was in, what with all the generals and counts and princes who were in league with Willms. Thinking it might be better if Willms's death at least looked a bit less like a murder, I swapped the Luger for my own Walther. Then, seeing Willms's tunic and belt hanging on coat-stand, I took his own standard-issue
Walther and put it in my holster before replacing the cold Luger in the desk drawer. Things only looked like a mess. Suicide was actually a nice tidy solution for the French police, for Sipo, and for the red stripes over at the Majestic Hotel. I wondered if they'd even bother to look for a powder burn on Willms's head. Because cops all over the world love suicides; they're nearly always the easiest homicides to solve. You just lift the rug and brush them underneath.
I picked up the telephone and asked the operator for the Prefecture of Police, in the Rue de Lutece.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: GERMANY, 1954
I sat up and blinked hard in the near-darkness of cell number seven, wondering how long I'd been asleep. The shade of Hitler was gone, at least for now, and I was glad about that. I didn't much like his questions, or the mocking assumption that, deep down, I was as big a criminal as him. It was true that I might have shot Nikolaus Willms somewhere less lethal than his head, and that even when I'd been trying to put him under arrest, secretly I had probably wanted to kill him. Perhaps if Paul Kestner had pulled a gun on me I'd have shot him, too. But as it was I never saw Kestner again, and the last I heard of him he'd been part of a police battalion in Smolensk, murdering Jews and communists.
I opened my window and put my face in the cool breeze of the Landsberg dawn. I couldn't see the cows but I could smell them in the fields across the river to the south-west and I could hear them, too. One, anyway; it sounded like a lost soul in a place far, far away. Like my own soul perhaps. I almost felt like blowing my own breath in a solitary hot blast by way of an answer.
The Paris of 1940 seemed equally far away. What a summer that had been, thanks to Renata. The Prefecture in the person of Chief Inspector Oltramare had accepted without demur my story of finding Willms dead after going to the maison with the intention of arresting him, although it was as plain as the Eiffel Tower that he believed not a word of it. Sipo proved only a little more troublesome, and I was summoned to the Hotel Majestic, in the Avenue des Portugais, to explain myself to General Best, the head of the RSHA in Paris.
A dark-eyed, severe-looking man from Darmstadt, Best was in his late thirties and bore a strong resemblance to the Nazi Party's deputy leader, Rudolf Hess. There was some bad blood between him and Heydrich, and because of that I half-expected Best to give me a rougher ride. Instead he confined himself to delivering a light reprimand for my declared intent to arrest Willms without consulting him. Which was fair enough and my apology seemed to put an end to the matter; as things turned out, he was much more interested in picking my brains for a book he was writing about the German police. On several occasions we met at his favourite restaurant, a brasserie on the Boulevard de Montparnasse called La Coupole, and I told him all about life at the Alex and some of the cases I investigated. Best's book was published the following year and sold very well.
In fact, he turned out to be something of a benefactor. He and his damn book were the main reason I managed to stay on in Paris until June 1941, and so it was Best who effectively ensured I missed out on going to Pretzsch and Himmler's pep- talk for the SS and SD. I might have stayed on a bit longer and avoided going to the Ukraine altogether but for Heydrich. Now and then he liked to tug the line a little just to remind me that he had his hook in my mouth.
I lit a cigarette and lay down on the bed again, waiting for the grey light to strengthen and the room to take shape and the uncaring guards to rouse Landsberg's inmates for exercise, breakfast, and then what was called 'free association'. To my surprise I was now allowed back into the general prison population. But to avoid Biberstein and Haensch, with their worries about what I was telling the Americans and how that might affect their own chances of parole, I found myself seeking out the company of Waldemar Klingelhofer. Since he had been cut by everyone else at Landsberg, my speaking to him was the best way of ensuring I was left alone – at least for the duration of our conversation. We talked in the garden, with the sun warming our faces.
Klingelhofer had not aged well since our time together at Lenin House in Minsk, and he was perhaps the only prisoner at WCPN1 of whom it could have been said that he had some sort of conscience about what he had done. He looked like a man haunted by his actions with the Moscow Commando. Martin Sandberger, watching us from a short distance away, merely looked psychopathic.
Looking at Klingelhofer's twitching, bespectacled face it was hard to imagine the former opera tenor who owned it singing anything, except perhaps the Dies Irae. But I was more interested in talking to him about what had happened in Minsk, after I had returned from there to Berlin.
'Do you remember a man called Paul Kestner?' I asked him.
'Yes,' said Klingelhofer. 'He was active with a murder commando in Smolensk when I got there in 1941. I was supposed to obtain furs to use for German military winter clothing. Kestner had been in Paris, I think, and was bitter about his being posted to Russia. He seemed to be taking it out on Jews, that much was obvious, and my impression was that he was a really cruel man. After that I heard he got posted to the death camp at Treblinka. That must have been about July of 1942. He was the deputy commander, I think. There was some talk about Kestner and Irmfried Eberl, who was in charge, running the camp for their own pleasure and profit; using Jewish women for sex and embezzling Jewish gold and jewellery that was properly the property of the Reich. Anyway, the bosses found out about it and by all accounts dismissed the pair of them and some others besides before putting in a new man to clean the stables. Fellow named Stangl. Meanwhile Eberl and Kestner were dismissed from the SS, and in 1944 I heard they joined the Wehrmacht in an attempt to redeem themselves. The Amis got Eberl a few years ago and I believe he hanged himself. But I've no idea what became of Kestner. They say Stangl's in South America.'
'Well, if he is it's not Argentina,' I said. 'Or Uruguay.'
'You're lucky,' said Klingelhofer. 'To have been to those places. Me, I expect I'll die here.'
'You must be the only prisoner in Landsberg who believes that, Wally. Everyone else seems to be expecting a parole. They've already let go men who, in my opinion, were worse than you.'
'Thanks. Nice of you to say so. But I just hope that if I do die in here, they'll allow my family to have my body. I wouldn't want to be buried here, in Landsberg. It would mean a lot to them. Nice of you to say so, yes. I mean, I'm not looking to get out. I mean, what would I do? What can any of us do?'
I left Klingelhofer talking to himself. He did a lot of that in Landsberg. It looked easier than talking to the Americans. Or Biberstein and Haensch. Or Sandberger, who cornered me on the way back to my cell.
'Why do you speak to a bastard like that?' he demanded.
'Why not? I speak to you. Really, I'm not that particular.'
'Funny guy. I heard that about you, Gunther.'
'I don't see you laughing. Then again you used to be a judge, didn't you? Before you went to Estonia? Not many laughs there either from what I heard.'
Sandberger had a ruffian's face with a jaw like a flat tyre and a boxer's hostile eyes. It was hard to imagine how anyone could have become a lawyer or a judge with a face like that. It was easier to imagine him murdering sixty-five thousand Jews. You didn't need to be a criminologist to figure out a physiognomy like Sandberger's.
'I hear the Amis have been giving you a hard time of it,' he said.
'You hear good with those things on the side of your head.'
'So I took the liberty of mentioning you to the Evangelical Bishop of Wurttemberg,' he said. 'In my last letter to him.'
'As long as there are prisons there will be prayers.'
'There's a lot more he can do than just pray.'
'A cake would be nice. Lots of cream and fruit and a Walther P38 filling.'
Sandberger smiled a lop-sided smile that wasn't provoking any second thoughts in my mind about the descent of man.
'He doesn't do prison breaks,' said Sandberger. 'Just letters to influential people here, and in America.'
'I wouldn't want to put him to any trouble,' I said. 'Besides, I just came back from America myself. But I certainly didn't make any friends while I was there.'
