by Philip Kerr
The driver glanced back over his shoulder. ‘Sorry,’ he said nervously, ‘I didn’t mean to —’
‘Forget it,’ I said, almost smiling now.
When we came past the yellow house I told the driver to keep going to the top of the hill. I had decided to approach Nebe’s house from the back, through the vineyards.
Because the meters on Vienna’s taxis were old and out of date, it was customary to multiply the tariff shown by five to give the total sum payable. There were six schillings on the clock when I told him to stop, and this was all the driver asked me for, his hand trembling as he took the money. The car was already roaring away by the time I realized he had forgotten his arithmetic.
I stood there, on a muddy track by the side of the road, wondering why I hadn’t kept my mouth shut, having intended to tell the man to wait a while. Now if I did find Veronika, I would have the problem of how to get away. Me and my smart mouth, I thought. The poor bastard was only offering a service, I told myself. But he was wrong about one thing. There was something open, a Café further up Cobenzlgasse: the Rudelshof. I decided that if I was going to get shot I’d prefer to collect it with something in my stomach.
The Café was a cosy little place if you didn’t mind taxidermy. I sat down under the beady eye of an anthraxic-looking weasel and waited for the badly stuffed proprietor to shamble up to my table.
‘God’s greeting to you, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s a lovely morning.’
I reeled away from his distilled breath. ‘I can tell you’re already enjoying it,’ I said, using my smart mouth yet again. He shrugged, uncomprehending, and took my order.
The five-schilling Viennese breakfast I gobbled tasted like the taxidermist had cooked it during his time off between jobs: the coffee had grounds in it, the roll was about as fresh as a piece of scrimshaw and the egg was so hard it might have come from a quarry. But I ate it. I had so much on my mind I’d probably have eaten the weasel if only they’d sat it on a slice of toast.
Outside the Café I walked down the road awhile and then climbed over a wall into what I thought must be Arthur Nebe’s vineyard.
There wasn’t much to see. The vines themselves, planted in neat rows, were still only young shoots, hardly higher than my knee. Here and there on high trolleys were what looked like abandoned jet engines but were in fact the rapid burners they used at night to heat the atmosphere around the shoots and protect them from late frost. They were still warm to the touch. The field itself was perhaps a hundred metres square and offered little in the way of cover. I wondered exactly how Belinsky would manage to deploy his men. Apart from crawling the length of the field on your belly, you could only stay close to the wall while you worked your way down to the trees immediately behind the yellow house and its outbuildings.
When I got as far as the trees I looked for some sign of life, and seeing none I edged my way forwards until I heard voices. Next to the largest of the outbuildings, a long half-timbered affair that resembled a barn, two men, neither of whom I recognized, were standing talking. Each man wore a metal drum on his back, and this was connected by a rubber hose to a long thin tube of metal he held in his hand which I presumed to be some kind of crop-spraying contraption.
At last they finished their conversation and walked towards the opposite side of the vineyard, as if to start their attack on the bacteria, fungi and insects which plagued their lives. I waited until they were well across the field before leaving the cover of the trees and entering the building.
A musty fruit smell hit my nostrils. Large oak vats and storage tanks were ranged under the open rafters of the ceiling like enormous cheeses. I walked the length of the stone floor and emerged at the other end of this first building to be faced with the door to another, built at right angles to the house.
This second outhouse contained hundreds of oak barrels, which lay on their sides as if awaiting the giant St Bernard dogs to come and collect them. Stairs led down into the darkness. It seemed like a good place to imprison someone, so I switched on the light and went downstairs to take a look. But there were only thousands of bottles of wine, each rack marked by a small blackboard on which were chalked a few numbers that must have meant something to somebody. I came back upstairs, switched off the light and stood by the barrel-room window. It was beginning to look as if Veronika might be in the house after all.
From where I was standing I had a clear view across a short cobbled yard, to the west side of the house. In front of an open door a big black cat sat staring at me. Beside the door was the window of what looked like the kitchen. There was a large, shiny shape on the kitchen ledge which I thought was probably a pot or a kettle. After a while the cat walked slowly up to the outbuilding where I was hiding and mewed loudly at something beside the window where I was standing. For a second or two it fixed me with its green eyes, and then for no apparent reason ran off. I looked back towards the house and continued to watch the kitchen door and window. After a few more minutes I judged it safe to leave the barrel room, and started across the yard.
I had not gone three paces when I heard the ratchet sound of an automatic-slide and almost simultaneously felt the cold steel of a gun muzzle pressed hard against my neck.
‘Clasp your hands behind your head,’ said a voice, none too distinctly.
I did as I was told. The gun pressed under my ear felt heavy enough to be a .45. Enough to dispose of a large part of my skull. I winced as he screwed the gun between my jaw and my jugular vein.
‘Twitch and you’re tomorrow morning’s pig swill,’ he said, smacking my pockets, and relieving me of my revolver.
‘You’ll find that Herr Nebe is expecting me,’ I said.
‘Don’t know a Herr Nebe,’ he said thickly, almost as if his mouth didn’t work properly. Naturally I was reluctant to turn round and take a good look to make sure.
‘Yes, that’s right, he changed his name, didn’t he?’ I tried hard to remember Nebe’s new surname. Meanwhile I heard the man behind me step back a couple of steps.
‘Now walk to your right,’ he told me. ‘Towards the trees. And don’t trip on your shoelaces or anything.’
He sounded big and not too bright. And it was a strangely accented German he spoke: like Prussian, but different; more like the Old Prussian I had heard my grandfather speak; almost like the German I had heard spoken in Poland.
‘Look, you’re making a mistake,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you check with your boss? My name is Bernhard Gunther. There’s a meeting at ten o’clock this morning. I’m supposed to be at it.’
‘It’s not even eight yet,’ grunted my captor. ‘If you’re here for a meeting, how come you’re so early? And how come you don’t come to the front door like normal visitors? How come you walk across the fields? How come you snoop around in the outhouses?’
‘I’m early because I own a couple of wineshops in Berlin,’ I said. ‘I thought it might be nice to take a look around the estate.’
‘You were taking a look all right. You’re a snooper.’ He chuckled cretinously. ‘I got orders to shoot snoopers.’
‘Now wait a minute —’ I turned into a clubbing blow from his gun, and as I fell I caught a glimpse of a big man with a shaven head and a lopsided sort of jaw. He grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and hauled me back on to my feet, and I wondered why I had never thought to sew a razor blade under that part of my coat collar. He pushed me through the line of trees and down a slope to a small clearing where several large dustbins were standing. A trail of smoke and a sweet sickly smell arose through the roof of a small brick hut: it was where they incinerated the rubbish. Next to several bags of what looked like cement, a sheet of rusting corrugated iron lay on some bricks. The man ordered me to draw it aside.
Now I had it. He was a Latvian. A big, stupid Latvian. And I decided that if he was working for Arthur Nebe he was probably from a Latvian SS division, that had served in one of the Polish death camps. They had used a lot of Latvians at places like Auschwitz. Latvians were
enthusiastic anti-Semites when Moses Mendelssohn was one of Germany’s favourite sons.
I hauled the iron sheet away from what was revealed as some kind of old drain, or cesspit. Certainly it smelt every bit as bad. It was then that I saw the cat again. It emerged from between two paper sacks labelled calcium oxide close by the pit. It mewed contemptuously, as if to say, ‘I warned you there was someone standing in that yard, but you wouldn’t listen to me.’ An acrid, chalky smell came up from the pit and made my skin crawl. ‘You’re right,’ mewed the cat, like something from Edgar Allan Poe, ‘calcium oxide is a cheap alkali for treating acid soil. Just the sort of thing you would expect to see in a vineyard. But it’s also called quicklime, and that’s an extremely efficient compound for speeding human decomposition.’
With horror I realized that the Latvian really did mean to kill me. And there I was trying to place his accent like some sort of philologist, and to recall the chemical formulas I had learned at school.
Then I got my first good look at him. He was big and as burly as a circus horse, but you hardly noticed that for looking at his face: its whole right side was crooked like he had a big chew of tobacco in his cheek; his right eye stared wide as if it had been made of glass. He could probably have kissed his own earlobe. Starved of affection, as any man with such a face would have been, he probably had to.
‘Kneel down by the side of the pit,’ he snarled, sounding like a Neanderthal short of a couple of vital chromosomes.
‘You’re not going to kill an old comrade, are you?’ I said desperately trying to remember Nebe’s new name, or even one of the Latvian regiments. I considered shouting for help except that I knew he would have shot me without hesitation.
‘You’re an old comrade?’ he sneered, without much apparent difficulty.
‘Obersturmführer with the First Latvian,’ I said with a poor show of nonchalance.
The Latvian spat into the bushes and regarded me blankly with his pop eye. The gun, a big blue steel Colt automatic, remained pointed squarely at my chest.
‘First Latvian, eh? You don’t sound like a Lat.’
‘I’m Prussian,’ I said. ‘Our family lived in Riga. My father was a shipworker from Danzig. He married a Russian.’ I offered a few words of Russian by way of confirmation, although I could not remember if Riga was predominantly Russian or German-speaking.
His eyes narrowed, one rather more than the other. ‘So what year was the First Latvian founded?’
I swallowed hard and racked my memory. The cat mewed encouragingly. Reasoning that the raising of a Latvian SS regiment would have to have followed Operation Barbarossa in 1941, I said, ‘1942.’
He grinned horribly, and shook his head with slow sadism. ‘1943,’ he said, advancing a couple of paces. ‘It was 1943. Now get down on your knees or I’ll give it to you in the guts.’
Slowly I sank down on my knees on the edge of the pit, feeling the ground wet through the material of my trousers. I had seen more than enough of SS murder to know what he intended: a shot in the back of the neck, my body collapsing neatly into a ready-made grave, and a few spadefuls of quicklime on top. He came around behind me in a wide circle. The cat settled down to watch, its tail wrapping neatly around its behind as it sat. I closed my eyes and waited.
‘Rainis,’ said a voice, and several seconds passed. I hardly dared to look around and see if I had been saved.
‘It’s all right, Bernie. You can get up now.’
My breath came out in one huge burp of fright. Weakly, my knees knocking, I picked myself up from the edge of the pit and turned to see Arthur Nebe standing a few metres behind the Latvian ugly. To my annoyance he was grinning.
‘I’m glad you find it so amusing, Dr Frankenstein,’ I said. ‘Your fucking monster nearly killed me.’
‘What on earth were you thinking of, Bernie?’ Nebe said. ‘You should know better. Rainis here was only doing his job.’
The Latvian nodded sullenly and holstered his Colt. ‘He was snooping,’ he said dully. ‘I caught him.’
I shrugged. ‘It’s a nice morning. I thought I’d take a look at Grinzing. I was just admiring your estate when Lon Chaney here stuck a gun in my ear.’
The Latvian took my revolver out of his jacket pocket and handed it to Nebe. ‘He was carrying a lighter, Nerr Nolde.’
‘Planning to shoot small game, is that it, Bernie?’
‘You can’t be too careful these days.’
‘I’m glad you think so,’ said Nebe. ‘It saves me the trouble of apologizing.’ He weighed my gun in his hand and then pocketed it. ‘All the same, I’ll hang on to this for now if you don’t mind. Guns make some of our friends nervous. Remind me to return it to you before you leave.’ He turned to the Latvian.
‘All right, Rainis, that’s all. You were only doing your job. I suggest that you go and get yourself some breakfast.’
The monster nodded and walked back towards the house, with the cat following him.
‘I’ll bet he can eat his weight in peanuts.’
Nebe smiled thinly. ‘Some people keep savage dogs to protect them. I have Rainis.’
‘Yes, well I hope he’s house-trained.’ I took off my hat and wiped my brow with my handkerchief. ‘Me, I wouldn’t let him past the front door. I’d keep him on a chain in the yard. Where does he think he is? Treblinka? The bastard couldn’t wait to shoot me, Arthur.’
‘Oh, I don’t doubt it. He enjoys killing people.’
Nebe shook his head to my offer of a cigarette, but he had to help me light mine as my hand was shaking like it was talking to a deaf Apache.
‘He’s a Latvian,’ Nebe explained. ‘He was a corporal at the Riga concentration camp. When the Russians captured him they stamped on his head and broke his jaw with their boots.’
‘Believe me, I know how they must have felt.’
‘They paralysed half his face, and left him slightly soft in the head. He was always a brutal killer. But now he’s more like an animal. And just as loyal as any dog.’
‘Well, naturally I was thinking he’d have his good points too. Riga eh?’ I jerked my head at the open pit and the incinerator. ‘I bet that little waste-disposal set-up makes him feel quite at home.’ I sucked gratefully at my cigarette and added, ‘If it comes to that, I bet it makes you both feel at home.’
Nebe frowned. ‘I think you need a drink,’ he said quietly.
‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Just make sure it doesn’t have any lime in it. I think I lost my taste for lime, for ever.’
34
I followed Nebe into the house and up to the library where we had talked the day before. He fetched me a brandy from the drinks-cabinet and set it down on the table in front of me.
‘Forgive me for not joining you,’ he said, watching me down it quickly. ‘Normally I quite enjoy a cognac with my breakfast but this morning I must keep a clear head.’ He smiled indulgently as I replaced the empty glass on the table. ‘Better now?’
I nodded. ‘Tell me, have you found your missing dentist yet? Dr Heim?’ Now that I no longer had to worry about my own immediate prospects for survival, Veronika was once again at the front of my mind.
‘He’s dead, I’m afraid. That’s bad enough, but it’s not half as bad as not knowing what had happened to him was. At least we now know that the Russians haven’t got him.’
‘What did happen to him?’
‘He had a heart attack.’ Nebe uttered the familiar, dry little laugh I remembered from my days at the Alex, the headquarters of Berlin’s criminal police. ‘It seems that he was with a girl at the time. A chocolady.’
‘You mean it was while they were —?’
‘I mean precisely that. Still, I can think of worse ways to go, can’t you?’
‘After what I’ve just been through, that’s not particularly difficult for me, Arthur.’
‘Quite.’ He smiled almost sheepishly.
I spent a moment searching for a frame of words that might enable me to innocently
inquire as to Veronika’s fate. ‘So what did she do? The chocolady, I mean. Phone the police?’ I frowned. ‘No, I expect not.’
‘Why do you say that?’
I shrugged at the apparent simplicity of my explanation. ‘I can’t imagine she’d have risked a run-in with the vice squad. No, I’ll bet she tried to have him dumped somewhere. Got her garter-handler to do it.’ I raised my eyebrows questioningly. ‘Well? Am I right?’
‘Yes, you’re right.’ He sounded almost as if he admired my thinking. ‘As usual.’ Then he uttered a wistful sort of sigh. ‘What a pity that we’re no longer with Kripo. I can’t tell you how much I miss it all.’
‘Me too.’
‘But you, you could rejoin. Surely you’re not wanted for anything, Bernie?’
‘And work for the Communists? No thanks.’ I pursed my lips and tried to look rueful. ‘Anyway, I’d rather stay out of Berlin for a while. A Russian soldier tried to rob me on a train. It was self-defence, but I’m afraid I killed him. I was seen leaving the scene of the crime covered in blood.’
‘“The scene of the crime”,’ quoted Nebe, rolling the phrase round his mouth like a fine wine. ‘It’s good to talk to a detective again.’
‘Just to satisfy my professional curiosity, Arthur: how did you find the chocolady?’
‘Oh, it wasn’t me, it was König. He tells me that it was you who told him how best to go about looking for poor Heim.’
‘It was just routine stuff, Arthur. You could have told him.’
‘Maybe so. Anyway, it seems that König’s girlfriend recognized Heim from a photograph. Apparently he used to frequent the nightclub where she works. She remembered that Heim used to be especially keen on one of the snappers who worked there. All Helmut had to do was persuade her to come clean about it. It was as simple as that.’
