The Pale Criminal

by Philip Kerr

  ‘No,’ he yelled. ‘I won’t wear this.’

  I caught his fist and twisted his arm behind him.

  ‘You snivelling little coward. Damn you, Lange, you’ll wear it and like it or so help me we’ll hang you upside down and cut your throat, like all those girls your friends have murdered. And then maybe we’ll just dump your carcass in a beer-barrel, or an old trunk, and see how your mother feels about identifying you after six weeks.’ I handcuffed him and Becker started with the make-up. When he’d finished, Oscar Wilde by comparison would have seemed as unassuming and conservative as a draper’s assistant from Hanover.

  ‘Come on,’ I growled. ‘Let’s get this Kit-Kat showgirl back to her hotel.’

  We had not exaggerated about the night tank at the Alex. It’s probably the same in every big city police station. But since the Alex is a very big city police station indeed, it followed that the tank there is also very big. In fact it is huge, as big as an average cinema theatre, except that there are no seats. Nor are there any bunks, or windows, or ventilation. There’s just the dirty floor, the dirty latrine buckets, the dirty bars, the dirty people and the lice. The Gestapo kept a lot of detainees there for whom there was no room at Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Orpo put the night’s drunks in there to fight, puke, and sleep it off. Kripo used the place like the Gestapo used the canal: as a toilet for its human refuse. A terrible place for a human being. Even one like Reinhard Lange. I had to keep reminding myself of what it was that he and his friends had done, of Emmeline Steininger, sitting in that barrel like so many rotten potatoes. Some of the prisoners whistled and blew kisses when they saw us bring him down, and Lange turned pale with fright.

  ‘My God, you’re not going to leave me here,’ he said, clutching at my arm.

  ‘Then unpack it,’ I said. ‘Weisthor, Rahn, Kindermann. A signed statement, and you can get a nice cell to yourself.’

  ‘I can’t, I can’t. You don’t know what they’ll do to me.’

  ‘No,’ I said, and nodded at the men behind the bars, ‘but I know what they’ll do to you.’

  The lock-up sergeant opened the enormous heavy cage and stood back as Becker pushed him into the tank.

  His cries were still ringing in my ears by the time I got back to Steglitz.

  Hildegard lay asleep on the sofa, her hair spread across the cushion like the dorsal fin of some exotic golden fish. I sat down, ran my hand across its smooth silkiness, and then kissed her forehead, catching the drink on her breath as I did so. Stirring, her eyes blinked open, sad and crusted with tears. She put her hand on my cheek and then on to the back of my neck, pulling me down to her mouth.

  ‘I have to talk to you,’ I said, holding back.

  She pressed her finger against my lips. ‘I know she’s dead,’ she said. ‘I’ve done all my crying. There’s no more water in the well.’

  She smiled sadly, and I kissed each eyelid tenderly, smoothing her scented hair with the palm of my hand, nuzzling at her ear, chewing the side of her neck as her arms held me close, and closer still.

  ‘You’ve had a ghastly evening too,’ she said gently. ‘Haven’t you, darling?’

  ‘Ghastly,’ I said.

  ‘I was worried about you going back to that awful house.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about it.’

  ‘Put me to bed, Bernie.’

  She put her arms around my neck and I gathered her up, folding her against my body like an invalid and carrying her into the bedroom. I sat her down on the edge of the bed and started to unbutton her blouse. When that was off she sighed and fell back against the quilt: slightly drunk I thought, unzipping her skirt and tugging it smoothly down her stockinged legs. Pulling down her slip I kissed her small breasts, her stomach and then the inside of her thighs. But her pants seemed to be too tight, or caught between her buttocks, and resisted my pulling. I asked her to lift her bottom.

  ‘Tear them,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tear them off. Hurt me, Bernie. Use me.’ She spoke with breathless urgency, her thighs opening and closing like the jaws of some enormous praying mantis.

  ‘Hildegard–’

  She struck me hard across the mouth.

  ‘Listen, damn you. Hurt me when I tell you.’

  I caught her wrist as she struck again.

  ‘I’ve had enough for one evening.’ I caught her other arm. ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Please, you must.’

  I shook my head, but her legs wrapped around my waist and my kidneys winced as her strong thighs squeezed tight.

  ‘Stop it, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Hit me, you stupid ugly bastard. Did I tell you that you were stupid, too? A typical bone-headed bull. If you were a man you’d rape me. But you haven’t got it in you, have you?’

  ‘If it’s a sense of grief you’re after, then we’ll take a drive down to the morgue.’ I shook my head and pushed her thighs apart and then away from me. ‘But not like this. It should be with love.’

  She stopped writhing and for a moment seemed to recognize the truth of what I was saying. Smiling, then raising her mouth to me, she spat in my face.

  After that there was nothing for it but to leave.

  There was a knot in my stomach that was as cold and lonely as my apartment on Fasanenstrasse, and almost immediately I arrived home again I enlisted a bottle of brandy in dissolving it. Someone once said that happiness is that which is negative, the mere abolition of desire and the extinction of pain. The brandy helped a little. But before I dropped off to sleep, still wearing my overcoat and sitting in my armchair, I think I realized just how positively I had been affected.

  22

  Sunday, 6 November

  Survival, especially in these difficult times, has to count as some sort of an achievement. It’s not something that comes easily. Life in Nazi Germany demands that you keep working at it. But, having done that much, you’re left with the problem of giving it some purpose. After all, what good is health and security if your life has no meaning?

  This wasn’t just me feeling sorry for myself. Like a lot of other people I genuinely believe that there is always someone who is worse off. In this case however, I knew it for a fact. The Jews were already persecuted, but if Weisthor had his way their suffering was about to be taken to a new extreme. In which case what did that say about them and us together? In what condition was that likely to leave Germany?

  It’s true, I told myself, that it was not my concern, and that the Jews had brought it on themselves: but even if that were the case, what was our pleasure beside their pain? Was our life any sweeter at their expense? Did my freedom feel any better as a result of their persecution?

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized the urgency not only of stopping the killings, but also of frustrating Weisthor’s declared aim of bringing hell down on Jewish heads, and the more I felt that to do otherwise would leave me degraded in equal measure.

  I’m no knight in shining armour. Just a weather-beaten man in a crumpled overcoat on a street corner with only a grey idea of something you might as well go ahead and call Morality. Sure, I’m none too scrupulous about the things that might benefit my pocket, and I could no more inspire a bunch of young thugs to do good works than I could stand up and sing a solo in the church choir. But of one thing I was sure. I was through looking at my fingernails when there were thieves in the store.

  I tossed the pile of letters on to the table in front of me.

  ‘We found these when we searched your house,’ I said.

  A very tired and dishevelled Reinhard Lange regarded them without much interest.

  ‘Perhaps you’d care to tell me how these came to be in your possession?’

  ‘They’re mine,’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t deny it.’ He sighed and dropped his head on to his hands. ‘Look, I’ve signed your statement. What more do you want? I’ve cooperated, haven’t I?’

  ‘We’re nearly finished, Reinhard. There’s just a loose end or two I want tied up
. Like who killed Klaus Hering.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You’ve got a short memory. He was blackmailing your mother with these letters which he stole from your lover, who also happened to be his employer. He thought she’d be better for the money, I guess. Well, to cut a long story short, your mother hired a private investigator to find out who was squeezing her. That person was me. This was before I went back to being a bull at the Alex. She’s a shrewd lady, your mother, Reinhard. Pity you didn’t inherit some of that from her. Anyway, she thought it possible that you and whoever was blackmailing her might be sexually involved. And so when I found out the name, she wanted you to decide what to do next. Of course she wasn’t to know that you’d already acquired a private investigator in the ugly shape of Rolf Vogelmann. Or at least, Otto Rahn had, using money you provided. Coincidentally, when Rahn was looking around for a business to buy into, he even wrote to me. We never had the pleasure of discussing his proposition, so it took me quite a while to remember his name. Anyway, that’s just by the by.

  ‘When your mother told you that Hering was blackmailing her, naturally you discussed the matter with Dr Kindermann, and he recommended dealing with the matter yourselves. You and Otto Rahn. After all, what’s one more wet-job when you’ve done so many?’

  ‘I never killed anyone, I told you that.’

  ‘But you went along with killing Hering, didn’t you? I expect you drove the car. Probably you even helped Kindermann string up Hering’s dead body and made it look like suicide.’

  ‘No, it’s not true.’

  ‘Wearing their SS uniforms, were they?’

  He frowned and shook his head. ‘How could you know that?’

  ‘I found an SS cap badge sticking in the flesh of Hering’s palm. I’ll bet he put up quite a struggle. Tell me, did the man in the car put up much of a fight? The man wearing the eyepatch. The one watching Hering’s apartment. He had to be killed too, didn’t he? Just in case he identified you.’

  ‘No — ’

  ‘All nice and neat. Kill him, and make it look like Hering did it, and then get Hering to hang himself in a fit of remorse. Not forgetting to take away the letters of course. Who killed the man in the car? Was that your idea?’

  ‘No, I didn’t want to be there.’

  I grabbed him by the lapels, picked him off his chair and started to slap him. ‘Come on, I’ve had just about enough of your whining. Tell me who killed him or I’ll have you shot within the hour.’

  ‘Lanz did it. With Rahn. Otto held his arms while Kindermann — he stabbed him. It was horrible. Horrible.’

  I let him back down on the chair. He collapsed forward on to the table and started to sob into his forearm.

  ‘You know, Reinhard, you’re in a pretty tight spot,’ I said, lighting a cigarette. ‘Being there makes you an accomplice to murder. And then there’s you knowing about the murders of all these girls.’

  ‘I told you,’ he sniffed miserably, ‘they would have killed me. I never went along with it, but I was afraid not to.’

  ‘That doesn’t explain how you got into this in the first place.’ I picked up Lange’s statement and glanced over it.

  ‘Don’t think I haven’t asked myself the same question.’

  ‘And did you come up with any answers?’

  ‘A man I admired. A man I believed in. He convinced me that what we were doing was for the good of Germany. That it was our duty. It was Kindermann who persuaded me.’

  ‘They’re not going to like that in court, Reinhard. Kindermann doesn’t play a very convincing Eve to your Adam.’

  ‘But it’s true, I tell you.’

  ‘That may be so, but we’re fresh out of fig-leaves. You want a defence, you better think of something to improve on that. That’s good legal advice, you can depend on it. And let me tell you something, you’re going to need all the good advice you can get. Because the way I see it, you’re the only one who’s likely to need a lawyer.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ll be straight with you, Reinhard. I’ve got enough in this statement of yours to send you straight to the block. But the rest of them, I don’t know. They’re all SS, acquainted with the Reichsfuhrer. Weisthor’s a personal friend of Himmler’s, and, well, I worry, Reinhard. I worry that you’ll be the scapegoat. That all of them will get away with it in order to avoid a scandal. Of course, they’ll probably have to resign from the SS, but nothing more than that. You’ll be the one who loses his head.’

  ‘No, it can’t be true.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Now if there was just something else besides your statement. Something that could let you off the hook on the murder charge. Of course, you’d have to take your chances on the Para 175. But you might get away with five years in a KZ, instead of an outright death sentence. You’d still have a chance.’ I paused. ‘So how about it, Reinhard?’

  ‘All right,’ he said after a minute, ‘there is something.’

  ‘Talk to me.’

  He started hesitantly, not quite sure whether or not he was right to trust me. I wasn’t sure myself.

  ‘Lanz is Austrian, from Salzburg.’

  ‘That much I guessed.’

  ‘He read medicine in Vienna. When he graduated he specialized in nervous diseases and took up a post at the Salzburg Mental Asylum. Which was where he met Weisthor. Or Wiligut, as he called himself in those days.’

  ‘Was he a doctor too?’

  ‘God, no. He was a patient. By profession a soldier in the Austrian army. But he is also the last in a long line of German wise men which dates back to prehistoric times. Weisthor possesses ancestral clairvoyant memory which enables him to describe the lives and religious practices of the early German pagans.’

  ‘How very useful.’

  ‘Pagans who worshipped the Germanic god Krist, a religion which was later stolen by the Jews as the new gospel of Jesus.’

  ‘Did they report this theft?’ I lit another cigarette.

  ‘You wanted to know,’ said Lange.

  ‘No, no. Please go on. I’m listening.’

  ‘Weisthor studied runes, of which the swastika is one of the basic forms. In fact, crystal shapes such as the pyramid are all rune types, solar symbols. That’s where the word “crystal” comes from.’

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘Well, in the early 1920S Weisthor began to exhibit signs of paranoid schizophrenia, believing that he was being victimized by Catholics, Jews and Freemasons. This followed the death of his son, which meant that the line of the Wiligut wise men was broken. He blamed his wife and as time went by, became increasingly violent. Finally he tried to strangle her and was later certified insane. On several occasions during his confinement he tried to murder other inmates. But gradually, under the influence of drug treatment, his mind was brought under control.’

  ‘And Kindermann was his doctor?’

  ‘Yes, until Weisthor’s discharge in 1932.’

  ‘I don’t get it. Kindermann knew Weisthor was a spinner and let him out?’

  ‘Lanz’s approach to psychotherapy is anti-Freudian, and he saw in Jung’s work material for the history and culture of a race. His field of research has been to investigate the human unconscious mind for spiritual strata that might make possible a reconstruction of the pre-history of cultures. That’s how he came to work with Weisthor. Lanz saw in him the key to his own branch of Jungian psychotherapy, which will, he hopes, enable him to set up, with Himmler’s blessing, his own version of a Goering Research Institute. That’s another psychotherapeutic –’

  ‘Yes, I know it.’

  ‘Well, at first the research was genuine. But then he discovered that Weisthor was a fake, that he was using his so-called ancestral clairvoyance as a way of projecting the importance of his ancestors in the eyes of Himmler. But by then it was too late. And there was no price that Lanz would not have paid to make sure of getting his institute.’

  ‘What does h
e need an institute for? He’s got the clinic, hasn’t he?’

  ‘That’s not enough for Lanz. In his own field he wants to be remembered in the same breath as Freud and Jung.’

  ‘What about Otto Rahn?’

  ‘Gifted academically, but really little more than a ruthless fanatic. He was a guard in Dachau for a while. That’s the kind of man he is.’ He stopped and chewed his fingernail. ‘Might I have one of those cigarettes, please?’

  I tossed him the packet and watched him light one with a hand that trembled as if he had a high fever. To see him smoke it, you would have thought it was pure protein.

  ‘Is that it?’

  He shook his head. ‘Kindermann still has Weisthor’s medical case history, which proves his insanity. Lanz used to say that it was his insurance, to guarantee Weisthor’s loyalty. You see, Himmler can’t abide mental illness. Some nonsense about racial health. So if he were ever to get hold of that case history, then–’

  ‘ — then the game would be well and truly up.’

  ‘So what’s the plan, sir?’

  ‘Himmler, Heydrich, Nebe — they’ve all gone to this SS Court of Honour at Wewelsburg.’

  ‘Where the hell is Wewelsburg?’ Becker said.

  ‘It’s quite near Paderborn,’ said Korsch.

  ‘I propose to go after them. See if I can’t expose Weisthor and the whole dirty business right in front of Himmler. I’ll take Lange along for the ride, just for evidentiary purposes.’

  Korsch stood up and went to the door. ‘Right, sir. I’ll get the car.’

  ‘I’m afraid not. I want you two to stay here.’

  Becker groaned loudly. ‘But that’s ridiculous, it really is, sir. It’s asking for trouble.’

  ‘It may not quite go the way I’m planning. Don’t forget that this Weisthor character is Himmler’s friend. I doubt that the Reichsführer will take too kindly to my revelations. Worse still, he may dismiss them altogether, in which case it would be better if there was only me to take the heat. After all, he can hardly kick me off the force, since I’m only on it for as long as this case lasts and then I’m back to my own business.