Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

“Goring?” I murmured, not quite believing it myself.

“That fat popinjay? He’s already too powerful for Hitler’s taste.”

I nodded. “Yes, you’re right, of course. Too powerful and too popular with the people at large.” I shook my head. “But I have to do something. In Turkey, Captain von Frisch saved my life. But for him, there would be a large hole in my head where my brains should be.”

I’d handed Bruno the straight line for the joke and of course he did not disappoint; my business partner is nothing if not predictable, which, for the most part, is an excellent quality in a partner.

“There is a large hole in your head where your brains should be. There is if you take the captain on as a client.”

“I already did. I gave him my word I’d try to help. Like I say, he saved my neck. The least I can do is try to save his.”

“Look, Bernie, that’s what happens in a war. It doesn’t mean anything. Saving someone’s life was just common courtesy in the trenches. Like giving a man a light for his cigarette. If I had ten marks for every bastard’s life I saved I’d be a rich man. Forget it. He probably has. It doesn’t mean anything, Bernie.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“No. All right. I don’t. So, how about this instead? Survival then was just a matter of luck, that’s all. Why pay it any regard now?”

I picked up my hat.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To Gestapo headquarters in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse,” I said. “I’m going to find that lion.”

FRENCH RIVIERA

1956

I sipped the perfectly mixed gimlet that Maugham’s stone-faced butler had just brought up to the rooftop writing aerie and winced a little as I felt the navy-strength gin entering my hardening arteries like a good quality formaldehyde. Why else does anyone drink? Then I lit a cigarette, pulled hard on the filter, and waited for the sweet Virginia tobacco to deliver the coup de grace to my senses after the dulling effect of the alcohol. Why else does anyone smoke? Meanwhile, a thin black cat had entered the room, and something about its stealthy, careful movements suggested that it was my own soul’s dark relation, come to make sure that I didn’t tell the old English writer too much. Never trust a writer, the cat seemed to be telling me; they write all sorts of things down. Things you didn’t mean to tell them. Especially this one. He already knows your name; don’t give him any more information. He’ll use it in some book he’s writing.

“I’d be grateful if you kept all that to yourself,” I said. “Me being a former detective from Berlin. It’s not something I want people to know about.”

“Of course. You have my word.”

“Anyway it’s not a story in which anyone comes out with very much credit,” I said. “Myself included.”

“That’s rather the point of a good story,” said Maugham. “I dislike heroes at the best of times and I much prefer men with flaws. Believe me, that’s what sells these days.”

“Then the surprise is that I haven’t been in a novel already. Seriously, though. In retrospect, I should have done a lot more to talk the captain out of his chosen course of action. But he was my old commander and I was used to doing what he asked. Which isn’t enough of an excuse, really. But there it is. It’s just another regret I have in the ten-volume apologia that’s the story of my life.”

“Ten volumes, eh? That sounds interesting.”

“Big print, though.”

“So what h-happened?” he asked. “In your story.”

“Nothing good,” I said. “It was a disaster for the captain, and in time for me, as well. It brought me back to the attention of General Heydrich, who, later that year, blackmailed me into returning to the police, which meant working for him and, eventually, the SD.”

“Blackmailed? What did he have on you?”

I smiled. “Nothing in particular. Only the threat of extreme violence. That’s the most effective blackmail of all. The Nazis had so many ways of threatening violence to a person that it’s sometimes hard to remember that this was the German government we’re talking about and not a bunch of Chicago gangsters. If I’d refused to do what he asked-work for him-I’d have been a dead man. No question. Heydrich always got what he wanted.”

The cat blinked up at me with slow disbelief, as if questioning the truth of that assertion. Cats just know when someone is lying or, in my case, bending the truth to suit my new persona. That’s probably why I don’t own a cat.

“And did you go to Gestapo headquarters? To put your head in the lion’s mouth?”

“Yes. I met with Huber and Fehling. They were the two Gestapo officers who were charged with investigating the von Fritsch case. It was immediately clear to me that these two possessed the arrogance of men who enjoyed the full confidence of people much higher in rank than themselves-Himmler, I think, and probably Heydrich, too. As you can imagine, they were less than helpful; they certainly didn’t like the idea of their case against the general going up in smoke because Otto Schmidt was about to be proved an obvious liar. It was lucky for me that while I was there I actually saw their boss, Arthur Nebe. He didn’t speak to me, but after he’d had a word with Huber, they decided to let me go. Nebe always had a soft spot for me, so I figure it was his call. All the same, I was warned in no uncertain terms that I was forbidden to make contact with Captain von Frisch again or with the general’s legal counsel, Count Rudiger von der Goltz. But I was always an insubordinate sort and I went to army headquarters anyway, where I spoke to another military judge-Karl Sack was his name-and put him in the picture. And it was he who informed the general’s lawyers of my captain’s willingness to give evidence against the Gestapo’s star witness, Otto Schmidt.

“By then things were moving more quickly than I knew, and with a greater ruthlessness than even I could have conceived. Captain von Frisch had already been arrested at his home in Lichterfelde and taken into what the Gestapo laughingly called ‘protective custody’ at their Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse HQ. That usually meant something bad was going to happen, and it did. There they subjected him to a terrible beating from which he never really recovered. But he was immensely brave and refused to change his story-that he was the von Frisch who had actually committed the homosexual act in the lavatories at Potsdamer Platz station, not the general-and eventually they were obliged to let him go. Hennig made me and my partner come and fetch von Frisch from his cell in the basement of the Gestapo HQ, which I can still remember in awful detail. It’s not the kind of thing you ever really forget.

“He was lying naked on the floor of the cell in a pool of blood and urine and, for several minutes, we thought he was dead. His whole body was as purple as a ripe plum-he was actually bleeding through his ears-and it was only when I touched him that he moaned and we realized that, incredibly, he was still alive. The Gestapo were very good at beating a man within an inch of his life, and sometimes nearer than that. A cursory examination of his body revealed he was suffering, probably, from several broken ribs, a broken collarbone, a broken jaw, and multiple contusions. All of his fingernails and several of his teeth had been torn out with a pair of pliers and one of his eyes was bulging horribly out of its socket. I’d seen men beaten before, but never as badly as that and certainly never one as old. Without a stretcher on which to carry him we were obliged to lift him out to my car in a filthy old blanket and only permitted to take him to the Charite Hospital on condition that we did not tell the medical staff the truth of how he had come by his injuries, so we were obliged to make up a real Bremen Town musician of a tale that he had sleepwalked his way out of the house and into the path of a tram. Not that they believed us, mind. They’d seen men, and women, who’d been beaten up by the Gestapo and SA many times before. How he’d resisted all of that and stuck to his story I’ll never know.