A Quiet Flame

by Philip Kerr

  “How do you know they’re SA?”

  “Haven’t you heard? The ban on uniforms has been lifted.”

  “Of course. It’s today, isn’t it? Some cop I am. I didn’t even notice. So who lives around here? Ernst Röhm?”

  “Nope. Although he does visit on occasion. I’ve seen him going in there. To the ground-floor apartment on the corner of number three. Owned by Mrs. Magda Quandt.”

  “Who?”

  The vendor grinned. “For a bull who takes as many newspapers as you do, you don’t know much.”

  “Me? I just look at the pictures. So go ahead and educate me.” I handed over a five. “And while you’re at it, keep the change.”

  “Magda Quandt. She got married last December to Josef Goebbels. I see him every morning. Comes out and buys all the papers.”

  “It gives the clubfoot some exercise, I suppose.”

  “He’s not so bad.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” I shrugged. “Well, I can see why he married her. Nice building like that. Wouldn’t mind living here myself.” I shook my head. “Thing is, I can’t for the life of me see why she married a little fritz like him.”

  I tossed the papers in the car, crossed over to the other side of the square, and glanced in the window of the car parked out front of number three. The vendor was right. It was full of Nazi brown shirts, who eyed me suspiciously as I went by. Apart from some clowns I’d seen fooling around in an old Model T at the circus one Christmas, it would have been hard to have seen more obvious stupidity in one car. It was all coming back to me now. Why the address had jogged my memory in Kassner’s office. One of the other Homicide teams at the Alex had been obliged to check an SA man’s alibi with Goebbels a month or two before.

  The building had its own doorman, of course. All the nice apartment buildings in the West End had a doorman. Probably there was an armed SA man somewhere inside the lobby, keeping him company. Just to make sure Goebbels was well protected. He probably needed it, too. The Communists had already made several attempts on Hitler’s life. I didn’t doubt they wanted to assassinate Goebbels. I wouldn’t have minded taking a poke at the little satyr myself.

  Naturally, I’d heard the rumors. That despite his cloven hoof and his diminished size, he was really quite a ladies’ man. The word around the Alex was that it wasn’t just Goebbels’s foot that looked like a club; that while he may have been short of stature, he was outsized on the butcher’s counter; that Goebbels was what Berlin’s line-boys would have called a Breslauer, after a large sausage of the same name. Much as I disliked him, however, I was still finding it hard to imagine Joey the Crip taking the risk of an open trip to the jelly clinic in Friedrichshain. Unless, of course, he’d gone in as a private patient, after hours, when no one else was about.

  I rounded the rusticated corner of the building and stopped below what must have been Joey’s bathroom window. It was slightly open. I looked back over my shoulder. The car containing the storm troopers was out of sight. The truck was nowhere to be seen. I glanced back up at the frosted-glass window. If I put my foot on the horizontal joint of the ground floor’s rusticated brickwork, it looked as though it would be just possible to push myself up the side of the building and reach the bottom of the window. I tried it once, just long enough to check that the bathroom was empty, before dropping back down onto the deserted sidewalk. I waited for a moment. No storm troopers came to beat me up. So much for security.

  The next time I did it, I pulled myself up the side and slid quickly through the open bathroom window. Breathing heavily, I sat on the toilet, and while I waited to see if my entry would be detected, I took a closer look at the window and saw that the rat’s-tail casement was broken on the sill. Even when the window looked like it was closed, it would have been a relatively simple matter to open it from the outside.

  It was a big bathroom, with pink tiles all over and a round pedestal basin. There was a liberal dusting of talcum powder on the bathroom mat. The boxed-in bath was as deep as a car door, with a hand shower, in case Magda wanted to wash her hair. By the wall-mounted soap dish was a small framed picture of Hitler, as if even here, the devoted Joey could keep his beloved leader in mind. At right angles to the bath was a stool on which sat a pile of fluffy towels, and next to this a matching table on which stood a loofah and an antiquarian statue of a naked lady. Above the table was a large, mirrored bathroom cabinet, which, naturally, I opened. Most of the shelves were Magda’s. She used Joy perfume, Kotex, Nivea, Wella shampoo, Wellapon, Kolestral, and Blondor. I remembered her now. I remembered the pictures of the wedding in the magazines. A winter wedding. The happy, smiling couple arm-in-arm in the snow, accompanied by several SA men—probably the same careless louts who were sitting outside in the car—and, of course, Hitler himself. I wonder what Hitler would have said if he’d known that Magda’s beautiful, perfectly Aryan blond hair was dyed?

  Joey had only one shelf in the cabinet. And it seemed we had something in common, after all. Joey shaved with a Schick injector razor and Mennen shaving cream, and cleaned his teeth with Colgate toothpaste. A bottle of Anzora hair cream explained Joey’s perfectly brushed head of dark hair. Then, between a packet of Beecham’s laxative pills and some Acqua di Parma cologne, was a bottle containing some blue pills. I opened it and emptied one out in my hand. It was the same pill I had seen in Kassner’s office earlier that morning. Protonsil. I decided that was my cue to leave. But not before using Joey’s toilet. And not flushing it was my way of thanking him for what he’d written about me in his newspaper.

  I went out the window, returned to my car, and drove quickly away. In Germany, there were things that it didn’t seem healthy to know about. I didn’t doubt for a minute that Joey’s jelly was one of these.

  THERE WERE nine technical inspectorates at the Alex. Inspectorate A dealt with murder, and C dealt with thefts. Gunther Braschwitz was the boss of C and specialized in burglaries. He had a younger brother, Rudolf, who was in the political police, but we didn’t hold that against him. Braschwitz was as elegant as your little finger, and a real champagne-pisser. He wore a bowler hat, carried a stick with a sword in it, which he would sometimes use, and, in winter at least, wore gaiters above his boots. He knew all the screens—the city’s professional burglars—and, it was said, could look at a break-in and tell which of them had probably done it.

  “Jewface Klein,” I said. “Seen him lately?”

  “Jewface? He claims he’s going straight,” said Braschwitz. “Managed to get himself a job at Heilbronner’s on Mohrenstrasse.”

  “The antique shop?”

  “That’s right. He always had a very good eye, that Jewface. Why? Has he been up to his old tricks?”

  “No. But he knows someone I’m looking for. A friend of that widow he used to partner. Eva Zimmer.” Only half of this was true, but I didn’t want Braschwitz asking too many questions.

  “Poor Eva,” he said. “She was a good widow, that girl.”

  A widow was someone a screen used to get rid of his ill-gotten goods. Not a real widow. Just someone pretending to be one. Some of them, like Eva Zimmer, were professional actresses. They would dress up in black and, with a well-rehearsed hard-luck story, try to sell stolen gold, silver, or jewelry to the high-street goldsmiths. Until I’d arrested Jewface, he and Eva had had one of the best partnerships in Berlin. I knew he was six months out of Tegel Prison, but there was nothing on file of what he’d been doing since.

  After Braschwitz had told me all he knew about Jewface, I telephoned the Adlon and asked Frieda what she could tell me about Josef Goebbels. Goebbels was a regular patron of the Adlon, and Frieda was able to give me some information that I thought I might use to help bait Klein.

  I walked to Heilbronner’s, but the manager told me Klein wasn’t there. “It’s his lunch hour,” he said. “You’ll probably find him across the street, at Gsellius. The bookshop. He usually goes in there at lunchtime.”

  I crossed the street and peered i
n the bookshop window. Jewface was in there, all right. I saw him straight away. A little older than I remembered, but a year in the cement can put five on your shine. His face wasn’t particularly Jewish, to be honest. He had the nickname from the jeweler’s eyeglass he used to wear when he was appraising something he’d stolen. But he did have a nose, for cops. I hadn’t been there for more than a few seconds when he looked up from the book he held and met my eye. I nodded at him to come outside and, reluctantly, he did. We weren’t friends exactly. But I was counting on his not having forgotten that it was I who’d found the pimp who’d stabbed Eva Zimmer the previous year. A man named Horst Wessel. And the pity of it was that Wessel, who was also a member of the SA, had then been murdered by another pimp, Ali Hohler, in an argument over some whore before I could make the arrest. Because Hohler happened also to be a Communist, Goebbels had managed to turn these tawdry events into a political melodrama, which was how Horst Wessel had achieved his unlikely immortalization in a song that was now heard all over Berlin when the SA went on one of its provocative marches through a Communist neighborhood. Naturally, Goebbels had left out of the story the underworld connections of these plankton protagonists. Meanwhile, Hohler had been arrested by one of my colleagues and sentenced to life imprisonment. Which left Jewface very much aggrieved with Goebbels for having waxed Eva Zimmer’s sordid murder from the Nazis’ canta storia of Horst Wessel’s heroic past.

  We went around the corner to Siechen’s on Friedrichstrasse, where I bought us a couple of Nurembergs and took a closer look at him. His face was all sharp angles, thin and pointed, like something Pythagoras had doodled on the corner of his scroll before getting on with his theorem.

  “So what can I do for you, Herr Gunther?”

  “I need a favor, Jewface. I want someone to break into a doctor’s office at the state hospital. Someone intelligent, who can read and write and not get greedy. I don’t want anything stolen.”

  “That’s good, because I’m retired. I don’t steal. And I don’t go breaking and entering. Not since Eva got stabbed.”

  “Look, all I want you to do is open a file and do a bit of copying out. A secretary with a key could do it. But I don’t have a key. For a man of your experience, it couldn’t be simpler.” I sipped my beer and let him blow me off like the froth on top of his own untouched glass.

  “You’re not listening, Commissar. I’m retired. Prison worked for me. Give yourself a medal.”

  “Medals, is it? I can’t give you a medal, Jewface. But you do what I ask, copy out some names from some files at the hospital, and I can give you something else.”

  “I don’t want your money, copper.”

  “I wouldn’t insult you. No, this is something better than money. It’s even patriotic—that is, if you believe in the republic.”

  “I don’t, as it happens. It was the republic that put me in the cement.”

  “All right. Call it revenge, then. Revenge for Eva.” I sipped some more of my beer and let him wait.

  “Keep talking.”

  “How would you like to shove one up Joey Goebbels?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Joey the Crip lives at number three Reichskanzlerplatz. Corner apartment, ground floor, eastern end. A bunch of SA men sit out front, so you’ll have to be careful. But they can’t see around the corner to where Joey’s bathroom faces the side street. There’s a rat’s-tail casement stay on the bathroom window that’s broken. You can be in and out in no time. Bread and butter to a man like you, Jewface. I did it myself just an hour or two ago. The man is a fanatic, Jewface. Do you know he’s got a photograph of Hitler on the side of the bath? Anyway, the apartment is owned by his wife, Magda. She used to be married to a rich industrialist called Gunther Quandt, who was very generous with the divorce settlement. He let her keep all her mints. You know? The ones you like. The ones you can sell at Margraf’s? Of course, with an election coming, Goebbels is out a lot. Making speeches, that kind of thing. In fact, I happen to know that Joey’s making a speech tonight, at Nazi Party headquarters on Hedemannstrasse. It will be an important speech. They’re all important between now and the end of July. But maybe this one is more important than most. Hitler will be there. Afterward, Magda’s throwing a little soirée for him at the Adlon Hotel. Which would give a man plenty of time.” I sipped some more beer and thought about ordering some sausage. It had been a busy morning. “So. What do you say? Do we have a deal? Will you copy out these names for me, like I asked?”

  “Like I told you already, Gunther. I’m a reformed character. I’m trying to lead an honest life.” Jewface smiled and offered me his hand. “But that’s the thing about the Nazis. They bring out the worst in people.”

  THE NEXT MORNING I had a handwritten list of names and addresses from all over the city and beyond. Not as good as a list of suspects, but perhaps the next best thing. Now all I had to do was check them out.

  The Residents Registrations Office was on the railway-station side of the Alex, in room 359. From this third-floor office, the address of any resident of Berlin might be obtained, quite legally, by any other resident of the city. The Prussian authorities had meant well: the knowledge that information in the state was freely available was supposed to help buttress faith in our fragile democracy. In practice, however, it just meant that Nazi storm troopers and Communists alike were able to find out where their opponents lived and take appropriately belligerent action. Democracy has its disadvantages, too.

  Not available to the general public at the Registration Office, but available to police, was the Devil’s Directory, so called because it worked backward. All you had to do was look up a street name and a house number, and the Devil’s Directory told you the name of the person or people living there. So it was the work of a morning to put a real name alongside each of the addresses and bogus patient names that Jewface Klein had copied from the summary file in Dr. Kassner’s office. This was a mundane task I might normally have ordered one of my sergeants to attend to. But I never was very good at giving orders—no more than I was any good at taking them. Besides, if I’d given the job to a sergeant, I might have ended up having to explain where and how I’d gotten hold of the list in the first place. KRIPO could be very unforgiving of bent coppers. Even coppers who were bent not for themselves but for the job.

  For the same reason, another mundane task I was going to have to perform myself was check out every name on that list. There was, however, nothing mundane about one name in particular I had found using the Devil’s Directory. This was Dr. Kassner’s own name. And I was looking forward to finding out why his home address should have been on a list of patients involved in Bayer’s clinical trial of protonsil.

  When I got back to my desk, Grund was there, typing something on my ancient Carmen, one ponderous finger at a time, as if he had been killing ants or playing the opening notes of some tuneless Russian piano concerto.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he asked.

  “Where the hell have you been, sir?” I said.

  “Illmann called. The Schwarz girl tested negative for jelly. And Gennat wants us to go and check out some girl found dead in the municipal cattle market. Looks like she was shot, but we’re to give it a quick sketch anyway, just in case.”

  “Makes sense, I suppose. The cattle market is only a few hundred yards from where we found the Schwarz girl in Friedrichshain Park.”

  We were there in a matter of minutes. Market days were Wednesdays and Saturdays, so the place was closed and deserted. But the restaurant was open, and some of the patrons—wholesale butchers mostly, from Pankow, Weissensee, and Petershagen—reported seeing three men chasing the girl into the yards. But the descriptions were vague. Too vague to be worth writing down. The body itself was in the slaughterhouse. She looked about twenty. She’d been shot in the head at fairly close range. There was a brown mark around the bullet hole. All the clothing below her waist was gone and, from the smell of her, it seemed probable she’d been raped. But
that was it. There had been no amateur surgery on this poor creature.

  “Circumstances arousing suspicion, right enough,” said Grund after quite a while.

  I would have been surprised if he hadn’t said it.

  “Nice-looking box on her,” he added.

  “Go ahead and give her one, why don’t you? I’ll look the other way.”

  “I was just saying,” he said. “I mean, look at it. Her box. It’s been shaved, mostly. Not something you often see, that’s all. Bare like that. Like a little girl.”

  I rifled through her handbag, which one of the uniformed SCHUPOs had found a short distance away from the body, and found a Communist Party card. Her name was Sabine Färber. She’d worked at KPD headquarters close to where I lived. Her home was in Pettenkoferstrasse, on the edge of Lichterfelde, just a hundred yards east of where she’d been murdered. Already it seemed abundantly clear to me what had probably happened.

  “Fucking Nazis,” I said with loud disgust.

  “Christ, I’m fed up with this,” Grund said, frowning. “How do you work that out? That they were Nazis who did this. You heard the descriptions given by those butchers. No one mentioned seeing any brown shirts or swastikas. Not even a toothbrush mustache. So how do you figure that they’re Nazis?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing personal, Heinrich.” I tossed him Sabine Färber’s party card. “But they weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to find a convert.”

  He looked at the card and shrugged, as if allowing only the possibility that I was right.

  “Come on. It’s got their fingerprints all over it. My guess is that the three men the butchers reported seeing were storm troopers wearing plain clothes so as not to draw attention to themselves. They must have been waiting for her when she came out of the KPD headquarters on Bulowplatz. It’s a nice day, so she decided to walk home and didn’t notice that they were following. Waiting for a good opportunity to attack her. When she spotted them, she ran in here, hoping to escape. Only they cornered her and then did what brave storm troopers do when they’re fighting a terrible menace like international Bolshevism. Heinrich?”