by Philip Kerr
I opened it, and inside were a number of contract-tender letters from companies as far afield as Würzburg and Bremerhaven. I glanced over them without much interest. I put these in my pocket, to irritate Reles with their apparent loss in case they were important to him, and went up to his suite.
I knocked on the door. It was answered by Dora Bauer. She was wearing a light brown gingham pleated dress with a matching cape collar and a large pussycat bow on the shoulder. Her hair had a wave as big as a tsunami that swept all the way across her forehead and down to an eyebrow as thin as a spider’s leg. A bow mouth that was more Clara than Cupid parted in a smile as wide as a welcome mat. The smile turned painful as she noticed the weal on my face.
“Oooh, what happened to you?”
Otherwise she seemed pleased to see me, unlike Reles, who ambled over behind her wearing his usual expression of contempt. I had the Chinese box at my back and was looking forward to handing it over after the usual litany of insults. I had the vain hope I might embarrass him or make him eat his words.
“If it isn’t the Continental Op,” he said.
“I don’t have much time for detective stories,” I said.
“I suppose you’re too busy reading the Leader’s book?”
“I don’t have much time for his stories, either.”
“You want to be careful saying disrespectful things like that. You could get hurt.” He frowned and searched my face. “Maybe you already did. Or did you just pick a fight with another hotel guest? That’s more your level, I’d say. Somehow I don’t see you as the heroic type.”
“Max, please.” Dora sounded scolding, but that was as far as it went.
“You’d be surprised what I’m called to do in the line of duty, Herr Reles,” I said. “Squeeze the eggs of a fellow who doesn’t pay his bill. Flick the ear of some barfly. Slap a garter handler in the mouth. Hell, I’ve even been known to recover stolen property.”
I brought my arm around and handed him the box, as if it had been a bunch of flowers. A bunch of five was what I felt like giving him.
“Well, I’ll be damned. You found it. You really were a cop, weren’t you?” He took the box and, backing away from the door, waved me in. “Come on in, Gunther. Dora, get Herr Gunther a drink, will you? What’ll you have, Detective? Schnapps? Scotch? Vodka?” He pointed out a series of bottles on the sideboard.
“Thank you. Schnapps would be good.”
I closed the door behind me, watching him carefully for the moment he opened the box. And when he did, I had the satisfaction of noticing a small wince of disappointment.
“That’s a pity,” he said.
“What is, sir?”
“Only that there was some money and correspondence in this box. And now it’s not there.”
“You didn’t mention the contents before, sir.” I shook my head. “Would you like me to inform the police, sir?” That was two “sirs” in a row: maybe it was still possible I could hold down a career in hotel keeping, after all.
He smiled irritably. “It really doesn’t matter, I suppose.”
“Ice?” Dora was standing over a bucket containing a piece of ice with a pick in her hand, looking more than a little like Lady Macbeth.
“Ice? In schnapps?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.”
Dora stabbed the ice a couple of times and placed a few shards in a large tumbler glass, which she handed to Reles.
“American habit,” said Reles. “We put ice in everything. But I kind of like it in schnapps. You should try it sometime.”
Dora handed me a smaller glass of schnapps. I was watching her now for some sign that she might be up to her old whore’s tricks, but there didn’t seem to be anything between them that I could see. She even shied away a little when he came too close. The typewriter looked like it was still as busy as always. The wastepaper basket was overflowing.
I toasted Reles.
“Down the hatch,” he said, and took a large mouthful of ice-cold schnapps.
I sipped mine like a dowager, and we faced each other in awkward silence. I waited a moment, then tossed back the rest.
“Well, if that’s all, Detective,” he said. “We have work to do, don’t we, Fräulein Bauer?”
I handed Dora the glass and headed for the door. Reles was there ahead of me, to open it and speed me on my way.
“And thanks again,” he said, “for recovering my property. I appreciate it. For what it’s worth, you’ve restored my faith in the German people.”
“I’ll be sure to tell them that, sir.”
He chuckled, thought of a retaliatory remark, appeared to think better of it, and then waited patiently for me to make my exit from his suite.
“Thanks for the drink, sir.”
He nodded and closed the door behind me.
I hurried along the landing and down the stairs. Crossing the entrance hall, I went into the switchboard room, where, under a high window, four girls were sitting on high chairs in front of what looked like a double-sized upright piano. Behind them was a desk where Hermine, the switchboard supervisor, sat watching the hotel’s “hello girls” as they went about the voluble business of connecting telephone calls. She was a prim woman, with short red hair and a complexion as pale as milk. Seeing me, Hermine stood up and then frowned.
“That mark on your face,” she said. “It looks very much like a whip mark.”
Several of her girls looked around and laughed.
“I went riding with Hedda Adlon,” I said. “Listen, Hermine, the party in 114. Herr Reles. I want a list of everyone he calls this evening.”
“Does Herr Behlert know you’re asking?”
I shook my head. I went a little closer to the switchboard, and Hermine followed attentively.
“He wouldn’t like you spying on the guests, Herr Gunther. I think you’ll need to get his written permission.”
“It’s not spying, it’s snooping. I’m paid to snoop, remember? To keep you and me and the guests safe, although not necessarily in that order.”
“Maybe. But if he found you listening in on Herr Reles’s calls, he’d have our hides.”
“Putting you through now, Herr Reles,” said Ingrid, who was one of the best-looking of the Adlon’s hello girls.
“Herr Reles? He’s on a call now? To whom?”
Ingrid exchanged a look with Hermine.
“Come on, ladies, this is important. If he’s a crook—and I think he is—we need to know about it.”
Hermine nodded her approval.
“Potsdam 3058,” said Ingrid.
“Who’s that?” I waited for a moment.
Hermine nodded again.
“That’s Count von Helldorf’s number,” said Ingrid. “At the Potsdam Police Praesidium.”
Anywhere else but the Adlon I might have persuaded them to let me eavesdrop on that call, but short of a spot lamp and a set of brass knuckles, I’d had all that I was going to get out of the hello girls: standards might have been compromised in other Berlin institutions such as the police, the courts, and the churches, but not at its best hotel.
So I went back to my office to smoke some cigarettes, have a couple of drinks, and take another look at the papers I had taken from the Chinese box. I had the curious idea these were more important to Max Reles than the box itself. But my mind was elsewhere. A telephone call made by Max Reles to von Helldorf so soon after I had seen the American was disturbing. Was it possible their topic of conversation had been me? And if so, to what effect? There were good reasons why von Helldorf might be useful to a man such as Max Reles, and vice versa.
Formerly the leader of Berlin’s SA, Count Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorf had been the police president of Berlin for just three months when a notorious scandal interrupted his progress to higher office. He had always been an enthusiastic gambler and a rumored pederast with a taste for the flagellation of young boys. He was also a close friend of Erik Hanussen, the famous clairvoyant who, it was supposed, had paid off the
count’s very substantial gambling debts in return for an introduction to the Leader.
Much of what happened thereafter was still the subject of speculation and mystery, but it seemed that Hitler was strongly impressed by the man Berlin’s communists called “the people’s stupefier.” As a result of Hitler’s open favor, Hanussen’s influence over senior Party members, including von Helldorf, became even greater. Yet all was not quite what it seemed. Hanussen’s leverage within the Party was, it was to be revealed, the result not of good advice, nor even of mesmeric power, but blackmail. At lavish sex parties he had hosted aboard his yacht, the Ursel IV, Hanussen had “hypnotized” several leading Nazis and subsequently filmed them taking part in sexual orgies. That was bad enough, but some of these orgies were homosexual orgies.
It is possible Berlin’s famous clairvoyant might have survived all of this. But when Goebbels’s newspaper, Der Angriff, revealed that Hanussen was a Jew, the shit really ended up on the conveyor belt, with most of it headed Hitler’s way. Suddenly Hanussen had become an acute embarrassment, and von Helldorf, held largely responsible, was required to clean up the mess. Several days after Hermann Goering dismissed him as Berlin’s police president, von Helldorf and some of his more murderous SA friends abducted Hanussen from his lavish apartment in Berlin’s Westend, drove him to his yacht, and tortured him there until Hanussen gave them all of the compromising material he had amassed over several months: debt receipts, letters, photographs, and ciné film. Then they shot him and dumped the body on a field in Mühlenbeck. Somewhere north of Berlin, anyway.
Rumors persisted that von Helldorf had used some of the material he had obtained from Hanussen to secure himself a new position as police president of Potsdam—an unimportant town about an hour southwest of Berlin, where, it is said, beer goes to turn flat. Von Helldorf now spent most of his time there breeding horses and organizing the continuing persecution of those Social Democrats and German communists who had most offended the Nazis during the last days of the republic. And it was generally supposed that in this respect, von Helldorf was largely motivated by the hope he might eventually manage to restore himself to Hitler’s full favor. I knew von Helldorf was also on the German Olympic Organizing Committee, of course, which said something about the success of his attempt to put himself back in favor with Hitler, although I wasn’t quite sure exactly what he did on the committee. Possibly that was just payback from his old SA pal von Tschammer und Osten. Possibly, since Goering’s departure from the Ministry of the Interior, he was in better odor there, too. In spite of everything, von Helldorf was not a man to be taken anything but seriously.
My attack of nerves lasted only a short while, however. As long as it took for the alcohol to kick in. After a few drinks I persuaded myself that since there was really nothing about the letters and business estimates I had taken from the Chinese box that could prove anything in a court of law, then there was no need for me to feel concerned. There wasn’t anything I had seen that could have harmed a man like Max Reles. Besides, Reles couldn’t know it had been I who had taken these papers, and not Ilse Szrajbman.
So I put the papers and the gun in my desk drawer and decided to head home, thinking, like Noreen, to have an early night myself. I was tired, and I ached in every conceivable part of my body.
Leaving Behlert’s car where I had parked it earlier, I walked south down Hermann-Goering-Strasse to catch a tram on Potsdamer Platz. It was dark and a little windy, and the Nazi banners hanging on the Brandenburg Gate were flapping around like danger flags, as if our imperial past were trying to warn us about something in our Nazi present. Even a stray dog trotting along the pavement ahead of me stopped and turned to look at me dolefully, perhaps to ask if I had a solution to our country’s problems. Then again, he might just have been trying to avoid the open door of the black W that had pulled up a few meters ahead. A man wearing a brown leather coat got out of the car and walked quickly toward me.
Instinctively, I turned to walk in the opposite direction and discovered my retreat blocked by a man wearing a thick, double-breasted overcoat and a low-brimmed hat, although it was the neat little bow tie I noticed most. At least until I noticed the beer token in his paw.
“Come with us, please.”
The other man in the leather coat was right behind me now, so that, sandwiched between them, I couldn’t very well have resisted. Like experienced window dressers moving a tailor’s dummy, they folded me into the car and jumped in the backseat on either side of me. We were moving before they had even slammed the car doors.
“If this is about that cop,” I said. “August Krichbaum, wasn’t it? I thought we’d sorted out that bullshit. I mean, you checked my alibi. I had nothing to do with it. You know that.”
After a few moments I realized we were going west, along Charlottenburger Strasse, in completely the opposite direction from Alexanderplatz. I asked where we were going, but neither of them spoke. The driver’s hat was made of leather. So were his ears, probably. By the time we reached Berlin’s famous radio tower and turned onto the AVUS—Berlin’s fastest road—I had guessed where we were driving. The driver bought a ticket and we sped toward Wannsee Station. A few years before, Fritz von Opel had set a speed record on the AVUS, driving a rocket-powered car at almost 240 kilometers an hour. We weren’t driving anything nearly as fast as that, but neither did I get the impression that we were likely to stop anywhere for coffee and cake. At the end of the AVUS, we drove through some woods onto the Glienecke Bridge and, although it was very dark, I could just make out that we had passed two castles. Shortly after that we entered Potsdam on New Königstrasse.
Surrounded by the Havel and its lakes, Potsdam wasn’t much more than an island. And I couldn’t have felt more lonely if I’d been marooned on some desert atoll with a solitary palm tree and a parrot. For more than a hundred years the town had been the headquarters of the Prussian army, but it might as well have been the headquarters of the Girl Guides for all the help the army was going to give me. I was about to become the prisoner of Count von Helldorf and there was nothing anyone could do about it. One of the buildings in Potsdam was the palace called Sanssouci, which is French for “without care.” I was a long way from a state of mind like that.
As we drove past another castle and a parade ground, I caught a glimpse of a street sign. We were on Priest Strasse, and I was beginning to think I might have need of one as we turned into the courtyard of the local police praesidium.
Entering the building, we went up several flights of stairs and along a cold, dimly lit corridor to a handsomely appointed office with a nice view of the Havel, which I recognized only because there was an even more handsomely appointed motor yacht floating on it just below the leaded window and lit up like a ride at Luna Park.
In the office, a tree was burning in an open fireplace where you could have roasted a whole ox. There were a big hanging tapestry, a portrait of Hitler, and a suit of armor that looked about as stiff as the man standing beside it. He was wearing the uniform of a police general and an air of aristocratic superiority, as if he should have preferred that my shoes had been removed before I was allowed to walk on his park-sized Persian rug. I suppose he was about the same age as I, but there the similarity ended. When he spoke, his tone was careworn and exasperated, and he gave me the impression I had caused him to miss the beginning of an opera or, more likely in his case, a queerish cabaret turn. On a log cabin of a desk, a backgammon set was laid out for a game, and in his hand was a little leather cup containing a pair of dice that every now and then he would rattle nervously, like some mendicant friar.
“Please sit down,” he said.
The man in the leather coat pushed me into a seat at a meeting table and then pushed a pen and a sheet of paper toward me. He seemed to be good at pushing things. “Sign it,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked
“It’s a D-11,” said the man. “An order for protective custody.”
“I used to be a cop mysel
f,” I said. “At the Alex. And I never heard of a D-11. What does it mean?”
Leather Coat glanced at von Helldorf, who replied, “If you sign it, it means you agree to be sent to a concentration camp.”
“I don’t want to go to a concentration camp. As a matter of fact, I don’t want to be here, either. No offense, but it’s been a hell of a day.”
“Signing a D-11 doesn’t mean you will be sent to a camp,” explained von Helldorf. “What it means is that you agree to go.”
“Forgive me, sir, but I don’t agree.”
Von Helldorf rocked on the heels of his jackboots and rattled the dice box behind his back.
“You could say that once it’s signed, it acts as a guarantee of your good behavior,” he said. “Your future good behavior. Do you see?”
“Yes. But equally, and with all due respect to yourself, General, it could just as easily result in my being taken from here to the nearest camp. Don’t get me wrong. I could use a holiday. I’d like to sit around for a couple of weeks and catch up on my reading. But from what I’ve heard, there’s not much concentration that’s possible in a concentration camp.”
“A lot of what you say is quite true, Herr Gunther,” said von Helldorf. “However, if you don’t sign, you will be kept here in a police cell until you agree to do so. So, as you can see, you really don’t have much choice in the matter.”
“So in other words, I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“I don’t suppose there’s a piece of paper I have to sign before I can be kept in a police cell, is there?”
“I’m afraid not. But let me repeat, signing the D-11 doesn’t mean you will go to a camp. The fact is, Herr Gunther, this government is doing its best to be more sparing with the use of protective custody. You may be aware that Oranienburg concentration camp has recently closed, for example. Also that the Leader has signed an amnesty affecting political prisoners, on August seventh this year. All of which makes perfect sense, given that almost everyone in the country is now inclined to favor his inspired leadership. Indeed, it is even hoped that in time all of the concentration camps will disappear, like Oranienburg.
