by Philip Kerr
“We found traces of green paint on the note,” said Weiss. “The same paint that was used on the Patent Office wet-paint signs. We contacted the Bank of England for some information on the banknote, but all they can tell us is that it was one of a batch sent to a bank in Wales. Which doesn’t get us much further forward.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It might let an awful lot of Germans breathe more easily at night if the killer should turn out to be British.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Weiss.
“I suppose I worry that, as a people, we’ve become very cruel since the war. The fact is, we’re still coming to terms with what happened. With our immediate history.”
“You make it sound as if history is something that could be over,” said Weiss. “But I’m afraid the lesson of history is that it’s never really over. Not today and certainly not tomorrow.”
“That may be so, but it cannot be denied that people get an appetite for blood and human suffering. Like the ancient Romans. And I think any German who was proud of his country would prefer Winnetou to come from somewhere other than Germany.”
“Good point,” admitted Gennat.
“Perhaps our man is a sex tourist,” I said. “Berlin is full of Englishmen and Americans getting the best rate of exchange in our nightclubs and with our women. They screwed us at Versailles and now they screw us here at home.”
“You’re beginning to sound like a Nazi,” said Weiss.
“I never wear brown,” I said. “Brown is definitely not my color.”
“It wasn’t the English and the Americans who screwed us at Versailles,” said Weiss. “It wasn’t even the French. It was the German high command. It’s them who’ve sold us all that stab-in-the-back horseshit. If only to get themselves off the hook.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’d like you to meet Dr. Hirschfeld sometime, Gunther,” said Weiss. “He’s convinced that the killer isn’t a man who hates women, but a man who loves women so much he wants to be one.”
“He’s got a funny way of showing that love, sir,” I said. “It seems to me that any man who really wants to be a woman only has to do what Fritz Pabst did—buy himself a nice dress and a good wig, call himself Louise, and head for the Eldorado. There are plenty of men in there who want to be women. Not to mention quite a few women who want to be men.”
“That’s not quite the same thing as actually becoming a real woman,” said Weiss. “According to Hirschfeld.”
“True,” I said. “And I’ll certainly be hanging on to that fact for dear life when I next talk to a strange girl. Real women are born that way. Even the ugly ones. Anything else is just hiding the family silver and moving the ornaments to the back of the shelf. But who knows? Maybe he’s just dumb enough to cut off his own private parts. And when we arrest him we’ll find there’s just one thing missing.”
“No one’s that stupid,” said Gennat. “You’d bleed to death.”
“I thought you said most of our clients were stupid.”
“Most. But what you’re describing is plain crazy,” said Gennat.
“Nobody’s that crazy,” said Hans Gross. “Not even in Berlin.”
“Could be this fellow comes the closest,” I said. “If he slices off his manhood in pursuit of becoming a woman, he’ll certainly save us the trouble of cutting off his head.”
Weiss laughed. “You know, I’m beginning to think that glass of schnapps was too much for Gunther. This is the most I’ve heard him say since we gave him the seat. Some of it even makes sense.”
I wound down the window and took a deep breath of the damp night air. It wasn’t the schnapps I found intoxicating, it was the tobacco smoke; I could see that if I was ever going to make it as a homicide detective I was going to have to work on my smoking habit. Beside these people in the murder wagon, I was a rank amateur. And I was beginning to appreciate why both Ernst Gennat and Hans Gross had a voice like a farrier’s rasp. Frau Künstler’s voice was more like black coffee, like her manicure.
“Sorry, sir.”
“No, I like my detectives to talk because, surprising as it might seem, I need food for thought, no matter how strange and exotic that food might be. You can say anything in this car. Anything, to me or the Big Buddha, just as long as it doesn’t offend Frau Künstler.”
“Don’t worry about me,” she said, taking the cover off her Torpedo. “I’m from Wedding and I can take care of myself.”
“But if you do talk, do try and make it entertaining. We hate boring people. And drop the sir when you’re in the wagon. I like things in here to be informal.”
* * *
—
THE MURDER WAGON’S window was still down because I was feeling a little nauseous and the rain and cool air felt good on my face. Southeast of Alexanderplatz, we stopped at a traffic light on Friedrichstrasse, immediately outside the James-Klein Revue, which, at number 104A, was right next door to the Haller-Revue. Both establishments were brightly lit and looked full of life, full of people—full of people with plenty of money who were drunk or on drugs. It seemed unlikely that any of them were thinking about the Wolfmium factory explosion and the dead workers, now at a count of fifty. At the very least it was probably a better Friday night out than our expedition in the murder wagon. You could hear their screams of laughter as well as a cacophonous mixture of jazz blaring out from both clubs, which only added to the feeling of corruption and intemperance in the air. An SA brownshirt was positioned between the two clubs with a collection box, as if any of the clubs’ patrons might be inclined to forget that the Nazis wanted to close down all of Berlin’s showgirl nightclubs. The Jimmy Klein doorman, a very tall Russian named Sasha carrying an umbrella as big as the dome on the Reichstag, approached the car with an oily, gap-toothed smile and leaned down toward my open window.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “please, why not join us inside? I can promise you won’t be disappointed. We have completely nude dancers in here. Seventy-five naked models—more than any other club in Berlin—whose daring and audacity is nothing short of priceless. The James-Klein Revue is proud to present an evening without morals in twenty-four scenes of startling eroticism.”
“Just an evening?” murmured Weiss. “Or a whole decade?”
It was about now that Sasha recognized me. We were old acquaintances from my time in Vice. Now and then he’d been a useful informer.
“Oh, sorry, Herr Gunther,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was you. You going into the undertaking business, then?” He was talking about the murder wagon and its occupants and it had to be admitted that we did resemble a group of mourners. “You want some free tickets? Paul Morgan’s the conferenciér tonight. He’s got the best dirty jokes in Berlin, if you ask me.”
But I was hardly listening. My eyes were on the Haller-Revue next door, trying to make out the sound of a saxophone and wondering how much of the music I could hear was being played by Rosa Braun. Clearly I wasn’t going to make it into the Haller that night to see her. If Weiss and Gennat hadn’t been with me, I might have dashed inside and informed the box office that the ticket she’d left for me was no longer required, and that she wasn’t to expect me. As it was, the traffic light changed and we drove off in search of our cadaver, a carful of ghouls with no discernible interest in the living or in scenes of eroticism, startling or otherwise. Nobody said anything now. There’s something about the imminent prospect of viewing a violent death that stops most normal conversation.
The car slowed at Wittenbergplatz, then turned south onto Wormser Strasse where there was a large courtyard surrounded by well-maintained offices and apartments. Guided by a uniformed officer, we drove into the yard and followed a flashlight to a distant corner. At the top of a steep basement stairwell, we found the lead detective. He was from the Police Praesidium on Sophie-Charlotte-Platz, north of the Ku’damm. His name was Johann Körner, and he was Erich Ludendorff un
der a false name with slightly less wax on the dead badger he called a mustache—a real old-school Prussian cop with a pickelhaube up his ass. Which is to say he disliked modern, lawyerly cops with new ideas like Bernhard Weiss almost as much as he disliked clever Jews like Bernhard Weiss. They’d crossed swords before but you wouldn’t have known it from the easy way Weiss spoke to him.
“Commissar Körner, good to see you. It’s my understanding that you have a dead girl here who’s been scalped.”
“It’s the work of Winnetou, all right. I’ve no doubt about that, sir. Hammer blow to the back of the neck and scalped. She’s lying at the foot of this stairwell. Been dead since the early hours of this morning, I’d say.”
“This is your case, of course, until you decide differently. But as you know we’ve already investigated two or three similar cases, which gives us a certain insight into the killer’s modus operandi. So we can remain here in a largely advisory capacity; or we can work together with you; or we can take over the case—as you prefer. Really, it’s entirely up to you.”
Körner glanced at his wristwatch as if considering that it was past his own bedtime, brushed his mustache, and then lifted himself up on his toes.
“Why don’t I just tell you what my men and I have been able to find out and then leave you to it, sir? I’m sure you and your people know much more about this sort of thing than I ever will.”
I wasn’t sure if “your people” meant everyone in the murder wagon or something more insidious, but if Weiss felt insulted, he certainly didn’t show it. As always he was a master of polite restraint and professional courtesy. He could have been speaking to a lawyer in court instead of to an anti-Semitic Pifke like Johann Körner.
“That’s very generous of you, Johann. Thank you. So tell us what you think you know.”
“Eva Angerstein, age twenty-seven. Payday prostitute. Worked as a stenographer by day for Siemens-Halske in Siemensstadt. And lived in a room at the far end of the Ku’damm on Heilbronner Strasse, number twenty-four. We found her office clothes in a large cloth handbag we presume must be hers.”
A payday prostitute was a girl who only went on the sledge toward the end of the month, before payday, when money was tight. Common enough in a city like Berlin, where there were always unexpected expenses.
“The building caretaker found her when he went down these stairs to check the boiler. Rancid fellow named Pietsch. He said there was a problem with half-silks bringing their clients down here from Wittenbergplatz. Up against the wall at the bottom of these stairs looks as good a place for a quick jump as any, I suppose. That’s what we figure must have happened. They went down there together, he hammered her on the neck, and then scalped the poor bitch.”
“Any witnesses?”
“None.”
“Have you spoken to any of the working girls on Wittenbergplatz?”
“No. There was a receipt in her handbag from the Kakadu club, on Joachimstaler Strasse, from last night, so that’s where we figure she may have met her killer. We haven’t been there either.”
One of Körner’s men handed him a pocketbook, which he handed to Weiss, who handed it to Gennat, who wiped his hands and then handed it to me. I opened it, dropped my flashlight inside, and noted that it had been bought from Hulbe, a quality leather goods shop on the Ku’damm. I was about to search through the contents when I became aware that the bag was covered in coal dust; it was more or less empty, too, apart from her identification papers.
“The cloth bag containing her clothes we found in the stairwell next to her body; the handbag we found in the coal bunker up on ground level. One of my men discovered it more or less by chance, just a short while ago.”
“I wonder why it was in there. Any ideas?”
“The bag was open, he said. Like someone had been through it, looking for something, and then tossed it.”
“Apart from the girl’s papers, the bag’s empty,” I said. “No money, no purse, no wallet, no valuables. Nothing.”
“Not our man’s normal behavior,” said Weiss. “Not normal at all. Our previous victims were still in possession of some money.”
“There’s nothing normal about this bastard.”
“True. I meant, he doesn’t normally rob his victims.”
I could tell that Weiss was thinking the same thing I was: that one of Körner’s men had stolen the money from Eva Angerstein’s handbag and divided it with his commissar. This wasn’t exactly unknown among Berlin cops. Neither of us said a thing.
“Who knows what’s in the mind of a twisted maniac like Winnetou?” said Körner. “It’s always been my experience that a man like that exhibits all kinds of criminal behavior. Thieving, arson, rape, you name it. If you told me he was also planning to commit treason I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s not like murderers are scrupulous about breaking the law. In my humble opinion, sir.”
“Bag’s from Hulbe,” I said to Weiss. “A good bag from a good shop. You wouldn’t expect a girl who could afford a bag like this to take a client and bang him up against a wall in an apartment courtyard. You’d think she would have used a room. Somewhere she could wash.” I continued searching the bag even as I spoke.
“You make it sound like she was something better than a whore,” said Körner. “Look, it’s just a handbag, right? I don’t know that it tells you anything. Perhaps her Fritz was in a hurry. Didn’t want all the fancy silk trimmings and lingerie that some of these girls offer. Just a quick bit of mouse and then a bit of cash for a taxi home.”
“I expect you’re right, Johann,” said Weiss.
“This is interesting,” I said. “There’s a secret pocket in this bag. The zip is at the bottom of the pocket instead of the top and underneath a fold of leather so it would be easy enough to miss, I suppose. Certainly anyone in a hurry might not realize it was there. There’s something in it, too.” My hand came out of the handbag holding a couple of gold rings and a new ten-mark banknote.
“Let me see that,” said Körner irritably.
I handed over the rings but not the note.
“I think you’d better not touch Herr Thaer,” I said. “This one looks brand-new. Like it was issued yesterday. We might even be able to trace this, sir.”
“Good work, Gunther.”
Ten-reichsmark notes were green and featured an agriculturalist called Albrecht Thaer, whose only real fame was that he was on the money. I’d never heard of him. The heroes of the Weimar Republic always seemed underwhelming, which is perhaps the hallmark of true democracy; under the Kaiser, German money had looked altogether more patriotic and inspiring.
I slipped the banknote into a paper bag and carried it back to the murder wagon before returning to the top of the stairwell. I left Weiss speaking to Körner and then descended the stairs to where Ernst Gennat was now giving the corpse the benefit of his many years’ experience in homicide. His flashlight was all over the ground around the body like an anteater’s nose. Her head was covered with blood and she looked like she’d fallen downstairs and cracked her skull. Her clothes were good quality and her stockings were made of silk; her discarded gray cloche hat was from Manheimer on Oberwallstrasse and resembled a steel helmet that hadn’t worked.
“Rigor’s set in,” said Gennat. “I figure she’s been dead about twenty-two or twenty-three hours. Like killing a seal pup.”
“How’s that?”
“She comes down here in front of him, he batters her with his hammer, one powerful blow, breaks her neck, and before she’s even hit the ground he’s got his blade out and is preparing to take her pelt. Start to finish maybe as little as sixty seconds.”
“Christ, that’s fast.”
“That’s because he takes no pleasure in it. This much is obvious. If he did there would be more evidence of him going into a frenzy. Sometimes when a killer actually gets up the courage to kill, it opens the floodgates and he i
nflicts multiple stab wounds. But this girl’s skirt hasn’t even been lifted and as far as I can see there’s not a mark on her body. So this is not about sex, Gunther. It’s not even about killing. It’s all about that trophy. The hair. Her scalp.” Gennat paused. “Find something in her handbag, did you?”
I told him about the banknote.
“A ten’s what he’d have given her to go with him somewhere,” he said. “Down here. Just enough to silence any misgivings she might have. And more than enough to blow him.”
“That’s what I figured. Only maybe he worried about that banknote. And came back to see if he could retrieve it. Which is why he ransacked her handbag.” I lowered my voice. “And here was me thinking that it was one of Körner’s men who did that.”
“It doesn’t mean that Körner’s boys didn’t pinch some stuff from her bag. The police from Sophie-Charlotte-Platz have always had a reputation for unofficial taxation, if you know what I mean. You notice they were careful to leave her ID so as not to have the trouble of the legwork needed to put a name to her face. Look, it’s a nice theory you have there, Gunther. About the banknote. Now see if you can prove it. Perhaps you can find something else out there that could have come from her handbag. A lipstick or a powder compact. A purse or a set of keys. Then, when you’ve done that, go to the Kakadu and see if anyone remembers her. Not forgetting some of the other girls on Wittenbergplatz. Maybe they’ll have seen her with someone. Hopefully someone with the word murderer chalked on his back.”
“Right you are, sir.” I started back up the steps, with the beam from my flashlight straight ahead of me. Something white reflected light back at me; I leaned over to take a closer look. It was an ivory cigar holder.
“I doubt that could have come from her handbag, don’t you?”
Gennat leaned toward the cigar holder and picked it up on the end of his Pelikan. He cursed loudly.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” he said.
“That the killer smokes cigars?”
