by Philip Kerr
“And what’s your feeling about doing that?”
“I suppose I could do it.”
“Really, it’s up to you, Gunther.”
“But honestly? I’m beginning to think I’m wasting my time. Especially now that there’s been another murder. I do believe a change of tactics is called for.”
“Well, it was a brave attempt. A noble failure, if you like. I still am convinced we have to try everything to catch this killer, even when what we are doing seems unusual or disagreeable. But perhaps you’re right. Maybe now is the time to change our tactics. To try something new. Whatever that might amount to. Grzesinski is tearing his hair out. We’re really short of ideas. The public has been less than helpful. I don’t have to tell you how many time-wasters we had in response to my own newspaper article appealing for help. You’d think Berliners don’t want this man caught.”
“That’s certainly a possibility.”
He paused. “But you’re all right, in yourself. Feeling well?”
“If you’re asking me if I’ve stopped drinking then yes, I have.”
“That’s something, I suppose. What I mean is, you’re not getting tired of police work.”
“Not in the least, sir. And I want to get this murderer as much as you do.”
“Good, good.”
“But I haven’t changed my theory that Winnetou and Dr. Gnadenschuss are one and the same. For this reason, and with your permission, I’m going to have to speak to the minister’s girlfriend, Daisy Torrens. It seems that her previous boyfriend, a fellow named Geise, Rudi Geise, used to have a penchant for mutilating enemy corpses during the war. Cutting off ears and that kind of thing. Apparently he still carries a knife. So if you add that to the fact that by all accounts he hated women, then he might make a useful suspect. As I’ve said, it’s only a few centimeters from cutting off an ear to cutting off a scalp. Worth a look, I’d have thought.”
“Very well. But please tread very carefully. Right now I’m not so popular with the minister. I do believe he would fire me if he could. It would certainly make him look good in front of his enemies if he could dismiss a Jew from the police. Especially as he’s a Jew himself. He can even produce a good reason to get rid of me. It seems that President Kleiber of the Stuttgart police has complained about my book. Accused me of settling old scores. Which simply isn’t true.”
If I’d ever got around to finishing his dry book I might have agreed with him, loyally. Meanwhile, I decided not to tell Weiss that I was half inclined to interview Fritz Lang about his first wife and his interest in Jack the Ripper. It might have sounded like one fishing trip too many. Instead I gave him something else.
“This latest victim, sir: Johann Tetzel. I met him in the course of my investigations. Questioned him outside the Berlin Zoo aquarium not so long ago. It was Tetzel who gave me the tip about Prussian Emil.”
“Prussian Emil is the one whose klutz wagon you were using, right?”
“Yes, sir. As a matter of fact I’m going to follow up a lead on him tonight.”
“Excellent. It might interest you to know that Gennat is currently working on a theory that the murderer is a member of the Steel Helmet. We found a membership stickpin in Tetzel’s dead hand. As if he’d grabbed it from the murderer’s lapel. Do you remember Tetzel wearing such a pin himself?”
“No. I don’t, sir. And he didn’t strike me as a right-winger either.”
“Well, we can talk more about this when you come in to the Alex. You are coming in tomorrow, aren’t you? I mean, if you’re not out playing klutz any longer.”
“I’ll be in tomorrow, sir.” If nothing else, I needed to report the missing Walther and put in for a replacement.
“Good. We can catch up. Share some ideas. Then I wondered if you’d care to come for dinner with me one night soon.”
“Thanks. I’d like to.”
“My wife is keen to meet you, Gunther. I didn’t give her any details but I’m afraid I told her that you saved my life. She and I don’t have secrets from each other. Besides, I’m a terrible liar. Comes of being an honest cop, I suppose.”
“Take my word for it, sir; we honest cops have to lie like all the rest. Sometimes that’s what keeps us alive.”
* * *
—
IT WAS WELL past eleven but the Thomas Cook charabanc was collecting excited English guests from some of the more exclusive hotels to take them on a late-night tour of Berlin’s famous sex clubs: lesbian clubs like the Toppkeller in Schwerinstrasse, where there was a famous Black Mass featuring several naked girls; or the Zauberflote with its separate floors for queer men and queer women. These sex tours were especially popular with the English, since it was certain that there was no sex to see nor any to be had back home.
Since the English sex tourists were only interested in visual stimulation it seemed unlikely that the Thomas Cook charabanc would be stopping outside the Cabaret of the Nameless; while being a byword for Berlin malevolence and bad taste, it was not a sex show. The cabaret involved a series of ten-minute amateur acts. All the players were poor deluded souls especially selected for their astonishing credulity and lack of talent by the sadistic conférencier, Erwin Lowinsky, who, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, managed to convince the performers that they had real talent and that there were some influential people in the audience who could give the poor wretches a head start in show business. Meanwhile, the audience—which thought itself quite sophisticated—enjoyed the cruel contemplation of one entertainment catastrophe after another. The Cabaret of the Nameless was very popular; for many a Berliner it was nothing less than a perfect evening. A cultural anthropologist seeking to understand the German character could not have done better than to go to the Cabaret of the Nameless.
I found Erich Angerstein seated near the back of a busy room behind a bottle of good champagne and accompanied by a couple of table ladies who seemed to be enjoying the show although their smiles might just as easily have been owed to the fact that he had a hand inside each of their brassieres. Seeing me, he made no attempt to remove his hands to somewhere more respectable—nothing was out of bounds among guests in the Cabaret of the Nameless—nor to introduce me to his two companions, who appeared to be twins.
“Gunther,” he said. “I’ve been wondering when you’d show up. Margit, pour Bernie a drink, there’s a good girl. You like champagne, Bernie?”
“Not particularly.”
“Horrible stuff. Smells of goat and tastes of cheese. Like a woman’s mouse. Women drink it because it’s expensive, which they think implies quality. But it’s a lot of gas, really.” He jerked his head, summoning a waiter, and I asked for a glass of Mosel. “Where have you been anyway? Getting a haircut, I suppose.”
“Something like that.”
“If I were you I’d ask for my money back.”
Up onstage, a woman in a wheelchair with one arm and one leg was singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Hers was an untrained voice—a bit like Lotte Lenya’s, only there the similarity ended; the woman in the wheelchair couldn’t have hit the right note if she’d swallowed a whole canteen of tuning forks. Every so often the laughter from the audience became too bovine and she stopped, at which point Erwin Lowinsky—“Elow”—would cajole her into believing she had a sweet, natural voice and that she might best ignore the audience. “Ah, Lucy,” he told her, “these fools have had too much to drink and wouldn’t know real talent when they saw it.” And then she would start all over again, to gusts of laughter.
“The trouble you’ve seen,” shouted a wag in the audience. “I’m just guessing, but might it involve an arm and a leg?”
The waiter came back with my Mosel. I sipped it slowly, even carefully, and then lit a cigarette.
“Is there a reason we’re meeting in this torture chamber?”
“In the front row. Table by the pian
o. Do you see the flax-haired Fritz with the cellar-mistress girlfriend? You can’t see them from here, but the girl is wearing spurs on her button-up boots.”
I looked over that way and saw a tall woman showing a good deal of snow-white thigh and quite a bit of purple garter. Beside her was a taller man wearing a coarse yellow wig. They were both in helpless fits of laughter, red-faced, tearful, slipping off the edge of their seats. The man looked like he was having an asthma attack.
“I see him.”
“That’s Prussian Emil. His real name is Emil Müller. Comes here regularly just before twelve after finishing work, so to speak. Last night he was in with a burglar by the name of Karl Szatmari, a Hungarian, I think. Both of them belong to a criminal ring called the Hand in Hand. I hope you’re impressed with my patience, Gunther. Sitting here and watching him for the last three or four nights has been a real test of character for me. I’ve just about chewed off my fingernails wanting to drag that bastard into an alley and beat some information out of him.”
“In that respect at least you strike me as the kind of man who needs a regular manicure.”
“I hope it’s been worth it. Which is why I’m going to have to insist on being there when you question Emil. I’d hate to think I’ve been coming here for no reason.”
“We’ll speak to him tonight. After he leaves we’ll follow him outside. How long does he normally stay here?”
“Couple of hours. I had him tailed one night. He went to the Heaven and Hell and then home to an apartment in Wedding.”
“Please try to remember what we agreed to. We do things my way. And you’ll be helping me with a witness. Not a suspect.”
“Sure, sure. But you try to remember this: These bastards don’t like giving out information at the best of times. Sometimes they need a little friendly persuasion.”
“Then let’s keep it as friendly as possible. I want him talking, not bleeding. He can’t talk if he’s spitting out teeth.”
“Whatever you say, commissioner. Always glad to help the Berlin police.”
I laughed. “If you mean the same way that Elow is helping poor Lucy’s singing career, then I can almost believe that.”
“He’s a genius, isn’t he?” said Angerstein. “How he can manage to persuade this one-legged no-hoper that she has a scintilla of talent is beyond me. He makes Svengali look like the Good Samaritan.”
But after my time on the street pretending to be a schnorrer, I had developed a certain sympathy for people with one leg, even the tone-deaf songbird who was at last leaving the stage in tears, followed by gales of laughter and derision. I stood up and started to applaud, as if I’d enjoyed her act.
Erich Angerstein looked at me with amusement and then pity. “You’re a decent man,” he said. “I can see that. Says a lot about you. But the people in this audience will only think you’re being sarcastic. You know that, don’t you? There’s no room for anything genuine in this place. You probably thought that show you and Old Sparky put on in Sing Sing was the cruelest spectacle in Berlin, but you were wrong, my friend. It’s not just dreams that are broken in here; it’s souls, too.”
Finally he removed his hand from Margit’s brassiere, but only to light a cigarette. For a moment I caught the girl’s narrowed eye and knew that she wasn’t much enamored of her host’s attentions. Or of the Cabaret of the Nameless. It wasn’t everyone in Berlin who enjoyed cruelty for cruelty’s sake or being constantly pawed.
Still looking at Margit, I said: “I wonder how the poor girl ended up in a wheelchair, anyway. With one leg and one arm, treated like she was shit on the cabaret carpet, pinning all her hopes on these heartless bastards.”
“You missed the beginning of her act,” said Margit. “She explained how she lost the arm in a factory accident, and the leg in hospital, as a result of losing the arm.”
Margit’s twin added: “She wanted to be the first one-legged actress and singer since Sarah Bernhardt.”
“Some people have all the luck,” said Angerstein. “While it seems that others have none at all. When it comes to good fortune, everyone believes they’re entitled to a fair share. And they’re not. They never were. And that’s where people like me come in.”
I sat down again. “Can you see all of human creation from on top of that high mountain, Siegfried?”
“My point is this: Can you imagine how much of existence would be impossible if people didn’t believe in a certain amount of luck in the face of all evidence to the contrary? The true essence of human life is delusion. That’s what we’ve got in here. And it’s been that way ever since the first Roman soldier blew on a handful of dice. It’s simple human nature to believe your luck is going to turn.”
“I’d hate to comb your hair, Erich. I’d probably cut myself.”
“Could be your own luck will turn tonight.”
“I hope it does. This case needs a break.”
“I’ve got a good feeling about that, Gunther. You’re going to crack this case wide open and turn yourself into a local hero. I’m sure of it. You’re going to catch Eva’s murderer. That man is going to have his head cut off. And I’m going to be there to see it, even if I have to bribe every guard in Plötzensee.”
He meant it, too. And just for a second I gained a small insight that perhaps Erich Angerstein was the wickedest thing in the club. I glanced around at the cabaret audience, just to make sure: Lucy was gone now, her hopes as dead as the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his poor wife. I had not thought vicious, conscience-free killing was so very common in Berlin. But in the Cabaret of the Nameless, it was the name of the game; and worse was to come. A one-eyed juggler with a bad speech impediment who couldn’t juggle; a grossly overweight impersonator who pretended to be Hitler and then Charlie Chaplin but looked and behaved more like Oliver Hardy; and a tap dancer who had no more sense of rhythm than a dying rhinoceros. Worst of all perhaps was the woman with the large breasts who fancied herself a mezzo-soprano and inexplicably had chosen to sing an aria from Richard Strauss’s Salomé and Elow had persuaded the poor creature that she might find more favor with the audience if, like Salomé, she removed her clothes while she was singing—this provided the most depressing sight of the evening when Salomé turned out to have a very large cesarian scar. Even Prussian Emil seemed to find this revelation too much, and soon after Salomé had left the stage, he and his hook-heeled girlfriend suddenly stood up and headed for the exit. Angerstein tossed some banknotes onto the table for the waiter and the twins. Then he and I followed our bewigged quarry outside.
“Where shall we pick him up?” I asked.
“This is your picnic basket, copper.”
“You said you had someone tail him to his place in Wedding?”
“Yes, it’s on Ackerstrasse. You see it and you’ll understand why he’s on the flypaper with the rest of them in that club we just came out of.”
“Well, let’s pick him up there. Are you in your Mercedes?”
“Not tonight. It’s having a little tune-up. Get it back first thing tomorrow.” He pointed at a little two-seat Hanomag. With its single headlight mounted in the middle of the hood, it looked more like a car in a children’s storybook than something a man such as Erich Angerstein might drive. “Which is why I’m driving that piece of shit toy. It’s my wife’s car. She’s away on vacation right now, so she doesn’t need it.”
* * *
—
PRUSSIAN EMIL DROVE a black Dixi north up Mauerstrasse, which traced the path of the old city wall. The curve of the street used to irritate Frederick the Great: Like any good Prussian, he much preferred straight lines. I was hoping to get a few myself when we caught up with Prussian Emil. With Angerstein driving, we headed across the river, into Red Wedding. It was red for a reason; like Schöneberg or Neukölln, the poverty in Wedding was the dispiriting kind they’d had back in Gaza, where sightless Samson had been forced to work g
rinding grain in a mill. Crushing poverty was the reason none of the thousands of Berliners who occupied Wedding’s sorry-looking tenement buildings would ever have dreamed of voting for anyone other than the communists or, at a pinch, the socialist SPD. Judging by the peeling signs painted on the gray walls of the Russian-doll courtyards, all human life was here: coalmen, dressmakers, butchers, pumpernickel bakers, car mechanics, kosher bakers, pigeon shops, cleaning ladies, briquette suppliers, fishmongers, housepainters; and quite a bit that was inhuman, too. The place was rat-infested, patrolled by mangy stray dogs and spavined horses and probably a Golem or two. Anything went in Red Wedding, and nobody paid much attention to what was deemed respectable by middle-class Berlin standards. Although it was the middle of the night, there were still small, undernourished children loitering in the lightless arched entryways under the watchful eyes of men and women wearing shabby Trachts and military surplus. It was the kind of place that made you feel lucky if you had a clean collar and a shine on your shoes.
“I hate this bloody neighborhood,” confessed Angerstein.
“Any particular reason, or are you just a student of fine art and architecture?”
“I grew up here. That’s the best reason of all.”
“Yours must have been quite an education.”
“That’s right. It was. I’ve had a lucky escape, right enough. Whenever I come back to Wedding it reminds me of what life might have been like if I’d had to—well, you know.”
“Make an honest living? Yes, I do see that.”
“No, you don’t. Nobody who hasn’t lived here can know what it’s like to grow up in a shit hole like this.”
Angerstein slowed the car to a halt for a moment; since he knew exactly where Prussian Emil’s car was going he wasn’t afraid of losing him. He looked at me with eyes that were brown and unflinching and almost lifeless, like cold rock pools in granite. They were the most intimidating eyes I’d ever seen. Gradually he smiled, but it took a while and there was little mirth in it.