Joseph Kanon - The Good German

American by birth, Joseph Kanon studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, before starting a career in publishing. He has worked in the industry on both sides of the Atlantic, most recently as head of Houghton Mifflin. Now a full-time writer, he lives in New York. He is the author of Los Alamos, which won the Edgar Award for the best first novel of 1997, and The Prodigal Spy.

ALSO BY JOSEPH KANON

Los Alamos
The Prodigal Spy

First published in the United States in 2001
by Henry Holt and Company, LLC
First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Little, Brown
This edition published by Sphere Copyright 2001 by Joseph Kanon

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7515-6446-4

Sphere
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
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London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk

www.littlebrown.co.uk

For my mother

The Good German takes place in Berlin in July and August of 1945. Any story set in the past runs the inevitable risk of error. This is particularly true of Berlin, whose map has been changed by history several times this past century, and certainly of the chaotic first few months of the Allied occupation, when events happened in such rapid succession that their chronology is often confused even in contemporary accounts, not to mention faulty memory. The alert reader, however, is entitled to know when deliberate liberties have been taken for narrative convenience. The Allies did indeed capture vast quantities of Nazi documents, but it was nearly a year before the Document Center in Wasserkfersteig, described here, was fully operational. The Allied victory parade actually took place on September 7 and not, as here, three weeks earlier. Readers familiar with the period will know the American occupation authority as OMGUS (Office of Military Government, United States), but this designation was not official until October 1945, so an easier form, MG, is used here rather than the more unwieldy but correct USGCC (United States Group, Control Council). Any other errors, alas, are unintentional.

THE WAR HAD made him famous. Not as famous as Murrow, the voice of London, and not as famous as Quent Reynolds, now the voice of the documentaries, but famous enough to get a promise from Colliers (four pieces, if you can get there) and then the press pass to Berlin. In the end, it was Hal Reidy whod made the difference, juggling the press slots like seating arrangements, UP next to Scripps-Howard, down the table from Hearst, whod assigned too many people anyway.

I cant get you out till Monday, though. They wont give us another plane, not with the conference on. Unless youve got some pull.

Only you.

Hal grinned. Youre in worse shape than I thought. Say hello to Nanny Wendt for me, the prick. Their censor from the old days, before the war, when theyd both been with Columbia, a nervous little man, prim as a governess, who liked to run a pen through their copy just before they went on the air. The Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, Hal said, the way he always did. I wonder what happened to him. Goebbels poisoned his own kids, I hear.

No. Magda, Jake said. The gndige frau. In chocolates.

Yeah, sweets to the sweet. Nice people. He handed Jake the traveling orders. Have a good time.

You should come too. Its a historic occasion.

Sos this, Hal said, pointing to another set of orders. Two more weeks and Im home. Berlin. Christ. I couldnt wait to get out. And you want to go back?

Jake shrugged. Its the last big story of the war.

Sitting around a table, divvying up the pot.

No. What happens when its over.

What happens is, you go home.

Not yet.

Hal glanced up. You think shes still there, he said flatly.

Jake put the orders in his pocket, not answering.

Its been a while, you know. Things happen.

Jake nodded. Shell be there. Thanks for this. I owe you one.

More than one, Hal said, letting it go. Just write pretty. And dont miss the plane.

But the plane was hours late getting into Frankfurt, then hours on the ground unloading and turning around, so it was midafternoon before they took off. The C-47 was a drafty military transport fitted out with benches along the sides, and the passengers, a spillover of journalists who, like Jake, hadnt made the earlier flights, had to shout over the engines. After a while Jake gave up and sat back with his eyes closed, feeling queasy as the plane bumped its way east. There had been drinks while they waited, and Brian Stanley, the Daily Express man who had somehow attached himself to the American group, was already eloquently drunk, with most of the others not far behind. Belser from Gannett, and Cowley, whod kept tabs on the SHAEF press office from a bar stool at the Scribe, and Gimbel, who had traveled with Jake following Patton into Germany. They had all been at war forever, in their khakis with the round correspondent patch, even Liz Yeager, the photographer, wearing a heavy pistol on her hip, cowgirl style.

Hed known all of them one way or another, their faces like pins in his own war map. London, where hed finally left Columbia in 42 because he wanted to see the fighting war. North Africa, where he saw it and caught a piece of shrapnel. Cairo, where he recovered and drank the nights away with Brian Stanley. Sicily, missing Palermo but managing, improbably, to get on with Patton, so that later, after France, he joined him again for the race east. Across Hesse and Thuringia, everything accelerated, the stop-and-go days of fitful waiting over, finally a war of clear, running adrenaline. Weimar. Then, finally, up to Nordhausen, and Camp Dora, where everything stopped. Two days of staring, not even able to talk. He wrote down numberstwo hundred a dayand then stopped that too. A newsreel camera filmed the stacks of bodies, jutting bones and floppy genitals. The living, with their striped rags and shaved heads, had no sex.

On the second day, at one of the slave labor camps, a skeleton took his hand and kissed it, then held on to it, an obscene gratitude, gibbering something in SlavicPolish? Russian?and Jake froze, trying not to smell, feeling his hand buckle under the weight of the fierce grip. Im not a soldier, he said, wanting to run but unable to take his hand away, ashamed, caught now too. The story theyd all missed, the hand you couldnt shake off.