Of course it was all too late. The cat had already fallen into the stream, and what was now clear was that Belinsky had been working for the Russians all along. No wonder he had played up the rivalry between the CIC and the military police, I said to my new American friends of truth. I thought myself a very clever sort of coat to have spotted that as early on as I had. By now he had presumably told his MVD boss all about America’s recruitment of Heinrich Muller and Arthur Nebe.
But there were several subjects about which I remained silent. Colonel Poroshin was one: I didn’t like to think what might have happened had they discovered that a senior officer in the MVD had arranged my coming to Vienna. Their curiosity about my travel documents and cigarette permit was quite uncomfortable enough. I told them that I had had to pay a great deal of money to bribe a Russian officer, and they seemed satisfied with that explanation.
Privately I wondered if my meeting with Belinsky had always been part of Poroshin’s plan. And the circumstances of our deciding to work together: was it possible that Belinsky had shot those two Russian deserters as a demonstration for my benefit, as a way of impressing upon me his ruthless dislike for all things Soviet?
There was another thing about which I kept resolutely silent, and that was Arthur Nebe’s explanation of how the Org had sabotaged the US Documents Centre in Berlin with the help of Captain Linden. That, I decided, was their problem. I did not think I cared to help a government that was prepared to hang Nazis on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, and to recruit them for its own security services on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Heinrich Muller had at least got that part right.
As for Muller himself, Major Breen and Captain Medlinskas were adamant that I must have been mistaken about him. The former Gestapo chief was long dead, they assured me. Belinsky, they insisted, for reasons best known to himself, had almost certainly shown me someone else’s picture. The military police had made a very careful search of Nebe’s wine estate in Grinzing, and discovered only that the owner, one Alfred Nolde, was abroad on business. No bodies were found, nor any evidence that anyone had been killed. And while it was true that there existed an organization of former German servicemen which was working alongside the United States to prevent the further spread of international Communism, it was, they insisted, quite inconceivable that this organization could have included fugitive Nazi war-criminals.
I listened impassively to all this nonsense, too exhausted by the whole business to care much what they believed or, for that matter, what they wanted me to believe. Suppressing my first reaction in the face of their indifference to the truth, which was to tell them to go to hell, I merely nodded politely, my manners verging on the truly Viennese. Agreeing with them seemed to be the best possible way of expediting my freedom.
Shields was less complaisant however. His help with translation grew more surly and uncooperative as the days went by, and it became obvious that he was unhappy with the way in which the two officers appeared to be more concerned to conceal rather than to reveal the implications of what I had first told him, and certainly he had believed. Much to Shields’s annoyance, Breen pronounced himself content that the case of Captain Linden had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Shields’s only satisfaction might have come from the knowledge that the 796th military police, still smarting as a result of the scandal involving Russians posing as American MPs, now had something to throw back at the 430th CIC: a Russian spy, posing as a member of the CIC, with the proper identity card, staying at a hotel requisitioned by the military, driving a vehicle registered to an American officer and generally coming and going as he pleased through areas restricted to American personnel. I knew that this would only have been a small consolation for a man like Roy Shields: a policeman with a common enough fetish for neatness. It was easy for me to sympathize. I’d often encountered that same feeling myself.
For the last two interrogations, Shields was replaced by another man, an Austrian, and I never saw him again.
Neither Breen nor Medlinskas told me when at last they had concluded their inquiry. Nor did they give me any indication that they were satisfied with my answers. They just left the matter hanging. But such are the ways of people in the security services.
Over the next two or three weeks I made a full recovery from my injuries. I was both amused and shocked to learn from the prison doctor, however, that on my first being admitted to the hospital after my accident, I had been suffering from gonorrhoea.
‘In the first place, you’re damned lucky that they brought you here,’ he said, ‘where we have penicillin. If they’d taken you anywhere but an American Military Hospital they’d have used Salvarsan, and that stuff burns like Lucifer’s spitball. And in the second, you’re lucky it was just drip and not Russian syphilis. These local whores are full of it. Haven’t any of you Jerries ever heard of French letters?’
‘You mean Parisians? Sure we have. But we don’t wear them. We give them to the Nazi fifth column who prick holes in them and sell them to GIs to make them sick when they screw our women.’
The doctor laughed. But I could tell that in a remote part of his soul he believed me. This was just one of many similar incidents I encountered during my recovery, as my English slowly improved, enabling me to talk with the two Americans who were the prison hospital’s nurses. For as we laughed and joked it always seemed to me that there was something strange in their eyes, but which I was never able to identify.
And then, a few days before I was discharged, it came to me in a sickening realization. Because I was a German these Americans were actually chilled by me. It was as if, when they looked at me, they ran newsreel film of Belsen and Buchenwald inside their heads. And what was in their eyes was a question: how could you have allowed it to happen? How could you have let that sort of thing go on?
Perhaps, for several generations at least, when other nations look us in the eye, it will always be with this same unspoken question in their hearts.
38
It was a pleasant September morning when, wearing an ill-fitting suit lent to me by the nurses at the military hospital, I returned to my pension in Skodagasse. The owner, Frau Blum-Weiss greeted me warmly, informed me that my luggage was stored safely in her basement, handed me a note which had arrived not half an hour before, and asked me if I would care to have some breakfast. I told her I would, and having thanked her for looking after my belongings, inquired if I owed any money.
‘Dr Liebl settled everything, Herr Gunther,’ she said. ‘But if you would like to take your old rooms again, that will be all right. They are vacant.’
Since I had no idea when I might be able to return to Berlin, I said I would.
‘Did Dr Liebl leave me any message?’ I asked, already knowing the answer. He had made no attempt to contact me during my stay in the military hospital.
‘No,’ she said, ‘no message.’
Then she showed me back to my old rooms and had her son bring my luggage up to me. I thanked her again and said that I would breakfast just as soon as I had changed into my own clothes.
‘Everything’s there,’ she said as her son heaved my bags on to the luggage stand. ‘I had a receipt for the few things that the police took away: papers, that kind of thing.’ Then she smiled sweetly, wished me another pleasant stay, and closed the door behind her. Typically Viennese, she showed no desire to know what had befallen me since last I had stayed in her house.
As soon as she had left the room, I opened my bags and found, almost to my astonishment and much to my relief, that I was still in possession of my $2,500 in cash and my several cartons of cigarettes. I lay on the bed and smoked a Memphis with something approaching delight.
I opened the note while I ate my breakfast. There was only one short sentence and that was written in Cyrillic: ‘Meet me at the Kaisergruft at eleven o’clock this morning.’ The note was unsigned but then it hardly needed to be. When Frau Blum-Weiss returned to my table to clear away the breakfast things, I asked her who had delivered it.
‘It was just a schoolboy, Herr Gunther,’ she said, collecting the crockery on a tray, ‘an ordinary schoolboy.’
‘I have to meet someone,’ I explained. ‘At the Kaisergruft. Where is that?’
‘The Imperial Crypt?’ She wiped a hand on a well-starched pinafore as if she had been about to meet the Kaiser himself, and then crossed herself. Mention of royalty always seemed to make the Viennese doubly
