Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

“She knows she’ll get them back. That’s all.”

“No, no. People aren’t like that, Heinrich. She’d have kept one back. At least one. But she gave me all of them. That’s what she said. I asked her about it. And she confirmed it. You heard her. Not only that, but these pictures aren’t in the best of condition. Like they’ve been kept in an old shoe box. A Commie kills you tonight and someone asks me for a picture of you for the police newspaper, I can give them a nice one, in a frame, in twenty seconds. And I’m not even related to you. Thank God.”

“So what are you saying?”

I pulled up close to the Residenz casino. It was well past midnight, but there were still plenty of people going into the place. One or two of them cops, probably. The Resi was popular with KRIPO from the Alex, and not just because of its proximity.

“I’m saying what you were saying back in the park.”

“What did I say back in the park?”

“That maybe they’re both of them glad the kid’s dead. That maybe they think she’s better off. More important, that they’re better off.”

“How do you work that out?”

“It’s Nazi policy, isn’t it? That cripples are a waste of all our tax marks. That’s where I assumed you’d got all this racial-purity shit from. Hell, Heinrich, you saw that photograph of Schwarz with Hitler.” I lit a cigarette. “I’ll bet you anything Hitler would probably like Otto Schwarz a whole lot better if it wasn’t for his gimp daughter.”

We went inside the Resi. The spanner on the door knew our faces and waved us past the ticket booth. None of the clubs made cops pay to get in. They needed us more than we needed them. Especially when, as with the Resi, there were more than a thousand people in the place. We found ourselves a little loge in the balcony and ordered a couple of beers. The club was full of alcoves and booths and private cellars, all of them equipped with telephones that encouraged patrons to flirt at a safe distance. These telephones were also one of the reasons the place was popular with detectives from the Alex. Informers liked them. The whores liked the telephones, too. Everyone liked the telephones at the Resi. The minute we sat down, the phone on our table started to ring. I picked it up.

“Gunther?” said a man’s voice. “It’s Bruno. Down here by the bar in front of the shooting gallery.” I glanced over the edge of the balcony and saw Stahlecker waving up at me. I waved back.

“For a man with one eye, you do all right.”

“We booked that alphonse. Say thanks to Heinrich.”

“Bruno says thanks, Heinrich. They booked the alphonse.”

“Good,” said Grund.

“On my way out of the Alex I saw Isidor,” Bruno said. “If I saw you he told me to tell you he wants to see you first thing in the morning.”

Isidor was the name by which everyone called the DPP, Dr. Bernard Weiss. It was also the name by which Der Angriff called him. Der Angriff didn’t mean the name to sound affectionate, just anti-Semitic. It didn’t bother Izzy.

“Did he say what about?” I asked, although I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

“No.”

“What time is first thing for Izzy these days?”

“Eight o’clock.”

I looked at my watch and groaned. “There goes my evening.”

HE WAS A SMALL MAN with a small mustache, a longish nose, and little round glasses. His hair was dark and combed back across a head full of brains. He wore a well-cut three-piece suit, spats, and, in winter, a coat with a fur collar. Easily caricatured, his Jewishness exaggerated by his enemies, Dr. Bernard Weiss cut an odd figure among the rest of Berlin’s policemen. Heimannsberg, who towered over him, was everyone’s idea of what a senior policeman should look like. Izzy’s appearance was more that of a lawyer, and indeed, he had once been a judge in the Berlin courts. But he was no stranger to uniforms, and returned from the Great War with an Iron Cross, First Class. Izzy did his best to seem like a hard-bitten detective, but it didn’t work. For one thing, he never carried a gun, not even after he was beaten up by a right-wing uniformed cop who claimed he’d mistaken the deputy police president for a Communist. Izzy preferred to do his fighting with his tongue, which was a formidable weapon when deployed. His sarcasm was as caustic as battery acid and, as he was surrounded by men of much lesser intellectual abilities than himself, it was frequently splashed around. This did not make him loved. That would hardly have mattered for most men in his elevated position, but since there were no men in his elevated position who were also Jewish, it ought to have mattered more to Izzy. His lack of popularity made him vulnerable. But I liked him and he liked me. More than any other man in Germany, it was Izzy who had been responsible for the modernization of the police force. But much of the impetus for this had come from the assassination of the foreign minister, Walther Rathenau.

It was said that everyone in Germany could remember exactly where they were on June 24, 1922, when they heard the news that Rathenau, a Jew, had been shot by right-wingers. I had been in the Romanisches Cafe, staring into a drink and still feeling sorry for myself after my wife’s death three months before. Rathenau’s murder had persuaded me to join the Berlin police. Izzy knew that. It was one of the reasons he liked me, I think.

His office at the Alex resembled that of a university professor’s. He sat in front of a large bookcase full of legal and forensic tomes, one of which he himself had written. On the wall was a map of Berlin with red and brown pins indicating outbreaks of political violence. The map looked like it had the measles, there were so many pins. On his desk were two telephones, several piles of papers, and an ashtray where he tipped the ash from the Black Wisdom Havanas that were his one apparent luxury.

He was, I knew, under enormous pressure, because the republic itself was under enormous pressure. In the March elections, the Nazis had doubled their strength in the Reichstag and were now the second-largest party, with eleven and a half million votes. The chancellor, Heinrich Bruning, was trying to turn the economy around, but with unemployment at nearly six million and rising, this was proving almost impossible. Bruning looked unlikely to survive now that the Reichstag had reconvened. Hindenburg remained president of the Weimar Republic and leader of the largest party. But the aristocratic old man had little liking for Bruning. And if Bruning went, what then? Schleicher? Papen? Groner? Hitler? Germany was running out of strong men who were fit to lead the country.

Izzy waved me to a chair without looking up from what he was writing with his black Pelikan. From time to time he put down the pen and lifted the cigar to his mouth, and I amused myself with the vague hope that he might put the pen in his mouth and try to write with the cigar.

“We must continue to do our duty as policemen even though others may make it difficult for us,” he said in a voice that was deep and full-bodied, like a lager darkened by colored malts-a Dunkel or a Bock. He put down the pen and, sitting back on the creaking swivel chair, fixed me with an eye as pointed as the spike on a cuirassier’s Pickelhaube. “Don’t you agree, Bernie?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Berliners still haven’t forgotten or forgiven their police force for what happened in 1918, when the Alex surrendered to anarchy and revolution without a shot.”

“No, sir. But what else could they do?”

“They could have upheld the law, Bernie. Instead they saved their own skins. Always we uphold the law.”

“And if the Nazis take over, what then? They’ll use the law and the police for their own ends.”