by Philip Kerr
“You see that stone bench? That’s the Wedding gamblers’ bench. My father sat on that bench for twenty years, playing skat and betting away what money he made from whatever temporary crap job he’d managed to get while my mother slaved her guts out taking in laundry and making children’s clothing. I swore I wasn’t ever going to end up like those poor bastards. The number of times since then I’ve wished I could go back in time and give them just a few hundred reichsmarks. Which would have transformed their lives. And mine.” He shook his head. “Sometimes it seems like it must have happened to someone else. Like a schizophrenic, you know? You ever want to know why people become criminals, just come and spend some time here and you’ll learn a thing or two.”
“Not everyone who lives here becomes a criminal, Erich. Some people manage to stay honest. A few even manage to better themselves. The hard way.”
“You’re right, of course. But mostly they get stuck here, see? Living their hopeless lives. And I’m not. If I had to live in Wedding again I think I’d kill myself. Or someone else, more likely. But murder’s not such a big crime when you live in a dump like Wedding. That’s called binding arbitration around these parts. A quick way to resolve disputes, one that doesn’t involve cops or courts. Leastways, not unless someone opens his flap.”
His laugh reminded me of just how dangerous a man he was. The Middle German Ring was one of the most feared in the whole of Germany.
“Which violates the first law of Wedding: Always keep your mouth shut, especially when there’s a cop around.” He shook his head. “I got out of this place for the sake of my family. I wanted something better for my children, you know? And when Eva got her Abitur, I couldn’t have been more proud. Kids round here wouldn’t even know how to spell Abitur. I was even proud when she got herself a job working as a stenographer for Siemens-Halske. I could have found her something better, but she was independent and wanted it that way. So I let it be. I didn’t interfere. Then something went wrong. I’m not sure what, exactly. Maybe a bad boyfriend, I don’t know. I’m still trying to find out. She started taking cocaine and going on the sledge now and then to help pay for it. You might even say she started to revert to type. And now that Eva’s dead I’m wondering why I bothered. Would she be alive now if we’d still been living here? I don’t know.”
“You did what you thought was right,” I said. “Even if what you did was wrong. That’s what matters. You give people chances. What they do with those chances is their own affair. It’s not down to you if she made mistakes, Angerstein. It’s not down to anyone except the person who makes those mistakes. At least, that’s the way I look at it.”
“Thanks for that, anyway. Even if you don’t mean it.”
Erich Angerstein’s life story over, we drove on a bit and then he pulled over, parking the car immediately behind the empty Dixi; Emil and his girlfriend had already gone inside the tenement. We followed through one gloomy courtyard and another, then up a narrow stone stairway that smelled of coal fumes and tobacco and fried food and carbolic and something worse. The whole place was like a black-and-white engraving of a deep pit and dry bones scene from The Divine Comedy.
“Top floor,” said Angerstein.
I looked up at the side of a building that was all wall cracks and dead concrete window boxes.
“Suppose he doesn’t answer the door,” I said. “I’m not sure I would answer it in this place and at this time of night.”
“Then it’s just as well we’re not going to knock,” said Angerstein.
At the top of the stairs were two apartment doors and, down a small flight of steps, a third, ill-fitting door that led outside again; this door was secured from the other side until Angerstein prised it open with a folding knife. “I know all these old tenement buildings like the back of my hand,” he explained. “From when I first started stealing. And other things.”
He led the way out onto an iron fire escape that overlooked a small, dark, rat-infested courtyard. Above us the sky was full of smoke and the sound of a couple having a furious argument—the kind that promised violence. I followed him quietly through a web of washing lines until we came to a grimy window. Inside, the lights were on, affording us a ringside view as Prussian Emil’s girlfriend finished tying his wrists and ankles to all four legs of a kitchen table with a selection of her client’s neckties. She herself was naked but for her boots and stockings and as soon as she was quite satisfied with her knots, she pulled down Emil’s trousers and underpants, picked up a cane and swished it in the air.
“Looks like we’re just in time for the late show,” said Angerstein.
“Somehow I can’t see the Thomas Cook sex tour making it up here.”
“No, but it saves us time.”
“How’s that?”
“You’ve read Kant, haven’t you? A man’s more likely to see reason when his trousers are around his ankles. And there’s no chance of his losing any teeth. Just like you said. It seems to me that he’s just waiting for us to question him.”
He walked along to the next window and while the cellar mistress went about her work, Angerstein silently jimmied it open with his knife and we climbed inside. It wasn’t much of an apartment. A green linoleum floor. A bed that looked and smelled like a nest of mice. A large wardrobe full of fur coats, probably stolen; and on the door, a military uniform and a bugle. We went into the living room where the cellar mistress was caning her client. He took it well enough, I thought, crying out only a little, but seeing us in the room he began to yell loudly—with outrage, not pain.
“Who the hell are you? Get out of here before I call the police.” And other words, most of them obscene, to that effect.
“What’s the twenty-mark word for this particular perversion?” Angerstein asked the mistress. “Algolagnia?”
The mistress nodded. Angerstein handed her a banknote.
“Get your clothes on, darling. Go home. Forget you ever saw us. We’ll finish up here with the algolagnia.”
The woman grabbed her clothes and ran. She could tell we meant business. For one thing, Angerstein had a gun in his hand.
“Put the Bismarck away,” I told him. “We won’t need it. Not now he’s trussed up and ready for some Socratic dialogue.”
He shrugged and slipped the pistol into a little holster on his belt.
“I don’t pretend to understand why anyone would want to be punished like this,” he said, picking up the cane. “But it takes all sorts. Especially in Berlin. Personally, I put it down to the armistice. We’re still beating ourselves up for the way the war ended. Or paying someone else to do it.”
“What the hell do you want?” demanded Emil.
“Answers to some questions,” I said, pulling a chair up beside his head, which was the much preferred alternative to the other end of the table. His wig had disappeared and the birthmark on his neck was just as Johann Tetzel had described; it looked as if a careless waiter had spilled something down his shirt collar. “As soon as we have those answers we’ll leave you alone. If you’re good, we may even untie you before we leave. Simple as that.”
“And who wants to know the answers?”
“Let’s get something straight,” Angerstein said, and hit him hard on his bare backside with the cane, which had me wincing with vicarious discomfort. “We ask the questions.”
“Yes, yes, yes. Whatever it is you want to know, I’ll tell you.”
“A few weeks ago,” I continued, “you went on a job one night with your friend Karl Szatmari. South of Wittenbergplatz, at the back of a building on Wormser Strasse. I found your klutz wagon. You were his achtung. That horn in the bedroom: You were meant to blow it if the cops turned up.”
“Who says?”
Angerstein beat him again. “Answers only, please. Not questions.”
“I’m not interested in any of that. What I want to know is why you ran away. What you saw
that made you abandon the klutz wagon and leg it.”
“I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about,” insisted Emil. “You’re right. I used to play schnorrer and spot cops for Szatmari when he was on a job. Yokel catching. I plead guilty to that. No question. But I lost that wagon on Wittenbergplatz. Had to make a run for it when a nosy cop started asking me awkward questions. I’ve no idea how it turned up where you said it did. But Wormser Strasse isn’t so far away from Wittenbergplatz.”
“A woman was murdered that night,” I said. “Murdered and mutilated. And I think you caught a glimpse of the man who was responsible. I believe that’s the reason you ran away. Because you were afraid he might kill you, too.”
“Whatever gave you that idea?”
Angerstein beat him a third time and Emil’s face turned an interesting shade of purple. “Didn’t they teach you anything at school?” he said. “The difference between a question and an answer?”
“All right, all right. And not so hard, eh? I’ve told you. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
“So far you’ve told us nothing,” said Angerstein.
“Look, Emil, there was a burglary in Wormser Strasse on the same night as the murder. That’s a fact. And I’m guessing it was Szatmari who was responsible. If we ask him and he says it was you who was cop-spotting for him, and we have to talk again, then my friend here is going to do more than just beat you. But you shouldn’t worry about that. You should worry about what’s going to happen right now.” I lit a cigarette. “This is your last chance, Emil. If I have to ask you the same questions once more I’m going to tell my colleague to beat you like an old carpet. And when he’s tired of doing that, then I’m going to beat you myself. Which will be worse because I won’t enjoy doing it. Not for a moment. I’ll be very embarrassed and because I’m embarrassed I’ll be angry. Maybe angry enough to beat you harder than anyone has ever beaten you before. You understand? So I urge you to start telling me some things I don’t already know. Before you really do get hurt.”
“All right. I did see something. Only it wasn’t much. Hardly anything in fact. But look, if you’re cops I really can’t imagine anything I could tell you would be of any help.”
“Why don’t you tell us from the very beginning? And we’ll be the judge of that.” I leaned back on the chair, flicked my ash onto the floor, and waited expectantly.
But Erich Angerstein was shaking his head and giving me his best stoneface.
“You read books?” he asked.
“Of course I read books. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Well, I read people the way you read books. I’m an avid reader, you might say. But the fact is that in my business you have to be. It’s my observation that you’ve got a lot to learn about interrogation, my young friend. When a man minimizes the importance of what he’s about to tell you, you can be damn sure he’s not going to tell you anything worth hearing. What you want is a whore who hasn’t eaten dinner for several days, someone who’s very keen to please her Fritz. And we don’t have that here. Not yet. Do you agree?”
I nodded. Emil was already repeating his willingness to answer all of our questions, but I was forced to agree with Angerstein. I didn’t want him to be right about this, but he was and we both knew it. And we both knew what was going to happen next. I didn’t like it, but all I cared about now was that we got whatever information we could get from Emil so that I could be out of that room and away from that loathsome scene as soon as possible. I nodded again.
Angerstein produced a folded white handkerchief, shook it out, and then stuffed it into Emil’s mouth. Then he turned to me. “So here’s what’s going to happen,” he said calmly, taking off his jacket and rolling up his shirt sleeves. “You’re going to go back in the bedroom, close the door, smoke a cigarette, and wait there patiently for five minutes. That’s because I don’t want you and your capacity for decency and fair play of the kind you exhibited back in the Cabaret of the Nameless interfering while I beat this bastard. Like an old carpet. Your words. That is what you said, right? I’m going to beat this bastard until he wants to tell me everything that’s happened to him since he let go of his mother’s teat.”
* * *
—
SITTING ON THE EDGE of the malodorous bed I smoked a cigarette to keep my mind off the smell and stared around at the blank room that stared back at me. As I waited uncomfortably—but not as uncomfortably as Prussian Emil—for Erich Angerstein to come and fetch me from the bedroom, I felt like a ghost and probably looked like one, too. But it was easier to keep my nose off the smell of the bed than it was to keep my ears detached from the sound of what was happening in the room next door. It was cowardly of me to let the gangster do the dirty work but that part of it seemed unimportant now beside the absolute imperative necessity of getting a name and a man I could arrest. I suppose I convinced myself that the end justified the means, which, in a case that refuses to crack, is always the honest policeman’s dilemma. Five minutes, he’d said, five minutes for me to smoke a cigarette and for him to force Emil to tell us everything he knew. Next to the lives of some other men and women who might yet be killed that didn’t seem so bad, but still, it was a long five minutes. I heard a little of what was going on, of course. I heard the slicing cuts of the cane and Emil’s muffled screams; and if I heard it, the neighbors very likely heard it, too, only no one would have tried to fetch the police in a building like the one we were in. It wasn’t as if cops or public telephones were plentiful in that part of Berlin. After a couple of minutes, I put the cigarette between my teeth and plugged my ears with my fingers, which only seemed to make my every guilty thought throb inside my skull as if I was suffering from a low fever.
When at last he came to fetch me, Angerstein was breathless, his forehead beaded with sweat and his cheeks flushed, as if he’d really put his shoulder into the beating, and the minute I laid eyes on Emil I knew that he’d done that and more. The man had passed out; his backside was the color of a crushed insect; blood was running down his thighs; and his face was as pale as goat’s cheese. The crimsoned cane lay on the floor like a murder weapon and in my guilty haste to erase the scene from my mind I kicked it angrily aside and bent down beside the unconscious man to retrieve the handkerchief from his mouth before he suffocated.
“I think he’ll tell us what we want to know now,” said Angerstein calmly. It was obvious that he didn’t despise himself in the least, as I would have done; he had probably intended to inflict the maximum violence necessary, and experience had told him the limit of what his victim could take. He rolled down his shirt sleeves and collected his jacket from the floor as I slapped Emil’s cheeks as firmly as I dared; and gradually the man started to come around. Angerstein was much less circumspect; he grabbed the man’s ear and lifted his head up.
“Now then,” he said. “Let’s hear it. Tell us the whole story. From the beginning. Exactly the way I told you a few minutes ago, Emil.”
It was a curious remark but at the time I thought no more about it.
“Tell my friend what you saw outside the building in Wormser Strasse. Or we’ll start again.”
“I was watching the street while my friend turned over an apartment,” said Emil. “I was supposed to . . . to blow my horn if any bulls turned up. Or anyone that looked like the apartment’s owner. I hadn’t been there for long when I saw this Fritz go into the courtyard with the girl. And I saw him when he came out again . . . just a few minutes later. Alone. Got a good look at him, too. Saw the blood on his—on his hands. I guessed what must have happened. That he had murdered her. But not only that. I recognized him. He was a cop.”
“A cop?”
“Yes. From Kripo.”
“A detective?” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you before. I was afraid you would kill me.”
“What�
�s this man’s name, Emil? I assume he has a name.”
“Don’t know his name. Right? I don’t know that. Please believe me. But I knew his face. From way back when I was being booked in the main hall at the Alex by another detective for a job I did. And this one saw I’d recognized him. Which was why I ran away. Before he could kill me. Laid low after that. As soon as that first schnorrer got shot, I guessed what it was about. That he was looking for me. Had to be.”
Shaking away my disbelief, I remembered what the homeless man, Stefan Rühle, had told me and Otto Trettin back at the Palme: that he’d seen the murderer, too, and that the murderer was a cop. Then I’d assumed the man was a lunatic, but now I wasn’t so sure. And already I was trying to match the policemen I knew with what sounded like Rühle’s description of Satan.
“Can you describe him?”
“Not very tall. Ordinary. I don’t know. I’m not very good at descriptions.”
“You’re not trying to put one over on us, are you? About the murderer being a copper.”
“No! I swear it was a cop that did it. A detective. I just don’t have a name.”
“A cop. I don’t believe it.”
“Please. You’ve got to believe me. I couldn’t take another beating.”
“It’s all right, Emil,” said Angerstein soothingly. “My friend is just a little surprised to hear this, that’s all. Unlike me. I’m much more inclined to believe the worst of Berlin policemen. All the same, I wouldn’t like it if you were taking the piss.”
“I told you everything I know, right? But please don’t hit me anymore.”
But Angerstein was already untying Emil’s ankles and hands, as if he was satisfied with what we had heard. Which surprised me; he wasn’t the type to be satisfied with anyone’s explanation of anything, let alone with a cursory description of the man who had probably murdered his daughter. Emil’s revelation that the suspect was a cop seemed to beg as many questions as it answered. Angerstein looked at me and shook his head.