The One From the Other (40 page)

I had heard about the Nazi doctors trial, of course. I remembered the surprise I had felt that the Allies should have seen fit to hang the president of the German Red Cross—at least that is until I read about how he had conducted sterilization experiments, and forced Jews to drink seawater. A lot of people—most people, including Kirsten—had refused to believe any of the evidence presented at the trial. Kirsten had said that the photographs and documents presented during the four-month-long trial had been faked in a grand sham to humiliate Germany even more. That the witnesses and victims who had survived had all been lying. I myself had found it all hard to comprehend—that we, perhaps the most civilized nation on earth, could have done such appalling things in the name of medical science. Hard to comprehend, yes. But not so hard to believe. After my own experiences on the Russian front, I came to believe human beings were capable of an unlimited degree of inhumanity. Perhaps that—our very inhumanity—is what makes us human most of all. I was beginning to understand what was going on. I still had one question about what Gruen and Jacobs and Henkell were up to. But it was the kind of question to which I had a good idea where to find the answer.

When the last IP vehicle had set off from outside the Justice building, I walked onto Heldenplatz, the great square of green that faced onto the Ring. Ahead of me was the New Palace, also occupied by the Russian army, and decorated with a large picture of Uncle Joe. I passed through an arcaded walk and onto a cobbled square that was home to the empty Spanish Riding School—the horses were all safe from Russian appetites—and the National Library. I went inside the library. A man was polishing a wooden floor as big as a football field. The library itself was chilly and, for the most part, unused. I approached the main desk and awaited the attention of the librarian, who was busy writing a catalogue card. The sign on her desk said “Inquiries.” But it might just as easily have said
“Cave canem.”
A couple of minutes passed before, with her glasses flashing the Morse code for “Go away,” she finally condescended to acknowledge my presence by looking at me.

“Yes?”

There was a blue rinse in her gray hair and her mouth was as severe as a geometry box. She wore a white blouse and a double-breasted navy blue jacket. She reminded me a little of Admiral Dönitz. There was a hearing aid attached to her pocket. I bent toward it and pointed at one of the marble statues.

“Actually, I think he’s been waiting rather longer than I have,” I said.

Just for that she showed me her teeth. They were better than the Russian woman’s. Strong-looking, too. Someone had been feeding her meat.

“Sir,” she said crisply. “This is the National Library of Vienna. If it’s laughs you want, I suggest you find a cabaret. If it’s a book, then maybe I can help you.”

“Actually, I’m looking for a magazine,” I told her.

“A magazine?” She uttered the word as if it were something venereal.

“Yes. An American magazine. Do you keep American magazines here?”

“Sadly, yes, we do. Which magazine was it that you were looking for?”

“
Life
magazine,” I said. “The issue for June 4, 1945.”

“Follow me, please,” she said, getting up from behind her woodpaneled redoubt.

“I’d be delighted to.”

“Most of what we have here is from the collection of Eugene of Savoy,” she said. “However, for the benefit of our American visitors, we do keep copies of
Life
magazine. Frankly, it’s the only thing they ever ask for.”

“Then I guess it’s my lucky day,” I said.

“Isn’t it just?”

Five minutes later I was seated at a refectory table staring at the magazine Major Jacobs had not wanted me to see. And on the face of it, it was hard to see why. On the front was an open letter written by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to the American people. And when I turned the pages it was full of patriotic war effort and wholesome American smiles, as well as advertisements for General Electric, Iodent, and Westinghouse. There was a nice picture of Humphrey Bogart getting married to Lauren Bacall, and an even nicer one of Himmler taken minutes after he had poisoned himself. I liked it better than the one of Bogart. I turned some more pages. Pictures of an English seaside resort. And then, on page forty-three, what I presumed I was looking for. A short article about how eight hundred convicts in three American penitentiaries had volunteered to be infected with malaria so that medical men could study the disease. It was easy to see why Jacobs might have been sensitive about such an article. What the American Office of Scientific Research and Development had done in prisons in Georgia, Illinois, and New Jersey looked very much like what SS doctors had done in Dachau. Clearly, the Americans had hanged men for what they themselves had done in their own prisons. It was true that all of these convicts were volunteers, but then Gruen and Henkell might easily have argued the same excuse. Engelbertina, or Albertine, was probably the proof of that. Reading this story in
Life
and seeing the photographs gave me an itch. Not the kind of itch you get from seeing men with bottles containing infected mosquitoes pressed to their abdomens—a curiously medieval-looking picture, like some ancient bee-sting remedy. But another kind of itch. The kind of itch you get when you start to suspect something unpleasant has been going on. The kind of itch that won’t be satisfied until you have scratched it.

I found a copy of Lange’s medical dictionary and, looking up the symptoms of malaria and those of viral meningitis, discovered that the two illnesses produced several symptoms that were more or less identical. In the Bavarian Alps, where mosquitoes are not exactly common, it would have been all too easy to have passed off several dozen men dying of malaria as an outbreak of viral meningitis. Who would have suspected it? All those German POWs had been used for medical experiments. Just like eight hundred American convicts. Not to mention all those people at Dachau and Majdanek. It seemed hard to believe, but experiments on human beings, for which seven Nazi doctors had been hanged at Landsberg, were obviously still going on, and under the protection of the CIA. The hypocrisy of it was staggering.

THIRTY-SIX

There was an Overseas Telephone and Telegraph Office on the ground floor of the Alliance Building in Alserstrasse, in the Ninth District. I approached an operator. He had a nose like a windsock and hair that was a sort of badger-color—gray on the outside and darker underneath. I gave him the Garmisch number, bought a kilogram of coins, and went to the telephone booth he had indicated. I didn’t expect to get through, but I figured it was worth a try. While I waited for my connection I thought about what I was going to say and hoped I could restrain myself from just using a lot of the words we used to use on the Russian front. I sat in the booth for about ten minutes before the telephone rang and the operator told me that the other phone was ringing. After a moment or two it was picked up and I heard a distant voice. Garmisch was only three hundred miles, but I imagined the call had to go through the telephone exchange in Linz, which was in the Russian zone of occupation, before being rerouted via Salzburg (in the American zone) and Innsbrück (in the French). The French were considered the least efficient of the four powers and the poor quality of the line was very likely their fault. But recognizing Eric Gruen’s voice, I started to pump a fistful of ten-groschen coins into the telephone, and after fifteen or twenty seconds we were speaking. Gruen seemed genuinely pleased to hear from me.

“Bernie,” he said. “I was hoping you would call. So that I might have a chance to tell you how sorry I am for landing you in a tight spot. Really, I am.”

“A tight spot,” I said. “Is that what you call it when you try to put another man’s head in a noose that’s meant for you?”

“I’m afraid it has to be that way, Bernie,” he said. “You see, I can’t begin my new life in America until Eric Gruen is officially dead, or in prison for his so-called war crimes. You can blame Jacobs for that. He says the CIA won’t have it any other way. If it ever got out that they had allowed a Nazi doctor into the country there would be hell to pay. It’s really as simple as that.”

“That much I understand,” I said. “But why have two innocent women killed if all you wanted was for me to take your rap? You, or Jacobs, or whichever Ami does your dirty work here in Vienna, could have just arranged for my arrest at the hotel.”

“And if we’d done what you say? Think about it, Bernie. You would have told them you were Bernie Gunther. Even without a passport the Allied authorities would probably check out your story, find out who you really are. No, we had to make sure that Bernie Gunther had nowhere to go. And I mean nowhere. When you’re planning your next move, you might think about this, Bernie. The penalty for murder, especially the despicable murders you have committed, is death. They’ll hang Bernie Gunther if they catch him. But depending on who catches Eric Gruen, you might get away with life imprisonment. And the way things are going in the Federal Republic right now, you’ll probably be out in less than ten years. It could even be just five. You can do my time and then come out to some money in the bank. If you stop to think about it, Bernie, you’ll agree that I’ve been remarkably generous. I mean, you’ve got the money, haven’t you? Twenty-five thousand schillings is not a bad sum to have waiting for you when you come out of Landsberg. Really, Bernie, I could have left you without a groschen to your name.”

“You’ve been very generous,” I said, biting my lip and hoping that he might let something slip. Some crumb of information that might be useful to me in working my escape from Vienna.

“You know, if I were you, I’d give myself up. As Eric Gruen, of course. And you’d best do it before they catch Bernie Gunther and hang him.”

I shoved some more coins into the telephone and laughed. “I don’t see how things could be any worse than they already are,” I said. “You’ve made quite sure of that.”

“Oh, but they could,” he said. “Believe me. Vienna’s a closed city, Bernie. It’s not so easy to get out of it. And under those circumstances I don’t think it would take one of those squads of Israeli avengers very long to track you down. What do they call themselves? The Nakam? Or is it the Brichah? Some soap name, anyway. Did you know that they are based in Austria? No, probably not. In fact, Linz and Vienna are their center of operations. Major Jacobs knows some of these soaps quite well. For one thing, he’s a soap himself, of course. And for another, there are several of those soaps working for the Nakam who are also working for the CIA. As a matter of fact, it was a CIA soap who killed the real Frau Warzok. Hardly surprising after what she did at Lemberg-Janowska. Really terrible things. I know, I was there. She was a real beast, that woman. Killing Jews for sport, that kind of thing.”

“Whereas you only killed them to further the cause of medical science,” I said.

“Now you’re just being sarcastic, Bernie,” he said. “And I don’t blame you. But what you say is quite true. I never killed anyone for the pleasure of it. I’m a doctor. None of us did, as a matter of fact.”

“And Vera? What’s your justification for killing her?”

“I can’t say that I approved of that,” said Gruen. “But Jacobs thought it would help to put you on your toes.”

“Maybe I will give myself up as Bernie Gunther after all,” I said. “Just to spoil your plans.”

“You could do that, yes,” he said. “But Jacobs has some powerful friends in Vienna. Somehow I think they’ll make it stick that you’re Eric Gruen. Even you will get to see the sense of it when you’re in police custody.”

“Whose idea was this, anyway?”

“Oh, Jacobs. He’s a very devious sort of person, our Major Jacobs. He got the idea when he and Wolfram Romberg came to dig up your garden in Dachau. He noticed the similarity between us as soon as he met you, Bernie. Originally he was going to come back to Dachau and get things started to frame you there. But then, of course, you moved to Munich and returned to your former trade. And that’s when we hatched the scheme to have you go looking for Friedrich Warzok. Just to make you think you’d stepped on the toes of some old comrades. Enough to earn yourself a good beating, so we might effect some important alterations to the tailor-made suit we were making for you. Such as losing that all-important finger. Those old SS files are irritatingly precise in the way they describe all of one’s distinguishing characteristics. That was rather clever of him, don’t you think? It’s the first thing any Allied War Crimes investigator or Jewish avenger squad would look for. That missing finger of mine.”

“And the woman who hired me?”

“My wife. The first time she came to look for you was in Dachau, and of course you’d gone. Then she came to your offices to take a good look at you, to see if Jacobs was right about there being a resemblance. And she agreed, there was. Which is when we sat down with the major and helped him to cook up the whole plot. Which I have to say was the fun part. It was kind of like writing our own play, inventing our own parts. And making sure our stories all worked out. Then all we had to do was get you down here to Garmisch so that you and I could get to know each other better.”

“But you could hardly know that your mother was going to die,” I said. “Or could you?”

“She’d been ill for some time,” he said. “She could have died at any time. But as it happens, when the time was right, we did help to ease her passing. It’s not so difficult to kill people in a hospital. Especially when they’re in a private room. You know something? It was a real kindness to her.”

“You had her murdered,” I said, pushing yet more coins into the telephone. “Your own mother.”

“Not murdered,” insisted Gruen. “No. This was euthanasia. Preemptive triage. That’s the way most German doctors still look on that kind of mercy killing. It still goes on. More often than you might suppose. You can’t change the whole medical system, just like that. Euthanasia has been part of the normal hospital routine in Germany and Austria since 1939.”