Metropolis

by Philip Kerr

  “Yes, I know. I’m ashamed to tell you they kicked me out twice. First because of sinusitis, and the second time because I had a breakdown. They were going to execute me as a deserter, but then the war ended. But before it did I saw more than enough for it to affect my work. Perhaps now and forever more. So my themes as an artist are despair, disillusionment, hate, fear, corruption, hypocrisy, and death. I draw drunkards, men puking their guts out, prostitutes, military men with blood on their hands, women pissing in your beer, suicides, men who are horribly crippled, and women who’ve been murdered by men playing skat. But chiefly my subject is this: hell’s metropolis, Berlin itself. With all its wild excess and decadence, the city seems to me to constitute the very essence of true humanity.”

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  “But I expect you think I should paint nice landscapes and pictures of pretty smiling girls and kittens. Well, I simply can’t. Not anymore. After the trenches there are no pretty girls, no nice landscapes, and not many kittens. Every time I see a landscape I try to imagine what it would look like if there was an enormous shell hole in the middle of it, a trench in the foreground, and a skeleton hanging on the barbed wire. Every time I see a pretty smiling girl I try to imagine what she’d look like if she’d been cut in half by a Vickers machine gun. If I was ever to paint a kitten I’d probably paint two men without noses tearing it apart over the dinner table.”

  “Is there much of a market for that kind of thing?”

  “I don’t do it for the money. We paint that way because we have to paint that way. Yes, that’s right, I’m not the only one. There are plenty of artists who think and paint the same way as I do. Max Beckmann. Otto Dix—yes, you should really see what Dix draws and paints if you think there’s something wrong with me. Some of his work is much more visceral than anything I might paint. But for the record I don’t think either of them is a murderer. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

  For a moment he made me feel glad that I was just a stupid policeman—clearly it was what he thought. Still, I was determined to prove him mistaken on that score. Just because I thought I could. But I was probably wrong about that, too, and later on I felt as if I’d been swimming against the wave machine in the indoor pool at Wellenbad.

  “Frankly, I don’t give a damn what you choose to draw and paint, Herr Grosz. That’s entirely your affair. This is Berlin, not Moscow. People can still do more or less what they like here. Like you, I, too, sometimes think that after the war nothing can ever be the same again. But I suppose the major difference between you and me is that I haven’t yet given up on beauty. On optimism. On hope. On a bit of law and order. On a little bit of morality. On Holy Germany, for want of a better phrase.”

  Grosz laughed, but his teeth clenched his pipestem tightly. I swam on, still against the tide.

  “Oddly enough I still see the best in women, too. My wife, for example. Until she died I thought she was the most wonderful person I’d ever met. I haven’t changed that opinion. I guess that makes me an incurable romantic. Something incurable, anyway.”

  Grosz smiled thinly, while his Pelikan raced across the page. From time to time his shrewd eyes flicked up at me, appraising, measuring, estimating. No one had ever drawn me before and it made me feel strange, as if I were being stripped bare, to my very essence, like one of the corpses in the Hanno showhouse.

  “When a man talks about a wonderful woman,” he said, “usually that just means he likes her because she tries very hard to be very like a man. Have you looked at women in this town, lately? Christ, most of them even look like men. These days it’s only the men who look like real women. And I could give a damn about what’s best in women.”

  “Well, you’ve certainly answered one question. Why you like drawing dead women so much. It’s because you don’t much like women. But I do like the drawing you’ve done of me. Very much. I wonder if you might give it to me.”

  Grosz tugged the page out of his sketchbook, added the date, his signature, and the location, and swept it across the table as if it had been the check.

  “It’s yours. A gift from me to the Berlin police.”

  “I shall pin it on my wall. Next to Hegel.” I looked at it again and nodded. “But you’ve made me look too young. Too smiley. Like a schoolboy who’s just got his Abitur.”

  “That’s how I see you, sergeant. Young and naïve. It’s certainly how you see yourself. Which surprises me given all you must have been through in four years at the front.”

  “Coming from you, sir, I count that as a great compliment. Makes me feel like that English queer who only gets old in his portrait and loses his soul.”

  “I think you must mean Dorian Gray.”

  “Yes, him. Except that I’ve still got mine. Yes, in future I shall look at this picture and think I’ve been lucky. I’ve come through the worst of it with my soul still intact. And that’s got to be worth something.”

  * * *

  —

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, a Wednesday, was another day off and I’d planned to walk up to Tietz and buy some things for my new office at the Alex to celebrate my promotion to the Commission: a city map for the wall, a decent-size ashtray, a table lighter, a desk set, and a bottle of good Korn and some glasses for the drawer, just in case anyone came visiting; and then to spend a quiet morning in my room reading some police files. But over breakfast that morning—coffee, Tilsit cheese, and fresh rolls from the Jewish baker’s shop on Schwerinstrasse—I learned that Frau Weitendorf, her hair even more rigidly Golem-like than normal, which made me think it must be a wig, had other ideas as to how I might spend at least the first part of my morning. Sticking a cigarette into her fat ruddy face and lighting it with a match struck on the pewter novelty monkey’s backside, which often made her smile (although not on this occasion), she came tortuously to the point:

  “I suppose you haven’t seen Herr Rankin,” she said as she turned down the volume on the Firma Telefunken radio that stood on the sideboard beside a vase of yellow flowers and underneath an Achenbach print of a seascape.

  “Not today.”

  “When was the last time you saw him, Herr Gunther?”

  “I don’t know. Last Friday evening, perhaps? When we all sat down to eat your delicious lung hash.”

  “That was the last time anyone at this table saw him,” she added ominously.

  I looked around at the two others, who were down for breakfast.

  “Is that true?”

  Rosa nodded and left the table.

  Herr Fischer nodded as well, but felt obliged to add his three pennies’ worth of information, none of which was in the least bit relevant.

  “Yes. It was Friday evening. I remember that because the next day I marched with the communists on Bismarckstrasse, and your lot opened fire as they held up our brass band to allow motor traffic over the intersection at Krumme Strasse. Which was quite uncalled for. But entirely typical of what we’ve come to expect from the Berlin police.”

  My lot were the police, of course. I shrugged. “Traffic takes precedence over Marx and Engels.”

  “I meant the shooting.”

  “Oh that. Look, all this is beside the point. I thought we were talking about Herr Rankin, not public order.”

  “He’s gone missing,” said Frau Weitendorf. “I’m certain of it.”

  “Are you sure? Perhaps he just went away for a few days. I’m beginning to wish I had.”

  “His suitcase is still here.”

  “You’ve been in his room?”

  “He pays me to clean it. And to change his sheets once a week. When I went in yesterday it was plain he hadn’t been there in days. There were several empty bottles lying on the floor and some blood in his shaving basin.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Go and take a look for yourself.”

  We all went upstairs and she unlocked Ra
nkin’s door from a bunch of keys on a pink silk ribbon and ushered me inside.

  “I don’t think we all need to be in here,” I said to Fischer in particular. “No matter what might have happened, I think we still have to respect Rankin’s privacy.”

  While I spoke I was eyeing several of the drawings on the wall, which were of naked men in various states of arousal and left nothing to the imagination.

  “Typical copper,” said Fischer. “Always telling people what to do. Just like the Nazis he and his kind serve so enthusiastically. Look, we all live here. And Robert Rankin’s a friend of mine. A good friend. It’s not like he hasn’t invited me in here before. And I think I’m entitled to know if something’s happened to him.”

  I had become tired of Fischer’s constant baiting and the assumption that because I was a cop I was also a Nazi lackey.

  “I think you’re entitled to know nothing,” I said, pushing him back out the doorway. “Although it does seem to me that nothing is usually what a Bolshevik heel hound such as yourself knows best of all.”

  “Listen, I’m a citizen. You should be more polite. Or I’ll feel obliged to report you to your superiors.”

  “Go right ahead. Meanwhile, I think I’m all through being polite with you, Herr Fischer, so please don’t be in any doubt about that.”

  I closed the door on him, leaving me alone with Frau Weitendorf, whose smile told me she’d quite enjoyed the way I’d spoken to Herr Fischer.

  “Lefty bastard,” she muttered.

  “Mostly I don’t have anything against communists,” I said. “But I’m beginning to make an exception in that man’s case.”

  Rankin’s rooms were much like my own, though bigger and better appointed, with the same sort of furniture except there were more pictures and a large Royal typewriter on the desk. The lip of the basin was spattered with blood and full of pinkish water. Among the shards of broken phonograph records on the floor were several empties that had once been filled with good Scotch; the ashtray beside the typewriter was full of English butts; and a handsome leather suitcase was still on top of the wardrobe. There were at least ten copies of his book, Pack Up Your Troubles, on the shelves, almost as if he’d tried to improve its sales by buying it himself. I went into the bedroom and inspected the narrow single bed. The pillow smelled strongly of Coty perfume, perhaps suggesting that Rosa Braun had a better acquaintance with Robert Rankin than I might have supposed.

  I picked up one of the records and inspected the label; the vocalist was Bessie Smith.

  “Why does a man smash his records like this? It’s not normal.”

  “That all depends on whether you like Bessie Smith,” I said. “Me, I can take her or leave her.”

  “I don’t mind telling you, Herr Gunther, I’m worried something’s happened to Herr Rankin.” She stubbed her cigarette out in Rankin’s ashtray and folded her arms under her substantial bosom.

  “I can’t say I’m inclined to agree with you. Not yet. Not on the basis of what I’ve seen in here. He drinks a lot. More than he should, perhaps. He smashed a few records. People do things like that when they’re drunk. And he cut himself shaving. If it wasn’t for the absence of a stick of alum on the shaving stand I’d see no real reason to worry.”

  Apart, I might have added, from the smell of Coty perfume on the missing man’s pillowcase.

  I sat down at Rankin’s desk. There was a diary and, beside the big black Royal, a pile of typed pages I assumed were part of the book he’d been translating into German. I thought these might give me a clue as to what might have happened to him. “Why don’t you leave it with me for a few minutes? I’ll poke my muzzle through his desk drawers. See what I can find out.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I should stay here and keep an eye on things. For Herr Rankin’s sake.”

  “True. You can’t trust anyone very much these days. And the cops not at all.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest you would steal anything, Herr Gunther.”

  “That’s because you don’t know as many cops as I do.” I thought of Commissar Körner and the way he or his men had helped themselves to what was in Eva Angerstein’s handbag. “Okay, take a seat. Here, have a smoke while you’re waiting.”

  I fished out my packet of Salem Aleikum, lit one for each of us, and then tugged open the top drawer. The little Browning .25 caught my eye right away; I sniffed it carefully; it had been recently cleaned. Everything else looked harmless enough, even the dirty postcards featuring boys from the Cosy Corner, which was a queer bar not very far away. What with the cards and the drawings on the wall, I was beginning to wonder if the Coty perfume on his pillow hadn’t been worn by Rankin himself; of course that was just wishful thinking and I knew better. For one thing, there wasn’t a bottle of the stuff anywhere in his drawers, and for another, it wasn’t every queer who didn’t like women. Besides, Rankin was a very handsome man, with a bit of money, which made him almost irresistible to every woman in Berlin, including Rosa. I’d seen the way she looked at him, and the way he’d looked at her, and given his obvious predilection for boys and her habit of dressing as a man, they seemed to have a lot in common.

  I looked in the diary and learned nothing, except that he often went for lunch at Höhn’s Oyster Saloon, and that he was a frequent visitor to the opera, which seemed like a questionable use of anyone’s time.

  “According to his diary he’s going to the Comic Opera on Friday night,” I said. “So if he is dead he’s still got time to get his money back.”

  “Don’t joke about such things, Herr Gunther.”

  “No. Perhaps you’re right.” I lifted the pile of typewritten paper and started to read. I must admit that I got slightly more than I had bargained for.

  In April I rejoined the First Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the Somme. We were billeted in Morlancourt, a very pretty village, and our trenches—formerly French, and hence more rat-infested than was normal—were at Fricourt, in close proximity to the Germans who were much inclined to throw all sorts of new bombs and grenades at us; the worst of these experimental weapons was one that we began to call the kitchen sink—a two-gallon drum full of explosive and every bit of scrap metal and frangible rubbish they could find to use in it as shrapnel. Once, we found an unexploded kitchen sink and discovered that as well as the usual nuts and bolts it also contained the complete skeleton of a chicken. If that sounds funny it wasn’t. Fragments of bone were every bit as dangerous as screws and rusted rifle parts, perhaps more so. I even saw a man who’d been struck in the head by a piece of his own officer’s jawbone after a mortar fell on the trench; it took him days to die of his injuries.

  A few weeks later I was posted to the Second Battalion and was discovered to be unfit for trench service by the MO; this was something of a surprise to me since, apart from a cough, which turned out to be bronchitis, I felt reasonably all right. So I went back to Frise and took command of the headquarter company, where things were much more relaxed, or so I thought. Almost immediately something happened that persuaded me I would have been better off back in the trenches with the rats, facing down the Germans. I was obliged one day to borrow a horse and ride to the nearest field hospital with a case of trench foot that was to cost me all my toenails. I was lucky; for many men the only treatment was surgical debridement, and sometimes amputation. As soon as I had been treated, Brigade told me to take command of a firing squad, following the court-martial of a Welsh corporal who was charged with cowardice.

  His case was already well known to me as it was to almost everyone in the Royal Welch; the day before throwing away his rifle in the presence of the enemy, the corporal had walked into no-man’s-land close to the German wire to retrieve his wounded sergeant, whom everyone had thought was dead but had now revived and was calling for help. In broad daylight the corporal had climbed over the parapet and, armed with only a white handkerchief that he wave
d in front of him like a flag of truce, walked slowly across no-man’s-land to where the wounded sergeant lay. At first the Germans fired shots around his feet to halt his advance, but he was not deterred and gradually their guns fell silent as they recognized the man’s enormous courage. Having reached the injured sergeant the corporal dressed the man’s wounds, gave him some rum, and then hoisted him up onto his back, carrying him all the way to his trench. Everyone who witnessed it said it was the bravest thing they’d ever seen and how it was a miracle that he hadn’t been shot for his trouble; even the Germans cheered him. The corporal might have been recommended for a medal but for the fact that there were no officers present to witness the action.

  All would probably have been well if the sergeant had survived, but the next day he died of his wounds, and someone at Brigade was stupid enough to make sure the corporal found out about it, minutes before the Germans mounted an attack, which was when the incident with the rifle occurred. Instead of helping to defend the trench, the corporal threw away his rifle in disgust and walked back toward Brigade HQ, where he was eventually arrested.

  With a better advocate he might have survived; an army order stipulated that in the case of men on trial for their life, a sentence of death might be mitigated if conduct in the field had been exemplary. By any standard the corporal’s heroic actions in saving the sergeant the previous day ought to have been more than enough to have saved his life. But asked by his court-martial exactly why he had thrown away his rifle, he had replied that if he’d held on to it any longer he might have shot the idiot of a lieutenant who was leading the company or indeed any of the general staff he might have run into. Not that there was any chance of that, he added, since in his opinion the general staff were even bigger cowards than he was. Any threat of injury to an officer was enough to have aggravated the corporal’s cowardice charge, and he was found guilty and ordered to be shot at dawn by a firing squad made up of his own company, who drew straws for the duty.

  Of course I might have refused this duty, but to do so would have resulted in my disobeying a direct order and being court-martialed myself; besides, someone else would only have taken command of the firing squad with the same inevitable outcome. As it was, and still limping, I was able to visit the corporal the night before his execution and leave him a small bottle of rum and some cigarettes. I don’t suppose he slept any more than I did.