His little rat’s eyes got there ahead of me, however.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said politely. “But aren’t you Chief Inspector Gunther? From the Homicide Division?”
“Have we met?”
“I was working Vice Squad at the Alex when I think I saw you last. My name is Willms. Nikolaus Willms.”
I nodded silently.
“Vice isn’t as glamorous as Homicide,” he said. “But it has its moments.”
He smiled without smiling—the sort of expression a snake has when it opens its mouth to swallow something whole. He was smaller than me, but he had the ambitious look of a man who might eventually swallow something larger than himself.
“So what takes you to Paris?” I asked without much interest.
“This isn’t my first trip,” he said. “I’ve been there for the last two weeks. I only came back to Berlin to attend to a family matter.”
“You still have some work to do there?”
“There’s plenty of vice in Paris, sir.”
“So I’m led to believe.”
“Although with any luck I won’t be stuck in Vice for very long.”
“No?”
Willms shook his head. He was small but powerful, and sat with his legs apart and his arms folded, as if watching a football match. He said:
“After the SD school in Bernau, I was sent on an exclusive leadership course in Berlin-Charlottenburg. It was the people who ran that course who organized this posting. I speak fluent French, you see. I’m from Trier originally.”
“So that’s what I can hear in your accent. French. I imagine that comes in handy in your line of work.”
“To be honest with you, sir, it’s rather dull work. I’m hoping for something a bit more exciting than a lot of French whores.”
“There are about five hundred soldiers on this train who would disagree with that, Lieutenant.”
He smiled, a proper smile this time, with teeth, only it didn’t work any better, the way a smile was supposed to work.
“So what are you hoping for?”
“My father was killed in the war,” Willms explained. “At Verdun. By a French sniper. I was two when that happened So I’ve always hated the French. I hate everything about them. I suppose I’d like a chance to pay them back for what they did to me. For taking my dad away from us. For giving me such a miserable childhood. My family should have left Trier, but we couldn’t afford to go. So we stayed. My mother and my sisters. We stayed in Trier and we were hated.” He nodded thoughtfully. “I should very much like to work for the Gestapo in Paris. Giving the Franzis a hard time sounds just about right to me. Cool a few, if you know what I mean, sir.”
“The war’s over,” I said. “I should think your chances for cooling any French, as you put it, are rather limited now. They’ve surrendered.”
“Oh, I should think there are some left who’ve still got a bit of fight in them. Don’t you? Terrorists. We’ll have to deal with them, surely. If you hear of anything in that line, sir, perhaps you’d let me know. I’m keen to get on. And to get out of Vice.” He smiled his reptilian smile and patted the briefcase on the seat next to him. “Until then,” he added, “perhaps I might do you a favor.”
“Oh? How?”
“In this briefcase I’ve got a list of about three hundred Paris restaurants and seven hundred hotels that are to be declared off-limits because of prostitution. And a list of about thirty that are officially approved. Not that anyone will take a blind bit of notice either way. It’s been my experience of vice that all the law in the world won’t stop a fellow who’s intent on having a bit of mouse or a whore who’s ready to give it to him. Anyway, it’s my considered opinion that if a man is looking for a good time in Paris then he could do a lot worse than go to the Hotel Fairyland on the place Blanche in Pigalle. According to the Prefecture of Police in the rue de Lutèce, the girls working in Fairyland are free of venereal disease. Of course, it might be asked how they know that, and I think the simple answer would have to be that it’s Paris, and of course the police would know that.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I just thought you might like to know that yourself, sir. Before the word gets around.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant. I’ll bear it in mind. But I think I’m going to be too busy to go looking for any more trouble than I already have. I’m on a case, see? An old case, and I figure I’ve got my work laid out in front of me. Anything else gets laid out, I’m liable to get even more distracted than seems reasonable, even in Paris. I’d like to tell you more about it, but I can’t for security reasons. You see, the man I’m after got away from me before. And I don’t intend to let that happen again. They could put hot and cold running Michèle Morgan in my hotel bedroom and still I’d have to behave myself.”
Willms smiled his snake smile, the one he probably used when he wanted to get some poor little snapper to give him one for free. I knew what these bulls from Vice were like. But while he was loathsome, I didn’t doubt that he might actually have been useful to my mission, and I suppose I could have offered him a job. I had a letter from Heydrich that would have compelled any man’s commanding officer to offer me his full cooperation. But I didn’t offer him a job. I didn’t because you don’t pick up a snake unless you really have to.
Arriving at Paris’s Gare de l’Est in the late afternoon, I presented my taxi warrant to a wurst-faced NCO, who directed me to a military car already occupied by another officer. Petrol was scarce, and since we were to be billeted in the same hotel across the river, we were obliged to share a driver, an SS corporal from Essen who attempted to forestall our impatience at getting to the hotel by warning us that the speed limit was only forty kph.
“And it’s worse at night,” he added. “Then it’s just thirty. Which is really crazy.”
“Surely it’s safer that way,” I said. “Because of the blackout.”
“No, sir,” said the corporal. “Nighttime is when this city comes alive. That’s when people really want to get somewhere. Somewhere important.”
“Like where?” asked my brother officer, a naval lieutenant who was attached to the Abwehr—German military intelligence. “For example?”
The driver smiled. “This is Paris, sir. There’s only one business of real importance here, sir. Or so you might think from the number of staff officers I drive to their liaisons, sir. The only business in Paris that’s doing better than ever before, sir, is the business of male and female relations, sir. In a word, prostitution. This city is rife with it. And you’d think some of these Germans coming here have never seen a girl before, the way they go at it.”
“Good God,” exclaimed the Abwehr lieutenant, whose name was Kurt Boger.
“There will be plenty of German reinforcements on the way soon,” said the driver. “Little Germans, that is. My advice to you both is to find yourselves a nice little girlfriend and get it for free. But if you’re short of time, the best brothels in the city are Maison Chabanais, at number twelve rue Chabanais, and the One Twenty-two on rue de Provence.”
“I heard the Fairyland was good,” I said.
“No, that’s rubbish, sir. With all due respect. Whoever told you that is talking out of their arse. The Fairyland is a real knocking shop. You want to keep away from there, sir, in case you wind up with a dose of jelly. If you’ll forgive me for saying so. Maison Chabanais is for officers only. The madame, Mademoiselle Marthe, runs a very classy house.”
Boger, hardly a typical sailor, was tutting loudly and shaking his head.
“But you’ll be all right at the Hôtel Lutetia,” said the driver, changing the subject. “It’s a very respectable hotel. There’s nothing going on there.”
“I’m relieved to hear it,” said Boger.
“All of the best hotels have been taken over by us Germans,” said the driver. “The general staff with red stripes on their trousers and the party big guns are at the Majestic and the Crillon. But I reckon you’re both better off here on the left bank.”
S
ecurity near the Lutetia was tight. A protective zone of sandbags and wooden barriers had been established around the hotel and armed sentries manned the entrance, to the general bewilderment of the hotel’s doorman and porters. All traffic save German military vehicles was forbidden in the zone. There wasn’t much traffic, however, since the last thing the French army had done before abandoning the city to its fate was to set fire to several fuel-storage depots to prevent them from falling into our hands. But the Paris Métro was still running, that much was evident. You could feel it underneath your feet in the Lutetia hotel lobby. Not that it was easy to see your feet, there were so many German officers milling around—SS, RSHA, Abwehr, Secret Field Police (the GFP)—and all goose-stepping on one another’s toes, because there was no one I knew who could have told you for sure where the responsibilities of one security service ended and another’s began. It wasn’t exactly Babel, but there was plenty of confusion all around, and in turning men from the fear of God to a constant dependence on his own power, Hitler made a convincing Nimrod.
The Lutetia staff were no less confused than we were ourselves. When I asked the German-speaking porter to identify the cupola I could see from my window, he told me he wasn’t sure; and, calling a maid over to the window, they debated the matter for a couple of minutes before, finally, they decided that the cupola was the dome of the church at Les Invalides where Napoleon was buried. A little later on I discovered that it was in fact the Pantheon, in the opposite direction. Otherwise, the service at the Lutetia was good, although hardly on a par with the Adlon in Berlin. And I couldn’t help favorably contrasting my current French accommodation with what I’d endured in the Great War. Crisp, clean sheets and a well-stocked cocktail bar made a very pleasant change from a flooded trench and some warm ersatz coffee. The experience was almost enough to complete my conversion to being a Nazi.
I wasn’t fond of the French. The war—the Great War—was much too recent in my mind to make me like them, but I felt sorry for them now that they were second-class citizens in their own country. They were forbidden the best hotels and restaurants; Maxim’s was under German management; on the Paris Métro, first-class carriages were reserved for Germans; and the French, for whom good food was virtually a religion, found it was rationed and there were long lines for bread, wine, meat, and cigarettes. Of course, nothing was in short supply if you were German. And I enjoyed an excellent dinner at Lapérouse—a nineteenth-century restaurant that looked more like a brothel than the brothels.
The next day, Paul Kestner was waiting for me in the Lutetia lobby, as arranged. We shook hands like old friends and admired each other’s tailoring. German officers did a lot of that in 1940, especially in Paris, where fine clothes seemed to matter more.
Kestner was tall and thin and round-shouldered like someone who had spent a lot of time behind a desk. His head was almost completely hairless apart from the dark eyebrows that softened his solidly cut features. It was a face engraved with integrity, and it was hard to believe that a man with a jaw as square as the Brandenburg Gate could have betrayed the police service and then me with such impunity. Kestner’s was a head that belonged on a Swiss banknote, only I’d spent a large part of the rail journey from Berlin considering the idea of putting a bullet in it. Heydrich’s myrmidons had done their homework well. The file he’d handed me in his car contained a copy of the anonymous letter Kestner had sent to the Jew desk denouncing me as a mischling, as well as a sample of Kestner’s own identical handwriting, which, conveniently, he had also signed. There was even a photograph taken in March 1925—before he’d joined the Berlin police—of Kestner wearing the uniform of a Communist Party cadre and aboard a KPD election bus, with a placard over his shoulder on which was printed “You Must Elect Thalmann.” At the very same moment I smiled and shook Kestner’s hand and talked about the old times we shared, I wanted to punch his teeth in, and the only thing that seemed likely to stop me from doing it was the affection I still held for his little sister.
“How’s Traudl?” I asked. “Has she finished medical school?”
“Yes. She’s a doctor now. Working for something called the Charitable Foundation for Health and Institutional Care. Some government-funded clinic in Austria.”
“You’ll have to give me the address,” I said. “So that I can send her a postcard from Paris.”
“It’s the Schloss Hartheim,” he explained. “In Alkoven, near Linz.”
“Not too near Linz, I hope. Hitler’s from Linz.”
“Same old Bernie Gunther.”
“Not quite. You’re forgetting this pirate hat I’m wearing now.” I tapped the silver skull and crossbones on my gray officer’s cap.
“That reminds me.” Kestner glanced at his wristwatch. “We have an eleven-o’clock appointment with Colonel Knochen at the Hôtel du Louvre.”
“He’s not here at the Lutetia?”
“No. Colonel Rudolf of the Abwehr is in charge here. Knochen likes to run his own show. The SD is mostly at the Hôtel du Louvre, on the other side of the river.”
“I wonder why they put me here.”
“Possibly to piss Rudolf off,” said Kestner. “Since almost certainly he knows nothing about your mission. By the way, Bernie, what is your mission? The Prinz Albrechtstrasse has been rather secretive about what you’re doing in Paris.”
“You remember that communist who murdered the two policemen in Berlin in 1931? Erich Mielke?”
To his credit, Kestner didn’t even flinch at the mention of this name.
“Vaguely,” he said.
“Heydrich thinks he’s in a French concentration camp somewhere in the south of France. My orders are to find him, get him back to Paris, and then arrange his transport back to Berlin, where he’s to stand trial.”
“Nothing else?”
“What else could there be?”
“Only that we could have organized that on our own, without your having to come here to Paris. You don’t even speak French.”
“You forget, Paul. I’ve met Mielke. If he’s changed his name, as seems likely, I might be able to identify him.”
“Yes, of course. I remember now. We just missed him in Hamburg, didn’t we?”
“That’s right.”
“Seems like a lot of effort for just one man. Are you sure there’s nothing else?”
“What Heydrich wants, Heydrich gets.”
“Point made,” said Kestner. “Well. Shall we walk? It’s a fine day.”
“Is it safe?”
Kestner laughed. “From who? The French?” He laughed again. “Let me tell you something about the French, Bernie. They know that it’s in their interest to get on with us Fridolins. That’s what they call us. Quite a lot of them are happy we’re here. Christ, they’re even more anti-Semitic than we are.” He shook his head. “No. You’ve got nothing to worry about from the French, my friend.”
Unlike Kestner, I didn’t speak a word of French, but it was easy to find your way around Paris. There were German direction signs on every street corner. It was a pity I didn’t have a similar arrangement inside my own head; it might have made it easier to decide what to do about Kestner.
Kestner’s French was, to my Fridolin ears, perfect, which is to say he sounded like a Frenchman. His father was a chemist who, disgusted by the Dreyfus affair, had left Alsace to live in Berlin. In those days, Berlin had been a more tolerant place than France. Paul Kestner had been just five years old when he came to live in Berlin, but for the rest of his life his mother always spoke to him in French.
“That’s how I got this posting,” he said as we walked north to the Seine.
“I didn’t think it was because of your love of art.”
The Hôtel du Louvre on the rue de Rivoli was older than the Lutetia but not dissimilar, with four façades and several hundred rooms; with an international reputation for luxury, it was a natural choice for the Gestapo and the SD. Security was every bit as tight as at the Lutetia, and we were obliged to sign in at a ma
keshift guardroom inside the front door. An SS orderly escorted us through the lobby and up a sweeping staircase to the public rooms, where the SD had established some temporary offices. Kestner and I were ushered into a tasteful salon with a rich red carpet and a series of hand-painted murals. We sat down at a long mahogany table and waited. A few minutes passed before three SD officers entered the room—one of whom I recognized.
The last time I had seen Herbert Hagen had been in 1937 in Cairo, where he and Adolf Eichmann were attempting to make contact with Haj Amin, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Hagen had been an SS sergeant then and a rather incompetent one. Now he was a major and aide to Colonel Helmut Knochen, who was a lugubrious officer of about thirty—about the same age as Hagen. The third officer, also a major, was older than the other two, with thick, horn-rimmed glasses and a face that was as thin and gray as the piping on his cap. His name was Karl Bömelburg. But it was Hagen who took charge of the meeting and came swiftly to the point without any reference to our former meeting. That suited me just fine.