Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“Putting you through now, Herr Reles,” said Ingrid, who was one of the best-looking of the Adlon’s hello girls.

“Herr Reles? He’s on a call now? To whom?”

Ingrid exchanged a look with Hermine.

“Come on, ladies, this is important. If he’s a crook-and I think he is-we need to know about it.”

Hermine nodded her approval.

“Potsdam 3058,” said Ingrid.

“Who’s that?” I waited for a moment.

Hermine nodded again.

“That’s Count von Helldorf’s number,” said Ingrid. “At the Potsdam Police Praesidium.”

Anywhere else but the Adlon I might have persuaded them to let me eavesdrop on that call, but short of a spot lamp and a set of brass knuckles, I’d had all that I was going to get out of the hello girls: standards might have been compromised in other Berlin institutions such as the police, the courts, and the churches, but not at its best hotel.

So I went back to my office to smoke some cigarettes, have a couple of drinks, and take another look at the papers I had taken from the Chinese box. I had the curious idea these were more important to Max Reles than the box itself. But my mind was elsewhere. A telephone call made by Max Reles to von Helldorf so soon after I had seen the American was disturbing. Was it possible their topic of conversation had been me? And if so, to what effect? There were good reasons why von Helldorf might be useful to a man such as Max Reles, and vice versa.

Formerly the leader of Berlin’s SA, Count Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorf had been the police president of Berlin for just three months when a notorious scandal interrupted his progress to higher office. He had always been an enthusiastic gambler and a rumored pederast with a taste for the flagellation of young boys. He was also a close friend of Erik Hanussen, the famous clairvoyant who, it was supposed, had paid off the count’s very substantial gambling debts in return for an introduction to the Leader.

Much of what happened thereafter was still the subject of speculation and mystery, but it seemed that Hitler was strongly impressed by the man Berlin’s communists called “the people’s stupefier.” As a result of Hitler’s open favor, Hanussen’s influence over senior Party members, including von Helldorf, became even greater. Yet all was not quite what it seemed. Hanussen’s leverage within the Party was, it was to be revealed, the result not of good advice, nor even of mesmeric power, but blackmail. At lavish sex parties he had hosted aboard his yacht, the Ursel IV , Hanussen had “hypnotized” several leading Nazis and subsequently filmed them taking part in sexual orgies. That was bad enough, but some of these orgies were homosexual orgies.

It is possible Berlin’s famous clairvoyant might have survived all of this. But when Goebbels’s newspaper, Der Angriff , revealed that Hanussen was a Jew, the shit really ended up on the conveyor belt, with most of it headed Hitler’s way. Suddenly Hanussen had become an acute embarrassment, and von Helldorf, held largely responsible, was required to clean up the mess. Several days after Hermann Goering dismissed him as Berlin’s police president, von Helldorf and some of his more murderous SA friends abducted Hanussen from his lavish apartment in Berlin’s Westend, drove him to his yacht, and tortured him there until Hanussen gave them all of the compromising material he had amassed over several months: debt receipts, letters, photographs, and ciné film. Then they shot him and dumped the body on a field in Mühlenbeck. Somewhere north of Berlin, anyway.

Rumors persisted that von Helldorf had used some of the material he had obtained from Hanussen to secure himself a new position as police president of Potsdam-an unimportant town about an hour southwest of Berlin, where, it is said, beer goes to turn flat. Von Helldorf now spent most of his time there breeding horses and organizing the continuing persecution of those Social Democrats and German communists who had most offended the Nazis during the last days of the republic. And it was generally supposed that in this respect, von Helldorf was largely motivated by the hope he might eventually manage to restore himself to Hitler’s full favor. I knew von Helldorf was also on the German Olympic Organizing Committee, of course, which said something about the success of his attempt to put himself back in favor with Hitler, although I wasn’t quite sure exactly what he did on the committee. Possibly that was just payback from his old SA pal von Tschammer und Osten. Possibly, since Goering’s departure from the Ministry of the Interior, he was in better odor there, too. In spite of everything, von Helldorf was not a man to be taken anything but seriously.

My attack of nerves lasted only a short while, however. As long as it took for the alcohol to kick in. After a few drinks I persuaded myself that since there was really nothing about the letters and business estimates I had taken from the Chinese box that could prove anything in a court of law, then there was no need for me to feel concerned. There wasn’t anything I had seen that could have harmed a man like Max Reles. Besides, Reles couldn’t know it had been I who had taken these papers, and not Ilse Szrajbman.

So I put the papers and the gun in my desk drawer and decided to head home, thinking, like Noreen, to have an early night myself. I was tired, and I ached in every conceivable part of my body.

Leaving Behlert’s car where I had parked it earlier, I walked south down Hermann-Goering-Strasse to catch a tram on Potsdamer Platz. It was dark and a little windy, and the Nazi banners hanging on the Brandenburg Gate were flapping around like danger flags, as if our imperial past were trying to warn us about something in our Nazi present. Even a stray dog trotting along the pavement ahead of me stopped and turned to look at me dolefully, perhaps to ask if I had a solution to our country’s problems. Then again, he might just have been trying to avoid the open door of the black W that had pulled up a few meters ahead. A man wearing a brown leather coat got out of the car and walked quickly toward me.

Instinctively, I turned to walk in the opposite direction and discovered my retreat blocked by a man wearing a thick, double-breasted overcoat and a low-brimmed hat, although it was the neat little bow tie I noticed most. At least until I noticed the beer token in his paw.

“Come with us, please.”

The other man in the leather coat was right behind me now, so that, sandwiched between them, I couldn’t very well have resisted. Like experienced window dressers moving a tailor’s dummy, they folded me into the car and jumped in the backseat on either side of me. We were moving before they had even slammed the car doors.

“If this is about that cop,” I said. “August Krichbaum, wasn’t it? I thought we’d sorted out that bullshit. I mean, you checked my alibi. I had nothing to do with it. You know that.”

After a few moments I realized we were going west, along Charlottenburger Strasse, in completely the opposite direction from Alexanderplatz. I asked where we were going, but neither of them spoke. The driver’s hat was made of leather. So were his ears, probably. By the time we reached Berlin’s famous radio tower and turned onto the AVUS-Berlin’s fastest road-I had guessed where we were driving. The driver bought a ticket and we sped toward Wannsee Station. A few years before, Fritz von Opel had set a speed record on the AVUS, driving a rocket-powered car at almost 240 kilometers an hour. We weren’t driving anything nearly as fast as that, but neither did I get the impression that we were likely to stop anywhere for coffee and cake. At the end of the AVUS, we drove through some woods onto the Glienecke Bridge and, although it was very dark, I could just make out that we had passed two castles. Shortly after that we entered Potsdam on New Königstrasse.