Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

Reaching the bottom of the stairwell, I paused briefly and then pushed a couple of planks that were leaning against the wall out onto the court, to draw the rifleman’s fire. By now I had a good idea that it was a German rifle. The 7.97 Mauser Gewehr 98. During the war, I’d heard its voice often enough to know its middle name. The 98 was an accurate rifle, but it was unsuited to rapid fire, on account of its peculiar bolt arrangement. And in the several seconds it took for him to put another one up the spout, I was out of the stairwell and shooting. There’s nothing slow about a nine-millimeter Parabellum.

The first shot missed him. The second, too. By the time the Parabellum was ready for a fourth, I was close enough to see the pattern on his bow tie. This matched the pattern on his shirt, and the pattern on his coat. Red spots aren’t normally a favorite of mine, but on him they looked just fine. Especially as their source was the hole I’d made in his face. He was dead before he hit the concrete.

This was unfortunate, for two reasons. One was that I hadn’t killed anyone since August 23, 1918, when I shot an Australian at the Battle of Amiens. Possibly more than one. When the war was over, I promised myself I’d never kill anyone again. The second reason it was unfortunate was that I’d wanted to question the dead man and find out who had put him up to killing me. Instead I had to rifle through his pockets and all, under the curious eyes of a gathering crowd of rent-barracks vultures.

He was tall, thin, and losing his hair. He had already lost his teeth. At the moment of his death, his tongue must have forced one of the plates from his mouth and now it sat on his upper lip like a pink plastic mustache.

I found his wallet. The dead man’s name was Erich Hoppner and he was a member of the Nazi Party since 1930. His membership card stated that his number was 510934. None of that meant he wasn’t also a member of the Always True gang. It wasn’t unusual for gangsters from Berlin’s underworld to be contracted and paid to carry out political murders. The question was, Who had ordered my murder? The Always True, for what I had done to Ricci Kamm? Or the Nazis, for what I hadn’t done for Josef Goebbels?

I took his wallet and his rifle and his watch and his ring and left him there. The vultures were already taking his false teeth as I walked out of the Ochsenhof. False teeth were an expensive luxury for the kind of folk who lived in the Roast.

On Bulowplatz, the PHWM in charge of the SCHUPO troop stationed there denied ever having received a message from a small boy to come to my aid. I told him to take some of his men and go and mount a guard on Hoppner’s body before it was eaten. Reluctantly, he agreed.

I went back to the Alex. First I visited the Record Department of Inspectorate J, where the criminal secretary on duty helped me discover that Erich Hoppner didn’t have a criminal record. This was surprising. Then I went upstairs and handed over Hoppner’s party card to the political boys in DIa. Naturally, they’d never heard of him, either. Then I sat down and typed out a statement and gave it to Gennat. After I’d handed in my report, I was asked into an interview room and questioned by Gennat and two police councilors, Gnade and Fischmann. My statement was then filed for later comparison with the findings of an independent homicide team. More paperwork followed. Then I was interviewed again, by KOK Muller, who was leading the investigating homicide team.

“Sounds like they led you on a nice little trot,” observed Muller. “And you never saw the girl in the green dress again?”

“No. And after the shooting, I didn’t see any point in looking for her.”

“And the boy? Emil? The one who fed you the sugar lump?”

I shook my head.

Muller was a tall man with lots of hair, only it was all on the sides of his head with none of it on top, as if he had grown through it like a rubber plant.

“They had you measured pretty well,” he said. “They did everything but chalk a letter M on the dead man’s coat for you. Like in that movie with Peter Lorre. It’s the kid in the movie who tips off the cop about Lorre.”

“Haven’t seen it.”

“You should get out more.”

“Sure. Maybe I’ll buy a horse.”

“See the sights.”

“I’ve seen them already. Besides, maybe I see too much as it is. Soon it’s going to be unhealthy to be a cop with good eyesight in this country. That’s what people keep telling me, anyway.”

“You talk like the Nazis were going to win the election, Bernie.”

“I keep hoping they won’t. And I keep worrying that they might. But I’ve got seven loaves and five fishes telling me the republic needs more than just a lucky break this time. If I wasn’t a cop, I might believe in miracles. But I am and I don’t. In this job you meet the lazy, the stupid, the cruel, and the indifferent. Unfortunately, that’s what’s called an electorate.”

Muller nodded. He was an SDP man, like me. “Hey, did you hear the good news? About Joey Clovenhoof? His new wife Magda’s apartment got screened. Her jewels were lifted.” Muller was grinning. “Can you credit it?”

“Credit it? They should give whoever did it the Blue Max.”

I NEEDED A DRINK, I needed some female company, and I probably needed a new job. As things turned out, I went to the best place for all three. I went to the Adlon Hotel. Inside the sumptuous lobby I looked around for Frieda. Instead I found Louis Adlon. He was wearing a white tie and tails. In his lapel was a white carnation that matched his mustache. He wasn’t a tall man but he was every inch a gentleman.

“Commissar Gunther,” he said. “How nice to see you. And you must think me rude for not writing to thank you for the way you dealt with that thug. But I was hoping to run into you and thank you in person.” He pointed to the bar. “Do you have a minute?”

“Several.”

In the bar, Adlon waved for service, but it was already on its way, like a small express train. “Schnapps for Commissar Gunther,” he said. “The best.”

We sat down. The bar was quiet. The old man poured two glasses to the brim and then toasted me silently.

“According to my wife, Hedda, there’s an old Confucian curse that says, ‘May you live in interesting times.’ I’d say these are very interesting times, wouldn’t you?”

I grinned. “Yes, sir, I would.”

“Given that, I just wanted you to know that there is always a job for you here.”

“Thank you, sir. It might just be that I take you up on that offer.”

“No, sir. Thank you. It may interest you to know that your superior, Dr. Weiss, speaks very highly of you.”

“I didn’t know you two knew each other, Herr Adlon.”

“We’re old friends. It was he who leads me to suppose that the police service may soon change in ways we do not yet care to imagine. For that reason I felt able to make you an offer like this. Most of the house detectives here are, as you know, retired policemen. The incident in the bar proved to me that one or two of them are no longer equal to the task.”

We sipped the excellent schnapps for a while, and after that he went to have dinner with his wife and some rich Americans, while I went to find Frieda. I found her on the second floor, in a corridor leading to the hotel’s Wilhelmstrasse extension. She was wearing an elegant black evening gown. But not for long. The smaller, less expensive rooms were on that floor. These had views of the Brandenburg Gate and, beyond it, the Victory Column on Konigsplatz. But I had the best view of all. And I wasn’t even looking out of the window.

I WAS TRYING to avoid Arthur Nebe. This had been easy while I was checking through the list of suspects I had compiled using the Devil’s Directory, but it was always more difficult when I was in the Alex. Still, Nebe wasn’t the kind of cop who liked leaving his desk very much. He did most of his detective work on the telephone and, for a while, by not answering mine, I managed not to speak to him at all. But I knew it couldn’t last, and a couple of days after the shooting, I finally ran into him on the stairwell outside the washrooms.