“Is that why we’re here? So you can flatter me with an assurance of my utility?”
“It might be.”
“I fear my days of being useful to anyone are long past, Arthur.”
“As usual, you underestimate yourself, Bernie. You know, I always think of you as a bit like one of those people’s cars designed by Dr. Porsche. A little blunt, perhaps, but cheap to run and very effective. Built to last, as well, to the point of being almost indestructible.”
“Right now, my engine could use some air-cooling,” I said, resting on the oars. “It’s hot.”
Nebe puffed his cigar and then allowed one hand to drag in the water. “What do you do, Bernie? When you want to get away from it all? When you want to forget about everything?”
“It takes a while to forget everything, Arthur. Especially in Berlin. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve got an awful feeling it’s going to take the rest of my life to forget as much as that.”
Nebe nodded. “You’re wrong, you know. It’s easy to forget if you put your mind to it.”
“How do you manage it?”
“By having a certain view of the world. That’s a concept that’s familiar to all Germans, surely. My father was a teacher and he used to say, ‘Find out what you believe in, Arthur, what your place in it is, and then stick to that. Use that view of the world to order your life, no matter what.’ And what I’ve concluded is this: life is all a matter of chance. That’s the way I look at things. If it hadn’t been me out there in Minsk, in charge of Group B, it would have been someone else. That bastard Erich Naumann, probably. He’s the swine who took over from me. But sometimes I think that I was never really there. At least not the real me. I have very little memory of it. No, I don’t.
“You know, back in 1919, I tried to get a job at Siemens selling Osram lightbulbs. I even tried to become a fireman. Well, you know what it was like back then. Any kind of a job looked like it was worth having. But it wasn’t meant to be. The only place that would have me after I left the army was Kripo. That’s what I’m talking about. What is it about life that takes a man one way, selling lightbulbs or putting out fires, or that takes the same man in quite another way so that he becomes a state executioner?”
“Is that what you call it?”
“Why not? I didn’t wear a tall hat, it’s true, but the job was the same. The fact of the matter is that quite often these things have very little to do with the man himself. I didn’t end up in Minsk because I’m a bad man, Bernie. I sincerely believe that. It was an accident that I was ever there at all. That’s the way I look at it. I’m the same man I always was. It’s just fate that took me into the police instead of the Berlin fire department. The same fate that killed all those Jews. Life is nothing but a random series of events. There’s no logic to anything that happens, Bernie. Sometimes I think that’s your real problem. You keep looking for some sort of meaning in things, but there isn’t any. Never was. All of that was a simple category mistake. And trying to solve things doesn’t solve anything at all. After what you’ve seen, surely you know that by now.”
“Thanks for the philosophy seminar. I think I’m beginning to.”
“You should thank me. I’m here to do you a favor.”
“You don’t look like a man who’s carrying a gun, Arthur.”
“No really, I am. I’ve got you a job with the War Crimes Bureau at the Bendlerblock, starting in September.”
I laughed. “Is that a joke?”
“Yes, it is rather amusing, when you think about it,” admitted Nebe. “Me, finding a job for you there, of all places. But I’m perfectly serious, Bernie. This is a good deal for you. It gets you out of the Alex and into somewhere your skills will be properly appreciated. You’re still SD, there’s not much I can do about that. But according to Judge Goldsche, to whom you will report, your uniform and investigative experience will open a few investigative doors that remain closed to the people who currently work there. Von this and von that, lawyers most of them, the wing-collar kind whose scars were earned in university societies rather than on the battlefield. Hell, you’ll even make more money.” He laughed. “Well, don’t you see? I’m trying to make you respectable again, my friend. Semi-respectable, anyway. Who knows, you might even make enough to afford a new suit.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Of course. You don’t think I’d waste my time lunching you without a damn good reason. I’d have brought a nice girl here, or even a girl who isn’t so nice, not a stinger like you. You can say thank you now.”
“Thank you.”
“So, now that I’ve done you a favor, I want you to do something for me in return.”
“In return? Perhaps you’ve forgotten our dirty weekend in Prague, Arthur. It was you who asked me to investigate Heydrich’s death, wasn’t it? Less than a month ago? You didn’t like my conclusions. When we met and had a conversation at the Esplanade Hotel, you told me we never had that conversation. I never did collect on that favor.”
“That was a favor to us both, Bernie. You and me.” Nebe started to scratch the eczema on the backs of his hands; it was a sign he was beginning to get irritable. “This is different. This is something that even you can do without causing trouble.”
“Which makes me wonder if I’m the right person to do it.”
He put the cigar in his mouth and scratched some more, as if there might be a better solution to his problem under the skin. The boat turned slowly in a circle so that we were pointing in the direction we had just come; I was used to that feeling. My whole life had been going in a circle since 1939.
“Is this something personal, Arthur? Or is this what we detectives laughingly call ‘work’?”
“I’ll tell you if you’ll just shut your beer hole for a minute. I don’t know. How did someone with a mouth like yours manage to stay alive for so long?”
“I’ve asked myself the same question.”
“It’s work, all right? Something for which you’re uniquely qualified, as it happens.”
“You know me, I’m uniquely qualified for all sorts of jobs it seems most other men wouldn’t touch with a pair of oily pliers.”
“You’ll remember the International Criminal Police Commission,” he said.
“You don’t mean to say that it still exists?”
“I’m the acting president,” Nebe said bitterly. “And if you make a joke about making a gardener out of a billy goat, I will shoot you.”
“I’m just a little surprised, that’s all.”
“As you may know, it was based in Vienna until 1940, when Heydrich decided that it should be headquartered here, in Berlin.”
Nebe pointed west, across the lake to a bridge across the Havel that was just a little way south of the Swedish Pavilion.
“Over there, as a matter of fact. With him in charge, of course. It was just another neon-lit showcase for the Reinhard Heydrich Show, and I had hoped that now the bastard’s dead, we might use that as an excuse to wind up the IKPK, which has outlived any usefulness it ever might have had. But Himmler is of a different opinion and wants the conference to go ahead. Yes, that’s right — there’s a conference in a week or two’s time. The invitations to all the various European police chiefs had already gone out before Heydrich was murdered. So we’re stuck with it.”
“But there’s a war on,” I objected. “Who the hell is going to come, Arthur?”
“You’d be surprised. The French Sûreté, of course. They love a good feast and any chance to air their opinions. The Swedes. The Danes. The Spanish. The Italians. The Romanians. Even the Swiss are coming. And the Gestapo, of course. We mustn’t forget them. Frankly, it’s almost everyone except the British. Oh, there’s no shortage of delegates, I can assure you. The trouble is that I’ve been given the task of organizing a program of speakers. And I’m scratching around for some names.”