by Philip Kerr
I arranged to see her for lunch at Aschinger. It wasn’t just because I liked the beer at Aschinger that she and I met there, although I did. I wanted to ask her about the shooting and assumed that being on-site would help her to remember everything she’d seen on the street outside.
“But you already told me you saw the whole thing,” she said.
“I did. And I just found out the killer’s name and address from the Office of Public Conveyances. He has an apartment in Kreuzberg.”
“Are you going to arrest him?”
“Yes. As soon as you’ve helped me sort something out in my own head.”
“Me? I don’t see how I can help. You’ve got his name and address, what do you need from me?”
“The fact is, I didn’t pay too much attention to the dead man’s corpse. You told me that you came down here to check it wasn’t me lying on the street. Correct?”
“Yes. I did. Can you imagine that? Me being concerned about you?”
“I try to, when I’m alone and naked, but somehow it’s difficult to picture.”
“Shouldn’t be too difficult if you think of all the other pictures of me that ought to be in your head by now. The ones I wouldn’t like anyone else to see.”
I picked up her hand and kissed it.
“You mentioned seeing a tattoo on the dead man’s hand. A woman’s name. On the base of his thumb. You see, I didn’t see that.”
“That’s right. I did.”
“Can you remember what the name was?”
“No. I don’t remember very much, actually.”
“Was it Helga?”
“I don’t think so. Besides, there was too much blood for me to remember very much. It’s been preying on my mind ever since.”
“I guess that means I have to go to the city morgue and take a look for myself.”
“You mean that place by the zoo? On Hannoversche Strasse?”
“I do. Perhaps you could drive me there.”
“Now?”
“Sooner the better. Before someone claims Beckmann’s body.”
“All right.”
We found her car, another BMW Dixi, and drove west to the morgue. She parked out front, and I kissed her hand again.
“Will you wait here for me? I won’t be long.”
“If you like. But it’s open to the public, isn’t it?”
“It is. Only, I don’t recommend you go in. You wouldn’t like the show any more than you’d enjoy a hard-boiled egg rolled in sand.”
“Lots of people do go in there, don’t they? There are people going in there now.”
“Almost a million people just voted Nazi, but that doesn’t mean you should do what they do.”
“It can’t be that bad. Otherwise they wouldn’t let the public in, surely.”
“The Prussian state authorities let the public in because they want to scare them into submission. The sight of violent death is usually enough to cow the most rebellious spirits. Even in Berlin.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, Gunther, I’m kind of rebellious myself. At least that’s what my father says. Maybe I’m not the little snowdrop you think I am.”
“If you’d just finished telling me that crime pays, I might recommend that you go in and see the sights, sure. But not otherwise. Look, angel, it simply hadn’t occurred to me you might want to go inside. If it had crossed my mind, I’d have caught the bus. Or taken the U-Bahn.”
“You’re beginning to sound suspiciously like a hero.”
“Maybe. And what kind of a knight in shining armor would I be if I didn’t try to talk the princess out of walking into the ogre’s castle?”
“I get that. And I’m grateful. But I like to think I can look after myself. Since my ex-husband started wearing my underwear instead of shining armor I’ve learned to be a lot tougher than people take me for. You included, it would seem.”
“That’s the trouble with real men, sugar. They expect women to behave like real women.”
She was already getting out of the Dixi. “That doesn’t mean you should treat them like they’re made of Venetian glass. Or is it just me you want to wrap in some tissue paper?”
“No, I’m against the existence of this place in general. It’s bad enough that there are so many men who remember how abominable things were in the trenches. I see no use for a public morgue in which we afford women and children an approximate sight of that same horror.”
“Maybe women should know something about this side of life.”
“All right. But bear this in mind. When it comes to seeing lots of dead people, your brain is like a camera with the shutter open. Everything gets recorded on the film. I was a schoolboy the first time I went in this place. I sneaked in, without permission. What I saw then has stayed with me forever. Somehow it always seems worse than anything I’ve seen since. So please don’t complain to me when you don’t sleep because you can’t destroy the negatives.”
She followed me inside and while I went to ask to see the body of Willi Beckmann, I left Brigitte to stroll around the morgue on her own. Maybe she was right. Thanks to people like George Grosz and his friends, you could probably see things that were just as unpleasant in the city’s modern art galleries.
Beckmann’s body contained more lead than Berlin’s water pipes. Fortunately for me, his right hand was one of the few parts of his body that had not been hit with a machine-gun bullet. So it took only a few minutes to satisfy my own curiosity; but rather longer than that for Brigitte to satisfy hers. I went outside, leaned against her car, and smoked a cigarette. When eventually she came out of the morgue she looked a little pale and was very quiet. Which was only to be expected, I thought.
“Well, that was horrible.”
“To say the least.”
“Is that all you’ve got to say?”
“See anyone you recognized?”
“Funny.”
“That’s why it exists. To help the cops identify the unidentifiable.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked, starting the engine.
“Yes.”
“Did he have a girl’s name tattooed on his hand?”
“He did.”
“Good. And was it Helga, after all?”
“Better than that. It was Frieda.”
“Where to?”
“I have to go back to the Alex.”
She turned the car around and drove east, on Lützowstrasse.
“Are you going to tell me about Frieda?”
After what she’d just seen I decided she could probably handle the whole story. I was wrong about that, too.
“About a year ago a man walking his dog in the Grünewald found some female body parts wrapped in butcher’s paper and buried in a shallow grave. There was no head. Just a torso, a foot, and a pair of hands. Which was thoughtful of the killer in that the girl’s fingerprints enabled us to identify her as Frieda Ahrendt, and they revealed that she had a record for petty theft. She also had the name Willi tattooed at the base of her thumb. In spite of all that, we never managed to find a family, a job, not even a last known address. And certainly not the murderer, who is probably still at large.”
“And you think Willi Beckmann—the man in the morgue—might be the same man.”
“I don’t think Willi Beckmann was dumb enough to chop her up and bury a severed hand that had his name on it. But it’s possible he could have told us something more about her. If he hadn’t been shot. Maybe enough to find her killer—the man the newspapers had dubbed the Grünewald Pork Butcher.” I’d already decided to visit Willi’s apartment in Tegel, to see what evidence I could find before I went looking for Hugo. “Who knows? Maybe he still can.”
Brigitte listened in silence and then said: “My God, the things that must be inside your head. You go looking at things t
hat no one should ever have to see, with no idea of the effect it’s going to have on your mind, and all for not much money. I don’t think you even know why you do it. Do you?”
“Sure I know. Because I have nothing to say as a painter. Because I couldn’t finish my unfinished symphony. Because being a cop is a job for honest men, and since there are not many of those around these days, they’ll take anyone they can get.”
“Well, I think you’re crazy. And if you’re not, then you soon will be. Still, I suppose that’s what being a detective is all about.”
* * *
—
WILLI BECKMANN had lived in Tegel, part of the northwestern borough of Reinickendorf and not far from the giant Borsig locomotive works. The whole area was dominated by a modern red brick ziggurat that was the model for the New Tower of Babel in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. That had been a silent movie—with talking pictures now arriving on the scene, it already looked like a remnant from the past. As for the Borsig works, there was nothing futuristic about it; noisy and dirty, it seemed a throwback to an industrial Berlin that was fast disappearing. Willi’s apartment was on the top floor of a more traditional Berlin building with its mustard-yellow walls, red-tiled mansard roof, and a curving balcony that was home to a spectacular window box full of pink carnations, which possibly explained the buttonhole poor Willi had been wearing at the time of his death. The concierge admitted me to the apartment. He was a man of few words and those he had expressed a kind of awed pride in the size and layout of the accommodation.
“I’d forgotten what a nice big apartment this is,” he said. “All these rooms. And the ceilings so high. You could play tennis in here.”
He had very little curiosity about what I was doing there or indeed about Beckmann’s death. To my relief, he quickly left me alone.
There wasn’t a lot of furniture but what there was was good stuff—Biedermeier copies, mostly, and on the walls were prints of hunting scenes in the gardens of Schloss Tegel. Of course, the police had already been there searching for leads to the identity of the dead man’s murderer and, according to an official notice taped to the apartment door, they had taken away some photographs and papers.
Not knowing what they were looking for, they’d removed very little.
I had better luck. In a cylinder cabinet, I found a couple of photograph albums, and in these were pictures of a quartet of good friends. Several had been taken at a nearby restaurant on the edge of Lake Tegel. The quartet was made up of Willi Beckmann, Hugo Gediehn, Helga “Mustermann”—I still didn’t know her surname—and Frieda Ahrendt. What was clear from the photographs was that Hugo and Frieda had once been lovers. Some time after the photos were taken Frieda and Willi became lovers, which was when they each had the tattoos made. None of the pictures provided a neat explanation for Frieda’s murder, but they were all the excuse I needed to detain both Hugo and Helga. These four wouldn’t have been the first good companions to fall out violently. There’s nothing like an old friendship to provide a solid basis for a lasting enmity.
Since I had the free run of the apartment, I spent another hour raking through drawers and closets, which is how I found several letters addressed to Frieda from her loving sister, Leni in Hamburg. I wondered if Leni even knew her sister was dead. I was still short of an ironclad motive as to why two of the people in the pictures had been murdered, but everything else seemed to be falling into place.
Leni’s letter had included a telephone number and since there was still a working telephone in Willi’s apartment, I called her.
“Forgive me for telephoning you out of the blue like this,” I said, “but my name is Bernhard Gunther and I’m a detective with Berlin Kripo.” Choosing my words carefully, I added, “I’ve been investigating your sister’s disappearance.”
Leni sighed. “It’s all right, Herr Gunther. I know she’s dead. If she were alive she’d have contacted me. But it’s been almost a year. And I gave up all hope of ever seeing her again several months ago. We were very close, you see, always in touch. Also, the man she was living with in Berlin at the time of her disappearance, Willi Beckmann, he came to see me here in Hamburg and told me he thought she was dead, too.”
“But why didn’t you contact the police?”
“Willi said that for his sake and for mine we’d best not say anything about it to the police because the man who told him she was dead was a member of a criminal ring and very dangerous.”
“Did he say what that man’s name was?”
“He did. But I’m not going to repeat it now, even after all this time.”
“Willi Beckmann’s dead. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“The man who murdered him is called Hugo Gediehn. And I’m going to arrest him today or tomorrow. Is that the name Willi told you?”
“Yes, it is.”
“I have him cold for Willi’s murder.”
“May I ask how you know that?”
“Because I have a witness.”
“A witness who’ll stand up in court?”
“Yes.”
“Sure about that?”
“Yes. I’m the witness. I saw him pull the trigger on Willi. But he’s also my only suspect in your sister’s murder. Frankly, I was hoping you might be able to help me out there.” I paused, and hearing nothing, added, “You’ll be quite safe, I can assure you. No one need ever know I spoke to you.”
“How can I help?”
“I have a suspicion as to why Hugo killed your sister, but I have no real proof. Getting proof would be help enough, I think.”
“The why is quite simple. Hugo and Frieda were lovers. Then Willi enticed her away from Hugo—Willi was a very attractive man—and Hugo decided to get his revenge. Killed her. Buried her in a shallow grave somewhere. That much he told Willi. To torture him. Of course, Hugo knew that Willi was also in a ring, and that the last thing he could ever do was talk to the police. But I don’t understand, Herr Gunther. Why did Hugo kill Willi now, after all this time?”
“I can’t be sure, but I think it was because Willi went and stole Hugo’s new girl, Helga.”
“Makes sense, I suppose. If you’re looking for him, Hugo has an apartment in Kreuzberg. But I expect you know that.”
“Yes. I do.”
“Will you let me know what happens?”
“Of course.”
“Thanks. And good luck. Hugo being Hugo, you might need it.”
* * *
—
BACK AT THE ALEX I made out a good case for Hugo Gediehn’s arrest to Weiss and Gennat and, accompanied by several heavily armed uniformed officers, we proceeded to his apartment in Kreuzberg and took him into custody. To my surprise, he came with us quietly, saying very little except to insist we had the wrong man, a detail to which we might have paid more attention if it hadn’t been for the Bergmann MP-18 that was still in his car and my discovery in his desk drawer of a single souvenir photograph of Frieda’s severed hand, the one featuring the tattoo of Willi’s name. It was what the lawyers called prima facie evidence, which is just a fancy way of saying that as soon as Gediehn saw that we had the photograph, his expression changed and all the color drained from his face as if we’d introduced him to a pack of hungry wolves.
The rest of the day and half of the night was spent interrogating him and eventually he confessed to both murders, with no sign of remorse. If I’d known that the court would later sentence him to just fifteen years in prison I almost might not have bothered, but of course clearing up a couple of murders was only part of the reason I’d gone after him. There’s nothing like solving a cold case to deflect attention from several hot ones.
For days no one mentioned Dr. Gnadenschuss. Bernhard Weiss was able to call a press conference and make a big song and dance about the fact that Frieda Ahrendt’s case was almost a year old and to call for a little more patience when
it came to reporting crime in the city. He even singled me out for praise, but this did little to allay my feelings of guilt at having covered up a greater crime.
Even Gennat offered me his congratulations although I could tell he was convinced that there was rather more to my tenacious detective work than met his eye. It was the elapse of time between my witnessing the murder of Willi Beckmann and the arrest of Hugo Gediehn that seemed to cause him the biggest problem.
“You had the car registration number, a description of the killer, and his Christian name—you almost had his shoe size—and yet you didn’t call it in,” he said. “I don’t get that. Suppose Hugo Gediehn had taken off? He could have slipped across the Polish border and we’d have been none the wiser.”
“It was a risk I was prepared to take.”
“That wasn’t your decision to make. And that’s not how this Commission operates. You should know that by now. You could have telephoned me or someone else in this department and dictated the car’s registration number without breaking your cover.”
“Look, when I saw Frieda’s name tattooed on Beckmann’s dead hand I wanted to see if I could make him a suspect for her murder. I couldn’t do any of that until I was through playing the klutz.”
“But Willi Beckmann wasn’t going anywhere,” objected Gennat. “He was dead. No, it looks very much as though you wanted to make yourself a hero. On the face of it, that would make you a glory seeker.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am. Maybe I decided that we need a bit of glory around here.”