'How soon after your arrival was the Minsk ghetto established?' asked Gotovina.
'Less than a month,' I said. 'July 20.'
'And how was the ghetto created?'
'There were about three dozen streets, I believe, including the Jewish cemetery. It was surrounded by thick rows of barbed wire and several watchtowers. And one hundred thousand people were transported there from places as far afield as Bremen and Frankfurt.'
'In what way was Minsk an unusual ghetto?'
'I'm not sure I understand the question, Father. There was nothing usual about what happened there.'
'What I mean to say is, where did most of the Jews in that ghetto meet their deaths? Which camp?'
'Oh, I see. No. I believe most of the people in Minsk were killed in Minsk. Yes, that's what made it unusual. When the ghetto was liquidated in October 1943, there were just eight thousand left. Of the original one hundred thousand. I'm afraid I have no idea what happened to the eight thousand.'
This was all proving much more difficult than I could have supposed. Most of what I had told him about Minsk I knew from my service with the War Crimes Bureau and, in particular, the case of Wilhelm Kube. In July 1943, Kube, the SS general commissioner in charge of White Ruthenia, which included Minsk, had made a formal complaint to the Bureau, alleging that Eduard Strauch, commander of the local SD, had personally murdered seventy Jews who were employed by Kube, and pocketed their valuables. I was charged with the investigation. Strauch, who was certainly guilty of the murders--and many others besides--had made a counterallegation against Kube, that his boss had let more than five thousand Jews escape liquidation. Strauch turned out to be right but he had not expected to be vindicated. And probably he murdered Kube, with a bomb planted under his bed, in September 1943, before I had a chance actually to form any conclusions. Despite my best endeavors, the crime was quickly blamed on Kube's Russian maid, who was just as quickly hanged. Suspecting Strauch's complicity in Kube's murder I then started another investigation only to be ordered by the Gestapo to drop the case. I refused. Not long afterward I found myself transferred to the Russian front. But none of this I felt able to reveal to Father Gotovina. Certainly he did not want to hear of how I had sympathized with poor Kube. There but for the grace of God.
'Come to think of it,' I said, 'I do remember what happened to those eight thousand Jews. Six thousand went to Sobibor. And two thousand were rounded up and killed at Maly Trostinec.'
'And we all lived happily ever after,' said Gotovina. He laughed. 'For someone who was only dealing with NKVD death squads, you seem to know an awful lot about what happened at Minsk, Herr Gunther. You know what I think? I think you're just being modest. For the last five years you've had to hide your lamp under a basket. Just like it says in Luke chapter eleven, verses thirty-three to thirty-six.'
'So you
'Of course,' he said. 'And now I'm ready to play the Good Samaritan. To help you. Money. A new passport. A weapon if you need one. A visa to wherever you want to go, just as long as it's Argentina. That's where most of our friends are, these days.'
'As I told you already, Father,' I said. 'I don't want a new life.'
'Then exactly what is it you do want, Herr Gunther?' I could hear him stiffening as he spoke.
'I'll tell you. These days I'm a private detective. I have a client who's looking for her husband. An SS man. She ought to have had a postcard from Buenos Aires by now, but she's heard nothing in more than three and a half years. So she's hired me to help find out what happened to him. The last time she saw him was in Ebensee, near Salzburg, in March 1946. He was already on the Web. In a safe house. Waiting for his new papers and tickets. She doesn't want to spoil anything for him. All she wants to know is if he's alive or dead. She'd like to remarry if it's the second. But not if it's the first. You see, the trouble is she's like you, Father. A good Roman Catholic.'
'That's a nice story,' he said.
'I liked it.'
'Don't tell me.' The laugh took on an altogether different persona. This one sounded a little unbalanced. 'You're the schmuck she wants to marry.'
I waited for him to finish laughing. Probably it was just shock. It's not every day you meet a priest who peels his lips back and lets it go like Peter Lorre.
'No, Father, it's exactly the way I told you. In that respect at least, I'm like a priest. People bring me their problems and I try to sort them out. The only difference is that I don't get much help from the guy on the high altar.'
'Does this housewife have a name?'
'Her name is Britta Warzok. Her husband's name is Friedrich Warzok.' I told him what I knew about Friedrich Warzok.
'I like him already,' said Father Gotovina. 'Three years without a word? He could very well be dead.'
'To be honest, I don't think she's looking for good news.'
'So why not tell her what she wants to hear?'
'That would be unethical, Father.'
'It took a lot of guts speaking to me like this,' he said quietly. 'I admire that in a man. The Comradeship is, shall we say, easily alarmed. This business at Landsberg with the Red Jackets. It doesn't help. Not to mention the prospect of yet more executions. The war's been over for four years and the Amis are still trying to hang people, like some stupid sheriff in a cheap Western.'
'Yes, I can see why that would make some of my old comrades nervous,' I said. 'There's nothing quite like the gallows to make a man swallow his scruples.'
'I'll see what I can find out,' he said. 'Meet me at the art gallery next to the Red Cross the day after tomorrow. At three p.m. If I'm late you'll have something to occupy your attention.'
People started to walk by the confessional. Father Gotovina drew back the curtain and went out, mingling with the faithful. I waited for a minute and then followed, crossing myself for no other reason than a wish not to be noticed. It felt silly. One more type of peculiar human behavior for the anthropology textbooks. Like rocking in front of a wall, kneeling down in the direction of a Middle Eastern city, or sticking your arm straight out in front of you and shouting 'Hail Victory.' None of it meant anything except a lot of trouble for someone else. If there's one thing history has taught me to believe it is that it's dangerous to believe in anything very much. Especially in Germany. The trouble with us is that we take belief much too seriously.
FOURTEEN
A couple of days went by. A southerly wind bearing an area of intense high pressure started to bear down on the city. At least that's what the weather man on Radio Munich said. He said it was the Fohn, which meant the wind was charged with a lot of static electricity, on account of it having already blown across the Alps before it got to us. Walking around Munich you could feel the warm, dehydrated wind drying your face and making your eyes water. Or maybe I was just hitting the bottle too much.
Americans took the Fohn more seriously than anyone, of course, and kept their children indoors to avoid it, almost as if it had been carrying something more lethal than a few positively charged ions. Maybe they knew something the rest of us didn't. Anything was possible now that the Ivans had exploded their atomic bomb the previous month. Possibly there were all sorts of things in the Fohn to really worry about. Either way, the Fohn served a very useful purpose. Muncheners blamed the Fohn for all kinds of things. They were always grousing about it. Some claimed it made their asthma worse, others that it gave them rheumatic pains, and quite a few that it caused them to have headaches. If the milk tasted funny, that was the Fohn. And if the beer came out flat, that was the Fohn, too. Where I lived, in Schwabing, the woman downstairs claimed that the Fohn interfered with the signal on her wireless radio. And on the tram I even heard a man claim he'd got into a fight because of the Fohn. It made a change from blaming things on the Jews, I suppose. The Fohn certainly made people seem cranky and more irritable than usual. Maybe that's how Nazism got started here in the first place. Because of the Fohn. I never heard of people trying to overthrow a government who weren't cranky and irritable.
That was the kind of day it was when I went back to Wagmullerstrasse and stood in front of the art gallery window next door to the offices of the Red Cross. I was earlier than the appointed time. I'm usually early for things. If punctuality is the virtue of kings then I'm the kind of person who likes to get there an hour or two before, to look for a landmine underneath the red carpet.
The gallery was called Oscar & Shine. Most of the city's art dealers were in the Brienner Strasse district.
