Death’s Head Read online

  After he had listened in silence for a time, Schwarzenbach went into the kitchen. The talk bored him and he felt somehow that it was dangerous just to be in the apartment. He imagined what might happen if Eberhard had assigned someone to follow him around and report on his movements. He knew it was unlikely but just the same he felt uneasy about the possibility. He washed his hands and examined the slight sores on the backs of his fingers.

  Broszat stood in the doorway. ‘Hiding yourself away, Gerhardt?’

  Schwarzenbach looked at him. He had first met Broszat at a party rally in 1939 at Freudenstadt in the Black Forest. And again in Berlin in the summer of 1940. They had kept in touch throughout the war and had met again in May when the war ended. These weekly gatherings were Broszat’s own idea. Looking at him, Schwarzenbach wondered if Broszat’s name was on Eberhard’s list – if such a list existed.

  ‘The atmosphere was too smoky,’ Schwarzenbach said.

  Broszat leaned against the wall. Once, a few weeks ago, he had shown Schwarzenbach an old wooden chest that contained his SS uniform. Thinking of this now, Schwarzenbach felt slightly ashamed that he had destroyed something so trivial as his photograph.

  ‘I had a visitor today, Helmut,’ Schwarzenbach said. ‘A certain Captain Eberhard of American Military Intelligence.’

  Broszat said, ‘That sounds serious.’

  ‘I don’t know what to make of it.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have come here tonight. Suppose they’ve put someone on to you –’

  ‘It’s too late to worry about that now.’

  Broszat asked, ‘What did he want?’

  ‘I have no idea.’ Schwarzenbach finished his wine. He could hear the conversation that drifted through from the other room. Katzmann’s excitable voice rose and fell, his words broken now and then by a statement from either Urbach or Seeler. They were talking on a subject they discussed frequently: the reasons for Germany’s defeat. He half-listened to them, lazily, waiting for Broszat to speak.

  ‘How much does he know?’ Broszat asked.

  ‘About me?’

  Broszat looked into the glass he was holding. ‘Did you form a clear impression of him? Do you have any idea whether he suspects you?’

  Schwarzenbach shrugged. ‘He was a devious man. He enjoyed playing silly little games.’

  ‘And so you don’t really know anything?’

  ‘He said that it was a routine check on identity papers.’

  ‘What’s a routine check?’ Broszat waited for an answer, but Schwarzenbach said nothing. ‘It’s ridiculous. Ever since they dreamed up the idea of war trials they have become like bloody limpets. They never let go of an idea as soon as it enters their heads – an American trait. Protectors of the Western world. That’s how they see themselves, Gerhardt. As bloody boy scouts!’

  Schwarzenbach listened, but found no consolation in Broszat’s words. He became silent, thinking of the Jew in the Augsburgerstrasse, more than a little amazed that the man hadn’t perished in the war. It was possible, just possible, that the Jew had believed him. But it was hardly likely. He remembered the shock that seemed to penetrate and freeze his brain when he heard the Jew call out the name. Had he shown surprise? Had his facial expression betrayed him?

  Broszat said, ‘They’ve got a Nuremberg mentality now. They see war criminals lurking on every bomb site. Criminals – Jesus! It’s ridiculous.’

  Suddenly Schwarzenbach felt angry. Broszat was correct. They were being made to feel like criminals, hunted men, they were being forced to walk in shadows with false identities and forged papers – and for what reason? Because they had believed in a certain set of ideals? Because they had worked and surrendered their lives to these ideals? Where was the crime in that?

  Broszat said, ‘It only emphasizes what I’m always saying. If we can get out of Germany, right out of Europe, we should do so. We can’t be safe here. The world has changed, Gerhardt. The Americans and the Russians have introduced a new set of rules and the old laws don’t apply any longer. They don’t kill Jews – they stick them in hospitals or send them back home in Red Cross trucks. This isn’t our world. Everything is different.’

  Schwarzenbach wondered what it would be like to leave Germany, and resented the thought. A furtive journey across Europe, an uncomfortable trip to a place like Egypt or South America, exiled forever – and he resented the idea. It was a journey that many men had made, driven by fear, terrified of vengeance, but it was not for him.

  He asked, ‘When are you leaving?’

  Broszat said, ‘As soon as I can. The sooner the better. It takes a little time to arrange. But I am working at it.’

  ‘It isn’t right,’ Schwarzenbach said. ‘My place is here. This is still Germany. It might have changed, but it’s still Germany.’

  Broszat said, ‘I sympathize with you, Gerhardt. But sometimes I feel the hangman’s rope round my neck. And I can’t stand having nightmares.’

  They went into the other room. Katzmann, half drunk, was sprawled across the carpet. Urbach was offering round a pack of American cigarettes. Schwarzenbach sat beside Seeler and listened to the dying conversation. Sometimes he found it hard to believe that everything had come to this: a weekly gathering, futile talk, a swastika flag that Broszat took from beneath his mattress and tacked to the wall for each meeting, sentimental recollections of the past. And it ended always in the same way, with either katzmann or Broszat proposing the toast – the Oath of Honour – which Schwarzenbach now found meaningless and pathetic. But, like the others, part of him still responded to the words, the same part that refused to accept as entirely true the report of the Führer’s death. Seeler argued that Hitler was in hiding. The suicide was Soviet propaganda. If the Führer were really dead, why hadn’t a recognizable body been exhibited? In any case, was it credible that a man like Hitler would have committed suicide? Urbach supported Seeler’s argument and Katzmann, who claimed to have spent a great deal of time in the Chancellery towards the end of the war, firmly believed that the Führer, together with his new wife, had fled south. If there had been a suicide, then surely he would have heard of it? Therefore it was either Soviet nonsense – or better still a story spread around by the Führer himself, to deceive his enemies into believing that he was dead. There was an air of naivety about these arguments that Schwarzenbach recognized but at the same time they were expressions of a genuine longing. It was impossible to believe that the man was dead, that the hard, exciting voice he had listened to countless times at rallies or over radio broadcasts had finally been silenced.

  He drank more wine and became dizzy. Mostly the conversation was about the period before the war, a time of promise and achievement, of nights spent dreaming and planning the shape of the world to come; of their days as SS cadets and their pride in being fully accepted after the probationary period; and Seeler, who had been an SS man before any of them, could even recall the action against the Brownshirts and how he personally had gunned down half a dozen of the bastards.

  Katzmann proposed the toast at midnight. They stood in front of the swastika flag and raised their glasses. They said the words in unison: I swear to thee, Adolf Hitler …

  Later, when the meeting had broken up, Schwarzenbach and Broszat went to a cellar bar near the Prager-Platz. Broszat, a little drunk, wanted a woman and Schwarzenbach, who was tired, felt that he needed a glass of schnapps before bed. The bar was almost empty. It was off-limits to the military and only a few Germans were present, drinking quietly together in a corner. If anything reflected the way Germany had changed, Schwarzenbach thought, it was the mood he continually encountered in bars. The songs, which had never been sad before, were now tastelessly filled with a quiet suffering. The drinkers consumed quietly and spoke in whispers, like conspirators who no longer have anything left to conspire over.

  Broszat bought beer for himself and schnapps for Schwarzenbach. They drank together in silence. Schwarzenbach felt uneasy again; it was like a fever that constantly kept retu
rning to him, a nagging irritation that entered his mind when he least expected it. The weekly gatherings invariably depressed him in any case; the futility of harking back to past history was all too apparent to him and although there were some of the old responses, he recognized the uselessness of his feelings. Broszat was right: the only thing to do now was to run. But running implied guilt and he could not accept that he was guilty of anything. He was a scientist. He had always been a scientist. And the source of all scientific advance lay in the value of experimentation. That was what had been expected of him and that was precisely what he had supplied – his scientific services, for the sake of the Reich. Human life, by that criterion, was worthless. If you thought of history as one monstrous river that never ceased to run, then human existence was as fragile and insignificant as a particle of water. But he did not need to justify himself in this or any other way. He had never performed a single criminal act. He wasn’t a criminal.

  Broszat said, ‘It’s so fucking quiet in here. It’s like a tomb.’

  ‘What do you expect?’

  Broszat shrugged. He drank his beer and looked round. Everywhere people were whispering: they had become a nation of whisperers. It was as if they were afraid to raise their voices for fear of offending the dead. Was that what losing a war meant? The voices that had been raised in the Luitpold Arena in Nuremberg not so very long ago had become suddenly dumb.

  Broszat said, ‘I want a woman. That’s the way to forget the whole bloody thing.’

  ‘Is there any way of forgetting?’ Schwarzenbach asked.

  Broszat went to talk to a girl who was standing at the other side of the bar. She was thin and looked tired; Broszat put his arm around her shoulders and after a moment Schwarzenbach saw them leave the bar together. He felt suddenly depressed. The country was bankrupt; everything had been squandered. Even a man like Broszat found it necessary to squander himself. He thought about the woman he had visited the previous evening and felt the cold metal of the key in the pocket of his overcoat. Life had become a sequence of useless gestures, a series of hushed voices in darkened rooms: somewhere along the way mistakes had been made and they were now living through the results of these errors. People whispered: what were they whispering about? What had become of everything? The pointless post-mortems of the past, the fruitless analyses of errors, the cold realization that the world had turned upside-down and that new emotions – fear, anxiety, hopelessness – had entered his life: it was the feeling that wherever he turned, wherever he looked, he was destined to be reminded of everything that had taken place so long ago in the past.

  He ordered another schnapps and drank it slowly. His mind became blank.

  He was awakened early, shortly after seven, by the sound of someone moving around in his surgery. He rose quickly from his bed, put his coat on over his pyjamas, and went through the kitchen to the room beyond.

  Eberhard was standing by the window. He looked alert and cheerful and smiled when he saw Schwarzenbach enter. He was carrying his briefcase in his left hand and Schwarzenbach saw that it was chained to his wrist by a length of linked metal.

  ‘I apologize for disturbing you so early,’ Eberhard said. ‘The door was unlocked.’

  Schwarzenbach went to his desk and sat down. He had a slight headache, a result of the mixture of wine and schnapps.

  ‘I normally rise at this time,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t,’ Eberhard said. ‘But today I felt like a change.’

  Schwarzenbach said, ‘A change sometimes does one good.’

  ‘Exactly. Exactly. You know what I think? I think you and me are going to get along well.’ Eberhard’s smile, fixed and hard, was suddenly threatening. For the first time Schwarzenbach realized that the man’s expression was totally devoid of humour.

  ‘It’s damned cold in here,’ Eberhard said. He rubbed his hands together and the chain rattled.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Schwarzenbach asked.

  ‘Well, Dr Lutzke, it’s a funny thing.’ Eberhard paused, and looked as if he were about to tell an obscene joke. ‘In my job, I sometimes come across anomalies. Little things here and there that don’t quite make sense. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Look. Suppose you had a patient and he had all the symptoms of – say, lung cancer. And yet you couldn’t find any trace of cancer in his lungs. Now that would be funny, wouldn’t it? That wouldn’t add up, would it?’ Eberhard looked pleased with the analogy.

  ‘I would then deduce that I had made a mistake in my original diagnosis,’ Schwarzenbach said.

  ‘Well, in my profession it isn’t as simple as that. I keep records, you see. And these records aren’t always complete. Now that worries me. I’ve got a tidy mind. Like yourself, I imagine.’ Eberhard lit a cigarette. Puzzled, Schwarzenbach waited: what was going to come next? He felt tense now.

  Eberhard said, ‘I’m coming to the point. I don’t want to alarm you, but I’ve got a file on you.’

  ‘On me?’

  ‘A routine matter, Dr Lutzke. But I’ve got a file on you.’

  Eberhard paused. Schwarzenbach felt that now, more than ever before, he had to remain calm. He had to keep his expression blank. He had to reveal nothing and yet look as if there were nothing to conceal in any case. He crossed his hands one over the other. He was going to remain calm.

  ‘Now my file on you doesn’t make sense,’ Eberhard said. ‘There’s one or two gaps in it. And this worries me. Basically, I’m really a clerk. I’ve got a clerical mentality. I like my records to be complete. And your file isn’t.’

  ‘In what way is it incomplete?’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t seem to tell us anything about your war record. Do you know what I mean?’ Eberhard’s smile was suddenly infuriating.

  ‘My war record?’ Schwarzenbach looked surprised. ‘Is it beyond the resources of the United States Army to discover what I did during the war?’

  Eberhard laughed. ‘No, not really. But that would take time. It’s a whole lot quicker if you give me the information straight.’

  ‘Why should my war record interest you?’

  ‘Well, we’re interested in medical personnel.’

  Schwarzenbach shrugged. ‘My war record is quite uninspiring, Captain. I carried on in general practice.’

  ‘That’s what we thought.’ Eberhard took a notebook from his pocket and flipped it open. ‘Now where would that have been?’

  ‘Between 1938 and 1942 in Munich. And from 1942 until the present time in Berlin.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Eberhard said. ‘That’s all we wanted to know.’

  Schwarzenbach stared at the American. It was extraordinary that he had not noticed the captain’s moustache before; a faint line of sandy hair about the upper lip – grown, no doubt, to detract from his boyish face, to give him authority.

  ‘Don’t you want any more details?’

  ‘No, that won’t be necessary, Dr Lutzke. We don’t need too many details.’ Eberhard stood up. He closed his notebook and returned it to his pocket. For some reason his hand appeared to be shaking. But why? Cold? Nervousness? Schwarzenbach could not imagine that the captain suffered from nerves.

  ‘Again, I’m sorry to have bothered you.’

  Schwarzenbach rose from the desk. ‘It isn’t any trouble.’

  Eberhard went to the door where he paused. When he turned round he was no longer smiling. ‘We’re just beginning to find out what went on in some of those concentration camps. A grisly business.’

  Schwarzenbach looked at the American a moment. Why had he mentioned the concentration camps? Why? It was strange – strange simply to append it to the conversation like that. Again Schwarzenbach had the feeling that this man was hunting him – yet it was impossible to tell from his expression exactly how much he knew. And if he really knew anything, if he possessed information and was not merely suspicious, then who had told him? Schwarzenbach pushed his hands into his overcoat. His skin seeped moisture even tho
ugh he felt intensely cold. He could not take his eyes from Eberhard’s face. Exactly how much did the bastard know?

  Eberhard smiled again. And then, when he had gone, and the sound of his car had faded down the street, Schwarzenbach went into the kitchen and sat at the table, his hands pressed flat to the surface. What would happen when Eberhard decided to investigate his past? When he started to check the dates of Lutzke’s war record? How much could he uncover there? Schwarzenbach returned to his bedroom; a heavy sense of fatigue had fallen across him, and he could not think straight. Certainly his identity papers were good, insofar as they were real and not forgeries. And his story would stand a certain amount of exploration. Before the end, before the final collapse, it had been possible to fabricate reality – it had been possible to discover, in the last chaos of bureaucracy, little clerical men with rubber stamps and anxious expressions who were prepared to issue the necessary papers to those who needed them and could also pay the required amounts of money. And so Schwarzenbach had purchased an identity at considerable cost; and he had purchased a past as well – Dr Gerhardt Lutzke, born 1900 in Munich, student in Berlin University, general practice first in Munich and later in Berlin: It was unfortunate that in the anarchic situation thrown up by war and the desperate bomb attacks made by the Royal Air Force certain things had either been lost or destroyed: not simply national monuments and buildings of historic interest, but records, files, dossiers, the whole intricate machinery of bureaucracy had been partially smashed. Who could tell what truths lay beneath uncleared acres of rubble, or had been dissolved in the aftermath of incendiary bombs? Even those of Gerhardt Lutzke, possibly those of Gerhardt Lutzke, had vanished forever. So who was there left to tell the truth? And what records remained to disprove anything Schwarzenbach chose to say? No; he wasn’t worried about the credibility of his story because it would require enormous patience on the part of Eberhard to refute a word of it. The thing that caused him anxiety was that Eberhard – for some obscure reason – felt it necessary to ask the questions that he did. And to drop certain hints into his speeches – war criminals, Nuremberg, the camps. But why? Why?