The Pale Criminal

by Philip Kerr

  ‘Like hell you do,’ Becker sneered.

  I tried the filing cabinet, which was locked.

  ‘What’s in here?’

  ‘A few papers, sir. The petty-cash box. The account books, that sort of thing. Nothing to interest you, I think.’

  ‘Open it.’

  ‘Really, sir, there’s nothing of any interest -’ The words dried in his mouth as he saw the cigarette lighter in my hand. I thumbed the bezel and held it underneath the magazine I’d been reading. It burned with a slow blue flame.

  ‘Becker. How much would you say this magazine was?’

  ‘Oh, they’re expensive, sir. At least ten Reichsmarks each.’

  ‘There must be a couple of thousands’ worth of stock in this rat-hole.’

  ‘Easily. Be a shame if there was a fire.’

  ‘I hope he’s insured.’

  ‘You want to see inside the cabinet?’ said Helmut. ‘You only had to ask.’ He handed Becker the key as I dropped the blazing magazine harmlessly into the metal wastepaper bin.

  There was nothing in the top drawer besides a cash box, but in the bottom drawer was another pile of pornographic magazines. Becker picked one up and turned back the plain front cover.

  “‘Virgin Sacrifice”,’ he said, reading the title page. ‘Take a look at this, sir.’

  He showed me a series of photographs depicting the degradation and punishment of a girl, who looked to be of high-school age, by an old and ugly man wearing an ill-fitting toupee. The weals his cane had left on her bare backside seemed very real indeed.

  ‘Nasty,’ I said.

  ‘You understand, I am merely the distributor,’ Helmut said, blowing his nose on a filthy handkerchief, ‘not the manufacturer.’

  One photograph was particularly interesting. In it the naked girl was bound hand and foot, and lying on a church altar like a human sacrifice. Her vagina had been penetrated with an enormous cucumber. Becker looked fiercely at Helmut.

  ‘But you know who produced it, don’t you?’ Helmut remained silent only until Becker grabbed him by the throat and started to slap him across the mouth.

  ‘Please don’t hit me.’

  ‘You’re probably enjoying it, you ugly little pervert,’ he snarled, warming to his work. ‘Come on, talk to me, or you’ll talk to this.’ He snatched a short rubber truncheon from his pocket, and pressed it against Helmut’s face.

  ‘It was Poliza,’ shouted Helmut. Becker squeezed his face.

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘Theodor Poliza. He’s a photographer. He has a studio on Schiffbauerdamm, next to the Comedy Theatre. He’s the one you want.’

  ‘If you’re lying to us, Helmut,’ said Becker, grinding the rubber against Helmut’s cheek, ‘we’ll be back. And we’ll not only set fire to your stock, but you with it. I hope you’ve got that.’ He pushed him away.

  Helmut dabbed at his bleeding mouth with the handkerchief, ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, ‘I understand.’

  When we were outside again I spat into the gutter.

  ‘Gives you a nasty taste in the mouth, doesn’t it, sir? Makes me glad I didn’t have a daughter, really it does.’

  I’d like to have said that I agreed with him there. Only I didn’t.

  We drove north.

  What a city it was for its public buildings, as immense as grey granite mountains. They built them big just to remind you of the importance of the state and the comparative insignificance of the individual. That just shows you how this whole business of National Socialism got started. It’s hard not to be overawed by a government, any government, that is accommodated in such grand buildings. And the long wide avenues that ran straight from one district to another seemed to have been made for nothing else but columns of marching soldiers.

  Quickly recovering my stomach I told Becker to stop the car at a cooked-meat shop on Friedrichstrasse and bought us both a plate of lentil soup. Standing at one of the little counters, we watched Berlin housewives lining up to buy their sausage, which lay coiled on the long marble counter like the rusted springs from some enormous motor car, or grew off the tiled walls in great bunches, like overripe bananas.

  Becker may have been married, but he hadn’t lost his eye for the ladies, passing some sort of nearly obscene comment about most of the women who came into the shop while we were there. And it hadn’t escaped my attention that he’d helped himself to a couple of pornographic magazines. How could it have? He didn’t try to hide them. Slap a man’s face, make his mouth bleed, threaten him with an india rubber, call him a filthy degenerate and then help yourself to some of his dirty books — that’s what being in Kripo was all about.

  We went back to the car.

  ‘Do you know this Poliza character?’ I said.

  ‘We’ve met,’ he said. ‘What can I tell you about him except that he’s shit on your shoe?’

  The Comedy Theatre on Schiffbauerdamm was on the north side of the Spree, a tower-topped relic ornamented with alabaster tritons, dolphins and assorted naked nymphs, and Poliza’s studio was in a basement nearby.

  We went down some stairs and into a long alleyway. Outside the door to Poliza’s studio we were met by a man wearing a cream-coloured blazer, a pair of green trousers, a cravat of lime silk and a red carnation. No amount of care or expense had been spared with his appearance, but the overall effect was so lacking in taste that he looked like a gypsy grave.

  Poliza took one look at us and decided that we weren’t there selling vacuum-cleaners. He wasn’t much of a runner. His bottom was too big, his legs were too short and his lungs were probably too hard. But by the time we realized what was happening he was nearly ten metres down the alley.

  ‘You bastard,’ muttered Becker.

  The voice of logic must have told Poliza he was being stupid, that Becker and I were easily capable of catching him, but it was probably so hoarsened by fear that it sounded as disquietingly unattractive as we ourselves must have appeared.

  There was no such voice for Becker, hoarse or otherwise. Yelling at Poliza to stop, he broke into a smooth and powerful running action. I struggled to keep up with him, but after only a few strides he was well ahead of me. Another few seconds and he would have caught the man.

  Then I saw the gun in his hand, a long-barrelled Parabellum, and yelled at both men to stop.

  Almost immediately Poliza came to a halt. He began to raise his arms as if to cover his ears against the noise of the gunshot, turning as he collapsed, blood and aqueous humour spilling gelatinously from the bullet’s exit wound in his eye, or what was left of it.

  We stood over Poliza’s dead body.

  ‘What is it with you?’ I said breathlessly. ‘Have you got corns? Are your shoes too tight? Or maybe you didn’t think your lungs were up to it? Listen, Becker, I’ve got ten years on you and I could have caught this man if I’d been wearing a deep-sea-diver’s suit.’

  Becker sighed and shook his head.

  ‘Christ, I’m sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘I only meant to wing him.’ He glanced awkwardly at his pistol, almost as if he didn’t quite believe it could have just killed a man.

  ‘Wing him? What were you aiming at, his earlobe? Listen, Becker, when you try and wing a man, unless you’re Buffalo Bill you aim at his legs, not try and give him a fucking haircut.’ I looked around, embarrassed, almost expecting a crowd to have gathered, but the alley stayed empty. I nodded down at his pistol. ‘What is that cannon, anyway?’

  Becker raised the gun. ‘Artillery Parabellum, sir.’

  ‘Shit, haven’t you ever heard of the Geneva Convention? That’s enough gun to drill for oil.’

  I told him to go and telephone the canned-meat wagon, and while he was away I took a look around Poliza’s studio.

  There wasn’t much to see. An assortment of open-crotch shots drying on a line in the darkroom. A collection of whips, chains, manacles and an altar complete with candlesticks, of the sort that I had seen in the photographed series of the girl with the cucumber. A couple of pi
les of magazines like the ones we had found back at Helmut’s office. Nothing to indicate that Poliza might have murdered five schoolgirls.

  When I went outside again I found that Becker had returned with a uniformed policeman, a sergeant. The pair of them stood looking at Poliza’s body like two small boys regarding a dead cat in the gutter, the sergeant even poking at Poliza’s side with the toe of his boot.

  ‘Right through the window,’ I heard the man say, with what sounded like admiration. ‘I never realized there was so much jelly in there.’

  ‘It’s a mess, isn’t it?’ said Becker without much enthusiasm.

  They looked up as I walked towards them.

  ‘Wagon coming?’ Becker nodded. ‘Good. You can make your report later.’ I spoke to the sergeant. ‘Until it arrives, you’ll stay here with the body, sergeant?’

  He straightened up. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You finished admiring your handiwork?’

  ‘Sir,’ said Becker.

  ‘Then let’s go.’

  We walked back to the car.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I’d like to check on a couple of these massage parlours.’

  ‘Evona Wylezynska’s the one to talk to. She owns several places. Takes 25 per cent of everything the girls make. Most likely she’ll be at her place on Richard Wagner Strasse.’

  ‘Richard Wagner Strasse?’ I said. ‘Where the hell is that?’

  ‘It used to be Sesenheimerstrasse, running on to Spree-strasse. You know, where the Opera House is.’

  ‘I suppose that we should count ourselves lucky that it’s opera Hitler loves, and not football.’

  Becker grinned. Driving there he seemed to recover some of his spirits.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you a really personal question, sir?’

  I shrugged. ‘Go right ahead. But if it works out, I might have to put my answer in an envelope and mail it to you instead.’

  ‘Well it’s this: have you ever fucked a Jew, sir?’

  I looked at him, trying to catch his eye, but he kept both of them determinedly on the road.

  ‘No, I can’t say I have. But it certainly wasn’t the race laws that prevented it. I guess I just never met one who wanted to fuck me.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t object if you got the chance?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose I would.’ I paused, waiting for him to go on, but he didn’t, so I said, ‘Why do you ask, as a matter of fact?’

  Becker smiled over the steering-wheel.

  ‘There’s a little Jewish snapper at this rub-joint we’re going to,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘A real scorcher. She’s got a plum that’s like the inside of a conger-eel, just one long piece of suction muscle. The kind to suck you in like a minnow and blow you right out of her arse. Best bit of damned plum I’ve ever had.’ He shook his head doubtfully. ‘I don’t reckon there’s anything to beat a nice ripe Jewess. Not even a nigger-woman, or a Chink.’

  ‘I never knew you were so broad-minded, Becker,’ I said, ‘or so damned cosmopolitan. Christ, I bet you’ve even read Goethe.’

  Becker laughed at that one. He seemed to have quite forgotten Poliza. ‘One thing about Evona,’ he said. ‘She won’t talk unless we relax a little, if you know what I mean. Have a drink, take things easy. Act like we’re not in a hurry. The minute we start to act like a couple of official stiffs in our trousers she’ll haul down the shutters and start polishing the mirrors in the bedrooms.’

  ‘Well, there’s a lot of people like that these days. Like I always say, people won’t put their fingers near the stove if they figure you’re stewing a broth.’

  Evona Wylezynska was a Pole with an Eton crop smelling lightly of Macassar oil, and a dangerous crevasse of cleavage. Although it was only the mid-afternoon she wore a peignoir of peach-coloured voile over a matching heavy satin slip, and high-heeled slippers. She greeted Becker like he was there with a rent rebate.

  ‘Darling Emil,’ she cooed. ‘Such a long time since we seen you here. Where have you been hiding?’

  ‘I’m off Vice now,’ he explained, kissing her on the cheek.

  ‘What a shame. And you were so good at it.’ She gave me a litmus-paper sort of look, as if I was something that might stain the expensive carpet. ‘And who is this you’ve brought us?’

  ‘It’s all right, Evona. He’s a friend.’

  ‘Does your friend have a name? And does he not know to take his hat off when he comes into a lady’s house?’

  I let that one go, and took it off. ‘Bernhard Gunther, Frau Wylezynska,’ I said, and shook her hand.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, darling, I’m sure.’ Her thickly accented, languorous voice seemed to start somewhere near the bottom of her corset, the faint outline of which I could just about make out underneath her slip. By the time it got to her pouting mouth it had more tease than a fairy’s kitten. The mouth was giving me quite a few problems too. It was the kind of mouth that can eat a five-course dinner at Kempinski’s without spoiling its lipstick, only on this occasion I seemed to be the preoccupation of its taste-buds.

  She ushered us into a comfortable sitting-room that wouldn’t have embarrassed a Potsdam lawyer, and stalked towards the enormous drinks tray.

  ‘What will you have, gentlemen? I have absolutely everything.’

  Becker guffawed loudly. ‘There’s no doubt about that,’ he said.

  I smiled thinly. Becker was starting to irritate me badly. I asked for a scotch whisky, and as Evona handed me my glass her cold fingers touched mine.

  She took a mouthful of her own drink as if it were unpleasant medicine to be hurried down, and tugged me on to a big leather sofa. Becker chuckled and sat down on an armchair beside us.

  ‘And how is my old friend Arthur Nebe?’ she asked. Noting my surprise, she added: ‘Oh yes, Arthur and I have known each other for many years. Ever since 1920 in fact, when he first joined Kripo.’

  ‘He’s much the same,’ I said.

  ‘Tell him to come and visit me sometime,’ she said. ‘He can storm free with me any time he wants. Or just a nice massage. Yes, that’s it. Tell him to come here for a nice rub. I give it to him myself.’ She laughed loudly at the idea and lit a cigarette.

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ I said, wondering if I would, and wondering if she really cared one way or the other.

  ‘And you, Emil. Maybe you would like a little company? Maybe you would both like a rub yourselves, eh?’

  I was about to broach the real purpose of our visit, but found that Becker was already clapping his hands and chuckling some more.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said, ‘let’s relax a little. Be nice and friendly.’ He glanced at me meaningfully. ‘We’re not in a hurry are we, sir?’

  I shrugged and shook my head.

  ‘Just as long as we don’t forget why we came,’ I said, trying not to sound like a prig.

  Evona Wylezynska stood up and pressed a bell on the wall behind a curtain. She made a tutting noise, and said: ‘Why not just forget everything? That’s why most of my gentlemen come here, to forget about their cares.’

  While her back was turned Becker frowned and shook his head at me. I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant.

  Evona took the nape of my neck in the palm of her hand and began to knead the flesh there with fingers that were as strong as blacksmith’s pincers.

  ‘There’s a lot of tension here, Bernhard,’ she informed me seductively.

  ‘I don’t doubt it. You should see the cart they’ve got me pulling down at the Alex. Not to mention the number of passengers I’ve been asked to take.’ It was my turn to glance meaningfully at Becker. Then I took Evona’s fingers away from my neck and kissed them amicably. They smelt of iodine soap, and there are better olfactory aphrodisiacs than that.

  Evona’s girls walked slowly into the room like a troupe of circus horses. Some were wearing just slips and stockings, but mostly they were naked. They took up positions around Becker and myself, and started to smoke or to help
themselves to drinks, almost as if we hadn’t been there at all. It was more female flesh than I had seen in a long time, and I have to admit that my eyes would have branded the bodies of any ordinary women. But these girls were used to being eyed, and remained coolly undisturbed by our prurient stares. One picked up a dining chair and, setting it down in front of me, sat astride it so that I had as perfect a view of her genitals as I could have been expected to have wished for. She started flexing her bare buttocks against the seat of the chair for good measure.

  Almost immediately Becker was on his feet and rubbing his hands together like the keenest of street-traders.

  ‘Well, this is very nice, isn’t it?’ Becker put his arms around a couple of the girls, his face growing redder with excitement. He glanced around the room and, not finding the face he was looking for, said: ‘Tell me, Evona, where is that lovely little child-bearing machine of a Jewess who used to work for you?’

  ‘You mean Esther. I’m afraid she had to go away.’ We waited, but there was no sign of anything other than smoke coming from Evona’s mouth to expand upon what she had said.

  ‘That’s too bad,’ said Becker. ‘I was telling my friend here just how nice she was.’ He shrugged. ‘Never mind. Plenty more where she came from, eh?’ Ignoring the look on my face, and still supported like a drunk by the two snappers, he turned and walked down the creaking corridor and into one of the bedrooms, leaving me alone with the rest of them.

  ‘And what is your preference, Bernhard?’ Evona snapped her fingers and waved one of her girls forward. ‘This one and Esther are very much alike,’ she said, taking hold of the girl’s bare backside and turning it towards my face, smoothing it with the palm of her hand. ‘She has two vertebrae too many, so that her behind is a long way from her waist. Very beautiful, do you not think?’

  ‘Very beautiful,’ I said, and patted the girl’s marble-cool bottom politely. ‘But to be honest, I’m the old-fashioned type. I like a girl to have all her mind on me and not my wallet.’

  Evona smiled. ‘No, I did not think you were the type.’ She smacked the girl’s behind like a favourite dog. ‘Go on, off you go. All of you.’