I gave killing myself quite a bit of thought, because a city view will only keep you going for so long. I figured out how to do it, too. I might not have had a belt or any shoelaces, but most convicts manage to hang themselves perfectly well with a cotton shirt. Almost all of the prisoners I knew who killed themselves—in Russia it was about one a week—hanged themselves using a shirt. After this, however, I decided to keep a closer eye on myself in case I did something foolish, and from time to time I would try to engage myself in conversation. But this wasn’t so easy. For one thing, I didn’t like Bernhard Gunther very much. He was cynical and world-weary and hardly had a good word to say about anyone, least of all himself. He’d had a pretty tough war one way or the other, and done quite a few things of which he wasn’t proud. Lots of people feel that way, of course, but it had been no picnic for him since then either; it didn’t seem to matter where he spread life’s tartan rug, there was always a turd on the grass.
“I bet you had a difficult childhood, too,” I said. “Is that why you became a cop? To get even with your father? You’ve never been very good with authority figures, have you? It strikes me that you’d have been a lot better off if you’d just stayed put in Havana and gone to work for Lieutenant Quevedo. Come to think of it, you’d have been a lot better off if you’d never been a cop at all. Trying to do the right thing has never really worked for you, Gunther, has it? You should have been a criminal like most of the others. That way you’d have been on the winning side a little more often.”
“Hey, I thought you were supposed to be talking me out of killing myself. If I want someone to make me despair, I could do it myself.”
“All right, all right. Look, this place isn’t so bad. Three meals a day, a room with a view, and all the peace and quiet a man of your age could ever wish for. They even wash the dinner plates. Remember those rusty cans you had to eat from in Russia? And the bread thief you helped murder? Don’t say that you’ve forgotten him. Or all the other dead comrades they had to stack like firewood because the ground was too cold and hard to bury them? And maybe you’ve forgotten how the Blues used to get us shoveling lime in the wind. The way it used to make your nose bleed all day. Why, this place is the Hotel Adlon next to Camp Eleven.”
“You talked me out of it. Maybe I won’t kill myself. I just wish I knew what was happening.”
After all that talking I was as quiet as Hegel for a spell; maybe it was for several days, weeks probably, I don’t know. I hadn’t been marking time on the wall the way you were supposed to, with six marks followed by a seventh through their middle. They stopped making those calendars after the man in the iron mask complained about all the graffiti on the wall of his cell. Besides, the quickest way to do the time is to pretend it’s not there. People pretend a lot when they’re in jail. And just when you’ve managed to persuade yourself that there’s something almost normal about being locked up like an animal, two strange men wearing suits and hats walk in and tell you that you’re being deported to Germany: One of them puts the cuffs on you and before you know it you’re on your way to the airport again.
The suits were good. The creases in their pants were almost perfect, like the bow of a big gray ship. The hats were nicely shaped and the shoes brightly polished, like their fingernails. They didn’t smoke—at least not on the job—and they smelled lightly of cologne. One of them had a little gold watch chain on which he kept the key to my handcuffs. The other wore a signet ring that gleamed like a cold white burgundy. They were smooth, efficient, and probably quite tough. They had good, white teeth of the kind that reminded me I probably needed to see a dentist. And they didn’t like me. Not in the least. In fact, they hated me. I knew this because when they looked my way they grimaced or snarled silently or gritted their teeth and gave every sign of wanting to bite me. For much of the journey to the airport there were just the white teeth to contend with; and then, after about thirty minutes, when it seemed they could no longer restrain themselves, they started to bark.
“Fucking Nazi,” said one.
I said nothing.
“What’s the matter, you Nazi bastard? Lost your tongue?”
I shook my head. “German,” I said. “But never a Nazi.”
“No difference,” said the other. “Not in my book.”
“Besides,” said the first one. “You were SS. And that makes you worse than a Nazi murderer. That makes you someone who enjoyed it.”
I couldn’t argue with him about that. What would have been the point? They’d already made up their minds about me: John Wilkes Booth would have received a more sympathetic hearing than I was likely to get from these two. But after weeks of solitary, I had an itch to talk a little:
“What are you? FBI?”
The first man nodded. “That’s right.”
“A lot of SS were cops just like you,” I said. “I was a detective when the war started. I didn’t have much choice in the matter.”
“I’m nothing like you, pal,” said the second agent. “Nothing. You hear me?” He poked me on the shoulder with his forefinger for good measure, and it felt like someone drilling for oil. “You remember that when you fly home to your mass-murdering pals. No American ever killed any Jews, mister.”
“What about the Rosenbergs?” I said.
“A Nazi with a sense of humor. How about that, Bill?”
“He’s going to need that when he gets back to Germany, Mitch.”
“The Rosenbergs. That’s very funny. It’s just a pity we can’t fry you, Gunther, the way we fried those two.”
“They had lawyers and a fair trial. And I happen to know that the judge and the prosecutor were Jews themselves. Just for your information, kraut.”
“That is reassuring,” I said. “However, I might feel more reassured if I’d ever seen a lawyer myself. I believe it’s not uncommon for someone in this country to have to appear before a court when there’s a move to have him deported. Especially when it seems possible I might be facing a trial in Germany. I had the strange idea that civil liberties actually meant something in America.”
“Extradition was never meant for scum like you, Gunther,” said the fed called Bill.
“Besides,” said Mitch, “you were never legally here. So you can’t be legally extradited. As far as the American courts are concerned, you don’t even exist.”
“Then it was all a bad dream, is that it?”
Bill put a stick of gum in his mouth and started to chew. “That’s it. You imagined the whole thing, kraut. It never happened. And neither did this.”
I ought to have been ready to sign for it. Their faces had been sending me telegrams ever since we’d got in the paddy wagon. I suppose they were just waiting for a chance to make the delivery, and when it came, in the belly, hard, right up to his elbow, I was still hearing the bell ringing in my ears ten minutes later when we stopped, the doors opened, and they clotheslined me out onto the runway. It was a real professional blow. I was up the steps and onto the plane before I could draw enough breath to wish them both good-bye.
I got a good view of the Statue of Liberty as we took off. I had the peculiar idea that the lady in the toga was giving the Hitler salute. At the very least, I figured the book under her left arm was missing a few important pages.
5
I’d been in Landsberg before, but only as a visitor. Before the war, lots of people visited Landsberg Prison to see cell number seven, where Adolf Hitler was imprisoned in 1923 following the failed Beer Hall Putsch, and where he had written Mein Kampf; but I certainly wasn’t one of those. I never liked biographies very much. My own previous visit had occurred in 1949 when, as a private detective working for a client in Munich, I’d gone there to interview an SS officer and convicted war criminal by the name of Fritz Gebauer.