Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

Much later on, when we were in her room again, she said, ‘Are you still feeling nervous?’

I reached for her gourd-like breasts and found her blouse damp with perspiration. She helped me to unbutton her and while I enjoyed the weight of her bosom in my hand she unfastened her skirt. I stood back to give her room to step out of it. And when she had laid it over the back of a chair I took her by the hand and drew her towards me.

For a brief moment I held her tight, enjoying her short, husky breath on my neck, before searching down for the curve of her girdled behind, her membrane-tight stocking-tops, and then the soft, cool flesh between her gartered thighs. And after she had engineered the subtraction of what little remained to cover her, I kissed her and allowed an intrepid finger to enjoy a short exploration of her hidden places.

In bed she held a smile on her face as slowly I strove to fathom her. Catching sight of her open eyes, which were no more than dreamy, as if she was unable to forget my satisfaction in search of her own, I found that I was too excited to care much beyond what seemed polite. When at last she felt the wound I was making in her become more urgent, she raised her thighs on to her chest and, reaching down, spread herself open with the flats of her hands, as if holding taut a piece of cloth for the needle of a sewing-machine, so that I might see myself periodically drawn tight into her. A moment later I flexed against her as life worked its independent and juddering propulsion.

It snowed hard that night, and then the temperature fell into the sewers, freezing the whole of Vienna, to preserve it for a better day. I dreamed, not of a lasting city, but of the city which was to come.

‘A date for Herr Becker’s trial has now been set,’ Liebl told me, ‘which makes it absolutely imperative that we make all haste with the preparation of our defence. I trust you will forgive me, Herr Gunther, if I impress upon you the urgent need for evidence to substantiate our client’s account. While I have faith in your ability as a detective, I should very much like to know exactly what progress you have made so far, in order that I may best advise Herr Becker how we are to conduct his case in court.’

This conversation took place several weeks after my arrival in Vienna – but it was not the first time that Liebl had pressed me for some indication of my progress.

We were sitting in the café Schwarzenberg, which had become the nearest thing I’d had to an office since before the war. The Viennese coffee house resembles a gentleman’s club, except in so far as that a day’s membership costs little more than the price of a cup of coffee. For that you can stay for as long as you like, read the papers and magazines that are provided, leave messages with waiters, receive mail, reserve a table for appointments and generally run a business in total confidence before all the world. The Viennese respect privacy in the same way that Americans worship antiquity, and a fellow patron of the Schwarzenberg would no more have stuck his nose over your shoulder than he would have stirred a cup of mocha with his forefinger.

On previous occasions I had told Liebl that an exact idea of progress was not something that existed in the world of the private investigator: that it was not the kind of business in which one might report that a specific course of action would definitely occur within a certain period. That’s the trouble with lawyers. They expect the rest of the world to work like the Code Napoléon. On this particular occasion however, I had rather more to tell Liebl.

‘König’s girlfriend, Lotte, is back in Vienna,’ I said.

‘She’s returned from her skiing holiday at long last?’

‘It looks like that.’

‘But you haven’t yet found her.

‘Someone I know from the Casanova Club has a friend who spoke to her just a couple of days ago. She may even have been back for a week or so.’

‘A week?’ Liebl repeated. ‘Why has it taken so long to find that out?’

‘These things take time,’ I shrugged provocatively. I was fed up with Liebl’s constant quizzing and had started to take a childish delight in teasing him with these displays of apparent insouciance.

‘Yes,’ he grumbled, ‘so you’ve said before.’ He did not sound convinced.

‘It’s not like we have addresses for these people,’ I said. ‘And Lotte Hartmann hasn’t been near the Casanova since she’s been back. The girl who spoke to her said that Lotte had been trying to get a small part in a film at Sievering Studios.’

‘Sievering? Yes, that’s in the 19th Bezirk. The studio is owned by a Viennese called Karl Hartl. He used to be a client of mine. Hartl’s directed all the great stars: Pola Negri, Lya de Putti, Maria Corda, Vilma Banky, Lilian Harvey. Did you see The Gypsy Baron? Well that was Hartl.’

‘You don’t suppose he could know anything about the film studio where Becker found Linden’s body?’

‘Drittemann Film?’ Liebl stirred his coffee absently. ‘If it were a legitimate film company, Hartl would know about it. There’s not much that happens in Viennese film-production that Hartl doesn’t know about. But this wasn’t anything more than a name on a lease. There weren’t actually any films made there. You checked it out yourself, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said, recalling the fruitless afternoon I had spent there two weeks before. It turned out that even the lease had expired, and that the property had now reverted to the state. ‘You’re right. Linden was the first and last thing to be shot there.’ I shrugged. ‘It was just a thought.’

‘So what will you do now?’

‘Try and trace Lotte Hartmann at Sievering. That shouldn’t be too difficult. You don’t go after a part in a film without leaving an address where you can be contacted.’

Liebl sipped his coffee noisily, and then dabbed daintily at his mouth with a spinnaker-sized handkerchief.

‘Please waste no time in tracing this person,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to have to press you like this, but until we discover Herr König’s whereabouts, we have nothing. Once you find him we might at least try and oblige him to be called as a material witness.’

I nodded meekly. There was more I could have told him but his tone irritated me, and any further explanation would have generated questions I was simply not equipped to answer yet. I could, for instance, have given him an account of what I had learned from Belinsky, at that same table in the Schwarzenberg, about a week after he had saved my skin – information that I was still turning over in my mind, and trying to make sense of. Nothing was as straightforward as Liebl somehow imagined.

‘First of all,’ Belinsky had explained, ‘the Drexlers were what they seemed. She survived Matthausen Concentration Camp, while he came out of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz. They met in a Red Cross hospital after the war, and lived in Frankfurt for a while before they went to Berlin. Apparently they worked pretty closely with the Crowcass people and the public prosecutor’s office. They maintained a large number of files on wanted Nazis and pursued many cases simultaneously. Consequently our people in Berlin weren’t able to determine if there had been any one investigation which related to their deaths, or to Captain Linden’s. The local police are baffled, as they say. Which is probably the way they prefer it. Frankly, they don’t give much of a damn who killed the Drexlers, and the American MP investigation doesn’t look as if it’s going to get anywhere.

‘But it doesn’t seem likely that the Drexlers would have been very interested in Martin Albers. He was S S and SD clandestine operations chief in Budapest until 1944, when he was arrested for his part in Stauffenberg’s plot to kill Hitler, and hanged at Flossenburg Concentration Camp in April 1945. But I dare say he had it coming to him. From all accounts, Albers was a bit of a bastard, even if he did try and get rid of the Führer. A lot of you guys were a hell of a long time about that, you know. Our Intelligence people even think that Himmler knew about the plot all along and let it go ahead in the hope that he could take Hitler’s place himself.