Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

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An omnibus of novels
These three mysteries are exciting and insightful looks at life inside Nazi Germany – richer and more readable than most histories of the period. We first meet ex-policeman Bernie Gunther in 1936, in March Violets (a term of derision which original Nazis used to describe late converts.) The Olympic Games are about to start; some of Bernie's Jewish friends are beginning to realize that they should have left while they could; and Gunther himself has been hired to look into two murders that reach high into the Nazi Party. In The Pale Criminal, it's 1938, and Gunther has been blackmailed into rejoining the police by Heydrich himself. And in A German Requiem, the saddest and most disturbing of the three books, it's 1947 as Gunther stumbles across a nightmare landscape that conceals even more death than he imagines.

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‘Excellent.’

‘On one condition.’

‘Name it.’

‘That for the duration of the investigation, I be given the rank of Kriminalkommissar and that I be allowed to run the investigation any way I want.’

‘Now wait a minute,’ said Nebe. ‘What’s wrong with your old rank of inspector?’

‘Quite apart from the salary,’ said Heydrich, ‘Gunther is no doubt keen that he should be as free as possible from the interference of senior officers. He’s quite right of course. He’ll need that kind of rank in order to overcome the prejudices that will undoubtedly accompany his return to Kripo. I should have thought of it myself. It is agreed.’

We walked back to the Palais. Inside the door an SD officer handed Heydrich a note. He read it and then smiled.

‘Isn’t that a coincidence?’ he smiled. ‘It would seem that my incompetent police force has found the man who murdered your partner, Herr Gunther. I wonder, does the name Klaus Hering mean anything to you?’

‘Stahlecker was keeping a watch on his apartment when he was killed.’

‘That is good news. The only sand in the oil is that this Hering fellow would appear to have committed suicide.’ He looked at Nebe and smiled. ‘Well, we had better go and take a look, don’t you think, Arthur? Otherwise Herr Gunther here will think that we have made it up.’

It is difficult to form any clear impression of a man who has been hanged that is not grotesque. The tongue, turgid and protruding like a third lip, the eyes as prominent as a racing dog’s balls – these things tend to colour your thoughts a little. So apart from the feeling that he wouldn’t be winning the local debating-society prize, there wasn’t much to say about Klaus Hering except that he was about thirty years old, slimly built, fair-haired and, thanks in part to his necktie, getting on for tall.

The thing looked clear-cut enough. In my experience hanging is almost always suicide: there are easier ways to kill a man. I have seen a few exceptions, but these were all accidental cases, where the victim had encountered the mishap of vagal inhibition while going about some sado-masochistic perversion. These sexual nonconformists were usually found naked or clothed in female underwear with a spread of pornographic literature to sticky hand, and were always men.

In Hering’s case there was no such evidence of death by sexual misadventure. His clothes were such as might have been chosen by his mother; and his hands, which were loose at his sides, were unfettered eloquence to the effect that his homicide had been self-inflicted.

Inspector Strunck, the bull who had interrogated me back at the Alex, explained the matter to Heydrich and Nebe.

‘We found this man’s name and address in Stahlecker’s pocket,’ he said. ‘There’s a bayonet wrapped in newspaper in the kitchen. It’s covered in blood, and from the look of it I’d say it was the knife that killed him. There’s also a bloodstained shirt that Hering was probably wearing at the time.’

‘Anything else?’ said Nebe.

‘Stahlecker’s shoulder-holster was empty, General,’ said Strunck. ‘Perhaps Gunther might like to tell us if this was his gun or not. We found it in a paper bag with the shirt.’

He handed me a Walther PPK. I put the muzzle to my nose and sniffed the gun-oil. Then I worked the slide and saw that there wasn’t even a bullet in the barrel, although the magazine was full. Next I pulled down the trigger-guard. Bruno’s initials were scratched neatly on the black metal.

‘It’s Bruno’s gun, all right,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t look like he even got his hand on it. I’d like to see that shirt please.’

Strunck glanced at his Reichskriminaldirektor for approval.

‘Let him see it, Inspector,’ said Nebe.

The shirt was from C & A, and heavily bloodstained around the stomach area and the right cuff, which seemed to confirm the general set-up.

‘It does look as though this was the man who murdered your partner, Herr Gunther,’ said Heydrich. ‘He came back here and, having changed his clothes, had a chance to reflect upon what he’d done. In a fit of remorse he hanged himself.’

‘It would seem so,’ I said, without much uncertainty. ‘But if you don’t mind, General Heydrich, I’d like to take a look round the place. On my own. Just to satisfy my curiosity about one or two things.’

‘Very well. Don’t be too long, will you?’

With Heydrich, Nebe and the police gone from the apartment, I took a closer look at Klaus Hering’s body. Apparently he had tied a length of electrical cord to the banister, slipped a noose over his head, and then simply stepped off the stair. But only an inspection of Hering’s hands, wrists and neck itself could tell me if that had really been what happened. There was something about the circumstances of his death, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, that I found questionable. Not least was the fact that he had chosen to change his shirt before hanging himself.

I climbed over the banister on to a small shelf that was made by the top of the stairwell’s wall, and knelt down. Leaning forward, I had a good view of the suspension point behind Hering’s right ear. The level of tightening of the ligature is always higher and more vertical with a hanging than with a case of strangulation. But here there was a second and altogether more horizontal mark just below the noose which seemed to confirm my doubts. Before hanging himself, Klaus Hering had been strangled to death.

I checked that Hering’s shirt collar was the same size as the bloodstained shirt I had examined earlier. It was. Then I climbed back over the banister and stepped down a few stairs. Standing on tiptoe I reached up to examine his hands and wrists. Prising the right hand open I saw the dried blood and then a small shiny object, which seemed to be sticking into the palm. I pulled it out of Hering’s flesh and laid it carefully on to the flat of my hand. The pin was bent, probably from the pressure of Hering’s fist, and although encrusted with blood, the death’s-head motif was unmistakable. It was an S S cap badge.

I paused briefly, trying to imagine what might have happened, certain now that Heydrich must have had a hand in it. Back in the garden at the Prinz Albrecht Palais, had he not asked me himself what my answer to his proposition would be if ‘the obstacle’ that was my obligation to find Bruno’s murderer, were ‘removed’? And wasn’t this as completely removed as it was possible to achieve? No doubt he had anticipated what my answer would be and had already ordered Hering’s murder by the time we went for our stroll.

With these and other thoughts I searched the apartment. I was quick but thorough, lifting mattresses, examining cisterns, rolling back rugs and even leafing through a set of medical textbooks. I managed to find a whole sheet of the old stamps commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Nazis coming to power which had consistently appeared on the blackmail notes to Frau Lange. But of her son’s letters to Dr Kindermann there was no sign.

6

Friday, 9 September

It felt strange being back in a case-meeting at the Alex, and even stranger hearing Arthur Nebe refer to me as Kommissar Gunther. Five years had elapsed since the day in June 1933 when, no longer able to tolerate Goering’s police purges, I had resigned my rank of Kriminalinspektor in order to become the house detective at the Adlon Hotel. Another few months and they would have probably fired me anyway. If anyone had said then that I’d be back at the Alex as a member of Kripo’s upper officer class while a National Socialist government was still in power, I’d have said that he was crazy.

Most of the people seated round the table would almost certainly have expressed the same opinion, if their faces were anything to go by now: Hans Lobbes, the Reichskriminaldirektor’s number three and head of Kripo Executive; Count Fritz von der Schulenberg, deputy to Berlin’s Police President, and representing the uniformed boys of Orpo. Even the three officers from Kripo, one from Vice and two from the Murder Commission who had been assigned to a new investigating team that was, at my own request, to be a small one, all regarded me with a mixture of fear and loathing. Not that I blamed them much. As far as they were concerned I was Heydrich’s spy. In their position I would probably have felt much the same way.

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