Greeks Bearing Gifts Read online

  ALSO BY PHILIP KERR

  THE BERNIE GUNTHER BOOKS

  The Berlin Noir Trilogy

  March Violets

  The Pale Criminal

  A German Requiem

  —

  The One from the Other

  A Quiet Flame

  If the Dead Rise Not

  Field Gray

  Prague Fatale

  A Man Without Breath

  The Lady from Zagreb

  The Other Side of Silence

  Prussian Blue

  OTHER WORKS

  A Philosophical Investigation

  Dead Meat

  The Grid

  Esau

  The Five-Year Plan

  The Second Angel

  The Shot

  Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton

  Hitler’s Peace

  Prayer

  FOR CHILDREN

  The Children of the Lamp Series

  The Akhenaten Adventure

  The Blue Djinn of Babylon

  The Cobra King of Kathmandu

  The Day of the Djinn Warriors

  The Eye of the Forest

  The Five Fakirs of Faizabad

  The Grave Robbers of Genghis Khan

  —

  One Small Step

  A MARIAN WOOD BOOK

  Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Thynker, Ltd.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kerr, Philip, author.

  Title: Greeks bearing gifts : a Bernie Gunther novel / Philip Kerr.

  Description: New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2018. | Series: Bernie Gunther; 13 | “A Marian Wood book.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017037137 | ISBN 9780399177064 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Gunther, Bernhard (Fictitious character)—Fiction. | World War, 1939–1945—Germany—Fiction. | Private investigators—Germany—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6061.E784 G74 2018 | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037137

  p. cm.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780698413146

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  This book is for Chris Anderson and Lisa Pickering, to whom I am very grateful.

  CONTENTS

  –

  ALSO BY PHILIP KERR

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger . . . they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor. . . . They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.

  —TACITUS, The Agricola and the Germania

  PROLOGUE

  –

  JANUARY 1957

  This would seem like the worst story ever told if it had not happened, all of it, every detail, exactly as I have described.

  That’s the thing about real life: it all looks so implausible right up until the moment when it starts to happen. I have my experience as a police detective and the events of my own personal history to confirm this observation. There’s been nothing probable about my life. But I’ve a strong feeling that it’s the same for everyone. The collection of stories that make us all who we are only looks exaggerated or fictitious until we find ourselves living on its stained and dog-eared pages.

  The Greeks have a word for this, of course: “mythology.” Mythology explains everything, from natural phenomena to what happens when you die and head downstairs, or when, unwisely, you steal a box of matches from Zeus. As it happens Greeks have a lot to do with this particular story. Perhaps with every story, when you stop to think about it. After all, it was a Greek called Homer who invented modern storytelling, in between losing his sight and probably not existing at all.

  Like many stories this one is probably much improved by taking a drink or two. So go ahead. Be my guest. Have one on me. Certainly I like a drink but honestly, I’m not a hopeless case. Far from it. I sincerely hope that one night I will go for a drink and wake up as an amnesiac on a steamer that’s headed for nowhere I’ve ever heard of.

  That’s the romantic in me, I guess. I’ve always liked to travel even when I was quite happy to stay at home. You might say that I just wanted to get away. Fro
m the authorities, most of all. Still do, if the truth be told, which it seldom is. Not in Germany. Not for me and quite a few others like me. For us the past is like the exterior wall in a prison yard: chances are, we’ll never get over it. And of course we shouldn’t be allowed to get over it, either, given who we were and everything we did.

  But how is one ever to explain what happened? It was a question I used to see in the eyes of some of the American guests at the Grand Hotel in Cap Ferrat where, until recently, I was a concierge, when they realized I was German: How was it possible that your people could murder so many others? Well, it’s like this: When you walk through a big fish market you appreciate just how alien and various life can be; it’s hard to imagine how some of the fantastic, sinister, slippery-looking creatures you see laid out on the slab could even exist, and sometimes when I contemplate my fellow man, I have much the same feeling.

  Myself, I’m a bit like an oyster. Years ago—in January 1933, to be exact—a piece of grit got into my shell and started to rub me up the wrong way. But if there is a pearl inside me I think it’s probably a black one. Frankly, I did a few things during the war of which I feel less than proud. This is not unusual. That’s what war’s about. It makes all of us who take part in it feel like we’re criminals and that we’ve done something bad. Apart from the real criminals, of course; no way has ever been invented to make them feel bad about anything. With one exception, perhaps: the hangman at Landsberg. When he’s given the chance, he can provoke a crisis of conscience in almost anyone.

  Officially, that’s all behind us now. Our National Socialist revolution and the devastating war it brought about is over and the peace we have since enjoyed has, thanks to the Americans at least, been anything but Carthaginian. We stopped hanging people a long time ago and all but four of the several hundred war criminals who were caught and locked up for life in Landsberg have now been released. I do believe that this new Federal Republic of Germany could be a tremendous country when we’ve finished fixing it up. All of West Germany smells of fresh paint and every public building is in a state of major reconstruction. The eagles and swastikas are long gone but now even the traces of them are being erased, like Leon Trotsky from an old Communist Party photograph. In Munich’s infamous Hofbräuhaus—there most of all, perhaps—they’d done their best to paint out the swastikas on the vaulted cream-colored ceiling, although you could still make out where they’d been. But for these—the fingerprints of fascism—it would be easy to believe the Nazis had never even existed and that thirteen years of life under Adolf Hitler had been some dreadful Gothic nightmare.

  If only the marks and traces of Nazism on the poisoned, bivalve soul of Bernie Gunther could have been erased with such facility. For these and other complicated reasons I won’t go into now, the only time I’m truly myself these days is, of necessity, when I’m alone. The rest of the time, I’m obliged to be someone else.

  So then. Hallo. God’s greeting to you, as we say here in Bavaria. My name is Christof Ganz.

  ONE

  –

  There was a murderous wind raging through the streets of Munich when I went to work that night. It was one of those cold, dry Bavarian winds that blow up from the Alps with an edge like a new razor blade and make you wish you lived somewhere warmer, or owned a better overcoat, or at least had a job that didn’t require you to hit the clock at six p.m. I’d pulled enough late shifts when I’d been a cop with the Murder Commission in Berlin so I should have been used to bluish fingers and cold feet, not to mention lack of sleep and the crappy pay. On such nights a busy city hospital is no place for a man to find himself doomed to work as a porter right through until dawn. He should be sitting by the fire in a cozy beer hall with a foaming mug of white beer in front of him, while his woman waits at home, a picture of connubial fidelity, weaving a shroud and plotting to sweeten his coffee with something a little more lethal than an extra spoonful of sugar.

  Of course, when I say I was a night porter, it would have been more accurate to say that I was a mortuary attendant, but being a night porter sounds better when you’re having a polite conversation. “Mortuary attendant” makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable. The living ones, mostly. But when you’ve seen as many corpses as I have you tend not to bat an eyelid about being around death so much. You can handle any amount of it after four years in the Flanders slaughterhouse. Besides, it was a job and with jobs as scarce as they are these days you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, even the spavined nag that had been bought for me, sight unseen, outside the doors of the local glue factory by the old comrades in Paderborn; they got me the job in the hospital after they had given me a new identity and fifty marks. So until I could find myself something better, I was stuck with it and my customers were stuck with me. I certainly didn’t hear any of them complaining about my bedside manner.

  You’d think the dead could look after themselves but of course people die in hospital all the time and, when they do, they usually need a bit of help getting around. It seems the days of patient defenestration are over. It was my job to go and fetch the bodies off the wards and take them down to the house of death and there to wash them before leaving them out for collection by the undertakers. In winter we didn’t worry about chilling the bodies or spraying the place for flies. We didn’t have to; it was just a few degrees above freezing in the mortuary. Much of the time I worked alone and, after a month at the Schwabing Hospital, I suppose I was almost used to it—to the cold, to the smell, and to the feeling of being alone and yet not quite alone, if you know what I mean. Once or twice a corpse moved by itself—they do that sometimes, wind usually—which, I’ll admit, was a little unnerving. But perhaps not surprising. I’d been alone for so long that I’d started talking to the radio. At least I assumed that’s where the voices were coming from. In the country that produced Luther, Nietzsche, and Adolf Hitler, you can never be absolutely sure about these things.

  On that particular night I had to go up to the emergency room and fetch a corpse that would have given Dante pause for thought. An unexploded bomb—it’s estimated that there are tens of thousands of these buried all over Munich, which often makes reconstruction work hazardous—had gone off in nearby Moosach, killing at least one and injuring several others in a local beer hall that took the worst of the blast. I heard it go off just before I started my shift and it sounded like a standing ovation in Asgard. If the glass in the window in my room hadn’t already been Scotch-taped against drafts it would certainly have shattered. So no real harm done. What’s one more German killed by a bomb from an American flying fortress after all these years?

  The dead man looked like he’d been given a front row seat in some reserved circle of hell where he’d been chewed up by a very angry Minotaur before being torn to pieces. His jiving days were over, given that his legs were hanging off at the knees and he was badly burned, too; his corpse gave off a lightly barbecued smell that was all the more horrifying because somehow it was also, vaguely and inexplicably, appetizing. Only his shoes remained undamaged; everything else—clothes, skin, hair—was a sight. I washed him carefully—his torso was a piñata of glass and metal splinters—and did my very best to fix him up a bit. I put his still shiny Salamanders in a shoe box, just in case someone from the deceased’s family turned up to identify the poor devil. You can tell a lot from a pair of shoes but this couldn’t have been a more hopeless task if he’d spent the last twelve days being dragged through the dust behind someone’s favorite chariot. Most of his face resembled a half kilo of freshly chopped dog meat and sudden death looked like it had done the guy a favor, not that I’d ever have said as much. Mercy killing is still a sensitive subject on a long list of sensitive subjects in modern Germany.

  It’s small wonder there are so many ghosts in this town. Some people go their whole lives without ever seeing a ghost; me, I see them all the time. Ghosts I sort of recognize, too. Twelve years after the war it was like living in Frankenstein Cast
le and every time I looked around I seemed to see a pensive, plaintive face I half-remembered from before. Quite often these looked like old comrades, but just now and again they resembled my poor mother. I miss her a lot. Sometimes the other ghosts mistook me for a ghost, which was hardly surprising, either; it’s only my name that’s changed, not my face, more’s the pity. Besides, my heart was playing up a bit, like a difficult child, except that it wasn’t so young as that. Every so often it would jump around for the sheer hell of it, as if to show me that it could and what might happen to me if it ever decided to have a break from taking care of a tiresome Fritz like me.

  After I got home at the end of my shift I was extra-careful to turn the gas off on my little two-ring cooker after I’d finished boiling water for the coffee I usually had with my early-morning schnapps. Gas is just as explosive as TNT, even the splutteringly thin stuff that comes squeaking out of German pipes. Outside my dingy yellow window was an eighty-foot-high heap of overgrown rubble, another legacy of the wartime bombing: seventy percent of the buildings in Schwabing had been destroyed, which was good for me, as it made rooms there cheap to rent. Mine was in a building scheduled for demolition and had a long crack in the wall so wide you could have hidden an ancient desert city in there. But I liked the rubble heap. It served to remind me of what, until recently, my life had amounted to. I even liked the fact that there was a local guide who would take visitors to the summit of the heap, as part of his advertised Munich tour. There was a memorial cross on top and a nice view of the city. You had to admire the fellow’s ingenuity. When I was a boy I used to climb to the top of Berlin’s cathedral—all 264 steps—and walk around the dome’s perimeter with only the pigeons for company; but it hadn’t ever occurred to me to make a career out of it.

  I never liked Munich all that much, with its fondness for traditional Tracht clothes and jolly brass bands, devout Roman Catholicism and the Nazis. Berlin suited me better and not just because it was my hometown. Munich was always a more compliant, governable, conservative place than the old Prussian capital. I got to know it best in the early years after the war, when my second wife, Kirsten, and I were trying to run an unfeasibly located hotel in a suburb of Munich called Dachau, now infamous for the concentration camp the Nazis had there; I didn’t like it any better then, either. Kirsten died, which hardly helped, and soon after that I left, thinking never to return and well, here I am again, with no real plans for the future, at least none that I would ever talk about, just in case God’s listening. I don’t find he’s nearly as merciful as a lot of Bavarians like to make out. Especially on a Sunday evening. And certainly not after Dachau. But I was here and trying to be optimistic even though there was absolutely no room for such a thing—not in my cramped lodgings—and doing my best to look on the bright side of life even though it felt as if this lay over the top of a very high barbed-wire fence.