by Philip Kerr
‘You stupid bastard. You don’t think I had anything to do with it, do you? Christ, I was the only friend he had. When you and all your cute friends here at the Alex managed to have him posted out to some backwater in Spreewald, I was the one who came through for him. I was the one who appreciated that despite his awkward lack of enthusiasm for the Nazis, he was still a good bull.’ I shook my head bitterly, and swore again.
‘When did you last see him?’
‘Last night, around eight o’clock. I left him in the car park behind the Metropol on Nollendorfplatz.’
‘Was he working?’
‘Yes.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Tailing someone. No, keeping someone under observation.’
‘Someone working in the theatre or living in the apartments?’
I nodded.
‘Which was it?’
‘I can’t tell you. At least, not until I’ve discussed it with my client.’
‘The one you can’t tell me about either. Who do you think you are, a priest? This is murder, Gunther. Don’t you want to catch the man who killed your partner?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think that you ought to consider the possibility that your client had something to do with it. And then suppose he says, “Herr Gunther, I forbid you to discuss this unfortunate matter with the police.” Where does that get us?’ He shook his head. ‘No fucking deal, Gunther. You tell me or you tell the judge.’ He stood up and went to the door. ‘It’s up to you. Take your time. I’m not in any hurry.’
He closed the door behind him, leaving me with my guilt for ever having wished ill to Bruno and his harmless pipe.
About an hour later the door opened and a senior SS officer came into the room.
‘I was wondering when you’d show up,’ I said.
Arthur Nebe sighed and shook his head.
‘I’m sorry about Stahlecker,’ he said. ‘He was a good man. Naturally you’ll want to see him.’ He motioned me to follow him. ‘And then I’m afraid you’ll have to see Heydrich.’
Beyond an outer office and an autopsy-theatre where a pathologist stood working on the naked body of an adolescent girl was a long, cool room with rows of tables stretching out in front of me. On a few of them lay human bodies, some naked, some covered with sheets, and some like Bruno still clothed and looking more like items of lost luggage than anything human.
I walked over and took a long hard look at my dead partner. The front of his shirt looked as though he had spilt a whole bottle of red wine on himself, and his mouth gaped open like he’d been stabbed sitting in a dentist’s chair. There are lots of ways of winding up a partnership, but they didn’t come much more permanent than this one.
‘I never knew he wore a plate,’ I said absently, catching the glint of something metallic inside Bruno’s mouth. ‘Stabbed?’
‘Once, through the pump. They reckon under the ribs and up through the pit of the stomach.’
I picked up each of his hands and inspected them carefully. ‘No protection cuts,’ I said. ‘Where did they find him?’
‘Metropol Theatre car park,’ said Nebe.
I opened his jacket, noticing the empty shoulder-holster, and then unbuttoned the front of his shirt, which was still sticky with his blood, to inspect the wound. It was difficult to tell without seeing him cleaned up a bit, but the entry looked split, as if the knife had been rocked inside him.
‘Whoever did it knew how to kill a man with a knife,’ I said. ‘This looks like a bayonet wound.’ I sighed and shook my head. ‘I’ve seen enough. There’s no need to put his wife through this, I’ll make the formal identification. Does she know yet?’
Nebe shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ He led the way back through the autopsy-theatre. ‘But I expect someone will tell her soon enough.’
The pathologist, a young fellow with a large moustache, had stopped work on the girl’s body to have a smoke. The blood from his gloved hand had stained the cigarette paper and there was some of it on his lower lip. Nebe stopped and regarded the scene before him with more than a little distaste.
‘Well?’ he said angrily. ‘Is it another one?’
The pathologist exhaled lazily and pulled a face. ‘At this early stage, it certainly looks that way,’ he said. ‘She’s wearing all the right accessories.’
‘I see.’ It was easily apparent that Nebe didn’t much care for the young pathologist. ‘I trust your report will be rather more detailed than the last one. Not to mention more accurate.’ He turned abruptly and walked quickly away, adding loudly over his shoulder, ‘And make sure I have it as soon as possible.’
In Nebe’s staff-car, on the way to the Wilhelmstrasse, I asked him what it was all about. ‘Back there, in the autopsy-theatre, I mean.’
‘My friend,’ he said, ‘I think that’s what you’re about to find out.’
The headquarters of Heydrich’s SD, the Security Service, at number 102 Wilhelmstrasse, seemed innocuous enough from the outside. Even elegant. At each end of an Ionic colonnade was a square, two-storey gatehouse. and an archway that led into a courtyard behind. A screen of trees made it difficult to see what lay beyond, and only the presence of two sentries told you that here was an official building of some sort.
We drove through the gate, past a neat shrub-lined lawn about the size of a tennis-court, and stopped outside a beautiful, three-storey building with arched windows that were as big as elephants. Stormtroopers jumped to open the car doors and we got out.
The interior wasn’t quite what I had expected of Sipo HQ. We waited in a hall, the central feature of which was an ornate gilt staircase, decorated with fully-formed caryatids, and enormous chandeliers. I looked at Nebe, allowing my eyebrows to inform him that I was favourably impressed.
‘It’s not bad, is it?’ he said, and taking me by the arm he led me to the French windows which looked out on to a magnificent landscaped garden. Beyond this, to the west, could be seen the modern outline of Gropius’s Europa Haus, while to the north, the southern wing of Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Albrecht Strasse was clearly visible. I had good reason to recognize it, having once been detained there awhile at Heydrich’s order.
At the same time, appreciating the difference between the SD, or Sipo as the Security Service was sometimes called, and the Gestapo was a rather more elusive matter, even for some of the people who worked for these two organizations. As far as I could understand the distinction, it was just like Bockwurst and Frankfurter: they have their special names, but they look and taste exactly the same.
What was easy to perceive was that with this building, the Prinz Albrecht Palais, Heydrich had done very well for himself. Perhaps even better than his putative master, Himmler, who now occupied the building next door to Gestapo headquarters, in what was formerly the Hotel Prinz Albrecht Strasse. There was no doubt that the old hotel, now called SS-Haus, was bigger than the Palais. But as with sausage, taste is seldom a question of size.
I heard Arthur Nebe’s heels click, and looking round I saw that the Reich’s crown prince of terror had joined us at the window.
Tall, skeletally thin, his long, pale face lacking expression, like some plaster of Paris death-mask, and his Jack Frost fingers clasped behind his ramrod-straight back, Heydrich stared outside for a moment or two, saying nothing to either of us.
‘Come, gentlemen,’ he said eventually, ‘it’s a beautiful day. Let’s walk a bit.’ Opening the windows he led the way into the garden, and I noticed how large were his feet and how bandy his legs, as if he had been riding a lot: if the silver Horseman’s Badge on his tunic pocket was anything to go by, he probably had.
In the fresh air and sunshine he seemed to become more animated, like some kind of reptile.
‘This was the summer house of the first Friedrich Wilhelm,’ he said expansively. ‘And more recently the Republic used it for important guests such as the King of Egypt, and the British prime minister. Ramsay MacDonald of course, not that idiot with th
e umbrella. I think it’s one of the most beautiful of all the old palaces. I often walk here. This garden connects Sipo with Gestapo headquarters, so it’s actually very convenient for me. And it’s especially pleasant at this time of year. Do you have a garden, Herr Gunther?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘They’ve always seemed like a lot of work to me. When I stop work, that’s exactly what I do — stop work, not start digging in a garden.’
‘That’s too bad. At my home in Schlactensee we have a fine garden with its own croquet lawn. Are either of you familiar with the game?’
‘No,’ we said in unison.
‘It’s an interesting game; I believe it’s very popular in England. It provides an interesting metaphor for the new Germany. Laws are merely hoops through which the people must be driven, with varying degrees of force. But there can be no movement without the mallet — croquet really is a perfect game for a policeman.’ Nebe nodded thoughtfully, and Heydrich himself seemed pleased with this comparison. He began to talk quite freely. In brief about some of the things he hated — Freemasons, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, German Military Secret Intelligence; and at length about some of the things that gave him pleasure — the piano and the cello, fencing, his favourite nightclubs and his family.
‘The new Germany,’ he said, ‘is all about arresting the decline of the family, you know, and establishing a national community of blood. Things are changing. For instance, there are now only 22,787 tramps in Germany, 5,500 fewer than at the start of the year. There are more marriages, more births and half as many divorces. You might well ask me why the family is so important to the Party. Well, I’ll tell you. Children. The better our children, the better the future for Germany. So when something threatens those children, then we had better act quickly.’
I found a cigarette and started to pay attention. It seemed like he was coming to the point at last. We stopped at a park bench and sat down, me between Heydrich and Nebe, the chicken-liver in the black-bread sandwich.
‘You don’t like gardens,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘What about children? Do you like them?’
‘I like them.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘It’s my own personal opinion that it is essential to like them, doing what we do — even the things we must do that are hard because they seem distasteful to us — for otherwise we can find no expression for our humanity. Do you understand what I mean?’
I wasn’t sure I did, but I nodded anyway.
‘May I be frank with you?’ he said. ‘In confidence?’
‘Be my guest.’
‘A maniac is loose on the streets of Berlin, Herr Gunther.’
I shrugged. ‘Not so as you would notice,’ I said.
Heydrich shook his head impatiently.
‘No, I don’t mean a stormtrooper beating up some old Jew. I mean a murderer. He’s raped and killed and mutilated four young German girls in as many months.’
‘I haven’t seen anything in the newspapers about it.’
Heydrich laughed. ‘The newspapers print what we tell them to print, and there’s an embargo on this particular story.’
‘Thanks to Streicher and his anti-Semitic rag, it would only get blamed on the Jews,’ said Nebe.
‘Precisely so,’ said Heydrich. ‘The last thing I want is an anti-Jewish riot in this city. That sort of thing offends my sense of public order. It offends me as a policeman. When we do decide to clear out the Jews it will be in a proper way, not with a rabble to do it. There are the commercial implications too. A couple of weeks ago some idiots in Nuremberg decided to tear down a synagogue. One that just happened to be well-insured with a German insurance company. It cost them thousands of marks to settle the claim. So you see, race riots are very bad for business.’
‘So why tell me?’
‘I want this lunatic caught, and caught soon, Gunther.’ He looked drily at Nebe. ‘In the best traditions of Kripo a man, a Jew, has already confessed to the murders. However, since he was almost certainly in custody at the time of the last murder, it seems that he might actually be innocent, and that an overzealous element in Nebe’s beloved police force may quite simply have framed this man.
‘But you, Gunther, you have no racial or political axe to grind. And what is more you have considerable experience in this field of criminal investigation. After all it was you, was it not, who apprehended Gormann, the strangler? That may have been ten years ago, but everyone still remembers the case.’ He paused and looked me straight in the eye — an uncomfortable sensation. ‘In other words, I want you back, Gunther. Back in Kripo, and tracking down this madman before he kills again.’
I flicked my cigarette-butt into the bushes and stood up. Arthur Nebe stared at me dispassionately, almost as if he disagreed with Heydrich’s wish to have me back on the force and leading the investigation in preference to any of his own men. I lit another cigarette and thought for a moment.
‘Hell, there must be other bulls,’ I said. ‘What about the one who caught Kürten, the Beast of Dusseldorf. Why not get him?’
‘We’ve already checked up on him,’ said Nebe. ‘It would seem that Peter Kürten just gave himself up. Prior to that it was hardly the most efficient investigation.’
‘Isn’t there anyone else?’
Nebe shook his head.
‘You see, Gunther,’ said Heydrich, ‘we come back to you again. Quite frankly I doubt that there is a better detective in the whole of Germany.’
I laughed and shook my head. ‘You’re good. Very good. That was a nice speech you made about children and the family, General, but of course we both know that the real reason you’re keeping the lid on this thing is because it makes your modern police force look like a bunch of incompetents. Bad for them, bad for you. And the real reason you want me back is not because I’m such a good detective, but because the rest are so bad. The only sort of crimes that today’s Kripo is capable of solving are things like race-defilement, or telling a joke about the Führer.’
Heydrich smiled like a guilty dog, his eyes narrowing.
‘Are you refusing me, Herr Gunther?’ he said evenly.
‘I’d like to help, really I would. But your timing is poor. You see, I’ve only just found out that my partner was murdered last night. You can call me old-fashioned, but I’d like to find out who killed him. Ordinarily I’d leave it to the boys in the Murder Commission, but given what you’ve just told me it doesn’t sound too promising, does it? They’ve all but accused me of killing him, so who knows, maybe they’ll force me to sign a confession, in which case I’ll have to work for you in order to escape the guillotine.’
‘Naturally I’d heard about Herr Stahlecker’s unfortunate death,’ he said, standing up again. ‘And of course you’ll want to make some inquiries. If my men can be of any assistance, no matter how incompetent, then please don’t hesitate. However, assuming for a moment that this obstacle were removed, what would be your answer?’
I shrugged. ‘Assuming that if I refused I would lose my private investigator’s licence–’
‘Naturally . . .’
‘ — gun permit, driving licence–’
‘No doubt we’d find some excuse . . .’
‘ — then probably I would be forced to accept.’
‘Excellent.’
‘On one condition.’
‘Name it.’
‘That for the duration of the investigation, I be given the rank of Kriminalkommissar and that I be allowed to run the investigation any way I want.’
‘Now wait a minute,’ said Nebe. ‘What’s wrong with your old rank of inspector?’
‘Quite apart from the salary,’ said Heydrich, ‘Gunther is no doubt keen that he should be as free as possible from the interference of senior officers. He’s quite right of course. He’ll need that kind of rank in order to overcome the prejudices that will undoubtedly accompany his return to Kripo. I should have thought of it myself. It is agreed.’
We walked back to the Palais. Inside the door an SD officer handed Heydrich a note. He read it and then smiled.
‘Isn’t that a coincidence?’ he smiled. ‘It would seem that my incompetent police force has found the man who murdered your partner, Herr Gunther. I wonder, does the name Klaus Hering mean anything to you?’
‘Stahlecker was keeping a watch on his apartment when he was killed.’
‘That is good news. The only sand in the oil is that this Hering fellow would appear to have committed suicide.’ He looked at Nebe and smiled. ‘Well, we had better go and take a look, don’t you think, Arthur? Otherwise Herr Gunther here will think that we have made it up.’
It is difficult to form any clear impression of a man who has been hanged that is not grotesque. The tongue, turgid and protruding like a third lip, the eyes as prominent as a racing dog’s balls — these things tend to colour your thoughts a little. So apart from the feeling that he wouldn’t be winning the local debating-society prize, there wasn’t much to say about Klaus Hering except that he was about thirty years old, slimly built, fair-haired and, thanks in part to his necktie, getting on for tall.
The thing looked clear-cut enough. In my experience hanging is almost always suicide: there are easier ways to kill a man. I have seen a few exceptions, but these were all accidental cases, where the victim had encountered the mishap of vagal inhibition while going about some sado-masochistic perversion. These sexual nonconformists were usually found naked or clothed in female underwear with a spread of pornographic literature to sticky hand, and were always men.
In Hering’s case there was no such evidence of death by sexual misadventure. His clothes were such as might have been chosen by his mother; and his hands, which were loose at his sides, were unfettered eloquence to the effect that his homicide had been self-inflicted.
Inspector Strunck, the bull who had interrogated me back at the Alex, explained the matter to Heydrich and Nebe.