'Did you go straight back to Berlin?'
'No, I stayed on in Paris for a while, pretending to make further inquiries about Erich Mielke. A lot of other German communists and men from the International Brigade had volunteered for the French Foreign Legion to escape from the Gestapo in France. The Legion never paid much attention to a man's past. You enlisted in Marseille and served in the French colonies, with no questions asked. It was easy to suggest in my report to Heydrich that this was how he had escaped us. The truth is rather more interesting.'
'Not to me,' said Hitler. 'What I'm more interested in is what you did about the officer who tried to murder you.'
'What makes you think I did anything at all?'
'Because I know men. Go on. Admit it. You got even with him, didn't you? This Lieutenant Nikolaus Willms.'
'Yes, I did.'
Hitler was triumphant. 'I knew it. You sit there with your kangaroo court, Robert Jackson questions, but underneath you're no different from me. That makes you a hypocrite, Gunther. A hypocrite.'
'Yes, that's true.'
'So what did you do? Denounce him to the Gestapo? The same way you helped denounce that other fellow? The Gestapo captain from Wiirzburg. What was his name again?'
'Weinberger.' I shook my head. 'No, that's not what happened.'
'Of course. You had Heydrich take care of him. Heydrich was always very good at getting rid of people. For a Mischling, he was an excellent Nazi. I suppose he felt he had to try that much harder to prove himself to me.' Hitler laughed. 'That's the only reason we ever kept him on.'
'No, it wasn't like that either. I didn't involve Heydrich.'
Hitler turned his chair around to face me and rubbed his hands. 'I want to hear it all. Every sordid detail.'
I yawned again. I was feeling tired. My eyes kept on closing. All I really wanted to do was go to sleep and dream of somewhere different.
'I order you to tell me.'
'Is that a Fuhrer order?'
'If you like.'
I gave a little jolt, the way you do when sleep takes you for a ride and instead you get the crazy idea you just died. This little death is a wonderful sensation. It reminds you why it is that breathing feels so good.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: FRANCE, 1940
It certainly felt good in the summer of 1940. And there was no better place to be breathing air than Paris. Especially when I had the little maid from the Lutetia Hotel to keep me amused. Not that I took advantage of her. As a matter of fact I was rather scrupulous where Renata was concerned. It was one of the ways I had of convincing myself I wasn't as big a rat as the field grey said I was. This wasn't Onegin's sermon. I mean, I wanted her. And eventually I had her. But I took my time about it, the way you do when you like what's between a girl's ears as much as you want what's between her legs. And when it happened it felt like it was something shaped by a higher motive than simple lust. It wasn't love, exactly. Neither of us wanted to get married. But it was romance: courtship, desire, fear and dread. Yes, there was fear and dread, too, because Renata always knew I would go and slay my fire-extinguishing dragon just as soon as I knew why he'd sought to put me out for good.
While I'd been away in the south of France Renata had searched Willms's room and once or twice even followed him to discover that he ate at Maxim's almost every other night. On a general's pay this would have been unusual enough, but for a mere lieutenant it was nothing short of miraculous, and I resolved to visit the restaurant myself in the hope that this might provide me with some clue as to why he had tried to kill me. And in this respect it was fortunate for me that Maxim's was now run by Otto Horcher, who owned a restaurant in Berlin-Schoneberg. In the spring of 1938 Otto had been a client of mine when I'd been running a successful business as a licensed private investigator. I'd worked undercover as a waiter in his place for a couple of weeks in order to find out who was stealing from him. As it turned out everyone was stealing from him, but one man, the majordomo, was stealing a lot more than all of the others put together. After that we were friends, and even though he was a Nazi and a good friend of Goring's – which was how he came to be managing the most famous restaurant in Paris – I could always count on him for a table when I needed to impress someone, because after Borchardt, Horcher's was the best restaurant in Berlin.
Maxim's was in the Rue Royale in the eighth arrondissement, and a shrine to art nouveau, red velvet and grande cuisine. Parked outside were several German staff cars but you didn't need to be German to eat at Maxim's. When I went along there with Renata, Pierre Laval, one of Vichy's leading politicians, was there; and so was Fernand de Brinon. All you needed was money – quite a lot of money – and some bismuth tablets. In 1940, Maxim's was a good place for men and women who knew what they wanted and how to get it, no matter what the price. Probably still is.
We went through the door and were shown straight to a table – or at least as straight as the oleaginous and fawning waiter could manage.
'Can you afford this?' asked Renata, glancing over the menu with widening eyes.
'It makes me feel young again,' I said. 'That was the last time I felt this poor.'
'So what are we doing here?'
'Looking for the one thing that's not on this menu. Information.'
'About your friend Willms?'
'You know, if you keep on calling him that, even in the spirit of jest, I'm going to have to show you how much I dislike him.'
She shuddered, visibly. 'No, please. I don't want to know.' She glanced around the restaurant. 'I don't see him in here.' She did a double-take on Laval. 'All the same, he should be. There are more snakes in here than in the whole of Africa.'
'I didn't know you were so well travelled.'
'No, just travelled. Obviously you haven't seen Africa.'
'I'm beginning to think I made a mistake about you, Renata. I had the quaint idea that you were the girl next door.'
'Where my parents live, in Berne, if you'd ever met the girl next door, you know why I came to Paris.'
The maitre d' arrived with two menus and more attitude than a professor of aeronautics. Renata found him a little intimidating. Me, I'd been intimidated before, and usually by someone holding something more deadly than a wine list.
'What's your name?' I asked him.
'Albert, Monsieur. Albert Glaser.'
'Well, Albert, it was my impression that Germany had stopped paying France war reparations, but I can see from the prices on this menu that I was wrong about that.'
'Our prices don't seem to bother most of the other German officers who come in here, Monsieur.'
'That's what victory does for Nazis, Albert. It makes them profligate. Careless. Arrogant. Me? I'm just a humble German from Berlin who's anxious to renew my acquaintance with a certain Monsieur Horcher. Do me a favour, will you Albert? Go and whisper in his ear that Bernie Gunther is in the store. Oh, and bring us a bottle of Mosel. The nearer the Rhine the better.'
Albert bowed stiffly and went away.
'You don't like the French, do you?' said Renata.
'I'm doing my best,' I said. 'But they make it so difficult.
Even in defeat they seem to persist in the belief that this is the best country in the world.'
'Maybe it is. Maybe that's why they didn't have the best army.'
'If you're going to be a philosopher you're going to have to grow an enormous beard or a silly moustache. Those are the only people we take seriously in Germany.'
