by Philip Kerr
‘You said that you talked about the war. Didn’t he tell you how many medals he won?’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Then don’t you think you should tell me?’
‘I didn’t think it was relevant.’
‘I’ll decide what’s relevant. Come on, unpack it, Becker.’
He stared at the wall and then shrugged. ‘As far as I remember, he said he had joined the Austrian Nazi Party when it was still illegal, in 1931. Later he got himself arrested for putting up posters. So he escaped to Germany to avoid arrest and joined the Bavarian police in Munich. He joined the SS in 1933, and stayed in until the end of the war.’
‘Any rank?’
‘He didn’t say.’
‘Did he give you any indication of where he served and in what sort of capacity?’
Becker shook his head.
‘Not much of a conversation you two had. What were you reminiscing about, the price of bread? All right. What about the second man — the one who came to your home with König and asked you to look for Linden?’
Becker squeezed his temples. ‘I’ve tried to remember his name, but it just won’t come,’ he said. ‘He was a bit more of the senior officer type. You know, very stiff and proper. An aristocrat, maybe. Again he was aged about forty, tall, thin, clean-shaven, balding. Wore a Schiller jacket and a club-tie.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not very good on club-ties. It could have been Herrenklub, I don’t know.’
‘And the man you saw come out of the studio where Linden was killed: what did he look like?’
‘He was too far away for me to see much, except that he was quite short and very stocky. He wore a dark hat and coat and he was in a hurry.’
‘I’ll bet he was,’ I said. ‘The publicity firm, Reklaue & Werbe Zentrale. It’s on Mariahilferstrasse, isn’t it?’
‘Was,’ Becker said gloomily. ‘It closed not long after I was arrested.’
‘Tell me about it anyway. Was it always König you saw there?’
‘No. It was usually a fellow called Abs, Max Abs. He was an academic-looking type, chin-beard, little glasses, you know.’ Becker helped himself to another of my cigarettes. ‘There was one thing I was meaning to tell you. One time I was there I heard Abs take a telephone call, from a stonemason called Pichler. Maybe he had a funeral. I thought that maybe you could find Pichler and find out about Abs when you go to Linden’s funeral this morning.’
‘At twelve o’clock,’ Liebl said.
‘I thought that it might be worth a look, Bernie,’ Becker explained.
‘You’re the client,’ I said.
‘See if any of Linden’s friends show up. And then see Pichler. Most of Vienna’s stonemasons are along the wall of the Central Cemetery, so it shouldn’t be all that difficult to find him. Maybe you can discover if Max Abs left an address when he ordered his piece of stone.’
I didn’t much care for having Becker describe my morning’s work for me like this, but it seemed easier to humour him. A man facing a possible death sentence can demand certain indulgences of his private investigator. Especially when there’s cash up front. So I said, ‘Why not? I love a good funeral.’ Then I stood up and walked about his cell a bit, as if I were the one who was nervous about being caged in. Maybe he was just more used to it than me.
‘There’s one thing still puzzling me here,’ I said after a minute’s thoughtful pacing.
‘What’s that?’
‘Dr Liebl told me that you’re not without friends and influence in this city.’
‘Up to a point.’
‘Well, how is it that none of your so-called friends tried to find König? Or for that matter his girlfriend Lotte?’
‘Who’s saying they didn’t?’
‘Are you going to keep it to yourself, or do I have to give you a couple of bars of chocolate?’
Becker’s tone turned placatory. ‘Now, it’s not certain what happened here, Bernie, so I don’t want you getting the wrong idea about this job. There’s no reason to suppose that —’
‘Cut the cold cabbage and just tell me what happened.’
‘All right. A couple of my associates, fellows who knew what they were doing, asked around about König and the girl. They checked a few of the nightclubs. And …’ he winced uncomfortably ‘… they haven’t been seen since. Maybe they doublecrossed me. Maybe they just left town.’
‘Or maybe they got the same as Linden,’ I suggested.
‘Who knows? But that’s why you’re here, Bernie. I can trust you. I know the kind of fellow you are. I respect what you did back in Minsk, really I did. You’re not the kind to let an innocent man hang.’ He smiled meaningfully. ‘I can’t believe I’m the only one who’s had a use for a man of your qualifications.’
‘I do all right,’ I said quickly, not caring much for flattery, least of all from clients like Emil Becker. ‘You know, you probably deserve to hang,’ I added. ‘Even if you didn’t kill Linden, there must have been plenty of others.’
‘But I just didn’t see it coming. Not until it was too late. Not like you. You were clever, and got out while you still had a choice. I never had that chance. It was obey orders, or face a court martial and a firing squad. I didn’t have the courage to do anything other than what I did.’
I shook my head. I really didn’t care any more. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’
‘You know I am. We were at war, Bernie.’ He finished his cigarette and stood up to face me in the corner where I was leaning. He lowered his voice, as if he meant Liebl not to hear.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know this is a dangerous job. But only you can do it. It needs to be done quietly, and privately, the way you do it best. Do you need a lighter?’
I had left the gun I’d taken off the dead Russian in Berlin, having had no wish to risk arrest for crossing a border with a pistol. I doubted that Poroshin’s cigarette pass could have sorted that out. So I shrugged and said, ‘You tell me. This is your city.’
‘I’d say you’ll need one.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘but for Christ’s sake make it a clean one.’
When we were outside the prison again Liebl smiled sarcastically and said: ‘Is a lighter what I think it is?’
‘Yes. But it’s just a precaution.’
‘The best precaution you can take while you’re in Vienna is to stay out of the Russian sector. Especially late at night.’
I followed Liebl’s gaze across the road and beyond, to the other side of the canal, where a red flag fluttered in the early morning breeze.
‘There are a number of kidnapping gangs working for the Ivans in Vienna,’ he explained. ‘They snatch anyone they think might be spying for the Americans, and in return they’re given black-market concessions to operate out of the Russian sector, which effectively puts them beyond the reach of the law. They took one woman out of her own house rolled up in a carpet, just like Cleopatra.’
‘Well, I’ll be careful not to fall asleep on the floor,’ I said. ‘Now, how do I get to the Central Cemetery?’
‘It’s in the British sector. You need to take a 71 from Schwarzenbergplatz, only your map calls it Stalinplatz. You can’t miss it: there’s an enormous statue to the Soviet soldier as liberator that we Viennese call the Unknown Plunderer.’
I smiled. ‘Like I always say, Herr Doktor, we can survive defeat, but heaven help us from another liberation.’
13
‘The city of the other Viennese’ was how Traudl Braunsteiner had described it. This was no exaggeration. The Central Cemetery was bigger than several towns of my acquaintance and quite a bit more affluent too. There was no more chance of the average Austrian doing without a headstone than there was of him staying out of his favourite coffee house. It seemed there was nobody who was too poor for a decent piece of marble, and for the first time I began to appreciate the attractions of the undertaking business. A piano keyboard, an inspired muse, the introductory bars of a famous waltz — there was nothing too ornate for Vienna
’s craftsmen, no flatulent fable or overstated allegory that was beyond the dead hand of their art. The huge necropolis even mirrored the religious and political divisions of its living counterpart, with its Jewish, Protestant and Catholic sections, not to mention those of the Four Powers.
There was quite a turnover of services at the first-wonder-of-the-world-sized chapel where Linden’s obsequies were heard, and I found that I had missed the captain’s mourners there by only a few minutes.
The little cortège wasn’t difficult to spot as it drove slowly across the snowbound park to the French sector where Linden, a Catholic, was to be buried. But for one on foot, as I was, it was rather more difficult to catch up: by the time I did the expensive casket was already being lowered slowly into the darkbrown trench like a dinghy let down into a dirty harbour. The Linden family, arms interlinked in the manner of a squad of riot-police, faced its grief as indomitably as if there had been medals to be won.
The colour party raised their rifles and took aim at the floating snow. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling as they fired, and for just a moment I was back in Minsk when, on a walk to staff headquarters, I had been summoned by the sound of gunshots: climbing up an embankment I had seen six men and women kneeling at the edge of a mass grave already filled with innumerable bodies, some of whom were still alive, and behind them an SS firing squad commanded by a young police officer. His name was Emil Becker.
‘Are you a friend of his?’ said a man, an American, appearing behind me.
‘No?’ I said. ‘I came over because you don’t expect to hear gunfire in a place like this.’ I couldn’t tell if the American had been at the funeral already or if he had followed me from the chapel. He didn’t look like the man who had been standing outside Liebl’s office. I pointed at the grave. ‘Tell me, who’s the —’
‘A fellow called Linden.’
It is difficult for someone who does not speak German as a first language, so I might have been mistaken, but there seemed to be no trace of emotion in the American’s voice.
When I had seen enough, and having ascertained that there was nobody even vaguely resembling König among the mourners — not that I really expected to see him there — I walked quietly away. To my surprise I found the American walking alongside me.
‘Cremation is so much kinder to the thoughts of the living,’ he said. ‘It consumes all sorts of hideous imaginings. For me the putrefaction of a loved one is quite unthinkable. It remains in the thoughts with the persistence of a tapeworm. Death is quite bad enough without letting the maggots make a meal of it. I should know. I’ve buried both parents and a sister. But these people are Catholics. They don’t want anything to jeopardize their chances of bodily resurrection. As if God is going to bother with —’ he waved his arm at the whole cemetery ‘— all this. Are you a Catholic, Herr -?’
‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘When I’m hurrying to catch a train, or trying to sober up.’
‘Linden used to pray to St Anthony,’ said the American. ‘I believe he’s the patron saint of lost things.’
Was he trying to be cryptic, I wondered. ‘Never use him myself,’ I said.
He followed me on to the road that led back to the chapel. It was a long avenue of severely pruned trees on which the gobbets of snow sitting on the sconce-like ends of the branches resembled the stumps of melted candles from some outsized requiem.
Pointing at one of the parked cars, a Mercedes, he said: ‘Like a lift to town? I’ve got a car here.’
It was true that I wasn’t much of a Catholic. Killing men, even Russians, wasn’t the kind of sin that was easy to explain to one’s maker. All the same I didn’t have to consult St Michael, the patron saint of policemen, to smell an MP.
‘You can drop me at the main gate, if you like,’ I heard myself reply.
‘Sure, hop in.’
He paid the funeral and the mourners no more attention. After all he had me, a new face, to interest him now. Perhaps I was someone who might shed some light on a dark corner of the whole affair. I wondered what he would have said if he could have known that my intentions were the same as his own; and that it was in the vague hope of just such an encounter that I had allowed myself to be persuaded to come to Linden’s funeral in the first place.
The American drove slowly, as if he were part of the cortège, no doubt hoping to spin out his chance to discover who I was and why I was there.
‘My name is Shields,’ he volunteered. ‘Roy Shields.’
‘Bernhard Gunther,’ I answered, seeing no reason to tease him with it.
‘Are you from Vienna?’
‘Not originally.’
‘Where, originally?’
‘Germany.’
‘No, I didn’t think you were Austrian.’
‘Your friend — Herr Linden,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘Did you know him well?’
The American laughed and found some cigarettes in the top pocket of his sports jacket. ‘Linden? I didn’t know him at all.’ He pulled one clear with his lips and then handed me the packet. ‘He got himself murdered a few weeks back, and my chief thought it would be a good idea if I were to represent our department at the funeral.’
‘And what department is that?’ I asked, although I was almost certain I already knew the answer.
‘The International Patrol.’ Lighting his cigarette he mimicked the style of the American radio broadcasters. ‘For your protection, call A29500.’ Then he handed me a book of matches from somewhere called the Zebra Club. ‘Waste of valuable time if you ask me, coming all the way down here like this.’
‘It’s not that far,’ I told him; and then: ‘Perhaps your chief was hoping that the murderer would put in an appearance.’
‘Hell, I should hope not,’ he laughed. ‘We’ve got that guy in gaol. No, the chief, Captain Clark, is the kind of fellow who likes to observe the proper protocols.’ Shields turned the car south towards the chapel. ‘Christ,’ he muttered, ‘this place is like a goddamned gridiron.’
‘You know, Gunther, that road we just turned off is almost a kilometre, as straight as an arrow. I caught sight of you when you were still a couple of hundred metres short of Linden’s funeral, and it looked to me like you were in a hurry to join us.’ He grinned, to himself it seemed. ‘Am I right?’
‘My father is buried only a short way from Linden’s grave. When I got there and saw the colour party I decided to come back a little later, when it’s quieter.’
‘You walked all that way and you didn’t bring a wreath?’
‘Did you bring one?’
‘Sure did. Cost me fifty schillings.’
‘Cost you, or cost your department?’
‘I guess we did pass a hat round at that.’
‘And you need to ask me why I didn’t bring a wreath.’
‘Come on, Gunther,’ Shields laughed. ‘There isn’t one of you people who isn’t involved in some kind of a racket. You’re all exchanging schillings for dollar scrip, or selling cigarettes on the black market. You know, I sometimes think that the Austrians are making more from breaking the rules than we are.’
‘That’s because you’re a policeman.’
We passed through the main gate on Simmeringer Haupt-strasse and drew up in front of the tram stop, where several men were already clinging to the outside of the packed tram car like a litter of hungry piglets on a sow’s belly.
‘Are you sure you don’t want that lift into town?’ said Shields.
‘No thanks. I have some business with some of the stonemasons.’
‘Well, it’s your funeral,’ he said with a grin, and sped away.
I walked along the high wall of the cemetery, where it seemed that most of Vienna’s market gardeners and stonemasons had their premises, and found a pathetic old woman standing in my way. She held up a penny candle and asked me if I had a light.
‘Here,’ I said, and gave her Shields’ book of matches.
When she made as if to take only one I told her to keep
the whole book. ‘I can’t afford to pay you for it,’ she said, with real apology.
Just as surely as you know that a man waiting for a train will look at his watch, I knew that I would be seeing Shields again. But I wished him back right then and there so that I could have shown him one Austrian who didn’t have the price of a match, let alone a fifty-schilling wreath.
Herr Josef Pichler was a fairly typical Austrian: shorter and thinner than the average German, with pale, soft-looking skin, and a sparse, immature sort of moustache. The hangdog expression on his drawn-out muzzle of a face gave him the appearance of one who had consumed too much of the absurdly young wine that Austrians apparently consider drinkable. I met him standing in his yard, comparing the sketch-plan of a stone’s inscription with its final execution.
‘God’s greeting to you,’ he said sullenly. I replied in kind.
‘Are you Herr Pichler, the celebrated sculptor?’ I asked. Traudl had advised me that the Viennese have a passion for overblown titles and flattery.
‘I am,’ he said, with a slight swell of pride. ‘Does the gallant gentleman wish to consider ordering a piece?’ He spoke as if he had been the curator of an art-gallery on Dorotheergasse. ‘A fine headstone perhaps.’ He indicated a large slice of polished black marble on which names and a date had been inscribed and painted in gold. ‘Something marmoreal? A carved figure? A statue perhaps?’
‘To be honest, I am not entirely sure, Herr Pichler. I believe you recently created a fine piece for a friend of mine, Dr Max Abs. He was so delighted with it that I wondered if I might have something similar.’
‘Yes, I think I remember the Herr Doktor.’ Pichler took off his little chocolate cake of a hat and scratched the top of his grey head. ‘But the particular design escapes me for the moment. Do you remember what kind of piece it was he had?’
‘Only that he was delighted with it, I’m afraid.’
‘No matter. Perhaps the honourable gentleman would care to return tomorrow, by which time I should have been able to find the Herr Doktor’s specifications. Permit me to explain.’ He showed me the sketch in his hand, one for a deceased whose inscription described him as an ‘Engineer of Urban Conduits and Conservancy’.