Field Gray by Philip Kerr

Author:Philip Kerr
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-08-10T22:00:00+00:00

23

GERMANY, 1954

I sat up and blinked hard in the near darkness of cell number seven, wondering how long I’d been asleep. The shade of Hitler was gone, at least for now, and I was glad about that. I didn’t much like his questions or the mocking assumption that, deep down, I was as big a criminal as him. It was true that I might have shot Nikolaus Willms somewhere less lethal than his head, and that even when I’d been trying to put him under arrest, secretly I had probably wanted to kill him. Perhaps if Paul Kestner had pulled a gun on me I’d have shot him, too. But as it was I never saw him again, and the last I heard of him he’d been part of a police battalion in Smolensk, murdering Jews and communists.

I opened my window and put my face in the cool breeze of the Landsberg dawn. I couldn’t see the cows, but I could smell them in the fields across the river to the southwest and I could hear them, too. One, anyway; it sounded like a lost soul in a place far, far away. Like my own soul, perhaps. I almost felt like blowing my own breath in a solitary hot blast by way of an answer.

The Paris of 1940 seemed equally far away. What a summer that had been, thanks to Renata. The prefecture in the person of Chief Inspector Oltramare had accepted without demur my story of finding Willms dead after going to the maison with the intention of arresting him, although it was as plain as the Eiffel Tower that he believed not a word of it. Sipo proved only a little more troublesome, and I was summoned to the Hôtel Majestic, in the avenue des Portugais, to explain myself to General Best, the head of RSHA in Paris.

A dark-eyed, severe-looking man from Darmstadt, Best was in his late thirties and bore a strong resemblance to the Nazi Party’s deputy leader, Rudolf Hess. There was some bad blood between him and Heydrich, and because of that, I half expected Best to give me a rougher ride. Instead, he confined himself to delivering a light reprimand for my declared intent to arrest Willms without consulting him. Which was fair enough, and my apology seemed to put an end to the matter; as things turned out, he was much more interested in picking my brains for a book he was writing about the German police. On several occasions we met at his favorite restaurant, a brasserie on the boulevard de Montparnasse called La Coupole, and I told him all about life at the Alex and some of the cases I had investigated. Best’s book was published the following year and sold very well.

In fact, he turned out to be something of a benefactor. He and his damn book were the main reason I managed to stay on in Paris until June 1941, and so it was Best who effectively ensured I missed out on going to Pretzsch and Himmler’s pep talk for the SS and SD.

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