by Philip Kerr
in ‘Würzburg.’ ” “There isn’t?” “Not if you come from Würzburg, there isn’t. Also, the letter g
on this typewriter is riding a little higher than the other letters.” She put the tender letter in front of me and placed a well-manicured fingernail under the offending g
. “D’you see?” In truth, my eyesight was feeling a little blurred, but I nodded all the same. She held the notepaper up to the light. “And you know what? This isn’t even our notepaper. It looks like it, only the watermark is different.” “I see.” And now I really did. “Of course,” I said. “Max Reles must have been rigging bids. And I think that works like this: You put in a bid for something yourself and then make sure that competing bids are priced at an unreasonably high level. Either that or you chase off the other bidders, by whatever means necessary. If this is a fake bid, Max Reles must have an interest in the company that was awarded the contract to supply the limestone. Probably that was a high bid too, but crucially not as high as your husband’s bid. As a matter of fact, who did win the contract?” “Würzburg Jura Limestone,” she said dully. “Our major competitor. The same company I’ve agreed to sell to.” “All right. Perhaps Reles had already asked Heinrich to put in a high bid so that your competitor would get the contract. If he’d agreed to do it, he’d have been paid a commission. And maybe even ended up supplying Würzburg Jura himself. The advantage being that he could have been paid twice.” “Heinrich may have been cheating on me as a husband,” she said, “but he wasn’t like that in business.” “In which case, Max Reles must have tried and failed to put the thumbscrews on him. Or simply faked the bid from your husband’s company. Perhaps both. Either way, Heinrich found out about it. So Max Reles got rid of him. Quickly. Discreetly. But permanently. This all makes sense now. The first night I ever saw your husband was at a dinner hosted by Reles for a lot of businessmen where there was an argument. One of the other businessmen stormed out. Perhaps he was asked to supply an inflated bid for something else.” “What are we going to do now?” “Tomorrow morning I have an appointment with the local Gestapo. It seems I’m not the only one who’s interested in Max Reles. Perhaps they’ll tell me what they know, and perhaps I’ll tell them what I know, and maybe we’ll figure out a way forward from there. But I’m afraid all of that might mean another autopsy. Obviously the Berlin pathologist missed something. These days they often do. Forensic standards are no longer as rigorous as they used to be. Nothing is.”
28 Y
OU WALK UP TO A DOOR that is guarded by two steel-helmeted men wearing black uniforms and white gloves. I’m not sure about the purpose of the white gloves. Are they meant to persuade the rest of us that the SS is pure in heart and deed? If so, then I’m not convinced: this is the militia that murdered Ernst Röhm and God knows how many other SA men. Inside a heavy wood-and-glass door is a large hallway with a stone floor and a marble staircase. Next to the desk are a Nazi flag and a full-length portrait of Adolf Hitler. Behind the desk is another man wearing a black uniform and the same unhelpful expression you see all over Germany. It is the face of totalitarian bureaucracy and officialdom. This face does not seek to please. It is not there to serve you. It cares not if you live or die. It regards you not as a citizen but as an object to be processed, up the stairs or out the door. It is how a man looks when he stops behaving like a human being and becomes a kind of robot. Unquestioning obedience. Orders to be carried out without a second thought. This is what they want. Ranks upon serried ranks of steel-helmeted automatons. My appointment is checked off on a neatly typed list that lies on the well-polished desk. I am early. I should not be early any more than I should be late. Now I will have to wait, and the robot does not know what to do with someone who is early and has to wait. There is an empty wooden chair beside the elevator cage. Normally there is a guard sitting there, I am told, but until the appointed time I may sit there. I sit. A few minutes pass. I smoke. At precisely ten o’clock the robot lifts the telephone receiver, dials a number, and announces my arrival. I am ordered into the elevator and up to the fourth floor, where another robot will meet me. I enter the elevator. The robot operating the machinery has heard the order and assumes temporary responsibility for my movement within the building. On the fourth floor, a group of people are waiting to take the elevator down. One of these is a man whose arms are supported by two more robots. He is manacled and half conscious, and there is blood streaming from his nose and onto his clothes. No one looks at all ashamed or embarrassed at my being there or seeing any of this. This would be to admit the possibility that what has been done is wrong. And since what has been done to him has been done in the name of the Leader, this simply cannot be the case. The man is dragged into the elevator, and the third robot, who remains standing on the fourth-floor landing, now leads me down a long, wide corridor. He stops in front of a door numbered 43, knocks, and then opens it without waiting. When I enter, he closes the door behind me. The room is furnished but empty. The window is wide open, but there is a smell in the air that makes me think that perhaps this is the place where the man with the bloody nose has just been interrogated. And when I see a couple of spots of blood on the brown linoleum, I know I am right about this. I go over to the window and look out onto Ludwigstrasse. My hotel is just around the corner, and although it is foggy outside, I can see its roof from here. On the other side of the street from Würzburg’s Gestapo HQ is the office building of the local Nazi Party. Through an upper window I can see a man with his feet up on a desk, and I wonder what gets done in there, in the name of the Party, that doesn’t get done in here. A bell starts to toll. The sound drifts across the red rooftops from the cathedral, I presume, only it sounds more like something out at sea, something to warn ships approaching rocks in the fog. And I think of Noreen, somewhere on the North Atlantic, standing in the stern of the SS Manhattan
, staring back at me through the thick fog. The door opens behind me, and a strong smell of soap is carried into the room. I turn as a smallish man closes the door and rolls down the sleeves of his shirt. I guess that he has just washed his hands. Perhaps there was some blood on them. He says nothing until he has fetched his black SS tunic from a hanger in the closet and puts it on as if the uniform will help to compensate for his lack of centimeters. “You’re Gunther?” he said in a voice that sounded folksy and Franconian. “That’s right. And you must be Captain Weinberger.” He carried on buttoning his tunic without bothering to answer. Then he pointed at the chair in front of his desk. “Sit down, please.” “No, thanks,” I said, sitting down on the windowsill. “I’m a bit like a cat. I’m very particular where I sit.” “What ever do you mean?” “There’s blood on the floor underneath that chair and, for all I know, there’s some on it as well. I don’t make enough money to risk spoiling a good suit.” Weinberger colored a little. “Please yourself.” He sat down behind the desk. His forehead was the only tall thing about him. On top of it was a shock of thick brown curly hair. His eyes were green and penetrating. His mouth was insolent. He looked like a defiant schoolboy. And it was hard to imagine him being rough with anything other than a collection of toy soldiers or a fairground coconut toss. “So, how can I help you, Herr Gunther?” I didn’t like the look of him. But that hardly mattered. A display of good manners would have struck the wrong note. Clipping the tails of young pups in the Gestapo was, as Liebermann von Sonnenberg had said, almost a sport among senior police officers. “An American called Max Reles. What do you know about him?” “And you’re asking in what capacity?” Weinberger put his boots up onto the desk like the man in the office across the street and clasped his hands behind his head. “You’re not Gestapo, and you’re not KRIPO. And I think we can take it you’re not SS.” “I’m conducting an undercover investigation for Berlin’s assistant police commissioner, Liebermann von Sonnenberg.” “Yes, I got his letter. And his telephone call. It’s not often that Berlin pays much attention to a place like this. But you still haven’t answered my question.” I lit a cigarette and
flicked the match out of the window. “Don’t piss me around. Are you going to help me, or am I going back to my hotel to call the Alex?” “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of pissing you off, Herr Gunther.” He smiled, affably. “Since this doesn’t appear to be an official matter, I just want to know why I’m going to help you. That is right, isn’t it? I mean, if this was an official matter, the assistant commissioner’s request would have come down through my superiors, wouldn’t it?” “We can do it that way if you’d prefer,” I said. “But then you’d be wasting my time. And yours. So why don’t you just count this as a favor to the head of Berlin KRIPO.” “I’m glad you mentioned that. A favor. Because I’d like a favor in return. That’s fair, isn’t it?” “So what do you want?” Weinberger shook his head. “Not here, eh? Let’s go for a coffee. Your hotel is not far. Let’s go there.” “All right. If that’s how you want this.” “I think it might be best. Given what you’re asking about.” He stood up and grabbed his belts and his cap. “Besides, I’m already doing you a favor. The coffee here is terrible.” He said nothing more until we were out of the building. But then I could hardly stop him. “This isn’t a bad town. I should know, I went to university here. I studied law, and when I graduated, I joined the Gestapo. It’s a very Catholic town, of course, which meant that, in the beginning, it wasn’t particularly Nazi. I can see that surprises you, but it’s true—when I first joined the Party, this town had one of the smallest Party memberships in the whole of Germany. It just shows you what can be achieved in a short period of time, eh? “Most of the cases we get in the Würzburg Gestapo office are denunciations. Germans having sexual relations with Jews, that kind of thing. But here’s the anomaly: the majority of denunciations come not from Party members, but from good Catholics. Of course, there is no actual law against Germans and Jews conducting their sordid love affairs. Not yet. But that doesn’t stop the denunciations, and we’re obliged to investigate them if only to prove that the Party disapproves of these obscene relationships. Occasionally we parade a couple accused of race defilement around the town square, but it seldom goes much further than that. Once or twice we have run a Jew out of town for profiteering, but that’s it. And it goes almost without saying that most of the denunciations are groundless and the product of stupidity and ignorance. Naturally. Most of the people who live here are not much more than peasants. This place is not Berlin. Would that it were. “My own situation is a case in point, Herr Gunther. Weinberger is not necessaily a Jewish name. I am not a Jew. None of my grandparents is a Jew. And yet I myself have been denounced as a Jew, and on more than one occasion, I might add. Which is not exactly helping my career here in Würzburg.” “I can imagine.” I allowed myself a smile, but that was all. I hadn’t yet got the information I needed, and until then, I hardly wanted to upset the young Gestapo man walking along the street beside me. We turned onto Adolf-Hitler-Strasse and walked north, toward my hotel. “Well, yes, it’s funny. Of course it is. Even I can see that. But somehow I feel it wouldn’t be happening in a more sophisticated place, such as Berlin. After all, there are people there with Jewish-sounding names who are Nazis, aren’t there? Liebermann von Sonnenberg? I ask you. Well, I’m sure he would understand my predicament.” I hardly liked to tell him that Berlin’s assistant police commissioner might have been a Party member but he also despised the Gestapo and all that it stood for. “What I feel is this,” he said earnestly. “That my name wouldn’t hold me back in a place like Berlin. Here in Würzburg there will always be the faintest suspicion that I’m not completely Aryan.” “Well, who is? I mean, you go far enough back and, if the Bible’s right, we’re all Jewish. Tower of Babel. Right.” “Hmm, yes.” He nodded uncertainly. “Besides all that, most of my caseload is so petty it’s hardly worth the effort of my investigating it. That’s why I became interested in Max Reles in the first place.” “And you want . . . ? Let’s be a bit more specific here, Captain.” “Nothing more than a chance. A chance to prove myself, that’s all. A word from the assistant commissioner to the Gestapo in Berlin would surely smooth my transfer. Don’t you think so?” “It might,” I admitted. “It might, at that.” We walked through the hotel entrance and made our way to the café, where I ordered us both coffee and cake. “When I get back to Berlin,” I told him, “I’ll see what can be done. As a matter of fact, I know someone in the Gestapo myself. He runs his own department in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. He might be able to help you. Yes, it’s possible he might. Always supposing that you can help me.” These days, that was how everything in Germany worked. For rats like Othman Weinberger, it was probably the only way to get on. And while personally I regarded him as something to be scraped carefully off the sole of my Salamanders, I could hardly blame him for wanting to get out of Würzburg. I’d been there for just twenty-four hours and already I felt as keen to leave the place as the wandering Jew’s stray dog. “But you know,” I said, “this case. Together we might yet make something out of it. Something a man might base a career on. You might not need anyone’s kind word if this impresses your superiors.” Weinberger smiled wryly and gave the pretty waitress a slow up-and-down as she stooped to serve our coffee and cake. “You think so? I doubt it. No one here seemed very much interested in what I had to tell them about Max Reles.” “I’m not here to pour coffee in my ears, Captain. Let’s hear it.” Ignoring his coffee and the excellent cake, Weinberger leaned forward excitedly. “This man is a real gangster,” he said. “Just like Al Capone and those other Chicago hoodlums. The FBI—” “Hold up. I want you to begin at the beginning.” “Well, then, you might know that Würzburg is the capital of the German quarrying business. Our limestone is highly prized by architects all over the country. But there are really only four companies that sell the stuff. One of them is a company called Würzburg Jura Limestone, and it’s owned by a prominent local citizen called Roland Rothenberger.” He shrugged, ruefully. “Does that sound any less Jewish than my name? You tell me.” “Get on with it.” “Rothenberger is a friend of my father’s. My father’s a local doctor and a town councillor. A few months ago, Rothenberger came to see him in his capacity as a councillor and told him that he was being intimidated by a man named Krempel. Gerhard Krempel. He used to be an SA man, but now he’s a heavy for Max Reles. Anyway, Rothenberger’s story was that someone called Max Reles had offered to buy a share in his company, and that this Krempel character started to get rough when Rothenberger told him he didn’t want to sell. So I started to check it out, but I’d hardly finished opening the file when Rothenberger contacted me to say that he wished to withdraw the complaint. He said that Reles had substantially improved his offer and that there had been a simple misunderstanding and that Max Reles was now a shareholder in Würzburg Jura Limestone. That I should forget all about it. That’s what he told me. “But I’m afraid boredom got the better of me, and I thought I’d see what else I could find out about Reles. Right away I discovered he was an American citizen and, on the face of it, an offense had been committed right there. As you probably know, only German-owned companies are allowed to tender for Olympic contracts, and, it transpired, Würzburg Jura Limestone had just outbid the local competition to supply stone for Berlin’s new stadium. I also found out that Reles seemed to have important connections here in Germany, so I resolved to see what was known about him in America. Which is why I contacted Liebermann von Sonnenberg.” “What did the FBI tell you?” “A lot more than I bargained for, to be honest. Enough to persuade me to check him out with the Vienna KRIPO. The picture I’ve built of Reles is based on two separate sets of information. And what I’ve managed to work out for myself.” “You have been busy.” “Max Reles is from Brownsville, New York, and he’s a Hungarian-German Jew. That would be bad enough, but there’s a lot more. His father, Theodor Reles, left Vienna for America at the turn of the century, most likely to escape a murder charge. He was strongly suspected by the Vienna KRIPO of murdering someone—perhaps several people—with an ice pick. It was apparently a secret technique taught to him by a Vie
nnese Jewish doctor by the name of Arnstein. When Theodor settled in America, he married and had two sons: Max and his younger brother, Abraham. “Now, Max has no convictions, although he was involved in the Prohibition rackets, as well as in loan-sharking and gambling. Since the end of Prohibition in March of last year, he’s built connections with the Chicago underworld. Little brother, Abraham, has a conviction for juvenile crime and is similarly involved in organized crime. He’s also believed to be one of the most cold-blooded killers in the Brooklyn mob and is reputed to use an ice pick for his murders, like his father. So skilled is he with this weapon that in some cases he leaves no trace.” “How does that work?” I asked. “You stab a man with an ice pick, you figure it leaves more than just a bruise.” Weinberger was grinning. “That’s what I thought. Anyway, there was nothing about this technique in the information I had from the FBI. But the Vienna KRIPO still have an old case file on Theodor Reles. You know, the father. Apparently what he used to do was ram the ice pick through the victim’s ear, right into his brain; and he was so good at it that many of his victims were thought to have died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Something natural, anyway.” “Jesus,” I muttered. “That must be how Reles killed Rubusch.” “What’s that?” I told Weinberger what I knew about the murder of Heinrich Rubusch, and how Würzburg Jura Limestone was now the new owner of the Rubusch Stone Company. “You said Max Reles has built connections with the Chicago underworld,” I said. “Such as what?” “Until recently, Chicago was run by Capone himself. Who also came from Brooklyn. But Capone is now in jail, and the Chicago organization has branched out into other areas, including construction and labor racketeering. The FBI suspects that the Chicago mob was involved in fixing construction contracts for the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics.” “That figures. Max Reles has a close friend on the American Olympic Committee who also owns a Chicago construction company. A fellow named Brundage. He’s getting some sort of kickback from our own committee in return for chasing off an American boycott.” “Money?” “No. He’s being drip-fed East Asian art treasures that were part of a collection donated to Berlin’s Ethnographical Museum by some old Jew.” I nodded appreciatively. “Like I said, you have been busy, Captain. I’m impressed at how much you’ve been able to find out. Frankly, I think the assistant commissioner is going to be as impressed as I am. With your talents, perhaps you ought to consider a career in the real police. In KRIPO.” “KRIPO?” Weinberger shook his head. “No, thanks,” he said. “The Gestapo is the police force of the future. The way I see it, the Gestapo and the SS will have to absorb KRIPO in the long run. No, no, I appreciate your compliment, but from the point of view of my career, I have to stay in the Gestapo. But preferably the Berlin Gestapo, of course.” “Of course.” “Tell me, Herr Gunther, you don’t think we’re eggs trying to be smarter than the hen, do you? I mean, this Reles may be a Jew and a gangster. But he’s got some important friends in Berlin.” “I’ve already spoken to Frau Rubusch about exhuming her husband’s body, which will prove he was murdered. I think I can even lay my hands on the murder weapon. Like most Amis, Reles likes a lot of ice in his liquor. There’s a lethal-looking ice pick on the sideboard of his hotel room. And if all that’s not enough, then there’s his being a Jew, like you said. I’d like to see what all of his important friends in the Party think about that. I don’t much like playing that domino, but in the end there might be no other way to nail the bastard. Liebermann von Sonnenberg was appointed by Hermann Goering himself. And possibly we’ll have to present all the salient facts to him. And since Goering isn’t on any Olympic committee, it’s hard to imagine him choosing to ignore corruption among the committee’s members, even if some others might.” “You’d better be certain of all your evidence before you do that. What’s the saying? The cock that crows too early gets the twisted neck.” “I suppose they teach you that at Gestapo training school. No, I won’t do anything until I have all the evidence. I can walk just as well as I can run.” Weinberger nodded. “I’ll need to see the widow. To get her written permission to exhume the body. Probably I’ll have to involve the Würzburg KRIPO, too. Such as it is. And a magistrate. All of that could take a little time. At least a week. Perhaps longer.” “Heinrich Rubusch has plenty of time, Captain. But he needs to rise up from the dead and start talking if this case is going to get anywhere. It’s one thing ignoring a construction racket. It’s quite another ignoring the murder of a prominent German citizen. Especially when he’s properly Aryan. You’re a little folksy for my taste, Weinberger, but we’ll make a first-rate policeman out of you yet. Back at the Alex, when I was police, we had a saying of our own. The bone won’t come to the dog. It’s the dog that goes to the bone.”
