March Violets

13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Was Bock one of them?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What do you want?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Did they double-cross Red?’

‘Nobody’s that stupid.’

‘You’re singing, aren’t you?’

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

‘Tell me more about the job.’

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

‘No diamonds?’

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

‘Are you sure of that?’

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

‘What were these papers, do you know?’

Bock shook his head. ‘Just papers.’

‘What about the killings?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Does he have any friends?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who says I ever did?’

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

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

‘Who was paying it?’

‘Red.’

‘And what was in it for him?’

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

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

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

‘But it was definitely organized.’

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

‘And you went to prison.’

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

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

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

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

I nodded. ‘That’s what I thought.’

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

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

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

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

‘Perhaps we should stop now,’ she said.

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

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

I picked her up and took her into the bedroom where we spent the rest of the afternoon, caressing, exploring and blissfully enjoying a feast of each other’s flesh.

The afternoon drifted lazily into evening, with light sleep and tender words; and when we rose from my bed having satisfied our lust, we found our appetites the more ravenous.

I took her to dinner at the Peltzer Grill, and then dancing at the Germania Roof, in nearby Hardenbergstrasse. The Roof was crowded with Berlin’s smartest set, many of them in uniform. Inge looked around at the blue glass walls, the ceiling illuminated with small blue stars and supported with columns of burnished copper, and the ornamental pools with their water-lilies, and smiled excitedly.

‘Isn’t this simply wonderful?’

‘I didn’t think that this was your sort of place,’ I said lamely. But she didn’t hear me. She was taking me by the hand and pulling me on to the less crowded of the two circular dance-floors.

It was a good band, and I held her tight and breathed through her hair. I was congratulating myself on bringing her here instead of one of the clubs with which I was better acquainted, such as Johnny’s or the Golden Horseshoe. Then I remembered that Neumann had said that the Germania Roof was one of Red Dieter’s chosen haunts. So when Inge went to the ladies’ room I called the waiter over to our table and handed him a five.

‘This gets me a couple of answers to a couple of simple questions, right?’ He shrugged, and pocketed the cash. ‘Is Dieter Helfferrich in the joint tonight?’

‘Red Dieter?’

‘What other colours are there?’ He didn’t get that, so I left it. He looked thoughtful for a moment, as if wondering whether or not the ringleader of German Strength would mind his being identified in this way. He made the right decision.

‘Yes, he’s here tonight.’ Anticipating my next question, he nodded over his shoulder in the direction of the bar. ‘He’s sitting in the booth furthest from the band.’ He started to collect some empties from the table and, lowering his voice, added, ‘It doesn’t do to ask too many questions about Red Dieter. And that’s for free.’

‘Just one more question,’ I said. ‘What’s his usual neck-oil?’ The waiter, who had the lemon-sucking look of a warm boy, looked at me pityingly, as if such a question hardly needed to be asked.

‘Red drinks nothing but champagne.’

‘The lower the life the fancier the taste, eh? Send a bottle over to his table, with my compliments.’ I handed him my card and a note. ‘And keep the change if there is any.’ He gave Inge the once-over as she came back from the ladies’ room. I didn’t blame him, and he wasn’t the only one; there was a man sitting at the bar who also seemed to find her worthy of attention.

We danced again and I watched the waiter deliver the bottle of champagne to Red Dieter’s table. I couldn’t see him in his seat, but I saw my card being handed over, and the waiter nodding in my direction.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘there’s something that I have to do. I won’t be long, but I’ll have to leave you for a short while. If there’s anything you want just ask the waiter.’ She looked at me anxiously as I accompanied her back to the table.

‘But where are you going?’

‘I have to see someone, someone here. I’ll only be a few minutes.’

She smiled at me, and said: ‘Please be careful.’

I bent forward and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Like I was walking on a tightrope.’

There was a touch of the Fatty Arbuckle about the solitary occupant of the end booth. His fat neck rested on a couple of doughnut-sized rolls pressed tight against the collar of his evening shirt. The face was as red as a boiled ham, and I wondered if this was the explanation behind the nickname. Red Dieter Helfferich’s mouth was set at a tough angle like it ought to have been chewing on a big cigar. When he spoke it was a medium-sized brown bear of a voice, growling from the inside of a short cave, and always on the edge of outrage. When he grinned, the mouth was a cross between early-Mayan and High Gothic.

‘A private investigator, huh? I never met one.’

‘That just goes to show there aren’t enough of us around. Mind if I join you?’

He glanced at the label on the bottle. ‘This is good champagne. The least I can do is hear you out. Sit down—’ He lifted his hand and looked at my card again for effect ‘—Herr Gunther.’ He poured us both a glass, and raised his own in a toast. Cowled under brows the size and shape of horizontal Eiffel Towers were eyes that were too wide for my comfort, each revealing a broken pencil of an iris.

‘To absent friends,’ he said.

I nodded and drank my champagne. ‘Like Kurt Mutschmann perhaps.’

‘Absent, but not forgotten.’ He uttered a brash, gloating laugh and sipped at his drink. ‘It would seem that we’d both like to know where he is. Just to put our minds at rest, of course. To stop us worrying about him, eh?’

‘Should we be worried?’ I asked.

‘These are dangerous times for a man in Kurt’s line of work. Well, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that. You know all about that, don’t you, fleabite, you being an ex-bull.’ He nodded appreciatively. ‘I’ve got to hand it to your client, fleabite, it showed real intelligence involving you rather than your former colleagues. All he wants is his bells back, no questions asked. You can get closer. You can negotiate. Perhaps he’ll even pay a small reward, eh?’

‘You’re very well informed.’

‘I am if that’s all your client wants; and to that extent I’ll even help you, if I can.’ His face darkened. ‘But Mutschmann—he’s mine. If your fellow has got any misplaced ideas of revenge, tell him to lay off. That’s my beat. It’s simply a matter of good business practice.’

‘Is that all you want? Just to tidy up the store? You’re forgetting the small matter of Von Greis’s papers, aren’t you? You remember—the ones your boys were so anxious to talk to him about. Like where he’d hidden them or who he’d given them. to. What were you planning to do with the papers when you got them? Try a little first-class blackmail? People like my client maybe? Or did you want to put a few politicians in your pocket for a rainy day?’

‘You’re quite well informed yourself, fleabite. Like I said, your client is a clever man. It’s lucky for me he took you into his confidence instead of the police. Lucky for me, lucky for you; because if you were a bull sitting there telling me what you just told me, you’d be on your way to being dead.’

I leaned out of the booth to check that Inge was all right. I could see her shiny black head easily. She was freezing off a uniformed reveller who was wasting his best lines.

‘Thanks for the champagne, fleabite. You took a fair-sized chance talking to me. And you haven’t had much of a payout on your bet. But at least you’re walking away with your stake-money.’ He grinned.

‘Well this time, the thrill of playing was all I wanted.’

The gangster seemed to find that funny. ‘There won’t be another. You can depend on it.’

I moved to go, but found him holding my arm. I expected him to threaten me, but instead he said:

‘Listen, I’d hate you to think that I’d cheated you. Don’t ask me why, but I’m going to do you a favour. Maybe because I like your nerve. Don’t turn round, but sitting at the bar is a big, heavy fellow, brown suit, sea-urchin haircut. Take a good look at him when you go back to your table. He’s a professional killer. He followed you and the girl in here. You must have stepped on someone’s corns. It looks as though you must be this week’s rent money. I doubt he’ll try anything in here, out of respect for me, you understand. But outside . . . fact is, I don’t much like cheap gunmen coming in here. Creates a bad impression.’

‘Thanks for the tip. I appreciate it.’ I lit a cigarette. ‘Is there a back way out of here? I wouldn’t want my girl to get hurt.’

He nodded. ‘Through the kitchens and down the emergency stairs. At the bottom there’s a door that leads onto an alley. It’s quiet there. Just a few parked cars. One of them, the light-grey sports, belongs to me.’ He pushed a set of keys towards me. ‘There’s a lighter in the glove-box if you need it. Just leave the keys in the exhaust pipe afterwards, and make sure you don’t mark the paintwork.’

I pocketed the keys and stood up. ‘It’s been nice talking to you, Red. Funny things, fleabites; you don’t notice one when you’re first bitten, but after a while there’s nothing more irritating.’

Red Dieter frowned. ‘Get out of here, Gunther, before I change my mind about you.’

On the way back to Inge I glanced over at the bar. The man in the brown suit was easy enough to spot, and I recognized him as the man who had been looking at Inge earlier on. At our table Inge was finding it easy, if not particularly pleasant, to resist the negligible charm of a good-looking but rather short S S officer. I hurried Inge to her feet and started to draw her away. The officer held my arm. I looked at his hand and then in his face.

‘Slow down, shorty,’ I said, looming over his diminutive figure like a frigate coming alongside of a fishing boat. ‘Or I’ll decorate your lip and it won’t be with a Knight’s Cross and oak leaves.’ I pulled a crumpled five-mark note from out of a pocket and dropped it onto the tabletop.

‘I didn’t think you were the jealous type,’ she said, as I moved her towards the door.

‘Get into the lift and go straight down,’ I told her. ‘When you get outside, go to the car and wait for me. There’s a gun under the seat. Better keep it handy, just in case.’ I glanced over at the bar where the man was paying for his drink. ‘Look, I haven’t got time to explain now, but it’s got nothing to do with our dashing little friend back there.’

‘And where will you be?’ she said. I handed her my car keys.

‘I’m going out the other way. There’s a big man in a brown suit who’s trying to kill me. If you see him coming towards the car, go home and phone Kriminalinspektor Bruno Stahlecker at the Alex. Got that?’ She nodded.

For a moment I pretended to follow her, and then turned abruptly away, walking quickly through the kitchens and out of the fire door.

Three flights down I heard footsteps behind me in the almost pitch dark of the stairwell. As I scampered blindly down I wondered if I could take him; but then I wasn’t armed and he was. What was more, he was a professional. I tripped and fell, scrambling up again even as I hit the landing, reaching out for the banister and wrenching myself down another flight, ignoring the pain in my elbows and forearms, with which I had broken my fall. At the top of the last flight I saw a light underneath a door and jumped. It was further than I thought but I landed well, on all fours. I hit the bar on the door and crashed out into the alley.

There were several cars, all of them parked in a neat row, but it wasn’t difficult to spot Red Dieter’s grey Bugatti Royale. I unlocked the door and opened the glove-box. Inside there were several small paper twists of white powder and a big revolver with a long barrel, the sort that puts a window in an eight-centimetre-thick mahogany door. I didn’t have time to check whether it was loaded, but I didn’t think that Red was the sort who kept a gun because he liked playing Cowboys and Indians.

I dropped to the ground and rolled under the running-board of the car parked next to the Bugatti, a big Mercedes convertible. At that moment my pursuer came through the fire door, hugging the well-shadowed wall for cover. I lay completely still, waiting for him to step into the moonlit centre of the alley. Minutes passed, with no sound or movement in the shadows, and after a while I guessed that he had edged along the wall in the cover of the shadow, until he was far enough away from the cars to cross the alley in safety before doubling back. A heel scraped on a cobblestone behind me, and I held my breath. There was only my thumb which moved, slowly and steadily pulling back the revolver’s hammer with a scarcely audible click, and then releasing the safety. Slowly I turned and looked down the length of my body. I saw a pair of shoes standing squarely behind where I was lying, framed neatly by the two rear wheels of the car. The man’s feet took him away to my right, behind the Bugatti, and, realizing that he was on to its half-open door, I slid in the opposite direction, to my left, and out from underneath the Mercedes. Staying low, beneath the level of the car’s windows, I went to the rear and peered around its enormous trunk. A brown-suited figure crouched beside the rear tyre of the Bugatti in almost exactly the same position as me, but facing in the opposite direction. He was no more than a couple of metres away. I stepped quietly forward, bringing the big revolver up to level it at arm’s length at the back of his hat.

‘Drop it,’ I said. ‘Or I’ll put a tunnel through your goddamned head, so help me God.’ The man froze, but the gun stayed put in his hand.

‘No problem, friend,’ he said, releasing the handle of his automatic, a Mauser, so that it dangled from his forefinger by the trigger guard. Mind if I put the catch on it? This little baby’s got a hair-trigger.’ The voice was slow and cool.

‘First pull the brim of your hat down over your face,’ I said. ‘Then put the catch on like you had your hand in a bag of sand. Remember, at this range I can hardly miss. And it would be too bad to mess up Red’s nice paintwork with your brains.’ He tugged at his hat until it was well down over his eyes, and after he had seen to the Mauser’s safety catch he let the gun drop to the ground where it clattered harmlessly on the cobbles.

‘Did Red tell you I was following you?’

‘Shut up and turn around,’ I told him. ‘And keep your hands in the air.’ The brown suit turned and then dropped his head back onto his shoulders in an effort to see beyond the brim of his hat.

‘You going to kill me?’ he said.

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On whether or not you tell me who’s signing your expenses.’

‘Maybe we can make a deal.’

‘I don’t see that you’ve got much to trade,’ I said. ‘Either you talk or I fit you with an extra pair of nostrils. It’s that simple.’

He grinned. ‘You wouldn’t shoot me in cold blood,’ he said.

‘Oh, wouldn’t I?’ I poked the gun hard against his chin, and then dragged the barrel up across the flesh of his face to screw it under his cheekbone. ‘Don’t be so sure. You’ve got me in the mood to use this thing, so you’d better find your tongue now or you’ll never find it again.’

‘But if I sing, then what? Will you let me go?’

‘And have you track me down again? You must think I’m stupid.’

‘What can I do to convince you that I wouldn’t?’

I stepped away from him, and thought for a moment. ‘Swear on your mother’s life.’

‘I swear on my mother’s life,’ he said readily enough.

‘Fine. So who’s your client?’

‘You’ll let me go if I tell you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Swear on your mother’s life.’

‘I swear on my mother’s life.’

‘All right then,’ he said. ‘It was a fellow called Haupthandler.’

‘How much is he paying you?’

‘Three hundred now and—’ He didn’t finish the sentence. Stepping forward I knocked him cold with one blow of the revolver’s butt. It was a cruel blow, delivered with sufficient power to render him insensible for a long time.

‘My mother is dead,’ I said. Then I picked up his weapon and pocketing both guns I ran back to the car. Inge’s eyes widened when she saw the dirt and oil covering my suit. My best suit.

‘The lift’s not good enough for you? What did you do, jump down?’

‘Something like that.’ I felt around under the driver’s seat for the pair of handcuffs I kept next to my gun. Then I drove the seventy or so metres back to the alley.

The brown suit lay unconscious where I had dropped him. I got out of the car and dragged him over to a wall a short way up the alley, where I manacled him to some iron bars protecting a window. He groaned a little as I moved him, so I knew I hadn’t killed him. I went back to the Bugatti and returned Red’s gun to the glove-box. At the same time I helped myself to the small paper twists of white powder. I didn’t figure that Red Dieter was the type to keep cooking-salt in his glove-box, but I sniffed a pinch anyway. Just enough to recognize cocaine. There weren’t many of the twists. Not more than a hundred marks’ worth. And it looked like they were for Red’s personal use.

I locked the car and slid the keys inside the exhaust, like he’d asked. Then I walked back to the brown suit and tucked a couple of the twists into his top pocket.

‘This should interest the boys at the Alex,’ I said. Short of killing him in cold blood, I could think of no more certain way of ensuring that he wouldn’t finish the job he’d started.

Deals were for people that met you with nothing more deadly in their right hand than a shot of schnapps.