by Philip Kerr
‘I was a friend of Captain Linden’s,’ I said in my halting English. ‘I have just heard the terrible news, and I came to say how sorry my wife and I were. He was kind to us both. Gave us PX, you know.’ From my pocket I produced the short letter I had composed on the train. ‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to deliver this to Colonel Helm.’
The soldier’s tone changed immediately.
‘Yes sir, I’ll give it to him.’ He took the letter and regarded it awkwardly. ‘Very kind of you to think of him.’
‘It is just a few marks, for some flowers,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘And a card. My wife and I wanted something on Captain Linden’s grave. We would go to the funeral if it was in Berlin, but we thought that his family would be taking him home.’
‘Well, no, sir,’ he said. ‘The funeral’s in Vienna, this Friday morning. Family wanted it that way. Less trouble than shipping a body all the way home I guess.’
I shrugged. ‘For a Berliner that might as well be in America. Travel is not easy these days.’ I sighed and glanced at my watch. ‘I had better be getting along. I have quite a walk ahead of me.’ When I turned to walk away, I groaned, and clutching my knee and affecting a broad grimace, I sat squarely down on the road in front of the barrier, my stick clattering on the cobbles beside me. Quite a performance. The soldier side-stepped his checkpoint.
‘Are you all right?’ he said, collecting my stick and helping me to my feet.
‘A bit of Russian shrapnel. It gives me some trouble now and again. I’ll be all right in a minute or two.’
‘Hey, come on in to the gatehouse and sit down for a couple of minutes.’ He led me round the barrier and through the little door of his hut.
‘Thank you. It is very kind of you.’
‘Kind, nothing. Any friend of Captain Linden’s …’
I sat down heavily and rubbed my almost painless knee. ‘Did you know him well?’
‘Me, I’m just a Pfc. I can’t say I knew him, but I used to drive him now and again.’
I smiled and shook my head. ‘Could you speak more slowly please? My English is not so good.’
‘I drove him now and again,’ the soldier said more loudly, and he imitated the action of turning a steering-wheel. ‘You say that he gave you PX?’
‘Yes, he was very kind.’
‘Yeah, that sounds like Linden. Always had plenty of PX to give away.’ He paused as a thought occurred to him. ‘There was one particular couple — well, he was like a son to them. Always taking them Care packages. Perhaps you know them. The Drexlers?’
I frowned and rubbed my jaw thoughtfully. ‘Not the couple who live in —’ I snapped my fingers as if the street name were on the tip of my tongue ‘— where is it now?’
‘Steglitz,’ he said, prompting me. ‘Handjery Strasse.’
I shook my head. ‘No, I must be thinking of someone else. Sorry.’
‘Hey, don’t mention it.’
‘I suppose the police must have asked you a lot of questions about Captain Linden’s murder.’
‘Nope. They asked us nothing, on account of the fact that they already got the guy who did it.’
‘They’ve got someone? That is good news. Who is he?’
‘Some Austrian.’
‘But why did he do it? Did he say?’
‘Nope. Crazy, I guess. How d’you meet the captain, anyway?’
‘I met him at a nightclub. The Gay Island.’
‘Yeah, I know it. Never go there myself. Me, I prefer those places down on the Ku-damm: Ronny’s Bar, and the Club Royale. But Linden used to go to the Gay Island a lot. He had a lot of German friends, I guess, and that’s where they liked to go.’
‘Well, he spoke such good German.’
‘That he did, sir. Like a native.’
‘My wife and I used to wonder why he never had a regular girl. We even offered to introduce him to some. Nice girls, from good families.’
The soldier shrugged. ‘Too busy, I guess.’ He chuckled. ‘He sure had plenty of others. Gee, that man liked to frat.’
After a moment I realized he meant fraternize, which was the euphemism in general military usage for what another American officer was doing to my wife. I squeezed my knee experimentally and stood up.
‘Sure you’re all right now?’ said the soldier.
‘Yes, thank you. You have been most kind.
‘Kind, nothing. Any friend of Captain Linden’s …’
8
I inquired after the Drexlers at the Steglitz local post office on Sintenis Platz, a quiet, peaceful square, once covered in grass and now given over to the cultivation of things edible.
The postmistress, a woman with an enormous Ionic curl on either side of her head, informed me crisply that her office knew of the Drexlers and that like most people in the area they collected their mail from the office. Therefore, she explained, their precise address on Handjery Strasse was not known. But she did add that the Drexlers’ usually considerable mail was now even larger in view of the fact that it was several days since they had bothered to collect it. She used the word ‘bothered’ with more than a little distaste, and I wondered if there was some reason she should have disliked the Drexlers. My offer to deliver their mail was swiftly rebuffed. That would not have been proper. But she told me that I could certainly remind them to come and take it away as it was becoming a nuisance.
Next I decided to try at the Schönberg Police Praesidium on nearby Grünewald Strasse. Walking there, under the uneasy shadow of gorgonzola walls that leaned forwards as if permanently on tiptoe, past buildings otherwise unscathed but with just a corner balustrade missing, like an illicitly sampled wedding cake, took me right by the Gay Island nightclub, where Becker had reportedly met Captain Linden. It was a dreary, cheerless-looking place with a cheap neon sign, and I felt almost glad that it was closed.
The bull on the desk at the Police Praesidium had a face as long as a mandarin’s thumbnail, but he was an obliging sort of fellow and while he consulted the local registration records he told me that the Drexlers were not unknown to the Schönberg police.
‘They’re a Jewish couple,’ he explained. ‘Lawyers. Quite well known around here. You might even say that they were notorious.’
‘Oh? Why’s that?’
‘It’s not that they break any laws, you understand.’ The sergeant’s wurst-sized finger found their name in his ledger and traversed the page to the street and the number. ‘Here we are. Handjery Strasse. Number seventeen.’
‘Thank you, Sergeant. So what is it about them?’
‘Are you a friend of theirs?’ He sounded circumspect.
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Well sir, it’s just that people don’t like that kind of thing. They want to forget about what happened. I don’t think there’s any good in raking over the past like that.’
‘Forgive me, Sergeant, but what is it that they do exactly?’
‘They hunt so-called Nazi war-criminals, sir.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, I can see how that might not make them very popular with the neighbours.’
‘It was wrong what happened. But we have to rebuild, start again. And we can hardly do that if the war follows us around like a bad smell.’
I needed some more information from him, so I agreed. Then I asked about the Gay Island.
‘It’s not the sort of place I’d let my missus catch me in, sir. It’s run by a sparkler called Kathy Fiege. The place is full of them. But there’s never any trouble there, apart from the occasional drunken Yank. Not that you can call that trouble. And if the rumours are true we’ll all be Yanks soon — leastways all of us in the American sector, eh?’
I thanked him and walked to the station door. ‘One more thing, sergeant,’ I said, turning on my heels. ‘The Drexlers? Do they ever find any war-criminals?’
The sergeant’s long face took on an amused, sly aspect.
‘Not if we can help it, sir.’
The Drexlers lived a short way south fr
om the Police Praesidium, in a recently renovated building close to the S–Bahn line and opposite a small school. But there was no reply when I knocked at the door of their top-floor apartment.
I lit a cigarette to rid my nostrils of the strong smell of disinfectant that hung about the landing, and knocked again. Glancing down I saw two cigarette-ends lying, unaccountably uncollected, on the floor close to the door. It didn’t look as if anyone had been through the door in a while. Bending down to pick them up I found the smell even stronger. Dropping into a press-up position I pushed my nose up to the gap between floor and door and retched as the air inside the apartment caught my throat and lungs. I rolled quickly away and coughed half my insides on to the stairs below.
When I had recovered my breath I stood up and shook my head. It seemed hardly possible that anyone could live in such an atmosphere. I glanced down the stairwell. There was nobody about.
I stepped back from the door and kicked hard at the lock with my better leg, but it budged hardly at all. Once more I checked the stairwell to see if the noise had drawn anyone out of their apartment and, finding myself undetected, I kicked again.
The door sprang open and a terrible, pestilent smell flew forth, so strong that I reeled back for a moment and almost fell downstairs. Pulling my coat lapel across my nose and mouth I bounded into the darkened apartment, and, spying the faint outline of a curtain valance, I tore the heavy velvet drapes aside and threw open the window.
Cold air stripped the tears from my eyes as I leaned into the fresh air. Children on their way home from school waved to me and weakly I waved back at them.
When I was sure that the draught between the door and the window had ventilated the room I ducked inside to find whatever I would find. I didn’t think it was the kind of smell that was meant to take care of any pest smaller than a rogue elephant.
I went over to the front door and pushed it back and forwards on its hinges to fan some more clean air through while I surveyed the desk, the chairs, the bookcases, the filing cabinets and the piles of books and papers that filled the little room. Beyond was an open door, and the edge of a brass bedstead.
My foot kicked something on the floor as I moved towards the bedroom. A cheap tin tray of the kind you find in a bar or a Café.
But for the congestion in the two faces that lay side by side on their pillows, you might have thought they were still sleeping. If your name is on someone’s death-card, there are worse ways than asphyxia while asleep to collect it.
I pulled back the quilt and undid Herr Drexler’s pyjama top, revealing a well-swollen stomach marbled with veins and blebs like a piece of blue cheese. I pressed it with my forefinger: it felt tight. Sure enough, a harder pressure with my hand produced a fart from the corpse, indicating a gaseous disruption of the internal organs. It appeared as if the pair of them had been dead for at least a week.
I drew the quilt over them again and returned to the front room. For a while I stared hopelessly at the books and papers which lay on the desk, even making a desultory attempt to find some clue or other, but since I had as yet only the vaguest appreciation of the puzzle, I soon abandoned this as a waste of time.
Outside, under a mother-of-pearl-coloured sky, I was just starting up the street towards the S-Bahn when something caught my eye. There was so much discarded military equipment still lying about Berlin that, but for the manner of the Drexlers’ death, I should have paid the thing no regard. Lying on a heap of rubble that had collected in the gutter was a gasmask. An empty tin can rolled to my feet as I tugged at the rubber strap. Rapidly colouring in the outline scenario of the murder, I abandoned the mask and squatted down on to the backs of my legs to read the label on the rusting metallic curve.
‘Zyklon-B. Poisonous gas! Danger! Keep cool and dry! Protect from the sun and from naked flame. Open and use with extreme caution. Kaliwerke A. G. Kolin.’
In my mind’s eye I pictured a man standing outside the Drexlers’ door. It was late at night. Nervously he half-smoked a couple of cigarettes before pulling on the gas-mask, checking the straps to make sure he had a tight fit. Then he opened the can of crystallized prussic acid, tipped the pellets — already liquefying on contact with the air — on to the tray he had brought with him, and quickly slid it under the door, into the Drexlers’ apartment. The sleeping couple breathed deeply, lapsing into unconsciousness as the Zyklon-B gas, first used on human beings in the concentration camps, started to block the uptake of oxygen in their blood. Small chance that the Drexlers would have left a window open in this weather. But perhaps the murderer laid something — a coat or a blanket — across the bottom of the door to prevent a draught of fresh air into the apartment, or to prevent anyone else in the building from being killed. One part in two thousand of the gas was lethal. Finally, after fifteen or twenty minutes, when the pellets were fully dissolved, and the murderer was satisfied that the gas had done its silent, deadly work — that two more Jews had, for whatever reason, joined the six million — he would have collected up his coat, his mask and his empty can (perhaps he hadn’t meant to leave the tray: not that it mattered, he would surely have worn gloves to handle the Zyklon-B), and walked into the night.
You could almost admire its simplicity.
9
Somewhere, further up the street, a jeep grumbled off into the snow-charged blackness. I wiped the condensation off the window with my sleeve, and saw the reflection of a face that I recognized.
‘Herr Gunther,’ he said, as I turned in my seat, ‘I thought it was you.’ A thin layer of snow covered the man’s head. With its squared-off skull and prominent, perfectly round ears, it reminded me of an ice-bucket.
‘Neumann,’ I said, ‘I thought you were dead for sure.’
He wiped his head and took off his coat. ‘Mind if I join you? My girl hasn’t turned up yet.’
‘When did you ever have a girl, Neumann? At least, one you hadn’t already paid for.’
He twitched nervously. ‘Look, if you’re going to be —’
‘Relax,’ I said. ‘Sit down.’ I waved to the waiter. ‘What will you have?’
‘Just a beer, thanks.’ He sat down and with narrowed eyes regarded me critically. ‘You haven’t changed much, Herr Gunther. Older-looking, a bit greyer, and rather thinner than you used to be, but still the same.’
‘I hate to think what I’d be like if you thought I looked any different,’ I said pointedly. ‘But what you say sounds like a fairly accurate description of eight years.’
‘Is that how long it’s been? Since we last met?’
‘Give or take a world war. You still listening at keyholes?’
‘Herr Gunther, you don’t know the half of it,’ he snorted. ‘I’m a prison warder at Tegel.’
‘I don’t believe it. You? You’re as bent as a stolen rocking-chair.’
‘Honest, Herr Gunther, it’s true. The Yanks have got me guarding Nazi war-criminals.’
‘And you’re the hard-labour, right?’
Neumann twitched again.
‘Here comes your beer.’
The waiter laid the glass in front of him. I started to speak but the Americans at the next table burst into loud laughter. Then one of them, a sergeant, said something else and this time even Neumann laughed.
‘He said that he doesn’t believe in fraternization,’ Neumann explained. ‘He said he doesn’t want to treat any fräulein the way he’d treat his brother.’
I smiled and looked over at the Americans. ‘Did you learn to speak English working in Tegel?’
‘Sure. I learn a lot of things.’
‘You were always a good informer.’
‘For instance,’ he lowered his voice, ‘I heard that the Soviets stopped a British military train at the border to take off two cars containing German passengers. The word is that it’s in retaliation for the establishment of Bizonia.’ He meant the merging of the British and American zones of Germany. Neumann drank some of his beer and shrugged. ‘Maybe there will be another wa
r.’
‘I don’t see how,’ I said. ‘Nobody’s got much stomach for another dose of it.’
‘I dunno. Maybe.’
He set his glass down and produced a box of snuff which he offered to me. I shook my head and grimaced as I watched him take a pinch and slide it under his lip.
‘Did you see any action during the war?’
‘Come on, Neumann, you should know better. Nobody asks a question like that these days. Do you hear me asking how you got a denazification certificate?’
‘I’ll have you know that I got that quite legitimately.’ He fished out his wallet and unfolded a piece of paper. ‘I was never involved in anything. Free from Nazi infection this says, and that’s what I am, and proud of it. I didn’t even join the army.’
‘Only because they wouldn’t have you.’
‘Free from Nazi infection,’ he repeated angrily.
‘Must be about the only infection you never had.’
‘What are you doing here anyway?’ he sneered back.
‘I love coming to the Gay Island.’
‘I’ve never seen you here before, and I’ve been coming here a while.’
‘Yes, it looks like the kind of place you’d feel comfortable in. But how do you afford it, on a warder’s pay?’
Neumann shrugged evasively.
‘You must do a lot of errands for people,’ I suggested.
‘Well, you have to, don’t you.’ He smiled thinly. ‘I’ll bet you’re here on a case, aren’t you?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I might be able to help. Like I say, I come here a lot.’
‘All right then.’ I took out my wallet and held up a five-dollar bill. ‘You ever hear of a man called Eddy Holl? He comes in here sometimes. He’s in the advertising and publicity business. A firm called Reklaue & Werbe Zentrale.’
Neumann swallowed and stared dismally at the bill. ‘No,’ he said reluctantly, ‘I don’t know him. But I could ask around. The barman’s a friend. He might —’
‘I already tried him. Not the talkative type. But from what he did say, I don’t think he knew Holl.’
