A Quiet Flame

by Philip Kerr

  “As it happens, though,” he added smoothly, “the missing girl is no ordinary girl. Fabienne von Bader is what we call a paquete. One of the elegant people. Her father, Kurt von Bader, is a close friend of the Peróns, as well as a director of the Banco Germánico, here in B.A. Naturally, the police are sparing no effort in looking for her. You will be merely a part of that effort. Perhaps she is already dead. Perhaps, as you suggested, she has only run away from home. Although, frankly, she is a little young to have a boyfriend. She’s only fourteen years old. Grete Wohlauf, you should leave her to the regular police. But Fabienne is a different story. She should be your main focus. From what I hear, missing persons were once something of a specialty for you. After you left the Berlin police in 1933. When you were a private detective.”

  “You seem to know everything about me, Colonel,” I said. “Too much for comfort.”

  “Not too much. Just everything that is important. For the purpose of your inquiry, you should assume that our potential murderer is a German and confine yourself to the community of recent immigrants, and those who are of German-Argentine origin. You are looking for a psychopath, yes. But always you are looking for some clue as to the whereabouts of young Fabienne von Bader.”

  “It won’t be easy asking questions of my old comrades.”

  “Which is why you must choose your questions carefully. You must make your questions seem innocent.”

  “You don’t know them,” I said. “There’s no such thing as an innocent question where they’re concerned.”

  “The Red Cross is an admirable institution,” said the colonel. “But to go anywhere else outside of this country again—Germany, for example—you will need an Argentine passport. To get a passport, you will have to prove that you have been an Argentine resident of good conduct. Once you have proved this, a good-conduct pass will be issued. With a conduct pass, you can apply to a court of first instance for a passport. I thought it would be a good cover story for your inquiry if we said that you are carrying out background checks for the Security and Intelligence Directorate to see whether someone is a suitable candidate for this good-conduct pass. That way you can pry into the backgrounds of your old comrades with impunity. I daresay most of them will be only too willing to answer all your questions, Herr Gunther. No matter how impertinent. Such a role allows you complete license. After all, who among your old comrades doesn’t want a passport in a new name?”

  “It might work,” I said.

  “Of course it will work. A desk will be provided for you at the Casa Rosada. That’s where the SIDE is headquartered. A car will be yours to use. You will receive expenses. A salary. Full SIDE identification. And you will report directly to me. Anything at all. No matter how small. Dr. Pack will be here in a couple of weeks. You can see him then. For obvious reasons, however, I’d like you to start your inquiry immediately. A list of the names and addresses of your old comrades will be given to you at the Casa Rosada. Naturally, Fuldner and the DAIE have given us some idea of who these people were back in Germany. What they did and when. But of course, I should like to know a lot more about them. In order to assess what diplomatic and security risk they might pose for us in the future. You can update the files as you go. Clear?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “I assume you’ll want to meet the parents of the missing girl as a matter of priority.”

  “If I could.”

  The colonel nodded. He drew open a little drawer in the table, from which he removed a leather briefcase. From one of the pockets in the briefcase, he took out a pistol before emptying the rest of the contents onto the table.

  “One Smith and Wesson semiautomatic pistol. One box of ammunition. One shoulder holster. One driver’s license in the name of Carlos Hausner. One SIDE identity warrant in the name of Carlos Hausner. One security pass for the Casa Rosada in the name of Carlos Hausner. One SIDE manual—make sure you read it carefully. One hundred thousand pesos in cash. There will be more when you need it. Naturally, receipts are required where possible. The manual will tell you exactly how to fill out an expense form. You’ll find everything else—DAIE files on German immigrants, KRIPO and Gestapo files from Alexanderplatz—in your filing cabinet at the Casa Rosada.”

  I nodded silently. There didn’t seem to be any point in mentioning the fact that all of this had been ready before I walked into the police station. He’d been so sure I’d agree that I almost told him to go and screw himself. I hated him taking me for granted like that. But I hated being ill even more. So how could I say no? We both knew I had no choice. Not if I wanted to receive the best medical treatment.

  He fiddled in his pocket and handed over some car keys. “It’s the one outside. The lime-colored Chevrolet we came in.”

  “My favorite flavor,” I said.

  He stood up. “You can drive, can’t you?”

  “I can drive.”

  “Good. Then you can drive us to Retiro.” He glanced at his watch. “They’re expecting us, so we had better be getting along.”

  “Before we go, I’d like to take another look at that dead body.”

  The colonel shrugged. “If you like. Was there anything that you noticed?”

  “Nothing apart from the obvious.” I shook my head. “I wasn’t really paying attention before. That’s all.”

  6

  BERLIN, 1932

  IN A MANUAL of forensic medicine that Ernst Gennat gave all the bulls that joined Department IV, there was a photograph that always caused a certain amount of mirth the first time you saw it. In the photograph, a naked girl was lying on a bed with her hands tied behind her back, around her neck was a ligature pulled tight, and half of her head had been blown off with a shotgun. Oh yes, and there was a dildo up her ass. Nothing funny about any of that, of course. It was the caption underneath the picture that was the funny part. It read: “Circumstances Arousing Suspicion.” That used to kill us. Whenever any of us who were assigned to D4 saw an atrocious and obvious case of homicide, we used to repeat the words of that caption. It helped lighten things up.

  The body was found in Friedrichshain Park, close to the hospital, in the eastern part of Berlin. The area was popular with children, because of the fairy-tale fountain that was there. Water flowed down a series of shallow steps that were flanked by ten groups of characters from stories each of us had heard at his mother’s knee. When the call came into the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz, it was hoped that the dead girl might have drowned, accidentally. But one look at the body and I knew different. She looked like the victim of the wolf from one of those old fairy tales. The kind of big bad wolf who might have tried to eat any one of those little limestone heroes and heroines.

  “Bloody hell, sir,” said my sergeant, KBS Heinrich Grund, as we shone our flashlights over the body. “Circumstances arousing suspicion, or what?”

  “Sure looks that way, doesn’t it?”

  “Only a bit, yeah. Shit. Wait till the boys at the Alex hear about this one.”

  There was not a permanent staff of detectives for homicide investigations at the Alex. D4 was supposed to be only a supervisory body, with three rotating teams of cops from other Berlin inspectorates. But in practice it didn’t work like that. By 1932 there were three teams on active duty, with nothing left in reserve. That night I had already driven over to Wedding to take a look at the body of a fifteen-year-old boy who had been found stabbed to death in a bus shelter. The other two teams were still out on cases: KOK Müller was looking into the death of a man found hanging on a lamppost in Lichtenrade; and KOK Lipik was in Neukölln, investigating the fatal shooting of a woman. If this sounds like a crime wave, it wasn’t. Most of the murders that took place in Berlin that spring and early summer were political. And but for the tit-for-tat violence carried out by Nazi storm troopers and Communist cadres, the city’s crime figures would have shown a declining murder rate during the last months of the Weimar Republic.

  Friedrichshain Park was a leafy mile north west of the
Alex. After the call came in, we were there in less than twenty minutes. Me, district secretary Grund, an ordinary criminal secretary, an assistant criminal secretary, and half a dozen uniformed polenta from the protection police—the Schutzpolizei.

  “A lust murder, do you think?” asked Grund.

  “Could be. There’s not much blood around, though. Whatever lust might have been involved must have happened elsewhere.” I looked up and around. The road junction at Königs-Thor was only a few yards to the west of us. “Whoever it was could have stopped his car on Friedenstrasse, or Am Friedrichshain, lifted her out of the trunk, and carried her here just after it got dark tonight.”

  “With the park on one side of the road and a couple of cemeteries on the other, it’s a good spot,” said Grund. “Lots of trees and bushes to keep him covered. Nice and quiet.”

  Then, somewhere to the west of us, in the heart of the Scheunenviertel, we heard two shots fired.

  “Although not so as you’d notice,” I said. Hearing a third shot, and then a fourth, I added, “Sounds like your friends are busy tonight.”

  “Nothing to do with me,” said Grund. “More likely the Always True, I’d have thought. This is their patch.”

  The Always True was one of Berlin’s most powerful criminal gangs.

  “But if it was a Red who just got shot, then presumably that would be to your lot’s advantage.”

  Heinrich Grund was, or had been, just about my best friend on the force. We had been in the army together. There was a picture of him on the wall in my corner of the detectives’ room. In the picture, no less a figure than Paul von Hindenburg, the president of the republic, was presenting Heinrich with the victor’s plaque for winning the Prussian Police Boxing Championships. But the previous week I had discovered that my old friend had joined the NSBAG—the National Socialist Fellowship of Civil Servants. As he was a boxer with a reputation for using the head, I had to admit that being a Nazi suited him. All the same, it felt like a betrayal.

  “What makes you think it was a Nazi shooting a Red, and not a Red shooting a Nazi?”

  “I can tell the difference.”

  “How?”

  “It’s a full moon, isn’t it? That’s usually the time when werewolves and Nazis creep out of their holes to commit murder.”

  “Very funny.” Grund smiled patiently and lit a cigarette. He blew out the match and, careful not to contaminate the crime scene, put it in his vest pocket. He might have been a Nazi but he was still a good detective. “And your lot. They’re so different, are they?”

  “My lot? What lot is that?”

  “Come on, Bernie. Everyone knows the Official supports the Reds.”

  The Official was the union of Prussian police officers, to which I belonged. It wasn’t the biggest union. That was the General. But the important names in the General’s leadership—policemen like Dillenburger and Borck—were openly right-wing and anti-Semitic. Which was why I’d left the General and joined the Official.

  “The Official isn’t Communist,” I said. “We support the Social Democrats and the republic.”

  “Oh, yeah? Then why the Iron Front against Fascism? Why not an Iron Front against Bolshevism, too?”

  “Because, as you well know, Heinrich, most of the violence on the streets is committed or provoked by the Nazis.”

  “How do you work that out, exactly?”

  “That woman in Neukölln that Lipik’s investigating. Even before he left the Alex, he reckoned she had been shot dead by a storm trooper who was aiming at a Commie.”

  “So. It was an accident. I don’t see how that proves the Nazis organize most of the violence.”

  “No? Well, you want to come round our way and take a look out of my apartment window on Dragonerstrasse. The Central Offices of the German Communist Party are just around the corner, on Bulowplatz. So that’s where the Nazis choose to exercise their democratic right to hold a parade. Does that seem reasonable? Does that sound law-abiding?”

  “Proves my point, doesn’t it? You living in a Red area like that.”

  “All it proves is that the Nazis are always spoiling for a fight.”

  I bent down and flicked my flashlight up and down the dead girl’s body. Her upper half looked more or less normal. She was about thirteen or fourteen, blond, with pale blue eyes and a small galaxy of freckles around her pixie nose. It was a tomboyish sort of face, and you could easily have mistaken her for a boy. The matter of her sex was only confirmed by her small, adolescent breasts, the rest of her sexual organs having been removed along with her lower intestines, her womb, and whatever else gets packed in down there when a girl gets born. But it wasn’t her evisceration that caught my eye. In truth, both Heinrich and I had seen this kind of thing many times in the trenches. There was also the caliper on her left leg. I hadn’t noticed it before.

  “No walking stick,” I said, tapping it with my pencil. “You’d think she’d have had one.”

  “Maybe she didn’t need one. It’s not every cripple that needs a stick.”

  “You’re right. Goebbels manages very well without one, doesn’t he? For a cripple. Then again there’s a big stick inside almost everything he says.” I lit a cigarette and let out a big, smoky sigh. “Why do people do this kind of thing?” I said to myself.

  “You mean, kill children?”

  “I meant, Why kill them like this? It’s monstrous, isn’t it? Depraved.”

  “I should have thought it was obvious,” said Grund.

  “Oh? How’s that?”

  “You’re the one who said he must be depraved. I couldn’t agree more. But is it any wonder? I say is it any wonder we have depraved people doing things like this when you consider the filth and depravity that’s tolerated by this fag end of a government? Look around you, Bernie. Berlin is like a big, slimy rock. Lift it up and you can see everything that crawls. The oilers, stripe men, wall-sliders, boot girls, sugarlickers, Munzis, T-girls. The women who are men and the men who are women. Sick. Venal. Corrupt. Depraved. And all of it tolerated by your beloved Weimar Republic.”

  “I suppose everything will be different if Adolf Hitler gets into power.” I was laughing as I said it. The Nazis had done well in the most recent elections. But nobody sensible really believed they could run the country. Nobody thought for a minute that President Hindenburg was ever going to ask the man he detested most in the world—a guttersnipe NCO from Austria—to become the next chancellor of Germany.

  “Why not? We’re going to need someone to restore order in this country.”

  As he spoke, we heard another shot travel through the warm night air.

  “And who better than the man who causes all the trouble to put an end to it, eh? I can sort of see the logic behind that, yes.”

  One of the uniforms came over. We stood up. It was Sergeant Gollner, better known as Tanker—because of his size and shape.

  “While you two were arguing,” he said, “I put a cordon around this part of the park. So as to keep the pot-watchers away. Last thing we want is any details of how she was killed getting into the newspapers. Giving stupid people stupid ideas. Confessing to things they haven’t done. We’ll have a closer look in the morning, eh? When it’s light.”

  “Thanks, Tanker,” I said. “I should have—”

  “Skip it.” He took a deep breath of a night air made moist by water a light breeze had carried from the fountain. “Nice here, isn’t it? I always liked this place. Used to come here a lot, I did. On account of the fact that my brother is buried over there.” He nodded south, in the direction of the state hospital. “With the revolutionaries of 1848.”

  “I didn’t know you were that old,” I said.

  Tanker grinned. “No, he got shot by the Freikorps, in December 1918. Proper lefty, so he was. A real troublemaker. But he didn’t deserve that. Not after what he went through in the trenches. Reds or not, none of them deserved to be shot for what happened.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said, nodding at Heinrich
Grund. “Tell him.”

  “He knows what I think,” said Tanker. He looked down at the girl’s body. “What was wrong with her leg, then?”

  “Hardly matters now,” observed Grund.

  “She might have had polio,” I said. “Or else she was a spastic.”

  “You wouldn’t have thought they’d have let her out on her own, would you?” said Grund.

  “She was crippled.” I bent down and went through the pockets of her coat. I came up with a roll of cash, wrapped in a rubber band. It was as thick as the handle of a tennis racket. I tossed it to Grund. “Plenty of disabled people manage perfectly well on their own. Even the kids.”

  “Must be several hundred marks here,” he muttered. “Where does a kid like this get money like that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Had to manage,” Tanker was saying. “The number of maimed and injured we had after the war. I used to have the beat next to the Charité Hospital. Got quite friendly with some of the lads who were there. A lot of them managed with no legs, or no arms.”

  “It’s one thing being crippled for something that happened fighting for the Fatherland,” said Grund, tossing the roll of cash in his hand. “It’s something else when you’re born with it.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?” I asked.

  “Meaning that life’s difficult enough when you’re a parent without having to look after a disabled child.”

  “Maybe they didn’t mind looking after her. Not if they loved her.”

  “If you ask me, if she was a spastic she’s better off out of it,” said Grund. “Germany’s better off in general with fewer cripples around.” He caught the look in my eye. “No, really. It’s a simple matter of racial purity. We have to protect our stock.”

  “I can think of one cripple we’d all be better off without,” I said.

  Tanker laughed and walked away.

  “Anyway, it’s only a caliper,” I said. “Lots of kids have calipers.”

  “Maybe,” said Grund. He threw the money back. “But it’s not every kid that’s carrying several hundred marks.”