I went out to get a coffee and a cognac. They were drugs, too. Maybe that way I’d see things differently. It was worth a try.
THIRTEEN
Wagmullerstrasse ran onto Prinzregentenstrasse, between the National Museum and the House of Art. On the English Garden side, the House of Art was now being used as an American Officers’ Club. The National Museum had just reopened following extensive repairs and now, once again, it was possible to see the city treasures that no one really wanted to look at. Wagmullerstrasse was in a district of Munich called Lehel, which was full of quiet residential streets built for the well-to-do during Germany’s industrial revolution. Lehel was still quiet but only because half of the houses were in ruins. The other half had been or were still being repaired and lived in by Munich’s new well-to-do. Even out of uniform the new well-to-do were easily recognizable by their buzz-cut hairstyles; their busy, gum-chewing mouths; their loud braying laughs; their impossibly wide trousers; their handsome cigarette cases; their sensible English shoes; their Kodak folding Brownies; and, above all, their semi-aristocratic air—that sense of absolute precedence they all gave off like cheap cologne.
The Red Cross building was four stories of yellowish Danubian limestone set between a rather fancy-looking shop selling Nymphenburger porcelain and a private art gallery. Inside, everything was in motion. Typewriters were being punched, filing cabinets opened and closed loudly, forms being filled out, people coming down stairs, and people going up in an open-grille elevator. Four years after the end of the war the Red Cross was still dealing with the human fallout. Just to make things more interesting they had let the painters in, and I didn’t have to look at the ceiling to know they were painting it white—there were spots of it all over the brown linoleum floor. Behind a desk that looked more like a counter in a beer hall, a woman with braids and a face as pink as a ham was brushing off an old man who might or might not have been a Jew. I never could tell the difference.
Most of her problem with him related to the fact that only half of what he was saying to her was in German. The rest, which was mostly spoken at the floor, just in case she understood the swear words, was in Russian. I buckled on my armor, mounted my white horse, and leveled my lance at the ham.
“Perhaps I can be of assistance,” I said to her before speaking to the man in Russian. It turned out that he was looking for his brother who had been in the concentration camp at Treblinka, then Dachau, before finally ending up in one of the Kaufering camps. He’d run out of money. He needed to get to the DP camp at Landsberg. He had been hoping that the Red Cross would help him. The way the ham was looking at him I wasn’t sure they would, so I gave the old man five marks and told him how to get to the railway station on Bayerstrasse. He thanked me profusely and then left me to be eaten by the ham.
“What was all that about?” she demanded.
I told her.
“Since 1945, a total of sixteen million tracing requests have been submitted to the Red Cross,” she said, answering the accusation that lay behind my eyes. “One point nine million returnees have been interviewed about missing persons. We’re still missing sixty-nine thousand prisoners of war, one point one million members of the Wehrmacht, and almost two hundred thousand German civilians. That means there are proper procedures to be observed. If we gave five marks to every heel who walks in off the street with a sob story we’d be broke in no time. You’d be surprised how many walk in here looking for their long-lost brother when what they’re really looking for is just the price of a drink.”
“Then it’s very lucky he took five marks from me instead of from the Red Cross,” I said. “I can afford to lose it.” I smiled warmly at her but she wasn’t near being thawed.
“What can I do for
you
?
”
she asked coolly.
“I’m looking for Father Gotovina.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No,” I said. “I thought I’d save him the trouble of meeting me at the Praesidium.”
“The Police Praesidium?” Like most Germans the ham was still apprehensive where the police were concerned. “On Ettstrasse?”
“With the stone lion in front of the entrance,” I said. “That’s right. Have you been there?”
“No,” she said, keen to be rid of me now. “Take the elevator to the second floor. You’ll find Father Gotovina in the Passport and Visa Section. Room twenty-nine.”
At first glance the man operating the elevator looked not much older than me. It was only after the second glance, when you’d finished taking in the one leg and the scar on his face that the third glance told you he was probably not much more than twenty-five. I got in the car with him, and said “two” and he went into action with the well-practiced air and grim determination of a man operating a 20mm Flak 38—the gun with the foot pedals and the collapsing seat. Stepping out onto the second floor I almost glanced up to see if he’d hit anything. It was just as well I didn’t, because if I had I’d have tripped over the man painting a skirting board that ran the length of a corridor as big as a bowling alley.
The Passport and Visa Section was like a state within a state. More typewriters, more filing cabinets, more forms to be filled, and more meaty-looking women. Each of them looked like she ate a Red Cross parcel, including the wrapping paper and string, for breakfast. There was a guy standing around beside a 50mm camera with a trip and hood. Outside the window there was a good view of the Angel of Peace monument on the other side of the River Isar. Erected in 1899 to commemorate the Franco-Prussian War, it hadn’t meant much then and it certainly didn’t mean much now.
Being a detective I spotted Father Gotovina within a few seconds of going through the door. There were lots of things that gave it away. The black suit, the black shirt, the crucifix hanging around his neck, the little white halo of collar. His was not a face that made you think of Jesus so much as Pontius Pilate. The thick, dark eyebrows were the only hair on his head. The skull looked like the rotating dome roof on the Göttingen Observatory, and each lobeless ear resembled a demon’s wing. His lips were as thick as his fingers, and his nose as broad and hooked as the beak on a giant octopus. He had a mole on his left cheek that was the size and color of a five-pfennig piece and walnut-brown eyes, like the walnut on the grip of a Walther PPK. One of them picked me out like a shoemaker’s awl and he came over, almost as if he could smell the cop on my shoes. It could just as easily have been the cognac on my breath. But I didn’t figure him for the teetotaler type any more than I could picture him singing in the Vienna Boys Choir. If the Medici had still been siring popes, Father Gotovina would have been what one looked like.
“Can I help you?” he asked in a voice like liquid furniture polish, with lips stretched tight across teeth that were as white as his collar in what, among the Holy Inquisition anyway, must have passed for a smile.
“Father Gotovina?” I asked.
He nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“I’m going to Peissenberg,” I told him, showing the rail ticket I had bought earlier. “I wondered if you know anyone there I could stay with.”
He glanced at my ticket for only a moment, but his eyes did not miss the way the name “Peissenberg” had been altered.
“I believe there’s a very good hotel there,” he said. “The Berggasthof Greitner. But it’s probably closed right now. You’re a little early for the ski season, Herr . . . ?”
“Gunther, Bernhard Gunther.”
“Of course there’s a fine church there which, incidentally, affords a remarkably extensive and panoramic view of the Bavarian Alps. As it happens the priest there is a friend of mine. He might be able to help you. If you come by the Holy Ghost Church at about five o’clock this afternoon, I’ll provide you with a letter of introduction. But I warn you, he’s a keen musician. If you spend any time in Peissenberg he’ll dragoon you into the church choir. Have you singing hymns for your supper, so to speak. Do you have a favorite hymn, Herr Gunther?”
“A favorite? Yes, probably ‘How Great Thou Art.’ I think it’s the tune I like more than anything.”
He closed his eyes in a poor affectation of piety and added, “Yes, that is a lovely hymn, isn’t it?” He nodded. “Until five o’clock, then.”
I left him and walked out of the building. I went south and west, across the city center, vaguely in the direction of the Holy Ghost Church but more precisely in the direction of the Hofbrauhaus, in the Platzl. I needed a beer.
With its red mansard roof, pink walls, arched windows, and heavy wooden doors, the Hofbrauhaus had a folkish, almost fairy-tale air, and whenever I passed it, I half expected to see the Hunch-back of Notre Dame swinging down from the roof to rescue some hapless Gypsy girl from the center of the cobbled square (assuming there were any Gypsies still left in Germany). But it could just as easily have been the Jew Süss swinging down into the medieval marketplace. Munich is that kind of a town. Small-minded. Even a bit rustic and primitive. It’s no accident that Adolf Hitler got started here, in another beer hall, the Burgerbraukeller, just a few blocks away from the Hofbrauhaus on Kaufingerstrasse. But Hitler’s echo was only part of the reason I seldom went to the Burgerbrau. The main reason was I didn’t like Löwenbräu beer. I preferred the darker beer at the Hofbrauhaus. The food there was better, too. I ordered Bavarian potato soup, followed by pork knuckles with potato dumplings and homemade bacon-cabbage salad. I’d been saving my meat coupons.
Several beers and a sweet yeast pudding later, I went along to the Holy Ghost Church on Tal. Like everything else in Munich, it had taken a battering. The roof and vaulting had been completely destroyed and the interior decoration devastated. But the pillars in the nave had been re-erected, the church reroofed and repaired sufficiently for services to be resumed. There was one under way as I entered the half-empty church. A priest who wasn’t Gotovina stood facing the still impressive high altar, his fluting voice echoing around the church’s skeletal interior like Pinocchio’s when he was trapped inside the whale. I felt my lip and nose curl with Protestant abhorrence. I disliked the idea of a God who could put up with being worshipped in this reedy, singsong, Roman way. Not that I ever called myself a Protestant. Not since I learned how to spell Friedrich Nietzsche.
I found Father Gotovina under what remained of the organ loft, next to the bronze tomb-slab of Duke Ferdinand of Bavaria. I followed him to a wooden confessional that looked more like an ornate photo booth. He swept aside a gray curtain and stepped inside. I did the same on the other side, sat down and knelt beside the screen, the way God liked it I presumed. There was just enough light in the confessional to see the top of the priest’s billiard-ball head. Or at least a patch of it—a small, shiny square of skin that looked like the lid on a copper kettle. In the half darkness and close confines of the confessional his voice sounded particularly infernal. He probably laid it on a greased rack and left it to smoke over a hickory-wood fire when he went to bed at night.
“Tell me a little about you, Herr Gunther?” he said.
“Before the war I was a Kommissar in KRIPO,” I told him. “Which is how I came to join the SS. I went to Minsk as a member of the special action group commanded by Arthur Nebe.” I left out my service with the War Crimes Bureau and my time as an intelligence officer with the Abwehr. The SS had never liked the Abwehr. “I held the rank of SS Oberleutnant.”
“There was a lot of good work done in Minsk,” said Father Gotovina. “How many did you liquidate?”
“I was part of a police battalion,” I said. “Our responsibility was dealing with NKVD murder squads.”
Gotovina chuckled. “There’s no reason to be coy with me, Oberleutnant. I’m on your side. And it makes no difference to me whether you killed five or five thousand. Either way, you were about God’s work. The Jew and the Bolshevik will always be synonymous. It’s only the Americans who are too stupid to see that.”
Outside the booth, in the church, the choir started to sing. I’d judged them too harshly. They were much sweeter on the ear than Father Gotovina.
“I need your help, Father,” I said.
“Naturally. That’s why you’re here. But we have to walk before we can run. I have to be satisfied that you are what you say you are, Herr Gunther. A few simple questions should suffice. Just to put my mind at rest. For example, can you tell me your oath of loyalty, as an SS man?”
“I can tell you it,” I said. “But I never had to take it. As a member of KRIPO my membership in the SS was more or less automatic.”
“Let me hear you say it, anyway.”
“All right.” The words almost stuck in my throat. “I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Führer and Reich Chancellor, loyalty and bravery. I vow to you, and to those you have named to command me, obedience unto death, so help me God.”
“You say it so nicely, Herr Gunther. Just like a catechism. And yet you never had to take the oath yourself?”
“Things were always rather different in Berlin from the rest of Germany,” I said. “People were always a little more relaxed about such matters. But I can’t imagine I’m the first SS man to tell you he never took the oath.”
“Perhaps I’m just testing you,” he said. “To see how honest you’re being. Honesty’s best, don’t you think? After all, we’re in a church. It wouldn’t do to lie in here. Think of your soul.”
“These days I prefer not to think about it at all,” I said. “At least not without a drink in my hand.” That was being honest, too.
“
Te absolvo,
Herr Gunther,” he said. “Feeling better now?”
“Like something just got lifted off my shoulders,” I said. “Dandruff, probably.”
“That’s good,” he said. “A sense of humor will be important to you in your new life.”
“I don’t want a new life.”
“Not even through Christ?” He laughed again. Or perhaps he was just clearing his throat of some finer feelings. “Tell me more about Minsk,” he said. His tone had changed. It was less playful. More businesslike. “When did the city fall to German forces?”