The man finally looked up and saw me. His brooding eyes and tremulous lips, like a rapacious old pervert, made me uncomfortable. I felt like a cornered child. I took a deep breath and adopted the posture of a boy accustomed to terrorizing girls in pigtails. I didn’t want to put his back up, the way I had the old man in Uelzen, by asking awkward questions.
“If you’re Ernest Brucke, aka Jean 92, I’d like to shake your hand and thank you on behalf of my father Hans Schiller.”
The man sat lost in thought for a moment, then, exhausted by the sheer effort, stretched his hand past the bottle and said in a gravelly voice, “Schiller?. . Who’s Schiller? You’re the son?”
“Too right I’m his son! On his deathbed, my father asked me to come and say goodbye to some old friends, people who helped him when times were. . “
“Hold on a minute, I’m not Jean 92. . ”
“Then who might you be, monsieur?
“I’m Adolph, his son. . the old man kicked the bucket years ago. . ”
“Oh. . ”
“So what did you want with the old man. . apart from to say thank you?”
“I just wanted to talk about old times. . ”
“Really? What for?”
“I’m, um. . I’m looking for stories, background stuff, I’m writing a book about my father’s struggle, his fight to save humanity, as far as I know Neo-Nazism is alive and well.”
“Yeah, you look like a writer.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to interview you, for a chapter I’m writing about your father, and about you, obviously. . ”
Bingo. I’d hit the jackpot. This drunken slob could see himself at the top of the bestseller list. He sat up, cleared his throat and looked at me a little more warmly. It hadn’t occurred to me — I’d forgotten that this sickness was still out there, this smug self-righteousness, the overweening pride that goes before a fall. I wasn’t about to let this guy slip through my fingers, the wonderful Jean 92 Junior.
“Maybe I didn’t mention it, mon cher Adolph, but I’ve already got a publisher, they pay well. . you’ll get a cut.”
“How much?”
“It all depends on the sales, but it could be a nice little earner. Here, here’s a hundred francs, call it an advance.”
It was a done deal. We sat back and chatted like partners in some lucrative scam. It was pretty futile, as it turned out. And it was hard work. The drunken slob kept trying to sideline his father and hog the limelight. He wanted a chapter to himself. He told me about his childhood, about his grandmother Gertrude who taught him to speak German, his military service in the “fucking French army,” the little wars in Africa where he did a little nigger-bashing to make up for the shame of having to fight for France, some bitch named Greta who ruined his life, some cousin Gaspard or Hector who ripped him off, his aunt Ursula who lived in Brazil with some guy called Felix who trafficked diamonds or maybe it was emeralds, how his house was falling down around his ears, how the village was under threat from some urban renewal scheme, how the fuckers at the city council, etcetera, etcetera. And he told me everything about his work with his Nazi father. Just paperwork at first, a little spying on the neighbours, watching the comings and goings from the post office, his role as acolyte at the shadowy ceremonies and, later, when he attained the age of unreason, the endless get-togethers, the secret meetings of freaks and failures, the summary justice dealt out to traitors and revisionists, the beatings meted out to local hooligans, the altercations with the local police, the winters spent drinking with old veterans depressed at how the world had changed. All in all, a rewarding catalogue of misery. He even showed me his files. I was surprised he was capable of standing up. He had a whole cupboard full of documents and I fell on them like a man possessed. An hour later, I was covered in dust and smelled of rotting flesh. I felt ashamed to be human. I poked around through the sort of jumble and clutter you would expect to find in the attic of a former torturer who has finally gone to meet the Prince of Darkness. It reeked of old men, of misfits, mildew and madness, of futility and horror. Dead or alive, a torturer is still a torturer. Poor Jean 92 should have died at birth. There were grubby posters, tattered books, a book of hours in a linen slipcase, hunters’ catalogues, faded pennants, hideous letters and even more appalling photographs, bile-filled notebooks and nauseating tracts. Adolph offered to sell me the lot for 200 francs. It was a lot of money for such unspeakable shit, but I had come here in search of the roots of evil. There was a pistol, too, and some copper bullets grey-green with age. “A Luger — best gun in the whole world,” he said, gripping it proudly. “You said it,” I nodded. “My old man swore by his.” What with Adolph and his Luger and me carrying a sheaf of Nazi pamphlets and pennants, we looked like we were about to take on the whole world. Any young firebrand who saw us would have signed up to fight with us.
Trying to find out about past wars is hellish, a series of dead ends, of paths that disappear into darkness, suppurating cesspits shrouded in mist, dust rising like curtains of smoke as you grope your way through the void. I’m beginning to understand the problems faced by people responsible for investigating war crimes that are inevitably shrouded in silence, amnesia and collusion. It’s impossible, the truth is always buried, mislaid in a pile of dossiers and reports, hushed up, covered up, doctored. Then there is the silence, the selective amnesia, the half-truths, the carefully rehearsed lines, the pleas by devil’s advocates, speech after speech, the worm-eaten papers. And above the chatter howls the wind of shame, sweeping aside our best intentions, and so we close our eyes, we lower our heads. Victims always die twice. And their executioners always outlive them.
“Papa never did tell me what 92 meant. . ”
“That was the code name for the organisation the old man set up. Unit 92, everyone in the unit had an alias, Jean 92, François 92, Gustave 92. We had to watch our backs, we had the French authorities on our backs, the Yids, the. . ”
“But why 92?”
“It was. . Hitler came to power in ’33, Pétain signed the armistice in 1940, the same year my father joined the Gestapo, he was nineteen. . if you add them up, you get 92. Clever bastard, the old man. That’s what the unit meant, loyalty to the Third Reich.”
“Mein Ehre Heißt Treue.”
“Exactly! So anyway, when the old man died in 1969, I took over and renamed it Unit 134. . I was born in ’42, you see, 92 plus 42 equals 134, get it? But by that time there wasn’t much to do, by then most of the Kameraden were living it up in Santiago, Chile and in Bangkok somewhere over in China. . you know?”
“Yeah, yeah I know. . it’s near Thailand somewhere. . So it was Unit 92 that managed to get my father. .?”
“Absolutely. At the end of the war, when Kameraden were forced to go to ground, the old man and a bunch of his friends set up Unit 92 to help get them out of Germany to friendly countries. Later on, he hooked up with ODESSA, you heard of them?
“Sure. . ODESSA, the Franciscan network, the Vatican Refugee Organisation, the phony papers supplied by fellow travellers in the Red Cross, the Ethiopian line, the Turco-Arab escape routes, and the rest.”
“Anyway, the 92, we mostly looked out for the SS officers who ran the Death Camps. They were the elite, you see, the guys that had to be saved for the future. You’ve got to put all this in the book, the old man did good work, he saved dozens of officers from those bastards. You can see all the names there in the little black book. You father must be in there somewhere. . What was his name again?”