A Quiet Flame

by Philip Kerr

  Ignoring my remark, Nebe said, “Since he arrested the Sass brothers, Otto’s had to watch himself. Like he was painting his own portrait.”

  “Well, we all know about Otto and the Sass brothers,” I said. In 1928, Otto Trettin had almost been dismissed from the force after it became known that he had beaten a confession out of these two criminals. “What I did was in no way similar to that. Pulling Ricci Kamm was a proper collar.”

  “I hope he sees it that way,” said Nebe. “For your sake. Look here, going without a barker is no good for a cop, see? Last April, after I put Franz Spernau in the cement, I got so many death threats they were offering even money at the Hoppegarten that someone would stall my motor before the end of the summer. It was a bet that was almost collected, too.” Nebe grinned his wolfish grin and swept back his jacket to reveal a big, broom-handled Mauser. “Only I stalled them first, if you know what I mean.” He tapped the side of his not inconsiderable nose with clear meaning. “By the way, how’s the Schwarz case coming along?”

  “What’s it to you, Arthur?”

  “I know Kurt Daluege a little. We were in the army together. He’s sure to ask the next time I see him.”

  “Actually I think I’m beginning to make real progress. I’m more or less certain my suspect is a patient at the jelly clinic in the state hospital in Friedrichshain.”

  “Is that so?”

  “So you can tell your chum Daluege that it’s nothing personal. I’d be working just as hard to catch this kid’s murderer even if her father wasn’t a lousy Nazi bastard.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be pleased to know it. But speaking personally, I can’t see the point of bringing a kid like that into the world in the first place. As a society, I think we should follow the example of the Romans. You know? Romulus and Remus? We should leave them out on a hillside to die of exposure. Something like that, anyway.”

  “Maybe. Only those two weren’t left on a hillside because they were sick but because their mother was a Vestal virgin who had violated her vow of celibacy.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t even know how to spell that,” said Nebe.

  “Besides, Romulus and Remus survived. Haven’t you heard? That’s how Rome was founded.”

  “I’m talking about the general principle, that’s all. I’m talking about wasting money on useless members of society. Did you realize that it costs the government sixty thousand marks more to keep a cripple alive in this country than the average healthy citizen?”

  “Tell me, Arthur. When we talk about healthy citizens, are we including Joey Goebbels?”

  Nebe smiled. “You’re a good cop, Bernie,” he said. “Everyone says so. Be a shame to stall a promising career because of a few thoughtless remarks like that.”

  “Who would say such a thing? That these are just thoughtless remarks?”

  “Well, aren’t they? You’re no Red. I know that.”

  “I put a lot of effort into my detestation of the Nazis, Arthur. You of all people should know that.”

  “Nevertheless, the Nazis are going to win the next election. Then what will you do?”

  “I shall do what everyone else will do, Arthur. I’ll go home and stick my head in the gas oven and hope to wake up from a very bad dream.”

  IT WAS ANOTHER FINE, unusually warm evening. I threw Heinrich Grund’s jacket at him. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go and do some detective work.”

  We went downstairs and into the central courtyard of the Alex, where I’d parked my car. I turned the key and pressed the button to operate the starter motor. The car rumbled into life.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “Oranienburger Strasse.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re looking for suspects, remember? That’s the great thing about this city, Heinrich. You don’t have to visit the nuthouse to seek out twisted, disordered minds. They’re everywhere you look. In the Reichstag. In the Wilhelmstrasse. In the Prussian Parliament. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were even one or two in Oranienburger Strasse. Makes the job a lot easier, don’t you think?”

  “If you say so, boss. But why Oranienburger Strasse?”

  “Because it’s popular with a certain kind of whore.”

  “Gravel.”

  “Precisely.”

  It was a Friday night, but I couldn’t help that. Every night was a busy one on Oranienburger Strasse. Cars stopped outside the Central Telegraph Office, which was open day and night. And, until the previous year, Oranienburger Strasse had been the location of one of Berlin’s more notorious cabarets, the Stork’s Nest, which was part of the reason the street had come to be popular with the city’s prostitutes. It was rumored that quite a few of the girls on Oranienburger had previously worked at the Stork, before the club’s manager had brought in some younger, cheaper nude dancers from Poland.

  On Friday nights there was even more traffic than usual, because of all the Jews attending shul at the New Synagogue, which was Berlin’s biggest. The New’s size and magnificent onion dome were a reflection of the confidence the city’s Jews had once felt about their presence in Berlin. But not anymore. According to my friend Lasker, some of the city’s Jews were already preparing to leave Germany should the unthinkable happen and the Nazis be elected. As we arrived, hundreds of them were streaming through the building’s multicolored brickwork arches: men with large fur hats and long black coats, men with shawls and ringlets, boys with velvet skullcaps, women with silk headscarves—and all under the watchful, slightly contemptuous scrutiny of the several uniformed policemen who were positioned in twos at intervals along the length of the street, just in case a group of Nazi agitators decided to show up and cause trouble.

  “Jesus Christ,” exclaimed Grund, as we got out of the car. “Look at this. It’s like the bloody Exodus. I’ve never seen so many damn Jews.”

  “It’s Friday night,” I said. “It’s when they go to pray.”

  “Like rats, so they are,” he said, with obvious distaste. “As for this—” He stared up at the huge synagogue, with its central dome and the two smaller, pavilionlike domes flanking it, and shook his head sadly. “I mean, whose stupid idea was it to let them build this ugly thing here?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It doesn’t belong here, that’s what’s wrong with it. This is Germany. We’re a Christian country. If they want this kind of thing they should go and live somewhere else.”

  “Like where?”

  “Palestine. Goshen. Somewhere with a hell of a lot of sand. I dunno and I don’t care. Just not here in Germany, that’s all. This is a Christian country.”

  He stared malevolently at the many Jews entering the New. With their long beards and white shirts and black coats and big, wide-brimmed hats and glasses, they looked more like nearsighted pioneers from America’s nineteenth century.

  We walked toward the Friedrichstrasse end of Oranienburger, where the more specialized whores I was looking for were given to waiting.

  “You know what I think?” said Grund.

  “Surprise me.”

  “These Friedrichstrasse types should dress more like the rest of us. Like Germans. Not like freaks. They should try to blend in. That way people would be less inclined to pick on them. It’s human nature, isn’t it? Anyone who looks a bit different, who looks like they’re setting themselves apart, well, they’re just asking for trouble, aren’t they?” He nodded. “They should try to look like normal Germans.”

  “You mean brown shirt, jackboots, shoulder belt, and swastika armband? Or how about leather shorts and flowery shirts?” I laughed. “Yeah, I understand. Normal. Sure.”

  “You know what I mean, boss. German.”

  “I used to know what that meant. When I was in the trenches, for instance. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “That’s just the point I’m making. Bastards like these have blurred things. Made it less obvious what being German is all about. I suppose that’s why the Nazis are doing so well. Becaus
e they give us a clear idea of ourselves.”

  I might have said that this was a clear idea of ourselves I didn’t much like, but I wasn’t in the mood to argue politics with him. Not again. Not now.

  In Berlin, all special tastes were catered for. The city was one big erotic—and sometimes not so erotic—menu. Provided you knew where to look and what to ask for, the chances were you could satisfy even the most peculiar taste. You wanted an old woman—and I mean an old woman, of the kind that lives in a shoe—you went to Mehnerstrasse, which, for obvious reasons, was also known as Old Maid Street. You wanted a fat woman—and I mean a fat woman, of the kind that has a twin brother who’s a sumo wrestler in Japan—you got yourself along to Landwehrstrasse, also known as Fat Street. Now, if mothers and daughters were your thing, then you went to Gollnowstrasse. That was known as Incest Street. Racehorses, girls you could use the whip on, were most often found in the beauty shops and massage parlors that surrounded Hallesches Tor. Pregnant women—and I do mean pregnant women, not girls with cushions stuffed up the front of their dirndls—were found on Münzstrasse. Münzstrasse was also called Coin Street, because there was a general sense that it was a place where people were prepared to sell absolutely anything.

  Unlike Grund, I usually tried to avoid sounding righteous about Berlin’s famous sex scene. What did we expect might happen to women in a country with almost two million German men dead in the war and perhaps as many people dead again—my own wife included—from the influenza? What did we expect might happen after the Bolshevik Revolution—with the country full of Russian immigrants—and the inflation and the depression and the unemployment? What did convention and morality matter when everything else—money, work, life itself—turned out to be so utterly unreliable? But it was hard not to feel a little outraged at the trade going on around the north end of Oranienburger Strasse. It was difficult not to wish fire from the air to purge Berlin of this illicit trade in human flesh when you contemplated the life of the washed-up, stone-faced, outcast prostitutes collectively known as gravel. You wanted a woman with one leg, one eye, or a hunchback, or hideous scars, you went to the north end of Oranienburger Strasse and raked through the gravel. You found them in the shadows—standing in the doorway of the defunct Stork’s Nest, or in the old Kaufhaus arcade, or sometimes inside a club called the Blue Stocking, on the corner of Linenstrasse.

  There were plenty of women we could have spoken to, but I was looking for one woman in particular—a whore named Gerda—and, not finding her on the street, I decided we should try inside the Blue Stocking.

  The spanner on the door sat on a tall stool in front of the cash office. His name was Neumann and, occasionally, I used him as an informer. He’d once been a runner for the Dragonfly ring that operated out of Charlottenburg, only now he wouldn’t go anywhere near the area, having double-crossed them somehow. For a spanner, Neumann wasn’t all that tough, but he had the kind of beaten, criminal face that made people think he might not care what happened to him, which sometimes amounts to a simulacrum of toughness. Plus (I happened to know) he kept an American baseball bat behind his stool and wasn’t slow to use it.

  “Commissar Gunther,” he said nervously. “What brings you to the Blue Stocking?”

  “I’m looking for a garter-snapper.”

  Neumann grinned a grin so carious his teeth looked more like the discarded butts of twenty cigarettes. “Aren’t they all, sir?” he said. “The fritzes who waltz in here.”

  “This one is gravel,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t have thought you was the type for that kind of trade.” His grin widened horribly, as he enjoyed what he hoped might be my embarrassment.

  “Stop thinking I feel awkward asking about her, because I don’t,” I said. “The only thing I feel awkward about is your dentist’s feelings, Neumann. Her name is Gerda.”

  The teeth disappeared behind thin, cracked lips that were all twitchy, like an angler with a hook in his mouth.

  “You mean like the little girl what rescues her brother, Kay, in The Snow Queen?”

  “That’s right. Only this one’s not so little. Not anymore. Plus, she’s short of an arm and a leg, not to mention a few teeth and half her liver. Now, is she here, or am I going to have to give the lads in E a call?”

  E was Inspectorate E, the part of Department IV that dealt with all matters relating to morals—or more, usually, the lack of them.

  “No need to be like that, Herr Gunther. Just having a bit of fun, that’s all.” He lifted a dog-trainer’s clicker off a chain on his belt and clicked it loudly, three times. “What happened to that sense of humor of yours, Commissar?”

  “With each plebiscite it seems to get smaller.”

  At the sound of the dog clicker, the door that led down into the club opened from the inside. At the top of a steep flight of stairs stood another spanner, only this one was wearing muscle.

  Neumann chuckled. “Bloody Nazis,” he said. “I know just what you mean, Commissar. Everyone says they’ll close us all down the minute they get in.”

  “I sincerely hope so,” remarked Grund.

  Neumann shot him a look of quiet distaste. “Gerda’s downstairs,” he said stiffly.

  “How does she get downstairs with one leg and one arm?” asked Grund.

  Neumann looked at me and then at Grund, with a smile dancing on the cracked playground of his lips. “Slowly,” he said, and let out a roar of laughter that I enjoyed as much as he did.

  Grund wasn’t laughing. “Think you’re a comedian, do you?” he said.

  “Forget about it,” I told Grund, pushing him through the door and into the club. “You walked right into that one.”

  Gerda wasn’t yet thirty, although you wouldn’t have known it. She could easily have passed for about fifty. We found her sitting in a wheelchair within spitting distance of a small stage where a zither-player and a striptease dancer were having a competition to see which of them could look more bored. By my reckoning, the striptease dancer had it won by a couple of droopy tits. On the table in front of Gerda stood a bottle of cheap schnapps, doubtless paid for by the man seated beside her, who, on closer inspection, turned out to be a woman.

  “Go and plaster it,” I told the bubi.

  “Yeah.” Grund flashed his warrant disc for good measure. “Try the Eldorado.”

  Gerda thought that was funny. The Eldorado was a club for transvestite men. The bubi, sullen and predatory-looking, like someone’s outcast uncle, got up and went away. We sat down on chairs as wobbly as Gerda’s remaining teeth.

  “I know you,” she told me. “You’re that cop, aren’t you?”

  I put a ten under her bottle.

  “What’s the idea, putting a shine on my table? I don’t know nothing.”

  “Sure you do, Gerda,” I told her. “Everyone knows something.”

  “Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t.” She nodded. “I’m glad you’re here, anyway, Commissar. I don’t like that mon bijou scene. You know? The ladies’ club scorpions. I mean, beggars can’t be choosers, and I’d have done it with her if she’d asked me nicely, you know? But I take no pleasure in a woman touching me down there.”

  I put a cigarette in Gerda’s mouth and lit it. She was thin, with short red hair, bluish eyes, and a reddish face. She drank too much, although she could hold it well enough. Most of the time. The one time I knew she couldn’t, she’d fallen down in front of a number 13 tram on Köpenicker Strasse. She might easily have been killed. Instead she lost her left arm and her left leg.

  “I remember now,” she said. “You put Ricci Kamm in the hospital.” Smiling happily, she added, “You deserve an Iron Cross for that, copper.”

  “As usual, you’re well informed, Gerda.”

  I lit my own cigarette and tossed her the pack. Easily amused—I figured that was how he became a Nazi in the first place—Grund was already paying more attention to the show than to our conversation.

  “Tell me, Gerda. Did you ever see a snapper with a cal
iper, age about fifteen? Blond, boyish, carried a stick. Name of Anita. She had cerebral palsy. A spastic. We know she was selling it, because we found a bedroll in her pocket and because the neighbors said she was selling it.”

  “Neet? Yeah, I heard she was dead, poor kid.” Gerda poured herself a drink from the bottle and swallowed it in one, like it was cold coffee. “Came in here sometimes. Nicely spoken girl, considering.”

  “Considering what?” asked Grund. His eyes remained on the stripper’s teats, which were altogether larger than would have seemed probable.

  “Considering she couldn’t speak very well.” Gerda made a noise that came mostly out of her nose. “Talked like that, you know?”

  “What else can you tell us about her?” I refilled Gerda’s glass and poured one for myself, just to look sociable.

  “From what I gathered, she didn’t get on with her parents. They didn’t like her being a gimp, you know? And of course they didn’t like her being on the sledge. She didn’t do it all the time, mind. Just when she wanted to irritate them, I think. Her dad was something in the Nazi Party, and it used to piss him off that she’d come out and sell it sometimes.”

  “Hard to believe,” murmured Grund. “That anyone would. You know. With a disabled kid.”

  Gerda laughed. “Oh no, darling. It’s not hard to believe at all. Lots of men do it with disabled girls. In fact, it’s quite the thing these days. I expect it’s something to do with the war. All those terrible injuries some of the men came home with. Left a lot of them feeling quite inadequate, in all sorts of ways. I think that doing it with gravel helps them find the confidence to get it up. Makes them feel superior to the gimp they’re with. It’s cheaper, too, of course. Cheaper than the regular. People don’t have the money for that kind of thing. Not like they used to.” She shot Grund an amused, pitying look. “Oh no, dearie. I’ve seen girls with half a face find a fritz in here. ’Sides, most fritzes aren’t looking at you anyway. Won’t meet your eye. So what a girl’s shine looks like or whether she’s got all her bits is not as important as the fact that she’s got her mouse.” Gerda laughed. “No, darling, you ask some of your mates at work and they’ll tell you the same thing. You don’t look at the whole house when you’re putting a letter in the box.”