Nacht Und Nebel 2011

In the summer of 1982 Count-No-Count phoned my East Village apartment. Kurt was calling from Hamburg with an offer of a job as ‘tursteher’ at his nightclub BSIR. The pay for a doorman was $150 a night, free accommodations, and all I could drink. Being dead-broke and wanted for questioning by the NYPD Internal Affairs for payment to the 20th Precinct at our after-hours club on West 25th Street I answered, “Ja.”

My stay in Hamburg had been pleasant throughout the warm season. I spoke bad German with a Boston accent thanks to an ancient Bavarian teacher Bruder Karl at my high school south of Boston, but the clientele of young students on holiday spoke good English and loved to dance to the DJ imported from Paris. Certainly better than my German. The weather was delightful and this far north the sun stayed up late into the night. I drove an orange VW and lived in a studio penthouse on chic Mittelweg. I was thirty and no one was after me.

Autumn brought the cold rain, gray fog, and darker days. The sun’s daily traverse across the sky descended like a frisbee weakening in flight with the approach of the winter solstice. Even worse was how the increasing bad weather allowed arrogant Nazis in their fifties and sixties to creep out of their hiding places. Maybe it was my imagination playing tricks with the shadows during my strolls through Jungfernstieg, but I regularly spotted well-dressed ex-Waffen SS striding proudly down the streets and their eyes didn’t lie about what they had seen or done in Russia, Poland, France, or Germany. They were not extras in a Hollywood movie. These men had not only obeyed orders and they had carried them out to the letter with pride. I was not scared by these old men nor of the young neo-Nazis. I was under the protection of the toughest gang in Hamburg.

Of course the young Germans were not obsessed by the ghosts of the past.

“We are the Porsche Reich, not the Fourth Reich,” Count-No-Count had told me on many occasions in Paris. The Telex millionaire’s best friend was a Reeperbahn pimp, Kalle, the son of a Harlem American sergeant and a local woman from Hafenstrasse on the harbor of Hamburg.

A black Zuhalter was an anomaly in a German gang. His blonde right-hand man was SS Tommy, a notorious killer. The two of them along with their gang, the GmBH, controlled the ErosCenter, the huge brothel on the Reeperbahn, and also thousands of Huren or whores there and elsewhere in Hamburg. Kalle was always good to me. In truth he was my boss and not Count-No-Count.

His associate SS Tommy believed in the Second Coming of the Third Reich. The original Thousand Year Reich had lasted twelve years, but the weightlifter was not a real Nazi. Not like those old men who had done things no one liked to speak about at parties or even behind their backs. Still when SS Tommy presented me a large bill for having sex with Astrid, who frequented BSIR. The Rechtung for my time with the blonde dacner came to 20,000 DMs or $12,000. Everything had been itemized on his list. Everything. Every sex act in five words or less. He had even charged twenty DMs for holding hands. Nothing was left off the list.

That evening I handed the pimp the keys to my VW and left Hamburg without saying an ‘auf weidersehen’ to anyone. Especially not Astrid. SS Tommy was scary and I was defensively scared of him.

The midnight train pulled into Hamburg’s Hauptbahnhof a little on time. During the wait I scanned the platform like a refugee fromthe Gestapo. I didn't free safe, until the train entered Belgium. I reached Paris at dawn and I knew I was as lucky to be in France. Everyone does after they escape someplace else in the middle of the night.

Count-no-Count came down to Paris. He said Kalle was alright with me. Count-no-Count had paid my debt and advised me to stay away from Hamburg. I had no intentions of going north or west to America. New York wasn’t an option as the investigation into police corruption was still in well swing. I worked at various nightclubs in the City of Light. Life was good for me. Less so for Count no Count. He ODed in 1985 in his Pigalle apartment. He was only 38. I was 33.

I moved back to New York in 1986. The precinct cops knew I was there. They also knew that I had held my sand. I was left alone. A friend gave me a job in the Diamond District and I traveled the world on my savings. I heard from friends that Kalle was still a big man in the GmBH and SS Tommy had fled the Bundes-Republik after a failed bank robbery. The years moved on.

In 2004 I was living in Pattaya, Thailand, running a fake F1 sports gear website. Thai wife and child. A car and a house with a mango tree in the front yard. F1-shopping.net was # 1 on Google search for Ferrari shirts. With the baht 50 to $1 a little counterfeiting was worth the risk. It wasn't like I was dealing drugs.

A Belgium marine geologist, Fabo, and I hung out at the Welkom Inn on Soi 3. Usually in the afternoon after I had shipped the day's shirt, caps, and jackets. One day he seemed very shook up and told me over a few Heinekens how his girlfriend's ex- had shown up from South Africa. A German. Name of Tommy. I added the SS to complete the picture.

"He wants Poo to work for him in Germany."

"As a pute in Hamburg."

"Yes? Do you know him?

"Maybe."

"He wants to meet me at my house. Poo is frightened and so am I."

"I understand. Call me when he's coming and I'll bring Bruno."

"Bruno."

"He's ex-legionaire. He can never return to France. Good people." I had never spoken to Bruno about the reasons for his exile.

I finished my beer and returned home. I said nothing to my wife about Fabo's woes. She probably knew. The Thais gossip more than anyone else in the world and know what is what and why before the news has reached a farang. When Bruno pulled up on his motorcycle, I kissed her and my daguhter. Nu said, "Lawang."

"I'll be careful."

She watched us drive away. I had informed Bruno of the situation. He only had to be told once. We crossed Sukhumvit rode up Khao Talo to a short-time bar in a Thai neighborhood. Both of us checked the soi. The German was friends with a Thai motorcycle gang. Both of us and Fabo were on good terms with them. There was no sign of them or him. We walked inside the dimly-lit bar. The girls didn't didn't lift from their chairs to greet us. Neither of us had ever gone upstairs with one of them. Bruno and I were faithful to our girlfriends. We cheated with our drinking.

Fabo was not sitting alone

He was with SS Tommy. Each had a Heineken beer

I hadn't seen him in over twenty years. He hadn't changed at all. Same stack of muscles. Same bleached blonde shag hair. Just more slash scars on his left forearm from countless knife fights. People had tried to kill him. They had all failed. He squinted and eyeballed us.

I sat down. SS Tommy didn’t recognized me.

He had accused me on being the police.

"I know you. You don't know me. Leave Fabo alone."

"Why?" He most certainly wasn't scared of me.

Bruno had heard enough. He attacked the killer with the fury of an ex-legionnaire. Fabo, the girls, and I watched a short effective beating that are never filmed in the movies. It was over in fifteen seconds. Bruno dragged out SS Tommy and threw his unconscious body into the street. The bikers rolled up to the bar. SS Tommy must have called them for back up. Bruno nodded to them and they drove away. This wasn't any of their business. SS Tommy fled Thailand. Legionaires had even more scary than pimp, if you are on their wrong side. A fugitive German conman late said at the Welkom Inn that SS Tommy had been arrested for a solo bank robbery in Jo-Burg. Good riddance. I was 52.

In the autumn of 2011 I was appointed writer-in-residence at the British Embassy in Luxembourg. The old fortress city was centrally located in Europe and I visited to Paris, Brussels, and Charleroi in the first month. Triers on the Moselle River was very close and I planned a trip to the ancient Roman city of 70,000, only a forty-five minute ride way by train.

Telling the Ambassador my plans, I caught the morning express to the Moselle and ferried across the river to Konz for a short train ride to Trier. On my arrival I half-expected SS Tommy to be waiting on the train platform. Not a sign of him there on in the streets.

Germany had changed in the last thirty years.

The old Nazis had died off and, while the young Nazis had become very active in the East, they weren’t in Triers, but I kept my eyes open. Walking through the old Roman ruins I studied the faces of the young and old. I didn’t spot a single Nazi. It was, as if their genes had been erased from the Germanic race.

In Triers the only broken glass were from broken bottles and not the windows of Jewish homes and synagogues as was on the morning after Kristelnacht. I ate a bratwurst from an Imbiss stand and drank a Kloster beer. I visited Karl Marx Haus. The creator of Communism had been born in the old city. The street was in the heart of the sex zone. Nothing was happening in the afternoon. As I stood outside the house and old man passed and muttered under his breath, “Juden.”

“And fuck you, you old Nazi.”

My comment turned his head. His skin was withered by age, but he still stood erect. He had never asked for forgiveness.

“Ja, du alte arseloch.”

I rushed him and he prepared to take a blow. I so wanted to hit him, but he wasn’t SS Tommy.

“Gehst heim,” I said with a Boston accent and he stood his ground with Nazi arrogance.

He was about 91. I was 59. 1945 was well back in the 20th Century. I stepped closer to the old man. He did not back away. He still stood for his beliefs and so did I. One blow would have put him in the hospital and me to jail. He was still a Nazi and I was me. Some things never change. I shoved him and said, “Go home.”

Our eyes said everything else. I was a Goy like him, but I wasn't anything like him and neither asre the millions and millions of Germans in this world. Some of my best friends are German. I love them. Ehrlich, but not Nazis. This old man and I will always be enemies and I would’t have it any other way.