The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (4 page)

Christian’s brother, Alexander, wasn’t born until 1973, so for the first twelve years of his life Christian was an only child, the cherished center of attention in a house that included not only his parents but also an aunt and grandmother. They indulged the boy’s every whim, including allowing him to watch whatever he wanted on television—even the science-fiction programs that were forbidden by most local parents.

“I thought he had discipline issues,” said Hallweger. “My son played with him when he was small, and he would do things with Christian that weren’t allowed.” For instance, most Bergen parents agreed that the local stream was a dangerous place for young children to play, but it was a favorite spot of Christian’s, and he would not hesitate to take other kids there. As he got older, Hallweger continued, he became even more of a hellion. “He would bang his soccer ball against the garage door for hours—for hours! Although they were all at home, there was nobody saying, ‘Stop it!’ I went over there and complained, but Christian didn’t care.”

Instead of gratitude for his favored treatment, Christian increasingly expressed contempt. It soon became clear that he wasn’t like most of the other residents of this little town, content to live there from humble birth to anonymous death. By the time he reached adolescence, Christian was focused on a single goal: escape.

He separated himself from the rest of Bergen with not only his attitude but also his appearance. “He became addicted to looking
cool
,” Hallweger said. “He had to be different. He had a certain hat he wore, and he had sunglasses and long hair. All of this was unusual for Bergen. But Christian always had to be ahead of everyone else in fashion.”

She sighed and looked in the direction of the house next door. If I wanted to learn more about Christian, she said, I should walk over to the beer garden and join the
Stammtisch
, the table reserved for local men who come to the tavern daily to drink and trade stories. I looked at my watch: it was only ten in the morning.

“Don’t worry about that,” Hallweger told me. The
Stammtisch
would already be in session.

She was right. The
Stammtisch
was in full swing when I arrived. There was a group of men sitting at a table beneath the trees in the outdoor section of the beer garden, each with a frosty stein in front of him. My interpreter and I approached the men, who were mostly in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. They eyed us suspiciously. We were two strangers carrying notebooks, and that could mean only one thing:
They’ve come to talk about Christian
. They had had their fill of nosy reporters. But once my German companion started making small talk and joking with them—and especially once I offered to buy everyone a round of drinks—they loosened up, and the stories began flowing as freely as the beer.

One of the men, Georg Heindlmeir, was eighty-three—he was born the same year as Simon Gerhartsreiter, with whom he grew up.

“If Simon were alive, he would be here now!” Heilmeir said.

“Here?” I asked. “Drinking beer before noon?”

He said yes, and the other men agreed. Simon wasn’t merely a member of the
Stammtisch
, they explained, he was the head of it. “Because he was an artist,” one of the men explained, “and artists don’t have set working hours. He would turn up every day at ten in the morning, on the dot, and he would leave at eleven fifty-five every day to be home for lunch. If Simon Gerhartsreiter opened his mouth, everybody got quiet, because Simon always had something to say.” He raised his beer stein and toasted the
Stammtisch
’s late leader, repeating, “He was an
artist
.”

As the day progressed, some of the men left and others arrived, and each had a different perspective on the oddball kid who had become, for better or worse, Bergen’s most famous citizen. One of them knew Christian from school and recalled, “He always tried to impress the other people in class. He was simply too weird for us.”

“He was very clever!” added another.

“Christian read a lot of the classics,” the first man said. “When we were eleven or twelve, he would come up with the most incredible quotes. He was a very good speaker. It was easy for him to express himself. But he didn’t get good grades in school.”

“And he was a mama’s boy!” a third man added.

Yes, others agreed, a mama’s boy with a locally famous father.

He would try to measure up to Simon. “He came to school in a
suit
,” said his classmate. “Not a Bavarian suit, but a proper business suit, the kind you only wore to church on Sundays or to a wedding. But it made his mother proud. Irmengard loved extravagance. She was just a simple tailor, taking in neighbors’ clothing to repair, but she tried to behave like a lady.”

As lunch hour turned to cocktail hour and cocktail hour to nighttime, the beer drinkers moved from the outdoor table to a bigger one inside the tavern, with a metal sign in the middle of it spelling out the word
Stammtisch
. A friendly waitress kept on bringing beers, the air filled with tobacco smoke, and the stories about Christian got increasingly wild.

Christian inherited his father’s creativity, the men said, but instead of painting he went into role-playing, imagining himself far from the small town he seemed destined to live and die in. The family toolshed became his workshop, where he could fiddle with all manner of gadgetry: radios, television sets, film equipment. Among his hobbies were eavesdropping on truck drivers as they chatted on their CB radios and watching old American movies. The more he saw of America on film, the more he felt he needed to escape Bergen.

“His major task became to make fun of our teachers,” said Christian’s former classmate. “At the start of the day, he would announce to us, ‘Watch out!’ and you knew something would happen.”

“What did he do?” several of the men asked in unison.

“One morning he approached the teacher with his fist closed. ‘What is in your hand, Christian?’ she asked, and then added, ‘Give it to me.’ He opened his fist. There was pepper in it, and he blew it in her face.”

The men shook their heads. Another beer drinker suddenly remembered another story.

“Simon brought Christian to the
Stammtisch
every Friday night,” he said. They wold always sit side by side, right where we were sitting now, “and Simon would say of his son,
‘Er ist ein verrückter Hund.’”
My companion leaned over to translate: “‘He is a mad dog.’”

The man continued, “But he meant it as a compliment. Simon thought Christian was strange, but he was
proud
of his son. He was saying, ‘He’s mad like me. And in a strange way, he will do well.’” He was proud of his son’s nerve and defiance—qualities he knew the boy would need in spades in order to create a life for himself outside of Bergen.

Christian was too big for Bergen, all of the men seemed to be saying, and creating another persona was the only way he would ever leave the little town that nobody ever leaves. To escape the preordained and predictable future that awaited him here, he would have to invent a new self out of whole cloth. After all, his father had also attempted to get away from Bergen, enrolling in art school in Munich, only to be forced to return after the death of his father and his lack of success as an artist. Perhaps that’s why Simon was proud of Christian. He was striving to do exactly what Simon himself had failed to accomplish during his short stint in art school: to become a success in a different arena from his forefathers and in a place beyond the boundaries of the little town where he was born and raised.

I mentioned something that one of Christian’s childhood friends had told the
New York Times:

“Christian liked to play games in which he adopted another identity,” said Thomas Schweiger, a onetime close friend.

At thirteen, Mr. Schweiger said, Christian telephoned a government office that registered cars, “and he changed his voice and said that he was a millionaire from Holland and that he wanted to register his two Rolls-Royces.” Although the clerk was skeptical, Christian persuaded him, his friend said. “He really played this role perfect.”

The men laughed. It was yet another illustration of young Christian Gerhartsreiter on his journey to discovering an incredibly gullible world. Then another man jumped into the conversation with a story that he seemed certain would trump all the others, but as he started to tell it, several of the others interrupted, exclaiming, “The hearse!”

One of the beer drinkers took up the thread. “Shortly before Christian left for America, he and his father fell out over something,” the man said. “His father threw him out of the house and told him, ‘You don’t sleep here anymore.’ Christian bought a hearse and parked it outside his parents’ house. The village was outraged. At first people thought the grandmother had died. But Christian was sleeping in it! It was the talk of the village for a long time. He would drive up to the shooting club in this big black car. He obviously loved to drive it around and bother people, to scandalize everybody.”

Someone else at the table said the man had gotten it wrong: that there was indeed a hearse parked in front of the Gerhartsreiter house for some time, but that it was Christian’s brother, Alexander, who drove it. By now it was past midnight, and I didn’t care who had the story straight. My belly was full of beer and my mind was reeling with a full day and night’s worth of tales of Bergen. I stumbled back to the small inn where I was staying, beneath the colorful maypole painted with idyllic scenes of everyday Bavarian life, and lapsed into a dead sleep in the quiet little town that Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter left behind.

I awoke to another source with further insights into Bergen’s wayward son: Herbert Willinger, the owner of the inn, sitting behind the front desk. He had gone through school with Christian Gerhartsreiter. Like everyone else, Willinger painted a picture of an aloof young man who considered himself destined for greater things.

“Christian would tell us, ‘Everything here in Bavaria is shit. If you want a better life, you have to go to America.’” When his classmates would laugh at him, he’d tell them, “You will see.” One day, Willinger continued, “Christian announced that he had gotten a job at a radio station in New York,” but Willinger was pretty sure that wasn’t true. “Pretending to be someone else was totally his character.”

However, Christian had apparently been experimenting with the idea of escape for some time. In order to get a taste of the world beyond Bergen, he would simply walk down the street in front of his family home to the nearby autobahn and stick out his thumb. Within minutes, a car, truck, or motorcycle would stop, and just like that, he’d be off to another town, another world, away from little Bergen. At first he would hitch his way to larger neighboring villages such as Traunstein, or to the city of Rosenheim, where he attended classes. His range grew along with his ambitions, and he became a regular presence on the autobahn, looking for anyone or anything that might help him escape. It was there that Elmer and Jean Kelln, the tourists from Loma Linda, California, drove into his orbit.

It was a torrential downpour, so much rain that the windshield wipers of the tiny rental car couldn’t keep up. Elmer and Jean could barely make out the autobahn through the blinding storm. They were trying to make their way from Munich to Berchtesgaden to visit the Eagle’s Nest, Adolf Hitler’s majestic country home high in the Bavarian Alps. At around 5 p.m., the Kellns exited the highway near Bergen, looking for shelter.

Elmer was driving, and he spotted a young man on the shoulder with his thumb in the air. He wouldn’t normally pick up a hitchhiker, but he had never been stuck in Germany in a blinding thunderstorm before. “Maybe he can tell us where we can spend the night,” Elmer said to his wife. Before she could voice an objection, he pulled over and stopped the car. The drenched young man flung open the back door and climbed inside.

He couldn’t have been more than seventeen. He was wearing white sunglasses, tight jeans, and a floppy hat, from beneath which spilled a mass of stringy brown hair. His clothing had been plastered to his thin frame by the rain.

“I’m Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter,” he said, extending a damp hand from the backseat, and the way he said the name, the couple felt, he was
somebody
. From the moment they met him they were impressed.

Jean was struck by how handsome he was. He had a long aquiline nose and full lips that broke into a wide grin when he began speaking, which he did practically nonstop. He said he worked as a tour guide for English-speaking visitors in Rosenheim and sometimes in Munich, and his flawless English gave the Kellns little reason to doubt him. Now he was heading home to Bergen, just a few miles down the road.

He wasn’t just charming, he was alluring. Although he was a foreigner decades younger than they were, Elmer and Jean Kelln somehow felt that they had something in common with him and wanted to get to know the young man better. “Where would you suggest we spend the night?” asked Elmer.

“You will stay at my house,” Christian said. The Kellns were hesitant, but he insisted. In any other circumstances they would have demurred, but the rain was unrelenting, darkness was descending, and something about the young man was practically magnetic. So they accepted.

The Kellns were charmed when they pulled up in front of his family home: an adorable, typically Bavarian house with geraniums in flower boxes outside the windows. By then the rain had subsided. The hitchhiker’s father was working on the roof and his mother was in the kitchen. Christian said little more than hello to them as he escorted the Americans inside. It was immediately clear that the son was the man of the house.

Jean marveled at how he had taken over the entire living room and turned it into
his
room, apparently with the blessing, or at least the acquiescence, of his parents. He had set up a large desk as his workstation and hooked up all manner of machinery—most important, a film projector and screen. Movies, Christian explained to Elmer and Jean, were his passion. In fact, he was soon heading to America to become a filmmaker. His favorite genre was film noir, in particular the works of Alfred Hitchcock. He said he would show them an example, and he dimmed the lights and flicked on the projector.