The bandit queen finished her whiskey and snapped her fingers for two more like one who was used to being obeyed. A former military colonel, she’d said. I didn’t doubt it. She finished one cigarette, lit another, and leaned back in her armchair. Her arms were almost the same color as the mahogany woodwork and probably just as strong. Easy enough to imagine her fighting Arabs, I thought.
“You may think you’ve done a good deed by handing Merten over to the Greek authorities,” she said, “but I’m afraid it’s our considered opinion that he always planned to be caught.”
“But what about Brunner? You’re forgetting he killed three people in pursuit of that gold.”
“I doubt anyone in the BND expected Brunner to put in an appearance down here. That was where the plan went badly wrong, as plans often do. As for the gold itself, I seriously doubt there was ever more than a million dollars’ worth of gold on that boat. A half share of a million dollars is not chump change. Certainly enough to interest a rat like Alois Brunner. But it’s nothing like the hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth that was sent back to Germany in 1943. It was one thing to steal from the Jews but tell me, honestly, as a man who used to be a detective with Kripo, do you think the likes of Eichmann, Brunner, and Merten would ever have had the courage to steal from the SS? Those who did and were caught risked being sent to the camps themselves. Isn’t that so?”
“Now you come to mention it, that does sound a little unlikely.”
“Take my word for it, this whole thing was a put-up job designed to mislead the Greek government into thinking the West Germans don’t have a single ounce of that gold, that it really is lying on the bottom of the Aegean Sea in some secret location that only Max Merten knows about. And that there’s no point in asking the Germans for the gold back because they know nothing of its whereabouts. Neat, wouldn’t you say?”
“If it’s true.”
“I don’t suppose we’ll ever be able to prove any of this. But we might hurt a few of the principal players. Adenauer’s state secretary Hans Globke, for example. Yes, we might make some trouble for him. It was Globke who promulgated the Nuremberg Laws, and who was the most capable and efficient official of the Nazi Ministry of the Interior. His participation in the so-called Reich Citizenship Law is a similarly irrefutable fact. Think of that for a minute, Christof. One of Hitler’s leading Jew murderers has a hand on the helm of the West German state. He is without doubt the prolonged arm of the chancellor and his most intimate confidant. But worse, this means that when Adenauer takes a holiday, Globke becomes the de facto federal chancellor of Germany and the nearest thing to Martin Bormann that there exists today. Which brings me to the question I wanted to ask you. Are you going back to Munich now?”
“Yes.”
“Then my question is this: When you get back to Germany, when you’re ready, will you help us get Hans Globke?”
“What do you mean by ‘get’? Don’t you mean murder? There’s a strong rumor your people ran down and killed Globke’s Nazi boss Wilhelm Stuckart in 1953.”
“I mean get by any means necessary.”
“I don’t know why you think I can help get a man like that, and in that way.”
“I’m asking because I sense in you the need to do something to atone for your country’s sins. For your own, perhaps. I don’t know but I think that’s why you helped Lieutenant Leventis to get Max Merten, isn’t it? Because you have a conscience about what happened here?”
The next round of drinks arrived and the bandit queen snatched one of the glasses off the tray and started drinking it before the other was even on the table. But she waited until the waiter was gone before she continued speaking:
“I know that’s an emotive word, ‘atonement.’ In Judaism this means the process of causing a transgression against God to be forgiven or pardoned. So perhaps it’s blasphemous of me to take it upon myself to offer you that chance, Christof. But that’s exactly what I’m doing. A chance to do something good with what’s left of your life. Israelis and Jews—there are plenty of them I can get to work for the Institute. None with the experience I need. What I really need are a few Germans who aren’t Jews. Germans with a conscience. Germans like you who are in respectable jobs, and who have some background in intelligence. That’s you, isn’t it? You’re not quite as innocent about these things as you like to pretend.”
I nodded. “It’s a long time since I felt innocent about anything.”
“Then take it from one who knows all about collective guilt. I’m a Jew. We’ve been
