Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

“According to Schellenberg, it was Heydrich who brought you back into Kripo, wasn’t it? After five years in the cold.”

“Yes. But it wasn’t so cold. At least I didn’t think it was.”

“Schelli says there were some more murders he wanted you to solve. In 1938. Of some Jewish girls.”

“A lot of Jews have been murdered in this city.”

“But you know the ones I’m talking about. These were just before the infamous night of broken glass, weren’t they?”

I nodded.

“Would you tell me about them?”

“All right.”

From the pocket of his tunic Meyer now produced a notepad and a pencil. “Do you mind?”

“No, go right ahead. Only, you’d better wait until I’m dead before you write about this. Or better still, you’d better wait until another theology student comes along with a gun in his hand.”

We talked for about forty minutes and then I walked him along Bismarckstrasse to the German Opera House, where Leuthard was already waiting outside, looking more thuggish than before. You wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen him in an opera — Wagner’s, full of thugs with swords and wings on their helmets — but attending one was something else again. There was grass on the back of his tunic, as if he’d been lying in the Tiergarten. He walked toward me with a sort of smile on his face and a program in his hand, but I might just as easily have expected him to have been carrying a gun.

“What did you do?” Meyer asked him.

“Nothing much,” said Leuthard. “Lay in the sun and slept for a little.”

“I’ll meet you back at the hotel after the show,” I said. “And then we can go to dinner. Or I’ll drive you back to the Adlon. Both, if you prefer.”

“I’m sure we could get you a ticket,” said Meyer.

“One thing you can’t knock about the opera is the music; it’s just a pity that they take so long to play it.”

“What will you do?”

“Don’t worry about me. I live not very far from here.”

“You know? I’d like to see the home of a real Berlin detective.”

“No, you wouldn’t. There’s no chemistry set, and no Persian slipper where I keep my tobacco. There’s not even a violin. The ordinariness of it would horrify a writer. You might never write another word again because of the disappointment. Besides, right now we’re not receiving visitors, on account of the fact that we’re waiting for a new guest book from Liebmann’s.”

“Well then. The Alex. I should like to see around the famous Alex.”

“Schellenberg will fix that for you. And now I’m going home. I’ll see you back here at ten o’clock.”

I walked back toward the Grand; but I didn’t go home. I had no intention of going home. Just around the corner was the municipal bathhouse where, two nights a week, Kirsten Handlöser — the schoolteacher I’d met in a boat on the Wannsee — went swimming. At least that was what she had told me. You never know with women. What they tell you and what they don’t tell you is a very long bridge across a very wide river with all kinds of fish.

The bathhouse was a big redbrick building with ceramic dolphins on the wall. Inside there was a handsome glass roof over a pool about thirty or forty meters long, and above the clock at the north end was a handsome-looking mural of some lakeside idyll: a couple of herons were watching a bearded man in a red toga trying to get the attention of a naked girl who was seated on a little grassy knoll. She looked like she was of two minds about whatever it was he was suggesting, but from where I was sitting it already looked too late for her to change her mind about anything very much except perhaps which bus she caught home.

I took a quick walk around the poolside but Kirsten wasn’t there and I certainly didn’t have the inclination to swim myself. Getting wet inside seemed like a better bet. I remembered that Dr. Heckholz had boasted of having an excellent schnapps. His office wasn’t so far away, on Bedeuten Strasse, and it was still early enough to find a hardworking lawyer in his office. Besides, I had news for him about Stiftung Nordhav, which was that I’d pushed an investigation about as far as it could go without getting myself into trouble.

I walked along Wallstrasse and instinctively looked to see if Heckholz’s office lights were on. Not that they needed to be: it was still light; and not that they would have been; if it had been dark there would have been a blackout, but old habits die hard. So I rang the bell and waited, and when nothing happened I rang all of them, which seldom works, only this time it did.

There was an elevator but as before I took the white marble stairs to the third floor and walked along the well-polished landing to the frosted-glass door, which, as before, was slightly ajar, only this time Dr. Heckholz wasn’t expecting me. He wasn’t expecting anyone. Not anymore. He was lying on the floor as if eavesdropping on the people in the office immediately below. But he wouldn’t have heard anyone or anything because he was quite dead. He couldn’t have looked more dead if he’d been lying on the side of a trench at Verdun with a bullet through his head.

The pool of blood on the white floorboards was right under the broken egg that was the dead lawyer’s skull, and as big as a bicycle wheel. You could see his brains under the blood and the bone, and it was clear to me that someone had hit him very hard, several times, with the bronze bust of Hitler that had previously been on the lawyer’s desk and which now lay discarded on the floor. There was blood on Hitler’s solemn face and tiny strands of Dr. Heckholz’s hair on top of the leader’s head. I almost laughed as if I could already hear myself telling the cops at the Berlin-Charlottenburg presidium that the victim had been murdered by Hitler. Instead I helped myself to some of the schnapps from a bottle on a silver tray by the window. My fingerprints were all over the door handles and the desktop anyway so it didn’t seem to matter that they’d be on a glass, too. Besides, if you can’t help yourself to a drink when you’re looking at a man with his head bashed in then I can’t see why the stuff was ever invented. And Heckholz had been right; it was an excellent schnapps, at least as good as the one I’d had at the Villa Minoux. I poured another. So much schnapps, only this time, so little to smile about.

I took another, closer look at the body. There was such a lot of blood. You always forget just how much there is inside a fully grown man, especially his head. You never forget the first time you ever see a man shot in the head, especially when you do it yourself. Sometimes it seems that there’s a natural spring of red that comes out of a person; and there is, of course, only that natural spring is called his life. And once that’s tapped it’s very hard to stop. Heckholz’s right hand, lying by his face, was surrounded with the stuff and it looked as if he’d dipped his finger in his own blood and used that to try to write something — perhaps the identity of his killer — but whatever it was I couldn’t make it out. I bent down to touch the pool of blood and rubbed it experimentally between my fingers; it was still quite viscous, as if poor Heckholz hadn’t been dead for very long.

I fetched his handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit and wiped my hands. A key chain led out of his trouser pocket on the floor like the body of a golden snake but there was no key on the end; that was in the safe, which was wide open like Ali Baba’s sesame, and immediately I saw that the motive for the murder hadn’t been robbery. Whatever was missing from the safe, it wasn’t money because there were several bundles of banknotes on the top shelf, just like the ones he’d sent to me at the Alex. I helped myself to the two hundred marks I’d been promised and left the rest for the murder boys at the local presidium. It was just around the corner on Bismarckstrasse. They’d probably built it there in case they had any trouble with the crowd at the German Opera. They were a rough lot, opera and ballet fans, as Nijinsky could probably have testified.