by Philip Kerr
“I’ve learned not to make allegations like this without evidence. And the evidence is all written in that file you’re holding. I’ve read it, cover to cover. And I’m still walking away with something bad on my shoe.”
“So what would you suggest?”
“It’s the widow who’ll be expecting the Irma Grese treatment. After all, she’s the one in line for the big payday. Not Friedrich Jauch. So why don’t I tail him for a couple of days? See what I come up with. If they are in this together he’ll be keeping his head low for now. If they had any sense they’ll have made an agreement not to contact each other until after the check is paid over. So all the trust is on his side. Especially after she has the money. Which means that maybe we can flush him out like a rabbit.” Even as I was talking to Dietrich I felt I was sharpening my blunted forensic skills like a razor’s edge on a leather strop. “Yes. That might work. Here’s what I’d like you to consider.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’d like you to speak to the accounts department and have them raise a certified check for twenty thousand deutschmarks, payable to Ursula Dorpmüller.”
“After all you said? You disappoint me.”
“But here’s the thing. Get them to date the check a week ago. And to let you have a photostat.”
“What are you planning?”
“To test the age-old theory that there’s no honor among thieves and even less among murderers.”
THIRTEEN
–
It probably took a German to invent the idea of an archduke. A German duke, that is, not satisfied with being an ordinary duke. It was much the same, I supposed, with German insurance men: According to Friedrich Jauch’s job title he was the Chief Senior Sales Executive in Charge of New Business Development. As if to match his long title, he was very tall and straight and thin; in his pale gray suit and light green tie he most resembled an aspen tree. I suppose he was in his mid-thirties, although his boyishly styled fair hair and lisping, high-pitched voice made him appear even younger. Young enough and stupid enough to see murder as an easy solution to a common problem: money and the lack of it. We’d met a couple of times before but this time I engineered it so that I seemed to meet him accidentally, on the broad marble staircase leading down to the magnificent main hall in MRE, just a couple of days after I’d first shared my suspicions about him with Dietrich. He was on his way out somewhere, wearing a hunter-green loden coat and a hat with half a badger attached to the crown.
“Good afternoon, how are you?” I said brightly.
“Well, thanks. How are you settling in here at MRE? How’s Dumbo?”
“Is he always so grumpy?”
“Always.”
“I think he believes he’s all that stands between this company and financial ruin. By the way, maybe you’d like to know, we paid off on the Dorpmüller life claim.”
“You did? Right. Good. At least I think it’s good. It was a lot of money, as I recall.”
“That’s right. It is. I looked into all the facts but we couldn’t see anything suspicious about it. Much to Dietrich’s irritation. As you can probably imagine. He hates paying up on a claim of that size. Anyway, I delivered the check myself. As a matter of fact I have a photostat here in this file. Perhaps you’d like to see it. If it was payable to me I’d probably have it framed.”
I opened the file under my arm and showed him the copy of a check for twenty thousand deutschmarks made payable to Ursula Dorpmüller, hoping he would notice the date.
“Look at that,” I said. “Twenty thousand deutschmarks. What I couldn’t do with money like that.”
“It’s a lot of money, all right.”
“I didn’t want to trust it to the postal service, given how much it was. So I delivered it to the widow personally. Took it round to her apartment in Nymphenburg, just a few days ago. I’m still finding my feet a little around here and I’m still not exactly sure how the bureaucracy of insurance works, but anyway, I thought you’d like to know.” I closed the file and offered him my friendliest smile, as if he were one of my best friends at MRE.
“Right, right. Thanks a lot. I’m glad you did.”
“That’s a very nice-looking woman, you know. Frau Dorpmüller, I mean.”
“I suppose she is.”
“I certainly thought so. Sometimes I wonder if good-looking women know the effect they have on men. Mostly I try not thinking about them at all. For my sake and theirs. The women close to me have not had the best of luck, one way or another. Leaving the female of the species alone has, for me, come to seem like a kind of valor.”
“Is that so? You surprise me. Perhaps you’re more dangerous than you look.”
“I hope so.”
His smile was as thin as his parchment skin. Aspens are suited to colder climates and the wood is famously hard to burn but as I chatted Friedrich Jauch’s pale neck started to turn bright red, as if his whole body were slowly catching fire. Clearly our conversation was having the effect I’d hoped for. Any doubts about his guilt were now gone. In my time as a cop in Berlin I’d interrogated some of the great Grand Master Liars, and Friedrich Jauch wasn’t one of those. His guilt and greed for a share of the settlement made him more transparent to me than some bloodless deep-ocean fish. The fact was I’d only just returned from handing over the check to Ursula Dorpmüller at her apartment in Nymphenburg, but I wanted Jauch to suspect she might have double-crossed him and was holding out on whatever deal they’d previously made. Even if they’d agreed not to meet for a while he would probably insist on a meeting now, as a result of what I was telling him—had to, and he’d certainly assume she was lying when she told him that she’d only just received the check. As soon as that seed of doubt took root in his mind I was betting their conspiracy would start to unravel like the wool of a cheap sweater.
“Well, thanks for letting me know, Christof. I appreciate it. But I can’t stand here chatting. I’d better get on. Clients to meet. Sales to make.”
“Nice talking to you,” I said, and carried on up the stairs to where I’d left my coat lying on a hand-carved fauteuil. I grabbed it, went back down to the hall, watched him turn right out of the colonnade onto Königinstrasse, and then followed.
It had been a while since I’d tailed a suspect, and I was looking forward to repeating the experience. Frankly the chase made me feel young again, like I was a junior detective back at the Alex when the commissars used to train us like bloodhounds. It was the best training in the world, as a matter of fact. I once followed a man for three days without him knowing I was there, and he didn’t even have a letter M chalked on the back of his coat. Ideally I would have had a partner to follow Jauch effectively but then he was by now probably too much preoccupied with doubt and suspicions concerning his co-conspirator to be looking out for a tail. Besides, I had done this a thousand times, whereas for him this was probably his first time being followed by a trained detective. If I was right it would probably be the last time he was followed, too.
I shadowed him to the corner of Galeriestrasse, where he stepped into a telephone box and made a call. A few minutes later he came out, crossed onto Ludwigstrasse, and took a cab from the taxi rank. First rule if you think you’re being tailed: Never take a cab from the taxi rank unless it’s the only one free. Here there were three, which meant it was easy for me to jump in another and follow him to wherever he was going. A few minutes later, in the south part of central Munich, his cab stopped and he got out on Sendlinger Tor Platz. But I stayed in my cab for a moment and watched. This area, extending from the Marienplatz beyond Rindermarkt, had been almost entirely destroyed during the war and was being rebuilt on new and uniformly modern lines; recent demolitions had laid bare the Löwenturm, one of the towers of the old town wall, and clear views were to be had across several empty spaces. It was easy to keep Jauch in sight. He couldn’t have made it easier for me wearing a hat
like that. It was a Gamsbart, a Tyrolean hat with a beard that was supposed to make the wearer look like a character. He might as well have been carrying a Nazi flag. After a few moments he ducked into a cinema and I followed.
At the ticket desk I smiled at the toucan-faced cashier behind the glass and said, “That fellow who came in with the stupid hat—the Gamsbart. Where’s he sitting? I want to make sure I’m not behind him.”
“Stalls,” she said.
I smiled again. “Give me a seat in the front dress circle, will you? Just in case he keeps it on.”
“Film’s just about to start,” she said, handing me my ticket before going back to her nails and her copy of Film Revue.
I went in and found my seat a few minutes before the lights went down, just in time to spot Friedrich Jauch, alone in the middle of the stalls, almost immediately beneath the front row of the dress circle where I’d positioned myself, not close enough to hear anything of what he might say, but close enough to notice if anyone sat anywhere near him. He put the hat on the seat next to him where it sat, quite noticeably, like a much-loved pet. I sat forward and, leaning my chin on the red velvet parapet, I found I was able to flick my eyes between the screen—the film was Bhowani Junction—and Friedrich Jauch without even moving my head. The cinema was more or less empty; a film about the British Empire was hardly a popular subject in Germany. I lit a cigarette and settled down to wait for the other show I’d come for.
I’d always enjoyed going to the cinema, even when Dr. Goebbels was pretending to be Louis B. Mayer. Being part of a cinema audience felt like something attractively infernal to me. There was the darkness and the smoke, of course; there was the grandiose architecture, the gold curtains and the cheap marble and the red velvet; there was the paradox of being anonymous among a group of people; and there was the drama taking place on the big screen, like watching the gods struggle and screw up badly. It was as if real life had been suspended or abruptly curtailed in some antechamber of purgatory. There was all of that and the fact that I’d always wanted to die in a cinema, for the simple reason that a movie would give me something better to think about than the actual business of breathing my last. Ava Gardner looking down on me with those emerald eyes of hers, not to mention the sight of her ample chest in a slightly too-tight British army shirt, was much better than some muttering po-faced priest every time.
It was only now I realized that it was Ava who Ursula Dorpmüller had reminded me of. Meeting her at the apartment in Nymphenburg it had been all too easy to imagine poor Friedrich Jauch falling in with this seductive siren’s plans; the wonder was how she’d ended up being married to a slob like Theo Dorpmüller in the first place. Maybe she’d married the poor bastard because it’s easier getting generous amounts of life insurance when you’re still in your thirties. I felt sorry for him. I even felt sorry for Friedrich Jauch. I hoped he’d enjoyed her body because where he was probably going they didn’t allow conjugal visits. West Germany might not have had the death penalty like France and Great Britain but from my own experience I knew that Landsberg Prison was no holiday camp.
After a while I tore my greedy eyes away from Ava’s chest and noticed that the seat immediately behind Jauch was now occupied by a figure wearing a fur coat and a lilac head scarf. The two lovers were pretending not to talk but then Jauch turned around and took her hand, which clinched it in my eyes. These two couldn’t have looked more guilty if they’d been Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra. Now all I had to do was get to a telephone and call Dumbo Dietrich.
I went through the fire exit and ran downstairs, and outside. If the cops were quick they could pick them both up, one after the other, when they left the movie theater like two strangers in the night. It was true that most of the evidence against them was circumstantial, but an experienced detective would easily break them down under interrogation; the only question was which of them would crack first. I had my own theory about that. Jauch had carried out the murder, so he had the most to lose—and she would rat him out. She wouldn’t be able to help it. That’s just what women do.
On the west side of Sendlinger Tor Platz, in front of the Nussbaum Gardens, was the Matthäuskirche, a soulless Protestant church built in 1953 with a high red-brick square tower that looked like somewhere to train firemen or, more likely, kill them. If he’d been looking, God must have thought German architects had lost all sense of reason. Nearby was a row of phone booths with more character than the church, and from one of these I called Dumbo. There were a couple of East German refugees begging in front of the church and I tossed a couple of coins their way when I came out of the phone booth. It wasn’t looking at refugees that upset me; it didn’t. It was them looking back that bothered me: one German staring at another and seeming to say, Why me and not you? The worst thing was how so many of the younger ones still managed to look like the blond, blue-eyed master race.
I hurried back to the cinema, where I bought another ticket, this time for the stalls. I breathed a sigh of relief. The lovers were seated together now where I’d left them, quite unaware of the disaster that was about to turn their world upside down.
Ava fixed her big green eyes on me and shook her head as if to say, How could you betray them, you rotten bastard? They couldn’t help it. That life insurance money was the only way they could make their love work.
Or some such crap. But then Ava was trouble. Anyone could see that. That was probably the reason I loved her. And it was just as well for us both that I’d promised myself to leave Ava alone.
FOURTEEN
–
Time passed, slowly, and then one freezing day near the middle of March, I got the summons to go upstairs for an audience with Mr. Alois Alzheimer himself—the kind of summons for which a bottle of oxygen might almost have been required, such was the rarefied atmosphere that existed on the fourth floor. When I got there Dietrich was already seated in a brown leather Biedermeier bergère and, for a moment, until I saw the bottle of Canadian Club in Alzheimer’s hand, I thought I was in some sort of trouble. That comes naturally to anyone who has as much to hide as I do.
“And here he is,” said Alzheimer, pouring me a large one in a crystal glass the size of a small goldfish bowl. “The man who saved us twenty thousand deutschmarks.”
Everything in the office was of the finest quality. There was so much oak paneling on the walls it was like being a Cuban cigar in a humidor, while the gray carpet under my feet felt like a mattress protector. In the stone fireplace a log the size of a trench mortar was smoking quietly. Next to a little Meissen desk set and an impressive photograph of Alzheimer with Konrad Adenauer in a silver frame was an RCA Victor clock radio, and among the many leather-bound volumes on the bookshelf were a Slim Jim portable TV and an Argus slide projector; outside the door, Alzheimer’s secretary’s fingers were busy on an IBM electric typewriter that sounded like a light machine gun. Clearly he was a man who had very simple tastes, for whom the best was probably quite good enough.
I glanced over at Dietrich, who was already nursing a glass. “They finally admitted it?”
“We just heard from the police. They both put their hands up to everything.”
“Took longer than I thought,” I said, raising my glass to the news. “In my day we’d have had a confession within forty-eight hours. And I’m not talking about any strong-arm stuff, either. You keep someone awake for twenty-four hours with a Kaiser lamp in their face and pretty soon they’ll forget even the most well-rehearsed story.”
“These days criminals have rights, unfortunately,” said Alzheimer.
“And don’t forget, Frau Dorpmüller suffered a heart attack,” said Dietrich. “The police weren’t allowed to question her until she was out of the hospital.”
I pulled a face and laughed.
“You think she was putting it on?” asked Alzheimer.
“There are plenty of ways to feign a heart attack,” I said. “Especially
when you’re an experienced nurse like she was. I think she was stalling for time until she’d got her story straight. Or until she found an opportunity to escape. Probably both. I’m surprised the cops still have her in custody.”
“That’s right,” said Dietrich. “She was a nurse, wasn’t she?”
“As a matter of interest,” said Alzheimer, “how would you pull something like that off? I mean it sounds like something we ought to be aware of in our industry, don’t you think, Philipp?”
For a moment I hesitated to tell them the full story; it wasn’t one of my proudest moments as a Berlin detective, but then there weren’t many of us who’d lived through the war who didn’t have something to hide. According to Max Merten, Alois Alzheimer and MRE’s previous chairman, Kurt Schmitt, had been close friends of Hermann Göring and were both taken into custody by the Americans after the war; it was generally held that Schmitt had even been in the SS, so it really didn’t seem the moment to be coy about my own record. I swallowed the whiskey and prepared to open the ancient Gunther family crypt just a crack.
“I was once obliged to arrest a doctor for being a Quaker,” I said. “This would have been 1939, probably. He was a pacifist, you see. We had him in custody and then he had his heart attack, so-called. Very convincing he was, too. We were completely fooled and took him to hospital, where they confirmed our diagnosis. But he’d faked it. Mostly it’s down to your breathing. You breathe fast deep breaths through the mouth, not the nose, and you hyperventilate and poison yourself with too much CO2. Chances are you’ll faint, like he did. When you come to, you pretend to mix up your words, complain of a pain in the arm and the throat, but crucially not the chest, and maybe affect the paralysis of an eyelid, or even your tongue. Once he was in hospital, a doctor friend got hold of some adrenaline and used it to keep up the deception. At least until the doctor’s wife, who’d decided she didn’t like him or the Quakers anymore, showed us a paper he’d written on the subject of feigning a heart attack in order to avoid military service, which he’d been handing out to students at Humboldt University, in Berlin. Luckily for him we weren’t yet at war, which meant he narrowly escaped the death penalty, for which I admit I was relieved. As it was he got two years in prison. I wasn’t a Nazi myself but I fought in the trenches during the first lot and so I’ve always strongly disagreed with pacifism. When it comes to war I tend to think in terms of ‘my country, right or wrong.’”