The Lady from Zagreb (19 page)

“I had no idea. She was always beautiful. Like her mother. But a movie star, you say?”

I nodded. I thought it best not to mention that his former wife was dead. That was best left to Dalia’s letter.

“I was a boy the last time I went to the cinema,” said the colonel. “Must have been. It was a silent film.” He frowned. “How did you find me?”

“Your old Father Abbot at Petricevac in Banja Luka. That was your last known address, apparently.”

“Father Marko? I can’t believe that someone hasn’t killed that man. He’s much too outspoken for his own good. Even for a Catholic priest. There are others who were less fortunate than him.”

“I rather liked him,” I lied.

“He pointed us in the direction of the Ustaše headquarters in the town,” explained Geiger. “And there they told us you were most likely here. In Jasenovac. Making bricks.”

“Forgive me, gentlemen, you’ve come a long way. Would you like some lunch, perhaps? Some beer? Some rakija? Some bread and sausage?”

I was about to decline when Geiger answered. “That would be very kind of you, Colonel Dragan.”

The colonel went off to order his men to bring us something and, presumably, to read his letter. I sat on the sofa again. And when, another twenty minutes later, the food and drink arrived, Geiger fell on it hungrily. I watched him eat with something close to contempt but I said nothing. I didn’t need to. My face must have looked like a letter from Émile Zola.

“Not eating?” asked Geiger. He grinned horribly as he ate.

“Strangely enough I don’t seem to have brought my appetite with me.”

“A soldier learns not to pay much attention to appetite. You eat when there’s food, hungry or not. But as it happens, I am hungry. And nothing gets in the way of me and my grub.” With his mouth full of bread and sausage, he got up to inspect the photographs. “Not even those heads and this little wall of Ustaše heroes. Never seen a man having his head sawn off before. You know, lumberjack-style. I’ve seen some terrible things in this war. Done one or two, as well. But I’ve never seen anything like that.”

He turned and stared out the window.

“Why don’t you ask Colonel Dragan if you can have a demonstration?”

“You know, I just might do that, Gunther. Should be easy enough. I don’t suppose those people who were on the train have anything better to do than provide me with some amusement. After all, I imagine they’re all going to die anyway.”

“You mean there are people in those wagons?”

I went to the window and looked out. As Geiger had said, the goods wagons were now open and several hundred people were climbing down from the train and were being herded toward the river and a barge that was already coming to ferry them to their most likely fate.

“Serbs?” I said.

“Probably. Like I said, all the Jews in this part of the world are dead. But there are still plenty of Serbs left to kill.”

From his tone it was hard to determine if Geiger approved of what was happening at Jasenovac or not.

I picked up the bottle of rakija the Ustaše guard had brought and helped myself to a brimful glass. It wasn’t nearly as strong as the stuff in Geiger’s hip flask but that hardly mattered.

“The sooner we’re away from this godforsaken place, the better,” I said.

“I tend to agree with you, Gunther. Although I rather think God might disagree. It’s not God who forsakes us but man who forsakes God. His presence would be more obvious here, of course, if instead of a high wall to imprison and then torture human beings, they’d built a great cathedral. As a celebration of God’s glory and the dignity of man. Just as other men like these men—perhaps their great-great-grandfathers—created a fine cathedral from bricks in Zagreb. On this occasion, however, they built this place to mark where and what man has been. To testify to what we all have within us—that capacity for death and destruction which all men possess. You see, for every Sistine Chapel there are a hundred places like this one, Gunther. And let me ask you this: Truly, is one any less valid as an expression of human endeavor than the other? No, of course not. Personally, I think God’s never far away, even from this shameful horror. Perhaps, ultimately, that’s what makes horror truly horrible. The knowledge that God sees it all, and does nothing.”

•   •   •

A couple of days later, with Colonel Dragan’s letter to his daughter, Dalia, in my tunic pocket, and Geiger’s cynical words still ringing in my ears, I was back at the Esplanade in Zagreb and, with nothing better to do with myself until I could fly gratefully back to Berlin, I became a German tourist. I might just as easily have stayed in my room at the Esplanade and drunk myself into oblivion with the flask of rakija I had brought back with me. It’s what I felt like doing. I would have done it, too, except for the fear that once I’d started to drink like that I would never stop. Among so many others who were intoxicated with cruelty, who would have noticed one man intoxicated with drink? So, I begged the loan of a map from the concierge and went to explore the city.

In Zagreb it seemed there were more Roman Catholic churches squeezed into one small space than in the Vatican telephone directory. One of these, St. Mark’s, had a fairy-story roof that was seemingly made of thousands of Haribo candies. On the façade of every other building were Atlantes, as if the place were weighed down with its own history. It was. Between them, the Habsburgs and the Roman Catholic Church had crushed all the tomorrows out of this place so that all that remained was the past and, for most people, a very uncertain future. It was the kind of place you expected to find a Dr. Frankenstein listed in the telephone book, although the last time the scrofulous citizenry had rioted it wasn’t to burn some mad scientist’s castle but the shops and homes of innocent Serbs. Most of the swivel-eyed locals still looked as if they kept a burning torch and a pitchfork behind the kitchen door. I walked along uneven cobbled streets lined with mustard-colored houses, up and down vertiginous wooden stairways and past steep garden terraces with urban vineyards, through open squares the size of Russian steppes with public buildings, many of these a forgotten shade of yellow, like old icing sugar. Approaching the old city gate, I heard a low, human sound, and when I turned the corner I found myself in a vaulted archway where a hundred or so hawk-faced women and potbellied unshaven men stood mumbling their adoration of a shrine to the Virgin Mary, which occupied a place behind a baroque iron fence. But to me it looked and sounded like a satanic mass. Later on I saw a gang of loud young men approaching. It gave me pause for thought when I saw they were all dressed in black. I thought they were Ustaše thugs until I saw their collars and realized they were all priests; and then I asked myself, “What’s the difference?” After what I had seen at Jasenovac, Catholicism didn’t seem like a faith so much as a kind of curse. Fascism and Nazism were bad enough but this more ancient cult seemed almost as wicked.

I walked along to the city’s cathedral and found other German soldiers already there seeking respite against the heat of the day, or perhaps, like me, they were looking for something spiritual. As he came in through the door, one soldier crossed himself reverently and genuflected in the direction of the altar. A pinch-faced nun told him sternly to roll down his shirtsleeves out of respect for God, and meekly he obeyed, as if God actually cared about such observance in a country where, less than a hundred kilometers away, his priests were butchering women and children. Having delivered her rebuke, the nun took herself off into a chapel that was a little Gethsemane of twinkling candles and set about cleaning Christ on the cross with a long feather duster. He didn’t bat an eyelid. I expect it made a welcome change from a Roman spear in his side. I wondered what either one of them—Christ, or the nun—would have made of what I’d seen at Jasenovac. For all their pagan cruelty, I doubt the Romans could have devised anything more bloodthirsty than the scenes I’d seen in that swamp. Then again, maybe the Ustaše belonged in a much older tradition of persecution than I had imagined.

Before we’d left the malarial insanity of Jasenovac, Colonel Dragan had proudly shown me his special glove—more of a leather mitt, really, and properly used for cutting wheat sheaves—with a razor-sharp, curving blade sewn onto the underside so that he might cut throats with greater speed and efficiency. With this
Srbosjek
—his Serb cutter—the unspeakable colonel had boasted to us of having cut more than thirteen hundred Serbian throats in a single day.

But I could restrain myself no longer and to this I replied: “That such a beautiful woman as Dragica could have a father like you simply beggars belief.”

At which point Geiger hustled me back to the car and we drove quickly away before the mad Croatian colonel could say or do anything.

Now, as I sat there in the cathedral, the confessional door opened and a young officer of the SS stepped out of the booth, and I wondered to what it was he had just confessed. Murder, perhaps? And could absolution ever be given for what we Germans had set into motion in that country? The Roman Catholics probably thought it could. That was the belief they lived by. Me, I rather doubted it. Later on, I walked to a jewel of a park, lay down, and stared numbly at the shiny grass and thought the ants and the bees were more deserving of God’s mercy than me. For was I not German? And had not we Germans put dreadful monsters like the Ustaše and Colonel Dragan into power? Then again, maybe Geiger was right after all. Maybe all men were somehow at fault. The Belgians had done some dreadful things in the Congo, as had the British in India and Australia. The Spanish had little to feel proud of in the way they had raped South America. Would the Armenians ever forgive the Turks? And the Russians—well, you could hardly leave them out of the evil equation, either. How many millions of deaths had Lenin and Stalin ordered? I had seen the evidence of that at Katyn. Were the Germans so very different from everyone else? And would an apology ever be enough? Only time would tell. One day in the future the dead would speak from the past about what was being done here in the present.

G
oebbels listened carefully to what I was saying.

It was just the two of us, in his vast office at the ministry again. Given who he was, it was hard to imagine me talking and him just listening, but that’s how it was. The monkey instructing the organ-grinder. I wondered if anyone had ever told him of some of the terrible things that were being done in Germany’s name. While I seemed to be talking only about what was happening in the former Yugoslavia, I was also indirectly referring to what was happening on our Eastern Front. I certainly wouldn’t and couldn’t have mentioned this in any more of a direct way. And Goebbels was much too intelligent not to realize this. If anyone knew when words could mean more than they appeared to mean, it was him. With a PhD from Heidelberg, Goebbels was perhaps the most intelligent Nazi I’d ever met; certainly more intelligent than Heydrich, and that was saying something. I suppose he must have let me talk like this for ten or fifteen minutes without interruption. The head of the film studio had given me this supporting role, and now he was obliged to see and hear what I’d made of it. But finally he sat forward on the sofa and lifted one of his delicate, womanly hands to say something:

“There’s no doubt that some terrible things are being done in this war, on both sides. Let’s be clear about that. Last night there was an exceptionally heavy raid on Hamburg with most serious consequences for the civilian population. Five hundred British planes attacked and bombed the city indiscriminately. For the moment no one can estimate how many German women and children were killed. But I can tell you it’s hundreds, perhaps thousands. Not only that, but almost two hundred thousand people have just been made homeless, and I don’t know how we’re going to solve that problem. Altona was especially hard hit. That’s a real catastrophe, just as what’s happening in Croatia is a catastrophe, too. I’ll admit that. But this stupid historic enmity between Slavs is a complete sideshow to the real war. Germany’s war. So our first thoughts have to be about what’s happening here, at home. If our people ever lose their will to resist, I don’t have to tell you what will happen. The most serious crisis this country has ever faced. The Russians will do to this country and to our people what the Ustaše are doing now in Croatia. There can be no doubt about that. I know you don’t want that, Gunther. No one does.”

As Goebbels moved his head in an avian sort of way I realized that with his black hair and beaky nose he reminded me most of a carrion crow.

“I agree with you,” he continued. “This fellow Colonel Dragan sounds like an absolute monster. A murderous beast from the deepest pit in hell. I must confess I had no idea that something like this might happen. He used to be a priest, after all. You don’t expect priests to become murderers, do you? Although of course Stalin trained for the priesthood before becoming a bank robber. No, if I’d known that such a thing was even possible, I’d never have sent you down there. And I can see you’ve had an awful time of it, Gunther. I’m sorry about that. But you’re back home now and the present question is, what are we going to tell poor Dalia? After all, we—you, probably—will have to tell her something. But what? Like most actresses, she’s sensitive. Temperamental. Emotional. Well, you know that already. By the way, she spoke very highly of you. Very highly indeed. You seem to have made quite an impression on her. Considering yours was such a short acquaintance.”

I lit a cigarette and wondered how much Goebbels knew about what had happened between his star and me. I didn’t for a minute think that Dalia would have told him that we’d slept together; but he was smart, and even a suspicion on his part that there was something between us would have been disastrous for me. Just because there weren’t any thugs in the ministry didn’t mean Goebbels couldn’t pick up the phone to Prinz Albrechtstrasse and have me in a Gestapo cell in the time it took for him to unlace his surgical boot.

“I thought that you wanted me to impress her, sir. Someone with special skills, you said. A detective with a proven reputation, you said.”

“Did I say that?”

“You’re not someone who’s in the habit of being vague about what he says. Or not remembering it. I think we both know that the lady needs a lot of very careful handling. I had the idea that you wanted me to make her believe that I wasn’t just some ministry stooge sent by you to smooth things over so you could get her back to work on this picture. That I really was a proper detective and that I stood a genuine chance of tracing this fellow. Which I did. Against considerable odds, and no small danger to myself, I might add.”

“The garden was actually decorated with human heads?”

“Like it was landscaped by Salome and Bluebeard. Just to be there made my neck itch.”

“I don’t think there can be any possibility of inviting such a man here to Berlin. That’s the substance of his letter to her, apparently. He wants to come and visit her at the studio.”

“You’ve read it?”

“I had it translated from Croat. Yes, I’ve read it. Colonel Dragan says he wants to come and visit her as soon as possible. Well, you can hardly blame a man for wanting to see his estranged daughter, I suppose. Especially when she’s a famous movie actress.”

I pulled a face.

“What?” he asked.

“The man is a homicidal maniac. I don’t think that I would welcome the news that my father was the most unspeakable war criminal who takes pleasure in cutting hundreds of throats in one day. Let alone him turning up on my doorstep.”

“No,” said Goebbels. “Neither would I. There’s also the publicity value to consider. If it got out that her father was a mass murderer, it might easily affect her career as an actress, not to mention the current picture. Germans like their leading ladies to appear virtuous, spotless, pure. I know I do. They don’t want them to have an Igor figure in the top tower. All of which persuades me that perhaps we shouldn’t give her his letter, either.”

“That’s up to you. Fortunately I don’t have to make that decision. About his letter or what to tell her.”

“Nevertheless, since you’re going to see her again—that’s the professional thing to do, isn’t it? That’s what you would do if you were a private detective? You would go and speak to the client?”

“Yes. I suppose so.”

“Then in view of that, your input would be greatly appreciated. We have to put our heads together and figure out what to do, for her sake. How we’re going to tell her what we’re going to tell her without further jeopardizing this movie.”

“All right, then. Try this hat on for size. I went to the monastery in Banja Luka to look for Antun Djurkovic, also known as Father Ladislaus. Dalia had already sent some letters there before. But they hadn’t been answered. So how about we say they hadn’t been answered because he’s dead? The Father Abbot I spoke to said as much. I don’t know what kind of priest he was but Father Ladislaus is now Colonel Dragan. And it might be kinder if she never knew that.”

“So, Captain Gunther, your advice is that we lie to the woman, about her own father?” Goebbels laughed. “In case you had forgotten, this is the Ministry of Truth.”

I hadn’t forgotten, of course; in his white summer suit Goebbels almost looked like someone you could trust; but given the number of lies cooked up in that place I didn’t think one more—one meant kindly—could possibly make a difference in the scheme of things. All the same I wasn’t about to tell him that. On the whole it’s not wise to remind the devil that he’s the devil, especially when we were getting on so well.

“And you think you can say this to Dalia without her guessing that it is a lie? It’s not everyone who can lie and get away with it. Once you lie you have to stick with it. You have to keep up the lie, even at the risk of looking ridiculous. Just as often you have to lie again to protect the one you told the first time. Lies are like rabbits. One lie gives birth to another. Believe me, Gunther, I know what I’m talking about. And she’s a smart woman. Are you sure you can convince her? Are you inventive enough?”

“Can I be honest, sir?”

“You can try.”

“The fact is, I’ve been lying my head off for the last ten years.”

Goebbels laughed. “I see what you mean. Since the Nazis came to power. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

“It was easier to stay alive that way. At least it was for someone who used to be a social democrat. But then you must know that. It’s why you picked me for this job, after all. Because I’m not a Nazi. Like you said, it’s all in my file.”

He nodded. “You know, we still have too many philistines in the Party. I must say, I should prefer to have you on board as a colleague than some of the others I have to meet with. A little late in the day, perhaps, but I’m going to get you a membership in the National Socialist Party. Believe me, it will be to your advantage. And you can leave it all to me. I’m still the Berlin Gauleiter. You won’t have to do anything. Except sign the papers.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Goebbels laughed again. “Your gratitude overwhelms me. I like you, Gunther. I don’t know why, but I do.”

“And I like her, sir,” I said, quickly changing the subject. “I like her a lot. Enough to want to protect her from something like this. Because the alternative is that I tell her the truth and she has to live with that knowledge for the rest of her life. There’s no telling what that will do to a person.”

For a moment I wondered what Goebbels’s several children would think about their father’s crimes when, one day, the Nazis were history.

Goebbels nodded. “You’re right. No one should have to go through life bearing that kind of cross. The lie would certainly be kinder in this case. And it might be hard for her to play the leading role in this film knowing her father was a monster like this man you met.” He thought for a moment. “She’s in Zurich right now. With her useless fucking husband. You’ll have to go there and speak to her in person.”

“What’s he like?”

“Dr. Obrenovic? Rich. Very rich. Old. At least—much older than her. He’s everything you might expect of a Swiss lawyer, apart from the fact that he’s vaguely related to the former king of Serbia.” Goebbels snapped his fingers. “You know?”

“I know. Alexander the First. The one who got himself assassinated in Marseille.”

“No, actually that was another Alexander. Alexander of Yugoslavia. I’m talking about Alexander of Serbia. But as it happens, he also managed to get himself assassinated, by some army officers in 1903. What a people they are for assassinations, eh? Like something out of Italy under the Borgias.”

“You want me to go to Zurich?”

“Well, I can hardly go myself. I think the Swiss government might have something to say about that. Besides, it might be a nice break for you after Zagreb. Zurich has some fine hotels. That’s one thing the Swiss do very well. In all other respects they’re as much of a bloody nuisance as the Serbs and the Croats. But for the Swiss, we could have offered Mussolini and Kesselring our immediate support in the present crisis without a second thought. As it is, we’ll have to send troops the long way round through Austria and France.”

“I’ve never been to Switzerland,” I said. “But it’s got to be better than Croatia.”

“I’ll speak to the Foreign Ministry,” said Goebbels. “Have them fix it up for you to go there immediately. No, wait a minute. There’s none of them who strike me as particularly competent. I met the new undersecretary the other day—a man named Steengracht von Moyland. Another damned aristocrat. Utterly mediocre. No, I’ll speak to Walter Schellenberg, in SD Foreign Intelligence. After all, you’re SD, too. He’s smart. He’ll know the best way to get you into the country. And the best hotel, too, probably. I’ll say one thing for Schellenberg, he’s a well-traveled man, considering we’re at war.”

“Might be nice, at that,” I said.

“There’s just one problem, as I see it.” Goebbels grinned. “You’re going to have to get married.”

I heard myself swallow. “Married? I don’t think I understand.”

“Oh, it’s quite simple. The only way our government can make absolutely sure that any citizen will come back here from somewhere like Switzerland is if they have family in Germany. Which you don’t. At least not yet.”

“I don’t think that’s about to change very soon,” I said.

“Don’t say that, Gunther. Take it from me, the love of a sweet woman is one of the great pleasures of life.”

“Perhaps that’s true but there’s no woman who’s sweet enough to take me on right now.”

Goebbels stood up and almost disappeared as he limped behind his desk, where he began to turn the pages of a file. “What about this woman you’ve been seeing?” He pulled a page out of the folder and came around his desk again. “The schoolteacher at the Fichte Gymnasium on Emser Strasse. Kirsten Handlöser.”

“What about her?”

“Couldn’t you marry her? She’s single.”

“There’s the small matter of her not being in love with me. And my not being in love with her. Frankly, sir, I don’t want to be married.”

“Perhaps. But there’s this to consider. More importantly. For her, anyway. Which is that you’d be doing her a favor.”

“How’s that?”

“Quite apart from the fact that as a woman it’s her patriotic duty to be married and to have children—like my own wife, Magda—you’d also be keeping her out of trouble.”

I stiffened. Whatever was coming around the mountain clearly was going to be something I didn’t like. I was beginning to understand that in real life Goebbels operated in the same schizophrenic way he did in his public speaking: seductive and persuasive one minute, intimidating and coercive the next.

“What kind of trouble?” I asked.

Goebbels uttered a harsh sort of laugh.

“There is only one kind of trouble in Germany, Gunther. The serious kind. It seems that a week or two ago some SD men turned up at her school, to conduct a sort of survey. They were asking questions about why none of the girls in her school have chosen to be evacuated from Berlin to a KLV camp. To escape the bombing. The KLVs haven’t been as popular as might reasonably have been supposed. Anyway, it seems Fräulein Handlöser was less than complimentary about the sort of boys that are to be found in these camps. She even suggested that any decent parent would avoid sending their girls to a KLV at all costs. I’m afraid that she’s going to be questioned again about her whole general attitude. There are some who might regard what she had to say about the Hitler Youth as antisocial behavior, under the 1939 Decree Against National Pests. Under the War Offenders Decree, what she said might even count as undermining the war effort. She could easily find herself doing six months at Brandenburg Prison, to say nothing of losing her job at the school. Of course, it would certainly count in her favor if an SD man and a Party member—albeit a new Party member—were to marry her. Yes, even if the SD man were you, Gunther. It would demonstrate your good faith in her. Especially as I myself would certainly send a letter to the SD to tell them of my confidence in you, as well as to bless your union. Which would count as a reference for you both. And thereby remove any possibility of a prison sentence.”