Field Gray by Philip Kerr Read Free Book Online Page B

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

    GERMANY, 1954
    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.
    The Americans ran the prison and there were more convicted Nazi war criminals locked up there than anywhere else in Europe. Two or three hundred had been executed on the prison gallows between 1946 and 1951, and since then, a great many more had been released, but the place still housed some of the biggest mass murderers in history. Of these, I was well acquainted with several, although I avoided most of them during the times when we prisoners were allowed freely to associate. There were even a few Japanese prisoners from the Shanghai war crimes trial, but we had little or no contact with them.
    The castle was from 1910 and, unlike the rest of the historic old town, was west of the River Lech: Four white brick-built blocks were arranged in a cross shape at the center of which was a tower from which location our steel-helmeted iron-faced guards could swing their white batons like Fred Astaire and watch us.
    I remembered once receiving a postcard of Hitler’s cell and I had the impression that my own was not dissimilar: There was a narrow iron bedstead with a small nightstand, a bedside light, a table, and a chair; and there was a big double window with more bars on the outside than on a lion tamer’s cage. I had a cell facing southwest, and that meant I had the sun in my cell during the afternoon and evening and a pleasant view of Spöttingen Cemetery, where several of the men hanged at WCPN1—which was what the Americans called it—were now interred. This made a nice change from my view of New York Bay and Lower Manhattan. The dead make quieter neighbors than waste-cargo barges.
    The food was good, although not recognizably German. And I didn’t much like the clothes we were obliged to wear. Gray and purple stripes never suited me very well; and the little white hat lacked the all-important wide snap brim I’d always preferred and made me look like an organ-grinder’s monkey.
    Soon after my arrival I had a visit from the Roman Catholic chaplain, Father Morgenweis: Herr Dr.