Prague Fatale

CHAPTER 5

I had an office in the Police Praesidium, on the third floor – a small room on the corner underneath the tower and overlooking the U-Bahn station on Alexanderplatz. The view out of the window on a late summer evening was the best thing about it. Life didn’t look quite so dismal at that kind of altitude. I couldn’t smell the people or see their pale, undernourished and sometimes just plain hopeless faces. All the streets came together in one big square just the same as they had done before the war, with trams clanging and taxis honking their horns and the city growling in the distance the way it always did. Sitting on the windowsill with my face in the sun, it was easy to pretend there was no war, no front, no Hitler and that none of it had anything to do with me. Outside there wasn’t a swastika in sight, just the many varieties of specimen in my own favourite game of girl spotting. It was a sport I was always passionate about and at which I excelled. I liked the way it helped me tune in to the natural world, and because girls in Berlin are visible in a way that other Berlin wildlife is not, I never seemed to grow tired of it. There are so many different girls out there. Mostly I was on the lookout for the rarer varieties: exotic blondes that hadn’t been seen since 1938 and fabulous redheads wearing summer plumage that was very nearly transparent. I’d thought about putting a feeder on my windowsill but I knew it was hopeless. The climb up to the third floor was simply too much for them.

The only creatures that ever made it up to my office were the rats. Somehow they never run out of energy, and when I turned back to face the room with its awful portrait of the Leader and the SD uniform that was hanging in an open closet, like a terrible reminder of the other man I’d been for much of the summer, there were two of them coming through the glass door. Neither of them said anything until they were seated with their hats in their hands and had stared at me for several seconds with preternatural calm, as if I were some lesser being, which of course I was, because these rats were from the Gestapo.

One of the men wore a double-breasted navy chalk-stripe, and the other, a dark grey three-piece suit with a watch-chain that glittered like his eyes. The one wearing the chalk-stripe had a full head of short, fair hair that was as carefully arranged as the lines on a sheet of writing paper; the other was even fairer but losing it on the front almost as if his forehead had been plucked like one of those medieval ladies in a rather dull oil painting. On their faces were smiles that were insolent or self-satisfied or cynical but mostly all three at the same time and they regarded me and my office and probably my very existence with some amusement. But that was okay because I felt much the same way myself.

‘You’re Bernhard Gunther?’

I nodded.

The man with the chalk-stripe suit checked his neatly combed hair fastidiously, as if he had just stepped out of the barber’s chair at the KaDeWe. A decent haircut was about the only thing in Berlin that was not in short supply.

‘With a reputation like yours I was expecting a pair of Persian slippers and a calabash.’ He smiled. ‘Like Sherlock Holmes.’

I sat down behind my desk facing the pair and smiled back. ‘These days I find that a three-pipe problem’s just the same as a one-pipe problem. I can’t find the tobacco to smoke in it. So I keep the calabash hidden in the drawer alongside my gold-plated syringe and some orange pips.’

They kept on looking, saying nothing, just sizing me up.

‘You fellows should have brought along a blackjack if you were expecting me to talk first.’

‘Is that what you think of us?’

‘I’m not the only one with a colourful reputation.’

‘True.’

‘Are you here to ask questions or for a favour?’

‘We don’t need to ask favours,’ said the one with the basilica skull designed by Brunelleschi. ‘Usually we get all the cooperation we require without having to ask anyone a favour.’ He glanced at his colleague and did some more smiling. ‘Isn’t that right?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’ The one with the neat hair was like a thicker-set version of von Ribbentrop. He had no eyebrows to speak of and big shoulders: I didn’t think he was a man you wanted to see taking off his coat and rolling up his sleeves in search of answers. ‘Most people are only too willing to help us and it’s rare we are ever obliged to ask for something as quaint as a favour.’

‘Is that so?’ I put a match in my mouth and started to chew it slowly. I figured that as long as I didn’t try inhaling it, my lungs would stay healthy. ‘All right. I’m listening.’ I leaned forward and clasped my hands with an earnest reverence that bordered on the sarcastic. ‘And if it persuades you to come quickly to the point then this is me looking all ready and willing to help the Gestapo in any way that I can. Only do stop trying to make me feel very small or I’ll start to question the wisdom of letting you sit in my office with your hats in your hands.’

Chalk-stripe pinched the crown of his hat and inspected the lining. For all I knew it had his name and rank written there just in case he forgot them.

‘You know my name. So why don’t you introduce yourselves?’

‘I’m Commissar Sachse. And this is Inspector Wandel.’

I nodded politely. ‘Delighted, I’m sure.’

‘How much do you know about the Three Kings? And please don’t mention the Bible or I shall conclude that I’m not going to like you.’

‘You’re talking about the three men who came to Berlin from Czechoslovakia in early 1938, aren’t you? I’m sorry, Bohemia and Moravia, although I’m never quite sure of the difference and anyway, who cares? The Three Kings are three Czech nationalists and officers of the defeated Czech Army who, having conducted a series of terrorist attacks in Prague – it is still called Prague, isn’t it? Good. Well then, having orchestrated a campaign of sabotage there they decided to bring their war here, to the streets of Berlin. And as far as I know, for a while they were quite successful. They planted a bomb at the Aviation Ministry in September 1939. Not to mention one in the doorway here at the Alex. Yes, that was embarrassing for us all, wasn’t it? No wonder the Press and radio didn’t mention it. Then there was the attempt on Himmler’s life at the Anhalter Railway Station in February of this year. I expect that was even more embarrassing, for the Gestapo, anyway. I believe the bomb was placed in the left luggage office, which is an obvious place and one that should certainly have been searched in advance of the Reichsführer-SS’s arrival in the station. I bet someone had a lot of explaining to do after that.’

Their smiles were fading a little now and their chairs were starting to look uncomfortable; as the two Gestapo men shifted their backsides around, the wagon-wheel backs creaked like a haunted house. Chalk-stripe checked his hair again almost as if he’d left the source of his ability to intimidate me on the barbershop floor. The other man, Wandel, bit his lip trying to keep the death’s head moth of a smile pinned to his delinquent mug. I might have stopped my little history there and then out of fear of what their organization was capable of, but I was enjoying myself too much.

I hadn’t considered the concept of suicide by Gestapo until now, but I could see its advantages. At least I might enjoy the process a little more than just blowing my own brains out. All the same, I wasn’t about to throw my life away on some small-timers like these two; if ever I did decide to blow a raspberry in some senior Nazi’s face I was going to make it count. Besides, it was now plain to me that they really were after a favour.

‘You know, the word here in Kripo is that the Three Kings get a kick out of embarrassing the Gestapo. There’s one particular story doing the rounds that one of them even stole Oscar Fleischer’s overcoat.’

Fleischer was head of the Gestapo’s Counterintelligence Section in Prague.

‘And that the same brazen fellow won a bet that he could cadge a light for his cigarette off Fleischer’s cigar.’

‘There’s always a lot of gossip in a place like this,’ said Sachse.

‘Oh sure. But that’s how cops work, Herr Commissar. A nudge here. A wink there. A whisper in a bar. A fellow tells you that someone else says that his pal heard this or that. Personally I’ve always put a vague rumour ahead of anything as imaginative as three pipes’ worth of deductive reasoning. It’s elementary, my dear Sachse. Oh yes, and didn’t these Three Kings send the Gestapo a complimentary copy of their own underground newspaper? That’s the gossip.’

‘Since you appear to be so well informed—’

I shook my head. ‘It’s common knowledge, here on the Third Floor.’

‘—Then I dare say you will also know that two of the Three Kings – Josef Balaban and Josef Masin – have already been arrested. As have many other of their collaborators. In Prague. And here in Berlin. It’s only a matter of time before we catch Melchior.’

‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘You caught Josef A in April; and Josef B in May. Or maybe it was the other way round. But here we are in September and you still haven’t managed to shake the third King out of their sleeves. You boys must be going soft.’

Of course I knew this couldn’t be true. The Gestapo had moved heaven and earth in search of the third man, but mostly they’d employed a more infernal sort of help. Because there was another rumour around the Alex: that the Prague Gestapo had enlisted the services of their most notorious torturer in Bohemia, a sadist called Paul Soppa, who was the commander of Pankrac Prison in Prague, to work on the two Czechs in his custody. I didn’t give much for their chances but, in the light of the continued liberty of Melchior, the certainty that neither man had talked was proof positive of their enormous courage and bravery.

‘There are different ways of approaching every problem,’ said Wandel. ‘And right now we should like you to help us with this problem. Colonel Schellenberg speaks very highly of you.’

Walter Schellenberg was close to General Heydrich, who was Chief of the whole RSHA, of which Kripo was now one part.

‘I know who Schellenberg is,’ I said. ‘At least, I remember meeting him. But I don’t know what he is. Not these days.’

‘He’s the acting chief of foreign intelligence within the RSHA,’ said Sachse.

‘Is this problem a foreign intelligence matter?’

‘It might be. But right now it’s a homicide. Which is where you come in.’

‘Well, anything to help Colonel Schellenberg, of course,’ I said, helpfully.

‘You know the Heinrich von Kleist Park?’

‘Of course. It used to be Berlin’s botanical garden before the Botanical Gardens were built in Steglitz.’

‘A body was found there this morning.’

‘Oh? I wonder why I haven’t heard about it.’

‘You’re hearing about it now. We’d like you to come and take a look at it, Gunther.’

I shrugged. ‘Have you got any petrol?’

Sachse frowned.

‘For your car,’ I added. ‘I wasn’t proposing that we burn the body.’

‘Yes, of course we have petrol.’

‘Then I’d love to go to the Park with you, Commissar Sachse.’

Kleist Park in Schöneberg had something to do with a famous German Romantic writer. He might have been called Kleist. There were lots of trees, a statue of the goddess Diana, and, on the western border of the park, the Court of Appeal. Not that Hitler’s Germany had much use for a Court of Appeal. Those who were convicted and condemned in a Nazi court of first instance usually stayed that way.

On the southern border was a building I had half an idea might once have been the Prussian State Art School, but given that the Gestapo was now headquartered in the old Industrial Art School on Prinz Albrechtstrasse, there seemed to be little or no chance that anyone was being taught how to paint someone’s portrait in the Prussian State Art School; not when they could more usefully be taught how to torture people. It was a fact that the Gestapo had always taken its share of the city’s best public buildings. That was to be expected. But lately they’d started confiscating the premises of shops and businesses that had been abandoned as a result of the shortages. A friend of mine had gone into the Singer Sewing Machine salesroom on Wittenberg Platz looking for a new treadle-belt only to discover that the place was now being used as an arsenal by the SS. Meyer’s Wine Shop, on Olivaer Platz, where once I’d been a regular customer, was now an SS ‘Information Bureau’. Whatever that was.

In the centre of the park was a curving promenade where you could walk, or perhaps sit, but only on the grass, since all of the city’s many wooden park benches had been taken away for the war effort; sometimes I imagined a fat Wehrmacht general conducting the siege of Leningrad while warming his hands over a brazier that was fuelled with one of these. On the eastern edge of this promenade, and bordering Potsdamer Strasse, was an area of shrubs and trees that had been closed off to the public by several uniformed policemen. The dead body of a man lay under a huge rhododendron that was in late flower, but only just, since he was covered with red petals that looked like multiple stab wounds. He was wearing a dark blouson-type jacket, a lighter brown pair of flannel trousers, and a pair of severely down-at-heel brown boots. I couldn’t see his face as one of my new Gestapo friends was blocking the sun, as was their habit, so I asked him to move and, as he stepped out of the way, I squatted down on my haunches to take a closer look.

It was a typical mortuary photograph: the mouth wide open as if awaiting the attentions of a dentist – although the teeth were in remarkably good condition and certainly better than mine – the wide eyes staring straight ahead so that, all things considered, he looked more surprised to see me than I was to see him. He was about twenty-five with a small moustache, and on the front of his left forehead below the line of his dark hair a contusion that was the shape and colour of an outsized amethyst and which more than likely was the cause of death.

‘Who found the body?’ I asked Sachse. ‘And when?’

‘A uniformed cop on patrol. From the Potsdamer Platz station. About six o’clock this morning.’

‘And how is it that you picked up the order?’

‘The duty detective from Kripo telephoned it in. Fellow named Lehnhoff.’

‘That was clever of him. Lehnhoff’s not usually so quick on his toes. And what did this Fritz have in his pocket that marked him out as your meat? A Czech passport?’

‘No. This.’

Sachse dipped into his pocket and then handed me a gun. It was a little Model 9 Walther, a palm-sized .25 calibre automatic. Smaller than the Baby Browning I had at home for when I wasn’t expecting visitors, but quite accurate.

‘A bit more lethal than a set of door keys, wouldn’t you say so?’ said Sachse.

‘That will open a door for you,’ I agreed.

‘Be careful. It’s still loaded.’

I nodded and handed the gun back to him.

‘This makes it a Gestapo matter.’

‘Automatically,’ I said. ‘I can see that. But I still don’t see how this connects him with the Three Kings.’

‘One of our officers from the Documentation Section looked over his papers and found some discrepancies.’

Wandel handed me a yellow card with the dead man’s photograph in the top left-hand corner. It was his Employment Certificate. He said, ‘Notice anything wrong with it?’

I shrugged. ‘The staples in the picture are a bit rusty. Otherwise it looks all right to me. Name of Victor Keil. Doesn’t ring any bells.’

‘The impression of the rubber stamp on the corner of the photograph can hardly be seen,’ said Wandel. ‘No German official would have permitted that.’ Then he handed me the dead man’s identity card. ‘And this? What do you make of this, Herr Commissar?’

I rubbed the document in my fingers, which drew a nod of approval from Sachse.

‘You’re right to check it that way first,’ he said. ‘The forgeries just don’t feel right. Like they’re made of linen. But that’s not what gives this one away as a fake.’

I opened it up and took a closer look at the contents. The photograph on the ID card had two corner stamps, one on the top right-hand corner and the other on the top left, and these both looked clear enough. The two fingerprints were similarly clear, as was the police precinct stamp. I shook my head. ‘Beats me what’s wrong with it. It looks completely right.’

‘The quality is actually quite good,’ admitted Sachse. ‘Except for one thing. Whoever made that can’t spell “forefinger”.’

‘My God, yes, you’re right.’

Sachse was starting to look satisfied with himself once more.

‘All of which prompted us to investigate further,’ he said. ‘It seems that the real Victor Keil was killed during a bombing raid in Hamburg last year. And we now know, or at least we strongly suspect, that this man isn’t a German at all, but a Czech terrorist by the name of Franz Koci. Our sources in Prague tell us that he was one of the last Czech agents operating here in Berlin. And he certainly fits the last description we had of him. Until October 1938 he was a lieutenant in a Czech regiment of artillery that was deployed to the Sudetenland. After the capitulation of the Benes government at Munich, he disappeared, along with many others who subsequently worked for the Three Kings.’

I shrugged. ‘It sounds like you know everything about him,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine why you need me to look at his fingernails.’

‘We don’t know who killed him,’ said Wandel. ‘Or why. Or even how.’

I nodded. ‘For the how you’ll need a doctor. Preferably a doctor of medicine.’ I smiled at my joke, thinking of the American, Dickson, and his aversion to the doctors of deceit at the Ministry of Propaganda. But it wasn’t a joke for sharing, especially with the Gestapo. ‘As for the who and the why, maybe I could take a closer look.’ I pointed at the body. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Be my guest,’ said Sachse.

I took out my handkerchief and then laid it neatly beside the body. ‘Somewhere to lay any evidence I find. You see I intend going through the dead man’s pockets.’

‘Help yourself. But all of the useful evidence has already been collected.’

‘Oh, I don’t doubt that. If there’s anything of value that the uniforms and Inspector Lehnhoff have left behind, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.’

Sachse frowned. ‘You don’t mean—’

‘Cops in this city are just as crooked as anyone else. Sometimes they’re even as crooked as the crooks. These days most of them only join so they can steal a man’s watch without getting caught.’

I lifted the dead man’s left arm by way of illustration. There was a tan mark on his wrist, only the watch that might have made it wasn’t there.

‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ said Sachse.

‘The body’s a little stiff, which means that rigor is setting in or passing off. It takes about twelve hours to get established, lasts about twelve hours and takes another twelve hours to pass.’ I tugged at the dead man’s cheek. ‘It starts in the face however and this fellow’s face is soft to the touch, which probably means the rigor is passing off. You understand that all of this is very crude but I’d say your man has been dead for at least a day or so. Of course, I might be wrong, but I’ve seen plenty of dead men who would say I’m probably right about that.’

I undid the buttons on the blouson and then pulled open the shirt to inspect the torso. ‘This man took a hard fall. Or received a substantial impact. There is substantial bruising on the left-hand side of his body.’ I pressed hard directly on the bruise and the lowest part of the ribcage. ‘Feels like one of the ribs has separated from the chest wall. In other words, it’s broken.’

I took out my pocket knife, unfolded it carefully and, starting at the cuff I began to cut up the length of the dead man’s trouser leg, but only because I didn’t want to start unbuttoning his fly buttons. Generally speaking, I prefer to know a man a little better before I will do that. On the left thigh there was another heavy bruise that matched the broken rib and the contusion on the head. I was trying not to appear nervous, but on top of the bad feeling I had most of the time I now had a bad feeling about the dead man, too. The distance between Kleist Park and Nollendorf Platz was about a kilometre, and even a man who had collided with a taxi on the corner of Motz Strasse might have staggered to the park in less than thirty minutes. This wouldn’t have been the only traffic accident in Berlin that night but it was almost certainly the only one likely to have gone unreported.

‘You want to know what I think?’

‘Of course.’

‘This man has been involved in a road traffic accident. Of course that’s hardly uncommon what with the blackout and Berlin drivers.’

I was quite certain I was looking at the man who had attacked Fräulein Tauber and who had collided with the taxi. A hundred different thoughts started to run through my mind. Did the Gestapo know that already? Was that what this was all about? To see how I would react when presented with the dead body, like Hagen’s treachery uncovered when he stands beside Siegfried’s bier? No. How could they know? None of the other parties involved – Fräulein Tauber, Frau Lippert, the taxi driver – even knew I was a cop, let alone my name. But for a moment my hand started to shake. I folded the knife and returned it to my coat pocket.

‘Anything wrong, Gunther?’

‘No, I like working with the dead. On most nights when I’m not contemplating cutting my own throat you can catch me down at the local cemetery with my good friend, Count Orlok.’ Biting my lip I steeled myself to go through the dead man’s pockets.

‘We’ve searched his pockets,’ said Sachse. ‘There’s nothing important left in them.’

From the dead man’s pocket I took out a packet of Haribos and showed them to the two Gestapo officers.

‘I don’t know what that tells us,’ objected Wandel.

‘It tells us that the man had a sweet tooth,’ I said, although it told me a lot more than that. Any doubts that this was the man who had attached Fräulein Tauber were now removed. Hadn’t she mentioned the smell of Haribos on his breath?

‘Apart from the false documentation,’ said Sachse, ‘and the gun, of course, all we found was a money clip, a door key, and a pocket diary.’

‘May I see them?’

I stood up. The money clip was silver and in its fold was about fifty Reichsmarks in twenties and ones, but it was loose on the notes and made me think that it had held more money than was now present; and it was all too easy to suppose that the policemen who had stolen Franz Koci’s watch had also relieved him of at least half of his cash. That would only be typical. The door key was on a steel chain that must have been attached to his belt: it was a key for an old mortise lock made by the Ferdinand Garbe Lock Company of Berlin. The diary was the most interesting item. It was a red-leather Army pocket diary for 1941 that they handed out to German officers: there was a little wallet at the front and at the back there was a useful guide to recognizing German army ranks and insignias. As a boy I’d had a diary with a similar guide for recognizing the footprints of animals – almost invaluable in a big city like Berlin. I turned to the current week and noted the only entry for the last forty-eight hours: ‘N.P. 9.15 p.m.’ It had been nine-thirty when I had interrupted Franz Koci’s attack on Fräulein Tauber, which was time enough for them to meet on Nolli at nine-fifteen.

But why would a Czech terrorist intent on avoiding the attention of the police risk carrying out a sexual assault on someone at an S-Bahn station? Someone he had arranged to meet there. Unless the person he had arranged to meet hadn’t turned up and, in frustration, he had attacked the girl. But that made no sense either.

I handed the diary back to Sachse. ‘These diaries are even more useful to spies than they are for our men, don’t you think? They tell the enemy who’s worth killing and who’s not.’

‘I imagine he must have stolen it,’ said Wandel, redundantly. ‘Our intelligence suggests that some of these Czechos are damn good pickpockets.’

I nodded. That sounded fair enough to me considering that we had just stolen their country.

I had a lot of thinking to do and I decided to do it at the Golden Horseshoe. That was probably against the rules. Anyone with a thought in his head wouldn’t ever have gone to the Golden Horseshoe so I figured a man with my chequered history was worth a discount.

It was a big round room with small round tables around a big round dance floor. The floor was mostly given over to a mechanical horse on which the club hostesses and female customers were invited to take a musical ride and, in the process, flash a stocking-top or something more intimate. If you’d had a lot of beer it was possibly a lot of fun, but in the middle of Berlin’s drought, a quiet game of cribbage had it beat.

One of the hostesses was perhaps the last black woman in Berlin. Her name was Ella. She sat at a table playing Solitaire using a pack of cards featuring photographic portraits of our beloved Nazi leaders. I joined her and watched for a while and she said that it improved her luck so I bought her a glass of lemonade and talked out the right cards for her; and when I gave her one of my precious American cigarettes she was all smiles and offered to ride the horse for me.

‘For fifty pfennigs you can see my thighs. For seventy-five you can see the mouse and everything in its mouth. I’m not wearing any underwear.’

‘Actually I was rather hoping to see Fräulein Tauber.’

‘She doesn’t work here any more. Not for a long time.’

‘Where does she work now?’

Ella took a lazy puff of her cigarette and remained silent.

I pushed a note across the table. There were no pictures on it like the ones on the backs of the cards but she hardly minded about that. I let her reach for it and then put my finger on the little black eagle in the corner.

‘Is she at the New World?’

‘That dump? I should say not. She tell you that she works there?’ She laughed. ‘It means she doesn’t want to see you again, darling. So why don’t you forget her and watch me ride that pony.’

The Negress was tapping Morse code on the other end of the bill. I let it go and watched it disappear into a brassiere as large as a barrage balloon.

‘So, where does she work?’

‘Arianne? She runs the cloakroom at the Jockey Bar. Has for a while. For a girl like Arianne, there’s plenty of money to be made at the Jockey.’

‘In the cloakroom?’

‘You can do a lot more in a cloakroom than just hang a coat, honey.’

‘I guess so.’

‘We got a cloakroom here, Fritz. It’s nice and dark in there. For five marks, I could take real care of all your valuables. In my mouth, if you wanted.’

‘You’d be wasting your time, Ella. The only reason they let me come back from the front was because I don’t have any valuables. Not any more.’

‘I’m sorry. That’s too bad. Nice-looking fellow like you.’

Her face fell a little and, for a moment, seeing her sympathy, I felt bad about lying to her like that. She had a kind way about her.

I changed the subject.

‘The Jockey,’ I said. ‘Sure I know it. It’s that place off Wittenberg Platz, on Luther Strasse. Used to be a Russian place called Yar.’

The Negress nodded.

‘I’ve only ever seen it from the outside. What’s it like?’

‘Expensive. Full of Amis and big-shots from the Foreign Ministry. They still play American jazz there. The real stuff. I’d go myself but for one rather obvious disadvantage. Coloureds ain’t welcome.’

I frowned. ‘The Nazis don’t like anyone except Germans. You should know that by now, gorgeous.’

She smiled. ‘Oh, I wasn’t talking about them. It’s the Amis who don’t like coloureds in the place.’

From the outside, the Jockey Bar certainly sounded like the old Berlin from before the war with its easy morals and vulgar charms. Others thought so too. A small crowd of jazz fans stood on the sidewalk in the dark enjoying the music but unwilling to pay the prohibitive cost of going inside. To save paying the entrance fee myself I flashed the beer-token in my raincoat – a little brass oval that said I was police. Unlike most Berlin cops I’m not fond of trying to score a free one off an honest business, but the Jockey Bar was hardly that. Five marks just to walk downstairs was little better than theft. Not that there weren’t plenty of people already down there who seemed more than willing to be robbed. Most of them were smart types, with quite a few wearing evening dress and Party buttons. They say crime doesn’t pay. Not as well as a job does at the Foreign Office or the Ministry of Propaganda. There were also plenty of Americans, as Ella had said there would be. You could recognize them by their loud ties and their even louder voices. The Jockey Bar was probably the one place in Berlin you could speak English without some fool in a uniform trying to remind you that Roosevelt was a gangster, a Negroid maniac, a warmonger in a wheelchair, and a depraved Jewish scoundrel; and the Germans who really disliked him had some even more unpleasant things to say.

At the bottom of the stairs was a cloakroom where a girl was filing her nails or reading a magazine and sometimes she managed to do both at the same time. You could tell that she was clever. She had dark hair and plenty of it but it was tied up like a velvet curtain at the back of her head. She was thin and she was wearing a black dress and I suppose she was good-looking in an obvious sort of way, which, lacking all subtlety, is the way I usually like my women; but she wasn’t Arianne Tauber.

I waited for the girl to finish her nail or her picture caption and to notice me and that seemed to take longer than it ought to have done with the lights on.

‘This is a cloakroom, isn’t it?’

She looked up, gave me the up and down and then, with a well-manicured hand, ushered my eyes to the coats – some of them made of fur – that were hanging on the rail behind her.

‘What do those look like? Icicles?’

‘From here it looks as if I’m in the wrong line of work. You, too, if I’m not mistaken. I had the strange idea that you’re supposed to be the first line of welcome in this upmarket shell-hole.’

I took off my coat and laid it on the counter and she stared at it with distaste for a moment before dragging it away like she was planning to kill it and then handing me a ticket.

‘Is Arianne here tonight?’

‘Arianne?’

‘Arianne Tauber. That’s Tauber as in Richard Tauber, only I wouldn’t like to have him sitting on my lap.’

‘She’s not here right now.’

‘Not here as in not working or not here as in she just stepped outside for a few minutes?’

‘Who wants to know?’

‘Just tell her that Parsifal is here. That’s Parsifal as in the Holy Grail. Talking of which, I’ll be in the bar if she does show up.’

‘You and everyone else, I guess. There’s the bar and then there’s the bar, see? And if you get bored in there you can try the bar. That’s bar as in Jockey Bar.’

‘You were listening after all.’

I went into the bar. The place needed a coat of paint and a new carpet, but not as much as I needed a drink and a set of earplugs. I like music when I’m drinking. I even like jazz, sometimes, just so long as they remember where they left the melody. The band at the Jockey Bar was a three-piece trio, and while they knew all the notes of ‘Avalon’ these were in no particular order. I sat down at a table and picked up the drinks card. The prices felt like mustard gas on my eyeballs and when I’d picked myself off the floor, I ordered a beer. The waitress came back almost immediately carrying a tray on which stood a tall glass filled with gold, which was the nearest thing to the Holy Grail I’d seen since the last time I bought a forty-pfennig stamp. I tasted it and found myself smiling like an idiot. It tasted exactly like beer.

‘I must be dead.’

‘That can be arranged,’ said a voice.

‘Oh?’

‘Take a look around, Parsifal. This louse house is jumping with important Nazis. Any one of these stuffed shirts could pick up the telephone and get you a seat on tomorrow’s partisan express.’

I stood up and pulled out a chair for her. ‘I’m impressed. That you know about the partisan express.’

The partisan express was what German soldiers called the troop train that travelled between Berlin and the eastern front.

‘I’ve got a brother in the Army,’ she explained.

‘That’s hardly an exclusive club. Not any more.’

‘Nor is this place. I guess that must be why they let you in.’ Arianne Tauber smiled and sat down. ‘But you can buy me a drink, if you like.’

‘At these prices? It would be cheaper to buy you a Mercedes Benz.’

‘What would be the point? You can’t get the petrol. So a drink will do just fine.’

I waved the waitress toward me and let Arianne order a beer for herself.

‘Got any more of those Ami cigarettes?’

‘No,’ I lied. Buying her a beer felt extravagant enough without throwing caution out of the window and giving her a smoke as well.

She shrugged. ‘That’s all right. I’ve got some Luckies.’

Arianne reached for her bag, and that gave me time to have another look at her. She was wearing a plain navy-blue dress with short sleeves. Around her waist was a purple leather belt with a series of shiny black or maybe blue lozenges that were arranged like the jewels on a crown. On her shoulder was an interesting bronze brooch of the Hindu goddess Kali. Her purple leather bag was round and on a long strap and a bit like a water-carrier, and out of it she took a silver cigarette box with three bits of inlaid turquoise that were as big as thrush eggs. On the side there was a little matching compartment for a lighter but which contained a roll of banknotes, and for a moment I pictured her lighting a cigarette with a five-mark note. As a way of wasting money that was only a little less profligate than buying a girl a drink at the Jockey Bar.

When she opened the little cigarette case I took one and rolled it in my fingers for a moment and passed it under my nostrils to remind myself that it was better to have America as a friend than an enemy before poking it between my lips and dipping my head onto a match from a book off the table that was in her scented hand.

‘Guerlain Shalimar,’ I said and puffed my cigarette happily for a second before adding, ‘You were wearing it when I last saw you.’

‘A gift from an admirer. Seems like every Fritz who comes back on leave from Paris brings a girl perfume. It’s the one thing there’s no shortage of here in Berlin. I swear I could open a shop, the amount of perfume I’ve been given since the war started. Men. Why don’t they bring something useful like shoe laces, or toilet paper?’ She shook her head. ‘Cooking oil. Have you tried buying cooking oil? Forget it.’

‘Maybe they figure you smell better wearing the perfume.’

She smiled. ‘You must think I’m really ungrateful.’

‘The next time I’m in Paris I’ll buy you some paperclips and put you to the test.’

‘No, really. The other night I didn’t get a chance to thank you properly, Parsifal.’

‘Skip it. You were in no state to be throwing me a cocktail party.’ I took hold of her chin and turned her profile toward me. ‘The eye looks fine. Maybe just a little bruised around the edges. Then again I always go simple for blue eyes.’

For a moment she looked bashful. Then she hardened again. ‘I don’t want you being nice to me.’

‘That’s all right. I didn’t bring any perfume.’

‘Not until I’ve apologized to you. For not being honest.’

‘It’s a national habit.’

She took a sip of her beer and then a kiss from her cigarette. Her hand was shaking a little.

‘Really. There’s nothing to apologize for.’

‘All the same, I would like to explain something.’

I shrugged. ‘If you want. Take your time. There’s no one waiting for me at home.’

She nodded and then picked out another smile to wear. This one was looking sheepish.

‘First of all I want you to know I’m not some joy-girl. Sometimes, when I’m in here, I’ll let a man buy me a drink. Or give me a present. Like these cigarettes. But that’s as far as it goes unless – well, we’re all human, aren’t we?’

‘I certainly used to believe that.’

‘That’s the truth, Parsifal. Anyway, being the cloakroom girl in a place like this is a good job. The Amis – even a few of the Germans – they tip well. There’s nothing much to spend it on but I figure you still have to put something away for the bad times. And I’ve got an ugly feeling that there’s plenty of those yet to come. Worse than now, I mean. My brother says so. He says—’

Whatever her brother had said she seemed to think better of telling me about it. A lot of Berliners were forgetful like that. They would start talking, then remember a little thing called the Gestapo and just stop, mid-sentence, and stare into the distance for a minute and then say something like what she said next.

‘Skip it. What I was saying. It wasn’t anything important.’

‘Sure.’

‘What’s important is you know I’m not selling it, Parsifal.’

‘I understand,’ I said, hardly caring if she was selling it or not. But I was keen to hear her out, although I was still wondering why she felt obliged to explain herself at all.

‘I hope so.’ She picked a piece of tobacco off her tongue and her fingers came away red from her lipstick. ‘Okay. Here’s what happened that night. Household, building, contents, everything because I figure I have to tell someone and I get the feeling you might be interested. Say if you’re not and I’ll just shut up. But you were interested enough to come down here and look for me, right?’

I nodded.

‘And as a matter of fact it’s in here that the story starts. It was during my break. Magda – she’s the girl you met, in the cloakroom – was behind the desk and I was in the bar. When we have our break we’re supposed to come in here and have a drink with the customers. Like you and me are doing now.’

She tried on another smile. This one looked wry.

‘Some break. Frankly it’s not a break at all. The Fritzes here are generous with their drinks and their cigarettes, and usually I’m glad to get back to the cloakroom to have a rest and try to clear my head.’ She shrugged. ‘I was never much of a drinker but that kind of excuse really doesn’t work in here.’

‘I can imagine.’

I glanced around and tried not to grimace. There’s something obscene about a nightclub in wartime. All of those people having a good time while our boys are away fighting Popovs, or flying sorties over England. Somehow it didn’t feel right to have a photograph of the English film star Leslie Howard on the Jockey Club wall. For a while, after the outbreak of war, the Nazis had been sensitive enough to ban all public dancing, but following our early victories that ban had been lifted and now things were going so wonderfully for the German Army that it was thought to be fine for men and women to let down their hair and throw themselves around on a dance floor. But I didn’t care for it at all. And I liked it even less when I thought about the Fridmann sisters in the apartment beneath my own.

‘Sometimes when I go home I can hardly walk I’m so heavy with the stuff.’

‘I can see I’m going to have to come here again. This must be the only bar in Berlin where the beer still tastes like beer.’

‘But at a price. And what a price. Anyway, I was going to tell you about this fellow called Gustav and how I came to be hanging around Nollendorfplatz in the dark the other night.’

‘Were you?’

‘Come on Parsifal, pay attention. A few nights ago when I’m in here I start talking to this Fritz. He said his name was Gustav but I have my doubts about that. He also said that he was a civil servant on Wilhelmstrasse. And that is what he looked like, I suppose. A real smooth type. Thin prick accent. Gold bird in his lapel. Silk handkerchief and spats. Oh yes, and he had this little gold cigarette holder that he brought out of a little velvet box every time he wanted a smoke. Just watching him was kind of fascinating in an irritating way. I asked him if he did that in the morning, too – I mean, if he used the little gold holder – and he said he did. Can you imagine that?’

‘I’ll give it a go.’ I shook my head. ‘No, I can’t. He sounds like a fish in a glass case.’

‘Good-looking though.’ Arianne grinned. ‘And rich. He was wearing a wristwatch and a pocket hunter and both of them were gold, just like his cufflinks and his shirt studs and his tie pin.’

‘Very observant of you.’

She shrugged. ‘What can I tell you? I like men who wear gold. It encourages me. Like a red rag to a bull. But it’s not the movement. It’s the colour. And the value, of course. Men who wear a lot of gold bits and pieces are just more generous, I suppose.’

‘And was he?’

‘Gustav? Sure. He tipped me just for lighting his cigarette. And again for sitting with him. At the end of the evening he asked me to meet him the following evening at the Romanisches Café.’

I nodded. ‘Just down from Wittenberg Platz.’

‘Yes. At eight o’clock. Anyway he was late and for a while I thought he wasn’t coming at all. It was nearer eight-twenty-five when eventually he showed up. And he was sweating and nervous. Not at all the smooth-as-silk type he’d been when we were in here the previous night. We talked for a while but he wasn’t listening. And when I asked him why he seemed so out of sorts, he came to the point. He had asked me along to the café because he had a job for me. An easy job, he said, but it was going to pay me a hundred marks. A hundred. By now I was shaking my head and telling him I wasn’t on the sledge just yet, but no, he said, it wasn’t anything like that, and what did I take him for? All I had to do was wait under the station at Nolli at nine-fifteen and give an envelope to a man who would be humming a tune.’

‘That’s nice. What was the tune?’

‘“Don’t say Goodbye, only say Adieu”.’

‘Zarah Leander. I like that one.’

‘He even hummed it for me to make sure I knew it. I had to ask the man for a light and then his name and if he said it was Paul I was to give him the envelope and walk away. Well, I could tell there was something peculiar about all this, so I asked him what was in the envelope and he said it was best I didn’t know, which didn’t make me feel any better about doing it. But then he put five pictures of Albrecht Dürer on the table and assured me that it would be the easiest hundred marks I’d ever earned. Especially in the blackout. Anyway I agreed. A hundred marks is a hundred marks.’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

‘So I rode the S-Bahn one stop east to Nolli and waited under the station just like Gustav had told me to do. I was early. And I was scared, but the five Alberts felt good inside my stocking top. I had time to think. Too much time, perhaps, because I got greedy. That’s a bad habit of mine.’

‘You and the Austrian corporal.’

‘I kept on thinking that if I had been given a hundred from Gustav for showing up with an envelope then I might make at least another ten or twenty from Paul for handing it over. And when eventually he turned up that’s what I suggested. But Paul didn’t like that and started to get rough with me. He searched my coat pockets for the envelope. And my bag. He even searched my underwear. Took my hundred marks. And that’s when you showed up, Parsifal. You see he wasn’t trying to rape me. He was only trying to find his damned envelope.’

‘Where was it? The envelope?’

‘I didn’t have it on me when I tried to brolly him. Well, that would have been foolish. I’d already hidden it in some bushes near the taxi rank.’

‘That was clever.’

‘I thought so, too. Right up until the moment he punched me.’

‘Where is it now?’

‘The envelope? When I went back the next day to look for it, the envelope was gone.’

‘Hmm.’

She shrugged. ‘Now I really don’t know what to do. I’m scared to go to the cops and tell them. Naturally I’m worried about what was in that envelope. I’m worried that I’ve landed myself in the middle of something dangerous.’ She closed her eyes. ‘It seemed so easy when we were in the Romanisches Café. Just hand it over in the blackout and walk away. If only I’d done that.’

‘This Gustav. Have you seen him in here since?’

‘No.’

‘Does anyone else know him?’

‘No. It turns out that Magda thought his name was Josef, and that’s all she remembers. Am I in trouble, Parsifal?’

‘You might be. If you went to the police and told them about this, yes, I think you would be.’

‘So you don’t think I should tell them.’

‘With a story like yours, Arianne, the police – the real police – are the least of your worries. There’s the Gestapo to consider.’

She sighed. ‘I thought as much.’

‘Have you told your story to anyone else?’

‘God, no.’

‘Then don’t. It simply never happened. You never met anyone called Gustav or Josef in this place. And no one ever asked you to be a cut-out for them at the S-Bahn on Nollendorf Platz.’

‘A cut-out?’

‘That’s what you call it when someone wants to give something to someone else without actually meeting them. But that’s all right, too, because there was no something. No envelope. You don’t even have a hundred marks to show for it, right?’

She nodded.

I sipped the beer and wondered how it and the cigarette could taste so good and how much truth there was in what Arianne Tauber had told me. It was just about possible that Franz Koci had taken a hundred marks out of her underwear, although he’d been carrying only half as much when the cops had found him in Kleist Park. Of course, they could easily have helped themselves to half his cash. And it was just about possible that some Foreign Office type who had an envelope for a Three Kings agent might have been spooked off a meeting and subcontracted the job to a money-hungry girl from the Jockey Bar. Stranger things had happened.

‘But I have a question for you, angel. Why are you telling me all this?’

‘In case you didn’t know, Parsifal’s not exactly a common name around here.’ She bit her thumbnail. ‘Look, in spite of what I told you, about getting all that perfume, I’m not the most popular girl around town. There are a lot of people who don’t like me very much.’

‘Sounds like we have a lot in common, angel.’

She let that one go. She was too busy talking about herself. That was good, too. To me she looked like a more interesting subject than I was.

‘Oh, sure, I’m attractive to look at. I know that. And there are a lot of men who want me to give them what men usually want women to give them but, beyond a cigarette and a drink and a tip, and maybe the odd present or two, I don’t want anything from anyone. You should know that about me. Maybe you’ve worked that out already. You seem bright enough. But what I’m trying to say is that I don’t have many friends and certainly none that are possessed of what you might call wisdom and maturity. Otto – Otto Schulze – the Fritz who runs this place, I couldn’t tell him. I can’t tell him anything. He’d tell the Gestapo, for sure. Otto likes to keep in with the Gestapo. I’m almost certain he pays them off with information: Magda, too, I think. And you’ve met Frau Lippert. So there’s no one else, see? My mother is old and lives in Dresden. My brother is on active service. But frankly he wouldn’t know what to say or do. He’s my younger brother and he looks to me for advice. But you, Parsifal. You strike me as the type who always knows what to say or do. So, if you’re interested, there’s a part-time job going as my special counsel. It doesn’t pay very much but maybe you can think of me as someone who is in your debt.’

‘Suddenly I feel every one of my forty-three years,’ I said.

‘That’s not so old. Not these days. Just look around, Parsifal. Where are the young men? There aren’t any. Not in Berlin. I can’t remember the last time I spoke to someone less than thirty. Anyone my age is on active service or in a concentration camp. Youth is no longer wasted on the young because it’s wasted on the war instead.’ She winced. ‘Forget I said that. I shouldn’t have said that. They’re fighting for their country, aren’t they?’

‘They’re fighting for someone else’s country,’ I said. ‘That’s the problem.’

Arianne looked sly for a moment, as if she’d outsmarted me in a game of cards. ‘It’s not healthy putting your head under a falling axe, Parsifal. You could get into trouble.’

‘I don’t mind a little trouble, when it looks like you, angel.’

‘That’s what you say now. But you haven’t seen me throwing crockery.’

‘Volatile, huh?’

‘Like my boiling point was on the moon.’

‘Smart, too. I’m not sure I’m qualified to be your special counsel, Fräulein Tauber. I don’t know the boiling point on the moon from my own shoe-size.’

She glanced down at my feet. ‘I’ll bet you’re a forty-six, right?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

‘Then, for a lot of liquids with higher vapour pressures, the boiling point and your shoe-size are probably the same.’

‘If that’s true then I’m impressed.’

‘Before the war I was a chemistry student.’

‘Why did you stop?’

‘Lack of money. Lack of opportunity. The Nazis like educated women almost as little as they like educated Jews. They prefer us to stay home polishing the hearth and stirring the pot.’

‘Not me.’

She tugged my wrist toward her and checked the time on my watch. ‘I have to go back to the cloakroom in a minute.’

‘I could wait but I might need to telephone the Reichs-bank to arrange a loan.’

‘It might be worth it, Parsifal. I finish at two. You could walk me home if you like. Better still you could drive me, if you have a car.’

‘I have a car. I just don’t have any petrol. And I’ll gladly walk you home. But I don’t think Frau Lippert would approve, do you?’

‘I said you could walk me home, not up the stairs. But if ever you did walk me up the stairs it’s actually none of her business. And she knows that, too. The other night, she was just mouthing off. If I hadn’t had that sock on the jaw I might have told her to shut up and mind her own business and she would have done. Up to a point. There’s nothing in our agreement that says I can’t have gentlemen friends in my room for a little quiet conversation. It’s hard to hear everything you say in a place like this. You need to speak up. I’m a little deaf.’

‘Now you tell me.’

‘That’s because last year I was near Kottbusser Strasse when a tame Tommy went off.’

A tame Tommy was what Berliners called an unexploded bomb.

‘It blew me through the air. Fortunately I landed in some bushes that broke my fall. But, for a few glorious moments, I thought I was dead.’

‘Why glorious?’

‘Haven’t you ever wanted to be dead? I have. Sometimes life is just so much trouble. Don’t you think so?’

I nodded. ‘Yes. I’ve wanted that, too. Quite recently as a matter of fact. I go to bed wanting to blow my brains out and wake up wondering why I didn’t do it. I guess that’s why I’m here. You make a very diverting alternative to the idea of self-slaughter.’

‘I’m glad about that, Parsifal. Hey, I don’t even know your name. And I should know something about you if I’m going to let you walk me home, don’t you think?’

‘My name is Bernhard Gunther.’

She nodded and closed her eyes as if she was trying to visualize my name in her mind’s eye. ‘Bernhard Gunther. Hmm. Yes.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Sssh. I’m trying to connect with it. I’m a little bit psychic, you see.’

‘While you’re there see if you can’t get a fix on where I’ve left my Postal Savings Bank Book. There’s five hundred marks in there I’d like to get my hands on.’

She opened her eyes. ‘That’s a solid name, Bernhard Gunther. Dependable. Honest. And wealthy with it, too. I can do a lot with five hundred marks. This is looking good. Tell me, what kind of work does Bernie Gunther do?’ She pressed her hands together in supplication. ‘No, wait. Let me guess.’

‘It’s better that I tell you.’

‘You don’t think I can’t guess? I’m certain you were in the Army. But now, I’m not sure. If you were on leave then it’s been quite a long one, hasn’t it? So maybe you were wounded. Although you don’t look like a man who was wounded. Then again maybe you got injured in the head. And that might be why you say you’re suicidal. A lot of boys are these days. I mean a lot. Only they don’t put that kind of thing in the newspapers because it’s bad for morale. Frau Lippert had another lodger who was a corporal in a police battalion and he hanged himself off a canal bridge in Moabit. He was a nice boy. You know, I might say you were a civil servant but you’re a little too muscular for that. And the suit – well, no civil servant would ever wear a suit like that.’

‘Arianne. Listen to me.’

‘You’re no fun at all, Gunther.’

‘I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about why I’m here.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I’m a cop. From the Police Praesidium at Alexanderplatz.’

The smile dried on her face like I’d poured poison in her ears. She sat there for a moment, stunned, immobile, as if a doctor had told her she had six months to live.

I was used to her reaction and I didn’t blame her for it. There wasn’t anyone in Berlin who wasn’t deeply afraid of the police, including the police, because when you said ‘police’ everyone thought about the Gestapo and when you started to think about the Gestapo it was soon hard to think of anything else.

‘You could have mentioned that earlier,’ she said, stiffly. ‘Or is that how it works? You let someone talk themselves into trouble. Give them enough rope so that they can hang themselves, like my friend.’

‘It’s not like that at all. I’m a detective. Not Gestapo.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘The difference is that I hate the Nazis. The difference is that I don’t care if you say Hitler is the son of Beelzebub. The difference is that if I was Gestapo you would already be in a police van and on your way to number eight.’

‘Number eight? What’s that?’

‘You’re not from Berlin, are you? Not originally.’

She shook her head.

‘Number eight Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Gestapo headquarters.’

I wasn’t exaggerating. Not in the least. If Sachse and Wandel had heard even half of her story, Arianne Tauber would have been sitting in a chair with her skirt up and a hot cigarette in her panties. I knew how those bastards questioned people and I wasn’t about to condemn her to that. Not without being damned sure she was guilty. As it happened, I believed at least half of her story, and that was enough to prevent me from handing her over to the Gestapo. I thought she was probably a prostitute. An occasional one. To make ends meet a lot of single women were. You could hardly blame them for that. Any kind of a living was hard to come by in Berlin. But I didn’t think she was a spy for the Czechs. No spy would have volunteered so much to a man in a club she hardly knew well.

‘So, what happens now? Are you going to arrest me?’

‘Didn’t I already tell you to forget all about what happened? Didn’t I tell you that? There never was an envelope. And there was no Gustav.’

She nodded silently, but still I could see she was unable to grasp what I was telling her.

‘Listen to me, Arianne, provided you take my advice, you’re in the clear. Well, almost. There are only three people who could possibly connect you with what happened. One of them is this fellow Gustav. And one of them is Paul. The man who attacked you. Only he’s dead.’

‘What? You didn’t tell me that. How?’

‘His body turned up in Kleist Park a day or so after that taxi hit him on Nolli. He must have crawled there in the blackout and died. The third person who knows about this is me. And I’m not about to tell anyone.’

‘Oh, I get it. I suppose you want to sleep with me. Before you hand me over to your pals in the Gestapo you want to have me yourself. Is that it?’

‘No. It’s not like that at all.’

‘Then what is it like? And don’t tell me it’s because you think I’m special, Parsifal. Because I won’t believe you.’

‘I’m going to tell you why, angel. But not here. Not now. Until then you think about everything I’ve said and then ask yourself why I said it. I’ll be waiting outside at two. I can still walk you home if you want. Or you can walk home by yourself and I give you my word you won’t be woken up at five a.m. by men in leather coats. You won’t ever see me again. All right?’