The Pale Criminal

by Philip Kerr

  ‘Do you play?’ he said.

  ‘Are you stretching me out? This used to be my sitting-room.’ I picked up a stick and watched Becker shoot the cue ball. It hit the red, banked off the cushion and hit the other white ball square.

  ‘Care for a little bet?’

  ‘Not after that shot. You’ve got a lot to learn about working a line. Now if you’d missed it–’

  ‘Lucky shot, that’s all,’ Becker insisted. He bent down and cued a wild one which missed by half a metre.

  I clicked my tongue. ‘That’s a billiard cue you’re holding, not a white stick. Stop trying to lay me down, will you? Look, if it makes you happy, we’ll play for five marks a game.’

  He smiled slightly and flexed his shoulders.

  ‘Twenty points all right with you?’

  I won the break and missed the opening shot. After that I might just as well have been baby-sitting. Becker hadn’t been in the Boy Scouts when he was young, that much was certain. After four games I tossed a twenty on to the felt and begged for mercy. Becker threw it back.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You let me lay you down.’

  ‘That’s another thing you’ve got to learn. A bet’s a bet. You never ever play for money unless you mean to collect. A man that lets you off might expect you to let him off. It makes people nervous, that’s all.’

  ‘That sounds like good advice.’ He pocketed the money.

  ‘It’s like business,’ I continued. ‘You never work for free. If you won’t take money for your work then it can’t have been worth much.’ I returned my cue to the rack and finished my beer. ‘Never trust anyone who’s happy to do the job for nothing.’

  ‘Is that what you’ve learnt as a private detective?’

  ‘No, it’s what I’ve learnt as a good businessman. But since you mention it, I don’t like the smell of a private investigator who tries to find a missing schoolgirl and then waives his fee.’

  ‘Rolf Vogelmann? But he didn’t find her.’

  ‘Let me tell you something. These days a lot of people go missing in this town, and for lots of different reasons. Finding one is the exception, not the rule. If I’d torn up the bill of every disappointed client I had, I’d have been washing dishes by now. When you’re private, there’s no room for sentiment. The man who doesn’t collect, doesn’t eat.’

  ‘Maybe this Vogelmann character is just more generous than you were, sir.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t see how he can afford to be,’ I said, unfolding Vogelmann’s advertisement and looking at it again. ‘Not with these overheads.’

  16

  Tuesday, 18 October

  It was her, all right. There was no mistaking that golden head and those well-sculpted legs. I watched her struggle out of Ka-De-We’s revolving door, laden with parcels and carrier-bags, looking like she was doing her last-minute Christmas shopping. She waved for a taxi, dropped a bag, bent down to retrieve it and looked up to find that the driver had missed her. It was difficult to see how. You’d have noticed Hildegard Steininger with a sack over your head. She looked as though she lived in a beauty parlour.

  From inside my car I heard her swear and, drawing up at the curb, I wound down the passenger window.

  ‘Need a lift somewhere?’

  She was still looking around for another taxi when she answered. ‘No, it’s all right,’ she said, as if I had cornered her at a cocktail party and she had been glancing over my shoulder to see if there might be someone more interesting coming along. There wasn’t, so she remembered to smile, briefly, and then added: ‘Well, if you’re sure it’s no trouble.’

  I jumped out to help her load the shopping. Millinery stores, shoe shops, a perfumers, a fancy Friedrichstrasse dress-designer, and Ka-De-We’s famous food hall: I figured she was the type for whom a cheque-book provided the best kind of panacea for what was troubling her. But then, there are lots of women like that.

  ‘It’s no trouble at all,’ I said, my eyes following her legs as they swung into the car, briefly enjoying a view of her stocking tops and garters. Forget it, I told myself. This one was too pricey. Besides, she had other things on her mind. Like whether the shoes matched the handbag, and what had happened to her missing daughter.

  ‘Where to?’ I said. ‘Home?’

  She sighed like I’d suggested the Palme doss-house on Frobelstrasse, and then, smiling a brave little smile, she nodded. We drove east towards Bülowstrasse.

  ‘I’m afraid that I don’t have any news for you,’ I said, fixing a serious expression to my features and trying to concentrate on the road rather than the memory of her thighs.

  ‘No, I didn’t think you did,’ she said dully. ‘It’s been almost four weeks now, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t give up hope.’

  Another sigh, rather more impatient. ‘You’re not going to find her. She’s dead, isn’t she? Why doesn’t somebody just admit it?’

  ‘She’s alive until I find out different, Frau Steininger.’ I turned south down Potsdamerstrasse and for a while we were both silent. Then I became aware of her shaking her head and breathing like she had walked up a flight of stairs.

  ‘Whatever must you think of me, Kommissar?’ she said. ‘My daughter missing, probably murdered, and here I am spending money as if I hadn’t a care in the world. You must think me a heartless sort of woman.’

  ‘I don’t think anything of the kind,’ I said, and started telling her how people dealt with these things in different ways, and that if a bit of shopping helped to take her mind off her daughter’s disappearance for a couple of hours then that was perfectly all right, and that nobody would blame her. I thought I made a convincing case, but by the time we reached her apartment in Steglitz, Hildegard Steininger was in tears.

  I took hold of her shoulder and just squeezed it, letting her go a bit before I said, ‘I’d offer you my handkerchief if I hadn’t wrapped my sandwiches in it.’

  Through her tears she tried a smile. ‘I have one,’ she said, and tugged a square of lace from out of her sleeve. Then she glanced over at my own handkerchief and laughed. ‘It does look as if you’d wrapped your sandwiches in it.’

  After I’d helped to carry her purchases upstairs, I stood outside her door while she found her key. Opening it, she turned and smiled gracefully.

  ‘Thank you for helping, Kommissar,’ she said. ‘It really was very kind of you.’

  ‘It was nothing,’ I said, thinking nothing of the sort.

  Not even an invitation in for a cup of coffee, I thought when I was sitting in the car once more. Lets me drive her all this way and not even invited inside.

  But then there are lots of women like that, for whom men are just taxi-drivers they don’t have to tip.

  The heavy scent of the lady’s Bajadi perfume was pulling quite a few funny faces at me. Some men aren’t affected by it at all, but a woman’s perfume smacks me right in the leather shorts. Arriving back at the Alex some twenty minutes later, I think I must have sniffed down every molecule of that woman’s fragrance like a vacuum cleaner.

  I called a friend of mine who worked at Dorlands, the advertising agency. Alex Sievers was someone I knew from the war.

  ‘Alex. Are you still buying advertising space?’

  ‘For as long as the job doesn’t require one to have a brain.’

  ‘It’s always nice to talk to a man who enjoys his work.’

  ‘Fortunately I enjoy the money a whole lot better.’

  It went on like that for another couple of minutes until I asked Alex if he had a copy of that morning’s Beobachter. I referred him to the page with Vogelmann’s ad.

  ‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘I can’t believe that there are people in your line of work who have finally staggered into the twentieth century.’

  ‘That advertisement has appeared at least twice a week for quite a few weeks now,’ I explained. ‘What’s a campaign like that cost?’

  ‘With that many insertions there’s bound to be som
e sort of discount. Listen, leave it with me. I know a couple of people on the Beobachter. I can probably find out for you.’

  ‘I’d appreciate it, Alex.’

  ‘You want to advertise yourself, maybe?’

  ‘Sorry, Alex, but this is a case.’

  ‘I get it. Spying on the competition, eh?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  I spent the rest of that afternoon reading Gestapo reports on Streicher and his Der Stürmer associates: of the Gauleiter’s affair with one Anni Seitz, and others, which he conducted in secret from his wife Kunigunde; of his son Lothar’s affair with an English girl called Mitford who was of noble birth; of Stürmer editor Ernst Hiemer’s homosexuality; of Stürmer cartoonist Philippe Rupprecht’s illegal activities after the war in Argentina; and of how the Stürmer team of writers included a man called Fritz Brand, who was really a Jew by the name of Jonas Wolk.

  These reports made fascinating, salacious reading, of the sort that would no doubt have appealed to Der Stürmer’s own following, but they didn’t bring me any nearer to establishing a connection between Streicher and the murders.

  Sievers called back at around five, and said that Vogelmann’s advertising was costing something like three or four hundred marks a month.

  ‘When did he start spending that kind of mouse?’

  ‘Since the beginning of July. Only he’s not spending it, Bernie.’

  ‘Don’t tell me he’s getting it for nothing.’

  ‘No, somebody else is picking up the bill.’

  ‘Oh? Who?’

  ‘Well that’s the funny thing, Bernie. Can you think of any reason why the Lange Publishing Company should be paying for a private investigator’s advertising campaign?’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘That’s very interesting, Alex. I owe you one.’

  ‘Just make sure that if you ever decide to do some advertising it’s me you speak to first, all right?’

  ‘You bet.’

  I put down the receiver and opened my diary. My account for work done on Frau Gertrude Lange’s behalf was at least a week overdue. Glancing at my watch I thought I could just about beat the westbound traffic.

  They had the painters in at the house in Herbertstrasse when I called, and Frau Lange’s black maid complained bitterly about people coming and going all the time so that she was never off her feet. You wouldn’t have thought it to look at her. She was even fatter than I remembered.

  ‘You’ll have to wait here in the hall while I go and see if she’s available,’ she told me. ‘Everywhere else is being decorated. Don’t touch anything, mind.’ She flinched as an enormous crash echoed through the house and, mumbling about men with dirty overalls disrupting the place, she went off in search of her mistress, leaving me to tap my heels on the marble floor.

  It seemed to make sense, their decorating the place. They probably did it every year, instead of spring cleaning. I ran my hand over an art-deco bronze of a leaping salmon that occupied the middle of a great round table. I might have enjoyed its tactile smoothness if the thing hadn’t been covered in dust. I turned, grimacing, as the black cauldron waddled back into the hall. She grimaced back at me and then down at my feet.

  ‘You see what your boots has gone and done to my clean floor?’ she said pointing at the several black marks my heels had left.

  I tutted with theatrical insincerity.

  ‘Perhaps you can persuade her to buy a new one,’ I said. I was certain she swore under her breath before telling me to follow her.

  We went along the same hallway that was a couple of coats of paint above gloomy, to the double doors of the sitting-room–office. Frau Lange, her chins and her dog were waiting for me on the same chaise longue, except that it had been recovered with a shade of material that was easy on the eye only if you had a piece of grit in there on which to concentrate. Having lots of money is no guarantee of good taste, but it can make the lack of it more glaringly obvious.

  ‘Don’t you own a telephone?’ she boomed through her cigarette smoke like a fog-horn. I heard her chuckle as she added: ‘I think you must have once been a debt-collector or something.’ Then, realizing what she had said, she clutched at one of her sagging jowls. ‘Oh God, I haven’t paid your bill, have I?’ She laughed again, and stood up. ‘I’m most awfully sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said, watching her go to the desk and take out her cheque-book.

  ‘And I haven’t yet thanked you properly for the speedy way in which you handled things. I’ve told all my friends about how good you were.’ She handed me the cheque. ‘I’ve put a small bonus on there. I can’t tell you how relieved I was to have done with that terrible man. In your letter you said that it appeared as if he had hanged himself, Herr Gunther. Saved somebody else the trouble, eh?’ She laughed again, loudly, like an amateur actress performing rather too vigorously to be wholly credible. Her teeth were also false.

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ I said. I didn’t see any point in telling her about my suspicion that Heydrich had had Klaus Hering killed with the aim of expediting my re-joining Kripo. Clients don’t much care for loose ends. I’m not all that fond of them myself.

  It was now that she remembered that her case had also happened to cost Bruno Stahlecker his life. She let her laughter subside, and fixing a more serious expression to her face she set about expressing her condolences. This also involved her cheque-book. For a moment I thought about saying something noble to do with the hazards of the profession, but then I thought of Bruno’s widow and let her finish writing it.

  ‘Very generous,’ I said. ‘I’ll see that this gets to his wife and family.’

  ‘Please do,’ she said. ‘And if there’s anything else that I can do for them, you will let me know, won’t you?’

  I said that I would.

  ‘There is something you can do for me, Herr Gunther,’ she said. ‘There are still the letters I gave you. My son asked me if those last few could be returned to him.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’d forgotten.’ But what was that she said? Was it possible that she meant the letters I still held in the file back at my office were the only surviving letters? Or did she mean that Reinhard Lange already had the rest? In which case, how had he come by them? Certainly I had failed to find any more of the letters when I searched Hering’s apartment. What had become of them?

  ‘I’ll drop them round myself,’ I said. ‘Thank goodness he has the rest of them back safely.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ she said.

  So there it was. He did have them.

  I began to move towards the door. ‘Well, I’d better be getting along, Frau Lange.’ I waved the two cheques in the air and then slipped them into my wallet. ‘Thanks for your generosity.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  I frowned as if something had occurred to me.

  ‘There is one thing that puzzles me,’ I said. ‘Something I meant to ask you about. What interest does your company have in the Rolf Vogelmann Detective Agency?’

  ‘Rolf Vogelmann?’ she repeated uncomfortably.

  ‘Yes. You see I learnt quite by accident that the Lange Publishing Company has been funding an advertising campaign for Rolf Vogelmann since July of this year. I was merely wondering why you should have hired me when you might with more reason have hired him?’

  Frau Lange blinked deliberately and shook her head.

  ‘I’m afraid that I have absolutely no idea.’

  I shrugged and allowed myself a little smile. ‘Well, as I say, it just puzzled me, that’s all. Nothing important. Do you sign all the company cheques, Frau Lange? I mean, I just wondered if this might be something your son could have done on his own without informing you. Like buying that magazine you told me about. Now what was its name? Urania.’

  Clearly embarrassed, Frau Lange’s face was beginning to redden. She swallowed hard before answering.

  ‘Reinhard has signing power ove
r a limited bank account which is supposed to cover his expenses as a company director. However, I’m at a loss to explain what this might relate to, Herr Gunther.’

  ‘Well, maybe he got tired of astrology. Maybe he decided to become a private investigator himself. To tell the truth, Frau Lange, there are times when a horoscope is as good a way of finding something out as any other.’

  ‘I shall make a point of asking Reinhard about this when I next see him. I’m indebted to you for the information. Would you mind telling me where you got it from?’

  ‘The information? Sorry, I make it a strict rule never to breach confidentiality. I’m sure you understand.’

  She nodded curtly, and bade me good evening.

  Back in the hall the black cauldron was still simmering over her floor.

  ‘You know what I’d recommend?’ I said.

  ‘What’s that?’ she said sullenly.

  ‘I think you should give Frau Lange’s son a call at his magazine. Maybe he can work up a magic spell to shift those marks.’

  17

  Friday, 21 October

  When I first suggested the idea to Hildegard Steininger, she had been less than enthusiastic.

  ‘Let me get this straight. You want to pose as my husband?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘In the first place, my husband is dead. And in the second you don’t look anything like him, Herr Kommissar.’

  ‘In the first place I’m counting on this man not knowing that the real Herr Steininger is dead; and in the second, I don’t suppose that he would have any more idea of what your husband might have looked like than I do.’

  ‘Exactly who is this Rolf Vogelmann, anyway?’

  ‘An investigation like this one is nothing more than a search for a pattern, for a common factor. Here the common factor is that we’ve discovered Vogelmann was retained by the parents of two other girls.’

  ‘Two other victims, you mean,’ she said. ‘I know that other girls have disappeared and then been found murdered, you know. There may be nothing about it in the papers, but one hears things all the time.’