Metropolis

by Philip Kerr

  “All right,” I said without much grace.

  “Where were you wounded?”

  “In the legs,” I said bitterly.

  “No, I meant— Well, I was wounded myself, as a matter of fact. In the neck. Although not as you’d notice. August 1918. Actually the wound in my neck—it saved my neck. They sent me on a flying course after that and by the time I’d completed it, the war was over.”

  I grunted. “What’s the idea, anyway?” I asked, playing the surly bastard, and playing it well, too. Brigitte would have been proud. “Drawing someone like me. It doesn’t make any sense. After all, I’m no oil painting.”

  “I disagree. There’s a certain beauty in the way you are. And I can assure you, you’re not the first injured war veteran I’ve sketched in this city.”

  “You want to go around the back of the theater. You’ll see many more interesting subjects than a klutz on a cart.”

  “Oh, you mean the whores.”

  “I do mean the whores. And their clients.”

  “No, I see enough of that when I go to a whorehouse. As a matter of fact, you and other unfortunate men like you are one of my favorite subjects. It’s more or less unique to Berlin.”

  “Are you taking the piss?”

  “No. Not at all. Look, everyone thinks they know what art should be—”

  “A nice picture. Of something nice. That’s what art should be. Something you can hang on your wall that doesn’t make you feel like throwing up. That’s what art should be. Everyone knows that.”

  “You might think so. But very few people have the wherewithal to experience painting as the sense of sight, to see colors and form as living reality.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll tell you about living reality. You’re looking at it. And it’s shit. There’s not a day that passes that I don’t wish I was dead.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m driving at. Germans are already beginning to forget what horrible suffering the war brought. I want to remind them of that. Drawing you, it’s an expression of what’s in my soul, that’s all. Sketching you is just drawing my own most innermost thoughts.”

  I laughed. “Well, then, go ahead. But don’t expect to sell any pictures. People don’t want to be reminded of how crappy life is. They want to forget it. And there’s nobody who wants to remember how terrible the war was. Me least of all.”

  He stopped spouting claptrap and went back to sketching me, which suited us both. After another half hour, he thanked me and then left on a bicycle, heading toward the university. I closed my eyes and told myself that if all artists were like Otto, if drawing a cripple on a klutz wagon really was what was in his soul, then Germany was in a lot more trouble than I could ever have imagined. And noting that an obsession with art depicting injured war veterans begging on the streets of Berlin was remarkable to say the least—almost as remarkable as George Grosz, who liked to draw the corpses of women—I mentally added him to the thin suspect file.

  * * *

  —

  “YOU’RE ALIVE,” she said. “Thank God. I was thinking of sending out a search party.”

  “I’m beginning to think this is all a waste of time.”

  “What? And miss my professional care and attention?”

  “Coming here to see you has been the only real compensation. My last thought as Dr. Gnadenschuss presses a pistol to my forehead will be: ‘I wonder if Brigitte can cover up this bullet hole and make me look like I’m still alive.’ For the sake of my loved ones, of course.”

  “That’s a cheerful thought.”

  “Oh, I’ve got others. But here’s something that will make you laugh. Someone drew my portrait today. A man wearing plus fours and a pink bow tie. The poor misguided fool mistook me for a work of art.”

  “Since I dressed and painted you myself I should be flattered.”

  “I never thought of it that way. But yes, maybe you’re right. Like a student copying a picture in an art gallery.”

  “Not just any picture. Something by Velázquez, probably. A painting of one of those fashionable court dwarves owned by the King of Spain.”

  “Now, that’s the kind of fashion you’d think a German must have invented.”

  Brigitte Mölbling helped me climb out of the klutz wagon and then knelt down and began rubbing my legs vigorously to get some feeling back into them while I washed my hands in the sink. She was wearing a very thin, clingy gray muslin dress with a matching scarf and a collection of South American silver jewelry that looked as if it was the understudy of the gold collection I’d met before. The dress was like a map since it showed every place I now wanted to explore.

  “How does that feel?” she said.

  “Beats my mother’s coffee, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “You look as though you need something a little stronger,” she said, taking off my army trousers. “Shall I fix you a drink?”

  “No, thanks. I’m leaving the hard stuff alone for a while.”

  “That sounds as if it’s a new thing.”

  “As a matter of fact it is. I want to be sure I can take it without being unable to leave it, if you know what I mean. Frankly, I was in danger of not liking the stuff anymore; it was beginning to taste a lot like medicine. The next time I have a drink I want it to taste like it’s something I’m doing only for pleasure.”

  “It sounds to me like you’ve had too much whiskey or too much sun.”

  “In Berlin? That seems hardly possible.”

  Brigitte slipped off my army tunic, and then steered me to the chair, where she began the business of removing my makeup. I was silent for a while, enjoying her breath and her scent and the brush of her breast against my shoulder and imagining the impression all of those might have on my pillow back home.

  “I was thinking,” I told her. “I still don’t know much about you.”

  “I was born in Berlin. I’ve worked here for six months and I have an apartment on Luther Strasse, not so very far from you. I’m convent educated. Studied art history and theater in Paris. I was married for a while to a very minor Prussian aristocrat, but it didn’t stick. One day I came home and found him wearing my clothes, including the underwear. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like anyone wearing my clothes except me. Least of all my husband. He’s happier now. Lives with a very poor boy in Hamburg and writes queer poetry that no one wants to read. Frankly he isn’t much of a man. And I can’t remember why I married him. Probably to please my father. It was all my fault, of course. My psychoanalyst says my problem is I like real men and, certainly since the war, they’re in very short supply. That’s probably the reason I like you. I get the feeling you’ve never worn a dress in your life.”

  “Only because I can never find one that fits. And then?”

  “I told you. I used to work at UFA.”

  “That’s it?”

  “It is in Berlin. UFA opens all kinds of locked doors. I worked on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Which almost broke the studio. That’s why I’m working in the theater now. UFA couldn’t afford to keep me.”

  “Then you must know Thea von Harbou.”

  “Sure. You know Thea?”

  “I helped her out with a story she’s writing for the cinema.”

  “It figures. She and Lang—they’re a strange couple. In many ways they’re not a couple at all. They have what you might call a free relationship and neither seems to mind what the other gets up to. She has an Indian lover who’s not much more than a boy. And by the way, she’s a Nazi, just in case you thought you liked her. As for him, he sees a lot of girls, mostly professionals, and not always with happy outcomes. I certainly wouldn’t put anything past Fritz. Including murder, by the way. His first wife is supposed to have killed herself but like a lot of other people, I’m not so sure it was suicide. Thea and Fritz are fascinated with violent crime. The library in their house looks like
it was assembled by Jack the Ripper, who’s something of an obsession for them both. They even have objects related to the Ripper murders. They’re just strange. Kurt—that’s Kurt Weill, the composer of our little show—he hates Fritz. Don’t ask me why, but pretty much everyone in theater and cinema hates Fritz Lang.”

  “What about Daisy Torrens? Do you know her?”

  “You certainly know some very peculiar people, Gunther. Yes, I know Daisy. Good-time girl. Yank. Plenty of money. Lives with the present minister for the interior. Albert Grzesinski. Even though he’s married. Still, he’s an improvement on her last boyfriend. Rudi. Rudi Geise. He was a swine.”

  I’d heard this name before, but I couldn’t remember where.

  “Tell me about Rudi.”

  “He works for Reinhold Schünzel Films. Daisy said he was an assistant producer but the only thing I ever saw him produce was a knife. And a couple of grams of snow. Not sure why they were ever an item because Rudi hates women. Come to think of it, Rudi hates everyone. Something happened to him during the war. His boyfriend got killed, I think. Anyway, he told me that he got his revenge on the Tommies who killed him by mutilating their corpses whenever he got the chance. Cutting an ear off, he said. Slitting noses in half. I mean, he’d be a really horrible person even if none of that was true.” She straightened up and looked at me critically. “There. I’ve finished. You look more or less normal. Or at least as normal as you’re ever going to look for now.”

  After what Brigitte had said I could see no good reason not to add the names of Fritz Lang and Rudi Geise to my suspect file and, as soon as I was done playing the tethered goat, assuming I was still alive and hadn’t caught Dr. Gnadenschuss, I resolved to go and interview both men. Especially Rudi. It was only a short step from slicing off ears to cutting off scalps. But right now I was more interested in Brigitte.

  “I was thinking. The next time you’re making me up, you should paint my toenails.”

  “Any particular color?”

  “The same as yours. Whatever that is.”

  “Generally speaking, a woman chooses the same shade for fingers and toes.” She kicked off one of her shoes and showed me her foot. There were five toes on the end of it and the nails were all painted lilac.

  “Satisfied?”

  “Not by a long way. It’s a lovely foot. I like it a lot. I imagine you’ve another just like it. But please don’t stop now you’ve started.”

  “You want to see the other one, too. Is that it?”

  “Just to check that the colors match.”

  From the sound of things, rehearsals were going well; by now I knew the names of all the principal characters in the show and Polly and Macheath were presently singing a crappy love song. Maybe that’s what started all the sexuality between Brigitte and me. Sexuality: I don’t know what else to call this activity when it seems natural but also excessive. But it’s amazing how sexy a woman’s bare foot can look when the nails are painted lilac and there’s toe cleavage and you’ve been sitting in the sun all day and she’s locked the door, kicked off the second shoe, and is slowly gathering the gray dress at the hem and pulling it carefully over her head, and then draping it across the back of the chair I was still sitting on.

  “I suppose you want me to take off my underwear.”

  “Generally that’s recommended in these situations.”

  “Is that what you’d call this? A situation?”

  “Of course.”

  “So what kind of a situation would you say this was?”

  “An interesting one.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Complicated, too.”

  She took off the underwear and tossed it silently onto the table, where it occupied not much more space than a handful of rose petals.

  “One that I don’t want to get out of in a hurry.”

  “Well, that’s why I locked the door, Herr Commissioner. To keep you here for my selfish pleasure.”

  “That’s just the way I was going to handle it. Your pleasure, I mean. Only, right now I’m a little distracted. It’s not every day I get to look at the treasures of the world.”

  She came and sat on my lap and stroked my head and for some reason I couldn’t put into words, I didn’t throw her onto the floor; it wasn’t that I couldn’t think of any words, at least the ones with more than one syllable, just that my mouth was busy kissing her.

  “So what happens now?”

  “I should have thought it was fairly straightforward.”

  “You might think that. But then you’re a man. Which means you really haven’t thought this out at all. I’m happy to sit on your lap without my clothes on. As a matter of fact I’m rather enjoying the situation. If that’s what this is. But for the next stage I want a large bed with nice sheets. Which means going to my place. I’ve never yet met a man whose bed linen was up to my standard. Just so you know, the way to my heart is through one-hundred-percent Egyptian cotton. Good bed linen is nonnegotiable as far as I’m concerned. And then maybe we’ll have some dinner. Horcher’s, I think. And before you say policeman’s salary, I’m paying. Just because I’m working here doesn’t mean I need the money. My dad is Curt Mölbling.”

  “The industrialist?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll check my diary. When were you thinking of?”

  “Tonight. Now, if you can. Any sooner than that would be better.”

  * * *

  —

  AT AROUND ELEVEN O’CLOCK the next morning, after having my makeup applied and in the hope of seeing something useful on the street, I sat outside Friedrichstrasse station under the bridge. If anything, the sun was even stronger than the day before and, always quick to complain, many Berliners were now grumbling about the heat and wishing for a rain shower. There was no sign of Ernst Gallwitz, the news vendor, and the shoe shiners had already packed up and gone home; they did a good trade first thing in the morning but not when it was getting near to lunch. I guess nobody wants a shoeshine in the middle of the day.

  I’d been sitting listening to the monotonously atonal symphony of overhead trains for almost an hour when a yellow BMW Dixi pulled up at the edge of the sidewalk and, with the engine still running, the driver sat there looking to all the world as if he was waiting for someone to emerge from the station. But after a while he seemed to be eyeing me with real malice, so much so that I memorized his number, convinced I was looking at Dr. Gnadenschuss.

  I put my hand inside my army tunic and took hold of the handle of my gun. In retrospect, I think he was probably trying to work out if the dark glasses meant I was also blind as well as crippled; but it was several minutes before I realized that he and his malice aforethought were waiting for someone else.

  A Fritz came out of Aschinger, an old wheat-beer tavern with plain wooden tables and pictures of the Kaiser, and when he crossed Friedrichstrasse heading toward the station, the man in the car wound down the Dixi’s window and shot him thirty-two times with a Bergmann submachine gun—the same kind of gun that an assassin had planned to use on Bernhard Weiss at the circus. I knew it was thirty-two times because that’s how many the magazine on a Bergmann holds and the man in the car emptied the whole drum before throwing the gun onto the passenger seat and driving off.

  Most people stayed back for fear of more shots being fired—a not-unreasonable precaution under the circumstances; this smelled like a ring killing, and it was safe to assume that there would be some kind of retaliation. Meanwhile, I wheeled myself onto the road to survey the bullet-ridden corpse at closer quarters; I didn’t recognize the dead man but I’d certainly recognized the man in the car who’d shot him: it was the same thug who’d been sitting next to me at the Sing Sing Club. There was nothing about that evening I was ever likely to forget. The killer’s name had been Hugo and his helpful girlfriend had been called Helga. Even as I recalled this detail, Helga her
self came out of Aschinger, screaming like a prehistoric bird and in that same moment the true nature of the catastrophe was explained. It wasn’t a ring killing at all, but a simple case of sexual jealousy. Hugo must have suspected Helga was seeing someone else and had resolved to eliminate his rival. And there could be no doubt he’d done that: I’d rarely seen a victim so comprehensively shot and killed as the torn and bloodied man lying on the street.

  Helga ran toward her dead lover, dropped to her knees, and, still keening, cradled his leaky head on her lap, hardly caring about the blood spilling onto her blouse, at which point a piece of his skull detached itself in her hands and her screams grew even louder. I didn’t say anything and having got halfway across Friedrichstrasse to check the man was dead, I didn’t stop, or look back. I kept on going. The last thing I needed was to blow my cover by helping the local law. There would be plenty of time and opportunity to telephone the Alex later on, when I was Bernie Gunther again. Besides, there was no way that Dr. Gnadenschuss was going to show up now when the whole street was about to swarm with cops. I needed to be somewhere else, and quickly.

  I wheeled myself east, thinking a cold wheat beer was just the thing on a hot day. My path took me past a shop selling foreign stamps and Diana air rifles and the local canine clinic, which was offering docking, castrating, and painless destroying. From the state of his corpse, I guessed that all three of those services must already have been provided for Hugo’s unfortunate victim—except perhaps the painless part: being pumped full of bullets hurts.