by Philip Kerr
“Any convictions?”
Most Germans thought whores were little better than criminals, but I’d known enough joy ladies in my life to recognize that many of them were much better than that. Often they were thoughtful, cultured, clever. Besides, this one wasn’t exactly a grasshopper. She was quite used to behaving herself in a big hotel like the Adlon. She wasn’t a lady, but she could pass herself off as one.
“Me? None so far.”
And yet. All my experience as a policeman told me not to trust her. Then again, my recent experience as a German told me not to trust anyone.
“All right. Come to my office. I have a proposition for you.”
She stopped on the stairs. “I don’t do a soup kitchen, mister.”
“Relax. I’m not after one. Besides, I’m the romantic kind. At the very least I expect to be taken to dinner at the Kroll Garden. I like flowers and champagne and a box of chocolates from von Hövel. Then, if I like the lady, I might let her take me shopping at Gersons. But I have to warn you. It could be a while before I feel sufficiently comfortable to spend the weekend with you in Baden-Baden.”
“You have expensive taste, Herr . . . ?”
“Gunther.”
“I approve. It coincides with my own, almost exactly.”
“I had a feeling it would.”
We went into the detectives’ office. It was a windowless room with a camp bed, an empty fireplace, a chair, a desk, and a washbasin. There were a razor and a shaving mug on a shelf above the basin, and an ironing board and a steam iron so that one could press a shirt and look vaguely respectable. Fritz Muller, the other house detective, had left a strong smell of sweat in the room, but the smell of cigarettes and boredom was all mine. Her nose wrinkled with disgust.
“So this is life belowstairs, huh? No offense, mister, but by the standard of the rest of the hotel, it’s kind of crummy in here.”
“By that standard, so is the Charlottenburg Palace. Now, about that proposition, Fräulein . . . ?”
“Bauer. Dora Bauer.”
“Your real name?”
“You wouldn’t like it if I gave you another.”
“And you can prove that.”
“Mister, this is Germany.”
She opened her bag to display several documents. One of them, in red pigskin, caught my eye.
“You’re a Party member?”
“Doing what I do, it’s always advisable to have the best documentation. This one turns away all sorts of unwelcome questions. Most cops leave you alone as soon as they see a Party card.”
“I don’t doubt it. What’s the yellow one?”
“My Reich Chamber of Culture card. When I’m not typing or selling mouse, I’m an actress. I figured being a Party member might get me a few parts. But not so far. Last play I had was Pandora’s Box at the Kammerspiele on Schumannstrasse. I was Lulu. That was three years ago. So I type for Herr Weiss at Odol and dream of something better. So what’s the pitch?”
“Only this. We get a lot of businessmen here at the Adlon. Quite a few of them need the services of a temporary stenographer. They pay well. Much more than the going rate in an office. Maybe not as good as what you’d make on your back in an hour, but a lot better than Odol. Plus, it’s honest, and above all, it’s safe. And it would mean you could come in and out of the Adlon quite legitimately.”
“Are you serious?” There was real interest and excitement in her tone of voice. “Work here? At the Adlon? Really?”
“Of course I’m serious.”
“On the level?”
I smiled and nodded.
“You smile, Gunther, but believe me, these days there’s something dodgy about nearly all jobs a girl is offered.”
“Do you think Herr Weiss would give you a reference?”
“If I asked him nicely he’d give me anything.” She smiled vainly. “Thanks. Thanks a lot, Gunther.”
“Just don’t let me down, Dora. If you do—” I shook my head. “Just don’t, all right? Who knows? You might even end up marrying the minister of the interior. With what’s in your handbag I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”
“Hey, you’re one of the workers, do you know that?”
“I wish I was, Dora, I wish to God I was.”
5
THE VERY NEXT DAY the guest in suite 114 reported a theft. This was one of the VIP corner rooms, right over the offices of North German Lloyd, and, accompanied by Herr Behlert, the hotel manager, I went along to interview him.
Max Reles was a German American from New York. Tall, powerful, balding, with feet like shoe boxes and fists as big as two basketballs, he resembled a cop more than a businessman—at least, a cop who could afford to buy silk ties from Sparmann and his suits (assuming he didn’t pay attention to the Jewish boycott) from Rudolf Hertzog. He wore cologne and diamond cuff links that were almost as polished and shiny as his shoes.
Behlert and I advanced into the suite, and Reles looked at him and then at me with eyes as narrow as his mouth. His bare-knuckle features seemed to wear a permanent scowl. I’d seen less pugnacious faces on a church wall.
“Well, it’s about fucking time,” he said gruffly, giving me an up-and-down look as if I were the rawest recruit in his platoon. “What are you? A cop? Hell, you look like a cop.” He looked at Behlert with something close to pity and added, “God damn it, Behlert, what kind of flea circus are you chumps running here, anyway? Jesus Christ, if this is Berlin’s best hotel, then I’d hate to see the worst. I thought you Nazis were supposed to be tough on crime. That’s your big boast, isn’t it? Or is that just so much bullshit for the masses?”
Behlert tried to calm Reles, but to no avail. I decided to let him sound off for a while.
Through a set of tall French windows there was a large stone balcony, where, depending on your inclination, you could wave to your adoring public or rant about the Jews. Maybe both. I went over to the window, pulled aside the net curtain, and stared outside, waiting for him to cool off. If ever he cooled off. I had my doubts about that. He spoke excellent German for an American, although he sang his words a bit more than we Berliners do, a bit like a Bayer, which gave it away.
“You won’t find the thief out there, fellow.”
“Nevertheless, that’s probably where he is,” I said. “I can’t imagine the thief is still in the hotel. Can you?”
“What’s that? German logic? God damn it, what’s the matter with you people? You might try and look a little more concerned.”
He hurled a gas grenade of a cigar at the window in front of me. Behlert sprang forward and picked it up. It was that or let the rug burn.
“Perhaps if you were to tell us what’s missing, sir,” I said, facing him squarely. “And exactly what makes you think it’s been stolen?”
“What makes me think? Jesus, are you calling me a liar?”
“Not at all, Herr Reles. I wouldn’t dream of doing that until I had ascertained all of the facts.”
Reles’s scowl turned to puzzlement as he tried to figure out if I was being insulting or not. I wasn’t exactly sure about that myself.
Meanwhile, Behlert was holding the crystal ashtray in front of Reles like an altar boy preparing to help a priest give communion. The cigar itself, wet and brown, resembled something left there by a small dog, and perhaps that was why Reles himself seemed to think better of putting it back in his mouth. He sneered biliously and waved the thing away with the back of his hand, which was when I noticed the diamond rings on his little fingers, not to mention his perfectly manicured, pink fingernails. It was like discovering a rose at the bottom of a boxer’s spittoon.
With Behlert standing between me and Reles, I half expected him to remind us of the rules of the ring. I didn’t much like loudmouthed Amis, even the ones who were loud in perfect German, and outside of the hotel I would hardly have minded showing it.
“So what’s your story, Fritz?” Reles asked me. “You look too young to be a house detective. That’s a job for a retired
cop, not a punk like you. Unless, of course, you’re a commie. The Nazis wouldn’t want a cop that was a commie. Fact is, I’m none too fond of the reds myself.”
“I’d hardly be working here if I was a red, Herr Reles. The hotel flower arranger wouldn’t like that. She prefers white to red. And so do I. Besides, it’s not my story that matters right now, it’s yours. So let’s try to concentrate on that, eh? Look, sir, I can see you’re upset. Helen Keller could see that you’re upset, but unless we can all keep calm and establish what happened here, we won’t get anywhere.”
Reles grinned and then snatched the cigar back just as Behlert was taking away the ashtray. “Helen Keller, eh?” He chuckled and put the cigar back in his mouth, puffing it back into life. But the tobacco seemed to smoke the traces of good humor out of him, and he returned to his resting state, which seemed to be that of low rage. He pointed at a chest of drawers. Like most of the furniture in his suite, it was blond Biedermeier and looked as if it had been baked in a glaze of honey.
“On top of that cabinet was a little basketry-and-lacquer Chinese box. It was early seventeenth century, Ming dynasty, and it was valuable. I had it parceled up and ready to send to someone in the States. I’m not exactly sure when it disappeared. Might have been yesterday. Might have been the day before.”
“How big was this box?”
“About twenty inches long, about a foot wide, three or four inches deep.”
I tried to work that out in metric and gave up.
“There’s a distinctive scene painted on the lid. Some Chinese officials sitting around on the edge of a lake.”
“Are you a collector of Chinese art, sir?”
“Hell, no. It’s too . . . Chinese for my tastes. I like my art to look a little more homegrown.”
“Since it was parceled, do you think you might have asked the concierge to have it collected and forgotten about it? Sometimes we’re too efficient for our own good.”
“Not so, as I’ve noticed,” he said.
“If you could answer the question, please.”
“You were a cop, weren’t you?” Reles sighed and combed his hair with the flat of his hand, as if checking it was still there. It was, but only just. “I checked, okay? No one sent it.”
“Then I have one more question, sir. Who else has access to this room? It could be someone with a key, perhaps. Or someone you’ve invited up here.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning just what I said. Can you think of someone who might have taken the box?”
“You mean apart from the maid?”
“Naturally, I’ll be asking her.”
Reles shook his head. Behlert cleared his throat and lifted his hand to interrupt.
“There is someone, surely,” he said.
“What are you talking about, Behlert?” snarled Reles.
The manager pointed at a desk by the window, where, between two sheaves of notepaper, sat a shiny new Torpedo portable typewriter. “Wasn’t Fräulein Szrajbman coming in here every day to do some shorthand and typing for you? Until a couple of days ago?”
Reles bit his knuckle. “Goddamn bitch,” he said, and flung away his cigar again. This time it flew through the door of the en-suite bathroom, hit the porcelain-tiled wall, and landed safely in the U-boat-sized bath. Behlert lifted his eyebrows clean off his forehead and went to retrieve it once again.
“You’re right,” I said. “I was a cop. I worked Homicide for almost ten years until my allegiance to the old republic and the basic principles of justice made me surplus to the new requirements. But along the way I developed a pretty good nose for criminal investigation. So. It’s clear to me you think she took it and, what’s more, that you’ve got a pretty good idea why. If we were in a police station I might ask you about that. But since you’re a guest in this hotel, it’s up to you whether you tell us or not. Sir.”
“We argued about money,” he said quietly. “About the number of hours she’d worked.”
“Is that all?”
“Of course. What are you implying, mister?”
“I’m not implying anything. But I knew Fräulein Szrajbman quite well. She was very conscientious. That’s why the Adlon recommended her to you in the first place.”
“She’s a thief,” Reles said, flatly. “What the hell are you going to do about it?”
“I’ll put the matter into the hands of the police right away, sir, if that’s what you want.”
“You’re damn right I do. Just tell your old pals to swing by, and I’ll swear out a warrant or whatever you flatfoots do in this sausage factory you call a country. Soon as they like. Now, get the hell out of here before I lose my temper.”
At that I almost told him he’d have to keep his temper before he could ever lose it, and that while his parents might have taught him to speak good German, they certainly hadn’t taught him any good German manners to go with it. Instead I kept my mouth shut, which, as Hedda Adlon was fond of telling me, is a large part of running a good hotel.
The fact that it was now also a large part of being a good German was neither here nor there.
6
A COUPLE OF SCHUPOS wearing puttees and rubber macs against the driving rain were standing on duty by the main entrance of the Police Praesidium on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. The word “praesidium” comes from the Latin meaning “protection,” but given that the Alex was now under the control of a bunch of thugs and murderers, it was hard to see who was protecting whom from whom. The two uniformed cops had a similar problem. Recognizing my face, they didn’t know whether to salute or batter me to the ground.
As usual, the main entrance hall smelled of cigarettes, cheap coffee, unwashed bodies, and sausage. I was arriving just as the local wurst seller had turned up to sell boiled sausage to those cops who were lunching at their desks. The Max—they were always known as Max—wore a white coat, a top hat, and, as was traditional, a little mustache he’d drawn onto his face with an eyebrow pencil. His mustaches were longer than I remembered and probably would continue to be that way while Hitler continued with a postage stamp on his own upper lip. But I often wondered if anyone had ever dared ask Hitler if he could smell gas, because that was what he looked like: a gas sniffer. Sometimes you saw these men fitting long pipes into holes in the road and then sniffing the open ends for escaping gas. It always gave them the same telltale smudge on the upper lip.
“Haven’t seen you in a while, Herr Commissar,” said the Max. The large square metal boiler hanging from a strap around his neck looked like a steam-powered accordion.
“I’ve been away for a while. It must have been something I ate.”
“Very amusing, sir, I’m sure.”
“You tell him, Bernie,” said a voice. “We’ve got more than enough sausage at the Alex, but not nearly enough laughs.”
I looked around and saw Otto Trettin coming through the entrance hall.
“What the hell are you doing back here?” he asked. “Don’t say you’re another March violet.”
“I came to report a crime at the Adlon.”
“The biggest crime at the Adlon is what they charge for a plate of sausage, eh, Max?”
“Too right, Herr Trettin.”
“But after that,” I said, “I was planning to buy you a beer.”
“Beer first,” said Otto. “Then report the crime.”
Otto and I went across the road to the Zum, in the arches of the local S-Bahn station. Cops liked it there because with a train passing overhead every few minutes it was hard to be overheard. And I imagined this was especially important in Otto Trettin’s case, since it was generally known that he fiddled his expenses and, probably, was not averse to having his bread spread with some very dodgy butter. He was still a good cop, however, one of the Alex’s best from the days before the police purge, and although he wasn’t a Party member, the Nazis seemed to like him. Otto had always been a bit heavy-handed: he had famously handed out a beating to the Sass brothers, which, at that time, was a s
erious breach of police ethics, although they had certainly deserved it, and, doubtless, this was one of the reasons that had helped him to find favor with the new government. The Nazis liked a bit of rough justice. To that extent it was perhaps surprising I wasn’t working there myself.
“I’ll have a Landwehr Top,” said Trettin.
“Make that two,” I told the barman.
Named after Berlin’s famous canal in which the water’s surface was often polluted with a layer of oil or gasoline, a Landwehr Top was a beer with a brandy in it. We hurried them down and ordered two more.
“You’re a bastard, Gunther,” said Otto. “Now that you’ve left, I’ve got no one to talk to. No one I can trust, that is.”
“What about your beloved coauthor, Erich?”
Trettin and Erich Liebermann von Sonnenberg had published a book together the previous year. Criminal Cases was little more than a series of stories cobbled together from a trawl through KRIPO’s oldest files. But no one doubted that the two had made money from it. Fiddling his expenses, ramping up the overtime, taking the odd back-hander, and now with a book already translated into English, Otto Trettin always seemed to know how to make money.
“Erich? We don’t see much of each other now that he’s head of Berlin KRIPO. Head’s up his arse with his own self-importance these days. You left me sitting in the ink, do you know that?”
“I can’t feel sorry for you. Not after I read your lousy book. You wrote up one of my cases and you didn’t even give me the credit. You gave the bracelets on that one to von Bachman. I could have understood it if he was a Nazi. But he’s not.”
“He paid me to write him up. A hundred marks, to make him look good.”
“You’re joking.”
“No, I’m not. Not that it matters now. He’s dead.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Sure you did. You’ve just forgotten, that’s all. Berlin’s like that these days. All sorts of people are dead and we forget about it. Fatty Arbuckle. Stefan George. Hindenburg. The Alex is no different. Take that cop who got murdered the other day. We’ve already forgotten his name.”