Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

“Is Joey’s foot the only reason he’d like this case to go nowhere?”

Diels looked puzzled. “Yes. What other reason could there be?”

It seemed imprudent to mention just how much I knew about the true extent of Joey’s current disabilities. “And what if another girl gets murdered? In similar circumstances. What then?”

“So you investigate it. Just lay off the Schwarz case. That’s all I’m asking. Just until after the election.”

“To spare Joey’s feelings.”

“To spare Joey’s feelings.”

“You make me think that maybe there’s a lot more to this case than I realized before.”

“It might be unhealthy to think that. For you and your career.”

“My career?” I laughed. “That really keeps me awake at night.”

“At least you’re still awake at night, Herr Gunther.” He grinned and blew on the end of his cigar. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

I’d heard all I wanted to hear. I reached for the fruit bowl, picked out a nice golden apple, and stood up.

The three naked women were now too caught up in themselves to pay me any regard, and it was looking like a proper floor show that Berliners would have paid good money to sit and watch.

“Hey, you,” I said. “Aphrodite.”

I tossed the apple and one of them caught it. Naturally she was the best-looking of the three Swedes. “My name is not Aphrodite,” she said dully. “It is Gunila.”

I didn’t say anything back. I just walked away with my clothes and my sense of humor and my classical education. It was a lot more than she had.

Outside I crossed the road and bought some cigarettes. In front of the tobacconist’s were six men wearing placards for the forthcoming election. One was for Bruner and the SDP, two were for Thalmann and the Communists, and three were for Hitler. All in all, the prospects for the republic were looking no better than my own.

IN 1932, I didn’t go to the cinema very much. Maybe if I had, I might not have been tricked so easily. I’d heard about Fritz Lang’s film M, because there was a detective in it who was supposedly based on Ernst Gennat. Certainly Gennat thought that was the case. But with one thing and another, I’d missed the film when it came out. It was still showing at my local Union Theater, but in summer, there always seemed to be something more important to do than to spend an evening watching a movie. Like investigate a murder. The night before it happened, I’d been up all night checking out political killings in Wedding and Neukolln. The descriptions given by witnesses were predictably vague. But then, all murderers look the same when they’re wearing brown shirts. That’s my excuse. One thing was for sure. The people who ambushed me must have seen the movie.

As I walked out of my apartment building, a small boy ran up to my car. I wasn’t sure if I’d seen the boy before, but even if I had, I’m not sure I’d have recognized him. All boys in the Scheunenviertel looked much the same. This one was shoeless, with short blond hair and bright blue eyes. He wore gray shorts, a gray shirt, and sported a number eleven of snot on his upper lip. I guessed him to be about eight years old.

“A girl I know just went off with a strange man,” he said. “Her name is Lotte Friedrich and she’s twelve years old and the fritz isn’t from around here. Creepy-looking dad he was, with a funny look on his shine. He’s the same schlepper who tried to give my sister some sweets yesterday if she’d go for a walk with him.” The boy tugged my sleeve urgently and pointed west along Schendelgasse until I agreed to look. “See them? She’s wearing a green dress and he’s wearing a coat. See?”

Sure enough, crossing Alte Schonhauser Strasse were a man and a girl. The man had his hand on the girl’s neck, like he was steering her somewhere. Wearing a coat seemed just a little suspicious, as the day was already a warm one.

Ordinarily, I might have been more suspicious of the boy. But then it wasn’t every month that an adolescent girl turned up dead with half of her insides removed. Nobody wanted that to happen again.

“What’s your name, sonny?”

“Emil.”

I gave him ten pfennigs and pointed in the direction of Bulowplatz.

“You know that armored car outside the Red HQ?”

Emil nodded and wiped the snot onto the back of his shirtsleeve.

“I want you to go and tell the SCHUPO in the armored car that Commissar Gunther from the Alex is following a suspect onto Mulackstrasse and requests them to come and give him support. Got that?”

Emil nodded again and ran off in the direction of Bulowplatz.

I walked quickly west, unholstering my Parabellum as I went, because as soon as I had crossed onto Mulackstrasse, I would be in the heart of Always True’s territory. I might have lacked caution but I wasn’t stupid.

The man and the girl ahead of me were walking briskly, too. I quickened my pace and came onto Mulackstrasse just in time to hear a scream and see the man pick the girl up under his arm before ducking into the Ochsenhof. At this point, I should probably have waited for the Twenty-first Battalion and its armored car. Only I was still thinking about Anita Schwarz and the girl in the green dress. Besides, when I looked back at where I had come from, there was still no sign of the cavalry. I took my whistle, blew it several times, and waited for some sign that they were coming. But nothing happened. Either the Twenty-first didn’t care for the idea of chasing a suspect into the most lawless part of Berlin, or they just didn’t believe the story Emil had told them. Probably it was a combination of the two.

I worked the slide on the Parabellum and went in a narrow door and up a darkened stair.

The Ochsenhof, also known as the Roast, or the Cattle Shed, was home to some of the worst animals in Berlin. A so-called rent barracks that occupied three acres, it was a slum tenement from the last century, with more entrances and exits than a lump of Swiss cheese. Rats ran along the balconies at night and were hunted for sport by dogs and feral children with air rifles. Cellar dives housed illegal stills, while on the granite back courts that were laughingly called “greens,” packing-case colonies of huts housing some of the city’s many homeless and unemployed squatted under lines of gray washing. On a dark, foul-smelling, gaslit stairwell, I found a group of young men already playing cards and sharing stumps of cigarette ends.

I looked at the card players and they looked at the nine-millimeter ace I was holding in my hand.

“Did any of you see a man come in here just now?” I asked. “He was wearing a light-colored coat and a hat. With him was a girl of about twelve, wearing a green dress. He might have been abducting her.”

Nobody said anything. But they were still listening. It pays to listen when it’s a man with a gun who’s doing the talking.

“Maybe she’s got a brother, like you,” I said.

“Nobody’s got a brother like him,” quipped a voice.

“Maybe he’ll be upset if his little sister gets sliced up and eaten by some rent-barracks cannibal,” I said. “Think about that.”

“Cops,” said another voice in the half-darkness. “They’re the last people in Berlin who still care about anything.”

The dealer jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “They went across the green.”

I ran up some steps and out onto the back court. It looked like a heavy, gray stone frame for the brilliantly blue sky. Something zipped past my left ear and I heard a bang as loud as a truck backfiring an eight-millimeter rifle bullet. Half a second later, my brain registered the subliminal image of a flash from the third-floor balcony and impelled my body to take cover behind some bedsheets that were flapping on a clothesline. I didn’t stay put. As soon as I had crawled several meters on my hands and knees, I heard another gunshot and something flicked through the sheet I’d been kneeling behind. I scrambled to the end of the line of washing and then sprinted like Georg Lammers into the relative safety of another stairwell. Several ragged-looking men cowering in the shadows stared at me fearfully. Ignoring them, I hared up to the third floor. Of a gunman there was no sign, unless you counted the sound of a pair of stout shoes descending another set of stairs three or four steps at a time. Angry, I went after the sound of the shoes. Some people had come out onto the Roast balconies to see what all the fuss was about. But the sensible ones stayed quietly in their sties.