by Philip Kerr
“I’ve heard of Fritz Lang.”
“Thea writes his film scripts. She’s researching a new movie about a sex murderer and would dearly like to speak to someone who’s employed by the famous Berlin Murder Commission.”
“Look, I’ve only just started. I’m not sure what I can tell her that you couldn’t tell her. It’s not like you haven’t worked for the Commission.”
“True, but I’m not a permanent member. And not actively on a murder case right now. Which is an important distinction. To her, anyway. Also, she has ambitions of being able to speak to the Big Buddha, and the plain fact of the matter is that there’s bad blood between Gennat and me, as is now obvious to everyone. Gennat would certainly have refused if I’d asked him about Thea von Harbou. He thinks I’m a thug. Well, maybe I am. I try to carry out my duties as best I can, but sometimes I am a little overzealous; particularly where Nazis are concerned. Either way, I can’t help Thea in this particular respect and I was hoping you might speak with her. Look, all she really cares about is that the person she meets is a permanent member of Berlin’s famous Commission. I imagine so she can tell her husband as much. He’s a very demanding fellow, by all accounts.”
“Sure, I’ll do it. If Gennat gives his permission.”
“I’m sure he will. If you ask him. Gennat loves cinema. Almost as much as he loves attractive women. And now that you’re his blue-eyed boy he won’t deny you much. Especially if what I hear is true; that you’ve already felt your first collar.”
“Yes. But there was nothing to it. We virtually caught the Fritz red-handed.”
“I’m sure you’re just being modest. Which is very commendable. Weiss loves a bit of modesty in his detectives. He hates anyone to outshine his beloved department. He only tolerates the fame of the Big Buddha because Ernst Gennat doesn’t give a damn for reputation. You can see that by the way he dresses. He’s not a threat to anyone. Those suits of his look like they were cut with a cheese knife.”
“On the whole modesty suits me better; I don’t sound good when I’m bossing people around.”
“Well, congratulations anyway. Even an easy collar can come away in your hand, Gunther. Remember that. And make sure you don’t neglect the paperwork. Weiss is above all a lawyer and lawyers love to read reports.”
“I was just heading upstairs to finish my report.”
“Good man. So then, here’s Thea’s business card—” He sniffed it before handing it over. “Hmm. Scented. Anyway, you can telephone her yourself. She’s quite attractive. A bit too old for you, probably. But an interesting woman nonetheless.”
“You’ve met her then?”
“Oh yes.”
“Here?”
“No. Although she’d dearly love to get a look around the Commission offices as well. At the time, I didn’t dare bring her here in case it scuppered my chances of getting Lindner’s seat. No, I took her to the Police Museum, the Hanno showhouse, and then Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science at In Den Zelten, just to give my stories some extra color, so to speak. The institute is mostly photographs of perverts and Japanese dildos. But she seemed to find it all quite interesting. Especially the dildos. At the very least you’ll probably get a nice dinner out of her. She took me to Horcher’s.”
I pocketed the woman’s business card and nodded. “I said I’d do it,” I said again. “And I will. I like a free dinner as much as the next man.”
“Good, good.” Reichenbach tipped his hat and started down the stairs, swinging his stick and puffing his cigar back into life. “I can’t understand it myself. A movie about a man killing whores in Berlin? I mean, who cares about that?” He laughed. “Nobody in this place, that’s for sure. You might just as well shoot a movie inside the Reichstag. Sometimes I think I should have been a movie producer, not a cop. I understand the public, you see. I know what scares them. And it certainly isn’t someone crushing a few grasshoppers. Most Germans think those girls have got it coming.”
* * *
—
I WANTED to contradict Reichenbach, to shout into the vertiginous stairwell that I cared. In fact, I cared very much and not just because I was now attached to the Murder Commission. I was thinking of Rosa Braun, wondering how I might feel if she turned up in the Spree with her neck broken; nobody deserved a death like that, not even if she was taking a risk selling it for money. But it wasn’t just Rosa I cared about. In my time with Vice I’d got to know a great many girls who were on the sledge and quite a few of them struck me as honest, good people. I even knew one or two who had made their Abitur. None were the worthless grasshoppers Reichenbach had spoken of. For many single women in Berlin, life was a slippery slope, which of course was one reason prostitution was called the sledge in the first place. And the whole city seemed morally degraded when a girl turned up in an alley with her neck broken and her scalp missing. But it hardly seemed worth disagreeing with Reichenbach now that he was halfway out of the building. Besides, keeping my mouth shut about a lot of things was probably best for the present. He was my superior after all. And it wasn’t as if he was wrong; most of the cops at the Alex didn’t care that much about the fate of a few prostitutes.
Nor was there much wrong with his advice to me, even if it was obvious. Bernhard Weiss didn’t appreciate it when Kripo detectives started to get their names in the newspapers and he did like things in his department to be well documented. Watertight paperwork was the best guarantee of our own investigative integrity: his words, not mine. You could hardly blame the boss for that; he was often suing the Nazis for libel, and he never went into court without a set of meticulous police records, which was why he always won, of course. He must have sued them successfully at least ten times, and they hated him for it. He ought to have had a bodyguard, but he scorned any police protection for himself on the grounds that the Nazis would only criticize him for that, too. Weiss did carry a gun, however; after the assassination of his friend the socialist journalist Kurt Eisner in 1919, every Jew in public life carried a pistol. In 1928, a pistol was the best kind of life insurance you could buy. Which was probably why I had two.
Weiss and Gennat came and found me not long after I’d sat down at my new desk to type out my report. The offices overlooked Dircksenstrasse and commanded a good view of the railway station and the western half of the city beyond. Berlin looked bigger at night: bigger and quieter and even more indifferent than it did by day, as if it were someone else’s bad dream. Looking at all that neon light was like staring up at the universe and wondering why you felt so insignificant. Not that there was any great mystery about that; really there was just light and darkness and some life in between, and you made of it what you could.
“Here he is,” said Gennat. “Berlin’s very own Philo Vance.”
My feet hurt but I stood up anyway. Weiss and Gennat were wearing their coats and it looked as if they were about to go home; it was almost eleven o’clock after all. They made an odd pair, like Laurel and Hardy: Weiss small and precise, Gennat large and shapeless. Weiss had the superior mind, but Gennat the better jokes. He glanced at the report on the carriage of my typewriter and rubbed his jowls noisily with the flat of his hand. It sounded like someone sweeping a path with a heavy brush. The Big Buddha badly needed another shave.
“You can forget that for now,” Gennat said, pointing at the typewriter. “Do the report later.”
That sounded good; in my mind’s eye I was already turning up at the Haller-Revue and imagining what it might be like to undress a woman who was dressed like a man. It had been a long day.
“Good work, Gunther.”
I told them what I’d told Reichenbach—that we’d caught the killer almost red-handed. “He was boozing away the spoils of the robbery in the very place where he’d met with his victim.” I laughed. “He was supposed to be the dead man’s bodyguard. But he’d got himself into debt. The dumbhead even had the dead man’s gold rin
g and wallet in his pocket.”
“That’s the thing about bodyguards,” said Weiss. “I’ve seen it happen again and again. They always end up despising the person they’re supposed to be protecting. Easy enough, I suppose. You guard a man, you get to know his foibles and weaknesses. And before he knows it, he’s trusted his life to someone with a gun who badly wants to put a hole in him.”
“It’s just as well most of our clients are stupid,” said Gennat. “I don’t know how we’d catch half of them if they all had their Abiturs.”
“A murderer is still a murderer,” said Weiss, polishing his glasses. “However you catch him. And catching him is what counts, not the mystery, nor the detection, nor the intellectual showdown between you and the killer. Just the arrest. Anything else is a sideshow. Remember that, Gunther.”
Gennat was pouring us each a glass of schnapps from a half liter he kept in his coat pocket. He raised his glass and waited for Weiss and me to do the same. In his fat pink fingers the glass looked like a crystal thimble.
“What are we drinking to?” I asked, thinking that it might be my own early good fortune.
“We’re not drinking to anything, lad,” said Gennat. “We’ve got another body to go and look at.”
“Now?”
“That’s right. Now. Tonight. This minute. And by all accounts we’re all going to need a bit of liquid backbone. Victim looks pretty tasty apparently.”
“Another girl’s been scalped,” added Weiss, and rather to my surprise he necked his drink in one.
I swallowed the schnapps, grabbed my hat and coat, and followed them out the door.
* * *
—
IN THE MURDER WAGON, outside the Praesidium’s main entrance, Weiss asked if I had read all the Silesian Station files.
“Not yet, sir. I’ve read the files on Mathilde Luz and Helen Strauch. I was just about to read the third case—the attempted murder—when the call came through about the floater in the Spree.”
“We’re waiting on Hans, are we, Eva?” Gennat was looking at Frau Künstler, who was busy lighting a cigarette.
“He said he wouldn’t be long. That he had to fetch some new plates for the camera.”
“I expect the dead girl will wait,” said Weiss. “They usually do. It’s me who’s in a hurry to get home, not her. Poor thing.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ernst, bring Gunther up to speed with the most recent attack,” said Weiss. “Do you mind listening to this kind of talk, Eva?”
“No. I don’t mind. I type up the victim reports, don’t I? What, do you think I just forget all that stuff? Sometimes I think this city has more dead bodies than a battlefield. I try and forget but not for long and not long enough. To really forget you need a hobby and I don’t have time for one on account of the fact that I’m always in this damn car.”
“Sorry, and I’m sorry to ask you to work late again,” said Weiss.
“That’s all right. Fortunately for you I need the extra money. Besides, I don’t sleep so well since I started working for you people.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Gennat.
“Oh, it’s nothing to do with the murders and the details of what happened to the victims. That I can deal with. Just about. It’s the man downstairs in the building where I live. He’s a singer in a choral group called the Comedian Harmonists. And when he’s drunk, which seems to be at all hours of the day and night, he sings.”
“I’ve heard of them,” said Gennat. “They’re famous.”
“Yes, well, not for much longer,” said Eva Künstler. “One night you’re going to get a telephone call to attend an address in Potsdamer Chaussee, and you’ll find a singer with his throat cut and me standing over him with a razor in my hand.”
“That’s a good address,” said Gennat. “We’ve never had a murder there. It will make a nice change to go somewhere like that one day. And I’ll certainly make a point of forgetting that we ever had this conversation. Now, I can’t say fairer than that.”
“Ernst remembers every detail of every murder he’s investigated,” said Weiss. “Isn’t that right, Ernst?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. If you say so.”
“That’s one reason why he’s such a good detective. The Big Buddha never forgets. So then. Fill Bernie in on girl number three. Fritz Pabst.”
“Fritz? She’s got a man’s name?”
“Believe me,” said Weiss, “the similarities are just beginning.”
“Fritz Pabst, also known as Louise Pabst, was a transvestite prostitute,” said Gennat, “and a good one, too, which is to say that even in broad daylight it was difficult to tell that she was really a man. The pictures of Fritz dressed as Louise are salutary for anyone who thinks he’s an experienced man of the world. Right down to his Goschenhofer underwear.”
“Wish I could afford nice stuff like that,” murmured Frau Künstler.
“Pabst kept a photo album and was planning to become a singer at the Pan Lounge. By day he worked at Wertheim’s department store, in haberdashery, and by night he frequented the Pan and the Eldorado lounge, not very far from where he was attacked and left for dead. That’s right: left for dead. Because girl number three there survived the attack.
“Pabst insists he hadn’t picked anyone up and that his attacker came out of a dark doorway and just hit him. As with the previous victims, a blow from a hammer broke his neck. We think that when the killer tried to scalp him, Fritz’s wig came off in his hand and the killer ran for it. The victim stayed alive, however, and gave us a clue, which, so far, we’ve managed to keep out of the newspapers. He doesn’t remember anything about the killer except for the fact that in the immediate seconds before he was attacked, he heard someone whistling a tune we’ve now identified as being from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, by a French composer called Paul Dukas. He wasn’t sure about the name but he hummed it to me and I whistled it to a musician from the Philharmonie in Bernburger Strasse, who identified it. The only witness—the woman who found him—doesn’t remember a man whistling but she does remember seeing a man washing his hands in a horse trough near Fritz’s unconscious body. A man wearing a soft wide-brimmed hat with lots of longish fair hair on one side, Bohemian style. Like an actor, she said. Fritz Pabst is recovering in hospital but so far he has been unable to remember anything else. And frankly he isn’t likely to; it’s touch-and-go if he’ll ever walk again, poor devil. And certainly not in high heels.”
Hans Gross arrived and, opening the rear door of the murder wagon, proceeded to place a box of camera plates in the back alongside his tripods and arc lamps before climbing in with Frau Künstler. He squeezed the woman’s knee and stole a puff of her cigarette; to my surprise she objected to neither.
“Sorry to keep you waiting. Sir, I’m going to need some more things from Anschütz. We’re running a bit short.”
“Investigating murder is an expensive business,” said Weiss. “Especially in Berlin. I’ll sort it out, Hans. Leave it to me.”
The driver—a cop in uniform—started the big engine and we drove off, followed by a squad car.
“Where are we going?” asked Gross.
“Wormser Strasse,” said Weiss.
“That’s much farther west than the previous victims.”
“Can I continue?” said Gennat.
“We’re all ears,” said Weiss.
“Now, at the time I couldn’t figure out exactly why the killer should have felt the need to wash his hands in the trough if he hadn’t scalped his victim. There was no blood to speak of. But walking around the area in daylight I discovered that there were wet-paint signs on the Patent Office on Alte Jakobstrasse, and it occurred to me that perhaps the killer wasn’t washing blood off his hands, but green paint. So we unscrewed the doors, scrutinized them for fingerprints, and found a partial handprint, which of course may or may not belo
ng to the killer. Sadly, it doesn’t match anyone we have on record, and for the moment, we’ve drawn a blank on that one, too.”
“Now, that was a clever bit of thinking,” said Weiss. “I’m sure I wouldn’t have thought of that. The Big Buddha is very like his ancient namesake, Gunther. Not only is he perfectly self-awakened, he is also endowed with the higher knowledge of many worlds. Learn the nine virtues of detective work from him. Learn them and make them your own.”
“Fritz Pabst had no boyfriend,” continued Gennat, ignoring the compliment, “no girlfriend, and nothing in the middle, if you know what I mean. So we can’t go blaming it on any poor bastard who loved him. But. And this is interesting. We did find a British pound note next to Fritz’s discarded wig. As if it might have fallen out of the killer’s pocket.”
“How much is that worth?” I asked.
“About twenty reichsmarks.”
“Which is about twice the going rate for a street whore,” I said. “So maybe the killer offered it to Fritz Pabst, or Louise. In lieu of German money. Not that it really mattered.”
“How do you mean?” asked Gennat.
“If the murderer was going to kill Fritz Pabst anyway, what difference would it make how much it was, or if it was even legal tender? By the time Fritz was holding it up to the light to see what it was, it was probably too late.”
“So you think Fritz could be lying about having picked someone up.”
“Not necessarily. If someone has hit you with a hammer with intent to kill, you probably forget more than just the latest rate of exchange. You forget everything, I shouldn’t wonder. I know I would. Either way it means the killer could be an Englishman. Or someone who wants it to look like an Englishman.” I shrugged. “Or perhaps it was someone else completely unrelated to the case who dropped it.”
