“But if I do keep the money for the GVP, then that begs the question about what to do about Christian Schramma. We can’t just leave him there. Can we? With those men dead and Schramma locked in the cellar it’s quite possible the police may never arrive at the general’s house tomorrow expecting to make an arrest. Without Schramma or someone else to tell them, he could be there for a while. The general was a bit of a recluse. I’m not sure he even had a housekeeper.”
“I have an idea about Schramma, too.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“You hired him. You can get rid of him. No, I don’t mean like that.”
“Then how?”
“We go back there and talk him into keeping his mouth shut.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“You’re right, of course. There’s no sense in putting this off and hoping it will go away. The devil’s favorite piece of furniture is the long bench. And you really think we should let him go?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“But he’s killed two people in cold blood.”
“Informing the police won’t bring them back. And will only cause us both trouble. Once he’s in the police station there’s no telling what he’ll say. To men who are his friends. They won’t want to believe us.”
“True. All the same, I don’t like it. He’s still got a gun, you said?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Suppose when we let him out of the cellar he shoots us? Or brings us both back here, takes the money for himself, like he intended, and then kills us both?”
“I think I know a way of preventing him from doing that.”
“How?”
“Got a camera?”
“Yes.”
“All right. This is what I think we should do.”
EIGHT
–
We drove east in Merten’s Mercedes, along Maximilianstrasse, and crossed the Isar on Maximilian’s Bridge, before turning left and north up Möhlstrasse. Merten hadn’t been to the dead general’s home before so I was giving him directions. It was snowing again and in the car’s headlights the flakes resembled the bubbles in a glass of weiss beer.
“I’m very grateful for this,” admitted Merten.
“Don’t mention it, Max.”
“Look, I don’t care what you did in the war. Really, it’s none of my business. But I am supposed to be an officer of the Bavarian court. So it might be best if at least I knew something about your present predicament. If I am going to be your lawyer you should tell me if you are wanted for anything in particular. Beyond the obvious.”
“What’s obvious?”
“I mean your past service, with the SD.”
“There’s nothing really. I know how it looks—me having a false name—but my conscience is clear.” I wasn’t sure about that; but, for the moment at least, I didn’t feel inclined to tell him my whole life story. “The fact is, I’m an escaped Russian POW. I killed a man at a camp in the DDR while making my escape. A German. If they caught me they’d chop off my head. But more probably the Stasi would prefer to just have me quietly murdered.” This was true at least.
“That’s all right then. For a moment I thought—well, you can guess what I was thinking. There were always lots of stories that were told around the Alex about the famous Bernie Gunther. That Himmler kicked you once. That you worked for the likes of Goebbels and Göring, but that you mostly worked for General Heydrich.”
“Reluctantly.”
“Was that even possible?”
“It was if Heydrich decided it was.”
“I guess so. The last I heard of you, they’d sent you to Russia as a member of a police battalion, working for that other murderer, Arthur Nebe, with Task Group B.”
“That’s right. Only I didn’t murder anyone.”
“Oh sure, sure, but how many did he kill? Fifty thousand?”
“Something like that.”
“Hard to believe that two or three years later he was part of the Stauffenberg Plot to kill Hitler.”
“Actually, I find it harder to believe that he murdered fifty thousand people,” I said. “But he did. Nebe was full of contradictions. Mainly he was a cynical opportunist. In the early ’30s a die-hard Nazi; by ’38, part of an early plot to get rid of Hitler; after the miraculous fall of France, a committed Nazi prepared to do anything to advance himself, including mass murder; and by ’44, when he saw the way the wind was blowing, part of Stauffenberg’s incompetent plot. If he was a character in a book you wouldn’t believe him even possible.”
“No, I suppose not. Anyway, there but for the grace of God. If it hadn’t been for your good advice I might be in the same position as you, Bernie.”
“Why do you say so?”
“What I mean is, it was you who talked me out of joining the Party and the SS. Remember? Just before the war I was an ambitious junior lawyer in the Ministry of Justice and keen to advance my career. At that time joining the SS and the Nazi Party was the quickest way to make that happen. Instead I stayed put at the ministry, thankfully. If you hadn’t put me off the idea, Bernie, I’d probably have ended up in the SD and in charge of some SS special action group in the Baltic States charged with killing Jewish women and kids—like so many other lawyers I knew—and now I’d be a wanted man, like you, or worse: I could have met the same fate as those other men who went to jail, or were hanged in Landsberg.” He shook his head and frowned. “I often wonder how I’d have handled that particular dilemma. You know—mass murder. What I would have done. If I could have done—that. I prefer to believe I would have refused to carry out those orders but if I’m really honest I don’t know the answer. I think my desire to stay alive would have persuaded me to do what I was told, like every other lawyer. Because there’s
