Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

Becker nodded appreciatively as the three of us seated ourselves round the table bolted to the yellow-tiled wall.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said to Dr Liebl. ‘All the warders are at it in here. Much better than the Stiftskaserne, I can tell you. None of those fucking Yanks could be greased. There’s nothing those bastards want that they can’t get for themselves.’

‘You’re telling me,’ I said, and found my own cigarettes. Liebl shook his head when I offered him one. ‘These come from your friend Poroshin,’ I explained as Becker slipped one out of the pack.

‘Quite a fellow, isn’t he?’

‘Your wife thinks he’s your boss.’

Becker lit us both and blew a cloud of smoke across my shoulder. ‘You spoke to Ella?’ he said, but he didn’t sound surprised.

‘Apart from the five thousand, she’s the only reason I’m here,’ I said. ‘With her on your case I decided you probably needed all the help you could get. As far as she’s concerned you’re already swinging.’

‘Hates me that bad, eh?’

‘Like a cold sore.’

‘Well she’s got the right, I guess.’ He sighed and shook his head. Then he took a long, nervous drag of his cigarette that barely left the paper on the tobacco. For a moment he stared at me, his bloodshot eyes blinking hard through the smoke. After several seconds he coughed and smiled all at once. ‘Go ahead and ask me.’

‘All right. Did you kill Captain Linden?’

‘As God is my witness, no.’ He laughed. ‘Can I go now, sir?’ He took another desperate suck at his smoke. ‘You do believe me, don’t you, Bernie?’

‘I believe you’d have a better story if you were lying. I credit you with that much sense. But as I was saying to your girlfriend -’

‘You’ve met Traudl? Good. She’s great, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, she is. Christ only knows what she sees in you.’

‘She enjoys my after-dinner conversation of course. That’s why she doesn’t like to see me locked up in here. She misses our little fireside chats about Wittgenstein.’ The smile disappeared as his hand reached across the table and clutched at my forearm. ‘Look, you’ve got to get me out of here, Bernie. The five thousand was just to get you in the game. You prove that I’m innocent and I’ll treble your fee.’

‘We both know that it isn’t going to be easy.’

Becker misunderstood.

‘Money’s not a problem: I’ve got plenty of money. There’s a car parked in a garage in Hernals with $30,000 in the boot. It’s yours if you get me off.’

Liebl winced as his client continued to demonstrate his apparent lack of business acumen. ‘Really, Herr Becker, as your lawyer I must protest. This is not the way to -’

‘Shut up,’ Becker said savagely. ‘When I want your advice I’ll ask for it.’

Liebl gave a diplomatic sort of shrug, and leaned back on his chair.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘let’s talk about a bonus when you’re out. The money’s fine. You’ve already paid me well. I wasn’t talking about the money. No, what I’d like now are a few ideas. So how about you start by telling me about Herr König: where you met him, what he looks like and whether you think he likes cream in his coffee. OK?’

Becker nodded and ground his cigarette out on the floor. He clasped and unclasped his hands and started to squeeze his knuckles uncomfortably. Probably he had been over the story too many times to feel happy about repeating it.

‘All right. Well then, let’s see. I met Helmut König in the Koralle. That’s a nightclub in the 9th Bezirk. Porzellangasse. He just came up and introduced himself. Said he’d heard of me, and wanted to buy me a drink. So I let him. We talked about the usual things. The war, me being in Russia, me being in Kripo before the SS, same as you really. Only you left, didn’t you, Bernie?’

‘Just keep to the point.’

‘He said he’d heard of me from friends. He didn’t say who. There was some business he’d like to put my way: a regular delivery across the Green Frontier. Cash money, no questions asked. It was easy. All I had to do was collect a small parcel from an office here in Vienna and take it to another office in Berlin. But only when I was going anyway, with a lorry load of cigarettes, that kind of thing. If I’d been picked up they probably wouldn’t even have noticed König’s parcel. At first I thought it was drugs. But then I opened one of the parcels. It was just a few files: Party files, army files, SS files. The old stuff. I couldn’t see what made it worth money to them.’

‘Was it always just files?’

He nodded.

‘Captain Linden worked for the US Documents Centre in Berlin,’ I explained. ‘He was a Nazi-hunter. These files – do you remember any names?’

‘Bernie, they were tadpoles, small fry. SS corporals and army pay-clerks. Any Nazi-hunter would just have thrown them back. Those fellows are after the big fish, people like Bormann and Eichmann. Not fucking little pay-clerks.’

‘Nevertheless, the files were important to Linden. Whoever it was that killed him also arranged to have a couple of amateur detectives he knew murdered. Two Jews who had survived the camps and were out to settle a few scores. I found them dead a few days ago. They’d been that way a while. Perhaps the files were for them. So it would help if you could try and remember some of the names.’

‘Sure, anything you say, Bernie. I’ll try to fit it into my busy schedule.’

‘You do that. Now tell me about König. What did he look like?’

‘Let’s see: he was about forty, I’d say. Well-built, dark, thick moustache, weighed about ninety kilos, one-ninety tall; wore a good tweed suit, smoked cigars and always had a dog with him -a little terrier. He was Austrian for sure. Sometimes he had a girl around. Her name was Lotte. I don’t know her surname, but she worked at the Casanova Club. Good-looking bitch, blonde. That’s all I remember.’

‘You said that you talked about the war. Didn’t he tell you how many medals he won?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘Then don’t you think you should tell me?’

‘I didn’t think it was relevant.’

‘I’ll decide what’s relevant. Come on, unpack it, Becker.’

He stared at the wall and then shrugged. ‘As far as I remember, he said he had joined the Austrian Nazi Party when it was still illegal, in 1931. Later he got himself arrested for putting up posters. So he escaped to Germany to avoid arrest and joined the Bavarian police in Munich. He joined the SS in 1933, and stayed in until the end of the war.’

‘Any rank?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘Did he give you any indication of where he served and in what sort of capacity?’

Becker shook his head.

‘Not much of a conversation you two had. What were you reminiscing about, the price of bread? All right. What about the second man – the one who came to your home with König and asked you to look for Linden?’

Becker squeezed his temples. ‘I’ve tried to remember his name, but it just won’t come,’ he said. ‘He was a bit more of the senior officer type. You know, very stiff and proper. An aristocrat, maybe. Again he was aged about forty, tall, thin, clean-shaven, balding. Wore a Schiller jacket and a club-tie.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not very good on club-ties. It could have been Herrenklub, I don’t know.’

‘And the man you saw come out of the studio where Linden was killed: what did he look like?’

‘He was too far away for me to see much, except that he was quite short and very stocky. He wore a dark hat and coat and he was in a hurry.’

‘I’ll bet he was,’ I said. ‘The publicity firm, Reklaue & Werbe Zentrale. It’s on Mariahilferstrasse, isn’t it?’