Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

‘More your type I’d have thought, sir.’

‘Oh? What makes you say that?’

‘You know, the type that responds to kindness.’

I laughed, despite my headache. ‘More than she responds to bad news. There we are with our big feet and long faces and all she can do is look like she was in the middle of her period.’

‘She’s a nurse. They’re used to handling bad news.’

‘That crossed my mind, but I think she’d done her crying already, and quite recently. What about Irma Hanke’s mother? Did she cry?’

‘God, no. As hard as Jew Süss that one. Maybe she did sniff a little when I first showed up. But they were giving off the same sort of atmosphere as the Ganzes.’

I looked at my watch. ‘I think we need a drink, don’t you?’

We drove to the café Kerkau, on Alexanderstrasse. With sixty billiard tables, it was where a lot of bulls from the Alex went to relax when they came off duty.

I bought a couple of beers and carried them over to a table where Becker was practising a few shots.

‘Do you play?’ he said.

‘Are you stretching me out? This used to be my sitting-room.’ I picked up a stick and watched Becker shoot the cue ball. It hit the red, banked off the cushion and hit the other white ball square.

‘Care for a little bet?’

‘Not after that shot. You’ve got a lot to learn about working a line. Now if you’d missed it -’

‘Lucky shot, that’s all,’ Becker insisted. He bent down and cued a wild one which missed by half a metre.

I clicked my tongue. ‘That’s a billiard cue you’re holding, not a white stick. Stop trying to lay me down, will you? Look, if it makes you happy, we’ll play for five marks a game.’

He smiled slightly and flexed his shoulders.

‘Twenty points all right with you?’

I won the break and missed the opening shot. After that I might just as well have been baby-sitting. Becker hadn’t been in the Boy Scouts when he was young, that much was certain. After four games I tossed a twenty on to the felt and begged for mercy. Becker threw it back.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You let me lay you down.’

‘That’s another thing you’ve got to learn. A bet’s a bet. You never ever play for money unless you mean to collect. A man that lets you off might expect you to let him off. It makes people nervous, that’s all.’

‘That sounds like good advice.’ He pocketed the money.

‘It’s like business,’ I continued. ‘You never work for free. If you won’t take money for your work then it can’t have been worth much.’ I returned my cue to the rack and finished my beer. ‘Never trust anyone who’s happy to do the job for nothing.’

‘Is that what you’ve learnt as a private detective?’

‘No, it’s what I’ve learnt as a good businessman. But since you mention it, I don’t like the smell of a private investigator who tries to find a missing schoolgirl and then waives his fee.’

‘Rolf Vogelmann? But he didn’t find her.’

‘Let me tell you something. These days a lot of people go missing in this town, and for lots of different reasons. Finding one is the exception, not the rule. If I’d torn up the bill of every disappointed client I had, I’d have been washing dishes by now. When you’re private, there’s no room for sentiment. The man who doesn’t collect, doesn’t eat.’

‘Maybe this Vogelmann character is just more generous than you were, sir.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t see how he can afford to be,’ I said, unfolding Vogelmann’s advertisement and looking at it again. ‘Not with these overheads.’

Tuesday, 18 October

It was her, all right. There was no mistaking that golden head and those well-sculpted legs. I watched her struggle out of Ka-De- We’s revolving door, laden with parcels and carrier-bags, looking like she was doing her last-minute Christmas shopping. She waved for a taxi, dropped a bag, bent down to retrieve it and looked up to find that the driver had missed her. It was difficult to see how. You’d have noticed Hildegard Steininger with a sack over your head. She looked as though she lived in a beauty parlour.

From inside my car I heard her swear and, drawing up at the curb, I wound down the passenger window.

‘Need a lift somewhere?’

She was still looking around for another taxi when she answered. ‘No, it’s all right,’ she said, as if I had cornered her at a cocktail party and she had been glancing over my shoulder to see if there might be someone more interesting coming along. There wasn’t, so she remembered to smile, briefly, and then added: ‘Well, if you’re sure it’s no trouble.’

I jumped out to help her load the shopping. Millinery stores, shoe shops, a perfumers, a fancy Friedrichstrasse dress-designer, and Ka-De-We’s famous food hall: I figured she was the type for whom a cheque-book provided the best kind of panacea for what was troubling her. But then, there are lots of women like that.

‘It’s no trouble at all,’ I said, my eyes following her legs as they swung into the car, briefly enjoying a view of her stocking tops and garters. Forget it, I told myself. This one was too pricey. Besides, she had other things on her mind. Like whether the shoes matched the handbag, and what had happened to her missing daughter.

‘Where to?’ I said. ‘Home?’

She sighed like I’d suggested the Palme doss-house on Frobelstrasse, and then, smiling a brave little smile, she nodded. We drove east towards Bülowstrasse.

‘I’m afraid that I don’t have any news for you,’ I said, fixing a serious expression to my features and trying to concentrate on the road rather than the memory of her thighs.

‘No, I didn’t think you did,’ she said dully. ‘It’s been almost four weeks now, hasn’t it?’

‘Don’t give up hope.’

Another sigh, rather more impatient. ‘You’re not going to find her. She’s dead, isn’t she? Why doesn’t somebody just admit it?’

‘She’s alive until I find out different, Frau Steininger.’ I turned south down Potsdamerstrasse and for a while we were both silent. Then I became aware of her shaking her head and breathing like she had walked up a flight of stairs.

‘Whatever must you think of me, Kommissar?’ she said. ‘My daughter missing, probably murdered, and here I am spending money as if I hadn’t a care in the world. You must think me a heartless sort of woman.’

‘I don’t think anything of the kind,’ I said, and started telling her how people dealt with these things in different ways, and that if a bit of shopping helped to take her mind off her daughter’s disappearance for a couple of hours then that was perfectly all right, and that nobody would blame her. I thought I made a convincing case, but by the time we reached her apartment in Steglitz, Hildegard Steininger was in tears.

I took hold of her shoulder and just squeezed it, letting her go a bit before I said, ‘I’d offer you my handkerchief if I hadn’t wrapped my sandwiches in it.’

Through her tears she tried a smile. ‘I have one,’ she said, and tugged a square of lace from out of her sleeve. Then she glanced over at my own handkerchief and laughed. ‘It does look as if you’d wrapped your sandwiches in it.’

After I’d helped to carry her purchases upstairs, I stood outside her door while she found her key. Opening it, she turned and smiled gracefully.

‘Thank you for helping, Kommissar,’ she said. ‘It really was very kind of you.’

‘It was nothing,’ I said, thinking nothing of the sort.

Not even an invitation in for a cup of coffee, I thought when I was sitting in the car once more. Lets me drive her all this way and not even invited inside.