“But to continue with the story. In September 1944, Brunner was transferred from Drancy to the Sered Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia, where he was tasked with the deportation of all the camp’s remaining Jews—some thirteen thousand people—before the camp was finally liberated by the Red Army in March 1945. I’ve not found anyone alive from Sered who remembers Brunner. You Germans did your work too well there. After the war, Brunner disappeared. For a while it was even thought he was dead, executed by the Allies in Vienna in May 1946. But this was a different Brunner. It was Anton Brunner, who conveniently also worked for Eichmann in Vienna, who was executed. And my friends in the National Intelligence Service of Greece tell me that they strongly suspect that the American CIA and the German Federal Intelligence Service—the BND—may have deliberately helped to muddy the waters around Anton Brunner’s end to protect Alois Brunner’s postwar work for Germany’s own intelligence services. Yes, that’s right, it’s not just German insurance companies that employ old Nazis.”
“I was never a Nazi,” I said.
“No, of course not,” said Leventis. But it was clear he didn’t believe me. “What’s more certain is that Brunner is still alive and that he has good connections in the current German government. According to my sources in the Greek NIS, it’s strongly believed that Brunner is presently working undercover for the German BND. Meanwhile a French court tried Brunner for war crimes in absentia in 1954 and sentenced him to death. And he’s one of the most wanted war criminals in the world.”
Lieutenant Leventis opened another file and took out a black-and-white photograph, which he now handed to me. “A friend of mine in the Greek NIS managed to obtain this from his opposite number in the French intelligence services, one of the only known photographs of Alois Brunner, taken in France sometime during the summer of 1944.”
I was looking at a man by a wooden fence in a field, wearing a belted leather trench coat, with a hat and gloves in his left hand and, as far as I could see, without even a badge in his lapel that might have helped to identify the man as a Nazi Party official. It was a good leather coat; I’d once owned one very like it myself before it had been stolen by a Russian POW guard. The man in the grainy picture didn’t look like a mass murderer, but then nobody ever does. I’d met enough murderers in my time to know that they nearly always look like everyone else. They’re not monsters and they’re not diabolical, they’re just the people who live next door and say hello on the stairs. This man was slim, with a high forehead, a narrow nose, neat dark hair, and an almost benign expression on his face; it was the kind of picture he might have sent to his girlfriend or wife, supposing he ever had one. On the back of the picture there was a description of the photograph, written in French: A photograph believed to be of Alois Brunner, born 8th April, 1912–, taken August 1944, property of the Direction Centrale des Renseignements Généraux.
“Alois Brunner would now be almost forty-five years old,” said Leventis. “Which is the same age as me. Perhaps that’s another reason why I take a special interest in him.”
Lieutenant Leventis continued talking for a while longer but I was hardly listening now; I kept looking at the thin man in the black-and-white photograph. Immediately I knew for sure that I’d met the man before, but it hadn’t been during the war and he hadn’t been calling himself Alois Brunner. I was quite certain of this. In fact, I still had the man’s business card in my pocket. The man in the photograph was the same Austro-Hungarian cigarette salesman who had struck up a conversation with me in the bar at the Mega Hotel.
TWENTY-FIVE
–
There was a police radio on somewhere or maybe I was just hearing a few garbled, half-heard, barely understood words through the white noise that was my own thoughts. In the lieutenant’s office, men and a few women came and went like the crew on a ship, handing him reports, which mostly he ignored. Eventually he got up and closed the frosted-glass door. With his glasses off Leventis looked a bit punchy; but with them on, his eyes missed nothing. He had seen my own eyes linger on Brunner’s photograph for a little too long, perhaps. The man I’d met in my hotel bar was a war criminal. And not just any war criminal but one of the most wanted war criminals in Europe. It was sometimes a shock to realize that I wasn’t the only German with a past. But I hardly wanted to confess to having met the man until I knew what he’d been after. Especially as he’d been a colleague of Adolf Eichmann. I’d met Eichmann once or twice myself, and I hardly wanted to admit this either. Not to some Greek cop I hardly knew. I liked Leventis. But I didn’t trust him.
“You recognize him, Commissar?”
“No.”
“You looked like you know him, maybe.”
“I was taking a good look at him, that’s all, just in case I did. I’m an ex-cop, remember? So old habits die hard. I was stationed in Paris for a while during the war and I was thinking it was at least possible that I’d met your man, Brunner. But our dates don’t match. By June 1943 I’m afraid I was back in Germany. Besides,
