The Lady from Zagreb

Ten

The pool of blood on the white floorboards was right under the broken egg that was the dead lawyer’s skull, and as big as a bicycle wheel. You could see his brains under the blood and the bone, and it was clear to me that someone had hit him very hard, several times, with the bronze bust of Hitler that had previously been on the lawyer’s desk and which now lay discarded on the floor. There was blood on Hitler’s solemn face and tiny strands of Dr. Heckholz’s hair on top of the leader’s head. I almost laughed as if I could already hear myself telling the cops at the Berlin-Charlottenburg presidium that the victim had been murdered by Hitler. Instead I helped myself to some of the schnapps from a bottle on a silver tray by the window. My fingerprints were all over the door handles and the desktop anyway so it didn’t seem to matter that they’d be on a glass, too. Besides, if you can’t help yourself to a drink when you’re looking at a man with his head bashed in then I can’t see why the stuff was ever invented. And Heckholz had been right; it was an excellent schnapps, at least as good as the one I’d had at the Villa Minoux. I poured another. So much schnapps, only this time, so little to smile about.

I took another, closer look at the body. There was such a lot of blood. You always forget just how much there is inside a fully grown man, especially his head. You never forget the first time you ever see a man shot in the head, especially when you do it yourself. Sometimes it seems that there’s a natural spring of red that comes out of a person; and there is, of course, only that natural spring is called his life. And once that’s tapped it’s very hard to stop. Heckholz’s right hand, lying by his face, was surrounded with the stuff and it looked as if he’d dipped his finger in his own blood and used that to try to write something — perhaps the identity of his killer — but whatever it was I couldn’t make it out. I bent down to touch the pool of blood and rubbed it experimentally between my fingers; it was still quite viscous, as if poor Heckholz hadn’t been dead for very long.

I fetched his handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit and wiped my hands. A key chain led out of his trouser pocket on the floor like the body of a golden snake but there was no key on the end; that was in the safe, which was wide open like Ali Baba’s sesame, and immediately I saw that the motive for the murder hadn’t been robbery. Whatever was missing from the safe, it wasn’t money because there were several bundles of banknotes on the top shelf, just like the ones he’d sent to me at the Alex. I helped myself to the two hundred marks I’d been promised and left the rest for the murder boys at the local presidium. It was just around the corner on Bismarckstrasse. They’d probably built it there in case they had any trouble with the crowd at the German Opera. They were a rough lot, opera and ballet fans, as Nijinsky could probably have testified.

After a while I sat down in the meeting room where, just a few days before, I’d eaten those delicious pancakes. I had a lot to think about. I was going to have to tell the police, of course. The question was whether or not I was going to involve Frau Minoux in any of this. If I did, then it might come out that I’d been involved in paying off Arthur Müller, the private detective who’d been employed by the Berlin Gas Company to spy on her and see if she was hanging on to any of her husband’s property they could make a claim against. If that happened, Müller would go to prison, and so would I; Frau Minoux, too, if either one of us chose to give evidence against her. I didn’t see any reason to do any of that. Besides, I figured she had enough to deal with: a husband in the cement at Brandenburg. Saying very little looked like it was by far the best option; that was always the best option, with the Nazis in charge of things.

I went around the corner to the presidium on Kaiser-Strasse — a smaller version of the Alex — and then returned about half an hour later with a couple of plainclothes detectives, only one of whom I knew. Criminal commissar Friedrich Heimenz was an older man with a pipe and a manner as deliberate as a chess move, which he used to conceal the fact that he knew almost nothing about detective work, least of all how to investigate a murder. Before taking the promotion at Charlottenburg he’d been an inspector at the Grunewald Station, and the last time I’d seen him had been when we were both investigating the death of the air ace Ernst Udet. I figured the promotion was a reward for agreeing to the fiction that Udet’s death had been suicide and not murder. A small man with small hands, he looked like he’d just finished drying the dishes. And right away he let it be known that he was looking for a free ride from me, hoping that I’d whitewash his curbstone so that he wouldn’t trip over his own feet in the blackout that was his mind.

“I suppose you’ll be wanting to take this case yourself, Herr Commissar,” he said.

“Me? Whatever gave you that idea? This is your jurisdiction, not mine. I’m not even on duty.”

“All the same, you’re the more experienced man.”

“I may have found this body but I’m still not welcome with the murder boys at Werderscher Markt. Besides, it wouldn’t be right. I couldn’t say I knew the man, exactly. But he sent me this letter inviting me to his office. And we spoke on the telephone. That was yesterday, and now here I am. A potential witness.”

I handed over the undated letter Heckholz had sent me at the Alex and five of the Albrechts I’d taken from his safe. But I kept back the envelope with the postmark.

“Who knows?” I added provocatively. “Maybe even a suspect.”

Heimenz read the letter and then nodded. “Did he say what he wanted to talk to you about?”

“He said he had a proposition for me and that there would be another hundred in it for me if I showed up.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

Heimenz nodded and brandished the money I’d given him. “I shall have to keep this for a while,” he said. “As evidence.”

“Be my guest.”

“You’ll get a receipt, of course.”

It was beginning to get dark. The other detective, an equally old sergeant — all the younger cops were in uniform — switched on a light, absently in the vain hope that it might illuminate their pedestrian thoughts.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I said. “You’ll have the RLB on your back.”

The RLB was the Air Raid Protection Squadron.

“Of course,” he said, and switched the light off again.

Heimenz looked down at the body with obvious distaste before finding his own handkerchief and pressing it to his mouth, as if he were going to vomit. Then he turned away and opened a window. “Horrible,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t think there would be so much blood.”

“No,” I said. “From the sheer quantity of the stuff I expect it’s gone through the floorboards. Tomorrow morning the ceiling in the office below is going to look like the ace of diamonds. Or the ace of hearts.”

“It’s a dentist’s waiting room,” said the sergeant.

“That will give them something to think about while they’re waiting to have their teeth pulled,” I said.

Heimenz didn’t mention the possibility that Heckholz had been trying to write something with his own blood and neither did I. He asked me some more questions and after a while I looked at my watch and told him I had to be going.

“I’ll be at the Alex if you need me,” I said. “On the graveyard shift.”

The Schupos had cordoned off the entrance to the building on Bedeuten Strasse and some of the neighbors had come out of their burrows to see what the fuss was all about. It’s only a dead body, I wanted to tell them; there are tens of thousands of those around if you know where to look for them.

I walked back down to the opera house. Inside I could hear the sound of applause. People started to come out of the auditorium. They looked pleased that the opera was over but none more so than Lieutenant Leuthard. He was holding the small of his back and yawning.

“Did you enjoy that?” I asked.

“Not in the least,” he said. “To be quite frank with you, I can’t remember ever being so bored.”

“He slept all the way through act three,” said Meyer.

“Christ, I need a drink,” said Leuthard.

“Me too,” I said. “Come on. As it happens, I know the best bar in the Tiergarten.”

I drove them to a little spot on the Neuer See where there was an open-air café and lots of boats.

“I was here earlier,” said Lieutenant Leuthard. “They had nothing to drink. Not even with a coupon.”

“I’ve already thought of that,” I said, and from the glove box I took out the bottle of pear schnapps and three glasses.

We sat down at a table and I filled three glasses. Meyer lifted one and looked at the SS etching on the glass and grinned.

“You stole this? From the Villa Minoux?”

“Of course I stole it. Which reminds me of another valuable little aperçu for your notebook, Captain Meyer. A good detective should always be honest, but not too honest. Not too honest for his own good. And not too inquisitive, either. There are some things it’s best not to know. This I know for sure. And you can put that in your next book.”