“You’re pretty tough yourself, Gunther,” said the one with the glasses.
“Me? No. How many tough guys do you have breakfast with when they’re naked?”
“Not many.”
“Besides, it’s easy to look tough when you’re wearing a bag over your head. Even if it does get you wondering what it might be like to have nothing under your feet.”
“Anytime you want to find out for sure, we can help you.”
“Sure, you can take Klingelhöfer’s place for the rehearsal.”
“We were here when they executed those five war criminals in June ’fifty-one.”
“I’ll bet you’ve got an interesting scrapbook.”
“They died quite calmly. Like they were resigned to their fate. Which was kind of ironic when you remember that’s what they said about all those Jews they murdered.”
I shrugged and pushed away my empty breakfast tray. “No man wants to die,” I said. “But sometimes it just seems worse to go on living.”
“Oh, I think they wanted to go on living, all right. Especially the ones who applied for clemency. Which was all of them. I read some of the letters that McCloy received. They were all predictably self-serving.”
“Ah, well,” I said. “That’s the difference between me and them. It’s just impossible for me to be self-serving. You see, I fired my own self a long time ago. These days I try to manage on my own.”
“You say that like you don’t want to go on living either, Gunther.”
“And you say that like I should be impressed with your hospitality. That’s the trouble with you Amis. You kick the shit out of people and then expect them to join in a couple of verses of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”
“We don’t expect you to sing, Gunther,” said the Ami with the pipe. Was he ever going to light it? “Just to go on talking. The way you’ve been talking until now.” He tossed a packet of cigarettes onto the table where Hitler had written his bestselling book. “By the way. What happened to that sergeant who Ziemer and Mielke shot in the stomach?”
“Willig?” I lit a cigarette and remembered that he had lived; three months after the shooting he had made lieutenant. “I forget.”
“You joined Kripo again in September 1938, is that right?”
“I didn’t exactly join,” I said. “I was ordered back in by General Heydrich. To solve a series of murders in Berlin. After the case was solved, I stayed on. Again, that’s what Heydrich wanted. There’s only one thing you have to understand about Heydrich: He almost always got what he wanted.”
“And he wanted you.”
“I had a certain reputation for getting the job done. He admired that.”
“So you stayed on.”
“I tried to get out of Kripo for good. But Heydrich made that more or less impossible.”
“Tell us about that. About what you were doing for Heydrich.”
“Kripo was part of Sipo, the State Security Police. I was promoted to Oberkommissar. A chief inspector. Most of the crime by then was politicized, but men carried on murdering their wives and professional criminals went about their business as normal. I conducted several investigations during that period, but in reality the Nazis cared very little about reducing crime in the usual time-honored way and most police could hardly be bothered to do what police do. This was because the Nazis preferred to “reduce” crime by declaring annual amnesties, which meant that most crimes never went to court at all. All the Nazis cared about was being able to say that the crime figures were down. In fact, crime—real crime—actually increased under the Nazis: Theft, murder, juvenile delinquency—it all got worse. So I carried on as normal at the Alex. I made arrests, prepared a case, handed the papers over to the Ministry of Justice, and in time the case was struck down, or dropped, and the accused walked free.
“One day in September 1939, not long after war was declared and Sipo became part of the RSHA—the Reich Main Security Office—I went to see General Heydrich at his office in Prinz Albrechtstrasse. I told him I was wasting my time and asked his permission to put in my papers. He listened patiently but continued to write for almost a minute after I’d finished speaking before turning his attention to a rack of rubber stamps on his desktop. There must have been thirty or forty of these. He picked one up, pressed it onto an inkpad, and then carefully stamped the sheet of paper he’d been writing on. Then, still silent, he got up and closed the door. There was a grand piano in his office—a big black Blüthner—and, to my surprise, he sat down in front of it and started to play, and play rather well, I might say. While he was playing, he shifted his large arse on the piano stool—he’d put on some weight since last I’d seen him—and then nodded at the space he’d made to indicate that I should sit beside him.
“I sat down, hardly knowing what to expect, and for a while neither of us said a word as his thin, bony, dead Christ hands rippled over the shiny keyboard. I listened and kept my eyes on the photograph on the piano lid. It was a picture of Heydrich in profile, wearing a fencer’s white jerkin and looking like the sort of dentist you might have nightmares about—the kind who would have pulled all of your teeth to improve your dental hygiene.
“Kuan Chung was a seventh-century Chinese philosopher,” Heydrich said quietly. “He wrote a very great book of Chinese sayings, one of which is that ‘even the walls have ears.’” Do you understand what I’m saying, Gunther?”
“Yes, General,” I said, and, looking around, tried to guess where a microphone might be hidden.
“Good. Then I’ll keep playing. This piece is by Mozart, who was taught by Antonio Salieri. Salieri was not a great composer. He’s better known to us today as the man who murdered Mozart.”
“I didn’t even know he’d been murdered, sir.”
“Oh yes. Salieri was jealous of Mozart, as is often the way with lesser men. Would it surprise you to know that someone is trying to murder me?”
“Who?”
“Himmler, of course. The Salieri de nos jours. Himmler’s is not a great mind. His most important thoughts are the ones I’m yet to give him. He is a man who goes to the lavatory and probably wonders what Hitler would like him to do while he’s in there. But one of us will certainly destroy the other, and with any luck it will be him who loses the game to me. He is not to be underestimated, however. And this is the reason that I keep you in Sipo, Gunther. Because if by any chance Himmler wins our little game, I want someone to find the evidence that will help to destroy him. Someone with a proven track record in Kripo as an investigating detective. Someone intelligent and resourceful. That man is you, Gunther. You are the Voltaire to my Frederick the Great. I keep you close for your honesty and your independence of mind.”
“I’m flattered, Herr General. And rather horrified. What makes you think I could ever destroy a man like Himmler?”
“Don’t be a fool, Gunther. And listen. I said help to destroy. If Himmler succeeds and I am murdered, it will of course look like an accident. Or that someone else was responsible for my death. In those circumstances, there will have to be an inquiry. As head of Kripo, Arthur Nebe has the power to appoint someone to direct that inquiry. That someone will be you, Gunther. You will have the assistance of my wife, Lina, and of my most trusted confidante—a man named Walter Schellenberg, of the SS Foreign Intelligence Service. You can trust Schellenberg to know the most politic way to bring the evidence of my murder to the Führer’s attention. I have enemies, it’s true. But so does that bastard Himmler. And some of his enemies are my friends.”