A Quiet Flame

8 BERLIN, 1932

DEPARTMENT IV, the ordinary criminal police, was supposed to stand apart from Department Ia, the political police. DIa was charged with the investigation of all political crime, but it did not operate secretly. The political police was supposed to work discreetly to forestall political violence of whatever hue. Given the situation in Germany, it was easy to understand why the Weimar government had thought it necessary to bring such a police force into being. In practice, however, neither the regular police force nor the German public liked the politicals; and DIa had proved to be spectacularly unsuccessful at preventing political violence. What was more, the point of having two separate police departments became all but meaningless as the majority of the murders we investigated turned out to be political: a storm trooper murdering a Communist, or vice versa. As a result, DIa struggled to establish its proper jurisdiction and to justify its continued existence. True republicans considered its functions undemocratic and potentially ripe for exploitation by any unscrupulous government that might wish to establish a police state. It was for this reason that Professor Hans Illmann, the pathologist handling the Schwarz case, preferred to meet away from the Alex, in his laboratory and office at the Institute for Police Science in Charlottenburg. Department IV and Department Ia might have existed on different floors of the Alex, but that was still too close for the politically sensitive nostrils of KRIPO’s leading forensic scientist.

I found Illmann staring out of a deep bay window at a garden that had nothing to do with the police or pathology. It and the villa it surrounded came from a gentler time when scientists had more hair on their cheeks than a mandrill baboon. It was easy to see why he preferred being here instead of at the Alex. Even with a couple of bodies in the basement, the place felt more like an expensive retirement home than a forensic science institute. He was as lean as a scalpel, with rimless glasses and a little Dutch chin-beard that made him everyone’s idea of what an artist ought to look like. Toulouse-Lautrec in his much taller period.

As we shook hands, I jutted my chin at a copy of Der Angriff lying on his desk. “What, are you turning Nazi on me? Reading shit like that.”

“If more people read this garbage then perhaps they wouldn’t vote for these intellectual pygmies. Or at least they would know what Germany can expect if they ever come to power. No, no, Bernie. Everyone should read this. You especially should read it. Your card has been well and truly stamped, my young republican friend. And in public, too. Welcome to the club.”

He picked up the newspaper and started to read aloud:

“ ‘The symbol of the Iron Front, which was designed by a Russian Jew, is three arrows pointing southeast inside a circle. The meaning of the arrows has been interpreted differently. Some say that the three arrows stand for the opponents of the Iron Front: Communism, monarchism, and National Socialism. Others say that these arrows stand for the three columns of the German workers’ movement: party, trade union, and Reichsbanner. But we say it stands for one thing only: the Iron Front is a political alliance that is full of pricks.

“ ‘Chief among the Iron Front pricks that pollute the Berlin police force are Police President Grzesinski, his yid deputy Bernard Weiss, and their KRIPO lackey Bernhard Gunther. These are the policemen who are supposed to be investigating the murder of Anita Schwarz. You would think that they would be sparing no effort to catch this monster. Far from it! Commissar Gunther astonished those attending yesterday’s press conference when he informed this stunned reporter that he hopes the murderer will be spared the death penalty.

“ ‘Let me tell Commissar Gunther this: that if he and his liberal-minded mates somehow scrape together the competence to apprehend the murderer of Anita Schwarz, there is only one sentence that will satisfy the German people. Death. The fact is, only brutality can now be respected in this country. The German people demand that criminals feel good, wholesome fear. Why get so worked up about the execution and torture of a few law-breakers? The masses want it. They are shouting for something that will give criminals a proper respect for the law. That is why we need the strong governance of National Socialism, as opposed to this bleeding-heart SDP government that is afraid of its own corrupt shadow. If Commissar Gunther spent more time worrying about catching killers and less time worrying about their rights, then, perhaps, this city would not be the sink of iniquity it is now.’ ”

Illmann tossed the paper across the desk at me and started rolling a perfect cigarette with the fingers of one hand.

“To hell with those bastards,” I said. “I’m not worried.”

“No? You should be. If this July election doesn’t prove conclusive one way or the other, there might be another putsch. And you and I could find ourselves floating in the Landwehr Canal, just like poor Rosa Luxemburg. Be careful, my young friend. Be careful.”

“It won’t come to that,” I said. “The army won’t stand for it.”

“I’m afraid I don’t share your touching faith in our armed forces. I think they’re just as likely to fall in behind the Nazis as they are to stand up for the republic.” He shook his head and grinned. “No, if the republic is to be saved, I’m afraid there’s just one thing for it. You’ll just have to solve this murder before July 31.”

“Fair enough, Doc. So what have you got?”

“Death was from asphyxia, caused by chloroform. Anita Schwarz swallowed her tongue. I found traces of chloroform in her hair and in her mouth. It’s a common enough death in hospitals. Heavy-handed anesthesiologists have killed many a patient in this way.”

“That’s a comforting thought. Any sign that she was interfered with sexually?”

“Impossible to tell, given her lack of plumbing. That could be why he did it, of course. To conceal evidence of intercourse. He knew what he was about, too. A very sharp curette was used calmly and confidently. This was no frenzied attack, Bernie. The killer took his time. Perhaps that’s why he used the chloroform. In which case, her fear was not a factor in his motivation. She was probably unconscious and almost certainly dead when he butchered her. You remember the Haarmann case, of course. Well, this is something very different.”

“Someone with medical experience, perhaps,” I said, thinking aloud. “In which case, the proximity of the state hospital might be relevant.”

“Very likely it is,” said Illmann. “But not for the reason we’ve just been discussing. No, I’d say it’s the pill you found near the body that makes it relevant.”

“Oh? How? What is it?”

“It’s nothing I’ve seen before. In chemical terms, it’s a sulfone group connected to an amine group. But the synthesis is new. I don’t even know what to call it, Bernie. Sulfanamine? I don’t know. It certainly doesn’t exist in the current pharmacopoeia. Not here. Not anywhere. Which means it’s new and experimental.”

“Have you any idea what it might be for?”

“The active sulfa molecule was first synthesized in 1906 and has been widely used in the dye-making industry.”

“Dye-making?”

“My guess is that there’s a smaller active compound that’s contained inside the dye-making molecule. About fifteen years ago the Pasteur Institute in Paris was using the sulfa molecule as the basis for some kind of antibacterial agent. Sadly, the work came to nothing. However, this pill would seem to indicate that someone, possibly here in Berlin, has successfully synthesized a sulfa-based drug.”

“Yes, but what could you use it for?”

“You could use it against any kind of bacterial infection. Any streptococci. However, you would have to test the drug on some volunteers before publishing any results. Especially given the Pasteur’s previous failures using dye-based drugs.”

“An experimental drug being tested at the state hospital, perhaps?”

“Could be.” Illmann finished his cigarette, stubbing it out in a little porcelain ashtray made for the Police Exhibition of 1926. He seemed about to say something and then checked himself.

“No, go on,” I said.

“I was only trying to think what might make Berlin interesting to someone conducting a drug trial.” He shook his head. “Because there are no drug companies based here in Berlin. And it’s not like we suffer from anything more than anywhere else in Germany.”

“Ah, well now, that’s where you’re wrong, Doc,” I said. “You want to read your police gazette, instead of worrying about the shit that’s in Der Angriff. There are more than one hundred thousand prostitutes working in Berlin today. More than anywhere else in Europe. And that’s just the straight ones. God knows how many warm boys there are in this city. My sergeant, Heinrich Grund, is always going on about it.”

“Of course,” said Illmann. “Venereal disease.”

“Since the war the figures have gone through the roof,” I said. “Not that I’d know, never having had a dose of jelly myself. But the current treatment is neosalvarsan, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. It contains organic arsenic, which makes its use somewhat hazardous. Even so, in its time it was such an important discovery and efficacious remedy—no proper remedy had existed before—that neosalvarsan was called ‘the magic bullet.’ That was a German discovery, too. Paul Ehrlich won the Nobel Prize for it in 1908. An exceptionally gifted man.”

“Could he—?”

“No, no, he’s dead, alas. Interestingly, salvarsan and neosalvarsan are dye-based compounds, too. Which is where the problem with them lies. In the color. And that must be where this new compound scores. Someone must have worked out how to remove the color without compromising the antibacterial activity.” He nodded, as if imagining the chemistry appearing on an invisible blackboard in front of his eyes. “Ingenious.”

“So let’s say we have a drug trial, here in Berlin,” I said. “For patients suffering from big jelly and little jelly? Syphilis and gonorrhea.”

“If it was effective against one, it might well be effective against the other, too.”

“How many patients would we be talking about? For a trial?”

“In the beginning? A few dozen. A hundred at the most. And all highly confidential, mind you. No doctor’s going to tell you which of his patients is suffering from a venereal disease. Not only that, but if it works, a drug like this could be worth millions. The clinical trials are very likely top secret.”

“How would you recruit your volunteers?”

Illmann shrugged. “Neosalvarsan treatment is no ice cream treat, Bernie. Its reputation precedes it. And most of the horror stories you’ve heard are true. So I’d have thought there would be no shortage of volunteers for a new drug.”

“All right. Suppose some T-girl gives our man a dose of jelly. Which makes him hate women enough to want to kill one. Meanwhile he volunteers for a drug trial to get his meat and two veg sorted.”

“But if a T-girl gives him a dose,” said Illmann, “then why not kill a T-girl? Why kill a child?”

“T-girls are too savvy. I saw one the other night. Built like a wrestler, she was. Some fritz came in and wanted her charged with assault. She’d hit the bastard with her riding crop.”

“Some men would pay good money for that kind of thing.”

“My point is this. He kills Anita Schwarz because she’s easier prey. She’s crippled. Makes it hard for her to get away. Could be he didn’t even notice it. After all, it was dark.”

“All right,” allowed Illmann. “That’s just about possible. Just.”

“Well then, here’s another thing. Something I haven’t told you yet. On account of the fact that I’ve only just remembered I can trust you. And this is hot stuff, mind. So keep it under your hat. Anita Schwarz may have been disabled. And she may have been just fifteen. But she wasn’t above earning herself some pocket money on the side.”

“You’re joking.”

“One of her neighbors told me the girl had a major morals problem. The parents won’t talk about it. And I didn’t dare mention it at the press conference after the lecture Izzy gave me about trying to keep the Nazis sweet. But we found quite a bankroll in her coat pocket. Five hundred marks. She didn’t get that from running errands to the local shop.”

“But the girl was crippled. She wore a caliper.”

“And there’s a market for that, too, believe me, Doc.”

“My God, there are some evil bastards in this city.”

“Now you sound like my sergeant, Grund.”

“Then maybe you are right. You know I never thought to test her for syphilis and gonorrhea. I’ll do it, immediately.”

“One more thing, Doc. What kind of dyes are we talking about here? Food dyes, cloth dyes, hair dyes, what?”

“Organic dyes. Direct or substantive dyeing. Direct dyes are used on a whole host of materials. Cotton, paper, leather, wool, silk, nylon. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know.” But somewhere, at the bottom of the sock drawer I called my mind, there was something important. I rummaged around for a moment and then shook my head. “No. It’s probably nothing.”

MY ROUTE BACK from Charlottenburg took me in a straight line all the way from Kaiserdamm to the Tiergarten. There were wild boars in the Tiergarten. You could hear them grunting as they wallowed in their enclosure, or sometimes squealing like the brakes on my old DKW as they fought with one another. Whenever I heard that sound, I thought of the Reichstag and German party politics. The Tiergarten was full of animal life—not just boars. There were buzzards and woodpeckers and pied wagtails and siskins and bats—there were lots of bats. The smell of cut grass and blossom that came through the open window of my car was wonderful. It was the clean, uncorrupted smell of early summer. At this time of year, the Tiergarten was open until early dusk, which also made it popular with grasshoppers—the amateur prostitutes with no room money, who did it with their fritzes lying down on the grass or in the shrubbery. Nature is wonderful.

I looked at my watch as I came through the Brandenburg Gate and onto Pariser Platz. There was time for lunch as long as lunch came in a brown bottle. I could have stopped almost anywhere south of Unter den Linden. There were lots of stand-ups around Gendarmen Market, where I might easily have got myself a sausage and a beer. But anywhere wasn’t where I wanted to go. Not when I was right outside the Adlon Hotel. It was true, I’d been there only a day or two before. And a day or two before that. The fact was, I liked the Adlon. Not for its ambience and its gardens and its whispering fountain and its palm court and its fabulous restaurant, which I couldn’t have afforded anyway. I liked it because I liked one of the house detectives. She was called Frieda Bamberger. I liked Frieda a lot.

Frieda was tall and dark, with a full mouth and an even fuller figure and a voluptuous sort of fertility about her that I put down to the fact that she was Jewish, but was actually something rather more indefinable. She was glamorous, too. Had to be. Her job involved hanging around the hotel posing as a guest and keeping an eye out for prostitutes, con artists, and thieves, who liked the Adlon for the rich pickings that were to be had from the even richer guests. I had got to know her in the summer of 1929, when I helped her to arrest a female jewel thief who was armed with a knife. I stopped Frieda getting stuck with it by the simple means of getting stuck myself. Clever Gunther. For that I got a nice letter from Hedda Adlon, the proprietor’s daughter-in-law, and, after I came out of the hospital, a very personal kind of thank-you from Frieda herself. We weren’t sharing an envelope, exactly. Frieda had a semi-detached husband, who lived in Hamburg. But just now and then we’d search an empty bedroom for a lost maharajah or a stolen movie star. Sometimes it could take us a while.

As soon as I walked through the door, Frieda was on my arm like a hawk. “Am I glad to see you,” she said.

“And I thought you weren’t the type who cares.”

“I’m serious, Bernie.”

“And so am I. I keep telling you, only you don’t listen. I’d have brought flowers if I’d known you felt this way.”

“I want you to go into the bar,” she said urgently.

“That’s good. That’s where I was going anyway.”

“I want you to take a look at the guy in the corner. And I mean the fritz in the corner, not the redhead he’s with. He’s wearing a dove-gray suit with a double-breasted waistcoat and a flower in his lapel. I don’t like the look of him.”

“If that’s so, then I hate him already.”

“No, I think he might be dangerous.”

I went into the bar, picked up a matchbook, lit a cigarette, and gave the fritz the quick up-and-down. The girl he was with looked me up and down back. This was bad, because the fritz she was with was worse than bad. He was Ricci Kamm, the boss of the Always True, one of Berlin’s most powerful criminal rings. Normally Ricci stayed put in Friedrichshain, where his gang was based, which was fine, since he tended not to give us any trouble there. But the girl he was with looked like she had an opinion of herself that was as high as the Zugspitze. Probably she figured she was too good for joints like the Zum Nussbaum, which was where the Always True boys usually went for their kicks. Very likely she was right, too. I’ve seen better-looking red-heads, but only on Rita Hayworth. She was wearing good curves, too. I doubt she could have cut a better figure if she’d been wearing Sonja Henie’s favorite ice skates.

Ricci’s eyes were on mine. But my eyes were on her and there was a bottle of Bismarck in front of them both that said this might spell trouble. Ricci was a quiet sort with a small, soft voice and nice manners—until he had one drink too many, and then it was like watching Dr. Jekyll turn into Mr. Hyde. From the level in the bottle, Ricci was about ready to grow an extra set of eyebrows.

I turned on my heel and went back into the lobby.

“You were right not to like him,” I told Frieda. “He’s a dangerous man and I think his timer’s about to go off.”

“What are we going to do?”

I waved Max, the hall porter, toward me. I didn’t do it lightly. Max paid Louis Adlon three thousand marks a month to have that job, because he got a kickback on everything he did for the hotel’s guests, which made him about thirty thousand marks a month. He was holding a dog leash, which was attached to a miniature dachshund. I figured Max was looking for a bellboy to walk the thing. “Max,” I said, “call the Alex and tell them to send the kiddy car. You’d better order up a couple of uniforms as well. There’s going to be some trouble in the bar.”

Max hesitated as if he was expecting a tip.

“Unless you’d rather handle it yourself.”

Max turned and walked quickly to the house phones.

“And while you’re at it, go and check the easy chairs in the library and see if you can’t rustle up one of those overpaid ex-cops who call themselves house bulls.”

Frieda had never been a cop, so she didn’t take offense at my remark about ex-cops. But I knew she could look after herself. Adlon had hired her on the strength of her having been in the German women’s Olympic fencing team in Paris in 1924, when she’d narrowly missed a medal.

I took her by the arm and walked her to the bar. “When we sit down,” I said, “I want you all over me like ivy. That way I’m not a threat to him.”

We sat down at the table right beside Ricci. The Bismarck had kicked in and he was sneering a series of swear words at a terrified bar waiter. The redhead looked like she’d seen it before. Most of the bar’s other customers were wondering if they could make it as far as the door without crossing Ricci’s line of sight. But one of them was made of sterner stuff. A businessman wearing a frock coat and a meat slicer of a shirt collar, and a look of indignation at the kind of low German that was spilling out of Ricci’s mouth, stood up and seemed inclined to take on the gangster. I caught his eye and shook my head and, for a moment, he seemed to heed my warning. The moment he sat down, Frieda let me have it. On the ears and the neck and the back of my head and on my cheek and finally on my mouth, which was where I liked it best of all.

“You’re cute,” she said, with some understatement.

Ricci looked at her and then at the redhead beside him. “Why can’t you be more like that?” he asked her, jerking a thumb Frieda’s way. “Friendly, like.”

“Because you’re drunk.” The redhead took out a powder compact and started to touch up her makeup. A futile effort in my estimation: like trying to touch up the Mona Lisa. “And when you’re drunk, you’re a pig.”

She had a point, but Ricci didn’t care for it. He stood up, but the table stayed on his lap. The bottle and the glasses and the ashtray went to the floor. Ricci swore and the redhead started to laugh.

“A clumsy drunken pig,” she added, for good measure, and started to laugh again. I liked the effect it had on the redhead’s mantrap of a mouth. I liked the way her sharp white teeth shucked off her red lips like cherry skins. But Ricci didn’t like it at all and let her have it hard with the flat of his hand. In the Adlon’s plush bar, the slap went off like New Year’s Eve. This was too much for the man wearing the meat-slicer shirt collar. He looked like a real Prussian gentleman—the kind who cares what happens to a lady, even a lady who was probably a hundred-mark whore.

“Uh-oh,” Frieda murmured in my ear. “The man from I. G. Farben is about to play Sir Lancelot.”

“Did you say I. G. Farben?”

I. G. Farben was Europe’s largest dyestuff syndicate. The company’s headquarters were in Frankfurt but they had an office in Berlin that was opposite the Adlon, on the other side of Unter den Linden. That was what I’d been trying to remember in Illmann’s office.

“I’m sorry,” said the man from I. G. Farben. His tone was as stiff as a washboard, and just as square. “But I really must protest at your loutish behavior and your treatment of that lady.”

The redhead picked herself off the floor and uttered a few short words that were common enough in the engine rooms of German naval vessels. She was probably wondering if the fritz with the high collar was referring to her. Collecting the now empty Bismarck bottle in her hand, she swung it at Ricci’s head. The Always True leader caught it neatly in his palm, wrested it from her, tossed it in the air like a juggler’s club, grabbed it by the neck, and then swung it down hard against the edge of the upturned table—all in one easy, practiced, and delinquent gesture. The bottle came up again, glistening, meaningfully triangular, like a shard of razor-sharp ice. Ricci took hold of the IGF man’s frock coat, fisted him a foot closer, and seemed on the point of acquainting him with a more fundamental rebuttal when I interrupted their conversation.

The barman at the Adlon made the best cocktails in Berlin. He was fond of cucumbers, too. He put pickled cucumbers on the tables and slices of fresh cucumber in some of the drinks favored by Americans. A large uncut cucumber lay on the bartop. Looking for a knife, I’d had my eye on it for a while. I don’t care for anything in my drink except ice, but I liked the look of that cucumber. Besides, my gun was in the glove box of my car.

I dislike hitting a man when his back is turned. Even with a cucumber. It goes against my inherent sense of fair play. But since Ricci Kamm didn’t have a sense of fair play, I hit him hard, on the back of the hand holding the broken bottle. He yelped and dropped it. Then I struck him with the cucumber on the side of his head, twice. If I’d had some ice and a slice of lemon, I’d probably have hit him with those as well. An exclamation tiptoed around the room, as if I’d made a rabbit disappear from inside a top hat. The only trouble was, the rabbit was still there. Ricci sat down heavily, holding his ear. Teeth bared, nose twitching, he reached inside his coat. I didn’t think he was looking for his wallet. I saw a little black hippo’s head peeking out from a holster, and then a Colt automatic appeared in Ricci’s hand.

It was a good, firm cucumber, hardly ripe at all. Springy, with plenty of heft, like a good blackjack. I put a lot of weight into it. I had to. Ricci didn’t move his head more than an inch. He didn’t try to block the cucumber. He was hoping to fire the gun before that happened. He took it across the nose, jerked back on the chair, dropped the gun, and lifted both hands to the blood-spattered center of his face. Figuring I might never get a better chance to do it, I cuffed both of his wrists before he even knew what was happening.

I let Ricci groan for a while before handing him a bar towel to press against his nose and hauling him by the cuffs to his feet. Acknowledging a round of applause from some of the other guests in the hotel bar, I pushed Ricci in the direction of two uniforms and then tossed the gun after him.

Frieda moved in on the redhead. “Time to go, lovely,” she said, taking hold of a bony elbow.

“Take your hands off me,” said the redhead, trying to wrest her arm away, but the elbow stayed held in Frieda’s strong fist. Then she laughed and gave me a languorous north-to-south look. “That was really something, what you did just now, comrade. Like a Christmas gift from the kaiser. Wait until people hear about this. Ricci Kamm got himself arrested by a johann armed with just a cucumber. He’s never going to live it down. Leastways, I hope he doesn’t. That bastard’s hit me once too often.”

Frieda steered her firmly toward the door, leaving me with the man from IGF. He was tall, thin, and gray. As full of Prussian good manners as Berlin’s Herrenklub, he bowed gravely.

“That was admirable,” he said. “Quite admirable. I’m very grateful to you, sir. I don’t doubt that thug would have seriously injured me. Perhaps worse.”

The IGF man had his wallet out and was pressing his business card on me. It was as thick and white as his shirt collar. His name was Dr. Carl Duisberg and he was one of the I. G. Farben’s directors, from Frankfurt.

“May I know your name, sir?”

I told him.

“I see the international reputation of Berlin’s police force is well deserved, sir.”

I shrugged. “It’s amazing what you can do with a cucumber,” I said.

“If there’s anything I can do for you in return,” he said. “To show my gratitude. Name it, sir. Name it.”

“I could use some information, Dr. Duisberg.”

He frowned, slightly puzzled. He hadn’t been expecting this. “Of course. If it’s in my power to give it.”

“Does the Dyestuff Syndicate have anything to do with drug companies?”

He smiled, and looked slightly reassured, as if the information I was seeking was common knowledge. “I can tell you that very easily. The Dyestuff Syndicate has owned Bayer since 1925.”

“You mean the company that makes aspirin?”

“No, sir,” he said proudly. “I mean the company that invented it.”

“I see.” I did my best to look impressed. “I guess I ought to be grateful, considering the number of hangovers your company has helped me cope with. So what’s next in line, Doc? What’s the new wonder drug your people are working on now?”

“It’s not my field, sir. Not my field at all. I’m a chemical engineer.”

“Whose field is it?”

“You mean one person?”

I nodded.

“My dear Commissar, we have dozens of research scientists working for us, all over Germany. But mainly in Leverkusen. Bayer is based in Leverkusen.”

“Leverkusen? Never heard of it.”

“That’s because it’s a new town, Commissar Gunther. It’s made up of several small villages on the Rhine. And a number of chemical factories.”

“It sounds perfectly charming.”

“No, Commissar. Leverkusen is not at all charming. But it is making money. It is making money.” The doctor laughed. “But why do you ask, sir?”

“Here in Berlin, we have an Institute for Police Science, in Charlottenburg,” I said. “And we’re always on the lookout for new experts we can call upon to help us with our inquiries. I’m sure you understand.”

“Of course, of course.”

“I met this doctor who’s handling some very sensitive clinical trials at the state hospital in Friedrichshain here in Berlin. I think he said he was working for Bayer. And I was wondering if he might be the kind of discreet and reliable fellow who might help us out once in a while. From all accounts he’s a very gifted man. I heard him described as the next Paul Ehrlich. You know? The ‘magic bullet’?”

“Oh, you must mean Gerhard Domagk,” said Duisberg.

“That’s him,” I said. “I just wondered if you might be able to vouch for him. As simple as that, really.”

“Well, I haven’t actually met him myself. But from what I hear, he’s very brilliant. Very brilliant, indeed. And very discreet. He has to be. Much of our work is highly confidential. I’m sure he would be delighted to help the Berlin Police if it was within his power to do so. Was there something specific you wanted to ask him?”

“No. Not yet. Perhaps in the future.”

I pocketed the IGF man’s card and let him get back to the rest of his lunch party. That let Frieda get back to me. She looked flushed and very grateful, which is the way I like my women.

“You handled that cucumber like a professional,” she said.

“Didn’t you know? Before I joined the Berlin polenta, I was a green-grocer, in Leverkusen.”

“Where the hell is Leverkusen?”

“Didn’t you know? It’s a new town, on the Rhine. The center of the German chemical industry. What do you say we go there for the weekend and you can show me how grateful you are?”

Frieda smiled. “We don’t have to go that far to go that far,” she said. “We only have to go upstairs. To room 102. That’s one of our VIP suites. Empty right now. But Charlie Chaplin once slept in room 102. So did Emil Jannings.” She smiled again. “But then neither of them had me around to help keep them awake.”

IT WAS AROUND FOUR-THIRTY when I got back to the Alex. On my desk was a box of cucumbers. I waved one in the air as several of the KRIPO men in the detective room cheered and clapped. Otto Trettin, one of the best cops in the department and a specialist in criminal rings like the Always True, came over to my desk. There was a half-cucumber in his shoulder holster. He took it out, pointed it at me, and made a noise like a pistol shot.

“Very funny.” I grinned and removed my jacket, then hung it on the back of my chair.

“Where’s yours?” he asked. “Your gun, I mean.”

“In the car.”

“Well, that explains the cucumber, I suppose.”

“Come on, Otto. You know how it is. When you wear a gun, you have to keep your jacket buttoned, and in this warm weather we’ve been having . . .”

“You thought you could get away with it.”

“Something like that.”

“Seriously, Bernie. Now that you’ve gone up against Ricci Kamm, you’re going to have to watch your back. Your front, too, most likely.”

“You think so?”

“A man who puts Ricci Kamm in the Charité with a broken nose and a concussion had better start carrying a firearm or he’ll be wearing a knife between his shoulder blades. Even a cop.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I admitted.

“Course I’m right. You live on Dragonerstrasse, don’t you, Bernie? That’s right on the doorstep of the Always True’s territory. A gun’s no good in the glove box, old man. Not unless you’re planning to hold up a garage.” And still shooting the cucumber in my direction, Otto walked away.

“You should listen to him,” said a voice. “He knows what he’s talking about. When words fail, a gun can come in very handy.”

It was Arthur Nebe, one of the slipperiest detectives in KRIPO. A former right-wing Freikorps man, he had been made a commissar in DIa within just two years of joining the force and had a formidable record of solving crimes. Nebe was a founding member of the NSBAG—the National Socialist Fellowship of Civil Servants—and was rumored to be a close friend of such leading Nazis as Goebbels, Count von Helldorf, and Kurt Daluege. Strangely, Nebe was also a friend of Bernard Weiss. There were other influential friends, in the SDP. And around the Alex it was generally held that Arthur Nebe had more options covered than the Berlin Stock Exchange.

“Hello, Arthur,” I said. “What are you doing here? Is there not enough work in Political that you have to come and poach down here?”

Ignoring my remark, Nebe said, “Since he arrested the Sass brothers, Otto’s had to watch himself. Like he was painting his own portrait.”

“Well, we all know about Otto and the Sass brothers,” I said. In 1928, Otto Trettin had almost been dismissed from the force after it became known that he had beaten a confession out of these two criminals. “What I did was in no way similar to that. Pulling Ricci Kamm was a proper collar.”

“I hope he sees it that way,” said Nebe. “For your sake. Look here, going without a barker is no good for a cop, see? Last April, after I put Franz Spernau in the cement, I got so many death threats they were offering even money at the Hoppegarten that someone would stall my motor before the end of the summer. It was a bet that was almost collected, too.” Nebe grinned his wolfish grin and swept back his jacket to reveal a big, broom-handled Mauser. “Only I stalled them first, if you know what I mean.” He tapped the side of his not inconsiderable nose with clear meaning. “By the way, how’s the Schwarz case coming along?”

“What’s it to you, Arthur?”

“I know Kurt Daluege a little. We were in the army together. He’s sure to ask the next time I see him.”

“Actually I think I’m beginning to make real progress. I’m more or less certain my suspect is a patient at the jelly clinic in the state hospital in Friedrichshain.”

“Is that so?”

“So you can tell your chum Daluege that it’s nothing personal. I’d be working just as hard to catch this kid’s murderer even if her father wasn’t a lousy Nazi bastard.”

“I’m sure he’ll be pleased to know it. But speaking personally, I can’t see the point of bringing a kid like that into the world in the first place. As a society, I think we should follow the example of the Romans. You know? Romulus and Remus? We should leave them out on a hillside to die of exposure. Something like that, anyway.”

“Maybe. Only those two weren’t left on a hillside because they were sick but because their mother was a Vestal virgin who had violated her vow of celibacy.”

“Well, I wouldn’t even know how to spell that,” said Nebe.

“Besides, Romulus and Remus survived. Haven’t you heard? That’s how Rome was founded.”

“I’m talking about the general principle, that’s all. I’m talking about wasting money on useless members of society. Did you realize that it costs the government sixty thousand marks more to keep a cripple alive in this country than the average healthy citizen?”

“Tell me, Arthur. When we talk about healthy citizens, are we including Joey Goebbels?”

Nebe smiled. “You’re a good cop, Bernie,” he said. “Everyone says so. Be a shame to stall a promising career because of a few thoughtless remarks like that.”

“Who would say such a thing? That these are just thoughtless remarks?”

“Well, aren’t they? You’re no Red. I know that.”

“I put a lot of effort into my detestation of the Nazis, Arthur. You of all people should know that.”

“Nevertheless, the Nazis are going to win the next election. Then what will you do?”

“I shall do what everyone else will do, Arthur. I’ll go home and stick my head in the gas oven and hope to wake up from a very bad dream.”

IT WAS ANOTHER FINE, unusually warm evening. I threw Heinrich Grund’s jacket at him. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go and do some detective work.”

We went downstairs and into the central courtyard of the Alex, where I’d parked my car. I turned the key and pressed the button to operate the starter motor. The car rumbled into life.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Oranienburger Strasse.”

“Why?”

“We’re looking for suspects, remember? That’s the great thing about this city, Heinrich. You don’t have to visit the nuthouse to seek out twisted, disordered minds. They’re everywhere you look. In the Reichstag. In the Wilhelmstrasse. In the Prussian Parliament. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were even one or two in Oranienburger Strasse. Makes the job a lot easier, don’t you think?”

“If you say so, boss. But why Oranienburger Strasse?”

“Because it’s popular with a certain kind of whore.”

“Gravel.”

“Precisely.”

It was a Friday night, but I couldn’t help that. Every night was a busy one on Oranienburger Strasse. Cars stopped outside the Central Telegraph Office, which was open day and night. And, until the previous year, Oranienburger Strasse had been the location of one of Berlin’s more notorious cabarets, the Stork’s Nest, which was part of the reason the street had come to be popular with the city’s prostitutes. It was rumored that quite a few of the girls on Oranienburger had previously worked at the Stork, before the club’s manager had brought in some younger, cheaper nude dancers from Poland.

On Friday nights there was even more traffic than usual, because of all the Jews attending shul at the New Synagogue, which was Berlin’s biggest. The New’s size and magnificent onion dome were a reflection of the confidence the city’s Jews had once felt about their presence in Berlin. But not anymore. According to my friend Lasker, some of the city’s Jews were already preparing to leave Germany should the unthinkable happen and the Nazis be elected. As we arrived, hundreds of them were streaming through the building’s multicolored brickwork arches: men with large fur hats and long black coats, men with shawls and ringlets, boys with velvet skullcaps, women with silk headscarves—and all under the watchful, slightly contemptuous scrutiny of the several uniformed policemen who were positioned in twos at intervals along the length of the street, just in case a group of Nazi agitators decided to show up and cause trouble.

“Jesus Christ,” exclaimed Grund, as we got out of the car. “Look at this. It’s like the bloody Exodus. I’ve never seen so many damn Jews.”

“It’s Friday night,” I said. “It’s when they go to pray.”

“Like rats, so they are,” he said, with obvious distaste. “As for this—” He stared up at the huge synagogue, with its central dome and the two smaller, pavilionlike domes flanking it, and shook his head sadly. “I mean, whose stupid idea was it to let them build this ugly thing here?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It doesn’t belong here, that’s what’s wrong with it. This is Germany. We’re a Christian country. If they want this kind of thing they should go and live somewhere else.”

“Like where?”

“Palestine. Goshen. Somewhere with a hell of a lot of sand. I dunno and I don’t care. Just not here in Germany, that’s all. This is a Christian country.”

He stared malevolently at the many Jews entering the New. With their long beards and white shirts and black coats and big, wide-brimmed hats and glasses, they looked more like nearsighted pioneers from America’s nineteenth century.

We walked toward the Friedrichstrasse end of Oranienburger, where the more specialized whores I was looking for were given to waiting.

“You know what I think?” said Grund.

“Surprise me.”

“These Friedrichstrasse types should dress more like the rest of us. Like Germans. Not like freaks. They should try to blend in. That way people would be less inclined to pick on them. It’s human nature, isn’t it? Anyone who looks a bit different, who looks like they’re setting themselves apart, well, they’re just asking for trouble, aren’t they?” He nodded. “They should try to look like normal Germans.”

“You mean brown shirt, jackboots, shoulder belt, and swastika armband? Or how about leather shorts and flowery shirts?” I laughed. “Yeah, I understand. Normal. Sure.”

“You know what I mean, boss. German.”

“I used to know what that meant. When I was in the trenches, for instance. Now I’m not so sure.”

“That’s just the point I’m making. Bastards like these have blurred things. Made it less obvious what being German is all about. I suppose that’s why the Nazis are doing so well. Because they give us a clear idea of ourselves.”

I might have said that this was a clear idea of ourselves I didn’t much like, but I wasn’t in the mood to argue politics with him. Not again. Not now.

In Berlin, all special tastes were catered for. The city was one big erotic—and sometimes not so erotic—menu. Provided you knew where to look and what to ask for, the chances were you could satisfy even the most peculiar taste. You wanted an old woman—and I mean an old woman, of the kind that lives in a shoe—you went to Mehnerstrasse, which, for obvious reasons, was also known as Old Maid Street. You wanted a fat woman—and I mean a fat woman, of the kind that has a twin brother who’s a sumo wrestler in Japan—you got yourself along to Landwehrstrasse, also known as Fat Street. Now, if mothers and daughters were your thing, then you went to Gollnowstrasse. That was known as Incest Street. Racehorses, girls you could use the whip on, were most often found in the beauty shops and massage parlors that surrounded Hallesches Tor. Pregnant women—and I do mean pregnant women, not girls with cushions stuffed up the front of their dirndls—were found on Münzstrasse. Münzstrasse was also called Coin Street, because there was a general sense that it was a place where people were prepared to sell absolutely anything.

Unlike Grund, I usually tried to avoid sounding righteous about Berlin’s famous sex scene. What did we expect might happen to women in a country with almost two million German men dead in the war and perhaps as many people dead again—my own wife included—from the influenza? What did we expect might happen after the Bolshevik Revolution—with the country full of Russian immigrants—and the inflation and the depression and the unemployment? What did convention and morality matter when everything else—money, work, life itself—turned out to be so utterly unreliable? But it was hard not to feel a little outraged at the trade going on around the north end of Oranienburger Strasse. It was difficult not to wish fire from the air to purge Berlin of this illicit trade in human flesh when you contemplated the life of the washed-up, stone-faced, outcast prostitutes collectively known as gravel. You wanted a woman with one leg, one eye, or a hunchback, or hideous scars, you went to the north end of Oranienburger Strasse and raked through the gravel. You found them in the shadows—standing in the doorway of the defunct Stork’s Nest, or in the old Kaufhaus arcade, or sometimes inside a club called the Blue Stocking, on the corner of Linenstrasse.

There were plenty of women we could have spoken to, but I was looking for one woman in particular—a whore named Gerda—and, not finding her on the street, I decided we should try inside the Blue Stocking.

The spanner on the door sat on a tall stool in front of the cash office. His name was Neumann and, occasionally, I used him as an informer. He’d once been a runner for the Dragonfly ring that operated out of Charlottenburg, only now he wouldn’t go anywhere near the area, having double-crossed them somehow. For a spanner, Neumann wasn’t all that tough, but he had the kind of beaten, criminal face that made people think he might not care what happened to him, which sometimes amounts to a simulacrum of toughness. Plus (I happened to know) he kept an American baseball bat behind his stool and wasn’t slow to use it.

“Commissar Gunther,” he said nervously. “What brings you to the Blue Stocking?”

“I’m looking for a garter-snapper.”

Neumann grinned a grin so carious his teeth looked more like the discarded butts of twenty cigarettes. “Aren’t they all, sir?” he said. “The fritzes who waltz in here.”

“This one is gravel,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have thought you was the type for that kind of trade.” His grin widened horribly, as he enjoyed what he hoped might be my embarrassment.

“Stop thinking I feel awkward asking about her, because I don’t,” I said. “The only thing I feel awkward about is your dentist’s feelings, Neumann. Her name is Gerda.”

The teeth disappeared behind thin, cracked lips that were all twitchy, like an angler with a hook in his mouth.

“You mean like the little girl what rescues her brother, Kay, in The Snow Queen?”

“That’s right. Only this one’s not so little. Not anymore. Plus, she’s short of an arm and a leg, not to mention a few teeth and half her liver. Now, is she here, or am I going to have to give the lads in E a call?”

E was Inspectorate E, the part of Department IV that dealt with all matters relating to morals—or more, usually, the lack of them.

“No need to be like that, Herr Gunther. Just having a bit of fun, that’s all.” He lifted a dog-trainer’s clicker off a chain on his belt and clicked it loudly, three times. “What happened to that sense of humor of yours, Commissar?”

“With each plebiscite it seems to get smaller.”

At the sound of the dog clicker, the door that led down into the club opened from the inside. At the top of a steep flight of stairs stood another spanner, only this one was wearing muscle.

Neumann chuckled. “Bloody Nazis,” he said. “I know just what you mean, Commissar. Everyone says they’ll close us all down the minute they get in.”

“I sincerely hope so,” remarked Grund.

Neumann shot him a look of quiet distaste. “Gerda’s downstairs,” he said stiffly.

“How does she get downstairs with one leg and one arm?” asked Grund.

Neumann looked at me and then at Grund, with a smile dancing on the cracked playground of his lips. “Slowly,” he said, and let out a roar of laughter that I enjoyed as much as he did.

Grund wasn’t laughing. “Think you’re a comedian, do you?” he said.

“Forget about it,” I told Grund, pushing him through the door and into the club. “You walked right into that one.”

Gerda wasn’t yet thirty, although you wouldn’t have known it. She could easily have passed for about fifty. We found her sitting in a wheelchair within spitting distance of a small stage where a zither-player and a striptease dancer were having a competition to see which of them could look more bored. By my reckoning, the striptease dancer had it won by a couple of droopy tits. On the table in front of Gerda stood a bottle of cheap schnapps, doubtless paid for by the man seated beside her, who, on closer inspection, turned out to be a woman.

“Go and plaster it,” I told the bubi.

“Yeah.” Grund flashed his warrant disc for good measure. “Try the Eldorado.”

Gerda thought that was funny. The Eldorado was a club for transvestite men. The bubi, sullen and predatory-looking, like someone’s outcast uncle, got up and went away. We sat down on chairs as wobbly as Gerda’s remaining teeth.

“I know you,” she told me. “You’re that cop, aren’t you?”

I put a ten under her bottle.

“What’s the idea, putting a shine on my table? I don’t know nothing.”

“Sure you do, Gerda,” I told her. “Everyone knows something.”

“Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t.” She nodded. “I’m glad you’re here, anyway, Commissar. I don’t like that mon bijou scene. You know? The ladies’ club scorpions. I mean, beggars can’t be choosers, and I’d have done it with her if she’d asked me nicely, you know? But I take no pleasure in a woman touching me down there.”

I put a cigarette in Gerda’s mouth and lit it. She was thin, with short red hair, bluish eyes, and a reddish face. She drank too much, although she could hold it well enough. Most of the time. The one time I knew she couldn’t, she’d fallen down in front of a number 13 tram on Köpenicker Strasse. She might easily have been killed. Instead she lost her left arm and her left leg.

“I remember now,” she said. “You put Ricci Kamm in the hospital.” Smiling happily, she added, “You deserve an Iron Cross for that, copper.”

“As usual, you’re well informed, Gerda.”

I lit my own cigarette and tossed her the pack. Easily amused—I figured that was how he became a Nazi in the first place—Grund was already paying more attention to the show than to our conversation.

“Tell me, Gerda. Did you ever see a snapper with a caliper, age about fifteen? Blond, boyish, carried a stick. Name of Anita. She had cerebral palsy. A spastic. We know she was selling it, because we found a bedroll in her pocket and because the neighbors said she was selling it.”

“Neet? Yeah, I heard she was dead, poor kid.” Gerda poured herself a drink from the bottle and swallowed it in one, like it was cold coffee. “Came in here sometimes. Nicely spoken girl, considering.”

“Considering what?” asked Grund. His eyes remained on the stripper’s teats, which were altogether larger than would have seemed probable.

“Considering she couldn’t speak very well.” Gerda made a noise that came mostly out of her nose. “Talked like that, you know?”

“What else can you tell us about her?” I refilled Gerda’s glass and poured one for myself, just to look sociable.

“From what I gathered, she didn’t get on with her parents. They didn’t like her being a gimp, you know? And of course they didn’t like her being on the sledge. She didn’t do it all the time, mind. Just when she wanted to irritate them, I think. Her dad was something in the Nazi Party, and it used to piss him off that she’d come out and sell it sometimes.”

“Hard to believe,” murmured Grund. “That anyone would. You know. With a disabled kid.”

Gerda laughed. “Oh no, darling. It’s not hard to believe at all. Lots of men do it with disabled girls. In fact, it’s quite the thing these days. I expect it’s something to do with the war. All those terrible injuries some of the men came home with. Left a lot of them feeling quite inadequate, in all sorts of ways. I think that doing it with gravel helps them find the confidence to get it up. Makes them feel superior to the gimp they’re with. It’s cheaper, too, of course. Cheaper than the regular. People don’t have the money for that kind of thing. Not like they used to.” She shot Grund an amused, pitying look. “Oh no, dearie. I’ve seen girls with half a face find a fritz in here. ’Sides, most fritzes aren’t looking at you anyway. Won’t meet your eye. So what a girl’s shine looks like or whether she’s got all her bits is not as important as the fact that she’s got her mouse.” Gerda laughed. “No, darling, you ask some of your mates at work and they’ll tell you the same thing. You don’t look at the whole house when you’re putting a letter in the box.”

“Coming back to Anita,” I said. “Was there ever anyone in particular you saw her with? A regular fritz? Anything at all.”

Gerda grinned. “How about a name?” She put some raw-looking fingers on the ten. “Make it a gypsy and I’ll give you his Otto Normal.”

I took out my wallet and put another ten on the table.

“As a matter of fact, there was a guy. One guy in particular. Licked his lollipop myself once or twice. But he preferred Anita. Name of Serkin. Rudi Serkin. She went to his apartment once or twice. It was in that big rent barracks on Mulackstrasse. The one with all the entrances and exits.”

“The Ochsenhof?” said Grund.

“That’s the one.”

“But that’s in Always True territory,” he said.

“So take an armored car.”

Gerda wasn’t joking. The Ochsenhof was a big block of slum apartments in the epicenter of the toughest neighborhood in Berlin and a virtual no-go area for the police. The only way cops from the Alex were ever likely to visit the Ochsenhof was with a tank to back them up. They’d tried it before. And failed, beaten back by snipers and petrol bombs. Not for nothing was it known as the Roast.

“What did he look like, this Rudi Serkin?” I asked.

“About thirty. Small. Dark, curly hair. Glasses. Smoked a pipe. Bow tie. Oh, and Jewish.” She chuckled. “At least he didn’t have a wrapper on his lollipop.”

“A Jew,” muttered Grund. “I might have known.”

“Got something against Jews, have you, darling?”

“He’s a Nazi,” I said. “He’s got something against everyone.”

For a moment or two we were all silent. Then a voice said, loudly: “Finished your talking, have you?”

We looked around and saw the striptease dancer staring drill holes through us. Gerda laughed. “Yeah, we’ve finished.”

“Good,” said the dancer, and dropped her drawers in one quick and unerotic movement. She bent over and paused just to make sure everyone got a good view of everything. Then, collecting her underwear off the floor, she straightened up again and stalked crossly off the stage.

I decided it was time we followed her example.

Leaving Gerda to finish her bottle alone, we went upstairs and took a deep breath of clean Berlin air. After the venereal atmosphere of the Blue Stocking, I felt like going home and washing my feet in disinfectant. And planning my next trip to the dentist. The sight of Neumann’s hideous smile as we were leaving was a dreadful warning.

Grund nodded with enthusiasm. “At least now we’ve got a name,” he said.

“You think so?”

“You heard her.”

I smiled. “Rudolf Serkin is the name of a famous concert pianist,” I said.

“All the better. Make a nice splash in Tempo.”

“Better still, in Der Angriff,” I said, and shook my head. “My dear Heinrich, the real Rudolf Serkin would no more get involved with a crippled whore than he’d play ‘My Parrot Doesn’t Like Hard-boiled Eggs’ at the Bechstein Hall. Whoever it was Gerda met. And whoever it was she saw Anita with. They just gave a false name. That’s all.”

“Maybe there are two Rudolf Serkins.”

“Maybe. But I doubt it. Would you give your real name to a bit of gravel you picked up in the Blue Stocking?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“You suppose right. Gerda knew it, too. Only she had nothing else to give.”

“What about the address?”

“She gave out the one address in Berlin she knows the polenta doesn’t dare set foot in. She was playing us a tune, chum.”

“Then why did you let her keep the gypsy?”

“Why?” I looked up at the sky. “I dunno. Maybe because she’s only got one leg and one arm. Maybe that’s why. Anyway, the next time I see her, she’ll know she owes me.”

Grund grimaced. “You’re too soft to be a cop, do you know that?”

“From a Nazi like you I’ll take that as a compliment.”

THE NEXT MORNING I left my Peek & Cloppenburg suit in the closet and put on my father’s tailcoat and stiff collar. Until his untimely death, he had worked as a clerk for the Bleichröder Bank, on Behrenstrasse. I don’t think I ever saw him wearing a lounge suit. Lounging was not something he did much of. My father was a pretty typical Prussian: deferential, loyal to his emperor, respectful, punctilious. I got all those qualities from him. While he was alive, we never got on as well as we might have done. But things were different now.

I took a good look at myself in the mirror and smiled. I was just like him. Apart from the smile and the cigarette and the extra hair on top of my head. All men come to resemble their fathers. That isn’t a tragedy. But you need a hell of a sense of humor to handle it.

I walked to the Adlon. The hotel car service was run by a Pole named Carl Mirow. Carl had once been Hindenburg’s chauffeur but left the Weimar president’s service when he discovered he could make more money driving for someone important. Like the Adlons. Carl was a member of the German Automobile Club and was very proud of the fact that in all his many years on the roads, he had kept a clean license. Very proud and very grateful, too. In 1922, a raw young Berlin policeman named Bernhard Gunther had stopped Carl for going through a red light. He smelled like he’d gone through quite a bit of schnapps as well, but I decided to let him off. It wasn’t very Prussian of me. Maybe Grund was right. Maybe I was too soft to be a cop. Anyway, ever since Carl and I had been friends.

The Adlons had a huge black Mercedes-Benz 770 Pullman convertible. With headlamps the size of tennis rackets and fenders and running boards as big as the ski jump at Holmenkollen, it was a real plutocrat’s car. The kind of plutocrat who might be a director on the board of the Dyestuff Syndicate. Impersonating Dr. Duisberg wasn’t much of a plan, but I couldn’t figure out another way of getting anything out of Dr. Gerhard Domagk at the state hospital’s jelly clinic. Illmann wasn’t usually wrong about such things. It did seem highly unlikely that any doctor would ever give out the kind of sensitive information that I was after. Unless he thought that, in effect, he was giving out that information to his employer.

Carl Mirow had agreed to drive me to the state hospital. The big Mercedes-Benz made quite an impact as we drove through the hospital’s grounds, especially when I wound down the window and asked a nurse for directions to the urological clinic. Carl got a little cross about that. He said, “Suppose someone sees the license plate and thinks that Mr. Adlon has got a dose of jelly.”

Mr. Adlon was Louis Adlon, the hotel’s owner. He was a man in his sixties, with thinning white hair and a rather neat white mustache. “Do I look anything like Mr. Adlon?”

“No.”

“Besides, if you had a dose of jelly, would you come to the clinic in a car like this? Or with your collar up and your hat pulled down?”

We pulled up outside the red-brick outbuilding that housed the urological clinic. Carl sprang out and opened the door for me. In his driver’s livery he looked like my old company commander. Which was probably the real reason I hadn’t pinched him for running a red light back in 1922. I was always a bit sentimental like that.

I went into the clinic. The entrance doors were double and had frosted-glass windows. The hall inside was bright and cool, and the linoleum floor was wearing so much polish that your shoes squeaked loudly as you tried to tiptoe up to the front desk. Once there, under the vaulted ceiling, your muttered plea for medical care would have sounded like a stage whisper in an opera. A strong smell of ether wasn’t just in the air. The strawberry blonde behind the welcome desk looked like she gargled with the stuff. I placed Dr. Duisberg’s business card on her desk and told her I wanted to see Dr. Domagk.

“He’s not here,” she said.

“I suppose he’s in Leverkusen.”

“No, he’s in Wuppertal.”

That was somewhere else I hadn’t ever heard of. There were times when I hardly recognized the country in which I was living.

“I suppose that’s another new town.”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said.

“Who’s in charge while he’s away?”

“Dr. Kassner.”

“Then he’s the person I want to see.”

“Have you an appointment?”

I smiled, affecting a show of self-important patience. “I think you’ll find I don’t need one. If you give Dr. Kassner that business card. You see, nurse, I fund all of the research in this clinic. So unless you want to join the ranks of the six million unemployed, I suggest you hurry along and tell him I’m here.”

The nurse colored a little, stood up, took Duisberg’s card, and, her feet squeaking like a series of squashed mice, disappeared through a set of swing doors.

A minute passed and a pale, awkward man came through the main entrance of the clinic. He was walking slowly, like someone with a bad leg. He kept his eyes on the linoleum, as if expecting to find a better explanation than an overdose of floor polish for the noise under his shoes. At the desk, he stopped and gave me a sideways sort of look, probably wondering if I was some kind of doctor. I smiled at him.

“Lovely day,” I said breezily.

Then a man in a white coat appeared in the hall, striding powerfully toward me like a founding member of the Wandervögel, one hand outstretched and the other holding Duisberg’s business card. He was big and bald-headed, which made him seem more military than medical. Underneath the white coat, he was dressed much as I was, a professional man with a position in the community.

“Dr. Duisberg, sir,” he said unctuously, with a slight speech impediment that might have been due to some ill-fitting false teeth. “What an honor, sir. What an honor. I’m Dr. Kassner. Dr. Domagk will be so very disappointed to have missed you. He’s in Wuppertal.”

“Yes, so I’ve just been informed.”

The doctor looked pained. “I trust there hasn’t been some kind of a mix-up and that he wasn’t expecting you,” he said.

“No, no,” I said. “I’m only in Berlin for a brief visit. I had a short time to kill between appointments, so I thought I might just drop by and see how the clinical trial is coming along. The Dyestuff Syndicate is very excited by your work, here.” I paused. “Of course, if it’s inconvenient . . .”

“No, no, sir.” He bowed. “If you’re happy to make do with my own inadequate explanations.”

“I’m sure they will be quite sufficient for a layman like me.”

“Then, do, please, come this way, sir.”

We went through the swing doors and into a corridor where a dozen or more rather miserable-looking men were seated along the wall, each of them holding what was either a urine sample or a very poor example of Berlin’s notoriously unpleasant tap water. Kassner ushered me into his office, which was suitably clinical. There was an examination couch, some shelves stuffed with medical textbooks, a couple of chairs, some filing cabinets, and a small desk. On the desk was a portable Bing with a sheet of paper rolled into the carriage, and a telephone. On the walls were some graphic illustrations that had me shrinking into my bladder and were almost enough to persuade me to take a vow of celibacy. I reflected I was probably the first man in a long while who’d walked into that little office and not been asked to drop his trousers.

“How much do you know about our work here?” he asked.

“Only that you’re working on a new magic bullet,” I said. “I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a chemical engineer. Dyestuffs are my forte. Just assume you’re explaining things to an educated layman.”

“Well, as you probably know, sulfa drugs are synthetic antimicrobial agents that contain sulfonamides. One of those drugs—a drug called protonsil—was synthesized by Josef Klarer at Bayer and tested on animals by Dr. Domagk. Successfully, of course. Since then, we’ve been testing it on a small group of outpatients who are suffering from syphilis and gonorrhea. But, in the course of time, we hope to find that protonsil will be effective in treating a whole range of bacterial infections inside the body. Oddly, it has no effect in the test tube. Its antibacterial action only seems to work inside living organisms, which leads us to suspect, and to hope, that the drug is successfully metabolized inside the body.”

“How big is your trial group?” I asked.

“Really we’ve only just started. So far we’ve given protonsil to approximately fifty men and about half as many women—there’s a separate clinic for them, of course, at the Charité. Some of our test cases have only just caught a venereal disease and others have had one for a while. It’s intended that over the next two or three years we shall test the drug on as many as fifteen hundred to two thousand volunteers.”

I nodded, almost wishing I had thought to bring Illmann with me. At least he might have asked some pertinent questions; even a few impertinent ones.

“So far,” continued Kassner, “the results have been very encouraging.”

“Might I see what the drug looks like?”

He opened his desk drawer and took out a bottle and then emptied some little blue pills onto my gloved palm. These looked exactly the same as the little pill I’d found near Anita Schwarz’s dead body.

“Of course, it won’t look like that when the trial is over. The German medical establishment is rather conservative and prefers its pills white. But they’re blue for the moment, to help distinguish them from anything else we’re using.”

“And your study group notes? Might I see one case file?”

“Yes, indeed.” Kassner turned to face one of the wooden filing cabinets. There was no key. He drew up the tambour front and then pulled open the top drawer. “This is a summary file containing brief notes on all of the patients who’ve been treated with protonsil to date.” He opened the file and handed it over.

I took out my father’s pince-nez. A nice touch, I told myself, and pinced them on the bridge of my nez. This was my list of suspects, I told myself. With these names I might very well have solved the case in less time than it took to cure a dose of jelly. But how was I going to get hold of this list of names? I could hardly memorize it. Nor could I ask to borrow it. One name caught my eye, however. Or rather not the name—Behrend—so much as the address. Reichskanzlerplatz, in the west end of the city, near the Grunewald, was undoubtedly one of the most exclusive addresses in the city. And for some reason it appeared familiar to me.

“As you probably know,” Kassner was saying, “the problem with salvarsan is that it is only slightly more toxic for the microbe than the host. No such problems have presented themselves with protonsil rubrum. The human liver deals with it quite effectively.”

“Excellent,” I murmured, as I glanced further down the list. But when I saw two Johann Müllers, a Fritz Schmidt, an Otto Schneider, a Johann Meyer, and a Paul Fischer, I began to suspect that the list might not be all I’d hoped it was. These were five of the most common surnames in Germany. “Tell me something, Doctor. Are these real names?”

“To be honest, I don’t know,” admitted Kassner. “We don’t insist on seeing identity cards here, otherwise they might never volunteer for the clinical trial. Patient confidentiality is an important issue with moral diseases.”

“I suppose that’s especially true since the National Socialists started talking about a cleanup of morals in this city,” I said.

“But all of those addresses are real enough. We do insist on that so that we might correspond with our patients over a period of time. Just to keep a check on how they’re all doing.”

I handed back the file and watched as he placed it in the top drawer of the filing cabinet.

“Well, thank you for your time,” I said, standing up. “I’ll certainly be making a favorable interim report to the Dyestuff Syndicate on your work here.”

“I’ll walk you to your car, Herr Doktor.”

We went outside. Carl Mirow threw away his cigarette and opened the heavy car door. If Dr. Kassner had harbored any doubts about who I was, they were banished by the sight of a uniformed chauffeur and a limousine as big as a Heinkell.

Carl drove to Dragonerstrasse and dropped me in front of my building. He was glad to see the back of me. And especially glad to see the back of Dragonerstrasse, which wasn’t anywhere to bring a chauffeur and a Mercedes-Benz 770. I went up to my apartment, put on some normal clothes, and went out again. I got into my car and headed toward the West End. I had an itch I suddenly wanted to scratch.

Number 3 Reichskanzlerplatz was an expensive, modern-looking apartment building in just about the richest, leafiest suburb in Berlin. A little farther to the west lay Grunewald racecourse and the athletics stadium, where some Berliners hoped that the Olympics might be staged in 1936. My late wife had been especially fond of this area. To the south of the racecourse was the Seeschloss restaurant, where I had asked her to marry me. I parked the car and went over to a kiosk to get some cigarettes and, perhaps, some information.

“Give me some Reemtsmas, a New Berliner, Tempo, and The Week,” I said. I flashed my warrant disc. “We had a report of some shots fired in this area. Anything in it?”

The vendor, who wore a suit, an Austrian hat, and a little mustache like Hitler’s, shook his head. “Car backfire probably. But I’ve been here since seven this morning and I haven’t heard a thing.”

“I figured as much just looking around,” I said. “Still, you have to check these things out.”

“There’s never any trouble around here,” he said. “Although there could be.”

“How do you mean?”

He pointed across Reichskanzlerplatz, to where it intersected with Kaiserdamm. “See that car?” He was pointing at a dark green Mercedes-Benz parked right in front of number three.

“Yes.”

“There are four SA men sitting in that car,” he said. Pointing north, up Ahornallee, he added: “And another truckload of them over there.”

“How do you know they’re SA?”

“Haven’t you heard? The ban on uniforms has been lifted.”

“Of course. It’s today, isn’t it? Some cop I am. I didn’t even notice. So who lives around here? Ernst Röhm?”

“Nope. Although he does visit on occasion. I’ve seen him going in there. To the ground-floor apartment on the corner of number three. Owned by Mrs. Magda Quandt.”

“Who?”

The vendor grinned. “For a bull who takes as many newspapers as you do, you don’t know much.”

“Me? I just look at the pictures. So go ahead and educate me.” I handed over a five. “And while you’re at it, keep the change.”

“Magda Quandt. She got married last December to Josef Goebbels. I see him every morning. Comes out and buys all the papers.”

“It gives the clubfoot some exercise, I suppose.”

“He’s not so bad.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” I shrugged. “Well, I can see why he married her. Nice building like that. Wouldn’t mind living here myself.” I shook my head. “Thing is, I can’t for the life of me see why she married a little fritz like him.”

I tossed the papers in the car, crossed over to the other side of the square, and glanced in the window of the car parked out front of number three. The vendor was right. It was full of Nazi brown shirts, who eyed me suspiciously as I went by. Apart from some clowns I’d seen fooling around in an old Model T at the circus one Christmas, it would have been hard to have seen more obvious stupidity in one car. It was all coming back to me now. Why the address had jogged my memory in Kassner’s office. One of the other Homicide teams at the Alex had been obliged to check an SA man’s alibi with Goebbels a month or two before.

The building had its own doorman, of course. All the nice apartment buildings in the West End had a doorman. Probably there was an armed SA man somewhere inside the lobby, keeping him company. Just to make sure Goebbels was well protected. He probably needed it, too. The Communists had already made several attempts on Hitler’s life. I didn’t doubt they wanted to assassinate Goebbels. I wouldn’t have minded taking a poke at the little satyr myself.

Naturally, I’d heard the rumors. That despite his cloven hoof and his diminished size, he was really quite a ladies’ man. The word around the Alex was that it wasn’t just Goebbels’s foot that looked like a club; that while he may have been short of stature, he was outsized on the butcher’s counter; that Goebbels was what Berlin’s line-boys would have called a Breslauer, after a large sausage of the same name. Much as I disliked him, however, I was still finding it hard to imagine Joey the Crip taking the risk of an open trip to the jelly clinic in Friedrichshain. Unless, of course, he’d gone in as a private patient, after hours, when no one else was about.

I rounded the rusticated corner of the building and stopped below what must have been Joey’s bathroom window. It was slightly open. I looked back over my shoulder. The car containing the storm troopers was out of sight. The truck was nowhere to be seen. I glanced back up at the frosted-glass window. If I put my foot on the horizontal joint of the ground floor’s rusticated brickwork, it looked as though it would be just possible to push myself up the side of the building and reach the bottom of the window. I tried it once, just long enough to check that the bathroom was empty, before dropping back down onto the deserted sidewalk. I waited for a moment. No storm troopers came to beat me up. So much for security.

The next time I did it, I pulled myself up the side and slid quickly through the open bathroom window. Breathing heavily, I sat on the toilet, and while I waited to see if my entry would be detected, I took a closer look at the window and saw that the rat’s-tail casement was broken on the sill. Even when the window looked like it was closed, it would have been a relatively simple matter to open it from the outside.

It was a big bathroom, with pink tiles all over and a round pedestal basin. There was a liberal dusting of talcum powder on the bathroom mat. The boxed-in bath was as deep as a car door, with a hand shower, in case Magda wanted to wash her hair. By the wall-mounted soap dish was a small framed picture of Hitler, as if even here, the devoted Joey could keep his beloved leader in mind. At right angles to the bath was a stool on which sat a pile of fluffy towels, and next to this a matching table on which stood a loofah and an antiquarian statue of a naked lady. Above the table was a large, mirrored bathroom cabinet, which, naturally, I opened. Most of the shelves were Magda’s. She used Joy perfume, Kotex, Nivea, Wella shampoo, Wellapon, Kolestral, and Blondor. I remembered her now. I remembered the pictures of the wedding in the magazines. A winter wedding. The happy, smiling couple arm-in-arm in the snow, accompanied by several SA men—probably the same careless louts who were sitting outside in the car—and, of course, Hitler himself. I wonder what Hitler would have said if he’d known that Magda’s beautiful, perfectly Aryan blond hair was dyed?

Joey had only one shelf in the cabinet. And it seemed we had something in common, after all. Joey shaved with a Schick injector razor and Mennen shaving cream, and cleaned his teeth with Colgate toothpaste. A bottle of Anzora hair cream explained Joey’s perfectly brushed head of dark hair. Then, between a packet of Beecham’s laxative pills and some Acqua di Parma cologne, was a bottle containing some blue pills. I opened it and emptied one out in my hand. It was the same pill I had seen in Kassner’s office earlier that morning. Protonsil. I decided that was my cue to leave. But not before using Joey’s toilet. And not flushing it was my way of thanking him for what he’d written about me in his newspaper.

I went out the window, returned to my car, and drove quickly away. In Germany, there were things that it didn’t seem healthy to know about. I didn’t doubt for a minute that Joey’s jelly was one of these.

THERE WERE nine technical inspectorates at the Alex. Inspectorate A dealt with murder, and C dealt with thefts. Gunther Braschwitz was the boss of C and specialized in burglaries. He had a younger brother, Rudolf, who was in the political police, but we didn’t hold that against him. Braschwitz was as elegant as your little finger, and a real champagne-pisser. He wore a bowler hat, carried a stick with a sword in it, which he would sometimes use, and, in winter at least, wore gaiters above his boots. He knew all the screens—the city’s professional burglars—and, it was said, could look at a break-in and tell which of them had probably done it.

“Jewface Klein,” I said. “Seen him lately?”

“Jewface? He claims he’s going straight,” said Braschwitz. “Managed to get himself a job at Heilbronner’s on Mohrenstrasse.”

“The antique shop?”

“That’s right. He always had a very good eye, that Jewface. Why? Has he been up to his old tricks?”

“No. But he knows someone I’m looking for. A friend of that widow he used to partner. Eva Zimmer.” Only half of this was true, but I didn’t want Braschwitz asking too many questions.

“Poor Eva,” he said. “She was a good widow, that girl.”

A widow was someone a screen used to get rid of his ill-gotten goods. Not a real widow. Just someone pretending to be one. Some of them, like Eva Zimmer, were professional actresses. They would dress up in black and, with a well-rehearsed hard-luck story, try to sell stolen gold, silver, or jewelry to the high-street goldsmiths. Until I’d arrested Jewface, he and Eva had had one of the best partnerships in Berlin. I knew he was six months out of Tegel Prison, but there was nothing on file of what he’d been doing since.

After Braschwitz had told me all he knew about Jewface, I telephoned the Adlon and asked Frieda what she could tell me about Josef Goebbels. Goebbels was a regular patron of the Adlon, and Frieda was able to give me some information that I thought I might use to help bait Klein.

I walked to Heilbronner’s, but the manager told me Klein wasn’t there. “It’s his lunch hour,” he said. “You’ll probably find him across the street, at Gsellius. The bookshop. He usually goes in there at lunchtime.”

I crossed the street and peered in the bookshop window. Jewface was in there, all right. I saw him straight away. A little older than I remembered, but a year in the cement can put five on your shine. His face wasn’t particularly Jewish, to be honest. He had the nickname from the jeweler’s eyeglass he used to wear when he was appraising something he’d stolen. But he did have a nose, for cops. I hadn’t been there for more than a few seconds when he looked up from the book he held and met my eye. I nodded at him to come outside and, reluctantly, he did. We weren’t friends exactly. But I was counting on his not having forgotten that it was I who’d found the pimp who’d stabbed Eva Zimmer the previous year. A man named Horst Wessel. And the pity of it was that Wessel, who was also a member of the SA, had then been murdered by another pimp, Ali Hohler, in an argument over some whore before I could make the arrest. Because Hohler happened also to be a Communist, Goebbels had managed to turn these tawdry events into a political melodrama, which was how Horst Wessel had achieved his unlikely immortalization in a song that was now heard all over Berlin when the SA went on one of its provocative marches through a Communist neighborhood. Naturally, Goebbels had left out of the story the underworld connections of these plankton protagonists. Meanwhile, Hohler had been arrested by one of my colleagues and sentenced to life imprisonment. Which left Jewface very much aggrieved with Goebbels for having waxed Eva Zimmer’s sordid murder from the Nazis’ canta storia of Horst Wessel’s heroic past.

We went around the corner to Siechen’s on Friedrichstrasse, where I bought us a couple of Nurembergs and took a closer look at him. His face was all sharp angles, thin and pointed, like something Pythagoras had doodled on the corner of his scroll before getting on with his theorem.

“So what can I do for you, Herr Gunther?”

“I need a favor, Jewface. I want someone to break into a doctor’s office at the state hospital. Someone intelligent, who can read and write and not get greedy. I don’t want anything stolen.”

“That’s good, because I’m retired. I don’t steal. And I don’t go breaking and entering. Not since Eva got stabbed.”

“Look, all I want you to do is open a file and do a bit of copying out. A secretary with a key could do it. But I don’t have a key. For a man of your experience, it couldn’t be simpler.” I sipped my beer and let him blow me off like the froth on top of his own untouched glass.

“You’re not listening, Commissar. I’m retired. Prison worked for me. Give yourself a medal.”

“Medals, is it? I can’t give you a medal, Jewface. But you do what I ask, copy out some names from some files at the hospital, and I can give you something else.”

“I don’t want your money, copper.”

“I wouldn’t insult you. No, this is something better than money. It’s even patriotic—that is, if you believe in the republic.”

“I don’t, as it happens. It was the republic that put me in the cement.”

“All right. Call it revenge, then. Revenge for Eva.” I sipped some more of my beer and let him wait.

“Keep talking.”

“How would you like to shove one up Joey Goebbels?”

“I’m listening.”

“Joey the Crip lives at number three Reichskanzlerplatz. Corner apartment, ground floor, eastern end. A bunch of SA men sit out front, so you’ll have to be careful. But they can’t see around the corner to where Joey’s bathroom faces the side street. There’s a rat’s-tail casement stay on the bathroom window that’s broken. You can be in and out in no time. Bread and butter to a man like you, Jewface. I did it myself just an hour or two ago. The man is a fanatic, Jewface. Do you know he’s got a photograph of Hitler on the side of the bath? Anyway, the apartment is owned by his wife, Magda. She used to be married to a rich industrialist called Gunther Quandt, who was very generous with the divorce settlement. He let her keep all her mints. You know? The ones you like. The ones you can sell at Margraf’s? Of course, with an election coming, Goebbels is out a lot. Making speeches, that kind of thing. In fact, I happen to know that Joey’s making a speech tonight, at Nazi Party headquarters on Hedemannstrasse. It will be an important speech. They’re all important between now and the end of July. But maybe this one is more important than most. Hitler will be there. Afterward, Magda’s throwing a little soirée for him at the Adlon Hotel. Which would give a man plenty of time.” I sipped some more beer and thought about ordering some sausage. It had been a busy morning. “So. What do you say? Do we have a deal? Will you copy out these names for me, like I asked?”

“Like I told you already, Gunther. I’m a reformed character. I’m trying to lead an honest life.” Jewface smiled and offered me his hand. “But that’s the thing about the Nazis. They bring out the worst in people.”

THE NEXT MORNING I had a handwritten list of names and addresses from all over the city and beyond. Not as good as a list of suspects, but perhaps the next best thing. Now all I had to do was check them out.

The Residents Registrations Office was on the railway-station side of the Alex, in room 359. From this third-floor office, the address of any resident of Berlin might be obtained, quite legally, by any other resident of the city. The Prussian authorities had meant well: the knowledge that information in the state was freely available was supposed to help buttress faith in our fragile democracy. In practice, however, it just meant that Nazi storm troopers and Communists alike were able to find out where their opponents lived and take appropriately belligerent action. Democracy has its disadvantages, too.

Not available to the general public at the Registration Office, but available to police, was the Devil’s Directory, so called because it worked backward. All you had to do was look up a street name and a house number, and the Devil’s Directory told you the name of the person or people living there. So it was the work of a morning to put a real name alongside each of the addresses and bogus patient names that Jewface Klein had copied from the summary file in Dr. Kassner’s office. This was a mundane task I might normally have ordered one of my sergeants to attend to. But I never was very good at giving orders—no more than I was any good at taking them. Besides, if I’d given the job to a sergeant, I might have ended up having to explain where and how I’d gotten hold of the list in the first place. KRIPO could be very unforgiving of bent coppers. Even coppers who were bent not for themselves but for the job.

For the same reason, another mundane task I was going to have to perform myself was check out every name on that list. There was, however, nothing mundane about one name in particular I had found using the Devil’s Directory. This was Dr. Kassner’s own name. And I was looking forward to finding out why his home address should have been on a list of patients involved in Bayer’s clinical trial of protonsil.

When I got back to my desk, Grund was there, typing something on my ancient Carmen, one ponderous finger at a time, as if he had been killing ants or playing the opening notes of some tuneless Russian piano concerto.

“Where the hell have you been?” he asked.

“Where the hell have you been, sir?” I said.

“Illmann called. The Schwarz girl tested negative for jelly. And Gennat wants us to go and check out some girl found dead in the municipal cattle market. Looks like she was shot, but we’re to give it a quick sketch anyway, just in case.”

“Makes sense, I suppose. The cattle market is only a few hundred yards from where we found the Schwarz girl in Friedrichshain Park.”

We were there in a matter of minutes. Market days were Wednesdays and Saturdays, so the place was closed and deserted. But the restaurant was open, and some of the patrons—wholesale butchers mostly, from Pankow, Weissensee, and Petershagen—reported seeing three men chasing the girl into the yards. But the descriptions were vague. Too vague to be worth writing down. The body itself was in the slaughterhouse. She looked about twenty. She’d been shot in the head at fairly close range. There was a brown mark around the bullet hole. All the clothing below her waist was gone and, from the smell of her, it seemed probable she’d been raped. But that was it. There had been no amateur surgery on this poor creature.

“Circumstances arousing suspicion, right enough,” said Grund after quite a while.

I would have been surprised if he hadn’t said it.

“Nice-looking box on her,” he added.

“Go ahead and give her one, why don’t you? I’ll look the other way.”

“I was just saying,” he said. “I mean, look at it. Her box. It’s been shaved, mostly. Not something you often see, that’s all. Bare like that. Like a little girl.”

I rifled through her handbag, which one of the uniformed SCHUPOs had found a short distance away from the body, and found a Communist Party card. Her name was Sabine Färber. She’d worked at KPD headquarters close to where I lived. Her home was in Pettenkoferstrasse, on the edge of Lichterfelde, just a hundred yards east of where she’d been murdered. Already it seemed abundantly clear to me what had probably happened.

“Fucking Nazis,” I said with loud disgust.

“Christ, I’m fed up with this,” Grund said, frowning. “How do you work that out? That they were Nazis who did this. You heard the descriptions given by those butchers. No one mentioned seeing any brown shirts or swastikas. Not even a toothbrush mustache. So how do you figure that they’re Nazis?”

“Oh, it’s nothing personal, Heinrich.” I tossed him Sabine Färber’s party card. “But they weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to find a convert.”

He looked at the card and shrugged, as if allowing only the possibility that I was right.

“Come on. It’s got their fingerprints all over it. My guess is that the three men the butchers reported seeing were storm troopers wearing plain clothes so as not to draw attention to themselves. They must have been waiting for her when she came out of the KPD headquarters on Bulowplatz. It’s a nice day, so she decided to walk home and didn’t notice that they were following. Waiting for a good opportunity to attack her. When she spotted them, she ran in here, hoping to escape. Only they cornered her and then did what brave storm troopers do when they’re fighting a terrible menace like international Bolshevism. Heinrich?”

“I suppose some of that might be right,” he said. “More or less.”

“Which part do you agree with less?” I asked.

Grund didn’t answer. He put Sabine Färber’s card back in her bag and stared down at the dead girl.

“What is it that Hitler says?” I asked. “Strength lies not in defense but in attack?” I lit a cigarette. “I always wondered what that meant.” I let the smoke char my lungs for a moment and then said, “Is this the kind of attack that he means, do you think? Your great leader?”

“Of course not,” muttered Grund. “You know it isn’t.”

“What, then? You tell me. I’d like to know.”

“Give it a rest, why don’t you?”

“Me?” I laughed. “It’s not me who needs to give it a rest, Heinrich. It’s the people who did this. They’re your friends. The National Socialists.”

“You don’t know any of that for a fact.”

“No, you’re right. I don’t. For real vision you need a man like Adolf Hitler. Perhaps he should be the detective here. Not a bad idea—I’m sure I prefer the idea of him as a cop to the idea of him becoming the next chancellor of Germany.” I smiled. “And it’s an even bet he’d have a superior cleanup rate to me. Who better to solve a city’s crimes than the man who instigates most of them?”

“Christ, I wish I didn’t have to listen to you, Gunther.”

Grund spoke through gritted teeth. There was color in his face that ought to have warned me to be careful. He was a boxer, after all.

“You don’t,” I told him. “I’m going back to the Alex to tell the political boys that this is one for them. You stay here and see if you can’t get some better witnesses than those sausage-makers. I dunno. Perhaps you’ll get lucky. Perhaps they’re Nazis themselves. They’re certainly ugly enough. Who knows? Perhaps they’ll even give you descriptions of three orthodox Jews.”

I suppose it was the sarcastic grin that did it for him. I hardly saw the punch. I hardly even felt it. One second I was standing there, grinning like Torquemada, and the next I was lying on the cobbled ground, felled like a heifer and feeling as if I’d been struck by a bolt of electricity. In the half-light available to my eyes, Grund was standing over me with fists clenched, like Firpo staring down at Dempsey, and shouting something at me. His words were quite silent to my ears. All I could hear was a loud, high-pitched noise. Finally, Grund was hustled away by a couple of uniformed bulls while their sergeant bent down and helped me to my feet.

My head cleared and I shifted my jaw against my hand.

“The bastard hit me,” I said.

“He did that,” said the cop, searching my eyes like a referee wondering if he should allow the fight to proceed or not. “We all saw it, sir.”

From his tone I assumed he meant that he took it for granted I was going to press disciplinary charges against Grund. Hitting a superior officer was a serious offense in KRIPO. Almost as bad as hitting a suspect.

I shook my head. “No, you didn’t,” I said.

The cop was older than me. Nearing retirement, probably. His short hair was the color of polished steel. He had a scar in the center of his forehead: it looked as if a bullet had struck him there.

“What’s that you say, sir?”

“You didn’t see anything, Sergeant. Any of you. Got that?”

The sergeant thought about this for a moment and then nodded. “If you say so, sir.”

There was blood in my mouth but I was uncut.

“No harm done,” I said, and spat onto the ground.

“What was it all about?” he asked.

“Politics,” I said. “That’s what everything’s always about in Germany these days. Politics.”

I DIDN’T GO straight back to the Alex. Instead I drove to Kassner’s apartment on Dönhoff-Platz, which wasn’t exactly on the way, being at the eastern end of Leipziger Strasse. I stopped on the north side of some ornamental gardens. The bronze statues of two Prussian statesmen stared at me across a low privet hedge. A small boy out for a walk with his mother was looking at the statues and probably wondering who they were. I was thinking about how Dr. Kassner’s home address had come to be on a list of names I had got from Jewface Klein. I knew Kassner would still be at the hospital, so I really haven’t a clue what I was expecting to find out. But I am an optimist like that. When you’re a detective, you have to be. And sometimes you just have to do what your instincts tell you to do.

I walked up to the shiny black front door and took a closer look. There were three bells. One of them was clearly labeled KASSNER. Beside the door were two cast-iron planters filled with geraniums. The whole area oozed respectability. I pulled the bell and waited. After a while I heard the key being turned and the door opened to reveal a man in his early twenties. I lifted my hat innocently.

“Dr. Kassner?”

“No,” said the man. “He’s not here.”

“My name is Hoffmann,” I said, raising my hat once again. “From Isar Life Insurance.”

The young man nodded politely but said nothing.

I glanced quickly at the other two names by the bell pulls. “Herr Körtig?”

“No.”

“Herr Peters, is it?”

“No. I’m a friend of Dr. Kassner’s. And as I said, he’s not here right now.”

“When will the doctor be back do you think, Herr—?”

“You can probably find him at the state hospital. At the urological clinic.” The man grinned as if somehow he hoped that this piece of information might embarrass me. There was a large gap between his front teeth. “I’m sorry, but I really do have to go. I’m late for an appointment. Would you excuse me?”

“Certainly.”

I stepped aside and watched him descend the front steps onto the square. He was of medium height, good-looking and dark in a Gypsy kind of way, but neat with it. He was wearing a light-colored summer-weight suit, a white shirt, but no tie. At the bottom of the steps he climbed over the door of a little open-topped Opel. It was white with a blue stripe. I hadn’t paid any attention to it before—maybe I was still a little bit punchy—but as he started the engine and drove off, I suddenly realized I needed to take down the license plate. All I got was the characters 11A before the car disappeared around the corner of Jerusalemstrasse. At least I knew that the slippery young man was from Munich.

An hour later, I was back at my desk. I saw Heinrich Grund on the other side of the detectives’ room and was just about to go over and tell him there were no hard feelings on my part when the Full Ernst arrived beside me like a bus reaching its depot. He was wearing a three-piece blue pin-striped suit in a size huge and had a Senior going full-blast in the corner of his mouth. He removed the cigar and I heard what sounded like the bellows on a church organ. An invisible choir of smoke and sweet coffee and something stronger perhaps descended on me as from Mount Sinai, and a lung ailment of a voice commanded my attention.

“Anything in that murder over at the cattle yard?” he asked.

“It looks like an aggravated political killing,” I said.

“Aggravated?”

“They raped her as well.”

Gennat grimaced.

“The DPP wants to see us.” Gennat never called Weiss Izzy. He didn’t even call him Bernard. He called him Weiss or the DPP. “Now.”

“What’s it about?” I asked, wondering if Grund had been stupid enough to report himself for striking a senior officer.

“The Schwarz case,” he said.

“What about it?”

But Gennat had already waddled off, expecting me to follow. As I went after him I reflected that Gennat had the flattest feet of any cop I’d ever seen, which was hardly surprising, given the bulk they had to carry. He must have weighed almost three hundred pounds. He walked with his arms behind him, which was hardly surprising, either, given how much of him was in front.

We went upstairs and along a quieter corridor lined with the pictures of previous Prussian police presidents and their deputies. Gennat knocked on Izzy’s door and opened it without waiting. We went inside. Bright sunshine was streaming through grimy, double-height windows. As usual, Izzy was writing. On the window seat, like a warm-looking cat and smelling lightly of cologne, sat Arthur Nebe.

“What’s he doing here?” I growled, sitting down on one of the hard wooden chairs. Gennat sat on the chair next to it and hoped for the best.

“Now, now, Bernie,” said Izzy. “Arthur’s just here to help.”

“I just came back from the cattle market. There’s a dead girl in one of the pens. Murdered by Nazis, most probably, given that she was a card-carrying Red. He could apply his formidable skills to that case, if he wants. But there’s nothing political about the murder of Anita Schwarz.”

Izzy put down his pen and leaned back. “I thought I made it clear that there is,” he said.

“Whoever killed Anita Schwarz was a nutcase, not a Nazi,” I said. “Although I will concede that it’s not at all uncommon for these two particulars to be coterminous.”

“I believe Commissar Gunther makes the point for me,” said Nebe. “Quite eloquently, as usual.”

“And what point might that be, Commissar Nebe?”

“Look here, Bernie,” said Izzy. “There are certain officials in the General—”

“I’m not in the General,” I said. “I’m in the Official.”

“—have queried your ability to remain impartial,” he continued. “They think your open hostility to the National Socialist Party and its adherents might actually get in the way of solving this murder.”

“Who said I was hostile to Nazism?”

“Oh come on, Bernie,” said Nebe. “After that press conference? Everyone knows you’re Iron Front.”

“Let’s not talk about that press conference,” said Gennat. “It was a disaster.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s not. After all, what’s any of it got to do with me finding the killer?”

“The dead girl’s parents, Herr and Frau Schwarz, have alleged that you have behaved aggressively and unsympathetically toward them because of their politics,” said Izzy. “Since then, they’ve alleged that you have been acting on some malicious gossip concerning her moral character.”

“Who told you that? Heinrich Grund, I suppose.”

“Actually, they spoke to me,” said Nebe.

“She was a prostitute,” I told Izzy. “An amateur, it’s true, but a prostitute nevertheless. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought that it might just have a bearing on why she was murdered. As well as how. After all, it’s not like prostitutes haven’t been murdered before in this city. And genital mutilation is something we’ve come across in cases of lust murder. Even Arthur would admit that much, surely.” I lit a cigarette. I didn’t ask permission to do it. I wasn’t in that kind of mood. “But if we are talking politics, may I remind everyone—especially you, Arthur—that it’s not against police regulations to be part of the Iron Front. It is against police regulations to be a member of the Nazi Party or the KPD.”

“I’m not a member of the Nazi Party,” said Nebe. “If Bernie’s referring to my belonging to the National Socialist Fellowship of Civil Servants, then that’s something different. You don’t have to be a member of one to be a member of the other.”

“I feel we’re getting off the subject here, a little,” said Izzy. “What I really wanted to talk about was Herr Schwarz’s position as a member of Kurt Daluege’s family. Daluege has been mentioned as a possible future police president. For that reason we’re keen to avoid any possible embarrassment to him.”

“I thought an election had to happen before that was even a possibility, sir,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I was counting on it. I believe lots of people are. You included, if I’m not wrong. But maybe that’s just me being old-fashioned again. I was under the strong impression that our job was to protect the republic, not the reputations of thugs like Daluege and Schwarz.”

“Not old-fashioned, Bernie,” said Gennat. “But perhaps a little naive. Regardless of what happens in the July election, this country will have to reach some sort of accommodation with the National Socialists. I don’t see how else anarchy and chaos are to be avoided in Germany.”

“We just want what’s best for the Berlin police,” added Izzy. “I think we all do. And it’s in the best interests of the Berlin police that this matter is dealt with more sensitively.” Izzy shook his head. “But you. You are not sensitive, Bernie. You are not diplomatic. You tread heavily.”

“You want me off the case, is that it?” I asked him.

“No one wants you off the case, Bernie,” said Gennat. “You’re one of the best detectives we’ve got. I should know. I trained you myself.”

“But we think it might be useful to have Arthur on board,” said Izzy. “To take care of the finer points of community relations.”

“You mean when it comes to speaking to bastards like Otto Schwarz and his wife,” I said.

“Precisely,” said Izzy. “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

“Well, I’d certainly be grateful for any help in that department,” I said, and smiled at Nebe. “I suppose I’ll just have to try my best to conceal my prejudices when I’m speaking to you, Arthur.”

Nebe smiled his crafty smile. He seemed impossible to provoke. “Since we’re all of us on the same side . . .”

“Yes, indeed,” I murmured.

“Perhaps you would care to share with us what you have discovered so far.”

I didn’t tell them everything. But I told them a lot. I told them about the autopsy and the protonsil pill and the five hundred marks and how Anita Schwarz had been on the sledge and that I had started to suspect that her probable killer was most likely a fritz who’d caught a dose of jelly and wanted to get even with a snapper and that he had probably picked Anita Schwarz because her disability made her an easy victim, and that as soon as I spoke to Dr. Kassner at the state hospital’s urological clinic, I could have a list of possible suspects. I didn’t mention I already had one. And I certainly didn’t mention what I’d discovered about Joey the Crip.

“You won’t get anything out of a doctor,” said Gennat. “Not even with a court order. He’ll sit on his big fat doctor-patient privilege and tell you to go and screw yourself.”

This sounded good, coming from a man whose own fat bottom would have been the envy of a pocket battleship.

“And he’ll be entitled to do so. As I’m sure you know.”

I stood up and bowed. “Ordinarily, I’d agree with you, sir. But I think you’re forgetting something.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“I think you’re forgetting that Arthur’s not the only cop in the Alex who can play Prince bloody Charming. I can do that, too. At least I can when the cause seems even vaguely worthwhile.”

I RANG the urological clinic to find out what time it closed, and was told five p.m. At four-thirty I filled a Thermos and drove back to Kassner’s house on Dönhoff-Platz. Once there, I switched off the engine, poured myself some coffee, and started on the papers I’d bought in Reichskanzlerplatz. They were a day old but that didn’t seem to matter very much. In Berlin the news was always the same. German chancellors made. German chancellors overthrown. And all the while the number of the unemployed kept on rising. Meanwhile, Hitler raced around the country in his Mercedes-Benz, telling people that he was the solution to everyone’s problems. I didn’t blame those who believed him. Not really. Most Germans just wanted to have something to hope for in the future. A job. A bank that stayed solvent. A government that could govern. Good schools. Streets that were safe to walk on. Good hospitals. A few honest cops.

At about six-thirty, Dr. Kassner showed up in a new black Horch. I got out and followed him up the steps to his front door. Recognizing my face, he started to smile, but the smile quickly faded when he saw my cheap suit and the KRIPO disc in my hand.

“Commissar Gunther,” I said. “From the Alex.”

“So, you’re not Dr. Duisberg from the Dyestuff Syndicate.”

“No, sir. I’m a homicide detective. I’m investigating the murder of Anita Schwarz.”

“I thought you looked rather young to be on the board of a company of that size and importance. Well, you’d better come in, I suppose.”

We went up to his apartment. The place was modern. A lot of bleached burr walnut and cream leather and bronzes of naked ladies standing on tiptoe. He opened a cocktail cabinet the size of a sarcophagus and helped himself to a drink. He didn’t offer me one. We both knew that I didn’t deserve to have a drink. He sat down and put his drink on a scallop-edged wooden coaster that was on a scallop-edged coffee table. He crossed his legs and silently invited me to sit down.

“Nice place,” I lied. “Live here alone?”

“Yes. Now what’s this all about, Commissar?”

“There was a girl found dead in Friedrichshain Park several nights ago. She’d been murdered.”

“Yes, I read about it in Tempo. Terrible. But I don’t see—”

“I found one of your protonsil pills near the body.”

“Ah. I see. And you think one of my patients might be the culprit.”

“It’s a possibility I’d like to explore, sir.”

“Of course, it might just be a coincidence. One of my patients walking home from the clinic could have dropped his pills several hours before the body was found.”

“I don’t buy that. The pill hadn’t been there that long. There was a shower of rain that afternoon. The pill we found was in pristine condition. Then there’s the girl herself. She was a juvenile prostitute.”

“Lord, how very shocking.”

“One theory I’m exploring is that the killer may have contracted venereal disease from a prostitute.”

“Thus giving him a motive to kill one. Is that it?”

“It’s a possibility I’d like to explore.”

Kassner sipped his drink and nodded thoughtfully.

“So why that stupid pantomime in the clinic?”

“I wanted to see a list of patients you were treating.”

“Couldn’t you have asked to see it legitimately?”

“Yes. But you wouldn’t have shown it to me.”

“That’s quite right. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. It would have been unethical.” He smiled. “So what are you? A memory man? Did you hope to remember every name on the list?”

“Something like that.” I shrugged.

“But there were rather more names than you had bargained for. Which is why you’re back here now. And at my home rather than the clinic, because you hoped that this might make it easier for me to forget my doctor-patient duty of confidentiality.”

“Something like that, yes.”

“My first duty, Commissar, is to my patients. Some of whom are very dangerously ill. Suppose for a moment that I did share information regarding their true identities with you. And suppose you chose to interview some of them. All of them. I don’t know. They might very well feel I’d betrayed their confidence. They might never again return to the clinic to complete their treatment. In which case they might very easily go and infect someone else. And so on, and so on.” He shrugged. “You do see what I mean? I regret the murder of anyone. However, I do have to be mindful of the bigger picture.”

“Here’s my bigger picture, Dr. Kassner. The person who killed Anita Schwarz is a psychopath. She was horribly mutilated. The kind of person who kills like that usually does it again. I want to find this maniac before that happens. Are you prepared to have another murder on your conscience?”

“You make a very fair point, Commissar. It’s quite a dilemma, isn’t it? Perhaps the best thing would be to put the matter before the Prussian Medical Ethics Committee and let them decide.”

“How long would that take?”

Kassner looked vague. “A week or two? Perhaps a month.”

“And what do you think they would decide?”

He sighed. “I would never like to second-guess a medical ethics committee. I’m sure it’s the same in the police. There are always proper procedures to be observed. Although they don’t really seem to have been observed here. I wonder what your superiors would make of your conduct toward me?” He shook his head. “But let us suppose that the committee turns down your request. That’s a realistic possibility, I think. What could you do then? I suppose you could try to interview everyone coming in and out of the clinic. Of course, it’s only a small percentage who are in the clinical trial. The vast majority of my patients—and I do mean a vast majority, Commissar—is still using neosalvarsan. And what would happen then? Why, you would frighten people away, of course. And we would have an epidemic of venereal disease in Berlin. As things stand now, we are barely controlling the disease. There are tens of thousands of people in this city suffering from jelly, as you call it. No, Commissar, my own suggestion to you would be to try to find a separate line of inquiry. Yes, sir, I do believe that would be the best thing for all concerned.”

“You make some good points, Doctor,” I said.

“I’m so glad you think so.”

“However, when I was in your office, I couldn’t help noticing that one of the addresses on your list of patients using protonsil is this address. Perhaps you’d care to comment on that.”

“I see. That was very sharp of you, Commissar. I suppose you think that might make me a suspect.”

“It’s a possibility I can’t afford to ignore, sir.”

“No, of course not.” Kassner finished his drink and got up to pour himself another. But I still wasn’t on his list of people he wanted to have a drink with. “Well, then, it’s like this. It’s not uncommon for doctors to infect themselves with a disease they’re trying to cure.” He sat down again, burped discreetly behind his glass, and then toasted me silently.

“Is that what you’re saying, Doctor? That you deliberately infected yourself with a venereal disease to test protonsil on yourself?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Sometimes it’s not enough to test the side effects of a drug on other people. They are less able to describe the full effects of a drug on the human body. As I believe I stated when first we met, it’s rather difficult to keep tabs on patients in these cases. Sometimes the only patient one can really trust is oneself. I’m sorry if you think that makes me a suspect. But I can assure you that I’ve never murdered anyone. As it happens, though, I believe I can supply an alibi for the day and night of that poor girl’s death.”

“I’m delighted to hear it.”

“I was attending a urologists’ conference, in Hannover.”

I nodded and took out my cigarettes. “Do you mind?”

He shook his head and sipped some of his drink. The alcohol hit his stomach and made it start rumbling.

“Here’s what I’d like to suggest, Doctor. Something that might help this inquiry. Something you might like to do voluntarily that wouldn’t offend your sense of ethics.”

“If it’s within my power.”

I lit my cigarette and leaned forward so I was in range of the scallop-edged ashtray.

“Have you ever had any psychiatric training, sir?”

“Some. As a matter of fact, I did my medical training in Vienna and went to several lectures on psychiatry. Once I even considered working in the field of psychotherapy.”

“If you are agreeable, I’d like you to look over all your own patient notes. See if there’s any one of them who perhaps stands out as a possible murderer.”

“And supposing there was? One patient who stood out. What then?”

“Why, then we could discuss the matter. And perhaps discover some mutually acceptable way forward.”

“Very well. I can assure you I’ve no desire to see this man kill again. I have a daughter myself.”

I glanced around the apartment.

“Oh, she lives with her mother, in Bavaria. We’re divorced.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“And the man who was here when I called earlier on today?”

“Ah, you must mean Beppo. He’s a friend of my wife’s and came to collect some of her things in his car. He’s a student, in Munich.” Kassner yawned. “I’m sorry, Commissar, but it’s been a very long day. Is there anything else? Only I’d like to take a bath. You can’t imagine how much I look forward to taking a bath after a day in the clinic. Well, perhaps you can imagine.”

“Yes, sir, I can imagine it quite well enough.”

We parted, more or less cordially. But I wondered just how cordial Kassner would have been if I’d mentioned Josef Goebbels. There was nothing around the apartment to indicate Kassner was a Nazi. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine Goebbels taking the risk of being treated by anyone other than a trusted Nazi Party member. Joey wasn’t the type to put much faith in things like ethics and professional confidence.

Sadly, there was nothing to suggest that the Nazi Party leader in Berlin might actually be a psychopathic murderer, either. A dose of jelly was one thing. The murder and mutilation of a fifteen-year-old girl was quite another.