Филип Керр - Metropolis

‘I didn’t have time to figure all the angles, but it seemed like a good idea. I still think you should let things lie the way they are.’

‘I can’t. It’s just not in me. I’ve got standards and I try to live up to them. Whereas you’ve got no standards at all, and you certainly live up to those. I should have realized that. So. Let’s have the rest of it. The whole story. Exactly what happened to Kurt Reichenbach.’

‘If you insist. Just don’t shoot me again.’

‘Like most cops in Berlin you actually know very little about it. The city, I mean. For people like you, German society is very simple. It’s the one familiar social order that has existed since time immemorial, a hierarchy in which everyone knows his or her place. The reality is very different. For more than a century there has existed another world that lies beyond the bounds of this hierarchy — a world of outcasts and people who belong to no recognized social class — which, for better or worse, people like you call the underworld. At the centre of this underworld are professional criminals, bandits, robbers, thieves and murderers. Oh, some of you — Ernst Engelbrecht, perhaps — they think they know this netherworld, but believe me, they don’t. No one does who is not a part of it.

‘This underworld exists deep beneath this city, like an intricate labyrinth of old mine shafts and tunnels. A criminal society, yes, but one with its own rules and institutions: a professional brother- and sisterhood that is restricted to those who’ve done time in the cement and that severely punishes not just those who inform on one another to the police, but also those who scorn our influence, or whose crimes are considered so heinous that they are beyond the merely criminal; crimes that fly in the face of what it is to be human, such as compulsive murder. In short, it’s the Middle German Ring that brings a bit of order and stability to the criminal world.’

I laughed. ‘If you’re telling me that there’s honour among thieves, I don’t believe it.’

‘Oh, it’s much more than honour, I can assure you. It’s about organization where otherwise there would be chaos. The Middle German Ring imposes statutes on the local gangs and clubs, controls their activities, exacts money tributes and punishes those who break our laws, which are as binding as anything a German jurist would recognize. We even have our own court to judge what sanctions and punishments are to be inflicted on those who have broken our laws.’

‘Next thing you’ll be telling about Esmeralda and Quasimodo and the court of the gypsies.’

‘You asked me to tell you what happened to Reichenbach and I’m telling you now. It’s your business what you believe.’

‘Go on.’ I tossed him my handkerchief to mop some of the blood off his thigh and shoulder. ‘I’m listening.’

‘This people’s court meets once a month or by special session in the cellar of an old disused brewery in Pankow.’

‘Which one?’

‘The Deutsches Bauernbrauerei near the water tower on Ibsenstrasse.’

‘I know it. There’s a hole in the west wall as tall as the Brandenburg Gate from when they took the copper fermentation tanks out.’

‘That’s right. It’s the kind of place where we can meet without disturbance. The court’s judges are the ring’s most senior bosses, but the jury is made up of some of the city’s thieves, pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, yokel catchers, illegal gamblers — all of whom are paying members of the local clubs — in short, all those men and women who can’t go to the police for protection.’

‘Hell of a country club you have there.’

‘Just give your mouth a rest and listen. You might learn something. So, as you surmised, this morning I kidnapped Kurt Reichenbach outside his own apartment and took him before a specially convened people’s court. In your world this has no official standing, of course, but in mine, it is a legitimate judicial authority, as important as the Imperial Court of Justice in Leipzig. As many as a hundred people were present to see that true justice was done. I myself acted as his prosecutor, and Prussian Emil was my chief witness. Reichenbach was given a defence attorney appointed by the court and allowed to argue his case. But the evidence — more evidence than you were aware of, perhaps — was compelling, not to say overwhelming.

‘The chief witness told the court he saw the accused enter the courtyard with my daughter, and not soon after, he saw him again, with blood on his hands . And if that wasn’t enough to convince the court he was Winnetou, a second witness, a prostitute, came forward to say that months before any of the Winnetou murders, she’d met with the accused and they’d agreed to have sex, but he’d changed his mind and started calling her the vilest names and said it was wrong that decent men like him could be tempted in this way, and how it was high time someone cleaned up the streets.

‘A few days later, she said she was attacked from behind by someone who hit her on the back of the head with a stone in a sock and that she was only alive because her attacker had been interrupted, as she was quite certain he’d meant to kill her. The man ran away leaving the sock and the stone. She is convinced it had been Reichenbach because she recognized the sweet smell of his cigars. Not only that, but one of the women who saved her life found a cigar stub at the scene and she’d kept it in her handbag intending to give it to the police when she reported the attack, but she changed her mind and never did. Decided she didn’t need police attention. Well, who does? Anyway, she told the court she had thrown away the cigar but remembered the brand on the wrapper clearly enough because it was such a beautiful name: Dominican Aurora. It was this information that truly sealed his fate, since a summary search of the accused’s personal effects had revealed some unsmoked Dominican Aurora cigars in his breast pocket, which, one of the judges informed the court, could only be obtained in Germany as an import from Amsterdam.

‘In the face of this damning evidence, Reichenbach’s defense attorney then argued a simple case of diminished responsibility: only a lunatic could have killed as many as nine people. The court was not persuaded. At that point, the accused, asked if he had anything to say for himself before sentence was pronounced, demanded to know by what right the scum of Berlin were putting him on trial — his words, not mine — and it was then that he confessed to his crimes, which he justified by saying he’d intended first to drive Berlin’s whores out of business, and then to make the city’s streets fit for decent law-abiding citizens to walk in again. It seems he had a closer acquaintance with Bruno Gerth than even you did. It was when Gerth got arrested that Reichenbach decided to carry on the good work.’

‘Did he say why he scalped them?’

‘No, but I should have thought it was obvious; he wanted to cause the maximum amount of terror among the city’s whores. And he succeeded, too. After all, it was this part — the scalping — that made the killings more newsworthy than an ordinary murder. Let’s face it: Whores being murdered in this town is almost commonplace.’

‘This is what I was afraid might happen. I now have a hundred questions that will very likely never be answered.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as why did he wait until he’d killed Werner Jugo before he wrote a taunting letter to the newspapers? And why didn’t he admit to killing any of the girls in either of those two letters? He suggested he might get around to killing some prostitutes, but that’s not the same as admitting he’d already killed four. It’s almost as if he wanted to make sure we didn’t establish a connection between Winnetou and Gnadenschuss. Which, of course, would have doubled our chances of catching him.’