Филип Керр - Metropolis

‘Don’t rush me. My head still feels like a Chinese switchboard.’

Nollendorfplatz looked a lot better from the inside of an expensive car; most things probably did. A new Mercedes roadster was like rose-tinted spectacles with wire wheels and hand-stitched leather upholstery. Even the exhaust fumes smelled good. Angerstein peeled off a glove, reached into the pocket of his silk suit and took out a stiff little business card that he handed to me with nicely manicured fingers. On it was embossed a smart address in Lichterfelde on the Teltow Canal, a telephone number and his name. They say crime doesn’t pay, but the benefits looked just fine to me.

Rosa and I got out of the car. Then I leaned in the driver’s window of the Mercedes and said, ‘Prussian Emil.’

‘That’s it?’

‘He’s a yokel catcher and snow shoveller. Pretends to be a disabled veteran. But mostly he’s a lookout for some of the city’s burglars. Positions his klutz wagon outside a house and blows a bugle if any law turns up. On the night your daughter was murdered, one of the apartments in the vicinity got turned over.’

‘And you went to Sing Sing to do what? Ask the locals if anyone had done a job with him? It’s amazing you’ve stayed alive this long, Gunther.’

‘I’ve got eyes as well as ears. As it happens, the man I went looking for is tall, cadaverous, vaguely military, with a port-wine stain on his neck like a careless waiter spilled something down his shirt collar. We detectives call that a description. You might have heard of it somewhere.’

‘It’s not much, is it?’

‘When you’re a cop, sometimes not much is all there is to go on, Herr Angerstein. You should try it sometime.’

My hands were still shaking as I tried to undo my collar stud, prompting Rosa to come to my aid.

‘Here, let me do that.’

It felt strange allowing someone wearing men’s clothes to help me undress but that problem soon disappeared when she herself was naked and lying beside me in my bed and looking more like a woman than I remembered — slender, her beautiful long hair, liberated from its tight bun, tumbling down her elegant back like a silk waterfall. There was a tenderness in her eyes. I’d had a severe shock, but not as severe as the one endured by poor Mrs Snyder in the real Sing Sing, which made me feel a bit of a fraud and I almost apologized for the way my body was behaving. Still, I could hardly ignore the twitching of my own muscles, like a frog whose legs had been touched by Galvani’s electrodes. But for her being with me, I’d probably have emptied the rum bottle that was in my desk drawer.

‘It’s all right,’ she said gently. ‘It’s all over now. You’re safe with me. Just lie still and close your eyes.’

It had gone four a.m. but even though the window was wide open the room was stifling; we lay on top of the covers for a while, exhausted and sheened with sweat, listening to the symphonic adagio that was the city’s smallest hours, too tired to smoke or to touch each other but knowing without having to say anything that there would be another time for all those mysteries. Somewhere a horse and cart were going about their early-morning deliveries; two cats had reached a stalemate in a game of feline chess; and, in the far distance, a barge was announcing its presence like a lost dinosaur as it made its lumbering way down the Spree.

Neither of us said anything and it seemed to me that for a fleeting instant we reached out into the void and touched a perfect innocence. After a while I stepped out of my body and stared down at these two intertwined lovers and marvelled at the small differences between us that made Rosa so much more beautiful and desirable than me. I watched my lips move as if to form an elusive, loving phrase but since nothing really needed to be said in that department it stayed unspoken. Eventually Rosa yawned and then whispered something that sounded like, ‘What very peculiar lives we both lead, don’t you think, Bernie?’ and laid her head on my chest and went to sleep.

This seemed incontrovertible and not just because of what had happened that evening. Life itself was so fast-moving it was impossible not to feel that sometimes things were completely out of control, like being alone in one of Berlin’s elongated open-topped tourist charabancs as it careered frantically around the metropolis, driverless, taking in the sights, heading towards some unknown peculiar disaster of our own making.

Bernhard Weiss listened to the tale of my night at Sing Sing and shook his head.

‘It was a brave effort,’ he said. ‘And I commend you for trying. But you mustn’t reproach yourself for having failed. The point is that the thinking behind what you were doing was sound. You couldn’t possibly have anticipated what happened when you got to the club. That was just bad luck, coming up against the German sense of humour. I don’t really understand it, myself. I suspect it is the kind of laughter that conceals a scream against modern life, man cut loose from all the certainties that once comforted him — God, tradition, love of country. Laughter that hides an existential crisis.’

I tried to control my expression; I’d heard the man talking out of his arse before, but this was something new. I wanted to tell him that a lot of people were just cunts and that was all there was to it, but with a breakfast drink or two already inside me I thought it best to keep my face shut; the last thing I wanted was an argument with the boss about the true moral calibre of our fellow citizens.

‘But you must be tired if you were out so late. Would you like some coffee, Bernie?’

‘No, thanks, sir.’

‘I know. It’s hardly the sort of weather for coffee. There is water if you’d prefer.’

‘I’m fine, thank you, sir.’

He got up and crossed the floor to open a window. ‘You would think they could supply an electric fan that worked properly. But that one on my desk is more or less useless. Really, it’s quite unforgivable when the temperature is as hot as this.’

Weiss was slow coming to the point, which made me nervous. I half suspected he was going to deliver a dry-as-mummy-dust lecture about police discipline and then fire me from the Murder Commission before sending me back to the ranks of Vice, realizing that he’d made a mistake in giving me Lindner’s seat and that Kurt Reichenbach should have had it after all.

Back at the desk he retrieved his cigar from the ashtray and relit it before sitting down. ‘Tell me, Bernie, do you remember the Klein and Nebbe case?’

‘Everyone in Berlin remembers the Klein and Nebbe case.’

‘Well, I’ve been reading this essay about the case by a writer called Alfred Döblin. From Stettin. I recommend you read it. Anyone who’s interested in criminalistics should read his essay. It contains newspaper reports, trial records, medical testimony, everything. Only, it’s not an attempt to sensationalize what happened but to understand it. To explain it.’

‘Two women poisoned one husband and attempted to poison the second,’ I said helplessly. ‘What’s to understand or explain? That’s a crime in any language.’

Weiss took out a small notebook, opened it, and ignoring my objections, prepared to read aloud.

‘One phrase that the writer uses in the essay struck me as particularly interesting. He says, I had the impulse to travel the streets that they — the murderers — routinely travelled. So I also sat in the pubs in which the two women got to know each other. I visited the apartment of one of them, spoke with her personally, spoke with others involved and observed them .’

‘There doesn’t seem much point in going into it now,’ I said. ‘It was six years ago.’

‘Döblin wrote his essay in 1924. And I disagree with you. His is a brave attempt to examine where in society the non-criminal ends and the criminal begins. But it’s not so much his conclusions that interested me as his whole investigative method.’