Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

Checking into the Palace Hotel Russia House helped to lift my spirits a little. After a week in police custody, I had the taste for a good hotel. Then again, I had the taste anyway, and now that I’d decided to overcome my scruples and cash Noreen’s check, I also had the money. After a light supper in the hotel’s Königs Café, I walked three quarters of a kilometer east, on Rottendorfer Strasse, to a quiet suburb near a reservoir to see the widow Rubusch.

It was a substantial two-story house-three if you counted the dormer window in the high mansard roof-with a curving bay-front door and a long white picket fence atop a substantial granite wall. It was painted the same color of yellowish beige that had been used to paint a small Star of David on the similar garden wall of the house on the opposite side of the street. There were one or two cars parked in front, both new and both made by Daimler-Benz. The trees had been recently pruned. It was a nice German neighborhood: quiet, well kept, solidly respectable. Even that yellow star looked as if it had been painted there by a professional decorator.

I mounted the front steps and tugged on a bell pull as big as a ship’s cannon, and almost as loud.

A light came on and a maid appeared in the door-a big pig’s-trotter of a girl with red braids and a stubborn, almost belligerent, cast to her jaw.

“Yes?”

“Bernhard Gunther,” I said. “Frau Rubusch is expecting me.”

“I wasn’t told about it.”

“Perhaps Hitler’s telegram hasn’t arrived yet. I’m sure he would have wanted to let you know.”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic,” she said, and, taking a large step backward, opened the curved door. “If you only knew how much I’m expected to do around here.”

I put down my briefcase and took off my hat and coat while she closed the front door and then locked it carefully.

“It sounds to me like you need a servant,” I said.

She shot me a high-velocity look.

“You had better wait in here.” She opened a door with the side of her foot and chopped at an electric light switch with the side of her hand. “Make yourself comfortable while I go and fetch her.” Then, seeing my hat and coat, she sighed loudly and took them, shaking her head at the inconvenience of finding herself with yet another duty to perform.

I went over to the fireplace, where a blackened piece of log was almost burning, and picked up a long poker. “Want me to bring this back to life? I’m good with fire. Show me a shelf of decadent literature and I’ll have you a blaze going in no time.”

The maid smiled back at me bleakly, although it could just as easily have been a sneer. It crossed her mind to say something tart until she thought better of it. I had a poker in my hand, after all, and she looked just the type who gets hit by one. I probably would have done it, too, if I’d been married to her. Not that being struck about the head with a poker would have troubled that girl very much, especially when she was hungry. I’ve seen hippos that looked more vulnerable.

I turned the half-burned log, heaped some embers next to it, and fetched another log from the basket by the hearth. I even bent down and blew on it for a while. A flame reached around the little pile of wood I’d made and then took hold with a snap as loud as a Christmas cracker.

“You’re good at that.”

I turned to see a small, birdlike woman wearing a shawl, and an uncomfortable smile on a freshly lipsticked mouth.

I stood up, wiped my hands, and made the same lame joke I’d made earlier, about decadent books, which didn’t sound any funnier the second time around. Not in that house. In the corner of the room was a table with a radio and a small photograph of Hitler, and a glass bowl of fruit.

“We’re not really like that around here,” she said with arms folded, watching the fire. “They did burn some books in front of the bishop’s palace about eighteen months ago, but not here. Not in East Würzburg.”

She made it sound like we were in Paris.

“And I suppose that yellow star painted on the house opposite is just mischievous children,” I said.

Frau Rubusch laughed but covered her mouth politely while she did, so that I wouldn’t have to look at her teeth, which were perfect and porcelain white, like a doll’s. And indeed a doll was what she most reminded me of with her penciled eyebrows, her fine features, her dainty red cheeks, and her even finer hair. “That’s not a Star of David,” she said through her fingers. “The man who lives in that house is a director of Würzburger Hofbrau, the town brewery, and that star is the company’s trademark.”

“Maybe he should sue the Nazis for infringing his copyright.”

“Which reminds me. Would you care for some schnapps?”

Next to the table was a three-tier wooden drinks trolley with bottles I was fond of. She poured a couple of large schooners, handed me one with her bony little hand, sat down on the sofa, kicked off her shoes, and tucked her feet under her skinny little backside. I’d seen folded laundry that looked less neat than she did.

“So your telegram said that you wanted to see me about my late husband.”

“Yes. I’m sorry for your loss, Frau Rubusch. It must have been a terrible shock to you.”

“It was.”

I lit a cigarette, double-inhaled the smoke, and then swallowed half of my drink. I was nervous about telling this woman that I believed her husband might have been murdered. Especially when she had only just buried him with the belief that he’d died in his sleep of a cerebral aneurysm. I swallowed the other half.

She recognized my nervousness. “Help yourself to another,” she said. “Perhaps then you’ll feel up to telling me what’s brought the Adlon Hotel detective all the way from Berlin.”

I went over to the drinks trolley and refilled my glass. Next to the picture of Hitler was a photograph of a younger, thinner Heinrich Rubusch.

“I really don’t know why Heinrich put that photograph there. Hitler’s, I mean. We were never very political. And it’s not like we used to entertain very much and try to impress people. I suppose he put it there in case anyone did visit. So that they would go away with the impression that we were good Germans.”

“You don’t have to be a Nazi to be that,” I said. “Although it does help when you’re a cop. Before I was a house detective at the Adlon, I was a Homicide cop at Berlin Alexanderplatz.”

“And you think my husband might have been murdered. Is that it?”

“I think it’s a possibility, yes.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Heinrich always stayed at the Adlon when he was in Berlin. I thought maybe you thought he’d stolen some towels.” She waited for a moment and then smiled. “I was joking.”

“Good. I hoped you were. Only, your being a widow, I assumed your sense of humor might have gone missing for a while.”

“Before I met my husband, I ran a sisal farm in East Africa, Herr Gunther. I shot my first lion when I was fourteen. And I was fifteen when I helped my father put down a native rebellion during the Maji Maji War. I’m a lot tougher than I look.”

“Good.”

“Did you stop being a policeman because you weren’t a Nazi?”

“I quit before I was pushed. Maybe I’m not as tough as I look. But I’d rather talk about your husband. I was reading the case notes on the train and was reminded that he had a heart condition.”

“He had an enlarged heart, yes.”

“It sort of makes you wonder why he didn’t die of that instead of a cerebral aneurysm. Did he ever suffer from headaches?”

“No.” She shook her head. “But his death wasn’t exactly a surprise. He ate too much and drank too much. He loved his sausage and his beer, lots of cream, cigars, chocolate. He was a very German sort of German.” She sighed. “He enjoyed life in every way. And I do mean every way.”