by Philip Kerr
I went downstairs, helped myself to some more cigarettes and a large schnapps from a bottle on a silver tray in the library—the best kind, made from the best fruit, which in this case was pears, and probably Austrian, as the finest schnapps usually is, and like eating the most delicious pear you’ve ever eaten only to discover that it was a wonderful, magic pear and that the effect extends far beyond the mouth into every corner of the human body like a benign witch’s spell. I quickly poured another and felt a smile spread on my face like a cloud shifting away from the sun. The bottle was too good to leave lying around in a place like that. If ever anything needed rescuing from the Nazis, it was that bottle.
The last lecture of the day was now over and the delegates were starting to drift out of the main hall. I swallowed the schnapps and, after a certain amount of talk was splashed about, I ushered Captain Meyer and his somber companion out to the car.
“I’m afraid it was all downhill after you left,” declared Meyer. “Very dull indeed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t mind telling you that I’ve been looking forward to meeting you again all day.”
I’d been working on my smile and quickly deployed it as I opened the car door.
“But it’s always nice to be back in Berlin,” he added politely.
“How about you, Lieutenant—?”
“Leuthard,” said the man dully.
“Are you enjoying Berlin?”
“No,” he said. “I never liked it here much before. And I like it even less now.”
Captain Meyer laughed. “Ueli says what’s on his mind, generally.”
“That’s not recommended in Berlin.”
We drove north, straight up the old AVUS speedway and then east onto Bismarckstrasse where, outside the Grand Hotel am Knie, I parked the car and gestured the two Swiss inside.
“Shall we?”
Lieutenant Leuthard stared sourly up at the hotel’s tall façade with its twin bell towers and steep Dutch gable, lit a cigarette, and then checked his watch. I made a mental note of the size of his hands and his shoulders and resolved not to have any kind of disagreement with him. He might have been Swiss but he didn’t look like the kind of man whose neutrality you could depend on.
“Is this a better hotel than the Adlon?” he asked.
“No. Not in my opinion.”
“What makes you say so?”
“Before the war, I worked at the Adlon,” I said.
“My father’s in the hotel business,” he said. “I thought I might go into that myself. After the war.”
“With your skill for diplomacy, it’s a sure thing you’d be successful.”
Leuthard smiled a patient sort of smile.
“If you’ll forgive me,” he said, “I’ve heard enough waffle for one day. I’m going for a walk. To stretch my legs. I’ll see you in the opera house foyer in one hour, Captain. Sir.” Then he fixed his kepi on his head and walked east on Berliner Strasse, in the direction of the Tiergarten.
“Sorry about that,” said Meyer. “Ueli is a difficult character, at the best of times. A bit hotheaded, frankly. But I think he’s a good policeman.”
We sat down outside the hotel entrance under the large awning that covered the open-air bar and ordered some beers, for which I felt obliged to apologize in advance.
“The best beer is in short supply,” I said.
“Believe me, things are just as bad in Switzerland. We’re a landlocked country, as you know, and totally dependent on Germany’s goodwill for our survival. Which isn’t easy to maintain, given certain recent events.”
I shrugged, unaware of what recent events he might have been referring to.
“I’m talking about Maurice Bavaud,” explained Meyer. “The Swiss theology student who tried to shoot Hitler in 1938. He was executed last year.”
I shrugged. “Speaking for myself, I’m not about to hold a little thing like that against you all.”
Meyer chuckled. “Schellenberg was right. You are an excellent detective, but a very poor Nazi. I wonder how you’ve stayed alive for so long.”
“This is Berlin. Most of the time people don’t notice when you call a child nasty names. It’s not just Lieutenant Leuthard who hates us. It’s our masters, too. Been that way since Bismarck’s time. We’re constitutionally ungovernable. A bit like the Paris mob, but with uglier women.”
He laughed. “You’re a most amusing man. I’m sure my wife, Patrizia, would love to meet you. If you’re ever in Switzerland, you must look us up.”
He gave me a stiff little card that had more names and more addresses than a Maltese confidence man.
“Sure. I’m often in your neck of the woods. Actually, my bankers in Zurich think I should move there permanently. But I like it here. There’s our famous air, for one thing. I’d miss that. Not to mention all our hard-won freedoms.”
“Seriously, though,” he said. “There’s an old murder case I’ve long been fascinated with. Happened in a place called Rapperswil. A woman was found dead in a boat. The local detective is a friend of mine. I’m sure he’d love to have the benefit of your insight. We both would.”
“The only insight I can offer you at the present moment is that hosting an international crime conference in Germany is like the Goths and the Vandals offering suggestions on new ways of tackling crimes against property during the sack of Rome. But it would certainly seem like a shame to go to Switzerland just to tell you this.”
The beers came and they were better than I had expected. But very expensive.
“Are you really a writer?” I asked.
“Of course. Why do you ask?”
“I never met a writer before. Especially one who was a policeman.”
Meyer shrugged. “I’m more on the intelligence side of things,” he explained.
“That explains why you know Schellenberg. He’s got a lot of intelligence. Maybe just enough to survive the war. We’ll see.”
“I like him. And he seems to like me.”
“How did you two meet?”
“In Bucharest. At the 1938 IKPK General Assembly, where it was proposed the IKPK headquarters be moved from Vienna to Geneva. Schellenberg was all for it. At least he was until your General Heydrich changed his mind for him.”
“He could be a very persuasive man when he wanted.”
“According to Schellenberg, it was Heydrich who brought you back into Kripo, wasn’t it? After five years in the cold.”
“Yes. But it wasn’t so cold. At least I didn’t think it was.”
“Schelli says there were some more murders he wanted you to solve. In 1938. Of some Jewish girls.”
“A lot of Jews have been murdered in this city.”
“But you know the ones I’m talking about. These were just before the infamous night of broken glass, weren’t they?”
I nodded.
“Would you tell me about them?”
“All right.”
From the pocket of his tunic Meyer now produced a notepad and a pencil. “Do you mind?”
“No, go right ahead. Only, you’d better wait until I’m dead before you write about this. Or better still, you’d better wait until another theology student comes along with a gun in his hand.”
We talked for about forty minutes and then I walked him along Bismarckstrasse to the German Opera House, where Leuthard was already waiting outside, looking more thuggish than before. You wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen him in an opera—Wagner’s, full of thugs with swords and wings on their helmets—but attending one was something else again. There was grass on the back of his tunic, as if he’d been lying in the Tiergarten. He walked toward me with a sort of smile on his face and a program in his hand, but I might just as easily have expected him to have been carrying a gun.
“What did you do?” Meyer
asked him.
“Nothing much,” said Leuthard. “Lay in the sun and slept for a little.”
“I’ll meet you back at the hotel after the show,” I said. “And then we can go to dinner. Or I’ll drive you back to the Adlon. Both, if you prefer.”
“I’m sure we could get you a ticket,” said Meyer.
“One thing you can’t knock about the opera is the music; it’s just a pity that they take so long to play it.”
“What will you do?”
“Don’t worry about me. I live not very far from here.”
“You know? I’d like to see the home of a real Berlin detective.”
“No, you wouldn’t. There’s no chemistry set, and no Persian slipper where I keep my tobacco. There’s not even a violin. The ordinariness of it would horrify a writer. You might never write another word again because of the disappointment. Besides, right now we’re not receiving visitors, on account of the fact that we’re waiting for a new guest book from Liebmann’s.”
“Well then. The Alex. I should like to see around the famous Alex.”
“Schellenberg will fix that for you. And now I’m going home. I’ll see you back here at ten o’clock.”
I walked back toward the Grand; but I didn’t go home. I had no intention of going home. Just around the corner was the municipal bathhouse where, two nights a week, Kirsten Handlöser—the schoolteacher I’d met in a boat on the Wannsee—went swimming. At least that was what she had told me. You never know with women. What they tell you and what they don’t tell you is a very long bridge across a very wide river with all kinds of fish.
The bathhouse was a big redbrick building with ceramic dolphins on the wall. Inside there was a handsome glass roof over a pool about thirty or forty meters long, and above the clock at the north end was a handsome-looking mural of some lakeside idyll: a couple of herons were watching a bearded man in a red toga trying to get the attention of a naked girl who was seated on a little grassy knoll. She looked like she was of two minds about whatever it was he was suggesting, but from where I was sitting it already looked too late for her to change her mind about anything very much except perhaps which bus she caught home.
I took a quick walk around the poolside but Kirsten wasn’t there and I certainly didn’t have the inclination to swim myself. Getting wet inside seemed like a better bet. I remembered that Dr. Heckholz had boasted of having an excellent schnapps. His office wasn’t so far away, on Bedeuten Strasse, and it was still early enough to find a hardworking lawyer in his office. Besides, I had news for him about Stiftung Nordhav, which was that I’d pushed an investigation about as far as it could go without getting myself into trouble.
I walked along Wallstrasse and instinctively looked to see if Heckholz’s office lights were on. Not that they needed to be: it was still light; and not that they would have been; if it had been dark there would have been a blackout, but old habits die hard. So I rang the bell and waited, and when nothing happened I rang all of them, which seldom works, only this time it did.
There was an elevator but as before I took the white marble stairs to the third floor and walked along the well-polished landing to the frosted-glass door, which, as before, was slightly ajar, only this time Dr. Heckholz wasn’t expecting me. He wasn’t expecting anyone. Not anymore. He was lying on the floor as if eavesdropping on the people in the office immediately below. But he wouldn’t have heard anyone or anything because he was quite dead. He couldn’t have looked more dead if he’d been lying on the side of a trench at Verdun with a bullet through his head.
Ten
The pool of blood on the white floorboards was right under the broken egg that was the dead lawyer’s skull, and as big as a bicycle wheel. You could see his brains under the blood and the bone, and it was clear to me that someone had hit him very hard, several times, with the bronze bust of Hitler that had previously been on the lawyer’s desk and which now lay discarded on the floor. There was blood on Hitler’s solemn face and tiny strands of Dr. Heckholz’s hair on top of the leader’s head. I almost laughed as if I could already hear myself telling the cops at the Berlin-Charlottenburg presidium that the victim had been murdered by Hitler. Instead I helped myself to some of the schnapps from a bottle on a silver tray by the window. My fingerprints were all over the door handles and the desktop anyway so it didn’t seem to matter that they’d be on a glass, too. Besides, if you can’t help yourself to a drink when you’re looking at a man with his head bashed in then I can’t see why the stuff was ever invented. And Heckholz had been right; it was an excellent schnapps, at least as good as the one I’d had at the Villa Minoux. I poured another. So much schnapps, only this time, so little to smile about.
I took another, closer look at the body. There was such a lot of blood. You always forget just how much there is inside a fully grown man, especially his head. You never forget the first time you ever see a man shot in the head, especially when you do it yourself. Sometimes it seems that there’s a natural spring of red that comes out of a person; and there is, of course, only that natural spring is called his life. And once that’s tapped it’s very hard to stop. Heckholz’s right hand, lying by his face, was surrounded with the stuff and it looked as if he’d dipped his finger in his own blood and used that to try to write something—perhaps the identity of his killer—but whatever it was I couldn’t make it out. I bent down to touch the pool of blood and rubbed it experimentally between my fingers; it was still quite viscous, as if poor Heckholz hadn’t been dead for very long.
I fetched his handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit and wiped my hands. A key chain led out of his trouser pocket on the floor like the body of a golden snake but there was no key on the end; that was in the safe, which was wide open like Ali Baba’s sesame, and immediately I saw that the motive for the murder hadn’t been robbery. Whatever was missing from the safe, it wasn’t money because there were several bundles of banknotes on the top shelf, just like the ones he’d sent to me at the Alex. I helped myself to the two hundred marks I’d been promised and left the rest for the murder boys at the local presidium. It was just around the corner on Bismarckstrasse. They’d probably built it there in case they had any trouble with the crowd at the German Opera. They were a rough lot, opera and ballet fans, as Nijinsky could probably have testified.
After a while I sat down in the meeting room where, just a few days before, I’d eaten those delicious pancakes. I had a lot to think about. I was going to have to tell the police, of course. The question was whether or not I was going to involve Frau Minoux in any of this. If I did, then it might come out that I’d been involved in paying off Arthur Müller, the private detective who’d been employed by the Berlin Gas Company to spy on her and see if she was hanging on to any of her husband’s property they could make a claim against. If that happened, Müller would go to prison, and so would I; Frau Minoux, too, if either one of us chose to give evidence against her. I didn’t see any reason to do any of that. Besides, I figured she had enough to deal with: a husband in the cement at Brandenburg. Saying very little looked like it was by far the best option; that was always the best option, with the Nazis in charge of things.
I went around the corner to the presidium on Kaiser-Strasse—a smaller version of the Alex—and then returned about half an hour later with a couple of plainclothes detectives, only one of whom I knew. Criminal commissar Friedrich Heimenz was an older man with a pipe and a manner as deliberate as a chess move, which he used to conceal the fact that he knew almost nothing about detective work, least of all how to investigate a murder. Before taking the promotion at Charlottenburg he’d been an inspector at the Grunewald Station, and the last time I’d seen him had been when we were both investigating the death of the air ace Ernst Udet. I figured the promotion was a reward for agreeing to the fiction that Udet’s death had been suicide and not murder. A small man with small hands, he looked like he’d just finished drying the dishes. And
right away he let it be known that he was looking for a free ride from me, hoping that I’d whitewash his curbstone so that he wouldn’t trip over his own feet in the blackout that was his mind.
“I suppose you’ll be wanting to take this case yourself, Herr Commissar,” he said.
“Me? Whatever gave you that idea? This is your jurisdiction, not mine. I’m not even on duty.”
“All the same, you’re the more experienced man.”
“I may have found this body but I’m still not welcome with the murder boys at Werderscher Markt. Besides, it wouldn’t be right. I couldn’t say I knew the man, exactly. But he sent me this letter inviting me to his office. And we spoke on the telephone. That was yesterday, and now here I am. A potential witness.”
I handed over the undated letter Heckholz had sent me at the Alex and five of the Albrechts I’d taken from his safe. But I kept back the envelope with the postmark.
“Who knows?” I added provocatively. “Maybe even a suspect.”
Heimenz read the letter and then nodded. “Did he say what he wanted to talk to you about?”
“He said he had a proposition for me and that there would be another hundred in it for me if I showed up.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
Heimenz nodded and brandished the money I’d given him. “I shall have to keep this for a while,” he said. “As evidence.”
“Be my guest.”
“You’ll get a receipt, of course.”
It was beginning to get dark. The other detective, an equally old sergeant—all the younger cops were in uniform—switched on a light, absently in the vain hope that it might illuminate their pedestrian thoughts.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I said. “You’ll have the RLB on your back.”
The RLB was the Air Raid Protection Squadron.
“Of course,” he said, and switched the light off again.
Heimenz looked down at the body with obvious distaste before finding his own handkerchief and pressing it to his mouth, as if he were going to vomit. Then he turned away and opened a window. “Horrible,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t think there would be so much blood.”