn't involve Heydrich.'

Hitler turned his chair around to face me and rubbed his hands. 'I want to hear it all. Every sordid detail.'

I yawned again. I was feeling tired. My eyes kept on closing. All I really wanted to do was go to sleep and dream of somewhere different.

'I order you to tell me.'

'Is that a Fuhrer order?'

'If you like.'

I gave a little jolt, the way you do when sleep takes you for a ride and instead you get the crazy idea you just died. This little death is a wonderful sensation. It reminds you why it is that breathing feels so good.

It certainly felt good in the summer of 1940. And there was no better place to be breathing air than Paris. Especially when I had the little maid from the Lutetia Hotel to keep me amused. Not that I took advantage of her. As a matter of fact I was rather scrupulous where Renata was concerned. It was one of the ways I had of convincing myself I wasn't as big a rat as the field grey said I was. This wasn't Onegin's sermon. I mean, I wanted her. And eventually I had her. But I took my time about it, the way you do when you like what's between a girl's ears as much as you want what's between her legs. And when it happened it felt like it was something shaped by a higher motive than simple lust. It wasn't love, exactly. Neither of us wanted to get married. But it was romance: courtship, desire, fear and dread. Yes, there was fear and dread, too, because Renata always knew I would go and slay my fire-extinguishing dragon just as soon as I knew why he'd sought to put me out for good.