Philip Kerr - Field Grey

'Don't mind him,' said the brunette. 'He's really not so bad.'

'I don't mind him as much as he seems to mind me,' I said.

'Well,' she said. 'I'm grateful for the lift. This is fine for me, here.'

She was wearing a bright print Percale dress with a heartshaped button waistline, a lacy collar and cute puff sleeves. The print was a riot of red and white fruit and flowers on a solid black background. She looked like a market garden at midnight. On her head was a little white trilby with a red silk ribbon, as if the hat was a cake and it was someone's birthday. Mine perhaps. Which of course it was. The smell of sweat on her body was honest and more provocative to me than some expensive, cloying scent. Underneath the midnight garden was a real woman with skin on every part of her body, and organs and glands and all the other things about women I knew I liked but had almost forgotten. Because it was the kind of day when girls like Elisabeth were wearing summer dresses again, and I remembered just what a long winter it had been in Berlin, sleeping in that cave with just my dreams for company.

'Come for a drink,' I said.

She looked tempted, but only for a moment. 'I'd like to, but – I should really be getting back to work.'

'Come on. It's a warm day and I need a beer. There's nothing like spending a couple of hours in the cement to give a man a thirst. Especially when it's his birthday. You wouldn't want me to drink alone on my birthday, would you?'

'No. If it really is your birthday.'

'If I show my identity card, will you come?'

'All right.'

So I did. And she came. Immediately next to the police station on Bulowplatz there was a bar called the Braustubl and, leaving my car where it was, we went in there.

The place was full of communists of course, but I wasn't thinking about them, or about Erich Mielke, although for a while Elisabeth kept on talking about him as if I was interested, which I wasn't. But I liked watching her red lips open and close to show off her white teeth. I was especially taken with the sound of her laughter, as she seemed to like my jokes, and that was really all that mattered, because when we parted she agreed to see me again.

When she'd gone I bought some cigarettes and heading back to my car I caught the eye of one of the uniformed cops on the square and stopped to chat with him in the sunshine. Bauer, that was his name, Sergeant Adolf Bauer. Our chat was the usual splash on the wall: the trial of Charlie Urban for a murder at the Mercedes Theatre, Bruning's emergency decrees, Hitler's evidence at the court in Moabit. Bauer was a good bull and all the time we were speaking I noticed how he had his eye on a car that was parked in front of Karl Liebknecht House, as if he recognised it or the man waiting patiently in the driver's seat. Then we were both watching three other men come out of the Braustubl and get into the car with this other fellow. And one of the men was Erich Mielke.

'Hullo,' said Bauer. 'There goes trouble.'

'I know the kid,' I said. 'The one with the quiff. But I don't know the others.'

'The one driving is Max Thunert,' said Bauer. 'He's a lowranking KPD thug. One of the others was Heinz Neumann. He's in the Reichstag, although he doesn't limit causing trouble to when he's there. I didn't recognise the other fellow.'

'I was just in that bar,' I said. 'And I didn't see any of them.'

'There's a private room upstairs that they use,' said Bauer. 'It's my opinion that they keep some weapons there. Just in case we decide to search Karl Liebknecht House. Also if the SA mounts a demo here they won't be expecting anything from the top floor of that bar.'

'Have you told the Hussar?'

The Hussar was a uniformed sergeant called Max Willig, who was frequently about Bulowplatz and almost as unpopular as Captain Anlauf.

'I've told him.'

'Didn't he believe you?'

'He did. But Judge Bode didn't when we went to get a warrant. Said we need more evidence than an itch on the end of my nose.'

'Think they're planning something?'

'They're always planning something. They're communists, aren't they? Criminals, most of them.'

'I don't like criminals who break the law,' I said.

'What other kind are there?'

'The kind that make the law. It's the Hindenburgs and Schleichers of this world who are doing more to screw the Republic than the commies and the Nazis put together.'

'You got that right, my friend.'

I might never have heard the name of Erich Mielke again but for two things. One was that I saw a lot more of Elisabeth, and now and again she'd say that she'd seen him, or one of his sisters. And then there were the events of August 9th, 1931. There's not a policeman from Weimar Berlin who doesn't remember August 9th, 1931. The way Americans remember the Maine.

To say the least, it had been a difficult summer. In spite of some new laws that made political violence a capital crime, Nazis were killing communists at the rate of almost two to one. Following the March elections in which the Nazis got more than three times as many votes as the KPD, the communists became increasingly violent, probably out of desperation. Then, in early August, there was a call for an election in the Prussian Parliament. Most likely this was something to do with the world economic crisis. After all, this was 1931 and we were in the middle of the Great Depression. Almost half the banks had failed in America, and in Germany we were still trying to pay for the war with almost six million men out of work. And you can blame the French with their Carthaginian peace for a lot of that.

Prussian elections were always a barometer for the rest of Germany, and usually bad-tempered affairs. For that you can blame the Prussian character. Jedem das Seine is a Prussian's motto. Literally it means 'To each his own', but more figuratively it also means 'Everyone gets what he deserves'. Which is why they put it above the gates at Buchenwald concentration camp. And probably why, given the peculiar character of the Prussian Parliament, we got what we deserved when, on the ninth of August, the results were announced and it turned out that not enough people had voted to force an election at a national level. With no quorum for a vote, tempers all over Berlin got even worse. But especially on Bulowplatz outside Karl Liebknecht House. Figuring that some sort of dirty deal had been done between the Nazis and the Prussian administration, thousands of communists gathered there. Possibly, they were correct about a deal. But things turned ugly when the riot police showed up and started cracking Red heads like eggs. Berlin cops were always good at making omelettes.

Probably the rain didn't help either. It had been warm and dry for several weeks, but that day it rained heavily and Berlin cops never did care to get wet. Something to do with all that leather on the shako helmets they wore. There was a cover you were supposed to put on it when the weather was bad but no one ever remembered them, which meant you had to spend ages cleaning and polishing the shako afterwards. If there was one thing guaranteed to piss off a Berlin bull it was getting his hat wet.

I guess the Reds decided they'd had enough. Then again they were always shouting about police dictatorship, even when the police were behaving with exemplary fairness. The local police had been threatened before, but this was different. The talk was about killing policemen. About eight o'clock that evening shots were fired and a full-scale gun battle between police and the KPD kicked off in a big way – the biggest we'd seen since the 1919 uprising.

News started to come in to Police Headquarters on Berlin Alexanderplatz at around nine o'clock that several officers, including two police captains, had been shot and killed. We were already investigating the June murder of another cop. I'd helped to carry his coffin. By the time I and some other detectives reached Bulowplatz most of the crowds had left, but the gunfight was still very much in progress. The communists were on the rooftops of several buildings and cops with searchlights were returning fire while, at the same time, they were searching apartment houses in the area for weapons and suspects. A hundred people were arrested, maybe more, while the battle continued. This meant that we couldn't get near the bodies, and for several hours we traded shots with the Reds; one time a rifle bullet clipped off a piece of brickwork just above my head and, more in anger than the hope of hitting anything, I let fly with the Bergmann until the magazine was empty. It was one in the morning before we got to the stricken police officers who were lying in the doorway of the Babylon Movie Theatre, by which time one communist had been shot dead and seventeen others wounded.