A Quiet Flame (17 page)

We went around the corner to Siechen’s on Friedrichstrasse, where I bought us a couple of Nurembergs and took a closer look at him. His face was all sharp angles, thin and pointed, like something Pythagoras had doodled on the corner of his scroll before getting on with his theorem.

“So what can I do for you, Herr Gunther?”

“I need a favor, Jewface. I want someone to break into a doctor’s office at the state hospital. Someone intelligent, who can read and write and not get greedy. I don’t want anything stolen.”

“That’s good, because I’m retired. I don’t steal. And I don’t go breaking and entering. Not since Eva got stabbed.”

“Look, all I want you to do is open a file and do a bit of copying out. A secretary with a key could do it. But I don’t have a key. For a man of your experience, it couldn’t be simpler.” I sipped my beer and let him blow me off like the froth on top of his own untouched glass.

“You’re not listening, Commissar. I’m retired. Prison worked for me. Give yourself a medal.”

“Medals, is it? I can’t give you a medal, Jewface. But you do what I ask, copy out some names from some files at the hospital, and I can give you something else.”

“I don’t want your money, copper.”

“I wouldn’t insult you. No, this is something better than money. It’s even patriotic—that is, if you believe in the republic.”

“I don’t, as it happens. It was the republic that put me in the cement.”

“All right. Call it revenge, then. Revenge for Eva.” I sipped some more of my beer and let him wait.

“Keep talking.”

“How would you like to shove one up Joey Goebbels?”

“I’m listening.”

“Joey the Crip lives at number three Reichskanzlerplatz. Corner apartment, ground floor, eastern end. A bunch of SA men sit out front, so you’ll have to be careful. But they can’t see around the corner to where Joey’s bathroom faces the side street. There’s a rat’s-tail casement stay on the bathroom window that’s broken. You can be in and out in no time. Bread and butter to a man like you, Jewface. I did it myself just an hour or two ago. The man is a fanatic, Jewface. Do you know he’s got a photograph of Hitler on the side of the bath? Anyway, the apartment is owned by his wife, Magda. She used to be married to a rich industrialist called Gunther Quandt, who was very generous with the divorce settlement. He let her keep all her mints. You know? The ones you like. The ones you can sell at Margraf’s? Of course, with an election coming, Goebbels is out a lot. Making speeches, that kind of thing. In fact, I happen to know that Joey’s making a speech tonight, at Nazi Party headquarters on Hedemannstrasse. It will be an important speech. They’re all important between now and the end of July. But maybe this one is more important than most. Hitler will be there. Afterward, Magda’s throwing a little soirée for him at the Adlon Hotel. Which would give a man plenty of time.” I sipped some more beer and thought about ordering some sausage. It had been a busy morning. “So. What do you say? Do we have a deal? Will you copy out these names for me, like I asked?”

“Like I told you already, Gunther. I’m a reformed character. I’m trying to lead an honest life.” Jewface smiled and offered me his hand. “But that’s the thing about the Nazis. They bring out the worst in people.”

 

 

 

THE NEXT MORNING I had a handwritten list of names and addresses from all over the city and beyond. Not as good as a list of suspects, but perhaps the next best thing. Now all I had to do was check them out.

The Residents Registrations Office was on the railway-station side of the Alex, in room 359. From this third-floor office, the address of any resident of Berlin might be obtained, quite legally, by any other resident of the city. The Prussian authorities had meant well: the knowledge that information in the state was freely available was supposed to help buttress faith in our fragile democracy. In practice, however, it just meant that Nazi storm troopers and Communists alike were able to find out where their opponents lived and take appropriately belligerent action. Democracy has its disadvantages, too.

Not available to the general public at the Registration Office, but available to police, was the Devil’s Directory, so called because it worked backward. All you had to do was look up a street name and a house number, and the Devil’s Directory told you the name of the person or people living there. So it was the work of a morning to put a real name alongside each of the addresses and bogus patient names that Jewface Klein had copied from the summary file in Dr. Kassner’s office. This was a mundane task I might normally have ordered one of my sergeants to attend to. But I never was very good at giving orders—no more than I was any good at taking them. Besides, if I’d given the job to a sergeant, I might have ended up having to explain where and how I’d gotten hold of the list in the first place. KRIPO could be very unforgiving of bent coppers. Even coppers who were bent not for themselves but for the job.

For the same reason, another mundane task I was going to have to perform myself was check out every name on that list. There was, however, nothing mundane about one name in particular I had found using the Devil’s Directory. This was Dr. Kassner’s own name. And I was looking forward to finding out why his home address should have been on a list of patients involved in Bayer’s clinical trial of protonsil.

When I got back to my desk, Grund was there, typing something on my ancient Carmen, one ponderous finger at a time, as if he had been killing ants or playing the opening notes of some tuneless Russian piano concerto.

“Where the hell have you been?” he asked.

“Where the hell have you been,
sir
?” I said.

“Illmann called. The Schwarz girl tested negative for jelly. And Gennat wants us to go and check out some girl found dead in the municipal cattle market. Looks like she was shot, but we’re to give it a quick sketch anyway, just in case.”

“Makes sense, I suppose. The cattle market is only a few hundred yards from where we found the Schwarz girl in Friedrichshain Park.”

We were there in a matter of minutes. Market days were Wednesdays and Saturdays, so the place was closed and deserted. But the restaurant was open, and some of the patrons—wholesale butchers mostly, from Pankow, Weissensee, and Petershagen—reported seeing three men chasing the girl into the yards. But the descriptions were vague. Too vague to be worth writing down. The body itself was in the slaughterhouse. She looked about twenty. She’d been shot in the head at fairly close range. There was a brown mark around the bullet hole. All the clothing below her waist was gone and, from the smell of her, it seemed probable she’d been raped. But that was it. There had been no amateur surgery on this poor creature.

“Circumstances arousing suspicion, right enough,” said Grund after quite a while.

I would have been surprised if he hadn’t said it.

“Nice-looking box on her,” he added.

“Go ahead and give her one, why don’t you? I’ll look the other way.”

“I was just saying,” he said. “I mean, look at it. Her box. It’s been shaved, mostly. Not something you often see, that’s all. Bare like that. Like a little girl.”

I rifled through her handbag, which one of the uniformed SCHUPOs had found a short distance away from the body, and found a Communist Party card. Her name was Sabine Färber. She’d worked at KPD headquarters close to where I lived. Her home was in Pettenkoferstrasse, on the edge of Lichterfelde, just a hundred yards east of where she’d been murdered. Already it seemed abundantly clear to me what had probably happened.

“Fucking Nazis,” I said with loud disgust.

“Christ, I’m fed up with this,” Grund said, frowning. “How do you work that out? That they were Nazis who did this. You heard the descriptions given by those butchers. No one mentioned seeing any brown shirts or swastikas. Not even a toothbrush mustache. So how do you figure that they’re Nazis?”

“Oh, it’s nothing personal, Heinrich.” I tossed him Sabine Färber’s party card. “But they weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to find a convert.”

He looked at the card and shrugged, as if allowing only the possibility that I was right.

“Come on. It’s got their fingerprints all over it. My guess is that the three men the butchers reported seeing were storm troopers wearing plain clothes so as not to draw attention to themselves. They must have been waiting for her when she came out of the KPD headquarters on Bulowplatz. It’s a nice day, so she decided to walk home and didn’t notice that they were following. Waiting for a good opportunity to attack her. When she spotted them, she ran in here, hoping to escape. Only they cornered her and then did what brave storm troopers do when they’re fighting a terrible menace like international Bolshevism. Heinrich?”

“I suppose some of that might be right,” he said. “More or less.”

“Which part do you agree with less?” I asked.

Grund didn’t answer. He put Sabine Färber’s card back in her bag and stared down at the dead girl.

“What is it that Hitler says?” I asked. “Strength lies not in defense but in attack?” I lit a cigarette. “I always wondered what that meant.” I let the smoke char my lungs for a moment and then said, “Is this the kind of attack that he means, do you think? Your great leader?”

“Of course not,” muttered Grund. “You know it isn’t.”

“What, then? You tell me. I’d like to know.”

“Give it a rest, why don’t you?”

“Me?” I laughed. “It’s not me who needs to give it a rest, Heinrich. It’s the people who did this. They’re your friends. The National Socialists.”

“You don’t know any of that for a fact.”

“No, you’re right. I don’t. For real vision you need a man like Adolf Hitler. Perhaps he should be the detective here. Not a bad idea—I’m sure I prefer the idea of him as a cop to the idea of him becoming the next chancellor of Germany.” I smiled. “And it’s an even bet he’d have a superior cleanup rate to me. Who better to solve a city’s crimes than the man who instigates most of them?”

“Christ, I wish I didn’t have to listen to you, Gunther.”

Grund spoke through gritted teeth. There was color in his face that ought to have warned me to be careful. He was a boxer, after all.

“You don’t,” I told him. “I’m going back to the Alex to tell the political boys that this is one for them. You stay here and see if you can’t get some better witnesses than those sausage-makers. I dunno. Perhaps you’ll get lucky. Perhaps they’re Nazis themselves. They’re certainly ugly enough. Who knows? Perhaps they’ll even give you descriptions of three orthodox Jews.”

I suppose it was the sarcastic grin that did it for him. I hardly saw the punch. I hardly even felt it. One second I was standing there, grinning like Torquemada, and the next I was lying on the cobbled ground, felled like a heifer and feeling as if I’d been struck by a bolt of electricity. In the half-light available to my eyes, Grund was standing over me with fists clenched, like Firpo staring down at Dempsey, and shouting something at me. His words were quite silent to my ears. All I could hear was a loud, high-pitched noise. Finally, Grund was hustled away by a couple of uniformed bulls while their sergeant bent down and helped me to my feet.

My head cleared and I shifted my jaw against my hand.

“The bastard hit me,” I said.

“He did that,” said the cop, searching my eyes like a referee wondering if he should allow the fight to proceed or not. “We all saw it, sir.”

From his tone I assumed he meant that he took it for granted I was going to press disciplinary charges against Grund. Hitting a superior officer was a serious offense in KRIPO. Almost as bad as hitting a suspect.

I shook my head. “No, you didn’t,” I said.

The cop was older than me. Nearing retirement, probably. His short hair was the color of polished steel. He had a scar in the center of his forehead: it looked as if a bullet had struck him there.

“What’s that you say, sir?”

“You didn’t see anything, Sergeant. Any of you. Got that?”

The sergeant thought about this for a moment and then nodded. “If you say so, sir.”

There was blood in my mouth but I was uncut.

“No harm done,” I said, and spat onto the ground.

“What was it all about?” he asked.

“Politics,” I said. “That’s what everything’s always about in Germany these days. Politics.”

 

 

 

I DIDN’T GO straight back to the Alex. Instead I drove to Kassner’s apartment on Dönhoff-Platz, which wasn’t exactly on the way, being at the eastern end of Leipziger Strasse. I stopped on the north side of some ornamental gardens. The bronze statues of two Prussian statesmen stared at me across a low privet hedge. A small boy out for a walk with his mother was looking at the statues and probably wondering who they were. I was thinking about how Dr. Kassner’s home address had come to be on a list of names I had got from Jewface Klein. I knew Kassner would still be at the hospital, so I really haven’t a clue what I was expecting to find out. But I am an optimist like that. When you’re a detective, you have to be. And sometimes you just have to do what your instincts tell you to do.

I walked up to the shiny black front door and took a closer look. There were three bells. One of them was clearly labeled KASSNER. Beside the door were two cast-iron planters filled with geraniums. The whole area oozed respectability. I pulled the bell and waited. After a while I heard the key being turned and the door opened to reveal a man in his early twenties. I lifted my hat innocently.

“Dr. Kassner?”

“No,” said the man. “He’s not here.”

“My name is Hoffmann,” I said, raising my hat once again. “From Isar Life Insurance.”

The young man nodded politely but said nothing.

I glanced quickly at the other two names by the bell pulls. “Herr Körtig?”

“No.”

“Herr Peters, is it?”