Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

Frieda had never been a cop, so she didn’t take offense at my remark about ex-cops. But I knew she could look after herself. Adlon had hired her on the strength of her having been in the German women’s Olympic fencing team in Paris in 1924, when she’d narrowly missed a medal.

I took her by the arm and walked her to the bar. “When we sit down,” I said, “I want you all over me like ivy. That way I’m not a threat to him.”

We sat down at the table right beside Ricci. The Bismarck had kicked in and he was sneering a series of swear words at a terrified bar waiter. The redhead looked like she’d seen it before. Most of the bar’s other customers were wondering if they could make it as far as the door without crossing Ricci’s line of sight. But one of them was made of sterner stuff. A businessman wearing a frock coat and a meat slicer of a shirt collar, and a look of indignation at the kind of low German that was spilling out of Ricci’s mouth, stood up and seemed inclined to take on the gangster. I caught his eye and shook my head and, for a moment, he seemed to heed my warning. The moment he sat down, Frieda let me have it. On the ears and the neck and the back of my head and on my cheek and finally on my mouth, which was where I liked it best of all.

“You’re cute,” she said, with some understatement.

Ricci looked at her and then at the redhead beside him. “Why can’t you be more like that?” he asked her, jerking a thumb Frieda’s way. “Friendly, like.”

“Because you’re drunk.” The redhead took out a powder compact and started to touch up her makeup. A futile effort in my estimation: like trying to touch up the Mona Lisa. “And when you’re drunk, you’re a pig.”

She had a point, but Ricci didn’t care for it. He stood up, but the table stayed on his lap. The bottle and the glasses and the ashtray went to the floor. Ricci swore and the redhead started to laugh.

“A clumsy drunken pig,” she added, for good measure, and started to laugh again. I liked the effect it had on the redhead’s mantrap of a mouth. I liked the way her sharp white teeth shucked off her red lips like cherry skins. But Ricci didn’t like it at all and let her have it hard with the flat of his hand. In the Adlon’s plush bar, the slap went off like New Year’s Eve. This was too much for the man wearing the meat-slicer shirt collar. He looked like a real Prussian gentleman-the kind who cares what happens to a lady, even a lady who was probably a hundred-mark whore.

“Uh-oh,” Frieda murmured in my ear. “The man from I. G. Farben is about to play Sir Lancelot.”

“Did you say I. G. Farben?”

I. G. Farben was Europe’s largest dyestuff syndicate. The company’s headquarters were in Frankfurt but they had an office in Berlin that was opposite the Adlon, on the other side of Unter den Linden. That was what I’d been trying to remember in Illmann’s office.

“I’m sorry,” said the man from I. G. Farben. His tone was as stiff as a washboard, and just as square. “But I really must protest at your loutish behavior and your treatment of that lady.”

The redhead picked herself off the floor and uttered a few short words that were common enough in the engine rooms of German naval vessels. She was probably wondering if the fritz with the high collar was referring to her. Collecting the now empty Bismarck bottle in her hand, she swung it at Ricci’s head. The Always True leader caught it neatly in his palm, wrested it from her, tossed it in the air like a juggler’s club, grabbed it by the neck, and then swung it down hard against the edge of the upturned table-all in one easy, practiced, and delinquent gesture. The bottle came up again, glistening, meaningfully triangular, like a shard of razor-sharp ice. Ricci took hold of the IGF man’s frock coat, fisted him a foot closer, and seemed on the point of acquainting him with a more fundamental rebuttal when I interrupted their conversation.

The barman at the Adlon made the best cocktails in Berlin. He was fond of cucumbers, too. He put pickled cucumbers on the tables and slices of fresh cucumber in some of the drinks favored by Americans. A large uncut cucumber lay on the bartop. Looking for a knife, I’d had my eye on it for a while. I don’t care for anything in my drink except ice, but I liked the look of that cucumber. Besides, my gun was in the glove box of my car.

I dislike hitting a man when his back is turned. Even with a cucumber. It goes against my inherent sense of fair play. But since Ricci Kamm didn’t have a sense of fair play, I hit him hard, on the back of the hand holding the broken bottle. He yelped and dropped it. Then I struck him with the cucumber on the side of his head, twice. If I’d had some ice and a slice of lemon, I’d probably have hit him with those as well. An exclamation tiptoed around the room, as if I’d made a rabbit disappear from inside a top hat. The only trouble was, the rabbit was still there. Ricci sat down heavily, holding his ear. Teeth bared, nose twitching, he reached inside his coat. I didn’t think he was looking for his wallet. I saw a little black hippo’s head peeking out from a holster, and then a Colt automatic appeared in Ricci’s hand.

It was a good, firm cucumber, hardly ripe at all. Springy, with plenty of heft, like a good blackjack. I put a lot of weight into it. I had to. Ricci didn’t move his head more than an inch. He didn’t try to block the cucumber. He was hoping to fire the gun before that happened. He took it across the nose, jerked back on the chair, dropped the gun, and lifted both hands to the blood-spattered center of his face. Figuring I might never get a better chance to do it, I cuffed both of his wrists before he even knew what was happening.

I let Ricci groan for a while before handing him a bar towel to press against his nose and hauling him by the cuffs to his feet. Acknowledging a round of applause from some of the other guests in the hotel bar, I pushed Ricci in the direction of two uniforms and then tossed the gun after him.

Frieda moved in on the redhead. “Time to go, lovely,” she said, taking hold of a bony elbow.

“Take your hands off me,” said the redhead, trying to wrest her arm away, but the elbow stayed held in Frieda’s strong fist. Then she laughed and gave me a languorous north-to-south look. “That was really something, what you did just now, comrade. Like a Christmas gift from the kaiser. Wait until people hear about this. Ricci Kamm got himself arrested by a johann armed with just a cucumber. He’s never going to live it down. Leastways, I hope he doesn’t. That bastard’s hit me once too often.”

Frieda steered her firmly toward the door, leaving me with the man from IGF. He was tall, thin, and gray. As full of Prussian good manners as Berlin’s Herrenklub, he bowed gravely.

“That was admirable,” he said. “Quite admirable. I’m very grateful to you, sir. I don’t doubt that thug would have seriously injured me. Perhaps worse.”

The IGF man had his wallet out and was pressing his business card on me. It was as thick and white as his shirt collar. His name was Dr. Carl Duisberg and he was one of the I. G. Farben’s directors, from Frankfurt.

“May I know your name, sir?”

I told him.

“I see the international reputation of Berlin’s police force is well deserved, sir.”

I shrugged. “It’s amazing what you can do with a cucumber,” I said.

“If there’s anything I can do for you in return,” he said. “To show my gratitude. Name it, sir. Name it.”

“I could use some information, Dr. Duisberg.”

He frowned, slightly puzzled. He hadn’t been expecting this. “Of course. If it’s in my power to give it.”

“Does the Dyestuff Syndicate have anything to do with drug companies?”