Metropolis

Part One: Women

FIVE DAYS AFTER the federal general election, Bernhard Weiss, Berlin’s chief of the Criminal Police, summoned me to a meeting in his sixth-floor office at the Alex. Wreathed in the smoke from one of his favorite Black Wisdom cigars and seated at the conference table alongside Ernst Gennat, one of his best homicide detectives, he invited me to sit down. Weiss was forty-eight years old and a Berliner, small, slim, and dapper, academic even, with round glasses and a neat, well-trimmed mustache. He was also a lawyer and a Jew, which made him unpopular with many of our colleagues, and he’d overcome a great deal of prejudice to get where he was: in peacetime, Jews had been forbidden to become officers in the Prussian Army; but when war broke out, Weiss applied to join the Royal Bavarian Army, where he quickly rose to the rank of captain and won an Iron Cross. After the war, at the request of the Ministry of the Interior, he’d reformed the Berlin police and made it one of the most modern forces in Europe. Still, it had to be said, he made an unlikely-looking policeman; he always reminded me a little of Toulouse-Lautrec.

There was a file open in front of him and from the look of it, the subject was me.

“You’ve been doing a good job in Vice,” he said in his plummy, almost thespian voice. “Although I fear you’re fighting a losing battle against prostitution in this city. All these war widows and Russian refugees make a living as best they can. I keep telling our leaders that if we did more to support equal pay for women we could solve the problem of prostitution in Berlin overnight.

“But that’s not why you’re here. I expect you’ve heard: Heinrich Lindner has left the force to become an air traffic controller at Tempelhof, which leaves a spare seat in the murder wagon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know why he left?”

I did know, but hardly wanting to say, I found myself pulling a face.

“You can say. I shan’t be in the least offended.”

“I’d heard it said he didn’t like taking orders from a Jew, sir.”

“That’s correct, Gunther. He didn’t like taking orders from a Jew.” Weiss drew on his cigar. “What about you? Do you have any problems taking orders from a Jew?”

“No, sir.”

“Or in taking orders from anyone else, for that matter.”

“No, sir. I have no problem with authority.”

“I’m delighted to hear it. Because we’re thinking of offering you a permanent seat in the wagon. Lindner’s seat.”

“Me, sir?”

“You sound surprised.”

“Only that it’s the splash around the Alex that Inspector Reichenbach was going to get the seat.”

“Not unless you turn it down. And even then I have my doubts about that man. Of course, people will say I don’t dare offer the seat to another Jew. But that’s not it at all. In our opinion you’ve the makings of a fine detective, Gunther. You are diligent and you know when to keep your mouth shut; that’s good in a detective. Very good. Kurt Reichenbach is a good detective, too, but he’s rather free with his fists. When he was still in uniform, some of his brother police officers nicknamed him Siegfried, on account of the fact that he was much too fond of wielding his sword. Of hitting some of our customers with the handle or the flat of the blade. I don’t mind what an officer does in the name of self-defense. But I won’t have a police officer cracking heads open for the pleasure of it. No matter whose head it is.”

“And he hasn’t stopped for the lack of a sword,” said Gennat. “More recently there was a rumor he beat up an SA man he’d arrested in Lichtenrade, a Nazi who’d stabbed a communist. Nothing was proven. He might be popular around the Alex—even some of the anti-Semites seem to like him—but he’s got a temper.”

“Precisely. I’m not saying he’s a bad policeman. Just that we think we prefer you to him.” Weiss looked down at the page in my file. “I see you made your Abitur. But no university.”

“The war. I volunteered.”

“Of course.”

“So then. You want the seat? It’s yours if you do.”

“Yes, sir. Very much.”

“You’ve been attached to the Murder Commission before, of course. So you’ve already worked a murder, haven’t you? Last year. In Schöneberg, wasn’t it? As you know, I like all my detectives to have had the experience of working a homicide alongside a top man like Gennat here.”

“Which makes me wonder why you think I’m worth the permanent seat,” I said. “That case—the Frieda Ahrendt case—has gone cold.”

“Most cases go cold for a while,” said Gennat. “And it’s not just cases that go cold, it’s detectives, too. Especially in this city. Never forget that. It’s just the nature of the job. New thinking is the key to solving cold cases. As a matter of fact, I’ve got some other cases you can check out if you ever get such a thing as a quiet moment. Cold cases are what can make a detective’s reputation.”

“Frieda Ahrendt,” said Weiss. “Remind me of that one.”

“A dog found some body parts wrapped in brown paper and buried in the Grünewald,” I said. “And it was Hans Schnieckert and the boys in Division J who first identified her. On account of the fact that the killer was thoughtful enough to leave us her hands. The dead girl’s fingerprints revealed she had a record for petty theft. You would think that might have opened a lot of doors. But we’ve found no family, no job, not even a last-known address. And because a newspaper was foolish enough to put up a substantial reward for information, we wasted a lot of time interviewing members of the public who were more interested in making a thousand reichsmarks than in helping the police. At least four women told us their husbands were the culprit. One of them even suggested her husband was originally going to cook the body parts. Thus the newspaper epithet: the Grünewald Pork Butcher.”

“That’s one way to get rid of your old man,” said Gennat. “Put him up for a murder. Cheaper than getting a divorce.”

After Bernhard Weiss, Ernst Gennat was the most senior detective in the Alex; he was also the largest, nicknamed the Big Buddha; it was a tight fit in the station wagon with Gennat on board. Weiss himself had designed the murder wagon. It was equipped with a radio, a small fold-down desk with a typewriter, a medical kit, lots of photographic equipment, and almost everything needed to investigate a homicide except a prayer book and a crystal ball. Gennat had a mordant Berlin wit, the result, he said, of having been born and brought up in the staff quarters at Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison, where his father had been the assistant governor. It was even rumored that on execution days Gennat had breakfasted with the headsman. Early in my days at the Alex, I’d decided to study the man and make him my model.

The telephone rang and Weiss answered it.

“You’re SPD, right, Gunther?” Gennat asked.

“That’s right.”

“Because we don’t need any politics in the wagon. Communists, Nazism, I get enough of that at home. And you’re single, right?”

I nodded.

“Good. Because this job ruins a marriage. You might look at me and think, not unreasonably, that I’m very popular with the ladies. But only until I get a case that keeps me here at the Alex day and night. I’ll need to find a nice lady copper if ever I’m going to get married. So where do you live?”

“I rent a room in a boardinghouse on Nollendorfplatz.”

“This job means a bit more money and a promotion and maybe a better room. In that order. And you’ll be on probation for a month or two. Does this house you live in have a telephone?”

“Yes.”

“Use drugs?”

“No.”

“Ever try them?”

“Bit of cocaine once. To see what all the fuss was about. Not for me. Besides, I couldn’t afford it.”

“No harm in that, I suppose,” said Gennat. “There’s still a lot of pain relief this country needs after the war.”

“A lot of people aren’t taking it for pain relief,” I said. “Which sometimes leaves them with a very different kind of crisis.”

“There are some people who think the Berlin police are in crisis,” said Gennat. “Who think the whole city is in crisis. What do you think, lad?”

“The larger the city, the more crises there are likely to be. I think we’re always going to be facing a crisis of one kind or another. Might as well get used to that. It’s indecision that’s more likely to cause us crises. Governments that can’t get anything done. With no clear majority, I’m not sure this new one will be any different. Right now our biggest problem looks like democracy itself. What use is it when it can’t deliver a viable government? It’s the paradox of our times and sometimes I worry that we will get tired of it before it can sort itself out.”

He nodded, seeming to agree with me, and moved on to another issue.

“Some politicians don’t think much of our clear-up rate. What do you say to that, lad?”

“They should come and meet some of our clients. Maybe if the dead were a bit more talkative they’d have a fair point.”

“It’s our job to hear them all the same,” said Gennat. He shifted his enormous bulk for a moment and then stood up. It was like watching a zeppelin get airborne. The floor creaked as he walked to the corner turret window. “If you listen closely enough you can still hear them whisper. Like these Winnetou murders. I figure his victims are talking to us, but we just haven’t understood what language they’re speaking.” He pointed out the window at the metropolis. “But someone does. Someone down there, perhaps coming out of Hermann Tietz. Maybe Winnetou himself.”

Weiss finished his telephone call and Gennat came back to the meeting table, where he lit his own pungent cigar. By now there was quite a cloudscape drifting across the table. It reminded me of gas drifting across no-man’s-land.

I was too nervous to light a cigarette myself. Too nervous and too respectful of my seniors; I was still in awe of them and amazed that they wanted me to be part of their team.

“That was the ViPoPra,” said Weiss.

The ViPoPra was the police president of Berlin, Karl Zörgiebel.

“It seems that the Wolfmium light-bulb factory in Stralau just blew up. First reports say there are many dead. Perhaps as many as thirty. He’ll keep us posted.

“I would remind you that we are agreed not to use the name Winnetou when we’re referring to our scalping murderer. I think it does those poor dead girls a grave disservice to use these sensationalized names. Let’s stick to the file name, shall we, Ernst? Silesian Station. Better for security that way.”

“Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again.”

“So welcome to the Murder Commission, Gunther. The rest of your life just changed forever. You’ll never look at people in the same way again. From now on, whenever you stand next to a man at a bus stop or on a train, you’ll be sizing him up as a potential killer. And you’d be right to do so. Statistics show that most murders in Berlin are committed by ordinary, law-abiding citizens. In short, people like you and me. Isn’t that right, Ernst?”

“Yes, sir. It’s rare I ever meet a murderer who looks like one.”

“You’ll see things every bit as bad as the things you saw in the trenches,” he added. “Except that some of the victims will be women and children. But we have to be hard. And you’ll find we tend to make jokes most people wouldn’t find funny.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you know about these Silesian Station killings, Gunther?”

“Three local prostitutes murdered in as many weeks. Always at night. The first one near Silesian Station. All of them hit over the head with a ball-peen hammer and then scalped with a very sharp knife. As if by the eponymous Red Indian from Karl May’s famous novels.”

“Which you’ve read, I trust.”

“Show me a German who hasn’t and I’ll show you a man who can’t read.”

“Enjoy them?”

“Well, it’s been a few years—but yes.”

“Good. I couldn’t like a man who didn’t like a good western by Karl May. What else do you know? About the murders, I mean.”

“Not much.” I shook my head. “Chances are the killer didn’t know the victims, which makes him hard to catch. It may be the instinct of the moment that drives his actions.”

“Yes, yes,” said Weiss, as if he’d heard all this before.

“The killings do seem to be having an effect on the number of girls on the streets,” I said. “There are fewer prostitutes about than there used to be. The ones I’ve spoken to tell me they’re scared to work.”

“Anything else?”

“Well—”

Weiss shot me a quizzical look. “Spit it out, man. Whatever it is. I expect all my detectives to speak frankly.”

“Just that the working girls have another name for these women. Because they were scalped. When the last woman was murdered I started hearing her described as another Pixavon Queen.” I paused. “Like the shampoo, sir.”

“Yes, I have heard of Pixavon shampoo. As the ads would have it, a shampoo used by ‘good wives and mothers.’ A bit of street corner irony. Anything else?”

“Nothing really. Only what’s in the newspapers. My landlady, Frau Weitendorf, has been following the case quite closely. As you might expect, given how lurid the facts are. She loves a good murder. We’re all obliged to listen to her while she brings us our breakfast. Hardly the most appetizing of subjects, but there it is.”

“I’m interested: What does she have to say about it?”

I paused, picturing Frau Weitendorf in her usual vocal flow, full of an almost righteous indignation and hardly seeming to care if any of her lodgers were paying attention. Large, with ill-fitting dentures, and two bulldogs that stayed close to her heels, she was one of those women who liked to talk, with or without an audience. The long-sleeved quilted peignoir she wore at breakfast made her look like a grubby Chinese emperor, an effect that was enhanced by her double chins.

Besides Weitendorf, there were four of us in the house: an Englishman called Robert Rankin who claimed to be a writer; a Bavarian Jew by the name of Fischer who said he was a traveling salesman, but was probably a crook of some kind; and a young woman named Rosa Braun who played the saxophone in a dance band but was almost certainly a half-silk. Including Frau Weitendorf, we were an unlikely quintet, but perhaps a perfect cross section of modern Berlin.

“As for Frau Weitendorf, she would say something like this: For these girls who get their throats cut, it’s an occupational hazard. When you think about it, they were asking for it, really. And isn’t life cheap enough without risking it unnecessarily? It wasn’t always like that. This used to be a respectable city, before the war. Human life stopped having much value after 1914. That was bad enough, but then inflation came along in 1923 and made our money worthless. Life doesn’t matter so very much when you’ve lost everything. Besides, anyone can see this city has grown too big. Four million people living cheek by jowl. It isn’t natural. Living like animals, some of them. Especially east of Alexanderplatz. So why should we be surprised if they behave like animals? There are no standards of decency. And with so many Poles and Jews and Russians living here since the Bolshevik revolution, is it any wonder these young women go and get themselves killed? Mark my words, it will turn out to be one of them who killed these women. A Jew. Or a Russian. Or a Jewish Russian. You ask me, the tsar and the Bolsheviks chased these people out of Russia for a reason. But the real reason these girls get killed is this: The men who returned from the trenches came back with a real taste for killing people that needs to be satisfied. Like vampires who need blood to survive, these men need to kill someone, anyone. Show me a man who was a solider in the trenches who says he hasn’t wanted to kill someone since he came home and I’ll show you a liar. It’s like the jazz music that those Negroes play in the nightclubs. Gets their blood up, if you ask me.”

“She sounds positively awful,” said Weiss. “I’m surprised you stay in for breakfast.”

“It’s included in the room price, sir.”

“I see. Now tell me what this awful bitch says about why the killer scalps these women.”

“Because he hates women. She reckons that during the war it was the women who stabbed the men in the back by taking their jobs for half the money, so when the men came back, all they found were jobs paying joke wages or, more likely, no jobs at all because the women were still doing them. That’s why he kills them and why he scalps them, too. Pure hate.”

“And what do you think? About why this maniac scalps his victims.”

“I think I’d want to know more of the facts before I speculate, sir.”

“Humor me. But I can tell you this much: None of the scalps have been recovered. Therefore we have to conclude he keeps them. He doesn’t seem to favor any particular hair color. We might easily conclude he kills in order to claim the scalp. Which begs the question: Why? What’s in it for him? Why would a man scalp a prostitute?”

“Could be a weird sexual pervert who wants to be a woman,” I said. “There are lots of transvestites in Berlin. Maybe we’ve got a man who wants the hair to make a wig.” I shook my head. “I know, it sounds ridiculous.”

“No more ridiculous than Fritz Haarmann cooking and eating the internal organs of his victims,” said Gennat. “Or Erich Kreuzberg masturbating onto the graves of the women he’d murdered. That’s how we caught him.”

“When you put it like that, no, I suppose it isn’t.”

“We have our own theories why this man scalps his victims,” said Weiss. “Or at least Dr. Hirschfeld does. He’s been advising us on this case. But I’d still welcome your ideas. Anything. No matter how outlandish.”

“Then it comes back to simple misogyny, sir. Or simple sadism. A wish to degrade and humiliate as well as to destroy. Humiliation is easy enough to inflict on a murder victim in Berlin. I’ve always believed it’s unspeakable that this city continues the practice of allowing the general public to come and inspect the corpses of murder victims at the city morgue. For anyone who wishes to ensure his victims are humiliated and degraded, you need look no further than there. It’s time the practice was stopped.”

“I agree,” said Weiss. “And I’ve told the Prussian minister of the interior as much on more than one occasion. But just as it seems something is going to be done about it, we find ourselves with a new PMI.”

“Who is it this time?” asked Gennat.

“Albert Grzesinski,” said Weiss. “Our own former police president.”

“Well, that’s a step in the right direction,” said Gennat.

“Carl Severing was a good man,” said Weiss, “but he had too much on his plate, what with having to deal with those bastards in the army—the ones already training in secret for another war. But let’s not get too carried away with Grzesinski. Since he’s also a Jew, it’s fair to say that his appointment isn’t likely to meet with universal enthusiasm. Grzesinski is his stepfather’s name. His real name is Lehmann.”

“How come I didn’t know that?” asked Gennat.

“I don’t know, Ernst, since they tell me you’re a detective. No, I’d be very surprised if Grzesinski lasts long. Besides, he has a secret his enemies are bound to exploit before long. He doesn’t live with his wife, but with his mistress. An American actress. You shrug, Bernie, but it’s only the Berlin public who are allowed to be immoral. Our elected representatives are not permitted to be truly representative; indeed, they are forbidden to have any vices of their own. Especially when they’re Jews. Look at me. I’m virtually a saint. These cigars are my only vice.”

“If you say so, sir.”

Weiss smiled. “That’s right, Bernie. Never accept anyone’s word for their own recognizance. Not unless they’ve already been found guilty.” He wrote a note on a piece of paper and pressed it on the blotter. “Take this to the cashier’s office. They’ll give you a new paybook and a new warrant disc.”

“When do I start, sir?”

Weiss pulled at his watch chain until a gold hunter lay on the palm of his hand.

“You already have. According to your file, you have a few days’ leave coming up, is that right?”

“Yes, sir. Starting next Tuesday.”

“Well, until then you’re the Commission’s weekend duty officer. Take the afternoon off and acquaint yourself with the Silesian Station files. That should help you stay awake. Because if anyone gets murdered in Berlin between now and Tuesday, you’ll be the first on the scene. So let’s hope for your sake it’s a quiet weekend.”

I CASHED A CHECK at the Darmstädter and National Bank to tide me over the weekend and then walked over to the enormous statue of Hercules; muscular and grumpy, he carried a useful-looking club over his right shoulder and except for the fact he was naked, he reminded me a lot of a beat copper who’d just restored order to some east-end drinking den. Despite what Bernhard Weiss had said, a bull required more than just a warrant disc and a strong word to close a bar at midnight; when Germans have been boozing all day and half the night, you need a friendly persuader to help you bang a beer counter and command their attention.

Not that the children leaning over the edge of the fountain paid Hercules much attention; they were more interested in the coins that had been tossed into the water over the years and in calculating the huge fortune that lay there. I hurried past the place and headed toward a tall house on the corner of Maassenstrasse with more scrollwork than a five-tier wedding cake and a top-heavy balcony facade that put you in mind of Frau Weitendorf herself.

I had two rooms on the fourth floor: a very narrow bedroom and a study with a ceramic stove that resembled a pistachio-colored cathedral and a marble-topped washstand that always made me feel like a priest when I stood in front of it to shave and wash myself. The study was also furnished with a small desk and chair, and a squarish leather armchair that creaked and farted more than a Baltic sea captain. Everything in my rooms was old and solid and probably indestructible—the sort of furniture the Wilhelmine manufacturers had intended to last at least as long as our empire, however long that might have been. My favorite piece was a large framed mezzotint of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; Hegel had thin hair, hammocks under his eyes, and what seemed to be a very bad case of wind. I liked it because whenever I had a hangover I looked at it and congratulated myself that however bad I felt I couldn’t feel as bad as Hegel must have felt when he’d sat for the man laughingly known as the artist. Frau Weitendorf had told me she was related to Hegel on her mother’s side and that might have been true except that she also informed me Hegel was a famous composer, after which it became clear she meant Georg Friedrich Händel, which made her story seem a little less likely. To maximize her rental income her own room was on the upper-floor hallway, where she slept behind a tall screen on a malodorous daybed she shared with her two French bulldogs. Practicalities and the need for money outweighed status. She might have been the mistress of her own house, but she certainly never saw any of her lodgers as slavishly subordinate to her will, which was quite Hegelian of her, I suppose.

The other lodgers kept themselves to themselves except at mealtimes, which was when I got to know Robert Rankin, the good-looking, cadaverous Englishman who had the rooms underneath mine. Like me he’d served on the Western Front, but with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and after several conversations we realized we’d faced each other across a stretch of no-man’s-land during the Battle of Loos, in 1915. He spoke near-perfect German, probably on account of the fact that his real name was von Ranke, which he’d been obliged to change during the war for obvious reasons. He’d written a novel about his experiences called Pack Up Your Troubles, but this had proved unpopular in England and he was hoping to sell it to a German publisher just as soon as he had translated it. Like most veterans, myself included, Rankin’s scars were mostly invisible: he had weakened lungs from a shell blast at the Somme, but more unusually he’d been electrocuted by a field telephone that had been hit by lightning and this had left him with a pathological fear of using any telephone. Frau Weitendorf liked him because his manners were impeccable and because he paid her extra for cleaning his room, but she still called him “the spy” when he wasn’t around. Frau Weitendorf was a Nazi and thought all foreigners were not to be trusted.

I arrived back at the house with the briefcase full of police files and crept quickly up the stairs to my room, hoping to avoid anyone who might be at home. I could hear Frau Weitendorf in the kitchen talking to Rosa. Most recently Rosa was playing her tenor sax at the upmarket Haller-Revue on Friedrichstrasse, which was the classiest of all the titty shows in Berlin, with a casino and VIP sections, and a very good restaurant. But there were lots of reasons to dislike the place—not least the number of people crowded into it, many of them foreigners—and the last time I’d been there I’d promised myself and my wallet that I’d never go again. I was certain that when she finished playing her sax Rosa wasn’t above earning extra cash on the side. Once or twice I had returned very late from the Alex to find Rosa sneaking a client upstairs. It was none of my business and I certainly wouldn’t have told “the Golem”—which was what all the lodgers called Frau Weitendorf, on account of the fact that she wore a large stiff yellow wig that resembled a large loaf of bread and was exactly like the monster’s in the horror movie of the same name.

The fact was, I had a soft spot for Rosa and hardly felt qualified to judge her for trying to earn a bit more. I could have been mistaken, but eavesdropping on the stairs one day I gained half an idea that Frau Weitendorf might have been trying to set Rosa up with one of her friends from the Nollendorfplatz Theater, where, as she never tired of telling us, she’d once been an actress—which meant that the Golem was probably doing a bit of pimping on the side.

In fact, after the inflation of 1923, nearly everyone, including a lot of cops, needed a little back-pocket business to help make ends meet, and my landlady and Rosa were no different from everyone else. Most people were trying to make enough to get by, but it was never enough to get ahead. I knew plenty of cops who sold drugs—cocaine wasn’t actually illegal—illicit alcohol, homemade sausage, foreign currency, rare books, dirty postcards, or watches lifted from the bodies of the dead and the dead drunk they found in the streets. For a while I supplemented my own wages by selling the odd story to Rudolf Olden, a friend at the Berliner Tageblatt. Olden was a lawyer as well as a journalist and, more important, a liberal who believed in free speech; but I stopped when Ernst Gennat saw me talking to him in a bar and threatened to put two and two together. Not that I’d ever have given Olden any sensitive information; mostly it was just tips about Nazis and communists in Department 1A, the political police, which was supposed to be staffed by cops who were free of any party allegiances. For example, I gave Olden some notes I took of a speech Commissioner Arthur Nebe gave at a meeting of the Prussian Police Officers’ Association, the Schrader-Verband. And while Olden didn’t mention Nebe by name, everyone at the Alex knew who was being quoted in the paper.

Gennat must have guessed it was probably me who’d fingered Arthur Nebe for the Tageblatt and while he didn’t say anything at the time, later on he reminded me that it wasn’t just cops from Department 1A who were supposed to leave their politics at home, it was Praesidium detectives, too. Especially detectives who disliked Arthur Nebe as much as he and I did. A higher standard was expected of people like us, said Gennat; there was, he said, enough division in the Prussian police without adding to it ourselves. I figured he was right and after that I stopped calling Olden.

Alone in my room I rolled and lit a cigarette, moistened the end with a little rum, and opened the window to clear the smoke. Then I unloaded my briefcase and settled down to read the Silesian Station files. Even for me they made uncomfortable reading, especially the black-and-white pictures taken by Hans Gross, the Alex police photographer.

There was something about his work on crime scenes that really got under your skin. They say every picture tells a story, but Hans Gross was the kind of photographer whose work made him the Scheherazade of modern criminalistics. This was only partly down to the fact he favored a big Folmer & Schwing Banquet camera on a rolling platform and a mobile version of the same carbon arc lamps they used at Tempelhof airport, both of which took up at least half the space in the murder wagon. More important than the camera equipment, it seemed to me, Hans had a feel for a crime scene that was nothing short of cinematic; Fritz Lang couldn’t have framed his pictures better, and, sometimes, Gross’s Murder Commission photographs were so sharp it seemed that the poor victim might not be dead at all, might in fact be faking it. It wasn’t just the framing and sharp focus that made the photographs effective, it was the way all the background details helped to bring them alive. Detectives often saw things in his photographs they’d failed to spot at the actual crime scene. Which was why detectives at the Alex had nicknamed him Cecil B. DeMorgue.

The picture in the first case file, that of Mathilde Luz, found murdered in Andreasplatz, was so clear you could see every line of Red Front graffiti on the dilapidated brick wall her body lay next to. A pair of thick-framed glasses lay to the right of her head as if she’d just taken them off for a second; you could even see the label in one of the Hellstern shoes she’d been wearing and which had come off during death. But for the fact that a strip of her scalp was missing, Mathilde Luz looked as if she’d just lain down for a moment to take a nap.

I read the notes and various statements and then tried to imagine the conversation I might have had with her if she herself had been able to tell me what had happened. This was a new technique Weiss was encouraging us to try, as a result of a paper he’d read by a criminalist called Robert Heindl. “Let the victim talk to you,” was what Heindl had said. “Try to imagine what she might tell you if you were able to spend some time with her.” So I did.

MATHILDE LUZ WAS a good-looking girl all right and still wearing the clothes she’d been murdered in: the hat, the coat, and the dress all from C&A, but no less becoming for that. There are some girls who manage to wear cheap fashion and make it look good and Mathilde Luz was one of those. The police report noted her perfume was 4711, worn in the kind of quantity that made you think it served to disguise rather than allure. The report also stated she was dark, with large brown eyes and lips the same red as her nail varnish. Her face was powdered dead white; at least I thought it was powder. It might have been that way just because she was dead.

“I made incandescent mantles at the German Incandescent Light Company for two years,” I heard her saying. “Liked it, too. I had some good friends there. The wages weren’t much, but with my husband Franz’s wage—he works at the Julius Pintsch factory, making gas meters for a living—we had just about enough to keep a roof over our heads. It wasn’t much of a roof, it’s fair to say. We lived on Koppenstrasse in a one-room apartment, if you can call it that—slum more like. It’s a poor area, as you probably know. There were two butter riots there in 1915. Can you imagine Berlin without any butter? Unthinkable. I remember them well. I guess at the time I must have been about fourteen.”

“Which made you twenty-seven at the time of your unfortunate death.”

“That’s right. Anyway, the landlord, Lansky, was a Jew like us, but he was never the kind to put his own tribe ahead of profit; if we hadn’t paid the rent on time the bailiff would have had us out double-quick. He always told us how lucky we were to have the place at all, but then he never had to live there himself. I know for a fact he lives in a nice apartment off Tauentzienstrasse. A real gonif, you know? Anyway, I got laid off just after Christmas last year. I looked for another, of course, but half the women in Berlin are looking for jobs now, so I knew that wasn’t ever going to happen. If I hadn’t been laid off, I wouldn’t ever have had to go on the sledge. With the rent due, it was Franz’s idea and I went along with it because it was better than taking a beating.”

“The shoes you were wearing. Style Salome, by Hellstern. Expensive.”

“Girl needs to look her best.”

“Where did you get them?”

“A friend stole them to order from Wertheim.”

“And the glasses?”

“Some men like the secretarial type. Especially around that pitch north of Silesian Station. Makes them feel like you’re the girl next door, which gives them confidence.”

“It’s a stone’s throw from the Julius Pintsch factory, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. Sometimes my darling husband worked a late shift and came and found me just to take what I’d earned so he could go and buy himself a beer or two. Franz was thoughtful that way. He told me he was looking out for me, like a proper Alphonse, but I knew different.

“Of course it was dangerous. I knew that, too. We all did. Everyone remembers Carl Grossmann. He killed God only knows how many women in the very same part of Berlin. When was that?”

“Between 1919 and 1921.”

“They say he ate his victims.”

“No, that was Haarmann. Grossmann merely chopped his victims up after he’d killed them. Usually in his apartment on Lange Strasse. But you’re right. It’s not far from where you were killed.”

“Bastards. If you ask me, all men are bastards.”

“You’re probably right.”

“You, too, probably. Bulls are just as bad as all the others. Worse. You’re all taking stocking money or shoveling snow, pretending you hold the law in respect. But sometimes you’re worse than anyone. Who was that cop bastard at the Alex who was killing women a few years ago? The one they let off with a smack on the wrist?”

“Bruno Gerth.”

“Did you know him?”

“Yes. But I wouldn’t exactly say they let him off.”

“No? He kept his head, didn’t he?”

“True, but he’s in a mental asylum now. And likely to stay there for the rest of his natural life. As a matter of fact I went to visit him a couple of months ago.”

“That must have been very nice for you both. They say he put it on for the trial judge. The loony act. He knew how to work the system and the court bought it.”

“That may be right. I don’t know. I didn’t attend the trial myself. But let’s get back to what happened to you, Mathilde. Tell me about the evening you were murdered. And I’m sorry for what happened.”

“I spent the early evening in the Hackebär. That was common. Lots of chontes like me would drink a couple of glasses of courage before we went out looking for a client.”

“There were traces of cocaine in your system, too.”

“Sure, why not? Puts a bit of spring in your step. Helps you when you’re coming onto a likely-looking Fritz. It even helps you enjoy it, you know. When they actually fuck you. And it’s not like the stuff is hard to get or particularly expensive. The sausage vendor in front of the Silesian Station is usually good for a toot.”

“We asked him. But he denied it.”

“You probably asked him at the wrong time. When all he had was salt and pepper.”

“Then what happened?”

“A couple of us girls went to the Rose Theater and maybe the Zur Möwe.”

“The dance hall. On Frankfurter.”

“Right. It’s a bit old-fashioned, but there are usually plenty of men looking for it. Mostly men like Franz, it has to be said. Someone saw me leave with a man, but I can’t tell you anything at all about him for obvious reasons. Things start to get a little bit fuzzy. Somewhere on Andreasplatz there’s a fountain with a statue of a Fritz holding a hammer.”

“A witness says he saw a man washing his hands in that fountain about ten or fifteen minutes after we think you must have been murdered.”

“It figures. Anyway, I reckon that’s what killed me. A hammer like that one. I felt a heavy blow on the back of my neck.”

“That’s what killed you, Mathilde. Your murderer broke your neck with one blow.”

“After that. Nothing. The big blank. Over to you, copper.”

“And then he scalped you.”

“Shame. I always had nice hair. You ask Franz. He used to brush it for me when he was feeling sweet. I found it very relaxing after a night on my back. Like someone really cared for me as a person, and not just a bit of mouse.”

“He told us that. But it struck my bosses as a bit strange. Not many men would brush their wives’ hair. It’s like he was perhaps abnormally interested in a woman’s hair.”

“Nothing abnormal about it. He could see I was tired and wanted to do something for me. Something nice. Something that would help me to relax.”

“Let’s talk about Franz. We interviewed him several times. Mostly on account of the fact that you and he were reported to have had several violent arguments.”

“It was Koppenstrasse, right? Not a suite at the Adlon Hotel. Everyone argues in a dump like that. Show me a couple who lives there who doesn’t have violent arguments.”

“He has several convictions for assault. And he owns plenty of sharp knives. Knives sharp enough to have scalped someone easily.”

“He did a lot of woodworking. Made toys to sell for the Christmas markets. To bring in a bit of extra money. Wasn’t bad at it, either. But the night I was killed he had an alibi. He was working the night shift at Julius Pintsch.”

“It’s my job to break alibis. So he was close enough to sneak out of the factory for ten minutes, kill you, and then go back to work.”

“Kill his golden goose? I don’t think so. I was good at being a whore, copper. Franz may be a bastard, but he isn’t entirely stupid. And lots of his fellow workers—including the factory foreman—say they never had him out of their sight.”

“The police also found several novels by Karl May in your apartment. Including Winnetou. In fact, that was what persuaded the press to start calling your killer Winnetou.”

For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to think of the murderer as the Silesian Station killer. I knew Gennat felt the same way and so long as Weiss wasn’t around he always called him Winnetou; everyone did, and I was no exception.

“I’m not much of a reader myself. But from what Franz told me, half the men in Germany have read those damn books.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Look, Franz was a lot of things, my friend. But somewhere deep inside that barrel chest of his was a heart that loved me. That’s what kept us together. We quarreled, yes, but usually because he’d had a skinful. What Fritz doesn’t drink himself into a state on a Friday night and then knock his wife around for the hell of it? You wouldn’t know much about that in a nice little room like this. Carpet on the floor. Curtains on the windows. Windows that you can see through. I gave Fritz a couple of smacks with a chair leg on occasion when he was properly out of line. One time I even thought I’d killed him. But he has a head like a walnut and he came around after an hour or so, full of apologies for having kicked off. Didn’t even bear me a grudge. In fact, I’m pretty sure he didn’t even remember me hitting him. We made it up nicely that time.”

“Sounds very romantic.”

“Sure, why not? That’s romance, Berlin style. Let me tell you something, copper; it’s only when a man is lying insensible at your feet and you realize you could beat his head to a pulp with a chair leg if you wanted to that you really know if you love him or not.”

“Like I said before, I’m sorry for what happened to you. And I’ll do my very best to catch the man who did it. You have my word.”

“That’s very sweet of you, Herr Gunther. But to be honest, it really doesn’t matter to me now one way or the other.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me?”

“No.”

“According to the lab report you were pregnant. Did you know?”

“No. I—we always wanted a baby. Not that we could have afforded one.” She wiped away a tear and was very quiet for a moment; and then she was very quiet forever.

I WASN’T USUALLY back home in Nollendorfplatz for supper, but it being a Friday and having missed lunch, I was glad I was, because this was the night Frau Weitendorf usually went to the theater and left a lung hash that only had to be heated up on the stove. There was always enough for about ten people and, having been quite particular to lung hash since I was a schoolboy, I was pleased to join my fellow lodgers around the dinner table. Rosa did the honors with the hash and some boiled potatoes, while Fischer, the Bavarian salesman, cut the black bread, and Rankin poured malted coffee into large mugs. I laid the table with the second-best china. They were curious as to why I was there at all, of course, but didn’t ask me why directly; not that I would have told them I’d been promoted to the Murder Commission. The last thing I wanted to talk about when I was at home was crime. But most of the talk was about the explosion at the Wolfmium factory and all the workers who’d been killed, and Fischer told us that this was one of the reasons he was going to march through Berlin with the communists the next day, which he would never have mentioned if Frau Weitendorf had been at home. If there was one subject likely to make our landlady fly into uncontrollable rage it was Bolshevism. It wasn’t just the fact that she was a Nazi that made her so vehemently anti-communist; it was the several bullet holes in the front of the house made by the Spartacist militia during Berlin’s Bolshevik revolution of 1919. Frau Weitendorf took each one of them personally.

“Which part?” I asked. “Of Berlin.”

“We’re starting in Charlottenburg.”

“Not many communists there, I’d have thought.”

“And heading east, along Bismarckstrasse.”

“I didn’t know you were a communist, Herr Fischer,” said Rosa.

“I’m not. But I feel I have to do something after the terrible tragedy at Wolfmium. You might say I want to show a bit of worker solidarity. But it’s no surprise to me that this kind of thing happens. Employers in this country don’t care anything about their workers and the conditions they have to endure. Some of the things I see when I’m on the road and visiting customers, you wouldn’t believe. Underground illegal factories, slum sweatshops; places you wouldn’t believe could exist in a city like Berlin.”

“Good for you, Herr Fischer,” said Rankin. “I agree with you about worker conditions. Here and in England, they’re awful. But you’re not saying that what happened at Wolfmium was the result of the employer’s negligence, are you? I mean there’s no evidence of that, surely. It was an accident. I imagine some of the materials they use in the manufacture of electric light bulbs are inherently dangerous.”

“I’ll make you a bet now,” insisted Fischer. “That someone’s to blame. Someone who ignored fire safety codes just to make a bigger profit.”

Rankin lit a cigarette with a handsome gold lighter, stared into the flame for a moment as if it might provide a clue to the origins of the explosion, and then said, “What do you think, Herr Gunther? Are the police investigating what happened?”

“Not my department,” I said. “It’s the fire brigade that has charge of this kind of investigation.” I smiled patiently and helped myself from Rankin’s cigarette case. As I leaned toward his lighter I caught a strong smell of alcohol. I puffed on the nail for a minute and then rolled it thoughtfully between my fingers. “But I will say this: A nail is always the most effective way to start a most effective fire. Chances are that’s all it was. A careless cigarette end. To that extent we’re all potential arsonists.”

Fischer looked scornful. “The Berlin police,” he said. “They’re part of the same conspiracy. These days the only crime is getting caught.”

Rankin smiled politely. He might have been a bit drunk, but he was still equal to the task of changing the subject on my behalf for the sake of politeness.

“I was reading in the newspaper,” he said to no one in particular. “Benito Mussolini has ended women’s rights in Italy on the same day that my own country has lowered the age of women voters from thirty to twenty-one. More or less the same day, anyway. For once I’m almost proud to be an Englishman.”

We finished supper not saying anything of much consequence, which suited me very well. After we’d cleared up, I returned to my room and was preparing to read the case file of Winnetou’s second murder when I heard the telephone downstairs. A minute or two later Rosa came up and spoke to me. She’d changed her clothes and was now clad in the male evening attire she was required to wear to play in the Haller-Revue’s band. The white tie and tails made her look oddly sexy; as a Vice detective, I was used to seeing transvestites—the Eldorado on Lutherstrasse was notorious for transvestites and a frequent source of information about what was happening in Berlin’s underground scene—but I wasn’t at all sure I was the kind of man who felt comfortable in the company of a woman dressed as a man. Not while there were still so many women who dressed like women.

“That was the Police Praesidium at Alexanderplatz on the telephone,” she said. “Someone called Hans Gross said he’ll pick you up outside our front door in half an hour.”

I thanked her, glanced at my watch, and quietly enjoyed the scent of her Coty perfume in my room. It made a nice change from rum, cigarettes, Lux, Nivea, fried potatoes, and cheap hair oil, not to mention a lot of old books and unwashed laundry.

“Think you’ll be working late?” she asked.

“I won’t know for sure until that police car turns up. But yes, maybe. That’s the nature of the job, I’m afraid.”

At the same time, I was thinking that it was still a little early for a murder. Berliners usually wait until they’ve loosened up with a few drinks and a couple of songs before battering someone to death. Only a few weeks before I’d seen a prisoner in the main reception hall at the Alex singing “From the Age of Youth” at the top of his voice. He was drunk, of course, but he’d also just beaten his elder sister to a pulp with a golf club.

“She comes, she comes no more! She comes, she comes no more!”

Which, sadly, was all very true, of course.

Chances were it was just an accident we were to attend, what some of the uniformed boys called a Max Mustermann; a body some citizen had found in circumstances that raised the question of foul play.

“Why don’t you come by the club tonight?” she said. “I’ll be there until well after midnight. Hella Kürty is on the bill.”

I shook my head blankly.

“Singer. She was in that movie Who Throws the First Stone.”

“Didn’t see it.”

“I could leave you a ticket at the box office if you like.”

“I can’t promise I’ll be there,” I said. “But sure. If I can. Thanks.”

“It’s probably not your thing, I know,” she said, a little sadly. “The show is very empty and pretentious, it’s true. But these days, tell me what isn’t? If you ask me, the inflation didn’t just affect our money, but everything else, too. Sex, drinking, drugs, nightlife, art, you name it. It’s like everything is rampantly out of control, you know? Especially in Berlin. The inflated money was just the beginning. The city’s become one great big department store of debauchery. Sometimes when I walk along the Kurfürstendamm and see all the boys powdered and rouged like tarts and behaving outrageously I fear for the future. I really do.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“All of this fake sexual freedom and eroticism, it puts me in mind of the last days of ancient Rome. And I keep thinking that ordinary Germans just wish it would all go away so that they could get back to living calm, orderly lives.”

“You’re probably right. But I worry what we’ll replace it with. Something worse perhaps. And that maybe we’ll regret its passing. I don’t know. Better the devil you know.”

When she’d gone I realized, too late, that Rosa had looked a bit lonely and that I should have talked to her more and even made it a little clearer that I liked her, but at that particular moment I had something else on my mind. Ernst Gennat would probably have said that a living girl—even one dressed like a man—is always more interesting than a dead one, especially a girl as pretty as Rosa, but I was keen to prove that Bernhard Weiss had been right about me, that I wasn’t another cynical Berlin bull, that I believed in the job and that I was the right man for Lindner’s seat. So I sat down in the armchair and lit another rum-moistened roll-up. There was just time to read the facts of the second Winnetou case before the Alex murder wagon showed up.

THE MUTILATED BODY of Helen Strauch was found in the old cemetery of St. Jacobi’s Church, just south of Hermannplatz, in Neukölln. The wide shots of the cemetery showed a not-unattractive mourning chapel resembling a small Greek temple, a Doric colonnade, several lime and chestnut trees, and a shapeless figure at the feet of a statue of St. Jacob as if prostrate in prayer. Close-ups of the head and the body showed Helen Strauch was lying facedown on some blackened flagstones that had been previously chalk-marked for the children’s hopping game called heaven and earth. According to the police pathologist, death had been more or less instantaneous; she’d been struck a mortal blow on the back of the neck—which is the weakest and most vulnerable part of the human body—leaving behind a bruise the size and color of a red cabbage, and then scalped from the center of her forehead to the occipital bone at the back of her skull. Like Mathilde Luz, there was no evidence that the killer had sex with his victim; there was even a ten-mark note still in her garter. The time of death was not long after midnight on the twentieth of May.

Helen had lived on Hermannstrasse, which ran along the eastern perimeter of the cemetery. According to the police report you could see the murder scene from her bedroom window; at least you could when the window was clean. The area, generally known as the Bullenviertel, was one I’d policed as a uniformed bull, the kind of area where a cop learned his trade fast—a gray and desolate place where people worked long hours for not much money, the air stank of roasted malt, barefoot children ran wild at all times of the day and night, every second cellar shop was a bar selling cheap and often illegal booze, and the Salvation Army was in almost permanent residence. I’d often had to shoo prostitutes out of the cemetery at St. Jacobi’s; they were inclined to use the colonnade to service their clients. But safe in my rooms in Nollendorfplatz and wearing a clean shirt collar and tie, I already felt like a stranger to the slums.

Helen Strauch was a prostitute who’d previously worked at the Bergschloss Brewery, which was only a short distance from where she was found dead. When she’d been laid off last summer, it seemed she’d had little choice but to become a full-time prostitute. This already looked like a typical Berlin story. On the night of her death she’d spent the evening drinking absinthe cocktails in the brewery bar on Hasenheide before going on the street. No one remembered her with a client or seeing her talking to any particular man. One girl did think she remembered Helen talking to someone in a car, with her foot up on the running board, but she didn’t remember the type of the car or the number plate, nor indeed the man, if it was a man. Opposite the brewery on Hasenheide was a hospital where Helen had gone for an appointment the previous day—a pregnancy test, which proved negative.

The body had been found by Walther Wenders, a drayman from Babel’s Brewery in Kreuzberg; beer in that part of Berlin is more than just a drink, it’s a way of life. Wenders lived on Berlinerstrasse and his walk to work took him west, past the little cemetery where he’d stopped for a quick pee, which was when his eye caught something unusual. At first he thought it was just an old coat someone had thrown away. It looked like a good coat and his wife certainly had need of one, but as soon as he saw the blood on the ground he realized exactly what he was looking at. It was obvious that there was nothing to be done for the girl, so he walked quickly west to the hospital on Hasenheide and raised the alarm there. The regular detective attached to the Murder Commission on that occasion had been Kurt Reichenbach who, having carefully searched the area on his hands and knees, found a man’s gold cuff link engraved with a Freemason’s symbol—the set square and compass. For a while it had looked like an important clue since Helen’s poor head had been resting on the chalked number nine, which has a special meaning in freemasonry; or so Reichenbach had argued.

Born in Thuringia in 1904, Helen Strauch had lived nearly all her life in Neukölln; her mother had left her drunken woodcutter father and come to Berlin to become a piecework seamstress in a garment factory before she had drowned herself in the Landwehr Canal aged just thirty-five, when Helen was only fifteen. The reason: early onset of arthritis that had stopped her from making her living. Helen then had an on-and-off relationship with a man called Paul Nowak who was employed at the gasworks on Fichtestrasse and who lived in a room on Friedelstrasse. But Paul Nowak was also a part-time prostitute and he had a fistful of alibis for the night of the murder, having spent the evening at several queer bars in Bülowstrasse—the Hollandais at number 69, the Continental at number 2, the Nationalhof at number 37, the Bülow Casino at number 41, and the Hohenzollern lounge at number 101—before bringing a gentleman home to his room on Friedelstrasse. All the barmen remembered seeing him that night, and even his client, a Dutch businessman called Rudi Klaver, who happened to be a Freemason himself, had provided him with an alibi, which says a great deal about how open homosexual men were in Berlin. “Berlin means boys” was a widely held thought throughout the Weimar Republic. But the fact was that ever since Frederick the Great had forbidden women to his Praetorian Guard in the 1750s, obliging the guards to seek the company of boys for their sexual pleasure, Berlin had been identified with soldierly inversion and uranic sexuality. Paragraph 175 of the Federal Criminal Code still forbade all homosexual activity but there were so many male prostitutes in Berlin—at the Alex it was generally held there were at least twenty-five thousand of them—that the law was more or less unenforceable.

Nowak had a criminal record for car theft and from the police photograph, he was no one’s idea of a rent boy; he was a large, powerful bearded youth who hunted wild boar in the Grünewald on his weekends and often skinned the beasts himself. He had knives, sharp knives, but then so did most Berlin men. I kept a folding knife in my jacket pocket myself; made by Henckels of Solingen, it was as sharp as a razor and could have scalped a bowling ball. Nowak wasn’t a violent man, however; if anything, Helen Strauch had been the abusive partner in their relationship. She was a boot whore, which is to say, she was a dominatrix who got paid to beat up her clients. Now and then she took a cane to Nowak, who, friends said, frequently took a whipping without complaint. Gennat liked Nowak for the murder and he liked his sharp knives, too, but with all those alibis in the back pocket of the boy’s greasy leather shorts—Nowak was only eighteen years old—he couldn’t make it stick. But most of all, on the night Mathilde Luz had been killed, Nowak had been in a cell at the police station on Bismarckstrasse following an allegation that he’d robbed another client with whom he’d had sex—an allegation that was subsequently withdrawn.

Meanwhile, Reichenbach had pursued the Freemason link all the way to the manufacturer in Rosenthaler Strasse, but after interviewing the masters of all three Berlin Grand Lodges, the trail finally went cold—though not before the Nazi Party unilaterally decided in the pages of Der Angriff that the link with freemasonry was all too real and only proved what it had always argued: that freemasonry was an insidious cult that threatened to undermine Germany and should be outlawed. Since it was generally known there were many Freemasons employed as policemen at the Alex, the Nazi theory provided the Party with yet another means of criticizing the Berlin police.

We were an easy target, of course, not least because Berlin now had almost nothing in common with the rest of the country. Increasingly the capital city was like a large ship that had slipped its mooring and was slowly drifting farther and farther away from the coast of Germany; it seemed unlikely we were going to return to its more conservative ways, even if we’d wanted to. It’s not just people who outgrow their parents and origins; it’s metropolises, too. I’d read that a lot of Franzis hated Paris for much the same reasons: Parisians always made them feel like poor relations. Maybe it’s the same with any great metropolis; for all I know the people of Mexico hate the citizens of Mexico City for the very same reasons that Berliners are despised by the citizens of Munich. And vice versa, of course; I’ve never been particularly fond of Bavarians.

Helen Strauch’s case was life in the metropolis writ horribly, swinishly large, squalid and depressing, like lifting a wet stone in a very dark forest to see what was crawling underneath, and when I finished reading the file I felt obliged to wash my hands and face; but my evening was just beginning and there were many more unpleasant things about to come crawling my way.

I KNEW WE WERE probably in the right place when, approaching the Fischerstrasse bridge at the end of Friedrichsgracht, I recognized the uniformed policeman seated on a mooring bollard; his name was Miczek and he was a good copper who could usually be relied on. The shine on his boots would have told you that much: Miczek was a real spit-and-polish copper and as tough as his steel toe caps. Seeing the murder wagon, he stood up, buttoned his tunic collar, replaced the fire bucket of a leather helmet on his head, tossed his cigarette into the black water behind him, and approached with a two-finger salute. It was the wagon that drew the respect, not me, even though I was now nominally in charge of the homicide.

“Where’s our Max Mustermann?” asked Hans Gross, climbing out from behind the wagon’s enormous steering wheel. Along with the two uniformed policemen who’d accompanied him from the Alex, I followed. Our stenographer, Frau Künstler, stayed put behind her typewriter; she had no appetite for seeing a dead body, and I couldn’t say I blamed her. Especially not a body that had been in the river. The haze of cigarette smoke in front of her bespectacled face was probably there to make sure she didn’t see or smell anything unpleasant.

“Still in the water,” said Miczek. “We’ve hooked him but didn’t want to pull him out in case we lost any evidence.”

Bodies were frequently found floating in the Spree and just as often remained unidentified. When a corpse was being manhandled onto the quayside it was easy for a wallet or a purse to fall out of a pocket and sink to the bottom of the river. After that it was surprisingly difficult to put a name to a human face, especially if the fish had already lunched there.

“Good work,” said Gross.

Miczek pointed down at three bargemen who were playing skat on top of an upturned fish basket. All had caps, pipes, and enough facial hair to stuff a small sofa.

“Come to see our catch, have you?” said one, and reaching behind him, he pulled on a length of line that brought closer to the oily surface of the water the upper part of a man’s body.

Meanwhile, Hans Gross had already unfolded his portable Voigtländer and was taking pictures.

“Who found him?” I asked.

“Me,” said the man holding the line. “Spotted him just after lunch.”

Half an hour later we had landed him on the quayside and a small crowd of bystanders started to gather. The man didn’t look as if he’d been in the water for very long. He was about fifty, with a small mustache that resembled a smudge on his upper lip. He was wearing a double-breasted, pinstriped suit, and a pair of shoes that already told me he wasn’t a bargee. On his lapel was an Iron Cross. And in his chest, right up to the hilt, was the knife that had killed him.

“Anyone recognize this fellow?” I asked.

No one said a thing. I touched the handle of the knife and found it was lodged so firmly in the dead man’s chest it must have gone all the way through into his backbone. As he lay there, his mouth slowly sagged open and, much to everyone’s horror, a small crayfish came wandering out, almost nonchalantly. Restraining my own disgust, I searched the man’s pockets, which were empty save for one thing: a plain wooden ball a little smaller than a tennis ball. I looked at it without much comprehension. I was thinking I might have encountered a real mystery of the kind that are supposed to fascinate good detectives when I heard a voice and realized that the discovery of the wooden ball had prompted a response from someone in the growing crowd.

“I reckon that’s Bruno Kleiber,” said a woman. She was wearing a cotton smock and a man’s old army cap, and she carried a broom. Her legs were so heavily covered with varicose veins they looked as if several small sea creatures had burrowed underneath her skin. And from the angle of her head on her shoulders I supposed there was something wrong with her spine. She spoke in a Berlin accent that was as thick as her forearms.

“Let her through,” I told the constable, and the woman stepped forward.

“You are?”

The woman snatched off her army cap to reveal a head that was so deeply scored with an old bullet wound it almost resembled a center parting and looked like the very definition of a lucky escape. “Dora Hauptmann, sir. I sweep the quays clean. For the Cölln Canal Company. Everywhere on this island, sir, south of Schlossplatz.”

“And you think you recognize the dead man?”

“Wasn’t sure of it until I saw that ball in his pocket. But now I am. No mistaking that wooden ball and that Iron Cross. His name is Bruno Kleiber and that wooden ball was his living for ten years, I reckon.” She took out a handkerchief, dabbed at the corner of each rheumy eye, and then pointed west along Friedrichsgracht. “I can show you where he worked, if you like.”

“Thanks. I’d appreciate it.”

We started along the quayside.

“Three-shell game was it?” I asked. “Kleiber’s racket?”

“Nah. Ball’s too big. He used to run a street roulette wheel underneath the Gertrauden Bridge. Every morning, at exactly nine thirty a.m., he’d open up his table and start the ball rolling. That’s when everyone who works at the Cölln Fish Market finishes for the day. They go and get a few beers in, or maybe a whore who doesn’t mind the smell of fish so much, and sometimes they’ll stop to make a bet at Kleiber’s table. Little Monte Carlo they call it. An illegal game, of course, but it didn’t do any harm and the game wasn’t crooked, neither. Kleiber didn’t need to be crooked. Ran a straight game, everyone knew that. That Iron Cross he wore was supposed to be a guarantee of his integrity and it was. He made just enough money to make it worthwhile for himself but not so much that folk around here ever resented him. He always paid up when he lost, which is how he stayed in business for so long.”

“Well, someone resented him,” I said as we walked along.

“I doubt that. He was a decent sort, was Kleiber. Always had a joke for you. Or a penny for some snot-nosed kid. You ask me, someone wanted to get their hands on his float. The cash he kept in his back pocket to pay up on a winning number.”

“Sounds like you knew him reasonably well.”

“Well enough to regret his passing. He used to give me a few coins every day to sweep up all the cigarette ends that people left on the ground under the table. He was scrupulous that way. As if his pitch really had been the red carpet at Monte.”

“And today?”

“I’m late today. I was on my way down to the bridge when I saw you lot fishing him out of the water.”

“By the way, not that it’s any of my business, but that scar on your head. How did you get it?”

She fingered the scar without any sign of discomfort. “This? I was lucky. That’s how I got it. I was a nurse on the Eastern Front in 1916 with a Catholic confessional sisterhood. Got hit by a piece of shrapnel from a Russian shell. Same piece of shrapnel that killed my sister, who was also a nurse. I was lucky once, and I might just get lucky again.”

“Sorry. It’s just that you don’t see many female war veterans on the streets.”

“That’s because most of us who were injured died. Women were less important than men.”

“Must be something a man said.”

Under the Gertrauden Bridge, chained to a mooring ring, we found what looked like a folded-up billboard of the kind a sandwich man might have carried. It was about four feet in length, painted green and quite heavy. I took out my knife, twisted the point in the padlock, and a minute later we were unfolding a trestle table about eight feet long that was squared off in numbers and combinations of numbers; in the middle was a sunken round dish with ten crude round slots numbered from zero to nine. The operation was fairly obvious. The croupier would spin the wooden ball around the dish, wait for the ball to drop onto a slot, and then reckon up the game’s losers and winners.

“Kleiber was quick at making calculations and he never got it wrong. Had a mind like a slide rule.”

“That float,” I said. “How much cash did he carry, do you think?”

“Maybe a hundred marks. Enough to make it worth someone’s while to rob the poor bastard.”

“Anyone spring to mind?”

“No one from Cölln. Folk around here are tough but honest, in the main. Some mad bastard from somewhere else, probably. Whole country has gone mad, if you ask me. Fact is, there used to be a madhouse nearby, but they closed it. Seems to me as if we need our madhouses more than ever.”

“You got that right. But with all that money you’d have thought he had a human watchdog.”

“He did. Ex-boxer. Corduroy suit. Matching cap. Tall fellow with an ear like someone’s kidney on toast. What was his name? Kube. Kolbe?”

“I wonder if he barked or not.” I fetched a roll-up from a tin and lit it quickly. “And if not, why not? Where did Kleiber live?”

“No idea, lad. But every day, after the game, regular as clockwork, he’d go to the Nussbaum Inn on Fischerstrasse and have his lunch there. They might know. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

We walked back to the crime scene and I waved Miczek over; I wanted him to hear me as I dictated to Frau Künstler through the rear window of the murder wagon. Without looking up, she typed on a sleek black Torpedo that was the same color as the lacquer on her fingernails. That was the first time I realized our stenographer was a much younger woman than I’d supposed; younger and more unconventional perhaps. On the back of her head she wore a little black beret, while on the shoulder of her black dress was a brooch shaped like a large black grasshopper. What with her white face and heavy black eye makeup, she resembled Theda Bara. Meanwhile, Hans Gross was taking pictures under the arc lamps, using the Folmer & Schwing now. While I was there a call came through on the radio from the Alex; it was Gennat. I told him what I knew, and when he’d gone off the air, I told Miczek and one of the other uniformed coppers to accompany me to the Nussbaum Inn.

“Do you know the place?” I asked Miczek.

“Everyone on the island knows the Nussbaum. Oldest bar in Berlin. And five minutes’ walk from here. But they don’t much like coppers in there. Especially on payday.”

“Good. That suits me just fine.”

“It might be a good idea to call for some backup.”

“We won’t need it.”

When we got to the Nussbaum, I told the two cops to wait outside front and back while I went in to ask questions.

“Are you sure about this, lad? There are some tough Fritzes in there. And likely most of them are drunk.”

“If anyone comes out in a hurry, I want you to stop them leaving. Just so I can get a look at them. You never know. My guess is that Kleiber’s murderer waited until his man had finished lunch and then followed him out, so maybe his killer is still on the grounds.”

“All right, lad. I see what you’re driving at. But be careful. No sense in you getting yourself murdered today.”

The Nussbaum had been at 21 Fischerstrasse since 1505 or 1705 depending on who told you the story. It was every American tourist’s idea of what an old Berlin bar should look like; it had a tall saddlebag dormer roof that was a little wonky and the kind of windows that made you think the place belonged properly in a fairy tale involving a witch with a very long nose. There was a ramshackle garden out front that was mostly one lime tree, and a green picket fence next to which stood a line of ragged children who were probably waiting for their parents to finish drinking away their wages in the bar. From ten feet away you could smell the beer and hear the raucous laughter of men and women who’d already had far too much to drink. And as I walked through the front door I tried to banish my nerves to the deepest pocket of my trousers.

At the bar I picked up a glass and tapped it loudly with a knife. “Could I have your attention, please?”

Gradually the noise died down.

“I’m a detective from the Alex—”

Several people booed and catcalled. The usual friendly Berlin welcome.

“And I’m investigating the murder of a man who came in here every day. His name was Bruno Kleiber and he ran an illegal roulette wheel under Gertrauden Bridge. Someone robbed him this afternoon. Stabbed him to death and pushed his body into the Spree. I’d like to speak to anyone who saw him today or who can shed some light on what happened to him.”

“He was a Jew,” someone called out. “So who gives a damn? Maybe someone just did to him what he used to do to other people.”

“Yes, rob them,” said someone else, laughing.

“I don’t believe that. According to what I’ve heard he ran a straight game.”

“He was in here today,” said the man nearest to me. “Same as always. Had his lunch and a beer and then left.”

“What time was that?”

“Came in about twelve. Left about two. Must have happened after that.”

“Did you see him talk to anyone?”

“He kept himself to himself,” said another man. “Never bothered anyone.”

The publican came around the counter with a small billy club in his hand. “Dead, you say? That’s too bad. Bruno Kleiber was a good customer and a good man and I’ll bar any one of you bastards who says different. Got that?”

The noise died down again.

“I’m at the Alex if anyone remembers anything, and you can telephone me in confidence. The name’s Gunther. Bernhard Gunther.”

It wasn’t my most subtle performance, but then it wasn’t meant to be. My intention had been to behave exactly like a loud yapping dog, and hopefully to drive some sheep into my pen.

Outside the Nussbaum were the sheep; well, one anyway. Miczek and the other policeman had arrested the man who was now my number one suspect; straightaway I recognized him from Dora Hauptmann’s description. Both cops had drawn their batons and looked ready to deal with a man resisting arrest, even one who looked as tough as this fellow.

“He came out just as soon as you started your spiel,” said Miczek. “In a hurry, too. Like maybe he didn’t want to help the Berlin police.”

“You Kube?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Kolbe, then?”

The big man shrugged. “Who wants to know?”

He stank of beer and was sufficiently unsteady on his feet to persuade me that he’d been drinking all afternoon.

“I’ve heard you were paid to watch Bruno Kleiber’s back.”

“Who told you that?”

“Doesn’t matter. Just answer the question.”

“You’ve got the wrong Fritz, copper. I played the Jew’s numbers just like lots of people around here, but I was never his dog.”

“You’ve got something against Jews?”

“Hasn’t everyone?”

“It didn’t sound like it in there,” I said. “Besides, who would be dumb enough to admit he didn’t like Jews when there’s a dead one lying on the quayside just five minutes’ walk from here?”

“I don’t like Jews. What of it?”

“Gives you a motive to kill him, I’d have thought. That and a hundred-mark float that was in the dead man’s back pocket. Which is reason enough for me to search you.”

“Try it and see what happens, copper.”

“Search him.”

Kolbe raised his huge fist, which was as far as it got before Miczek tapped him on the back of the head with his police baton; not hard, but just hard enough to drop him onto the cobbles, leaving him dazed for several minutes, in no position to resist us. We went through his pockets and just about the first thing we found was a solid-gold signet ring; on this was a Star of David.

“For a man who doesn’t like Jews you have some interesting jewelry,” I said.

Miczek had a good-quality leather wallet open on his palm and anyone could have seen it wasn’t Kolbe’s; for one thing there was a wedding picture of Kleiber and his wife; for another, the wallet held two hundred-mark notes. We even found an empty leather sheath for the murder weapon in Kolbe’s pocket. It was probably the easiest murder arrest I ever made, but I was soon to discover that not all Berlin’s murderers were as dumb as Herbert Kolbe.

WE WENT BACK to the Alex to put Kolbe in the lockup. As usual the main front door was so heavy I had to push it open with both hands—Gross was carrying the camera, and the two men in uniform each held one of Kolbe’s muscular arms. The door closed behind us with an enormous hollow boom like the sound of a howitzer at the last judgment. Inside the entrance hall everything was as busy as the front line during wartime: drunks being processed for a night in the cells, typewriters clattering away, telephones ringing, coppers shouting, keys jangling, women crying, police dogs barking, and always the front door closing loudly on the peculiar metropolitan hell that was the Berlin Police Praesidium. Leaving the boys in green to process our prisoner I grabbed a quick coffee and a smoke in the canteen and then went up to the Commission offices to file my report. But on the stairs, I met none other than Kurt Reichenbach. There was an awkward silence between us for a moment, and then Reichenbach lifted his hat politely.

“I’ve just heard that you got the seat in the murder wagon,” he said affably. “Congratulations, my dear fellow. It’s a good break for you. And very well deserved.”

“Thanks. That’s good of you, Kurt.”

“Not at all. Word is you’ll go far, Gunther. You’ll be a commissar in no time. Me, I’ve got a big mouth so it’s probably just as well I didn’t get the seat. Truth be told, two Jews in the one car is one Jew too many. But you know when to keep your lip buttoned, lad. That’s the secret to advancement around here. Knowing when to keep your trap shut. And when to forget about politics. Besides, there are too many damn lawyers in the force already. The ranks of the commissars are stiff with them. You’re precisely the kind of new blood this place needs.”

Reichenbach was small and bearded, with an easy smile. He wore a fine black leather coat in nearly all weathers and carried a thick walking stick. Since there was nothing wrong with either of his legs it was assumed, rightly, that he carried the stick in lieu of a truncheon.

He was well dressed for a detective. There was a feather in the band of his gray bowler hat and a handsome gold pin in the knot of his green woolen tie. Even when it was empty, the amber cigar holder he favored rarely left his mouth, but on this occasion it was filled with a sweet-smelling Dominican Aurora. I was sure about the brand because even as he was speaking he was generously tucking one into the breast pocket of my jacket.

“Anyway, there’s something for you. A good cigar to celebrate your promotion and show there’s no hard feelings from me. I get these sent from a special shop in Amsterdam.”

“Thanks, Kurt. They must be expensive.”

“Sure they’re expensive. But there’s no wisdom in smoking cheap cigars, is there?”

I was almost sure this was a reference to Bernhard Weiss, but if it was he didn’t make a big thing of it and I didn’t pick him up on it.

“My wife, who’s a nurse, disapproves of all kinds of smoking, but where would Kripo be without tobacco? That’s what I say. It’s hard enough being a detective as it is without giving up something that stimulates the old gray machine.” He tapped his head and grinned. “I suppose if I ever stopped to think about it, I might give it up. But until then I shall keep puffing away. In spite of my wife.”

I ran the cigar under my nose, savoring it gratefully and quietly wondering where he got the money for such luxuries. I was quite sure I’d seen his leather coat in the window at Peek & Cloppenburg costing over a thousand reichsmarks. I’d heard it said he had a loan-sharking business on the side; then again, that might just have been plain anti-Semitism; he certainly never offered me a loan. Still, it’s true that being a detective with the Prussian police wasn’t particularly well paid.

“By the way, Gunther, there’s a favor you might do me if you’re so inclined.”

“Sure. If I can.”

“I have a friend who’s a filmmaker. Her name is Thea von Harbou and she’s a scriptwriter who’s married to Fritz Lang, the film director.” He paused. “I take it you’ve heard of Fritz Lang.”

“I’ve heard of Fritz Lang.”

“Thea writes his film scripts. She’s researching a new movie about a sex murderer and would dearly like to speak to someone who’s employed by the famous Berlin Murder Commission.”

“Look, I’ve only just started. I’m not sure what I can tell her that you couldn’t tell her. It’s not like you haven’t worked for the Commission.”

“True, but I’m not a permanent member. And not actively on a murder case right now. Which is an important distinction. To her, anyway. Also, she has ambitions of being able to speak to the Big Buddha, and the plain fact of the matter is that there’s bad blood between Gennat and me, as is now obvious to everyone. Gennat would certainly have refused if I’d asked him about Thea von Harbou. He thinks I’m a thug. Well, maybe I am. I try to carry out my duties as best I can, but sometimes I am a little overzealous; particularly where Nazis are concerned. Either way, I can’t help Thea in this particular respect and I was hoping you might speak with her. Look, all she really cares about is that the person she meets is a permanent member of Berlin’s famous Commission. I imagine so she can tell her husband as much. He’s a very demanding fellow, by all accounts.”

“Sure, I’ll do it. If Gennat gives his permission.”

“I’m sure he will. If you ask him. Gennat loves cinema. Almost as much as he loves attractive women. And now that you’re his blue-eyed boy he won’t deny you much. Especially if what I hear is true; that you’ve already felt your first collar.”

“Yes. But there was nothing to it. We virtually caught the Fritz red-handed.”

“I’m sure you’re just being modest. Which is very commendable. Weiss loves a bit of modesty in his detectives. He hates anyone to outshine his beloved department. He only tolerates the fame of the Big Buddha because Ernst Gennat doesn’t give a damn for reputation. You can see that by the way he dresses. He’s not a threat to anyone. Those suits of his look like they were cut with a cheese knife.”

“On the whole modesty suits me better; I don’t sound good when I’m bossing people around.”

“Well, congratulations anyway. Even an easy collar can come away in your hand, Gunther. Remember that. And make sure you don’t neglect the paperwork. Weiss is above all a lawyer and lawyers love to read reports.”

“I was just heading upstairs to finish my report.”

“Good man. So then, here’s Thea’s business card—” He sniffed it before handing it over. “Hmm. Scented. Anyway, you can telephone her yourself. She’s quite attractive. A bit too old for you, probably. But an interesting woman nonetheless.”

“You’ve met her then?”

“Oh yes.”

“Here?”

“No. Although she’d dearly love to get a look around the Commission offices as well. At the time, I didn’t dare bring her here in case it scuppered my chances of getting Lindner’s seat. No, I took her to the Police Museum, the Hanno showhouse, and then Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science at In Den Zelten, just to give my stories some extra color, so to speak. The institute is mostly photographs of perverts and Japanese dildos. But she seemed to find it all quite interesting. Especially the dildos. At the very least you’ll probably get a nice dinner out of her. She took me to Horcher’s.”

I pocketed the woman’s business card and nodded. “I said I’d do it,” I said again. “And I will. I like a free dinner as much as the next man.”

“Good, good.” Reichenbach tipped his hat and started down the stairs, swinging his stick and puffing his cigar back into life. “I can’t understand it myself. A movie about a man killing whores in Berlin? I mean, who cares about that?” He laughed. “Nobody in this place, that’s for sure. You might just as well shoot a movie inside the Reichstag. Sometimes I think I should have been a movie producer, not a cop. I understand the public, you see. I know what scares them. And it certainly isn’t someone crushing a few grasshoppers. Most Germans think those girls have got it coming.”

I WANTED to contradict Reichenbach, to shout into the vertiginous stairwell that I cared. In fact, I cared very much and not just because I was now attached to the Murder Commission. I was thinking of Rosa Braun, wondering how I might feel if she turned up in the Spree with her neck broken; nobody deserved a death like that, not even if she was taking a risk selling it for money. But it wasn’t just Rosa I cared about. In my time with Vice I’d got to know a great many girls who were on the sledge and quite a few of them struck me as honest, good people. I even knew one or two who had made their Abitur. None were the worthless grasshoppers Reichenbach had spoken of. For many single women in Berlin, life was a slippery slope, which of course was one reason prostitution was called the sledge in the first place. And the whole city seemed morally degraded when a girl turned up in an alley with her neck broken and her scalp missing. But it hardly seemed worth disagreeing with Reichenbach now that he was halfway out of the building. Besides, keeping my mouth shut about a lot of things was probably best for the present. He was my superior after all. And it wasn’t as if he was wrong; most of the cops at the Alex didn’t care that much about the fate of a few prostitutes.

Nor was there much wrong with his advice to me, even if it was obvious. Bernhard Weiss didn’t appreciate it when Kripo detectives started to get their names in the newspapers and he did like things in his department to be well documented. Watertight paperwork was the best guarantee of our own investigative integrity: his words, not mine. You could hardly blame the boss for that; he was often suing the Nazis for libel, and he never went into court without a set of meticulous police records, which was why he always won, of course. He must have sued them successfully at least ten times, and they hated him for it. He ought to have had a bodyguard, but he scorned any police protection for himself on the grounds that the Nazis would only criticize him for that, too. Weiss did carry a gun, however; after the assassination of his friend the socialist journalist Kurt Eisner in 1919, every Jew in public life carried a pistol. In 1928, a pistol was the best kind of life insurance you could buy. Which was probably why I had two.

Weiss and Gennat came and found me not long after I’d sat down at my new desk to type out my report. The offices overlooked Dircksenstrasse and commanded a good view of the railway station and the western half of the city beyond. Berlin looked bigger at night: bigger and quieter and even more indifferent than it did by day, as if it were someone else’s bad dream. Looking at all that neon light was like staring up at the universe and wondering why you felt so insignificant. Not that there was any great mystery about that; really there was just light and darkness and some life in between, and you made of it what you could.

“Here he is,” said Gennat. “Berlin’s very own Philo Vance.”

My feet hurt but I stood up anyway. Weiss and Gennat were wearing their coats and it looked as if they were about to go home; it was almost eleven o’clock after all. They made an odd pair, like Laurel and Hardy: Weiss small and precise, Gennat large and shapeless. Weiss had the superior mind, but Gennat the better jokes. He glanced at the report on the carriage of my typewriter and rubbed his jowls noisily with the flat of his hand. It sounded like someone sweeping a path with a heavy brush. The Big Buddha badly needed another shave.

“You can forget that for now,” Gennat said, pointing at the typewriter. “Do the report later.”

That sounded good; in my mind’s eye I was already turning up at the Haller-Revue and imagining what it might be like to undress a woman who was dressed like a man. It had been a long day.

“Good work, Gunther.”

I told them what I’d told Reichenbach—that we’d caught the killer almost red-handed. “He was boozing away the spoils of the robbery in the very place where he’d met with his victim.” I laughed. “He was supposed to be the dead man’s bodyguard. But he’d got himself into debt. The dumbhead even had the dead man’s gold ring and wallet in his pocket.”

“That’s the thing about bodyguards,” said Weiss. “I’ve seen it happen again and again. They always end up despising the person they’re supposed to be protecting. Easy enough, I suppose. You guard a man, you get to know his foibles and weaknesses. And before he knows it, he’s trusted his life to someone with a gun who badly wants to put a hole in him.”

“It’s just as well most of our clients are stupid,” said Gennat. “I don’t know how we’d catch half of them if they all had their Abiturs.”

“A murderer is still a murderer,” said Weiss, polishing his glasses. “However you catch him. And catching him is what counts, not the mystery, nor the detection, nor the intellectual showdown between you and the killer. Just the arrest. Anything else is a sideshow. Remember that, Gunther.”

Gennat was pouring us each a glass of schnapps from a half liter he kept in his coat pocket. He raised his glass and waited for Weiss and me to do the same. In his fat pink fingers the glass looked like a crystal thimble.

“What are we drinking to?” I asked, thinking that it might be my own early good fortune.

“We’re not drinking to anything, lad,” said Gennat. “We’ve got another body to go and look at.”

“Now?”

“That’s right. Now. Tonight. This minute. And by all accounts we’re all going to need a bit of liquid backbone. Victim looks pretty tasty apparently.”

“Another girl’s been scalped,” added Weiss, and rather to my surprise he necked his drink in one.

I swallowed the schnapps, grabbed my hat and coat, and followed them out the door.

IN THE MURDER WAGON, outside the Praesidium’s main entrance, Weiss asked if I had read all the Silesian Station files.

“Not yet, sir. I’ve read the files on Mathilde Luz and Helen Strauch. I was just about to read the third case—the attempted murder—when the call came through about the floater in the Spree.”

“We’re waiting on Hans, are we, Eva?” Gennat was looking at Frau Künstler, who was busy lighting a cigarette.

“He said he wouldn’t be long. That he had to fetch some new plates for the camera.”

“I expect the dead girl will wait,” said Weiss. “They usually do. It’s me who’s in a hurry to get home, not her. Poor thing.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ernst, bring Gunther up to speed with the most recent attack,” said Weiss. “Do you mind listening to this kind of talk, Eva?”

“No. I don’t mind. I type up the victim reports, don’t I? What, do you think I just forget all that stuff? Sometimes I think this city has more dead bodies than a battlefield. I try and forget but not for long and not long enough. To really forget you need a hobby and I don’t have time for one on account of the fact that I’m always in this damn car.”

“Sorry, and I’m sorry to ask you to work late again,” said Weiss.

“That’s all right. Fortunately for you I need the extra money. Besides, I don’t sleep so well since I started working for you people.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Gennat.

“Oh, it’s nothing to do with the murders and the details of what happened to the victims. That I can deal with. Just about. It’s the man downstairs in the building where I live. He’s a singer in a choral group called the Comedian Harmonists. And when he’s drunk, which seems to be at all hours of the day and night, he sings.”

“I’ve heard of them,” said Gennat. “They’re famous.”

“Yes, well, not for much longer,” said Eva Künstler. “One night you’re going to get a telephone call to attend an address in Potsdamer Chaussee, and you’ll find a singer with his throat cut and me standing over him with a razor in my hand.”

“That’s a good address,” said Gennat. “We’ve never had a murder there. It will make a nice change to go somewhere like that one day. And I’ll certainly make a point of forgetting that we ever had this conversation. Now, I can’t say fairer than that.”

“Ernst remembers every detail of every murder he’s investigated,” said Weiss. “Isn’t that right, Ernst?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. If you say so.”

“That’s one reason why he’s such a good detective. The Big Buddha never forgets. So then. Fill Bernie in on girl number three. Fritz Pabst.”

“Fritz? She’s got a man’s name?”

“Believe me,” said Weiss, “the similarities are just beginning.”

“Fritz Pabst, also known as Louise Pabst, was a transvestite prostitute,” said Gennat, “and a good one, too, which is to say that even in broad daylight it was difficult to tell that she was really a man. The pictures of Fritz dressed as Louise are salutary for anyone who thinks he’s an experienced man of the world. Right down to his Goschenhofer underwear.”

“Wish I could afford nice stuff like that,” murmured Frau Künstler.

“Pabst kept a photo album and was planning to become a singer at the Pan Lounge. By day he worked at Wertheim’s department store, in haberdashery, and by night he frequented the Pan and the Eldorado lounge, not very far from where he was attacked and left for dead. That’s right: left for dead. Because girl number three there survived the attack.

“Pabst insists he hadn’t picked anyone up and that his attacker came out of a dark doorway and just hit him. As with the previous victims, a blow from a hammer broke his neck. We think that when the killer tried to scalp him, Fritz’s wig came off in his hand and the killer ran for it. The victim stayed alive, however, and gave us a clue, which, so far, we’ve managed to keep out of the newspapers. He doesn’t remember anything about the killer except for the fact that in the immediate seconds before he was attacked, he heard someone whistling a tune we’ve now identified as being from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, by a French composer called Paul Dukas. He wasn’t sure about the name but he hummed it to me and I whistled it to a musician from the Philharmonie in Bernburger Strasse, who identified it. The only witness—the woman who found him—doesn’t remember a man whistling but she does remember seeing a man washing his hands in a horse trough near Fritz’s unconscious body. A man wearing a soft wide-brimmed hat with lots of longish fair hair on one side, Bohemian style. Like an actor, she said. Fritz Pabst is recovering in hospital but so far he has been unable to remember anything else. And frankly he isn’t likely to; it’s touch-and-go if he’ll ever walk again, poor devil. And certainly not in high heels.”

Hans Gross arrived and, opening the rear door of the murder wagon, proceeded to place a box of camera plates in the back alongside his tripods and arc lamps before climbing in with Frau Künstler. He squeezed the woman’s knee and stole a puff of her cigarette; to my surprise she objected to neither.

“Sorry to keep you waiting. Sir, I’m going to need some more things from Anschütz. We’re running a bit short.”

“Investigating murder is an expensive business,” said Weiss. “Especially in Berlin. I’ll sort it out, Hans. Leave it to me.”

The driver—a cop in uniform—started the big engine and we drove off, followed by a squad car.

“Where are we going?” asked Gross.

“Wormser Strasse,” said Weiss.

“That’s much farther west than the previous victims.”

“Can I continue?” said Gennat.

“We’re all ears,” said Weiss.

“Now, at the time I couldn’t figure out exactly why the killer should have felt the need to wash his hands in the trough if he hadn’t scalped his victim. There was no blood to speak of. But walking around the area in daylight I discovered that there were wet-paint signs on the Patent Office on Alte Jakobstrasse, and it occurred to me that perhaps the killer wasn’t washing blood off his hands, but green paint. So we unscrewed the doors, scrutinized them for fingerprints, and found a partial handprint, which of course may or may not belong to the killer. Sadly, it doesn’t match anyone we have on record, and for the moment, we’ve drawn a blank on that one, too.”

“Now, that was a clever bit of thinking,” said Weiss. “I’m sure I wouldn’t have thought of that. The Big Buddha is very like his ancient namesake, Gunther. Not only is he perfectly self-awakened, he is also endowed with the higher knowledge of many worlds. Learn the nine virtues of detective work from him. Learn them and make them your own.”

“Fritz Pabst had no boyfriend,” continued Gennat, ignoring the compliment, “no girlfriend, and nothing in the middle, if you know what I mean. So we can’t go blaming it on any poor bastard who loved him. But. And this is interesting. We did find a British pound note next to Fritz’s discarded wig. As if it might have fallen out of the killer’s pocket.”

“How much is that worth?” I asked.

“About twenty reichsmarks.”

“Which is about twice the going rate for a street whore,” I said. “So maybe the killer offered it to Fritz Pabst, or Louise. In lieu of German money. Not that it really mattered.”

“How do you mean?” asked Gennat.

“If the murderer was going to kill Fritz Pabst anyway, what difference would it make how much it was, or if it was even legal tender? By the time Fritz was holding it up to the light to see what it was, it was probably too late.”

“So you think Fritz could be lying about having picked someone up.”

“Not necessarily. If someone has hit you with a hammer with intent to kill, you probably forget more than just the latest rate of exchange. You forget everything, I shouldn’t wonder. I know I would. Either way it means the killer could be an Englishman. Or someone who wants it to look like an Englishman.” I shrugged. “Or perhaps it was someone else completely unrelated to the case who dropped it.”

“We found traces of green paint on the note,” said Weiss. “The same paint that was used on the Patent Office wet-paint signs. We contacted the Bank of England for some information on the banknote, but all they can tell us is that it was one of a batch sent to a bank in Wales. Which doesn’t get us much further forward.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It might let an awful lot of Germans breathe more easily at night if the killer should turn out to be British.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Weiss.

“I suppose I worry that, as a people, we’ve become very cruel since the war. The fact is, we’re still coming to terms with what happened. With our immediate history.”

“You make it sound as if history is something that could be over,” said Weiss. “But I’m afraid the lesson of history is that it’s never really over. Not today and certainly not tomorrow.”

“That may be so, but it cannot be denied that people get an appetite for blood and human suffering. Like the ancient Romans. And I think any German who was proud of his country would prefer Winnetou to come from somewhere other than Germany.”

“Good point,” admitted Gennat.

“Perhaps our man is a sex tourist,” I said. “Berlin is full of Englishmen and Americans getting the best rate of exchange in our nightclubs and with our women. They screwed us at Versailles and now they screw us here at home.”

“You’re beginning to sound like a Nazi,” said Weiss.

“I never wear brown,” I said. “Brown is definitely not my color.”

“It wasn’t the English and the Americans who screwed us at Versailles,” said Weiss. “It wasn’t even the French. It was the German high command. It’s them who’ve sold us all that stab-in-the-back horseshit. If only to get themselves off the hook.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’d like you to meet Dr. Hirschfeld sometime, Gunther,” said Weiss. “He’s convinced that the killer isn’t a man who hates women, but a man who loves women so much he wants to be one.”

“He’s got a funny way of showing that love, sir,” I said. “It seems to me that any man who really wants to be a woman only has to do what Fritz Pabst did—buy himself a nice dress and a good wig, call himself Louise, and head for the Eldorado. There are plenty of men in there who want to be women. Not to mention quite a few women who want to be men.”

“That’s not quite the same thing as actually becoming a real woman,” said Weiss. “According to Hirschfeld.”

“True,” I said. “And I’ll certainly be hanging on to that fact for dear life when I next talk to a strange girl. Real women are born that way. Even the ugly ones. Anything else is just hiding the family silver and moving the ornaments to the back of the shelf. But who knows? Maybe he’s just dumb enough to cut off his own private parts. And when we arrest him we’ll find there’s just one thing missing.”

“No one’s that stupid,” said Gennat. “You’d bleed to death.”

“I thought you said most of our clients were stupid.”

“Most. But what you’re describing is plain crazy,” said Gennat.

“Nobody’s that crazy,” said Hans Gross. “Not even in Berlin.”

“Could be this fellow comes the closest,” I said. “If he slices off his manhood in pursuit of becoming a woman, he’ll certainly save us the trouble of cutting off his head.”

Weiss laughed. “You know, I’m beginning to think that glass of schnapps was too much for Gunther. This is the most I’ve heard him say since we gave him the seat. Some of it even makes sense.”

I wound down the window and took a deep breath of the damp night air. It wasn’t the schnapps I found intoxicating, it was the tobacco smoke; I could see that if I was ever going to make it as a homicide detective I was going to have to work on my smoking habit. Beside these people in the murder wagon, I was a rank amateur. And I was beginning to appreciate why both Ernst Gennat and Hans Gross had a voice like a farrier’s rasp. Frau Künstler’s voice was more like black coffee, like her manicure.

“Sorry, sir.”

“No, I like my detectives to talk because, surprising as it might seem, I need food for thought, no matter how strange and exotic that food might be. You can say anything in this car. Anything, to me or the Big Buddha, just as long as it doesn’t offend Frau Künstler.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said, taking the cover off her Torpedo. “I’m from Wedding and I can take care of myself.”

“But if you do talk, do try and make it entertaining. We hate boring people. And drop the sir when you’re in the wagon. I like things in here to be informal.”

THE MURDER WAGON’S window was still down because I was feeling a little nauseous and the rain and cool air felt good on my face. Southeast of Alexanderplatz, we stopped at a traffic light on Friedrichstrasse, immediately outside the James-Klein Revue, which, at number 104A, was right next door to the Haller-Revue. Both establishments were brightly lit and looked full of life, full of people—full of people with plenty of money who were drunk or on drugs. It seemed unlikely that any of them were thinking about the Wolfmium factory explosion and the dead workers, now at a count of fifty. At the very least it was probably a better Friday night out than our expedition in the murder wagon. You could hear their screams of laughter as well as a cacophonous mixture of jazz blaring out from both clubs, which only added to the feeling of corruption and intemperance in the air. An SA brownshirt was positioned between the two clubs with a collection box, as if any of the clubs’ patrons might be inclined to forget that the Nazis wanted to close down all of Berlin’s showgirl nightclubs. The Jimmy Klein doorman, a very tall Russian named Sasha carrying an umbrella as big as the dome on the Reichstag, approached the car with an oily, gap-toothed smile and leaned down toward my open window.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “please, why not join us inside? I can promise you won’t be disappointed. We have completely nude dancers in here. Seventy-five naked models—more than any other club in Berlin—whose daring and audacity is nothing short of priceless. The James-Klein Revue is proud to present an evening without morals in twenty-four scenes of startling eroticism.”

“Just an evening?” murmured Weiss. “Or a whole decade?”

It was about now that Sasha recognized me. We were old acquaintances from my time in Vice. Now and then he’d been a useful informer.

“Oh, sorry, Herr Gunther,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was you. You going into the undertaking business, then?” He was talking about the murder wagon and its occupants and it had to be admitted that we did resemble a group of mourners. “You want some free tickets? Paul Morgan’s the conferenciér tonight. He’s got the best dirty jokes in Berlin, if you ask me.”

But I was hardly listening. My eyes were on the Haller-Revue next door, trying to make out the sound of a saxophone and wondering how much of the music I could hear was being played by Rosa Braun. Clearly I wasn’t going to make it into the Haller that night to see her. If Weiss and Gennat hadn’t been with me, I might have dashed inside and informed the box office that the ticket she’d left for me was no longer required, and that she wasn’t to expect me. As it was, the traffic light changed and we drove off in search of our cadaver, a carful of ghouls with no discernible interest in the living or in scenes of eroticism, startling or otherwise. Nobody said anything now. There’s something about the imminent prospect of viewing a violent death that stops most normal conversation.

The car slowed at Wittenbergplatz, then turned south onto Wormser Strasse where there was a large courtyard surrounded by well-maintained offices and apartments. Guided by a uniformed officer, we drove into the yard and followed a flashlight to a distant corner. At the top of a steep basement stairwell, we found the lead detective. He was from the Police Praesidium on Sophie-Charlotte-Platz, north of the Ku’damm. His name was Johann Körner, and he was Erich Ludendorff under a false name with slightly less wax on the dead badger he called a mustache—a real old-school Prussian cop with a pickelhaube up his ass. Which is to say he disliked modern, lawyerly cops with new ideas like Bernhard Weiss almost as much as he disliked clever Jews like Bernhard Weiss. They’d crossed swords before but you wouldn’t have known it from the easy way Weiss spoke to him.

“Commissar Körner, good to see you. It’s my understanding that you have a dead girl here who’s been scalped.”

“It’s the work of Winnetou, all right. I’ve no doubt about that, sir. Hammer blow to the back of the neck and scalped. She’s lying at the foot of this stairwell. Been dead since the early hours of this morning, I’d say.”

“This is your case, of course, until you decide differently. But as you know we’ve already investigated two or three similar cases, which gives us a certain insight into the killer’s modus operandi. So we can remain here in a largely advisory capacity; or we can work together with you; or we can take over the case—as you prefer. Really, it’s entirely up to you.”

Körner glanced at his wristwatch as if considering that it was past his own bedtime, brushed his mustache, and then lifted himself up on his toes.

“Why don’t I just tell you what my men and I have been able to find out and then leave you to it, sir? I’m sure you and your people know much more about this sort of thing than I ever will.”

I wasn’t sure if “your people” meant everyone in the murder wagon or something more insidious, but if Weiss felt insulted, he certainly didn’t show it. As always he was a master of polite restraint and professional courtesy. He could have been speaking to a lawyer in court instead of to an anti-Semitic Pifke like Johann Körner.

“That’s very generous of you, Johann. Thank you. So tell us what you think you know.”

“Eva Angerstein, age twenty-seven. Payday prostitute. Worked as a stenographer by day for Siemens-Halske in Siemensstadt. And lived in a room at the far end of the Ku’damm on Heilbronner Strasse, number twenty-four. We found her office clothes in a large cloth handbag we presume must be hers.”

A payday prostitute was a girl who only went on the sledge toward the end of the month, before payday, when money was tight. Common enough in a city like Berlin, where there were always unexpected expenses.

“The building caretaker found her when he went down these stairs to check the boiler. Rancid fellow named Pietsch. He said there was a problem with half-silks bringing their clients down here from Wittenbergplatz. Up against the wall at the bottom of these stairs looks as good a place for a quick jump as any, I suppose. That’s what we figure must have happened. They went down there together, he hammered her on the neck, and then scalped the poor bitch.”

“Any witnesses?”

“None.”

“Have you spoken to any of the working girls on Wittenbergplatz?”

“No. There was a receipt in her handbag from the Kakadu club, on Joachimstaler Strasse, from last night, so that’s where we figure she may have met her killer. We haven’t been there either.”

One of Körner’s men handed him a pocketbook, which he handed to Weiss, who handed it to Gennat, who wiped his hands and then handed it to me. I opened it, dropped my flashlight inside, and noted that it had been bought from Hulbe, a quality leather goods shop on the Ku’damm. I was about to search through the contents when I became aware that the bag was covered in coal dust; it was more or less empty, too, apart from her identification papers.

“The cloth bag containing her clothes we found in the stairwell next to her body; the handbag we found in the coal bunker up on ground level. One of my men discovered it more or less by chance, just a short while ago.”

“I wonder why it was in there. Any ideas?”

“The bag was open, he said. Like someone had been through it, looking for something, and then tossed it.”

“Apart from the girl’s papers, the bag’s empty,” I said. “No money, no purse, no wallet, no valuables. Nothing.”

“Not our man’s normal behavior,” said Weiss. “Not normal at all. Our previous victims were still in possession of some money.”

“There’s nothing normal about this bastard.”

“True. I meant, he doesn’t normally rob his victims.”

I could tell that Weiss was thinking the same thing I was: that one of Körner’s men had stolen the money from Eva Angerstein’s handbag and divided it with his commissar. This wasn’t exactly unknown among Berlin cops. Neither of us said a thing.

“Who knows what’s in the mind of a twisted maniac like Winnetou?” said Körner. “It’s always been my experience that a man like that exhibits all kinds of criminal behavior. Thieving, arson, rape, you name it. If you told me he was also planning to commit treason I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s not like murderers are scrupulous about breaking the law. In my humble opinion, sir.”

“Bag’s from Hulbe,” I said to Weiss. “A good bag from a good shop. You wouldn’t expect a girl who could afford a bag like this to take a client and bang him up against a wall in an apartment courtyard. You’d think she would have used a room. Somewhere she could wash.” I continued searching the bag even as I spoke.

“You make it sound like she was something better than a whore,” said Körner. “Look, it’s just a handbag, right? I don’t know that it tells you anything. Perhaps her Fritz was in a hurry. Didn’t want all the fancy silk trimmings and lingerie that some of these girls offer. Just a quick bit of mouse and then a bit of cash for a taxi home.”

“I expect you’re right, Johann,” said Weiss.

“This is interesting,” I said. “There’s a secret pocket in this bag. The zip is at the bottom of the pocket instead of the top and underneath a fold of leather so it would be easy enough to miss, I suppose. Certainly anyone in a hurry might not realize it was there. There’s something in it, too.” My hand came out of the handbag holding a couple of gold rings and a new ten-mark banknote.

“Let me see that,” said Körner irritably.

I handed over the rings but not the note.

“I think you’d better not touch Herr Thaer,” I said. “This one looks brand-new. Like it was issued yesterday. We might even be able to trace this, sir.”

“Good work, Gunther.”

Ten-reichsmark notes were green and featured an agriculturalist called Albrecht Thaer, whose only real fame was that he was on the money. I’d never heard of him. The heroes of the Weimar Republic always seemed underwhelming, which is perhaps the hallmark of true democracy; under the Kaiser, German money had looked altogether more patriotic and inspiring.

I slipped the banknote into a paper bag and carried it back to the murder wagon before returning to the top of the stairwell. I left Weiss speaking to Körner and then descended the stairs to where Ernst Gennat was now giving the corpse the benefit of his many years’ experience in homicide. His flashlight was all over the ground around the body like an anteater’s nose. Her head was covered with blood and she looked like she’d fallen downstairs and cracked her skull. Her clothes were good quality and her stockings were made of silk; her discarded gray cloche hat was from Manheimer on Oberwallstrasse and resembled a steel helmet that hadn’t worked.

“Rigor’s set in,” said Gennat. “I figure she’s been dead about twenty-two or twenty-three hours. Like killing a seal pup.”

“How’s that?”

“She comes down here in front of him, he batters her with his hammer, one powerful blow, breaks her neck, and before she’s even hit the ground he’s got his blade out and is preparing to take her pelt. Start to finish maybe as little as sixty seconds.”

“Christ, that’s fast.”

“That’s because he takes no pleasure in it. This much is obvious. If he did there would be more evidence of him going into a frenzy. Sometimes when a killer actually gets up the courage to kill, it opens the floodgates and he inflicts multiple stab wounds. But this girl’s skirt hasn’t even been lifted and as far as I can see there’s not a mark on her body. So this is not about sex, Gunther. It’s not even about killing. It’s all about that trophy. The hair. Her scalp.” Gennat paused. “Find something in her handbag, did you?”

I told him about the banknote.

“A ten’s what he’d have given her to go with him somewhere,” he said. “Down here. Just enough to silence any misgivings she might have. And more than enough to blow him.”

“That’s what I figured. Only maybe he worried about that banknote. And came back to see if he could retrieve it. Which is why he ransacked her handbag.” I lowered my voice. “And here was me thinking that it was one of Körner’s men who did that.”

“It doesn’t mean that Körner’s boys didn’t pinch some stuff from her bag. The police from Sophie-Charlotte-Platz have always had a reputation for unofficial taxation, if you know what I mean. You notice they were careful to leave her ID so as not to have the trouble of the legwork needed to put a name to her face. Look, it’s a nice theory you have there, Gunther. About the banknote. Now see if you can prove it. Perhaps you can find something else out there that could have come from her handbag. A lipstick or a powder compact. A purse or a set of keys. Then, when you’ve done that, go to the Kakadu and see if anyone remembers her. Not forgetting some of the other girls on Wittenbergplatz. Maybe they’ll have seen her with someone. Hopefully someone with the word murderer chalked on his back.”

“Right you are, sir.” I started back up the steps, with the beam from my flashlight straight ahead of me. Something white reflected light back at me; I leaned over to take a closer look. It was an ivory cigar holder.

“I doubt that could have come from her handbag, don’t you?”

Gennat leaned toward the cigar holder and picked it up on the end of his Pelikan. He cursed loudly.

“You know what this means, don’t you?” he said.

“That the killer smokes cigars?”

“It means we have found an important clue at three of the murder scenes. A cuff link. A pound note. And now this.”

“You believe the killer is playing games with us?”

“I’m beginning to think so. Christ only knows how much police time Reichenbach was obliged to waste on the idea that the killer might be a Freemason.”

“Of course, they might all be genuine, those clues. He really could smoke cigars, wear Freemason cuff links, and have a pocket full of foreign currency.”

“Sure, why not? If it helps you to believe that a little mouse will pay you a nice shiny penny if you leave a tooth on your bedside table, then go right ahead. But I think Winnetou’s playing us for fools. It’s always been my experience that clues are like wine; they need a bit of time to grow in stature. Clues only look like clues in stories. But I’m smelling a rat because my nostrils are more sensitive to rats than yours. The question is why? Why tease us like this? It looks very premeditated.”

“He wants to waste our time. Doubles back like a fox to throw us off the scent. Surely that’s got to be a good thing for him.”

“Looks that way. To my mind that banknote looks like the real clue here. Now go and back it up.”

I STALKED AROUND the courtyard with my flashlight, staring at the ground like a heron. From time to time I glanced up at the surrounding windows, some of which were occupied by interested onlookers. Nothing like a murder to bring Berliners out of their pigeonholes. A few of them shouted to me but I couldn’t hear what was said and even if I had, I wouldn’t have answered.

Close to the stairwell was a solitary tree that had seen better days. At the base of the tree was a hole; I pushed my arm in up to the elbow and quickly found a leather wallet that matched the dead girl’s Hulbe handbag. There was no money in it but there was a bus ticket and a photograph of Eva Angerstein. She was pictured standing on Potsdamer Platz in front of the famous traffic-light clock. Behind her you could see the equally famous Haus Vaterland on Köthener Strasse, which would have been exactly the kind of place a half-silk like Eva would have plied her trade. She was wearing a little navy cloche and a loose blue dress, which she had raised with one hand just enough to show off her red garter: a provocative pose for laughs, it looked like. It was the first time I’d got a proper look at her face. She was pretty, with a Cupid’s-bow mouth, dark hair, and a nice smile. Someone’s daughter, I thought; someone’s sister, perhaps; and now someone’s victim.

I had another feel around inside the tree and came up with a lipstick. I put the lipstick in a paper bag and the photograph in my pocket. Then I brought the evidence back to the murder wagon, told Bernhard Weiss where I was going, and said I might get back before they left, and if not, I’d catch them in the morning. Then I set off for the Kakadu, a five-minute walk away, in the hope that someone there would remember her.

But nobody did.

Over every dining table was a caged cockatoo that was supposed to squawk for the bill when you tapped the glass with a knife, and probably I’d have been better off asking the birds for information for all the help I got. But on my way out I got lucky when I asked the hatcheck girl if she recognized the girl in the photograph. She said she did, and even mentioned another girl she’d been with for part of the previous evening. Her name was Daisy and she was an American and the hatcheck girl thought I’d probably find her in the small lounge, which I’d forgotten existed.

The lounge was full of cozy corners with lots of little fireplaces and sofas and chaises longues and couples getting to know each other, some of them quite intimately; fortunately for me, Daisy wasn’t one of these. She was easily distinguishable from the other women in the Kakadu: American women always looked better-dressed than German women. She was sitting on her own, drinking champagne, and, seeing me out of the corner of her eye, she glanced at her watch impatiently as I approached. She was slender, small-breasted, and good-looking, probably in her twenties, and quite sure of herself, the way girls are when they have plenty of money. The wristwatch told me that much; it was all jade and diamonds and she probably couldn’t have cared less what time it was.

“Daisy?”

“I’m waiting for someone, Fritz,” she said. “And he’ll be here any minute, so don’t bother sitting down.”

“It’s no bother. At least not for me. And my name’s not Fritz.” I sat down and showed her my new beer token. “It’s police. Maybe police trouble for you, maybe not. That’s what we need to find out.”

“What do you want?”

“Some information. First of all, your full name.”

“Torrens. Daisy Torrens. What’s this about?”

“You seem nervous, Daisy.”

“Like I said, I’m waiting for someone.”

“Then I’ll make it quick.” I took Eva’s photograph out of my pocket. “Ever seen this girl before?”

“No.” Daisy might have been looking at someone’s tram ticket for all the attention she paid to the picture.

“I think you should look at it again. Because I’ve a witness who says you were speaking to her last night. And it wouldn’t do for an American girl to mislead a German policeman. It will look bad for international relations when I’m forced to arrest you on suspicion of withholding evidence.”

“All right, I spoke to her. So what?”

“What about?”

“Look, I really don’t remember. We just spoke for a few minutes. About nothing at all really. Girl talk. Men. This place. How the cockatoos shit on the tables in the other room. I don’t know.”

“We could always do this at Alexanderplatz if you prefer. But I can’t promise that someone won’t shit on the tables there, I’m afraid.”

“What’s the big deal? I speak to all kinds of people in here. Everyone does. There’s no law against it.”

“The big deal is that Eva Angerstein was murdered after she left here last night. And there is a law against that. For all I know you were the last person to see her alive.”

“Oh, I see. That’s terrible. I’m sorry.” She didn’t sound in the least bit sorry. She thought for a moment, bit her pouty lip, and then looked squarely at me. “Look, if I tell you what I know, which really isn’t much, will you go away and leave me alone? My gentleman friend won’t like it if he sees me talking to the police.”

“Sure. Why not. But I’ll need to see an identity card. Just to know you’re on the level.”

She grabbed her purse and handed me her identity card. Hers was a good address, and easily remembered: villa G, street 6, number 9, in the fashionable suburb of Eichkamp. The kind of address where diamond-and-jade wristwatches were easily afforded. I handed the card back.

“So. Talk to me.”

“Eva used to buy me cocaine,” said Daisy Torrens. “There’s a dealer on Wittenbergplatz. Outside the station. Sells sausages as well as dope. But he doubles his price when he sees me coming. Because I’m an American, he figures I’m good for it. And I don’t much like the smell of sausages. That’s one of the reasons I come here; the vegetarian restaurant. It’s the best in Berlin.”

“You’re supposed to have a prescription to buy cocaine,” I said. “And only from a pharmacist.”

“Yes, I know, but at this time of night where are you going to get one of those?”

“So Eva was your go-between. You’d done this before?”

“Sure. Lots of times. We met in here a while ago. I wouldn’t say we were friends. But I’d give her ten percent for the trouble. She used to do that for lots of people. They don’t like anyone selling drugs in here. Anyway, Eva was always reliable. Until last night. I gave her fifty marks to get me some coke and she never came back.” Daisy glanced at her watch again. It was worth a second look. “I guess now I know why.”

“Did you know Eva was a prostitute?”

“She never said as much, but I had a pretty shrewd idea she was at it. A lot of girls in here are.”

“But not you.”

“No.” Her tone stiffened and her chin raised a little as if she was thinking of telling me to go to hell, and she might have done if I hadn’t been a policeman. “I’m an actress, as a matter of fact. And now if you don’t mind, I’d like you to leave me alone.”

“One more question and then I will. Did you see her talk to any men last night? Any men at all.”

“Honestly? No. The lighting in here is a little subdued as you can see and I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so even if I had seen her talking to someone I wouldn’t have recognized them.”

“You’re shortsighted?”

“Yes.”

“May I see those glasses?”

“Sure.” She opened her handbag and took out a spectacle case, which she handed me. I took out a pair of glasses and held them up, inspecting the lenses. “Satisfied?” she asked.

I handed them back. “Thank you.” I stood and walked away without another word but at the edge of the small lounge I hung back behind a pillar in the hope I might see the gentleman friend on whom she was waiting. Daisy didn’t see me. I was sure about that; she wasn’t wearing her glasses. But I did see the man she’d been waiting for, whom she now kissed very fondly. Dressed in a dinner jacket, he was probably twice her age and certainly twice her size: dark, fleshy, balding, with eyebrows like hedgerows and a nose the size of a car horn. In short, he was every German bigot’s idea of what a rich Jew was supposed to look like and, what’s more, I recognized him and only to see him was to feel as if I had stepped onto the roller coaster at Luna Park. His name was Albert Grzesinski, once Berlin’s chief of police and now the new Weimar government’s minister of the interior.

I WAS DOG-TIRED by the time I reached Wittenbergplatz. My feet hurt even more than before and my brain felt like a half lemon in a bartender’s fist. There’s something about all that neon light at night that seems to bleach out a man’s spirit. I was much too tired to be as polite as I’d been in the Kakadu and I was already regretting I hadn’t been a little harder on Daisy Torrens. The indifference she’d demonstrated at the news of Eva Angerstein’s murder had shocked me a little; in those days I was still capable of being shocked at human behavior, in spite of having worked in Vice for two years.

Wittenbergplatz was known for two things: the Hermann Tietz department store, formerly known as Jandorf’s, where I did most of my own clothes shopping, and the art nouveau U-Bahn station; with its neoclassical facade and grand entrance hall, it looked more like a church than a railway station. That was Berlin for you. Make something look better, nicer, a little more grand than what it was. The same way that the UFA Cinema on Nollendorfplatz looked more like the ancient Temple of Dagon before Samson turned up and rearranged the architecture.

Inside the entrance hall of the Wittenbergplatz station was the usual gauntlet of whores through which men coming up from the trains were obliged to pass, and indeed there was a man balancing a boiler tray of sausages on his chest, and a couple of beggars—injured war veterans trying to make a few pennies. It was a fairly typical metropolitan scene right down to the fat lawyer type coming into the entryway who looked at the whores and the beggars and then harrumphed loudly.

“Disgraceful,” he said to the two beggars. Why he should have singled them out for criticism I don’t know. “You should be ashamed of yourselves. The way you degrade that uniform. And those medals.”

Which was my cue to walk over and drop a handful of coins into each man’s cap and that was more than enough to send the fat man scuttling down to catch his train to somewhere as respectable as his opinions.

I bought twenty Salem Aleikum, presented myself in front of the sausage seller, and asked for a bag of salt, which, without the sausage, only meant one thing; when I was certain it was in his hand, I showed him my beer token. Selling cocaine without a prescription didn’t count as much of a crime but it was probably enough for me to have taken him in, and might even have been enough for him to have lost his street vendor’s license.

“You can put the bag of salt away,” I said. “I’m not interested in that. I’m more interested in talking about one of your regular customers. Half-silk. Name of Eva Angerstein.”

“They’ve got names? You surprise me.”

“This one has a photograph.”

I handed him the picture and he took it between a greasy thumb and forefinger, found some glasses in the breast pocket of his jacket, looked at the photo, ate a bit of a sausage he obviously wasn’t going to sell that night, and then nodded.

“Nice-looking girl.”

“Isn’t she just.”

“All right, I know her,” he admitted. “Buys from me two or three nights a week. Too much to use herself. Takes it to one of the clubs, I reckon, and probably sells it in the ladies’ toilets. I take that into account when I give her the price.”

“When did you last see her?”

“Last night. About this time. Why? What’s she done?”

“She’s been murdered.”

“Pity. Lot of that about these days. As a matter of fact it’s got so bad that some of these girls are afraid to work. You wouldn’t think it, but there’s only half as many girls on the streets these days. Afraid of getting scalped by Winnetou. Well, who wouldn’t be? Was she scalped?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“You just did. So Eva bought some salt and then went to talk to those girls over there. At least I think it was them. Hard to tell them apart from this distance. Then after a few minutes this fellow comes into the station and eventually she leaves with him. Out the front door.”

“Could you describe him?”

“Now you’re asking. These girls talk to more men than I sell sausages. It’d be like you asking me to describe a würst I just sold.”

“Try.”

“Well dressed. Gentleman, looked like. Wore his hat on the side of his head. Sort of rakishly. Big raincoat. I was only half paying attention.” He shrugged. “That’s about it. You’d best ask the grasshoppers. They don’t miss anything. In less than ten seconds they can size you up and tell how much you’ve got in your pockets and if you’re in the mood for some mouse or not.”

HE WAS RIGHT.

I turned toward the girls, but they’d already taken a good look at me talking to the sausage seller, concluded I was police, and scattered to the four winds. I walked back to my informant.

“See what I mean?” He laughed. “They had you fingered as a bull the minute you handed me that photograph, son. Hard enough to make a living without you scaring away the fish.”

I nodded and turned away wearily. My bed in Nollendorfplatz felt very close by and I badly wanted to be there. On my own.

“One more thing,” said the sausage seller. “I don’t think it was him who killed her. The Fritz with the hat, I mean.”

“Why do you say so?”

“Because it’s my opinion he didn’t look or sound like he was going to kill anyone.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, he was whistling, wasn’t he? Fellow who’s going to scalp a girl and kill her doesn’t whistle before he does it. Does he? No. I wouldn’t say so. A man whistling is a carefree sort of sound, I’d say. Hardly the type to go on the warpath.”

“You’re probably right. But just as a matter of interest, do you remember the tune he was whistling?”

“No. Not a chance, I’m afraid. I’m tone deaf. Here. Have a sausage. On the house. I’m not going to sell these and I’m knocking off soon. They’ll only go to waste.”

BACK OUTSIDE THE COURTYARD in Wormser Strasse, eating my sausage in the darkness, I barked my shins on some short wooden crutches and a vagrant’s trolley, the type a legless or partially paralyzed man might have used in lieu of a proper wheelchair to get around the city. It reminded me of some medieval painting of amusing German beggars wearing cardboard crowns and foxtails on their backs. We always had a cruel sense of humor in Germany. The trolley was homemade and crude, but many men had little choice but to use one. Modern orthopedic wheelchairs of the kind produced by Germany’s agency for the disabled were expensive and, immediately after the war, there had been many instances of men being robbed of them. Maybe that’s why it struck me as strange that one of these “cripple-carts,” as they were commonly known, should have been abandoned in this way. Where was the man who’d been using it? And it says a lot about my own attitude to Germany’s disabled that I should have forgotten about this cart almost as soon as I’d encountered it earlier in the evening. Ten years after the armistice, Berlin’s disabled veterans were still so ubiquitous that nobody—myself included—gave them a second thought; they were like stray cats or dogs—always around. The few coins I had dispensed at the station on Wittenbergplatz had been the first I’d parted with in more than a year.

I hurried inside the courtyard in search of further head-swelling praise for what I had recently discovered.

Commissar Körner had gone home, leaving behind just a few uniformed cops from Sophie-Charlotte-Platz to help police the crime scene. People were still leaning out their high windows to see what was happening; it was that or listen to the radio, or maybe go to bed. I knew which one I was keenest on. My bed couldn’t have felt more enticing if it had contained a bottle of good rum and a clean pair of pajamas. Hans Gross had finished taking his photographs. Frau Künstler had pulled the cover on top of the typewriter and was lighting another cigarette. Weiss was checking his pocket watch; his own car and police driver had arrived to take him home and he looked as if he was getting ready to leave; at least he was until I took him and Gennat aside to tell them what I’d discovered on Wittenbergplatz and, more intriguingly, in the Kakadu.

“Before she was murdered, the victim met up with a woman she sometimes bought drugs for,” I explained. “An American girl, name of Daisy Torrens.”

Weiss frowned. “Now, why does that name ring a distant bell?”

“Perhaps because she was awaiting the arrival of a man you yourself know, sir. That man’s name is Albert Grzesinski.”

“The new minister?” said Gennat.

“Unless he has a twin brother.”

“Are you sure?” asked Weiss. But he didn’t sound as if it was me he doubted so much as his own ears.

“Positive.”

“He was really with that woman in public?”

“Not just with her, but all over her.”

“Jesus.”

“Who is Daisy Torrens?” asked Gennat. “I’ve never heard of her.”

“An actress,” said Weiss. “She had the leading role in a recent UFA movie called We’ll Meet Again in the Homeland. I thought you were interested in cinema.”

“That was a dreadful film,” said Gennat.

“I don’t doubt it. Anyway, Grzesinski’s been having an affair with Miss Torrens but, until recently, he was much too discreet ever to be seen with her in public. He’s married, after all. But they share a house in Eichkamp.”

“She gave me the address,” I said.

“So far, the press have been ignoring the affair, but if the Nazis were to find out about it they could easily finish off his career in the pages of Der Angriff. There’s nothing they like more than a Jew with his hand in an American girl’s pants. Especially one who’s involved with drugs.” Weiss removed his pince-nez, polished the lenses gently, squeezed them back onto the bridge of his nose, and then shot me a look. “You’re sure about that part.”

“She told me herself,” I said.

“What kind of woman would you say she was?”

“A rich bitch. Glamorous and heartless.”

“That’s what I heard,” said Weiss. For a moment he seemed overcome with a mild fit of coughing, which he stifled with the back of his hand.

“If this gets out,” said Gennat, “the new government will be over before it’s even started. The last thing we need now unless you’re a goddamn Nazi is another election. There’s only so much democracy that one country can take before it starts to get tired of the idea.”

“Then we’d best keep this to ourselves,” said Weiss.

“Agreed,” said Gennat.

I nodded my assent as if that were important; the idea that I might have some influence over the fate of the government seemed absurd to me.

“I’ll speak to Grzesinski and suggest that he and his American friend might like to behave a little more discreetly in future,” added Weiss. “For his sake and the country’s. Anyway, this is all beside the point. You obtained another description of the murderer, Gunther. Which fits the one we already had from the woman who found Fritz Pabst. Good work, my boy. First thing in the morning I want you to visit the Reichsbank on Jägerstrasse and get them to start checking up on that ten-mark banknote you found. If you have any problems with this, telephone me at home and I’ll speak to Heinrich Köhler himself. He owes me a favor.”

Köhler was the German finance minister.

“But right now, you should go home. You, too, Ernst. We’ve done all we can tonight, short of staging a candlelit vigil for the dead girl.” He glanced up as someone in one of the higher windows whistled down to us. “If we stay out here any longer they’ll be wanting a few bars of ‘Berliner Luft.’”

“ACCORDING TO THE serial number, the banknote I found in Eva Angerstein’s handbag was issued just a week ago,” I said. “I’ve traced it to a branch of Commerzbank, in Moabit. The manager believes it was part of a batch of notes from the German central bank that was divided up and paid out to one or two local businesses in time to be distributed in workers’ wage packets last Friday. By far the largest of these payments was made to the Charité hospital, which means the killer could be a medical man. And that would certainly be consistent with the killer’s fondness for—and skill with—a sharp knife. It’s my belief that we should probably speak to the hospital director and arrange to have all male employees of the Charité interviewed by police officers from the Alex as soon as possible. We have a description of the man, we even have a possible handprint, and we can certainly check alibis. This note might be just enough to narrow down our inquiry quite significantly.”

Weiss listened carefully and then nodded. It was Monday afternoon and we were in his office at the Alex. I sensed I only had half his attention, which was perhaps hardly surprising. It had been a difficult weekend for the Berlin police and for him in particular—the large bruise on his face told me that much. At the communist march in West Berlin, the police had charged after the Reds had broken through their lines, shots had been fired, and a communist workman had been killed. And if all that wasn’t enough, Weiss had been assaulted on Frankfurter Allee by Otto Dillenburger while he himself was watching a different communist demonstration. An openly right-wing police colonel in command of the eastern police region, Dillenburger had previously alleged that Weiss was secretly colluding with the communists, and he was now suspended from duty pending an inquiry by the Praesidium. But already he’d lodged an appeal with the PPPO—the Prussian Police Officers’ Association—and it was widely held that the colonel would be quickly reinstated. The PPPO was almost as right wing as Dillenburger himself.

You didn’t have to be a detective to work out why Weiss was suspected of being a communist; not in Germany. Everyone who was sympathetic to the Nazis believed that a Jew was just a communist with a big nose and a gold watch. I felt desperately sorry for this man whom I and many others much admired, but I didn’t mention the incident with Dillenburger; Weiss wasn’t the type to dwell on his own misfortunes or to seek sympathy.

“Approximately how many people would you say work at the Charité hospital, Bernie?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps a thousand.”

“And how many men do you think work here, at the Alex?”

“About half that number.”

Weiss smiled. “True. I fear there are many reforms still needed to make this the force it might yet become. A great many policemen are just hanging on for a severance payment or a police maintenance claim with which to start up a business. Between you and me, I’ve heard of some patrolmen leaving the force with several thousand marks in their pockets.”

I whistled quietly. “So that’s why the uniformed boys wear those riding breeches. You need big pockets with that kind of money on offer.”

“Ironic, isn’t it?” said Weiss. “For all its antipathy to socialism and to trade unionism and workers’ rights, I know of no organization in the whole of Germany with more powerful unions than the Berlin police.”

He relit his cigar and stared up at the three-arm brass gasolier, as if things were clearer near the ceiling.

“Bernie, what you recommend is certainly what should be done, without question; and I’ve no doubt that in the future, all investigations will be conducted on the basis of cross-referenced witness statements. But I’m afraid that what you’re suggesting is quite impossible. For one thing, we don’t have the time, but even if we did, I’m not sure I should follow your recommendation. You see, there’s the politics of it to consider. Yes, the politics, although I hate mentioning a word like that in this building. Let me explain. I’m not one of those who believe that Berlin society is improved by the presence of fewer girls on the street, but there are many—Commissar Körner, for example—who believe exactly that. And the plain fact of the matter is that if we’re going to catch this psychopath it will have to be with the immediate resources of the Murder Commission and a few like-minded Kripo officers, rather than the whole police department. So as far as the Charité is concerned, feel free to speak to the hospital director; maybe he can identify a few doctors who present themselves as morally insane. I’ve certainly met a few of those in my time. But I fear that if you do conduct any more interviews, it will have to be a mostly solo effort. I’m sorry, Bernie, but that’s just how it is and how it has to be. Understand?”

“I understand.”

“Was there anything else?”

“Yes. There’s a writer who’d like a little help with a script she’s writing about a police detective investigating a series of murders. Background research, I suppose. I’d like your permission to bring her into the Commission’s offices on one of my days off this week. Her name is Thea von Harbou.”

“Married to Fritz Lang, the film director. Yes, I’ve heard of her. Permission granted. With one proviso.”

“And that is?”

“Thea von Harbou comes from a family of minor Bavarian nobility. The same cannot be said of Fritz Lang. Lang is a Jew who identifies as a Roman Catholic but that means nothing to the likes of Hitler and his local ape, Josef Goebbels. Once a Jew always a Jew. So bring her here to the Alex by all means, and give her all the assistance you think appropriate, but please make sure you deal with her and with her husband discreetly, as if your name was Albert Grzesinski and hers was Daisy Torrens.”

IT WAS LIKE visiting Berlin Zoo but without the entry charge, which probably was why there was a longer line to be admitted to the place. Berlin’s showhouse for the dead—otherwise known as the police morgue—was just that: a popular spectacle and perhaps the last place in Europe where the murdered corpses of your fellow citizens could be viewed in all their anonymous ruination, no matter how horrific that might be. People queued along Hannoversche Strasse as far as Oranienburger Tor to get in to see the “exhibits.” Grouped in glass cases around the central hall, they most resembled the inhabitants of the zoo’s famous aquarium. Certainly many of these corpses looked as torpid as any ancient moray eel or crusty blue lobster. Children under sixteen were forbidden entry but it certainly didn’t stop them from trying to sneak past attendants who were employed not by the police, nor by the Charité hospital across the street, but by the city’s animal hospital next door. As a schoolboy, I myself had tried to get into the Hanno showhouse; and once, to my everlasting disgust, I had succeeded.

There was, of course, a sound forensic reason for this exhibition; it was argued that information about a deceased person was often very hard to obtain from a metropolitan citizenry that was enormously diverse except for a shared dislike of Prussians and the Berlin police, and the display of corpses, while no doubt titillating, sometimes produced valuable information. None of this counted for much with me. You just had to eavesdrop on what was said to know that the people who went to see the stiffs and be horrified were the same ones who would have bought a sausage and gone to watch a man broken on the wheel. Sometimes there is nothing quite so dreadful as your fellow man, dead or alive.

None of the bodies already exhibited in the central hall were familiar to me, but I wasn’t in search of a name or evidence so much as to confirm something I’d heard Arthur Nebe talking about in his speech to the Prussian Police Officers’ Association: that the Hanno showhouse was very popular with Berlin’s artists in search of something to draw. I assumed, wrongly as it transpired, that these artists were merely following in the tradition of Leonardo da Vinci and perhaps Goya, looking for human subjects that wouldn’t or couldn’t move while you were drawing them.

As it happened I only saw one artist at the Hanno showhouse that Tuesday afternoon. To my surprise, he wasn’t drawing anatomical studies but actual wounds—throats that were cut or torsos that had been comprehensively disemboweled—and he seemed not at all interested in drawing dead men, only dead women, preferably in a state of undress. He was about forty, thickset with dark hair and, for some obscure reason, dressed as an American cowboy. A pipe was in his mouth and he was almost oblivious of everyone around him—everyone who was alive, that is. Several times I looked over his shoulder at his sketchbook just to check my own appraisal of his work before I eventually introduced myself with the Kripo warrant disc. I’m no art critic but the word I’d have used to sum up his style was depraved. I suppose if he’d been dressed like an Apache Indian I might even have arrested him.

“Can we talk?”

“S’up? Am I in trouble?” he asked, and almost immediately I knew he was a Berliner. “Because I’m quite sure there’s no law against what I’m doing. Nor any rule in here that I’m breaking. I already asked the people in charge of this place and they said I was free to draw anything I liked but not to take photographs.”

Despite his eccentric appearance—he was even wearing spurs—the Fritz was a Berliner, all right: asserting your rights in the face of Prussian officialdom was as typical as the accent.

“Well, then, you know more than I do, Herr—”

“Grosz. George Ehrenfried Grosz.”

“No, you’re not in any trouble, sir. At least none that I know of. I’d just like to talk to you, if I may.”

“All right. But what shall we talk about?”

“This, of course. What you’re drawing. Your preferred subject. Murder. In particular, murdered women. Look, there’s a bar nearby, on Luisenstrasse—Lauer’s.”

“I know the place.”

“Let me buy you a drink.”

“Is this official? Perhaps I should invite my lawyer.”

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like our fine capital’s police?”

He laughed. “Clearly, you haven’t heard of me, Sergeant Gunther. The law and my work don’t seem to get on very well right now. And not for the first time, either. Currently I’m being prosecuted for blasphemy.”

“Not my department, I’m afraid. The only picture on my wall at home is a mezzotint of Hegel and you would think it had been originally drawn by his bitterest enemy. If he had his throat cut and his arse hanging out of his trousers he couldn’t look any worse.”

“History teaches us that no one ever learned anything from Hegel. Least of all about art or even history. But yours is a compelling image. I shall borrow it.”

In Lauer’s I bought us each a beer—two foaming glasses of Schultheiss-Patzenhofer, which was the best beer in the city—and we sat down at a quiet table. Not that it mattered much to George Grosz; he didn’t seem to mind that people looked at him as if he were a lunatic; maybe that was supposed to be artistic in itself, like walking your pet lobster through the streets on a blue silk ribbon. While we talked and sipped our beers he was also drawing me with pen and ink, and doing it with great skill and speed.

“So what’s with the Tom Mix outfit?”

“Did you ask me here to talk about my clothes or about my art?”

“Maybe both.”

“You know, I might be tempted to dress up as a police officer if I could buy myself a uniform.”

“You wouldn’t like the boots. Or the hat. Or for that matter the pay. And it probably is a crime to dress up as police in this town. On the whole, cops in Berlin don’t have much of a sense of humor about such things. Or about anything else, now I come to think about it.”

“You would think they would, considering those boots and that leather hat. There is one thing that cannot be denied, however: the truncheon always seems to hit at the left. Never at the right.”

I smiled weakly. “Haven’t heard that one before.”

“Witness Saturday’s demonstration in which a communist worker was shot.”

“Are you a communist?”

“Would it surprise you to learn that I’m not?”

“Frankly, yes.”

“I once met Lenin, that’s why I’m not a communist. He was a most unimpressive figure.”

“So might I ask, why would a man who’s met Lenin dress up as a cowboy?”

“You might call it a romantic enthusiasm. I guess I’ve always loved America more than I love Russia. When I was a boy I read a lot of James Fenimore Cooper and Karl May.”

“Me too.”

“I’d have been surprised if you told me any different.”

“It’s said that as well as his fascination for the Old West, Karl May had a peculiar enthusiasm for using pseudonyms.”

“True.”

“So is George Grosz your real name? Or is it something else?”

Grosz fished in his jacket, took out his card, and handed it to me silently. I glanced over the details, held the card up to the light—this wasn’t just for show, there were plenty of forgeries around—and handed it back.

“But as it happens you’re right,” he said. “I also enjoy using pseudonyms. Anything like that seems not only possible when you’re an artist, but excusable, too. Even necessary. The reason a man becomes an artist these days is to make his own rules.”

“And here was me thinking a man only becomes an artist because he wants to paint and draw.”

“Then I guess that’s why you became a policeman.”

“What’s your favorite book by May?”

“It’s a toss-up between Old Surehand and Winnetou the Red Gentleman.”

“I assume you must have heard about the killer the Berlin newspapers have dubbed Winnetou.”

“The one who scalps his victims? Yes. Ah, now I begin to understand your interest in me, sergeant. You think that because I sometimes draw murdered women I might actually have killed someone in real life. Like Caravaggio. Or Richard Dadd.”

“It certainly crossed my mind.”

“Tell me, did you see any active service?”

“Four fun years in one place after another. But always the same nasty trench. You?”

“Jesus, four years? I did six months and it damn near killed me. They had me training recruits and guarding prisoners of war, on account of how I was partly an invalid.”

“You look all right now.”

“Yes, I know. I’m ashamed to tell you they kicked me out twice. First because of sinusitis, and the second time because I had a breakdown. They were going to execute me as a deserter, but then the war ended. But before it did I saw more than enough for it to affect my work. Perhaps now and forever more. So my themes as an artist are despair, disillusionment, hate, fear, corruption, hypocrisy, and death. I draw drunkards, men puking their guts out, prostitutes, military men with blood on their hands, women pissing in your beer, suicides, men who are horribly crippled, and women who’ve been murdered by men playing skat. But chiefly my subject is this: hell’s metropolis, Berlin itself. With all its wild excess and decadence, the city seems to me to constitute the very essence of true humanity.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

“But I expect you think I should paint nice landscapes and pictures of pretty smiling girls and kittens. Well, I simply can’t. Not anymore. After the trenches there are no pretty girls, no nice landscapes, and not many kittens. Every time I see a landscape I try to imagine what it would look like if there was an enormous shell hole in the middle of it, a trench in the foreground, and a skeleton hanging on the barbed wire. Every time I see a pretty smiling girl I try to imagine what she’d look like if she’d been cut in half by a Vickers machine gun. If I was ever to paint a kitten I’d probably paint two men without noses tearing it apart over the dinner table.”

“Is there much of a market for that kind of thing?”

“I don’t do it for the money. We paint that way because we have to paint that way. Yes, that’s right, I’m not the only one. There are plenty of artists who think and paint the same way as I do. Max Beckmann. Otto Dix—yes, you should really see what Dix draws and paints if you think there’s something wrong with me. Some of his work is much more visceral than anything I might paint. But for the record I don’t think either of them is a murderer. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

For a moment he made me feel glad that I was just a stupid policeman—clearly it was what he thought. Still, I was determined to prove him mistaken on that score. Just because I thought I could. But I was probably wrong about that, too, and later on I felt as if I’d been swimming against the wave machine in the indoor pool at Wellenbad.

“Frankly, I don’t give a damn what you choose to draw and paint, Herr Grosz. That’s entirely your affair. This is Berlin, not Moscow. People can still do more or less what they like here. Like you, I, too, sometimes think that after the war nothing can ever be the same again. But I suppose the major difference between you and me is that I haven’t yet given up on beauty. On optimism. On hope. On a bit of law and order. On a little bit of morality. On Holy Germany, for want of a better phrase.”

Grosz laughed, but his teeth clenched his pipestem tightly. I swam on, still against the tide.

“Oddly enough I still see the best in women, too. My wife, for example. Until she died I thought she was the most wonderful person I’d ever met. I haven’t changed that opinion. I guess that makes me an incurable romantic. Something incurable, anyway.”

Grosz smiled thinly, while his Pelikan raced across the page. From time to time his shrewd eyes flicked up at me, appraising, measuring, estimating. No one had ever drawn me before and it made me feel strange, as if I were being stripped bare, to my very essence, like one of the corpses in the Hanno showhouse.

“When a man talks about a wonderful woman,” he said, “usually that just means he likes her because she tries very hard to be very like a man. Have you looked at women in this town, lately? Christ, most of them even look like men. These days it’s only the men who look like real women. And I could give a damn about what’s best in women.”

“Well, you’ve certainly answered one question. Why you like drawing dead women so much. It’s because you don’t much like women. But I do like the drawing you’ve done of me. Very much. I wonder if you might give it to me.”

Grosz tugged the page out of his sketchbook, added the date, his signature, and the location, and swept it across the table as if it had been the check.

“It’s yours. A gift from me to the Berlin police.”

“I shall pin it on my wall. Next to Hegel.” I looked at it again and nodded. “But you’ve made me look too young. Too smiley. Like a schoolboy who’s just got his Abitur.”

“That’s how I see you, sergeant. Young and naïve. It’s certainly how you see yourself. Which surprises me given all you must have been through in four years at the front.”

“Coming from you, sir, I count that as a great compliment. Makes me feel like that English queer who only gets old in his portrait and loses his soul.”

“I think you must mean Dorian Gray.”

“Yes, him. Except that I’ve still got mine. Yes, in future I shall look at this picture and think I’ve been lucky. I’ve come through the worst of it with my soul still intact. And that’s got to be worth something.”

THE FOLLOWING DAY, a Wednesday, was another day off and I’d planned to walk up to Tietz and buy some things for my new office at the Alex to celebrate my promotion to the Commission: a city map for the wall, a decent-size ashtray, a table lighter, a desk set, and a bottle of good Korn and some glasses for the drawer, just in case anyone came visiting; and then to spend a quiet morning in my room reading some police files. But over breakfast that morning—coffee, Tilsit cheese, and fresh rolls from the Jewish baker’s shop on Schwerinstrasse—I learned that Frau Weitendorf, her hair even more rigidly Golem-like than normal, which made me think it must be a wig, had other ideas as to how I might spend at least the first part of my morning. Sticking a cigarette into her fat ruddy face and lighting it with a match struck on the pewter novelty monkey’s backside, which often made her smile (although not on this occasion), she came tortuously to the point:

“I suppose you haven’t seen Herr Rankin,” she said as she turned down the volume on the Firma Telefunken radio that stood on the sideboard beside a vase of yellow flowers and underneath an Achenbach print of a seascape.

“Not today.”

“When was the last time you saw him, Herr Gunther?”

“I don’t know. Last Friday evening, perhaps? When we all sat down to eat your delicious lung hash.”

“That was the last time anyone at this table saw him,” she added ominously.

I looked around at the two others, who were down for breakfast.

“Is that true?”

Rosa nodded and left the table.

Herr Fischer nodded as well, but felt obliged to add his three pennies’ worth of information, none of which was in the least bit relevant.

“Yes. It was Friday evening. I remember that because the next day I marched with the communists on Bismarckstrasse, and your lot opened fire as they held up our brass band to allow motor traffic over the intersection at Krumme Strasse. Which was quite uncalled for. But entirely typical of what we’ve come to expect from the Berlin police.”

My lot were the police, of course. I shrugged. “Traffic takes precedence over Marx and Engels.”

“I meant the shooting.”

“Oh that. Look, all this is beside the point. I thought we were talking about Herr Rankin, not public order.”

“He’s gone missing,” said Frau Weitendorf. “I’m certain of it.”

“Are you sure? Perhaps he just went away for a few days. I’m beginning to wish I had.”

“His suitcase is still here.”

“You’ve been in his room?”

“He pays me to clean it. And to change his sheets once a week. When I went in yesterday it was plain he hadn’t been there in days. There were several empty bottles lying on the floor and some blood in his shaving basin.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Go and take a look for yourself.”

We all went upstairs and she unlocked Rankin’s door from a bunch of keys on a pink silk ribbon and ushered me inside.

“I don’t think we all need to be in here,” I said to Fischer in particular. “No matter what might have happened, I think we still have to respect Rankin’s privacy.”

While I spoke I was eyeing several of the drawings on the wall, which were of naked men in various states of arousal and left nothing to the imagination.

“Typical copper,” said Fischer. “Always telling people what to do. Just like the Nazis he and his kind serve so enthusiastically. Look, we all live here. And Robert Rankin’s a friend of mine. A good friend. It’s not like he hasn’t invited me in here before. And I think I’m entitled to know if something’s happened to him.”

I had become tired of Fischer’s constant baiting and the assumption that because I was a cop I was also a Nazi lackey.

“I think you’re entitled to know nothing,” I said, pushing him back out the doorway. “Although it does seem to me that nothing is usually what a Bolshevik heel hound such as yourself knows best of all.”

“Listen, I’m a citizen. You should be more polite. Or I’ll feel obliged to report you to your superiors.”

“Go right ahead. Meanwhile, I think I’m all through being polite with you, Herr Fischer, so please don’t be in any doubt about that.”

I closed the door on him, leaving me alone with Frau Weitendorf, whose smile told me she’d quite enjoyed the way I’d spoken to Herr Fischer.

“Lefty bastard,” she muttered.

“Mostly I don’t have anything against communists,” I said. “But I’m beginning to make an exception in that man’s case.”

Rankin’s rooms were much like my own, though bigger and better appointed, with the same sort of furniture except there were more pictures and a large Royal typewriter on the desk. The lip of the basin was spattered with blood and full of pinkish water. Among the shards of broken phonograph records on the floor were several empties that had once been filled with good Scotch; the ashtray beside the typewriter was full of English butts; and a handsome leather suitcase was still on top of the wardrobe. There were at least ten copies of his book, Pack Up Your Troubles, on the shelves, almost as if he’d tried to improve its sales by buying it himself. I went into the bedroom and inspected the narrow single bed. The pillow smelled strongly of Coty perfume, perhaps suggesting that Rosa Braun had a better acquaintance with Robert Rankin than I might have supposed.

I picked up one of the records and inspected the label; the vocalist was Bessie Smith.

“Why does a man smash his records like this? It’s not normal.”

“That all depends on whether you like Bessie Smith,” I said. “Me, I can take her or leave her.”

“I don’t mind telling you, Herr Gunther, I’m worried something’s happened to Herr Rankin.” She stubbed her cigarette out in Rankin’s ashtray and folded her arms under her substantial bosom.

“I can’t say I’m inclined to agree with you. Not yet. Not on the basis of what I’ve seen in here. He drinks a lot. More than he should, perhaps. He smashed a few records. People do things like that when they’re drunk. And he cut himself shaving. If it wasn’t for the absence of a stick of alum on the shaving stand I’d see no real reason to worry.”

Apart, I might have added, from the smell of Coty perfume on the missing man’s pillowcase.

I sat down at Rankin’s desk. There was a diary and, beside the big black Royal, a pile of typed pages I assumed were part of the book he’d been translating into German. I thought these might give me a clue as to what might have happened to him. “Why don’t you leave it with me for a few minutes? I’ll poke my muzzle through his desk drawers. See what I can find out.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I should stay here and keep an eye on things. For Herr Rankin’s sake.”

“True. You can’t trust anyone very much these days. And the cops not at all.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest you would steal anything, Herr Gunther.”

“That’s because you don’t know as many cops as I do.” I thought of Commissar Körner and the way he or his men had helped themselves to what was in Eva Angerstein’s handbag. “Okay, take a seat. Here, have a smoke while you’re waiting.”

I fished out my packet of Salem Aleikum, lit one for each of us, and then tugged open the top drawer. The little Browning .25 caught my eye right away; I sniffed it carefully; it had been recently cleaned. Everything else looked harmless enough, even the dirty postcards featuring boys from the Cosy Corner, which was a queer bar not very far away. What with the cards and the drawings on the wall, I was beginning to wonder if the Coty perfume on his pillow hadn’t been worn by Rankin himself; of course that was just wishful thinking and I knew better. For one thing, there wasn’t a bottle of the stuff anywhere in his drawers, and for another, it wasn’t every queer who didn’t like women. Besides, Rankin was a very handsome man, with a bit of money, which made him almost irresistible to every woman in Berlin, including Rosa. I’d seen the way she looked at him, and the way he’d looked at her, and given his obvious predilection for boys and her habit of dressing as a man, they seemed to have a lot in common.

I looked in the diary and learned nothing, except that he often went for lunch at Höhn’s Oyster Saloon, and that he was a frequent visitor to the opera, which seemed like a questionable use of anyone’s time.

“According to his diary he’s going to the Comic Opera on Friday night,” I said. “So if he is dead he’s still got time to get his money back.”

“Don’t joke about such things, Herr Gunther.”

“No. Perhaps you’re right.” I lifted the pile of typewritten paper and started to read. I must admit that I got slightly more than I had bargained for.

It was there that Rankin had stopped typing his book although according to the original text he was only halfway through the chapter and but for my lack of English I might have read that, too. I put aside the manuscript, took a puff on my Salem, and thought for a moment. It felt strange reading the account of a man who’d once been my enemy even if he was half German, but if anything it made me realize how much more we had in common than what had divided us. It felt a little as if we were brothers-in-arms. And like Frau Weitendorf, I realized that I, too, was now feeling a little worried about Rankin.

“Well? What do you think?”

I’d almost forgotten that I was not alone in the Englishman’s rooms.

“Those flowers on the sideboard in the dining room,” I said. “The yellow ones. What are they called?”

“Evening primrose,” said Frau Weitendorf. “I pick them from the Heinrich-von-Kleist-Park. At this time of year there are thousands of them. Lovely, aren’t they? Why?”

“When did you put them there?”

“Saturday afternoon. Is it important?”

“I think in future it might be a good idea to choose something else. It seems those particular flowers awaken terrible memories in our Englishman’s mind. Suicidal memories, perhaps.”

“How is that possible?”

“I don’t know. But it certainly fits with my own experiences. The smallest thing can trigger all sorts of unpleasant thoughts of the war.” I finished my cigarette and stubbed it out. “I’ll make some inquiries at the Alex and have someone check the hospitals. Just in case.”

I might also have mentioned the Hanno showhouse but for the fact that I’d just been there and I was more or less sure I hadn’t seen a corpse who resembled Robert Rankin.

THE ALEX TELEPHONED, asking me to cut short my leave and come in the following day, which left me only enough time to have dinner with Thea von Harbou. She suggested we meet at the Hotel Adlon.

THEA WAS TALL, handsome rather than beautiful, full figured, and about forty. Looking at her, it was hard to believe she’d written the screenplay of a movie about robots and an industrialized future. I might more easily have believed she was an opera singer; she certainly had the chest for it. She was wearing a light tweed two-piece suit, a man’s shirt and tie, white stockings, and a pair of silver earrings. Her shortish blond hair was parted to one side, her mouth was maybe a bit too wide, and her nose a bit too long, but she was as elegant as Occam’s razor and just as sharp. She had come armed with some expensive stationery from Liebmann and a variety of accessories that made me think she might have been to India: a gold enameled cigarette case that resembled a Mughal’s favorite rug; a variety of silver and ivory bangles; and a green clutch bag with an embroidered Hindu god that was home to a lorgnette and several large banknotes. This was just as well; the Hotel Adlon’s restaurant was the most expensive in Berlin. I knew that because I saw the ransom demands that were amusingly called prices on the menu, and because Fritz Thyssen was at the next table. Naturally Thea von Harbou was a friend of his; I expect she knew everyone who was worth knowing and Thyssen was worth a lot more than that. He was wearing an extremely fine double-breasted gray suit that made my own gray suit look more like the hide on a dead rhinoceros.

“So when did you become a policeman?” she asked.

“Immediately after the war.”

“And it’s taken until now to get into the Murder Commission?”

“I wasn’t in any hurry. How about you? How did you get into the picture business?”

“The usual way. A man. Two men, if I’m honest. My husband. And the husband before him. I suppose I always wanted to be a writer more than I wanted to be a wife. Still do, if the truth be known.”

Hers was the kind of voice that licks your ear slowly, inside and out, as if it contained the sweetest honey: dark and sexy and very assured, with just a hint of whisper on the edge of it, like the lace on a pillowcase. I liked her voice and I liked her, too. It’s hard not to like a woman who buys you a good dinner at the Adlon.

“How does your husband feel about that? The present one, I mean.”

“We have an understanding. He sees other women—a lot of women; actresses, mostly—and I try to be understanding. There’s a club he enjoys going to. The Heaven and Hell, on Kurfürstendamm. He’s probably there with some little minette right now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. In many ways Fritz is a very selfish, narcissistic man. But he’s also enormously talented. And I admire him a lot. So most of the time we’re a pretty good team.”

“I know. I saw your last picture. Metropolis.”

“What did you think?”

“What didn’t I think? I thought it was very thought provoking. I especially enjoyed the part when the workers rise up against their masters. I’m only surprised they haven’t done it already. That’s what I think.”

“Then we think the same way.”

“Although not so as you’d notice from the people you know.” I glanced sideways at Thyssen.

“Thyssen? He’s not so bad. He puts money into a lot of our pictures. Even the losers. And that’s good enough for me.”

“So how did Metropolis do?”

“It’s had a mixed reception. Even from my darling husband. When he hears bad things about Metropolis he blames me; but when he hears good things about the movie, he prefers to take full credit. But that’s directors for you. It’s not just our movie cameras that need a tripod, it’s his ego, too. Writers are a lesser species. Lesser and cheaper. Especially when they’re women. Anyway we’re through making pictures about the future. Nobody in Germany gives a damn about the future. At least for the present. If they did, they wouldn’t keep voting for the communists and the Nazis. We’d have a proper government that could get things done. So right now we’re focusing on something very different, something with more popular appeal. In particular, the subject of mass murderers like Fritz Haarmann and this other man who’s been killing and scalping Berlin prostitutes: Winnetou. Fritz is fascinated with sex murders. These murders, in particular. You might even say he’s obsessed.”

“Why’s that, do you think?”

“Sometimes I wonder, you know?”

“And what answers do you come up with?”

“It might be the fact that the victims are prostitutes. Fritz has always had a thing about Berlin’s demi-monde. But it might also be the scalping. Yes, I think it must be that. It’s so very extreme. If Fritz wasn’t a film director and interested in all sorts of other extreme stories I might even be worried about him.”

“I don’t think he’s the only one, Thea. Sex murder seems to be an obsession he shares with a lot of Berlin artists.” I mentioned my meeting with George Grosz and what he’d told me about Otto Dix and Max Beckmann.

“I guess that doesn’t surprise me. Fritz says Berlin has become the sex-murder capital of the Western world. And maybe it has, I don’t know. Certainly you’d think so from what’s in the newspapers. So we’ve decided we want to make a picture right here in Berlin about a sex killer like Winnetou. And a detective like Ernst Gennat.”

“He’ll be delighted.”

“What sort of man is he, anyway?”

“Gennat? Buddha with a large cigar and a voice like a black bear with a heavy cold. Berlin’s best detective and probably Germany’s, too, but don’t say it to his face. Fat, a bit clownish to look at, grumpy and easily underestimated.”

“Is he married?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

“You’d have to teach him how that kind of thing works these days. And I doubt he’s got the time or the inclination.”

She nodded and sipped some of the excellent Mosel she’d ordered with dinner. Then she smiled. Her smile was bright and full of warmth and meant, I realized too late, for the man seated behind me.

“That’s what Kurt Reichenbach said.”

“I’m not sure I can improve on anything he’s already told you.”

“Perhaps. But Fritz says our investors are very keen on us having a source who actually works for the Murder Commission. It’s the sort of thing that impresses such people. Fritz says that having you to advise me will help persuade them our film is as true to life—as realistic—as possible. And that you’ll be able to help explain why the killer does what he does. How he gets away with it, for a while at any rate. And eventually how he’s caught.”

“You make that part sound like a foregone conclusion.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Not at all. You’d be surprised how many killers get away with it. If murderers were all that easy to catch I’d be directing traffic on Potsdamer Platz. Or looking for missing cats and dogs.”

“That’s a comforting thought.”

“There’s a lot of thumb twiddling and navel-gazing in the detective business, Thea. And a good measure of luck. Not to mention incompetence and stupidity.”

I might have added dishonesty, too, but for the fact that I’d already gained the impression that she and Fritz Lang wanted to make a detective the hero of their movie.

“Would it surprise you to learn that most detectives are dependent on professional criminals to help them solve crimes? Criminals who for one reason or another become informers. Fact is, most cops would be lost without them. Even in the Murder Commission we often have to rely on Berlin’s lowlife to get a handle on what’s what. Sometimes the best detective is just the guy with the most reliable informer. Or someone who’s better at squeezing a lemon, if you know what I mean. You want to know the reason that most murderers get away with it?”

“Do tell.”

“Because they’re people who look just like you and me. Well, me, anyway. There are not so many women killing prostitutes. Even in Berlin. You want realism? Then make your murderer nice. The guy next door. That’s my advice. The type of clean-shirt and bow-tie sort of guy who is kind to children and animals. A respectable fellow who takes a regular bath and wouldn’t hurt a fly. At least that’s what all the neighbors will say when he’s arrested afterward. No hideous scars, no hunchback, no staring eyes, no long fingernails, no sinister rictus smile. So you can forget about Conrad Veidt or Max Schreck. Make your character insignificant. A little guy. Someone hardly like a villain at all. Someone whose life has run out of meaning. It might lack drama but that’s realistic.”

Thea was silent for a few minutes. “So tell me about Winnetou.”

“I’ll tell you what I’m allowed to tell you. Another time, I’ll invite you back to the Commission offices, maybe introduce you to Gennat himself, show you the murder wagon, but tomorrow I have to work.”

“Do you mind me taking notes? Only, my secretary will type them up and Fritz will read them, too.”

“That’s okay.”

Thea lit a cigarette, spread her notebook expectantly on the table, and started writing down everything I told her as if I were dictating holy writ. Which was probably why, when I’d finished talking, I told her that a lot of people at the Alex—which is to say, a lot of men—didn’t think the Winnetou killings were important.

“What I mean is this, Thea. Dead prostitutes in this city are ten for a penny. And while I’m very keen to catch this bastard, as are Weiss and Gennat, there are plenty of others at the Alex who really don’t give a damn. And not just at the Alex but across the whole city: there are Berliners who believe that many of these girls got what was coming to them. Who think that Winnetou is doing the Lord’s work, and cleaning out the Augean stables. They’re probably the same misguided people who think Germany needs a strongman to lead her out of our current situation. Someone like Hitler. Or the army perhaps. Hindenburg. Or maybe the Pied Piper of Hamelin, I don’t know.”

“So what are you saying? That I shouldn’t write this movie?”

“No, I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying why take the risk of choosing a murderer who preys on people who are already perceived by some to be part of the problem? Why not choose another sort of killer? Another kind of victim. For maximum sympathy. The kind of victim no one could argue with.”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know. I’m a cop, not a writer. But if you were to choose a killer who preys on children, perhaps, then there’s no one who could ever suggest that they deserved it, that they were courting disaster. Everyone likes children. Even Gennat.”

“A child murderer.” Thea’s eyes widened. “That is something new. But it might be too much. Could people stand a film like that?”

“Make them stand it.” I lifted my glass, leaned back in my chair, and watched Thyssen screw a cigarette into a gold holder; vulgarly I wondered how much he was worth and what kind of house he was going home to. I expect he was looking at me and doing the same.

“But there’s another reason why I’m saying this. If you’re writing about a child murderer, then your screen killer will look very different from Winnetou. This helps put a bit of distance between Bernhard Weiss and your husband.”

“And that’s important? Why? Because they’re both Jews, I suppose.”

“Because they’re both Jews. The Nazis love to see conspiracies where none exist. So let’s give them as little ammunition as possible. And by the way, this is Weiss’s thinking, not mine. I’m just a detective.”

She gave me a ride home in her car. When I got inside the house on Nollendorfplatz, I found Rankin had turned up safe and sound. He’d been on a bender with some old friends who were over from England and had stayed in the house they’d rented over in Schmargendorf.

“I’m sorry but it simply didn’t occur to me that any of you would worry,” he said.

“That’s all right,” I said. “We’ll know the next time that you’re probably all right. Won’t we, Frau Weitendorf?”

“Well, I think you’ve been very selfish,” she said. “Fraulein Braun and I thought something dreadful must have happened to you, Herr Rankin. All those broken records on the floor of your room. And the empty bottles of whiskey. What were we supposed to think? Even Herr Gunther was concerned about you.”

“It’s true, I drink too much sometimes. And when I do I get very strong opinions about music. I should never have bought those records. You might say they were a sort of failed experiment in taste. The fact is, I much prefer Wagner and Schubert.”

“That is no excuse,” said Frau Weitendorf, and waddled off irritably.

“I think she’d almost have preferred it if you were dead,” I said.

“I think you’re right. But she’ll come around. They always do. I’ll give her a bit extra for cleaning the room and she’ll be fine.” Rankin grinned at me sheepishly. “Women, eh? Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.”

I thought about my pleasant evening with Thea von Harbou and reflected that possibly her husband felt exactly the same way as Rankin. My own opinion of women wasn’t in the least bit equivocal: Living without my own wife was much less preferable than living with her. In fact, there were times when it was nothing short of intolerable. If women were good for one thing it was this: that they take the sharp edge off feeling forever like a man.