by Philip Kerr
“Well, that’s a bit of a turnup, eh?” he said. “A copper from the Alex. Narrows it down a bit, I suppose. Who was that other copper who was fond of murdering whores? The fellow who thought he was doing God’s work cleaning up the city.”
“Bruno Gerth.”
“And where is he now, exactly?”
“Still in the asylum at Wuhlgarten. Last I heard.”
“I don’t suppose a kind judge could have been persuaded to let him out?”
“No. As a matter of fact I went to see him just a couple of months ago.”
“Might I ask why?”
“I was seeking some information on another case.” This hardly stated it. I’d gone there specifically at the behest of Ernst Gennat, who knew I was well acquainted with Gerth, to see if he couldn’t help us with a few unsolved murders. More important, however, I’d been asked to check on a story circulating about Bruno Gerth at the time of his conviction; it was never confirmed but it was widely rumored that he’d had a partner. He’d denied everything, of course. It was obvious to me that he hoped at some stage to “prove” that he was sane again and effect his own early release: A late confession would have spoiled that.
“So he’s quite sane then. In spite of the fact he’s in Wuhlgarten. Otherwise you’d hardly have gone there asking for his help.”
“In my opinion, quite sane. He knew how to work the legal system, that’s all. To avoid a death sentence.”
“Any other homicidal cops you know that spring to mind?”
“Plenty,” I said. “But not like this. On the other hand.”
“Yes?”
“If he really is a cop, then it might explain the way he salted those crime scenes with clues. Like he knew the best way of making us waste our time. And maybe some other things, too. The way he taunted the police in the newspapers. As if he wanted to get back at Kripo—to show all of us up as incompetent.”
“It’s a pity Emil didn’t give us a name.”
“That’s the only reason I get paid to be a detective. To try and work it out for myself.”
Angerstein tapped Emil on the head with his knuckle. “We know where you live. And you know who I am. You know that I can find people and hurt them very badly. You think of anything else to do with this copper you saw, then you get in touch, Emil.”
“Yes, sir.”
Angerstein took out his wallet and laid some cash on the kitchen table. “Here. Go and see a doctor and get your stripes attended to.”
“Thanks.”
“We need to leave. Now.” Angerstein took my arm and moved me toward the door. “In case anyone heard something and decided to report it. Even in Berlin that’s just about possible.”
* * *
—
ANGERSTEIN DROVE ME back to Nollendorfplatz.
“You’re very quiet,” he said.
“I’m thinking.”
“Would you care to share some of that thinking with me, Gunther?”
“I’d be wasting your time. I’m still drilling for oil here. But I’ll let you know if I hit a gusher. Until then I’m just going to whistle a tune and keep my hands in my pockets.”
“If there’s one thing more ridiculous than the idea of a policeman who’s thinking, it’s a policeman saying he expects something important to come of it.”
“I’m glad we fill you with such confidence.”
“The police?” Angerstein laughed. “Maybe you weren’t there when I was beating that carpet. I just learned it was a cop who murdered my daughter. I’m doing my best not to blame you for that. You being a cop yourself and part of the general conspiracy of silence that afflicts this town.”
“It’s the part of me that’s a cop that’s doing the thinking.”
“Don’t take too long. The sooner you arrest someone, the sooner I can stop pecking your head.”
“Sorry, but a man has to do his thinking in private.”
“Maybe back in the day when you were a theology student in Heidelberg. But these days you’ve got to write reports so your superiors can help guide your thoughts with wisdom. If they can. That’s why they put cops in teams, isn’t it? It’s not the bar bills they expect you to share, it’s the brain work.” He lit a cigarette. “All I’m saying is that maybe I can help.”
“And all I’m saying is that if you’re expecting ninety-five theses nailed to your front door tomorrow morning, you’re going to be disappointed. Look, Herr Angerstein, I’ll tell you something just as soon as I have it. Until then, have a good night.”
I went inside the house and crept upstairs. There was a light under Rankin’s door, but I didn’t knock. And I didn’t go to bed; my mind was too active for sleep. Instead I went to my desk and drew a paper pad toward me and sat thinking and making idle marks with my pen, hoping that the business of writing and reconsideration might fix a number of things that remained jumbled in my thoughts. I was trying to remember a few forgotten facts, some blurred details, and any lurking inconsistencies. In short, I hoped to set something down on paper that had appeared altogether trivial but now nagged at me as being piercingly significant. I looked at the bottle of rum in my drawer and turned it down, like a man of real character, and kept on scribbling things on the pad as they occurred to me, in no particular order. And after a while I found myself yawning and thought it best to leave such compelling considerations to the subterranean part of my mind, about which nothing seemed clear except perhaps the antithesis between sleep and wakefulness, and a good policeman and a bad one. But was there ever any such antithesis in fact? A lot of good cops were capable of some very bad behavior, myself included. Some more than others. Which was why my thoughts returned to the meeting of the Schrader-Verband at the Schlossbrauerei in Schöneberg, and the anti-republican cops I’d seen there. Many held opinions that I found objectionable—and one, Gottfried Nass, had even attempted to kill me—but were any of them capable of psychopathic murder? The only truly psychopathic cop I’d ever met had been someone I actually liked: Bruno Gerth. At the time I visited him, I’d thought bad policemen didn’t come much worse than Bruno Gerth, and yet he’d been warm and courteous and, to my layman’s eyes, more or less sane. We’d known each other since before the time I’d joined Kripo, when I was still in uniform like him; and he’d greeted me in his room at the asylum in Wuhlgarten like a long-lost friend.
* * *
—
“BERNIE GUNTHER,” said Gerth, shaking my hand. “How long has it been?”
“Four years.” I lit us each a cigarette and transferred one to him.
“Four years. Incredible, isn’t it? I heard you were out of uniform. In plainclothes.”
“Who told you that?”
“Oh, I couldn’t say. But I get visitors. Tell me, are you enjoying being a detective? You’re in Vice now, aren’t you?”
“Vice. That’s correct. It’s all right, I guess. But I’m never off duty. That’s the thing about wearing a uniform. Once you hang it in your locker, you’re finished for the day.”
“So what brings you to east Berlin? I take it this isn’t a social call.”
Bruno wasn’t much older than me. With his blue eyes, blond hair, and regular features, he was also a war hero and a policeman with a commendation for bravery. He fit no one’s profile of a violent murderer; certainly not that of the judge of the court that had tried him. His lawyers had argued that he would never have killed anyone if he hadn’t also been an epileptic. I wasn’t so sure about that. Not only had the detectives investigating Elsie Hoffmann’s and Emma Trautmann’s murders described a scene of horrifying brutality, they’d also revealed Gerth’s obsession with a book by a popular criminologist by the name of Erich Wulffen. Gerth’s copy of The Sexual Criminal was heavily underlined and annotated, and both his victims were eviscerated in a way that seemed to be a copycat version of what was in Wulffen’s near-pornographic book.
“I could tell you I’m here because I wanted to see how you are, Bruno. Because we’re Bolle boys. To see if there was anything I could do for you. But that would be a lie. The truth is, Ernst Gennat found out we’d been colleagues and prevailed upon me to come and talk to you. Not as a friend but as a cop.”
“Hoping I might help with his clear-up rate, I suppose.”
“Something like that.”
“I already put out my wrists for those two whores, Elsie Hoffmann and Emma Trautmann. I don’t see how I can help any more than I have already.”
“That would be true if they were your only victims.”
“What makes you think they weren’t?”
“Not me. Gennat. He likes you for another girl called Frieda Ahrendt.”
“Never heard of her.”
“As well as some others we don’t even know about.”
“He’s fishing in a cold spot, Bernie. Let me tell you as an old friend. Those two women were the only ones I killed. But I suppose if I hadn’t been caught I would have killed again. Depending on my physiological state at the time.”
“Then as a friend, let me ask you this: Why the hell did you do it? And don’t say it was because of a preexisting medical condition. I’m not buying it. That book they found in your apartment was also covered in your own handwriting; lurid accounts of fantasy sexual murders.”
“Which were themselves the result of my condition. But I will say this, Bernie. And you being a detective in Vice will appreciate it. At the time I killed those women, the absolute logic of what I did seemed unassailable. You can hardly deny that Berlin has been suffering from an almost biblical plague of prostitutes. Killing one or two to put the fear of God in the majority and perhaps deter them from their profession seems an effective means of control. Much better than registration and medical examinations.”
“So it wasn’t that you just wanted to kill them for the pleasure of it, like the prosecutor said?”
“Really, what kind of man do you take me for?”
“It’s also been suggested by some that you may have had a partner. Another copper who agreed with what you were doing and who looked the other way. Who shielded you from arrest. At least for a while.”
“Lots of police agreed with what I did. Surely you must know that by now. Following my arrest, no less a figure than the chairman of the Schrader-Verband, Police Colonel Otto Dillenburger, told me he fully supported my actions. Now, that’s what I call a union.”
“I’m more interested in what police support you might have received before you were arrested, Bruno.”
“Now, that would be telling. Let’s just say that I had my fans. I get lots of letters in here, you know. From people who applaud what I did. Those who think that something has to be done to help turn the tide of filth and immorality that threatens to engulf this town. From morally minded women, too, who strongly disapprove of prostitution. I’ve even had offers of marriage.”
“After the war there’s a severe shortage of single men, right enough. I guess you just about pass in that respect.”
“Don’t knock it. Some of them have money. I could marry well if I play my cards right.”
“Is that how you were able to afford to retain Erich Frey to defend you? Because someone else paid for it?”
Gerth didn’t answer.
“And not just him. No less a figure than Magnus Hirschfeld was the physician for the defense.”
Again Gerth didn’t answer.
“But for those two, your head would be leaking in a cold bucket.”
“Yes. That’s true. Isn’t liberal German justice wonderful?”
* * *
—
AFTER MY VISIT I had gone to see the director of the asylum, a doctor by the name of Karl-Theodor Wagenknecht, who had the most unruly joined-up eyebrows I’d ever seen; they looked like the nest of a very large and untidy species of eagle.
“Do you keep a record of a patient’s visitors? I’m particularly interested in those people who’ve visited Bruno Gerth.”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to see it if I may.”
He disappeared for several minutes, leaving me in his curious office, half of which was given over to what looked like a sort of electric chair; I decided not to inquire about it in case the doctor offered me a free demonstration. When he returned, he handed me a sheet of paper.
“You can keep that,” he said.
I glanced down the list. One name drew my attention immediately. It was the name of Police Commissioner Arthur Nebe.
Ever since that visit to Wuhlgarten Asylum, I’d been possessed of the idea that there was a lot more to Nebe than met the eye, and his speech to the Schrader-Verband at the Schlossbrauerei in Schöneberg had left me convinced that if there was anyone in the Berlin police who approved of ending useless or criminal lives it was Commissioner Nebe.
* * *
—
I CLOSED MY EYES and laid my head on my forearm, drifting somewhere in the middle of nowhere near a tall house on Nollendorfplatz. For a moment I thought I was back at the Palme, in Dr. Manfred Ostwald’s office, with Stefan Rühle and Lotte Lenya and Arthur Nebe and Frizt Pabst, among several others. There were solid clues all over the place but I didn’t pick them up because I didn’t trust them. If only Ernst Gennat could learn to take his own advice. Lotte was whistling a snatch of a tune from The Threepenny Opera only it wasn’t, it was from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, by the French composer Paul Dukas—the very tune Fritz Pabst remembered his or her attacker whistling when she was being Louise Pabst. Meanwhile, Rühle was babbling at her about a devil in white shoes whose face was covered in hair and whose eyes were red; and Nebe was making a tidy speech about cleaning up Berlin’s streets and how the Nazis were going to fix everything because nobody else could, especially not Bernhard Weiss. After a while Gottfried Nass came into the office and succeeded in throwing Weiss out the window. Then it was my turn. Two other officers arrived to help him: Albert Becker, who’d assaulted a senior officer because he was a communist; and Kurt Gildisch, who was a violent drunk given to singing Nazi party songs when he’d had a few. But Nass was the most determined of the three; like Bruno Gerth, he’d also been tried for the murder of a prostitute, albeit acquitted. None of them succeeded in my defenestration because I had the door with the wet green paint and the handprint from the Patent Office on Alte Jakobstrasse and I was able to keep it pressed shut against all three until Kurt Reichenbach came to my aid in his usual timely fashion and hit them on the head with his stick and then walked away whistling and dancing. Which pleased Brigitte Mölbling enough for her to shed some clothes and try to sit on my lap while I was still standing up, much to the amusement of Robert Rankin, who was pointing a small gun at the center of my forehead. Meanwhile, someone was screaming in pain, and Prussian Emil was being beaten with a cane for the pleasure of the crowd from the Cabaret of the Nameless, a prospect that I, too, enjoyed, albeit from the comfort of an electric chair. Then I was briefly out of the chair and flat on the bed in Nollendorfplatz with my clothes on.
That was the last thing of which I took any notice. After this there was just the dark and silence and a general sense of impending doom.
* * *
—
ON AWAKENING, I felt strongly that much of this nagging vivid dream made sense. Scowling at the clock, which told me I was late, I found pen and paper and, even before I could shave and throw some cold water in my face, I hurriedly began to write, intent on preserving some memory of the dream.
I had the strong sense I was on the edge of understanding everything about the case, as if, like van Leeuwenhoek with his primitive compound microscope, I was about to see the great significance in all that was small, but at this moment I was summoned to the window by a loud commotion in the street below: a running battle between Nazis and communists that detained me
for almost ten minutes. On returning to my desk, I found, to no small surprise, that though I still retained a dim recollection of what I had so clearly understood in my dream, with the exception of a few scattered words and phrases, all the rest lay hidden away in the clouds, and no amount of staring at the sky could restore it.
Cursing, I shaved and washed, put on a clean shirt, and went to the Alex—my first day back in the Praesidium since my adventures with the klutz wagon—and immediately joined a meeting that had just begun in Weiss’s office, where Ernst Gennat was explaining his latest theory: that Dr. Gnadenschuss was a member of the Stahlhelm because a Steel Helmet stickpin had been found in the latest victim’s hand.
I listened patiently until Gennat finished and then made my objections.
“I’m afraid that Tetzel’s stickpin sounds suspiciously like a soft clue to me.”
“A soft clue?” said Weiss. “What the hell’s that?”
“It was Ernst himself who thought Winnetou was deliberately planting soft clues like that to put us off the scent. Or onto the wrong one. Don’t you remember the Freemason cuff link that was found at the scene of Helen Strauch’s murder? And the British pound note we found next to Louise/Fritz Pabst? And the cigar holder next to Eva Angerstein’s corpse?”
“Yes.”
“A Steel Helmet stickpin fits the same pattern. An object for us to waste time on.”
“Yes, but the stickpin would fit in with the Nazi profile of the killer that we’ve seen in his letters to the newspapers.”
“Would it? I’m not so sure. Members of the Stahlhelm regard themselves as conservative nationalists, yes, but above politics and very separate from the Nazis. At least that’s my understanding.”
Gennat wasn’t about to give up on his theory without a struggle.
“There must be plenty of those bastards who admire Adolf Hitler as much as they hate the Jews,” he said. “Wouldn’t you agree? And unless you’ve had some luck finding Prussian Emil, it’s about all we’ve got to go on right now.” He paused and lit a cigar. “Well, have you?”
