Филип Керр - Metropolis

Weiss was silent for a moment.

‘You’re right about that much, anyway,’ he said eventually. ‘Ever since Otto Dillenburger assaulted me, my daughter Hilda’s been begging me to resign from the force. My wife hasn’t said anything about it but I know she agrees.’

‘And another thing: leaving that body there for his friends to find is a clear message to these nationalist bastards. After all, they don’t know that it was me who shot him and not you. Maybe now they’ll think twice about trying to kill you again. Maybe they’ll think you’re tougher and more ruthless than you look. There’s all that and the fact that you don’t know what the Nazis will make of it in their newspapers if you report exactly what happened. Who knows? Maybe they’ll find that poor boy back there had a mother and a sister, and that he sang in a church choir and was kind to little animals, and that he didn’t stand a chance against us. That he only meant to scare you. Maybe someone like Goebbels will call him a martyr and write a poem about what a great Fritz he was and how a dirty Jew helped shoot him down like a dog.’

‘You don’t know that he was a Nazi.’

‘Don’t I?’

I handed Weiss the party badge I’d pulled off the dead man’s pullover.

‘And just in case you thought I’m only thinking of you, chief, here’s another thing. You make this thing public and it’s not only you that’s on a Nazi death list. It’s me, too. Maybe you’re used to it by now, being a Jew and all. But I’ve got enough to worry about seeing snakes in my boots, with the booze. The last thing I want is to have to look over my shoulder as well.’

Weiss was silent until we reached the safety of the Alex. I parked the car in the central courtyard, turned off the engine, and lit us each a cigarette.

‘And if none of those arguments convince you, then consider this, if you would, sir. You’re a decent man and you have my respect and my admiration; but you’re also a Jew in Germany, which means that whether you like it or not your people are at war with the Fatherland. Have been since 1893, when anti-Semites won sixteen seats in the Reichstag, including Prussia. In case you’ve forgotten, that election made the hatred of Jews in this country socially respectable. You may not like it, sir, but you should remember that when you’re at war the most important thing is to win at all costs. And by any means. You won’t win doing things by the book, sir. You’ll only win by being more ruthless than they are, by doing things the Prussian way. By killing them before they kill you.’

Weiss took a puff of his cigarette and then looked at the end thoughtfully. ‘I can’t tell you I like what you say, but you’re probably right.’

‘I wish I wasn’t, but I am. So. We don’t tell anyone. Not the ViPoPra, not your secretary, and not even Ernst Gennat. Although I happen to think he might agree with me.’

‘He might at that. Although not on much else. He wants you out of the Murder Commission. He thinks I should send you back to Vice. At least until you’ve stopped drinking. He thinks you’re about to crack.’

‘That’s not an unreasonable assumption.’

‘Are you about to crack?’

‘This is Berlin. Who’d notice? But no, I’m not about to crack, chief. I’m hard-boiled, at least ten minutes. I may have had a drink in my coffee this morning, but you didn’t see me going to pieces. The way I feel now you could write the works of Goethe on my shell with a fountain pen without putting a hole in me.’

‘You saved my life. I won’t forget that. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d be dead and my wife, Lotte, would be a widow. A sheynem dank , Bernie Gunther.’

I delved into my jacket pocket and produced a hip flask full of good Austrian rum. I unscrewed the cap and took a large bite off the top that was part nerves and part bravado; I didn’t care what Weiss thought about me now. Having just saved his neck I figured I could afford to stick mine out a bit.

‘Then here’s to your wife,’ I said. ‘You get to go home and see her and your family. That’s all that matters. You get to go home. That’s all that matters for anyone who’s a cop in this city.’

I handed him the flask and watched him take a drink with hands that looked as unsteady as my turbulent heartbeat. It had been a while since I’d killed anyone. I wondered if I would have shot the assassin a second time if I hadn’t already enjoyed a few drinks. When you think about it, sometimes that’s all it takes to kill anyone.

It wasn’t a detective’s instinct that led me back to the scene of Eva Angerstein’s murder off Wormser Strasse so much as my dismay at the ferocious indifference of the authorities to her death and the deaths of the other girls. That as well as a perverse and insubordinate desire to disobey the Ministry’s orders in the name of true justice; somehow it’s easier to understand what justice amounts to when you’ve had a drink. Besides, it wasn’t like we had a lot of clues to work with in the case of Dr Gnadenschuss. That’s the trouble with random murders and why they’re so hard to solve; where there is no connection between murderer and victim, you might as well try to mate a German mastiff and a dachshund.

As it happened not everyone was indifferent to Eva Angerstein’s death; at least that was the conclusion I drew from the large bouquet of flowers — twenty-seven white lilies — that someone had left at the foot of the stairs where her body had been found. There was a damp handwritten card on the flowers with a name that was hard to read but the identity of the florist was clear enough: Harry Lehmann’s on Friedrichstrasse. Twenty-seven flowers from an expensive florist that was at least four or five kilometres east of Wormser Strasse meant that the buyer was someone close to the dead girl, someone who’d made a special journey to the scene of her murder. I wondered about the number until I remembered Eva Angerstein had been twenty-seven years old, which seemed to indicate the buyer was very close to the dead girl. We’d tried and failed to trace Eva’s next of kin. Not that I was surprised at this outcome; most girls who went on the sledge lost contact with their families, for obvious reasons. So I was keen to speak to the person who’d bought these flowers and decided to look in at Harry Lehmann’s on my way back to the Alex. Twenty-seven white lilies was the kind of order that would be easy to remember.

I went back up the stairs and was met by a man wearing a blue pinstriped suit with lapels like halberds, a bowler hat and leather gloves. He was carrying a thick cane, his fair hair was longish, and the lines on his red forehead were so deep they looked as if they’d been carved there by a glacier. It was obvious he’d seen me looking at the flowers.

‘Can I help you with something?’ he asked.

‘Not unless these are your flowers,’ I said, facing him now. He was about fifty and a Berliner; his accent was as thick as Stettin soot.

‘Who wants to know?’

I showed him my beer token and his eyes narrowed.

‘You don’t smell much like a cop.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment, shall I?’

‘What I mean is, I could put a match to your breath and torch this whole damn neighbourhood. That’s what I mean. Most cops I’ve met at this time of the morning are still digesting their first coffee.’

‘Who are you? The local insurance man?’

He nodded over my shoulder down the stairs. ‘You’re investigating Eva’s death?’

‘That’s right.’

‘From the Murder Commission?’

I nodded. ‘Try it sometime. We see a lot of dead bodies in various stages of disrepair. And we like a drink to edit some of that shit out. It helps keep us sane, if not always sober.’