Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

I gave Herr and Frau Schwarz all of the hard words of grief straight from the holster. I didn’t even try to rub them in the snow first.

“We think we’ve found the body of your daughter, Anita. We believe she was murdered. Obviously I’ll have to ask you to come down to the station to identify her. Shall we say tomorrow morning, ten o’clock, at the Police Praesidium, on Alexanderplatz?”

Otto Schwarz nodded silently.

I had retailed bad news before, of course. Just the previous week I’d had to tell a mother in Moabit that her seventeen-year-old son, a schoolboy at the local Gymnasium, had been murdered by Communists who’d mistaken him for a brown shirt. “Are you sure it’s him, Commissar?” she asked me more than once during the course of my lachrymose time with her. “Are you sure there hasn’t been a mistake? Couldn’t it be someone else?”

Herr and Frau Schwarz seemed to be taking it on the chin, however.

I glanced around the apartment again. There was a little embroidery sampler in a frame above the door. It read WILLINGNESS FOR SELF-SACRIFICE and was stitched in red, with an exclamation point. I’d seen one before, and I knew the quotation was from Mein Kampf. I wasn’t surprised to see it, of course. But I was surprised that I could see no photographs of their daughter, Anita. Most people who are parents have one or two of their children around the place.

“We have the photograph you gave us, on file,” I said. “So we’re quite sure it’s her, I’m afraid. But it would save time if you could spare us some others.”

“Save time?” Otto Schwarz frowned. “I don’t understand. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Save time trying to catch her murderer,” I said coldly. “Someone may have seen her with him.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” Frau Schwarz said, and left the room, quite composed and less upset than if I’d told her that Hitler wouldn’t be coming to tea.

“Your wife seems to be taking it very well,” I said.

“My wife is a nurse at the Charite,” he said. “I suppose she’s used to dealing with bad news. Besides. We were sort of expecting the worst.”

“Really, sir?” I glanced at Grund, who stared balefully at me and then looked away.

“We’re very sorry for your loss, sir,” he told Schwarz. “Very sorry, indeed. Incidentally, there’s no need for both of you to come to the Praesidium tomorrow. And if tomorrow’s not convenient, we can always do it another time.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. But tomorrow will be fine.”

Grund nodded. “Best to get it over with, sir,” he said, nodding. “You’re probably right. And then you can get on with your grieving.”

“Yes. Thank you, Sergeant.”

“What was the nature of your daughter’s disability?” I asked.

“She was a spastic. It affected only the left side of her body. She had trouble walking, of course. There were also occasional seizures, spasms, and other involuntary movements. She couldn’t hear very well, either.”

Schwarz went over to the sideboard and, ignoring the Bible, laid his hand fondly on the open copy of Hitler’s book, as if his Fuhrer’s warm words about the National Socialist movement might afford him some spiritual and philosophical solace.

“What about her capacity for understanding?” I asked.

He shook his head. “There was nothing wrong with her mind, if that’s what you mean?”

“It was.” I paused. “And I just wondered if you might be able to explain how she came to have five hundred marks on her.”

“Five hundred marks?”

“In her coat pocket.”

He shook his head. “There must be some mistake.”

“No, sir, there’s no mistake.”

“Where would Anita get five hundred marks? Someone must have put it there.”

I nodded. “I suppose that’s possible, sir.”

“No, really.”

“Do you have any other children, Herr Schwarz?”

He looked astonished even to be asked such a thing. “Good God, no. Do you think we would have risked having another child like Anita?” He sighed loudly, and suddenly there was a strong smell of something foul in the air. “No, we had quite enough to do just looking after her. It wasn’t easy, I can tell you. It wasn’t easy at all.”

Finally, Frau Schwarz returned with several photographs. They were old and rather faded. One was folded down at the edge, as if someone had handled it carelessly. “These are all that I could find,” she announced, still quite dry-eyed.

“All of them, did you say?”

“Yes. That’s all of them.”

“Thank you, Frau Schwarz. Thank you very much.” I nodded curtly. “Well, then. We had better be getting back to the station. Until tomorrow.”

Schwarz started to move toward the door.

“It’s all right, sir. We’ll see ourselves out.”

We went out of the apartment and down the stairs to the street. The Cafe Kerkau, beneath the apartment, was still open, but I was in the mood for something stronger than coffee. I cranked up the car’s two-cylinder engine and we drove east along Unter den Linden.

“I need a drink after that,” I said after a few minutes.

“I suppose it’s lucky you didn’t have a drink before,” observed Grund.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, you were a bit hard on them, sir.” He shook his head. “Christ, you didn’t even rub it with snow. You just gave it to them, grit and all. Right between the eyes.”

“Let’s go to the Resi,” I said. “Somewhere with lots of people.”

“And we all know how good you are with people,” Grund said bitterly. “Was it because he was a storm trooper that you treated him and his wife like they had no feelings?”

“Didn’t you see that collar patch? Twenty-first Battalion. That was the same SA battalion Walter Grabsch belonged to. You remember Walter Grabsch? He murdered Emil Kuhfeld.”

“That’s not what the local police said. And what about all the polenta the Commies have murdered? Those two police captains, Anlauf and Lenck. Not forgetting Paul Zankert. What about those fellows?”

“I didn’t know them. But I did know Emil Kuhfeld. He was a good cop.”

“So were Anlauf and Lenck.”

“And I hate the bastards who murdered them every bit as much as I hate the man who killed Emil. The only difference between the Reds and the Nazis as far as I’m concerned is that the Reds don’t wear uniforms. If they did, it’d be a lot easier for me to hate them on sight, too, the same way I hated Schwarz, back there.”

“Well, at least you admit it, you uncaring bastard.”

“All right. I admit it. I was a bit out of line. But it could have been a lot worse. It’s only out of sympathy for that Nazi sod’s feelings that I didn’t pinch him for wearing the SA uniform.”

“That was big of you, sir.”

“Assuming either of them had any feelings. Which I very much doubt. Did you see her?”

“How do you work that out?”

“Come on, Heinrich. You know the play as well as I do. Your daughter’s dead. Someone murdered her. Cue handkerchief. ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yes, we’re sure.’ ”

“She’s a nurse. They can take it.”

“My eggs. Did you see her? Her tits didn’t even wobble when I told her that her daughter was dead. They were good tits. I liked looking at them. But they didn’t so much as tremble when I gave it to them. Tell me I’m wrong, Heinrich. And tell me I’m wrong that there weren’t any photographs of Anita Schwarz on the sideboard. Tell me I’m wrong that she spent at least ten minutes trying to find one. And tell me I’m wrong that she said she’d given me all the photographs of her daughter.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Wouldn’t you want to keep at least one photograph to remember your dead daughter? Just in case some dumb cop like you lost them?”