Prague Fatale (12 page)

‘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?’

I went back to the Alex for a while and sat at my desk and wondered if there might be a way of finding Gustav without involving Arianne Tauber. She and only she could have identified him and, for that reason alone, it seemed unlikely that he would ever go back to the Jockey and risk seeing her again. Especially if he was what it seemed he was – almost certainly a spy. More than likely he’d lost his nerve about meeting his Czech contact on Nolli. Possibly, he thought he was already being shadowed by the Gestapo, but if they had been tailing him, then surely they’d have picked her up when she met Gustav at the Romanisches Café. If he was under surveillance then the Gestapo would never have risked allowing him to pass information to her. It seemed more likely that Gustav had lost his nerve. In which case, who better than a joy-lady to deliver something to his Czech contact? Most of the prostitutes I’d ever known were resourceful, courageous, and, above all, greedy. For a hundred marks there wasn’t a silk in Berlin who wouldn’t have agreed to what Gustav had asked. Handing over an envelope in the dark was a lot easier and quicker and, on the face of it, safer than sucking someone’s pipe.

‘Working late?’

It was Lehnhoff.

‘Victor Keil, aka Franz Koci,’ I said.

‘The Kleist Park case. Yeah. What about it?’

‘The uniformed fairy that found him under the bushes. Sergeant Otto Macher. Do you know him well?’

‘Well enough.’

‘Do you think he’s honest?’

‘Meaning what?’

‘It’s a straightforward question, Gottfried. Is he honest?’

‘As far as it goes these days.’

‘In my book it goes all the way to the altar.’

‘There’s a war on. So maybe not as far as that.’

‘Look, Gottfried. We’re both in the shit-house age-group. And I certainly don’t want to cause any trouble for you and Sergeant Macher. But I need to know if our dead Czecho was carrying more than just the fifty marks we found on him.’

All of the lavatories at the Alex had three numbers on the door, of which two were always ‘00’; and the phrase ‘shit-house age-group’ was used to indicate anyone born before 1900 and therefore over the age of forty.

‘If you say you’re in the shit-house then I believe you,’ said Lehnhoff. ‘But from what I’ve heard around the factory you’re here not because you’re ready for your pension, but because you’ve got vitamin B.’

He meant that I had connections with senior Nazis who would keep me better nourished than other men.

‘With Heydrich,’ he added.

‘Who told you that?’

‘Does it matter? That’s the splash on the men’s porcelain.’

‘The Czecho’s watch was gone. It wasn’t at his apartment when we searched it, and there wasn’t a pawn ticket. But I really don’t care about that. I’m guessing he had at least five Alberts on him when he was first found in the park. There
were only fifty on him by the time I made his acquaintance. I need to know if I’m right about that. You don’t have to say anything. Just nod or shake your head and we’ll say no more about it.’

Lehnhoff’s head remained still. Then he grinned. ‘I can’t help you. I just don’t know. But even if I did, what makes you think I’d tell you?’

I stood up and came around the desk. ‘I don’t like threatening other men with my vitamin B. I much prefer it if people pay attention to my natural authority. Me being a Commissar’n all.’

‘That won’t work either. Sir.’

Lehnhoff was still grinning as he left my office.

I picked up my coat and followed him out onto the landing. Cool air was drifting up the enormous stairwell. Down on the ground floor there were raised voices, but that was normal in the Alex. Even at the best of times the place was like a zoo full of all kinds of wild and noisy animals. But up on the third floor things were quieter. The blackout curtains were drawn and most of the lights were off. At the other end of the landing was an abandoned floor polisher. It looked a lot like me. Then the raised voices on the ground floor became a little more urgent and someone cried out with pain. Someone was working overtime and it gave me an idea.

‘Hey Gottfried,’ I said, catching him up. ‘You know what they used to say about this place?’

Lehnhoff stopped at the top of the stairs and looked at me with open contempt. ‘What’s that?’

‘Be careful on the stairs.’

I hit him in the stomach, hard enough to bend him in two and fold him over the balustrade so that he could empty his fat gut into the stairwell. If it was my lucky day some
Nazi would slip on Lehnhoff’s soup and break his collarbone. Holding him by the collar, I pushed him down so that his feet tipped off the shiny floor and then slammed my forearm across one of his kidneys. He yelled out with the pain of it but that was fine because nobody ever paid much attention to the sound of pain at the Alex. It was one more background noise, like the sound of a typewriter or a telephone ringing in an empty room. I could have slugged Lehnhoff all night until he was groaning for his pastor and it would have been just another night at police headquarters to anyone’s ears.

‘Now,’ I said, bending close to Lehnhoff’s waxy ear. ‘Do I get an answer to my question or would you like to go downstairs? Three flights at a time?’

‘Yes, yes, yes. Okay. God. Please.’ His subsequent answers sounded exactly like a cry for help. ‘We took a hundred marks off him. Me and Macher. Sixty for me and forty for him. Please.’

‘In twenties?’

‘Yes. Yes. Twenties. Yes. Pull me up, for God’s sake.’

I pulled him back off the balustrade and dumped him on the linoleum, where he lay curled and twitching and whimpering as if his mother had just delivered him onto the Alex floor. He gasped:

‘What the hell—’

‘Hmm? What’s that?’

‘What the hell difference does it make to you, anyway? A hundred fucking marks.’

‘It’s not the money. I don’t care about that. It’s just that I didn’t have the time or even the inclination to wait until you were ready to answer my question. You know something? I think I’ve been affected deeply by working in an environment
where, within the context of a police interrogation, violence is now endemic.’

‘I’ll get you for this, Gunther. I’ll make a fucking complaint. Just see if I don’t.’

‘Hmm. I wouldn’t rush into that, if I were you. Remember. I’ve got vitamin B, Gottfried.’ I twisted the hair on his scalp so that I could tap the back of his skull against the balustrade. ‘I can see in the dark. And I can hear everything you say from a hundred miles away.’

The jazz lovers outside the Jockey Bar had called it a night and several smart-looking Mercedes cars were parked out front with drivers who were impatient to take their masters home in comfort and safety – or as safe as could be managed with most of your headlights taped up. There was a rumble in the sky but it wasn’t the RAF. I could feel a breeze in the air and the breeze had an edge of moisture that was the vanguard of something heavier. Minutes later it started to rain. I moved into an inadequate doorway and buttoned my coat tight against my neck, but it wasn’t long before it started to feel more like a shower curtain and I cursed my stupidity for not bringing along the nail-brush and the shard of soap that I kept in my desk drawer. But an umbrella would probably have been better. Suddenly, walking a prostitute home, even a pretty one, looked like a bad idea in a whole novel full of miserable ideas by some miserable French writer. The sort of novel that gets turned into an even more miserable movie starring Charles Laughton and Fredric March. And, reminding myself why I was there – she was the only person who had met Franz Koci, whose homicide I was supposed to be investigating – I pulled my hat down over my ears and pressed myself hard into the doorway.