Филип Керр - Metropolis

‘All right. I did see something. Only it wasn’t much. Hardly anything in fact. But look, if you’re cops I really can’t imagine anything I could tell you would be of any help.’

‘Why don’t you tell us from the very beginning? And we’ll be the judge of that.’ I leaned back on the chair, flicked my ash onto the floor, and waited expectantly.

But Erich Angerstein was shaking his head and giving me his best stoneface.

‘You read books?’ he asked.

‘Of course I read books. What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Well, I read people the way you read books. I’m an avid reader, you might say. But the fact is that in my business you have to be. It’s my observation that you’ve got a lot to learn about interrogation, my young friend. When a man minimizes the importance of what he’s about to tell you, you can be damn sure he’s not going to tell you anything worth hearing. What you want is a whore who hasn’t eaten dinner for several days, someone who’s very keen to please her Fritz. And we don’t have that here. Not yet. Do you agree?’

I nodded. Emil was already repeating his willingness to answer all of our questions, but I was forced to agree with Angerstein. I didn’t want him to be right about this, but he was and we both knew it. And we both knew what was going to happen next. I didn’t like it, but all I cared about now was that we got whatever information we could get from Emil so that I could be out of that room and away from that loathsome scene as soon as possible. I nodded again.

Angerstein produced a folded white handkerchief, shook it out and then stuffed it into Emil’s mouth. Then he turned to me. ‘So here’s what’s going to happen,’ he said calmly, taking off his jacket and rolling up his shirt sleeves. ‘You’re going to go back in the bedroom, close the door, smoke a cigarette and wait there patiently for five minutes. That’s because I don’t want you and your capacity for decency and fair play of the kind you exhibited back in the Cabaret of the Nameless interfering while I beat this bastard. Like an old carpet. Your words. That is what you said, right? I’m going to beat this bastard until he wants to tell me everything that’s happened to him since he let go of his mother’s teat.’

Sitting on the edge of the malodorous bed I smoked a cigarette to keep my mind off the smell and stared around at the blank room that stared back at me. As I waited uncomfortably — but not as uncomfortably as Prussian Emil — for Erich Angerstein to come and fetch me from the bedroom, I felt like a ghost and probably looked like one, too. But it was easier to keep my nose off the smell of the bed than it was to keep my ears detached from the sound of what was happening in the room next door. It was cowardly of me to let the gangster do the dirty work but that part of it seemed unimportant now beside the absolute imperative necessity of getting a name and a man I could arrest. I suppose I convinced myself that the end justified the means, which, in a case that refuses to crack, is always the honest policeman’s dilemma. Five minutes, he’d said, five minutes for me to smoke a cigarette and for him to force Emil to tell us everything he knew. Next to the lives of some other men and women who might yet be killed that didn’t seem so bad, but still, it was a long five minutes. I heard a little of what was going on, of course. I heard the slicing cuts of the cane and Emil’s muffled screams; and if I heard it, the neighbours very likely heard it, too, only no one would have tried to fetch the police in a building like the one we were in. It wasn’t as if cops or public telephones were plentiful in that part of Berlin. After a couple of minutes, I put the cigarette between my teeth and plugged my ears with my fingers, which only seemed to make my every guilty thought throb inside my skull as if I was suffering from a low fever.

When at last he came to fetch me, Angerstein was breathless, his forehead beaded with sweat and his cheeks flushed, as if he’d really put his shoulder into the beating, and the minute I laid eyes on Emil I knew that he’d done that and more. The man had passed out; his backside was the colour of a crushed insect; blood was running down his thighs; and his face was as pale as goat’s cheese. The crimsoned cane lay on the floor like a murder weapon and in my guilty haste to erase the scene from my mind I kicked it angrily aside and bent down beside the unconscious man to retrieve the handkerchief from his mouth before he suffocated.

‘I think he’ll tell us what we want to know now,’ said Angerstein calmly. It was obvious that he didn’t despise himself in the least, as I would have done; he had probably intended to inflict the maximum violence necessary, and experience had told him the limit of what his victim could take. He rolled down his shirt sleeves and collected his jacket from the floor as I slapped Emil’s cheeks as firmly as I dared; and gradually the man started to come around. Angerstein was much less circumspect; he grabbed the man’s ear and lifted his head up.

‘Now then,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear it. Tell us the whole story. From the beginning. Exactly the way I told you a few minutes ago, Emil.’

It was a curious remark but at the time I thought no more about it.

‘Tell my friend what you saw outside the building in Wormser Strasse. Or we’ll start again.’

‘I was watching the street while my friend turned over an apartment,’ said Emil. ‘I was supposed to... to blow my horn if any bulls turned up. Or anyone that looked like the apartment’s owner. I hadn’t been there for long when I saw this Fritz go into the courtyard with the girl. And I saw him when he came out again... just a few minutes later. Alone. Got a good look at him, too. Saw the blood on his — on his hands. I guessed what must have happened. That he had murdered her. But not only that. I recognized him. He was a cop.’

‘A cop?’

‘Yes. From Kripo.’

‘A detective?’ I said. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you before. I was afraid you would kill me.’

‘What’s this man’s name, Emil? I assume he has a name.’

‘Don’t know his name. Right? I don’t know that. Please believe me. But I knew his face. From way back when I was being booked in the main hall at the Alex by another detective for a job I did. And this one saw I’d recognized him. Which was why I ran away. Before he could kill me. Laid low after that. As soon as that first schnorrer got shot, I guessed what it was about. That he was looking for me. Had to be.’

Shaking away my disbelief, I remembered what the homeless man, Stefan Rühle, had told me and Otto Trettin back at the Palme: that he’d seen the murderer, too, and that the murderer was a cop. Then I’d assumed the man was a lunatic, but now I wasn’t so sure. And already I was trying to match the policemen I knew with what sounded like Rühle’s description of Satan.

‘Can you describe him?’

‘Not very tall. Ordinary. I don’t know. I’m not very good at descriptions.’

‘You’re not trying to put one over on us, are you? About the murderer being a copper.’

‘No! I swear it was a cop that did it. A detective. I just don’t have a name.’

‘A cop. I don’t believe it.’

‘Please. You’ve got to believe me. I couldn’t take another beating.’

‘It’s all right, Emil,’ said Angerstein soothingly. ‘My friend is just a little surprised to hear this, that’s all. Unlike me. I’m much more inclined to believe the worst of Berlin policemen. All the same, I wouldn’t like it if you were taking the piss.’

‘I told you everything I know, right? But please don’t hit me anymore.’