by Philip Kerr
“Has something happened to Kurt?”
“No. Not that I know of. I was hoping to find him at home.”
“He’s not here. Wait. I’ll throw some keys down. Top floor. Number ten.”
I found the keys and let myself in the front door. I took the stairs instead of the elevator, only because it gave me time to adjust my story. If I was going to speak to his wife, then there might be a way to get some information out of her without raising the woman’s suspicions; at the same time I was thinking that if his car was there and he wasn’t at home or at the Alex, then where the hell was he?
Traudl Reichenbach opened the door to the apartment wearing a nurse’s uniform and a look of deep concern. I showed her my warrant disc just to reassure her that I was on the level.
“Are you sure there’s nothing the matter?” she asked, ushering me inside. “It’s just that Kurt still hasn’t come home from work. That’s not so very out of the ordinary, him being a detective, but he usually manages to let me know. So this is not like him. Plus his car is still where he left it yesterday.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s not like there are many other cars in the street.”
“I see. Well, I’m sorry to have missed him. I was in the area and thought I’d drop in and ask him if he wanted to come out for a drink.”
“Would you like to wait for him? Perhaps you’d like some coffee, Herr Gunther?”
She smelled, lightly, of sweat, as if she’d just come from work, but was no less attractive for that: a tall, fair-haired woman with brown eyes, wide hips, and strong, defensively folded arms.
From what I could see of it, the apartment’s interior was modern with the kind of expensive furniture you only see in magazines. We stayed in the entrance hall, which was patrolled by a black cat and smelt lightly of cinnamon, as if she’d been baking. The cat wrapped its tail around my leg, prompting her to shoo it away impatiently.
“No, thanks,” I said. A minute later I spotted a typewriter on the dining table and regretted turning down the coffee. It was an Orga Privat Bingwerke. I wondered if it was going to be possible for me to check to see if the machine displayed a horizontal alignment defect in which the capital letter G printed to the right, which would have certainly proved that it was Reichenbach who’d sent the letters to the newspapers. But it was clear that an examination of the machine would probably have to wait until later. The same way I was going to have to wait to try to match Reichenbach’s handprint to the one we’d found in the wet paint of the door to the Patent Office on Alte Jakobstrasse.
“I’m worried,” she confessed. “This isn’t like Kurt at all. He knows I worry enough about him as it is.”
“All copper’s wives worry. It’s natural.”
“Maybe. But he suffers from extreme melancholy, you see. Has done ever since the war. Sometimes he’s suicidal.”
I shrugged. “I’m that way myself sometimes, Frau Reichenbach. There’s hardly a man who came out of the trenches who isn’t scarred in some way. Often those scars aren’t obvious.”
“I suppose so.”
I glanced through another door at an impressively equipped kitchen, where a second black cat stared back at me with unblinking green eyes as if, like a cynical lawyer, it knew what I was up to.
“But look, maybe I can help. Maybe he left something in the car that will help tell us where he is. Would you like me to go and have a look, Frau Reichenbach? It’s the gray Brennabor, right?”
She fetched the key from a hook on the kitchen wall and handed it over and I told her I wouldn’t be long.
I went back downstairs and unlocked the car. There was nothing in the front or rear seat, so I went around the back and opened the enormous trunk. There was a flashlight and I picked it up, turned it on, and lifted an old army-style woolen blanket. Underneath a surprise awaited me, and not a pleasant one: There, on the floor of the trunk, I found a heavy hammer, a razor-sharp knife, and a fedora hat to which a bit of yellow wig was attached on one side; there was also a loden coat with a smudge of green paint on the sleeve. And looking at these four objects it was immediately plain that Reichenbach was Winnetou. The only thing missing was a motive explaining why he had murdered all those people. Because it made no sense to me. Frau Reichenbach seemed like a nice woman; it was hard to imagine how a man married to her could have brutally murdered three prostitutes. The anticlimax of my discovery was only exceeded by the terrible disappointment of being proved right; I thought of some of the other policemen I’d have preferred the killer to have been and realized I had little or no appetite for arresting a brother officer I liked and admired.
I covered the evidence with the blanket, closed the Brennabor’s big trunk, locked it carefully, and trudged back upstairs, wondering what to do next. I badly wanted to speak to Reichenbach himself before doing anything, but after what I’d found in the trunk, the sensible thing would have been to telephone the Alex and summon the murder wagon. I may not have had a suspect in custody but I already had more than enough evidence to justify a search of Reichenbach’s apartment and to get a warrant for his arrest.
“How long has it been since you last saw him?” I asked when I reached the top floor.
“This morning, before we both went to work. I’m a nurse at the Charité, and sometimes, because we both keep such irregular hours, we don’t see each other for days. But we managed to have breakfast together. Which hadn’t happened for a while.”
“How did he seem?”
“In good spirits. He said he was about to make an arrest. Which always put him in a good mood.”
“Did he say who?”
I thought of Hugo, the man who’d murdered Willi Beckmann in front of Aschinger, and concluded that it might have been him that Reichenbach had planned to arrest following my own tip. But it was impossible to imagine that Reichenbach would have tried to arrest a man like that by himself; he was much too experienced a policeman, especially given Hugo’s willingness to use a Bergmann machine gun. It was clear that I was going to have to speak to someone else on Reichenbach’s team back at the Alex. But I was almost hoping that something might happen to Reichenbach while I was making this arrest if only because it looked like a less ignominious end for him.
“No. He didn’t.”
“Oh well, I expect there’s a perfectly innocent explanation,” I said, trying to think of one. Perfect innocence was already something far beyond my own understanding. I was beginning to wonder if such a thing could even exist in Berlin. “There was a meeting tonight of a new police union: the Betnarek-Verband. It’s always possible he went to that. I was going to go myself and then thought better of it. Don’t worry. I expect he’ll come through the door at any moment. And when he does, tell him Bernie Gunther was here.”
“Bernie Gunther. All right. I’ll do that.”
She opened the apartment door so that I could leave.
“There is one thing,” she added. “And I don’t know if it’s worth mentioning. It’s probably nothing, but when I went to work I noticed there was a brand-new Mercedes parked near Kurt’s car. I had half an idea that the two men inside were keeping an eye on it. As if they were waiting there for Kurt.”
“Oh? Did you get a good look at them?”
“Smartly dressed. I might have thought they were policemen but for the car. I was paying more attention to it, really. An expensive item. A cream-colored roadster.”
I felt my heart miss a beat. The Mercedes roadster was not a common car. I knew of only two people who owned a cream Mercedes roadster: one was Thea von Harbou; the other was Erich Angerstein, and the thought of him knowing half of what I did about Kurt Reichenbach filled me with alarm.
“You’re sure it was a Mercedes?”
“Oh, yes. I’m sure about it because that was Kurt’s favorite type of car. They’ve got one in the Mercedes showroom on the Kurfürstendamm. We would stop and ad
mire it when we were out for a walk. I used to say that one day I was going to win the Prussian State Lottery and buy the car for him.”
“I see. Well, thanks. Like I say, I expect he’ll turn up safe and well before long.”
But hearing this latest information I had a strong sense of foreboding that this was never going to happen, that Kurt Reichenbach was probably dead, or worse.
* * *
—
I OUGHT to have despised myself. At the very least I’d been very stupid. I’d trusted Erich Angerstein to keep his word when all my better instincts had told me he wouldn’t. It was now obvious what must have happened in that awful apartment in Wedding. No wonder the bastard had asked me to leave the room before he’d started to beat the man, and like a fool I’d done it. A few minutes before Prussian Emil told me that the man he’d seen near the scene of Eva Angerstein’s murder had been an anonymous policeman from Kripo, he had informed her father that this same cop was called Kurt Reichenbach. With me sitting safely out of the way in the bedroom, all Angerstein had to do was order Emil to withhold Reichenbach’s name from me. That would give him ample time to find Reichenbach and then take him to a ring hideout to exact his own personal revenge. The earlier telephone call I’d taken at my office desk from Angerstein had doubtless been designed to help bolster some sort of deniability when, eventually, I discovered Reichenbach was missing.
I’d made it so easy for him. But all that was over now. Angerstein wasn’t the only one who could turn up armed and unannounced. I had a gun. I had the gangster’s business card. I had an address in Lichterfelde.
* * *
—
THE ANGERSTEIN HOUSE was a white stucco building near the former cadet school at the southwest end of the Teltow Canal. A three-story Wilhelmine, with a short Corinthian portico, topped with a balcony about the size of a laundry basket; it looked like the most expensive house in the road. I’d have been disappointed if Erich Angerstein had been staying anywhere else. The carriage light that hung in the portico was lit, and the cream-colored Mercedes roadster was parked out front. I laid my hand on the bonnet and felt the still-warm engine underneath. Angerstein hadn’t been home long.
There was a small garden with a cherry tree in front of the house, and a larger one at the back, which was where I began my search, having climbed over a low picket fence. The ground-floor windows were dark and fitted with louvered shutters that prevented my peering in, but all the lights were on in the upper floors and, having tried, unsuccessfully, to gain entry through a kitchen door and then a set of French windows, I returned to the front door and prepared to ring the bell, which is to say I took Mendel’s Browning out of my pocket, worked the slide, put one in the barrel, and kept it close to my armpit, ready to point at whoever answered.
I was angry enough now to go all the way. I’d been suckered by Angerstein, but that was over now. I felt sure of it. All the same, I wouldn’t have minded a drink to put a little iron in my soul. I told myself I wasn’t prepared to kill him, but I was ready to shoot him; with a little .25 there were all sorts of places I could shoot Erich Angerstein without killing him.
Behind me the Teltow district steamer let out a mocking toot as it headed down the canal to Potsdam. The purpling night was clear and warm, with just a hint of honeysuckle in the air, or perhaps it was jasmine; something sweeter than the way I was feeling, anyway. I pulled on the butcher’s-weight brass doorbell and waited while the big bell in the entrance hall did its job, sounding as if it were summoning the local people to mass. I heard a couple of bolts slide away and then the door opened to reveal Erich Angerstein.
“Where is he?”
“Who?”
I pushed him back into the double-height entrance hall and kicked the door shut behind me.
“Don’t waste my time. You know perfectly well who I’m talking about.”
In his silk dressing gown he looked as if he’d been about to go to bed, but I frisked him for a gun anyway and while I did, he smiled like a schoolteacher who has been obliged to humor an unruly pupil, which did very little for my own humor.
“I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about, Gunther. I thought you were here to tell me something interesting. In which case, come in, take a load off, sit down, and have a drink.”
“Yesterday I was an idiot, Angerstein, but not today. Today I’m smarter than the paint on a new car. Today I know you’re a lying bastard and that it was you who snatched Kurt Reichenbach from outside his apartment in Halensee.”
“Who’s he? The man who killed my daughter, I suppose. I told you on the telephone, Gunther. I’m impatient. But I’m not a mind reader. It’s me who’s following your lead, remember?”
“That’s how it was supposed to be. Only, you persuaded Prussian Emil to give the cop’s name to you but not to me. That gave you a head start—enough time to deal with him yourself.”
“That’s crap.”
“I don’t think so.”
“For Christ’s sake put the gun down and let’s have a drink.”
I shook my head. “Not tonight.”
“You don’t mind if I do? Look, whoever it is you’re searching for, he’s not here. Take a look around, if you don’t believe me. I’m quite alone. My wife’s away. And just as well for you, my friend. She wouldn’t like this at all.”
Instinctively I glanced at my surroundings. The entrance hall was largely given over to a bar under the curving staircase; on the other side of the room was a white grand piano; and on one of the taller walls was a full-length painting of an old bald man with rotten feet copulating with a generously endowed naked lady that owed more to the artist’s sense of humor than it did to accurate draughtsmanship or skill with a paintbrush. Angerstein moved slowly toward the bar, where he picked up a bottle of schnapps and filled a small schooner.
“You wouldn’t have brought him here, to your lovely home,” I said. “I expect your friends in the ring are holding him somewhere quiet where nobody will complain about his screams. And you’re going to tell me where that is. Or he’s already dead. In which case I’m going to need some evidence. Like a body.”
“Listen to me, Gunther. And listen to yourself. You’re like some crazy scientist with a dumb theory. Flat earth. Phlogiston. Or maybe the planet Vulcan. But whatever you think you know for sure, you don’t.”
“I was crazy ever to think a scumbag like you would keep his word. My own mother could have told me that.”
“Mothers can be wrong. They often are. Otherwise they wouldn’t have sons. At least that’s what mine always told me.”
“So you’re not going to tell me where he is.”
“I’ll admit, I’ve made some inquiries of my own. Asked around. Sure I did. You can’t blame me for that. I figured I could help.”
“You’re an interesting man, Herr Angerstein. I’ve learned quite a bit from my brief association with you. Not all of it good, I’m afraid. Principally, I’ve learned that I’m quite like you in a lot of ways.”
“Really? You surprise me, Herr Gunther.”
“Yes. You’re not the only person who can thrash another man until he tells you exactly what you want to know. Metaphorically speaking. Thanks to you, I’ve realized that at the right time and in the right place, I’m capable of almost anything. The same way you are.”
“Like what, for instance.”
“Like this, for instance.” I smiled thinly and then shot him in the shoulder. He dropped the schooner and suddenly the air was strong with the smell of liquor and gunpowder.
“Jesus.” Angerstein winced with pain and grabbed at his shoulder. “What the hell did you do that for?”
“I tell you what I’m going to do, Herr Angerstein. If you don’t tell me where Kurt Reichenbach is, I’m going to shoot you again. I might not kill you. But I will inflict the maximum amount of pain this little gun can provide. I haven’
t got the time or the inclination to ask you more politely.”
Angerstein sat down on the piano stool and glanced uncomfortably at his shoulder; the silk dressing-gown was now shiny with blood. He shook his head. “You’re making a big mistake.”
So I shot him again, this time in the pajama leg.
Angerstein yelled out with pain. I figured the second one hurt more than the first.
“I can’t believe you shot me.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard to believe, what with two bullets in you. And I will shoot you a third time if I have to. Just count yourself lucky it’s this little peashooter and not my usual cannon.”
“That little peashooter, as you call it, hurts like hell, damn you.”
“All the more reason for you to tell me where you’ve cached Kurt Reichenbach.” I pointed the gun at his other leg.
“All right, all right. I’ll tell you. Reichenbach is dead.”
“How do I know you’re telling the truth? How do I know he’s not being tortured somewhere even as we speak?”
“He’s dead, I tell you.”
“Tell me exactly what happened. Convince me he’s dead and maybe I won’t shoot you again.”
“What do you care, anyway? He was a multiple murderer. The city’s well rid of a man like that. But I’d like to know how a public trial would have helped anyone. Least of all this city’s cops.”
“That’s not for you to say.”
“Why not? He killed my daughter.”
“I’m asking the questions, remember?”
I pulled the trigger on the Browning a third time, only this time I let the bullet graze his earlobe.
“Isn’t that what you said to Prussian Emil?”
“What do you want? A confession? You might think you’ve got my neck under the blade, but I certainly didn’t kill him. And I didn’t order him to be killed. Not that it matters. None of this will stand up in court.”
“Eva was your daughter. Fine. I get that. And you have my sympathy. But she was my case. The law’s still a set menu in this city, Angerstein. You don’t get to pick and choose what you’ll have and what you won’t.” I lit a cigarette. “So what’s it to be? An explanation of what exactly happened, or another bullet in the leg?”
