March Violets

by Philip Kerr

  ‘Do you mean that he was a strike-breaker?’

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  ‘You wouldn’t happen to have the particulars of that case, would you?’

  Spiedel shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. The case file has been sent back to Criminal Records at the Alex.’ He paused. ‘Hmm. This might help you, though. On discharge Bock gave the address where he was intending to stay as “Care of Pension Tillessen, Chamissoplatz, Number 17, Kreuzberg’. Not only that but this same Kasper Tillessen paid Bock a visit on behalf of the Union of Ex-Convicts.’ He looked at me vaguely. ‘That’s about it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I think I’ve got enough,’ I said brightly. ‘It was kind of you to give me some of your time.’

  Spiedel adopted an expression of great sincerity, and with some solemnity he said: ‘Sir, it was my pleasure to help the man who brought Gormann to justice.’

  I reckon that in ten years from now, I’ll still be trading off that Gormann business.

  When a man’s wife visits him only once in two years’ cement, then she doesn’t bake him a sponge-cake to celebrate his freedom. But it was possible that Mutschmann had seen her after his release, if only to knock the shit out of her, so I decided to check her out anyway. You always eliminate the obvious. That’s fundamental to detection.

  Neither Mutschmann nor his wife lived at the address in Cicerostrasse any more. The woman I spoke to there told me that Frau Mutschmann had re-married, and was living in Ohm-strasse on the Siemens housing-estate. I asked her if anyone else had been around looking for her, but she told me that there hadn’t.

  It was 7.30 by the time I got to the Siemens housing-estate. There are as many as a thousand houses on it, each of them built of the same whitewashed brick, and providing accommodation for the families of the employees of the Siemens Electrical Company. I couldn’t imagine anything less congenial than living in a house that had all the character of a sugar lump; but I knew that in the Third Reich there were many worse things being done in the name of progress than the homogenizing of workers’ dwellings.

  Standing outside the front door, my nose caught the smell of cooking meat, pork I thought, and suddenly I realized how hungry I was; and how tired. I wanted to be at home, or seeing some easy, brainless show with Inge. I wanted to be anywhere other than confronting the flint-faced brunette who opened the door to me. She wiped her mottled pink hands on her grubby apron and eyed me suspiciously.

  ‘Frau Buverts?’ I said, using her new married name, and almost hoping she wasn’t.

  ‘Yes,’ she said crisply. ‘And who might you be? Not that I need to ask. You’ve got bull stapled to each dumb ear. So I’ll tell you once, and then you can clear off. I haven’t seen him in more than eighteen months. And if you should find him, then tell him not to come after me. He’s as welcome here as a Jew’s prick up Goering’s arse. And that goes for you, too.’

  It’s the small manifestations of ordinary good humour and common courtesy that make the job so worthwhile.

  Later that night, between 11 and 1 1.30, there was a loud knock at my front door. I hadn’t had a drink, but the sleep I’d been having was deep enough to make me feel as if I had. I walked unsteadily into the hall, where the faint chalky outline of Walther Kolb’s body on the floor brought me out of my sleepy stupor and prompted me to go back and get my spare gun. There was another knock, louder this time, followed by a man’s voice.

  ‘Hey, Gunther, it’s me, Rienacker. Come on, open up, I want to talk to you.’

  ‘I’m still aching from our last little chat.’

  ‘Aw, you’re not still sore about that, are you?’

  ‘I’m fine about it. But as far as my neck is concerned, you’re strictly persona non grata. Especially at this time of night.’

  ‘Hey, no hard feelings, Gunther,’ said Rienacker. ‘Look, this is important. There’s money in it.’ There was a long pause, and when Rienacker spoke again, there was an edge of irritation in his bass voice. ‘Come on, Gunther, open up, will you? What the fuck are you so scared of? If I was arresting you, I’d have busted the door down by now.’ There was some truth in that, I thought, so I opened the door, revealing his massive figure. He glanced coolly at the gun in my hand, and nodded as if admitting that for the moment I still had an advantage.

  ‘You weren’t expecting me, then,’ he said drily.

  ‘Oh, I knew it was you all right, Rienacker. I heard your knuckles dragging on the stairs.’

  He snorted a laugh that was mainly tobacco smoke. Then he said: ‘Get dressed, we’re going for a ride. And better leave the hammer.’

  I hesitated. ‘What’s the matter?’

  He grinned at my discomfiture. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘Now why do you say that? The nice man from the Gestapo knocks on my door at midnight, and asks me if I’d like to take a spin in his big shiny-black motor-car. Naturally I just go weak at the knees because I know that you’ve booked us the best table at Horcher’s.’

  ‘Someone important wants to see you,’ he yawned. ‘Someone very important.’

  ‘They’ve named me for the Olympic shit-throwing team, right?’ Rienacker’s face changed colour and his nostrils flared and contracted quickly, like two emptying hot-water bottles. He was starting to get impatient.

  ‘All right, all right,’ I said. ‘I suppose I’m going whether I like it or not. I’ll get dressed.’ I went towards the bedroom. ‘And no peeking.’

  It was a big black Mercedes, and I climbed in without a word. There were two gargoyles in the front seat, and lying on the floor in the back, his hands cuffed behind him, was the semi-conscious body of a man. It was dark, but from his moans I could tell that he’d taken quite a beating. Rienacker got in behind me. With the movement of the car, the man on the floor stirred and made a half attempt to get up. It earned him the toe of Rienacker’s boot against his ear.

  ‘What did he do? Leave his fly button undone?’

  ‘He’s a fucking Kozi,’ said Rienacker, outraged, as if he had arrested an habitual child molester. ‘A midnight fucking postman. We caught him red-handed, pushing Bolshie leaflets for the KPD through letter-boxes in this area.’

  I shook my head. ‘I see the job is just as hazardous as it always was.’

  He ignored me, and shouted to the driver: ‘We’ll drop this bastard off, and then go straight onto Leipzigerstrasse. Mustn’t keep his majesty waiting.’

  ‘Drop him off where? Schöneberger Bridge?’

  Rienacker laughed. ‘Maybe.’ He produced a hip flask from his coat pocket and took a long pull from it. I’d had just such a leaflet put through my own letter-box the previous evening. It had been devoted largely to ridiculing no less a person than the Prussian Prime Minister. I knew that in the weeks leading up to the Olympiad, the Gestapo were making strenuous efforts to smash the communist underground in Berlin. Thousands of Kozis had been arrested and sent to KZ camps like Oranienburg, Columbia Haus, Dachau and Buchenwald. Putting two and two together, it suddenly came to me with a shock just who it was I was being taken to see.

  At Grolmanstrasse Police Station, the car stopped, and one of the gargoyles dragged the prisoner out from under our feet. I didn’t think much for his chances. If ever I saw a man destined for a late-night swimming lesson in the Landwehr, it was him. Then we drove east on Berlinerstrasse and Charlottenburg-chaussee, Berlin’s east-west axis, which was decorated with a lot of black, white and red bunting in celebration of the forthcoming Olympiad. Rienacker eyed it grimly.

  ‘Fucking Olympic Games,’ he sneered. ‘Waste of fucking money.’

  ‘I’m forced to agree with you,’ I said.

  ‘What’s it all for, that’s what I’d like to know. We are what we are, so why pretend we’re not? All this pretence really pisses me off. You know, they’re even drafting in snappers from Munich and Hamburg because Berlin trade in female flesh has been so hard hit by the Emergency Powers. And nigger jazz is legal again. What do you make of that, Gunther?’

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nbsp; ‘Say one thing, do another. That’s this Government all over.’

  He looked at me narrowly. ‘I wouldn’t go around saying that sort of thing, if I were you,’ he said.

  I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter what I say, Rienacker, you know that. Just as long as I can be of service to your boss. He wouldn’t care if I were Karl Marx and Moses in one, if he thought I could be of use to him.’

  ‘Then you’d better make the most of it. You’ll never get another client as important as this one.’

  ‘That’s what they all say.’

  Just short of the Brandenburger Tor, the car turned south onto Hermann Goering Strasse. At the British Embassy all the lights were burning and there were several dozen limousines drawn up out front. As the car slowed and turned into the driveway of the big building next door, the driver wound down the window to let the storm-trooper on guard identify us, and we heard the sound of a big party drifting across the lawn.

  We waited, Rienacker and I, in a room the size of a tennis court. After a short while a tall thin man wearing the uniform of an officer in the Luftwaffe told us that Goering was changing, and that he would see us in ten minutes.

  It was a gloomy palace: overbearing, grandiose and affecting a bucolic air that belied its urban location. Rienacker sat down in a medieval-looking chair, saying nothing as I took a look around, but watching me closely.

  ‘Cosy,’ I said, and stood in front of a Gobelin tapestry depicting several hunting scenes that could just as easily have accommodated a scene featuring a full-scale version of the Hindenburg. The room’s only light came from a lamp on the huge Renaissance-style desk which was composed of two silver candelabra with parchment shades; it illuminated a small shrine of photographs: there was one of Hitler wearing the brown shirt and leather cross belt of an SA man, and looking more than a little like a boy scout; and there were photographs of two women, whom I guessed were Goering’s dead wife Karin, and his living wife Emmy. Next to the photographs was a large leather-bound book, on the front of which was a coat of arms, which, I presumed, was Goering’s own. This was a mailed fist grasping a bludgeon, and it struck me how much more ap- propriate than the swastika it would have been for the National Socialists.

  I sat down beside Rienacker, who produced some cigarettes. We waited for an hour, perhaps longer, before we heard voices outside the door, and hearing it open, we both stood up. Two men in Luftwaffe uniform followed Goering into the room. To my astonishment, I saw that he was carrying a lion cub in his arms. He kissed it on the head, pulled its ears and then dropped it on to the silk rug.

  ‘Off you go and play, Mucki, there’s a good little fellow.’ The cub growled happily, and gambolled over to the window, where he started to play with the tassel on one of the heavy curtains.

  Goering was shorter than I had imagined, which made him seem that much bulkier. He wore a sleeveless green-leather hunting jacket, a white flannel shirt, white drill trousers and white tennis shoes.

  ‘Hallo,’ he said, shaking my hand and smiling broadly. There was something slightly animal about him, and his eyes were a hard, intelligent blue. The hand wore several rings, one of them a big ruby. ‘Thank you for coming. I’m so sorry you’ve been kept waiting. Affairs of state, you understand.’ I said that it was quite all right, although in truth I hardly knew what to say. Close up, I was struck by the smooth, almost babyish quality of his skin, and I wondered if it was powdered. We sat down. For several minutes he continued to appear delighted at my being there, almost childishly so, and after a while he felt obliged to explain himself.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to meet a real private detective,’ he said. ‘Tell me, have you ever read any of Dashiell Hammett’s detective stories? He’s an American, but I think he’s wonderful.’

  ‘I can’t say I have, sir.’

  ‘Oh, but you should. I shall lend you a German edition of Red Harvest. You’ll enjoy it. And do you carry a gun, Herr Gunther?’

  ‘Sometimes, sir, when I think I might need it.’

  Goering beamed like an excited schoolboy. ‘Are you carrying it now?’

  I shook my head. ‘Rienacker here thought it might scare the cat.’

  ‘A pity,’ said Goering. ‘I should like to have seen the gun of a real shamus.’ He leaned back in his chair, which looked as though it might once have belonged to a bumper-sized Medici pope, and waved his hand.

  ‘Well then, to business,’ he said. One of the aides brought forward a file and laid it before his master. Goering opened it and studied the contents for several seconds. I figured that it was about me. There were so many files on me around these days that I was beginning to feel like a medical case-history.

  ‘It says here that you used to be a policeman,’ he said. ‘Quite an impressive record, too. You’d have been a kommissar by now. Why did you leave?’ He removed a small lacquered pillbox from his jacket and shook a couple of pink pills onto his fat palm as he waited for me to reply. He took them with a glass of water.

  ‘I didn’t much care for the police canteen, sir.’ He laughed loudly. ‘But with respect, Herr Prime Minister, I’m sure you are well aware of why I left, since at that time you were yourself in command of the police. I don’t recall making a secret of my opposition to the purging of so-called unreliable police officers. Many of those men were my friends. Many of them lost their pensions. A couple even lost their heads.’

  Goering smiled slowly. With his broad forehead, cold eyes, low growling voice, predatory grin and lazy belly, he reminded me of nothing so much as a big, fat, man-eating tiger; and as if telepathically conscious of the impression he was making on me, he leaned forwards in his chair, scooped up the lion cub from off the rug and cradled it on his sofa-sized lap. The cub blinked sleepily, hardly stirring as its owner stroked its head and thumbed its ears. He looked like he was admiring his own child.

  ‘You see,’ he said. ‘He is not in anyone’s shadow. And he’s not afraid to speak his mind. That is the great virtue of independence. There’s no reason on earth why this man should do me a service. He’s got the guts to remind me of that when another man would have stayed silent. I can trust a man like that.’

  I nodded at the file on his desk. ‘I’d lay a bet that it was Diels who put that little lot together.’

  ‘And you’d be right. I inherited this file, your file, with a great many others, when he lost his position as Gestapo chief to that little shit of a chicken farmer. It was the last great service that he was to do for me.’

  ‘Do you mind my asking what happened to him?’

  ‘Not at all. He is still in my employment, although occupying a lesser position, as an inland-shipping administrator with the Hermann Goering Works in Cologne.’ Goering repeated his own name without the least trace of hesitation or embarrassment; he must have thought it was the most natural thing in the world that a factory should bear his name.

  ‘You see,’ he said proudly, ‘I look after the people who have done me a service. Isn’t that so, Rienacker?’

  The big man’s answer came back with the speed of a pilota ball. ‘Yes sir, Herr Prime Minister, you most certainly do.’ Full marks, I thought as a servant bearing a large tray of coffee, Moselle and eggs Benedict for the Prime Minister came into the room. Goering tucked in as if he hadn’t eaten all day.

  ‘I may no longer be head of the Gestapo,’ he said, ‘but there are many in the security police, like Rienacker here, who are still loyal to me, rather than to Himmler.’

  ‘A great many,’ piped Rienacker loyally.

  ‘Who keep me informed about what the Gestapo is doing.’ He dabbed daintily at his wide mouth with a napkin. ‘Now then,’ he said. ‘Rienacker tells me that you turned up at my apartment in Derfflingerstrasse this afternoon. It is, as he may already have told you, an apartment that I have placed at the disposal of a man who in certain matters is my confidential agent. His name is, as I believe you know, Gerhard Von Greis, and he has been missing for over a week. Rienacker says that you thought tha
t he might have been approached by someone trying to sell a stolen painting. A Rubens nude, to be precise. What made you think that my agent was worth contacting, and how you managed to track him down to that particular address I have no idea. But you impress me, Herr Gunther.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Herr Prime Minister.’ Who knows? I thought; with a little practice I could sound just like Rienacker.

  ‘Your record as a police officer speaks for itself, and I don’t doubt that as a private investigator you are no less competent.’ He finished eating, swallowed a glassful of Moselle and lit an enormous cigar. He showed no signs of weariness, unlike the two aides and Rienacker, and I was starting to wonder what the pink pills had been. He blew a doughnut-sized smoke-ring. ‘Gunther, I want to become your client. I want you to find Gerhard Von Greis, preferably before Sipo does. Not that he’s committed any crime, you understand. It’s just that he is the custodian of some confidential information which I have no wish to see fall into Himmler’s hands.’

  ‘What kind of confidential information, Herr Prime Minister?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Look, sir,’ I said. ‘If I’m going to row the boat I like to know if there are any leaks in it. That’s the difference between me and a regular bull. He doesn’t get to ask why. It’s the privilege of independence.’

  Goering nodded. ‘I admire directness,’ he said. ‘I don’t just say that I’m going to do something, I do it and I do it properly. I don’t suppose there’s any point in hiring you unless I take you fully into my confidence. But you must understand, that imposes certain obligations on you, Herr Gunther. The price of betraying my trust is a high one.’

  I didn’t doubt it for a minute. I got so little sleep these days, I didn’t think that losing some more on account of what I knew about Goering was going to make any difference. I couldn’t back off. Besides, there was likely to be some good money in it, and I try not to walk away from money unless I can possibly help it. He took another two of the little pink pills. He seemed to take them as often as I might have smoked a cigarette.