The Pale Criminal

by Philip Kerr

  ‘One would not have thought it possible to cause such aggravation throughout Kripo Executive from such a bureaucratic dungeon as this.’ He laughed, and stroking his chin-beard added: ‘You, and a Sturmbannfuhrer from the Gestapo, have caused all sorts of problems for poor Dr Schade. He’s had telephone calls from lots of important people. Nebe, Muller, even Heydrich. How very satisfying for you. No, don’t shrug modestly like that. You have my admiration, Bernie, you really do.’

  I pulled open a drawer in my desk and took out a bottle and a couple of glasses.

  ‘Let’s drink to it,’ I said.

  ‘Gladly. I could use one after the day I’ve had.’ He picked up the full glass and sipped it gratefully. ‘You know, I had no idea that there was a special department in the Gestapo to persecute Catholics.’

  ‘Nor had I. But I can’t say that it surprises me much. National Socialism permits only one kind of organized belief.’ I nodded at the dossier on Illmann’s lap. ‘So what have you got?’

  ‘Victim number five is what we have got.’ He handed me the dossier and started to roll himself a cigarette.

  ‘These are good,’ I said flicking through its contents. ‘Your man takes a nice photograph.’

  ‘Yes, I thought you’d appreciate them. That one of the throat is particularly interesting. The right carotid artery is almost completely severed thanks to one perfectly horizontal knife cut. That means that she was flat on her back when he cut her. All the same, the greater part of the wound is on the right-hand side of the throat, so in all probability our man is right-handed.’

  ‘It must have been some knife,’ I said, observing the depth of the wound.

  ‘Yes. It severed the larynx almost completely.’ He licked his cigarette paper. ‘Something extremely sharp, like a surgical curette I should say. At the same time, however, the epiglottis was strongly compressed, and between that and the oesophagus on the right were haematomas as big as an orange pip.’

  ‘Strangled, right?’

  ‘Very good,’ Illmann grinned. ‘But half-strangled, in actual fact. There was a small quantity of blood in the girl’s partially inflated lungs.’

  ‘So he throttled her into silence, and later cut her throat?’

  ‘She bled to death, hanging upside down like a butchered calf. Same as all the others. Do you have a match?’

  I tossed my book across the desk. ‘What about her important little places? Did he fuck her?’

  ‘Fucked her, and tore her up a bit in the process. Well, you’d expect that. The girl was a virgin, I should imagine. There were even imprints of his fingernails on the mucous membrane. But more importantly I found some foreign pubic hairs, and I don’t mean that they were imported from Paris.’

  ‘You’ve got a hair colour?’

  ‘Brown. Don’t ask me for a shade, I can’t be that specific.’

  ‘But you’re sure they’re not Irma Hanke’s?’

  ‘Positive. They stood out on her perfectly Aryan fair-haired little plum like shit in a sugar-bowl.’ He leaned back and blew a cloud into the air above his head. ‘You want me to try and match one with a cutting from the bush of your crazy Czech?’

  ‘No, I released him at lunchtime. He’s in the clear. And as it happens his hair was fair.’ I leafed through the typewritten pages of the autopsy report. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Not quite.’ He sucked at his cigarette and then crushed it into my ashtray. From his tweed hunting-jacket pocket he produced a sheet of folded newspaper which he spread out on the desk. ‘I thought you ought to see this.’

  It was the front page of an old issue of Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic publication. A flash across the top left-hand corner of the paper advertised it as ‘A Special Ritual Murder Number’. Not that one needed reminding. The pen-and-ink illustration said it eloquently enough. Eight naked, fair-haired German girls hanging upside-down, their throats slit, and their blood spilling into a great Communion plate that was held by an ugly caricature Jew.

  ‘Interesting, don’t you think?’ he said.

  ‘Streicher’s always publishing this sort of crap,’ I said. ‘Nobody takes it seriously.’

  Illmann shook his head, and reclaimed his cigarette. ‘I’m not for one minute saying that it should be. I no more believe in ritual murder than I believe in Adolf Hitler the Peacemaker.’

  ‘But there is this drawing, right?’ He nodded. ‘Which is remarkably similar to the method with which five German girls have already been killed.’ He nodded again.

  I glanced down the page at the article that accompanied the drawing, and read: ‘The Jews are charged with enticing Gentile children and Gentile adults, butchering them and draining their blood. They are charged with mixing this blood into their masses (unleavened bread) and using it to practise superstitious magic. They are charged with torturing their victims, especially the children; and during this torture they scream threats, curses and cast magic spells against the Gentiles. This systematic murder has a special name. It is called Ritual Murder.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that Streicher might have had something to do with these murders?’

  ‘I don’t know that I’m suggesting anything, Bernie. I merely thought I ought to bring it to your attention.’ He shrugged. ‘But why not? After all, he wouldn’t be the first district Gauleiter to commit a crime. Governor Kube of Kurmark for example.’

  ‘There are quite a few stories about Streicher that one hears,’ I said.

  ‘In any other country Streicher would be in prison.’

  ‘Can I keep this?’

  ‘I wish you would. It’s not the sort of thing that one likes to leave lying on the coffee-table.’ He crushed out yet another cigarette and stood up to leave. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘About Streicher? I don’t exactly know.’ I looked at my watch. ‘I’ll think about it after the formal ID. Becker’s on his way back here with the girl’s parents by now. We’d better get down to the mortuary.’

  It was something that Becker said that made me drive the Hankes home myself after Herr Hanke had positively identified the remains of his daughter.

  ‘It’s not the first time I’ve had to break bad news to a family,’ he had explained. ‘In a strange way they always hope against hope, clinging on to the last straw right up until the end. And then when you tell them, that’s when it really hits them. The mother breaks down, you know. But somehow these two were different. It’s difficult to explain what I mean, sir, but I got the impression that they were expecting it.’

  ‘After four weeks? Come on, they had just resigned themselves to it, that’s all.’

  Becker frowned and scratched the top of his untidy head.

  ‘No,’ he said slowly, ‘it was stronger than that, sir. Like they already knew, for sure. I’m sorry, sir, I’m not explaining it very well. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it at all. Perhaps I am imagining it.’

  ‘Do you believe in instinct?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Good. Sometimes it’s the only thing a bull has got to go on. And then he’s got no choice but to trust in it. A bull that doesn’t trust a few hunches now and then doesn’t ever take any chances. And without taking them you can’t ever hope to solve a case. No, you were right to tell me.’

  Sitting beside me now, as I drove south-west to Steglitz, Herr Hanke, an accountant with the AEG works on Seestrasse, seemed anything but resigned to his only daughter’s death. All the same, I didn’t discount what Becker had told me. I was keeping an open mind until I could form my own opinion.

  ‘Irma was a clever girl,’ Hanke sighed. He spoke with a Rhineland accent, with a voice that was just like Goebbels’. ‘Clever enough to stay on at school and get her Abitur, which she’d wanted to do. But she was no book-buffalo. Just bright, and pretty with it. Good at sports. She had just won her Reich Sports Badge and her swimming certificate. She never did any harm to anyone.’ His voice was breaking as he added: ‘Who could have killed her, Kommissar? Who would
do such a thing?’

  ‘That’s what I intend to find out,’ I said. But Hanke’s wife sitting in the back seat believed she already had the answer.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious who is responsible?’ she said. ‘My daughter was a good BdM girl, praised in her racial-theory class as the perfect example of the Aryan type. She knew her Horst Wessel and could quote whole pages of the Fuhrer’s great book. So who do you think killed her, a virgin, but the Jews? Who else but the Jews would have done such things to her?’

  Herr Hanke turned in his seat and took his wife by the hand.

  ‘We don’t know that, Silke, dear,’he said. ‘Do we, Kommissar?’

  ‘I think it’s very unlikely,’ I said.

  ‘You see, Silke? The Kommissar doesn’t believe it, and neither do I.’

  ‘I see what I see,’ she hissed. ‘You’re both wrong. It’s as plain as the nose on a Jew’s face. Who else but the Jews? Don’t you realize how obvious it is?’

  ‘The accusation is loudly raised immediately, anywhere in the world, when a body is found which bears the marks of ritual murder. This accusation is raised only against the Jews.’ I remembered the words of the article in Der Stürmer which I had folded in my pocket, and as I listened to Frau Hanke it occurred to me that she was right, but in a way she could hardly have dreamt of.

  11

  Thursday, 22 September

  A whistle shrieked, the train jolted, and then we pulled slowly out of Anhalter Station on the six-hour journey that would take us to Nuremberg. Korsch, the compartment’s only other occupant, was already reading his newspaper.

  ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘listen to this. It says here that the Soviet foreign minister, Maxim Litvinoff declared in front of the League of Nations in Geneva that his government is determined to fulfil its existing treaty of alliance with Czechoslovakia, and that it will offer military help at the same time as France. Christ, we’ll really be in for it then, with an attack on both fronts.’

  I grunted. There was less chance of the French offering any real opposition to Hitler than there was of them declaring Prohibition. Litvinoff had chosen his words carefully. Nobody wanted war. Nobody but Hitler, that is. Hitler the syphilitic.

  My thoughts returned to a meeting I had had the previous Tuesday with Frau Kalau vom Hofe at the Goering Institute.

  ‘I brought your books back,’ I explained. ‘The one by Professor Berg was particularly interesting.’

  ‘I’m glad you thought so,’ she said. ‘How about the Baudelaire?’

  ‘That too, although it seemed much more applicable to Germany now. Especially the poems called “Spleen”.’

  ‘Maybe now you’re ready for Nietzsche,’ she said, leaning back in her chair.

  It was a pleasantly furnished, bright office with a view of the Zoo opposite. You could just about hear the monkeys screaming in the distance.

  Her smile persisted. She was better looking than I remembered. I picked up the solitary photograph that sat on her desk and stared at a handsome man and two little boys.

  ‘Your family?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must be very happy.’ I returned the picture to its position. ‘Nietzsche,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘I don’t know about that. I’m not really much of a reader, you see. I don’t seem to be able to find the time. But I did look up those pages in Mein Kampf — the ones about venereal disease. Mind you, it meant that for a while I had to use a brick to wedge the bathroom window open.’ She laughed. ‘Anyway, I think you must be right.’ She started to speak but I raised my hand. ‘I know, I know, you didn’t say anything. You were just telling me what is written in the Führer’s marvellous book. Not offering a psychotherapeutic analysis of him through his writing.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  I sat down and faced her across the desk.

  ‘But that sort of thing is possible?’

  ‘Oh, yes indeed.’

  I handed her the page from Der Stürmer.

  ‘Even with something like this?’

  She looked at me levelly, and then opened her cigarette box. I helped myself to one, and then lit us both.

  ‘Are you asking me officially?’ she said.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Then I should say that it would be possible. In fact I should say that Der Stürmer is the work of not one but several psychotic personalities. The so-called editorials, these illustrations by Fino — God only knows what effect this sort of filth is having on people.’

  ‘Can you speculate a little? The effect, I mean.’

  She pursed her beautiful lips. ‘Hard to evaluate,’ she said after a pause. ‘Certainly for weaker personalities, this sort of thing, regularly absorbed, could be corrupting.’

  ‘Corrupting enough to make a man a murderer?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think so. It wouldn’t make a killer out of a normal man. But for a man already disposed to kill, I think it’s quite possible that this kind of story and drawing might have a profound effect on him. And as you know from your own reading of Berg, Kurten himself was of the opinion that the more salacious kind of crime reporting had very definitely affected him.’

  She crossed her legs, the sibilance of her stockings drawing my thoughts to their tops, to her garters and finally to the lacy paradise that I imagined existed there. My stomach tightened at the thought of running my hand up her skirt, at the thought of her stripped naked before me, and yet still speaking intelligently to me. Exactly where is the beginning of corruption?

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘And what would be your professional opinion of the man who published this story? I mean Julius Streicher.’

  ‘A hatred like this is almost certainly the result of a great mental instability.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Can I tell you something in confidence?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You know that Matthias Goering, the chairman of this institute, is the prime minister’s cousin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Streicher has written a lot of poisonous nonsense about medicine as a Jewish conspiracy, and psychotherapy in particular. For a while the future of mental health in this country was in jeopardy because of him. Consequently Dr Goering has good reason to wish Streicher out of the way, and has already prepared a psychological evaluation of him at the prime minister’s orders. I’m sure that I could guarantee the cooperation of this institute in any investigation involving Streicher.’

  I nodded slowly.

  ‘Are you investigating Streicher?’

  ‘In confidence?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I don’t honestly know. Right now let’s just say that I’m curious about him.’

  ‘Do you want me to ask Dr Goering for help?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not at this stage. But thanks for the offer. I’ll certainly bear it in mind.’ I stood up, and went to the door. ‘I’ll bet you probably think quite highly of the prime minister, him being the patron of this institute. Am I right?’

  ‘He’s been good to us, it’s true. Without his help I doubt there would be an institute. Naturally we think highly of him for that.’

  ‘Please don’t think I’m blaming you, I’m not. But hasn’t it ever occurred to you that your beneficent patron is just as likely to go and shit in someone else’s garden, as Streicher is in yours? Have you ever thought about that? It stikes me as how it’s a dirty neighbourhood we’re living in, and that we’re all going to keep finding crap on our shoes until someone has the sense to put all the stray dogs in the public kennel.’ I touched the brim of my hat to her. ‘Think about it.’

  Korsch twisted his moustache absently as he continued reading his newspaper. I supposed that he had grown it in an effort to look more of a character, in the same way as some men will grow a beard: not because they dislike shaving — a beard requires just as much grooming as a clean-shaven face — but because they think it will make them seem like someone to be taken seriously. But with Korsch the moustache, little more than
the stroke of an eyebrow-pencil, merely served to underscore his shifty mien. It made him look like a pimp, an effect at odds with his character however, which in a period of less than two weeks, I had discovered to be a willing and reliable one.

  Noticing my attention, he was moved to inform me that the Polish foreign minister, Josef Beck, had demanded a solution to the problem of the Polish minority in the Olsa region of Czechoslovakia.

  ‘Just like a bunch of gangsters, isn’t it, sir?’ he said. ‘Everyone wants his cut.’

  ‘Korsch,’ I said, ‘you missed your vocation. You should have been a newsreader on the radio.’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said, folding away his paper. ‘Have you been to Nuremberg before?’

  ‘Once. Just after the war. I can’t say I like Bavarians much, though. How about you?’

  ‘First time. But I know what you mean about Bavarians. All that quaint conservatism. It’s a lot of nonsense, isn’t it?’ He looked out of the window for a minute at the moving picture that was the German countryside. Facing me again he said: ‘Do you really think Streicher could have something to do with these killings, sir?’

  ‘We’re not exactly tripping over the leads in this case, are we? Nor would it appear that the Gauleiter of Franconia is what you would call popular. Arthur Nebe even went so far as to tell me that Julius Streicher is one of the Reich’s greatest criminals, and that there are already several investigations pending against him. He was keen that we should speak to the Nuremberg Police President personally. Apparently there’s no love lost between him and Streicher. But at the same time we have to be extremely careful. Streicher runs his district like a Chinese warlord. Not to mention the fact that he’s on first-name terms with the Fuhrer.’

  When the train reached Leipzig a young SA naval company leader joined our compartment, and Korsch and I went in search of the dining car. By the time we had finished eating the train was in Gera, close to the Czech border, but despite the fact that our SA travelling companion got off at that stop, there was no sign of the troop concentrations we had heard about. Korsch suggested that the naval SA man’s presence there meant that there was going to be an amphibious attack, and this, we both agreed, would be the best thing for everyone, given that the border was largely mountainous.