The One From the Other (41 page)

“You killed your own mother to save your skin.”

“On the contrary, Bernie. I did it for the work. The ends do justify the means in this particular situation. I thought Heinrich explained all this. The importance of the work. A malaria vaccine really is something that’s worth everything that has been done in its name. I thought you understood that. What are a few hundred lives, maybe a couple of thousand, beside the millions that a vaccine will save? My conscience is clear, Bernie.”

“I know. That’s what makes this so tragic.”

“But for our work to proceed to the next stage, we simply have to have access to American medical research facilities. Laboratories. Equipment. Money.”

“New prisoners for experimentation,” I added. “Like those German POWs in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Who would have suspected that they had died of malaria in the Alps? I have to hand it to you, Eric. That was clever. So where will you go? Atlanta? New Jersey? Illinois? Or Rochester?”

For a moment, Gruen hesitated. “What makes you think I’ll go to any of those places?” he asked, carefully.

“Maybe I’m just a better detective than you think I am.”

“Don’t try to look for me, Bernie. For one thing, who’s going to believe you? You, a war criminal, against the word of someone like me. Someone who’s trusted by the CIA, no less. Believe me, Jacobs has done his homework on you, old friend. He found some very interesting photographs of you with Reichsführer Himmler, General Heydrich, and Arthur Nebe. There’s even a picture of you with Hermann Göring. I had no idea you were so well connected. The soaps will like that. It’ll make them think you’re the real thing. That Eric Gruen was much more important to the Reich than he really was.”

“Eric, I’m going to find you,” I said. “All of you. And I’m going to kill you. You, Henkell, Jacobs, and Albertine.”

“Ah, so you know about her as well, do you? You’ve been busy, Bernie. I congratulate you. What a pity that your powers as a detective didn’t kick in earlier. Well, what am I to say to such an idle threat?”

“It’s no idle threat.”

“Only what I said before. My new friends are very powerful. If you try to come after me, it won’t just be the soaps who are after you. It’ll be the CIA as well.”

“You forgot to mention the ODESSA,” I said. “Let’s not leave them out.”

He laughed. “What do you think you know about the ODESSA?”

“Enough to know that they helped set me up. Them and your friend, Father Gotovina.”

“Then you don’t know as much as you think you do. As a matter of fact, Father Gotovina had nothing to do with what happened to you. He’s not part of the ODESSA at all. Or this. I wouldn’t like you to harm him. Really. His hands are clean.”

“No? Then why did your wife go and see him at the Holy Ghost Church, in Munich?”

“Well, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Father was involved with the Old Comradeship.” Gruen laughed again. “Not a bit. But he’s not part of the ODESSA, or connected with the CIA in any way. And my wife visiting him? That was quite innocent, I can assure you. You see, Father Gotovina goes to Landsberg Prison a great deal. He’s chaplain to all of the Roman Catholics at Landsberg. And occasionally I have him take a message to a friend of mine. Someone who’s serving a life sentence for so-called war crimes. He brings him medical journals. That kind of thing. For old time’s sake.”

“Gerhard Rose,” I said. “Your friend, I suppose.”

“Yes. You have been busy. I underestimated you—in that respect at least. That’s another thing my mother’s money is going to come in handy for, Bernie. Paying for a legal appeal against that man’s sentence. He’ll be out in five years. You mark my words. And you ought to. It’s in your interests, too.”

“Eric?” I said. “I’ve got to go now. I’ve run out of coins. But I will find you.”

“No, Bernie. We won’t see each other again. Not in this life.”

“In hell then.”

“Yes. In hell, perhaps. Good-bye, Bernie.”

“
Auf Wiedersehen,
my friend.
Auf Wiedersehen.
”

I put the phone down and stared at my new boots, reflecting on what I had just learned. I almost breathed a sigh of relief. It was the ODESSA and not the Comradeship that was behind everything that had happened to me. I wasn’t exactly out of the Vienna woods. Not yet. Not by a long shot. But if, as Fritz Gebauer had told me when I had visited him in his prison cell in Landsberg, the ODESSA and the Comradeship were not connected, then it was only the CIA and the ODESSA I had to fear. It meant there was nothing at all to stop me from seeking help from the Comradeship myself. I would ask my old comrades in the SS for their help in getting out of Vienna. I would go to the Web. Like any other common or garden Nazi rat.

THIRTY-SEVEN

It seemed somehow appropriate that Ruprechtskirche on Ruprechtsplatz should be the contact point in Vienna for old comrades who were on the run from Allied justice. Ruprechtsplatz lies just south of the canal and Morzinplatz, which was where the Gestapo had had its headquarters in Vienna. Perhaps that was why the church had been chosen. There was very little else to recommend it. The church was the oldest in Vienna and somewhat dilapidated. Unusually this was not, according to a sign inside the door, the result of Allied bombing, but because of the negligent demolition of a neighboring building. Inside, it was as cold as a Polish cowshed and almost as plain. Even the Madonna looked like a milkmaid. But there is a surprise in store for anyone visiting the church. Under a side altar, preserved in a glass casket, lies the blackened skeleton of Saint Vitalis. It’s as if Snow White had waited much too long for her prince to come and rescue her from a deathlike slumber with love’s first kiss.

Father Lajolo—the Italian priest named by Father Gotovina as someone who was connected to the Comradeship—was almost as thin as Saint Vitalis, and not much better preserved. As thin as a coat hanger, he had hair like wire wool and a face like a billhook. He was quite tanned and as gap-toothed as a Ming dynasty lion. Wearing a long black cassock, he looked very Italian to me, like a face in a crowd scene in a canvas by some Florentine old master. I followed him into a side apse and, in front of an altar, I handed him a railway ticket for Pressbaum. As in Munich, with Father Gotovina, I had crossed out all of the letters on the ticket, except the
ss.

“I was wondering if you could recommend a good Catholic church in Pressbaum, Father,” I said.

Seeing my ticket and hearing my carefully worded question, Father Lajolo winced a little, as if pained by this meeting and, for a moment, I thought he would answer that he knew nothing at all about Pressbaum. “It’s possible I can help, yes,” he said, in a thick Italian accent. It was almost as thick as the smell of coffee and cigarettes with which it was coated. “I don’t know. That all depends. Come with me.”

He led me into the sacristy, which was warmer than the church. Here there were a holy-water font, a freestanding gas fire, a closet for various vestments in all the latest liturgical colors, a wooden crucifix on the wall, and through an open door, a lavatory. He closed the door through which we had come and locked it. Then he went over to a small table with a kettle, some cups and saucers, and a simple gas-ring.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“Please, Father.”

“Sit down, my friend.” He pointed to one of a pair of threadbare armchairs. I sat down and took out my cigarettes.

“Do you mind?” I asked, offering him a Lucky.

He chuckled. “No, I don’t mind.” Taking a cigarette, he added. “I think most of the disciples would have been smokers, don’t you? After all, they were fishermen. My father was a fisherman, from Genoa. All Italian fishermen smoke.” He lit the gas and then my cigarette and his own. “When Christ went aboard the fishing boat and there was a storm, they would have smoked then, especially. Smoking is the one thing you can do when you are afraid that doesn’t make you look like you’re afraid. But if you’re in a bad storm at sea and you start praying or singing hymns, well, that’s hardly something to inspire courage, is it?”

“I think that would depend on the hymn, don’t you? I asked, guessing that this was my cue.

“Perhaps,” he said. “Tell me, what’s your own favorite hymn?”

“‘How Great Thou Art,’” I answered, without hesitation. “I like the tune.”

“Yes, you’re right,” he said, sitting down on the chair opposite. “That’s a good one. Personally I prefer ‘Il Canto degli Arditi,’ or ‘Giovinezza.’ That’s an Italian marching song. For a while we did have something to march about, you know. But that hymn of yours is a good one.” He chuckled. “I have heard a rumor that the tune is very like the Horst Wessel Song.” He took a little puff on his cigarette. “It has been such a long while since I heard that song, I’ve almost forgotten the words. Perhaps you could remind me.”

“You don’t want me to sing it, surely,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “If you don’t mind. Humor me, please.”

I had always detested the Horst Wessel Song. And yet I knew the words well enough. There had been a time in Berlin when, just walking around the city, you would have heard it several times a day, and I could easily remember when it was almost impossible to go to the pictures without hearing it on the newsreels. I remembered Christmas 1935, and some people had started singing it in church, during a carol service. But I myself had sung the song only when not to have done so would have been to have risked a beating at the murderous hands of the SA. I cleared my throat and began singing the words in my almost tuneless baritone:

 

He nodded and then handed me a small cup of black coffee. I wrapped my hands around it gratefully and inhaled the bittersweet aroma. “Do you want the other two verses as well?” I asked him.

“No, no.” He smiled. “There’s no need. It’s just one of the things I ask people to do. Just to help make sure who I am dealing with, you understand.” He fixed the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, screwed up his eye against the smoke, and took out a notebook and a pencil. “One has to be careful, you know. It’s an elementary precaution.”

“I’m not sure what the Horst Wessel Song could tell you,” I said. “By the time Hitler came to power, the Reds probably knew the words as well as we did. Some of them were even forced to learn it in concentration camps.”

He sipped his coffee loudly, ignoring my objections. “Now, then,” he said. “A few details. Your name.”

“Eric Gruen,” I said.

“Your Nazi Party number, your SS number, your rank, your place and date of birth, please.”

“Here,” I said. “I’ve written it down for you already.” I handed him the page of notes I had made while studying Gruen’s file in the Russian Kommandatura.

“Thank you.” He glanced over the paper and nodded while he read it. “Do you have any means of identification with you?”

I handed over Eric Gruen’s passport. He studied that carefully and then slipped it and the sheet of paper into the back of his notebook.

“I’m afraid I shall have to hang on to this for now,” he said. “Now, then. You had better tell me what prompted you to come and ask for my help.”

“It was my own stupidity, really, Father,” I said, affecting rueful-ness. “My mother died, more than a week ago. The funeral was yesterday. At the Central Cemetery. I knew it was a risk coming back here to Vienna, but, well, you’ve only got one mother, haven’t you? Anyway, I thought I might be safe, if I stayed in the background. If I tried to keep a low profile. I wasn’t even sure the Allies were actually looking for me.”

“And you came under your real name?”

“Yes.” I shrugged. “After all, it’s been more than five years, and one reads things in the newspapers about the possibility of there being an amnesty for . . . for old comrades.”

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Well, it turns out they were looking for me. After the funeral I was recognized. By one of my mother’s servants. He told me that unless I gave him some ludicrously large sum of money, he would tell the authorities where to find me. I thought I’d stalled him. I went back to my hotel, intending to check out and go home immediately, only to find that the International Patrol was waiting there for me already. Since then I’ve been walking around Vienna. Staying in bars and cafés. For fear that I couldn’t go and stay in another hotel or pension. Last night I went to the Oriental and allowed myself to be picked up by a girl, and spent the night with her. Not that anything happened, mind. But I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.”

He shrugged, almost as if he agreed with me. “Where have you been living until now? I mean outside Vienna.”

“Garmisch-Partenkirchen,” I said. “It’s a quiet little place. No one pays me any attention there.”

“Can you go back there?”

“No,” I said. “Not now. The person who told me to get out of Vienna also knew where I’d been living. I doubt he’ll hesitate to inform the Allied authorities in Germany.”

“And this girl you stayed with last night,” he said. “Can she be trusted?”

“As long as I keep paying her, yes, I think so.”

“Does she know anything about you? Anything at all.”

“No. Nothing.”

“Keep it that way, please. And she doesn’t know that you’ve come here today?”

“No, of course not, Father,” I said. “No one does.”

“Can you stay with her for one more night?”

“Yes. As a matter of fact I’ve already arranged it.”

“Good,” he said. “Because I’m going to need at least twenty-four hours to make some arrangements to get you out of Vienna, to a safe house. Is that all your luggage?”