Greeks Bearing Gifts

by Philip Kerr

  “I should be doing that, you know,” said Seehofer as I mounted the ladder, which, now that I was working for an insurance company, felt a bit less than safe on the polished marble floor.

  I nodded and came back down without a word, happy not to take the risk. I wasn’t about to get paid my twenty-five marks a week if I fell off a ladder.

  Seehofer went up the ladder, looked down precariously several times, and finally managed to reach eye level with the bell, where his powers as a detective really started to kick in. “That explains it,” he said. “There’s a piece of folded card between the bell and the clapper.”

  “Then don’t for Christ’s sake pull it out,” I said.

  “What’s that?” he asked, and pulled it out. The bell began to ring, very loudly, almost causing Seehofer to fall off the ladder. Losing his nerve for the height he was at, he came quickly down again.

  “Can you turn it off, sir?” I shouted at Dr. Schmidt.

  “I’m not sure I know how,” he admitted.

  “Who does?”

  “The security guard.”

  “Where’s he?”

  “Er, I fired him when I discovered the break-in. I imagine he’s gone home.”

  Since none of us could now hear ourselves think, let alone speak, I felt obliged to take the piece of card from Seehofer’s nervous fingers, go back up the ladder myself, and replace it between clapper and bell, but not before unfolding it to reveal that it was actually an empty packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes.

  I came back down and said, “Why is this ladder here?”

  “It was up all day yesterday,” said Schmidt. “One of the builders was using it to replace the lightbulbs in the ceiling fixtures.”

  “So it might have been left unattended for some length of time.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then my guess is that whoever broke in here last night came into the museum as a visitor yesterday and, seeing an opportunity, went up the ladder and disabled the alarm with that empty cigarette packet.”

  Seehofer murmured, “Lucky Strike. But not for some,” which hardly endeared him to Dr. Schmidt, whose sense of humor was understandably absent that morning.

  “It looks very opportunistic,” I said. “Like our man saw his chance to disable the alarm on the spur of the moment and used the first object that came to hand.”

  “Which makes it all the more surprising that nothing was stolen,” said Schmidt. “I mean, this was planned. I can’t see kids going to that amount of trouble. Or with that amount of foresight. Can you?”

  “Could I see inside those desk drawers?” I asked him. “If you don’t mind, sir.”

  “Certainly, but there’s nothing to see. Just some museum stationery and some guidebooks. Perhaps a few very small artifacts that were kept in a desk drawer. I’m not sure exactly. It’s not my desk. It’s the assistant director’s.”

  “Maybe we could ask him what’s missing, if anything.”

  “I’m afraid not. He’s been ill for some time now. In fact, I doubt he’ll be coming back at all.”

  “I see.”

  We went back across the hall, which was when we caught a glimpse of a large marble statue in a Pantheon of a room by itself, and if this caught our eye it was not because it had been damaged but because of what it was: a life-sized statue of a Roman faun or Greek satyr, legs akimbo—one of them at a right angle to the rock he was seated upon—who looked like he was suffering after a late night in the Hofbräuhaus. The indecorous statue was extremely well rendered and left nothing to the imagination.

  “Christ,” said Seehofer. “For a moment I thought he was the real thing. It’s very—very realistic, isn’t it?”

  “That’s the Barberini Faun I was telling you about,” said Schmidt. “Greek. Possibly restored by Bernini after being badly damaged during an attack by the Goths almost a thousand years earlier.”

  “It seems that history is always repeating itself,” I said, momentarily picturing those previous Germans in some desperate fight to the death.

  Back in the office I took a look inside the desk. “Anything stolen from in here?” I asked. “A cash box, perhaps.”

  “No, not so much as a ticket roll.”

  “Then why do you keep it locked?”

  “Habit. Sometimes I leave my own valuables in there. A gold pen. A nice cigarette lighter. My wallet. But not on this occasion. Not when I go home. Really. It’s most extraordinary. Everything looks just fine.”

  I might have agreed with that but for something I’d seen on the desk that didn’t look as if it belonged anywhere except in an ashtray. It was a half-chewed cigar projecting at a right angle from the edge of the desk like the leg of the Barberini Faun.

  TWELVE

  –

  What should I have done? Told Detective Inspector Seehofer that a cop I knew who’d murdered two people had broken into Munich’s oldest museum and stolen—nothing? A cop he would probably know, too? So I said—nothing. A lot of the time nothing is the best thing to say. Especially in a new job when you’re still trying to make an impression. An acquaintance with murderers and crooked policemen doesn’t inspire the confidence of any insurance company. All the same I did wonder what Detective Schramma had been up to. Of course, it might have been someone else who was the true culprit. But deep in my gut I knew it was he who’d broken into the Glyptothek, just as I’d known with absolute certainty that the Barberini Faun was a man. If I’d been a detective myself and not a claims adjustor I might have taken the cigar butt for analysis and possibly matched it to the one found in the dead general’s house in Bogenhausen: The cops had found those bodies now and, according to the newspapers, they weren’t saying very much, which was the same thing as saying they hadn’t a clue who was responsible. Which suited me fine. The last thing I wanted was to see Schramma any time soon. Whatever he was up to now wasn’t any of my business. And helping the cops wasn’t part of my new job description.

  In truth, however, the job was very boring and seemed to involve a lot of staring out the window. Most days I did a lot of that. Frankly I couldn’t have felt more bored at Munich RE if I’d spent a couple of hours trying to guess the speed of the grass growing in the office back garden.

  A week or two passed in this way. A pile of claims files started to accumulate on my desk. I was supposed to read these, looking out for anything suspicious before passing them on to Dietrich with recommendations. Car fires that might have been arson, burst water pipes that had been deliberately sabotaged—we got a lot of those in the early spring—family heirlooms lost or damaged on purpose, bogus personal injuries, fraudulent loss-of-earnings claims. But there was nothing that raised so much as an eyebrow, really. After Dietrich’s explanation of his opinion of some of our clients, I felt disappointed to say the least. I prayed I might find something suspicious just to alleviate the boredom. And then Ares, the Greek god of war, violence, bloodshed, and the insurance industry, answered my prayer with a juicy life claim.

  Now this was how life insurance worked: An insurance company and the policy holder made a simple contract where, in exchange for an annual premium, the insurer promised to pay a designated beneficiary a sum of money upon the death or serious injury of the insured person. But after many years with Kripo in Berlin, the whole idea of one person profiting from another person’s death just looked suspicious to me. It was ignorant of me, really—life insurance was one of the most profitable parts of Munich RE’s business—but old habits die hard. I guess it’s true what they say: Detectives are simple people who persist in asking obvious or even stupid questions, but I figured that was what I was being paid for and, like I say, I was very bored. Besides, a substantial amount of money was involved.

  The facts were that a thirty-nine-year-old man had fallen to his death under the train to Rosenheim at Holzkirchen Station. He’d had a three-star policy with MRE since July of the p
revious year for which he’d been paying four marks a month: death, personal injury, and loss of earnings. The widow’s name was Ursula Dorpmüller, age thirty-one, and she was our claimant; she lived in Nymphenburg, at Loristrasse number 11, top flat. The husband was Theo Dorpmüller; he’d owned a cabaret bar on Dachauerstrasse and the police said he’d fallen off the railway platform because he was drunk. In other words, they were perfectly satisfied that his death had been accidental; then again, they weren’t facing a large insurance claim. There was a receipt in the dead man’s coat pocket for a five-deutschmark dinner for two at the Walterspiel, which ruled out suicide in my mind. You don’t normally eat and drink so well when you’re planning to kill yourself. Frankly, that was the only real reason the cops thought he was drunk in the first place: On the bill were two bottles of champagne and a bottle of the best burgundy. Maybe he was drunk, I don’t know, but if the policy paid out, Ursula Dorpmüller was set to make twenty thousand deutschmarks, which would have made her the original merry widow. Twenty thousand buys an awful lot of handkerchiefs and a whole ocean of deepest sympathy. Ursula worked as an air hostess for Trans World Airlines on Briennerstrasse and made an excellent salary. Before that she’d been a nurse. She was away in America, visiting her sick mother, when her husband, Theo, was killed. She played the church organ every Sunday at St. Benno’s just up the street from her apartment and was on the committee of the Magnolia Ball—a charity event arranged by the German-American Women’s Club. She also did a lot of work with another charity, which helped East German and Hungarian refugees, and she sounded like a thoroughly decent woman. I might never have raised her case with Dietrich if I hadn’t remembered that I’d heard the name Dorpmüller before and recently, too; it took me several nagging days to remember from where. Finally it came to me. And when it did I went straight to see Dietrich.

  “Timothy Q. Mouse and I need to have a word in Dumbo’s ears,” I said.

  “What about?”

  “The Dorpmüller claim,” I said. “I don’t like it.”

  “She seems like a decent enough woman.”

  “Yes, she does, doesn’t she? And that’s precisely what I don’t like about her. She’s a saint. She’s Hildegard of Bingen, that’s who she is, and let me tell you, saints don’t normally collect twenty thousand deutschmarks free of income tax.”

  “I take it you’ve got something more substantial for saying this than your gut feel.”

  “Before I got this job I was working at Schwabing Hospital, as you know.”

  “I figured that’s where you got your concern for your fellow man.”

  “While I was there they brought in some people who had been seriously injured after an unexploded bomb went off.”

  “I read about that. Not one of ours, fortunately. The policy, I mean. Not the bomb.”

  “Actually, you’re wrong about that. One of the injured was the Fritz who went under the train. Theo Dorpmüller.”

  “Was he now? Badly injured?”

  I pictured the man in the wheelchair I’d taken to the mortuary with Schramma, to identify Johann Bernbach.

  “Not badly. A few burns. But certainly enough to have a week off work.”

  “My ears just started to flap. And Timothy says, ‘Hello.’”

  “My point is this: He didn’t make a claim for loss of earnings. The man has a three-star policy for death and personal injury and he didn’t claim a penny. Why?”

  “Timothy says, ‘Hello again,’ and, ‘Are you sure it was the same Fritz?’”

  “I’m sure. I’m also sure that it means just one thing.”

  “That he didn’t know he had a three-star policy with Munich RE. He couldn’t have done. Because if he’d known about it he would certainly have claimed for loss of earnings.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Good work, Christof.”

  “I think you and Timothy need to check out Ursula Dorpmüller.”

  “Not going to happen. Just look at this desk. That’s the trouble with this business: too much paper. I’m chained to this office like that fellow with the liver and the eagle. I just don’t have the time to check her out. But you, Diogenes, you could take her on. You’ve just made this case in my eyes, and now you need to run with it.”

  “All right. But how should I handle it?”

  “Like this. Make the woman believe we’re going to pay off on the policy without any problem. That you’re satisfied with her claim but that you just want to check out a few petty details. Get her to sign a few useless bits of paper. You need a copy of her passport. Her driving license if she has one. Her birth certificate. Her marriage certificate. Keep stringing her along. Any moment now the check will be raised by our accounts department and the minute it is, you say you’ll hand it to her in person. Really, it’s just a formality. The twenty thousand is as good as in the bank. If it’s taking so long it’s because it’s such a large amount. Be as nice to her as if she was your mother, assuming you had one. Butter her up like a Christmas goose. Make love to her if you have to. But in private I want you to treat her like she’s Irma Grese. And see what’s in Irma’s kit bag.”

  Irma Grese had been an SS guard hanged for war crimes by the British in 1945; by all accounts she’d been known as the “beautiful blond beast” of Belsen.

  “I get the picture. It’s an ugly one but I can see exactly how to play it. Good cop, bad cop, Jekyll and Hyde.”

  “Maybe. But Timothy Q. Mouse likes that Fritz in Shakespeare better. The one who plays Othello for an idiot.”

  “Iago.”

  “Yes, him. On her side, but not on her side. You gain her confidence and hope you can trip her up.”

  “All right.” I frowned. “If that’s how you want it. You’re the boss.”

  “What’s the matter? You don’t look convinced by my strategy.”

  “No, it’s not that. I was just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “For one thing, we’re talking about premeditated murder here. And a conspiracy. Someone must have pushed Dorpmüller off that station platform. My guess is the person he had dinner with. A friend. A good friend, given the cost of dinner.”

  “According to the police report, it was late at night, dark, with just Dorpmüller on that platform.”

  “So someone already thinks they got away with it.”

  “The widow?”

  “The widow has an iron-clad alibi. She was in America when her husband was killed.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Which means she must have had an accomplice. A co-conspirator.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I can tell there’s a lot more on your very dirty mind, Christof.”

  “Look, Herr Dietrich, I’ve been here at Munich RE for five minutes. So I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.”

  “That’s all right, they’re probably insured.”

  “Not against this kind of thing. No one is insured against the escape of something dangerous from another man’s mouth.”

  “Spit it out, whatever it is. You’ve done pretty well so far.”

  “All right. How well do you know the salesman who sold Dorpmüller the policy?”

  Dietrich flicked open the file and consulted the names on the insurance certificate.

  “Friedrich Jauch,” he said. “I’ve known him since he came here about two years ago. Smart fellow. Good-looking, too. Used to be an auctioneer at Karl & Faber before he joined MRE. As a matter of fact he applied for your job.”

  “As a claims adjustor?”

  “That’s right. Only he’s too smart for the sales department to let him go. Makes them too much money. So the top floor made me turn him down.”

  “When was this?”

  “A month or two ago.”

  “Then long after he sold Dorpmüller his policy?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.” />
  “Interesting.”

  “You think he might be involved?”

  “If Dorpmüller didn’t know he had the policy, then who signed those application forms? That’s what I’d like to know. I’m thinking it was Frau Dorpmüller? Maybe with the connivance of Friedrich Jauch.”

  “And maybe more than that.”

  “Could be. Could be someone pushed Dorpmüller off that railway platform. Could be that someone was Friedrich Jauch. Could be that’s why he applied for a job in claims. Just so that he could scupper a possible investigation by this department. Think about that for a moment. It’s a nice sweet scheme, investigating a claim on a policy that he’d sold himself.”

  “You have got a dirty mind, haven’t you. Now I come to think about it I was a little surprised he applied for the job in the first place. It’s not just MRE who make money from Friedrich Jauch’s salesmanship. It’s him, too. What with commission, becoming a claims adjustor would have meant a substantial pay cut.”

  “Did you ask him about that?”

  “Yes. He said he was getting a little tired of shaking hands and smiling all day. That he’d been thinking a job in claims might suit him better.”

  “How did he take it when you turned him down?”

  “Just fine. They sweetened his deal as a salesman. Gave him a company car and another percentage point on his commission. He could hardly turn up his nose at that.”

  “Not without it drawing attention to himself.”

  “Of course, there is another possibility. It could be that Dorpmüller just didn’t get around to claiming for his time off work. That he was too busy.”

  “You don’t believe that. And nor does Timothy Q. Mouse.”

  “But I want to believe it,” said Dietrich. “There’s a subtle difference. Friedrich Jauch is almost a friend of mine.”

  “Look, it’s not like Dorpmüller’s premium would have gone up if he’d claimed. He was covered for that, too.”

  “You noticed that, as well? You learn fast, Christof.”