by Philip Kerr
“Sure. I played Hamlet, too, but it certainly won’t bother my conscience if I don’t win or lose with you, Herr Angerstein. You’re not the only informant in this town. There never was a detective who couldn’t find himself another informer.”
“No, but trust me, I am the best-informed informer you’re likely to find. There’s not much crime that happens in Berlin that I don’t know about. The fact is, it’s not just me who wants this bastard caught; it’s all the bosses I represent in the syndicate. A killer like this is bad for business. There are too many cops out looking for him. With the result that they see more than they should.”
“Now, that I can believe. But I already told you, I’m not the trusting kind, Herr Angerstein. They don’t pay me enough to think too much. When it snows I know to stay indoors. These days that’s considered enough to make detective.”
“I think you’re a lot smarter than you say you are. And you’d have to be smarter than that suit says you are. Look, Gunther, by the oath I took to the ring to which I belong, I’m supposed to finger cops for the benefit of our fellow members. But I didn’t give you away back there. That has to be worth something.”
“They have a name for that, too?”
“You could call it a sign of good faith. I see your dilemma. But I really do want you to get this bastard. Not just for me and Eva, but for all the others he’s killed as well. And all the others he might yet kill. So please give me a chance. Let me help. The Berlin underworld is a sardine can without a key for a cop like you. But with my contacts I can probably find this fish in no time.”
“That’s the first reasonable thing you’ve said since you offered to drive us home.”
“So you’ll give me a name to work on?”
“I’m still thinking about it.”
“Well, think up, copper, we’re here.”
“Don’t rush me. My head still feels like a Chinese switchboard.”
Nollendorfplatz looked a lot better from the inside of an expensive car; most things probably did. A new Mercedes roadster was like rose-tinted spectacles with wire wheels and hand-stitched leather upholstery. Even the exhaust fumes smelled good. Angerstein peeled off a glove, reached into the pocket of his silk suit, and took out a stiff little business card that he handed to me with nicely manicured fingers. On it was embossed a smart address in Lichterfelde on the Teltow Canal, a telephone number, and his name. They say crime doesn’t pay, but the benefits looked just fine to me.
Rosa and I got out of the car. Then I leaned in the driver’s window of the Mercedes and said, “Prussian Emil.”
“That’s it?”
“He’s a yokel catcher and snow shoveler. Pretends to be a disabled veteran. But mostly he’s a lookout for some of the city’s burglars. Positions his klutz wagon outside a house and blows a bugle if any law turns up. On the night your daughter was murdered, one of the apartments in the vicinity got turned over.”
“And you went to Sing Sing to do what? Ask the locals if anyone had done a job with him? It’s amazing you’ve stayed alive this long, Gunther.”
“I’ve got eyes as well as ears. As it happens, the man I went looking for is tall, cadaverous, vaguely military, with a port-wine stain on his neck like a careless waiter spilled something down his shirt collar. We detectives call that a description. You might have heard of it somewhere.”
“It’s not much, is it?”
“When you’re a cop, sometimes not much is all there is to go on, Herr Angerstein. You should try it sometime.”
* * *
—
MY HANDS WERE still shaking as I tried to undo my collar stud, prompting Rosa to come to my aid.
“Here, let me do that.”
It felt strange allowing someone wearing men’s clothes to help me undress but that problem soon disappeared when she herself was naked and lying beside me in my bed and looking more like a woman than I remembered—slender, her beautiful long hair, liberated from its tight bun, tumbling down her elegant back like a silk waterfall. There was a tenderness in her eyes. I’d had a severe shock, but not as severe as the one endured by poor Mrs. Snyder in the real Sing Sing, which made me feel a bit of a fraud and I almost apologized for the way my body was behaving. Still, I could hardly ignore the twitching of my own muscles, like a frog whose legs had been touched by Galvani’s electrodes. But for her being with me, I’d probably have emptied the rum bottle that was in my desk drawer.
“It’s all right,” she said gently. “It’s all over now. You’re safe with me. Just lie still and close your eyes.”
It had gone four a.m. but even though the window was wide open the room was stifling; we lay on top of the covers for a while, exhausted and sheened with sweat, listening to the symphonic adagio that was the city’s smallest hours, too tired to smoke or to touch each other but knowing without having to say anything that there would be another time for all those mysteries. Somewhere a horse and cart were going about their early-morning deliveries; two cats had reached a stalemate in a game of feline chess; and, in the far distance, a barge was announcing its presence like a lost dinosaur as it made its lumbering way down the Spree.
Neither of us said anything and it seemed to me that for a fleeting instant we reached out into the void and touched a perfect innocence. After a while I stepped out of my body and stared down at these two intertwined lovers and marveled at the small differences between us that made Rosa so much more beautiful and desirable than me. I watched my lips move as if to form an elusive, loving phrase but since nothing really needed to be said in that department it stayed unspoken. Eventually Rosa yawned and then whispered something that sounded like, “What very peculiar lives we both lead, don’t you think, Bernie?” and laid her head on my chest and went to sleep.
This seemed incontrovertible and not just because of what had happened that evening. Life itself was so fast-moving it was impossible not to feel that sometimes things were completely out of control, like being alone in one of Berlin’s elongated open-topped tourist charabancs as it careered frantically around the metropolis, driverless, taking in the sights, heading toward some unknown peculiar disaster of our own making.
* * *
—
BERNHARD WEISS LISTENED to the tale of my night at Sing Sing and shook his head.
“It was a brave effort,” he said. “And I commend you for trying. But you mustn’t reproach yourself for having failed. The point is that the thinking behind what you were doing was sound. You couldn’t possibly have anticipated what happened when you got to the club. That was just bad luck, coming up against the German sense of humor. I don’t really understand it, myself. I suspect it is the kind of laughter that conceals a scream against modern life, man cut loose from all the certainties that once comforted him—God, tradition, love of country. Laughter that hides an existential crisis.”
I tried to control my expression; I’d heard the man talking out of his arse before, but this was something new. I wanted to tell him that a lot of people were just cunts and that was all there was to it, but with a breakfast drink or two already inside me I thought it best to keep my face shut; the last thing I wanted was an argument with the boss about the true moral caliber of our fellow citizens.
“But you must be tired if you were out so late. Would you like some coffee, Bernie?”
“No, thanks, sir.”
“I know. It’s hardly the sort of weather for coffee. There is water if you’d prefer.”
“I’m fine, thank you, sir.”
He got up and crossed the floor to open a window. “You would think they could supply an electric fan that worked properly. But that one on my desk is more or less useless. Really, it’s quite unforgivable when the temperature is as hot as this.”
Weiss was slow coming to the point, which made me nervous. I half suspected he was going to deliver a dry-as-mummy-dust lecture about police discipline
and then fire me from the Murder Commission before sending me back to the ranks of Vice, realizing that he’d made a mistake in giving me Lindner’s seat and that Kurt Reichenbach should have had it after all.
Back at the desk he retrieved his cigar from the ashtray and relit it before sitting down. “Tell me, Bernie, do you remember the Klein and Nebbe case?”
“Everyone in Berlin remembers the Klein and Nebbe case.”
“Well, I’ve been reading this essay about the case by a writer called Alfred Döblin. From Stettin. I recommend you read it. Anyone who’s interested in criminalistics should read his essay. It contains newspaper reports, trial records, medical testimony, everything. Only, it’s not an attempt to sensationalize what happened but to understand it. To explain it.”
“Two women poisoned one husband and attempted to poison the second,” I said helplessly. “What’s to understand or explain? That’s a crime in any language.”
Weiss took out a small notebook, opened it, and ignoring my objections, prepared to read aloud.
“One phrase that the writer uses in the essay struck me as particularly interesting. He says, I had the impulse to travel the streets that they—the murderers—routinely traveled. So I also sat in the pubs in which the two women got to know each other. I visited the apartment of one of them, spoke with her personally, spoke with others involved, and observed them.”
“There doesn’t seem much point in going into it now,” I said. “It was six years ago.”
“Döblin wrote his essay in 1924. And I disagree with you. His is a brave attempt to examine where in society the noncriminal ends and the criminal begins. But it’s not so much his conclusions that interested me as his whole investigative method.”
I nodded. Anything to avoid giving my opinion of the case, which was that Ella Klein and Margarete Nebbe were a lesbian couple who’d richly deserved much harsher sentences than those handed down by the court; there wasn’t one cop in the Alex who didn’t think they should both have faced the falling ax. Arsenic was every happily married man’s abiding fear.
“You see, Bernie, I was thinking that this essay might provide the inspiration for a new kind of detective work. Something much more immersive than merely searching a crime scene for clues and collecting witness statements.”
“Like what?”
“Like the same sort of thing you were doing last night, Bernie. You, investigating a crime undercover. At street level. No, really. This is the kind of detective work I’m talking about. No one is doing this at present. Not even Scotland Yard.”
“I’m still not sure I understand, sir.”
“It’s just this. Detective work is based on the assumption that we are better than the criminals we investigate. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Of course.”
“That we do not descend to the level of criminals ourselves. However, it occurs to me that in this respect we are missing an important trick. That there may be occasions when this is exactly what’s required. That to solve the crime we need to be proactive rather than reactive. That we need to inhabit the very milieu of the crime that has been committed. Do you see? We need to be in that world but not part of it.”
I bit my lip and looked at my fingernails. It was like working for a school headmaster and I was the slow-witted pupil who wasn’t quite following the line of his high-minded reasoning. I lit a cigarette and puffed it into life; if only Weiss’s conversation could have combusted as easily; as it was, his words had yet to catch fire in my mind. By now I was more or less certain I wasn’t being sacked. But was I listening to a lecture or merely a series of rhetorical questions?
“Are you still drinking, Bernie? Well, of course you are. I can smell it on your breath. I know, this isn’t the Lutheran church. Men come off duty and they need a drink. But can you control it?”
“I am controlling it.”
Weiss nodded sympathetically. “Because I think you’ll need your wits about you for what I have in mind.”
“I saved your life, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did. Which is why I think you’re probably just the man for this. We have to do something. I’m under a lot of pressure from the minister to catch this Dr. Gnadenschuss. And what we’re doing right now, well, it just doesn’t seem to be enough.” He paused for a moment and regarded me through a haze of cigar smoke. “What do you think?”
“Honestly? Until he kills again, I don’t think we’ve a chance of catching him, no. The thumbprint on the letter they received at the Berliner Tageblatt didn’t find a match with records, as you know. Right now we’re just whistling while we wait for another corpse to turn up.”
“And yet I think we have to do something more. In fact, I don’t think we have any choice but to do something.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Before I tell you, I want you to feel free to turn me down. It won’t in the least reflect badly on you, Bernie. You’re young and I think you’re still keen and you’ll probably say yes without thinking. But you need to think about this carefully. Because what I’m proposing is a little out of the ordinary. What I’m proposing is to make you a kind of hunting decoy. In short, that you use the klutz wagon you recovered from Eva Angerstein’s murder scene and pose as one of these unfortunate disabled war veterans yourself. Just as your friend Prussian Emil was doing. That’s right. I want you to pose as a klutz in the hope that Dr. Gnadenschuss might try and kill you. And if he does try to kill you, then of course you would be perfectly placed to apprehend him. In flagrante delicto. But only if you’re agreeable to the idea.”
Weiss wasn’t smiling. So I knew it wasn’t a joke. But it certainly sounded like one.
“It will mean living on the street for a while, begging outside railway stations for pennies, maybe even sleeping in a hostel for the homeless, going without the odd meal, not washing regularly, accepting some abuse. And all the time keeping your eyes peeled for someone trying to kill you.”
“If it’s a question of catching Dr. Gnadenschuss, then I’m game.”
“Are you sure?” He looked at me thoughtfully. “Yes, I think you are. Of course you’ll have a bit of help in looking like a real klutz. With the army uniform and disability. As if you were an actor in a play. The klutz wagon you found helps because it was made for a man who isn’t really disabled. For the rest of it, I was thinking of sending you to see a friend of mine at the Neues Theater on Schiffbauerdamm. A makeup artist and costumier called Brigitte Mölbling. She worked on that movie Metropolis. That is, if you’re sure you actually want to do this, Bernie.”
“I’d like to try. As you say, sir, we have to do something.”
“Good, good.”
“What does Ernst think about your plan, sir?”
“I haven’t told him. In fact, I don’t propose to tell anyone, and nor should you. The fewer people who know about this the better. What we certainly want to avoid is any other police officers coming to look at you, as if you were an exhibit in the zoo. Or tipping off the newspapers that one of our detectives is working in disguise. What I will tell Ernst is that I’ve given you some compassionate leave to get your drinking sorted out. Which, I might add, wouldn’t be a bad idea anyway. And when you’ve decided where you’re going to make your pitch, from time to time, I may come and check on you myself, if only to put a few coins in your hat.”
* * *
—
BEFORE I LEFT to begin my mission I looked in on the new department at the Alex, the one handling commercial fraud. Created by Weiss, it was headed by Ulrich Possehl. He was a good officer, well respected, with an outstanding war record. But he was away on vacation and his deputy, Dr. Alfred Jachode, was an altogether different animal. By training he was a lawyer and an accountant and his office was lined with some very dry books. He was also an adherent of the Steel Helmet, and although this was supposed to be an organization above party pol
itics, many of its members were quite open about their allegiance—in fact, many wore a miniature helmet on a stickpin in their lapels. In practice they were so radically anti-democratic and anti-republican they made the Nazis look reasonable. The minute I walked into his office, I knew I was probably wasting my time asking if he had any reason to suspect the owners of the Wolfmium factory of commercial fraud.
“You’ve got a nerve, do you know that? You’re wasting your time if you think I would do anything to help a Jew’s poodle like you, Gunther.”
“If you’re suggesting that my position in the Murder Commission owes anything to Bernhard Weiss, then you’re wrong. It owes everything to him.”
“What do you want?”
“I was hoping to waste your time, which looks like a better outcome. Besides, I wasn’t thinking of you helping me so much as you helping the workers who were killed in the factory fire.”
“Most of them were Russians, probably here illegally, so who gives a damn? I know I don’t. They got what they deserved.”
“You make me think that if Germany ever gets what it deserves, we’ll have a very bad time of it.”
“Communists.”
“Actually, a lot of those workers were Germans.”
“Volga Germans,” he said. “There’s a big difference.”
“Is there?”
“I assume one or two of them are decent people. But most are probably thieves and rapists and murderers and therefore Russians in all but name. And every bit as illegal. It’s only Jews and Jews’ poodles who care about these people.”
The Volga Germans were ethnic Germans, largely descended from Bavarians and Rhinelanders and Hessians who were invited in 1762 by the Empress Catherine the Great—herself a Pomeranian native of Stettin—to come and farm Russian land. They’d helped to modernize backward Russian farming and, being German, had thrived, at least until the Bolshevik revolution, when their lands had been confiscated by the communists and they’d been forced to return to the Fatherland. It goes without saying that they were not welcomed back with joy.
