Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

After a while I said, ‘So what have you heard? Anything?’

‘A man’s body fished out of the Landwehr.’

‘That’s about as unusual as a fat railwayman,’ I told him. ‘The canal is the Gestapo’s toilet, you know that. It’s got so that if someone disappears in this goddamn city, it’s quicker to look for him at the lighterman’s office than police headquarters or the city morgue.’

‘Yes, but this one had a billiard cue – up his nose. It penetrated the bottom of his brain they reckoned.’

I put down my knife and fork. ‘Would you mind laying off the gory details until I’ve finished my food?’ I said.

‘Sorry,’ said Stock. ‘Well, that’s all there is really. But they don’t normally do that sort of thing, do they, the Gestapo?’

‘There’s no telling what is considered normal on Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Perhaps he’d been sticking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted. They might have wanted to do something poetic.’ I wiped my mouth and laid some change on the table which Stock collected up without bothering to count it.

‘Funny to think that it used to be the Art School – Gestapo headquarters, I mean.’

‘Hilarious. I bet the poor bastards they work over up there go to sleep as happy as little snowmen at the notion.’ I stood up and went to the door. ‘Nice about the Lindberghs though.’

I walked back to the office. Frau Protze was polishing the glass on the yellowing print of Tilly that hung on the wall of my waiting room, contemplating with some amusement the predicament of the hapless Burgomeister of Rothenburg. As I came through the door the phone started to ring. Frau Protze smiled at me and then stepped smartly into her little cubicle to answer it, leaving me to look afresh at the clean picture. It was a long time since I’d really looked at it. The Burgomeister, having pleaded with Tilly, the sixteenth-century commander of the Imperial German Army, for his town to be spared destruction, was required by his conqueror to drink six litres of beer without drawing breath. As I remembered the story, the Burgomeister had pulled off this prodigious feat of bibbing and the town had been saved. It was, as I had always thought, so characteristically German. And just the sort of sadistic trick some S A thug would play. Nothing really changes that much.

‘It’s a lady,’ Frau Protze called to me. ‘She won’t give her name, but she insists on speaking to you.’

‘Then put her through,’ I said, stepping into my office. I picked up the candlestick and the earpiece.

‘We met last night,’ said the voice. I cursed, thinking it was Carola, the girl from Dagmarr’s wedding reception. I wanted to forget all about that little episode. But it wasn’t Carola. ‘Or perhaps I should say this morning. It was pretty late. You were on your way out and I was just coming back after a party. Do you remember?’

‘Frau-’ I hesitated, still not quite able to believe it.

‘Please,’ she said, ‘less of the Frau. Lise Rudel, if you don’t mind, Herr Gunther.’

‘I don’t mind at all,’ I said. ‘How could I not remember?’

‘You might,’ she said. ‘You looked very tired.’ Her voice was as sweet as a plate of Kaiser’s pancakes. ‘Hermann and I, we often forget that other people don’t keep such late hours.’

‘If you’ll permit me to say so, you looked pretty good on it.’

‘Well, thank you,’ she cooed, sounding genuinely flattered. In my experience you can never flatter any woman too much, just as you can never give a dog too many biscuits.

‘And how can I be of service?’

‘I’d like to speak to you on a matter of some urgency,’ she said. ‘All the same, I’d rather not talk about it on the telephone.’

‘Come and see me here, in my office?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t. I’m at the studios in Babelsberg right now. Perhaps you would care to come to my apartment this evening?’

‘Your apartment?’ I said. ‘Well, yes, I’d be delighted. Where is it?’

‘Badenschestrasse, Number 7. Shall we say nine o’clock?’

‘That would be fine.’ She hung up. I lit a cigarette and smoked it absently. She was probably working on a film, I thought, and imagined her telephoning me from her dressing room wearing only a robe, having just finished a scene in which she’d been required to swim naked in a mountain lake. That took me quite a few minutes. I’ve got a good imagination. Then I got to wondering if Six knew about the apartment. I decided he did. You don’t get to be as rich as Six was without knowing your wife had her own place. She probably kept it on in order to retain a degree of independence. I guessed that there wasn’t much she couldn’t have had if she really put her mind to it. Putting her body to it as well probably got her the moon and a couple of galaxies on top. All the same, I didn’t think it was likely that Six knew or would have approved of her seeing me. Not after what he had said about me not poking into his family affairs. Whatever it was she wanted to talk to me urgently about was certainly not for the gnome’s ears.

I called Müller, the crime reporter on the Berliner Morgenpost , which was the only half-decent rag left on the news-stand. Müller was a good reporter gone to seed. There wasn’t much call for the old style of crime-reporting; the Ministry of Propaganda had seen to that.

‘Look,’ I said after the preliminaries, ‘I need some biographical information from your library files, as much as you can get and as soon as possible, on Hermann Six.’

‘The steel millionaire? Working on his daughter’s death, eh, Bernie?’

‘I’ve been retained by the insurance company to investigate the fire.’

‘What have you got so far?’

‘You could write what I know on a tram ticket.’

‘Well,’ said Müller, ‘that’s about the size of the piece we’ve got on it for tomorrow’s edition. The Ministry has told us to lay off it. Just to record the facts, and keep it small.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Six has got some powerful friends, Bernie. His sort of money buys an awful lot of silence.’

‘Were you onto anything?’

‘I heard it was arson, that’s about all. When do you need this stuff?’

‘Fifty says tomorrow. And anything you can dig up on the rest of the family.’

‘I can always use a little extra money. Be talking to you.’

I hung up and shoved some papers inside some old newspapers and then dumped them in one of the desk drawers that still had a bit of space. After that I doodled on the blotter and then picked up one of the several paperweights that were lying on the desk. I was rolling its cold bulk around my hands when there was a knock at the door. Frau Protze edged into the room.

‘I wondered if there was any filing that needed to be done.’ I pointed at the untidy stacks of files that lay on the floor behind my desk.

‘That’s my filing system there,’ I said. ‘Believe it or not, they are in some sort of order.’ She smiled, humouring me no doubt, and nodded attentively as if I was explaining something that would change her life.

‘And are they all work in progress?’

I laughed. ‘This isn’t a lawyer’s office,’ I said. ‘With quite a few of them, I don’t know whether they are in progress or not. Investigation isn’t a fast business with quick results. You have to have a lot of patience.’

‘Yes, I can see that,’ she said. There was only one photograph on my desk. She turned it round to get a better look at it. ‘She’s very beautiful. Your wife?’

‘She was. Died on the day of the Kapp Putsch.’ I must have made that remark a hundred times. Allying her death to another event like that, well, it plays down how much I still miss her, even after sixteen years. Never successfully however. ‘It was Spanish influenza,’ I explained. ‘We were together for only ten months.’ Frau Protze nodded sympathetically.