March Violets

5

There was chaos back at Alexanderplatz, where a tram had derailed. The clock in the tall, red-brick tower of St George’s was striking three o‘clock, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten anything since a bowl of Quaker Quick Flakes (‘For the Youth of the Nation’) since breakfast. I went to the Cafe Stock; it was close by Wertheim’s Department Store, and in the shadow of the S-Bahn railway viaduct.

The Café Stock was a modest little restaurant with an even more modest bar in the far corner. Such was the size of the eponymous proprietor’s bibulous belly that there was only just room for him to squeeze behind the bar; and as I came through the door it was there that I found him standing, pouring beers and polishing glasses, while his pretty little wife waited on the tables. These tables were often taken by Kripo officers from the Alex, and this had the effect of obliging Stock to play up his commitment to National Socialism. There was a large picture of the Führer on the wall, as well as a printed sign that said, ‘Always give the Hitler Salute.’

Stock wasn’t always that way, and before March 1933 he had been a bit of a Red. He knew that I knew it, and it always worried him that there were others who would remember it too. So I didn’t blame him for the picture and the sign. Everyone in Germany was somebody different before March 1933. And as I’m always saying, ‘Who isn’t a National Socialist when there’s a gun pointed at his head?’

I sat down at an empty table and surveyed the rest of the clientele. A couple of tables away were two bulls from the Queer Squad, the Department for the Suppression of Homosexuality: a bunch of what are little better than blackmailers. At a table next to them, and sitting on his own, was a young Kriminalassistent from the station at Wedersche Market, whose badly pock-marked face I remembered chiefly for his having once arrested my informer, Neumann, on suspicion of theft.

Frau Stock took my order of pig’s knuckle with sauerkraut briskly and without much in the way of pleasantry. A shrewish woman, she knew and disapproved of my paying Stock for small snippets of interesting gossip about what was going on at the Alex. With so many officers coming in and out of the place, he often heard quite a lot. She moved off to the dumb-waiter and shouted my order down the shaft to the kitchen. Stock squeezed out from behind his bar and ambled over. He had a copy of the Party newspaper, the Beobachter, in his fat hand.

‘Hallo, Bernie,’ he said. ‘Lousy weather we’re having, eh?’

‘Wet as a poodle, Max,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a beer when you’re ready.’

‘Coming right up. You want to look at the paper?’

‘Anything in it?’

‘Mr and Mrs Charles Lindbergh are in Berlin. He’s the fellow that flew across the Atlantic.’

‘It sounds fascinating, really it does. I suppose the great aviator will be opening a few bomber factories while he’s here. Maybe even take a test-flight in a shiny new fighter. Perhaps they want him to pilot one all the way to Spain.’

Stock looked nervously over his shoulder and gestured for me to lower my voice. ‘Not so loud, Bernie,’ he said, twitching like a rabbit. ‘You’ll get me shot.’ Muttering unhappily, he went off to get my beer.

I glanced at the newspaper he had left on my table. There was a small paragraph about the ‘investigation of a fire on Ferdinandstrasse, in which two people are known to have lost their lives’, which made no mention of their names, or their relation to my client, or that the police were treating it as a murder investigation. I tossed it contemptuously onto another table. There’s more real news on the back of a matchbox than there is in the Beobachter. Meanwhile, the detectives from the Queer Squad were leaving; and Stock came back with my beer. He held the glass up for my attention before placing it on the table.

‘A nice sergeant-major on it, like always,’ he said.

‘Thanks.’ I took a long drink and then wiped some of the sergeant-major off my upper lip with the back of my hand. Frau Stock collected my lunch from the dumb-waiter and brought it over. She gave her husband a look that should have burned a hole in his shirt, but he pretended not to have seen it. Then she went to clear the table that was being vacated by the pock-marked Kriminalassistant. Stock sat down and watched me eat.

After a while I said, ‘So what have you heard? Anything?’

‘A man’s body fished out of the Landwehr.’

‘That’s about as unusual as a fat railwayman,’ I told him. ‘The canal is the Gestapo’s toilet, you know that. It’s got so that if someone disappears in this goddamn city, it’s quicker to look for him at the lighterman’s office than police headquarters or the city morgue.’

‘Yes, but this one had a billiard cue—up his nose. It penetrated the bottom of his brain they reckoned.’

I put down my knife and fork. ‘Would you mind laying off the gory details until I’ve finished my food?’ I said.

‘Sorry,’ said Stock. ‘Well, that’s all there is really. But they don’t normally do that sort of thing, do they, the Gestapo?’

‘There’s no telling what is considered normal on Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Perhaps he’d been sticking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted. They might have wanted to do something poetic.’ I wiped my mouth and laid some change on the table which Stock collected up without bothering to count it.

‘Funny to think that it used to be the Art School—Gestapo headquarters, I mean.’

‘Hilarious. I bet the poor bastards they work over up there go to sleep as happy as little snowmen at the notion.’ I stood up and went to the door. ‘Nice about the Lindberghs though.’

I walked back to the office. Frau Protze was polishing the glass on the yellowing print of Tilly that hung on the wall of my waiting room, contemplating with some amusement the predicament of the hapless Burgomeister of Rothenburg. As I came through the door the phone started to ring. Frau Protze smiled at me and then stepped smartly into her little cubicle to answer it, leaving me to look afresh at the clean picture. It was a long time since I’d really looked at it. The Burgomeister, having pleaded with Tilly, the sixteenth-century commander of the Imperial German Army, for his town to be spared destruction, was required by his conqueror to drink six litres of beer without drawing breath. As I remembered the story, the Burgomeister had pulled off this prodigious feat of bibbing and the town had been saved. It was, as I had always thought, so characteristically German. And just the sort of sadistic trick some S A thug would play. Nothing really changes that much.

‘It’s a lady,’ Frau Protze called to me. ‘She won’t give her name, but she insists on speaking to you.’

‘Then put her through,’ I said, stepping into my office. I picked up the candlestick and the earpiece.

‘We met last night,’ said the voice. I cursed, thinking it was Carola, the girl from Dagmarr’s wedding reception. I wanted to forget all about that little episode. But it wasn’t Carola. ‘Or perhaps I should say this morning. It was pretty late. You were on your way out and I was just coming back after a party. Do you remember?’

‘Frau—’ I hesitated, still not quite able to believe it.

‘Please,’ she said, ‘less of the Frau. Ilse Rudel, if you don’t mind, Herr Gunther.’

‘I don’t mind at all,’ I said. ‘How could I not remember?’

‘You might,’ she said. ‘You looked very tired.’ Her voice was as sweet as a plate of Kaiser’s pancakes. ‘Hermann and I, we often forget that other people don’t keep such late hours.’

‘If you’ll permit me to say so, you looked pretty good on it.’

‘Well, thank you,’ she cooed, sounding genuinely flattered. In my experience you can never flatter any woman too much, just as you can never give a dog too many biscuits.

‘And how can I be of service?’

‘I’d like to speak to you on a matter of some urgency,’ she said. ‘All the same, I’d rather not talk about it on the telephone.’

‘Come and see me here, in my office?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t. I’m at the studios in Babelsberg right now. Perhaps you would care to come to my apartment this evening?’

‘Your apartment?’ I said. ‘Well, yes, I’d be delighted. Where is it?’

‘Badenschestrasse, Number 7. Shall we say nine o’clock?’

‘That would be fine.’ She hung up. I lit a cigarette and smoked it absently. She was probably working on a film, I thought, and imagined her telephoning me from her dressing room wearing only a robe, having just finished a scene in which she’d been required to swim naked in a mountain lake. That took me quite a few minutes. I’ve got a good imagination. Then I got to wondering if Six knew about the apartment. I decided he did. You don’t get to be as rich as Six was without knowing your wife had her own place. She probably kept it on in order to retain a degree of independence. I guessed that there wasn’t much she couldn’t have had if she really put her mind to it. Putting her body to it as well probably got her the moon and a couple of galaxies on top. All the same, I didn’t think it was likely that Six knew or would have approved of her seeing me. Not after what he had said about me not poking into his family affairs. Whatever it was she wanted to talk to me urgently about was certainly not for the gnome’s ears.

I called Müller, the crime reporter on the Berliner Morgenpost, which was the only half-decent rag left on the news-stand. Müller was a good reporter gone to seed. There wasn’t much call for the old style of crime-reporting; the Ministry of Propaganda had seen to that.

‘Look,’ I said after the preliminaries, ‘I need some biographical information from your library files, as much as you can get and as soon as possible, on Hermann Six.’

‘The steel millionaire? Working on his daughter’s death, eh, Bernie?’

‘I’ve been retained by the insurance company to investigate the fire.’

‘What have you got so far?’

‘You could write what I know on a tram ticket.’

‘Well,’ said Müller, ‘that’s about the size of the piece we’ve got on it for tomorrow’s edition. The Ministry has told us to lay off it. Just to record the facts, and keep it small.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Six has got some powerful friends, Bernie. His sort of money buys an awful lot of silence.’

‘Were you onto anything?’

‘I heard it was arson, that’s about all. When do you need this stuff?’

‘Fifty says tomorrow. And anything you can dig up on the rest of the family.’

‘I can always use a little extra money. Be talking to you.’

I hung up and shoved some papers inside some old newspapers and then dumped them in one of the desk drawers that still had a bit of space. After that I doodled on the blotter and then picked up one of the several paperweights that were lying on the desk. I was rolling its cold bulk around my hands when there was a knock at the door. Frau Protze edged into the room.

‘I wondered if there was any filing that needed to be done.’ I pointed at the untidy stacks of files that lay on the floor behind my desk.

‘That’s my filing system there,’ I said. ‘Believe it or not, they are in some sort of order.’ She smiled, humouring me no doubt, and nodded attentively as if I was explaining something that would change her life.

‘And are they all work in progress?’

I laughed. ‘This isn’t a lawyer’s office,’ I said. ‘With quite a few of them, I don’t know whether they are in progress or not. Investigation isn’t a fast business with quick results. You have to have a lot of patience.’

‘Yes, I can see that,’ she said. There was only one photograph on my desk. She turned it round to get a better look at it. ‘She’s very beautiful. Your wife?’

‘She was. Died on the day of the Kapp Putsch.’ I must have made that remark a hundred times. Allying her death to another event like that, well, it plays down how much I still miss her, even after sixteen years. Never successfully however. ‘It was Spanish influenza,’ I explained. ‘We were together for only ten months.’ Frau Protze nodded sympathetically.

We were both silent for a moment. Then I looked at my watch.

‘You can go home if you like,’ I told her.

When she had gone I stood at my high window a long time and watched the wet streets below, glistening like patent leather in the late afternoon sunlight. The rain had stopped and it looked as though it would be a fine evening. Already the office workers were making their ways home, streaming out of Berolina Haus opposite, and down into the labyrinth of underground tunnels and walkways that led to the Alexanderplatz U-Bahn station.

Berlin. I used to love this old city. But that was before it had caught sight of its own reflection and taken to wearing corsets laced so tight that it could hardly breathe. I loved the easy, carefree philosophies, the cheap jazz, the vulgar cabarets and all of the other cultural excesses that characterized the Weimar years and made Berlin seem like one of the most exciting cities in the world.

Behind my office, to the south-east, was Police Headquarters, and I imagined all the good hard work that was being done there to crack down on Berlin’s crime. Villainies like speaking disrespectfully of the Führer, displaying a ‘Sold Out’ sign in your butcher’s shop window, not giving the Hitler Salute, and homosexuality. That was Berlin under the National Socialist Government: a big, haunted house with dark corners, gloomy staircases, sinister cellars, locked rooms and a whole attic full of poltergeists on the loose, throwing books, banging doors, breaking glass, shouting in the night and generally scaring the owners so badly that there were times when they were ready to sell up and get out. But most of the time they just stopped up their ears, covered their blackened eyes and tried to pretend that there was nothing wrong. Cowed with fear, they spoke very little, ignoring the carpet moving underneath their feet, and their laughter was the thin, nervous kind that always accompanies the boss’s little joke.

Policing, like autobahn construction and informing, is one of the new Germany’s growth industries; and so the Alex is always busy. Even though it was past closing time for most of the departments that had dealings with the public, there were still a great many people milling about the various entrances to the building when I got there. Entrance Four, for the Passport Office, was especially busy. Berliners, many of them Jewish, who had queued all day for an exit visa, were even now emerging from this part of the Alex, their faces happy or sad according to the success of their enterprise.

I walked on down Alexanderstrasse and passed Entrance Three, in front of which a couple of traffic police, nicknamed ‘white mice’ because of their distinctive short white coats, were climbing off their powder-blue BMW motorcycles. A Green Minna, a police-van, came racing down the street, Martin-horn blaring, in the direction of Jannowitz Bridge. Oblivious to the noise, the two white mice swaggered in through Entrance Three to make their reports.

I went in by Entrance Two, knowing the place well enough to have chosen the entrance where I was least likely to be challenged by someone. If I was stopped, I was on my way to Room 32a, the Lost Property Office. But Entrance Two also serves the police morgue.

I walked nonchalantly along a corridor and down into the basement, past a small canteen to a fire exit. I pushed the bar on the door down and found myself in a large cobbled courtyard where several police cars were parked. One of these was being washed by a man wearing gumboots who paid me no attention as I crossed the yard and ducked into another doorway. This led to the boiler room, and I stopped there for a moment while I made a mental check of my bearings. I hadn’t worked at the Alex for ten years not to know my way around. My only concern was that I might meet someone who knew me. I opened the only other door that led out of the boiler room and ascended a short staircase into a corridor, at the end of which was the morgue.

When I entered the morgue’s outer office I encountered a sour smell that was reminiscent of warm, wet poultry flesh. It mixed with the formaldehyde to make a sickly cocktail that I felt in my stomach at the same time as I drew it into my nostrils. The office, barely furnished with a couple of chairs and a table, contained nothing to warn the unwary of what lay beyond the two glass doors, except the smell and a sign which simply read ‘Morgue: Entrance Forbidden’. I opened the doors a crack and looked inside.

In the centre of a grim, damp room was an operating-table that was also part trough. On opposite sides of a stained ceramic gulley were two marble slabs, set slightly at an angle so that fluids from a corpse could drain into the centre and be washed down a drain by water from one of the two tall murmuring taps that were situated at each end. The table was big enough for two corpses laid head-to-toe, one on each side of the drain; but there was only one cadaver, that of a male, which lay under the knife and the surgical saw. These were wielded by a bent, slight man with thin dark hair, a high forehead, glasses, a long hooked nose, a neat moustache and a small chin-beard. He was wearing gumboots, a heavy apron, rubber gloves and a stiff collar and a tie.

I stepped quietly through the doors, and contemplated the corpse with professional curiosity. Moving closer I tried to see what had caused the man’s death. It was clear that the body had been lying in water, since the skin was sodden and peeling away on the hands and feet, like gloves and socks. Otherwise it was in largely reasonable condition, with the exception of the head. This was black in colour and completely featureless, like a muddy football, and the top part of the cranium had been sawn away and the brain removed. Like a wet Gordian knot, it now lay in a kidney-shaped dish awaiting dissection.

Confronted with violent death in all its ghastly hues, contorted attitudes and porcine fleshiness, I had no more reaction than if I had been looking in the window of my local ‘German’ butcher’s shop, except that this one had more meat on display. Sometimes I was surprised at the totality of my own indifference to the sight of the stabbed, the drowned, the crushed, the shot, the burnt and the bludgeoned, although I knew well how that insensitivity had come about. Seeing so much death on the Turkish front and in my service with Kripo, I had almost ceased to regard a corpse as being in any way human. This acquaintance with death had persisted since my becoming a private investigator, when the trail of a missing person so often led to the morgue at St Gertrauden, Berlin’s largest hospital, or to a salvage-man’s hut near a levee on the Landwehr Canal.

I stood there for several minutes, staring at the gruesome scene in front of me, and puzzled as to what had produced the condition of the head and the differing one of the body, before eventually Dr Illmann glanced round and saw me.

‘Good God,’ he growled. ‘Bernhard Gunther. Are you still alive?’ I approached the table, and blew a breath of disgust.

‘Christ,’ I said. ‘The last time I came across body odour this bad, a horse was sitting on my face.’

‘He’s quite a picture, isn’t he?’

‘You’re telling me. What was he doing, frenching a polar bear? Or maybe Hitler kissed him.’

‘Unusual, isn’t it? Almost as if the head were burned.’

‘Acid?’

‘Yes.’ Illmann sounded pleased, like I was a clever pupil. ‘Very good. It’s difficult to say what kind, but most probably hydrochloric or sulphuric.’

‘Like someone didn’t want you to know who he was.’

‘Precisely so. Mind you, it doesn’t disguise the cause of death. He had a broken billiard cue forced up one of his nostrils. It pierced the brain, killing him instantly. Not a very common way of killing a man; indeed, in my experience it is unique. However, one learns not to be surprised at the various ways in which murderers choose to kill their victims. But I’m sure you’re not surprised. You always did have a good imagination for a bull, Bernie. To say nothing of your nerve. You know, you’ve got a hell of a nerve just walking in here like this. It’s only my sentimental nature that stops me from having you thrown out on your ear.’

‘I need to talk to you about the Pfarr case. You did the PM, didn’t you?’

‘You’re well informed,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact the family reclaimed the bodies this morning.’

‘And your report?’

‘Look, I can’t talk here. I’ll be through with our friend on the slab in a while. Give me an hour.’

‘Where?’

‘How about the Künstler Eck, on Alt Kölln. It’s quiet there and we won’t be disturbed.’

‘The Künstler Eck,’ I repeated. ‘I’ll find it.’ I turned back towards the glass doors.

‘Oh, and Bernie. Make sure you bring a little something for my expenses?’

The independent township of Alt Kölln, long since absorbed by the capital, is a small island on the River Spree. Largely given up to museums, it has thus earned itself the sobriquet ‘Museum Island’. But I have to confess that I have never seen the inside of one of them. I’m not much interested in The Past and, if you ask me, it is this country’s obsession with its history that has partly put us where we are now: in the shit. You can’t go into a bar without some arsehole going on about our pre-1918 borders, or harking back to Bismarck and when we kicked the stuffing out of the French. These are old sores, and to my mind it doesn’t do any good to keep picking at them.

From the outside, there was nothing about the place that would have attracted the passer-by to drop in for a casual drink: not the door’s scruffy paintwork, nor the dried-up flowers in the windowbox; and certainly not the poorly handwritten sign in the dirty window which read: ‘Tonight’s speech can be heard here.’ I cursed, for this meant that Joey the Cripp was addressing a Party rally that evening, and as a result there would be the usual traffic chaos. I went down the steps and opened the door.

There was even less about the inside of the Künstler Eck that would have persuaded the casual drinker to stay awhile. The walls were covered with gloomy wood carvings—tiny models of cannons, death’s heads, coffins and skeletons. Against the far wall was a large pump-organ painted to look like a graveyard, with crypts and graves yielding up their dead, at which a hunchback was playing a piece by Haydn. This was as much for his own benefit as anyone else’s, since a group of storm-troopers were singing ‘My Prussia Stands So Proud and Great’ with sufficient gusto as to almost completely drown the hunchback’s playing. I’ve seen some odd things in Berlin in my time, but this was like something from a Conrad Veidt film, and not a very good one at that. I expected the one-armed police-captain to come in at any moment.

Instead I found Illmann sitting alone in a corner, nursing a bottle of Engelhardt. I ordered two more of the same and sat down as the storm-troopers finished their song and the hunchback commenced a massacre of one of my favourite Schubert sonatas.

‘This is a hell of a place to choose,’ I said grimly.

‘I’m afraid that I find it curiously quaint.’

‘Just the place to meet your friendly neighbourhood body-snatcher. Don’t you see enough of death during the day that you have to come to drink in a charnel-house like this?’

He shrugged unabashedly. ‘It is only with death around me that I am constantly reminded that I am alive.’

‘There’s a lot to be said for necrophilia.’ Illmann smiled, as if agreeing with me.

‘So you want to know about the poor Hauptsturmführer and his little wife, eh?’ I nodded. ‘This is an interesting case, and, I don’t mind telling you, the interesting ones are becoming increasingly rare. With all the people who wind up dead in this city you would think I was busy. But of course, there is usually little or no mystery about how most of them got that way. Half the time I find myself presenting the forensic evidence of a homicide to the very people who committed it. It’s an upside down world that we live in.’ He opened his briefcase and took out a blue ring-file. ‘I brought the photographs. I thought you would want to see the happy couple. I’m afraid they’re a pair of real stokers. I was only able to make the identification from their wedding rings, his and hers.’

I flicked through the file. The camera angles changed but the subject remained the same: two gun-metal grey corpses, bald like Egyptian pharaohs, lay on the exposed and blackened springs of what had once been a bed, like sausages left too long under the grill.

‘Nice album. What were they doing, having a punch-up?’ I said, noticing the way in which each corpse had its fists raised like a bare-knuckle fighter.

‘A common enough observation in a death like this.’

‘What about those cuts in the skin? They look like knife wounds.’

‘Again, what one would expect,’ said Illmann. ‘The heat in a conflagration causes the skin to split open like a ripe banana. That is, if you can remember what a banana looks like.’

‘Where did you find the petrol cans?’

He raised his eyebrows quizzically. ‘Oh, you know about those, do you? Yes, we found two empty cans in the garden. I don’t think they’d been there very long. They weren’t rusted and there was still a small amount of petrol which remained unevaporated in the bottom of one of them. And according to the fire officer there was a strong smell of petrol about the place.’

‘Arson, then.’

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘So what made you look for bullets?’

‘Experience. With a post-mortem following a fire, one always keeps in mind the possibility that there has been an attempt to destroy evidence. It’s standard procedure. I found three bullets in the female, two in the male and three in the headboard of the bed. The female was dead before the fire started. She was hit in the head and the throat. Not so the male. There were smoke particles in the air passages and carbon monoxide in the blood. The tissues were still pink. He was hit in the chest and in the face.’

‘Has the gun been found yet?’ I asked.

‘No, but I can tell you that it was most probably a 7.65 mm automatic, and something quite hard on its ammunition, like an old Mauser.’

‘And they were shot from what sort of distance?’

‘I should say the murderer was about 150 cm from the victims when firing the weapon. The entry and exit wounds were consistent with the murderer having stood at the bottom of the bed; and, of course, there are the bullets in the headboard.’

‘Just the one weapon, you think?’ Illmann nodded. ‘Eight bullets,’ I said. ‘That’s a whole magazine for a pocket pistol, isn’t it. Somebody was making very sure. Or else they were very angry. Christ, didn’t the neighbours hear anything?’

‘Apparently not. If they did, they probably thought it was just the Gestapo having a little party. The fire wasn’t reported until 3.10 a.m., by which time there was no chance of bringing it under control.’

The hunchback abandoned his organ recital as the storm-troopers launched into a rendition of ‘Germany, Thou Art Our Pride’. One of them, a big burly fellow with a scar on his face the length and consistency of a piece of bacon-rind walked round the bar, waving his beer and demanding that the rest of the Kunstler Eck’s customers join in the singing. Illmann did not seem to mind and sang in a loud baritone. My own singing showed a considerable want of key and alacrity. Loud songs do not a patriot make. The trouble with these fucking National Socialists, especially the young ones, is that they think they have got a monopoly on patriotism. And even if they don’t have one now, the way things are going, they soon will.

When the song was over, I asked Illmann some more questions.

‘They were both naked,’ he told me, ‘and had drunk a good deal. She had consumed several Ohio Cocktails, and he’d had a large amount of beer and schnapps. More than likely they were quite drunk when they were shot. Also, I took a high vaginal swab in the female and found recent semen, which was of the same blood type as the male. I think they’d had quite an evening. Oh yes, she was eight weeks pregnant. Ah, life’s little candle burns but briefly.’

‘Pregnant.’ I repeated the word thoughtfully. Illmann stretched and yawned.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Want to know what they had for dinner?’

‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘Tell me about the safe instead. Was it open or shut?’

‘Open.’ He paused. ‘You know, it’s interesting, you didn’t ask me how it was opened. Which leads me to suppose that you already knew that beyond a bit of scorching, the safe was undamaged; that if the safe was opened illegally, then it was done by someone who knew what he was doing. A Stockinger safe is no pushover.’

‘Any piano players on it?’ Illmann shook his head.

‘It was too badly scorched to take any prints,’ he said.

‘Let us assume,’ I said, ‘that immediately prior to the deaths of the Pfarrs, the safe contained—what it contained, and that it was, as it should have been, locked up for the night.’

‘Very well.’

‘Then there are two possibilities: one is that a professional nutcracker did the job and then killed them; and the other is that someone forced them to open it and then ordered them back to bed where he shot them. Still, it’s not like a pro to have left the safe door open.’

‘Unless he was trying hard to look like an amateur,’ said Illmann. ‘My own opinion is that they were both asleep when they were shot. Certainly from the angle of bullet entry I would say that both of them were lying down. Now if you were conscious, and someone had a gun on you, it’s more than likely you would be sitting up in bed. And so I would conclude that your intimidation theory is unlikely.’ He looked at his watch and finished his beer. Patting my leg, he added warmly, ‘It’s been good, Bernie. Just like the old days. How pleasant to talk to someone whose idea of detective work does not involve a spotlight and a set of brass knuckles. Still. I won’t have to put up with the Alex for much longer. Our illustrious Reichskriminaldirektor, Arthur Nebe, is retiring me, just as he’s retired the other old conservatives before me.’

‘I didn’t know you were interested in politics,’ I said.

‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘But isn’t that how Hitler got elected in the first place: too many people who didn’t give a shit who was running the country? The funny thing is that I care even less now than I did before. Catch me joining those March Violets on the bandwagon. But I won’t be sorry to leave. I’m tired of all the squabbling that goes on between Sipo and Orpo as to who controls Kripo. It gets very confusing when it comes to filing a report, not knowing whether or not one should be involving our uniformed friends in Orpo.’

‘I thought Sipo and the Gestapo were in the Kripo driving seat.’

‘At the higher levels of command that is the case,’ Illmann confirmed. ‘But at the middle and lower levels the old administrative chains of command still operate. At the municipal level, local police presidents, who are part of Orpo, are also responsible for Kripo. But the word is that Orpo’s head is giving undercover encouragement to any police president who is prepared to frustrate the thumbscrew boys in Sipo. In Berlin, that suits our own police president. He and the Reichskriminaldirektor, Arthur Nebe, hate each other’s guts. Ludicrous, isn’t it? And now, if you don’t mind, I really must be going.’

‘What a way to run a fucking bullring,’ I said.

‘Believe me, Bernie, you’re well out of it.’ He grinned happily. ‘And it can get a lot worse yet.’

Illmann’s information cost me a hundred marks. I’ve never found that information comes cheap, but lately the cost of private investigation does seem to be going up. It’s not difficult to see why. Everyone is making some sort of a twist these days. Corruption in one form or another is the most distinctive feature of life under National Socialism. The government has made several revelations about the corruption of the various Weimar political parties, but these were as nothing compared to the corruption that exists now. It flourishes at the top, and everyone knows it. So most people figure that they are due a share themselves. I don’t know of anyone who is as fastidious about such things as they used to be. And that includes me. The plain truth of it is that people’s sensitivity to corruption, whether it’s black-market food or obtaining favours from a government official, is about as blunt as a joiner’s pencil stub.