by Philip Kerr
She turned toward me expectantly, and I kissed her hard. Her breath was charged with cigarettes and ice-cold liquor and lipstick and a little something special from inside her pants. She tasted better than lightly salted butter on freshly baked bread. I felt her eyelashes brush my cheeks like the wings of tiny hummingbirds, and after a minute or so she began to breathe like a medium who was trying to get in touch with the spirit world. Maybe she did at that. And, keen to possess her whole body, I pushed my left hand underneath her fur coat and let it slide awhile up and down her thigh and torso, as if I’d been trying to generate static electricity. Noreen Charalambides wasn’t the only one who knew physics. There was a thud as her handbag slid off her lap and hit the floor of the car. I opened my eyes and drew away from her mouth.
“Gravity still works, then,” I said. “The way my head feels, I was beginning to wonder. I guess Newton knew a thing or two, after all.”
“He didn’t know everything. I bet he didn’t know how to kiss a girl like that.”
“That’s because he never met a girl such as you, Noreen. If he had, he might have done something useful with his life. Like this.”
I kissed her again, only this time I put my whole back into it, like I really meant what I was doing. And maybe I did. A lot of time had passed since I’d felt this way about a woman. I glanced out of the window and, seeing the name of the street, I was reminded of what I had told myself the first time I’d talked to Noreen back in Hedda Adlon’s apartment at the hotel: that Noreen was my employer’s oldest friend, and that I was going to sleep with Hermann Goering before I ever laid a finger on her. The way things were going, it looked as if the Prussian prime minister was in for a Hermann-sized surprise.
Her tongue was in my mouth now, alongside my heart and the misgivings I kept trying to swallow. I was losing control, but mostly of my left hand, which was now under her dress and making itself familiar with her garter and the cool thigh it was stretched across. Only when the hand slipped into the secret space between her thighs did she move to arrest the wrist commanding it. I let her move my hand away and then brought my fingers up to my mouth and licked them.
“This hand. I don’t know what gets into it sometimes.”
“You’re a man, Gunther. That’s what gets into it.” She took my fingers and brushed them with her lips. “I like you kissing me. You’re a good kisser. If kissing was in the Olympics, you’d be a medal prospect. But I don’t like to be hurried. I like to be walked around the ring for a while before being mounted. And don’t even think of using the whip if you want to stay in the saddle. I’m the independent sort, Gunther. When I run it’ll be because my eyes are open and because I want to. And I won’t be wearing any blinkers if and when we reach the wire. I might not be wearing anything at all.”
“Sure,” I said. “I never figured you any other way. No blinkers. Not even a tongue strap. How do you feel about me giving you an apple sometimes?”
“I like apples,” she said. “Just watch out you don’t get your fingers bitten.”
I let her bite me, hard. It was painful, but I enjoyed it. Pain from her felt good, like something primordial, something that was always meant to be. Besides, we both knew that when our clothes were lying on the floor beside our sweating, naked bodies, I was going to pay her back in kind. That’s always how it is between a man and a woman. A man takes a woman. A woman gets taken. It isn’t always marked by a due consideration of what is fair and decent and well mannered. Sometimes human nature can leave you looking just a little shamefaced.
I DROVE US BACK to the hotel and parked the car. As we went through the door and into the entrance hall, we met Max Reles, who was on his way out somewhere. He was accompanied by Gerhard Krempel and Dora Bauer, and they were all wearing evening clothes. Reles spoke to Noreen first and in English, which left me with the opportunity to say something to Dora.
“Good evening, Fräulein Bauer,” I said politely.
“Herr Gunther.”
“You look lovely.”
“Thank you.” She smiled warmly. “And I really mean that. I’m very grateful to you for helping me to get this job.”
“It was my pleasure, Fräulein. Behlert tells me you’re now working almost exclusively for Herr Reles.”
“Max keeps me very busy, yes. I don’t think I’ve ever done so much typing. Not even when I was at Odol. But right now, we’re off to the opera.”
“To see what?”
She smiled ingenuously. “I haven’t the faintest idea. I don’t know anything about opera.”
“Me neither.”
“I expect I shall hate it. But Max wants me to take some dictation during the interval.”
“And what about you, Herr Krempel? What do you do during the interval? Murder a good tune? In the absence of anything else.”
“Do I know you?” he asked, hardly looking at me. His whispered growl of a voice sounded as if it had been rubbed down with sandpaper and then marinated in burning kerosene.
“No, you don’t. But I know you.”
Krempel was tall, with flying-buttress shoulders and dead black eyes. Thick yellow hair grew on top of a head that was as big as a Galápagos tortoise and probably about as quick. His mouth resembled an ancient scar on a footballer’s knees. Fingers like scrap-yard grapples were already bunching into fists the size of wrecking balls. He looked like a real thug’s thug, and if the German Labor Front included a section for employees in the field of intimidation and coercion, then Gerhard Krempel might reasonably have expected to be elected as a workers’ representative.
“You must be confusing me with someone else,” he said, stifling a yawn.
“My mistake. I expect it’s those evening clothes. I thought you were an SA bullyboy.”
Max Reles must have caught that, because he scowled at me and then at Noreen.
“Is this dishwasher giving you any trouble?” he asked her, speaking German now for my benefit.
“No,” she said. “Herr Gunther’s been very helpful.”
“Really?” Reles chuckled. “Must be his birthday or something. How about it, Gunther? Did you take a bath today?”
Krempel thought that was hilarious.
“Tell me, did you find my Chinese box yet? Or the girl who stole it?”
“The matter is in the hands of the police, sir. I’m sure they’re doing all they can to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.”
“That’s very reassuring. Tell me, Gunther, what kind of a cop were you, anyway, before you started peeping through hotel keyholes? You know, I’ll bet you were one of those cops who wear that stupid leather helmet with the flat top. Is that because all of you kraut cops have flat heads or because some of you do a little moonlighting carrying trays of fish at Friedrichshain Market?”
“I think it’s both,” said Krempel.
“You know, in the States some people call coppers ‘flatfoots’ because a lot of them have flat feet,” said Reles. “But I think I like ‘flatheads’ a whole lot better.”
“We aim to please, sir,” I said patiently. “Ladies. Gentlemen.” As I turned to leave, I even tipped my hat. It seemed more diplomatic than punching Max Reles on the nose and a lot less likely to leave me without a job. “Enjoy your evening, Fräulein Bauer.”
I strolled over behind the front desk where Franz Joseph, the concierge, was in conversation with Dajos Béla, the leader of the hotel orchestra. I checked my pigeonhole. I had two messages. One was from Emil Linthe informing me that his work was completed. The other message was from Otto Trettin, asking me to call him back, urgently. I picked up the phone and had the hotel operator connect me with the Alex and then with Otto, who often worked late, since he seldom worked early.
“So what’s the story in Danzig?” I asked.
“Never mind that now,” he said. “Remember that cop who got murdered? August Krichbaum?”
“Sure,” I said, making a fist and biting my knuckles, calmly.
“The witness is an ex-cop. Seems like
he reckons the killer is an ex-cop, too. He’s been going through the police files and has got himself a short list of suspects.”
“I heard that.”
Otto paused for a moment. “You’re on the list, Bernie.”
“Me?” I said, as coolly as I was able. “How do you figure that?”
“Maybe you did it.”
“Maybe I did. On the other hand, maybe it’s a frame. Because I was a republican.”
“Maybe,” admitted Otto. “They’ve framed people for less.”
“How long is the list?”
“I hear just ten men.”
“I see. Well, thanks for the tip, Otto.”
“I thought you’d want to know.”
I lit a cigarette. “It happens I think I’ve got an alibi for when it happened. But I hardly want to use him. You see, it’s the fellow on the Jew Desk at the Gestapo. The one who tipped me off about my grandmother. If I mention him, they’ll want to know what I was doing at Gestapo House. And I might drop him in it.”
A simple lie often saves a lot of time-consuming truth. I hardly wanted to put sand in Otto’s eye bath, but I didn’t seem to have much choice in the matter.
“Then it’s fortunate you were with me at the time of Krichbaum’s murder,” said Otto. “Having a beer in the Zum. Remember?”
“Sure, I remember.”
“We talked about you helping me with a chapter in my new book. A case you once worked on. Gormann the Strangler. You’d think I know all about it, the number of times you’ve bored me with that story.”
“I’ll remember that. Thanks, Otto.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. Trettin’s name and word still counted for something at the Alex. Half a sigh, anyway.
“By the way,” he added. “Your Jewish stenographer, Ilse Szrajbman, had the guest’s Chinese lacquer box, all right. She says she took it on an impulse because Reles behaved like a shit and refused to pay what he owed for her work.”
“Knowing Reles, I can easily believe that.” I tried to gather my trembling thoughts. “But why didn’t she speak to the hotel manager about it? Why didn’t she tell Herr Behlert?”
“She said it’s not so easy for a Jew to complain about things. Or about a man who is as well connected as this Max Reles. She told the Danzig KRIPO that she was afraid of him.”
“So afraid that she was prepared to steal from him?”
“Danzig is a long way from Berlin, Bernie. Besides, it was an impulse thing, like I said. And she regretted it.”
“The Danzig KRIPO is being unusually sensitive about this, Otto. Why?”
“As a favor to me, not the Jewess. A lot of these local cops want to come and work crime in the big city, you know that. I’m a somebody to these morons. Anyway, I got the box back. And to be frank, I can’t see what all the fuss was about. I’ve seen more obvious-looking antiques in Woolworth’s. What do you want me to do with it?”
“Perhaps you could drop it by the hotel sometime. I’d rather not come by the Alex, unless I’m asked to. Last time I was there, your old pal Liebermann von Sonnenberg collared me for a favor.”
“He told me.”
“Although from the sound of things, it’s me who might need to ask him for a favor.”
“It’s me you owe, not him, Bernie.”
“I’ll try to remember that. You know, Otto, there’s a lot more to this thing with Max Reles than some stenographer trying to get even with her boss. Just a few weeks ago that Chinese box was in a museum here in Berlin. Next thing, Reles has the box and it’s being used by him to bribe some Ami on their Olympic Committee with the full knowledge of the Ministry of the Interior.”
“Please bear in mind I have sensitive ears, Bernie. There are things I want to know. But there are just as many things I don’t want to know.”
I put the phone down and looked at Franz Joseph. His real name was Gustav, but with his bald head and muttonchop whiskers, the Adlon concierge bore a marked resemblance to the old Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, and was so nicknamed by almost everyone in the hotel.
“Hey, Franz Joseph. Did you get Herr Reles tickets for the opera tonight?”
“Reles?”
“The American in suite 114.”
“Yes. Alexander Kipnis is singing Gurnemanz in Parsifal. The tickets were hard to get, even for me. Kipnis is a Jew, you see. These days it’s not often you can hear a Jew singing Wagner.”
“I imagine Kipnis has one of the least disagreeable voices to be heard in German right now.”
“They say Hitler doesn’t approve.”
“Where is this opera?”
“The German Opera House. On Bismarckstrasse.”
“Can you remember the seat numbers? Only, I need to find Herr Reles and give him a message.”
“The curtain goes up in an hour. He has a box on the grand tier, stage left.”
“You make that sound like a big deal, Franz.”
“It is. It’s the same box Hitler has when he goes to the opera.”
“But not tonight.”
“Obviously.”
I walked back into the entrance hall. Behlert was speaking to two men. I hadn’t ever seen them before, but I knew they were cops. For a start there was Behlert’s manner to identify them: he looked like he was speaking to two of the most interesting men in the world; and then there was theirs: they looked indifferent to almost everything he was saying, except the part about me. And I knew that much because Behlert pointed my way. Another reason I knew they were cops was their thick coats and their heavy boots and their body odor. During the winter, Berlin cops always dressed and smelled as if they were in the trenches. Backed by Behlert’s rolling eyeballs, they came toward me, flashing their warrant discs and sizing me up with narrowed eyes—almost as if they hoped I was going to make their day and run for it; that way they could have had a little fun trying to shoot me. I could hardly blame them. A lot of Berlin crime gets cleaned up that way.
“Bernhard Gunther?”
“Yes.”
“Inspectors Rust and Brandt, from the Alex.”
“Sure, I remember. You two were the detectives Liebermann von Sonnenberg assigned to investigate the death of Herr Rubusch, in 210, weren’t you? Say, what did he die of anyway? I never did find out.”
“Cerebral aneurysm,” said one.
“Aneurysm, eh? Never can tell with that kind of thing, can you? One minute you’re hopping around like a flea, and the next you’re lying on the floor of the trench looking up at the sky.”
“We’d like to ask you a few questions down at the Alex.”
“Sure.”
I followed them outside into the cold night air.
“Is that what this is about?”
“You’ll find out when we get to the Alex,” said Rust.
BISMARCKSTRASSE WAS STILL CALLED BISMARCKSTRASSE and ran all the way from the western tip of the Tiergarten to the eastern edge of the Grunewald. The German Opera House, formerly called the Municipal Opera House, was about halfway along the street, on the north side, and was comparatively recent in its design and construction. Not that I’d ever really noticed it much before. At the end of a working day I need something a little less bogus than the sight of a lot of very fat people pretending to be heroes and heroines. My idea of a musical evening is the Kempinski Waterland Chorus: a revue of buxom girls in short skirts playing ukuleles and singing vulgar songs about Bavarian goatherds.
I was hardly in the mood for anything that took itself as seriously as opera in German, not after a couple of uncomfortable hours spent at the Alex waiting to be asked questions about the cop I had killed, and then for them to find Otto Trettin—he was in the Zum—and have him corroborate my story. When finally they let me go I wondered if that was the end of it. But somehow I suspected it was not, with the result that I hardly felt like celebrating. All in all it had been quite an experience, which is often the lesson you get from life when you need it least.
In spite of that, I was still keen to se
e who Max Reles might be sharing a box with. And arriving at the opera in time for the interval, I bought a standing pass that afforded me an excellent view of the stage and, more important, the occupants of Hitler’s usual box on the grand tier. Before the lights went down I was even able to borrow a pair of opera glasses from a woman sitting close to where I was standing, so that I might take a closer look at them.
“He’s not in the house tonight,” said the woman observing where my attention was directed.
“Who?”
“The Leader.”
That much was obvious. But it was clear that there were others in the box, guests of Max Reles, who were senior figures in the Nazi Party. One of these was a man in his late forties with silver hair and thick, dark eyebrows. He wore a brown, military-style tunic with several decorations, including an Iron Cross and a Nazi armband, a white shirt, a black tie, brown riding breeches, and leather jackboots.
I handed back the opera glasses. “I don’t suppose you know who the party leader is?”
The woman peered through the glasses and then nodded. “That’s Von Tschammer und Osten.”
“The Reich sports leader?”
“Yes.”
“And the general standing behind him?”
“Von Reichenau.” She had answered without a moment’s hesitation. “The bald one is Walther Funk, from the Propaganda Ministry.”
“I’m impressed,” I said, with genuine admiration.
The woman smiled. She wore spectacles. Not a beauty, but she looked intelligent in an attractive way. “It’s my job to know who these people are,” she explained. “I’m a photographic editor at the Berlin Illustrated News.” Still scrutinizing the box, she shook her head. “I don’t recognize the tall one, though. The one with the face like a blunt instrument. Or for that matter the rather attractive girl who seems to be with him. They seem to be the host and hostess, but either she’s too young for him or he’s too old for her. I’m not quite sure which it is.”
“He’s an American,” I said. “His name is Max Reles. And the girl is his stenographer.”
“You think so?”