March Violets

by Philip Kerr

  ‘I had to pay twice,’ he grumbled. ‘Once at the front door, and again to come in here.’

  ‘You should have flashed your Sipo pass,’ I said. ‘You’d have got in for nothing. That’s the whole point of having it, isn’t it?’ Stahlecker looked blankly at the screen.

  ‘Very funny,’ he said. ‘What is this shit, anyway?’

  ‘Still the newsreel,’ I told him. ‘So what did you find out?’

  ‘There’s the small matter of last night to be dealt with yet.’

  ‘My word of honour, Bruno, I never saw the kid before.’ Stahlecker sighed wearily. ‘Apparently this Kolb was a small-time actor. One or two bit-parts in films, in the chorus-line in a couple of shows. Not exactly Richard Tauber. Now why would a fellow like that want to kill you? Unless maybe you’ve turned critic and gave him a few bad notices.’

  ‘I’ve got no more understanding of theatre than a dog has of laying a fire.’

  ‘But you do know why he tried to kill you, right?’

  ‘There’s this lady,’ I said. ‘Her husband hired me to do a job for him. She thought that I’d been hired to look through her keyhole. So last night she has me round to her place, asks me to lay off and accuses me of lying when I tell her that I’m not concerned who she’s sleeping with. Then she throws me out. Next thing I know there’s this pear-head standing in my doorway with a lighter poked in my gut, accusing me of raping the lady. We dance around the room a while, and in the process the gun goes off. My guess is that the kid was in a swarm about her, and that she knew it.’

  ‘And so she put him up to it, right?’

  ‘That’s the way I see it. But try and make it stick and see how far you’d get.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me the name of this lady, or her husband, are you?’ I shook my head. ‘No, I thought not.’

  The film was starting: called The Higher Order, it was one of those patriotic little entertainments that the boys in the Ministry of Propaganda had dreamed up on a bad day. Stahlecker groaned.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and get a drink. I don’t think I can stand watching this shit.’

  We went to the Wild West Bar on the first floor, where a band of cowboys were playing Home on the Range. Painted prairies covered the walls, complete with buffalo and Indians. Leaning up against the bar, we ordered a couple of beers.

  ‘I don’t suppose any of this would have something to do with the Pfarr case, would it, Bernie?’

  ‘I’ve been retained to investigate the fire,’ I explained. ‘By the insurance company.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you this just the once, and then you can tell me to go to hell. Drop it. It’s a hot one, if you’ll pardon the expression.’

  ‘Bruno,’ I said, ‘go to hell. I’m on a percentage.’

  ‘Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when they throw you into a KZ.’

  ‘I promise. Now unpack it.’

  ‘Bernie, you’ve got more promises than a debtor has for the bailiff.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘Well, here’s what there is.’

  ‘This Paul Pfarr fellow was a high-flyer. Passed his juridicial in 1930, saw preparatory service in the Stuttgart and Berlin Provincial Courts. In 1933, this particular March Violet joins the SA, and by 1934 he is an assessor judge in the Berlin Police Court, trying cases of police corruption, of all things. The same year he is recruited into the S S and in 1935 he also joins the Gestapo, supervising associations, economic unions and of course the DAF, the Reich Labour Service. Later that year he is transferred yet again, this time to the Ministry of the Interior, reporting directly to Himmler, with his own department investigating corruption amongst servants of the Reich.’

  ‘I’m surprised that they notice.’

  ‘Apparently Himmler takes a very dim view of it. Anyway, Paul Pfarr was charged with paying particular attention to the DAF, where corruption is endemic.’

  ‘So he was Himmler’s boy, eh?’

  ‘That’s right. And his ex-boss takes an even dimmer view of people working for him getting canned than he does of corruption. So a couple of days ago the Reichskriminaldirektor appoints a special squad to investigate. It’s an impressive team: Gohrmann, Schild, Jost, Dietz. You get mixed up in this, Bernie, and you won’t last longer than a synagogue window.’

  ‘They got any leads?’

  ‘The only thing I heard was that they were looking for a girl. It seems as though Pfarr might have had a mistress. No name, I’m afraid. Not only that, but she’s disappeared.’

  ‘You want to know something?’ I said. ‘Disappearing is all the rage. Everyone’s doing it.’

  ‘So I heard. I hope you aren’t the fashionable sort, then.’

  ‘Me? I must be one of the only people in this city not to own a uniform. I’d say that makes me very unfashionable.’

  Back at Alexanderplatz I visited a locksmith and gave him the mould to make a copy of Jeschonnek’s office keys. I’d used him many times before, and he never asked any questions. Then I collected my laundry and went up to the office.

  I wasn’t half-way through the door before a Sipo pass had flashed in front of my face. In the same instant I caught sight of the Walther inside the man’s unbuttoned grey-flannel jacket.

  ‘You must be the sniffer,’ he said. ‘We’ve been waiting to speak to you.’ He had mustard-coloured hair, coiffed by a competition sheepshearer, and a nose like a champagne cork. His moustache was wider than the brim on a Mexican’s hat. The other one was the racial archetype with the sort of exaggerated chin and cheekbones he’d copied off a Prussian election poster. They both had cool, patient eyes, like mussels in brine, and sneers like someone had farted, or told a particularly tasteless joke.

  ‘If I’d known, I’d have gone to see a couple of movies.’ The one with the pass and the haircut stared blankly at me.

  ‘This here is Kriminalinspektor Dietz,’ he said.

  The one called Dietz, who I guessed to be the senior officer, was sitting on the edge of my desk, swinging his leg and looking generally unpleasant.

  ‘You’ll excuse me if I don’t get out my autograph-book,’ I said, and walked over to the corner by the window where Frau Protze was standing. She sniffed and pulled out a handkerchief from the sleeve of her blouse, and blew her nose. Through the material she said:

  ‘I’m sorry, Herr Gunther, they just barged in here and started ransacking the place. I told them I didn’t know where you were, or when you would be back, and they got quite nasty. I never knew that policemen could behave so disgracefully.’

  ‘They’re not policemen,’ I said. ‘More like knuckles with suits. You’d better run along home now. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  She sniffed some more. ‘Thank you, Herr Gunther,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think I’ll be coming back. I don’t think my nerves are up to this sort of thing. I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right. I’ll mail what I owe you.’ She nodded, and having stepped round me she almost ran out of the office. The haircut snorted with laughter and kicked the door shut behind her. I opened the window.

  ‘There’s a bit of a smell in here,’ I said. ‘What do you fellows do when you’re not scaring widows and searching for the petty-cash box?’

  Dietz jerked himself off my desk and came over to the window. ‘I heard about you, Gunther,’ he said, looking out at the traffic. ‘You used to be a bull, so I know that you know the official paper on just how far I can go. And that’s still a hell of a long way yet. I can stand on your fucking face for the rest of the afternoon, and I don’t even have to tell you why. So why don’t you cut the shit and tell me what you know about Paul Pfarr, and then we’ll be on our way again.’

  ‘I know he wasn’t a careless smoker,’ I said. ‘Look, if you hadn’t gone through this place like an earth-tremor, I might have been able to find a letter from the Germania Life Assurance Company engaging me to investigate the fire pending any claim.’

  ‘Oh, we found that lette
r,’ said Dietz. ‘We found this, too.’ He took my gun out of his jacket pocket and pointed it playfully at my head.

  ‘I’ve got a licence for it.’

  ‘Sure you have,’ he said, smiling. Then he sniffed the muzzle, and spoke to his partner. ‘You know, Martins, I’d say this pistol has been cleaned; and recently, too.’

  ‘I’m a clean boy,’ I said. ‘Take a look at my fingernails if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘Walther PPK, 9 mm,’ said Martins, lighting a cigarette. ‘Just like the gun that killed poor Herr Pfarr and his wife.’

  ‘That’s not what I heard.’ I went over to the drinks cabinet. I was surprised to see that they hadn’t helped themselves to any of my whisky.

  ‘Of course,’ said Dietz, ‘we were forgetting that you’ve still got friends over at the Alex, weren’t we.’ I poured myself a drink. A little too much to swallow in less than three gulps.

  ‘I thought they got rid of all those reactionaries,’ said Martins. I surveyed the last mouthful of whisky.

  ‘I’d offer you boys a drink, only I wouldn’t want to have to throw away the glasses afterwards.’ I tossed the drink back.

  Martins flicked away his cigarette and, clenching his fists, he stepped forward a couple of paces. ‘This bum specializes in lip like a yid does in nose,’ he snarled. Dietz stayed where he was, leaning on the window. But when he turned around there was tabasco in his eyes.

  ‘I’m running out of patience with you, mulemouth.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘You’ve seen the letter from the Assurance people. If you think it’s a fake, then check it out.’

  ‘We already did.’

  ‘Then why the double act?’ Dietz walked over and looked me up and down like I was shit on his shoe. Then he picked up my last bottle of good scotch, weighed it in his hand and threw it against the wall above the desk. It smashed with the sound of a canteen of cutlery dropping down a stairwell, and the air was suddenly redolent with alcohol. Dietz straightened his jacket after the exertion.

  ‘We just wanted to impress you with the need to keep us informed of what you’re doing, Gunther. If you find out anything, and I mean anything, then you better speak to us. Because if I find out you’ve been giving us any fig-leaf, then I’ll have you in a KZ so quick, your fucking ears will whistle.’ He leaned towards me and I caught the smell of his sweat. ‘Understand, mulemouth?’

  ‘Don’t stick your jaw too far out, Dietz,’ I said, ‘or I’ll feel obliged to slap it.’

  He smiled. ‘I’d like that sometime. Really I would.’ He turned to his partner. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here before I kick him in the eggs.’

  I’d just finished clearing up the mess when the phone rang. It was Müller from the Berliner Morgenpost to say that he was sorry, but beyond the sort of material that the obituaries people collected over the years, there really wasn’t much in the files about Hermann Six to interest me.

  ‘Are you giving me the up and down, Eddie? Christ, this fellow is a millionaire. He owns half the Ruhr. If he stuck his finger up his arse he’d find oil. Somebody must have got a look through his keyhole at some time.’

  ‘There was a reporter a while back who did quite a bit of spadework on all of those big boys on the Ruhr: Krupp, Voegler, Wolff, Thyssen. She lost her job when the Government solved the unemployment problem. ‘I’ll see if I can find out where she’s living.’

  ‘Thanks, Eddie. What about the Pfarrs? Anything?’

  ‘She was really into spas. Nauheim, Wiesbaden, Bad Homburg, you name it, she’d splashed some there. She even wrote an article about it for Die Frau. And she was keen on quack medicine. There’s nothing about him, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Thanks for the gossip, Eddie. Next time I’ll read the society page and save you the trouble.’

  ‘Not worth a hundred, huh?’

  ‘Not worth fifty. Find this lady reporter for me and then I’ll see what I can do.’

  After that I closed the office and returned to the key shop to collect my new set of keys and my tin of clay. I’ll admit it sounds a bit theatrical; but honestly, I’ve carried that tin for several years, and short of stealing the actual key itself, I don’t know of a better way of opening locked doors. A delicate mechanism of fine steel with which you can open any kind of lock, I don’t have. The truth is that with the best modern locks, you can forget picking: there are no slick, fancy little wonder tools. That stuff is for the film-boys at UFA. More often than not a burglar simply saws off the bolt-head, or drills around it and removes a piece of the goddam door. And that reminded me: sooner or later I was going to have to check out just who there was in the fraternity of nutcrackers with the talent to have opened the Pfarrs’ safe. If that was how it was done. Which meant that there was a certain scrofulous little tenor who was long overdue for a singing lesson.

  I didn’t expect to find Neumann at the dump where he lived in Admiralstrasse, in the Kottbusser Tor district, but I tried there anyway. Kottbusser Tor was the kind of area that had worn about as well as a music-hall poster, and Admiralstrasse, Number 43 was the kind of place where the rats wore ear-plugs and the cockroaches had nasty coughs. Neumann’s room was in the basement at the back. It was damp. It was dirty. It was foul. And Neumann wasn’t there.

  The concierge was a snapper who was over the hill and down a disused mine-shaft. Her hair was every bit as natural as parade goose-stepping down the Wilhelmstrasse, and she’d evidently been wearing a boxing-glove when she’d applied the crimson lipstick to her paperclip of a mouth. Her breasts were like the rear ends of a pair of dray horses at the end of a long hard day. Maybe she still had a few clients, but I thought it was a better bet that I’d see a Jew at the front of a Nuremberg pork-butcher’s queue. She stood in the doorway to her apartment, naked under the grubby towelling robe which she left open, and lit a half-smoked cigarette.

  ‘I’m looking for Neumann,’ I said, doing my level best to ignore the two coat-pegs and the Russian boyar’s beard that were being displayed for my benefit. You felt the twang and itch of syphilis in your tail just looking at her. ‘I’m a friend of his.’ The snapper yawned cheesily and, deciding that I’d seen enough for free, she closed her robe and tied the cord.

  ‘You a bull?’ she sniffed.

  ‘Like I said, I’m a friend.’ She folded her arms and leaned on the doorway.

  ‘Neumann doesn’t have any friends,’ she said, looking at her dirty fingernails and then back at my face. I had to give her that one. ‘Except for me, maybe, and that’s only because I feel sorry for the little twitcher. If you were a friend of his you’d tell him to see a doctor. He isn’t right in the head, you know.’ She took a long drag on her cigarette and then flicked the butt past my shoulder.

  ‘He’s not tapped,’ I said. ‘He just has a tendency to talk to himself. A bit strange, that’s all.’

  ‘If that’s not tapped then I don’t know what the hell is,’ she said. There was something in that too.

  ‘You know when he’ll be back?’

  The snapper shrugged. A hand that was all blue veins and knuckle-duster rings took hold of my tie; she tried to smile coyly, only it came out as a grimace. ‘Maybe you’d care to wait for him,’ she said. ‘You know, twenty marks buys an awful lot of time.’

  Retrieving my tie I took out my wallet and thumbed her a five. ‘I’d like to. Really I would. But I must be getting on my way. Perhaps you’d tell Neumann that I was looking for him. The name is Gunther. Bernhard Gunther.’

  ‘Thank you, Bernhard. You’re a real gentleman.’

  ‘Do you have any idea where he might be?’

  ‘Bernhard, your guess is as good as mine. You could chase him from Pontius to Pilate and still not find him.’ She shrugged and shook her head. ‘If he’s broke he’ll be somewhere like the X Bar, or the Rucker. If he’s got any mouse in his pocket he’ll be trying to nudge a bit of plum at the Femina or the Café Casanova.’ I started down the stairs. ‘And if he’s not at any of those
places then he’ll be at the racetrack.’ She followed me out onto the landing and down some of the steps. I got into my car with a sigh of relief. It’s always difficult getting away from a snapper. They never like to see trade walking out of the door.

  I don’t have much faith in experts; or, for that matter, in the statements of witnesses. Over the years I’ve come to belong to the school of detection that favours good, old-fashioned, circumstantial evidence of the kind that says a fellow did it because he was the type who’d do that sort of thing anyway. That, and information received.

  Keeping a tenor like Neumann is something that requires trust and patience; and just as the first of these does not come naturally to Neumann, so the second does not come naturally to me: but only where he is concerned. Neumann is the best informer I’ve ever had, and his tips are usually accurate. There were no lengths to which I would not go to protect him. On the other hand, it does not follow that you can rely on him. Like all informers he would sell his own sister’s plum. You get one to trust you, that’s the hard bit; but you could no more trust one yourself than I could win the Sierstorpff Stakes at the Hoppegarten.

  I started at the X Bar, an illegal jazz club where the band were sandwiching American hits between the opening and closing chords of whatever innocuous and culturally acceptable Aryan number took their fancy; and they did it well enough not to trouble any Nazi’s conscience regarding so-called inferior music.

  In spite of his occasionally strange behaviour, Neumann was one of the most nondescript, anonymous-looking people I had ever seen. It was what made him such an excellent informer. You had to look hard to see him, but that particular night, there was no sign of him at the X. Nor at the Allaverdi, nor the Rucker Bar in the rough end of the red-light district.