by Philip Kerr
Perhaps you will consider that this will be a tragedy to me; but while I lament that I am now forbidden the chance to oppose the evil of national socialism in the way I know best, the greater tragedy, according to my understanding of that word, is the obligation I now have to give you up, and the utter improbability of seeing you at any time in the near future. Perhaps ever!
Given more time, I should have spoken to you of love and, perhaps, you would have done the same. Tempting as it is for a writer to put words in someone else’s mouth, this is my letter and I must limit myself to what I myself can say. Which is this: I love you, right enough. And if I now seem to draw a line under that, it’s only because the elation that I once might have felt at being in love with someone again—it’s not easy for me to love anyone—is alloyed with the acute pain of our parting and separation.
There is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich that encapsulates the way I’m feeling right now. It’s called The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, and if you’re ever in Hamburg, you should go to the local art gallery and take a look at it. If you don’t know this painting, it depicts a solitary man standing on a mountaintop staring out over a landscape of distant peaks and jagged rocks. And you should picture me, similarly positioned on the stern of the SS Manhattan carrying me back to New York, and all the while staring back at a rocky, jagged, increasingly remote Germany that contains you, my love.
You might equally think of another Friedrich painting when you try to visualize my heart. This picture is called The Sea of Ice, and it shows a ship, hardly visible, crushed by great shards of ice upon a landscape more bleak than the surface of the moon. I’m not sure where this picture can be seen, as I only ever saw it myself in a book. Nevertheless, it represents very well the cold devastation that is my current situation.
It seems to me I might very easily curse the fortune that made me love you; and yet I know, in spite of everything, that I don’t regret it one little bit, because, in the future, every time I read of some dreadful deed or criminal policy carried out by that big-talking man in his silly uniform, I will think of you, Bernie, and remember that there are many good Germans who have courageous, good hearts (although none, I think, could ever have a heart as courageous and good as yours). And this is good, for if Hitler teaches us anything, it is the stupidity of judging a whole race as one. There are bad Jews and there are good Jews, just as there are bad Germans and there are good Germans.
You are a good German, Bernie. You protect yourself with a thick coat of cynicism, but at heart I know that you are a good man. But I fear for all good men in Germany and I wonder what terrible choices now lie ahead of them and you. I wonder what awful compromises you will be called upon to make.
Which is why I want to help you to help others in the only way now open to me.
By now you will have found the enclosed check, and your first inclination on seeing that it is much more than you asked to borrow may be not to cash it at all. That would be a mistake. It seems to me that you should take it as my gift to you and start the private detective business you told me about. And for this good reason: in a society founded upon lies, the discovery of truth will become more and more important. Probably it will land you in trouble, but, knowing you, I suspect you can handle that in your own way. Most of all, I hope that you can come to the aid of others in need of your help, as you tried to help me; and that you will do what, because it is dangerous, you ought not to do because it is also right.
I’m not sure I expressed that correctly. While I speak German well enough I find I am out of practice writing it. I hope this letter does not seem too formal. Emperor Charles V said he spoke Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to his horse. But you know, I think that horse might just have been the creature he loved best in the world and that, like you, his horse was very bold and full of spirit; and I cannot think of any other language that suits your temperament, Bernie. Certainly not English, with its many shades of meaning! I never met a more straightforward man than you, which is one of the reasons why I love you so much.
These are ugly times and you will have to go to ugly places and deal with people who have made themselves ugly, but you are my knight of heaven, my Galahad, and I feel certain you can endure all these tests without becoming ugly yourself. And you must always tell yourself that you are not just sweeping leaves on a windy day, although there will be times when that is what it will feel like.
I kiss you. Noreen. xx
WÜRZBURG WASN’T AN UGLY PLACE, although the Franconians had done their best to make their state capital a virtual shrine to Nazism and had effectively uglified what was a pleasantly situated medieval red-roofed town in an open part of a river valley. In almost every shop window there was a photograph of Hitler or a sign advising Jews to keep out or risk the consequences—sometimes both. The town made Berlin look like a model of true representative democracy.
Dominating the landscape from the left bank of the river was the old castle of Marienberg, built by the prince-bishops of Würzburg who had been champions of the Counter-Reformation during another ugly time in German history. But it was just as easy to imagine the imposing white castle inhabited by some evil scientist who exercised a powerful and malign influence on Würzburg, unleashing an elemental force to make monsters of the town’s unsuspecting peasants. These were mostly ordinary-looking folk, although there were one or two with boxy foreheads, vivid surgical scars, and ill-fitting coats who might have given even the most committed galvanist some pause for thought. I felt kind of inhuman myself and walked south from the railway station and onto Adolf-Hitler-Strasse with awkward, stiff legs, which might easily have belonged to a dead man, although that might have been the lingering effect of Noreen’s letter.
Checking into the Palace Hotel Russia House helped to lift my spirits a little. After a week in police custody, I had the taste for a good hotel. Then again, I had the taste anyway, and now that I’d decided to overcome my scruples and cash Noreen’s check, I also had the money. After a light supper in the hotel’s Königs Café, I walked three quarters of a kilometer east, on Rottendorfer Strasse, to a quiet suburb near a reservoir to see the widow Rubusch.
It was a substantial two-story house—three if you counted the dormer window in the high mansard roof—with a curving bay-front door and a long white picket fence atop a substantial granite wall. It was painted the same color of yellowish beige that had been used to paint a small Star of David on the similar garden wall of the house on the opposite side of the street. There were one or two cars parked in front, both new and both made by Daimler-Benz. The trees had been recently pruned. It was a nice German neighborhood: quiet, well kept, solidly respectable. Even that yellow star looked as if it had been painted there by a professional decorator.
I mounted the front steps and tugged on a bell pull as big as a ship’s cannon, and almost as loud.
A light came on and a maid appeared in the door—a big pig’s-trotter of a girl with red braids and a stubborn, almost belligerent, cast to her jaw.
“Yes?”
“Bernhard Gunther,” I said. “Frau Rubusch is expecting me.”
“I wasn’t told about it.”
“Perhaps Hitler’s telegram hasn’t arrived yet. I’m sure he would have wanted to let you know.”
“There’s no need to be sarcastic,” she said, and, taking a large step backward, opened the curved door. “If you only knew how much I’m expected to do around here.”
I put down my briefcase and took off my hat and coat while she closed the front door and then locked it carefully.
“It sounds to me like you need a servant,” I said.
She shot me a high-velocity look.
“You had better wait in here.” She opened a door with the side of her foot and chopped at an electric light switch with the side of her hand. “Make yourself comfortable while I go and fetch her.” Then, seeing my hat and coat, she sighed loudly and took them, shaking her head at the inconvenience of finding her
self with yet another duty to perform.
I went over to the fireplace, where a blackened piece of log was almost burning, and picked up a long poker. “Want me to bring this back to life? I’m good with fire. Show me a shelf of decadent literature and I’ll have you a blaze going in no time.”
The maid smiled back at me bleakly, although it could just as easily have been a sneer. It crossed her mind to say something tart until she thought better of it. I had a poker in my hand, after all, and she looked just the type who gets hit by one. I probably would have done it, too, if I’d been married to her. Not that being struck about the head with a poker would have troubled that girl very much, especially when she was hungry. I’ve seen hippos that looked more vulnerable.
I turned the half-burned log, heaped some embers next to it, and fetched another log from the basket by the hearth. I even bent down and blew on it for a while. A flame reached around the little pile of wood I’d made and then took hold with a snap as loud as a Christmas cracker.
“You’re good at that.”
I turned to see a small, birdlike woman wearing a shawl, and an uncomfortable smile on a freshly lipsticked mouth.
I stood up, wiped my hands, and made the same lame joke I’d made earlier, about decadent books, which didn’t sound any funnier the second time around. Not in that house. In the corner of the room was a table with a radio and a small photograph of Hitler, and a glass bowl of fruit.
“We’re not really like that around here,” she said with arms folded, watching the fire. “They did burn some books in front of the bishop’s palace about eighteen months ago, but not here. Not in East Würzburg.”
She made it sound like we were in Paris.
“And I suppose that yellow star painted on the house opposite is just mischievous children,” I said.
Frau Rubusch laughed but covered her mouth politely while she did, so that I wouldn’t have to look at her teeth, which were perfect and porcelain white, like a doll’s. And indeed a doll was what she most reminded me of with her penciled eyebrows, her fine features, her dainty red cheeks, and her even finer hair. “That’s not a Star of David,” she said through her fingers. “The man who lives in that house is a director of Würzburger Hofbrau, the town brewery, and that star is the company’s trademark.”
“Maybe he should sue the Nazis for infringing his copyright.”
“Which reminds me. Would you care for some schnapps?”
Next to the table was a three-tier wooden drinks trolley with bottles I was fond of. She poured a couple of large schooners, handed me one with her bony little hand, sat down on the sofa, kicked off her shoes, and tucked her feet under her skinny little backside. I’d seen folded laundry that looked less neat than she did.
“So your telegram said that you wanted to see me about my late husband.”
“Yes. I’m sorry for your loss, Frau Rubusch. It must have been a terrible shock to you.”
“It was.”
I lit a cigarette, double-inhaled the smoke, and then swallowed half of my drink. I was nervous about telling this woman that I believed her husband might have been murdered. Especially when she had only just buried him with the belief that he’d died in his sleep of a cerebral aneurysm. I swallowed the other half.
She recognized my nervousness. “Help yourself to another,” she said. “Perhaps then you’ll feel up to telling me what’s brought the Adlon Hotel detective all the way from Berlin.”
I went over to the drinks trolley and refilled my glass. Next to the picture of Hitler was a photograph of a younger, thinner Heinrich Rubusch.
“I really don’t know why Heinrich put that photograph there. Hitler’s, I mean. We were never very political. And it’s not like we used to entertain very much and try to impress people. I suppose he put it there in case anyone did visit. So that they would go away with the impression that we were good Germans.”
“You don’t have to be a Nazi to be that,” I said. “Although it does help when you’re a cop. Before I was a house detective at the Adlon, I was a Homicide cop at Berlin Alexanderplatz.”
“And you think my husband might have been murdered. Is that it?”
“I think it’s a possibility, yes.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Heinrich always stayed at the Adlon when he was in Berlin. I thought maybe you thought he’d stolen some towels.” She waited for a moment and then smiled. “I was joking.”
“Good. I hoped you were. Only, your being a widow, I assumed your sense of humor might have gone missing for a while.”
“Before I met my husband, I ran a sisal farm in East Africa, Herr Gunther. I shot my first lion when I was fourteen. And I was fifteen when I helped my father put down a native rebellion during the Maji Maji War. I’m a lot tougher than I look.”
“Good.”
“Did you stop being a policeman because you weren’t a Nazi?”
“I quit before I was pushed. Maybe I’m not as tough as I look. But I’d rather talk about your husband. I was reading the case notes on the train and was reminded that he had a heart condition.”
“He had an enlarged heart, yes.”
“It sort of makes you wonder why he didn’t die of that instead of a cerebral aneurysm. Did he ever suffer from headaches?”
“No.” She shook her head. “But his death wasn’t exactly a surprise. He ate too much and drank too much. He loved his sausage and his beer, lots of cream, cigars, chocolate. He was a very German sort of German.” She sighed. “He enjoyed life in every way. And I do mean every way.”
“You mean besides his food and his drink and his cigars?”
“That’s precisely what I mean. I haven’t ever been to Berlin. But I hear it’s changed quite a bit since the Nazis came into government. I’m told it’s not the den of iniquity it used to be during the Weimar years.”
“That’s correct. It’s not.”
“Nevertheless, it’s hard to believe that it’s difficult to find the company of a certain kind of woman, if that is what one wants. One imagines that the Nazis can only do so much to change things. After all, it’s not called the oldest profession for nothing.”
I smiled.
“Did I say something amusing?”
“No, not at all, Frau Rubusch. It’s just that after I found your husband dead, I went to a lot of trouble to persuade the police to spare you some of the details when they informed you that he was dead. To leave out the fact that he had been in bed with another woman. I had the quaint idea that it might upset you unnecessarily.”
“That was very thoughtful of you. Perhaps you’re right. You’re not as tough as you look.”
She sipped some of her schnapps and put the glass down on a flame birch coffee table: the X-shaped base made it look like something from Roman antiquity. Frau Rubusch had a sort of Roman air herself. Maybe it was just the way she was sitting, half reclined on her sofa, but it was easy to imagine her as the influential and steely wife of some fat senator who had, perhaps, outlived his usefulness.
“Tell me, Herr Gunther. Is it normal for ex-policemen to be in possession of a police file?”
“No. I’ve been helping out a friend in Homicide. And, to tell the truth, I miss the work. Your husband’s case gave me an itch I simply had to scratch.”
“Yes, I can see how that might happen. You said you were reading my husband’s case file on the train. Is it inside that briefcase?”
“Yes.”
“I would very much like to look at that file.”
“Forgive me, but I don’t think that would be a good idea. The file contains photographs of your husband’s body as he was found in his hotel room.”
“I was hoping it did. Those pictures are what I’d like to see. Oh, you needn’t worry about me. Did you not think I would look at him before we buried him?”
I could see there was no point in arguing with her. Besides, as far as I was concerned, there were other things I wanted to discus
s with her more important than the happy smile on her dead husband’s face. So I opened my briefcase, took out the KRIPO file, and handed it over.
As soon as she saw the photograph, she started to cry, and for a moment, I cursed myself for taking Frau Rubusch at her word. But then she let out a breath, fanned herself with the flat of her hand, and, swallowing an almost visible lump in her throat, said, “And this is how you found him?”
“Yes. Exactly as we found him.”
“Then I fear you are right to be suspicious, Herr Gunther. You see, my husband is wearing his pajama jacket in bed. He never wore a jacket when he was in bed. I used to pack him two pairs of pajamas, but he only ever wore the trousers. Someone else must have put the jacket on him. You see, he used to sweat a lot at night. Fat men often do. Which is why he never wore the jacket. Which reminds me. When the police returned his belongings, I received only one pajama jacket. Two pairs of pajama trousers but only one jacket. At the time I thought the police must have kept it or that perhaps they had lost it. Not that it seemed of any great importance. But now that I’ve seen this photograph, I rather think it must be important. Don’t you?”
“Yes. I do.” I lit another cigarette and stood up to help myself to a third drink. “If you don’t mind.”
She shook her head and carried on staring at the photograph.
“All right,” I said. “Someone must have put the jacket on him after he was dead, in order to make his death seem as natural as possible. But what prostitute would do such a thing? If he died while or immediately after having sex, any sensible party girl would have ripped a hole in the wall to get out of there.”
“Also, my husband was very heavy. So it’s hard to imagine a girl able to lift him up and put a jacket on him by herself. I know I couldn’t have done that. Once, when he was drunk, I tried to get his shirt off him, and it was almost impossible.”
“And yet there’s the evidence of the autopsy. The cause of death appeared to be natural. What else but a strenuous bout of lovemaking could bring about a cerebral aneurysm?”
