Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

“So. Why did you want to see me?”

“Weiss told me about this case you’ve been working on. The murder of Anita Schwarz. We had a similar case in Munich. You know Munich?”

“A little.”

“About three months ago, a fifteen-year-old girl turned up dead at the Schlosspark. Just about everything in her pants had been sliced out. The whole bag of love and life. A real neat job, too. Like a surgeon had done it. The dead girl’s name was Elizabeth Bremer and she went to the Gymnasium in Schwabing. Nice family, too. Her father works at the customs house, in Landsberger Strasse. Mother’s a librarian at some kind of Latin library on Maximilianeum. Weiss told me about your girl. That she was an amateur whore.” Herzefelde shook his head. “Elizabeth Bremer wasn’t anything like that. She was a good student with good prospects. Wanted to be a doctor. About the only thing you could hold against her was an older boyfriend. He was a skating teacher at the Prinzregenten Stadium. That’s how they met. Anyway, we hauled him over the coals for it but got nothing. He didn’t do it. He had a cast-iron alibi for the day of her death and that was that. According to him, they’d stopped seeing each other before she wound up dead. He’d been pretty broken up about it. The way he told it, she’d thrown him over for no good reason other than she caught him reading her diary. So he’d gone back home to Gunzburg, to see his family and get over it.”

Herzefelde waited as an S-Bahn train passed overhead.

“We had a list of possible suspects,” he continued, after the train had gone. “Naturally, we checked them out, but with no luck. I thought the case had gone cold until Weiss told me about your murder victim.”

“I’d like to see that list,” I said. “That and the rest of the case file.”

“State law forbids me from using the mail to send my papers on the case,” said Herzefelde. “However, there’s nothing to stop you from coming to Munich to look them over. You could stay in my house.”

“That would be quite impossible,” I said. “I couldn’t stay in a Jew’s house.” I paused long enough to change the expression on Herzefelde’s handsome face. “Not unless he’d stayed in my house first.” I smiled. “Come on. Let’s go and get your bag from the Alex. You’re staying with me tonight.”

IT WAS LUNCHTIME, and the cafe at the Richmond Hotel was busy with hungry portenos. I went down to the basement, found an empty table, and set out a chessboard. I wasn’t looking for a game with anyone other than myself. That way I figured I stood a better chance of winning. Also I needed to clear my head of old Nazis and their war crimes for a while. They were starting to get me down.

I tried not to stare at her, but this was almost impossible. She was a stunningly beautiful girl. Eyes just naturally followed her around the room like cows trotting after a milkmaid. But mostly it was hard not to stare at her because she seemed to be staring at me. I didn’t flatter myself she actually wanted to meet me. I guessed I was old enough to be her father. There had to be some mistake. She was tall and slim, with a spectacular waterfall of black, curly hair. Her eyes were the shape and color of chocolate-covered almonds. She wore a tailored tweed jacket buttoned tight at the waist, and a matching long pencil skirt that made me wish I had a couple of sheets of paper. Her figure was all right if you liked them built like expensive thoroughbreds. I happened to like them built that way just fine.

She walked toward me, her high heels perforating the polished wooden air of the Richmond’s quiet basement like the slow beat of a tall clock. Expensive perfume tugged an edge of the air I was breathing. It made a very pleasant change from the smell of coffee and cigarettes and my own dyspeptic middle age.

As soon as she spoke to me, it was obvious she hadn’t mistaken me for someone else. She spoke in castellano. I was pleased about that. It meant I had to pay extra attention to her lips and the way her small pink tongue rested on her gypsum-white teeth.

“Forgive me for interrupting your game, senor, ” she said. “But are you Carlos Hausner, perhaps?”

“I am.”

“Might I sit down and talk to you for a moment?”

I looked around. Three tables away, the little Scotsman, Melville, was playing chess with a man whose leathery brown face belonged on the back of a horse. Two younger portenos with Cuban heels and silver-buckled belts were engaged in a rather vigorous game of billiards. They put as much vitality into their noisy cue shots as Furtwangler conducting the Kaim Orchestra. All of their eyes were on their respective games but their ears and their attention to the Richmond’s resolutely masculine traditions were on us.

I shook my head. “My opponent, the Invisible Man, gets a little irritated when people sit on his lap. We’d better go upstairs.”

I let her walk ahead of me. It was the polite thing to do and it gave me a chance to study the seams of her stockings. These were straight, as if someone had fixed them using a theodolite. Fortunately, her legs were anything but. They had better curves than the Mille Miglia and were probably just as challenging to negotiate. We found a quiet table near the window. I waved a waiter over. She ordered a coffee, and I ordered something I had no interest in drinking, so long as she was around. When you’re having a cup of coffee with the best-looking woman who’s spoken to you in months, there are better things to do than drink it. She took one of my cigarettes and let me light it for her. It was yet another excuse to pay close attention to her big, sensuous mouth. Sometimes I think that’s why men invented smoking.

“My name is Anna Yagubsky,” she said. “I live with my parents in Belgrano. My father used to be a musician in the orchestra at the Teatro Colon. My mother sells English ceramics from a shop on Bartolome Mitre. Both of them are Russian immigrants. They came here before the Revolution, to escape the czar and his pogroms.”

“Do you speak Russian, Anna?”

“Yes. Fluently. Why?”

“Because my Russian is better than my Spanish.”

She smiled a little smile and we spoke in Russian.

“I am a legal officer,” she explained. “I work in an office next to the law courts on Calle Talcahuano. Someone-a friend of mine in the police, it doesn’t matter who-told me about you, Senor Hausner. He told me that before the war you were a famous detective, in Berlin.”

“That’s right.” I saw no advantage to myself in disagreeing with her. No advantage at all. I was keen to be someone who looked good in her eyes-not least because every time I saw myself in a mirror, my own eyes were telling me something different. And I’m not just talking about my appearance. I still had all my hair. There was even quite a bit of color left in it. But my face was hardly what it used to be, while my stomach was more than it had ever been. I was stiff when I awoke in the morning, in all the wrong places and for all the wrong reasons. And I had thyroid cancer. Apart from all that, I was just fine and dandy.

“You were a famous detective and now you’re working for the secret police.”

“It wouldn’t be much of a secret police if I admitted that was true, now would it?”

“No, I suppose not,” she said. “Nevertheless, you are working for them, aren’t you?”

I smiled my best enigmatic smile-the one that didn’t show my teeth. “What can I do for you, Senorita Yagubsky?”

“Please. Call me Anna. In case you hadn’t already guessed, I’m a Jew. That’s an important part of my story.”