by Philip Kerr
‘But you two have careers ahead of you. Not very promising careers, it’s true.’ I grinned. ‘All the same, it would be a shame for you both to earn Himmler’s displeasure when I can just as easily do that on my own.’
Korsch exchanged a short look with Becker, and then replied: ‘Come on, sir, don’t give us that cold cabbage. It’s dangerous, what you’re planning. We know it, and you know it too.’
‘Not only that,’ Becker said, ‘but how will you get there with a prisoner? Who’ll drive the car?’
‘That’s right, sir. It’s over three hundred kilometres to Wewelsburg.’
‘I’ll take a staff car.’
‘Suppose Lange tries something on the way?’
‘He’ll be handcuffed, so I doubt I’ll have any trouble from him.’ I shook my head and collected my hat and coat from the rack. ‘I’m sorry, boys, but that’s the way it’s got to be.’ I walked to the door.
‘Sir?’ said Korsch. He held out his hand. I shook it. Then I shook Becker’s. Then I went to collect my prisoner.
Kindermann’s clinic looked just as neat and well-behaved as it had the first time I’d been there, in late August. If anything, it seemed quieter, with no rooks in the trees and no boat on the lake to disturb them. There was just the sound of the wind and the dead leaves it blew across the path like so many flying locusts.
I placed my hand in the small of Lange’s back and pushed him firmly towards the front door.
‘This is most embarrassing,’ he said. ‘Coming here in handcuffs, like a common criminal. I’m well known here, you know.’
‘A common criminal is what you are, Lange. Want me to put a towel over your ugly head?’ I pushed him again. ‘Listen, it’s only my good nature that stops me from marching you in there with your prick hanging out of your trousers.’
‘What about my civil rights?’
‘Shit, where have you been for the last five years? This is Nazi Germany, not ancient Athens. Now shut your fucking mouth.’
A nurse met us in the hallway. She started to say hallo to Lange and then saw the handcuffs. I flapped my ID in front of her startled features.
‘Police,’ I said. ‘I have a warrant to search Dr Kindermann’s office.’ This was true: I’d signed it myself. Only the nurse had been in the same holiday camp as Lange.
‘I don’t think you can just walk in there,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to — ’
‘Lady, a few weeks ago that little swastika you see on my identity card there was considered sufficient authority for German troops to march into the Sudetenland. So you can bet it will let me march into the good doctor’s underpants if I want it to.’ I shoved Lange forward again. ‘Come on, Reinhard, show me the way.’
Kindermann’s office was at the back of the clinic. As an apartment in town it would have been considered to be on the small side, but as a doctor’s private room it was just fine. There was a long, low couch, a nice walnut desk, a couple of big modern paintings of the kind that look like the inside of a monkey’s mind, and enough expensively bound books to explain the country’s shoe-leather shortage.
‘Take a seat where I can keep an eye on you, Reinhard,’ I told him. ‘And don’t make any sudden moves. I scare easily and then get violent to cover my embarrassment. What’s the word the rattle-doctors use for that?’ There was a large filing cabinet by the window. I opened it and started to leaf through Kindermann’s files. ‘Compensatory behaviour,’ I said. ‘That’s two words, but I guess that’s what it is all right.
‘You know, you wouldn’t believe some of the names that your friend Kindermann has treated. This filing cabinet reads like the guest list at a Reich Chancellery gala night. Wait a minute, this looks like your file.’ I picked it out and tossed it on to his lap. ‘Why don’t you see what he wrote about you, Reinhard? Perhaps it will explain how you got yourself in with these bastards in the first place.’
He stared at the unopened file.
‘It really is very simple,’ he said quietly. ‘As I explained to you earlier on, I became interested in the psychic sciences as a result of my friendship with Dr Kindermann.’ He raised his face to me challengingly.
‘I’ll tell you why you got yourself involved,’ I said, grinning back at him. ‘You were bored. With all your money you don’t know what to be at next. That’s the trouble with your kind, the kind that’s born into money. You never learn its value. They knew that, Reinhard, and they played you for Johann Simple.’
‘It won’t work, Gunther. You’re talking rubbish.’
‘Am I? You’ve read the file then. You’ll know that for sure.’
‘A patient ought never to see his doctor’s case notes. It would be unethical of me to even open this.’
‘It occurs to me that you’ve seen a lot more than just your doctor’s case notes, Reinhard. And Kindermann learnt his ethics with the Holy Inquisition.’
I turned back to the filing cabinet and fell silent as I came across another name I recognized. The name of a girl I had once wasted a couple of months trying to find. A girl who had once been important to me. I’ll admit that I was even in love with her. The job is like that sometimes. A person vanishes without trace, the world moves on, and you find a piece of information that at the right time would have cracked the case wide open. Aside of the obvious irritation you feel at remembering how wide of the mark you’d really been, mostly you learn to live with it. My business doesn’t exactly suit those who are disposed to be neat. Being a private investigator leaves you holding more loose ends than a blind carpet-weaver. All the same, I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t admit to finding some satisfaction in tying them off. Yet this name, the name of the girl that Arthur Nebe had mentioned to me all those weeks ago when we met late one night in the ruins of the Reichstag, meant so much more than just satisfaction in finding a belated solution to an enigma. There are times when discovery has the force of revelation.
‘The bastard,’ said Lange, turning the pages of his own case notes.
‘I was thinking the same thing myself.’
‘“A neurotic effeminate”,’ he quoted. ‘Me. How could he think such a thing about me?’
I moved down to the next drawer, only half listening to what he was saying.
‘You tell me, he’s your friend.’
‘How could he say these things? I don’t believe it.’
‘Come on, Reinhard. You know how it is when you swim with the sharks. You’ve got to expect to get your balls bitten once in a while.’
‘I’ll kill him,’ he said, flinging the case notes across the office.
‘Not before I do,’ I said, finding Weisthor’s file at last. I slammed the drawer shut. ‘Right. I’ve got it. Now we can get out of this place.’
I was about to reach for the door-handle when a heavy revolver came through the door, followed closely by Lanz Kindermann.
‘Would you mind telling me what the hell’s going on here?’
I stepped back into the room. ‘Well, this is a pleasant surprise,’ I said. ‘We were just talking about you. We thought you might have gone to your Bible class in Wewelsburg. Incidentally, I’d be careful with that gun if I were you. My men have got this place under surveillance. They’re very loyal, you know. That’s the way we are in the police these days. I’d hate to think what they’d do if they found out that some harm had come to me.’
Kindermann glanced at Lange, who hadn’t moved, and then at the files under my arm.
‘I don’t know what your game is, Herr Steininger, if that is your real name, but I think that you had better put those down on the desk and raise your hands, don’t you?’
I laid the files down on the desk and started to say something about having a warrant, but Reinhard Lange had already taken the initiative, if that’s what you call it when you’re misguided enough to throw yourself on to a man who is holding a 45-calibre pistol cocked on you. His first three or four words of bellowing outrage ended abruptly as the deafening gunshot blasted the side of his neck a
way. Gurgling horribly, Lange twisted around like a whirling dervish, grasping frantically at his neck with his still-manacled hands, and decorating the wallpaper with red roses as he fell to the floor.
Kindermann’s hands were better suited to the violin than something as big as the 45, and with the hammer down you need a carpenter’s forefinger to work a trigger that heavy, so there was plenty of time for me to collect the bust of Dante that sat on Kindermann’s desk and smash it into several pieces against the side of his head.
With Kindermann unconscious, I looked round to where Lange had curled himself into the corner. With his bloody forearm pressed against what remained of his jugular, he stayed alive for only a minute or so, and then died without speaking another word.
I removed the handcuffs and was transferring them to the groaning Kindermann when, summoned by the shot, two nurses burst into the office and stared in terror at the scene that met their eyes. I wiped my hands on Kindermann’s necktie and then went over to the desk.
‘Before you ask, your boss here just shot his pansy friend.’ I picked up the telephone. ‘Operator, get me Police Headquarters, Alexanderplatz, please.’ I watched one nurse search for Lange’s pulse and the other help Kindermann on to the couch as I waited to be connected.
‘He’s dead,’ said the first nurse. Both of them stared suspiciously at me.
‘This is Kommissar Gunther,’ I said to the operator at the Alex. ‘Connect me with Kriminalassistant Korsch or Becker in the Murder Commission as quickly as possible, if you please.’ After another short wait Becker came on to the line.
‘I’m at Kindermann’s clinic,’ I explained. ‘We stopped to pick up the medical case history on Weisthor and Lange managed to get himself killed. He lost his temper and a piece of his neck. Kindermann was carrying a lighter.’
‘Want me to organize the meat wagon?’
‘That’s the general idea, yes. Only I won’t be here when it comes. I’m sticking to my original plan, except that now I’m taking Kindermann along with me instead of Lange.’
‘All right, sir. Leave it to me. Oh, incidentally, Frau Steininger called.’
‘Did she leave a message?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘No, sir. Sir, you know what that one needs, if you don’t mind me saying?’
‘Try and surprise me.’
‘I reckon that she needs–’
‘On second thoughts, don’t bother.’
‘Well, you know the type, sir.’
‘Not exactly, Becker, no. But while I’m driving I’ll certainly give it some thought. You can depend on it.’
I drove west out of Berlin, following the yellow signs indicating long-distance traffic, heading towards Potsdam and beyond it, to Hanover.
The autobahn branches off from the Berlin circular road at Lehnin, leaving the old town of Brandenburg to the north, and beyond Zeisar, the ancient town of the Bishops of Brandenburg, the road runs west in a straight line.
After a while I was aware of Kindermann sitting upright in the back seat of the Mercedes.
‘Where are we going?’ he said dully.
I glanced over my right shoulder. With his hands manacled behind his back I didn’t think he’d be stupid enough to try hitting me with his head. Especially now it was bandaged, something the two nurses from the clinic had insisted on doing before allowing me to drive the doctor away.
‘Don’t you recognize the road?’ I said. ‘We’re on our way to a little town south of Paderborn. Wewelsburg. I’m sure you know it. I didn’t think you would want to miss your S S Court of Honour on my account.’ Out of the corner of my eye I saw him smile and settle back in the rear seat, or at least, as well as he was able to.
‘That suits me fine.’
‘You know, you’ve really inconvenienced me, Herr Doktor. Shooting my star witness like that. He was going to give a special performance for Himmler. It’s lucky he made a written statement back at the Alex. And, of course, you’ll have to understudy.’
He laughed. ‘And what makes you think I’ll take to that role?’
‘I’d hate to think what might happen if you were to disappoint me.’
‘Looking at you, I’d say you were used to being disappointed.’
‘Perhaps. But I doubt my disappointment will even compare with Himmler’s.’
‘My life is in no danger from the Reichsfuhrer, I can assure you.’
‘I wouldn’t place too much reliance on your rank or your uniform if I were you, Hauptsturmfuhrer. You’ll shoot just as easily as Ernst Röhm and all those SA men did.’
‘I knew Röhm quite well,’ he said smoothly. ‘We were good friends. It may interest you to know that that’s a fact which is well-known to Himmler, with all that such a relationship implies.’
‘You’re saying he knows you’re a queer?’
‘Certainly. If I survived the Night of Long Knives, I think I can manage to cope with whatever inconvenience you’ve arranged for me, don’t you?’
‘The Reichsfuhrer will be pleased to read Lange’s letters, then. If only to confirm what he already knows. Never underestimate the importance to a policeman of confirming information. I dare say he knows all about Weisthor’s insanity as well, right?’
‘What was insanity ten years ago merely counts as a treatable nervous disorder today. Psychotherapy has come a long way in a short time. Do you seriously believe that Herr Weisthor can be the first senior SS officer to be treated? I’m a consultant at a special orthopaedic hospital at Hohenlychen, near Ravensbruck concentration camp, where many S S staff officers are treated for the prevailing euphemism that describes mental illness. You know, you surprise me. As a policeman you ought to know how skilled the Reich is in the practice of such convenient hypocrisies. Here you are hurrying to create a great big firework display for the Reichsfuhrer with a couple of rather damp little crackers. He will be disappointed.’
‘I like listening to you, Kindermann. I always like to see another man’s work. I bet you’re great with all those rich widows who bring their menstrual depressions to your fancy clinic. Tell me, for how many of them do you prescribe cocaine?’
‘Cocaine hydrochloride has always been used as a stimulant to combat the more extreme cases of depression.’
‘How do you stop them becoming addicted?’
‘It’s true there is always that risk. One has to be watchful for any sign of drug dependency. That’s my job.’ He paused. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Just curious, Herr Doktor. That’s my job.’
At Hohenwarhe, north of Magdeburg, we crossed the Elbe by a bridge, beyond which, on the right, could be seen the lights of the almost completed Rothensee Ship Elevator, designed to connect the Elbe with the Mittelland Canal some twenty metres above it. Soon we had passed into the next state of Niedersachsen, and at Helmstedt we stopped for a rest, and to pick up some petroleum.
It was getting dark and looking at my watch I saw that it was almost seven o’clock. Having chained one of Kindermann’s hands to the door handle, I allowed him to take a pee, and attended to my own needs at a short distance. Then I pushed the spare wheel into the back seat beside Kindermann and handcuffed it to his left wrist, which left one hand free. The Mercedes is a big car, however, and he was far enough behind me not to worry about. All the same, I removed the Walther from my shoulder-holster, showed it to him and then laid it beside me on the big bench seat.
‘You’ll be more comfortable like that,’ I said. ‘But so much as pick your nose and you’ll get this.’ I started the car and drove on.
‘What is the hurry?’ Kindermann said exasperatedly. ‘I fail to understand why you’re doing this. You could just as easily stage your performance on Monday, when everyone arrives back in Berlin. I really don’t see the need to drive all this way.’
‘It’ll be too late by then, Kindermann. Too late to stop the special pogrom that your friend Weisthor’s got planned for Berlin’s Jews. Project Krist, isn’t t
hat what it’s called?’
‘Ah, you know about that do you? You have been busy. Don’t tell me that you’re a Jew-lover.’
‘Let’s just say that I don’t much care for lynch-law, and rule by the mob. That’s why I became a policeman.’
‘To uphold justice?’
‘If you want to call it that, yes.’
‘You’re deluding yourself. What rules is force. Human will. And to build that collective will it must be given a focus. What we are doing is no more than a child does with a magnifying-glass when it concentrates the light of the sun on to a sheet of paper and causes it to catch alight. We are merely using a power that already exists. Justice would be a wonderful thing were it not for men. Herr–? Look here, what is your name?’
‘The name is Gunther, and you can spare me the Party propaganda.’
‘These are facts, Gunther, not propaganda. You’re an anachronism, do you know that? You are out of your time.’
‘From the little history I know it seems to me that justice is never very fashionable, Kindermann. If I’m out of my time, if I’m out of step with the will of the people, as you describe it, then I’m glad. The difference between us is that whereas you wish to use their will, I want to see it curbed.’
‘You’re the worst kind of idealist: you’re naive. Do you really think that you can stop what’s happening to the Jews? You’ve missed that boat. The newspapers already have the story about Jewish ritual murder in Berlin. I doubt that Himmler and Heydrich could prevent what is going on even if they wanted to.’
‘I might not be able to stop it,’ I said, ‘but perhaps I can try and get it postponed.’
‘And even if you do manage to persuade Himmler to consider your evidence, do you seriously think that he’ll welcome his stupidity being made public? I doubt you’ll get much in the way of justice from the Reichsführer-SS. He’ll just sweep it under the carpet and in a short while it will all be forgotten. As will the Jews. You mark my words. People in this country have very short memories.’
