Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

‘I’ve got a licence for it.’

‘Sure you have,’ he said, smiling. Then he sniffed the muzzle, and spoke to his partner. ‘You know, Martins, I’d say this pistol has been cleaned; and recently, too.’

‘I’m a clean boy,’ I said. ‘Take a look at my fingernails if you don’t believe me.’

‘Walther PPK, 9 mm,’ said Martins, lighting a cigarette. ‘Just like the gun that killed poor Herr Pfarr and his wife.’

‘That’s not what I heard.’ I went over to the drinks cabinet. I was surprised to see that they hadn’t helped themselves to any of my whisky.

‘Of course,’ said Dietz, ‘we were forgetting that you’ve still got friends over at the Alex, weren’t we.’ I poured myself a drink. A little too much to swallow in less than three gulps.

‘I thought they got rid of all those reactionaries,’ said Martins. I surveyed the last mouthful of whisky.

‘I’d offer you boys a drink, only I wouldn’t want to have to throw away the glasses afterwards.’ I tossed the drink back.

Martins flicked away his cigarette and, clenching his fists, he stepped forward a couple of paces. ‘This bum specializes in lip like a yid does in nose,’ he snarled. Dietz stayed where he was, leaning on the window. But when he turned around there was tabasco in his eyes.

‘I’m running out of patience with you, mulemouth.’

‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘You’ve seen the letter from the Assurance people. If you think it’s a fake, then check it out.’

‘We already did.’

‘Then why the double act?’ Dietz walked over and looked me up and down like I was shit on his shoe. Then he picked up my last bottle of good scotch, weighed it in his hand and threw it against the wall above the desk. It smashed with the sound of a canteen of cutlery dropping down a stairwell, and the air was suddenly redolent with alcohol. Dietz straightened his jacket after the exertion.

‘We just wanted to impress you with the need to keep us informed of what you’re doing, Gunther. If you find out anything, and I mean anything, then you better speak to us. Because if I find out you’ve been giving us any fig-leaf, then I’ll have you in a K Z so quick, your fucking ears will whistle.’ He leaned towards me and I caught the smell of his sweat. ‘Understand, mulemouth?’

‘Don’t stick your jaw too far out, Dietz,’ I said, ‘or I’ll feel obliged to slap it.’

He smiled. ‘I’d like that sometime. Really I would.’ He turned to his partner. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here before I kick him in the eggs.’

I’d just finished clearing up the mess when the phone rang. It was Müller from the Berliner Morgenpost to say that he was sorry, but beyond the sort of material that the obituaries people collected over the years, there really wasn’t much in the files about Hermann Six to interest me.

‘Are you giving me the up and down, Eddie? Christ, this fellow is a millionaire. He owns half the Ruhr. If he stuck his finger up his arse he’d find oil. Somebody must have got a look through his keyhole at some time.’

‘There was a reporter a while back who did quite a bit of spadework on all of those big boys on the Ruhr: Krupp, Voegler, Wolff, Thyssen. She lost her job when the Government solved the unemployment problem. ’I’ll see if I can find out where she’s living.‘

‘Thanks, Eddie. What about the Pfarrs? Anything?’

‘She was really into spas. Nauheim, Wiesbaden, Bad Homburg, you name it, she’d splashed some there. She even wrote an article about it for Die Frau . And she was keen on quack medicine. There’s nothing about him, I’m afraid.’

‘Thanks for the gossip, Eddie. Next time I’ll read the society page and save you the trouble.’

‘Not worth a hundred, huh?’

‘Not worth fifty. Find this lady reporter for me and then I’ll see what I can do.’

After that I closed the office and returned to the key shop to collect my new set of keys and my tin of clay. I’ll admit it sounds a bit theatrical; but honestly, I’ve carried that tin for several years, and short of stealing the actual key itself, I don’t know of a better way of opening locked doors. A delicate mechanism of fine steel with which you can open any kind of lock, I don’t have. The truth is that with the best modern locks, you can forget picking: there are no slick, fancy little wonder tools. That stuff is for the film-boys at U F A. More often than not a burglar simply saws off the bolt-head, or drills around it and removes a piece of the goddam door. And that reminded me: sooner or later I was going to have to check out just who there was in the fraternity of nutcrackers with the talent to have opened the Pfarrs’ safe. If that was how it was done. Which meant that there was a certain scrofulous little tenor who was long overdue for a singing lesson.

I didn’t expect to find Neumann at the dump where he lived in Admiralstrasse, in the Kottbusser Tor district, but I tried there anyway. Kottbusser Tor was the kind of area that had worn about as well as a music-hall poster, and Admiralstrasse, Number 43 was the kind of place where the rats wore ear-plugs and the cockroaches had nasty coughs. Neumann’s room was in the basement at the back. It was damp. It was dirty. It was foul. And Neumann wasn’t there.

The concierge was a snapper who was over the hill and down a disused mine-shaft. Her hair was every bit as natural as parade goose-stepping down the Wilhelmstrasse, and she’d evidently been wearing a boxing-glove when she’d applied the crimson lipstick to her paperclip of a mouth. Her breasts were like the rear ends of a pair of dray horses at the end of a long hard day. Maybe she still had a few clients, but I thought it was a better bet that I’d see a Jew at the front of a Nuremberg pork-butcher’s queue. She stood in the doorway to her apartment, naked under the grubby towelling robe which she left open, and lit a half-smoked cigarette.

‘I’m looking for Neumann,’ I said, doing my level best to ignore the two coat-pegs and the Russian boyar’s beard that were being displayed for my benefit. You felt the twang and itch of syphilis in your tail just looking at her. ‘I’m a friend of his.’ The snapper yawned cheesily and, deciding that I’d seen enough for free, she closed her robe and tied the cord.

‘You a bull?’ she sniffed.

‘Like I said, I’m a friend.’ She folded her arms and leaned on the doorway.

‘Neumann doesn’t have any friends,’ she said, looking at her dirty fingernails and then back at my face. I had to give her that one. ‘Except for me, maybe, and that’s only because I feel sorry for the little twitcher. If you were a friend of his you’d tell him to see a doctor. He isn’t right in the head, you know.’ She took a long drag on her cigarette and then nicked the butt past my shoulder.

‘He’s not tapped,’ I said. ‘He just has a tendency to talk to himself. A bit strange, that’s all.’

‘If that’s not tapped then I don’t know what the hell is,’ she said. There was something in that too.

‘You know when he’ll be back?’

The snapper shrugged. A hand that was all blue veins and knuckle-duster rings took hold of my tie; she tried to smile coyly, only it came out as a grimace. ‘Maybe you’d care to wait for him,’ she said. ‘You know, twenty marks buys an awful lot of time.’

Retrieving my tie I took out my wallet and thumbed her a five. ‘I’d like to. Really I would. But I must be getting on my way. Perhaps you’d tell Neumann that I was looking for him. The name is Gunther. Bernhard Gunther.’

‘Thank you, Bernhard. You’re a real gentleman.’

‘Do you have any idea where he might be?’

‘Bernhard, your guess is as good as mine. You could chase him from Pontius to Pilate and still not find him.’ She shrugged and shook her head. ‘If he’s broke he’ll be somewhere like the X Bar, or the Rucker. If he’s got any mouse in his pocket he’ll be trying to nudge a bit of plum at the Femina or the café Casanova.’ I started down the stairs. ‘And if he’s not at any of those places then he’ll be at the racetrack.’ She followed me out onto the landing and down some of the steps. I got into my car with a sigh of relief. It’s always difficult getting away from a snapper. They never like to see trade walking out of the door.