March Violets

by Philip Kerr

  I threw myself at his waist, and as I did so I saw the flash and felt the air of the 9 mm bullet as it zipped over my head and smashed something behind me. My weight carried us both crashing into the front door. But if I had expected him to be less than capable of putting up a stiff resistance, I was mistaken. I took hold of the wrist with the gun and found the arm twisting towards me with a lot more strength than I had credited it with. I felt him grab the collar of my dressing-gown and twist it. Then I heard it rip.

  ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘That does it.’ I pushed the gun towards him, and succeeded in pressing the barrel against his sternum. Putting my whole weight onto it I hoped to break a rib, but instead there was a muffled, fleshy report as it fired again, and I found myself covered in his steaming blood. I held his limp body for several seconds before I let it roll away from me.

  I stood up and took a look at him. There was no doubt that he was dead, although blood continued to bubble up from the hole in his chest. Then I went through his pockets. You always want to know who’s been trying to kill you. There was a wallet containing an ID card in the name of Walther Kolb, and 200 marks. It didn’t make sense to leave the money for the boys from Kripo, so I took 150 to cover the cost of my dressing-gown. Also, there were two photographs; one of these was an obscene postcard in which a man was doing things to a girl’s bottom with a length of rubber tube; and the other was a publicity still of Ilse Rudel, signed, ‘with much love’. I burned the photograph of my former bedmate, poured myself a stiff one and, marvelling at the picture of the erotic enema, I called the police.

  A couple of bulls came down from the Alex. The senior officer, Oberinspektor Tesmer, was a Gestapo man; the other, Inspektor Stahlecker, was a friend, one of my few remaining friends in Kripo, but with Tesmer around there wasn’t a chance of an easy ride.

  ‘That’s my story,’ I said, having told it for the third time. We were all seated round my dining table on which lay the Parabellum and the contents of the dead man’s pockets. Tesmer shook his head slowly, as if I had offered to sell him something he wouldn’t have a chance of shifting himself.

  ‘You could always part exchange it for something else. Come on, try again. Maybe this time you’ll make me laugh.’ With its thin, almost non-existent lips, Tesmer’s mouth was like a slash in a length of cheap curtain. And all you saw through the hole were the points of his rodent’s teeth, and the occasional glimpse of the ragged, grey-white oyster that was his tongue.

  ‘Look, Tesmer,’ I said. ‘I know it looks a bit beat up, but take my word for it, it’s really very reliable. Not everything that shines is any good.’

  ‘Try shifting some of the fucking dust off it then. What do you know about the canned meat?’

  I shrugged. ‘Only what was in his pockets. And that he and I weren’t going to get along.’

  ‘That wins him quite a few extra points on my card,’ said Tesmer.

  Stahlecker sat uncomfortably beside his boss, and tugged nervously at his eyepatch. He had lost an eye when he was with the Prussian infantry, and at the same time had won the coveted ‘pour le mérite’ for his bravery. Me, I’d have hung onto the eye, although the patch did look rather dashing. Combined with his dark colouring and bushy black moustache, it served to give him a piratical air, although his manner was altogether more stolid: slow even. But he was a good bull, and a loyal friend. All the same, he wasn’t about to risk burning his fingers while Tesmer was doing his best to see if I’d catch fire. His honesty had previously led him to express one or two ill-advised opinions about the NSDAP during the ’33 elections. Since then he’d had the sense to keep his mouth shut, but he and I both knew that the Kripo Executive was just looking for an excuse to hang him out to dry. It was only his outstanding war record that had kept him in the force this long.

  ‘And I suppose he tried to kill you because he didn’t like your cologne,’ said Tesmer.

  ‘You noticed it too, huh?’ I saw Stahlecker smile a bit at that, but so did Tesmer, and he didn’t like it.

  ‘Gunther, you’ve got more lip than a nigger with a trumpet. Your friend here may think you’re funny, but I just think you’re a cunt, so don’t fuck me around. I’m not the sort with a sense of humour.’

  ‘I’ve told you the truth, Tesmer. I opened the door and there was Herr Kolb with the lighter pointing at my dinner.’

  ‘A Parabellum on you, and yet you still managed to take him. I don’t see any fucking holes in you, Gunther.’

  ‘I’m taking a correspondence course in hypnotism. Like I said, I was lucky, he missed. You saw the broken light.’

  ‘Listen, I don’t mesmerize easy. This fellow was a professional. Not the sort to let you have his lighter for a bag of sherbet.’

  ‘A professional what — haberdasher? Don’t talk out of your navel, Tesmer. He was just a kid.’

  ‘Well, that makes it worse for you, because he isn’t going to do any more growing up.’

  ‘Young he may have been,’ I said, ‘but he was no weakling. I didn’t bite my lip because I find you so damned attractive. This is real blood, you know. And my dressing-gown. It’s torn, or hadn’t you noticed?’

  Tesmer laughed scornfully. ‘I thought you were just a sloppy dresser.’

  ‘Hey, this is a fifty-mark gown. You don’t think I’d tear it just for your benefit, do you?’

  ‘You could afford to buy it, then you could also afford to lose it. I always thought your kind made too much money.’ I leaned back in my chair. I remembered Tesmer as one of Police Major Walther Wecke’s hatchet-men, charged with rooting out conservatives and Bolsheviks from the force. A mean bastard if ever there was one. I wondered how Stahlecker managed to survive.

  ‘What is it you earn, Gunther? Three? Four hundred marks a week? Probably make as much as me and Stahlecker put together, eh, Stahlecker?’ My friend shrugged non-committally.

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘See?’ said Tesmer. ‘Even Stahlecker doesn’t have any idea how many thousands a year you make.’

  ‘You’re in the wrong job, Tesmer. The way you exaggerate, you should work for the Ministry of Propaganda.’ He said nothing. ‘All right, all right, I get it. How much is it going to cost me?’ Tesmer shrugged, trying to control the grin that threatened to break out on his face.

  ‘From a man with a fifty-mark gown? Let’s say a round hundred.’

  ‘A hundred? For that cheap little garter-handler? Go and take another look at him, Tesmer. He doesn’t have a Charlie Chaplin moustache and a stiff right arm.’

  Tesmer stood up. ‘You talk too much, Gunther. Let’s hope your mouth begins to fray at the edges before it gets you into serious trouble.’ He looked at Stahlecker and then back at me. ‘I’m going for a piss. Your old pitman here has got until I come back into the room to persuade you, otherwise . . .’ He pursed his lips and shook his head. As he walked out, I called after him:

  ‘Make sure you lift the seat.’ I grinned at Stahlecker.

  ‘How are you doing, Bruno?’

  ‘What is it, Bernie? Have you been drinking? You blue or something? Come on, you know how difficult Tesmer could make things for you. First you plum the man with all that smart talk, and now you want to play the black horse. Pay the bastard.’

  ‘Look, if I don’t black horse him a little and drag my heels about paying him that kind of mouse, then he’ll figure I’m worth a lot more. Bruno, as soon as I saw that son of a bitch I knew that the evening was going to cost me something. Before I left Kripo he and Wecke had me marked. I haven’t forgotten and neither has he. I still owe him some agony.’

  ‘Well, you certainly made it expensive for yourself when you mentioned the price of that gown.’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It cost nearer a hundred.’

  ‘Christ,’ breathed Stahlecker. ‘Tesmer is right. You are making too much money.’ He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and looked squarely at me. ‘Want to tell me what really happened here?’

  ‘Another time, Bruno. It was m
ostly true.’

  ‘Excepting one or two small details.’

  ‘Right. Listen, I need a favour. Can we meet tomorrow? The matinee at the Kammerlichtespiele in the Haus Vaterland. Back row, at four o’clock.’

  Bruno sighed, and then nodded. ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Before then see if you can’t find out something about the Paul Pfarr case.’ He frowned and was about to speak when Tesmer returned from the lavatory.

  ‘I hope you wiped the floor.’

  Tesmer pointed a face at me in which belligerence was moulded like cornice-work on a Gothic folly. The set of his jaw and the spread of his nose gave him about as much profile as a piece of lead piping. The general effect was early-Paleolithic.

  ‘I hope you decided to get wise,’ he growled. There would have been more chance of reasoning with a water buffalo.

  ‘Seems like I don’t have much choice,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a receipt?’

  7

  Just off Clayallee, on the edge of Dahlem, was the huge wrought-iron gate to Six’s estate. I sat in the car for a while and watched the road. Several times I closed my eyes and found my head nodding. It had been a late night. After a short nap I got out and opened the gate. Then I ambled back to the car and turned onto the private road, down a long, gentle slope and into the cool shade cast by the dark pine trees lining its gravelled length.

  In daylight Six’s house was even more impressive, although I could see now that it was not one but two houses, standing close together: beautiful, solidly built Wilhelmine farmhouses.

  I pulled up at the front door, where Ilse Rudel had parked her BMW the night I had first seen her, and got out, leaving the door open just in case the two Dobermanns put in an appearance. Dogs are not at all keen on private investigators, and it’s an antipathy that is entirely mutual.

  I knocked on the door. I heard it echo in the hall and, seeing the closed shutters, I wondered if I’d had a wasted journey. I lit a cigarette and stood there, just leaning on the door, smoking and listening. The place was about as quiet as the sap in a gift-wrapped rubber tree. Then I heard some footsteps, and I straightened up as the door opened to reveal the Levantine head and round shoulders of the butler, Farraj.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said brightly. ‘I was hoping that I’d find Herr Haupthandler in.’ Farraj looked at me with the clinical distaste of a chiropodist regarding a septic toenail.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really,’ I said, handing him my card. ‘I was hoping he might give me five minutes, though. I was here the other night, to see Herr Six.’ Farraj nodded silently, and returned my card.

  ‘My apologies for not recognizing you, sir.’ Still holding the door, he retreated into the hall, inviting me to enter. Having closed it behind him, he looked at my hat with something short of amusement.

  ‘No doubt you will wish to keep your hat again, sir.’

  ‘I think I had better, don’t you?’ Standing closer to him, I could detect the very definite smell of alcohol, and not the sort they serve in exclusive gentlemen’s clubs.

  ‘Very good, sir. If you’ll just wait here for a moment, I’ll find Herr Haupthändler and ask him if he can see you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Do you have an ashtray?’ I held my cigarette ash aloft like a hypodermic syringe.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He produced one made of dark onyx that was the size of a church Bible, and which he held in both hands while I did the stubbing out. When my cigarette was extinguished he turned away and, still carrying the ashtray, he disappeared down the corridor, leaving me to wonder what I was going to say to Haupthändler if he would see me. There was nothing in particular I had in mind, and not for one minute did I imagine that he would be prepared to discuss Ilse Rudel’s story about him and Grete Pfarr. I was just poking around. You ask ten people ten dumb questions, and sometimes you hit a raw nerve somewhere. Sometimes, if you weren’t too bored to notice, you managed to recognize that you were on to something. It was a bit like panning for gold. Every day you went down to the river and went through pan after pan of mud. And just occasionally, provided you kept your eyes peeled, you found a dirty little stone that was actually a nugget.

  I went to the bottom of the stairs and looked up the stairwell. A large circular skylight illuminated the paintings on the scarlet-coloured walls. I was looking at a still life of a lobster and a pewter pot when I heard footsteps on the marble floor behind me.

  ‘It’s by Karl Schuch you know,’ said Haupthändler. ‘Worth a great deal of money.’ He paused, and added: ‘But very, very dull. Please, come this way.’ He led the way into Six’s library.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t give you very long. You see, I still have a great many things to do for the funeral tomorrow. I’m sure you understand.’ I sat down on one of the sofas and lit a cigarette. Haupthändler folded his arms, the leather of his nutmeg-brown sports jacket creaking across his sizeable shoulders, and leaned against his master’s desk.

  ‘Now what was it that you wished to see me about?’

  ‘Actually, it’s about the funeral,’ I said, improvising on what he had given me. ‘I wondered where it was to be held.’

  ‘I must apologize, Herr Gunther,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid it hadn’t occurred to me that Herr Six would wish you to attend. He’s left all the arrangements to me while he’s in the Ruhr, but he didn’t think to leave any instructions regarding a list of mourners.’

  I tried to look awkward. ‘Oh, well,’ I said, standing up. ‘Naturally, with a client such as Herr Six I should like to have been able to pay my respects to his daughter. It is customary. But I’m sure he will understand.’

  ‘Herr Gunther,’ said Haupthandler, after a short silence. ‘Would you think it terrible of me if I were to give you an invitation now, by hand?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘If you are sure it won’t inconvenience your arrangements.’

  ‘It’s no trouble,’ he said. ‘I have some cards here.’ He walked around the desk and pulled open a drawer.

  ‘Have you worked for Herr Six long?’

  ‘About two years,’ he said absently. ‘Prior to that I was a diplomat with the German Consular Service.’ He took out a pair of glasses from his breast pocket and placed them on the end of his nose before writing out the invitation.

  ‘And did you know Grete Pfarr well?’

  He glanced up at me briefly. ‘I really didn’t know her at all,’ he said. ‘Other than to say hallo to.’

  ‘Do you know if she had any enemies, jealous lovers, that sort of thing?’ He finished writing the card, and pressed it on the blotter.

  ‘I’m quite sure she didn’t,’ he said crisply, removing his glasses and returning them to his pocket.

  ‘Is that so? What about him? Paul.’

  ‘I can tell you even less about him, I’m afraid,’ he said, slipping the invitation into an envelope.

  ‘Did he and Herr Six get on all right?’

  ‘They weren’t enemies, if that’s what you’re implying. Their differences were purely political.’

  ‘Well, that amounts to something quite fundamental these days, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Not in this case, no. Now if you’ll excuse me, Herr Gunther, I really must be getting on.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ He handed me the invitation. ‘Well, thanks for this,’ I said, following him out into the hall. ‘Do you live here too, Herr Haupthandler?’

  ‘No, I have an apartment in town.’

  ‘Really? Where?’ He hesitated for a moment.

  ‘Kurfürstenstrasse,’ he said eventually. ‘Why do you ask?’

  I shrugged. ‘I ask too many questions, Herr Haupthandler,’ I said. ‘Forgive me. It’s habit, I’m afraid. A suspicious nature goes with the job. Please don’t be offended. Well, I must be going.’ He smiled thinly, and as he showed me to the door he seemed relaxed; but I hoped I had said enough to put a few ripples on his pond.

  The Hanomag se
ems to take an age to reach any sort of speed, so it was with a certain amount of misplaced optimism that I took the Avus ‘Speedway’ back to the centre of town. It costs a mark to get on this highway, but the Avus is worth it: ten kilometres without a curve, all the way from Potsdam to Kurfürstendamm. It’s the one road in the city on which the driver who fancies himself as Carraciola, the great racing driver, can put his foot down and hit speeds of up to 150 kilometres an hour. At least, they could in the days before BV Aral, the low-octane substitute petrol that’s not much better than meths. Now it was all I could do to get ninety out of the Hanomag’s 1.3 litre engine.

  I parked at the intersection of Kurfürstendamm and Joachimsthaler Strasse, known as ‘Grunfeld Corner’ because of the department store of the same name which occupies it. When Grunfeld, a Jew, still owned his store, they used to serve free lemonade at the Fountain in the basement. But since the State dispossessed him, as it has with all the Jews who owned big stores, like Wertheim, Hermann Teitz and Israel, the days of free lemonade have gone. If that weren’t bad enough, the lemonade you now have to pay for and once got free doesn’t taste half as good, and you don’t have to have the sharpest taste-buds in the world to realize that they’re cutting down on the sugar. Just like they’re cheating on everything else.

  I sat drinking my lemonade and watching the lift go up and down the tubular glass shaft that allowed you to see out into the store as you rode from floor to floor, in two minds whether or not to go up to the stocking counter and see Carola, the girl from Dagmarr’s wedding. It was the sour taste of the lemonade that put me in mind of my own debauched behaviour, and that decided me against it. Instead I left Grunfeld’s and walked the short distance down Kurfurstendamm and onto Schlüterstrasse.

  A jewellers is one of the few places in Berlin where you can expect to find people queueing to sell rather than to buy. Peter Neumaier’s Antique Jewellers was no exception. When I got there the line wasn’t quite outside the door, but it was certainly rubbing the glass; and it was older and sadder looking than most of the queues that I was used to standing in. The people waiting there were from a mixture of backgrounds, but mostly they had two things in common: their Judaism and, as an inevitable corollary, their lack of work, which was how they came to be selling their valuables in the first place. At the top of the queue, behind a long glass counter, were two stone-faced shop assistants in good suits. They had a neat line in appraisal, which was to tell the prospective seller how poor the piece actually was and how little it was likely to fetch on the open market.