Филип Керр: Metropolis

‘Yes, sir. It’s rare I ever meet a murderer who looks like one.’

‘You’ll see things every bit as bad as the things you saw in the trenches,’ he added. ‘Except that some of the victims will be women and children. But we have to be hard. And you’ll find we tend to make jokes most people wouldn’t find funny.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What do you know about these Silesian Station killings, Gunther?’

‘Four local prostitutes murdered in as many weeks. Always at night. The first one near Silesian Station. All of them hit over the head with a ball-peen hammer and then scalped with a very sharp knife. As if by the eponymous Red Indian from Karl May’s famous novels.’

‘Which you’ve read, I trust.’

‘Show me a German who hasn’t and I’ll show you a man who can’t read.’

‘Enjoy it?’

‘Well, it’s been a few years — but yes.’

‘Good. I couldn’t like a man who didn’t like a good western by Karl May. What else do you know? About the murders, I mean.’

‘Not much.’ I shook my head. ‘Chances are the killer didn’t know the victims, which makes him hard to catch. It may be the instinct of the moment that drives his actions.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Weiss, as if he’d heard all this before.

‘The killings do seem to be having an effect on the number of girls on the streets,’ I said. ‘There are fewer prostitutes about than there used to be. The ones I’ve spoken to tell me they’re scared to work.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Well—’

Weiss shot me a quizzical look. ‘Spit it out, man. Whatever it is. I expect all my detectives to speak frankly.’

‘Just that the working girls have another name for these women. Because they were scalped. When the last woman was murdered I started hearing her described as another Pixavon Queen.’ I paused. ‘Like the shampoo, sir.’

‘Yes, I have heard of Pixavon shampoo. As the ads would have it, a shampoo used by “good wives and mothers”. A bit of street corner irony. Anything else?’

‘Nothing really. Only what’s in the newspapers. My landlady, Frau Weitendorf, has been following the case quite closely. As you might expect, given how lurid the facts are. She loves a good murder. We’re all obliged to listen to her while she brings us our breakfast. Hardly the most appetizing of subjects, but there it is.’

‘I’m interested: What does she have to say about it?’

I paused, picturing Frau Weitendorf in her usual vocal flow, full of an almost righteous indignation and hardly seeming to care if any of her lodgers were paying attention. Large, with ill-fitting dentures, and two bulldogs that stayed close to her heels, she was one of those women who liked to talk, with or without an audience. The long-sleeved quilted peignoir she wore at breakfast made her look like a grubby Chinese emperor, an effect that was enhanced by her double chins.

Besides Weitendorf, there were four of us in the house: an Englishman called Robert Rankin who claimed to be a writer; a Bavarian Jew by the name of Fischer who said he was a travelling salesman, but was probably a crook of some kind; and a young woman named Rosa Braun who played the saxophone in a dance band but was almost certainly a half-silk. Including Frau Weitendorf, we were an unlikely quintet, but perhaps a perfect cross section of modern Berlin.

‘As for Frau Weitendorf, she would say something like this: For these girls who get their throats cut, it’s an occupational hazard. When you think about it, they were asking for it, really. And isn’t life cheap enough without risking it unnecessarily? It wasn’t always like that. This used to be a respectable city, before the war. Human life stopped having much value after 1914. That was bad enough, but then inflation came along in 1923 and made our money worthless. Life doesn’t matter so very much when you’ve lost everything. Besides, anyone can see this city has grown too big. Four million people living cheek by jowl. It isn’t natural. Living like animals, some of them. Especially east of Alexanderplatz. So why should we be surprised if they behave like animals? There are no standards of decency. And with so many Poles and Jews and Russians living here since the Bolshevik revolution, is it any wonder these young women go and get themselves killed? Mark my words, it will turn out to be one of them who killed these women. A Jew. Or a Russian. Or a Jewish Russian. You ask me, the tsar and the Bolsheviks chased these people out of Russia for a reason. But the real reason these girls get killed is this: The men who returned from the trenches came back with a real taste for killing people that needs to be satisfied. Like vampires who need blood to survive, these men need to kill someone, anyone . Show me a man who was a soldier in the trenches who says he hasn’t wanted to kill someone since he came home and I’ll show you a liar. It’s like the jazz music that those Negroes play in the nightclubs. Gets their blood up, if you ask me.’

‘She sounds positively awful,’ said Weiss. ‘I’m surprised you stay in for breakfast.’

‘It’s included in the room price, sir.’

‘I see. Now tell me what this awful bitch says about why the killer scalps these women.’

‘Because he hates women. She reckons that during the war it was the women who stabbed the men in the back by taking their jobs for half the money, so when the men came back, all they found were jobs paying joke wages or, more likely, no jobs at all because the women were still doing them. That’s why he kills them and why he scalps them, too. Pure hate.’

‘And what do you think? About why this maniac scalps his victims.’

‘I think I’d want to know more of the facts before I speculate, sir.’

‘Humour me. But I can tell you this much: None of the scalps have been recovered. Therefore we have to conclude he keeps them. He doesn’t seem to favour any particular hair colour. We might easily conclude he kills in order to claim the scalp. Which begs the question: Why? What’s in it for him? Why would a man scalp a prostitute?’

‘Could be a weird sexual pervert who wants to be a woman,’ I said. ‘There are lots of transvestites in Berlin. Maybe we’ve got a man who wants the hair to make a wig.’ I shook my head. ‘I know, it sounds ridiculous.’

‘No more ridiculous than Fritz Haarmann cooking and eating the internal organs of his victims,’ said Gennat. ‘Or Erich Kreuzberg masturbating onto the graves of the women he’d murdered. That’s how we caught him.’

‘When you put it like that, no, I suppose it isn’t.’

‘We have our own theories why this man scalps his victims,’ said Weiss. ‘Or at least Dr Hirschfeld does. He’s been advising us on this case. But I’d still welcome your ideas. Anything. No matter how outlandish.’

‘Then it comes back to simple misogyny, sir. Or simple sadism. A wish to degrade and humiliate as well as to destroy. Humiliation is easy enough to inflict on a murder victim in Berlin. I’ve always believed it’s unspeakable that this city continues the practice of allowing the general public to come and inspect the corpses of murder victims at the city morgue. For anyone who wishes to ensure his victims are humiliated and degraded, you need look no further than there. It’s time the practice was stopped.’

‘I agree,’ said Weiss. ‘And I’ve told the Prussian minister of the interior as much on more than one occasion. But just as it seems something is going to be done about it, we find ourselves with a new PMI.’

‘Who is it this time?’ asked Gennat.

‘Albert Grzesinski,’ said Weiss. ‘Our own former police president.’

‘Well, that’s a step in the right direction,’ said Gennat.