March Violets

by Philip Kerr

  ‘You boys are getting lazy,’ I said, producing my papers. He snatched them away for examination.

  ‘What are you doing hanging around here?’

  ‘Hanging? Who’s hanging?’ I said. ‘I stopped to admire the architecture.’

  ‘Why were you looking at those officers who got out of the car?’

  ‘I wasn’t looking at the officers,’ I said. ‘I was looking at the girl. I love women in uniforms.’

  ‘On your way,’ he said, tossing my papers back at me.

  The average German seems to be able to tolerate the most offensive behaviour from anyone wearing a uniform or carrying some sort of official insignia. In everything except that I consider myself to be a fairly typical German, because I have to admit that I am naturally disposed to be obstructive to authority. I suppose you would say that it’s an odd attitude for an ex-policeman.

  On Königstrasse the collectors for the Winter Relief were out in force, shaking their little red collecting-boxes under everyone’s noses, although November was only a few days old. In the early days the Relief had been intended to help overcome the effects of unemployment and the depression, but now, and almost universally, it was regarded as nothing more than financial and psychological blackmail by the Party: the Relief raised funds but, just as importantly, it created an emotional climate in which people were trained to do without for the sake of the Fatherland. Each week the collection was the charge of a different organization, and this week it was the Railwaymen.

  The only railwayman I ever liked was my former secretary Dagmarr’s father. I had no sooner bitten my lip and handed over 20 pfennigs to one of them, than farther up the road I was solicited by another. The small glass badge you got for contributing didn’t so much protect you from further harassment as mark you out as a good prospect. Still, it wasn’t that which made me curse the man, fat as only a railwayman can be, and push him out of my way, but the sight of Dagmarr herself disappearing round the sacrificial column that stands outside the Town Hall.

  Hearing my hurried footsteps she turned and saw me before I reached her. We stood awkwardly in front of the urn-like monument with its huge white-lettered motto which read ‘Sacrifice for the Winter Relief’.

  ‘Bernie,’ she said.

  ‘Hallo,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking about you.’ Feeling rather awkward, I touched her on the arm. ‘I was sorry to hear about Johannes.’ She gave me a brave smile, and drew her brown wool coat closer about her neck.

  ‘You’ve lost a lot of weight, Bernie. Have you been ill?’

  ‘It’s a long story. Have you got time for a coffee?’

  We went to the Alexanderquelle on Alexanderplatz where we ordered real mocha and real scones with real jam and real butter.

  ‘They say that Goering’s got a new process that makes butter from coal.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like he’s eating any of it then.’ I laughed politely. ‘And you can’t buy an onion anywhere in Berlin. Father reckons they’re using them to make poison gas for the Japs to use against the Chinese.’

  After a while I asked her if she was able to discuss Johannes. ‘I’m afraid there’s not really much to tell,’ she said.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘All I know is that he was killed in an air-raid on Madrid. One of his comrades came to tell me. From the Reich I received a one-line message which read: “Your husband died for Germany’s honour.” In a pig’s eye, I thought.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Then I had to go and see someone at the Air Ministry, and sign a promise that I wouldn’t talk about what had happened, and that I wouldn’t wear mourning. Can you imagine that, Bernie? I couldn’t even wear black for my own husband. It was the only way I could get a pension.’ She smiled bitterly, and added: “You are Nothing, Your Nation is Everything.” Well, they certainly mean it.’ She took out her handkerchief and blew her nose.

  ‘Never underestimate the National Socialists when it comes to the pantheistic,’ I said. ‘Individuals are an irrelevance. These days your own mother takes your disappearance for granted. Nobody cares.’

  Nobody except me, I thought. For several weeks after my release from Dachau, the disappearance of Inge Lorenz was my only case. But sometimes even Bernie Gunther draws a blank

  Looking for someone in Germany in the late autumn of 1936 was like trying to find something in a great desk drawer that had crashed to the floor, the contents spilled and then replaced according to a new order so that things no longer came easily to hand, or even seemed to belong in there. Gradually my sense of urgency was worn away by the indifference of others. Inge’s former colleagues on the newspaper shrugged and said that really, they hadn’t known her all that well. Neighbours shook their heads and suggested that one needed to be philosophical about such things. Otto, her admirer at the DAF, thought she’d probably turn up before very long. I couldn’t blame any of them. To lose another hair from a head that’s already lost so many seems merely inconvenient.

  Sharing quiet, lonely evenings with a friendly bottle, I often tried to imagine what might have become of her: a car accident; some kind of amnesia perhaps; an emotional or mental breakdown; a crime she had committed which necessitated an immediate and permanent disappearance. But always I was led back to abduction and murder and the idea that whatever had happened had been related to the case I had been working on.

  Even after two months had passed, when you might normally have expected the Gestapo to have admitted to something, Bruno Stahlecker, lately transferred out of the city to a little Kripo station of no account in Spreewald, failed to come up with any record of Inge having been executed or sent to a KZ. And no matter how many times I returned to Haupthändler’s house in Wannsee, in the hope that I might find something that would provide me with a clue to what had happened, there never was anything.

  Until Inge’s lease expired I often went back to her apartment looking for some secret things she had not seen fit to share with me. Meanwhile, the memory of her grew more distant. Having no photograph, I forgot her face, and came to realize how little I had really known about her, beyond rudimentary pieces of information. There had always seemed to be so much time to find out all there was to know.

  As the weeks turned into months. I knew my chances of finding Inge grew smaller as an almost arithmetically inverse proportion. And as the trail grew colder, so did hope. I felt — I knew — that I would never see her again.

  Dagmarr ordered some more coffee, and we talked about what each of us had been doing. But I said nothing of Inge, or of my time in Dachau. There are some things that can’t be discussed over morning coffee.

  ‘How’s business?’ she asked.

  ‘I bought myself a new car, an Opel.’

  ‘You must be doing all right then.’

  ‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘How do you live?’

  ‘I’m back home with my parents. I do a lot of typing at home,’ she said. ‘Students’ theses, that sort of thing.’ She managed a smile. ‘Father worries about me doing it. You see, I like to type at night, and the sound of my typewriter has brought the Gestapo round three times in as many weeks. They’re on the lookout for people writing opposition newspapers. Luckily the sort of stuff that I’m churning out is so worshipful of National Socialism that they’re easy to get rid of. But Father worries about the neighbours. He says they’ll start to believe that the Gestapo is after us for something.’

  After a while I suggested that we go to see a film.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think I could stand one of those patriotic films.’

  Outside the café we bought a newspaper.

  On the front page there was a photograph of the two Hermanns, Six and Goering, shaking hands: Goering was grinning broadly, and Six wasn’t smiling at all: it looked like the Prime Minister was going to have his way regarding the supply of raw materials for the German steel industry after all. I turned up the entertainments section.

  ‘How about The Scarlet Empress at the Tauenzienpalast?’
I said. Dagmarr said that she’d seen it twice.

  ‘What about this one?’ she said. ‘The Greatest Passion, with Ilse Rudel. That’s her new picture, isn’t it? You like her, don’t you? Most men seem to.’ I thought of the young actor, Walther Kolb, who Ilse Rudel had sent to do murder for her, and had himself been killed by me. The line-drawing on the newspaper advertisement showed her wearing a nun’s veil. Even when I had discounted my personal knowledge of her, I thought the characterization questionable.

  But nothing surprises me now. I’ve grown used to living in a world that is out of joint, as if it has been struck by an enormous earthquake so that the roads are no longer flat, nor the buildings straight.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she’s all right.’

  We walked to the cinema. The red Der Stürmer showcases were back on the street corners and, if anything, Streicher’s paper seemed more rabid than ever.