by Philip Kerr
I glanced around the other terraced doorways for an object I could toss over the roof of the corrugated iron bus stop to distract him—an old wine bottle or perhaps a piece of wood. There was nothing. The little town of Freyming-Merlebach wasn’t the kind of place where anyone threw very much away. I squatted down on haunches tight from walking and cycling and watched and waited, hoping he might get up and stretch his long legs and leave the bus stop, but all he did was finish one cigarette and fire up another. They smelled good, too. In my book there’s nothing that smells better than a French cigarette, except perhaps a Frenchwoman. In the yellow flame of his lighter I caught a brief glimpse of his scarred face and the gun in his hand, and I knew I would not be so lucky with this man a second time. From time to time he leveled the silenced barrel of the automatic at one of the windows opposite the bus stop, almost as if he was keen to shoot at something, anything, if only to alleviate the boredom of his all-night stakeout. I’d been there myself. Doubtless Korsch—and by extension, Erich Mielke—had impressed on his men the absolute necessity of killing me. For all I knew they were even offering a cash bonus on my head. I’d heard it said that Grenzpos could earn themselves a full weekend’s leave with extra food and alcohol vouchers if they shot a republikflüchtiger.
I stared at my dirty shoes for a while and considered just how far they’d come since I’d left Cap Ferrat. Almost a thousand kilometers, probably. Just the thought of this distance made me feel a combination of victory and despair: victory that I had eluded capture for so long; despair at the loss of my old and comparatively comfortable life. And all because I was squeamish about killing some mendacious Englishwoman who wouldn’t have cared if I was alive or dead. I wondered what she was doing now. Making tea? I had no idea. I didn’t even like the English. In fact, I probably hated the Tommies now even more than I hated the French, which was saying a lot. But for them and the Stasi, I might still be in my old job behind the front desk at the Grand Hôtel. I leaned back against the door and pondered what to do next. The cold andouillette I’d eaten kept repeating on me and every time it did my mouth seemed to turn to piss. Just like my life.
A black cat appeared at my side, stepped sinuously between my legs, wrapped its tail around my knee, and let me fold its pointy ears for a moment or two. I’m not sure I always liked cats, but this one was so friendly that I couldn’t help but warm to it. When I was growing up in Germany my mother used to say that if a black cat crossed your path from left to right it was a sign of good luck; I couldn’t tell if this cat was from the left but it was so long since anything or anyone had come near me by choice that I picked the animal up and stroked it fondly. I needed all the friends I could get, even furry ones. Perhaps he saw in me a kindred spirit, a solitary creature of the night without ties or obligations. After a while the cat blinked an apology at me with large green eyes and explained that it had one or two things to be getting on with and, having pushed its face into mine for a second to cement our new friendship, trotted across the road. In the moonlight the black cat cast a much larger shadow so that it seemed bigger than it was; but no one could have mistaken it for anything but a cat. Which made it all the more shocking when the man in the leather shorts leaned out of the bus shelter and took a shot at it with his silenced automatic. The cat sprang forward into the bushes and disappeared. I suppose that this was the moment I started to hate the Stasi man in the bus shelter. It was one thing him planning to shoot me but it felt like something else him taking a shot at a harmless animal. For me, friends were rare and to see one of mine having to dodge a bullet for something I’d done provoked in me a strong feeling of outrage. I felt like strangling this Fritz. In my book cruelty to animals is always a sign that cruelty to human beings is not far off. It’s a well-known fact that many of Weimar Germany’s worst lust murderers began their murderous careers by torturing and killing cats and dogs.
“You cruel fucking bastard,” I whispered.
It was now that I made out a few loose cobblestones about a meter in front of me. I crept forward, tugged one out of the road, and backed into the doorway again. I hefted the stone cube in my hand. It was about the size of a doughnut and seemed ideal for what I still had in mind. After seeing the Stasi man take a potshot at the cat, I think I would have preferred to have thrown the cobblestone straight at his head. Instead, I glanced both ways along the street to check there were no cars or other Stasi men on patrol and, seeing that it remained all but deserted, I stepped forward and hurled the stone over the bus stop and into the trees, where it bounced off a trunk and then landed with a thud on the ground.
The man in the shorts jumped to his feet, flicked away his cigarette, and stepped out of the bus shelter. I saw that he was wearing a gray wool Tracht jacket now that made him look exactly like a grown-up Hansel who was looking for his Gretel, except that Hansel was never so dangerous. With his silenced gun close to his waist he advanced carefully into the trees, leaving me plenty of time to tiptoe across the slippery road behind him. I knelt by the bus stop and paused. A moment later, I almost cried out as I felt a searing pain in my knee, and it was a second or two before I realized that it was resting on the Stasi man’s hot cigarette end. I cursed silently, brushed it quickly off my trousers, and then stepped into the bushes. I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t even hear him and I hardly wanted to move again until I was quite sure where he was. And then I heard the man a few meters ahead, coming slowly in my direction with one thing on his mind: to find and kill me. In truth, I might have stayed there a while longer and later on walked through the forest and into the Saarland, perhaps without very much hindrance. It was then that I saw it. The black cat. I reached out to stroke it and snatched back my hand when I found its fur was wet and sticky. Suddenly I realized that the Stasi man’s bullet hadn’t missed the cat after all. The animal had been shot as it crossed the road and had limped into the bushes where it collapsed and died. Tears welled up in my eyes—I was tired but I felt sick for my newfound friend, sick and angry now. Angry for the cat and angry that my life had been turned upside down by Erich Mielke and the Stasi, angry enough and perhaps tired enough to want to exact some kind of revenge. So, holding my breath, I crouched down behind a thick tree trunk, drew the carving knife from my sock, and waited for the man in shorts to come close enough for me to cut his throat. While I waited I caught sight of the burn hole in the knee of my trousers. I also had the beginning of a hole in the sole of my shoe and I wasn’t far off looking like a genuine clochard, so the last thing I needed was a large bloodstain on the sleeve of my jacket, because it’s impossible to kill a man with a cold blade and not end up resembling a character in a tragedy by Shakespeare. There’s nothing like blood on your clothes to attract attention. And the thing most murderers usually forget is just how much blood there is in a human body. A human being isn’t much more than a soft-sided jerry can full of liquid. Even as I was crouching there I remembered a bookmaker called Alfred Hau; he stabbed a man to death in an apartment in Hoppegarten—a man who’d weighed close to one hundred and fifty kilos—and the cops reckoned almost eight liters of blood came gushing out of his fat torso, so much that it leaked through the bare floorboards and onto the kitchen ceiling of a Kripo detective who lived in the apartment below. It was probably the easiest arrest the Berlin Murder Commission ever made. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that using my knife was out of the question.
I stabbed the knife into the ground from where I might retrieve it, if needed. Then I whipped off my silk scarf, quickly tied a couple of knots along the length of it, wrapped an end tight around each of my wrists, and held it taut between my hands like an Ismaili assassin. Slowly, with my back pressed against the trunk, I stood up, and taking a silent, deep breath, tried to steady my already twisted nerves. I’d seen the bodies of men who had been strangled—it’s probably the most common form of murder a cop ever sees—and I knew what to do: when there are two or more firm knots in the scarf or the rope, homicide is almo
st certain, but of course actually doing it was a very different proposition. In my limited experience, killing a man in cold blood usually involves killing a significant part of yourself. It’s a fact that many men of my own acquaintance belonging to the SS Einsatzgruppen had often needed to get drunk in order to murder Jews, and even in the higher ranks, nervous breakdowns were common. I didn’t consider myself like any of those but the thought of the dead cat and then the cruel way the Stasi had half-hanged me in Villefranche turned what was left of my heart to stone. I make no excuses for that. It was bastards like the man in the leather shorts who’d put me in this situation in the first place. It was him or me, and I hoped it would be him.
He paused next to the tree behind which I was standing but I waited in a state of suspended animation, the way a hungry tiger waits patiently until it is absolutely sure of a successful attack. I was close enough to smell my quarry now. The soap he’d used to wash himself with the previous day. The Old Spice on his face. The Brylcreem in his yellow hair—he looked like Lutz Moik, the German film actor. The smoke of the Gauloises he’d smoked that was sticking to his quaint clothes. The Mentos he was sucking. I could even smell the leather dressing on his stupid shorts. I almost wondered if he could smell me. I know I could. I was hoping he’d see the dead cat and bend down to inspect his cruel handiwork. It was easy enough to see the little pile of fur that lay in the moonlight like a fairy’s black velvet cushion and the red ruby of blood in its dead center.
“Hey, kitty, kitty. Did someone put the cat out?” And then the bastard laughed a high-pitched girlish laugh and shot the cat again, just for the hell of it. The silenced gun in his hand sounded not much louder than an old-fashioned mousetrap springing into action but no less lethal for that. And now I felt real hatred for him and the new Germany—another new Germany no one wanted—that he represented. Shooting the cat again was a sign that he had relaxed a little, that and the fact that he slipped a packet of cigarettes from a pocket in his leather bib, and pulled one out with his lips. Then he reached into his pocket for the lighter.
Which was when I attacked.
Hooking the silk scarf around his scrawny neck, I pushed him forward onto the damp ground and as he fell, I shoved a knee hard into the small of his back and then knelt on him while I tightened my ligature mercilessly, one knot up against his larynx and the other against his carotid arteries. His face was buried in the cat’s dead body, which seemed appropriate but he was as strong as a bull, much stronger than I’d expected, and even as I set about trying to subdue him I was cursing myself for not just stabbing him in the neck as I’d originally planned. He twisted one way and then the other like a man whose whole body was convulsed with a large current of electricity. The thing about strangling a man is to remember that most such deaths are accidental, that it takes less time to kill someone like this than might be imagined—or so the forensic pathologists had always told me. Most victims of strangling are women—housewives strangled by drunken husbands who don’t know what they’re doing until it’s too late. It’s one thing strangling a woman after a night out on the beer; but it’s another strangling a wiry, powerful man who was perhaps half my age. What gave me extra strength was the certainty that the German wearing the shorts would have killed me with no more thought than he’d given to shooting the cat.
The first ten or fifteen seconds were the worst for us both; he kicked and bucked like an angry rodeo horse desperate to unseat its rider and it took every bit of my strength just to lie on top of him and keep him pinned down, pulling with all my might on both ends of the silk scarf to maintain the pressure. After I’d obstructed the blood flow to his brain for at least twenty or more seconds he was clawing at my hands, which is when his legs started to slow down at last; and after more than a minute I was certain I was lying on top of the body of a dead man. I knew this with even greater certainty when I detected the strong smell of his bowels in his shorts; the unpleasant fact is that when you have all your weight compressing a man’s dying body, it’s like squeezing a tube of toothpaste. Something has to give. But still I stayed there a while longer, tightening the scarf one last time until every drop of blood was gone from his brain, every milliliter of air was gone from his lungs, and, it seemed to my wrinkling nostrils, every bit of shit was squeezed out of his arse.
FIFTY
April 1939
Gerdy Troost was reading Hitler’s book in her comfortable upstairs rooms at the Berghof when I turned up.
“My, but you’re a sight, aren’t you?”
“Didn’t I tell you? I’m practicing to be a ventriloquist. This is the best way to learn, according to the instruction manual.”
“I think you’ve been reading the one for the dummy.”
I smiled and regretted it immediately.
“What happened, anyway? And don’t tell me you slipped on the ice. Nobody slips around here unless they’re meant to.”
“Someone hit me.”
“Now, why would they do that?”
“The usual reason.”
“Is there just the one?”
“There is where I’m concerned.”
The room was dimly lit and now she switched on another lamp to take a closer look at me, which was when I noticed the German shepherd lying in the corner. The dog growled as Frau Troost touched my face solicitously. Her fingers were cool and gentle and caring and her fingernails were unvarnished, as if she wasn’t much interested in that kind of thing. Maybe Hitler didn’t like women who looked too much like women.
“Does it hurt?”
“Only when I laugh, so really not at all.”
The dog kept on growling but this time it stood up.
“Quiet, Harras,” she said. “Just ignore him, Commissar. He’s jealous. But he certainly wouldn’t do anything about it. Which is more than can be said for whoever clobbered you. They caught you a good one, didn’t they?”
“Being hit is an occupational hazard for someone like me. I’ve got that kind of a face, I think. People just seem to want to punch it. Nazis, mostly.”
“Well, that certainly narrows it down. It’s probably too late to put something cold on it, but I could do that, if you like. It might still help to take the swelling down.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“I hope you’re right. Because Obersalzberg has no shortage of Nazis. Me included, in case you’d forgotten.”
“I hadn’t; not in this house. But you’ll forgive me if I say that you don’t look like the kind of Nazi who hits people in the face. Not without a very good reason.”
“Don’t be too sure, Gunther. I can get pretty worked up about a lot of things.”
“You don’t have to worry about me upsetting you, Professor. My opinion on design and architecture counts for absolutely nothing. I don’t know a pediment from a pedicure. And when it comes to art, I’m a complete philistine.”
“Then it seems to me you’re a lot nearer to being a Nazi than you might think, Gunther.”
“You know, you certainly don’t sound like the Leader’s girlfriend.”
“Whatever gave you the idea I was?”
“You, maybe.”
“I like him. I like him a lot. But not like that. Besides, he already has a girlfriend. Her name is Eva Braun.”
“Does she know much about art?”
Gerdy smiled. “Eva doesn’t know much about anything. Which is the way the Leader seems to like it. Except for me and the Leader, this whole administration is run by complete philistines.”
“If you say so. You see? I’m not disposed to disagree with you about anything very much. But if you do feel like hitting me, then maybe you’d be kind enough to ask the dog to bite me instead. I can probably spare a leg more than my face right now. And not because it’s so handsome but because my face has my mouth in it. I figure I’m going to need that if I am going to solve this case in the allotted time.”
“Like that, is it?”
I said it was.
“Bormann putting on the pressure?”
I nodded again. “Like I was the prime minister of Czechoslovakia.”
“He’s good at that.” She picked up the telephone. “Still, I think you’d better eat something. Keep your strength up. I was about to request dinner service. I suggest you have some scrambled eggs. You’ll have no problem with that. And a Moselle to take the edge off the pain. And what about a hot banana cooked in cream and sugar? The Leader’s very fond of that himself.”
“Did someone smack him, too?”
While Professor Troost gave my dinner order to someone in the Berghof kitchens I walked around her rooms looking at the paintings, the architectural models, and the bronze sculptures. I don’t have much of an eye for art, but I can usually recognize a good picture when I see one. Mostly it’s the frame that gives it away and helps to distinguish it from what’s happening on the wallpaper. After she had replaced the cream-colored receiver in its cradle she came and stood beside me in front of a rather nicely rendered watercolor of mad King Ludwig’s famous castle in Bavaria. After all the cheap cologne I’d been smelling, her own Chanel No. 5 was a breath of fresh air.
