by Philip Kerr
“But only on the face of it. You’re not out for glory. Why say it when we both know it’s not true? That’s not who you are. I think I know you well enough to say that.”
“I don’t know where you’re going with this, sir. The Murder Commission just put two unsolved murders to bed. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“I was doing my job.”
“Come on, Gunther. You’re playing an angle here. Only, I can’t see it. And that irritates me, because I’m supposed to be smart. They don’t call me the Big Buddha for nothing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ernst.”
“Then I’ll spell it out for you. It’s the way this digs the Murder Commission out of a hole that I don’t like. It’s too convenient. All the bad press we were getting for not doing our jobs properly and now you come along and fix that overnight by solving two cases for the price of one. They’ll make you an inspector for this. Maybe give you a medal. Bernhard Weiss is ecstatic. So’s the minister.”
“But you’re not.”
“I’m a man with an ulcer. And when that’s not grumbling, I am. You’re a good detective, Gunther. One day you’ll be an excellent commissar. But you’re a man with secrets. That’s what I think. That there’s a lot more to you than meets the eye. I can’t help thinking that there’s a reason you solved these two murders when you did. And so very neatly it’s like they had pink bows on them.”
“A reason?”
“A reason. I haven’t figured out what that might be. But I will. And when I do I can promise you we’ll have this conversation again. Until then, try to remember this: You can’t cut corners in our business. And you can’t make deals with the truth. That’s good advice, from one who knows. Otherwise, one day you’ll try to do the right thing and discover you’re so out of practice you can’t.”
* * *
—
IT DID NOT, of course, go unremarked that Kurt Reichenbach, a serving detective, was missing. But Police Praesidiums are busy places and it wasn’t long before the buzz about his absence subsided to little more than a murmur. There were some at the Alex who ascribed his sudden disappearance to a nefarious Prussian land deal gone wrong, that he’d been obliged to disappear before he could be arrested by his own department. One or two mentioned a rich mistress in Charlottenburg and were adamant that he’d run away with her; someone even claimed to have seen him taking the waters in Marienbad. Others suggested that he’d been murdered by the Polish intelligence services as a result of his supposed acquaintance with the Weimar foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, who hoped to annex the so-called Polish Corridor and much of Upper Silesia. (It transpired that Reichenbach had occasionally acted as Stresemann’s bodyguard and, at the foreign minister’s request, had once met with agents of the Soviet OGPU, who were collaborating with Stresemann in opposing Polish statehood.)
But the majority of the men in Kripo, including Bernhard Weiss, were convinced he’d been murdered by right-wing nationalists simply because he was a Jew. It wasn’t just German politicians who were attacked because they were Jews, as Weiss himself knew only too well; several German bankers and businessmen had also been attacked, one of them fatally. What was more certain was that if Kurt Reichenbach hadn’t been a Jew, then perhaps some of his Kripo colleagues would have tried a bit harder to find him. Without a body or a witness, however, it was soon a case of out of sight, out of mind.
Even Traudl Reichenbach seemed reluctant to demand answers to her husband’s sudden disappearance, and eventually I wondered if she’d actually known more about the Winnetou murders than any of us could have suspected. I kept thinking of the Brennabor and the contents of the car’s trunk: the hammer, the razor-sharp knife, the coat, and the hat with the piece of wig attached. How innocent were those? Would anyone other than a homicide detective like me ever have connected those objects with a series of vicious murders? Surely there must have been one night when she had suspected her husband was guilty of something unusual: some blood on his shirt cuff perhaps; a trace of another woman’s perfume on his collar; a single stray hair. A wife just knows these things, doesn’t she? And what about those human scalps? What had Kurt done with the scalps? I don’t suppose I’ll ever know. But did she know? If anyone could handle that, it was Traudl. Being a nurse, she was likely made of strong stuff, stronger stuff than most women, stronger stuff even than Brigitte Mölbling.
* * *
—
“ROBERT HAS INVITED me to his home in England,” Rosa told me. “To meet his mother and father.”
“That sounds serious,” I said.
“Oh, it’s nothing like that.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure. The minute you start speaking to parents you’ve got some innocent bystanders.”
“No. It’s just that he wants me to meet them because they’re very old.”
“So’s the Sabre of Charlemagne, but it’s not every girl I want to take to Vienna to see it.”
“It isn’t how you think it is.”
But of course it was; it always is. Four weeks later I received a gold-embossed invitation to their wedding in Oxford and I never saw either of them again. Later on, Frau Weitendorf told me they were going to live in Cairo, that Rankin had been offered a job teaching English at the university. I was glad for them both, of course, especially Rosa, not least because I still had Brigitte in my life; at least I thought I did.
Then one day, like Orpheus, I looked around expecting to see Eurydice and found she’d vanished. Brigitte had written me a letter that tried to explain why she was ending our relationship; she even offered to meet me to talk about it but I couldn’t see the point; it’s hard not to take that kind of letter personally.
My darling Bernie,
This is not an easy letter to write, my dear, but I have to stop seeing you, for the sake of my own sanity. This will sound like an exaggeration but I can assure you it is not. At first it was exciting to be around you because you’re an extraordinary man—you know that, don’t you?—and not just by virtue of your vocation. Ever since I went to the morgue and encountered the reality of what you do, day in, day out, I’ve been thinking about who and what you are, and how you make a living. You did warn me not to go into that terrible place, of course, and I wish now I’d had the good sense to listen to you. One should always listen to a policeman. But I’m afraid my spiritual independence got the better of me.
In effect the city pays you to go all the way to hell and back again, doesn’t it? But hell’s only a small word. For most people, that police morgue on Hannoversche Strasse is a gateway to a place most people couldn’t ever, shouldn’t ever possibly imagine. To another infernal world. But for you hell is so much more than just a word. And what that does to you—what it must do to your mind—it makes me shudder.
The fact is, I don’t believe you can be around all that horror without something of the grave attaching itself to you like a ghost or perhaps the angel of death. And what scares me most is that you’re not even aware of it, my love. When you started drinking heavily I’m sure you believed that it was just a legacy of the war but to me it now looks more like a simple corollary of what you do: of your being a homicide detective.
If I was telling you this in person, you’d smile a cute smile and probably make a joke about it, and then tell me I was overreacting—you’d be much too polite to tell me I was being hysterical. Well, you can fake a smile; but you can’t fake what’s in those blue eyes, Bernie; the eyes tell you things that a person’s body might not reveal. Your eyes are like the windows of a car: the transition between two worlds; there’s you looking out at one world; and there’s me from another looking in and increasingly scared of what I will see lying on your backseat. When I look at you, Bernie, I see eyes that half an hour before might have seen a woman with her throat cut, or a man with his skull bashed in like a grapefruit; either way,
something terrible. What’s more, I feel this as if I had been there to see it myself. Eyes so familiar with violent death now looking at me, it makes me uncomfortable.
And the jokes—I understand now where they’re coming from; if you didn’t make a joke I think you’d scream. Maybe you don’t even realize that yourself. I would tell you to get out of the police, now, while you still have a chance of leading a normal human life, but we both know I’d be wasting ink; you’re good at what you do, I can see that. And people remain what they are even if their faces fall apart. That’s what Brecht says. Why would you give up something you’re good at because some hypersensitive woman you’d met and who was fond of you thought it could only get worse? Which it will. I am very sorry.
If you want, we can meet and talk about this but you should know that I’ve thought a great deal about this before putting pen to paper and my decision is final.
Your own very loving Brigitte
“You know you should write a book on how to be a detective, angel,” I said out loud to no one except the ghost of Eurydice. “You almost make it sound interesting. From a metaphysical point of view.”
I burned her letter. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t had one before, and I suppose that before my time is up, I’ll have others. Never forget, always replace. That’s the first rule of human relationships. Moving on: This is the important part. Which is why later on I telephoned Fritz Lang’s wife.
“Thea, it’s Bernie Gunther. I was wondering if we might meet for dinner again. I’ve got some great ideas for your script.”
Author’s Note
Bernhard Weiss fled Berlin with his family just a few days before Hitler was made chancellor of Germany in 1933. He moved to London, where he opened a printing and stationery business and died in 1951. The forecourts at Friedrichstrasse railway station and the Alexanderplatzstrasse are named in his honor.*
All the members of the Schrader-Verband described in the early part of this book achieved positions of importance under the Nazis, not least Arthur Nebe, who commanded an SS-Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine that massacred some 40,000 Jews. His postwar fate remains something of a mystery.
Ernst Gennat remained in Kripo until his death in August 1939.
Frieda Ahrendt’s death was never officially solved by the Berlin police and remains open to this day.
Albert Grzesinski fled to Switzerland in 1933. It is not known to the author if Daisy Torrens went with him; he died in New York, in 1948. Her fate is also unknown.
The double-murderer Bruno Gerth remained in a Berlin mental institution for the remainder of his life.
The Berlin morgue was built on the site of the Charité hospital’s old cholera cemetery. The main viewing hall was twenty-five meters long. Bodies were displayed for three weeks and then buried by the city in a coffin that Berliners called a Nasequetscher (a nose crusher). The morgue was closed to the public; since the Nazis were now responsible for most of the murders in Berlin, it may be that they wanted to keep their crimes as quiet as possible.
George Grosz was one of the Weimar Dada movement’s leading artists. To say the least, his work, not to mention his appearance—he really did walk around the city dressed as a cowboy—was challenging for conservative-minded Berliners. Here he is in his words—and this goes a long way to explaining just why the Nazis thought his work was degenerate and banned it: “My drawings expressed my hate and my despair. I sketched drunks, puking men, men shaking their fists at the moon. I drew a man, his face filled with horror, washing blood from his hands. . . . I drew a cross section of a tenement house: through one window could be seen a man beating up his wife; through another two people making love; from a third hung a man, his body covered with flies. I drew soldiers without noses, war cripples with crab-like steel arms; I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit having a medical for military duty. I also wrote poetry.” He emigrated to the USA in 1933, returning to Berlin in 1956, where he died, in 1959.
Thea von Harbou was a German screenwriter married to Fritz Lang, the film director. Her screenplays include the Dr. Mabuse films, Metropolis, and M. She and Lang divorced in April 1933, soon after Hitler came to power. She was loyal to the new regime, which may have had something to do with it. Imprisoned by the British after the war and subject to denazification, she died in 1954. M was released in May 1931; the leading detective in the story, Inspector Karl Lohmann, is based on Ernst Gennat.
Theo Wolff was editor of the Berliner Tageblatt until 1933, when the Nazis took control of the paper. It was finally shut down by the Nazis in 1939.
Walter Gempp was head of the Berlin firefighting department at the time of the Reichstag fire, in February 1933; in March 1933 he was dismissed from the fire department for suggesting that the Nazis had had a hand in the fire. In 1937 Gempp was arrested and accused of malfeasance. He was sent to prison, where he was strangled in his cell.
The biggest criminal rings in Germany were the Grosser Ring, the Freier Bund, and the Frei Vereinigung; these were all part of a larger syndicate called the Middle German Ring.
The Sing Sing Club really did have an electric chair; it was closed down by the Nazis in 1933.
The Threepenny Opera opened at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on August 31, 1928. Despite an initially poor reception, it became a great success and played almost four hundred times over the next two years. But both Brecht and Weill were forced to leave Germany in 1933. Lotte Lenya also left Germany in 1933; she and Weill remained together until 1933, when they divorced. But they remarried in New York in 1935, and the marriage lasted until Weill’s death in 1950. Lotte Lenya died in Manhattan in 1981.
Otto Dix was a friend and contemporary of George Grosz; his works are perhaps even more visceral: some remind one of Goya at his darkest. He was also regarded as a degenerate artist and was obliged to leave Germany in 1933; he did not return until after the war and died in Baden-Württemberg, in July 1969.
The Cabaret of the Nameless, which reminds me of Pop Idol and anything with Simon Cowell, was closed in 1932.
About the Author
Philip Kerr was the New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Bernie Gunther novels, three of which--Field Gray, The Lady from Zagreb, and Prussian Blue--were finalists for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Kerr has also won several Shamus Awards and the British Crime Writers' Association Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction. Just before his death in 2018, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. as P.B. Kerr, he is the author of the much-loved young adult fantasy series Children of the Lamp.
* There is some confusion about his formal titles: According to his daughter Hilde Horton, nee Weiss, he was both chief of the Berlin Criminal Police and vice president of the Berlin police during the Weimar Republic (Weiner Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, https://portal.ehri-project.eu/units/gb-003348-wl1768). Moreover, Philip translated the title Polizeivizepräsident as both “deputy police president” and “deputy police commissioner.” Although our team at Putnam made a valiant attempt to identify the preferred titles, in this—though nowhere else—their search was unsuccessful, and we decided to acknowledge the inconsistency, which may well be what Philip intended all along.
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