A Quiet Flame

by Philip Kerr

  “It would be a real shame if the force was to lose a man of your forensic capabilities, Herr Gunther.”

  “Wouldn’t it just? But there it is.”

  The third Swede came back from powdering her nose. Like her two friends, she was as naked as a hat pin without a hat. Obviously bored, the other two got up from the table and went over to her and put their arms around her, and slowly, they began to dance to some silent music. They looked like the Three Graces.

  “They really are tourists, you know,” he said. “Not demi-castors, or half-silks, or whatever you cops call them. Just three girls on holiday from Stockholm, who felt like being true Berliners and taking off their clothes for the sheer hell of it.” He sighed. “I think it will be a real shame when this kind of thing is gone. But things have to change. It can’t be allowed to go on like this. The vice, the prostitution, the drugs. It’s corrupting us.”

  I shrugged.

  “You’re a cop,” he said. “I thought you would surely agree with me about that, at least.”

  Two of the band came back and started to play gently, for the benefit of the impromptu floor show.

  “You’re not from Berlin, are you, Herr Diels? In Berlin we say that you should leave another man’s mustache alone, even if it droops into his coffee cup. That’s why the Nazis will never do well in this city. Because you people can’t leave another man’s mustache alone.”

  “That’s an unusual attitude for a policeman. Don’t you want to make councilor, or director? You could, you know. The minute this election is over. Everyone is going to want to help us then. But you’re in a position to help us now. When it really counts.”

  “I told you. I’m not interested in being a part of your expanded political police.”

  “I’m not talking about that. I mean that you could stay on, in Department Four. That you could keep doing what you’re doing now. It’s not like you’re a Communist or anything. We can easily overlook something like the Iron Front.” He shrugged innocently. “No, all you would have to do is a favor for us.”

  “What kind of favor?” I asked, intrigued.

  “We want you to drop the Schwarz case.”

  “I’m a police officer, Herr Diels. I can’t do that. I’ve been ordered to investigate a murder, and it’s my duty to carry out that investigation to the best of my abilities.”

  “You were ordered to do it by people who won’t be around for much longer. Besides, we both know that in this city there are lots of cases that remain unsolved.”

  “I go slow, is that it? So Goebbels can accuse Grzesinski and Weiss of sparing the horses because the victim’s old man is a big noise in the SA?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that. The Schwarz girl was disabled. She had a bad leg. Like Goebbels. It’s a little embarrassing for him to have this kind of issue in the public eye. It magnifies it, somewhat. Anita Schwarz had a bad leg. That reminds people that Goebbels has one, too. Dr. Goebbels would be greatly in your debt if the Schwarz case could be driven into a sand dune, so to speak.”

  “Is Joey’s foot the only reason he’d like this case to go nowhere?”

  Diels looked puzzled. “Yes. What other reason could there be?”

  It seemed imprudent to mention just how much I knew about the true extent of Joey’s current disabilities. “And what if another girl gets murdered? In similar circumstances. What then?”

  “So you investigate it. Just lay off the Schwarz case. That’s all I’m asking. Just until after the election.”

  “To spare Joey’s feelings.”

  “To spare Joey’s feelings.”

  “You make me think that maybe there’s a lot more to this case than I realized before.”

  “It might be unhealthy to think that. For you and your career.”

  “My career?” I laughed. “That really keeps me awake at night.”

  “At least you’re still awake at night, Herr Gunther.” He grinned and blew on the end of his cigar. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

  I’d heard all I wanted to hear. I reached for the fruit bowl, picked out a nice golden apple, and stood up.

  The three naked women were now too caught up in themselves to pay me any regard, and it was looking like a proper floor show that Berliners would have paid good money to sit and watch.

  “Hey, you,” I said. “Aphrodite.”

  I tossed the apple and one of them caught it. Naturally she was the best-looking of the three Swedes. “My name is not Aphrodite,” she said dully. “It is Gunila.”

  I didn’t say anything back. I just walked away with my clothes and my sense of humor and my classical education. It was a lot more than she had.

  Outside I crossed the road and bought some cigarettes. In front of the tobacconist’s were six men wearing placards for the forthcoming election. One was for Bruner and the SDP, two were for Thalmann and the Communists, and three were for Hitler. All in all, the prospects for the republic were looking no better than my own.

  IN 1932, I didn’t go to the cinema very much. Maybe if I had, I might not have been tricked so easily. I’d heard about Fritz Lang’s film M, because there was a detective in it who was supposedly based on Ernst Gennat. Certainly Gennat thought that was the case. But with one thing and another, I’d missed the film when it came out. It was still showing at my local Union Theater, but in summer, there always seemed to be something more important to do than to spend an evening watching a movie. Like investigate a murder. The night before it happened, I’d been up all night checking out political killings in Wedding and Neukölln. The descriptions given by witnesses were predictably vague. But then, all murderers look the same when they’re wearing brown shirts. That’s my excuse. One thing was for sure. The people who ambushed me must have seen the movie.

  As I walked out of my apartment building, a small boy ran up to my car. I wasn’t sure if I’d seen the boy before, but even if I had, I’m not sure I’d have recognized him. All boys in the Scheunenviertel looked much the same. This one was shoeless, with short blond hair and bright blue eyes. He wore gray shorts, a gray shirt, and sported a number eleven of snot on his upper lip. I guessed him to be about eight years old.

  “A girl I know just went off with a strange man,” he said. “Her name is Lotte Friedrich and she’s twelve years old and the fritz isn’t from around here. Creepy-looking dad he was, with a funny look on his shine. He’s the same schlepper who tried to give my sister some sweets yesterday if she’d go for a walk with him.” The boy tugged my sleeve urgently and pointed west along Schendelgasse until I agreed to look. “See them? She’s wearing a green dress and he’s wearing a coat. See?”

  Sure enough, crossing Alte Schönhauser Strasse were a man and a girl. The man had his hand on the girl’s neck, like he was steering her somewhere. Wearing a coat seemed just a little suspicious, as the day was already a warm one.

  Ordinarily, I might have been more suspicious of the boy. But then it wasn’t every month that an adolescent girl turned up dead with half of her insides removed. Nobody wanted that to happen again.

  “What’s your name, sonny?”

  “Emil.”

  I gave him ten pfennigs and pointed in the direction of Bulowplatz.

  “You know that armored car outside the Red HQ?”

  Emil nodded and wiped the snot onto the back of his shirtsleeve.

  “I want you to go and tell the SCHUPO in the armored car that Commissar Gunther from the Alex is following a suspect onto Mulackstrasse and requests them to come and give him support. Got that?”

  Emil nodded again and ran off in the direction of Bulowplatz.

  I walked quickly west, unholstering my Parabellum as I went, because as soon as I had crossed onto Mulackstrasse, I would be in the heart of Always True’s territory. I might have lacked caution but I wasn’t stupid.

  The man and the girl ahead of me were walking briskly, too. I quickened my pace and came onto Mulackstrasse just in time to hear a scream and see the man pick the girl up under his
arm before ducking into the Ochsenhof. At this point, I should probably have waited for the Twenty-first Battalion and its armored car. Only I was still thinking about Anita Schwarz and the girl in the green dress. Besides, when I looked back at where I had come from, there was still no sign of the cavalry. I took my whistle, blew it several times, and waited for some sign that they were coming. But nothing happened. Either the Twenty-first didn’t care for the idea of chasing a suspect into the most lawless part of Berlin, or they just didn’t believe the story Emil had told them. Probably it was a combination of the two.

  I worked the slide on the Parabellum and went in a narrow door and up a darkened stair.

  The Ochsenhof, also known as the Roast, or the Cattle Shed, was home to some of the worst animals in Berlin. A so-called rent barracks that occupied three acres, it was a slum tenement from the last century, with more entrances and exits than a lump of Swiss cheese. Rats ran along the balconies at night and were hunted for sport by dogs and feral children with air rifles. Cellar dives housed illegal stills, while on the granite back courts that were laughingly called “greens,” packing-case colonies of huts housing some of the city’s many homeless and unemployed squatted under lines of gray washing. On a dark, foul-smelling, gaslit stairwell, I found a group of young men already playing cards and sharing stumps of cigarette ends.

  I looked at the card players and they looked at the nine-millimeter ace I was holding in my hand.

  “Did any of you see a man come in here just now?” I asked. “He was wearing a light-colored coat and a hat. With him was a girl of about twelve, wearing a green dress. He might have been abducting her.”

  Nobody said anything. But they were still listening. It pays to listen when it’s a man with a gun who’s doing the talking.

  “Maybe she’s got a brother, like you,” I said.

  “Nobody’s got a brother like him,” quipped a voice.

  “Maybe he’ll be upset if his little sister gets sliced up and eaten by some rent-barracks cannibal,” I said. “Think about that.”

  “Cops,” said another voice in the half-darkness. “They’re the last people in Berlin who still care about anything.”

  The dealer jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “They went across the green.”

  I ran up some steps and out onto the back court. It looked like a heavy, gray stone frame for the brilliantly blue sky. Something zipped past my left ear and I heard a bang as loud as a truck backfiring an eight-millimeter rifle bullet. Half a second later, my brain registered the subliminal image of a flash from the third-floor balcony and impelled my body to take cover behind some bedsheets that were flapping on a clothesline. I didn’t stay put. As soon as I had crawled several meters on my hands and knees, I heard another gunshot and something flicked through the sheet I’d been kneeling behind. I scrambled to the end of the line of washing and then sprinted like Georg Lammers into the relative safety of another stairwell. Several ragged-looking men cowering in the shadows stared at me fearfully. Ignoring them, I hared up to the third floor. Of a gunman there was no sign, unless you counted the sound of a pair of stout shoes descending another set of stairs three or four steps at a time. Angry, I went after the sound of the shoes. Some people had come out onto the Roast balconies to see what all the fuss was about. But the sensible ones stayed quietly in their sties.

  Reaching the bottom of the stairwell, I paused briefly and then pushed a couple of planks that were leaning against the wall out onto the court, to draw the rifleman’s fire. By now I had a good idea that it was a German rifle. The 7.97 Mauser Gewehr 98. During the war, I’d heard its voice often enough to know its middle name. The 98 was an accurate rifle, but it was unsuited to rapid fire, on account of its peculiar bolt arrangement. And in the several seconds it took for him to put another one up the spout, I was out of the stairwell and shooting. There’s nothing slow about a nine-millimeter Parabellum.

  The first shot missed him. The second, too. By the time the Parabellum was ready for a fourth, I was close enough to see the pattern on his bow tie. This matched the pattern on his shirt, and the pattern on his coat. Red spots aren’t normally a favorite of mine, but on him they looked just fine. Especially as their source was the hole I’d made in his face. He was dead before he hit the concrete.

  This was unfortunate, for two reasons. One was that I hadn’t killed anyone since August 23, 1918, when I shot an Australian at the Battle of Amiens. Possibly more than one. When the war was over, I promised myself I’d never kill anyone again. The second reason it was unfortunate was that I’d wanted to question the dead man and find out who had put him up to killing me. Instead I had to rifle through his pockets and all, under the curious eyes of a gathering crowd of rent-barracks vultures.

  He was tall, thin, and losing his hair. He had already lost his teeth. At the moment of his death, his tongue must have forced one of the plates from his mouth and now it sat on his upper lip like a pink plastic mustache.

  I found his wallet. The dead man’s name was Erich Hoppner and he was a member of the Nazi Party since 1930. His membership card stated that his number was 510934. None of that meant he wasn’t also a member of the Always True gang. It wasn’t unusual for gangsters from Berlin’s underworld to be contracted and paid to carry out political murders. The question was, Who had ordered my murder? The Always True, for what I had done to Ricci Kamm? Or the Nazis, for what I hadn’t done for Josef Goebbels?

  I took his wallet and his rifle and his watch and his ring and left him there. The vultures were already taking his false teeth as I walked out of the Ochsenhof. False teeth were an expensive luxury for the kind of folk who lived in the Roast.

  On Bulowplatz, the PHWM in charge of the SCHUPO troop stationed there denied ever having received a message from a small boy to come to my aid. I told him to take some of his men and go and mount a guard on Hoppner’s body before it was eaten. Reluctantly, he agreed.

  I went back to the Alex. First I visited the Record Department of Inspectorate J, where the criminal secretary on duty helped me discover that Erich Hoppner didn’t have a criminal record. This was surprising. Then I went upstairs and handed over Hoppner’s party card to the political boys in DIa. Naturally, they’d never heard of him, either. Then I sat down and typed out a statement and gave it to Gennat. After I’d handed in my report, I was asked into an interview room and questioned by Gennat and two police councilors, Gnade and Fischmann. My statement was then filed for later comparison with the findings of an independent homicide team. More paperwork followed. Then I was interviewed again, by KOK Müller, who was leading the investigating homicide team.

  “Sounds like they led you on a nice little trot,” observed Müller. “And you never saw the girl in the green dress again?”

  “No. And after the shooting, I didn’t see any point in looking for her.”

  “And the boy? Emil? The one who fed you the sugar lump?”

  I shook my head.

  Müller was a tall man with lots of hair, only it was all on the sides of his head with none of it on top, as if he had grown through it like a rubber plant.

  “They had you measured pretty well,” he said. “They did everything but chalk a letter M on the dead man’s coat for you. Like in that movie with Peter Lorre. It’s the kid in the movie who tips off the cop about Lorre.”

  “Haven’t seen it.”

  “You should get out more.”

  “Sure. Maybe I’ll buy a horse.”

  “See the sights.”

  “I’ve seen them already. Besides, maybe I see too much as it is. Soon it’s going to be unhealthy to be a cop with good eyesight in this country. That’s what people keep telling me, anyway.”

  “You talk like the Nazis were going to win the election, Bernie.”

  “I keep hoping they won’t. And I keep worrying that they might. But I’ve got seven loaves and five fishes telling me the republic needs more than just a lucky break this time. If I wasn’t a cop, I might believe in miracles. But I a
m and I don’t. In this job you meet the lazy, the stupid, the cruel, and the indifferent. Unfortunately, that’s what’s called an electorate.”

  Müller nodded. He was an SDP man, like me. “Hey, did you hear the good news? About Joey Clovenhoof? His new wife Magda’s apartment got screened. Her jewels were lifted.” Müller was grinning. “Can you credit it?”

  “Credit it? They should give whoever did it the Blue Max.”

  I NEEDED A DRINK, I needed some female company, and I probably needed a new job. As things turned out, I went to the best place for all three. I went to the Adlon Hotel. Inside the sumptuous lobby I looked around for Frieda. Instead I found Louis Adlon. He was wearing a white tie and tails. In his lapel was a white carnation that matched his mustache. He wasn’t a tall man but he was every inch a gentleman.

  “Commissar Gunther,” he said. “How nice to see you. And you must think me rude for not writing to thank you for the way you dealt with that thug. But I was hoping to run into you and thank you in person.” He pointed to the bar. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Several.”

  In the bar, Adlon waved for service, but it was already on its way, like a small express train. “Schnapps for Commissar Gunther,” he said. “The best.”

  We sat down. The bar was quiet. The old man poured two glasses to the brim and then toasted me silently.

  “According to my wife, Hedda, there’s an old Confucian curse that says, ‘May you live in interesting times.’ I’d say these are very interesting times, wouldn’t you?”

  I grinned. “Yes, sir, I would.”

  “Given that, I just wanted you to know that there is always a job for you here.”

  “Thank you, sir. It might just be that I take you up on that offer.”

  “No, sir. Thank you. It may interest you to know that your superior, Dr. Weiss, speaks very highly of you.”

  “I didn’t know you two knew each other, Herr Adlon.”