St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(41)

‘I’m serious, Laz.’

‘I’m serious too. Bad bastards. They enjoyed their work too much.’

There was a tall wooden pepper grinder on the table and Lazlo picked it up and looked at it for a moment. ‘Some things never change, eh? That was what you said, correct? You get straight to the point.’

‘I’m looking for a missing girl, some missing girls and I don’t have a lot of time.’

‘These girls, these are the girls you told me of last time we spoke?’

‘Some of them. I got taken off that case but now it seems that I’m involved again.’

‘So tell me, how is this to do with the SS?’

‘It isn’t, it doesn’t – I mean, it hasn’t got anything to do with that investigation, it’s just something that came up. And you’re are the only person I know with ...with direct experience.’

Lazlo put the pepper grinder back on the table. ‘Auschwitz was an experience, it must be said. Some people have all the luck, eh, Charlie?’

‘Suppose I met someone, Laz, a German, who claimed to have been an anti-aircraft gunner in the war but I thought perhaps he was actually in the SS. Is there any way I could go about confirming it, seeing if I was right?’

‘Not easy, I should say. Can you maybe get his shirt off?’

‘Whose shirt?’

‘Your SS man, who may or may not be.’

Berlin was struggling to follow the direction of the conversation.

‘Why should I get his shirt off?’

‘Because, Charlie my friend, many of the most dedicated members of the SS had a tattoo under the arm.’ Lazlo lifted up his left arm and indicated a spot just under his armpit. ‘Here is where you look.’

‘What sort of tattoo? What did it say?’

‘Property of Heinrich Himmler. If found, return to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. No reward.’

‘Lazlo.’

‘Okay. Charlie, you yourself should keep your shirt on. I just find it interesting that the Nazis tattooed just two groups: prisoners in Auschwitz – the Untermenschen, the inferiors – and the SS, the cream of the Aryan race. We Jews got a number, like a commodity, while in the case of the SS it was just a letter – their blood type, you know, for the doctors if they were wounded. A, B, that kind of thing.’

‘Wouldn’t all German soldiers have that sort of tattoo?’

‘Apparently not, and for them a good thing too. Lots of captured Krauts were made to strip off and if the partisans or some pissed-off GI or Tommy or Ivan spotted a tattoo it was a quick trip behind the nearest barn and ...’ He drew his index finger quickly across his throat and made a nasty gurgling sound. ‘I tell you a story, Charlie, one I hear up in the Snowy. You hear a lot of stories up there, many funny people working on the Snowy and not a lot to do at nights apart from playing cards and talking.’

Berlin waited.

‘This bloke, a Pole, I think, is coming out on a refugee boat in ’52 or ‘53. Pretty crowded with DPs and by no means the Queen Mary, as he tells me. There are two women who stay to their cabin, take their meals there and only go walking at night, always wearing hats, or scarves on their heads. Strange, perhaps, but there was a war not long finished and strange behaviour wasn’t so uncommon.’

Berlin recalled that a lot of his own behaviour after the war was pretty strange.

‘So off Perth one afternoon it gets hot as hell and these two come out on deck around noon. Their cabin is on the sunny side of the ship and must be like an oven and on deck there is a breeze. The wind blows the hat off one of them and another passenger starts screaming and pointing. There is now more screaming in a half-dozen languages and a mob surrounds the two women. They start beating on them, tearing at their clothes. The screaming woman says she recognises this pair as guards from the camp where she was held. SS guards, you understand.’

‘I saw some women SS, towards the end of the war. That was something I really found very hard to understand.’

‘How so? Trust me on this, Charlie, when a government, any government, starts handing out licences to do evil without consequences and a nice uniform to go with it, there will never be any shortage of takers, male and female both.’

Berlin remembered poor old Pete Whitmore saying something similar once in the bar of the Diggers Rest Hotel. Give someone a licence to kill and they’ll use it.

‘So what happened? With these women, I mean.’

‘They strip them down to the waist and there they find it, under the arm of each of them – the tattoo. The mob goes crazy and the crew just manage to stop them tossing the ladies over the side. They have a lot of sharks in the sea around there, I hear, Charlie. Big ones.’

‘Then what?’

‘They lock them in their cabin, with a sailor on guard outside. When the ship docks in Adelaide the police come onboard and take the ladies away, but only with the crew holding the passengers back can it be done. After that, who knows what happens to them?’

‘So getting these tattoos wasn’t the smartest move, not when you’re on the losing side.’

Lazlo smiled. ‘But you’re never on the losing side, Charlie, not at the beginning. Everyone is going to win because everyone has God on their side. Even the Nazis said, Gott mit uns, God is with us. This God is a very strange fellow, I have to say.’