“And you found out all this how?” I asked.
“I’m a cop, Gunther. That’s what cops do. We find out stuff we’re not supposed to know about. Some days I do the crossword in twenty minutes. Others I dig up shit on people like you and Heinkel.”
“So why are you telling me all this, and not Max Merten?”
Schramma puffed his cigar silently and as his curious blue eyes narrowed I began to guess the whole dirty scheme, which is a bad habit of mine: I’ve always been possessed of a sneaking and uncomfortable feeling that underneath any evidence to the contrary I’m a really bad man—which makes me better able to second-guess other bad men. Maybe it’s the edge you need to be a good cop.
“Because you’ve told Max Merten that General Heinkel is on the level, haven’t you? That’s it, isn’t it? The cops aren’t going to come at all for the simple reason you’re planning to snatch the GDR’s money for yourself. You’re going to turn up an hour or two before Max Merten and rob this general.”
“Something like that. And you’re going to help me, Gunther. After all, it’s quite possible that Heinkel may have company. A man who robs alone is a man who gets caught.”
“There’s only one thing worse than a crook and it’s a crooked cop.”
“You’re the one with the false identity, Gunther, not me. In my book that says you’re dirty. So spare me any lectures about honesty. If I have to I’ll take care of the job myself. Of course, that will mean you’ll be in jail or, at the very least, on the run. But I’d much prefer it if you were there, backing me up.”
“I’m beginning to understand a little more about what happened to Paul Herzefelde back in 1932,” I said. “It was you who was squeezing that fraudster, wasn’t it? Kohl, was it? Did Herzefelde guess as much? Yes, that would fit. It was you who killed him. And you who let the Nazis take the blame because he was a Jew. That was smart. I’ve misjudged you, Schramma. You must be awfully good at pretending to be a good cop to get away with it for so many years.”
“Really, it’s not so difficult these days. The police are like everyone else in Germany. A little short on manpower after the war. They can’t afford to be so fussy about who they have back on the force. Now you, you really are a smart fellow, the way you figured all that out in just a few minutes.”
“If I was that smart I wouldn’t be sitting in this car talking to a bastard like you, Schramma.”
“You’re selling yourself short, Gunther. It’s not every day you solve a murder that’s twenty-five years old. Believe it or not, I like that about you. And it’s another reason I want you along for the ride. You don’t think like a normal person. If you’ve survived this long as someone else, I figure you can see things coming. Situations developing. I can use experience like that. Now, and in the future. There’s no one left in Munich I can really trust; most of my younger Ettstrasse colleagues are too honest for their own good, and more importantly, for mine.”
“I’m glad to hear that. I’d hate to think we lost a war just to keep scum like you in uniform.”
“Keep using your mouth if that helps. But I figure some money will shut you up. I’ll make it worth your while, Gunther. I’ll give you ten percent. That’s a thousand marks. Don’t tell me you couldn’t use a thousand marks. Fate looks like it’s been dogging your footsteps for a long time now with a length of lead pipe in its hand.”
As if to make the point there was now an automatic pistol in his own big hand and it was jammed up against my liver, which I figured I could ill afford to lose in spite of the damage it had already sustained after years of heavy drinking.
“Just don’t get too clever with me, Gunther,” he said, and nodded at the hospital’s front door. “Or it’ll be your corpse that’s short of a face in that stinking mortuary.”
FIVE
–
A pewter-colored sky compressed the cold, even landscape; for a Bavarian town Munich is as flat as a mattress and just as comfortable, and there’s no part of Munich more comfortable than Bogenhausen, on the east bank of the Isar River. General Heinkel’s house was a white three-story villa with louvered green shutters, about thirty windows, and a vaguely fairy-tale stillness. You could hear the river in the drains and, in the little church that was opposite where Schramma had parked the BMW, the sound of an organist practicing a Bach cantata that might have been O lovely day, o hoped-for time, only that wasn’t how I regarded it. A green picket fence sloped gently down to an untidy line of deciduous trees that bordered the Isar. On the other side of the empty cobbled street was a small military hospital for soldiers whom the war had left maimed or horribly disfigured. I knew this because while we were sitting in the car we watched in uncomfortable silence as a group of maybe ten or fifteen of them trooped out the gate to take their afternoon constitutional around Bogenhausen. One man glanced in our window as he passed by although, in truth, it was hard to believe that this had been his intention as a large part of his face was pointed in completely the opposite direction. The man behind him seemed to be wearing a pair of thick goggles or spectacles made of pink flesh that were the result, perhaps, of some plastic surgery that was intended to remedy extensive facial burns. A third man with one eye and one leg and
