A Quiet Flame

by Philip Kerr

  “Right. We’d better have a look around, before the site gets trampled over. See what we can find on our hands and knees with the flashlights.”

  I dropped onto all fours and slowly crawled away from the body in the direction of Königs-Thor. Heinrich Grund did the same, a yard or two to my left. The night was warm, and the grass felt dry and smelled sweet under my hands. It was something we had done before. Something Ernst Gennat was keen on. Something that was in the manual he’d given us. How it was small things that solved murders: bullet casings, blood spots, collar buttons, cigarette ends, matchbooks, earrings, hanks of hair, party badges. Things that were large and easy to see were usually carried away from a crime scene. But the small stuff. That was different. It was the small stuff that could send a man to the guillotine. Nobody called them clues. Gennat hated that word.

  “Clues are for the clueless,” was what the Full Ernst would tell us. “That’s not what I want from my detectives. Give me little spots of color on a canvas. Like that Frenchie who used to paint in little dots. Georges Seurat. Each dot means shit on its own. But when you take a few steps back and look at all of the dots together, you see a picture. That’s what I want you bastards to do. Learn how to paint me a picture like Georges Seurat.”

  So there we were, me and Heinrich Grund, crawling along the grass in Friedrichshain Park, like a couple of dogs. The Berlin polenta trying to paint a picture.

  If I had blinked, I might have missed it. As spots of color go, this one was as small as anything you might have seen on an Impressionist’s canvas, but just as colorful. At first glance I mistook it for a cornflower, because it was light blue, like the dead girl’s eyes. It was a pill, lying on top of a few blades of grass. I picked it up and held it up to my eyes and saw that it was as immaculate as a diamond, which meant it couldn’t have been there that long. There had been a brief shower of rain just after lunch, so it had to have fallen on the ground some time after that. A man hurrying back to the road from the fountains where he had dumped a body might easily have taken out a box of pills, fumbled it in his nervous state, and dropped one. Now all I had to do was find out what kind of pill it was.

  “What have you got there, boss?”

  “A pill,” I said, laying it on his palm.

  “Kind of pill?”

  “I’m not a chemist.”

  “Want me to check it out at the hospital?”

  “No. I’ll get Hans Illmann to do it.”

  Illmann was professor of forensic medicine at the Institute for Police Science in Charlottenburg, and senior pathologist at the Alex. He was also a prominent member of the Social Democratic Party, the SDP. For this and other alleged character failings he had been frequently denounced by Goebbels in the pages of Der Angriff, Berlin’s Nazi newspaper. Illmann wasn’t Jewish, but as far as the Nazis were concerned, he was the next worst thing: a liberal-minded intellectual.

  “Illmann?”

  “Professor Illmann. Any objections?”

  Grund looked up at the moon, as if trying to learn patience. The white light had turned his pale blond head a steely shade of silver, and his blue eyes became almost electric. He looked like some kind of machine-man. Something hard, metallic, and cruel. The head turned, and he stared at me as he might have stared at some poor opponent in the ring—an inadequate subspecies of man who was not fit to enter a contest with one such as him.

  “You’re the boss,” he said, and dropped the pill back in my hand.

  But for how much longer? I asked myself.

  WE DROVE BACK to the Alex, which, with its cupolas and arched entranceways, was as big as a railway station and, behind the four-story brick façade, in the double-height entrance hall, very nearly as busy. All human life was in there. And quite a bit of pond life, too. There was a drunk with a black eye, who was unsteadily awaiting being locked up for the night; a taxi driver making a complaint about a passenger who had run off without paying; an androgynous-looking young man wearing tight white shorts, who was sitting quietly in a corner, checking his makeup in a hand mirror; and a bespectacled man with a briefcase in his hands and a livid red mark across his mouth.

  At the bunker-sized front desk, we checked through a file containing a list of missing persons. The desk sergeant who was supposed to be assisting us had a big handlebar mustache and an eleven o’clock shadow that was so blue it made his face look like a housefly’s. This effect was enhanced, because his eyes were bulging out of his head at the sight of two tall boot girls a cop had shooed in off the street. They were wearing thigh-high black leather boots and red leather coats, which, thoughtfully, they had left undone, revealing to anyone who cared to look that they were wearing nothing underneath. One of them was carrying a riding crop that the arresting officer, a man with an eye patch—a man I knew, named Bruno Stahlecker—was having a hard job persuading her to give up. Clearly the girls had had a drink or two and probably quite a bit else besides, and, as I flicked through the missing-persons reports, half of me was listening to what Stahlecker and the girls were saying. It would have been hard not to hear it.

  “I like a man in uniform,” said the taller of the leather-booted Amazons. She snapped her riding crop against her boot and then fingered the hair at the base of her belly, provocatively. “Which one of Berlin’s bulls wants to be my slave tonight?”

  Boot girls were the city’s outdoor dominatrices. Mostly they worked west of Wittenbergplatz, near the Zoological Gardens, but Stahlecker had picked up this pair of whores in Friedrichstrasse after a man had complained of being beaten and robbed by two women in leather.

  “Behave yourself, Brigit,” said Stahlecker. “Or I’ll throw the rules of the medical profession at you as well.” He turned to the man with the red mark on his face. “Are these the two women who robbed you?”

  “Yes,” said the man. “One of them hit me across the face with a whip and demanded money or she’d hit me again.”

  The girls loudly protested their innocence. Innocence never looked quite so venereal and corrupt.

  Finally I found what I’d been looking for. “Anita Schwarz,” I said, showing Heinrich Grund the missing-persons report. “Aged fifteen. Behrenstrasse 8, flat 3. Report filed by her father, Otto. Disappeared yesterday. One meter, sixty centimeters tall, blond hair, blue eyes, caliper on left leg, carries a walking stick. That’s our girl, all right.”

  But Grund was hardly paying attention. I thought he was looking at the free nude show. And leaving him to it, I went to one of the other filing cabinets and found a more detailed report. There was a star on the file and, next to it, a letter W. “It would seem that the deputy police president is taking an interest in our case,” I said. Inside the file was a photograph. Quite an old one, I thought. But there could be no doubt: it was the girl in the park. “Perhaps he knows the girl’s father.”

  “I know that man,” murmured Grund.

  “Who? Schwarz?”

  “No. That man there.” Leaning back on the front desk, he flicked his snout at the man with the whip mark on his face. “He’s an alphonse.” “Alphonse” was Berlin criminal underworld slang for a pimp. One of many slang words for a pimp, like “louie,” “oiler,” “stripe man,” “ludwig,” and “garter-handler.” “Runs one of those bogus clinics off the Ku-damm. I think his racket is that he poses as a physician and then ‘prescribes’ an underage girl for his so-called patient.” Grund called out to Stahlecker. “Hey, Bruno? What’s the citizen’s name? The one wearing the spectacles and the extra smile.”

  “Him? Dr. Geise.”

  “Dr. Geise, my eggs. His real name is Koch, Hans Theodor Koch, and he’s no more a doctor than I am. He’s an alphonse. A medicine man who fixes old perverts up with little girls.”

  The man stood up. “That’s a damn lie,” he said indignantly.

  “Open his briefcase,” said Grund. “See if I’m wrong.”

  Stahlecker looked at the man, who held the briefcase tightly to his chest as if he really did have something to hide. “W
ell, sir? How about it?”

  Reluctantly, the man allowed Stahlecker to take the briefcase and then to open it. A few seconds later, a pile of pornographic magazines was lying on the desk sergeant’s blotter. The magazine was called Figaro, and on the cover of each copy was a picture of seven naked boys and girls, about ten or eleven years old, sitting in the branches of a dead tree, like a pride of small white lions.

  “You old pervert,” snarled one of the boot girls.

  “This puts rather a different complexion on things, sir,” Stahlecker told Koch.

  “That is a naked-culture magazine,” insisted Koch. “Dedicated to the cause of free life reform. It doesn’t prove anything of what this vile man has alleged.”

  “It proves one thing,” said the boot girl with the whip. “It proves you like looking at dirty pictures of little boys and girls.”

  We left them all in a heated argument.

  “What did I tell you?” said Grund as we went back to the car. “This city is a whore and your beloved republic is her pimp. When are you going to wake up to that fact, Bernie?”

  ON BEHRENSTRASSE, I parked the car in front of a glass-covered arcade that led to Unter den Linden. The arcade was nicknamed the Back Passage, because it was a popular pick-up spot for Berlin’s male prostitutes. These were easily identifiable thanks to the short white trousers, sailor shirts, and peaked caps many of them wore to appear younger to the tree stumps—their middle-aged clients who, until they had made their selection, would walk up and down the passage pretending to look in the windows of the arcade’s antique shops.

  It was a warm night. By my reckoning, there were at least eighty or ninety of the city’s sultriest boys milling around underneath the famous REEMTSMA sign—one of the few left unbroken by the Nazi SA. Storm troopers were supposed to smoke a Trommler brand called Story, so, being Nazis and, therefore, very brand-loyal, they often took exception to other brands of tobacco, of which Reemtsma was perhaps the best known. If the SA did show up, all of the sultry boys would take to their heels or risk a beating—perhaps worse. The SA seemed to hate queers almost as much as they hated Communists and Jews.

  We found the apartment above a café in a smart-looking Romanesque building. I pulled the polished brass bell and we waited. A minute later we heard a man’s voice above our heads, and we stepped back on the sidewalk to get a better look at him.

  “Yes?”

  “Herr Schwarz?”

  “Yes.”

  “Police, sir. May we come up?”

  “Yes. Wait there. I’ll come down and let you in.”

  While we waited, Heinrich Grund fulminated against all the sultries we’d seen. “Russian fairies,” he said.

  Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, many of Berlin’s prostitutes, male and female, had been Russians. But this was no longer true, and I did my best to ignore him. It wasn’t that I liked queers. I just didn’t dislike them as much as he did.

  Otto Schwarz came to the door to let us in. We showed him our KRIPO warrant discs and introduced ourselves, and he nodded as if he had been expecting us. He was a big man with a belly that looked as if a lot of money had been poured into it. His fair hair was cut very short at the sides and wavy on top. Underneath a swinish nose that was almost divided in two by a thick scar was a nearly invisible toothbrush mustache. That he reminded me strongly of Ernst Röhm, the SA leader, was a first impression—reinforced by the uniform he was wearing, illegally. There had been a ban on Nazi uniforms since June 1930, and as recently as April, in a campaign to reduce Nazi terrorism in Berlin, Reich President Hindenburg had dissolved the SA and the SS. I wasn’t much good at recognizing the shoulder and collar insignia on their uniforms, but Grund was. The two of them made polite conversation as we tramped upstairs. That was how I came to learn not just that Schwarz was an Oberführer in the SA but also that this was the equivalent of a brigadier general. There was a small part of me that wanted to join in this polite conversation. I wanted to say I was surprised to find an SA Oberführer at home when there were Communists to lynch and Jewish windows to smash. But since I was about to tell Schwarz that his daughter was dead, I had to make do with an observation about his wearing the uniform of a proscribed organization. Half of the polenta in Berlin would have looked the other way, ignored it. But then half of the cops in Berlin were Nazis.

  Many of my colleagues seemed quite happy to be sleepwalking their way to a dictatorship. I wasn’t one of them.

  “You know that since April 14 of this year, it’s illegal to wear that uniform, don’t you, sir?” I said.

  “Surely that hardly matters now. The ban on uniforms is about to be revoked.”

  “Until then it’s still illegal, sir. However, under the circumstances, I’ll overlook it.”

  Schwarz colored a little and then squeezed his fists, one after the other. These made a noise like a noose tightening. I imagine he was wishing there was one around my neck. He bit his lip. It was easier to reach than my face. He pushed open the apartment door. Stiffly, he said, “Please. Come in, gentlemen.”

  The apartment was a shrine to Adolf Hitler. There was a portrait of him in an oval frame in the hall, and another, different portrait of him inside a square frame in the sitting room. A copy of Mein Kampf lay open on a book stand that was on the sideboard, next to a family Bible, and behind these was a framed photograph of Otto Schwarz and Adolf Hitler. They were wearing leather flying helmets and sitting in the front seat of an enormous open-top Mercedes with cheesy grins on their faces, as if they had just won the ADAC Eifelrennen, and in record time. By one of the armchairs on the floor lay a dozen or so copies of Der Stürmer, the vehemently anti-Semitic newspaper. I’d seen election posters for Adolf Hitler that were less obviously Nazi than the Schwarz family home.

  In her own sweet, big-breasted, blond, and blue-eyed way, Frau Schwarz looked no less of a Nazi than her storm trooper of a husband. When she put her arm through her husband’s arm, I half expected them both to shout “Germany, awake!” and “Death to the Jews” before breaking up the furniture and then singing the “Horst Wessel Song.” Sometimes it was only these daydreaming little fantasies that made my job at all bearable. It certainly wasn’t two hundred fifty marks a month. Frau Schwarz wore a full, gathered dirndl skirt with traditional embroidery, a tight-laced-up blouse, an apron, and an expression that was a combination of fear and hostility.

  Schwarz put his hand on top of the hand his wife had threaded through his ham hock of an arm, and then she put her other hand on his. But for their grim and resolute faces, they reminded me of a couple getting married.

  At last they looked like they were ready to hear what they knew I was going to tell them. I’d like to say I admired their courage and that I felt sorry for them. The truth is, I didn’t, very much. The sight of Schwarz’s illegal uniform and the battalion number on his collar patch made me almost indifferent to their feelings. Assuming they had any. A very good friend of mine, POWM Emil Kuhfeld, a first sergeant with the SCHUPO, had been shot dead at the head of the detachment of riot police trying to disperse a large group of Communists in Frankfurter Allee. A Nazi commissar at Police Station 85, who had investigated the case, had managed to pin the murder on a Communist. But nearly everyone at the Alex knew he had suppressed the evidence of a witness who had seen Kuhfeld shot by an SA man with a rifle. The day after Kuhfeld’s murder, this SA man, one Walter Grabsch, was discovered dead in his Kadinerstrasse flat, having conveniently committed suicide. Kuhfeld’s funeral had been the biggest ever given to a Berlin policeman. I had helped carry the coffin. Which was how I knew that the battalion number on Schwarz’s blue collar patch was the same battalion to which Walter Grabsch had belonged.

  I gave Herr and Frau Schwarz all of the hard words of grief straight from the holster. I didn’t even try to rub them in the snow first.

  “We think we’ve found the body of your daughter, Anita. We believe she was murdered. Obviously I’ll have to ask you to come down to the station to identif
y her. Shall we say tomorrow morning, ten o’clock, at the Police Praesidium, on Alexanderplatz?”

  Otto Schwarz nodded silently.

  I had retailed bad news before, of course. Just the previous week I’d had to tell a mother in Moabit that her seventeen-year-old son, a schoolboy at the local Gymnasium, had been murdered by Communists who’d mistaken him for a brown shirt. “Are you sure it’s him, Commissar?” she asked me more than once during the course of my lachrymose time with her. “Are you sure there hasn’t been a mistake? Couldn’t it be someone else?”

  Herr and Frau Schwarz seemed to be taking it on the chin, however.

  I glanced around the apartment again. There was a little embroidery sampler in a frame above the door. It read WILLINGNESS FOR SELF-SACRIFICE and was stitched in red, with an exclamation point. I’d seen one before, and I knew the quotation was from Mein Kampf. I wasn’t surprised to see it, of course. But I was surprised that I could see no photographs of their daughter, Anita. Most people who are parents have one or two of their children around the place.

  “We have the photograph you gave us, on file,” I said. “So we’re quite sure it’s her, I’m afraid. But it would save time if you could spare us some others.”

  “Save time?” Otto Schwarz frowned. “I don’t understand. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Save time trying to catch her murderer,” I said coldly. “Someone may have seen her with him.”

  “I’ll see what I can find,” Frau Schwarz said, and left the room, quite composed and less upset than if I’d told her that Hitler wouldn’t be coming to tea.

  “Your wife seems to be taking it very well,” I said.

  “My wife is a nurse at the Charité,” he said. “I suppose she’s used to dealing with bad news. Besides. We were sort of expecting the worst.”

  “Really, sir?” I glanced at Grund, who stared balefully at me and then looked away.

  “We’re very sorry for your loss, sir,” he told Schwarz. “Very sorry, indeed. Incidentally, there’s no need for both of you to come to the Praesidium tomorrow. And if tomorrow’s not convenient, we can always do it another time.”