by Philip Kerr
As Joey helped me walk to the door, I got a better look at him and saw a man who didn’t look much more Jewish than I did. The hair on the side of a head as big as a watermelon was gray, but on top it was blond, and as curly as an Astrakhan coat. The huge face was both florid and pasty, like old bacon. Small brown eyes sat on either side of a broken nose that was sharp and pointy. The eyebrows were almost invisible, as were the teeth in his gaping mouth. Somehow he put me in mind of a man-sized baby.
We went downstairs, and I recognized that we were in the Albert the Bear. There was no sign of a proprietor, and I didn’t ask. Outside, the fresh morning air helped revive me a little. I got into the passenger seat of the Hanomag and, almost destroying the gears, Deutsch quickly drove us away. He was a terrible driver and narrowly missed colliding with a water trough on the corner.
It turned out that he lived not so very far away from me in the south-eastern part of the city. We dumped what was left of the Hanomag in the car park of the cemetery on Baruther Strasse. Joey wanted to take me to a hospital, but I told him I thought I’d probably be all right.
“How about you?” I asked him.
“Me? I’m all right. You don’t have to worry about me, son.”
“I just cost you a job.”
Joey shook his head. “I shouldn’t ever have taken it.”
I lit us both a cigarette. “Feel up to talking about it?”
“How do you mean?”
“My Ami friend. The journalist. Noreen Charalambides. She’s the one writing about Isaac. I imagine she’d like to speak to you. To get your story and Isaac’s.”
Joey grunted without much enthusiasm for the idea.
“Given that he’s got no actual grave, it could be like a kind of memorial,” I said. “To his memory.”
While Joey considered this idea, he puffed at the cigarette. In his mallet-sized fist it looked more like a safety match.
“Not a bad idea at that,” he said finally. “Bring her around this evening. She can get the whole story. If she doesn’t mind slumming it.”
He gave me an address in Britz, near the meat-canning factory. I jotted it down on the inside of my cigarette pack.
“Does Erich Goerz know this address?” I asked.
“Nobody does. There’s just me that lives there now. If you can call it living. Since Isaac died I’ve let myself go a bit, you know? There doesn’t seem to be much point in looking after the place now that he’s gone. Not much point in anything at all, really.”
“I know what that’s like,” I said.
“Been a while since I had any visitors. Maybe I could tidy up a bit. Put things in order before—”
“Don’t put yourself to any trouble.”
“It’s no trouble,” he said quietly. “No trouble at all.” He nodded resolutely. “Matter of fact, I should have done it a while ago.”
He walked away. I found a phone booth and telephoned the Adlon.
I told Noreen some of it but not all. The part about me spilling almost the whole story to Erich Goerz I didn’t tell her. The only consolation there was that I hadn’t mentioned the name of the hotel where she was staying.
She said she’d come right over.
22
IOPENED THE DOOR WIDE, but not as wide as Noreen’s eyes. She stood there, wearing a red dress underneath her sable coat and looking at me with a mixture of shock and bewilderment, much as Lotte must have looked upon discovering she had arrived in time to find that young Werther had just succeeded in blowing his brains out. Assuming he had any brains.
“My God,” she whispered, touching my face. “What happened to you?”
“I just read a portion of Ossian,” I said. “Second-rate poetry always affects me this way.”
She pushed me gently aside and closed the door behind her.
“You should see me when I’m really affected by something good. Like Schiller. I’m bedridden for days.”
She shrugged off her coat and tossed it onto a chair.
“You might not want to do that,” I said. I was trying not to feel embarrassed about the place, but it wasn’t easy. “It’s been a while since that chair was properly deloused.”
“Do you have any iodine?”
“No, but I have a bottle of kummel. Matter of fact, I think I’ll have one myself.”
I went over to the sideboard to pour a couple of drinks. I didn’t ask if she wanted one. I’d seen her drink before.
While she waited, she glanced around. The living room had a sideboard, an armchair, and a folding table. There was a high bookcase built into the walls, and it was full of books, several of which I’d read. There were a stove and a small fireplace with an even smaller fire. There was also a bed, since the living room happened also to be the bedroom. Through an open doorway was a garbage area that was also the kitchen. On the other side of the frosted kitchen window was a security grille and a fire escape, just to make the mice feel safe. Next to the front door was the door to the bathroom, only the bath was hanging upside down on the ceiling, right above the lavatory, where a man sitting there might contemplate the inconvenience of taking a bath in front of the fire. The floor was linoleum throughout, with a small collection of stamp-sized rugs. Some people might have thought it a bit of a dump, but to me it was a palace or, to be more accurate, the meanest room in a palace, the one where the servants kept their junk.
“I’m waiting for my interior decorator to come back with a portrait of the Leader,” I said. “After that it should look nice and cozy.”
She took the drink I offered her and stared closely at my face. “That weal,” she said. “You should put something on it.”
I pulled her closer. “How about your mouth?”
“Do you have any Vaseline?”
“What’s that?”
“First-aid petroleum jelly.”
“Hey, listen, I’ll live. I was at the Battle of Amiens and I’m still here, and believe me, that takes some doing.”
She shrugged and pulled away. “Go ahead. Be tough. But I had the funny idea I care for you, which means I don’t like it that you’ve been whipped. If anyone’s going to whip you it ought to be me, only I’ll make sure I don’t leave any marks.”
“Thanks, I’ll bear it in mind. Anyway, it wasn’t a whip. It was a dog leash.”
“You didn’t mention a dog.”
“There wasn’t a dog. It’s my impression that Goerz would prefer to carry a whip, but people on the tram look at you a bit strangely when you go around with one of those in your hand. Even in Berlin.”
“Do you think he hits his Jewish workers with it?”
“I shouldn’t be at all surprised.”
I tossed back the kummel, held it on my tonsils for moment, and then let it roll, enjoying the warmth as it spread through my body. Meanwhile Noreen found some chamomile ointment and anointed my more obvious wounds with it. I think it made her feel better. I poured myself another kummel. Which made me feel better.
WE WALKED TO A TAXI RANK and took a cab to the address in Britz. South of another modern apartment building called the Horseshoe and next to the Grossmann Coburg canned-meat factory was a decayed archway that was the entrance to a series of courtyards and tenement buildings of the kind that might convince any architect that he was some kind of messiah come to save people from their squalor and poverty. Personally, I never minded a little squalor. To be honest, for a long time after the war I hardly noticed it.
Passing through another archway, we came upon a tatty sign for infrared health lamps painted onto the brickwork. That seemed a little optimistic, to say the least. We mounted a dark stairway that led up into the building’s tomblike interior. Somewhere a barrel organ was churning out a melancholy tune that matched our lowering spirits. A German tenement building could have sucked all the light out of the second coming.
Halfway up the stairs we passed a woman who was on her way down. There was a bicycle wheel in her hand and a loaf of bread under her arm. A few steps behind he
r was a boy of about ten or eleven wearing the uniform of the Hitler Youth. The woman smiled and nodded a little bow in Noreen’s direction or, as seemed more likely, at the sable coat she was wearing. This prompted Noreen to ask if we were on the right flight of stairs for Herr Deutsch. The woman with the bicycle wheel answered respectfully that it was, and we carried on up, stepping carefully around a second woman who was on her knees, scrubbing the stairs with a heavy brush and something noxious in a bucket. She had heard us ask about Joey Deutsch, and as we moved past, she said, “Tell that Jew it’s his turn to clean the stairs.”
“Tell him yourself,” said Noreen.
“I did,” said the woman. “Just now. But he paid no notice. Didn’t even come to the door. Which is why I’m doing it myself.”
“Perhaps he’s not in,” said Noreen.
“Oh, he’s in there, all right. He must be. I saw him go up there a while ago and I haven’t seen him come down. Besides, his door is open.” She went at the steps with the brush for several seconds. “I expect he’s avoiding me.”
“Does he normally leave his front door open?” I asked, suddenly suspicious.
“What? Around here? Are you joking? But I think he must be expecting someone. You, perhaps, if your name is Gunther. There’s a note stuck on the door.”
We quickly went up the last two flights of stairs and stopped in front of a door once painted scarlet but now hardly painted at all unless you counted the yellow star and the words JEWS OUT with which someone had thoughtfully defaced it. There was a blue envelope tacked onto the door frame. It was addressed to me. And the door was open just as the woman cleaning the stairs had said. I put the envelope in my pocket and, taking out Erich Goerz’s pistol, steered Noreen behind me.
“There’s something not right here,” I said, and pushed open the door.
As we went into the little apartment, Noreen reached up and touched a small brass plate on the door frame. “The mezuzah,” she said. “It’s a passage from the Torah. Most Jewish homes have one.”
I worked the slide on the little automatic and stepped into the small hallway. The apartment comprised two largish rooms. To the left was a living room that was a shrine to boxing and one boxer in particular: Isaac Deutsch. In a glass cabinet were some ten or fifteen empty wooden trophy stands and several photographs of Joey and Isaac. I imagined the trophies had been pawned a long time ago. The walls were papered with boxing posters, and piles of fight magazines were heaped around the room. On a table were a very stale loaf of bread and a fruit bowl containing a couple of blackened bananas that were now a world’s fair of tiny flies. A pair of ancient-looking boxing gloves hung from a nail on the back of the door, and a selection of rusting weights lay next to a bar that was leaning against a wall. Above it was a length of rope from which were hanging a shirt and a broken umbrella. There were a disemboweled armchair and, behind it, a full-length mirror with a crack in the glass. Everything else was just junk.
“Herr Deutsch?” My voice sounded tight in my chest, like I had a cuckoo nesting between my two lungs. “It’s Gunther. Are you home?”
We went back through the hallway and into the bedroom, where the curtains were drawn. There was a strong smell of carbolic soap and disinfectant. Or so I thought, anyway. A big brass bed stood opposite a wardrobe the size of a small Swiss bank vault.
“Joey? Is that you?”
In the curtained gloom I saw the outline of a figure on the bed and felt my hair lift the back of my hat. You spend ten years as a cop, sometimes you know what you’re going to see before you see it. And you know that it’s not everyone who can look it straight in the eye.
“Noreen,” I said. “I think Joey’s killed himself. We’ll only find out for sure when I draw the curtains and read that note. Maybe you’re the kind of writer who feels she needs to see everything. Who thinks she has a duty to report everything, unflinchingly. I don’t know. But it’s my opinion that you need to brace yourself or leave the room. I’ve seen enough bodies in my time to know that it’s never—”
“I’ve seen a dead body before, Bernie. I told you about that lynching in Georgia. And my father, he killed himself, with a shotgun. You don’t forget that in a hurry, I can tell you.”
Reflecting that it was interesting how quickly my concern to spare her feelings turned to something like sadism, I yanked the curtains open with no more argument. She wanted to play at being Turgenev, it was all right with me.
Joey Deutsch lay across his bed, still wearing the same clothes I had seen him in earlier. He was half twisted up off the mattress, as if some of the springs had burst out of the material under the small of his back. He was clean-shaven as before—only now it looked as if he were wearing a brown mustache and a small beard. These were corrosive burns and the result of whatever he had swallowed to poison himself. A bottle lay on the floor where he had dropped it, and next to this was a pool of bloody vomit. I picked the bottle up carefully and sniffed at the open neck.
“Lye,” I told her, but she had already turned away and was leaving the room. I followed her into the hallway. “He drank lye. Jesus. What a way to kill yourself.”
Noreen had pressed her face into a corner of the entrance hall like a disobedient child. Her arms were folded defensively across her chest and her eyes were closed. I lit a couple of cigarettes, tapped her on the elbow, and gave her one. I didn’t say anything. Whatever I might have said would have sounded like “I told you so.”
Still smoking, I went back into the living room. On top of a pile of fight magazines was a small leather writing folder. Inside were some envelopes and notepaper that matched the note addressed to me. So did the ink in the Pelikan he’d replaced in the little cylindrical leather sleeve. There was nothing that made me suspect anyone had forced him to write the note. The writing was neat and unhurried. I’d had love letters that were much less legible, although not for a long time. I read it carefully, as if Joey Deutsch had meant something to me. It seemed like the least I could do for a dead man. Then I read it again.
“What does it say?” Noreen was standing in the doorway. In her hand was a handkerchief, and in her eyes were some tears.
I held the note out to her. “Here.” I watched her read it, wondering what was going through her mind. If she actually felt anything for the poor guy who’d just killed himself, or if she was just relieved to have found an end for her story and a good excuse to go home. If that sounds cynical, maybe it was, but the truth was that her leaving Berlin was all I could think about now because, for the first time, I realized I was in love with her. And when you’re in love with someone you think might be about to leave you, it’s easier to be cynical, just to protect yourself from the pain you know is coming.
She offered the note back.
“Why don’t you keep it,” I said. “Although he never met you, I think he really meant you to have it. For your newspaper article. I kind of sold him on the idea that your piece could be a kind of memorial to Isaac.”
“It will be, I think. Why not?” She took the letter. “But what about the police? Won’t they need this? It’s evidence, isn’t it?”
“What do they care?” I shrugged. “Maybe you’ve forgotten how anxious they were to find out what happened to Isaac. All the same, perhaps we ought to get out of here before we have to wait around and answer questions we might not want to answer. Like how come I’ve got a gun without a license, and why I’ve got the mark of a dog leash across my face.”
“The neighbors,” she said. “That woman on the stairs. Suppose they tell the police about us. The note. She knows your name.”
“I’ll square her on the way out. Ten marks buys a lot of silence in this part of Berlin. Besides, you saw the door. These neighbors don’t exactly strike me as very neighborly. It’s my impression that they’ll be glad to see Joey dead and out of this building. And what do you think the polenta would do with a note like that? Print it in the newspaper? I don’t think so. Most likely they’ll destroy it. No, it’s best yo
u keep it, Noreen. For Joey’s sake. And Isaac’s, too.”
“I guess you’re right, Gunther. But I wish you weren’t.”
“I get that.” I glanced around the miserable apartment and let out a sigh. “Who knows? Maybe he’s better off out of it.”
“You can’t believe that.”
“I don’t see things improving for Jews in this country. There are a bunch of new laws coming that will make things even tougher for anyone who’s not properly German, as they see it. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.”
“Ahead of the Olympics?”
“Didn’t I mention it?”
“You know you didn’t.”
I shrugged. “I suppose I didn’t want to put a dent in your optimism, angel. That something can be done. Maybe I was hoping that some of your lefty idealism would rub off on me along with your pants and stockings.”
“And did it?”
“Not this particular morning.”
23
IN THE EARLY EVENING I accompanied Noreen back to the hotel. She went up to her room for a bath and an early night. The discovery of Joey Deutsch’s body had left Noreen emotionally and physically exhausted. I had a good idea how she felt.
I was on my way to my office when Franz Joseph called me over and, after some polite inquiries about the marks on my face, told me he had a package for me, from Otto Trettin at the Alex. I knew it was the Chinese box belonging to Max Reles. Just the same, when I got to my desk, I opened it up to see what all the fuss had been about.
It looked like a paper-clip box for a Chinese emperor. I suppose it was quite attractive, if you like that kind of thing. I prefer something in sterling silver, with a matching table lighter. On a black lacquer lid, outlined in gold, was a brightly painted Arcadian scene featuring a lake, some mountains, a handsome weeping willow, a cherry tree, a fisherman, a couple of mounted archers, a coolie carrying a large bag of hotel laundry, and a group of Fu Manchu types in the local noodle house who seemed to be discussing the yellow peril and the finer points of white slavery. I expect you never got tired of looking at it if you lived in seventeenth-century China, unless there was some paint you could watch getting dry. It had the feel of a cheap souvenir from a day trip to Luna Park.
