by Philip Kerr
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Dedication
PART ONE - Berlin, 1934
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
PART TWO - Havana, February 1954
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
ALSO BY PHILIP KERR
THE BERNIE GUNTHER BOOKS
The Berlin Noir trilogy
March Violets
The Pale Criminal
A German Requiem
The One from the Other
A Quiet Flame
A Philosophical Investigation
Dead Meat
The Grid
Esau
A Five-Year Plan
The Second Angel
The Shot
Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton
Hitler’s Peace
FOR CHILDREN
Children of the Lamp
The Akhenaten Adventure
The Blue Djinn of Babylon
The Cobra King of Kathmandu
The Day of the Djinn Warriors
The Eye of the Forest
One Small Step
A MARIAN WOOD BOOK
Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons
Publishers Since 1838
a member of the Penguin Group
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Originally published in the United Kingdom by Quercus in 2009
First U.S. edition copyright © 2010 by Philip Kerr
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kerr, Philip.
If the dead rise not: a Bernie Gunther novel / Philip Kerr.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-18603-9
1. Gunther, Bernhard (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Germany—
Fiction. 3. Nazis—Fiction. 4. Germany—History—1933-1945—Fiction.
5. Berlin (Germany)—Fiction. 6. Havana (Cuba)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6061.E
823’.914—dc22
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party web-sites or their content.
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That I have fought with beasts at Ephesus after the manner of men, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not again? Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die.
—FROM THE 1559 BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
For Caradoc King
PART ONE
Berlin, 1934
1
IT WAS THE SORT OF SOUND you hear in the distance and mistake for something else: a dirty steam barge puffing along the River Spree; the shunting of a slow locomotive underneath the great glass roof of the Anhalter Station; the hot, impatient breath of some enormous dragon, as if one of the stone dinosaurs in Berlin’s zoo had come to life and was now lumbering up Wilhelmstrasse. It hardly seemed like something musical until you guessed it was a military brass band, but even then it was too mechanical to resemble man-made music. Suddenly the air was filled with the clash of cymbals and the tinkling of frame glockenspiels, and at last I saw it—a detachment of soldiers marching as if intent on making work for the road menders. Just looking at these men made my feet hurt. They came clock-stepping along the street, their Mauser carbines shouldered on the left, their muscular right arms swinging with a pendulum-like exactitude between elbow and eagle-embossed belt buckle, their gray steel-helmeted heads held high and their thoughts, assuming they had any, occupied with nonsense about one folk, one leader, one empire—with Germany!
People stopped to stare and to salute the traffic jam of Nazi flags and banners the soldiers were carrying—an entire haberdasher’s store of red and black and white curtain material. Others came running, full of patriotic enthusiasm to do the same. Children were hoisted onto broad shoulders or slipped through a policeman’s legs so as not to miss anything. Only the man standing next to me seemed less than enthusiastic.
“You mark my words,” he said. “That crazy idiot Hitler means to have another war with England and France. As if we didn’t lose enough men the last time. All this marching up and down makes me sick. It might have been God who invented the devil, but it was Austria that gave us the Leader.”
The man uttering these words had a face like the Golem of Prague and a barrel-shaped body that belonged on a beer cart. He wore a short leather coat and a cap with a peak that grew straight out of his forehead. He had ears like an Indian elephant, a mustache like a toilet brush, and more chins than the Shanghai telephone directory. Even before he flicked
the end of his cigarette at the brass band and hit the bass drum, a gap had opened around this ill-advised commentator, as if he were carrying a deadly disease. And no one wanted to be around when the Gestapo showed up with its own idea of a cure.
I turned away and walked quickly down Hedemann Strasse. It was a warm day, almost the end of September, when a word like “summer” made me think of something precious that was soon to be forgotten. Like freedom and justice. “Germany awake” was the slogan on everyone’s lips, only it appeared to me that we were clock-stepping in our sleep toward some terrible but as yet unknown disaster. This didn’t mean I was ever going to be foolish enough to say so in public, and certainly not when strangers were listening. I had principles, sure, but I also had all my own teeth.
“Hey you,” said a voice behind me. “Stop a minute. I want to talk to you.”
I kept on walking, and it was not until Saarland Strasse—formerly Königgrätzer Strasse, until the Nazis decided we all needed to be reminded about the Treaty of Versailles and the injustice of the League of Nations—that the owner of the voice caught up with me.
“Didn’t you hear me?” he said. Taking hold of my shoulder, he pushed me up against an advertising column and showed me a bronze warrant disc on the palm of his hand. From this it was hard to tell if he was local or state criminal police, but from what I knew about Hermann Goering’s new Prussian police, only the lower ranks carried bronze beer tokens. No one else was on the pavement, and the advertising column shielded us from the view of anyone on the road. Not that there was much real advertising pasted on it. These days, advertising was just a sign telling a Jew to keep off the grass.
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
“The man who spoke treasonably about the Leader. You must have heard what he said. You were standing right next to him.”
“I don’t remember hearing anything treasonable about the Leader,” I said. “I was listening to the band.”
“So why did you suddenly walk away?”
“I remembered that I had an appointment.”
The cop’s cheeks flushed a little. It wasn’t a pleasant face. He had dark, shadowy eyes; a rigid, sneering mouth; and a rather salient jaw. It was a face that had nothing to fear from death since it already looked like a skull. If Goebbels had a taller, more rabidly Nazi brother, then this man might have been him.
“I don’t believe you,” the cop said, and, snapping his fingers impatiently, added, “Identification card, please.”
The “please” was nice, but I still hardly wanted to let him see my identification. Section eight of page two detailed my profession by training and in fact. And since I was no longer a policeman but a hotel employee, it was as good as telling him I wasn’t a Nazi. Worse than that. A man who had been obliged to leave the Berlin detective force because of his allegiance to the old Weimar Republic might be just the type to ignore someone speaking treason about the Leader. If treason was what that was. But I knew the cop would probably arrest me just to spoil my day, and arrest would very likely mean two weeks in a concentration camp.
He snapped his fingers again and glanced away, almost bored. “Come on, come on, I haven’t got all day.”
For a moment, I just bit my lip, irritated at being pushed around yet again, not just by this cadaver-faced cop but by the whole Nazi state. I’d been forced out of my job as a senior detective with KRIPO—a job I had loved—and been made to feel like a pariah because of my adherence to the old Weimar Republic. The Republic’s faults had been many, it was true, but at least it had been democratic. And since its collapse, Berlin, the city of my birth, was hardly recognizable. Previously it had been the most liberal place in the world. Now it felt like a military parade ground. Dictatorships always look good until someone starts giving you dictation.
“Are you deaf! Let’s see that damned card!” The cop snapped his fingers again.
My irritation turned to anger. I reached inside my jacket for the card with my left hand, turning my body just far enough around to disguise my right hand becoming a fist. And when I buried it in his gut, my whole body was behind it.
I hit him too hard. Much too hard. The blow took all the air out of him and then some. You hit a man in the gut like that, he stays hit for a good long while. I held the cop’s unconscious body against me for a moment and then waltzed him through the revolving door of the Kaiser Hotel. My anger was already turning to something resembling panic.
“I think this man has suffered some kind of a seizure,” I told the frowning doorman, and dumped the cop’s body into a leather armchair. “Where are the house phones? I’ll call an ambulance.”
The doorman pointed around the corner of the front desk.
I loosened the cop’s tie for effect and behaved as if I were headed for the telephones. But as soon as I was around the corner, I walked through a service door and down some stairs before exiting the hotel through the kitchens. Emerging into an alley that gave onto Saarland Strasse, I walked quickly into Anhalter Station. For a moment I considered boarding a train. Then I saw the subway tunnel connecting the station with the Excelsior, which was Berlin’s second-best hotel. No one would ever think to look for me in there. Not so close to an obvious means of escape. Besides, there was an excellent bar in the Excelsior. There’s nothing like knocking out a policeman to give you a thirst.
2
I WENT STRAIGHT INTO THE BAR, ordered a large schnapps, and hurried it down like it was the middle of January.
The Excelsior was full of cops, but the only one I recognized was the house detective, Rolf Kuhnast. Before the purge of 1933, Kuhnast had been with the Potsdam political police and might reasonably have expected to join the Gestapo except for two things: One was that it had been Kuhnast who had led the team detailed to arrest SA leader Count Helldorf in April 1932, following Hindenburg’s orders to forestall a possible Nazi coup. The other was that Helldorf was now the police president of Potsdam.
“Hey,” I said.
“Bernie Gunther. What brings the Adlon Hotel’s house detective into the Excelsior?” he asked.
“I always forget that this is a hotel. I came in to buy a train ticket.”
“You’re a funny guy, Bernie. Always were.”
“I’d be laughing myself but for all these cops. What’s going on here? I know the Excelsior’s the Gestapo’s favorite watering hole, but usually they don’t make it quite so obvious. There are guys with foreheads in here who look like they just walked out of the Neander Valley. On their knuckles.”
“We got ourselves a VIP,” explained Kuhnast. “Someone from the American Olympic Committee is staying here.”
“I thought the Kaiserhof was the official Olympic hotel.”
“It is. But this was a last-minute thing, and the Kaiserhof couldn’t put him up.”
“Then I guess the Adlon must have been full as well.”
“Take a flick at me,” said Kuhnast. “Be my guest. Those oxtails from the Gestapo have been flicking my ears all day. So some shit-smart fellow from the great Adlon Hotel coming around to straighten my tie for me is all I need.”
“I’m not taking a flick at you, Rolf. Honest. Here, why don’t you let me buy you a drink?”
“I’m surprised that you can afford it, Bernie.”
“I don’t mind getting it free. A house bull’s not doing his job unless he’s got something on the barman. Drop by the Adlon sometime and I’ll show you how philanthropic our hotel barman can be when he’s been caught with his hand in the till.”
“Otto? I don’t believe it.”
“You don’t have to, Rolf. But Frau Adlon will, and she’s not as understanding as me.” I ordered another. “Come on, have a drink. After what just happened to me, I need something to tighten my bowels.”
“What happened?”
“Never you mind. Let’s just say that beer won’t fix it.”
I tossed the schnapps after the other one.
Kuhnast shook his head. “I’d like to, Bernie. But Herr E
lschner won’t like it if I’m not around to stop these Nazi bastards from stealing the ashtrays.”
These apparently indiscreet words were guided by an awareness of my own republican-minded past. But he still felt the need for caution. So he walked me out of the bar, through the entrance hall, and into the Palm Court. It was easier to speak freely when no one could hear what we were saying above the Excelsior’s orchestra. These days the weather’s the only really safe thing to talk about in Germany.
“So, the Gestapo are here to protect some Ami?” I shook my head. “I thought Hitler didn’t like Amis.”
“This particular Ami is taking a tour of Berlin to decide if we’re fit to host the Olympic Games in two years’ time.”
“There are two thousand workers to the west of Charlottenburg who are under the strong impression we’re already hosting them.”
“It seems there’s a lot of Amis that want to boycott the Olympiad on the grounds of our government’s anti-Semitism. The Ami is here on a f act-finding mission to see for himself if Germany discriminates against Jews.”
“For a blindingly obvious fact-finding mission like that, I’m surprised he bothered checking into a hotel.”
Rolf Kuhnast grinned back. “From what I’ve heard, it’s a mere formality. Right now he’s up in one of our function rooms getting a list of facts put together for him by the Ministry of Propaganda.”
“Oh, those kinds of facts. Well, sure, we wouldn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea about Hitler’s Germany, now, would we? I mean, it’s not that we have anything against the Jews. But, hey, there’s a new chosen people in town.”
It was hard to see why an American might be prepared to ignore the new regime’s anti-Jewish measures. Especially when there were so many egregious examples of it all over the city. Only a blind man could have failed to notice the grossly offensive cartoons on the front pages of the more rabidly Nazi newspapers, the David stars painted on the windows of Jewish-owned stores, and the German Only signs in the public parks—to say nothing of the real fear that was in the eyes of every Jew in the Fatherland.