Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

I shook my head. “No, you didn’t,” I said.

The cop was older than me. Nearing retirement, probably. His short hair was the color of polished steel. He had a scar in the center of his forehead: it looked as if a bullet had struck him there.

“What’s that you say, sir?”

“You didn’t see anything, Sergeant. Any of you. Got that?”

The sergeant thought about this for a moment and then nodded. “If you say so, sir.”

There was blood in my mouth but I was uncut.

“No harm done,” I said, and spat onto the ground.

“What was it all about?” he asked.

“Politics,” I said. “That’s what everything’s always about in Germany these days. Politics.”

I DIDN’T GO straight back to the Alex. Instead I drove to Kassner’s apartment on Donhoff-Platz, which wasn’t exactly on the way, being at the eastern end of Leipziger Strasse. I stopped on the north side of some ornamental gardens. The bronze statues of two Prussian statesmen stared at me across a low privet hedge. A small boy out for a walk with his mother was looking at the statues and probably wondering who they were. I was thinking about how Dr. Kassner’s home address had come to be on a list of names I had got from Jewface Klein. I knew Kassner would still be at the hospital, so I really haven’t a clue what I was expecting to find out. But I am an optimist like that. When you’re a detective, you have to be. And sometimes you just have to do what your instincts tell you to do.

I walked up to the shiny black front door and took a closer look. There were three bells. One of them was clearly labeled KASSNER. Beside the door were two cast-iron planters filled with geraniums. The whole area oozed respectability. I pulled the bell and waited. After a while I heard the key being turned and the door opened to reveal a man in his early twenties. I lifted my hat innocently.

“Dr. Kassner?”

“No,” said the man. “He’s not here.”

“My name is Hoffmann,” I said, raising my hat once again. “From Isar Life Insurance.”

The young man nodded politely but said nothing.

I glanced quickly at the other two names by the bell pulls. “Herr Kortig?”

“No.”

“Herr Peters, is it?”

“No. I’m a friend of Dr. Kassner’s. And as I said, he’s not here right now.”

“When will the doctor be back do you think, Herr-?”

“You can probably find him at the state hospital. At the urological clinic.” The man grinned as if somehow he hoped that this piece of information might embarrass me. There was a large gap between his front teeth. “I’m sorry, but I really do have to go. I’m late for an appointment. Would you excuse me?”

“Certainly.”

I stepped aside and watched him descend the front steps onto the square. He was of medium height, good-looking and dark in a Gypsy kind of way, but neat with it. He was wearing a light-colored summer-weight suit, a white shirt, but no tie. At the bottom of the steps he climbed over the door of a little open-topped Opel. It was white with a blue stripe. I hadn’t paid any attention to it before-maybe I was still a little bit punchy-but as he started the engine and drove off, I suddenly realized I needed to take down the license plate. All I got was the characters 11A before the car disappeared around the corner of Jerusalemstrasse. At least I knew that the slippery young man was from Munich.

An hour later, I was back at my desk. I saw Heinrich Grund on the other side of the detectives’ room and was just about to go over and tell him there were no hard feelings on my part when the Full Ernst arrived beside me like a bus reaching its depot. He was wearing a three-piece blue pin-striped suit in a size huge and had a Senior going full-blast in the corner of his mouth. He removed the cigar and I heard what sounded like the bellows on a church organ. An invisible choir of smoke and sweet coffee and something stronger perhaps descended on me as from Mount Sinai, and a lung ailment of a voice commanded my attention.

“Anything in that murder over at the cattle yard?” he asked.

“It looks like an aggravated political killing,” I said.

“Aggravated?”

“They raped her as well.”

Gennat grimaced.

“The DPP wants to see us.” Gennat never called Weiss Izzy. He didn’t even call him Bernard. He called him Weiss or the DPP. “Now.”

“What’s it about?” I asked, wondering if Grund had been stupid enough to report himself for striking a senior officer.

“The Schwarz case,” he said.

“What about it?”

But Gennat had already waddled off, expecting me to follow. As I went after him I reflected that Gennat had the flattest feet of any cop I’d ever seen, which was hardly surprising, given the bulk they had to carry. He must have weighed almost three hundred pounds. He walked with his arms behind him, which was hardly surprising, either, given how much of him was in front.

We went upstairs and along a quieter corridor lined with the pictures of previous Prussian police presidents and their deputies. Gennat knocked on Izzy’s door and opened it without waiting. We went inside. Bright sunshine was streaming through grimy, double-height windows. As usual, Izzy was writing. On the window seat, like a warm-looking cat and smelling lightly of cologne, sat Arthur Nebe.

“What’s he doing here?” I growled, sitting down on one of the hard wooden chairs. Gennat sat on the chair next to it and hoped for the best.

“Now, now, Bernie,” said Izzy. “Arthur’s just here to help.”

“I just came back from the cattle market. There’s a dead girl in one of the pens. Murdered by Nazis, most probably, given that she was a card-carrying Red. He could apply his formidable skills to that case, if he wants. But there’s nothing political about the murder of Anita Schwarz.”

Izzy put down his pen and leaned back. “I thought I made it clear that there is,” he said.

“Whoever killed Anita Schwarz was a nutcase, not a Nazi,” I said. “Although I will concede that it’s not at all uncommon for these two particulars to be coterminous.”

“I believe Commissar Gunther makes the point for me,” said Nebe. “Quite eloquently, as usual.”

“And what point might that be, Commissar Nebe?”

“Look here, Bernie,” said Izzy. “There are certain officials in the General-”

“I’m not in the General,” I said. “I’m in the Official.”

“-have queried your ability to remain impartial,” he continued. “They think your open hostility to the National Socialist Party and its adherents might actually get in the way of solving this murder.”

“Who said I was hostile to Nazism?”

“Oh come on, Bernie,” said Nebe. “After that press conference? Everyone knows you’re Iron Front.”

“Let’s not talk about that press conference,” said Gennat. “It was a disaster.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s not. After all, what’s any of it got to do with me finding the killer?”

“The dead girl’s parents, Herr and Frau Schwarz, have alleged that you have behaved aggressively and unsympathetically toward them because of their politics,” said Izzy. “Since then, they’ve alleged that you have been acting on some malicious gossip concerning her moral character.”

“Who told you that? Heinrich Grund, I suppose.”

“Actually, they spoke to me,” said Nebe.

“She was a prostitute,” I told Izzy. “An amateur, it’s true, but a prostitute nevertheless. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought that it might just have a bearing on why she was murdered. As well as how. After all, it’s not like prostitutes haven’t been murdered before in this city. And genital mutilation is something we’ve come across in cases of lust murder. Even Arthur would admit that much, surely.” I lit a cigarette. I didn’t ask permission to do it. I wasn’t in that kind of mood. “But if we are talking politics, may I remind everyone-especially you, Arthur-that it’s not against police regulations to be part of the Iron Front. It is against police regulations to be a member of the Nazi Party or the KPD.”