Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘If you are sure it won’t inconvenience your arrangements.’

‘It’s no trouble,’ he said. ‘I have some cards here.’ He walked around the desk and pulled open a drawer.

‘Have you worked for Herr Six long?’

‘About two years,’ he said absently. ‘Prior to that I was a diplomat with the German Consular Service.’ He took out a pair of glasses from his breast pocket and placed them on the end of his nose before writing out the invitation.

‘And did you know Grete Pfarr well?’

He glanced up at me briefly. ‘I really didn’t know her at all,’ he said. ‘Other than to say hallo to.’

‘Do you know if she had any enemies, jealous lovers, that sort of thing?’ He finished writing the card, and pressed it on the blotter.

‘I’m quite sure she didn’t,’ he said crisply, removing his glasses and returning them to his pocket.

‘Is that so? What about him? Paul.’

‘I can tell you even less about him, I’m afraid,’ he said, slipping the invitation into an envelope.

‘Did he and Herr Six get on all right?’

‘They weren’t enemies, if that’s what you’re implying. Their differences were purely political.’

‘Well, that amounts to something quite fundamental these days, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Not in this case, no. Now if you’ll excuse me, Herr Gunther, I really must be getting on.’

‘Yes, of course.’ He handed me the invitation. ‘Well, thanks for this,’ I said, following him out into the hall. ‘Do you live here too, Herr Haupthändler?’

‘No, I have an apartment in town.’

‘Really? Where?’ He hesitated for a moment.

‘Kurfurstenstrasse,’ he said eventually. ‘Why do you ask?’

I shrugged. ‘I ask too many questions, Herr Haupthändler,’ I said. ‘Forgive me. It’s habit, I’m afraid. A suspicious nature goes with the job. Please don’t be offended. Well, I must be going.’ He smiled thinly, and as he showed me to the door he seemed relaxed; but I hoped I had said enough to put a few ripples on his pond.

The Hanomag seems to take an age to reach any sort of speed, so it was with a certain amount of misplaced optimism that I took the Avus ‘Speedway’ back to the centre of town. It costs a mark to get on this highway, but the Avus is worth it: ten kilometres without a curve, all the way from Potsdam to Kurfürstendamm. It’s the one road in the city on which the driver who fancies himself as Carraciola, the great racing driver, can put his foot down and hit speeds of up to 150 kilometres an hour. At least, they could in the days before B V Aral, the low-octane substitute petrol that’s not much better than meths. Now it was all I could do to get ninety out of the Hanomag’s 1.3 litre engine.

I parked at the intersection of Kurfürstendamm and Joachimsthaler Strasse, known as ‘Grunfeld Corner’ because of the department store of the same name which occupies it. When Grunfeld, a Jew, still owned his store, they used to serve free lemonade at the Fountain in the basement. But since the State dispossessed him, as it has with all the Jews who owned big stores, like Wertheim, Hermann Teitz and Israel, the days of free lemonade have gone. If that weren’t bad enough, the lemonade you now have to pay for and once got free doesn’t taste half as good, and you don’t have to have the sharpest taste-buds in the world to realize that they’re cutting down on the sugar. Just like they’re cheating on everything else.

I sat drinking my lemonade and watching the lift go up and down the tubular glass shaft that allowed you to see out into the store as you rode from floor to floor, in two minds whether or not to go up to the stocking counter and see Carola, the girl from Dagmarr’s wedding. It was the sour taste of the lemonade that put me in mind of my own debauched behaviour, and that decided me against it. Instead I left Grunfeld’s and walked the short distance down Kurfürstendamm and onto Schluterstrasse.

A jewellers is one of the few places in Berlin where you can expect to find people queueing to sell rather than to buy. Peter Neumaier’s Antique Jewellers was no exception. When I got there the line wasn’t quite outside the door, but it was certainly rubbing the glass; and it was older and sadder looking than most of the queues that I was used to standing in. The people waiting there were from a mixture of backgrounds, but mostly they had two things in common: their Judaism and, as an inevitable corollary, their lack of work, which was how they came to be selling their valuables in the first place. At the top of the queue, behind a long glass counter, were two stone-faced shop assistants in good suits. They had a neat line in appraisal, which was to tell the prospective seller how poor the piece actually was and how little it was likely to fetch on the open market.

‘We see stuff like this all the time,’ said one of them, wrinkling his lips and shaking his head at the spread of pearls and brooches on the counter beneath him. ‘You see, we can’t put a price on sentimental value. I’m sure you understand that.’ He was a young fellow, half the age of the deflating old mattress of a woman before him, and good-looking too, although in need of a shave, perhaps. His colleague was less forthcoming with his indifference: he sniffed so that his nose took on a sneer, he shrugged a half shrug of his coathanger-sized shoulders, and he grunted unenthusiastically. Silently, he counted out five one-hundred-mark notes from a roll in his skinny miser’s hand that must have been worth thirty times as much. The old man he was buying from was undecided about whether or not he should accept what must have been a derisory offer, and with a trembling hand he pointed at the bracelet lying on the piece of cloth he had wrapped it up in.

‘But look here,’ said the old man, ‘you’ve got one just like it in the window for three times what you’re offering.’

The Coathanger pursed his lips. ‘Fritz,’ he said, ‘how long has that sapphire bracelet been in the window?’ It was an efficient double-act, you had to say that much.

‘Must be six months,’ responded the other. ‘Don’t buy another one, this isn’t a charity you know.’ He probably said that several times a day. Coathanger blinked with slow boredom.

‘See what I mean? Look, go somewhere else if you think you can get more for it.’ But the sight of the cash was too much for the old man, and he capitulated. I walked to the head of the line and said that I was looking for Herr Neumaier.

‘If you’ve got something to sell, then you’ll have to wait in line with all the rest of them,’ muttered Coathanger.

‘I have nothing to sell,’ I said vaguely, adding, ‘I’m looking for a diamond necklace.’ At that Coathanger smiled at me like I was his long-lost rich uncle.

‘If you’ll just wait one moment,’ he said unctuously, ‘I’ll just see if Herr Neumaier is free.’ He disappeared behind a curtain for a minute, and when he returned I was ushered through to a small office at the end of the corridor.

Peter Neumaier sat at his desk, smoking a cigar that belonged properly in a plumber’s tool-bag. He was dark, with bright blue eyes, just like our beloved Führer, and was possessed of a stomach that stuck out like a cash register. The cheeks of his face had a red, skinned look, as if he had eczema, or had simply stood too close to his razor that morning. He shook me by the hand as I introduced myself. It was like holding a cucumber.

‘I’m pleased to meet you, Herr Gunther,’ he said warmly. ‘I hear you’re looking for some diamonds.’

‘That’s correct. But I should tell you that I’m acting on behalf of someone else.’

‘I understand,’ Neumaier grinned. ‘Did you have a particular setting in mind?’