by Various
"Do you know what Pervitin is?" I said.
"Of course," he said, without hesitation, but with a moue of distaste. "It is an artificial stimulant. A type of drug, what they call methamphetamines. They gave it to us during Barbarossa. It keeps you awake and gives you energy, and it lowers inhibition, which is useful in battle."
"It is also highly addictive."
"Yes," he said. "In our case, the army didn't worry about it too much. Most of the people who took it were destined for death. I was just luckier than most."
"Your friend, Ulla Blau, came to London some years ago," I said. "London at that time was a city in ruin. A large occupying force was initially needed and soldiers, as soldiers are wont to do, require entertainments."
"What are you saying?"
"Ulla's theater connections proved handy in supplying girls for the soldiers. At that time, in London, a warm body was cheaper than a loaf of bread, and easier to get. From the soldiers she could easily acquire extra supplies of Pervitin. These she sold back into the general populace. It wasn't, strictly speaking, legal, but legality didn't have much of a meaning in the immediate aftermath of the war."
"I don't believe you," he said.
I shrugged. "You can believe what you'd like to believe," I said. "But you can't dismiss the evidence of your own eyes. Somebody plugged a nine-millimeter bullet into her pretty little face, after all."
"That doesn't make her guilty!"
"It doesn't make her bloody innocent, either," I said.
He stared at me with hatred and his fingers curled into fists. He was going to go for me in a moment.
Then realization dawned; I could see his expression change. "You don't think I killed her," he said, wonderingly.
"Look, Sloam," I said. I was tired and the pastry was cloyingly sweet. "It doesn't matter to me if you killed her or not. She was nothing but trouble and the world's a better place for her not being in it. However."
He watched me closely. I could see he was still aching to swing at me. He wasn't the first and he wasn't going to be the last.
"Either way, it's a mess. You're a citizen of the Deutsches Reich, not just a colonial. So was Fräulein Blau, and as a former actress, her death would play for news. The last thing my superiors want is a fuss back in Berlin about a sordid murder in the colonies. Citizens of the Reich must feel they can travel safely to any part of the empire. This isn't 1946, Sloam. England's a peaceful place, and a faithful servant of the Führer."
"So where does that leave me?" he said. He wasn't slow when he didn't want to be.
"What would you do in my place?" I said.
He considered. "You'd announce her death as an unfortunate accident, and bury me somewhere out of sight with a bullet between my eyes."
I nodded. He wasn't an innocent, just the wrong man in the wrong place, and for all his war experience, he still thought like a character in one of his movies. "What did you think," I said, "that you'd come over here and rescue her?"
"I don't know what I thought," he said. "And I still don't believe she was guilty!"
"Which of us isn't guilty, Mr. Sloam," I said. "Which of us isn't guilty?"
He watched me. "I am not afraid to die," he said.
I pressed a button, and Sergeant Cole came in. Gunther tensed.
"Cole," I said "Please show Mr. Sloam outside."
Gunther watched me with suspicion.
"There's a flight leaving for Berlin tonight," I said. "I'd advise you to be on it. Remember, I had made that offer before, and I'm unlikely to make it a third time. Sergeant Cole will take you to a hotel where you can clean up and get some rest. Auf Wiedersehen, Mr. Sloam. I hope, sincerely, we do not meet again."
The hint of a smile touched his lips then. "Good-bye, Kriminalinspector Everly," he said.
But I could see he did not mean it.
* * *
Cole dropped him off at the Albert in Covent Garden. It was basic, but clean. Gunther collected his key and went up to his room. He showered and changed. He did not sleep.
Of course the obstinate German did not take my advice. I had accused him of being a romantic and I wasn't wrong. Gunther, for all his battle experience in the Wehrmacht, still insisted, deep down, to think of himself as a character in one of his own cowboy pictures. All he could think about was Ulla Blau's ruined, once-beautiful face staring back at him from the mortuary slab. I think he believed himself untouchable. Most Germans did, after the war. There were still pockets of resistance in America, but few since we'd dropped the A-bomb on Washington, D.C. The world belonged to Germany: for Gunther, that idea was as fixed as his notion of honor.
From the hotel, Gunther went out. For a time he walked through Covent Garden, which he found a dismal sort of place. Underneath the butchers' stalls the blood ran rancid, and the greengrocers' offerings of hard, lumpy potatoes and bent carrots depressed Gunther. The market had all the festivity of a Dachau.
He watched the passersby, though. Londoners moved about the market furtively, with the hunched shoulders of a conquered people. They wore shabby clothes, the men in ill-fitting suits, the women in hand-me-down dresses that appeared to have come from a German Red Cross charity stall. He saw few smiles. Here and there, soldiers patrolled, but they were few in number and looked indifferent to the populace. As I had told Gunther, this England was resigned to its fate. The majority of the occupying force had moved on to other duties, in the new African territories or America. Now, only a skeleton barracks was left and, of course, the Gestapo.
Gunther walked past the Opera House, where a prominent sign advertised the soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf's appearance that night. Along Drury Lane he saw a young boy in the shadows, peaked cap covering half his face, skulking. He paused to watch as first two men and then a woman stopped and appeared to make a furtive purchase. When the street was clear, Gunther crossed the road and approached the boy.
"What do you want, mister?"
"What have you got?" Gunther said.
The boy looked up at him with suspicion. "You're a German!" he said accusingly.
Gunther shrugged.
"You want girls?" the boy said. "My sister is very clean."
"I need something to keep me awake," Gunther said. "You got some of that?"
The boy grinned, relieved that this was just another punter. "Sure, sure," he said expansively. "But it'll cost you."
Gunther took out a clip of bills and the boy's eyes went wide and round. "Pervitin?" Gunther said.
The boy nodded. Gunther peeled off a twenty. "Tell me where you get it from," he said, "and there'll be another ten in it for you."
"Another twenty," the boy said immediately.
"That's a lot of money," Gunther said. The boy nodded, his eyes still drawn to the cash. Gunther let him have the first note and waited.
The boy darted glances to either side of the street. "Seven Dials, mister," he whispered. His hand was extended for the rest of the money. "The Bricklayer's Arms. Ask for Doyle, the Irishman. And for God's sake, man, don't mention me. It's more than my job's worth."
Gunther gave him the other twenty and the boy ran off. At the end of the street, he paused and turned back. He stuck two fingers up at Gunther. "Nazi go home!" he shouted. Then he was gone.
Gunther resumed his walk. My men were watching him, of course. We had not been able to locate the dwarf. He usually resided at a house in Mayfair, near the Swiss ambassador's residency. The dwarf was as good as untouchable, but Gunther didn't know that. That suited me fine.
He walked with the same determined gait of a city dweller. Though he did not know his way, he did not appear lost. He did not stop to look at the sights. He made enquiries politely but with a certain force; and the people of London still, when they heard a German voice, were trained to reply helpfully and quickly.
Seven Dials was only a short walk away. It was a maze of narrow, twisting alleyways between Covent Garden and Soho, a cesspit of racial degradation, or so according to my superior, SS-Obergruppe
nführer Oswald Pohl. An efficient administrator, he was the overseer of the camps erected to deal with the Jewish question during the war. A falling out with his patron, Himmler, after the war, however (the nature of which I never quite knew) saw him exiled to Britain to supervise the local Gestapo, after the former bureau chief SS-Brigadeführer Franz Six had an unfortunate and fatal encounter with a bullet. Six was leading an Einsatzgruppe on a hunt for missing Jews in Manchester at the time.
Pohl, my current superior, took over the job with his customary efficiency but little enthusiasm. He was a keen lover of the arts and found England stifling. I also happened to know he'd been a fan of Ulla Blau.
Standing at the Seven Dials, Gunther was faced with roads leading in every direction away from him. It was as though he stood in the center of a spider bite, and the infection spread outward in wavy paths. Rundown drinking establishments faced him from each point of the compass. He saw the Bricklayer's Arms, and two women fighting loudly over a bottle of gin at the shabby entrance. He stepped around them and entered the pub. Already he was growing sick of the sight and the smell of British pubs.
Inside it was dark, dim, and smelled of the sewers. Gunther lit a cigarette to combat the smell. He looked about him and hostile or indifferent faces stared back at him. He went to the bar and leaned across. "I am looking for Doyle, the Irishman," he said.
"What's it to me?" the bartender said.
Gunther put money on the counter. He did not have much but, in London, Reichsmarks seemed to go a long way. At the sight of the money there was a collective in-drawing of breath.
"I'm Doyle," said a tall specimen.
"I'm Doyle," said a fat, red-haired man.
"I'll be your doll, sailor," said a bald woman with very few teeth, and leered.
Gunther waited. His stillness was born of the war. A shadow stirred by the far wall. It rose and the others faded into the background.
The man stepped close. He was a short, wiry man, in a checkered suit and a jaunty flattop hat with a red feather in the band. His knuckles were scabbed like a bareknuckle boxer's. He jabbed a finger at Gunther's chest.
"What do you want?" he said.
"Are you Doyle?"
"Depends who's asking."
"My name's Sloam. I was a friend of Ulla Blau."
Doyle retreated a step at the name. "Ulla is dead," he said. His voice was softer.
"I know."
"Heard they found her by the river," the Irishman said. "Some maniac did her in."
He took in Gunther's beat-up face. Not with suspicion, Gunther thought, but as confirmation of information he already knew.
"You say you were friends?"
"Old friends," Gunther said. Something in the Irishman's eyes made him trust the man; he couldn't say what it was. "We'd lost touch until recently."
"I liked Ulla," the Irishman said. "I don't care what they say about her."
"What do they say about her?" Gunther said; but of course, he thought he already knew.
"She poisoned those boys!" the bald woman said. Her savagery startled Gunther, who hadn't noticed her creeping close. "The poor boys in Great Ormond. It's a hospital," she said into Gunther's bemused face. "For children. They needed medication, pain relief."
"Do you know what Heroin is?" Doyle said.
"Yes," Gunther said, surprised. "It's a medication made by Bayer."
"You can't get it here," Doyle said. "So.…" He shrugged.
"She cut it with rat poison," the bald woman said, then spat. "Twenty-one children, dead, in agony."
"Now, Martha, you don't know that," Doyle said. Gunther felt sick.
"She was always good to you," Doyle said. "Who do you come to when you need your medication?"
"You and your filthy comrades," the woman said. "We should have stood with the Allies in the war, Doyle. We shouldn't have stayed neutral." She spat again. "Neutral," she said. "Isn't that just another word for collaborator."
Doyle slapped her. The sound, like a gunshot, filled the room. "You're getting above yourself, Martha," he said. The woman glared at him defiantly; then the fight went out of her.
"I need it, Doyle," she said, whining. "I need it."
Gunther watched. He felt sick to his stomach. He could not look away. He could not believe what the woman had said about Ulla. Doyle reached into his pocket and came back with two small pills which he tossed to the woman, like dog biscuits to a pet. She caught them eagerly. "Don't go opening your big gob of shite, now," Doyle said.
"I won't, Doyle. Honest."
"I liked Ulla, whatever they said about her," Doyle said again, sadly. He turned back to Gunther.
"Let's have a drink," he said.
5
IT MAY HAVE occurred to Gunther at this point that all the men he'd so far encountered belonged to countries that remained neutral during the war. The Swiss, the Luxembourgians, and the Irish were rewarded for their careful noninvolvement with the status of sovereign protectorates of the Third Reich, and enjoyed a great deal of autonomy as a consequence.
"Ulla spoke of you," Doyle said.
"She did?" Gunther said, with a mixture of pleasure and surprise.
Doyle's smile transformed his face. "She called you the one who got away."
They were sitting in the back room of the pub. A bottle of whiskey sat between them. Gunther only sipped at his glass. Doyle drank steadily; it didn't seem to hamper him in any way.
"You were foolish to come see me," Doyle said. "You are lucky to be alive."
"Would you have killed me, then?"
"People who come to the Dials asking questions don't always come out again."
Gunther shrugged. "So why spare me?" he said.
"I'd heard you were in town. Heard you were picked up by the Gestapo, too." He downed a shot and refilled the glass and grimaced. "Filthy animals," he said.
"The Gestapo is a necessary organ of the state," Gunther said, primly. He was still a good German.
Doyle shot him a look of disgust. "Have you asked yourself why they let you walk?" he said. "By rights you should be floating past the Isle of Dogs around this time. Depending on the tide."
Gunther shrugged. I think he had an idea. "I want to know who killed her," he said.
"She's dead," Doyle said. "Let it go. This isn't your country, or your cause. Go back to Berlin, make movies, find yourself a nice girl."
"A nice girl? In Berlin?" Gunther said. Doyle smiled; reluctantly, it seemed.
"What did she say about me?"
"She said you were a good man, and that good men were hard to find. She was drunk when she said it, mind."
"That does sound like Ulla."
"Good old Ulla," Doyle said.
"Did you kill her?" Gunther said, softly; the question hung between them like a cloud of ash. They stared at each other across the table.
Doyle broke eye contact first. He shrugged indifferently. "I had no reason to kill her," he said. "We did business, that's all."
"Drugs."
"I don't advise you to go around asking questions," Doyle said. "Go home. Be a good German."
"But Heroin?" Gunther said.
"It is a powerful analgesic," Doyle said. "We need drugs, Herr Sloam. If the Reich won't provide, someone should."
"I don't believe she was involved—" Gunther began.
Doyle banged the glass on the table. "Never trust an actress," he said. "Oh, Ulla knew what she was doing. Whores, black-market medicine—other stuff, too, I heard. Nothing to do with me. She knew. She was planning her retirement. Unfortunately, someone retired her first."
He drank. The bottle was half-empty.
"It's nothing to me," he said.
Gunther said, "Where can I buy a gun?"
* * *
Everyone so far was being very helpful. It was as though London was going out of its way to be obliging to her accidental German tourist. He was as rare and unwelcome as a three-pound note. So why, Gunther wondered, was he practically being given the keys t
o the city?
Back in the pre-war days, in '32 or so, when he was young and carefree, and National Socialism sounded, on a good day, like a bad punch line to an off-color joke, Gunther had worked on a picture called Der Traumdetektiv for the Jewish director Max Ophüls. Gunther's commission was to produce a surrealist piece of film noir, a sort of unreal history in which Germany, faced by her many enemies, nevertheless won the Great War. He recalled little from the finished product—which he had done quickly and for little money—but that the detective figure, whose name he could not remember, at some point entered a dusty old bookshop whose strange proprietor was played by the Hungarian actor Szõke Szakáll.
He remembered it now as he entered Blucher's, across Charing Cross Road from W. & G. Foyle and next to a florist. The shop was low-ceilinged and dark. On a rack outside, copies of the Daily Mail were displayed. It was Britain's sole remaining paper. Gunther picked one up and leafed through it quickly. He found it at the bottom of page five: Mystery Woman Discovered Dead. The article was only a few paragraphs long. The unknown woman was believed to be a dancer—the implication was clear—and likely took her own life. Gunther thought of Ulla Blau on the mortuary slab with her face shot clean off and fought a rise of bile. He replaced the newspaper on the stand and stepped carefully into the store. A bell rang as the door opened and poor yellow light fell down in drops. All about Gunther, books were piled up in haphazard piles. They were dusty and rust-spotted, many of them damaged by fire. Gunther smelled old smoke and cat piss.
"Can I help you?"
The man really did resemble the actor Szakáll a little. He was bespectacled and rotund, with the kind of hair that looked like a hairpiece but wasn't. He sat behind a desk laden with books, his hands folded over his ample stomach.
"You're Blucher?"
The man spread his arms as though to say, Who else can I be ?
"You sell many books?"
"Books?" Blucher said. His myopic eyes looked at Gunther sadly. "Who today has need of books."
"They look like they been in a fire."