A German Requiem

by Philip Kerr

  ‘Congratulations. What’s the role?’

  ‘It’s an English film. Not a very big part, you understand. But there are going to be some big stars in it. I play the role of a girl at a nightclub.’

  ‘Well, that sounds simple enough.’

  ‘Isn’t it exciting?’ she squealed. ‘Me acting with Orson Welles.’

  ‘The War of the Worlds fellow?’

  She shrugged blankly. ‘I never saw that film.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Of course they’re not actually sure about Welles. But they think there’s a good chance they can persuade him to come to Vienna.’

  ‘That all sounds very familiar to me.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I didn’t even know you were an actress.’

  ‘You mean I didn’t tell you? Listen, that job at the Oriental is just temporary.’

  ‘You seem pretty good at it.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve always been good with numbers and money. I used to work in the local tax department.’ She leaned forward and her expression became just a little too quizzical, as if she meant to question me about my year-end business expenses. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ she said, ‘that night when you dropped all that mouse. What were you trying to prove?’

  ‘Prove? I’m not sure I follow you.’

  ‘No?’ She turned her smile up a couple of stops to shoot me a knowing, conspiratorial sort of look. ‘I see a lot of quirks, mister. I get to recognize the types. One day I’m even going to write a book about it. Like Franz Josef Gall. Ever hear of him?’

  ‘I can’t say that I have.’

  ‘He was an Austrian doctor who founded the science of phrenology. Now you’ve heard of that, haven’t you?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘And what can you tell from the bumps I’m wearing on my head?’

  ‘I can tell you’re not the kind to drop that sort of money without a good reason.’ She stretched an eyebrow of draughtsman’s quality up her smooth forehead. ‘I’ve got an idea about that too.’

  ‘Let’s hear it,’ I urged, and poured myself another drink. ‘Maybe you’ll make a better go of reading my mind than you did of reading my cranium.’

  ‘Don’t act so hard to get,’ she told me. ‘We both know you’re the kind of man that likes to make an impression.’

  ‘And did I? Make an impression?’

  ‘I’m here, aren’t I? What do you want — Tristan and Isolde?’

  So that was it. She thought that I had lost the money for her benefit. To look like a big-shot.

  She drained her glass, stood up and handed it back to me. ‘Pour me some more of that love potion of yours while I powder my nose.’

  While she was in the bathroom I refilled the glasses with hands that were none too steady. I didn’t particularly like the woman, but I had nothing against her body: it was just fine. I had an idea that my head was going to object to this little skylark when my libido had released the controls, but at that particular moment I could do nothing more than sit back and enjoy the flight. Even so, I was unprepared for what happened next.

  I heard her open the bathroom door and say something ordinary about the perfume she was wearing, but when I turned round with the drinks I saw that the perfume was all that she was wearing. Actually she had kept her shoes on, but it took my eyes a little while to work their way down past her breasts and her pubic equilateral. Except for those high-heels, Lotte Hartmann was as naked as an assassin’s blade, and probably just as treacherous.

  She stood in the doorway of my bedroom, her hands hanging by her bare thighs, glowing with delight as my tongue licked my lips rather too obviously for me to have contemplated using it on anything but her. Maybe I could have given her a pompous little lecture at that. I’d seen enough naked women in my time, some of them in fair shape too. I ought to have tossed her back like a fish, but the sweat starting out on my palms, the flare of my nostrils, the lump in my throat and the dull, insistent ache in my groin told me that the machina had other ideas as to the next course of action than the deus which called it home.

  Delighted with the effect she was having on me, Lotte smiled happily and took the glass from my hand.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me undressing,’ she said, ‘only the gown is an expensive one and I had the strangest feeling that you were about to tear it off my back.’

  ‘Why should I mind? It’s not as if I haven’t finished reading the evening paper. Anyway, I like having a naked woman about the place.’ I watched the slight wobble of her behind as she walked lazily to the other side of the sitting-room where she swallowed her drink and dropped the empty glass on to the sofa.

  Suddenly I wanted to see her bottom shaking like a jelly against the rut of my abdomen. She seemed to sense this and, bending forwards, took hold of the radiator like a wrestler pulling against the ring ropes in his corner. Then she stood with her feet a short way apart and stood quietly with her backside towards me, as if waiting for a thoroughly unnecessary body-search. She glanced back over her shoulder, flexed her buttocks and then faced the wall again.

  I’d had more eloquent invitations, but with the blood buzzing in my ears and battering those few brain cells not yet affected by alcohol or adrenalin, I really couldn’t remember when. Probably I didn’t even care. I tore off my pyjamas and stalked after her.

  I’m no longer young enough, nor quite thin enough, to share a single bed with anything other than a hangover or a cigarette. So it was perhaps a sense of surprise that woke me from an unexpectedly comfortable sleep at around six o’clock. Lotte, who might otherwise have caused me a restless night, was no longer lying in the crook of my arm and for a brief, happy moment I supposed that she must have gone home. It was then that I heard a small, stifled sob coming from the sitting-room. Reluctantly I slipped out from under the covers and into my overcoat, and went to see what was wrong.

  Still naked, Lotte had made a little ball of herself on the floor by the radiator where it was warm. I squatted down beside her and asked why she was crying. A fat tear rolled down a stained cheek and hung on her top lip like a translucent wart. She licked it away and sniffed as I handed her my handkerchief.

  ‘What do you care?’ she said bitterly. ‘Now that you’ve had your fun.’

  She had a point, but I went ahead and protested, enough to be polite. Lotte heard me out and when her vanity was satisfied she tried a crippled sort of smile that reminded me of the way an unhappy child will cheer up when you hand over 50 pfennigs or a penny-chew.

  ‘You’re very sweet,’ she allowed finally, and wiped her red eyes. ‘I’ll be all right now, thank you.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

  Lotte glanced at me out of the corner of one eye. ‘In this town? Better tell me your rates first, doctor.’ She blew her nose and then uttered a short, hollow laugh. ‘You might make a good screw doctor.’

  ‘You seem quite sane to me,’ I said, helping her to an arm-chair.

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’

  ‘Is that your professional advice?’ I lit a couple of cigarettes and handed her one. She smoked it desperately, and without much apparent pleasure.

  ‘That’s my advice as a woman who’s mad enough to have been having an affair with a man who just slapped her round like a circus clown.’

  ‘König? I never saw him as the violent type.’

  ‘If he seems urbane that’s only the morphine he uses.’

  ‘He’s an addict?’

  ‘I don’t know if he’s an addict exactly. But whatever it was he did while he was in the SS, he needed morphine to get through the war.’

  ‘So why did he paste you?’

  She bit her lip fiercely. ‘Well, it wasn’t because he thought I could use a little colour.’

  I laughed. I had to hand it to her, she was a tough one. I said, ‘Not with that tan anyway.’ I picked up the astrakhan jacket from the floor where she had dropped it and draped it around her shoulders. Lotte drew it close to her th
roat and smiled bitterly.

  ‘Nobody puts his hand on my jaw,’ she said, ‘not if he ever wants to put his hand any place else. Tonight was the first and last time that he’ll give me a pair of slaps, so help me.’ She blew smoke from her nostrils as fiercely as a dragon. ‘That’s what you get when you try to help someone, I guess.’

  ‘Help who?’

  ‘König came into the Oriental at around ten last night,’ she explained. ‘He was in a foul mood and when I asked him why, he wanted to know if I remembered a dentist who used to come into the club and gamble a bit.’ She shrugged. ‘Well, I did remember him. A bad player but certainly not half as bad as you like to pretend you are.’ Her eyes flicked at me uncertainly.

  I nodded, urgently. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Helmut wanted to know if Dr Heim, the dentist, had been in the place during the last couple of days. I told him I didn’t think he had. Then he wanted me to ask some of the girls if they remembered him being there. Well, there was one particular girl I said he should be sure to speak to. A bit of a hard-luck case, but pretty with it. The doctors always went for her. I guess it was because she always looked that little bit more vulnerable, and there are some men who quite like that sort of thing. It so happened she was sitting at the bar, so I pointed her out to him.

  I felt my stomach turning to quicksand. ‘What was this girl’s name?’ I asked.

  ‘Veronika something,’ she said, and noticing my concern, added, ‘Why? Do you know her?’

  ‘A little,’ I said. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Helmut and one of his friends took Veronika next door.’

  ‘To the hat shop?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was soft now and just a little ashamed. ‘Helmut’s temper —’ she flinched at the memory of it ‘— I was worried. Veronika’s a nice girl. A doofy, but nice, you know. She’s had a bit of a hard life but she’s got plenty of guts. Perhaps too many for her own good. I thought with Helmut the way he was, the mood he was in, it would be better for her to tell him if she knew anything or not, and to tell him quickly. He’s not a very patient man. Just in case he turned nasty.’ She grimaced. ‘Not much of a corner to turn, when you know Helmut.’

  ‘So I went after them. Veronika was crying when I found them. They’d already slapped her around quite hard. She’d had enough, and I told them to stop it. That was when he slapped me. Twice.’ She held her cheeks as if the pain lingered with the memory. ‘Then he shoved me out into the corridor and told me to mind my own business and stay out of his.’

  ‘What happened after that?’

  I went to the Ladies, a couple of bars and came here, in that order.’

  ‘Did you see what happened to Veronika?’

  ‘They left with her, Helmut and the other man.’

  ‘You mean they took her away somewhere?’

  Lotte shrugged glumly. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Where would they have taken her?’ I stood up and walked into the bedroom.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Try and think.’

  ‘You’re going after her?’

  ‘Like you said, she’s been through a lot already.’ I started to dress. ‘And what’s more, I got her into this.’

  ‘You. How come?’

  While I finished dressing I described how, coming back from Grinzing with König, I had explained how I would have gone about trying to find a missing person, in this case Dr Heim.

  ‘I told him how we could check Heim’s usual haunts if he could tell me where they were,’ I told her. But I left out how I had thought it would never have got that far: how I assumed that with Müller — possibly Nebe and König too — arrested by Belinsky and the people from Crowcass, the need actually to look for Heim would never have arisen: how I thought that I had stalled König into waiting until the meeting at Grinzing was over before we started to look for his dead dentist.

  ‘Why should they have thought that you could find her?’

  ‘Before the war I was a detective with the Berlin police.’

  ‘I should have known,’ she snorted.

  ‘Not really,’ I said, straightening my tie, and jabbing a cigarette into my sour-tasting mouth, ‘but I should certainly have known that your boyfriend was arrogant enough to go and look for Heim on his own. It was stupid of me to think that he would wait.’ I climbed back into my overcoat and picked up my hat. ‘Do you think they would have taken her to Grinzing?’ I asked her.

  ‘Now I come to think of it, I had the idea they were going to Veronika’s room, wherever that is. But if she’s not there, Grinzing would be as good a place to look as any.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope she’s home.’ But even as I said it, I knew in my guts that this was unlikely.

  Lotte stood up. The jacket covered her chest and her upper torso, but left bare the burning bush which earlier had spoken so persuasively and left me feeling as sore as a skinned rabbit.

  ‘What about me?’ she said quietly. ‘What shall I do?’

  ‘You?’ I nodded down at her nakedness. ‘Put the magic away and go home.’

  33

  The morning was bright, clear and chilly. Crossing the park in front of the new town hall on my way to the Inner City, a couple of squirrels bounded up to say hello and check me out for breakfast. But before they got close they caught the cloud on my face and the smell of fear on my socks. Probably they even made a mental note of the heavy shape in my coat pocket and thought better of it. Smart little creatures. After all, it wasn’t so very long since small mammals were being shot and eaten in Vienna. So they hurried on their way, like living scribbles of fur.

  At the dump where Veronika lived they were used to people, mostly men, coming and going at all hours of the day and night, and even if the landlady had been the most misanthropic of lesbians, I doubt she would have paid me much attention if she had met me on the stairs. But as it happened there was nobody about, and I made my way up to Veronika’s room unchallenged.

  I didn’t need to break the door in. It was wide open, just like all the drawers and cupboards. I wondered why they had bothered when all the evidence they needed was still hanging on the back of the chair where Doctor Heim had left it.

  ‘The stupid bitch,’ I muttered angrily. ‘What’s the point of getting rid of a man’s body if you leave his suit in your room?’ I slammed a drawer shut. The force dislodged one of Veronika’s pathetic sketches from off the chest of drawers, and it floated to the floor like a huge dead leaf. König had probably turned the place over out of pure spite. And then taken her to Grinzing. With an important meeting there that morning I couldn’t see that they would have gone anywhere else. Assuming that they didn’t kill her outright. On the other hand, if Veronika told them the truth about what had happened — that a couple of friends had helped her to dispose of Heim’s body after his suffering a heart attack, then (if she had omitted mentioning Belinsky’s name and my own) perhaps they would let her go. But there was a real possibility that they might still kick her around to make sure she had told them everything she knew: that by the time I arrived to try and help her I would already be exposed as the man who had dumped Heim’s body.

  I remembered how Veronika had told me about her life as a Sudeten Jew during wartime. How she had hid in lavatories, dirty basements, cupboards and attics. And then a DP camp for six months. ‘A bit of hard life,’ was how Lotte Hartmann had described it. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that she’d had very little of what could properly be called life at all.

  I glanced at my wristwatch and saw that it was seven o’clock. There were still three hours to go before the meeting started: longer before Belinsky could be expected with ‘the cavalry’, as he put it. And because the men who had taken Veronika were who they were, I began to think that there was a real possibility that she wouldn’t live that long. It looked as if I had no choice but to go and get her myself.

  I took out my revolver, thumbed open the six-shot cylinder and checked that it was fully load
ed before heading back downstairs. Outside, I hailed a taxi at the rank on Kärtnerstrasse and told the driver to go to Grinzing.

  ‘Whereabouts in Grinzing?’ he asked, accelerating away from the kerb.

  ‘I’ll tell you when we get there.’

  ‘You’re the boss,’ he said, speeding on to the Ring. ‘Only reason I asked was that everything there will be shut at this time of the morning. And you don’t look like you’re going hill-walking. Not in that coat.’ The car shuddered as we hit a couple of enormous potholes. ‘And you’re no Austrian. I can tell that from your accent. You sound like a pifke, sir. Am I right?’

  ‘Skip the university-of-life class, will you? I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘That’s all right, sir. Only reason I asked was in case you were looking for a little bit of fun. You see, sir, only a few minutes further on from Grinzing, on the road to Cobenzl, there’s this hotel — the Schloss-Hotel Cobenzl.’ He wrestled with the wheel as the car hit another pothole. ‘Right now it’s being used as a DP camp. There’s girls there you can have for just a few cigarettes. Even at this hour of the morning if you fancy it. A man wearing a good coat like yours could have two or three together maybe. Get them to put a nice show on for you between themselves if you know what I mean.’ He laughed coarsely. ‘Some of these girls, sir. They’ve grown up in DP camps. Got the morals of rabbits, so they have. They’ll do anything. Believe me, sir, I know what I’m talking about. I keep rabbits myself.’ He chuckled warmly at the thought of it all. ‘I could arrange something for you, sir. In the back of the car. For a small commission of course.’

  I leaned forwards on the seat. I don’t know why I bothered with him. Maybe I just don’t like garter-handlers. Maybe I just didn’t much care for his Trotsky-lookalike face.

  ‘That would be just great,’ I said, very tough. ‘If it weren’t for a Russian table-trap I found in the Ukraine. Partisans put a tension-release grenade behind a drawer that they left half-open with a bottle of vodka in there, just to get your attention. I came along, pulled the drawer, the pressure was released and the grenade detonated. It took the meat and two vegetables clean off at my belly. I nearly died of shock, then I nearly died from loss of blood. And when finally I came out of the coma I nearly died of grief. I tell you if I so much as see a bit of plum I’m liable to go mad with the frustration of it. I’d probably kill the nearest man to me out of plain envy.’