by Philip Kerr
I felt myself smart at the idea that the SD was “my lot.”
“Really, I’m still just a policeman,” I said, keen to distance myself from the kind of SS who had destroyed Lidice and Ležáky. “I got called back onto the force in ’thirty-eight. And they put us all in uniform when we invaded Russia. There wasn’t much I could do about it.”
The number of times I’d heard myself utter this excuse. Did anyone believe it? And did it really matter to anyone but me? The sooner I was part of something worthwhile like the War Crimes Bureau the better.
“Anyway, they’ve got me on nights at the Alex, so I don’t offend anyone with my choice of cologne. What are you doing here anyway?”
“I live around here, sir. Königstrasse. Matter of fact, there’s several of us who used to work for Herr Minoux who are there now. Number 58, if you’re ever in the area again. Nice place. Owned by the local coal merchant. Fellow called Schulze, who used to know the boss.”
“I was very sorry to read about what happened to Herr Minoux. He was a good client. How is he dealing with bed and breakfast at German Michael’s?”
“He’s just started a stretch at Brandenburg at the age of sixty-five, so, not well. The bed’s a little hard, as you might expect. But the food? I mean, we’re all on short rations because of the war, right? But what they call food in there, I wouldn’t give it to a dog. So I drive out to Brandenburg every morning to take him breakfast. Not the Daimler, of course. I’m afraid that went south a long time ago. I’ve got a Horch now.”
“It’s allowed? You bringing in breakfast?”
“It’s not just allowed, it’s actively encouraged. Excuses the government from having to feed the prisoners. About the only food he’ll eat is what I take him in the car. Just some boiled eggs, and some bread and jam. Matter of fact, I was just in town to fetch some of his favorite jam from someone who makes it especially for him. I take the S-Bahn to save petrol. Frau Minoux, she’s still in Garmisch, although she also rents a house in Dahlem. And Monika, Herr Minoux’s daughter, she lives on Hagenstrasse, in Grunewald. I’ll tell the boss you said hello if you like.”
“You do that.”
“By the way, what are you doing over at the villa? Are you part of this conference they’re planning?”
“Yes, I am. Unfortunately. My boss, Arthur Nebe, the head of Kripo, he wants me to make a speech about being a Berlin detective.”
“That should be easy,” said Gantner. “Since you are a detective.”
“I suppose so. He’s ordered me to go to Wannsee and tell a lot of important foreign cops what a great detective I was. Bernie Gunther, the Berlin policeman who apprehended Gormann, the strangler.”
State Secretary Gutterer had exaggerated all that, of course, which was his job, I suppose. I rather doubted that any one man could ever have been the omniscient sleuth my speech now said I was. But you didn’t have to be Charlie Chan to figure out that it was this little speech of mine that was behind much of what happened in the summer of 1942, not to mention the summer of 1943.
Four
Outside the Kripo offices at the Alex was a giant pigeonhole cabinet where they left your mail, just like in a hotel. The first thing I did whenever I came on duty was check my pigeonhole. Usually it was just Party propaganda, or Prussian Police Union stuff that no one paid any attention to—the more important case correspondence was brought straight to your desk by one of two uniformed policemen, two ferociously ill-tempered old men who were universally known as the Brothers Grimm, for obvious reasons. You wouldn’t have dreamed of having anyone leave something valuable in your pigeonhole, or anywhere else, for that matter—not at police headquarters. A few senior coppers like me still remembered Berlin’s master burglars, Emil and Erich Krauss, who stole back their own tools from our own museum of crime. But it wasn’t just our clients who were long-fingered; some of the coppers around the place were just as bent. You left a cigarette case lying around at your peril, especially if you were lucky enough to have cigarettes in it, and things like soap and toilet paper in the lavatories were always going missing. Once, someone even stole all of the electric lightbulbs in the police canteen, which meant that for several days we had to eat in the dark, although that did at least mean the food tasted better. (There used to be an electrician on Elsasser Strasse who would pay six marks for secondhand bulbs, no questions asked.) Imagine my surprise, then, when late one night, I went to my pigeonhole and opened an envelope to find five new pictures of Albrecht Dürer; I think I even turned them over just to check that the Brandenburg Gate was on the back of them, where it usually was. There was a lawyer’s letter, too, but it was a while before enough of the novelty of having a hundred marks in my pocket had worn off for me to look at it.
The envelope had a little brown Hitler on the corner. It was odd how he was on the stamps but not on the banknotes. That could have been a precaution against him being associated with another hyper-inflation. Or maybe he wanted people to think he was above things like money, which, in retrospect, was a pretty good reason not to trust him. Anyone who thinks he’s too good for our money is never going to succeed in Germany. The postmark was Berlin and the letter paper was as thick as a starched pillowcase. On the sender’s letterhead was a drawing of Justitia, wearing a blindfold and holding up a set of scales, which almost made me smile. It had been a long time since justice had been quite so objective and impartial as that in Germany. I took the letter—which wasn’t dated—back to my desk to read it in a better light. And as soon as I’d done so I put it in the pocket of my jacket and went out of the Alex. I went across the road to the station to use the pay phones. The author said he suspected his telephone was being monitored and perhaps it was, but I was more concerned about the phone lines at the Alex, which had certainly been tapped since the days when Göring had been in charge of the Prussian State Police.
Although it was almost ten o’clock, the sky was still light and the station on Alexanderplatz—full of people arriving back after an afternoon stolen on the beach, their faces red from the sun, their hair messed up, their clothes peppered with white sand—buzzed with life like a huge hollowed-out tree colonized by a swarm of bees. Mercifully the station had, so far, escaped the bombs and remained my favorite place in the world. All human life was here in this glass Noah’s Ark, which was full of the things that I loved about the old Berlin. I picked up a phone and made the call.
“Herr Doctor Heckholz?”
“This is he.”
“I’m the man with five twenty-reichsmark notes and one pressing question.”
“Which is?”
“What do I have to do for them?”
“Come and see me at my office tomorrow morning. I have a proposition for you. I might even say, a handsome proposition.”
“Would you care to give me a clue as to what this is all about? I might be wasting your time.”
“I think it’s best I don’t. I have a strong suspicion that the Gestapo are listening in to my telephone calls.”
“If someone’s listening it’s certainly not the Gestapo,” I told him. “The German Signals Intelligence—the FA—is run by Göring’s Aviation Ministry and Hermann keeps a pretty jealous hold on it. Any information obtained by the FA is seldom shared with anyone in the RSHA. As long as you don’t say anything rude about Hitler or Göring, my professional opinion is that you’ve nothing to worry about.”
“If that’s the case then you’ve already earned your money. But do please come anyway. In fact, why not come for breakfast? Do you like pancakes?”
His accent sounded Austrian; the way he said “pancakes” was very different from the way a German would have said it and something a little closer to Hungarian. But I wasn’t about to hold that against him with his Albrechts in my pocket, not to mention the prospect of fresh-made pancakes.
“Sure, I like pancakes.”
“What time do you finish you
r shift?”
“Nine o’clock.”
“Then I’ll see you at nine-thirty.”
I hung up and went back across the road to the Alex.
It was a quiet night. I had some urgent paperwork but now that I was soon to be on my way to the War Crimes Bureau I wasn’t much inclined to do it; that’s the thing about urgent paperwork: the longer you leave it the less urgent it becomes. So I just sat around and read the newspaper and smoked a couple of the cigarettes I’d stolen from the Wannsee villa. Once, I went to check on the blackout blinds just to stretch my legs; and another time I tried the crossword in the Illustrierter Beobachter. Mostly I waited for the phone to ring. It didn’t. When you’re working nights for the Murder Commission, you don’t really exist unless there’s a murder, of course. Nobody cares what you look like or what your opinions are. All that is asked of you is that you’re there until it’s time to go home.
At nine o’clock I signed off and went back to the station, where I caught an S-Bahn train to Zoo Station and then walked a few blocks north, across Knie onto Bismarckstrasse. Bedeuten Strasse was off Wallstrasse, behind the German Opera House. In a solid, five-story redbrick building a short series of steps led up to an arched door and a large round skylight. I mounted the stairs and looked around. There was an older man in a cheap gray suit on the other side of the street reading the Beobachter. He wasn’t Gestapo; then again he wasn’t really reading the newspaper, either. Nobody leans on a lamppost to read a newspaper, especially one as dull and boring as the Völkischer Beobachter, unless he’s on a stakeout. Above the number on the wall was a mosaic of brass plaques for German doctors, German dentists, German architects, and German lawyers. Since there were hardly any Jews left in Berlin, and certainly none in these noble professions, their Aryan character seemed hardly worth mentioning. Everyone was Aryan now, whether he liked it or not.
Five
I tugged on a brass bellpull as big as a butcher’s weight, heard the door spring open, and climbed a white marble staircase to the third floor, where, at the end of a well-polished landing, I found a frosted-glass door open and a smallish, thickly bearded man standing with his hand outstretched toward me. He was smiling broadly and there was a touch of the fairy king about him. We shook hands. He was wearing a tailored, cream-colored linen suit and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that were on a length of gold chain around his neck. In a waiting room behind him was a luscious-looking redhead who was draped in a beige, wraparound summer dress, and on her head was a wide-brimmed straw hat you could have used as a beach parasol. She was reading a magazine and smoking with a little amber holder that was the same incandescent shade as her hair. There was a full set of Malle Courier luggage with leather and brass trim by her chair, and I supposed she was traveling somewhere; she looked much too fresh to have come from somewhere else. The man was as friendly as a kitten but the redhead stayed put on the leather chesterfield and she was not introduced nor did she look at me. It was as if she didn’t exist. Perhaps she was another client for another lawyer. Either way, she was keeping herself to herself, which suited her a lot better than it suited me.
“I’m Gunther,” I said.
Heckholz brought his heels together silently and he bowed.
“Herr Gunther,” he said, “it’s good of you to come here at such short notice. I am Heinrich Heckholz.”
“There were five good reasons to come, Herr Doctor. Or perhaps a hundred, depending on how you look at it.”
“Surely you’re forgetting the pancakes. Will you join me?”
“I’ve been thinking about nothing else since midnight.”
We went along a corridor floored with white boards and lined with law books and box files, all of which carried the same little drawing of Justitia that appeared on his letterhead. He led me into a small kitchen where the mixture was already made, and immediately he put on a clean white apron and set about making the pancakes, but I felt him sizing me up out of the corner of his eye.
“Have you just finished your shift?”
“Yes. I came straight here.”
“Somehow I thought you’d be wearing your uniform,” he said.
“Only in the field,” I said, “or on ceremonial occasions.”
“In which case I wonder how you ever find the time to take it off. Berlin has more ceremonial occasions than imperial Rome, I fancy. The Nazis do like a good show.”
“You’ve got that right.”
He’d heated some cherry sauce in a small copper saucepan that he poured generously onto the finished pancakes and we carried Meissen plates into a meeting room. There was a round Biedermeier table and four matching chairs; on the yellow-papered wall was a portrait of Hitler, and on a sideboard in the window a large pot of white orchids. Through another open door on a white-wood floor was a partners desk, a large filing cabinet, and a safe. On the desk I spied a bronze head of the leader. Heckholz didn’t look like he was taking any chances with appearances. A third door was partly open, and I had half an idea that behind it was a room and that there was someone in that room; someone wearing the same perfume as the redhead in the waiting room.
Heckholz handed me a napkin and we ate the pancakes in silence. They were predictably delicious.
“I’d offer you an excellent schnapps with that but it’s a little early, even for me.”
I nodded, but it was just as well he didn’t twist my arm as it’s never too early for a glass of schnapps, especially when you’ve just finished work for the day.
He saw me looking at the picture on the wall and shrugged. “That’s good for business,” he said. “If not necessarily good for the digestion.” He shook his head. “Our leader has a very hungry look. Doubtless a result of his many years of struggle in my hometown of Vienna. Poor man. He almost looks as if he has been forbidden any pancakes and sent to bed early, don’t you think?”
“I really couldn’t say.”
“Still, his is an inspiring story. To come so far, from nothing. I’ve been to Braunau-on-the-Inn where he was born. It’s completely unremarkable. Which makes his story all the more remarkable when you think about it. Although, to be quite frank with you, as an Austrian I prefer not to think about it at all. It’s true that we Austrians will have to take the blame for giving the world Hitler. But I’m afraid it’s you Germans who must take the blame for giving him absolute power.”
I said nothing.
“Oh, come now,” said Heckholz, “there’s no need to be so coy, Herr Gunther. We both know you’re no more a Nazi than I am. Despite all the evidence to the contrary. I was a member of the Christian Social Party, but never a Nazi. The Nazis are all about show, and a show of loyalty to the leader is usually enough to deflect suspicion. How else can you explain the fact that so many Austrians and Germans who hate the Nazis give the Hitler salute with such alacrity?”
“I usually find that the safer explanation is to believe that they’re Nazis, too.”
Heckholz chuckled. “Yes, I suppose it is. Which probably explains why you’ve stayed alive for so long. You’ll remember Herr Gantner, who used to drive for Friedrich Minoux—he said that when you were working for Herr Minoux, as a private investigator, all those years ago, you told him you’d been a dedicated Social Democrat, right up until the moment that the Nazis gained power in 1933, when you had to leave the police.”
“So, it was him who recommended me to you.”
“Indeed it was. Only, now you’re in the SD.” Dr. Heckholz smiled. “How is that possible? I mean, how does someone who supported the SPD end up as a captain of SD?”
“People change,” I said. “Especially in Germany. If they know what’s good for them.”
“Some people. But not you, I think. Gantner told me what you said to him. In Wannsee. He told me that you virtually apologized for wearing the uniform. Like you were ashamed of it.”
“People see the scary SD badge on my sl
eeve and become alarmed. It’s a bad habit of mine, that’s all. Trying to put people at their ease.”
“That’s certainly unusual in Germany.”
Heckholz cleared away the plates, removed the apron, and then sat down; it was obvious he didn’t believe a word of what I’d said.
“All the same, Herr Gantner thought your remarks noteworthy enough to mention you to me in the hope that you might be able to provide us with some assistance.”
“What kind of assistance?”
“With a problem that results from what happened to Herr Minoux.”
“You mean the Berlin Gas Company fraud.”
“The Berlin Gas Company fraud. I do mean that, yes.”
“Thank you for the pancakes,” I said, standing up. I tossed the five Albrechts back onto his table. “But whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested.”
“Please don’t go just yet,” he said. “You haven’t heard about my handsome proposition.”
“I’m beginning to believe your handsome proposition is about to turn into a rather ugly frog. Besides, I’m all out of kisses.”
“How would you like to make ten thousand reichsmarks?”
“I’d like it fine just as long as I was able to live to spend it. But if I’ve stayed alive for so long it’s because I’ve learned not to have conversations like this with strangers, especially when it’s next to an open door. If you want me to stay and hear you out, Herr Doctor Heckholz, then you’d better ask your friend wearing the Arabian Nights perfume to come in here and join us.”
Heckholz grinned and stood up. “I should have realized the difficulty of trying to trick a famous detective from the Alex.”
“No, that’s remarkably easy. You just send them a hundred marks in an envelope.”
“Lilly, darling, will you please come in here?”
A minute later the redhead was in the meeting room. She was taller than I had supposed, with larger breasts, and as Heckholz made the introductions she took my hand as if she’d been handing alms to Lazarus.
