I thought of all the excuses for what had happened in Lutsk. That I wasn't to know they were Jews. That they were murderers. That they had killed nearly three thousand people--probably more. That they certainly would have killed many more political prisoners if we hadn't shot them.
But it always came up the same way.
I had executed thirty Jews. That they had killed all those prisoners simply to stop them from collaborating with the Nazi invaders--as almost certainly they would have. That Stalin had recruited large numbers of Jews to the NKVD because he knew they had more to fight for. That I had played a part in the greatest crime in recorded history.
I hated myself for that. But I hated the SS more. I hated the way I had become complicit in their genocide. No one knew better than me what had been done in the name of Germany. And that was the real reason I was walking into that church with murder on my mind. It wasn't just about a severe beating and the loss of my little finger. It was about something far more important. If anything, the beating had brought me to my senses about who these people were and what they had done, not just to millions of Jews, but to millions of Germans like me.
TWENTY-ONE
I sat in the fifteenth-century aisle of the Holy Ghost Church, close to the confessional, and waited for it to become free. I was more or less certain that Gotovina was in there because the two other priests I'd seen on my earlier visit were visible to me. One of them, a real understanding sort with a suffer-the-little-children smile, was having a quiet talk with a largish, market-ready woman just inside the front door. The other, dainty-looking with dark hair and a pimp mustache, and holding a walking stick with a silver top, was limping toward the high altar like an insect with only three legs, as if someone had swatted him hard and he was on his way to pray for them.
The place smelled strongly of incense, new-cut timber, and building mortar. A man with an eye patch was tuning a grand piano in a way that left you thinking he was probably wasting his time. About six or seven rows in front of me, a woman knelt in prayer. There was plenty of light coming through the tall arched windows and, above them, the smaller round windows. The ceiling looked like the lid on a very fancy biscuit tin. Someone moved a chair and, in the cavernous church interior, it sounded like a donkey braying a strong note of dissent. Now that I saw it again, the high altar, made of black marble and gold, reminded me of a Venetian undertaker's fanciest gondola. It was the kind of church where you almost expected to find a bellboy to help you carry your hymnal.
The ox-blood was wearing off a little. I wanted to lie down. The polished wooden bench I was sitting on began to look very comfortable and inviting. Then the green curtain in the confessional twitched and was drawn back, and a good-looking woman of about thirty stepped out. She was holding a rosary, crossing herself more for form's sake than anything else. She was wearing a tight red dress and it was easy to see why she had spent such a long time in the confessional. From the look of her, none of the venial sins would have detained her. She was built for just the one kind of sin, the mortal kind that cried aloud to heaven when you managed to touch her in the right places. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath that drop-kicked my libido to the top of the rococo pillars and down again. The scarlet gloves matched the handbag that matched the shoes that matched the lipstick that matched the veil on the little hat that was doing what it was supposed to do. Scarlet was her color all right. She looked like the word made flesh, just as long as the word was 'sex.' A kind of epiphany. The heavyweight champion of all scarlet women. When you saw her, you told yourself that the Book of Revelation was probably well named. It was Britta Warzok.
She did not see me. She made no act of contrition or penance. She just turned on her high heel and walked quickly up the aisle and out of the church. For a moment I was too surprised to move. If I had been less surprised I might have made it to the confessional in time to blow Father Gotovina's brains out. But by the time I had gathered myself together, the priest was out of the confessional and walking toward the altar. He spoke to the dainty-looking priest for a moment and then disappeared through a door at the back of the church.
He had not seen me. For a moment I considered pursuing the Croatian priest into the sacristy--if that was where he had gone--and killing him in there. Except that there were now questions he needed to answer. Questions for which I did not yet have the strength. Questions about Britta Warzok. Questions that would have to wait until I was feeling stronger. Questions that required a little more thinking before I asked them.
I picked up my tool bag and shuffled slowly out of the church and onto Viktualienmarkt, where the cooler air revived me a little. The bell in the church clock tower was ringing the half hour. I took a few steps and then leaned on the Nivea girl who was adorning a poster pillar. I could have used a whole tin of Nivea on my soul. Better still, a whole of tin of her.
Stuber's beetle came quickly toward me. For a minute I thought he was going to run me down. But he came to an abrupt halt, leaned across the passenger seat, and threw open the door. I wondered why he was in such a hurry. Then I remembered he was probably working under the assumption that I had shot and killed someone in the church. I took hold of the car door.
'It's all right,' I said. 'There's no hurry. I didn't go through with it.'
He pulled on the brake and got out, calmer now, helping me into the car as if I had been his old mother, and lighting me another cigarette when finally I was stowed away. Back in the driver's seat, he revved the car hard, waited for a small troop of cyclists to pedal past, and then fired us on our way.
'So what changed your mind?' he asked.
'A woman.'
'That's what they're for, I suppose,' he said. 'Sounds to me like she was sent by God.'
'Not this one,' I said. I sucked on the cigarette and winced as the heat of it hit my most recent scar. 'I don't know who the hell sent her. But I'm going to find out.'
'A woman of mystery, huh?' he said. 'You know, I got a theory: Love is just a temporary form of mental illness. Once you know that, you can deal with it. Deal with it. Medicate for it.'
Stuber started going on about some girlfriend he'd had who had treated him badly and I stopped listening for a while. I was thinking about Britta Warzok.
A small part of my brain was telling me that maybe she was a better Roman Catholic than I had given her credit for. In which case, her meeting with Father Gotovina might just have been a coincidence. That maybe hers had been a genuine confession and that she could have been on the level all along. I paid attention to this part of my brain for a minute or two and then blew it off. After all, this was the part of my brain that still believed in the perfectibility of man. Thanks to Adolf Hitler we all know what that's worth.
TWENTY-TWO
Days passed. I got a little better. The weekend came along and Dr. Henkell said I was fit to travel. He had a newish, maroon-colored Mercedes four-door sedan that he had gone all the way to the factory in Sindelfingen to collect, and of which he was very proud. He let me sit in the back so I would be more comfortable on the fifty- eight-mile journey to Garmisch-Partenkirchen. We left Munich on Autobahn Number 2, a very well-engineered highway that took us through Starnberg, where I told Henkell about the eponymous baron and the fabulous house where he lived and the Maybach Zeppelin he was using to run down to the shops. And, because he liked cars a lot, I also told him about the baron's daughter, Helene Elisabeth, and the Porsche 356 she drove.
'That's a nice car,' he said. 'But I like Mercedes.' And he proceeded to tell me about some of the other cars that were stored in his Ramersdorf garage. These now included my own Hansa, which Henkell had kindly driven away from the place where I had left it on the night I had been picked up by the comrades.
'Cars are a bit of a hobby of mine,' he confessed as we drove on to Traubing and into the Alpine foothills. 'So is climbing. I've climbed all of the big peaks in the Ammergau Alps.'
