March Violets

by Philip Kerr

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting something? I work for the Gestapo.’

  ‘Rienacker, I may be easy to slug, but I’m not stupid. We both know that Goering has lots of friends in the Gestapo. Which is hardly surprising, since he set it up.’

  ‘You know, you should have been a detective.’

  ‘My client thinks much the same way as yours about involving the bulls in his business. Which means that I can level with you, Rienacker. My man is missing a picture, an oil painting, which he acquired outside any of the recognized channels, so you see, it would be best if the police didn’t know anything about it.’ The big bull said nothing, so I kept on going.

  ‘Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, it was stolen from his home. Which is where I fit in. I’ve been hanging around some of the dealers, and the word I hear is that Hermann Goering is a keen art buyer - that somewhere in the depths of Karinhall he has a collection of old masters, not all of them acquired legitimately. I heard that he had an agent, Herr Von Greis, in all matters relating to the purchase of art. So I decided to come here and see if I could speak to him. Who knows, the picture I’m looking for might very well be one of the ones stacked up against that wall.’

  ‘Maybe it is,’ said Rienacker. ‘Always supposing I believe you. Who’s the painting by, and what’s the subject?’

  ‘Rubens,’ I said, enjoying my own inventiveness. ‘A couple of nude women standing by a river. It’s called The Bathers, or something like that. I’ve a photograph back at the office.’

  ‘And who is your client?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.’

  Rienacker wielded a fist slowly. ‘I could try persuading you perhaps.’

  I shrugged. ‘I still wouldn’t tell you. It’s not that I’m the honourable type, protecting my client’s reputation, and all that crap. It’s just that I’m on a pretty substantial recovery fee. This case is my big chance to make some real flea, and if it costs me a few bruises and some broken ribs then that’s the way it will have to be.’

  ‘All right,’ said Rienacker. ‘Take a look at the pictures if you want. But if it is there I’ll have to clear it first.’ I got back onto my wobbly legs and went over to the paintings. I don’t know a great deal about Art. All the same, I recognize quality when I see it, and most of the pictures in Goering’s apartment were the genuine article. To my relief there was nothing that had a nude woman in it, so I wasn’t required to make a guess as to whether Rubens had done it or not.

  ‘It’s not here,’ I said finally. ‘But thanks for letting me take a look.’ Rienacker nodded.

  In the hallway I picked up my hat and placed it back on my throbbing head. He said: ‘I’m at the station on Charlottenstrasse. Corner of Französische Strasse.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know it. Above Lutter and Wegner’s Restaurant, isn’t it?’ Rienacker nodded. ‘And yes, if I hear anything, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘See that you do,’ he growled, and let me out.

  When I got back to Alexanderplatz, I found that I had a visitor in my waiting room.

  She was well-built and quite tall, in a suit of black cloth that lent her impressive curves the contours of a well-made Spanish guitar. The skirt was short and narrow and tight across her ample behind, and the jacket was cut to give a high-waisted line, with the fullness gathered in to fit under her substantial bust. On her shiny black head of hair she wore a black hat with a brim turned up all the way round, and in her hands she held a black cloth bag with a white handle and clasp, and a book which she put down as I came into the waiting room.

  The blue eyes and perfectly lipsticked mouth smiled with disarming friendliness.

  ‘Herr Gunther, I imagine.’ I nodded dumbly. ‘I’m Inge Lorenz. A friend of Eduard Müller. Of the Berliner Morgenpost?’ We shook hands. I unlocked the door to my office.

  ‘Come in and make yourself comfortable,’ I said. She took a look around the room and sniffed the air a couple of times. The place still smelt like a bartender’s apron.

  ‘Sorry about the smell. I’m afraid I had a bit of an accident.’ I went to the window and pushed it open. When I turned round I found her standing beside me.

  ‘An impressive view,’ she observed.

  ‘It’s not bad.’

  ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz. Have you read Döblin’s novel?’

  ‘I don’t get much time for reading nowadays,’ I said. ‘Anyway, there’s so little that’s worth reading.’

  ‘Of course it’s a forbidden book,’ she said, ‘but you should read it, while it’s in circulation again.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, but haven’t you noticed? Banned writers are back in the bookshops. It’s because of the Olympiad. So that tourists won’t think things are quite as repressive here as has been made out. Of course, they’ll disappear again as soon as it’s all over but, if only because they are forbidden, you should read them.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll bear it in mind.’

  ‘Do you have a cigarette?’

  I flipped open the silver box on the desk and held it up by the lid for her. She took one and let me light her.

  ‘The other day, in a café on Kurfürstendamm, I absentmindedly lit one, and some old busybody came up to me and reminded me of my duty as a German woman, wife or mother. Fat chance, I thought. I’m nearly thirty-nine, hardly the age to start producing new recruits for the Party. I’m what they call a eugenic dud.’ She sat down in one of the armchairs and crossed her beautiful legs. I could see nothing that was dud about her, except maybe the cafés she frequented. ‘It’s got so that a woman can’t go out wearing a bit of make-up for fear of being called a whore.’

  ‘You don’t strike me as being the type to worry much about what people call you,’ I said. ‘And as it happens, I like a woman to look like a lady, not a Hessian milkmaid.’

  ‘Thank you, Herr Gunther,’ she said smiling. ‘That’s very sweet of you.’

  ‘Müller says you used to be a reporter on the DAZ.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. I lost my job during the Party’s “Clear Women out of Industry” campaign. An ingenious way of solving Germany’s unemployment problem, don’t you think? You just say that a woman already has a job, and that’s looking after the home and the family. If she doesn’t have a husband then she’d better get one, if she knows what’s good for her. The logic is frightening.’

  ‘How do you support yourself now?’

  ‘I did freelance a bit. But right now, well frankly, Herr Gunther, I’m broke, which is why I’m here. Müller says you’re digging for some information on Hermann Six. I’d like to try and sell what I know. Are you investigating him?’

  ‘No. Actually, he’s my client.’

  ‘Oh.’ She seemed slightly taken aback at this.

  ‘There was something about the way he hired me that made me want to know a lot more about him,’ I explained, ‘and I don’t just mean the school he went to. I suppose you could say that he irritated me. You see, I don’t like being told what to do.’

  ‘Not a very healthy attitude these days.’

  ‘I guess not.’ I grinned at her. ‘Shall we say fifty marks then, for what you know?’

  ‘Shall we say a hundred, and then you won’t be disappointed?’

  ‘How about seventy-five and dinner?’

  ‘It’s a deal.’ She offered me her hand and we shook on it.

  ‘Is there a file or something, Fraulein Lorenz?’

  She tapped her head. ‘Please call me Inge. And it’s all up here, down to the last detail.’

  And then she told me.

  ‘Hermann Six was born, the son of one of the wealthiest men in Germany, in April 1881, nine years to the day before our beloved Fuhrer entered this world. Since you mentioned school, he went to the König Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin. After that he went into the stock exchange, and then into his father’s business, which, of course, was the Six Steel Works.

  ‘Along with Fritz Thyssen, the heir to another gr
eat family fortune, young Six was an ardent nationalist, organizing the passive resistance to the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. For this both he and Thyssen were arrested and imprisoned. But there the similarity between the two ends, for unlike Thyssen, Six has never cared for Hitler. He was a Conservative Nationalist, never a National Socialist, and any support he may have given the Party has been purely pragmatic, not to say opportunistic.

  ‘Meanwhile he married Lisa Voegler, a former State Actress in the Berlin State Theatre. They had one child, Grete, born in 1911. Lisa died of tuberculosis in 1934, and Six married Ilse Rudel, the actress.’ Inge Lorenz stood up and started to walk about the room as she spoke. Watching her made it difficult to concentrate: when she turned away my eyes were on her behind; and when she turned to face me they were on her belly.

  ‘I said that Six doesn’t care for the Party. That’s true. He is equally opposed, however, to the trade-union cause, and appreciated the way in which the Party set about neutralizing it when it first came to power. But it’s the so-called Socialism of the Party that really sticks in his throat. And the Party’s economic policy. Six was one of several leading businessmen present at a secret meeting in early 1933 held in the Presidential Palace, at which future National Socialist economic policy was explained by Hitler and Goering. Anyway, these businessmen responded by contributing several million marks to Party coffers on the strength of Hitler’s promise to eliminate the Bolsheviks and restore the army. It was a courtship that did not last long. Like a lot of Germany’s industrialists, Six favours expanding trade and increased commerce. Specifically, with regard to the steel industry he prefers to buy his raw materials abroad, because it’s cheaper. Goering does not agree, however, and believes that Germany should be self-sufficient in iron ore, as in everything else. He believes in a controlled level of consumption and exports. It’s easy to see why.’ She paused, waiting for me to furnish her with the explanation that was so easy to see.

  ‘Is it?’ I said.

  She tutted and sighed and shook her head all at once. ‘Well, of course it is. The simple fact of the matter is that Germany is preparing for war, and so conventional economic policy is of little or no relevance.’

  I nodded intelligently. ‘Yes, I see what you mean.’ She sat down on the arm of her chair, and folded her arms.

  ‘I was speaking to someone who still works on the DAZ,’ she said, ‘and he says that there’s a rumour that in a couple of months, Goering will assume control over the second four-year economic plan. Given his declared interest in the setting up of state-owned raw material plants to guarantee the supply of strategic resources, such as iron ore, one can imagine that Six is less than happy about that possibility. You see, the steel industry suffered from considerable over-capacity during the depression. Six is reluctant to sanction the investment that is required for Germany to become self-sufficient in iron ore because he knows that as soon as the rearmament boom finishes, he’ll find himself massively over-capitalized, producing expensive iron and steel, itself the result of the high cost of producing and using domestic iron ore. He’ll be unable to sell German steel abroad because of the high price. Of course, it goes without saying that Six wants business to keep the initiative in the German economy. And my guess is that he’ll be doing his best to persuade the other leading businessmen to join him in opposing Goering. If they fail to back him, there’s no telling what he’s capable of. He’s not above fighting dirty. It’s my suspicion, and it’s only a suspicion, mind, that he has contacts in the underworld.’

  The stuff on German economic policy was of marginal consequence, I thought; but Six and the underworld, well that really got me interested.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Well, first there was the strike-breaking that occurred during the steel strikes,’ she said. ‘Some of the men who beat up workers had gangland connections. Many of them were ex-convicts, members of a ring, you know, one of those criminal rehabilitation societies.’

  ‘Can you remember the name of this ring?’ She shook her head.

  ‘It wasn’t German Strength, was it?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’ She thought some more. ‘I could probably dig up the names of the people involved, if that would help.’

  ‘If you can,’ I said, ‘and anything else you can produce on that strike-breaking episode, if you wouldn’t mind.’

  There was a lot more, but I already had my seventy-five-marks worth. Knowing more about my private, secretive client, I felt that I was properly in the driving seat. And now that I’d heard her out, it occurred to me that I could make use of her.

  ‘How would you like to come and work for me? I need someone to be my assistant, someone to do the digging around in public records and to be here now and then. I think it would suit you. I could pay you, say, sixty marks a week. Cash, so we wouldn’t have to inform the labour people. Maybe more if things work out. What do you say?’

  ‘Well if you’re sure . . .’ She shrugged. ‘I could certainly use the money.’

  ‘That’s settled then.’ I thought for a minute. ‘Presumably, you still have a few contacts on papers, in government departments?’ She nodded. ‘Do you happen to know anyone in the DAF, the German Labour Service?’

  She thought for a minute, and fiddled with the buttons on her jacket. ‘There was someone,’ she said, ruminatively. ‘An ex-boyfriend, an SA man. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Give him a call, and ask him to take you out this evening.’

  ‘But I haven’t seen or spoken to him in months,’ she said. ‘And it was bad enough getting him to leave me alone the last time. He’s a real leech.’ Her blue eyes glanced anxiously at me.

  ‘I want you to find out anything you can about what Six’s son-in-law, Paul Pfarr, was so interested in that he was there several times a week. He had a mistress, too, so anything you can find out about her as well. And I mean anything.’

  ‘I’d better wear an extra pair of knickers, then,’ she said. ‘The man has hands like he thinks he should have been a midwife.’ For the briefest of moments I allowed myself a small pang of jealousy, as I imagined him making a pass at her. Perhaps in time I might do the same.

  ‘I’ll ask him to take me to see a show,’ she said, summoning me from my erotic reverie. ‘Maybe even get him a little drunk.’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ I said. ‘And if that fails, offer the bastard money.’

  11

  Tegal Prison lies to the north-west of Berlin and borders a small lake and the Borsig Locomotive Company housing-estate. As I drove onto Seidelstrasse, its red-brick walls heaved into sight like the muddy flanks of some horny-skinned dinosaur; and when the heavy wooden door banged shut behind me, and the blue sky vanished as though it had been switched off like an electric light, I began to feel a certain amount of sympathy for the inmates of what is one of Germany’s toughest prisons.

  A menagerie of warders lounged around the main entrance hall, and one of these, a pug-faced man smelling strongly of carbolic soap and carrying a bunch of keys that was about the size of the average car tyre, led me through a Cretan labyrinth of yellowing, toilet-bricked corridors and into a small cobbled courtyard in the centre of which stood the guillotine. It’s a fearsome-looking object, and always sends a chill down my spine when I see it again. Since the Party had come to power, it had seen quite a bit of action, and even now it was being tested, no doubt in preparation for the several executions that were posted on the gate as scheduled for dawn the next morning.

  The warder led me through an oak door and up a carpeted stairway, to a corridor. At the end of the corridor, the warder stood outside a polished mahogany door and knocked. He paused for a second or two and then ushered me inside. The prison governor, Dr Konrad Spiedel, rose from behind his desk to greet me. It was several years since I had first made his acquaintance, when he’d been governor of Brauweiler Prison, near Köln, but he had not forgotten the occasion:

  ‘You were seeking information on the cellmate of a p
risoner,’ he recalled, nodding towards an armchair. ‘Something to do with. a bank robbery.’

  ‘You’ve a good memory, Herr Doktor,’ I said.

  ‘I confess that my recall is not entirely fortuitous,’ he said. ‘The same man is now a prisoner within these walls, on another charge.’ Spiedel was a tall, broad-shouldered man of about fifty. He wore a Schiller tie and an olive-green Bavarian jacket; and in his buttonhole, the black-and-white silk bow and crossed swords that denoted a war veteran.

  ‘Oddly enough, I’m here on the same sort of mission,’ I explained. ‘I believe that until recently you had a prisoner here by the name of Kurt Mutschmann. I was hoping that you could tell me something about him.’

  ‘Mutschmann, yes, I remember him. What can I tell you except that he kept out of trouble while he was here, and seemed quite a reasonable fellow?’ Spiedel stood up and went over to his filing cabinet, and rummaged through several sections. ‘Yes, here we are. Mutschmann, Kurt Hermann, aged thirty-six. Convicted of car theft April 1934, sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. Address given as Cicerostrasse, Number 29, Halensee.’

  ‘Is that where he went on discharge?’

  ‘I’m afraid your guess is as good as mine. Mutschmann had a wife, but during his imprisonment it would seem from his record that she visited him only the one time. It doesn’t look like he had much to look forward to on the outside.’

  ‘Did he have any other visitors?’

  Spiedel consulted the file. ‘Just the one, from the Union of Ex-Convicts, a welfare organization we are led to believe, although I have my doubts as to the authenticity of that organization. A man by the name of Kasper Tillessen. He visited Mutschmann on two occasions.’

  ‘Did Mutschmann have a cellmate?’

  ‘Yes, he shared with 7888319, Bock, H.J.’ He retrieved another file from the drawer. ‘Hans Jürgen Bock, aged thirty-eight. Convicted of assaulting and maiming a man in the old Steel Workers Union in March 1930, sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.’