March Violets

by Philip Kerr

  It wasn’t yet dark, but already the dope dealers had surfaced. To be caught selling cocaine was to be sent to a KZ, and for my money they couldn’t catch too many of them; but as I knew from experience, that wasn’t easy: the dealers never carried coke on them; instead they would hide it in a stash nearby, in a secluded alley or doorway. Some of them posed as war cripples selling cigarettes; and some of them were war cripples selling cigarettes, wearing the yellow armlet with its three black spots that had persisted from Weimar days. This armlet conferred no official status, however; only the Salvation Army received official permission to peddle wares on street corners, but the laws against vagrancy were not strictly enforced anywhere except the more fashionable areas of the city, where the tourists were likely to go.

  ‘Ssigars, and ssigarettes,’ hissed a voice. Those familiar with this ‘coke signal’ would answer with a loud sniff; often they found that they had bought cooking salt and aspirin.

  The Femina, on Nurnberger Strasse, was the sort of spot you went when you were looking for some female company if you didn’t mind them big and florid and thirty marks for the privilege. Table telephones made the Femina especially suitable for the shy type, so it was just Neumann’s sort of place, always presuming that he had some money. He could order a bottle of sekt and invite a girl to join him without so much as moving from his table. There were even pneumatic tubes through which small presents could be blown into the hand of a girl at the opposite end of the club. Apart from money, the only thing a man needed at the Femina was good eyesight.

  I sat at a corner table and glanced idly at the menu. As well as the list of drinks, there was a list of presents that could be purchased from the waiter, for sending through the tubes: a powder compact for one mark fifty; a matchbox-container for a mark; and perfume for five. I couldn’t help thinking that money was likely to be the most popular sort of present you could send rocketing over to whichever party girl caught your eye. There was no sign of Neumann, but I decided to stick it out for a while in case he showed up. I signalled the waiter and ordered a beer.

  There was a cabaret, of sorts: a chanteuse with orange hair, and a twangy voice like a Jew’s harp; and a skinny little comedian with joined-up eyebrows, who was about as risque as a wafer on an ice-cream sundae. There was less chance of the crowd at the Femina enjoying the acts than there was of it rebuilding the Reichstag: it laughed during the songs; and it sang during the comedian’s monologues; and it was no nearer the palm of anyone’s hand than if it had been a rabid dog.

  Looking round the room I found there were so many false eyelashes flapping at me that I was beginning to feel a draught. Several tables away a fat woman rippled the fingers of a pudgy hand at me, and misinterpreting my sneer for a smile, she started to struggle out of her seat. I groaned.

  ‘Yessir?’ answered the waiter. I pulled a crumpled note out of my pocket and tossed it on to his tray. Without bothering to wait for my change I turned and fled.

  There’s only one thing that unnerves me more than the company of an ugly woman in the evening, and that’s the company of the same ugly woman the following morning.

  I got into the car and drove to Potsdamer Platz. It was a warm, dry evening, but the rumbling in the purple sky told me that the weather was about to change for the worse. I parked on Leipziger Platz in front of the Palast Hotel. Then I went inside and telephoned the Adlon.

  I got through to Benita, who said that Hermine had left her a message, and that about half an hour after I had spoken to her a man had called asking about an Indian princess. It was all I needed to know.

  I collected my raincoat and a flashlight from the car. Holding the flash under the raincoat I walked the fifty metres back to Potsdamer Platz, past the Berlin Tramway Company and the Ministry of Agriculture, towards Columbus Haus. There were lights on the fifth and seventh floors, but none on the eighth. I looked in through the heavy plate-glass doors. There was a security guard sitting at the desk reading a newspaper, and, further along the corridor, a woman who was going over the floor with an electric polisher. It started to rain as I turned the corner onto Hermann Goering Strasse, and made a left onto the narrow service alley that led to the underground car-park at the back of Columbus Haus.

  There were only two cars parked - a D KW and a Mercedes. It seemed unlikely that either of them belonged to the security guard or the cleaner; more probably, their owners were still at work in offices on the floors above. Behind the two cars, and under a bulkhead light, was a grey, steel door with the word ‘Service’ painted on it; it had no handle, and was locked. I decided that it was probably the sort of lock that had a spring bolt that could be withdrawn by a knob on the inside, or by means of a key on the outside, and I thought that there was a good chance that the cleaner might leave the building through this door.

  I checked the doors of the two parked cars almost absentmindedly, and found that the Mercedes was not locked. I sat in the driver’s seat, and fumbled for the light switch. The two huge lamps cut through the shadows like the spots at a Party rally in Nuremberg. I waited. Several minutes passed. Bored, I opened the glove-box. There was a road map, a bag of mints and a Party membership book with stamps up to date. It identified the bearer as one Henning Peter Manstein. Manstein had a comparatively low Party number, which belied the youthfulness of the man in the photograph on the book’s ninth page. There was quite a racket in the sale of early Party numbers, and there was no doubting that was how Manstein had come by his. A low number was essential to quick political advancement. His handsome young face had the greedy look of a March Violet stamped all over it, as clearly as the Party insignia embossed across the corner of the photograph.

  Fifteen minutes passed before I heard the sound of the service door opening. I sprang out of the seat. If it was Manstein, then I was going to have to make a run for it. A wide pool of light spilled onto the floor of the garage, and the cleaning woman came through the door.

  ‘Hold the door,’ I called. I switched off the headlights and slammed the car door. ‘I’ve left something upstairs,’ I said. ‘I thought for a minute I was going to have to walk all the way round to the front.’ She stood there dumbly, holding the door open as I approached. When I drew near her she stepped aside, saying:

  ‘I have to walk all the way to Nollendorf Platz. I don’t have no big car to take me home.’

  I smiled sheepishly, like the idiot I imagined Manstein to be. ‘Thanks very much,’ I said, and muttered something about having left my key in my office. The cleaning woman hovered a little and then released the door to me. I stepped inside the building and let it go. It closed behind me, and I heard the loud click of the cylinder lock as the bolt hit the chamber.

  Two double doors with porthole windows led into a long, brightly lit corridor that was lined with stacks of cardboard boxes. At the far end was a lift, but there was no way of using it without alerting the guard. So I sat down on the stairs and removed my shoes and socks, putting them on again in reverse order, with the socks over the shoes. It’s an old trick, favoured by burglars, for muffling the sound of shoe-leather on a hard surface. I stood up and began the long climb.

  By the time I got to the eighth floor my heart was pounding with the effort of the climb and having to breathe quietly. I waited at the edge of the stairs, but there was no sound from any of the offices next to Jeschonnek’s. I shone the flash at both ends of the corridor, and then walked down to his door. Kneeling down I looked for some wires that might give a clue to there being an alarm, but there were none; I tried first one key, and then the other. The second one was almost turning, so I pulled it out and smoothed the points with a small file. I tried again, this time successfully. I opened the door and went in, locking it behind me in case the security guard decided to do his rounds. I pointed the flash onto the desk, over the pictures and across to the door to Jeschonnek’s private office. Without the least resistance to the levers, the key turned smoothly in my fingers. Covering the name of my locksmith with mental blessing
s, I walked over to the window. The neon sign on top of Pschorr Haus cast a red glow over Jeschonnek’s opulent office, so there wasn’t much need for the flash. I turned it off.

  I sat down at the desk and started to look for I didn’t know what. The drawers weren’t locked, but they contained little that was of any interest to me. I got quite excited when I found a red leather-bound address book, but I read it all the way through, recognizing just the one name: that of Hermann Goering, only he was care of a Gerhard Von Greis at an address on Derfflingerstrasse. I remembered Weizmann the pawnbroker saying something about Fat Hermann having an agent who sometimes bought precious stones on his behalf, so I copied out Von Greis’s address and put it in my pocket.

  The filing cabinet wasn’t locked either, but again I drew a blank; plenty of catalogues of gems and semi-precious stones, a Lufthansa flight table, a lot of papers to do with currency exchange, some invoices and some life assurance policies, one of which was with the Germania Life.

  Meanwhile, the big safe sat in the corner, impregnable, and mocking my rather feeble attempts to uncover Jeschonnek’s secrets, if he had any. It wasn’t difficult to see why the place wasn’t fitted with an alarm. You couldn’t have opened that box if you’d had a truck-load of dynamite. There wasn’t much left, apart from the waste-paper basket. I emptied the contents on the desk, and started to poke through the scraps of paper: a Wrigley’s chewing-gum wrapper, the morning’s Beobachter, two ticket-halves from the Lessing Theater, a till receipt from the KDW department store and some rolled-up balls of paper. I smoothed them out. On one of these was the Adlon’s telephone number, and underneath the name ‘Princess Mushmi’, which had been question-marked and then crossed out several times; next to it was written my own name. There was another telephone number written next to my name, and this had been doodled around so that it looked like an illumination from a page in a medieval Bible. The number was a mystery to me, although I recognized it was Berlin West. I picked up the receiver and waited for the operator.

  ‘Number please?’ she said.

  ‘J1 — 90 — 33.’

  ‘Trying to connect you.’ There was a brief silence on the line, and then it started ringing.

  I have an excellent memory when it comes to recognizing a face, or a voice, but it might have taken me several minutes to place the cultured voice with its light Frankfurt accent that answered the telephone. As it was, the man identified himself immediately he had finished confirming the number.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I mumbled indistinctly. ‘I have the wrong number.’ But as I replaced the receiver I knew that it was anything but.

  9

  It was in a grave close to the north wall of the Nikolai Cemetery on Prenzlauer Allee, and only a short distance away from the memorial to National Socialism’s most venerated martyr, Horst Wessel, that the bodies were buried, one on top of the other, following a short service at Nikolai Kirche on nearby Molken Market.

  Wearing a stunning black hat that was like a grand piano with the lid up, Ilse Rudel was even more beautiful in mourning than she was in bed. A couple of times I caught her eye, but tight-lipped, like she had my neck between her teeth, she looked straight through me as if I was a piece of dirty glass. Six himself maintained an expression that was more angry than grief-stricken: with eyebrows knotted and head bowed, he stared down into the grave as though he were trying by a supernatural effort of will to make it yield up the living body of his daughter. And then there was Haupthandler, who looked merely thoughtful, like a man for whom there were other matters that were more pressing, such as the disposal of a diamond necklace. The appearance on the same sheet of paper in Jeschonnek’s wastepaper basket of Haupthändler’s home telephone number with that of the Adlon Hotel, my own name and that of the bogus princess, demonstrated a possible chain of causation: alarmed by my visit, and yet puzzled by my story, Jeschonnek had telephoned the Adlon to confirm the existence of the Indian princess, and then, having done so, he had telephoned Haupthandler to confront him with a set of facts regarding the ownership and theft of the jewels which was at variance with that which might originally have been explained to him.

  Perhaps. At least, it was enough to be going on with.

  At one point Haupthandler stared impassively at me for several seconds; but I could read nothing in his features: no guilt, no fear, no ignorance of the connection I had established between him and Jeschonnek, nor any suspicion of it either. I saw nothing that made me think he was incapable of having committed a double murder. But he was certainly no cracksman; so had he somehow persuaded Frau Pfarr to open it for him? Had he made love to her in order to get at her jewels? Given Use Rudel’s suspicion that they might have been having an affair, it had to be counted as one possibility.

  There were some other faces that I recognized. Old Kripo faces: Reichskriminaldirektor Arthur Nebe; Hans Lobbe, the head of Kripo Executive; and one face which, with its rimless glasses and small moustache, looked more as if it belonged to a punctilious little schoolmaster than to the head of the Gestapo and Reichsfuhrer of the S S. Himmler’s presence at the funeral confirmed Bruno Stahlecker’s impression - that Pfarr had been the Reichsfuhrer’s star pupil, and that he wasn’t about to let the murderer get away with it.

  Of a woman on her own, who might have been the mistress that Bruno had mentioned as having been kept by Paul Pfarr, there was no sign. Not that I really expected to see her, but you never can tell.

  After the burial Haupthandler was ready with a few words of advice from his, and my employer, ‘Herr Six sees little need for you to have concerned yourself in what is essentially a family affair. I’m also to remind you that you are being remunerated on the basis of a daily fee.’

  I watched the mourners get into their big black cars, and then Himmler and the top bulls in Kripo get into theirs. ‘Look, Haupthandler,’ I said. ‘Forget the sledge ride. Tell your boss that if he thinks he’s getting a cat in a sack, then he can cut me loose now. I’m not here because I like fresh air and eulogies.’

  ‘Then why are you here, Herr Gunther?’ he said.

  ‘Ever read The Song of the Niebelungen?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Then you’ll remember that the Niebelung warriors wished to avenge the murder of Siegfried. But they couldn’t tell who they should hold to account. So the trial of blood was begun. The Burgundian warriors passed one by one before the bier of the hero. And when it was the murderer Hagen’s turn, Siegfried’s wounds flowed with blood again, so revealing Hagen’s guilt.’

  Haupthändler smiled. ‘That’s hardly the stuff of modern criminal investigation, is it?’

  ‘Detection should observe the little ceremonies, Herr Haupthandler, be they apparently anachronistic. You might have noticed that I was not the only person involved in finding a solution to this case who attended this funeral.’

  ‘Are you seriously suggesting that someone here could have killed Paul and Grete Pfarr?’

  ‘Don’t be so bourgeois. Of course it is possible.’

  ‘It’s preposterous, that’s what it is. All the same, do you have someone in mind for the role of Hagen yet?’

  ‘It’s under consideration.’

  ‘Then I trust you will be able to report your having identified him to Herr Six before very long. Good day to you.’

  I had to admit one thing. If Haupthändler had killed the Pfarrs then he was as cool as a treasure chest in fifty fathoms of water.

  I drove down Prenzlauer Strasse on to Alexanderplatz. I collected my mail and went up to the office. The cleaning woman had opened the window, but the smell of booze was still there. She must have thought I washed in the stuff.

  There were a couple of cheques, a bill and a hand-delivered note from Neumann telling me to meet him at the Café Kranzler at twelve o’clock. I looked at my watch. It was almost 11.30.

  In front of the German War Memorial a company of Reichswehr were making trade for chiropodists to the accompaniment of a brass band. Sometimes I think that
there must be more brass bands in Germany than there are motor-cars. This one struck up with The Great Elector’s Cavalry March and set off at a lick towards the Brandenburger Tor. Everyone who was watching was getting in some arm exercise, so I hung back, pausing in a shop doorway to avoid having to join them.

  I walked on, following the parade at a discreet distance and reflecting on the last alterations to the capital’s most famous avenue: changes that the Government has deemed to be necessary to make Unter den Linden more suitable for military parades like the one I was watching. Not content with removing most of the lime trees which had given the avenue its name, they had erected white Doric columns on top of which sat German eagles; new lime trees had been planted, but these were not even as tall as the street lamps. The central lane had been widened, so that military columns might march twelve abreast, and was strewn with red sand so that their jackboots did not slip. And tall white flagpoles were being erected for the imminent Olympiad. Unter den Linden had always been flamboyant, without much harmony in its mixture of architectural designs and styles; but that flamboyance was now made brutal. The bohemian’s fedora had become a Pickelhaube.

  The Café Kranzler, on the corner of Friedrichstrasse, was popular with the tourists and prices were accordingly high; so it was not the sort of place that I would have expected Neumann to have chosen for a meet. I found him twitching over a cup of mocha and an abandoned piece of cake.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, sitting down. ‘Lost your appetite?’

  Neumann sneered at his plate. ‘Just like this Government,’ he said. ‘It looks damn good, but tastes of absolutely nothing. Lousy ersatz cream.’ I waved to the waiter and ordered two coffees. ‘Look, Herr Gunther, can we make this quick? I’m going over to Karlshorst this afternoon.’

  ‘Oh? Got a tip, have you?’