Филип Керр - Metropolis

‘Sure, I’ll do it. If Gennat gives his permission.’

‘I’m sure he will. If you ask him. Gennat loves cinema. Almost as much as he loves attractive women. And now that you’re his blue-eyed boy he won’t deny you much. Especially if what I hear is true; that you’ve already felt your first collar.’

‘Yes. But there was nothing to it. We virtually caught the Fritz red-handed.’

‘I’m sure you’re just being modest. Which is very commendable. Weiss loves a bit of modesty in his detectives. He hates anyone to outshine his beloved department. He only tolerates the fame of the Big Buddha because Ernst Gennat doesn’t give a damn for reputation. You can see that by the way he dresses. He’s not a threat to anyone. Those suits of his look like they were cut with a cheese knife.’

‘On the whole modesty suits me better; I don’t sound good when I’m bossing people around.’

‘Well, congratulations anyway. Even an easy collar can come away in your hand, Gunther. Remember that. And make sure you don’t neglect the paperwork. Weiss is above all a lawyer and lawyers love to read reports.’

‘I was just heading upstairs to finish my report.’

‘Good man. So then, here’s Thea’s business card — ’ He sniffed it before handing it over. ‘Hmm. Scented. Anyway, you can telephone her yourself. She’s quite attractive. A bit too old for you, probably. But an interesting woman nonetheless.’

‘You’ve met her then?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Here?’

‘No. Although she’d dearly love to get a look around the Commission offices as well. At the time, I didn’t dare bring her here in case it scuppered my chances of getting Lindner’s seat. No, I took her to the Police Museum, the Hanno showhouse, and then Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science at In Den Zelten, just to give my stories some extra colour, so to speak. The institute is mostly photographs of perverts and Japanese dildos. But she seemed to find it all quite interesting. Especially the dildos. At the very least you’ll probably get a nice dinner out of her. She took me to Horcher’s.’

I pocketed the woman’s business card and nodded. ‘I said I’d do it,’ I said again. ‘And I will. I like a free dinner as much as the next man.’

‘Good, good.’ Reichenbach tipped his hat and started down the stairs, swinging his stick and puffing his cigar back into life. ‘I can’t understand it myself. A film about a man killing whores in Berlin? I mean, who cares about that?’ He laughed. ‘Nobody in this place, that’s for sure. You might just as well shoot a film inside the Reichstag. Sometimes I think I should have been a film producer, not a cop. I understand the public, you see. I know what scares them. And it certainly isn’t someone crushing a few grasshoppers. Most Germans think those girls have got it coming.’

I wanted to contradict Reichenbach, to shout into the vertiginous stairwell that I cared. In fact, I cared very much and not just because I was now attached to the Murder Commission. I was thinking of Rosa Braun, wondering how I might feel if she turned up in the Spree with her neck broken; nobody deserved a death like that, not even if she was taking a risk selling it for money. But it wasn’t just Rosa I cared about. In my time with Vice I’d got to know a great many girls who were on the sledge and quite a few of them struck me as honest, good people. I even knew one or two who had made their Abitur . None were the worthless grasshoppers Reichenbach had spoken of. For many single women in Berlin, life was a slippery slope, which of course was one reason prostitution was called the sledge in the first place. And the whole city seemed morally degraded when a girl turned up in an alley with her neck broken and her scalp missing. But it hardly seemed worth disagreeing with Reichenbach now that he was halfway out of the building. Besides, keeping my mouth shut about a lot of things was probably best for the present. He was my superior after all. And it wasn’t as if he was wrong; most of the cops at the Alex didn’t care that much about the fate of a few prostitutes.

Nor was there much wrong with his advice to me, even if it was obvious. Bernhard Weiss didn’t appreciate it when Kripo detectives started to get their names in the newspapers and he did like things in his department to be well documented. Watertight paperwork was the best guarantee of our own investigative integrity: his words, not mine. You could hardly blame the boss for that; he was often suing the Nazis for libel, and he never went into court without a set of meticulous police records, which was why he always won, of course. He must have sued them successfully at least ten times, and they hated him for it. He ought to have had a bodyguard, but he scorned any police protection for himself on the grounds that the Nazis would only criticize him for that, too. Weiss did carry a gun, however; after the assassination of his friend the socialist journalist Kurt Eisner in 1919, every Jew in public life carried a pistol. In 1928, a pistol was the best kind of life insurance you could buy. Which was probably why I had two.

Weiss and Gennat came and found me not long after I’d sat down at my new desk to type out my report. The offices overlooked Dircksenstrasse and commanded a good view of the railway station and the western half of the city beyond. Berlin looked bigger at night: bigger and quieter and even more indifferent than it did by day, as if it were someone else’s bad dream. Looking at all that neon light was like staring up at the universe and wondering why you felt so insignificant. Not that there was any great mystery about that; really there was just light and darkness and some life in between, and you made of it what you could.

‘Here he is,’ said Gennat. ‘Berlin’s very own Philo Vance.’

My feet hurt but I stood up anyway. Weiss and Gennat were wearing their coats and it looked as if they were about to go home; it was almost eleven o’clock after all. They made an odd pair, like Laurel and Hardy: Weiss small and precise, Gennat large and shapeless. Weiss had the superior mind, but Gennat the better jokes. He glanced at the report on the carriage of my typewriter and rubbed his jowls noisily with the flat of his hand. It sounded like someone sweeping a path with a heavy brush. The Big Buddha badly needed another shave.

‘You can forget that for now,’ Gennat said, pointing at the typewriter. ‘Do the report later.’

That sounded good; in my mind’s eye I was already turning up at the Haller-Revue and imagining what it might be like to undress a woman who was dressed like a man. It had been a long day.

‘Good work, Gunther.’

I told them what I’d told Reichenbach — that we’d caught the killer almost red-handed. ‘He was boozing away the spoils of the robbery in the very place where he’d met with his victim.’ I laughed. ‘He was supposed to be the dead man’s bodyguard. But he’d got himself into debt. The dumbhead even had the dead man’s gold ring and wallet in his pocket.’

‘That’s the thing about bodyguards,’ said Weiss. ‘I’ve seen it happen again and again. They always end up despising the person they’re supposed to be protecting. Easy enough, I suppose. You guard a man, you get to know his foibles and weaknesses. And before he knows it, he’s trusted his life to someone with a gun who badly wants to put a hole in him.’

‘It’s just as well most of our clients are stupid,’ said Gennat. ‘I don’t know how we’d catch half of them if they all had their Abiturs .’

‘A murderer is still a murderer,’ said Weiss, polishing his glasses. ‘However you catch him. And catching him is what counts, not the mystery, nor the detection, nor the intellectual showdown between you and the killer. Just the arrest. Anything else is a sideshow. Remember that, Gunther.’