Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

“Which is exactly what the Independent Socialists did in 1918,” he said. “Under Emil Eichhorn. We survived that. We shall survive the Nazis, too.”

“Maybe.”

“We must have a little faith, Bernie,” he said. “If the Nazis do get in, we shall have to have faith that, eventually, the parliamentary process will restore Germany to its senses.”

“I hope you’re right, sir.” Then, just as I was beginning to think Izzy had summoned me for a lesson in political science, he came to the point.

“An English philosopher named Jeremy Bentham once wrote that publicity is the very soul of justice. That’s especially true in the case of Anita Schwarz. To bowdlerize a phrase from another English jurist, the investigation into her murder must not merely proceed, it must be seen to proceed vigorously. Now let me tell you why. Helga Schwarz, the murdered girl’s mother, is Kurt Daluege’s cousin. That makes this a high-profile case, Bernie. And I just wanted to let you know that the last thing we want right now is Dr. Goebbels arguing in the pages of his tawdry but nonetheless influential newspaper that the investigation is being handled incompetently, or that we’re dragging our feet because we have some anti-Nazi ax to grind. All personal prejudices must be put aside. Do I make myself clear, Bernie?”

“Very clear, sir.” I might not have had a doctorate in jurisprudence like Bernard Weiss, but I didn’t need to have it spelled out with umlauts and ablauts. Kurt Daluege was a decorated war hero. Currently in the SS, he was an ex-SA leader in Berlin, not to mention Goebbels’s deputy. More important for us, he was an NSDAP member of the Prussian State Parliament, to which the Berlin police owed its first loyalty. Daluege could make political trouble for us. With friends like his, he could make trouble in a hospice for retired Benedictine monks. The smart money in Berlin said that if they ever got into power, the Nazis were planning to put Daluege in charge of the Berlin police force. It wasn’t that he had any experience of policing. He wasn’t even a lawyer. What he did have experience of was doing exactly what Hitler and Goebbels told him to do. And I presumed the same was true of his relation by marriage Otto Schwarz.

“That’s why I’m organizing a press conference this afternoon,” said Izzy. “So you can tell the newspapers just how seriously we’re taking this case. That we’re pursuing all possible leads. That we won’t rest until the murderer is caught. Well, you know the kind of thing. You’ve handled a press conference many times before. On occasion, you’ve even handled them quite well.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“However, you have a natural wit that sometimes you would do well to restrain. Especially in a political case like this one.”

“Is that what this is, sir?”

“Oh, I’d say so, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ernst Gennat and I will attend the conference, of course. But it’s your investigation and your conference. If questioned, Ernst and I will confine ourselves to statements regarding your competence. Commissar Gunther’s impressive reputation, his extraordinary perseverance, his keen psychological insights, his cleanup record. The usual crap.”

“Thank you for your confidence, sir.”

Izzy’s lips puckered, as if savoring the taste of his own intelligence like a freshly made matzoh ball. “Well, what have you come up with so far?”

“Not much. She wasn’t killed in the park, that’s for sure. We’ll know more about the cause of death later on today. Hard to say if it was a lust murder or not. Maybe that was the point of removing all her sexual organs and everything that was attached to them. On the face of it, you might say that’s the most remarkable feature of the case. But you might just as easily point to the reaction of Herr and Frau Schwarz themselves. Last night, neither of them seemed particularly upset when I told them that their daughter was dead.”

“God, I hope you’re not suggesting you think they did it?”

I thought for a moment. “Maybe I’m misjudging them, sir. But the girl was disabled. Somehow I got the feeling that they were glad to be rid of her, that’s all. Maybe.”

“I trust you won’t be mentioning any of this at the press conference.”

“You know me better than that.”

“It’s true, some Nazis do have a few ruthless ideas concerning the treatment of society’s unfortunates. People who are physically and mentally handicapped. However, even the Nazis aren’t stupid enough to think that’s a vote winner. Nobody’s going to vote for a political party that advocates the extermination of the sick and the infirm. Not after a war that left thousands of men disabled.”

“No, I suppose not, sir.” I lit a cigarette. “There’s one other thing. The murdered girl had five hundred marks on her. That’s a lot more pocket money than I used to get when I was her age.”

“Yes, you’re right. Did you ask the parents about it?”

“They suggested there must have been some mistake.”

“I’ve heard of money disappearing from a dead man’s pockets. But I’ve never heard of money being planted on one.”

“No, sir.”

“Ask the neighbors, Bernie. Speak to her school friends. Find out what kind of girl Anita Schwarz was.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Bernie. Get yourself a new tie. That one looks like it’s been in your soup.”

“Yes, sir.”

BEFORE THE PRESS CONFERENCE I went and had my hair cut at the KaDeWe. Henry Ford himself couldn’t have arranged the business of cutting German hair more efficiently. There were ten chairs, and I was in and out in less than twenty minutes. The KaDe We wasn’t exactly around the corner from the Alex. But it was a good place to have a haircut and buy a new tie.

As always, the conference itself took place in the Police Museum at the Alex. This was Gennat’s idea following the Police Exhibition of 1926, so that KRIPO might present itself to the world among the photographs, knives, test tubes, fingerprints, poison bottles, revolvers, rope, and buttons that were the exhibits of our many proud investigative successes. The modern face of policing we were keen to display to the world might have looked a bit more efficient had the glass cases containing this assortment of forensic trash and the heavy curtains that shrouded the tall windows of the exhibition hall not been so dusty. Even the most recent photograph, of Ernst Gennat, looked like it had been there for a hundred years.

There were about twenty reporters and photographers gathered among our previous triumphs. Behind a table that had been cleared of a selection of curious murder weapons, I sat between Weiss and Gennat. As if we had been arranged in ascending order of size. The men of Berlin’s press heard me appeal for any witnesses who might have seen a man behaving suspiciously in Friedrichshain Park on the night of the murder and then go on to assure the Berlin public that we were doing all in our power to catch the killer of Anita Schwarz-which, of course, was something I was determined to do. Things seemed to be going quite well until I uttered the usual bromides about interviewing known sex offenders. At this, Fritz Allgeier, the reporter for Der Angriff, a boss-eyed specimen with a gray beard and arms that seemed longer than his legs-hardly master-race material-said that the German people demanded to be told why known sex offenders were allowed to walk our streets in the first place.

Later on, I agreed with Weiss that my next comments could have been a little more diplomatic:

“The last time I looked, Herr Allgeier, Germany still has a system of criminal justice in which people are brought before the courts, tried, and, if found guilty, serve a prison sentence. After they’ve paid their debt to society, we let them go.”