Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

Trollmann looked at the photograph again and nodded.

“I know this guy. And it ain’t Trollmann. How’d you figure him for a fighter anyway?”

I told him about the healed fractures on the knuckles of the dead man’s little fingers and the burn mark on his chest, and he nodded sagely.

“You’re a clever man, Herr Gunther. And you were right. This guy is a pug. Name of Isaac Deutsch. A Jewish boxer, sure. You were right about that.”

“Stop it,” said Mrs. Charalambides. “You’re going to make his head swell.” But she was writing now. The pencil was moving across the page of her notebook with the sound of an urgent whisper.

Trollmann grinned but kept on talking. “Zak was in the same workers’ sports club as me. The Sparta, back in Hannover. Poor old Zak. Somewhere at home I got me a photograph of all the fighters at the Sparta. The ones who were contenders, anyway. And Zak is standing right in front of me. Poor guy. He was a nice fellow and a pretty good fighter, with a lot of heart. We was never matched, though. I wouldn’t have liked to have fought him. Not from fear, you understand, although he was plenty tough. But because he was a real nice fellow. His uncle, Joey, used to train him, and he looked like a prospect for the Olympics until he got kicked out of the federation and the Sparta.” He sighed and shook his head again. “So poor old Zak’s dead. That’s sad.”

“So he wasn’t a professional fighter?” I said.

“What’s the difference?” asked Mrs. Charalambides.

I groaned. But patiently, like he was talking to a little girl, Trollmann explained it to her. He had a good, kind way about him. Except for the memory of seeing him fight, I might have had a hard time believing he’d ever been a professional boxer.

“Zak, he wanted a medal before he turned professional,” he said. “Might have won one, too, if he’d not been Jewish. Which makes it ironic, I suppose. If ‘ironic’ means what I think it means.”

“What do you think it means?” she asked.

“Like when there’s a difference between what is supposed to happen to a man and what actually happens to him.”

“That covers it pretty well in this case,” she agreed.

“Like the fact that Zak Deutsch couldn’t box at the Olympics for Germany because he was a Jew. But he ended up being a construction worker at Pichelsberg, helping to build the new stadium. Even though he wasn’t supposed to be working there. See, only Aryan Germans are allowed to get jobs on the Olympic construction site. That’s what I heard, anyway. And that’s what I meant about it being ironic, see? Because there are lots of Jews working at the Pichelsberg site. I was going to have to work there myself before I got this job. You see, there’s so much pressure to get the stadium finished in time that they can’t afford to turn any able-bodied man away. Be he Jew or Gentile. That’s what I heard.”

“This is beginning to make some sense,” I said.

“You’ve got a strange idea of sense, Herr Gunther.” Trollmann grinned his big, toothy grin. “Me, I think it’s crazy.”

“Me, too,” murmured Mrs. Charalambides.

“What I meant was that I’m beginning to understand a few things,” I said. “But you are right, too, Rukelie. It is crazy.” I lit a cigarette. “During the war I saw a lot of stupid things. Men getting killed for no good reason. The sheer waste of life. And quite a bit of stupidity after the war, as well. But this business with the Jews and the Gypsies is just madness. How else can you explain the inexplicable?”

“I been giving this some thought,” said Trollmann. “A lot of thought. And from what I seen in the fight game, the conclusion I come to is this: Sometimes, if you want to win a contest at all costs, it helps to hate the other guy.” He shrugged. “Roma people. Jewish people. Homos and commies. The Nazis need someone to hate, that’s all.”

“I guess you’re right,” I said. “But it makes me worry if there’s another war. I worry what will happen to all these poor bastards the Nazis don’t like.”

MOST OF THE WAY BACK to the Adlon, I was thinking about what we had learned. Gypsy Trollmann had promised to mail me the Sparta Club photograph, but I didn’t doubt his identification of the dead man found floating in Mühlendamm Lock or his information about Isaac Deutsch’s having been a construction worker on the Olympic Stadium site. Say one thing, do another, that was typical of the Nazis. All the same, Pichelsberg was a long way from Mühlendamm; the opposite end of the city. And nothing I had yet learned explained how Deutsch had drowned in salt water.

“You talk too much, Gunther.”

“I was thinking, Mrs. Charalambides. What you must think of us? We seem to be the only people in the world who are actively trying to live up to everyone else’s worst impression of us.”

“Please call me Noreen. Charalambides is such a long name, even in Germany.”

“I don’t know if I can do that now that you’re my employer. Ten marks a day demands a certain amount of professional courtesy.”

“You can hardly go on calling me Mrs. Charalambides if you’re going to kiss me.”

“Am I going to kiss you?”

“This morning you mentioned something about Isaac Newton. Which certainly encourages me to think you are.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“Newton came up with three laws to describe the relationships between two bodies. I’d say he might also have come up with a fourth if he’d ever met me and you, Gunther. You’re going to kiss me, all right. There’s absolutely no doubt about it.”

“You mean there’s algebra and stuff to prove it?”

“Pages of it. Impulse, unbalanced force, equal and opposite reaction. Between us, we’ve got almost enough equations to cover a bedsheet.”

“Then I guess there’s no point in my trying to resist the laws of planetary motion, Noreen.”

“Absolutely none at all. In fact, it would be best if you gave in to the impulse right now, in case you put the whole damned universe out of joint.”

I stopped the car, pulled on the hand brake, and leaned toward her. For a moment she turned away.

“Hermann-Goering-Strasse,” she said. “Didn’t it used to be called something else?”

“Budapester Strasse.”

“That’s better. I want to remember where it was you first kissed me. I don’t want that memory to include Hermann Goering.”

She turned toward me expectantly, and I kissed her hard. Her breath was charged with cigarettes and ice-cold liquor and lipstick and a little something special from inside her pants. She tasted better than lightly salted butter on freshly baked bread. I felt her eyelashes brush my cheeks like the wings of tiny hummingbirds, and after a minute or so she began to breathe like a medium who was trying to get in touch with the spirit world. Maybe she did at that. And, keen to possess her whole body, I pushed my left hand underneath her fur coat and let it slide awhile up and down her thigh and torso, as if I’d been trying to generate static electricity. Noreen Charalambides wasn’t the only one who knew physics. There was a thud as her handbag slid off her lap and hit the floor of the car. I opened my eyes and drew away from her mouth.

“Gravity still works, then,” I said. “The way my head feels, I was beginning to wonder. I guess Newton knew a thing or two, after all.”

“He didn’t know everything. I bet he didn’t know how to kiss a girl like that.”

“That’s because he never met a girl such as you, Noreen. If he had, he might have done something useful with his life. Like this.”

I kissed her again, only this time I put my whole back into it, like I really meant what I was doing. And maybe I did. A lot of time had passed since I’d felt this way about a woman. I glanced out of the window and, seeing the name of the street, I was reminded of what I had told myself the first time I’d talked to Noreen back in Hedda Adlon’s apartment at the hotel: that Noreen was my employer’s oldest friend, and that I was going to sleep with Hermann Goering before I ever laid a finger on her. The way things were going, it looked as if the Prussian prime minister was in for a Hermann-sized surprise.