Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

I handed back the file and watched as he placed it in the top drawer of the filing cabinet.

“Well, thank you for your time,” I said, standing up. “I’ll certainly be making a favorable interim report to the Dyestuff Syndicate on your work here.”

“I’ll walk you to your car, Herr Doktor.”

We went outside. Carl Mirow threw away his cigarette and opened the heavy car door. If Dr. Kassner had harbored any doubts about who I was, they were banished by the sight of a uniformed chauffeur and a limousine as big as a Heinkell.

Carl drove to Dragonerstrasse and dropped me in front of my building. He was glad to see the back of me. And especially glad to see the back of Dragonerstrasse, which wasn’t anywhere to bring a chauffeur and a Mercedes-Benz 770. I went up to my apartment, put on some normal clothes, and went out again. I got into my car and headed toward the West End. I had an itch I suddenly wanted to scratch.

Number 3 Reichskanzlerplatz was an expensive, modern-looking apartment building in just about the richest, leafiest suburb in Berlin. A little farther to the west lay Grunewald racecourse and the athletics stadium, where some Berliners hoped that the Olympics might be staged in 1936. My late wife had been especially fond of this area. To the south of the racecourse was the Seeschloss restaurant, where I had asked her to marry me. I parked the car and went over to a kiosk to get some cigarettes and, perhaps, some information.

“Give me some Reemtsmas, a New Berliner, Tempo, and The Week, ” I said. I flashed my warrant disc. “We had a report of some shots fired in this area. Anything in it?”

The vendor, who wore a suit, an Austrian hat, and a little mustache like Hitler’s, shook his head. “Car backfire probably. But I’ve been here since seven this morning and I haven’t heard a thing.”

“I figured as much just looking around,” I said. “Still, you have to check these things out.”

“There’s never any trouble around here,” he said. “Although there could be.”

“How do you mean?”

He pointed across Reichskanzlerplatz, to where it intersected with Kaiserdamm. “See that car?” He was pointing at a dark green Mercedes-Benz parked right in front of number three.

“Yes.”

“There are four SA men sitting in that car,” he said. Pointing north, up Ahornallee, he added: “And another truckload of them over there.”

“How do you know they’re SA?”

“Haven’t you heard? The ban on uniforms has been lifted.”

“Of course. It’s today, isn’t it? Some cop I am. I didn’t even notice. So who lives around here? Ernst Rohm?”

“Nope. Although he does visit on occasion. I’ve seen him going in there. To the ground-floor apartment on the corner of number three. Owned by Mrs. Magda Quandt.”

“Who?”

The vendor grinned. “For a bull who takes as many newspapers as you do, you don’t know much.”

“Me? I just look at the pictures. So go ahead and educate me.” I handed over a five. “And while you’re at it, keep the change.”

“Magda Quandt. She got married last December to Josef Goebbels. I see him every morning. Comes out and buys all the papers.”

“It gives the clubfoot some exercise, I suppose.”

“He’s not so bad.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” I shrugged. “Well, I can see why he married her. Nice building like that. Wouldn’t mind living here myself.” I shook my head. “Thing is, I can’t for the life of me see why she married a little fritz like him.”

I tossed the papers in the car, crossed over to the other side of the square, and glanced in the window of the car parked out front of number three. The vendor was right. It was full of Nazi brown shirts, who eyed me suspiciously as I went by. Apart from some clowns I’d seen fooling around in an old Model T at the circus one Christmas, it would have been hard to have seen more obvious stupidity in one car. It was all coming back to me now. Why the address had jogged my memory in Kassner’s office. One of the other Homicide teams at the Alex had been obliged to check an SA man’s alibi with Goebbels a month or two before.

The building had its own doorman, of course. All the nice apartment buildings in the West End had a doorman. Probably there was an armed SA man somewhere inside the lobby, keeping him company. Just to make sure Goebbels was well protected. He probably needed it, too. The Communists had already made several attempts on Hitler’s life. I didn’t doubt they wanted to assassinate Goebbels. I wouldn’t have minded taking a poke at the little satyr myself.

Naturally, I’d heard the rumors. That despite his cloven hoof and his diminished size, he was really quite a ladies’ man. The word around the Alex was that it wasn’t just Goebbels’s foot that looked like a club; that while he may have been short of stature, he was outsized on the butcher’s counter; that Goebbels was what Berlin’s line-boys would have called a Breslauer, after a large sausage of the same name. Much as I disliked him, however, I was still finding it hard to imagine Joey the Crip taking the risk of an open trip to the jelly clinic in Friedrichshain. Unless, of course, he’d gone in as a private patient, after hours, when no one else was about.

I rounded the rusticated corner of the building and stopped below what must have been Joey’s bathroom window. It was slightly open. I looked back over my shoulder. The car containing the storm troopers was out of sight. The truck was nowhere to be seen. I glanced back up at the frosted-glass window. If I put my foot on the horizontal joint of the ground floor’s rusticated brickwork, it looked as though it would be just possible to push myself up the side of the building and reach the bottom of the window. I tried it once, just long enough to check that the bathroom was empty, before dropping back down onto the deserted sidewalk. I waited for a moment. No storm troopers came to beat me up. So much for security.

The next time I did it, I pulled myself up the side and slid quickly through the open bathroom window. Breathing heavily, I sat on the toilet, and while I waited to see if my entry would be detected, I took a closer look at the window and saw that the rat’s-tail casement was broken on the sill. Even when the window looked like it was closed, it would have been a relatively simple matter to open it from the outside.

It was a big bathroom, with pink tiles all over and a round pedestal basin. There was a liberal dusting of talcum powder on the bathroom mat. The boxed-in bath was as deep as a car door, with a hand shower, in case Magda wanted to wash her hair. By the wall-mounted soap dish was a small framed picture of Hitler, as if even here, the devoted Joey could keep his beloved leader in mind. At right angles to the bath was a stool on which sat a pile of fluffy towels, and next to this a matching table on which stood a loofah and an antiquarian statue of a naked lady. Above the table was a large, mirrored bathroom cabinet, which, naturally, I opened. Most of the shelves were Magda’s. She used Joy perfume, Kotex, Nivea, Wella shampoo, Wellapon, Kolestral, and Blondor. I remembered her now. I remembered the pictures of the wedding in the magazines. A winter wedding. The happy, smiling couple arm-in-arm in the snow, accompanied by several SA men-probably the same careless louts who were sitting outside in the car-and, of course, Hitler himself. I wonder what Hitler would have said if he’d known that Magda’s beautiful, perfectly Aryan blond hair was dyed?

Joey had only one shelf in the cabinet. And it seemed we had something in common, after all. Joey shaved with a Schick injector razor and Mennen shaving cream, and cleaned his teeth with Colgate toothpaste. A bottle of Anzora hair cream explained Joey’s perfectly brushed head of dark hair. Then, between a packet of Beecham’s laxative pills and some Acqua di Parma cologne, was a bottle containing some blue pills. I opened it and emptied one out in my hand. It was the same pill I had seen in Kassner’s office earlier that morning. Protonsil. I decided that was my cue to leave. But not before using Joey’s toilet. And not flushing it was my way of thanking him for what he’d written about me in his newspaper.