The Good German (Bestselling Backlist) Page 28

  “Nothing doing,” Bernie said.

  But Jake glanced at him, his body shrunken in the old suit, eyes uneasy, and walked over to the table and poured out a finger of brandy. Gunther drank it back in one gulp, like medicine, then stood for a second letting it work its way through him.

  “Don’t worry,” he said to Bernie. “I won’t forget anything.”

  “Let’s hope not.” He reached into his pockets and pulled out a mint. “Here, chew this. The Russians’ll smell it on you a mile off.”

  “The Russians?” Jake said.

  “It’s a Russian trial. To show us they can do it too, not just string people up. Especially when we help catch them. Come on, we’ll be late.”

  “Can I get in? I’d like to see this. See Renate.”

  “The press slots were gone days ago. Everybody wants to see this one.”

  Jake looked at him, feeling like Gunther asking for a drink.

  “All right,” Bernie said. “We’ll put you on the prosecution team. You can keep an eye on our friend here. Which is getting to be a job.” He glanced at Gunther. “No more.”

  Gunther handed the glass back to Jake. “Thank you.” And then, as a kind of return favor, “I’ll talk to Willi for you.”

  “Willi?”

  “It’s a type I know well. He’ll talk to me.”

  “I mean, why him?” Jake said, intrigued to see Gunther still working, behind everything.

  “To keep the figures neat. The little details. What’s the English? Dot the i’s and cross the t’s.”

  “Still a cop.”

  Gunther shrugged. “It pays to be neat. Not overlook anything.”

  “What else did I overlook?”

  “Not overlook—ignore, perhaps. Sometimes when it’s not pleasant, we don’t want to see.”

  “Such as?”

  “The car.”

  “The Horch again? What’s so important about the Horch?”

  “No, Herr Brandt’s car. That week—to drive into Berlin, how was it possible? The city was burning, at war. And yet he comes to get his wife. How was that allowed?”

  “It was an SS car.”

  “Yes, his. You think the SS was offering lifts? While the city was falling? Either he was one of them or he was their prisoner. But they stop to collect the father, so not a prisoner. One of them. A mission for the SS—what kind? Even the SS didn’t send cars for relatives those last days.”

  “His father said they were picking up files.”

  “And they risk coming to Berlin. What files, I wonder.”

  “That’s easy to find out,” Bernie said. “They surrendered in the west. There’ll be a record somewhere. One thing we’ve got plenty of is files.”

  “More folders,” Gunther said, looking at the stack Bernie had brought with him for the trial. “For all the bad Germans. Let’s see what they say about Herr Brandt.”

  “What makes you think he’s in them?” Jake said.

  “What do you save when a city’s on fire? You save yourself.”

  “He was trying to save his wife.”

  “But he didn’t,” Gunther said, then looked away, somewhere else. “Of course, sometimes it’s not possible.” He picked up his jacket and put it on, ready to go. “That last week—you weren’t here. Fires. Russians in the streets. We thought it was the end of the world.” He looked back at Jake. “But it wasn’t. Now there’s this. The reckoning.”

  The courtroom had an improvised look to it, as if the Russians had set up a stage without knowing where the props went. Their de-Nazification program had run to group executions, not trials, but the greifer was a special case, so they’d taken over a room near the old police headquarters in the Alex, built a raised platform of raw wooden boards for the judges’ bench, and assigned the press haphazard rows of folding chairs that squeaked and scraped the floor as reporters leaned forward to hear. The prosecution attorneys and their Allied advisers were crammed together at one table, a lopsided stacking of cards against the defense lawyer and his one assistant, who sat by themselves at another. Along the wall, female Soviet soldiers made transcripts with steno machines, handing them to two civilian girls for translation.

  The trial was in German, but the judges, three senior officers shuffling papers and trying not to look bored, evidently understood only a little, so the lawyers, also in uniform, occasionally switched to Russian, afraid to let their points drift away to the steno keys unheard. There was a heavy chair for witnesses, a Soviet flag, and not much else. It was the format of an inquisition, starker even than the rough-and-ready frontier courtrooms of Karl May, not a robe in sight. People were frisked at the door.

  Renate stood behind a cagelike railing of new plywood next to the bench, facing the room, as if her expression during the testimony would be recorded as a kind of evidence. Behind her stood two soldiers with machine guns, gazing stolidly at her back. Bernie said she had changed, but she was recognizably the same—thinner, with the hollowed-out look you saw everywhere in Berlin, but still Renate. Only her dark hair was different, cropped close and turned a premature, indeterminate pale. She was dressed in a loose gray prison shift, belted, her collarbones sticking out, and the face he remembered as pretty and animated seemed rearranged—beaten, perhaps, or somehow disfigured by her life. But there were the eyes, sharp and knowing, glancing defiantly around the crowd as if she were even now looking for news items. The same way, Jake thought, she must have hunted for Jews.

  She spotted him instantly, raising her eyebrows in surprise, then dropping them in bewilderment. A friend sitting at the table of her accusers. Did she think he was there to testify against her? What would he have said? A girl with a quick smile who liked to take chances, bold enough to cadge a cigarette from a Nazi on a train platform. A sharp eye, trained for snatching prey in the street. How could she have done it? But that was always the question—how could any of them have done it? He wanted suddenly to signal some absurd reassurance. I remember who you were. Not a monster, not then. How can I judge? But who could? Three Russian soldiers on a makeshift platform, whose fleshy faces seemed to ask no questions at all.

  They were only minutes into the trial before Jake realized they hadn’t come to establish guilt, just the sentence. And was there any doubt? The Germans had kept records of her activity, more columns of numbers. As the prosecution read out its indictments, Jake watched her lower her head, as if she too were overwhelmed by the sweep of it, all the snatches, one by one, until finally there were enough to fill boxcars. So many. Had she known them all, or just guessed, smelling fear when it walked into one of her cafés? Each number a face-to-face moment, real to her, not anonymous like a pilot opening the bomb bay.

  The method was as Bernie had described—the sighting, the hurried call, the nod of her head to make the arrest, her colleagues bundling people into cars as she walked away. Why hadn’t she kept walking? Instead she’d gone back to the collection center, her room there its own kind of short leash, but still not a prison. Why not just keep walking away? Gunther had moved his wife fourteen times. But he had had papers and friends prepared to help. No U-boat could survive alone. Where, after all, would she have gone?

  The Russian prosecutor then switched, oddly, to a detailed account of Renate’s own capture, the manhunt that finally ran her to ground in a basement in Wedding. For a moment Jake thought the Soviets were simply congratulating themselves for the press, now busily taking notes. Then he noticed Bernie in a lawyer’s huddle, heard Gunther mentioned by name as the hunter, and saw that it was something more—the old DA’s ploy, establishing your witness, the good guy in the neat jacket and tie. He needn’t have bothered. The story, with its breathless chase, seemed lost on the first judge, who shifted in his seat and lit a cigarette. The Russian next to him leaned over and whispered. The judge, annoyed, put it out and gazed at the window, where a standing fan was lazily moving the stuffy air. Apparently an unexpected western custom. Jake wondered how long it would take to call a recess.

>   He’d assumed from the buildup that Gunther would be the star witness. Who else was there? The records supplied the mechanics of the crime, but its victims were dead, no longer able to accuse. Gunther had actually seen her do it. And a DA always started with the police, to weight his case at the beginning. The first person called, however, was a Frau Gersh, a more theatrical choice, a frail woman who had to be helped to the witness chair on crutches. The prosecutor began, solicitously, with her feet.

  “From frostbite. On the death march,” she said, halting but matter-of-fact. “They made us leave the camp so the Russians wouldn’t find out. We had to walk in the snow. If you fell, they shot you.”

  “But you were fortunate.”

  “No, I fell. They shot me. Here,” she said, pointing to her hip. “They thought I was dead, so they left me. But I couldn’t move. In the snow. So the feet.”

  She spoke simply, her voice low, so that chairs creaked as people strained forward to hear. Then she looked over at Renate.

  “The camp where she sent me,” she said, louder, spitting it out.

  “I didn’t know,” Renate said, shaking her head. “I didn’t know.”

  The judge glared at her, startled to hear her speak but unsure what to do about it. No one seemed to know what the rules were supposed to be, least of all the defense attorney, who could only silence her with a wave of his hand and nod at the judge, an uneasy apology.

  “She did!” the woman said, forceful now. “She knew.”

  “Frau Gersh,” the prosecutor said deliberately, as if the outburst hadn’t happened, “do you recognize the prisoner?”

  “Of course. The greifer.”

  “She was known to you personally?”

  “No. But I know that face. She came for me, with the men.”

  “That was the first time you saw her?”

  “No. She talked to me at the shoe repair. I should have known, but I didn’t. Then, that same afternoon—”

  “The shoe repair?” one of the judges said, confusing the past with the crutches now on display.

  “One of her contacts,” the prosecutor said. “People in hiding wore out their shoes—from all the walking, to keep moving. So Fräulein Naumann made friends with the shoe men. ‘Who’s been in today? Any strangers?’ She found many this way. This particular shop—” He made a show of checking his notes. “In Schöneberg. Hauptstrasse. That’s correct?”

  “Yes, Hauptstrasse,” Frau Gersh said.

  Jake looked at Renate. Clever, if that’s what you were after, collecting items from cobblers. All her news-gathering tricks, offered to murderers.

  “So she talked to you there?”

  “Yes, you know, the weather, the raids. Just to talk. I didn’t like it—I had to be careful—so I left.”

  “And went home?”

  “No, I had to be careful. I walked to Viktoria Park, then here and there. But when I got back, she was there. With the men. The others—good German people, helping me—were already gone. She sent them away too.”

  “I must point out,” the defense lawyer said, “that at this time, 1944, it was against the law for German citizens to hide Jews. This was an illegal act.”

  The judge looked at him, amazed. “We are not interested in German law,” he said finally. “Are you suggesting that Fräulein Naumann acted correctly?”

  “I’m suggesting that she acted legally.” He looked down. “At the time.”

  “Go on,” the judge said to the prosecutor. “Finish it.”

  “You were taken away then. On what charge?”

  “Charge? I was a Jew.”

  “How did Fräulein Naumann know this? You hadn’t told her?”

  Frau Gersh shrugged. “She said she could always tell. I have papers, I said. No, she told them, she’s a Jew. And of course they listened to her. She worked for them.”

  The prosecutor turned to Renate. “Did you say this?”

  “She was a Jew.”

  “You could tell. How?”

  “The look she had.”

  “What kind of look was that?”

  Renate lowered her eyes. “A Jewish look.”

  “May I ask the prisoner—such a skill—were you ever mistaken?”

  Renate looked at him directly. “No, never. I always knew.”

  Jake sat back, feeling sick. Proud of it. His old friend.

  “Continue, Frau Gersh. You were taken where?”

  “The Jewish Old Age Home. Grosse Hamburger Strasse.” A precise detail, coached.

  “And what happened there?”

  “We were held until they had enough to fill a truck. Then to the train. Then east,” she said, her voice dropping.

  “To the camp,” the prosecutor finished.

  “Yes, to the camp. To the gas. I was healthy, so I worked. The others—” She broke off, then looked again at Renate. “The others you sent were killed.”

  “I didn’t send them. I didn’t know,” Renate said.

  This time the judge held up his hand to silence her.

  “You saw. You saw,” the woman shouted.

  “Frau Gersh,” the prosecutor said, his calm voice a substitute for a gavel, “can you positively identify the prisoner as the woman who came to your house to arrest you?”

  “Yes, positive.”

  Bernie leaned over in another huddle.

  “And did you see her again?”

  Jake glanced at the prosecutor, wondering where he was heading.

  “Yes, from the truck. She was watching us from her window. When they took us away. Watching.”

  An echo of the story from Bernie. A shoe shop in Schöneberg, the American sector. So Bernie had found her, another gift to the Russians.

  “The same woman. You’re positive.”

  Now the woman was shaking, slipping out of control. “The same. The same.” She started to rise from the chair, staring at Renate. “A Jew. Killing your own. You watched them take us away.” The beginning of a sob, no longer in court. “Your own people. Animal! Eating your own, like an animal.”

  “No!” Renate shouted back.

  The judge slapped the desk with his palm and said something in Russian, presumably calling a recess, but the prosecutor hurried up to the bench and began whispering. The judge nodded, slightly taken aback, then said formally to the room, “We will stop for fifteen minutes, but first the photographers will be allowed in. The prisoner will remain standing.”

  Jake followed the prosecutor’s signal to the back of the room, where Ron appeared from the press section, opening the door to let the photographers in. A small group filed down the center of the room. Flashing lights went off in Renate’s face, causing her to blink and turn, shaking her head as if they were flies. The judges sat erect, posing. A soldier helped Frau Gersh onto her crutches. For a second Jake expected to see Liz, snapping history. Then the flashbulbs died out and the judge stood.

  “Fifteen minutes,” he said, already lighting a cigarette.

  In the corridor outside, the crowd of reporters had to press against the wall to let Frau Gersh pass on her crutches. Evidently there would be no cross-examination. Brian Stanley was standing off to one side, drinking from a pocket flask.

  “Not up to Moscow standards, is it?” He offered Jake a drink. “Not the same without the confessions. That’s what they like—all that bloody hand-wringing. Of course, they’ve got a lot to confess, the Russians have.”

  “It’s a farce,” Jake said, watching Frau Gersh leave.

  “’Course it is. Can’t expect the Old Bailey here.” He looked down at his bottle. “Still, not the nicest girl in Berlin, is she?”

  “She used to be. Nice.”

  Brian looked at him, confused, unaware of the connection.

  “Yes, well,” he said, at a loss, then slowly shook his head. “Never mistaken. Brought out the best in everybody, didn’t it? By the way, I found you a boat.”

  “A boat?”

  “You asked about a boat, didn’t you? Anyway, they’ve g
ot a few still. Over at the yacht club. Just mention my name.” He looked up. “You did ask.”

  The afternoon he’d promised Lena, sailing on the lake, away from everything.

  “Yes, sorry, I forgot. Thanks.”

  “Mind you don’t sink it. They’ll make me pay.”

  “Is that a drink?” Benson said, appearing with Ron.

  “It was,” Brian said, handing him the flask.

  “What are you doing here?” Benson said to Jake, then turned to Ron. “And you promised. Stars and Stripes exclusive.”

  “Don’t look at me. How did you get in?” he said to Jake. “They said no more passes.”

  “I’m helping the prosecution. She used to be a friend of mine.”

  An embarrassed silence.

  “Christ,” Ron said finally. “You always turn up one way or the other, don’t you?”

  “Can you get me an interview?”

  “I can request one. So far, nothing. She hasn’t been in a talking mood. I mean, what do you say after that? What can you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she’ll say it to me.”

  “You’d have to share,” Ron said, working. “Everybody wants this story.”

  “Fine. Just get me in.” He looked at Benson. “That was a good piece on Liz. She would have liked it.”

  “Thanks,” Benson said, a little uncomfortable with the compliment. “Hell of a thing. I hear the boyfriend’s all right, though. He got out this morning.”

  Jake’s head snapped up. “What? Yesterday he couldn’t have visitors and today’s he out of there? How did that happen?”

  “What I hear is he’s got friends in Congress,” Benson said, trying to make a joke. “Who the hell wants to stay in the infirmary? They kill more than they cure. Anyway, he’s sitting pretty. Got a nurse in his billet and everything. What’s it to you?”

  Jake turned to Ron, still agitated. “Did you know about this?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I told you,” he said, grabbing Ron’s arm. “She took a bullet for him—somebody wants him dead. Are there guards? Who’s with him in the billet?”

  “What do you mean, took a bullet?” Benson said, but Ron was moving Jake’s hand away, staring.