Out of the first-floor window was a view of the garden and the conical roof of a little white tower in the prison wall. As far as I knew it wasn't a view that any red jacket in Landsberg was accustomed to seeing. Blinking against the sun streaming in through the window and the smoke streaming into my eye, I rubbed my chin wearily and took the cigarette from my mouth.
'Maybe,' said the man with the pipe. There was a moustache on his upper lip that matched the size and shape of his little blue bow tie. He had more chin than would have made him handsome, and while it wasn't exactly Charles V there were some, myself included, who would have grown a short beard on it to make it seem smaller, perhaps. But in my eyes leprosy would have looked a lot better on him.
The door opened. No keys were required to open this cell. The door just swung open and a guard came in carrying some clothes, followed by another guard bearing a tray with coffee and a hot meal. I didn't much like the clothes, since these were the ones I'd been wearing the previous day, but the coffee and the food smelled like they'd been prepared in Kempinski's. I started to eat before they changed their minds. When you're hungry clothes don't seem that important. I didn't use the knife and fork because I couldn't yet hold them properly, so I ate with my fingers, wiping them on my thighs and backside. I certainly wasn't about to worry about my table manners. Immediately I started to feel better. It's amazing how good even an American cup of coffee can taste when you're hungry.
'From now on,' said the man with the pipe, 'this is your cell. Number seven.'
'Recognise that number?' The other Ami – the one wearing the glasses – had short grey hair and looked like any college professor. The legs of the glasses were too short for his head and the hooks stood off his ears so that they looked like two small umbrellas. Maybe the glasses were too small for his face. Or maybe he'd borrowed them. Or maybe his head was abnormally large to accommodate all the abnormally unpleasant thoughts – most of them about me – that were swelling it.
I shrugged. My mind was a blank.
'Of course you do. It's the Fuhrer's cell. Where you're eating your food is where he wrote his book. And I don't know which I find more disgusting. The thought of him writing down his poisonous thoughts. Or you eating with your fingers.'
'I'll certainly try not to let that thought spoil my appetite.'
'By all accounts Hitler had an easy time here in Landsberg.'
'I guess you weren't working here, back then.'
'Tell me, Gunther. Did you ever read it? Hitler's book.'
'Yes. I prefer Ayn Rand. But only just.'
'Do you like Ayn Rand?'
'No. I think Hitler would have liked her, though. He wanted to be an architect, too, of course. Only he couldn't afford the paper and the pencils. Not to mention the education. Plus he didn't have a large enough ego. And I think you've got to be pretty tough to make it in that world.'
'You're pretty tough yourself, Gunther,' said the one with the glasses.
'Me? No. How many tough guys do you have breakfast with when they're naked?'
'Not many.'
'Besides, it's easy to look tough when you're wearing a bag over your head. Even if it does get you wondering what it might be like to have nothing under your feet.'
'Any time you want to find out for sure we can help you.'
'Sure, you can take Klingelhofer's place for the rehearsal.'
'We were here when they executed those five war criminals in June fifty-one.'
'I'll bet you've got an interesting scrapbook.'
'They died quite calmly. Like they were resigned to their fate. Which was kind of ironic when you remember that's what they said about all those Jews they murdered.'
I shrugged and pushed away my empty breakfast tray. 'No man wants to die,' I said. 'But sometimes it just seems worse to go on living.'
'Oh, I think they wanted to go on living all right. Especially the ones who applied for clemency. Which was all of them. I read some of the letters that McCloy received. They were all predictably self-serving.'
'Ah well,' I said, 'that's the difference between me and them. It's just impossible for me to be self-serving. You see, I fired my own self a long time ago. These days I try to manage on my own.'
'You say that like you don't want to go on living either, Gunther.'
'And you say that like I should be impressed with your hospitality. That's the trouble with you Amis. You kick the shit out of people and then expect them to join in a couple of verses of 'The Star-Spangled Banner'.'
'We don't expect you to sing, Gunther,' said the Ami with the pipe. Was he ever going to light it? 'Just to go on talking. The way you've been talking until now.' He tossed a packet of cigarettes onto the table where Hitler had written his best- selling book. 'By the way, what happened to that sergeant who Zeimer and Mielke shot in the stomach?'
'Willig?' I lit a cigarette and remembered that he had lived; three months after the shooting he had made lieutenant. 'I forget.'
'You joined Kripo again in September 1938, is that right?'
'I didn't exactly join,' I said. 'I was ordered back in by General Heydrich. To solve a series of murders in Berlin. After the case was solved, I stayed on. Again, that's what Heydrich wanted. There's only one thing you have to understand about Heydrich: he almost always got what he wanted.'
'And he wanted you.'
'I had a certain reputation for getting the job done. He admired that.'
'So you stayed on.'
'I tried to get out of Kripo, for good. But Heydrich made that more or less impossible.'
'Tell us about that. About what you were doing for Heydrich.'
'Kripo was part of Sipo, the State Security Police. I was promoted to Oberkommissar. A chief inspector. Most of the crime by then was politicised, but men carried on murdering their wives and professional criminals went about their business as normal. I conducted several investigations during that period, but in reality the Nazis cared very little about reducing crime in the usual time-honoured way, and most police could hardly be bothered to do what police do. This was because the Nazis preferred to 'reduce' crime by declaring annual amnesties, which meant that most crimes never went to court at all. All the Nazis cared about was being able to say that the crime figures were down. In fact, crime – real crime – actually increased under the Nazis: theft, murder, juvenile delinquency – it all got worse. So I carried on as normal at the Alex. I made arrests, prepared a case, handed the papers over to the Ministry of Justice and, in time, the case was struck down, or dropped, and the accused walked free.
'One day, in September 1939, not long after war was declared and Sipo became part of the RSHA, I went to see General Heydrich at his office in Prinz Albrechtstrasse. I told him I was wasting my time and asked his permission to put in my papers. He listened patiently but continued to write for almost a minute after I'd finished speaking before turning his attention to a rack of rubber stamps on his desktop. There must have been thirty or forty of these. He picked one up, pressed it onto an inkpad and then carefully stamped the sheet of paper he'd been writing on. Then, still silent, he got up and closed the door. There was a grand piano in his office – a nine- foot black Bluthner – and, to my surprise, he sat down in front of it and started to play, and play rather well, I might say. While he was playing he shifted his large arse on the piano stool – he'd put on some weight since last I'd seen him – and then nodded at the space he'd made to indicate that I should sit beside him.
'I sat down hardly knowing what to expect, and for a while neither of us said a word as his thin, bony, dead Christ hands rippled over the shiny keyboard. I listened and kept my eyes on the photograph on the piano lid. It was a picture of Heydrich in profile wearing a fencer's white jerkin and looking like the sort of dentist you might have nightmares about – the kind who would have pulled all of your teeth to improve your dental hygiene.
''Ghuan Zhong was a seventh-century Chinese philosopher,' Heydrich said, quietly. 'He wrote a very great book of Chinese sayings, one of which is that 'Even the walls have ears'. Do you understand what I'm saying, Gunther?'
''Yes, General,' I said and looking around tried to guess where a microphone might have been hidden.
''Good. Then I'll keep playing. This piece is by Mozart, who was taught by Antonio Salieri. Salieri was not a great composer. He's better known to us today as the man who murdered Mozart.'
