by Philip Kerr
“Oh, I know. I just heard him order a dozen bottles of champagne. All the same, he’s keeping some very ugly company.”
“Nonsense,” Behlert said, and walked away to find the sommelier, shaking his head. “Nonsense, nonsense.”
He was right, of course. After all, we were all of us keeping some very ugly company in Hitler’s new Germany. And perhaps the Leader was the ugliest of them all.
9
ROOM 210 WAS ON THE SECOND FLOOR in the Wilhelmstrasse extension. It cost sixteen marks a night, and came with an en-suite bathroom. It was a nice room and a few meters bigger than my apartment.
I got there at long past midday. Hanging on the door was a DO NOT DISTURB card and a pink form informing the room’s occupant that there was a message awaiting him at the front desk. His name was Herr Doctor Heinrich Rubusch, and the chambermaid usually would have left him alone, except that he was supposed to check out of the hotel at eleven. When she knocked at the door there was no reply, at which point she tried to enter the room, and found the key was still in the lock. After a great deal more fruitless knocking, she informed Herr Pieck, the assistant manager, who, fearing the worst, summoned me.
I went to the hotel safe to fetch one of the key turners that we kept in there—a simple piece of metal about the size of tuning fork designed to fit an Adlon keyhole and turn a key from the other side. There were supposed to be six turners, but one was gone, which probably meant Muller, the other hotel detective, had it and had forgotten to put it back. This would have been quite typical. Muller was a bit of a drunk. I took another key turner from the safe and went up to the second floor.
Herr Rubusch was still in bed. I hoped he’d wake up and shout at us to get out and let him get some sleep, but he didn’t. I put my fingers on the big vein on his neck, but there was so much fat on him that I soon gave up and, having opened his pajama jacket, pressed my ear to his cold ham of a chest.
“Shall I call Dr. Küttner?” asked Pieck.
“Yes. But tell him not to hurry. He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
I shrugged. “Staying in a hotel is a bit like life. At some stage you have to check out.”
“Oh, dear me, are you sure?”
“Baron Frankenstein couldn’t make this character move.”
The chambermaid standing in the doorway started crossing herself gravely. Pieck told her to go and fetch the house doctor at once.
I sniffed the water glass on his bedside table. It had water in it. The dead man’s fingernails were clean and polished as if he’d just had a manicure. There was no blood visible anywhere on his person or on his pillow. “Looks like natural causes, but we’d better wait for Küttner. I don’t get paid any extra for an on-the-spot diagnosis.”
Pieck walked toward the window and started to open it.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I said. “The police won’t like it.”
“The police?”
“When a dead body’s found, they like it if you tell them. That’s the law. Or at least it used to be. But, considering the number of bodies that turn up dead these days, who knows? In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a strong smell of perfume in the room. Blue Grass by Elizabeth Arden, if I’m not mistaken. Somehow I don’t see this gentleman choosing to wear it himself, which means there might have been someone with him when he stepped off the pavement. And that means the police will prefer things to be left the way they are now. With the window closed.”
I went into the bathroom and glanced over a neat array of men’s toiletries. It was the usual out-of-town crap. One of the hand towels was smeared with makeup. In the wastebasket was a tissue with a lipstick mark. I opened his toilet bag and found a bottle of nitroglycerin pills and a packet of three Fromms. I opened up the packet, saw that one was missing, and took out a little folded slip on which was printed: “Please discreetly hand me a packet of Fromms.” I lifted the lid on the toilet seat and checked the water in the lavatory. There was nothing in the water. In a wastepaper basket by the desk I found an empty Fromm wrapper. I did all the things a real detective would have done except make a tasteless joke. I was going to leave that to Dr. Küttner.
By the time he came through the door I was about to ready to toss him a probable cause, but professional courtesy made me hang on to it until he’d earned his retainer.
“People in expensive hotels are seldom ever really ill, you know,” he said. “At sixteen marks a night they usually wait until they’re back home to be really ill.”
“This one won’t be going home,” I said.
“Dead, is he?” said Küttner.
“It’s beginning to look that way, Herr Doctor.”
“Makes a change to be doing something for my fee, I suppose.”
He took out a stethoscope and set about looking for a heartbeat. “I had better go and inform Frau Adlon,” Pieck said, and left the room.
While Küttner worked his trade, I took another look at the body. Rubusch was a big, heavy man with short, fair hair and a face as fat as a hundred-kilo baby. In bed, from the side, he looked like a foothill in the Harz Mountains. Without his clothes it was hard to place him, but I was sure there was a reason other than the fact that he was staying in the hotel why he seemed familiar to me.
Küttner leaned back and nodded with what looked like satisfaction. “He’s been dead for several hours I should say.” Looking at his pocket watch, he added, “Sometime between the hours of midnight and six o’clock this morning.”
“There are some nitro pills in the bathroom, Doc,” I said. “I took the liberty of looking through his things.”
“Probably an enlarged heart.”
“An enlarged everything, by the look of him,” I said, and handed the doctor the little slip of folded paper. “And I do mean everything. There’s a packet of three minus one in the bathroom. That, plus some makeup on the towel and the smell of perfume in the air, leads me to suggest that, perhaps, the last few hours of his life may have included a very happy few minutes.”
By now I had noticed a clip of brand-new banknotes on the desk and was liking my theory more and more.
“You don’t think he died in her arms, do you?” asked Küttner.
“No. The door was locked from the inside.”
“So this poor fellow could have had sex, shown her out, locked the door, gone back to bed, and then expired after all the exertion and excitement.”
“You’ve got me convinced.”
“The useful thing about being a hotel doctor is that people such as yourself don’t ever get to see that my surgery is full of sick people. Consequently, I look like I actually know what I’m doing.”
“Don’t you?”
“Only some of the time. Most medicine comes down to just one prescription, you know. That you’ll feel a lot better in the morning.”
“He won’t.”
“There are worse ways to hit the slab, I suppose,” said Küttner.
“Not if you are married, there aren’t.”
“Was he? Married?”
I lifted the dead man’s left hand to show off a gold band.
“You don’t miss much, do you, Gunther?”
“Not much, give or take the old Weimar Republic and a proper police force that catches criminals instead of employing them.”
Küttner was no liberal, but he was no Nazi, either. A month or two earlier I had found him in the men’s room, weeping at the news of Paul von Hindenburg’s death. All the same, he looked alarmed at my remark, and for a moment he glanced down at Heinrich Rubusch’s body as if he might report my conversation to the Gestapo.
“Relax, Doc. Even the Gestapo haven’t yet worked out a way of making an informer out of a dead man.”
I WENT DOWNSTAIRS to the front and picked up the message for Rubusch, which was only from Georg Behlert expressing the hope that he had enjoyed his stay at the Adlon. I was checking the duty roster when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hedda Adlon coming through the entrance hall talk
ing to Pieck. This was my cue to hurry up and find out more before she could talk to me. Hedda Adlon seemed to have a high opinion of my abilities, and I wanted to keep it that way. The passkey to what I did for a living was having snappy answers to the questions other people hadn’t even thought about. An air of omniscience is a very useful quality in a god or, for that matter, a detective. Of course, with a detective, omniscience is just an illusion. Plato knew that. And it’s one of the things that made him a better writer than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Unseen by my employer, I stepped into the elevator car.
“Which floor?” asked the boy. His name was Wolfgang, and he was a boy of about sixty.
“Just drive.”
Smoothly, Wolfgang’s white gloves went into motion, like a magician’s, and I felt my stomach lower inside my torso as we ascended into Lorenz Adlon’s idea of heaven.
“Is there something on your mind, Herr Gunther?”
“Last night, did you see any joy ladies go up to the second floor?”
“A lot of ladies go up and down in this elevator car, Herr Gunther. Doris Duke, Barbara Hutton, the Soviet ambassador, the Queen of Siam, Princess Mafalda. It’s easy to see who and what they are. But some of these actresses, movie stars, showgirls, they all look like joy ladies to me. I guess that’s why I’m the elevator boy and not the house detective.”
“You’re right, of course.”
He grinned back at me. “A smart hotel’s a bit like a jeweler’s shop window. Everything is on show. Now that reminds me. I did see Herr Muller talking to a lady on the stairs at about two a.m. It’s possible she was a joy lady. Except for the fact she was wearing diamonds. Tiara, too. That makes me think she wasn’t a joy lady. I mean, if she could afford to be wearing mints, then why would she be letting people stroke her mouse? At the same time, if she was a little pinkie in the air, then what was she doing speaking to a sow’s bladder like Muller? No offense intended.”
“None taken. He is a sow’s bladder. Was this lady blond or brunette?”
“Blond. And plenty of it, too.”
“I’m relieved to hear it,” I said, mentally eliminating from my list of possible suspects Dora Bauer. She had short brown hair and was hardly the type to afford a tiara.
“ Anything else?”
“She wore a lot of perfume. Smelled real nice. Like she was Aphrodite herself.”
“I get the picture. Did you drive her?”
“No. She must have used the stairs.”
“Or maybe she just climbed on the back of a swan and flew straight out of the window. That’s what Aphrodite would have done.”
“Are you calling me a liar, sir?”
“No, not at all. Just an incurable romantic and lover of women in general.”
Wolfgang grinned. “That I am, sir.”
“Me, too.”
MULLER WAS IN THE OFFICE we shared, which was about all we shared. He hated me and, if I’d cared enough, I might have hated him back. Before coming to the Adlon he’d been a leather hat with the Potsdam police—a uniformed bull with an instinctive dislike of detectives from the Alex like me. He was also ex-Freikorps and more right wing than the Nazis, which was another reason he hated me: he hated all Republicans the way a wheat farmer hates rats. But for his drinking, he might have remained in the police. Instead he took early retirement, climbed on the temperance wagon for as long as it took to find himself the job at the Adlon, and started drinking again. Most of the time he could hold it, too, I’ll say that for him. Most of the time. I might have figured it was part of my job to put him out of a job, but I didn’t. Leastways, I hadn’t done it yet. Of course, we both knew it wouldn’t be long before Behlert or one of the Adlons found him drunk on the job. And I hoped it would happen without any help from me. But I knew I could probably live with the disappointment if this turned out not to be the case.
He was asleep in the chair. There was a half bottle of Bismarck on the floor beside his foot and an empty glass in his hand. He hadn’t shaved, and the sound of a heavy chest of drawers being rolled across a wooden floor was coming out of his nose and throat. He looked like an uninvited guest at a Brueghel peasant wedding. I slipped my hand into his coat pocket and took out his wallet. Inside were four new five-mark notes with a serial number that matched the notes I’d found on the desk in Rubusch’s room. I figured Muller had either procured the joy lady for him or taken a bribe off her afterward. Perhaps both, but it hardly mattered. I put the leaves back in the wallet, returned it to his pocket, and then kicked him on the ankle.
“Hey. Sigmund Romberg. Wake up.”
Muller stirred, took a sniff of air, and then let out a deep breath that smelled like a wet malting floor. Wiping his sandpaper chin with the back of his hand, he looked around thirstily.
“It’s by your left foot,” I said.
He glanced down at the bottle and pretended to ignore it, only he wasn’t very convincing. He could have pretended he was Frederick the Great and he would have looked more persuasive.
“What do you want?”
“Thanks, but it’s a little early for me. But you go right ahead and have one if it makes thinking any easier. I’ll just stand here and watch and have fun imagining what your liver must look like. You know, I’ll bet it’s an interesting shape. Maybe I should paint it. I do a little abstract painting now and then. Let’s see, now. How about Still Life with Liver and Onions? We can use your brains for the onions, okay?”
“What do you want?”
His tone was darker now, as if he were getting ready to hit me. But I was on my toes, moving around the room like a dancing master just in case I had to slug him. I almost wanted him to try it so I could. A solid right to the jaw might have helped sober him up.
“Since we’re talking of interesting shapes, why don’t we talk about that joy lady who was in here last night? The one wearing the tiara. The one visiting the man in 210. Name of Rubusch, Heinrich Rubusch. Did he give you the four leaves, or did you take it off the pussycat in the corridor? Incidentally, if you’re wondering why it’s any of my damn business, it’s because Rubusch is dead.”
“Who says I took four leaves off anyone?”
“Your concern for the welfare of the hotel’s guests is most touching, Muller. The serial numbers on those four new bills in your wallet match the numbers on a fold of notes lying on a table in the dead man’s room.”
“You’ve been in my wallet?”
“You might ask yourself why I’m telling you that I’ve been in your wallet. The fact is I could have brought Behlert or Pieck or even one of the Adlons along here and found those leaves in front of an audience. But I haven’t. Now ask me why.”
“All right. I’ll take a card from your pack. Why?”
“I don’t want to see you fired, Muller. I just want you out of this hotel. I’m offering you a chance to leave under your own steam. Who knows? That way, you might even leave with a reference.”
“Suppose I don’t want to leave.”
“Then I’ll go and fetch them anyway. Of course, by the time we get back, you’ll have got rid of the leaves. But that won’t matter, because that’s not why they’ll fire you. They’ll fire you because you’re stinking drunk. In fact, you stink of it so bad, the city’s thinking of sending a gas sniffer here to check it out.”
“Drunk, he says.” Muller picked up the bottle and then drained it. “What do you expect, in a job like this, with so much hanging around? What’s a man to do with himself all day if he doesn’t drink?”
I was almost ready to agree with him there. The job was boring. I was bored myself. I felt like a calf’s foot in aspic jelly.
Muller looked at the empty bottle and grinned. “Looks like I need another leg to stand on.” Then he looked at me. “You think you’re so clever, don’t you, Gunther?”
“With the intellectual equipment you have, Muller, I can see that it might seem that way. But there’s still a lot I don’t know. Take that joy girl. Did you bring her into the hot
el, or did Rubusch?”
“He’s dead, you say?”
I nodded.
“I ain’t surprised. Big fat man, right?”
I nodded again.
“I saw the girl on the stairs and reckoned I could tap the tree for a little trickle-down, you know?” He shrugged. “Who can live on twenty-five marks a week? She said her name was Angela. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I didn’t ask to see her papers. Twenty marks was good enough ID as far as I was concerned.” He grinned. “She was pretty good, too. You don’t see many snappers as good-looking as that one. A real peach, so she was. So, like I said, I ain’t surprised the fat man is dead. I felt my arteries tighten like clams just looking at her.”
“Was that when you saw him? When you saw her?”
“No. I saw him earlier on that evening. In the bar. And then in the Raphael Room.”
“He was one of the Olympic Committee’s party?”
“Yes.”
“And where were you? You were supposed to be keeping an eye on them?”
“What can I tell you?” he said irritably. “They were businessmen, not students. I left them to get on with it. I went to that beer house on the corner of Behrenstrasse and Friedrichstrasse—Pschorr Haus—and got soaked. How was I to know there was going to be trouble?”
“Hope for the best but expect the worst. That’s the job, pal.” I took out my cigarette case and flicked it open in front of his ugly face. “So. What’s it to be? A letter of resignation or Louis Adlon’s Oxford toe cap buried up your arse?”
He took a cigarette. I even lit it for him, just to be sociable.
“All right, you win. I’ll resign. But we ain’t friends.”
“That’s okay. I’ll probably cry a little when I get home tonight, but I think I can live with it.”
I WAS HALFWAY ACROSS THE ENTRANCE HALL when Hedda Adlon winged me with a tilt of her jaw and the sound of my name in full. Hedda Adlon was the only person who ever pronounced my first name as if it really meant what it means: brave bear, although actually there’s some debate that the “hard” part actually means “foolhardy.”