In truth, that process was working out for Germany a little better than it was working out for me, and all thanks to the Old Man. This was what we called Konrad Adenauer, on account of how he was seventy-three when he became West Germany’s first postwar chancellor. He was still in power at eighty-one, leading the Christian Democrats and, unless you were a radical Jewish group like Irgun, who’d tried to assassinate the Old Man on more than one occasion, it had to be admitted he’d made a pretty good job of it, too. Already people were talking about “the Miracle on the Rhine” and they weren’t referring to Saint Alban of Mainz. Thanks to a combination of the Marshall Plan, low inflation, rapid industrial growth, and plain hard work, Germany was now doing better economically than England. This didn’t surprise me that much; the Tommies always were too bolshy for their own good. After winning two world wars they made the mistake of thinking the world owed them a living. Perhaps the real miracle was how the rest of the world seemed to have forgiven Germany for starting a war that had cost the lives of forty million people—this in spite of the Old Man having denounced the whole denazification process and brought in an amnesty law for our war criminals, all of which certainly explained why there was a lingering and general suspicion that many old Nazis were now back in government. The Old Man had a useful explanation for that, too: he said you needed to make sure you had a good supply of clean water available before you threw out your dirty water.
As someone who washed dead Germans for a living, I couldn’t disagree with this.
Of course, I had more dirty water in my bucket than most and above all else I was appreciating my newfound obscurity. Like Garbo in Grand Hotel, I just wanted to be alone and loved the idea of being anonymous more than I liked the short beard I’d grown to help make this work. The beard was yellowish gray, vaguely metallic; it made me look wiser than I am. Our lives are shaped by the choices we make, of course, and more noticeably by the choices that were wrong. But the idea that I had been forgotten by the cops, not to mention the world’s major security and intelligence agencies, was pleasing, to say the least. My life looked good on paper; indeed it was the only place it looked as if it had been well spent, which, speaking as someone who’d been a cop for many years, was in itself suspicious. And so, to facilitate my life as Christof Ganz, in my spare time I would often go back over the bare facts of his life and invent some of the things he’d done and achieved. Places I’d been, jobs I’d had, and, most important of all, my wartime service on behalf of the Third Reich. In much the same way that everyone else had done in the new Germany. Yes, we’ve all had to become very creative with our résumés. Including, it seemed, many members of the Christian Democrats.
I took another drink with my breakfast, just to help me sleep, of course, and went to bed, where I dreamed of happier times, although that might just as easily have been a prayer to the god of the black cloud, dwelling in the skies. Since prayers are never answered it’s hard to tell the difference.
TWO
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When I went into work the following evening the Moosach bomb victim was still there, laid out on the slab like a vulture’s abandoned banquet. Someone had tied a name tag to his toe which, given the fact that his leg was no longer attached to his body, seemed imprudent to say the least. His name was Johann Bernbach, and he was just twenty-five years old. By now I knew a little more about the bomb from what was in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. A five-hundred-pounder had exploded on a building site next door to a beer hall in Dachauerstrasse, less than fifty meters from the municipal gasworks. The gasometer contained over seven million cubic feet of gas, so the feeling expressed in the newspaper was that the city had had a lucky escape with just two people killed and six injured and I said as much to Bernbach when I saw him.
“I hope you had a few beers tucked away when you got your ticket punched, friend. Enough to take the edge off the shrapnel. Look here, it won’t matter much to you now, but your unexpected death is not being treated with quite the reverence it warrants. To put it bluntly, Johann, it seems everyone’s glad it’s only you who’s burnt toast. There was a gasometer near where that giant marrow went off. It was full of gas, too. More than enough to keep my little department in this hospital busy for weeks. Kind of fitting you should end up here, given it was an Ami bomb that killed you. Until last year this was the American hospital. Anyway, I’ve done my best for you. Pulled most of that glass out
