March Violets

by Philip Kerr

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And is he likely to be working today?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ said the clerk. ‘Many of them do work Saturdays. But even if he’s not working, you’ll probably find him in the workers’ barracks. They live on site, you see.’

  ‘You’ve been most helpful,’ I said, and added with the pomposity that is typical of all Gestapo officers, ‘I shall report your efficiency to your superior.’

  13

  ‘It’s just typical of the bloody Nazis,’ said Inge, ‘to build the People’s roads before the People’s car.’

  We were driving towards Potsdam on the Avus Speedway, and Inge was referring to the much delayed Strength Through Joy car, the KdF-Wagen. It was a subject she evidently felt strongly about.

  ‘If you ask me, it’s putting the cart before the horse. I mean, who needs these gigantic highways? It’s not as if there’s anything wrong with the roads we have now. It’s not as if there are that many cars in Germany.’ She turned sideways in her seat the better to see me as she continued speaking. ‘I have this friend, an engineer, who tells me that they’re building an autobahn right across the Polish Corridor, and that one is projected across Czechoslovakia. Now why else would that be but to move an army about?’

  I cleared my throat before answering; it gave me a couple more seconds to think about it. ‘I can’t see the autobahns are of much military value, and there are none west of the Rhine, towards France. Anyway, on a long straight stretch of road, a convoy of trucks makes an easy target for an air attack.’

  This last remark drew a short, mocking laugh from my companion. ‘That’s precisely why they’re building up the Luftwaffe - to protect the convoys.’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe. But if you’re looking for the real reason why Hitler has built these roads, then it’s much more simple. It’s an easy way of cutting the unemployment figures. A man receiving state relief risks losing it if he refuses the offer of a job on the autobahns. So he takes it. Who knows, that may be what happened to Bock.’

  ‘You should take a look at Wedding and Neukölln sometime,’ she said, referring to Berlin’s remaining strongholds of KPD sympathy.

  ‘Well, of course, there are those who know all about the rotten pay and conditions on the autobahns. I suppose a lot of them think that it’s better not to sign on for relief at all rather than risk being sent to work on the roads.’ We were coming into Potsdam on the Neue Königstrasse. Potsdam. A shrine where the older residents of the town light the candles to the glorious, bygone days of the Fatherland, and to their youth; the silent, discarded shell of Imperial Prussia. More French-looking than German, it’s a museum of a place, where the old ways of speech and sentiment are reverently preserved, where conservatism is absolute and where the windows are as well polished as the glass on the pictures of the Kaiser.

  A couple of kilometres down the road to Lehnin, the picturesque gave way abruptly to the chaotic. Where once had been some of the most beautiful countryside outside Berlin, there was now the earth-moving machinery and the torn brown valley that was the half built Lehnin — Brandenburg stretch of autobahn. Closer to Brandenburg, at a collection of wooden huts and idle excavating equipment, I pulled up and asked a worker to direct me to the foreman’s hut. He pointed at a man standing only a few metres away.

  ‘If you want him, that’s the foreman there.’ I thanked him, and parked the car. We got out.

  The foreman was a stocky, red-faced man of medium height, and with a belly that was bigger than a woman who has reached the full term of her pregnancy: it hung over the edge of his trousers like a climber’s rucksack. He turned to face us as we approached, and almost as if he had been preparing to square up to me, he hitched up his trousers, wiped his stubbly jaw with the back of his shovel-sized hand and transferred most of his weight on to his back foot.

  ‘Hallo there,’ I called, before we were quite next to him. ‘Are you the foreman?’ He said nothing. ‘My name is Gunther, Bernhard Gunther. I’m a private investigator, and this is my assistant, Fraulein Inge Lorenz.’ I handed him my identification. The foreman nodded at Inge and then returned his gaze back to my licence. There was a literalness about his conduct that seemed almost simian.

  ‘Peter Welser,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you people?’

  ‘I’d like to speak to Herr Bock. I’m hoping he can help us. We’re looking for a missing person.’

  Welser chuckled and hitched up his trousers again. ‘Christ, that’s a funny one.’ He shook his head and then spat onto the earth. ‘This week alone I’ve had three workers disappear. Perhaps I should hire you to try and find them, eh?’ He laughed again.

  ‘Was Bock one of them?’

  ‘Good God, no,’ said Welser. ‘He’s a damn good worker. Ex-convict trying to live an honest life. I hope you’re not going to spoil that for him.’

  ‘Herr Welser, I just want to ask him one or two questions, not rubber him and take him back to Tegel Prison in my trunk. Is he here now?’

  ‘Yes, he’s here. He’s very probably in his hut. I’ll take you over there.’ We followed him to one of several long, single-storey wooden huts that had been built at the side of what had once been forest, and was now destined to be the autobahn. At the bottom of the hut steps the foreman turned and said, ‘They’re a bit rough-and-ready, these fellows. Maybe it would be better if the lady didn’t come in. You have to take these men as you find them. Some of them might not be dressed.’

  ‘I’ll wait in the car, Bernie,’ said Inge. I looked at her and shrugged apologetically, before following Welser up the steps. He raised the wooden latch and we went through the door.

  Inside, the walls and floor were painted a washed-out shade of yellow. Against the walls were bunks for twelve workers, three of them without mattresses and three of them occupied by men wearing just their underwear. In the middle of the hut was a pot-bellied stove made of black cast-iron, its stove-pipe going straight through the ceiling, and next to it a big wooden table at which four men were seated, playing skat for a few pfennigs. Welser spoke to one of the card players.

  ‘This fellow is from Berlin,’ he explained. ‘He’d like to ask you a few questions.’

  A solid slab of man with a head the size of a tree stump studied the palm of his big hand carefully, looked up at the foreman, and then suspiciously at me. Another man got up off his bunk and started to sweep the floor nonchalantly with a broom.

  I’ve had better introductions in my time, and I wasn’t surprised to see that it didn’t exactly put Bock at his ease. I was about to utter my own codicil to Welser’s inadequate reference when Bock sprang out of his chair, and my jaw, blocking his exit, was duly hooked aside. Not much of a punch, but enough to set off a small steam kettle between my ears and knock me sideways. A second or two later I heard a short, dull clang, like someone striking a tin tray with a soup ladle. When I had recovered my senses, I looked around and saw Welser standing over Bock’s half-conscious body. In his hand he held a coal shovel, with which he had evidently struck the big man’s head. There was the scrape of chairs and table legs as Bock’s card-playing friends jumped to their feet.

  ‘Relax, all of you,’ yelled Welser. ‘This fellow isn’t a fucking bull, he’s a private investigator. He’s not come to arrest Hans. He just wants to ask him a few questions, that’s all. He’s looking for a missing person.’ He pointed at one of the men in the skat game. ‘Here you, give me a hand with him.’ Then he looked at me. ‘You all right?’ he said. I nodded vaguely. Welser and the other man bent down and lifted Bock from where he lay in the doorway. I could see it wasn’t easy; the man looked heavy. They sat him in a chair and waited for him to shake his head clear. Meanwhile the foreman told the rest of the men in the hut to go outside for ten minutes. The men in the bunks didn’t put up any resistance and I could see that Welser was a man who was used to being obeyed, and quickly.

  When Bock came round, Welser told him what he had told the rest of the hut. I could have wished that he had done it
at the beginning.

  ‘I’ll be outside if you need me,’ said Welser, and pushing the last man from the hut, he left the two of us alone.

  ‘If you’re not a polyp then you must be one of Red’s boys.’ Bock spoke sideways out of his mouth, and I saw that his tongue was several sizes too big for his mouth. Its tip remained buried in his cheek somewhere, so that all I saw was the large pink-coloured chew that was his tongue’s thickest part.

  ‘Look, I’m not a complete idiot,’ he said more vehemently. ‘I’m not so stupid that I’d get killed to protect Kurt. I really have no idea where he is.’ I took out my cigarette case and offered him one. I lit us both in silence.

  ‘Listen, first off, I’m not one of Red’s boys. I really am a private investigator, like the man said. But I’ve got a sore jaw and unless you answer all my questions your name will be the one the boys up at the Alex draw out of the hat to make the trip to the blade for canning the meat at Pension Tillessen.’ Bock stiffened in his chair. ‘And if you move from that chair, so help me I’ll break your damned neck.’ I drew up a chair and put one foot on its seat so that I could lean on my knee while looking at him.

  ‘You can’t prove I was near the place,’ he said.

  I grinned at him. ‘Oh, can’t I?’ I took a long pull at my smoke, and blew it in his face. I said: ‘On your last little visit to Tillessen’s joint you kindly left your pay-slip behind. I found it in the incinerator, next to the murder weapon. That’s how I managed to track you down here. Of course it’s not there now, but I could easily put it back. The police haven’t yet found the body, but that’s only because I haven’t had time to tell them. That pay-slip puts you in an awkward situation. Next to the murder weapon, it’s more than enough to send you to the block.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  I sat down opposite him. ‘Answers,’ I said. ‘Look, friend, if I ask you to name the capital of Mongolia you’d better give me an answer or I’ll have your fucking head for it. Do you understand?’ He shrugged. ‘But we’ll start with Kurt Mutschmann, and what the two of you did when you came out of Tegel.’

  Bock sighed heavily and then nodded. ‘I got out first. I decided to try and go straight. This isn’t much of a job, but it’s a job. I didn’t want to go back in the cement. I used to go back to Berlin for the odd weekend, see? Stay at Tillessen’s bang. He’s a pimp, or was. Sometimes he fixed me up with a bit of plum.’ He tucked the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and rubbed the top of his head. ‘Anyway, a couple of months after I got out, Kurt finished his cement and went to stay with Tillessen. I went to see him, and he told me that the ring were going to fix him up with his first bit of thieving.

  ‘Well, the same night I saw him, Red Dieter and a couple of his boys turn up. He more or less runs the ring, you understand. They’ve got this older fellow with them, and start working him over in the dining room. I stayed out of the way in my room. After a while Red comes in and tells Kurt that he wants him to do a safe, and that he wants me to drive. Well, neither of us was too happy about it. Me, because I’d had enough of all that sort of thing. And Kurt because he’s a professional. He doesn’t like violence, mess, you know. He likes to take his time, too. Not just go straight ahead and do a job without any real planning.’

  ‘This safe: did Red Dieter find out about it from the man in the dining room, the man being beaten up?’ Bock nodded. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘I decided that I wanted nothing to do with it. So I went out through the window, spent the night at the doss-house on Frobe-strasse, and came back here. That fellow, the one they had beaten up, he was still alive when I left. They were keeping him alive until they found out if he had told them the truth.’ He took the cigarette stub out of his mouth and dropped it on the wooden floor, grinding it under his heel. I gave him another.

  ‘Well, the next thing I hear is that the job went wrong. Tillessen did the driving, apparently. Afterwards, Red’s boys killed him. They would have killed Kurt too, only he got away.’

  ‘Did they double-cross Red?’

  ‘Nobody’s that stupid.’

  ‘You’re singing, aren’t you?’

  ‘When I was in the cement, in Tegel, I saw lots of men die on that guillotine,’ he said quietly. ‘I’d rather take my chances with Red. When I go I want to go in one piece.’

  ‘Tell me more about the job.’

  ‘ “Just crack a nut,” ’ said Red. ‘Easy to a man like Kurt, he’s a real professional. Could open Hitler’s heart. The job was middle of the night. Puzzle the safe and take some papers. That’s all.’

  ‘No diamonds?’

  ‘Diamonds? He never said nothing about no bells.’

  ‘Are you sure of that?’

  ‘Course I’m sure. He was just to claw the papers. Nothing else.’

  ‘What were these papers, do you know?’

  Bock shook his head. ‘Just papers.’

  ‘What about the killings?’

  ‘Nobody mentioned killings. Kurt wouldn’t have agreed to do the job if he thought he was going to have to can anyone. He wasn’t that kind of fellow.’

  ‘What about Tillessen? Was he the type to shoot people in their beds?’

  ‘Not a chance. That wasn’t his style at all. Tillessen was just a fucking garter-handler. Beating up snappers was all he was good for. Show him a lighter and he’d have been off like a rabbit.’

  ‘Maybe they got greedy, and helped themselves to more than they were supposed to.’

  ‘You tell me. You’re the fucking detective.’

  ‘And you haven’t seen or heard from Kurt since?’

  ‘He’s too smart to contact me. If he’s got any sense, he’ll have done a U-Boat by now.’

  ‘Does he have any friends?’

  ‘A few. But I don’t know who. His wife left him, so you can forget her. She spent every pfennig he had earned, and when she’d finished she took off with another man. He’d die before he’d ask that bitch for help.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s dead already,’ I suggested.

  ‘Not Kurt,’ said Bock, his face set against the thought. ‘He’s a clever one. Resourceful. He’ll find a way out of it.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, and then: ‘One thing I can’t figure is you going straight, especially when you end up working here. How much do you make a week?’

  Bock shrugged. ‘About forty marks.’ He caught the quiet surprise in my face. It was even less than I had supposed. ‘Not much, is it?’

  ‘So what’s the deal? Why aren’t you breaking heads for Red Dieter?’

  ‘Who says I ever did?’

  ‘You went inside for beating up steel pickets, didn’t you?’

  ‘That was a mistake. I needed the money.’

  ‘Who was paying it?’

  ‘Red.’

  ‘And what was in it for him?’

  ‘Money, same as me. Just more of it. His sort never gets caught. I worked that one out in the cement. The worst of it is that now that I’ve decided to go straight it seems like the rest of the country has decided to go bent. I go to prison and when I come out I find that the stupid bastards have elected a bunch of gangsters. How do you like that?’

  ‘Well, don’t blame me, friend, I voted for the Social Democrats. Did you ever find out who was paying Red to break the steel strikes? Hear any names maybe?’

  He shrugged. ‘The bosses, I suppose. Doesn’t take a detective to work that one out. But I never heard any names.’

  ‘But it was definitely organized.’

  ‘Oh yes, it was organized all right. What’s more it worked. They went back, didn’t they?’

  ‘And you went to prison.’

  ‘I got caught. Never have been very lucky. You turning up here is proof of that.’

  I took out my wallet and thumbed a fifty at him. He opened his mouth to thank me.

  ‘Skip it.’ I got to my feet and made for the hut door. Turning round, I said, ‘Was your Kurt the type of puzzler to leave a nut he’d cracked open?�
��

  Bock folded the fifty and shook his head. ‘Nobody was ever tidier round a job than Kurt Mutschmann.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘You’re going to have quite an eye in the morning,’ said Inge. She took hold of my chin and turned my head to get a better look at the bruise on my cheekbone. ‘You’d better let me put something on that.’ She went into the bathroom. We had stopped off at my apartment on our way back from Brandenburg. I heard her run the tap for a while, and when she returned she pressed a cold flannel to my face. As she stood there I felt her breath caress my ear, and I inhaled deeply of the haze of perfume in which she moved.

  ‘This might help to stop the swelling,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks. A jaw-whistler looks bad for business. On the other hand, maybe they’ll just think that I’m the determined type - you know, the kind who never lets up on a case.’

  ‘Hold still,’ she said impatiently. Her belly brushed against me, and I realized with some surprise that I had an erection. She blinked quickly and I supposed that she had noticed it too; but she did not step back. Instead, almost involuntarily, she brushed against me once more, only with a greater pressure than before. I lifted my hand and cradled her ample breast on my open palm. After a minute or so of that I took her nipple in between my finger and thumb. It wasn’t difficult to find. It was as hard as the lid on a teapot, and just as big. Then she turned away.

  ‘Perhaps we should stop now,’ she said.

  ‘If you’re intending to stop the swelling, you’re too late,’ I told her. Her eyes passed lightly over me as I said it. Colouring a little, she folded her arms across her breasts and flexed her long neck against her backbone.

  Enjoying the very deliberateness of my own actions, I stepped close to her and looked slowly down from her face, across her breasts and her belly, over her thighs to the hem of the green cotton dress. Reaching down I caught hold of it. Our fingers brushed as she took the hem from me and held it at her waist where I had placed it. Then I knelt before her, my eyes lingering on her underthings for long seconds before I reached up and slipped her knickers round her ankles. She steadied herself with one hand on my shoulder and stepped out of them, her long smooth thighs trembling slightly as she moved. I looked up at the sight I had coveted, and then beyond, to a face that smiled and then vanished as the dress rose up over her head, revealing her breasts, her neck and then her head again, which shook its cascade of shiny black hair like a bird fluttering the feathers on its wings. She dropped the dress to the floor and stood before me, naked but for her garter-belt, her stockings and her shoes. I sat back on my haunches and with an excitement that ached to be liberated I watched her slowly turn herself in front of me, showing me the profile of her pubic hair and her erect nipples, the long chute of her back and the two perfectly matched halves of her bottom, and then once more the swell of her belly, the dark pennant that seemed to prick the air with its own excitement, and the smooth, quivering shanks.