Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

There was an old Pickelhaube helmet, a stuffed marmot, in a glass case, that looked as if it had perished of anthrax, and an old Siemens vacuum-cleaner; there were several cases full of military medals – mostly second-class Iron Crosses like mine own, twenty odd volumes of Kohler’s Naval Calendar , full of ships long since sunk or sent to the breaker’s yard, a Blaupunkt radio, a chipped bust of Bismarck and an old Leica. I was inspecting the case of medals when a smell of tobacco, and Weizmann’s familiar cough, announced his present appearance.

‘You should look after yourself, Weizmann.’

‘And what would I do with a long life?’ The threat of Weizmann’s wheezing cough was ever present in his speech. It lay in wait to trip him like a sleeping halberdier. Sometimes he managed to catch himself; but this time he fell into a spasm of coughing that sounded hardly human at all, more like someone trying to start a car with an almost flat battery, and as usual it seemed to afford him no relief whatsoever. Nor did it require him to remove the pipe from his tobacco-pouch of a mouth.

‘You should try inhaling a little bit of air now and then,’ I told him. ‘Or at least something you haven’t first set on fire.’

‘Air,’ he said. ‘It goes straight to my head. Anyway, I’m training myself to do without it: there’s no telling when they’ll ban Jews from breathing oxygen.’ He lifted the counter. ‘Come into the back room, my friend, and tell me what service I can do for you.’ I followed him round the counter, past an empty bookcase.

‘Is business picking up then?’ I said. He turned to look at me. ‘What happened to all the books?’ Weizmann shook his head sadly.

‘Unfortunately, I had to remove them. The Nuremberg Laws -’ he said with a scornful laugh, ‘- they forbid a Jew to sell books. Even secondhand ones.’ He turned and passed on through to the back room. ‘These days I believe in the law like I believe in Horst Wessel’s heroism.’

‘Horst Wessel?’ I said. ‘Never heard of him.’

Weizmann smiled and pointed at an old Jacquard sofa with the stem of his reeking pipe. ‘Sit down, Bernie, and let me fix us a drink.’

‘Well, what do you know? They still let Jews drink booze. I was almost feeling sorry for you back there when you told me about those books. Things are never as bad as they seem, just as long as there’s a drink about.’

‘That’s the truth, my friend.’ He opened a corner cabinet, found the bottle of schnapps and poured it carefully but generously. Handing me my glass he said, ‘I’ll tell you something. If it wasn’t for all the people who drink, this country really would be in a hell of a state.’ He raised his glass. ‘Let us wish for more drunks and the frustration of an efficiently run National Socialist Germany.’

‘To more drunks,’ I said, watching him drink it, almost too gratefully. He had a shrewd face, with a mouth that wore a wry smile, even with the chimneystack. A large, fleshy nose separated eyes that were rather too closely set together, and supported a pair of thick, rimless glasses. The still-dark hair was brushed neatly to the right of a high forehead. Wearing his well-pressed blue pin-striped suit, Weizmann looked not unlike Ernst Lubitsch, the comic actor turned film director. He sat down at an old rolltop and turned sideways to face me.

‘So what can I do for you?’

I showed him the photograph of Six’s necklace. He wheezed a little as he looked at it, and then coughed his way into a remark.

‘If it’s real -’ He smiled and nodded his head from side to side. ‘Is it real? Of course it’s real, or why else would you be showing me such a nice photograph. Well then, it looks like a very fine piece indeed.’

‘It’s been stolen,’ I said.

‘Bernie, with you sitting there I didn’t think it was stuck up a tree waiting for the fire service.’ He shrugged. ‘But, such a fine-looking necklace – what can I tell you about it that you don’t already know?’

‘Come on, Weizmann. Until you got caught thieving you were one of Friedlaender’s best jewellers.’

‘Ah, you put it so delicately.’

‘After twenty years in the business you know bells like you know your own waistcoat pocket.’

‘Twenty-two years,’ he said quietly, and poured us both another glass. ‘Very well. Ask your questions, Bernie, and we shall see what we shall see.’

‘How would someone go about getting rid of it?’

‘You mean some other way than just dropping it in the Landwehr Canal? For money? It would depend.’

‘On what?’ I said patiently.

‘On whether the person in possession was Jewish or Gentile.’

‘Come on, Weizmann,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to keep wringing the yarmulke for my benefit.’

‘No, seriously, Bernie. Right now the market for gems is at rock bottom. There are lots of Jews leaving Germany who, to fund their emigration, must sell the family jewels. At least, those who are lucky enough to have any to sell. And, as you might expect, they get the lowest prices. A Gentile could afford to wait for the market to become more buoyant. A Jew could not.’ Coughing in small explosive bursts, he took another, longer look at Six’s photograph and gave a chesty little shrug.

‘Way out of my league, I can tell you that much. Sure, I buy some small stuff. But nothing big enough to interest the boys from the Alex. Like you, they know about me, Bernie. There’s my time in the cement for a start. If I was to step badly out of line they’d have me in a K Z quicker than the drawers off a Kit-Kat showgirl.’ Wheezing like a leaky old harmonium, Weizmann grinned and handed the photograph back to me.

‘Amsterdam would be the best place to sell it,’ he said. ‘If you could get it out of Germany, that is. German customs officers are a smuggler’s nightmare. Not that there aren’t plenty of people in Berlin who would buy it.’

‘Like who, for instance?’

‘The two-tray boys – one tray on top and one under the counter – they might be interested. Like Peter Neumaier. He’s got a nice little shop on Schlüterstrasse, specializing in antique jewellery. This might be his sort of thing. I’ve heard he’s got plenty of flea and can pay it in whatever currency you like. Yes, I’d have thought he’d certainly be worth checking out.’ He wrote the name down on a piece of paper. ‘Then we have Werner Seldte. He may appear to be a bit Potsdam, but he’s not above buying some hot bells.’ Potsdam was a word of faint opprobrium for people who, like the antiquated pro-Royalists of that town, were smug, hypocritical and hopelessly dated in both intellectual and social ideas. ‘Frankly, he’s got fewer scruples than a backstreet angelmaker. His shop is on Budapester Strasse or Ebertstrasse or Hermann Goering Strasse or whatever the hell the Party calls it now.

‘Then there are the dealers, the diamond merchants who buy and sell from classy offices where a browser for an engagement ring is about as popular as a pork chop in a rabbi’s coat pocket. These are the sort of people who do most of their business on the gabbler.’ He wrote down some more names. ‘This one, Laser Oppenheimer, he’s a Jew. That’s just to show that I’m fair and that I’ve got nothing against Gentiles. Oppenheimer has an office on Joachimsthaler Strasse. Anyway, the last I heard of him he was still in business.

‘There’s Gert Jeschonnek. New to Berlin. Used to be based in Munich. From what I’ve heard, he’s the worst kind of March Violet – you know, climbing on board the Party wagon and riding it to make a quick profit. He’s got a very smart set of offices in that steel monstrosity on Potsdamer Platz. What’s it called-?’

‘Columbus Haus,’ I said.