Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

We used the car for a day and then gave it back, and thereafter borrowed Herr Behlert’s rather more discreet W.

Berlin ’s wide roads were almost as busy as the sidewalks. Trams rattled up the center, their steady clockwork progress invigilated by white-sleeved traffic policemen who prevented cars and taxis from cutting in front of them like so many potbellied linesmen in a metropolitan football match. With the traffic cops’ whistles, the car Klaxons, and the bus horns, the road system was almost as noisy as a football match, too, and the way Berliners drove, you might have believed they thought someone stood a good chance of winning. Things looked calmer inside the trams: sober-suited clerks faced men in uniform like two delegations signing a peace treaty in a French siding. But the injustices of the armistice and the Depression already seemed a long way behind us. The city’s famous air was thick with the smell of gasoline and the smell of blooms from the baskets of the many flower women, not to mention a growing self-confidence. Germans were good about themselves again; at least those of us who were properly, noticeably German. Like the eagle on the Kaiser’s helmet.

“Do you ever think of yourself as Aryan?” Mrs. Charalambides asked me. “As more German than the Jews?”

I hardly wanted to tell her about my Aryan transfusion. For one thing, I hardly knew her; for another, it seemed rather a shameful thing to tell someone who, as far as I was aware, was one hundred percent Jewish. So I shrugged and said, “A German is a man who can feel enormously proud of being a German while wearing a pair of tight leather shorts. In other words, the whole idea is ridiculous. Does that answer your question?”

She smiled. “Hedda said you had to leave the police because you were a well-known Social Democrat.”

“I don’t know about well known. If I had been well known, things would be different for me now, I guess. These days you recognize a man who was a prominent Social Democrat by the arrows on his pajamas.”

“Do you miss being a policeman?”

I shook my head.

“But you were a policeman for more than ten years. Did you always want to be a policeman?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. When I was a little boy I used to play cops and robbers on the green outside our apartment building, and I wasn’t sure which I enjoyed being most: a cop or a robber. Anyway, I told my father that when I grew up I was probably going to be a cop or a robber, and he said, ‘Why not be like most cops and do both?’ ” I grinned. “He was a respectable man, but he didn’t much like the police. No one did. I wouldn’t say we lived in a tough neighborhood, but when I was growing up we still called a story with a happy ending an alibi.”

FOR SEVERAL DAYS WE DOODLED our way across a street map of Berlin with me telling her jokes and keeping her amused while we went visiting the city’s gyms and sporting clubs, and I showed around the photograph of “Fritz” from the police file Richard Bömer had left with me. It’s true Fritz wasn’t looking his best, on account of the fact that he was dead, but no one seemed to recognize him. Maybe they didn’t at that, but it was hard to tell, given their greater interest in Mrs. Charalambides. A well-dressed, beautiful woman visiting a Berlin gym wasn’t unheard of, but it was unusual. I tried to tell her that I might get more out of the men in these places if she stayed in the car, but she wasn’t having it. Mrs. Charalambides wasn’t the kind of woman you told to do anything very much.

“If I do what you say,” she said, “how am I going to get my story?”

I might have agreed with her except for the fact that it was always the same three-word story we came upon: NO JEWS ALLOWED. I felt sorry for Mrs. Charalambides seeing that kind of thing whenever we went inside a gym. She didn’t show it, but I guessed it might be upsetting for her.

The T-gym was the last place on my list. With the benefit of hindsight it ought to have been the first.

In the heart of West Berlin, just south of the Zoological Garden Station, is the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. With its many spires of differing heights, it looks more like the castle of the Swan Knight Lohengrin than any place of religious worship. Grouped around the church were cinemas, dance halls, cabarets, restaurants, smart shops, and, at the western end of the Tauentzienstrasse, sandwiched between a cheap hotel and the Kaufhaus des Westens, was the T-gym.

I parked the car, got Mrs. Charalambides out, and then turned to gaze in the KaDeWe’s shop window. “This is a pretty good department store,” I said.

“No.”

“Oh, it is. The restaurant’s good, too.”

“I mean, no, I’m not going shopping while you go in that gym.”

“How about you go in the gym and I go shopping? There’s a mark on this tie I’m wearing.”

“Then you’d hardly be doing your job. You don’t know much about women if you think I’m not coming into the gym with you.”

“Who said I know anything about women?” I shrugged. “The one thing I know for sure about women is that they walk along the street with their arms folded. Men don’t do that. Not unless they’re queer.”

“You wouldn’t be doing your job, and I wouldn’t pay you. How about that?”

“I’m glad you mentioned that, Mrs. Charalambides. How much are you paying me? We never actually agreed on a fee.”

“Tell me what you think would be fair.”

“That’s a difficult one. I’ve not had much practice at being fair. Fair’s a word I use for what’s on a barometer or perhaps to describe a maiden who’s in distress.”

“Why don’t you think of me like that and then suggest a price.”

“Because if I ever did think of you like that, then I’d have to charge you nothing at all. I don’t recall Lohengrin asking Elsa for ten marks a day.”

“Maybe he should have done. Then he might not have left her.”

“True.”

“Well, then, ten marks a day plus expenses it shall be.”

She smiled, enough to let me know that her dentist loved her, and then took my arm. She could have taken the other one to match, and I wouldn’t have objected. Not that ten marks a day had anything to do with it. Just being near enough to smell her and get the odd snapshot of her garters when she climbed out of Behlert’s car was payment enough. We turned away from the department-store window and went along to the T-gym door.

“The place is owned by an ex-boxer called the Terrible Turk. People call him the Turk for short and because they don’t want to hurt his feelings. He hurts people who hurt his feelings. I never used to come to this place very much because it was the kind of gym that was more popular with businessmen and actors than with Berlin’s rings.”

“Rings? What are they?”

“Nothing to do with the Olympics, that’s for sure. The rings are what we Berliners call the criminal fraternities that more or less used to run this city during the Weimar Republic. There were three main rings: the Big, the Free, and the Free Alliance. All of them were officially registered as benevolent societies or sports clubs. Some of them were registered as gyms, and everyone used to pay them tribute: doormen, bootblacks, prostitutes, toilet attendants, newspaper vendors, flower sellers, you name it. All of it backed up by muscle from a gym. The rings still exist, but they themselves have to pay up now to a new gang in town. A gang with more muscle than anyone. The Nazis.”

Mrs. Charalambides smiled and tightened her grip on my arm, which was the first time I realized her eyes were as blue as an ultramarine panel in an illuminated manuscript, and just as eloquent. She liked me. That much was obvious.

“How have you stayed out of prison?” she asked.