by Philip Kerr
‘Honestly, sir, don’t you think it’s just a bit risky?’
‘Of course it is. But what do we really know about this bastard? He drives a car, he wears a uniform, he has an Austrian or Bavarian accent. After that everything is a maybe. I don’t have to remind you both that we are running out of time. That Heydrich has given me less than four weeks to solve this case. Well, we need to get closer, and we need to do it quickly. The only way is to take the initiative, to select his next victim for him.’
‘But we might wait for ever,’ said Korsch.
‘I didn’t say that it would be easy. You hunt tiger and you can end up sleeping in a tree.’
‘What about the girl?’ Korsch continued. ‘You don’t propose to keep her at it night and day, do you?’
‘She can do it in the afternoons,’ said Becker. ‘Afternoons and early evenings. Not in the dark, so we can make sure he sees her, and we see him.’
‘You’re getting the idea.’
‘But where does Vogelmann fit in?’
‘I don’t know. A feeling in my socks, that’s all. Maybe it’s nothing, but I just want to check it out.’
Becker smiled. ‘A bull has to trust a few hunches now and then,’ he said.
I recognized my own uninspired rhetoric. ‘We’ll make a detective out of you yet,’ I told him.
She listened to her Gigli gramophone records with the avidity of someone who is about to go deaf, offering and requiring no more conversation than a railway ticket-collector. By now I had realized that Hildegard Steininger was about as self-contained as a fountain-pen, and I figured that she probably preferred the kind of man who could think of himself as little more than a blank sheet of writing paper. And yet, almost in spite of her, I continued to find her attractive. For my taste she was too much concerned with the shade of her gold-spun hair, the length of her fingernails and the state of her teeth, which she was forever brushing. Too vain by half, and too selfish twice over. Given a choice between pleasing herself and pleasing someone else she would have hoped that pleasing herself would have made everyone happy. That she should have thought that one would almost certainly result from the other was for her as simple a reaction as a knee jerking under a patella-hammer.
It was my sixth night staying at her apartment, and as usual she had cooked a dinner that was nearly inedible.
‘You don’t have to eat it, you know,’ she had said. ‘I was never much of a cook.’
‘I was never much of a dinner guest,’ I had replied, and eaten most of it, not for politeness’ sake, but because I was hungry and had learnt in the trenches not to be too fussy about my food.
Now she closed the gramophone cabinet and yawned.
‘I’m going to bed,’ she said.
I tossed aside the book I was reading and said that I was going to turn in myself.
In Paul’s bedroom I spent a few minutes studying the map of Spain that was pinned to the boy’s wall, documenting the fortunes of the Condor Legions, before turning out the light. It seemed that every German schoolboy these days wanted to be a fighter-pilot. I was just settling down when there was a knock at the door.
‘May I come in?’ she said, hovering naked in the doorway. For a moment or two she just stood there, framed in the light from the hallway like some marvellous madonna, almost as if she were allowing me to assess her proportions. My chest and scrotum tightening, I watched her walk gracefully towards me.
Whereas her head and back were small, her legs were so long that she seemed to have been created by a draughtsman of genius. One hand covered her sex and this small shyness excited me very much. I allowed it for a short time while I looked upon the rounded simple volumes of her breasts. These were lightly, almost invisibly nippled, and the size of perfect nectarines.
I leant forwards, pushed that modest hand away, and then, taking hold of her smooth flanks, I pressed my mouth against the sleek filaments that mantled her sex. Standing up to kiss her I felt her hand reach down urgently for me, and winced as she peeled me back. It was too rough to be polite, to be tender, and so I responded by pushing her face first on to the bed, pulling her cool buttocks towards me and moulding her into a position that pleased me. She cried out at the moment when I plunged into her body, and her long thighs trembled wonderfully as we played out our noisy pantomime to its barnstorming denouement.
We slept until dawn came creeping through the thin material of the curtains. Awake before her, I was struck by her colour, which was every bit as cool as her awakening expression which changed not a bit as she sought to find my penis with her mouth. And then, turning on to her back, she pulled herself up the bed and laid her head on the pillow, her thighs yawning open so that I could see where life begins, and again I licked and kissed her there before acquainting it with the full rank of my ardour, pressing myself into her body until I thought that only my head and shoulders would remain unconsumed.
Finally, when there was nothing left in either of us, she wrapped herself round me and wept until I thought that she would melt.
19
Saturday, 29 October
‘I thought you’d like the idea.’
‘I’m not sure that I don’t. Just give me a second to swill it around my head.’
‘You don’t want her hanging around somewhere just for the hell of it. He’ll smell that shit in minutes and won’t go near her. It’s got to look natural.’
I nodded without a great deal of conviction and tried to smile at the BdM girl Becker had found. She was an extraordinarily pretty adolescent and I wasn’t sure what Becker had been more impressed with, her bravery or her breasts.
‘Come on, sir, you know what it’s like,’ he said. ‘These girls are always hanging around the Der Stürmer display cases on street corners. They get a cheap thrill reading about Jewish doctors interfering with mesmerized German virgins. Look at it this way. Not only will it stop her from getting bored, but also, if Streicher or his people are involved, then they’re more than likely going to take notice of her here, in front of one of these Sturmerkasten, than anywhere else.’
I stared uncomfortably at the elaborate, red-painted case, probably built by some loyal readers, with its vivid slogans proclaiming: ‘German Women: The Jews are your Destruction’, and the three double-page spreads from the paper under glass. It was bad enough to ask a girl to act as bait, without having to expose her to this kind of trash as well.
‘I suppose you’re right, Becker.’
‘You know I am. Look at her. She’s reading it already. I swear she likes it.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Ulrike.’
I walked over to the Sturmerkasten where she was standing, singing quietly to herself.
‘You know what to do, Ulrike?’ I said quietly, not looking at her now that I was beside her, but staring at the Fips cartoon with its mandatory ugly Jew. No one could look like that, I thought. The nose was as big as a sheep’s muzzle.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said brightly.
‘There are lots of policemen around. You can’t see them, but they are all watching you. Understand?’ I saw her head nod in the reflection on the glass. ‘You’re a very brave girl.’
At that she started to sing again, only louder, and I realized that it was the Hitler Youth song:‘Our flag see before us fly,
Our flag means an age without strife,
Our flag leads us to eternity,
Our flag means more to us than life.’
I walked back to where Becker was standing and got back into the car.
‘She’s quite a girl, isn’t she, sir?’
‘She certainly is. Just make sure that you keep your flippers off her, do you hear?’
He was all innocence. ‘Come on, sir, you don’t think I’d try to bird that one, do you?’ He got into the driving seat and started the engine.
‘I think you’d fuck your great-grandmother, if you really want my opinion.’ I glanced over each shoulder. ‘Where are your men?’
�
�Sergeant Hingsen’s on the first floor of that apartment building there,’ he said, ‘and I’ve got a couple of men on the street. One is tidying up the graveyard on the corner, and the other’s cleaning windows over there. If our man does show up, we’ll have him.’
‘Do the girl’s parents know about this?’
‘Yes.’
‘Rather public-spirited of them to give their permission, wouldn’t you say?’
‘They didn’t exactly do that, sir. Ulrike informed them that she had volunteered to do this in the service of the Fiihrer and the Fatherland. She said that it would be unpatriotic to try and stop her. So they didn’t have much choice in the matter. She’s a forceful sort of girl.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘Quite a swimmer, too, by all accounts. A future Olympic prospect, her teacher reckons.’
‘Well, let’s just hope for a bit of rain in case she has to try and swim her way out of trouble.’
I heard the bell in the hall and went to the window. Pulling it up I leant out to see who was working the bell-pull. Even three storeys up I could recognize Vogelmann’s head of distinctive red hair.
‘That’s a very common thing to do,’ said Hildegard. ‘Lean out of a window like a fishwife.’
‘As it happens, I might just have caught a fish. It’s Vogelmann. And he’s brought a friend.’
‘Well, you had better go and let them in, hadn’t you?’
I walked out on to the landing and operated the lever that pulled the chain to open the street door, and watched the two men climb up the stairs. Neither one of them said anything.
Vogelmann came into Hildegard’s apartment wearing his best undertaker’s face, which was a blessing since the grim set to his halitosic mouth meant that, for a while at least, it stayed mercifully shut. The man with him was shorter than Vogelmann by a head, and in his mid-thirties, with fair hair, blue eyes and an intense, even academic air about him. Vogelmann waited until we were all seated before introducing the other man as Dr Otto Rahn, and promised to say more about him presently. Then he sighed loudly and shook his head.
‘I’m afraid that I have had no luck in the search for your daughter Emmeline,’ he said. ‘I’ve asked everyone I could possibly have asked, and looked everywhere I could possibly have looked. With no result. It has been most disappointing.’ He paused, and added: ‘Of course, I realize that my own disappointment must count as nothing besides your own. However, I thought I might at least find some trace of her.
‘If there was anything, anything at all, that gave some clue as to what might have become of her, then I would feel justified in recommending to you that I continue with my inquiries. But there’s nothing that gives me any confidence that I wouldn’t be wasting your time and money.’
I nodded with slow resignation. ‘Thank you for being so honest, Herr Vogelmann.’
‘At least you can say we tried, Herr Steininger,’ Vogelmann said. ‘I’m not exaggerating when I say that I have exhausted all the usual methods of inquiry.’ He stopped to clear his throat and, excusing himself, dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief.
‘I hesitate to suggest this to you, Herr and Frau Steininger, and please don’t think me facetious, but when the usual has proved itself to be unhelpful, there can surely be no harm in resorting to the unusual.’
‘I rather thought that was why we consulted you in the first place,’ Hildegard said stiffly. ‘The usual, as you put it, was something that we expected from the police.’
Vogelmann smiled awkwardly. ‘I’ve expressed it badly,’ he said. ‘I should perhaps have been talking in terms of the ordinary and the extraordinary.’
The other man, Otto Rahn, came to Vogelmann’s assistance.
‘What Herr Vogelmann is trying to suggest, with as much good taste as he can in the circumstances, is that you consider enlisting the services of a medium to help you find your daughter.’ His accent was educated and he spoke with the speed of a man from somewhere like Frankfurt.
‘A medium?’ I said. ‘You mean spiritualism?’ I shrugged. ‘We’re not believers in that sort of thing.’ I wanted to hear what Rahn might have to say in order to sell us on the idea.
He smiled patiently. ‘These days it’s hardly a matter of belief. Spiritualism is now more of a science. There have been some quite amazing developments since the war, especially in the last decade.’
‘But isn’t this illegal?’ I asked meekly. ‘I’m sure I read somewhere that Count Helldorf had banned all professional fortune-telling in Berlin, why, as long ago as 1934.’
Rahn was smooth and not at all deflected by my choice of phrase.
‘You’re very well-informed, Herr Steininger. And you’re right, the Police President did ban them. Since then, however, the situation has been satisfactorily resolved, and racially sound practitioners in the psychic sciences are incorporated in the Independent Professions sections of the German Labour Front. It was only ever the mixed races, the Jews and the gypsies, that gave the psychic sciences a bad name. Why, these days the Führer himself employs a professional astrologer. So you see, things have come a long way since Nostradamus.’
Vogelmann nodded and chuckled quietly.
So this was the reason Reinhard Lange was sponsoring Vogelmann’s advertising campaign, I thought. To drum up a little business for the floating wine-glass trade. It looked like quite a neat operation too. Your detective failed to find your missing person, after which, through the mediation of Otto Rahn, you were passed on to an apparently higher power. This service probably resulted in your paying several times as much for the privilege of finding out what was already obvious: that your loved one slept with the angels.
Yes indeed, I thought, a neat piece of theatre. I was going to enjoy putting these people away. You can sometimes forgive a man who works a line, but not the ones who prey on the grief and suffering of others. That was like stealing the cushions off a pair of crutches.
‘Peter,’ said Hildegard, ‘I don’t see that we really have much to lose.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘I’m so glad you think so,’ said Vogelmann. ‘One always hesitates to recommend such a thing, but I think that in this case, there is really little or no alternative.’
‘What will it cost?’
‘This is Emmeline’s life we’re talking about,’ Hildegard snapped. ‘How can you mention money?’
‘The cost is very reasonable,’ said Rahn. ‘I’m quite sure you’ll be entirely satisfied. But let’s talk about that at a later date. The most important thing is that you meet someone who can help you.
‘There is a man, a very great and gifted man, who is possessed of enormous psychic ability. He might be able to help. This man, as the last descendant of a long line of German men of wisdom, has an ancestral-clairvoyant memory that is quite unique in our time.’
‘He sounds wonderful,’ Hildegard breathed.
‘He is,’ said Vogelmann.
‘Then I will arrange for you to meet him,’ said Rahn. ‘I happen to know that he is free this coming Thursday. Will you be available in the evening?’
‘Yes. We’ll be available.’
Rahn took out a notebook and started writing. When he’d finished he tore out the sheet and handed it to me.
‘Here is the address. Shall we say eight o‘clock? Unless you hear from me before then?’ I nodded. ‘Excellent.’
Vogelmann stood up to leave while Rahn bent and searched for something in his briefcase. He handed Hildegard a magazine.
‘Perhaps this might also be of interest to you,’ he said.
I saw them out and when I came back I found her engrossed in the magazine. I didn’t need to look at the front cover to know that it was Reinhard Lange’s Urania. Nor did I need to speak to Hildegard to know that she was convinced Otto Rahn was genuine.
20
Thursday, 3 November
The Resident Registration Office turned up an Otto Rahn, formerly of Michelstadt near Frankfurt, now living at Tierg
artenstrasse 8a, Berlin West 35.
VC1, Criminal Records, on the other hand, had no trace of him.
Nor did VC2, the department that compiled the Wanted Persons List. I was just about to leave when the department director, an SS Sturmbannfuhrer by the name of Baum, called me over to his office.
‘Kommissar, did I hear you asking that officer about somebody called Otto Rahn?’ he asked.
I told him that I was interested in finding out everything I could about Otto Rahn.
‘Which department are you with?’
‘The Murder Commission. He might be able to assist us with an inquiry.’
‘So you don’t actually suspect him of having committed a crime?’
Sensing that the Sturmbannführer knew something about an Otto Rahn, I decided to cover my tracks a little.
‘Good grief, no,’ I said. ‘As I say, it’s just that he may be able to put us in contact with a valuable witness. Why? Do you know someone by that name?’
‘Yes, I do, as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘He’s more of an acquaintance really. There is an Otto Rahn who’s in the SS.’
The old Hotel Prinz Albrecht Strasse was an unremarkable four-storey building of arched windows and mock Corinthian pillars, with two long, dictator-sized balconies on the first floor, surmounted by an enormous ornate clock. Its seventy rooms meant that it had never been in the same league as the big hotels like the Bristol or the Adlon, which was probably how it came to be taken over by the SS. Now called SS-Haus, and situated next door to Gestapo headquarters at number eight, it was also headquarters to Heinrich Himmler in his capacity as Reichsführer-SS.
In the Personnel Records Department on the second floor, I showed them my warrant and explained my mission.
‘I’m required by the SD to obtain a security clearance for a member of the SS in order that he may be considered for promotion to General Heydrich’s personal staff.’
