A Quiet Flame

10 BERLIN, 1932

THERE WERE TWO MEN waiting by my car. They were wearing hats and double-breasted suits that were all buttoned up the way you do when you’ve got more than just a fountain pen in your breast pocket. I told myself they were a little far south to be Ricci Kamm’s. A little too smooth, too. Ring members tended to wear broken noses and cauliflower ears the way some men wear watch chains and carry canes. There was all that and the fact that they looked pleased to see me. When you’ve been in the zoo as long as I have, you kind of get to know when an animal is going to attack. It gets all nervous and agitated, because, for most people, it’s upsetting to kill someone. But these two were calm and self-assured.

“Are you Gunther?”

“That all depends.”

“On what?”

“On what you say next?”

“Someone wants to talk to you.”

“So why isn’t someone here?”

“Because he’s in the Eldorado. Buying you a drink.”

“Does this someone have a name?”

“Herr Diels. Rudolf Diels.”

“Maybe I’m the shy type. Maybe I don’t like the Eldorado. Besides, it’s a little early for a nightclub.”

“Exactly. Makes it nice and quiet. Somewhere private you can hear yourself think.”

“I get all sorts of strange ideas when I hear myself think,” I said. “Like maybe there’s some point to my existence. But since there isn’t, we’d better get along to the Eldorado.”

The Eldorado on Motzstrasse was on the ground floor of a modern building that was in the High Concrete style. Like the old Eldorado, which still existed on Lutherstrasse, the new was a he/she club popular with Berlin high society, expensive prostitutes, and adventurous tourists eager to get a taste of real Berlin decadence. Inside, the club was a facsimile of a Chinese opium-smoking den. Only it wasn’t just a facsimile. If sex was one reason to visit the Eldorado, then the ready supply of drugs was another. But at that hour of the day, the place was more or less deserted. The Bernd Robert Rhythmics had just finished rehearsing. In the corner, beside a copper gong as big as a truck tire, a youngish man with a largish scar on his face was sharing a bottle of champagne with two girls. I knew they were girls—not because of their womanly hands and manicured fingernails but because of their private parts, which were easy to see since both girls were also naked.

Seeing me arrive in the club with his two double-breasted scouts, the scar-faced man stood up and waved me toward him. He was dark, with a weak chin. I guessed his age was about thirty. His suit looked handmade and he was smoking a Gildemann cigar. He had a woman’s lips, and his eyebrows were so neat and fine that they almost looked plucked and then drawn in with a pencil. His eyes were brown, with long lashes. His hands were womanish, too, and but for the scar and the company he was keeping, I might have wondered if he was a bit warm. But he was polite and welcoming, which made me wonder how he’d come by his scar.

“Herr Gunther,” he said. “I’m glad you came. This is Fräulein Olafsson, and Fräulein Larsson. They are both on holiday from Sweden. Aren’t you, ladies?” He looked quickly around. “There’s another one somewhere. Fräulein Liljeroth. But I think she must have gone to powder her nose. If you know what I mean.”

I bowed politely. “Ladies.”

“They’re trying to behave like true Berliners,” said Diels. “Isn’t that right, ladies?”

“Nakedness is normal,” said one of the Swedes. “Desire is healthy. Don’t you agree?”

“Here, sit down and have a drink,” said Diels, and pushed a glass of champagne toward me.

It was a little early for me, but, noting the label and the year on the bottle, I drank it anyway.

“What can I do for you, Herr Diels?”

“Please. Call me Rudi. And by the way, you can speak quite freely in front of our two lady friends. They don’t speak very good German.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “Only that might have something to do with the fact that my tongue is hanging out of my mouth.”

“Ever been here before?”

“Once or twice. But I don’t get any kick out of guessing whether someone’s a man or a woman.” I nodded at Fräulein Olafsson. “It makes a pleasant change to have any doubts on that score removed so unequivocally.”

“You’d better enjoy it while you can. In just a month or two a lot of these clubs are going to be closed down by the new government. This one is already earmarked to be the Nazi Party headquarters in Berlin South.”

“You’re taking a lot for granted. There’s the small matter of an election to be fought first.”

“You’re right. It is a small matter. The National Socialists may not manage to win an outright majority in the Reichstag, but it seems more than probable that they will be the largest party.”

“They?”

“I’m not a party member, Herr Gunther. But I am broadly sympathetic to the cause of National Socialism.”

“Is that how you got those scars on your face? By being broadly sympathetic to the Nazis?”

Diels touched his cheek without any trace of self-consciousness. “This?” He shook his head. “No. I’m afraid there wasn’t much honor in the way they were earned. I used to drink a lot. More than was good for me. Sometimes, when I wanted to amuse or intimidate someone, I would chew a beer glass.”

There was a bowl of fruit on the table. I nodded at it.

“Me, I prefer a nice apple.” I lit a cigarette and, leaning back in my chair, took a good look at our two naked companions. I didn’t mind looking at them any more than they minded being looked at.

“Help yourself.”

“No, thanks. Some of my concentration is still caught up with the fate of the republic.”

“That’s too bad. Because the republic’s days are numbered. We’re going to win.”

“So it’s ‘we’ now. A minute ago you weren’t even in the party. I guess you must be what’s called a floating voter.”

“You mean like Rosa Luxemburg?” Diels smiled at his own little joke. “Oh, I’m not much of a Hitlerite,” he said. “But I do believe in Hermann Goering. He’s a much more impressive figure than Hitler.”

“He’s certainly a larger one.” It was my turn to smile at my little joke.

“Hitler cares nothing for human life,” continued Diels. “But Goering is different. I work for him, in the Reichstag. After the Nazis come to power, Goering is going to be in overall charge of the police in Germany. Kurt Daluege is going to be in charge of the uniformed police. And I’m going to be in charge of a much-expanded political police.”

“The number of people wanting to join the police these days. And we haven’t even had a recruiting drive.”

“We’re going to need men we can trust. Good men who are prepared to devote body and soul to the fight against Jewry and Bolshevism. But not just against Jewry and Bolshevism. It’s imperative that the power of the SA be curtailed, too. Which is where you come in.”

“Me? I don’t see how I can be of any use to you. I don’t even like the political police we’ve got now.”

“You’re well known in KRIPO as someone who dislikes the SA.”

“Everyone in KRIPO dislikes the SA. Everyone who’s worth a damn.”

“That is what I’m looking for. To get rid of the SA we’ll need men who aren’t afraid. Men like you.”

“I can see your dilemma. You need the SA to strong-arm the election. But once you’re elected, you need someone else to strong-arm it back into line.” I grinned. “I have to hand it to you. There’s sophism and then there’s Nazism. Hitler adds a whole new section to that part of the dictionary that deals with specious argument and dirty dealing.” I shook my head. “I’m not your man, Herr Diels. Never will be.”

“It would be a real shame if the force was to lose a man of your forensic capabilities, Herr Gunther.”

“Wouldn’t it just? But there it is.”

The third Swede came back from powdering her nose. Like her two friends, she was as naked as a hat pin without a hat. Obviously bored, the other two got up from the table and went over to her and put their arms around her, and slowly, they began to dance to some silent music. They looked like the Three Graces.

“They really are tourists, you know,” he said. “Not demi-castors, or half-silks, or whatever you cops call them. Just three girls on holiday from Stockholm, who felt like being true Berliners and taking off their clothes for the sheer hell of it.” He sighed. “I think it will be a real shame when this kind of thing is gone. But things have to change. It can’t be allowed to go on like this. The vice, the prostitution, the drugs. It’s corrupting us.”

I shrugged.

“You’re a cop,” he said. “I thought you would surely agree with me about that, at least.”

Two of the band came back and started to play gently, for the benefit of the impromptu floor show.

“You’re not from Berlin, are you, Herr Diels? In Berlin we say that you should leave another man’s mustache alone, even if it droops into his coffee cup. That’s why the Nazis will never do well in this city. Because you people can’t leave another man’s mustache alone.”

“That’s an unusual attitude for a policeman. Don’t you want to make councilor, or director? You could, you know. The minute this election is over. Everyone is going to want to help us then. But you’re in a position to help us now. When it really counts.”

“I told you. I’m not interested in being a part of your expanded political police.”

“I’m not talking about that. I mean that you could stay on, in Department Four. That you could keep doing what you’re doing now. It’s not like you’re a Communist or anything. We can easily overlook something like the Iron Front.” He shrugged innocently. “No, all you would have to do is a favor for us.”

“What kind of favor?” I asked, intrigued.

“We want you to drop the Schwarz case.”

“I’m a police officer, Herr Diels. I can’t do that. I’ve been ordered to investigate a murder, and it’s my duty to carry out that investigation to the best of my abilities.”

“You were ordered to do it by people who won’t be around for much longer. Besides, we both know that in this city there are lots of cases that remain unsolved.”

“I go slow, is that it? So Goebbels can accuse Grzesinski and Weiss of sparing the horses because the victim’s old man is a big noise in the SA?”

“No, it’s nothing like that. The Schwarz girl was disabled. She had a bad leg. Like Goebbels. It’s a little embarrassing for him to have this kind of issue in the public eye. It magnifies it, somewhat. Anita Schwarz had a bad leg. That reminds people that Goebbels has one, too. Dr. Goebbels would be greatly in your debt if the Schwarz case could be driven into a sand dune, so to speak.”

“Is Joey’s foot the only reason he’d like this case to go nowhere?”

Diels looked puzzled. “Yes. What other reason could there be?”

It seemed imprudent to mention just how much I knew about the true extent of Joey’s current disabilities. “And what if another girl gets murdered? In similar circumstances. What then?”

“So you investigate it. Just lay off the Schwarz case. That’s all I’m asking. Just until after the election.”

“To spare Joey’s feelings.”

“To spare Joey’s feelings.”

“You make me think that maybe there’s a lot more to this case than I realized before.”

“It might be unhealthy to think that. For you and your career.”

“My career?” I laughed. “That really keeps me awake at night.”

“At least you’re still awake at night, Herr Gunther.” He grinned and blew on the end of his cigar. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

I’d heard all I wanted to hear. I reached for the fruit bowl, picked out a nice golden apple, and stood up.

The three naked women were now too caught up in themselves to pay me any regard, and it was looking like a proper floor show that Berliners would have paid good money to sit and watch.

“Hey, you,” I said. “Aphrodite.”

I tossed the apple and one of them caught it. Naturally she was the best-looking of the three Swedes. “My name is not Aphrodite,” she said dully. “It is Gunila.”

I didn’t say anything back. I just walked away with my clothes and my sense of humor and my classical education. It was a lot more than she had.

Outside I crossed the road and bought some cigarettes. In front of the tobacconist’s were six men wearing placards for the forthcoming election. One was for Bruner and the SDP, two were for Thalmann and the Communists, and three were for Hitler. All in all, the prospects for the republic were looking no better than my own.

IN 1932, I didn’t go to the cinema very much. Maybe if I had, I might not have been tricked so easily. I’d heard about Fritz Lang’s film M, because there was a detective in it who was supposedly based on Ernst Gennat. Certainly Gennat thought that was the case. But with one thing and another, I’d missed the film when it came out. It was still showing at my local Union Theater, but in summer, there always seemed to be something more important to do than to spend an evening watching a movie. Like investigate a murder. The night before it happened, I’d been up all night checking out political killings in Wedding and Neukölln. The descriptions given by witnesses were predictably vague. But then, all murderers look the same when they’re wearing brown shirts. That’s my excuse. One thing was for sure. The people who ambushed me must have seen the movie.

As I walked out of my apartment building, a small boy ran up to my car. I wasn’t sure if I’d seen the boy before, but even if I had, I’m not sure I’d have recognized him. All boys in the Scheunenviertel looked much the same. This one was shoeless, with short blond hair and bright blue eyes. He wore gray shorts, a gray shirt, and sported a number eleven of snot on his upper lip. I guessed him to be about eight years old.

“A girl I know just went off with a strange man,” he said. “Her name is Lotte Friedrich and she’s twelve years old and the fritz isn’t from around here. Creepy-looking dad he was, with a funny look on his shine. He’s the same schlepper who tried to give my sister some sweets yesterday if she’d go for a walk with him.” The boy tugged my sleeve urgently and pointed west along Schendelgasse until I agreed to look. “See them? She’s wearing a green dress and he’s wearing a coat. See?”

Sure enough, crossing Alte Schönhauser Strasse were a man and a girl. The man had his hand on the girl’s neck, like he was steering her somewhere. Wearing a coat seemed just a little suspicious, as the day was already a warm one.

Ordinarily, I might have been more suspicious of the boy. But then it wasn’t every month that an adolescent girl turned up dead with half of her insides removed. Nobody wanted that to happen again.

“What’s your name, sonny?”

“Emil.”

I gave him ten pfennigs and pointed in the direction of Bulowplatz.

“You know that armored car outside the Red HQ?”

Emil nodded and wiped the snot onto the back of his shirtsleeve.

“I want you to go and tell the SCHUPO in the armored car that Commissar Gunther from the Alex is following a suspect onto Mulackstrasse and requests them to come and give him support. Got that?”

Emil nodded again and ran off in the direction of Bulowplatz.

I walked quickly west, unholstering my Parabellum as I went, because as soon as I had crossed onto Mulackstrasse, I would be in the heart of Always True’s territory. I might have lacked caution but I wasn’t stupid.

The man and the girl ahead of me were walking briskly, too. I quickened my pace and came onto Mulackstrasse just in time to hear a scream and see the man pick the girl up under his arm before ducking into the Ochsenhof. At this point, I should probably have waited for the Twenty-first Battalion and its armored car. Only I was still thinking about Anita Schwarz and the girl in the green dress. Besides, when I looked back at where I had come from, there was still no sign of the cavalry. I took my whistle, blew it several times, and waited for some sign that they were coming. But nothing happened. Either the Twenty-first didn’t care for the idea of chasing a suspect into the most lawless part of Berlin, or they just didn’t believe the story Emil had told them. Probably it was a combination of the two.

I worked the slide on the Parabellum and went in a narrow door and up a darkened stair.

The Ochsenhof, also known as the Roast, or the Cattle Shed, was home to some of the worst animals in Berlin. A so-called rent barracks that occupied three acres, it was a slum tenement from the last century, with more entrances and exits than a lump of Swiss cheese. Rats ran along the balconies at night and were hunted for sport by dogs and feral children with air rifles. Cellar dives housed illegal stills, while on the granite back courts that were laughingly called “greens,” packing-case colonies of huts housing some of the city’s many homeless and unemployed squatted under lines of gray washing. On a dark, foul-smelling, gaslit stairwell, I found a group of young men already playing cards and sharing stumps of cigarette ends.

I looked at the card players and they looked at the nine-millimeter ace I was holding in my hand.

“Did any of you see a man come in here just now?” I asked. “He was wearing a light-colored coat and a hat. With him was a girl of about twelve, wearing a green dress. He might have been abducting her.”

Nobody said anything. But they were still listening. It pays to listen when it’s a man with a gun who’s doing the talking.

“Maybe she’s got a brother, like you,” I said.

“Nobody’s got a brother like him,” quipped a voice.

“Maybe he’ll be upset if his little sister gets sliced up and eaten by some rent-barracks cannibal,” I said. “Think about that.”

“Cops,” said another voice in the half-darkness. “They’re the last people in Berlin who still care about anything.”

The dealer jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “They went across the green.”

I ran up some steps and out onto the back court. It looked like a heavy, gray stone frame for the brilliantly blue sky. Something zipped past my left ear and I heard a bang as loud as a truck backfiring an eight-millimeter rifle bullet. Half a second later, my brain registered the subliminal image of a flash from the third-floor balcony and impelled my body to take cover behind some bedsheets that were flapping on a clothesline. I didn’t stay put. As soon as I had crawled several meters on my hands and knees, I heard another gunshot and something flicked through the sheet I’d been kneeling behind. I scrambled to the end of the line of washing and then sprinted like Georg Lammers into the relative safety of another stairwell. Several ragged-looking men cowering in the shadows stared at me fearfully. Ignoring them, I hared up to the third floor. Of a gunman there was no sign, unless you counted the sound of a pair of stout shoes descending another set of stairs three or four steps at a time. Angry, I went after the sound of the shoes. Some people had come out onto the Roast balconies to see what all the fuss was about. But the sensible ones stayed quietly in their sties.

Reaching the bottom of the stairwell, I paused briefly and then pushed a couple of planks that were leaning against the wall out onto the court, to draw the rifleman’s fire. By now I had a good idea that it was a German rifle. The 7.97 Mauser Gewehr 98. During the war, I’d heard its voice often enough to know its middle name. The 98 was an accurate rifle, but it was unsuited to rapid fire, on account of its peculiar bolt arrangement. And in the several seconds it took for him to put another one up the spout, I was out of the stairwell and shooting. There’s nothing slow about a nine-millimeter Parabellum.

The first shot missed him. The second, too. By the time the Parabellum was ready for a fourth, I was close enough to see the pattern on his bow tie. This matched the pattern on his shirt, and the pattern on his coat. Red spots aren’t normally a favorite of mine, but on him they looked just fine. Especially as their source was the hole I’d made in his face. He was dead before he hit the concrete.

This was unfortunate, for two reasons. One was that I hadn’t killed anyone since August 23, 1918, when I shot an Australian at the Battle of Amiens. Possibly more than one. When the war was over, I promised myself I’d never kill anyone again. The second reason it was unfortunate was that I’d wanted to question the dead man and find out who had put him up to killing me. Instead I had to rifle through his pockets and all, under the curious eyes of a gathering crowd of rent-barracks vultures.

He was tall, thin, and losing his hair. He had already lost his teeth. At the moment of his death, his tongue must have forced one of the plates from his mouth and now it sat on his upper lip like a pink plastic mustache.

I found his wallet. The dead man’s name was Erich Hoppner and he was a member of the Nazi Party since 1930. His membership card stated that his number was 510934. None of that meant he wasn’t also a member of the Always True gang. It wasn’t unusual for gangsters from Berlin’s underworld to be contracted and paid to carry out political murders. The question was, Who had ordered my murder? The Always True, for what I had done to Ricci Kamm? Or the Nazis, for what I hadn’t done for Josef Goebbels?

I took his wallet and his rifle and his watch and his ring and left him there. The vultures were already taking his false teeth as I walked out of the Ochsenhof. False teeth were an expensive luxury for the kind of folk who lived in the Roast.

On Bulowplatz, the PHWM in charge of the SCHUPO troop stationed there denied ever having received a message from a small boy to come to my aid. I told him to take some of his men and go and mount a guard on Hoppner’s body before it was eaten. Reluctantly, he agreed.

I went back to the Alex. First I visited the Record Department of Inspectorate J, where the criminal secretary on duty helped me discover that Erich Hoppner didn’t have a criminal record. This was surprising. Then I went upstairs and handed over Hoppner’s party card to the political boys in DIa. Naturally, they’d never heard of him, either. Then I sat down and typed out a statement and gave it to Gennat. After I’d handed in my report, I was asked into an interview room and questioned by Gennat and two police councilors, Gnade and Fischmann. My statement was then filed for later comparison with the findings of an independent homicide team. More paperwork followed. Then I was interviewed again, by KOK Müller, who was leading the investigating homicide team.

“Sounds like they led you on a nice little trot,” observed Müller. “And you never saw the girl in the green dress again?”

“No. And after the shooting, I didn’t see any point in looking for her.”

“And the boy? Emil? The one who fed you the sugar lump?”

I shook my head.

Müller was a tall man with lots of hair, only it was all on the sides of his head with none of it on top, as if he had grown through it like a rubber plant.

“They had you measured pretty well,” he said. “They did everything but chalk a letter M on the dead man’s coat for you. Like in that movie with Peter Lorre. It’s the kid in the movie who tips off the cop about Lorre.”

“Haven’t seen it.”

“You should get out more.”

“Sure. Maybe I’ll buy a horse.”

“See the sights.”

“I’ve seen them already. Besides, maybe I see too much as it is. Soon it’s going to be unhealthy to be a cop with good eyesight in this country. That’s what people keep telling me, anyway.”

“You talk like the Nazis were going to win the election, Bernie.”

“I keep hoping they won’t. And I keep worrying that they might. But I’ve got seven loaves and five fishes telling me the republic needs more than just a lucky break this time. If I wasn’t a cop, I might believe in miracles. But I am and I don’t. In this job you meet the lazy, the stupid, the cruel, and the indifferent. Unfortunately, that’s what’s called an electorate.”

Müller nodded. He was an SDP man, like me. “Hey, did you hear the good news? About Joey Clovenhoof? His new wife Magda’s apartment got screened. Her jewels were lifted.” Müller was grinning. “Can you credit it?”

“Credit it? They should give whoever did it the Blue Max.”

I NEEDED A DRINK, I needed some female company, and I probably needed a new job. As things turned out, I went to the best place for all three. I went to the Adlon Hotel. Inside the sumptuous lobby I looked around for Frieda. Instead I found Louis Adlon. He was wearing a white tie and tails. In his lapel was a white carnation that matched his mustache. He wasn’t a tall man but he was every inch a gentleman.

“Commissar Gunther,” he said. “How nice to see you. And you must think me rude for not writing to thank you for the way you dealt with that thug. But I was hoping to run into you and thank you in person.” He pointed to the bar. “Do you have a minute?”

“Several.”

In the bar, Adlon waved for service, but it was already on its way, like a small express train. “Schnapps for Commissar Gunther,” he said. “The best.”

We sat down. The bar was quiet. The old man poured two glasses to the brim and then toasted me silently.

“According to my wife, Hedda, there’s an old Confucian curse that says, ‘May you live in interesting times.’ I’d say these are very interesting times, wouldn’t you?”

I grinned. “Yes, sir, I would.”

“Given that, I just wanted you to know that there is always a job for you here.”

“Thank you, sir. It might just be that I take you up on that offer.”

“No, sir. Thank you. It may interest you to know that your superior, Dr. Weiss, speaks very highly of you.”

“I didn’t know you two knew each other, Herr Adlon.”

“We’re old friends. It was he who leads me to suppose that the police service may soon change in ways we do not yet care to imagine. For that reason I felt able to make you an offer like this. Most of the house detectives here are, as you know, retired policemen. The incident in the bar proved to me that one or two of them are no longer equal to the task.”

We sipped the excellent schnapps for a while, and after that he went to have dinner with his wife and some rich Americans, while I went to find Frieda. I found her on the second floor, in a corridor leading to the hotel’s Wilhelmstrasse extension. She was wearing an elegant black evening gown. But not for long. The smaller, less expensive rooms were on that floor. These had views of the Brandenburg Gate and, beyond it, the Victory Column on Königsplatz. But I had the best view of all. And I wasn’t even looking out of the window.

I WAS TRYING to avoid Arthur Nebe. This had been easy while I was checking through the list of suspects I had compiled using the Devil’s Directory, but it was always more difficult when I was in the Alex. Still, Nebe wasn’t the kind of cop who liked leaving his desk very much. He did most of his detective work on the telephone and, for a while, by not answering mine, I managed not to speak to him at all. But I knew it couldn’t last, and a couple of days after the shooting, I finally ran into him on the stairwell outside the washrooms.

“What’s this?” said Nebe. “Has someone else been shooting at you?” He put his fingers in some old bullet holes in the walls of the stairwell. We both knew they’d been there since 1919, when the Freikorps had taken the Alex back by force from the left-wing Spartakists. It was a very German occasion. “If you’re not careful, you’re going to spend the rest of your life dead.” He smiled. “So, what’s the story?”

“No story. Not in this town, anyway. A Nazi thug took a potshot at me, that’s all.”

“Any idea why?”

“I figured it was because I’m not a Nazi,” I said. “But maybe you can tell me.”

“Erich Hoppner. Yes. I checked him out. It doesn’t look particularly political, since you mention it.”

“How can you tell?”

“You’re not KPD. He wasn’t SA.”

“But he was a Nazi Party member.”

“Lots of people are party members, Bernie. In case you hadn’t noticed. At the last count, there were eleven and a half million people who voted for the party. No, I’d say this has more to do with what happened to Ricci Kamm. The Roast is in the heart of Always True territory. You were asking for trouble going in there.”

“At the time I had the quaint idea I might be preventing it. Trouble, I mean. That’s what we cops call it when a real person gets murdered. Not some thug with an ideology.”

“For the record,” said Nebe, “and between you and me, I don’t like the Nazis. It’s just that I like the Communists a little less. The way I see it, it’s going to come down to a choice between them and the Reds.”

“Whatever you say, Arthur. All I know is that it’s not the Reds who have been threatening me. Telling me to lay off the Schwarz case so we can spare the feelings of Josef Goebbels’s crummy foot. It’s the Nazis.”

“Oh? Who, in particular?”

“Rudolf Diels.”

“He’s Fat Hermann’s man, not Joey’s.”

“They’re all the same bastard to me, Arthur.”

“Anything else you want to tell me? About the Schwarz case, I mean. How’s that coming along?”

I smiled bitterly. “A murder investigation works like this, Arthur. Sometimes the worst has to happen first, before you can hope for the best.”

“Like another murder, you mean?”

I nodded.

Nebe was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I can understand that. Anyone can. Even you.”

“Me? What do you mean, Arthur?”

“Sometimes the worst has to happen before you can hope for the best? That’s the only reason anyone is going to vote for the Nazis.”

LOOKING UP from his typewriter, Heinrich Grund could hardly conceal his disgust. “There’s some Jew looking for you,” he said, as I returned to my desk.

“Really? Did this Jew have a name?”

“Commissar Paul Herzefelde. From Munich.” He uttered the name with sneering lip and wrinkled nose, as if describing something on the sole of his shoe.

“And where is the commissar now?”

Grund pointed into the air above our heads. “The Excelsior,” he said.

The Alex had once been a barracks for the Prussian police, and the Excelsior was what cops called that part of the building that still existed to accommodate policemen who were working late or who were visiting Berlin from outside the city.

“They won’t like it,” said Grund.

“Who won’t like what?”

“The other lads. In the Excelsior. They won’t like having to share their quarters with a Jew.”

I shook my head wearily. “Doesn’t your mouth hurt sometimes? On account of the nasty things that come out of it. The man’s a brother police officer, for Christ’s sake.”

“For Christ’s sake?” Grund looked skeptical. “For Christ’s sake, his kind did nothing. That’s the point, isn’t it? The Jews wouldn’t be in the spot they’re in now if they’d recognized our Lord for what he was.”

“Heinrich? You’re the kind of rotten cop that gives rotten cops a bad name.” I thought of something Nebe had said, and borrowed it. “And it’s not that I love Jews. It’s that I love anti-Semites just that little bit less.”

I went upstairs to find Herzefelde. After Heinrich Grund’s bigotry, I didn’t know what sort of man I expected to meet. It wasn’t that I was expecting to see a cop with a phylactery strapped to his forehead and a prayer shawl wrapped around his shoulders. Just that Paul Herzefelde wasn’t what I was expecting. I suppose I thought he might look a bit more like Izzy Weiss. Instead he looked more like a film star. Well over six feet tall, he was a handsome man with gray, wiry hair and thick, dark eyebrows. His hard, shiny, suntanned face looked as if it had been made by a diamond-cutter. Paul Herzefelde had as much in common with the swarthy fat Jew wearing a top hat and coattails beloved of Nazi caricaturists as Hitler had in common with Paul von Hindenburg.

“Are you Commissar Herzefelde?”

The man nodded. “And you are . . . ?”

“Commissar Gunther. Welcome to Berlin.”

“Not so as I noticed.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Skip it. To be honest with you, Munich is a hell of a lot worse.”

“Then I’m glad I don’t live in Munich.”

“It has its moments. Especially if you like a beer.”

“The beer’s pretty good in Berlin, too, you know.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Then how about we go have one and you can find out?”

“I thought you’d never ask, copper.”

We went to the Zum Prälaten, in the arches of the S-Bahn station. It was a good place to drink beer, and popular with cops from the Alex. About every ten minutes a train passed overhead, and since there was no point in saying anything while this was happening, you could give your mouth a rest and concentrate on the beer.

“So what brings you to Berlin?”

“Bernard Weiss. We kike cops have to stick together. We were thinking of starting our own yid union. Trouble is, with so many Jewish cops, it’s knowing where to begin.”

“I can imagine. Actually, Berlin’s not so bad. The Reds do better here than the Nazis. Thalmann got twenty-nine percent in the last election compared to Hitler’s twenty-three.”

Herzefelde shook his head. “Unfortunately, Berlin is not Germany. I don’t know how things are for Jews in this town, but in the south they can be pretty rough. Back home in Munich, there’s hardly a day passes when I don’t get some kind of death threat.” He swallowed some beer and nodded his appreciation. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I was speaking to Weiss. I’ve been thinking of moving here, with my family.”

“You mean, be a cop? Here in Berlin?”

Herzefelde smiled. “Weiss was similarly appalled. It looks like I’m going to have to consider my plan B. Something that’s got nothing to do with government.”

“I’ve been sort of looking around myself.”

“You? But you’re not a Jew, are you?”

“No. I’m SDP. Iron Front. A Weimar diehard who dislikes the Nazis.”

Herzefelde raised his glass and toasted me. “Then here’s to you, comrade.”

“So, do you have a plan B yet?”

“Thought I might go private.”

“Here in Berlin?”

“Sure. Why not? If the Nazis get in, I’ve a feeling there’s going to be a lot of missing-persons work.”

“Me, I’ve been offered a job at the Adlon Hotel. House detective.”

“Sounds nice.” He lit a cigarette. “Going to take it?”

“I thought I’d wait and see what happens in the election.”

“You want my advice?”

“Sure.”

“If you can, stay in the force. Jews, liberals, Communists are going to have need of friendly policemen like you.”

“I’ll bear it in mind.”

“You’ll be doing everyone a favor. God only knows what the police will be like if everyone in it is a lousy Nazi.”

“So. Why did you want to see me?”

“Weiss told me about this case you’ve been working on. The murder of Anita Schwarz. We had a similar case in Munich. You know Munich?”

“A little.”

“About three months ago, a fifteen-year-old girl turned up dead at the Schlosspark. Just about everything in her pants had been sliced out. The whole bag of love and life. A real neat job, too. Like a surgeon had done it. The dead girl’s name was Elizabeth Bremer and she went to the Gymnasium in Schwabing. Nice family, too. Her father works at the customs house, in Landsberger Strasse. Mother’s a librarian at some kind of Latin library on Maximilianeum. Weiss told me about your girl. That she was an amateur whore.” Herzefelde shook his head. “Elizabeth Bremer wasn’t anything like that. She was a good student with good prospects. Wanted to be a doctor. About the only thing you could hold against her was an older boyfriend. He was a skating teacher at the Prinzregenten Stadium. That’s how they met. Anyway, we hauled him over the coals for it but got nothing. He didn’t do it. He had a cast-iron alibi for the day of her death and that was that. According to him, they’d stopped seeing each other before she wound up dead. He’d been pretty broken up about it. The way he told it, she’d thrown him over for no good reason other than she caught him reading her diary. So he’d gone back home to Günzburg, to see his family and get over it.”

Herzefelde waited as an S-Bahn train passed overhead.

“We had a list of possible suspects,” he continued, after the train had gone. “Naturally, we checked them out, but with no luck. I thought the case had gone cold until Weiss told me about your murder victim.”

“I’d like to see that list,” I said. “That and the rest of the case file.”

“State law forbids me from using the mail to send my papers on the case,” said Herzefelde. “However, there’s nothing to stop you from coming to Munich to look them over. You could stay in my house.”

“That would be quite impossible,” I said. “I couldn’t stay in a Jew’s house.” I paused long enough to change the expression on Herzefelde’s handsome face. “Not unless he’d stayed in my house first.” I smiled. “Come on. Let’s go and get your bag from the Alex. You’re staying with me tonight.”