Metropolis

by Philip Kerr

  “Which part?” I asked. “Of Berlin.”

  “We’re starting in Charlottenburg.”

  “Not many communists there, I’d have thought.”

  “And heading east, along Bismarckstrasse.”

  “I didn’t know you were a communist, Herr Fischer,” said Rosa.

  “I’m not. But I feel I have to do something after the terrible tragedy at Wolfmium. You might say I want to show a bit of worker solidarity. But it’s no surprise to me that this kind of thing happens. Employers in this country don’t care anything about their workers and the conditions they have to endure. Some of the things I see when I’m on the road and visiting customers, you wouldn’t believe. Underground illegal factories, slum sweatshops; places you wouldn’t believe could exist in a city like Berlin.”

  “Good for you, Herr Fischer,” said Rankin. “I agree with you about worker conditions. Here and in England, they’re awful. But you’re not saying that what happened at Wolfmium was the result of the employer’s negligence, are you? I mean there’s no evidence of that, surely. It was an accident. I imagine some of the materials they use in the manufacture of electric light bulbs are inherently dangerous.”

  “I’ll make you a bet now,” insisted Fischer. “That someone’s to blame. Someone who ignored fire safety codes just to make a bigger profit.”

  Rankin lit a cigarette with a handsome gold lighter, stared into the flame for a moment as if it might provide a clue to the origins of the explosion, and then said, “What do you think, Herr Gunther? Are the police investigating what happened?”

  “Not my department,” I said. “It’s the fire brigade that has charge of this kind of investigation.” I smiled patiently and helped myself from Rankin’s cigarette case. As I leaned toward his lighter I caught a strong smell of alcohol. I puffed on the nail for a minute and then rolled it thoughtfully between my fingers. “But I will say this: A nail is always the most effective way to start a most effective fire. Chances are that’s all it was. A careless cigarette end. To that extent we’re all potential arsonists.”

  Fischer looked scornful. “The Berlin police,” he said. “They’re part of the same conspiracy. These days the only crime is getting caught.”

  Rankin smiled politely. He might have been a bit drunk, but he was still equal to the task of changing the subject on my behalf for the sake of politeness.

  “I was reading in the newspaper,” he said to no one in particular. “Benito Mussolini has ended women’s rights in Italy on the same day that my own country has lowered the age of women voters from thirty to twenty-one. More or less the same day, anyway. For once I’m almost proud to be an Englishman.”

  We finished supper not saying anything of much consequence, which suited me very well. After we’d cleared up, I returned to my room and was preparing to read the case file of Winnetou’s second murder when I heard the telephone downstairs. A minute or two later Rosa came up and spoke to me. She’d changed her clothes and was now clad in the male evening attire she was required to wear to play in the Haller-Revue’s band. The white tie and tails made her look oddly sexy; as a Vice detective, I was used to seeing transvestites—the Eldorado on Lutherstrasse was notorious for transvestites and a frequent source of information about what was happening in Berlin’s underground scene—but I wasn’t at all sure I was the kind of man who felt comfortable in the company of a woman dressed as a man. Not while there were still so many women who dressed like women.

  “That was the Police Praesidium at Alexanderplatz on the telephone,” she said. “Someone called Hans Gross said he’ll pick you up outside our front door in half an hour.”

  I thanked her, glanced at my watch, and quietly enjoyed the scent of her Coty perfume in my room. It made a nice change from rum, cigarettes, Lux, Nivea, fried potatoes, and cheap hair oil, not to mention a lot of old books and unwashed laundry.

  “Think you’ll be working late?” she asked.

  “I won’t know for sure until that police car turns up. But yes, maybe. That’s the nature of the job, I’m afraid.”

  At the same time, I was thinking that it was still a little early for a murder. Berliners usually wait until they’ve loosened up with a few drinks and a couple of songs before battering someone to death. Only a few weeks before I’d seen a prisoner in the main reception hall at the Alex singing “From the Age of Youth” at the top of his voice. He was drunk, of course, but he’d also just beaten his elder sister to a pulp with a golf club.

  “She comes, she comes no more! She comes, she comes no more!”

  Which, sadly, was all very true, of course.

  Chances were it was just an accident we were to attend, what some of the uniformed boys called a Max Mustermann; a body some citizen had found in circumstances that raised the question of foul play.

  “Why don’t you come by the club tonight?” she said. “I’ll be there until well after midnight. Hella Kürty is on the bill.”

  I shook my head blankly.

  “Singer. She was in that movie Who Throws the First Stone.”

  “Didn’t see it.”

  “I could leave you a ticket at the box office if you like.”

  “I can’t promise I’ll be there,” I said. “But sure. If I can. Thanks.”

  “It’s probably not your thing, I know,” she said, a little sadly. “The show is very empty and pretentious, it’s true. But these days, tell me what isn’t? If you ask me, the inflation didn’t just affect our money, but everything else, too. Sex, drinking, drugs, nightlife, art, you name it. It’s like everything is rampantly out of control, you know? Especially in Berlin. The inflated money was just the beginning. The city’s become one great big department store of debauchery. Sometimes when I walk along the Kurfürstendamm and see all the boys powdered and rouged like tarts and behaving outrageously I fear for the future. I really do.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “All of this fake sexual freedom and eroticism, it puts me in mind of the last days of ancient Rome. And I keep thinking that ordinary Germans just wish it would all go away so that they could get back to living calm, orderly lives.”

  “You’re probably right. But I worry what we’ll replace it with. Something worse perhaps. And that maybe we’ll regret its passing. I don’t know. Better the devil you know.”

  When she’d gone I realized, too late, that Rosa had looked a bit lonely and that I should have talked to her more and even made it a little clearer that I liked her, but at that particular moment I had something else on my mind. Ernst Gennat would probably have said that a living girl—even one dressed like a man—is always more interesting than a dead one, especially a girl as pretty as Rosa, but I was keen to prove that Bernhard Weiss had been right about me, that I wasn’t another cynical Berlin bull, that I believed in the job and that I was the right man for Lindner’s seat. So I sat down in the armchair and lit another rum-moistened roll-up. There was just time to read the facts of the second Winnetou case before the Alex murder wagon showed up.

  * * *

  —

  THE MUTILATED BODY of Helen Strauch was found in the old cemetery of St. Jacobi’s Church, just south of Hermannplatz, in Neukölln. The wide shots of the cemetery showed a not-unattractive mourning chapel resembling a small Greek temple, a Doric colonnade, several lime and chestnut trees, and a shapeless figure at the feet of a statue of St. Jacob as if prostrate in prayer. Close-ups of the head and the body showed Helen Strauch was lying facedown on some blackened flagstones that had been previously chalk-marked for the children’s hopping game called heaven and earth. According to the police pathologist, death had been more or less instantaneous; she’d been struck a mortal blow on the back of the neck—which is the weakest and most vulnerable part of the human body—leaving behind a bruise the size and color of a red cabbage, and then scalped from the center of her forehead to the occipital bone at the back
of her skull. Like Mathilde Luz, there was no evidence that the killer had sex with his victim; there was even a ten-mark note still in her garter. The time of death was not long after midnight on the twentieth of May.

  Helen had lived on Hermannstrasse, which ran along the eastern perimeter of the cemetery. According to the police report you could see the murder scene from her bedroom window; at least you could when the window was clean. The area, generally known as the Bullenviertel, was one I’d policed as a uniformed bull, the kind of area where a cop learned his trade fast—a gray and desolate place where people worked long hours for not much money, the air stank of roasted malt, barefoot children ran wild at all times of the day and night, every second cellar shop was a bar selling cheap and often illegal booze, and the Salvation Army was in almost permanent residence. I’d often had to shoo prostitutes out of the cemetery at St. Jacobi’s; they were inclined to use the colonnade to service their clients. But safe in my rooms in Nollendorfplatz and wearing a clean shirt collar and tie, I already felt like a stranger to the slums.

  Helen Strauch was a prostitute who’d previously worked at the Bergschloss Brewery, which was only a short distance from where she was found dead. When she’d been laid off last summer, it seemed she’d had little choice but to become a full-time prostitute. This already looked like a typical Berlin story. On the night of her death she’d spent the evening drinking absinthe cocktails in the brewery bar on Hasenheide before going on the street. No one remembered her with a client or seeing her talking to any particular man. One girl did think she remembered Helen talking to someone in a car, with her foot up on the running board, but she didn’t remember the type of the car or the number plate, nor indeed the man, if it was a man. Opposite the brewery on Hasenheide was a hospital where Helen had gone for an appointment the previous day—a pregnancy test, which proved negative.

  The body had been found by Walther Wenders, a drayman from Babel’s Brewery in Kreuzberg; beer in that part of Berlin is more than just a drink, it’s a way of life. Wenders lived on Berlinerstrasse and his walk to work took him west, past the little cemetery where he’d stopped for a quick pee, which was when his eye caught something unusual. At first he thought it was just an old coat someone had thrown away. It looked like a good coat and his wife certainly had need of one, but as soon as he saw the blood on the ground he realized exactly what he was looking at. It was obvious that there was nothing to be done for the girl, so he walked quickly west to the hospital on Hasenheide and raised the alarm there. The regular detective attached to the Murder Commission on that occasion had been Kurt Reichenbach who, having carefully searched the area on his hands and knees, found a man’s gold cuff link engraved with a Freemason’s symbol—the set square and compass. For a while it had looked like an important clue since Helen’s poor head had been resting on the chalked number nine, which has a special meaning in freemasonry; or so Reichenbach had argued.

  Born in Thuringia in 1904, Helen Strauch had lived nearly all her life in Neukölln; her mother had left her drunken woodcutter father and come to Berlin to become a piecework seamstress in a garment factory before she had drowned herself in the Landwehr Canal aged just thirty-five, when Helen was only fifteen. The reason: early onset of arthritis that had stopped her from making her living. Helen then had an on-and-off relationship with a man called Paul Nowak who was employed at the gasworks on Fichtestrasse and who lived in a room on Friedelstrasse. But Paul Nowak was also a part-time prostitute and he had a fistful of alibis for the night of the murder, having spent the evening at several queer bars in Bülowstrasse—the Hollandais at number 69, the Continental at number 2, the Nationalhof at number 37, the Bülow Casino at number 41, and the Hohenzollern lounge at number 101—before bringing a gentleman home to his room on Friedelstrasse. All the barmen remembered seeing him that night, and even his client, a Dutch businessman called Rudi Klaver, who happened to be a Freemason himself, had provided him with an alibi, which says a great deal about how open homosexual men were in Berlin. “Berlin means boys” was a widely held thought throughout the Weimar Republic. But the fact was that ever since Frederick the Great had forbidden women to his Praetorian Guard in the 1750s, obliging the guards to seek the company of boys for their sexual pleasure, Berlin had been identified with soldierly inversion and uranic sexuality. Paragraph 175 of the Federal Criminal Code still forbade all homosexual activity but there were so many male prostitutes in Berlin—at the Alex it was generally held there were at least twenty-five thousand of them—that the law was more or less unenforceable.

  Nowak had a criminal record for car theft and from the police photograph, he was no one’s idea of a rent boy; he was a large, powerful bearded youth who hunted wild boar in the Grünewald on his weekends and often skinned the beasts himself. He had knives, sharp knives, but then so did most Berlin men. I kept a folding knife in my jacket pocket myself; made by Henckels of Solingen, it was as sharp as a razor and could have scalped a bowling ball. Nowak wasn’t a violent man, however; if anything, Helen Strauch had been the abusive partner in their relationship. She was a boot whore, which is to say, she was a dominatrix who got paid to beat up her clients. Now and then she took a cane to Nowak, who, friends said, frequently took a whipping without complaint. Gennat liked Nowak for the murder and he liked his sharp knives, too, but with all those alibis in the back pocket of the boy’s greasy leather shorts—Nowak was only eighteen years old—he couldn’t make it stick. But most of all, on the night Mathilde Luz had been killed, Nowak had been in a cell at the police station on Bismarckstrasse following an allegation that he’d robbed another client with whom he’d had sex—an allegation that was subsequently withdrawn.

  Meanwhile, Reichenbach had pursued the Freemason link all the way to the manufacturer in Rosenthaler Strasse, but after interviewing the masters of all three Berlin Grand Lodges, the trail finally went cold—though not before the Nazi Party unilaterally decided in the pages of Der Angriff that the link with freemasonry was all too real and only proved what it had always argued: that freemasonry was an insidious cult that threatened to undermine Germany and should be outlawed. Since it was generally known there were many Freemasons employed as policemen at the Alex, the Nazi theory provided the Party with yet another means of criticizing the Berlin police.

  We were an easy target, of course, not least because Berlin now had almost nothing in common with the rest of the country. Increasingly the capital city was like a large ship that had slipped its mooring and was slowly drifting farther and farther away from the coast of Germany; it seemed unlikely we were going to return to its more conservative ways, even if we’d wanted to. It’s not just people who outgrow their parents and origins; it’s metropolises, too. I’d read that a lot of Franzis hated Paris for much the same reasons: Parisians always made them feel like poor relations. Maybe it’s the same with any great metropolis; for all I know the people of Mexico hate the citizens of Mexico City for the very same reasons that Berliners are despised by the citizens of Munich. And vice versa, of course; I’ve never been particularly fond of Bavarians.

  Helen Strauch’s case was life in the metropolis writ horribly, swinishly large, squalid and depressing, like lifting a wet stone in a very dark forest to see what was crawling underneath, and when I finished reading the file I felt obliged to wash my hands and face; but my evening was just beginning and there were many more unpleasant things about to come crawling my way.

  * * *

  —

  I KNEW WE WERE probably in the right place when, approaching the Fischerstrasse bridge at the end of Friedrichsgracht, I recognized the uniformed policeman seated on a mooring bollard; his name was Miczek and he was a good copper who could usually be relied on. The shine on his boots would have told you that much: Miczek was a real spit-and-polish copper and as tough as his steel toe caps. Seeing the murder wagon, he stood up, buttoned his tunic collar, replaced the fire bucket of a leather helmet on his head, tossed his cigarette into th
e black water behind him, and approached with a two-finger salute. It was the wagon that drew the respect, not me, even though I was now nominally in charge of the homicide.

  “Where’s our Max Mustermann?” asked Hans Gross, climbing out from behind the wagon’s enormous steering wheel. Along with the two uniformed policemen who’d accompanied him from the Alex, I followed. Our stenographer, Frau Künstler, stayed put behind her typewriter; she had no appetite for seeing a dead body, and I couldn’t say I blamed her. Especially not a body that had been in the river. The haze of cigarette smoke in front of her bespectacled face was probably there to make sure she didn’t see or smell anything unpleasant.

  “Still in the water,” said Miczek. “We’ve hooked him but didn’t want to pull him out in case we lost any evidence.”

  Bodies were frequently found floating in the Spree and just as often remained unidentified. When a corpse was being manhandled onto the quayside it was easy for a wallet or a purse to fall out of a pocket and sink to the bottom of the river. After that it was surprisingly difficult to put a name to a human face, especially if the fish had already lunched there.

  “Good work,” said Gross.

  Miczek pointed down at three bargemen who were playing skat on top of an upturned fish basket. All had caps, pipes, and enough facial hair to stuff a small sofa.

  “Come to see our catch, have you?” said one, and reaching behind him, he pulled on a length of line that brought closer to the oily surface of the water the upper part of a man’s body.