Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“Maybe. But if we go to Pichelsberg looking for answers about Isaac Deutsch, we might find ourselves asking questions of the very people who tossed him into the canal. They might not take kindly to being written about. Even if it is in a New York newspaper. Looking for Joey Deutsch could turn out to be just as dangerous as investigating Max Reles.”

“You’re a detective. An ex-cop. I’d have thought a certain amount of danger is written into your job description.”

“A certain amount, yes. But that doesn’t make me bulletproof. Besides, when you’re back in New York collecting a Pulitzer Prize for reporting, I’ll still be here. That’s the hope, at least. I can float in the canal just as easily as Isaac Deutsch.”

“If it’s a question of money.”

“Given what happened last night, I might tell you it’s not a question of money. At the same time, I have to admit that money is always a very persuasive answer.”

“Money talks, huh, Gunther?”

“Sometimes it seems you just can’t shut it up. I’m a hotel detective because I have to be, Noreen, not because I want to be. I’m broke, angel. When I quit KRIPO, I left behind a reasonable salary and a pension, not to mention what my father used to call ‘good prospects.’ I don’t see myself rising to the rank of hotel manager, do you?”

Noreen smiled. “Not in the kind of hotel I’d ever want to stay in.”

“Exactly.”

“How does twenty marks a day sound?”

“Generous. Very. But it’s a different kind of dialogue I’m looking for.”

“Pulitzer Prizes don’t pay that much, you know.”

“I’m not after a slice. Just a loan. A business loan, with interest. What with the Depression, the banks aren’t lending. Not even to each other. And I can hardly ask the Adlons to stake me enough to hand in my notice.”

“To do what?”

“To do this. Be a private investigator, of course. It’s about the one thing I’m good at. I figure about five hundred marks would let me set up on my own.”

“How do I know you’d stay alive long enough to pay me back?”

“That would be an incentive, of course. I’d hate to lose my life. And I’d hate to see you lose your money as a result of that, of course. Fact is, I could probably pay you a twenty-percent return on your investment.”

“You’ve obviously given this some thought.”

“Ever since the Nazis came into power. Human tragedies like the one we just witnessed in front of the town hall back there are happening all over this city. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better. A lot of people-Jews, Gypsies, Freemasons, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses-they already figure they can’t go to the cops and get a hearing from anyone. So they’re going to go somewhere else. Which just has to be good for someone like me.”

“So you could end up making a profit under the Nazis?”

“That’s always a possibility. At the same time, it’s just possible I might actually end up helping someone as well as myself.”

“You know what I like about you, Gunther?”

“I sure could use a bit of reminding.”

“It’s that you can make Copernicus and Kepler look so very short-sighted and impractical and yet still cut a convincingly romantic figure.”

“Does that mean you still find me attractive?”

“I don’t know. Ask me later when I’ve forgotten that I’m no longer just your employer but your banker, too.”

“Does that mean you’re going to give me the loan?”

Noreen smiled. “Why not? But on one condition. You never tell Hedda that you got the money from me.”

“It’ll be our secret.”

“One of two, it now looks like.”

“You do realize you’re going to have to sleep with me again,” I said. “To guarantee my silence.”

“Of course. In fact, as your banker, I was banking on it. With interest.”

IDROPPED NOREEN OFF at the Ministry of the Interior for her interview with von Tschammer und Osten, and drove back to the hotel and then kept on driving, west, again. Now that she was out of the way, I wanted to nose around the Olympic site at Pichelsberg on my own. The fact was I had only the one pair of gum boots; and then there was the fact that I didn’t want to draw any attention while I was doing the nosing, which was almost impossible when Noreen was on my arm. She commanded attention like a nudist playing the trombone.

Pichelsberg Racecourse was at the north end of the Grunewald. In the center of the racecourse was the stadium, laid out from a design by Otto March and opened in 1913. Encircling the course were running and cycling tracks, while to the north was a swimming pool-all built for the canceled Berlin Olympiad of 1916. In stands that could accommodate almost forty thousand people were sculptures, including a goddess of victory and a Neptune group. Except that none of them were there anymore. Nothing was. Everything-the racecourse, the stadium, and the pool-had been demolished and replaced by an enormous earthwork: a huge mass of soil had been created from the excavation of a vaguely circular pit, where I assumed the new stadium was going to be built. As assumptions go, this one seemed unlikely. The Berlin Olympics were less than two years away and nothing had been built. Indeed, a perfectly serviceable and recently constructed stadium had been knocked down to make way for the Battle of Verdun as imagined by D. W. Griffith. As I got out of the car I half expected to see the French front lines, our own line, and heavy shell bursts in the air.

For a moment I was back in uniform and feeling fairly sick with fear at the sudden recollection of that earlier dun-colored wilderness. And then the shakes were on me, as if I had just woken up from the same nightmare I always had, which was about being back there…

… carrying a box of ammunition through the mud and clay while shells were falling all around. It took me two hours to move 150 meters up to our front line. I kept throwing myself on the ground or simply falling over until I was soaked to the skin and caked with earth, like a man made of mud.

I had almost reached our redoubt when I stepped into a shell hole and found myself waist deep in mud and sinking. I shouted for help, but the noise of the barrage was too loud for anyone to hear. Struggling only seemed to make me sink more quickly, and in less than five minutes I was up to my neck and facing the horrible fate of being drowned in a small sea of brown glue. I’d seen horses stuck in the mud, and nearly always they were shot, such was the effort of pulling one out. I struggled to take hold of my pistol so that I might shoot myself in the head before being drowned, but that was hopeless, too. The mud held me tightly now. I tried to lean back so that I might “float” on the surface, but that was no use, either.

And then, just as the mud was up to my jaw, there was an enormous explosion a few meters away as a shell hit the ground and, miraculously, I was lifted right out of the morass and high into the air to land twenty meters away, winded but uninjured. Had it not been for the mud enveloping me, the shock of the blast would certainly have killed me.

That was my recurring nightmare, and I never had it without waking up, soaked with perspiration and out of breath, as if I had just sprinted across no-man’s-land. Even now, in broad daylight, I had to drop down on my haunches and take several deep breaths in an effort to pull myself together. A few spots of color in the once fertile but now devastated landscape served my mental recovery: some blue thistle at the edge of the distant tree line; red dead nettle close to where I’d left the car; some yellow-flowered tansy ragwort; a robin redbreast picking a juicy pink worm out of the ground; the empty blue sky; and finally an army of workmen and a railway line conveying a small red train of earthmoving wagons from one end of the site to the other.