Metropolis Read online

  ALSO BY PHILIP KERR

  THE BERNIE GUNTHER BOOKS

  THE BERLIN NOIR TRILOGY

  March Violets

  The Pale Criminal

  A German Requiem

  —

  The One from the Other

  A Quiet Flame

  If the Dead Rise Not

  Field Gray

  Prague Fatale

  A Man Without Breath

  The Lady from Zagreb

  The Other Side of Silence

  Prussian Blue

  Greeks Bearing Gifts

  OTHER WORKS

  A Philosophical Investigation

  Dead Meat

  The Grid

  Esau

  A Five-Year Plan

  The Second Angel

  The Shot

  Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton

  Hitler’s Peace

  Prayer

  FOR CHILDREN

  CHILDREN OF THE LAMP

  The Akhenaten Adventure

  The Blue Djinn of Babylon

  The Cobra King of Kathmandu

  The Day of the Djinn Warriors

  The Eye of the Forest

  The Five Fakirs of Faizabad

  The Grave Robbers of Genghis Khan

  —

  One Small Step

  A MARIAN WOOD BOOK

  Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Thynker, Ltd.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York, for permission to reproduce photographs of the triptych Metropolis (1928) by Otto Dix (Kunstmuseum Stuttgart). Copyright © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kerr, Philip, author.

  Title: Metropolis: a Bernie Gunther novel / Philip Kerr.

  Description: New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2019. | Series: A Bernie Gunther novel | “A Marian Wood Book.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018046712 | ISBN 9780735218895 (hardback) | ISBN 9780525543015 (international edition) | ISBN 9780735218918 (epub)

  Subjects: | BISAC: Fiction / Thrillers. | Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General. | Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Historical. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6061.E784 M48 2019 | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046712

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Jane

  Now and forever

  Contents

  Also by Philip Kerr

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One: Women

  Two: Decline

  Three: Sexuality

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Prologue

  LIKE ANYONE WHO’S read the Bible, I was familiar with the idea of Babylon as a city that was a byword for iniquity and the abominations of the earth, whatever they might be. And like anyone who lived in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, I was also familiar with the comparison frequently made between the two cities. At the Lutheran St. Nicholas’ Church in Berlin where I used to go with my parents as a small boy, our brick-faced, shouty pastor, Dr. Rotpfad, seemed so familiar with Babylon and its topography that I believed he must once have lived there. Which only provoked my fascination with the name and prompted me to look it up in the Conversations-Lexicon, which occupied a whole shelf in the family bookcase. But the encyclopedia wasn’t very enlightening on the abominations. And while it’s true there were plenty of whores and scarlet women and an ample supply of sin to be found in Berlin, I’m not sure it was worse than in any other great metropolis such as London, New York, or Shanghai.

  Bernhard Weiss told me the comparison was and always had been nonsense, that it was like comparing apples with oranges. He didn’t believe in evil and reminded me that there were no laws against it anywhere, not even in England, where there were laws against almost everything. In May 1928, the famous Ishtar Gate, the northern entrance to Babylon, had yet to be reconstructed in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, so the Prussian capital’s notoriety as the wickedest place in the world had yet to be underlined in red by the city’s moral guardians, meaning there was still some room for doubt. Perhaps we were just more honest about our own depravities and more tolerant of other people’s vices. And I should know; in 1928, vice in all its endless permutations was my departmental responsibility at the Police Praesidium on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. Criminalistically speaking—which was a new word for us cops, thanks to Weiss—I knew almost as much about the subject of vice as Gilles de Rais. But in truth, with so many dead in the Great War and the flu that came immediately after, which, like some Old Testament plague, killed millions more, it hardly seemed important to worry about what people put up their noses or what they did when they got undressed in their dark Biedermeier bedrooms. And not just in their bedrooms. On summer nights, the Tiergarten sometimes looked like a stud farm, there were so many whores copulating on the grass with their clients. I suppose it’s hardly surprising that after a war in which so many Germans were obliged to kill for their country, they now preferred to fuck.

  Given everything that went before and everything that followed, it’s difficult to speak accurately or fairly about Berlin. In many ways it was never a pleasant place and sometimes a senseless, ugly one. Too cold in winter, too hot in summer, too dirty, too smoky, too smelly, too loud, and, of course, afflicted horribly with far too many people, like Babel, which is the other name for Babylon. All the city’s public buildings were constructed to the glory of a German empire that hardly ever existed and, like the city’s worst slums and tenements, made nearly everyone who encountered them feel inhuman and insignificant. Not that anyone ever cared much about Berlin’s people (certainly its rulers didn’t) since they were not very agreeable, or friendly, or well mannered; quite often they were stupid, heavy, dull, and relentlessly vulgar; always they were cruel and brutal. Violent murders were commonplace; mostly these were committed by drunken men who came home from the beer house and strangled their wives because they were so befuddled by beer and schnapps they didn’t know what they were doing. But sometimes, it was something much worse: a Fritz Haarmann or a Karl Denke, one of those peculiar, godless Germans who seemed to enjoy killing for its own sake. Even this no longer seemed so surprising; in Weimar Germany there was perhaps an indifference to sudden death and human suffering that was also an inevitable legacy of the Great War. Our two million dead was as many as Britain and France combined. There are fields in Flanders that contain the bones of so many of our young men that they are more German than Unter den Linden. And even today, ten years after the
war, the streets are always full of the maimed and the lame, many of them still in uniform, begging for a few coins outside railway stations and banks. It’s a rare day when Berlin’s public spaces don’t resemble a painting by Pieter Brueghel.

  And yet, for all that, Berlin was also a wonderful, inspiring place. Despite the many previously listed reasons to dislike the city, it was a large, bright mirror to the world and hence, for anyone interested in living in that world, a marvelous reflection of human life in all its fascinating glory. I wouldn’t have lived anywhere else but Berlin if you’d paid me, especially now that Germany was over the worst. After the Great War, the flu, and the inflation, things were getting better, albeit slowly; things were still hard for a lot of people, in the east of the city most of all. But it was difficult to see Berlin ever going the same way as Babylon, which, according to the Conversations-Lexicon, was destroyed by the Chaldeans, its walls, temples, and palaces razed and the rubble thrown into the sea. Something like that was never going to happen to us. Whatever followed now, we were probably safe from a biblical destruction. It wasn’t in anyone’s interest—not the French, nor the British, and certainly not the Russians—to see Berlin and, by extension, Germany, become the subject of divine apocalyptic vengeance.

  part one

  women

  Everywhere the mystery of the corpse.

  —MAX BECKMANN, Self-Portrait in Words

  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 rumore
d 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.”