Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“KRIPO?” Weinberger shook his head. “No, thanks,” he said. “The Gestapo is the police force of the future. The way I see it, the Gestapo and the SS will have to absorb KRIPO in the long run. No, no, I appreciate your compliment, but from the point of view of my career, I have to stay in the Gestapo. But preferably the Berlin Gestapo, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Tell me, Herr Gunther, you don’t think we’re eggs trying to be smarter than the hen, do you? I mean, this Reles may be a Jew and a gangster. But he’s got some important friends in Berlin.”

“I’ve already spoken to Frau Rubusch about exhuming her husband’s body, which will prove he was murdered. I think I can even lay my hands on the murder weapon. Like most Amis, Reles likes a lot of ice in his liquor. There’s a lethal-looking ice pick on the sideboard of his hotel room. And if all that’s not enough, then there’s his being a Jew, like you said. I’d like to see what all of his important friends in the Party think about that. I don’t much like playing that domino, but in the end there might be no other way to nail the bastard. Liebermann von Sonnenberg was appointed by Hermann Goering himself. And possibly we’ll have to present all the salient facts to him. And since Goering isn’t on any Olympic committee, it’s hard to imagine him choosing to ignore corruption among the committee’s members, even if some others might.”

“You’d better be certain of all your evidence before you do that. What’s the saying? The cock that crows too early gets the twisted neck.”

“I suppose they teach you that at Gestapo training school. No, I won’t do anything until I have all the evidence. I can walk just as well as I can run.”

Weinberger nodded. “I’ll need to see the widow. To get her written permission to exhume the body. Probably I’ll have to involve the Würzburg KRIPO, too. Such as it is. And a magistrate. All of that could take a little time. At least a week. Perhaps longer.”

“Heinrich Rubusch has plenty of time, Captain. But he needs to rise up from the dead and start talking if this case is going to get anywhere. It’s one thing ignoring a construction racket. It’s quite another ignoring the murder of a prominent German citizen. Especially when he’s properly Aryan. You’re a little folksy for my taste, Weinberger, but we’ll make a first-rate policeman out of you yet. Back at the Alex, when I was police, we had a saying of our own. The bone won’t come to the dog. It’s the dog that goes to the bone.”

IT WAS THREE HOURS TO FRANKFURT on the passenger train. We stopped at almost every town along the Main valley, and when I wasn’t looking out of the window and admiring the scenery, I was writing a letter. I wrote it several different ways. It wasn’t the kind of letter I had written before or which made me feel happy, but all the same it needed to be written. And somehow I managed to persuade myself that it was a way to protect myself.

I shouldn’t have been thinking of other women, but I was. At Frankfurt, I followed along the platform a woman who was built like a Stradivarius cello, and then felt a bow stroke of disappointment when she climbed up into the ladies’ compartment, leaving me in a first-class smoker beside a professional type with a pipe the shape of a tenor saxophone, and an SA leader who favored Zeppelin-sized cigars that smelled more lethal than the locomotive. In the eight hours it took the train to reach Berlin, we generated a lot of smoke-almost as much as the Borsig-built steam R101 itself.

It was raining from a bucket when finally I arrived back in Berlin, and with a hole in the sole of my shoe, I had to wait awhile for a taxi at the rank in front of the station. The rain hit the big glass roof like stair rods and leaked onto the head of the line. The cabdrivers couldn’t see it, which meant they always pulled up to exactly the same spot so that the next in line would have to take a shower before he or she could climb inside, like something out of a Fat and Stupid movie. When it was my turn I pulled my coat over my head and ducked into the cab; I was able to wash one whole sleeve of my shirt without a trip to the laundry. But at least it was too early in the winter for snow. Whenever it snows in Berlin, it reminds you that it’s nearer to Moscow than Madrid by more than two hundred kilometers.

The shops were closed. There was no booze at home, and I didn’t want to go to a bar. I told the driver to take me to the Adlon, remembering that there was half a bottle of Bismarck in my desk at work-the same bottle I’d confiscated from Fritz Muller. I figured I’d use just enough of it to warm myself up and, if Max Reles was out somewhere, to put enough blood and iron in my belly to check out my own typing skills on the Torpedo in his suite.

The hotel was busy. There was a party in the Raphael Room, and undoubtedly the many patrons in the dining room were staring up at the Tiepolo panegyric ceiling, if only to remind themselves of what a blue and cloudless sky actually looks like. Pouches of thick white tobacco smoke gently rolled out of the door of the reading room like a quilt from Freyja’s bed in Asgard. A drunk wearing a white tie and tails was holding on to the front desk while he complained loudly to Pieck, the assistant manager, that the phonograph in his suite wasn’t working. I could taste his breath from the other side of the entrance hall. But even as I went to lend a hand, the man fell backward, as if he’d been sawn off at the ankles. Luckily for him, he hit a carpet that was even thicker than his head. His head bounced a bit, and then he lay still. It was a near-perfect impersonation of a fight I’d seen on the newsreels, when Mad-cap Maxie Baer laid out Frankie Campbell one night in San Francisco.

Pieck rushed around the desk to help. So did a couple of bellboys, and in the confusion, I managed to lift the key for 114 and drop it into my pocket before kneeling down by the unconscious man. I checked his pulse.

“Thank goodness you’re here, Herr Gunther,” said Pieck.

“Where’s Stahlecker?” I asked. “The guy who’s supposed to be filling in for me?”

“There was an incident in the kitchens earlier. Two members of the Brigade were involved in a fight. The rotisseur tried to stab the pastry chef. Herr Stahlecker went to break it up.”

The Brigade was what we called the kitchen staff at the Adlon.

“He’ll live,” I said, letting go of the drunk’s neck. “Passed out is all. He smells like the schnapps academy in Oberkirch. That’s probably what stopped him from hurting himself when he fell. You could stick a hat pin in this rumrunner, and he wouldn’t feel a thing. Here, give me some space here, and I’ll take him back to his room and let him sleep it off.”

I grabbed the man by the back of his coat collar and dragged him to the elevator.

“Don’t you think you should take the service elevator?” protested Pieck. “One of the guests might see you.”

“You want to carry him there?”

“Er… no. Perhaps not.”

A page boy came after me with the guest’s room key. In return I handed him the letter I’d written on the train.

“Post that, will you, kid? And not in the hotel. Use the box at the post office around the corner on Dorotheenstrasse.” I reached into my pocket and gave him fifty pfennigs. “Here. You’d better take this. It’s raining.”

I dragged the still-unconscious man into the elevator car and glanced at the number on the key fob. “Three twenty,” I told Wolfgang.

“Yes sir,” he said, and closed the door.

I bent down, pulled the man forward onto my shoulder, and then lifted him up.

A few minutes later the guest was lying on his bed, and I was wiping the sweat off my face and then helping myself from an open bottle of good Korn that was standing on the floor. It didn’t burn, didn’t even catch my collar stud. It was the smooth, expensive stuff that you drank to savor while reading a good book or listening to an impromptu by Schubert, not to help you handle an unhappy love affair. But it got the job done all the same. It went down like a clear conscience, or as near to the feeling of a clear conscience as I was going to get after posting that letter.