The Lady from Zagreb

Four

Outside the Kripo offices at the Alex was a giant pigeonhole cabinet where they left your mail, just like in a hotel. The first thing I did whenever I came on duty was check my pigeonhole. Usually it was just Party propaganda, or Prussian Police Union stuff that no one paid any attention to — the more important case correspondence was brought straight to your desk by one of two uniformed policemen, two ferociously ill-tempered old men who were universally known as the Brothers Grimm, for obvious reasons. You wouldn’t have dreamed of having anyone leave something valuable in your pigeonhole, or anywhere else, for that matter — not at police headquarters. A few senior coppers like me still remembered Berlin’s master burglars, Emil and Erich Krauss, who stole back their own tools from our own museum of crime. But it wasn’t just our clients who were long-fingered; some of the coppers around the place were just as bent. You left a cigarette case lying around at your peril, especially if you were lucky enough to have cigarettes in it, and things like soap and toilet paper in the lavatories were always going missing. Once, someone even stole all of the electric lightbulbs in the police canteen, which meant that for several days we had to eat in the dark, although that did at least mean the food tasted better. (There used to be an electrician on Elsasser Strasse who would pay six marks for secondhand bulbs, no questions asked.) Imagine my surprise, then, when late one night, I went to my pigeonhole and opened an envelope to find five new pictures of Albrecht Dürer; I think I even turned them over just to check that the Brandenburg Gate was on the back of them, where it usually was. There was a lawyer’s letter, too, but it was a while before enough of the novelty of having a hundred marks in my pocket had worn off for me to look at it.

The envelope had a little brown Hitler on the corner. It was odd how he was on the stamps but not on the banknotes. That could have been a precaution against him being associated with another hyper-inflation. Or maybe he wanted people to think he was above things like money, which, in retrospect, was a pretty good reason not to trust him. Anyone who thinks he’s too good for our money is never going to succeed in Germany. The postmark was Berlin and the letter paper was as thick as a starched pillowcase. On the sender’s letterhead was a drawing of Justitia, wearing a blindfold and holding up a set of scales, which almost made me smile. It had been a long time since justice had been quite so objective and impartial as that in Germany. I took the letter — which wasn’t dated — back to my desk to read it in a better light. And as soon as I’d done so I put it in the pocket of my jacket and went out of the Alex. I went across the road to the station to use the pay phones. The author said he suspected his telephone was being monitored and perhaps it was, but I was more concerned about the phone lines at the Alex, which had certainly been tapped since the days when Göring had been in charge of the Prussian State Police.

Although it was almost ten o’clock, the sky was still light and the station on Alexanderplatz — full of people arriving back after an afternoon stolen on the beach, their faces red from the sun, their hair messed up, their clothes peppered with white sand — buzzed with life like a huge hollowed-out tree colonized by a swarm of bees. Mercifully the station had, so far, escaped the bombs and remained my favorite place in the world. All human life was here in this glass Noah’s Ark, which was full of the things that I loved about the old Berlin. I picked up a phone and made the call.

“Herr Doctor Heckholz?”

“This is he.”

“I’m the man with five twenty-reichsmark notes and one pressing question.”

“Which is?”

“What do I have to do for them?”

“Come and see me at my office tomorrow morning. I have a proposition for you. I might even say, a handsome proposition.”

“Would you care to give me a clue as to what this is all about? I might be wasting your time.”

“I think it’s best I don’t. I have a strong suspicion that the Gestapo are listening in to my telephone calls.”

“If someone’s listening it’s certainly not the Gestapo,” I told him. “The German Signals Intelligence — the FA — is run by Göring’s Aviation Ministry and Hermann keeps a pretty jealous hold on it. Any information obtained by the FA is seldom shared with anyone in the RSHA. As long as you don’t say anything rude about Hitler or Göring, my professional opinion is that you’ve nothing to worry about.”

“If that’s the case then you’ve already earned your money. But do please come anyway. In fact, why not come for breakfast? Do you like pancakes?”

His accent sounded Austrian; the way he said “pancakes” was very different from the way a German would have said it and something a little closer to Hungarian. But I wasn’t about to hold that against him with his Albrechts in my pocket, not to mention the prospect of fresh-made pancakes.

“Sure, I like pancakes.”

“What time do you finish your shift?”

“Nine o’clock.”

“Then I’ll see you at nine-thirty.”

I hung up and went back across the road to the Alex.

It was a quiet night. I had some urgent paperwork but now that I was soon to be on my way to the War Crimes Bureau I wasn’t much inclined to do it; that’s the thing about urgent paperwork: the longer you leave it the less urgent it becomes. So I just sat around and read the newspaper and smoked a couple of the cigarettes I’d stolen from the Wannsee villa. Once, I went to check on the blackout blinds just to stretch my legs; and another time I tried the crossword in the Illustrierter Beobachter. Mostly I waited for the phone to ring. It didn’t. When you’re working nights for the Murder Commission, you don’t really exist unless there’s a murder, of course. Nobody cares what you look like or what your opinions are. All that is asked of you is that you’re there until it’s time to go home.

At nine o’clock I signed off and went back to the station, where I caught an S-Bahn train to Zoo Station and then walked a few blocks north, across Knie onto Bismarckstrasse. Bedeuten Strasse was off Wallstrasse, behind the German Opera House. In a solid, five-story redbrick building a short series of steps led up to an arched door and a large round skylight. I mounted the stairs and looked around. There was an older man in a cheap gray suit on the other side of the street reading the Beobachter. He wasn’t Gestapo; then again he wasn’t really reading the newspaper, either. Nobody leans on a lamppost to read a newspaper, especially one as dull and boring as the Völkischer Beobachter, unless he’s on a stakeout. Above the number on the wall was a mosaic of brass plaques for German doctors, German dentists, German architects, and German lawyers. Since there were hardly any Jews left in Berlin, and certainly none in these noble professions, their Aryan character seemed hardly worth mentioning. Everyone was Aryan now, whether he liked it or not.