by Philip Kerr
Kluckholn spoke as if his voice was being recorded on a gramophone disc.
I looked at Kahlo. ‘Kurt. Would you please close that door?’
Kahlo moved away from the piano and closed the door behind him quietly.
‘What are you hiding, Hermann?’
Kluckholn shook his head. ‘I can assure you, I’m not hiding anything.’
‘Sure you are, Hermann.’ I shrugged. ‘Everyone in this damned house is hiding something or other. Small secrets. Big secrets. Dirty secrets. And you’re no exception, Hermann.’
‘I would rather you did not call me Hermann in that familiar way. I prefer Kluckholn, or Captain Kluckholn. And your suggestion that I’m hiding something is not only nonsensical it is also insulting.’ Colouring with irritation and injured pride, Kluckholn moved toward the closed door. ‘And I am not going to remain here to endure your insinuations.’
‘Yes, you are, Hermann.’
I nodded at Kahlo, who quickly turned the key in the lock and then pocketed it.
Meanwhile Kluckholn looked as if I had just stood on his corn.
‘You really are a most vulgar, tiresome fellow, Gunther. Has anyone told you that?’
‘Many times. It must have something to do with all the vulgar murders I’ve investigated. Not to mention all the murders that I myself have been obliged to commit. Of course that hardly makes me unusual in this house. But like Captain Kuttner I found there was something about it I didn’t like. Which is the reason I’m here now, speaking to you instead of carrying on the good work out east with all the special action boys. By the way, how was it that you escaped that particular tour of duty, Hermann?’
‘I’m ordering you to unlock that door,’ Kluckholn told Kahlo.
Kahlo folded his arms and looked sad, as if disappointed that he couldn’t obey the order. I didn’t doubt that he was more than equal to the task of dealing with Kluckholn if the third adjutant decided to try and get tough with him. Kahlo looked tougher. Kahlo would have looked tough in a bath full of Turkish wrestlers.
‘Maybe you had vitamin B, too,’ I said. ‘Better still perhaps you had vitamin A. What’s the big name in Berlin that’s been helping you to keep your nice polished boots out of the murder pits of Minsk and Riga, Hermann?’
Kluckholn stood immediately in front of Kahlo and held out his hand. ‘As your superior officer I am ordering you to hand over that key.’
‘Why don’t you sit down and tell us what you’re hiding, Hermann? For example, why don’t we talk about this list of Captain Kuttner’s personal effects? It was you who compiled that, wasn’t it?’
‘Open that damn door, or you’ll regret it.’
‘The trouble is, I’m afraid, that you left some items off the list. And I don’t like it when people try to deceive me. You see I conducted a very swift search of the room before you tidied up. Which is how I know that this list doesn’t include those copies of Der Führer magazine that were in Kuttner’s drawer.’
I felt Kahlo frown at me.
‘They’re not quite what you think,’ I told Kahlo. ‘Der Führer is or rather was a homosexual magazine. Used to be quite popular with some of Berlin’s warmer boys. So were the others in that drawer. Der Kreise and Der Insel. Lots of naked men playing with medicine balls or doing press-ups on top of each other.’ I shook my head. ‘You see the corrupting things I’ve had to deal with in my career as a police officer, Kurt? It’s a wonder I’m not in the cement myself, some of the filth I’ve seen.’
‘Lots of bums, was it, sir?’
‘Lots. Collector’s items now, on the Berlin black market, pornography being so hard to obtain these days. Expensive stuff. For connoisseurs of that kind of thing, you might say.’
Kahlo pulled a face that was a pantomime of disgust.
‘It’s a dirty job, sir. Being a detective.’
‘Don’t tell anyone, Kurt. Not in this house. They’ll all want to do it.’
Kluckholn had calmed down a bit and was looking a little less inclined to fight Kahlo for the key to the Morning Room door.
But another minute passed before he turned away and sat down on the sofa.
‘Of course,’ said Kahlo, ‘it’s possible the Captain here took those dirty magazines off the list not because he wanted to deceive you, sir, but because he wanted to keep them for himself.’
‘No,’ said Kluckholn, loudly.
‘I never thought of that, Kurt. Good thinking.’
Kahlo grinned, enjoying himself. There wasn’t much licence to insult senior officers in the Gestapo and SS, and he was going to take full advantage of it now.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘He took them to use while he was rubbing his own pipe.’
‘No,’ insisted Kluckholn. ‘No. I was merely trying to safeguard Kuttner’s reputation. Not to mention the reputation of the squadron.’
The squadron was what nice well-bred people like Kluckholn called the SS.
‘Kuttner wasn’t like that, I’m sure of it. He liked women. Those filthy magazines must have belonged to someone else. Perhaps they were already here when the house was taken over. Perhaps they belonged to the Jews who owned the place before von Neurath. After all, as far as I could tell, they were hardly recent copies.’ He shook his head. ‘Anyway, I talked it over with my own conscience and I decided that it was best to burn them. It was obvious they had no bearing on the case.’
‘You burned them?’
‘Yes, I burned them all. It was quite bad enough that Kuttner should be murdered, but we hardly wanted you questioning his reputation as an officer and a gentleman.’
‘We? You mean you and Ploetz burned them?’
‘Yes. And we certainly didn’t want those filthy magazines being sent to his parents in Halle, along with all his other personal effects.’
‘That much I can understand.’
‘I doubt that, Gunther. I really do.’
‘What makes you think he liked women, Hermann?’
‘Because he talked about a girl he’d met. A girl here in Prague. That’s why.’
‘This girl have a name?’
‘Grete. I don’t know her surname.’
‘She wouldn’t be the woman in the framed photograph that’s still listed among his possessions?’
‘No, that’s his mother.’
‘Maybe this Grete was just his black face,’ I said. ‘To help persuade you that he was as normal as the rest of you.’
‘Or maybe,’ offered Kahlo, ‘he was just dipping his toe into the water, to see if he liked it.’
‘Or maybe Hermann here is just making it up,’ I said. ‘To make his fellow adjutant seem like less of a queer in our eyes than he really was.’
‘Perhaps he’s a bit warm himself, sir. Perhaps he has to give Kuttner an alibi so he can have one, too. Could be that’s what they were arguing about. A lover’s tiff.’
Kluckholn stood up and stared angrily at Kahlo. ‘I don’t have to take that from you.’ He turned to glare at me. ‘I don’t have to take it from either of you.’
‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘Before I make you sit down.’
Kluckholn remained standing.
‘By the way,’ I said. ‘What other evidence did you destroy when you were burning Kuttner’s puppy mags?’
Kluckholn shook his head and sat down. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘A diary, perhaps, Some love letters? Photographs of the two of you on a nice trip to Rügen Island with all the boys?’
I wasn’t interested in any of these, although I might have been if I had ever supposed that they had been among his possessions. There was however one more thing I was interested in; something I knew had been in his drawer because I had seen it.
‘What about the pipe?’
‘What pipe?’
‘There was a broken clay pipe in his drawer. What happened to that?’
‘I didn’t see a clay pipe. But I fail to see what relevance a broken old pipe might have to anything.’
‘That all depends,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t it, Kurt?’
‘Depends on what?’ Kluckholn asked.
‘Depends on what he smoked in it,’ Kahlo said. ‘Tobacco. Marijuana. Opium. They say a clay is best for opium, don’t they, sir? Clay keeps the heat better.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Opium or marijuana might be just the thing for a man who was having trouble sleeping. Or just to ease the conscience of a man who felt very guilty about what he’d done in Riga.’
‘Of course,’ added Kahlo, ‘you would only throw it away if you suspected that’s what it had been used for. You wouldn’t throw it away if you thought he’d only used it to smoke tobacco.’
‘Good point,’ I said. ‘Of course, if we still had it we could have tested it in the lab. They might have cleared him of any suspicion on that score. But now we’ll never know.’
Kluckholn was about to say something and then seemed to think better of it. For a moment his brown eyes met mine pleadingly, as if he wanted me to stop and he really did have some secret he couldn’t bring himself to reveal. He took hold of his fist in the palm of his other hand and started to squeeze it, trying to stop it from punching me, almost as if Belshazzar had managed to get hold of the disembodied hand that was interrupting his famous feast.
‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘Punch me on the nose. Then we’ll have all the excuse I need to beat it out of you. Won’t we, Kurt?’
‘Just say the word, sir. I’d love to smack this bastard.’
Kluckholn regarded us with real hatred before he seemed to shrink into a silence and then a shape that made me think we really would have to beat anything else out of him.
Which effectively meant that the interrogation was over.
‘Back at the Alex, when a suspect won’t talk, we put him down in the cells to think it over. That’s what I’d do with you, Hermann, if we weren’t doing this in a nice country house with a good piano and some choice works of art. That’s what we’d do if we were doing this back in Berlin. We’d lock you up for the night, if we were doing this the proper police way, not like some bullshit scene in a crappy detective novel by that English lady novelist Heydrich seems to admire so much.’
I flicked my cigarette into the fireplace, where it smashed against the chimney wall in a hail of tiny sparks.
‘You can go,’ I said. ‘But I shall certainly want to speak to you again, Hermann. You can depend on it.’
Kluckholn stood up and, without uttering another word, he made straight for the door, which Kahlo then unlocked with a deliberate insolence that reminded me strongly of myself.
When the Captain was gone, Kahlo went over to the coffee table where I’d left my cigarette case and helped himself.
‘Guilty conscience, do you think?’ he asked.
‘Around here? I’m not sure what that might look like.’
‘The bastard was shaking like a rice pudding. If he didn’t do it, or knows who did it, then I’m a Blue Dragoon.’
The Blue Dragoons was the nickname of an Army punishment battalion stationed on the peat-bog moors of the Ems River region. They said that if the damp didn’t kill you, the labour – digging peat in all weathers – was certain to do it.
‘That’s probably what he’s worried about,’ I said. ‘Being sent there. Or whatever the SS equivalent of the Blue Dragoons might be. Some lesser circle of hell, probably.’
‘A firing squad looks like a better bet, if you ask me. He destroys evidence and won’t say what he and Kuttner were arguing about? Fuck off. Not to mention his declared dislike of the man. If it was me, I’d arrest him now and tap it out of him with a small hammer.’
Kahlo took a fierce drag of his cigarette and then bared his teeth like he was enduring pain.
‘And you know something, sir? Kluckholn might be just as good as it can get for us. In fact, I think he’s perfect for it.’
‘Meaning what, exactly?’
‘Only that he’s standing right in front of your box camera with a name and number chalked on a piece of board. No, really. You could just as easily snap him for this murder as anyone else.’
‘You sound so like the Gestapo sometimes that I wonder why I like you, Kurt.’
‘You’re the one with Heydrich’s breath in your ear. When you’ve got a suspect who’s suspicious it’s foolish to go and look for someone with a kind face and a good alibi. Come on, sir. Every bull does it now and then, even when they don’t have to. And if you ask me, you have to.’ He paused. ‘We have to.’
I grinned. ‘It’s quite like old times, working with you. You remind me of why I left the police the first time.’
‘It’s your funeral.’ Kahlo shrugged. ‘I just hope that I’m only the chief mourner.’
‘You needn’t worry. I’m not about to reach up and pull you in the grave beside me.’
‘It’s not just that.’
‘What then?’
‘I need to get on. In the job. I can’t stay being a Criminal Assistant for the rest of my bloody life. Unlike you, I’ve got a wife to support. The only way I’m going to get a promotion is if you deliver someone’s head for Kuttner’s murder, or if I join one of those SS police battalions in Russia. Come on, sir, you’ve been there. Everyone says it’s the holiday in hell.’
I nodded. ‘That it is.’
‘It sent Kuttner over the edge. We know that. I don’t want that happening to me. I want kids. I want to be able to look them in the eye when they go to bed at night.’
‘Yes, I can understand that.’
‘Right then. So far I’ve managed to avoid all that resettlement shit. But I don’t know how much longer I can do it. I can’t afford for you to fuck this case up because you’re a bit squeamish about sewing someone into the bag for this, sir.’
‘So, you admit you don’t actually think he did it, then?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I think. What matters is if it will stand up in front of General Heydrich.’
‘Well, I don’t think it will. I agree, Kluckholn’s keeping something from us. But if you remember, he said that Major Ploetz was party to the decision to burn those puppy mags. For all we know he knew about the pipe, too. You can’t put a man in front of a firing squad just because he tries to sidestep a few awkward questions.’
‘No? This is Germany, sir. Remember? It happens every day. Someone has got to go down for this and if you ask me it might as well be him. Besides, adjutant or not, he’s only a fucking captain and it’s going to be a lot easier pinning a charge on him than on any of the cauliflower. There’s not one of these bastards that doesn’t have a supply of vitamins that goes all the way to the top.’
He had a point. I didn’t like it but what he was saying made a lot of sense.
‘Am I interrupting you?’
An officer in Army uniform put his head around the door, and for a moment I failed to recognize him.
‘Only Captain Kluckholn said he was going to try to get me bumped up your list but – peculiar fellow – he wouldn’t answer me when I asked him just now if that was all right with you. Seemed rather upset about something. Had a face like thunder.’ He paused. ‘Well, is it? All right, I mean? I can come back in a few minutes if you’d prefer, only I was rather hoping to catch this afternoon’s train to Dresden. There’s quite a lot of work waiting on my desk. The Admiral – that’s Admiral Canaris – he keeps me pretty busy these days, I can tell you.’
‘I’m sorry. Major Thummel, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You’d better come in.’
‘Good of you,’ he warbled.
Paul Thummel advanced into the Morning Room. He moved with flat-footed nonchalance, like a golfer approaching a putt he expected to sink without any trouble, and sat down on the sofa recently vacated by Hermann Kluckholn.
‘All right here, am I?’ He smoothed his hands along the silk cushions like a schoolboy and then leaned back, comfortably. ‘I haven’t been in this room,’ he added, looking around. �
��Very cosy. Although maybe a bit too feminine for my taste. Not that I have any. At least that’s what my wife says. She gets to choose the wallpaper in our house, not me. I just pay for it.’
Thummel was about forty. He had dark hair which, like almost everyone wearing a German uniform, he wore very short at the sides so that what was on top of his skull resembled a little cap. His face was sharp and he had a very pronounced hook nose that looked as if it was trying its best to meet halfway his equally prominent chin. He was friendly and as smoothly confident as you might have expected of a man wearing a gold Party badge, a first-class Iron Cross, a decent cologne, and a silver wedding band.
