by Philip Kerr
“We’re old friends. It was he who leads me to suppose that the police service may soon change in ways we do not yet care to imagine. For that reason I felt able to make you an offer like this. Most of the house detectives here are, as you know, retired policemen. The incident in the bar proved to me that one or two of them are no longer equal to the task.”
We sipped the excellent schnapps for a while, and after that he went to have dinner with his wife and some rich Americans, while I went to find Frieda. I found her on the second floor, in a corridor leading to the hotel’s Wilhelmstrasse extension. She was wearing an elegant black evening gown. But not for long. The smaller, less expensive rooms were on that floor. These had views of the Brandenburg Gate and, beyond it, the Victory Column on Königsplatz. But I had the best view of all. And I wasn’t even looking out of the window.
I WAS TRYING to avoid Arthur Nebe. This had been easy while I was checking through the list of suspects I had compiled using the Devil’s Directory, but it was always more difficult when I was in the Alex. Still, Nebe wasn’t the kind of cop who liked leaving his desk very much. He did most of his detective work on the telephone and, for a while, by not answering mine, I managed not to speak to him at all. But I knew it couldn’t last, and a couple of days after the shooting, I finally ran into him on the stairwell outside the washrooms.
“What’s this?” said Nebe. “Has someone else been shooting at you?” He put his fingers in some old bullet holes in the walls of the stairwell. We both knew they’d been there since 1919, when the Freikorps had taken the Alex back by force from the left-wing Spartakists. It was a very German occasion. “If you’re not careful, you’re going to spend the rest of your life dead.” He smiled. “So, what’s the story?”
“No story. Not in this town, anyway. A Nazi thug took a potshot at me, that’s all.”
“Any idea why?”
“I figured it was because I’m not a Nazi,” I said. “But maybe you can tell me.”
“Erich Hoppner. Yes. I checked him out. It doesn’t look particularly political, since you mention it.”
“How can you tell?”
“You’re not KPD. He wasn’t SA.”
“But he was a Nazi Party member.”
“Lots of people are party members, Bernie. In case you hadn’t noticed. At the last count, there were eleven and a half million people who voted for the party. No, I’d say this has more to do with what happened to Ricci Kamm. The Roast is in the heart of Always True territory. You were asking for trouble going in there.”
“At the time I had the quaint idea I might be preventing it. Trouble, I mean. That’s what we cops call it when a real person gets murdered. Not some thug with an ideology.”
“For the record,” said Nebe, “and between you and me, I don’t like the Nazis. It’s just that I like the Communists a little less. The way I see it, it’s going to come down to a choice between them and the Reds.”
“Whatever you say, Arthur. All I know is that it’s not the Reds who have been threatening me. Telling me to lay off the Schwarz case so we can spare the feelings of Josef Goebbels’s crummy foot. It’s the Nazis.”
“Oh? Who, in particular?”
“Rudolf Diels.”
“He’s Fat Hermann’s man, not Joey’s.”
“They’re all the same bastard to me, Arthur.”
“Anything else you want to tell me? About the Schwarz case, I mean. How’s that coming along?”
I smiled bitterly. “A murder investigation works like this, Arthur. Sometimes the worst has to happen first, before you can hope for the best.”
“Like another murder, you mean?”
I nodded.
Nebe was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I can understand that. Anyone can. Even you.”
“Me? What do you mean, Arthur?”
“Sometimes the worst has to happen before you can hope for the best? That’s the only reason anyone is going to vote for the Nazis.”
LOOKING UP from his typewriter, Heinrich Grund could hardly conceal his disgust. “There’s some Jew looking for you,” he said, as I returned to my desk.
“Really? Did this Jew have a name?”
“Commissar Paul Herzefelde. From Munich.” He uttered the name with sneering lip and wrinkled nose, as if describing something on the sole of his shoe.
“And where is the commissar now?”
Grund pointed into the air above our heads. “The Excelsior,” he said.
The Alex had once been a barracks for the Prussian police, and the Excelsior was what cops called that part of the building that still existed to accommodate policemen who were working late or who were visiting Berlin from outside the city.
“They won’t like it,” said Grund.
“Who won’t like what?”
“The other lads. In the Excelsior. They won’t like having to share their quarters with a Jew.”
I shook my head wearily. “Doesn’t your mouth hurt sometimes? On account of the nasty things that come out of it. The man’s a brother police officer, for Christ’s sake.”
“For Christ’s sake?” Grund looked skeptical. “For Christ’s sake, his kind did nothing. That’s the point, isn’t it? The Jews wouldn’t be in the spot they’re in now if they’d recognized our Lord for what he was.”
“Heinrich? You’re the kind of rotten cop that gives rotten cops a bad name.” I thought of something Nebe had said, and borrowed it. “And it’s not that I love Jews. It’s that I love anti-Semites just that little bit less.”
I went upstairs to find Herzefelde. After Heinrich Grund’s bigotry, I didn’t know what sort of man I expected to meet. It wasn’t that I was expecting to see a cop with a phylactery strapped to his forehead and a prayer shawl wrapped around his shoulders. Just that Paul Herzefelde wasn’t what I was expecting. I suppose I thought he might look a bit more like Izzy Weiss. Instead he looked more like a film star. Well over six feet tall, he was a handsome man with gray, wiry hair and thick, dark eyebrows. His hard, shiny, suntanned face looked as if it had been made by a diamond-cutter. Paul Herzefelde had as much in common with the swarthy fat Jew wearing a top hat and coattails beloved of Nazi caricaturists as Hitler had in common with Paul von Hindenburg.
“Are you Commissar Herzefelde?”
The man nodded. “And you are . . . ?”
“Commissar Gunther. Welcome to Berlin.”
“Not so as I noticed.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Skip it. To be honest with you, Munich is a hell of a lot worse.”
“Then I’m glad I don’t live in Munich.”
“It has its moments. Especially if you like a beer.”
“The beer’s pretty good in Berlin, too, you know.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Then how about we go have one and you can find out?”
“I thought you’d never ask, copper.”
We went to the Zum Prälaten, in the arches of the S-Bahn station. It was a good place to drink beer, and popular with cops from the Alex. About every ten minutes a train passed overhead, and since there was no point in saying anything while this was happening, you could give your mouth a rest and concentrate on the beer.
“So what brings you to Berlin?”
“Bernard Weiss. We kike cops have to stick together. We were thinking of starting our own yid union. Trouble is, with so many Jewish cops, it’s knowing where to begin.”
“I can imagine. Actually, Berlin’s not so bad. The Reds do better here than the Nazis. Thalmann got twenty-nine percent in the last election compared to Hitler’s twenty-three.”
Herzefelde shook his head. “Unfortunately, Berlin is not Germany. I don’t know how things are for Jews in this town, but in the south they can be pretty rough. Back home in Munich, there’s hardly a day passes when I don’t get some kind of death threat.” He swallowed some beer and nodded his appreciation. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I was speaking to Weiss. I’ve been thinking of moving h
ere, with my family.”
“You mean, be a cop? Here in Berlin?”
Herzefelde smiled. “Weiss was similarly appalled. It looks like I’m going to have to consider my plan B. Something that’s got nothing to do with government.”
“I’ve been sort of looking around myself.”
“You? But you’re not a Jew, are you?”
“No. I’m SDP. Iron Front. A Weimar diehard who dislikes the Nazis.”
Herzefelde raised his glass and toasted me. “Then here’s to you, comrade.”
“So, do you have a plan B yet?”
“Thought I might go private.”
“Here in Berlin?”
“Sure. Why not? If the Nazis get in, I’ve a feeling there’s going to be a lot of missing-persons work.”
“Me, I’ve been offered a job at the Adlon Hotel. House detective.”
“Sounds nice.” He lit a cigarette. “Going to take it?”
“I thought I’d wait and see what happens in the election.”
“You want my advice?”
“Sure.”
“If you can, stay in the force. Jews, liberals, Communists are going to have need of friendly policemen like you.”
“I’ll bear it in mind.”
“You’ll be doing everyone a favor. God only knows what the police will be like if everyone in it is a lousy Nazi.”
“So. Why did you want to see me?”
“Weiss told me about this case you’ve been working on. The murder of Anita Schwarz. We had a similar case in Munich. You know Munich?”
“A little.”
“About three months ago, a fifteen-year-old girl turned up dead at the Schlosspark. Just about everything in her pants had been sliced out. The whole bag of love and life. A real neat job, too. Like a surgeon had done it. The dead girl’s name was Elizabeth Bremer and she went to the Gymnasium in Schwabing. Nice family, too. Her father works at the customs house, in Landsberger Strasse. Mother’s a librarian at some kind of Latin library on Maximilianeum. Weiss told me about your girl. That she was an amateur whore.” Herzefelde shook his head. “Elizabeth Bremer wasn’t anything like that. She was a good student with good prospects. Wanted to be a doctor. About the only thing you could hold against her was an older boyfriend. He was a skating teacher at the Prinzregenten Stadium. That’s how they met. Anyway, we hauled him over the coals for it but got nothing. He didn’t do it. He had a cast-iron alibi for the day of her death and that was that. According to him, they’d stopped seeing each other before she wound up dead. He’d been pretty broken up about it. The way he told it, she’d thrown him over for no good reason other than she caught him reading her diary. So he’d gone back home to Günzburg, to see his family and get over it.”
Herzefelde waited as an S-Bahn train passed overhead.
“We had a list of possible suspects,” he continued, after the train had gone. “Naturally, we checked them out, but with no luck. I thought the case had gone cold until Weiss told me about your murder victim.”
“I’d like to see that list,” I said. “That and the rest of the case file.”
“State law forbids me from using the mail to send my papers on the case,” said Herzefelde. “However, there’s nothing to stop you from coming to Munich to look them over. You could stay in my house.”
“That would be quite impossible,” I said. “I couldn’t stay in a Jew’s house.” I paused long enough to change the expression on Herzefelde’s handsome face. “Not unless he’d stayed in my house first.” I smiled. “Come on. Let’s go and get your bag from the Alex. You’re staying with me tonight.”
11
BUENOS AIRES, 1950
IT WAS LUNCHTIME, and the café at the Richmond Hotel was busy with hungry porteños. I went down to the basement, found an empty table, and set out a chessboard. I wasn’t looking for a game with anyone other than myself. That way I figured I stood a better chance of winning. Also I needed to clear my head of old Nazis and their war crimes for a while. They were starting to get me down.
I tried not to stare at her, but this was almost impossible. She was a stunningly beautiful girl. Eyes just naturally followed her around the room like cows trotting after a milkmaid. But mostly it was hard not to stare at her because she seemed to be staring at me. I didn’t flatter myself she actually wanted to meet me. I guessed I was old enough to be her father. There had to be some mistake. She was tall and slim, with a spectacular waterfall of black, curly hair. Her eyes were the shape and color of chocolate-covered almonds. She wore a tailored tweed jacket buttoned tight at the waist, and a matching long pencil skirt that made me wish I had a couple of sheets of paper. Her figure was all right if you liked them built like expensive thoroughbreds. I happened to like them built that way just fine.
She walked toward me, her high heels perforating the polished wooden air of the Richmond’s quiet basement like the slow beat of a tall clock. Expensive perfume tugged an edge of the air I was breathing. It made a very pleasant change from the smell of coffee and cigarettes and my own dyspeptic middle age.
As soon as she spoke to me, it was obvious she hadn’t mistaken me for someone else. She spoke in castellano. I was pleased about that. It meant I had to pay extra attention to her lips and the way her small pink tongue rested on her gypsum-white teeth.
“Forgive me for interrupting your game, señor,” she said. “But are you Carlos Hausner, perhaps?”
“I am.”
“Might I sit down and talk to you for a moment?”
I looked around. Three tables away, the little Scotsman, Melville, was playing chess with a man whose leathery brown face belonged on the back of a horse. Two younger porteños with Cuban heels and silver-buckled belts were engaged in a rather vigorous game of billiards. They put as much vitality into their noisy cue shots as Furtwängler conducting the Kaim Orchestra. All of their eyes were on their respective games but their ears and their attention to the Richmond’s resolutely masculine traditions were on us.
I shook my head. “My opponent, the Invisible Man, gets a little irritated when people sit on his lap. We’d better go upstairs.”
I let her walk ahead of me. It was the polite thing to do and it gave me a chance to study the seams of her stockings. These were straight, as if someone had fixed them using a theodolite. Fortunately, her legs were anything but. They had better curves than the Mille Miglia and were probably just as challenging to negotiate. We found a quiet table near the window. I waved a waiter over. She ordered a coffee, and I ordered something I had no interest in drinking, so long as she was around. When you’re having a cup of coffee with the best-looking woman who’s spoken to you in months, there are better things to do than drink it. She took one of my cigarettes and let me light it for her. It was yet another excuse to pay close attention to her big, sensuous mouth. Sometimes I think that’s why men invented smoking.
“My name is Anna Yagubsky,” she said. “I live with my parents in Belgrano. My father used to be a musician in the orchestra at the Teatro Colón. My mother sells English ceramics from a shop on Bartolomé Mitre. Both of them are Russian immigrants. They came here before the Revolution, to escape the czar and his pogroms.”
“Do you speak Russian, Anna?”
“Yes. Fluently. Why?”
“Because my Russian is better than my Spanish.”
She smiled a little smile and we spoke in Russian.
“I am a legal officer,” she explained. “I work in an office next to the law courts on Calle Talcahuano. Someone—a friend of mine in the police, it doesn’t matter who—told me about you, Señor Hausner. He told me that before the war you were a famous detective, in Berlin.”
“That’s right.” I saw no advantage to myself in disagreeing with her. No advantage at all. I was keen to be someone who looked good in her eyes—not least because every time I saw myself in a mirror, my own eyes were telling me something different. And I’m not just talking about my appearance. I still had all my hair. There was even quite a
bit of color left in it. But my face was hardly what it used to be, while my stomach was more than it had ever been. I was stiff when I awoke in the morning, in all the wrong places and for all the wrong reasons. And I had thyroid cancer. Apart from all that, I was just fine and dandy.
“You were a famous detective and now you’re working for the secret police.”
“It wouldn’t be much of a secret police if I admitted that was true, now would it?”
“No, I suppose not,” she said. “Nevertheless, you are working for them, aren’t you?”
I smiled my best enigmatic smile—the one that didn’t show my teeth. “What can I do for you, Señorita Yagubsky?”
“Please. Call me Anna. In case you hadn’t already guessed, I’m a Jew. That’s an important part of my story.”
“I rather supposed you were when you mentioned pogroms.”
“My aunt and uncle went to Germany from Russia. Somehow they survived the war and came to South America in 1945. But Jews were not welcome in Argentina, in spite of the fact there were a lot of Jews living here already. You see, this is a fascist, anti-Semitic country. And until recently, there was a secret government directive, called Directive Eleven, that denied entry visas to all Jews. Even to Jews who had family here already, such as my aunt and uncle. But like many other Jews who wanted to live here, they managed to get into Paraguay. And from there, eventually, they were successful in coming across the land border and entering the country illegally. For a while, they lived very quietly in a small town called Colón, in the province of Entre Ríos, north of Buenos Aires. From time to time my father would go and see them with money, clothes, food, whatever we could spare. And they waited for an opportunity to come and live here in Buenos Aires.
“But then one day, about three years ago, they disappeared. My father went to Colón and found them gone. The neighbors knew nothing about where they had gone, or if they did, they weren’t saying. And because they were illegal, my father couldn’t very well go to the police and ask them. Since then, we’ve heard nothing. Nothing at all. For obvious reasons, my parents are reluctant to make inquiries about them, in case they get into trouble. The directive may have ended, but this is still a military dictatorship, and people—opposition people—are sometimes arrested and thrown into prison and never seen again. So we still have no idea if they are alive or dead. What we do know is that they weren’t the only illegal Jews who have disappeared. We’ve heard of other Jewish families who have lost relatives in Argentina, but nobody knows anything for sure.” She shrugged. “Then I heard about you. I heard that you used to look for missing persons in Germany, before the war. And, well, it seemed more than likely that some of those missing persons must also have been Jewish. And I thought— no, that’s not true—I hoped that you might help. I’m not asking that you do anything very much. In your position, you might hear something. Something that might shed a little light on what happened to them.”