The Good German (Bestselling Backlist) Read online

  Jake stood for a minute in front of the gloomy institute, unsettled. Emil must have joined. There wouldn’t have been any exceptions. But why did it surprise him? Millions had. A formality. Except Jake hadn’t known. All that time, something unsaid. A pleasant man with gentle eyes, quiet at parties, diffident, who saw numbers in his head—someone Jake never thought about at all. Not a Nazi, one of the good Germans. Standing with his arm around Lena. Had she known? How could he not tell her? And how could she stay with him, knowing? But she had.

  It was getting dark, so he started down Thielallee. A jeep had pulled up in front of the Kommandatura, dropping off two soldiers, who hurried up the stairs with briefcases. New politics, soon to be as old as the Freikorps. What was important? People do what they have to do. She had stayed. Jake had left. That simple. Except Emil wasn’t simple anymore, which changed things. Had she known, those afternoons when they drew the shades to keep Berlin outside?

  Jake felt suddenly disoriented, his mental map redrawn like the city’s streets, no longer where they were supposed to be. When he turned right off Thielallee, he saw, confused, that he was literally lost. The side street didn’t connect back to Gelferstrasse as he’d thought it would. And your German isn’t the best either anymore, he thought to himself, smiling. But he had never known this part of town; the streets here had always gone this way. It was the other Berlin, the one he had known, where you now needed a compass to find your way, some needle pulled by gravity, strong enough to bend starlight.

  CHAPTER 4

  Almost all the other buildings in Elssholzstrasse had been knocked out, so the Control Council headquarters stood even larger now. A massive hulk of Prussian stone, its grim streetfront must have seemed an appropriate way station in the old court days, when the judges inside, party members all, had sentenced their victims to worse prisons. The main entrance, however, around the driveway into Kleist Park, presented a lighter face, tall windowed doors flanked by carved floating angels who looked down across what had been a formal lawn bordered with hedges toward two symmetrical colonnades at the other end, an unexpected piece of Paris. The whole place was noisy with activity—cars crunching on the gravel, a work party repairing the roof, banging tiles—like a country house getting ready for a big weekend party. Four bright new Allied flags had been hung over the entrance; 82nd Airborne guards in white spats and shiny helmets were posted at the doorway. Even the dusty grounds were being tidied up, raked by a detachment of German POWs, the letters stenciled on their backs, while a handful of bored GIs kept watch, standing around idly and taking the sun. Jake followed a group of husky Russian women in uniform through the chandeliered hall and up a grand marble staircase, an opera house entrance. He was met, surprisingly, by Muller himself.

  “I thought you might like a look around,” Muller said, heading them down the corridor. “We’re still trying to get things in shape. Place took a fair amount of damage.”

  “Maybe not enough, given what it was.”

  “Well, we have to use what we can. Biggest place we could find. Over four hundred rooms, they say, although I don’t know who’s counting. Maybe they threw in a closet or two. Of course, only part of it’s usable. This is where the council will sit.” He opened the door to a large chamber, already converted to a meeting room with long tables arranged in a square. In each corner, near their respective flags, were desks with shorthand typewriters for recording secretaries. A stack of ashtrays and notepads sat on one table, waiting to be distributed.

  “Nobody’s been here yet,” Muller said. “You’re the first, if that means anything to you.”

  Jake looked around the empty room, feeling he was back at the Cecilienhof, counting chimneys. “No press section?”

  “No press section. We don’t want to encourage speeches—hard to resist with the press around. Give them an audience, they can’t help themselves. We want working sessions.”

  “Nice and private.”

  “No.” He nodded to the recording desks. “There’ll be minutes. The council will meet once a quarter,” he continued. “The Coordinating Committee once a month, the subcommittees—well, all the time. There’s a lot to do.”

  Jake fingered the stack of notepads. “All organized.”

  “On paper,” Muller said, leaning against the table, his back to the window, so that his silver hair developed a halo of light. “Actually, nobody knows how it’s going to work. Until we do it. We’re making it up as we go along. Nobody planned on this, running the country.” He noticed Jake’s raised eyebrows. “Not this way. They trained a few people, somewhere down in Virginia—to help the Germans with the transition,” he said, drawing out the word. “Transition. I don’t know what they expected. The last war, I suppose. Get a peace treaty, hand the country over to the good guys, and go home. But not this time. There wasn’t anybody to hand it over to. Twelve years. Even the mailmen were Nazis. And the country—you’ve seen it, it’s just shot to hell. Nobody expected them to fight to the end. Why would they? You don’t expect a whole country to commit suicide.”

  “They had a little help from bomber command.”

  Muller nodded. “I don’t say they didn’t ask for it. But now it’s flat and we’ve got it. No food, nothing running—Berlin HQ has got its hands full just fixing the water mains.” He took a breath and looked directly at Jake. “We’ve got twenty million people to feed in our zone alone. The ones who aren’t starving are stealing bicycles just to get around. We’ve got a winter coming with no coal. Epidemics, if we’re not lucky, which we probably won’t be. DPs—” He waved his hand as if, overwhelmed, he’d run out of words. “We didn’t sign on for any of this,” he said, his voice as tired as his eyes, “but we’ve got it anyway. So there’s a lot to do.” He glanced at the room. “Seen enough?”

  Jake nodded. “Thanks for the look. And the speech,” he added easily. “You wouldn’t be trying to tell me something, by any chance.”

  Muller smiled patiently, Judge Hardy again. “Maybe just a little. I’ve been regular army all my life—we’re used to protecting our flanks. People who write about MG, maybe they should have some idea what we’re up against. A little perspective. We’re not all—well, come on, I’ll give you what you came for.”

  “How did you end up here, anyway?” Jake said, following him out into the long hall.

  “Like everyone else—they don’t need us in the field now, so we’ve got to serve our time out somewhere. I didn’t volunteer, if that’s what you mean. Tactical units don’t have much use for MG, think we’re just office boys. I wasn’t any different. Nobody’s going to get a promotion for fixing sewer lines. But nobody’s getting promoted in the field now either—the war’s over, they tell me—and I have a while to go before they pension me off. So. We’re long on old farts here. The civilians, that’s something else. Most of the time it’s some lawyer who sat out the war in Omaha and now wants a commission so he can call himself captain—they won’t sign on for the lower ranks. They get it too, the rank. What the rest of us had to work years for. It rubs a little, if you let it.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “I did. But it’s like anything else—the work takes over. You serve your country,” he said flatly, without a hint of irony. “I didn’t ask for it, but you know what? I think we’re doing one helluva job here, given everything. Or does that sound like another speech to you?”

  “No.” Jake smiled. “It sounds like they ought to promote you.”

  “They won’t,” Muller said evenly, then stopped and faced him. “You know, this is probably my last post. I wouldn’t want to see—any mess. If you’re going to start flinging mud around, I’d appreciate a little early warning.”

  “I’m not—”

  “I know, you’re just curious. So are we. A man’s been killed. And the truth is, we have no way of finding out what happened. We don’t have Scotland Yard here, just some MPs arresting drunks. So we may never know. But if there’s anything that might, well, be a problem for us, that
we do need to know.”

  “What makes you think there is?”

  “I don’t. But that’s what you’re fishing for, isn’t it?” He started walking again. “Look, all I’m asking is you meet me halfway on this. I don’t have to release any information. If you hadn’t been there at Potsdam—but you were, and you knew him. So now I’ve got a situation. I can’t pretend it didn’t happen. But I don’t have to open this up to a lot of speculation either. I’m releasing it to you, not anybody else. If you do turn up something, okay, you’ve got yourself a story.”

  “But if I don’t—”

  “Then you don’t guess out loud. No mystery body. No unsolved anything. You might get some mileage out of that in the papers. But all we’d get is a lot of questions we can’t answer. That just eats time. We can’t afford that. There’s too much to do. All I’m asking is a little discretion.”

  “And tell you in advance what I’m going to say.”

  “I didn’t say you couldn’t say it. Just tell me if it’s coming.”

  “So you can deny it?”

  “No,” Muller said, deadpan. “So I can duck.” He stopped at a door paned with translucent glass. “Here we are. Jeanie should have the copies by now.”

  Jeanie was a pretty WAC whose red fingernails seemed too long for serious typing. She was putting carbon sheets into two beige folders and threw Muller a smile that Jake, amused, guessed was more than secretarial. Muller, however, was all business.

  “Got those reports?”

  She handed him one of the folders, then a message slip. “The general wants you at ten.”

  “Come on, then,” he said to Jake, leading him into a plain office with an American flag in the corner. Muller belonged to the clean desk school—the only things on the empty surface were a pen set and a framed picture of a young soldier.

  “Your boy?” Jake asked.

  Muller nodded. “He was hit on Guadalcanal.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, not killed. Wounded. At least he’s out of it now.” Then, avoiding any more intimacy, he opened the folder, took out two carbon flimsies, and pushed them across the desk to Jake. “Service record. Casualty report.”

  “You’re calling it a casualty?”

  “It’s what we call the report,” Muller said, slightly annoyed. “It’s just a form. Anyway, now you know what we know.”

  Jake skimmed the first sheet, a spare listing of dates and assignments. Patrick Tully. Natick, Mass. A little older than the boy in the picture on the desk. The casualty report Jake could have written himself. “Not much, is it?” he said.

  “No.”

  “What isn’t here? Any trouble before that didn’t make it into the record?”

  “Not that I know of. Service record’s clean, no flags. A distinguished member of the United States Armed Forces. That’s what we’re going to write to his mother, anyway.”

  “Yes,” Jake said. A person, not a number, a kid with a family, not as lucky as young Muller. “What about the money?”

  “She’ll get that too, with his effects. APO money order. It was his, as far as we know. Let’s hope she thinks he saved his back pay.”

  “How much was there? It doesn’t say.”

  Muller looked at him, then nodded. “Fifty-six thousand marks. They convert at ten to one. So roughly five thousand dollars. That’s what the Russians gave us, anyway. They say some of it blew away.”

  “So figure twice that. That’s a lot of back pay.”

  “Maybe he was good at cards,” Muller said.

  “What brings in that kind of money? On the black market.”

  “Watches, mostly. If it ticks, the Russians’ll buy it. A Mickey Mouse can go for five hundred bucks.”

  “That’s still a lot of watches.”

  “That depends how long he was doing it. If he was doing it. Look, on the record? There is no black market. Sometimes supply depots come up a little short. Things disappear. One of the facts of wartime. The Germans are hungry. They’ll buy food any way they can. It’s about food. Naturally, we’re doing what we can to stop it.”

  “And off the record?”

  “Off the record, everybody does it. How do you stop a kid in a candy store? Want to do some quick arithmetic? A GI’s allowed a carton of cigarettes a week at the PX. A nickel a pack, fifty cents a carton. On the street, it’s worth a hundred dollars—that’s five thousand dollars a year. Add in some chocolate, four bottles of liquor a month, another five thousand dollars. A package of food from home? Maybe some tuna fish, a can of soup? More. Lots more. It adds up. A guy can make a year’s salary just from his rations. You try stopping that. Officially, there’s no fraternization either. So how do we explain all the VD?”

  Jake glanced down at the sheet. “He’d only been in Germany since May.”

  “What do you want me to say? Some of our boys are more enterprising than others. You don’t have to be a big operator to make money in Germany. Last month our troops were paid about a million dollars. They sent three million home.” He paused. “Off the record.”

  Jake stared, staggered by the figure. “I didn’t think the Germans had that much money.”

  “The Germans. They’re selling silverware for a stick of margarine. Whatever they’ve got left. The Russians have the money.”

  Jake thought of the ragtag guards at the Chancellery, the peasants wheeling carts through Potsdamerplatz, as primitive as a muddy village. “The Russians have that kind of money?” he said dubiously. “Since when?”

  Muller looked at him. “Since we gave it to them.” He hesitated. “How far off the record are we?”

  “Farther every minute.”

  Muller sat back. “I’m going to hold you to that. You see, the original plan was to issue occupation marks. Something all the forces could use here and the locals would accept, not gum up the works with four different currencies. Fine. So the Treasury made up the engraving plates and, like idiots, gave a set to the Russians. Same money. Of course, the idea was they’d keep a strict accounting of theirs, since it would have to be convertible to hard currency—dollars, pounds, whatever. Instead they just started the presses and kept going. Nobody knows how much they made. Most of their troops hadn’t been paid in three years. They got it all in occupation marks. The hitch is, they can’t take them home—the Russians won’t convert them—and now you’ve got a whole army with more money than they’ve ever seen before in their lives and one place to spend it. Here. So they buy watches and whatever else they can carry home. At any price. It’s Monopoly money to them. And meanwhile, since the currency has to be honored, our boys take the marks they get and send them home as dollars and the Treasury has one hell of a drain on its hands. We yell and scream, of course, but I’d lay you even money—in dollars—that we’re never going to see one ruble for those plates. The Russians say their marks just circulate in Germany, keeping the local wheels going—the Germans’ tab. And we have a small problem explaining why so many are flooding back home, since there is no black market—so we pay. We’re paying, in fact, for the Russian occupation here. But nobody wants to touch that story.” He smiled. “And neither do you.”

  “I’m not even sure I understand it.”

  “Nobody understands money. Except what’s in his pocket. Which is lucky for the Treasury. If we’d pulled a stunt like that, they’d court-martial us out of here in no time.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “That’s the ten o’clock meeting. General Clay wants to limit the amount a man can send home to his actual pay. It’ll be a headache for the APO, just keeping track, and it won’t solve everything, but at least it’ll stop the worst of the bleeding. Of course they can still send goods home, but the money will stay here, where it belongs. Ultimately, the only thing that’s going to work is a new currency, but don’t hold your breath. How fast do you think the Russians would agree to that?”

  “I mean, what are you doing on the ground? How do you police it?”
/>   “Well, it’s a problem. MP raids the worst spots from time to time, but that’s just a little finger in the dike. Berlin’s an open city—people go where they want—but it’s just administered in zones. So we can’t patrol Zoo Station, that’s the Brits. Alexanderplatz is in the Russian zone.”

  “Like Potsdam.”

  Muller looked up at him. “Like Potsdam. There’s nothing we can do there.”

  “What about off the street? This much money—somebody must be running things.”

  “You mean gangs? Professionals? That I don’t know. And I’d doubt it. You hear rumors about the DPs, but people like to blame the DPs for everything. Nobody polices them. The kind of thing you’re talking about, you’d have to go back to Bavaria or Frankfurt, where there’s still something to steal. Warehouses. Big hoardings. It happens, and I suppose Frankfurt must have somebody on it, if you’re interested. But Berlin? It’s been picked pretty clean. What you’ve got here is a lot of small money that adds up.”

  “That’s a fair description of the numbers racket too.”

  A reluctant smile. “I guess.” Muller paused, spreading his hands on the desk. “Look. A soldier sells a watch. Maybe he shouldn’t, and maybe you don’t think we’re doing enough to stop him. But I’ll tell you this—I’ve seen lots of men die in the last few years. Ripped up, holding their guts in. Good men. Kids. Nobody thought they were criminals then. Now they’re picking up a few bucks. Maybe it’s wrong, but you know what? I’m still a soldier. I think they’re worth two million a month.”

  “So do I,” Jake said slowly. “I just don’t like to see them get shot. It doesn’t seem right. For a watch.”

  Muller looked at him, disconcerted, then lowered his head. “No. Well. Is there anything else?”