A Good German Read online

  His cheek moved in a tic of surprise, which he covered by walking over to the table and pouring two fingers of brandy into a glass. “How is it you speak German?” he said.

  “I used to live in Berlin.”

  “Ah.” He tossed back a healthy swig. “How do you like it now?”

  “I knew Renate,” Jake said to his back, hoping for a point of contact.

  Gunther took another gulp. “So did many people. That was the problem.”

  “Bernie told me. I’m sorry about your wife.”

  But Gunther seemed not to have heard, a willed deafness. In the awkward quiet Jake noticed for the first time that there were no pictures in the room, no reminders at all, the visual traces locked away somewhere in a closet, or thrown out after the divorce. “So what do you want?”

  “Some help. Bernie said you were a detective.”

  “Retired. The Amis retired me. Did he tell you that?”

  “Yes. He also said you were good. I’m trying to solve a murder.”

  “A murder?” He snorted. “A murder in Berlin. My friend, there Were millions. Who cares about one?”

  “I do.”

  Gunther turned, looking him up and down, a policeman’s appraisal. Jake said nothing. Finally Gunther turned back to the bottle. A drink?“ he said. ”Since you brought it.“

  “No, it’s early.”

  “Coffee, then? Real coffee, not ersatz.” Not grudging; an invitation to stay.

  “You have it?”

  “Another gift,” he said, holding up the glass. “One minute.” He headed toward the kitchen but detoured to peek out the window. “Did you disable the motor? The distributor cap?”

  “I’ll chance it.”

  “Don’t take chances in Berlin,” he said, scolding. “Not now.” He shook his head. “Americans.”

  Jake watched him open the door to the kitchen. More packing cases, a pile of canned goods, cartons of cigarettes. Gifts. He was still sipping the brandy, but moved around the small space with steady efficiency, one of those drinkers who never seem affected until they pass out at night. Jake went over to the shelves. Rows of westerns. Karl May, the German Zane Grey. Gunfights in Yuma. Sheriffs and posses tracking through sagebrush. An unexpected vice at the edge of Kreuzberg.

  “Where did you get the map?” Jake said. The whole city, dotted with pins.

  “My office. It wasn’t safe in the Alex, with the bombs. Now I like to look at it sometimes. It makes me think Berlin is still out there. All the streets.” He came into the room with two cups. “It’s important to know where you are in police work. The where, very important.” He handed Jake a cup. “Where was your murder?”

  “Potsdam,” Jake said, glancing involuntarily at the map, as if the body would appear in the ribbons of blue lakes in the lower left corner.

  “Potsdam? An American?” He followed Jake’s eyes to the edge of the map. “With the conference?”

  “No. He had ten thousand dollars,” Jake said, baiting a hook.

  Gunther looked at him, then motioned him to a table chair. “Sit.” He sank into the armchair, moving the book aside. “So tell me.”

  It took ten minutes. There wasn’t much to tell, and Gunther’s expression discouraged speculation. He had taken off his glasses, his eyelids lowered to slits, and he listened without nodding, the only sign of life a steady movement of his hand from coffee cup to brandy glass.

  “I’ll know more when I hear back from Bernie,” Jake finished.

  Gunther pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed it in thought, then put back his glasses.

  “What will you know?” he said finally.

  “Who he was, what he was like.”

  “You think that would be useful,” Gunther said. “Who.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Usually,” he said, taking a drink. “If this were before. Now? Let me explain something to you. I saved the map.” He cocked his head toward the wall. “But everything else was lost. Fingerprint files. Criminal picture files. General files. We don’t know who anyone is in Berlin. No residency records. Lost. Something is stolen, you can’t look in the hock shops, the usual places. They’re gone. If it’s sold to a soldier, he sends it home. No trace. No policeman in Berlin can solve a crime now. Not even a retired one.”

  “It’s not a German crime.”

  “Then why come to me?”

  “Because you know the black market.”

  “You think so?”

  “You get a lot of gifts.”

  “Yes, I’m so rich,” he said, lifting his hand to the room. “Tins of corned beef. A treasure.”

  “You know how it works, or you wouldn’t be eating. You know how Berlin works.”

  “How Berlin works,” Gunther said, grunting again.

  “Even now. Germans run the market. Probably the same ones who ran things before. You’d know them. So which one did Tully know? He wasn’t making a casual deal. He wasn’t in Berlin, he came to Berlin.”

  Gunther slowly took out a cigarette and watched Jake as he lit it. “Good. That’s the first point. You saw that. What else?”

  A detective testing a recruit. Jake leaned forward.

  “The point is the money. There’s too much.”

  Gunther shook his head. “No, you missed the point. The point is that he still had it.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Herr Geismar. A man sells something. The buyer shoots him. Would he not take the money back? Why would he leave it?”

  Jake sat back, disconcerted. The obvious question, overlooked by everybody except a bent cop, still on the job behind the brandy haze. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning the buyer and the killer are not necessarily the same. In fact, not the same. How could it be? You’re looking for the wrong man.”

  Jake got up and walked over to the map. “The one leads to the other. Has to. There’s still the money.”

  “Yes, the money,” Gunther said, following him with his eyes. “That interests you. It’s the other point that interests me. Where.”

  “Potsdam,” Jake said dully, looking at the map.

  “Potsdam,” Gunther repeated. “Which the Russians have closed off. No one has been there for days. Not even the people you think I know.” He took another drink. “For them, a real inconvenience. No market day-a serious loss. But they can’t get in. And your soldier can. How is that?”

  “Maybe he was invited.”

  Gunther nodded. “The final point. But for you, also the end. A Russian? Children with guns. They don’t need a reason to shoot. You will never find him.”

  “The black market doesn’t work by sector. It’s all over the city. This much money-even a Russian-someone will know something. People talk.” Jake went back to his chair and leaned forward again. “They’d talk to you. They know you.”

  Gunther lifted his head.

  “I can pay,” Jake said.

  “I’m not an informer.”

  “No. A cop.”

  “Retired,” Gunther said sourly. “With a pension.” He raised his glass to the packing cases.

  “And how long do you think that will last? Once the MPs get started. An American killed-they have to do something about that. Clean things up. At least for a while. You could use a little insurance.”

  “From the Americans,” Gunther said, deadpan. “To find someone they don’t want found.”

  “They will. They’ll have to, if somebody makes enough noise.” He paused, holding Gunther’s eyes. “You never know when a favor might come in handy.”

  “You are the noisemaker, I take it.” Gunther looked away and took off his glasses again. “And what do I get? For my services. My per-silschein?”

  “Persil?” Jake said, confused, trying to translate. “Like the detergent?”

  “Persil washes everything clean,” Gunther said, rubbing the glasses on the cardigan. “Remember the advertisements? The per-silschein washes everything too, even sins. An American signs a certificate and”-he sn
apped his fingers-“the record is clean. No Nazi past. Go back to work.”

  “I can’t do that,” Jake said, then hesitated. “Maybe I can talk to Bernie.”

  “Herr Geismar, I’m not serious. He won’t persil me. I was in the party. He knows that. Now I’m in-business. My hands are—” He stopped, looking down at them. “Anyway, I don’t want to go back to work. It’s finished here. When you leave, the Russians will take over. Not even a persilschein would make me work for them.”

  “Then work for me.”

  “Why?” he said, more a dismissal than a question.

  Jake glanced around the airless room, a short walk from the old office, all the teletypes and radio calls now just a map on the wall.

  “Because you’re not ready to retire. And I’ll miss all the points.” He nodded at the book. “You can’t sit around all day reading Karl May. He isn’t writing any new ones.”

  Gunther looked at him for a second, a bleary scowl, then put on his glasses and picked up the book. “Leave me alone,” he said, retreating again behind the haze.

  But Jake sat still, waiting him out. For a few minutes there was no sound but the quiet ticking of the wall clock, the silence of a standoff, like the one on the book jacket, six-shooters drawn. Finally Gunther peered over his glasses.

  “There is maybe one more point.”

  Jake raised his eyebrows, still waiting.

  “Did he speak German?”

  “Tully? I don’t know. I doubt it.”

  “A difficulty, then, for such a transaction,” Gunther said carefully, working through a checklist. “If he was meeting a German. Who run the market. You say.”

  “All right. Then who else?”

  “This talk-it would be private? I have to protect my pension,” “he said.

  “Private as a confessional.”

  “You know Ronny’s? On the Ku’damm?”

  “I can find it.”

  “Try there tonight. Ask for Alford,” he said, pronouncing the English correctly. “He likes Ronny’s.”

  “An American?”

  “A Tommy. Not German. So maybe he’s heard something. Who knows? It’s a start. Mention my name.”

  Jake nodded. “But you’ll be there.”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  Gunther looked down at the page, dismissing him again. “Whether I finish the book.”

  He got back to Gelferstrasse to find a crowd halfway down the block from the billet, MPs in jeeps and a whole truckload of soldiers all milling around two women who stood looking at a house, hands to their cheeks, as if they were watching an accident. In the open truck, Ron stood next to some newsreel cameras, deserted by the rest of the press for the sidewalk show. The MPs were trying to get the women to move but without much success, barking in English while the women wailed in German. Plaster dust was floating out of the windows like smoke.

  “He speaks German,” Tommy Ottinger said to one of the MPs, waving Jake over.

  “Tell them in kraut they can’t go in,” the MP said, frustrated. “One floor’s gone already-the rest of it’s going to cave.”

  “What happened?” Jake said to Tommy.

  “They had a bomb in the back that weakened the house and now the whole thing’s shaky. Kitchen ceiling just went and another wall’s about to pop and they’re still trying to get in.”

  The two women now shouted at Jake.

  “They want to get their things,” he translated. “Before it goes.”

  “No can do,” the MP said. “Christ, these people don’t know when they’re lucky. They could have been in there. You got to hit them over the head to make them understand anything.”

  “My clothes,” one of the women cried in German. “I have to have clothes. How do you live without clothes?”

  “It’s dangerous,” Jake said to her. “Wait till it settles. Maybe it’ll be all right.”

  The house answered with a groan, almost a human sound, the joists pressed down by weight. A piece of plaster fell inside, sending out another puff of dust.

  “Helmut,” the other woman said, holding herself, now really alarmed.

  “What’s that, her dog?” the MP said.

  “I don’t know,” Jake said. “Is anybody coming to help?”

  “Are you kidding? What are we supposed to do?”

  “Prop the walls.” He’d seen it done in London, support beams put against a damaged house like improvised flying buttresses. Just a few pieces of lumber.

  “Buddy—” the MP said, then stopped, the idea too absurd to deserve a response.

  “So what are they doing?” Jake said, indicating the soldiers.

  “Them? They’re on their way to the game. Why don’t you take it easy and tell the krauts to come over here before they get hurt. Fuck their things.”

  Jake looked up at the truck where Ron was standing with his hands on his hips, obviously annoyed at the delay. “We’re going to be late,” he said to the men.

  “What game?”

  “Football,” Ron said. “Come on, guys. Let’s go.”

  A few of them moved, climbing reluctantly into the truck.

  “The Brits’ll wait,” Tommy said.

  “I can’t leave him,” the woman said.

  “This could take all day,” Ron said, but the house was groaning again, as compelling as a fire, working to some kind of end.

  “Helmut,” the woman said, hearing the rumble, and then, before anyone could stop her, bolted up the pavement to the door and raced inside.

  “Hey!” the MP shouted, but no one moved, frozen like a crowd held at gunpoint. “Fuck,” he said, watching her disappear. “Well, that’s one less to worry about.”

  The words seemed to push Jake by the shoulders. He glared at the MP, then broke away without thinking and ran after her. The entry-way was littered with plaster. “ Frau!” he yelled. “Come. It’s not safe.” No one answered. He stopped, listening in the creaking house for an animal whimper, the terrified Helmut being rescued. Instead, a calm “One moment” came from the front room. She was standing in the middle, just looking around, holding a picture frame.

  “You must come out,” he said gently, going over to her. “It’s not safe.”

  She nodded. “Yes, I know. It’s all I have, you see,” she said, looking down at the picture. A boy in a Wehrmacht uniform.

  He took her elbow. “Please,” he said, leading her away.

  She began to walk with him, then stopped at an end table near the doorway and picked up a porcelain figurine, one of those pink-cheeked shepherdesses that gather dust in parlors. “For Elisabeth,” she said, as if she were apologizing for taking her own things.

  The house, having held its breath for a few minutes, now exhaled again with a loud thump in the back. She started, and Jake took her by the shoulder to keep her going, so that his arm was around her when they came out on the stoop.

  “Hold it.” The voice, oddly, of a policeman catching looters. But it was only Ron, next to the newsreel camera. For a brief moment, as they stood on the stoop, Jake realized that it was running and, worse, that what it had hoped to catch was his death. American journalist killed in Berlin-something finally worth filming.

  “Anna!” the other woman shouted, hysterical. “Are you crazy? Are you crazy? ”

  But Anna was undisturbed now, the picture clutched to her chest. She left Jake’s side, walked calmly down the steps, and handed the figurine to the other woman.

  “Fucking Boy Scout,” the MP said to him.

  “Ain’t he, though?” Tommy said. “Probably do the same for a cat.”

  “Where is fucking Helmut anyway?” the MP said, disgusted.

  “It’s her son,” Jake said. He turned to the truck. “Get a good picture?” he said to Ron. “Sorry it didn’t fall down for you.”

  “Maybe next time.” Ron grinned. “Come on, hop up. Next stop, Allied games. The boys who fought together play together. Collier’s will love it.”

  J
ake looked up at him. The truth was, Collier’s would. The Allies in peace, conference table to playing field. Not Nazi cops and homeless Berliners. He could file this week, before the impatient telegrams started coming.

  “The Russians too?”

  “They’ve been invited.”

  “Hey, buddy,” said the MP, subdued now. “Ask them if they’ve got someplace to go.”

  Jake spoke with the women, standing now arm in arm, their backs to the soldiers.

  “She has another sister in Hannover.”

  “She’ll need a travel permit for that. Tell her we’ll get her to the DP camp down in Teltowerdamm. It’s not bad.”

  But the word, once translated, jolted them, the clang of a cell door closing. “Not a camp!” the woman with the figurine shrieked. “Not a camp. You can’t make us.” She clutched Jake’s arm.

  “What’s lager?” the MP said.

  “Camp. They’re afraid. They think it’s a concentration camp.”

  “Yeah, like the ones they used to run. Tell them it’s an American camp,” he said, certain this would be a comfort.

  “They look to you like they ran anything?”

  “What the hell. Krauts.”

  Before Jake could answer, the side wall finally gave way, collapsing inward and taking the weakened body of the house with it in a roar. There was a crack of wood splintering and masonry smashing down, all the sounds of an explosion, so that when the dust rose in a cloud from the center it seemed the house had been bombed after all. One of the women gasped, holding her hand over her mouth. Everyone stood still, mesmerized. In the truck the cameras were running again, grateful for a little spectacle after the dud rescue. Some of the neighbors had run over and joined the crowd, standing away from the two women, as if their bad luck were catching. No one spoke. A part of the back wall buckled. Another crash, more dust, then a series of thuds, like aftershocks, as bits of the house detached themselves and slid into the center heap, until finally the noise stopped and they were looking through the standing facade at another one of Ron’s decayed teeth. The woman holding the figurine started to cry, but Anna simply stared at the wreck without expression, then turned.

  “Okay, okay,” the MP said, waving his white stick, “let’s break it up. Show’s over.”

  Jake looked at the house. Hundreds of thousands of them.