by Philip Kerr
“August Krichbaum.”
“Everyone except you.” He shook his head. “See what I mean? You’re a good copper. You shouldn’t ever have left.” He raised his glass. “To the dead. Where would we be without them?”
“Steady on,” I said as he drained his glass a second time.
“I’ve had a hell of a morning. I’ve been to Plötzensee Prison with a load of Berlin’s top polenta, and the Leader. Now ask me why.”
“Why?”
“Because his nibs wanted to see the falling ax in action.”
The falling ax was what we Germans quaintly called the guillotine.
Otto waved the barman back a third time.
“You’ve seen an execution, with Hitler?”
“That’s right.”
“There wasn’t anything about an execution in the newspaper. Who was it?”
“Some poor communist. Just a kid, really. Anyway, Hitler watched it happen and pronounced himself very impressed. So much so that he’s ordered twenty new falling-ax machines from the manufacturer in Tegel. One for every big city in Germany. He was smiling when he left. Which is more than I can say for that poor commie. I’ve never seen it before. Goering’s idea that we should, apparently. Something about us all recognizing the gravity of the historic mission we’ve set ourselves—or some such nonsense. Well, there’s a lot of gravity involved with a falling ax, let me tell you. Have you ever seen one at work?”
“Just once. Gormann the Strangler.”
“Oh, right. Then you’ll know what it’s like.” Otto shook his head. “My God, I’ll never forget it as long as I live. That terrible sound. Took it well, though, the commie. When the lad saw that Hitler was there, he started to sing the Red Flag. At least he did until someone slapped him. Now ask me why I’m telling you all this.”
“Because you enjoy scaring the shit out of people, Otto. You always were the sensitive type.”
“I’m telling you, Bernie, because people like you need to know.”
“People like me. What does that mean?”
“You’ve got a smart mouth, son. Which is why you have to be told that these bastards are not playing games. They’re in power and they mean to stay in power, with whatever it takes. Last year there were just four executions at the Plot. This year there have already been twelve. And it’s going to get worse.”
A train thundered overhead, rendering all conversation meaningless for almost a minute. It sounded like a very large, very slow falling ax.
“That’s the thing about things getting worse,” I remarked. “Just as you’re thinking they can’t, they usually do. That’s what the fellow on the Jewish Desk at the Gestapo told me, anyway. There are some new laws on the way that mean my grandmother wasn’t quite German enough. Not that it matters much to her. She’s dead, too. But it seems as if it’s going to matter to me. If you follow my meaning.”
“Like Aaron’s rod.”
“Exactly. And you being an expert on forgers and counterfeiting, I was wondering if you knew someone who might help to fix it for me to lose the yarmulke. I used to think an Iron Cross was all the evidence I needed to be a German. But it would seem not.”
“A German’s worst problems always start when he starts to think of what it means to be a German.” Otto sighed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Cheer up, yiddo. You’re not the first to need an Aryan transfusion. That’s what they call it these days. My paternal grandfather was a gyppo. That’s where I get my Latin good looks from.”
“I’ve never understood what they have against Gypsies.”
“I think it’s something to do with fortune-telling. Hitler just doesn’t want us to know the future he has planned for Germany.”
“It’s that or the price of clothespins, I suppose.” Gypsies were always selling clothespins.
Otto produced a nice gold Pelikan from his coat pocket and started to write a name and address on a piece of paper. “Emil is expensive, so try not to let your tribe’s reputation for driving a hard bargain lead you to suppose that he’s not worth every penny, because he is. Make sure you tell him I sent you and, if necessary, remind him that the only reason he’s not cooling his heels in the Punch is because I lost his file. But I lost it in a place where I can certainly find it again.”
The Punch was what Berlin’s police and underworld called the courthouse and jail complex in Moabit; because Moabit was a heavily working-class district, someone had once described the prison there as “an imperial punch in the face of the Berlin proletariat.” Certainly a punch in the face was more or less guaranteed when you went there, regardless of your social class. It was without question Berlin’s hardest concrete.
He told me what was in Emil Linthe’s file, so that I might make proper use of it when I spoke to him.
“Thanks, Otto.”
“This crime at the Adlon,” he said. “Anything there for me? Like a nice young girl who’s been passing dud checks?”
“It’s small fry for a bull like you. An antique box belonging to one of the guests got stolen. Besides, I already figured out who probably did it.”
“Even better. I can get the credit. Who did do it?”
“Some Ami blowhard’s stenographer. Jewish girl who’s already left Berlin.”
“Good-looking?”
“Forget it, Otto. She went home to Danzig.”
“Danzig is good. I could use a trip somewhere nice.” He finished his drink. “Come on. We’ll go back across the road. As soon as you’ve reported it I can be on my way. I wonder why she went to Danzig. I thought Jews were leaving Danzig. Especially now that it’s gone Nazi. They don’t even like Berliners in Danzig.”
“Like everywhere else in Germany. We buy the rest of the country a beer, and still they hate us.” I finished my brandy. “Your neighbor’s field of corn is always better, I guess.”
“I thought everyone knew that Berlin is the most tolerant city in Germany. For one thing, it’s always been the only place that would tolerate the German government living here. Danzig. I ask you.”
“Then we’d better hurry before she realizes her mistake and comes back.”
7
THE FRONT DESK AT THE ALEX was the usual crowd scene from Hieronymus Bosch. A woman with a face like Erasmus and a pink pig’s bladder of a hat was reporting a burglary to a duty sergeant whose outsized ears looked as if they had belonged to someone else before being sliced off and stuck on the sides of his dog-shaped skull with a pencil and an unsmoked roll-up. Two spectacularly ugly thugs—their bloodied mugs stamped with the atavistic stigmata of criminality, their hands manacled behind their twisting backs—were being pushed and pulled into a dimly lit corridor that led down to the cells and a probable job offer from the SS. A cleaning woman, with a cigarette clamped firmly in her mouth against the smell, who was badly in need of a shave, was mopping a pool of vomit on the shit-brown linoleum floor. A lost-looking boy, his dirty face streaked with tears, was sitting fearfully in a corner underneath an enormous spiderweb and rocking on his stringy buttocks, and probably wondering if he’d make bail. A pale, rabbit-eyed attorney, carrying a briefcase as big as the well-fed sow whose hide had been used to fashion it, was demanding to see his client, except that no one was listening. Somewhere, someone was adducing his previous good character and his innocence of everything. Meanwhile a cop had removed his black leather shako and was showing a fellow SCHUPO the large purple bruise on his closely shaven head: it was probably just a thought making a futile bid to escape from his rusticated skull.
It felt awkward being back at the Alex. Awkward and exciting. I figured Martin Luther must have felt the same way when he turned up at the Diet of Worms to defend himself against a charge of spoiling the church door in Wittenberg. So many faces that were familiar. A few looked at me as if I were the prodigal son, but rather more seemed to regard me as the fatted calf.
Berlin Alexanderplatz. I could have told Alfred Döblin a thing or two.
Otto Trettin led me behind
the desk and told a young uniformed cop to record my statement.
The cop was in his mid-twenties and, unusually by SCHUPO standards, was as bright as the badge on his ammunition pouch. He hadn’t been typing my statement very long when he stopped, bit his already well-bitten fingernails, lit a cigarette, and silently went over to a filing cabinet as big as a Mercedes that stood in the center of the huge room. He was taller than I’d expected. And thinner. He hadn’t been there long enough to get a taste for beer and get himself a pregnant belly, like a true SCHUPO man. He came back reading, which, in the Alex, was something of a miracle in itself.
“I thought so,” he said, handing Otto the file, but looking at me. “This object you’re reporting stolen was reported stolen yesterday. I took the particulars myself.”
“Chinese lacquer-and-basketry box,” said Otto, glancing over the report. “Fifty centimeters by thirty centimeters by ten centimeters.”
I tried to work that out in imperial measurement and gave up.
“Seventeenth century, Mong dynasty.” Otto looked at me. “That sound like the same box, Bernie?”
“Ming dynasty,” I said. “It’s Ming.”
“Ming, Mong, what’s the difference?”
“Either it’s the same box or they’re as common as pretzels. Who made the report?”
“A Dr. Martin Stock,” said the young cop. “From the Asiatic Museum. He was pretty exercised about it.”
“What kind of fellow was he?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. Kind of how you’d imagine someone from a museum would look. Sixtyish, gray mustache, white goatee, bald, myopic, overweight—he reminded me of the walrus at the zoo. He wore a bow tie—”
“I’ve seen that before,” said Otto. “A walrus wearing a bow tie.”
The cop smiled and then continued. “Spats, nothing in his lapel—I mean no Party badge or anything. And it was a Bruno Kuczorski suit he was wearing.”
“Now he’s just showing off,” said Otto.
“I saw the label on the inside of his coat when he took out his handkerchief to mop his brow. An anxious sort of fellow. But you would have gathered that from the handkerchief.”
“On the level?”
“Like he swallowed a geometry set.”
“What’s your name, son?” Otto asked him.
“Heinz Seldte.”
“Well, Heinz Seldte, it’s my opinion that you should leave this fat man’s desk job you’ve got here and become a cop.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“So what’s the deal, Gunther?” said Otto. “You trying to make a monkey out of me?”
“I’m the one who feels like a monkey.” I tugged the sheet and the carbons off Seldte’s typewriter and crushed them up. “I think maybe I should go and yodel in a few ears, like Johnny Weissmuller, and see what comes running out of the jungle.” I took Dr. Stock’s crime sheet from the police file. “Mind if I borrow this, Otto?”
Otto glanced at Seldte, who shrugged back at him. “It’s okay with us, I guess,” said Otto. “But you will let us know what you find out, Bernie. Ming Mong dynasty theft is a special investigative priority for KRIPO right now. We have our reputation to think of.”
“I’ll get right on it, I promise.”
I meant it, too. It was going to be a pleasure to feel like a real detective again instead of a hotel carpet creeper. But, as Immanuel Kant once said, it’s funny how categorically wrong you can be about a lot of stuff you think just has to be true.
MOST OF BERLIN’S MUSEUMS stood on a little island in the center of the city, surrounded by the dark waters of the River Spree, as if the people who built them had decided that Berlin needed to keep its culture separate from the state. As I was about to discover, there should have been a lot more importance attached to this idea than anyone might have thought.
The Ethnographical Museum, however, formerly in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, was now located in Dahlem, in the far west of Berlin. I traveled there on the underground railway—on the Wilmersdorf line as far as Dahlem-Dorf—and then walked southeast to the new Asiatic Museum. It was a comparatively modern three-story redbrick building surrounded by expensive villas and manor houses with large gates and even larger dogs. Laws were made for the protection of suburbs such as Dahlem, and it was hard to see why there should have been two Gestapo men parked in a black W out front of the nearby confessing church until I remembered there was a priest in Dahlem called Martin Niemöller who was well known for his opposition to the so-called Aryan paragraph. Either that or the two men just had something to confess.
I went into the museum, opened the first door marked PRIVATE, and found myself looking down at a rather fetching stenographer sitting behind a three-bank Carmen, with Maybelline eyes and a mouth that was painted better than Holbein’s favorite portrait. She wore a checked shirt; a whole souk’s supply of brass bangles, which tinkled on her wrist like tiny telephones; and a rather severe expression that almost had me checking the knot on my tie.
“Can I help you?”
I felt sure she could, but I hardly liked to mention exactly how. Instead, I sat on the corner of her desk and folded my arms, just to keep my hands off her breasts. She didn’t like that. Her desk looked as neat as a display in a department-store window.
“Herr Stock about?”
“I guess if you had an appointment you’d know it was Dr. Stock.”
“I don’t. Have an appointment.”
“So he’s busy.” She glanced involuntarily at a door on the other side of the room, as if hoping I would be gone before it opened again.
“I bet he does that a lot. Is busy. Men like him always are. Now, if it was me, I’d be giving you a little dictation or maybe signing a few letters you’d just typed with those lovely hands of yours.”
“You can write, then?”
“Sure. I can even type. Not as well as you, I’ll bet. But you can be judge of that.” I reached into my jacket and took out the crime sheet I’d borrowed from the Alex. “Here,” I said, handing it over. “Take a look and tell me what you think.”
She glanced at it and her eyes widened a few f-stops.
“You’re from the Police Praesidium, on Alexanderplatz?”
“Didn’t I say? I just came from there on the underground.” This was true, but only as far as it went. If she or Stock asked to see a warrant disc, I wasn’t going to get anywhere, which was the main reason I was behaving the way a lot of real cops from the Alex behave. A Berliner is someone who believes it’s best to be just a little less polite than other people might think is necessary. And most Berlin cops fall a long way short of that high standard. I lit a cigarette, blew the smoke her way, and then nodded at a chunk of rock on a shelf behind her well-coiffed head.
“Is that a swastika on that bit of stone?”
“It’s a seal,” she said. “From the Indus Valley civilization. From around 1500 B.C. The swastika used to be a significant religious symbol of our own remote ancestors.”
I grinned at her. “Either that or they were trying to warn us about something.”
She stood up from behind the typewriter and quickly walked across the office to fetch Dr. Stock. It gave me enough time to study her curves and the seams in her stockings, so perfect they looked as if they’d been done in a technical drawing class. I always disliked technical drawing, but I might have been a lot better at it had I been asked to sit behind a nice girl’s legs and try to make a couple of straight lines on her calves.
Stock was less easy on the eye than his secretary but exactly as Heinz Seldte had described him back at the Alex. A Berlin waxwork.
“This is most embarrassing,” he wailed. “There has been an awful mistake for which I’m most dreadfully sorry.” He came close enough for me to smell the peppermint lozenges on his breath, which was a nice change from most of the people who spoke to me, and then bowed an abject apology. “Dreadfully sorry, sir. It would seem that the box I reported stolen was not stolen at all. Merely mislaid.”
&nbs
p; “Mislaid? How’s that possible?”
“We’ve been moving the Fischer collections from the old Ethnographical Museum, in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, to our new home, here in Dahlem, and everything is in disarray. The official guide to our collections is out of print. Many objects were misplaced or wrongly attributed. I’m afraid you’ve had a wasted journey. On the underground, you said? Perhaps the museum could pay for a taxicab to take you back to the Police Praesidium. It’s the least we can do to make up for the inconvenience.”
“So you have the box back in your possession?” I said, ignoring his bleatings.
Stock looked awkward again.
“Perhaps I might see it for myself,” I said.
“Why?”
“Why?” I shrugged. “Because you reported it stolen, that’s why. And now you’re reporting that it has been found. The thing is, sir, I have to fill out a report, in triplicate. Proper procedures have to be followed. And if this Ming dynasty box can’t be produced, I don’t see how I can very well close the file on its disappearance. You see, sir, in a sense, the moment I type that it’s been found, I make myself responsible for it. I mean, that’s logical, isn’t it?”
“Well, the fact is—” He looked at his stenographer and twitched a couple of times, as if someone had a fishing line in him somewhere.
She stared at me with hat pins in her eyes.
“Perhaps you’d better come into my office, Herr—”
“Trettin. Criminal Commissar Trettin.”
I followed him into his office, and he closed the door behind me straightaway. But for the size and opulence of the room, I might have felt sorry for him. Everywhere there were Chinese artifacts and Japanese paintings, although it could just as easily have been Chinese paintings and Japanese artifacts. That year I was a little weak on my knowledge of Asiatic antiquities.
“Must be interesting, working in a place like this.”
