A Quiet Flame (16 page)

“How big is your trial group?” I asked.

“Really we’ve only just started. So far we’ve given protonsil to approximately fifty men and about half as many women—there’s a separate clinic for them, of course, at the Charité. Some of our test cases have only just caught a venereal disease and others have had one for a while. It’s intended that over the next two or three years we shall test the drug on as many as fifteen hundred to two thousand volunteers.”

I nodded, almost wishing I had thought to bring Illmann with me. At least he might have asked some pertinent questions; even a few impertinent ones.

“So far,” continued Kassner, “the results have been very encouraging.”

“Might I see what the drug looks like?”

He opened his desk drawer and took out a bottle and then emptied some little blue pills onto my gloved palm. These looked exactly the same as the little pill I’d found near Anita Schwarz’s dead body.

“Of course, it won’t look like that when the trial is over. The German medical establishment is rather conservative and prefers its pills white. But they’re blue for the moment, to help distinguish them from anything else we’re using.”

“And your study group notes? Might I see one case file?”

“Yes, indeed.” Kassner turned to face one of the wooden filing cabinets. There was no key. He drew up the tambour front and then pulled open the top drawer. “This is a summary file containing brief notes on all of the patients who’ve been treated with protonsil to date.” He opened the file and handed it over.

I took out my father’s pince-nez. A nice touch, I told myself, and pinced them on the bridge of my nez. This was my list of suspects, I told myself. With these names I might very well have solved the case in less time than it took to cure a dose of jelly. But how was I going to get hold of this list of names? I could hardly memorize it. Nor could I ask to borrow it. One name caught my eye, however. Or rather not the name—Behrend—so much as the address. Reichskanzlerplatz, in the west end of the city, near the Grunewald, was undoubtedly one of the most exclusive addresses in the city. And for some reason it appeared familiar to me.

“As you probably know,” Kassner was saying, “the problem with salvarsan is that it is only slightly more toxic for the microbe than the host. No such problems have presented themselves with protonsil rubrum. The human liver deals with it quite effectively.”

“Excellent,” I murmured, as I glanced further down the list. But when I saw two Johann Müllers, a Fritz Schmidt, an Otto Schneider, a Johann Meyer, and a Paul Fischer, I began to suspect that the list might not be all I’d hoped it was. These were five of the most common surnames in Germany. “Tell me something, Doctor. Are these real names?”

“To be honest, I don’t know,” admitted Kassner. “We don’t insist on seeing identity cards here, otherwise they might never volunteer for the clinical trial. Patient confidentiality is an important issue with moral diseases.”

“I suppose that’s especially true since the National Socialists started talking about a cleanup of morals in this city,” I said.

“But all of those addresses are real enough. We do insist on that so that we might correspond with our patients over a period of time. Just to keep a check on how they’re all doing.”

I handed back the file and watched as he placed it in the top drawer of the filing cabinet.

“Well, thank you for your time,” I said, standing up. “I’ll certainly be making a favorable interim report to the Dyestuff Syndicate on your work here.”

“I’ll walk you to your car, Herr Doktor.”

We went outside. Carl Mirow threw away his cigarette and opened the heavy car door. If Dr. Kassner had harbored any doubts about who I was, they were banished by the sight of a uniformed chauffeur and a limousine as big as a Heinkell.

Carl drove to Dragonerstrasse and dropped me in front of my building. He was glad to see the back of me. And especially glad to see the back of Dragonerstrasse, which wasn’t anywhere to bring a chauffeur and a Mercedes-Benz 770. I went up to my apartment, put on some normal clothes, and went out again. I got into my car and headed toward the West End. I had an itch I suddenly wanted to scratch.

Number 3 Reichskanzlerplatz was an expensive, modern-looking apartment building in just about the richest, leafiest suburb in Berlin. A little farther to the west lay Grunewald racecourse and the athletics stadium, where some Berliners hoped that the Olympics might be staged in 1936. My late wife had been especially fond of this area. To the south of the racecourse was the Seeschloss restaurant, where I had asked her to marry me. I parked the car and went over to a kiosk to get some cigarettes and, perhaps, some information.

“Give me some Reemtsmas, a
New Berliner, Tempo,
and
The Week,
” I said. I flashed my warrant disc. “We had a report of some shots fired in this area. Anything in it?”

The vendor, who wore a suit, an Austrian hat, and a little mustache like Hitler’s, shook his head. “Car backfire probably. But I’ve been here since seven this morning and I haven’t heard a thing.”

“I figured as much just looking around,” I said. “Still, you have to check these things out.”

“There’s never any trouble around here,” he said. “Although there could be.”

“How do you mean?”

He pointed across Reichskanzlerplatz, to where it intersected with Kaiserdamm. “See that car?” He was pointing at a dark green Mercedes-Benz parked right in front of number three.

“Yes.”

“There are four SA men sitting in that car,” he said. Pointing north, up Ahornallee, he added: “And another truckload of them over there.”

“How do you know they’re SA?”

“Haven’t you heard? The ban on uniforms has been lifted.”

“Of course. It’s today, isn’t it? Some cop I am. I didn’t even notice. So who lives around here? Ernst Röhm?”

“Nope. Although he does visit on occasion. I’ve seen him going in there. To the ground-floor apartment on the corner of number three. Owned by Mrs. Magda Quandt.”

“Who?”

The vendor grinned. “For a bull who takes as many newspapers as you do, you don’t know much.”

“Me? I just look at the pictures. So go ahead and educate me.” I handed over a five. “And while you’re at it, keep the change.”

“Magda Quandt. She got married last December to Josef Goebbels. I see him every morning. Comes out and buys all the papers.”

“It gives the clubfoot some exercise, I suppose.”

“He’s not so bad.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” I shrugged. “Well, I can see why he married her. Nice building like that. Wouldn’t mind living here myself.” I shook my head. “Thing is, I can’t for the life of me see why she married a little fritz like him.”

I tossed the papers in the car, crossed over to the other side of the square, and glanced in the window of the car parked out front of number three. The vendor was right. It was full of Nazi brown shirts, who eyed me suspiciously as I went by. Apart from some clowns I’d seen fooling around in an old Model T at the circus one Christmas, it would have been hard to have seen more obvious stupidity in one car. It was all coming back to me now. Why the address had jogged my memory in Kassner’s office. One of the other Homicide teams at the Alex had been obliged to check an SA man’s alibi with Goebbels a month or two before.

The building had its own doorman, of course. All the nice apartment buildings in the West End had a doorman. Probably there was an armed SA man somewhere inside the lobby, keeping him company. Just to make sure Goebbels was well protected. He probably needed it, too. The Communists had already made several attempts on Hitler’s life. I didn’t doubt they wanted to assassinate Goebbels. I wouldn’t have minded taking a poke at the little satyr myself.

Naturally, I’d heard the rumors. That despite his cloven hoof and his diminished size, he was really quite a ladies’ man. The word around the Alex was that it wasn’t just Goebbels’s foot that looked like a club; that while he may have been short of stature, he was outsized on the butcher’s counter; that Goebbels was what Berlin’s line-boys would have called a Breslauer, after a large sausage of the same name. Much as I disliked him, however, I was still finding it hard to imagine Joey the Crip taking the risk of an open trip to the jelly clinic in Friedrichshain. Unless, of course, he’d gone in as a private patient, after hours, when no one else was about.

I rounded the rusticated corner of the building and stopped below what must have been Joey’s bathroom window. It was slightly open. I looked back over my shoulder. The car containing the storm troopers was out of sight. The truck was nowhere to be seen. I glanced back up at the frosted-glass window. If I put my foot on the horizontal joint of the ground floor’s rusticated brickwork, it looked as though it would be just possible to push myself up the side of the building and reach the bottom of the window. I tried it once, just long enough to check that the bathroom was empty, before dropping back down onto the deserted sidewalk. I waited for a moment. No storm troopers came to beat me up. So much for security.

The next time I did it, I pulled myself up the side and slid quickly through the open bathroom window. Breathing heavily, I sat on the toilet, and while I waited to see if my entry would be detected, I took a closer look at the window and saw that the rat’s-tail casement was broken on the sill. Even when the window looked like it was closed, it would have been a relatively simple matter to open it from the outside.

It was a big bathroom, with pink tiles all over and a round pedestal basin. There was a liberal dusting of talcum powder on the bathroom mat. The boxed-in bath was as deep as a car door, with a hand shower, in case Magda wanted to wash her hair. By the wall-mounted soap dish was a small framed picture of Hitler, as if even here, the devoted Joey could keep his beloved leader in mind. At right angles to the bath was a stool on which sat a pile of fluffy towels, and next to this a matching table on which stood a loofah and an antiquarian statue of a naked lady. Above the table was a large, mirrored bathroom cabinet, which, naturally, I opened. Most of the shelves were Magda’s. She used Joy perfume, Kotex, Nivea, Wella shampoo, Wellapon, Kolestral, and Blondor. I remembered her now. I remembered the pictures of the wedding in the magazines. A winter wedding. The happy, smiling couple arm-in-arm in the snow, accompanied by several SA men—probably the same careless louts who were sitting outside in the car—and, of course, Hitler himself. I wonder what Hitler would have said if he’d known that Magda’s beautiful, perfectly Aryan blond hair was dyed?

Joey had only one shelf in the cabinet. And it seemed we had something in common, after all. Joey shaved with a Schick injector razor and Mennen shaving cream, and cleaned his teeth with Colgate toothpaste. A bottle of Anzora hair cream explained Joey’s perfectly brushed head of dark hair. Then, between a packet of Beecham’s laxative pills and some Acqua di Parma cologne, was a bottle containing some blue pills. I opened it and emptied one out in my hand. It was the same pill I had seen in Kassner’s office earlier that morning. Protonsil. I decided that was my cue to leave. But not before using Joey’s toilet. And not flushing it was my way of thanking him for what he’d written about me in his newspaper.

I went out the window, returned to my car, and drove quickly away. In Germany, there were things that it didn’t seem healthy to know about. I didn’t doubt for a minute that Joey’s jelly was one of these.

 

 

 

THERE WERE nine technical inspectorates at the Alex. Inspectorate A dealt with murder, and C dealt with thefts. Gunther Braschwitz was the boss of C and specialized in burglaries. He had a younger brother, Rudolf, who was in the political police, but we didn’t hold that against him. Braschwitz was as elegant as your little finger, and a real champagne-pisser. He wore a bowler hat, carried a stick with a sword in it, which he would sometimes use, and, in winter at least, wore gaiters above his boots. He knew all the screens—the city’s professional burglars—and, it was said, could look at a break-in and tell which of them had probably done it.

“Jewface Klein,” I said. “Seen him lately?”

“Jewface? He claims he’s going straight,” said Braschwitz. “Managed to get himself a job at Heilbronner’s on Mohrenstrasse.”

“The antique shop?”

“That’s right. He always had a very good eye, that Jewface. Why? Has he been up to his old tricks?”

“No. But he knows someone I’m looking for. A friend of that widow he used to partner. Eva Zimmer.” Only half of this was true, but I didn’t want Braschwitz asking too many questions.

“Poor Eva,” he said. “She was a good widow, that girl.”

A widow was someone a screen used to get rid of his ill-gotten goods. Not a real widow. Just someone pretending to be one. Some of them, like Eva Zimmer, were professional actresses. They would dress up in black and, with a well-rehearsed hard-luck story, try to sell stolen gold, silver, or jewelry to the high-street goldsmiths. Until I’d arrested Jewface, he and Eva had had one of the best partnerships in Berlin. I knew he was six months out of Tegel Prison, but there was nothing on file of what he’d been doing since.

After Braschwitz had told me all he knew about Jewface, I telephoned the Adlon and asked Frieda what she could tell me about Josef Goebbels. Goebbels was a regular patron of the Adlon, and Frieda was able to give me some information that I thought I might use to help bait Klein.

I walked to Heilbronner’s, but the manager told me Klein wasn’t there. “It’s his lunch hour,” he said. “You’ll probably find him across the street, at Gsellius. The bookshop. He usually goes in there at lunchtime.”

I crossed the street and peered in the bookshop window. Jewface was in there, all right. I saw him straight away. A little older than I remembered, but a year in the cement can put five on your shine. His face wasn’t particularly Jewish, to be honest. He had the nickname from the jeweler’s eyeglass he used to wear when he was appraising something he’d stolen. But he did have a nose, for cops. I hadn’t been there for more than a few seconds when he looked up from the book he held and met my eye. I nodded at him to come outside and, reluctantly, he did. We weren’t friends exactly. But I was counting on his not having forgotten that it was I who’d found the pimp who’d stabbed Eva Zimmer the previous year. A man named Horst Wessel. And the pity of it was that Wessel, who was also a member of the SA, had then been murdered by another pimp, Ali Hohler, in an argument over some whore before I could make the arrest. Because Hohler happened also to be a Communist, Goebbels had managed to turn these tawdry events into a political melodrama, which was how Horst Wessel had achieved his unlikely immortalization in a song that was now heard all over Berlin when the SA went on one of its provocative marches through a Communist neighborhood. Naturally, Goebbels had left out of the story the underworld connections of these plankton protagonists. Meanwhile, Hohler had been arrested by one of my colleagues and sentenced to life imprisonment. Which left Jewface very much aggrieved with Goebbels for having waxed Eva Zimmer’s sordid murder from the Nazis’
canta storia
of Horst Wessel’s heroic past.