March Violets Read online

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘Maybe this woman that he’s taking to London doesn’t have any nice clothes.’

  ‘More like, doesn’t have any clothes at all,’ I said. ‘Rather a strange kind of woman, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Bernie, just you come home with me. I’ll show you a woman without any clothes.’

  For a brief second I entertained myself with the idea. But I went on, ‘No, I’m convinced that Haupthändler’s mystery girlfriend is starting out on this trip with a completely new wardrobe, from top to toe. Like a woman with no past.’

  ‘Or,’ said Inge, ‘a woman who is starting afresh.’ The theory was taking shape in her mind even as she was speaking. With greater conviction, she added, ‘A woman who has had to sever contact with her previous existence. A woman who couldn’t go home and pick up her things, because there wasn’t time. No, that can’t be right. She has until Monday night after all. So perhaps she’s afraid to go home, in case there’s someone waiting for her there.’ I nodded approvingly, and was about to develop this line of reasoning, but found that she was there ahead of me. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘this woman was Pfarr’s mistress, the one the police are looking for. Vera, or Eva, I forget which.’

  ‘Haupthändler in this with her? Yes,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘that could fit. Maybe Pfarr gives his mistress the brush-off when he finds out that his wife is pregnant. The prospect of fatherhood has been known to bring some men to their senses. But it also happens to spoil things for Haupthandler, who might himself have had ambitions as far as Frau Pfarr was concerned. Maybe Haupthandler and this woman Eva got together and decided to play the part of the wronged lover - in tandem, so to speak — and also make a little money into the bargain. It’s not unlikely that Pfarr might have told Eva about his wife’s jewellery.’ I stood up, finishing my drink.

  ‘Then maybe Haupthandler is hiding Eva somewhere.’

  ‘That makes three maybes. More than I’m used to having over lunch. Any more and I’ll get sick.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘Come on, we can think about it some more on the way.’

  ‘On the way where?’

  ‘Kreuzberg.’

  She levelled a well-manicured finger at me. ‘And this time, I’m not being left somewhere safe while you get all the fun. Understood?’

  I grinned at her, and shrugged. ‘Understood.’

  The Kreuzberg, the Hill of the Cross, lies to the south of the city, in Viktoria Park, near Tempelhof Airport. It’s where Berlin’s artists gather to sell their pictures. Just a block away from the park, Chamissoplatz is a square surrounded by high, grey, fortress-like tenements. Pension Tillessen occupied the corner of Number 17, but with its closed shutters pasted over with Party posters and KPD graffiti, it didn’t look as though it had been taking guests since Bismarck grew his first moustache. I went to the front door and found it locked. Bending down, I peered through the letter-box, but there was no sign of anyone.

  Next door, at the office of Heinrich Billinger, ‘German’ Accountant, the coalman was delivering some brown-coal briquets on what looked like a bakery tray. I asked him if he could recollect when the pension had closed. He wiped his smutty brow, and then spat as he tried to remember.

  ‘It never was what you might call a regular pension,’ he declared finally. He looked uncertainly at Inge, and choosing his words carefully, added: ‘More what you might call a house of ill-repute. Not a regular out-and-out bawdy house, you understand. Just the sort of place where you used to see a snapper take her sledge. I remember as I saw some men coming out of there only a couple of weeks ago. The boss never bought coal regular like. Just the odd tray here and there. But as to when it closed, I couldn’t tell you. If it is closed, mind. Don’t judge it by the way it looks. Seems to me as how it’s always been in that state.’

  I led Inge round the back, to a small cobbled alleyway that was lined with garages and lock-ups. Stray cats sat mangily self-contained on top of brick walls; a mattress lay abandoned in a doorway, its iron guts spilling on to the ground; someone had tried to burn it, and I was reminded of the blackened bed-frames in the forensic photographs Illmann had shown me. We stopped beside what I took to be the garage belonging to the pension and looked through the filthy window, but it was impossible to see anything.

  ‘I’ll come back for you in a minute,’ I said, and clambered up the drainpipe at the side of the garage and onto the corrugated iron roof.

  ‘See that you do,’ she called.

  I walked carefully across the badly rusted roof on all fours, not daring to stand up straight and concentrate all my weight on one point. At the back of the roof I looked down into a small courtyard which led on to the pension. Most of the windows in the rooms were shrouded with dirty net curtains, and there was no sign of life at any of them. I searched for a way down, but there was no drainpipe, and the wall to the adjoining property, the German accountant’s, was too low to be of any use. It was fortunate that the rear of the pension obscured the view to the garage of anyone who might have chanced to look up from poring over a dull set of accounts. There was no choice but to jump, although it was a height of over four metres. I made it, but it left the soles of my feet stinging for minutes afterwards, as if they had been beaten with a length of rubber hosing. The back door to the garage was not locked and, but for a pile of old car tyres, it was empty. I unbolted the double doors and admitted Inge. Then I bolted them again. For a moment we stood in silence, looking at each other in the half darkness, and I nearly let myself kiss her. But there are better places to kiss a pretty girl than a disused garage in Kreuzberg.

  We crossed the yard, and when we came to the back door of the pension, I tried the handle. The door stayed shut.

  ‘Now what?’ said Inge. ‘A lock-pick? A skeleton key?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I said, and kicked the door in.

  ‘Very subtle,’ she said, watching the door swing open on its hinges. ‘I assume you’ve decided that there’s nobody here.’

  I grinned at her. ‘When I looked through the letter-box I saw a pile of unopened mail on the mat.’ I went in. She hesitated long enough for me to look back at her. ‘It’s all right. There’s nobody here. Hasn’t been for some time, I’d bet.’

  ‘So what are we doing here?’

  ‘We’re having a look around, that’s all.’

  ‘You make it sound as if we were in Grunfeld’s department store,’ she said, following me down the gloomy stone corridor. The only sound was our own footsteps, mine strong and purposeful, and hers nervous and half on tiptoe.

  At the end of the corridor I stopped and glanced into a large and extremely smelly kitchen. Piles of dirty dishes lay in untidy stacks. Cheese and meat lay flyblown on the kitchen table. A bloated insect buzzed past my ear. One step in, the stink was overpowering. Behind me I heard Inge cough so that it was almost a retch. I hurried to the window and pushed it open. For a moment we stood there, enjoying the clean air. Then, looking down at the floor, I saw some papers in front of the stove. One of the doors to the incinerator was open, and I bent forward to take a look. Inside, the stove was full of burnt paper, most of it nothing more than ash; but here and there were the edges or corners of something that had not quite been consumed by the flames.

  ‘See if you can salvage some of this,’ I said. ‘It looks like someone was in a hurry to cover his tracks.’

  ‘Anything in particular?’

  ‘Anything legible, I suppose.’ I walked over to the kitchen doorway.

  ‘Where will you be?’

  ‘I’m going to take a look upstairs.’ I pointed to the dumb-waiter. ‘If you need me, just shout up the shaft there.’ She nodded silently, and rolled up her sleeves.

  Upstairs, and on the same level as the front door, there was even more mess. Behind the front desk were empty drawers, their contents lying on the threadbare carpet; and the doors of every cupboard had been wrenched off their hinges. I was reminded of the mess in Goering’s
Derfflingerstrasse apartment. Most of the bedroom floorboards had been ripped up, and some of the chimneys showed signs of having been probed with a broom. Then I went into the dining room. Blood had spattered the white wallpaper like an enormous graze, and on the rug was a stain the size of a dinner-plate. I stood on something hard, and bent down to pick up what looked like a bullet. It was a lead weight, encrusted with blood. I tossed it in my hand and then put it in my jacket pocket.

  More blood had stained the wooden sill of the dumb-waiter. I leaned into the shaft to shout down to Inge and found myself retching, so strong was the smell of putrefaction. I staggered away. There was something sticking in the shaft, and it wasn’t a late breakfast. Covering my nose and mouth with my handkerchief, I poked my head back into the shaft. Looking down I saw that the lift itself was stuck between floors. Glancing upwards I saw that as it crossed the pulley, one of the ropes supporting the lift had been jammed with a piece of wood. Sitting on the sill, with the top half of my body in the shaft, I reached up and pulled the piece of wood away. The rope ran past my face and beneath me the lift plummeted down to the kitchen with a loud bang. I heard Inge’s shocked scream; and then she screamed again, only this time it was louder and more sustained.

  I sprinted out of the dining room, down the stairs to the basement and found her standing in the corridor, leaning weakly on the wall outside the kitchen. ‘Are you all right?’

  She swallowed loudly. ‘It’s horrible.’

  ‘What is?’ I went through the doorway. I heard Inge say: ‘Don’t go in there, Bernie.’ But it was too late.

  The body sat to one side in the lift, huddled foetally like a daredevil ready to attempt Niagara Falls in a beer barrel. As I stared at it the head seemed to turn, and it took a moment for me to realize that it was covered with maggots, a glistening mask of worms feeding on the blackened face. I swallowed hard several times. Covering my nose and mouth once again, I stepped forward for a closer look, close enough so that I could hear the light rustling sound, like a gentle breeze through moist leaves, of hundreds of small mouth parts. From my small knowledge of forensics, I knew that soon after death, flies not only lay their eggs on a cadaver’s moist parts such as the eyes and mouth, but also on open wounds. By the number of maggots feeding on the upper part of the cranium and on the right temple, it looked more than probable that the victim had been beaten to death. From the clothes I could tell that the body was that of a man, and judging by the obvious quality of his shoes, quite a wealthy one. I put my hand into the right-hand jacket pocket, and turned it inside out. Some loose change and scraps of paper fell to the floor, but there was nothing that might have identified him. I felt around the area of the breast pocket, but it seemed to be empty, and I didn’t feel like squeezing my hand between his knee and the maggoty head to make sure. As I stepped back to the window to draw a decent breath, a thought occurred to me.

  ‘What are you doing, Bernie?’ Her voice seemed stronger now.

  ‘Just stay where you are,’ I told her. ‘I won’t be very long. I just want to see if I can find out who our friend is.’ I heard her take a deep breath, and the scrape of a match as she lit a cigarette. I found a pair of kitchen scissors and went back to the dumb-waiter, where I cut the arm of the jacket lengthways up the man’s forearm. Against the skin’s greenish, purplish hue and marbled veining, the tattoo was still clearly visible, clinging to his forearm like a large, black insect which, rather than feast on the head with the smaller flies and worms, had chosen to dine alone, on a bigger piece of carrion. I’ve never understood why men get themselves tattooed. You would have thought there were better things to do than deface your own body. Still, it makes identifying someone relatively straightforward, and it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be very long before every German citizen was the subject of compulsory tattooing. But right now, the imperial German eagle identified Gerhard Von Greis just as certainly as if I had been handed his Party card and passport.

  Inge looked round the doorway. ‘Do you have any idea who it is?’ I rolled up my sleeve and put my arm into the incinerator. ‘Yes, I do,’ I said, feeling around in the cold ash. My fingers touched something hard and long. I drew it out, and regarded it objectively. It was hardly burnt at all. Not the sort of wood that burns easily. At the thicker end it was split, revealing another lead weight, and an empty socket for the one I had found on the carpet in the dining room upstairs. ‘His name was Gerhard Von Greis, and he was a high-class squeeze-artist. Looks like he was paid off, permanently. Someone combed his hair with this.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A length of broken billiard cue,’ I said, and thrust it back into the stove.

  ‘Shouldn’t we tell the police?’

  ‘We don’t have the time to help them feel their way around. Not right now, anyway. We’d just spend the rest of the weekend answering stupid questions.’ I was also thinking that a couple of days’ more fees from Goering wouldn’t go amiss, but I kept that one to myself.

  ‘What about him - the dead man?’

  I looked back at Von Greis’s maggoty body, and then shrugged. ‘He’s in no hurry,’ I said. ‘Besides, you wouldn’t want to spoil the picnic, would you?’

  We collected up the scraps of paper that Inge had managed to salvage from the inside of the stove, and caught a cab back to the office. I poured us both large cognacs. Inge drank it gratefully, holding the glass with both hands like a small child who is greedy for lemonade. I sat down on the side of her chair and put my arm around her trembling shoulders, drawing her to me, Von Greis’s death accelerating our growing need to be close.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not used to dead bodies,’ she said with an embarrassed smile. ‘Least of all badly decomposed bodies that appear unexpectedly in service-lifts.’

  ‘Yes, it must have been quite a shock to you. I’m sorry you had to see that. I have to admit he’d let himself go a bit.’

  She gave a slight shudder. ‘It’s hard to credit that it was ever human at all. It looked so . . . so vegetable; like a sack of rotten potatoes.’ I resisted the temptation to make another tasteless remark. Instead I went over to my desk, laid out the scraps of paper from Tillessen’s kitchen stove and glanced over them. Mostly they were bills, but there was one, almost untouched by the flames, that interested me a good deal.

  ‘What is it?’ said Inge.

  I picked up the scrap of paper between finger and thumb. ‘A pay-slip.’ She stood up and looked at it more closely. ‘From a pay-packet made up by the Gesellschaft Reichsautobahnen for one of its motorway-construction workers.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘A fellow by the name of Hans Jurgen Bock. Until recently, he was in the cement with somebody by the name of Kurt Mutschmann, a nutcracker.’

  ‘And you think that this Mutschmann might have been the one who opened the Pfarrs’ safe, right?’

  ‘Both he and Bock are members of the same ring, as was the owner of the excuse for a hotel we just visited.’

  ‘But if Bock is in a ring with Mutschmann and Tillessen, what’s he doing working in motorway construction?’

  ‘That’s a good question.’ I shrugged and added, ‘Who knows, maybe he’s trying to go straight? Whatever he’s doing, we ought to speak to him.’

  ‘Perhaps he can tell us where to find Mutschmann.’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘And Tillessen.’

  I shook my head. ‘Tillessen’s dead,’ I explained. ‘Von Greis was killed, beaten with a broken billiard cue. A few days ago, in the police morgue, I saw what happened to the other half of that billiard cue. It was pushed up Tillessen’s nose, into his brain.’

  Inge grimaced uncomfortably. ‘But how do you know it was Tillessen?’

  ‘I don’t for sure,’ I admitted. ‘But I know that Mutschmann is hiding, and that it was Tillessen who he went to stay with when he got out of prison. I don’t think Tillessen would have left a body lying around his own pension if he could possibly have avoided it. The last I
heard, the police still hadn’t made a positive ID on the corpse, so I’m assuming that it must be Tillessen.’

  ‘But why couldn’t it be Mutschmann?’

  ‘I don’t see it that way. A couple of days ago my informer told me that there was a contract out on Mutschmann, by which time the body with the cue up its nose had already been fished out of the Landwehr. No, it could only be Tillessen.’

  ‘And Von Greis? Was he a member of this ring too?’

  ‘Not this ring, but another one, and far more powerful. He worked for Goering. All the same, I can’t explain why he should have been there.’ I swilled some brandy around my mouth like a mouthwash, and when I had swallowed it, I picked up the telephone and called the Reichsbahn. I spoke to a clerk in the payroll department.

  ‘My name is Rienacker,’ I said. ‘Kriminalinspecktor Rienacker of the Gestapo. We are anxious to trace the whereabouts of an autobahn-construction worker by the name of Hans Jurgen Bock, pay reference 30 — 4 — 232564. He may be able to help us in apprehending an enemy of the Reich.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the clerk meekly. ‘What is it that you wish to know?’

  ‘Obviously, the section of the autobahn on which he is working, and whether or not he’ll be there today.’

  ‘If you will please wait one minute, I shall go and check the records.’ Several minutes elapsed.

  ‘That’s quite a nice little act you have there,’ said Inge.

  I covered the mouthpiece. ‘It’s a brave man who refuses to cooperate with a caller claiming to be in the Gestapo.’

  The clerk came back to the telephone and told me that Bock was on a work detail beyond the edge of Greater Berlin, on the Berlin-to-Hanover stretch. ‘Specifically, the section between Brandenburg and Lehnin. I suggest that you contact the site-office a couple of kilometres this side of Brandenburg. It’s about seventy kilometres. You drive to Potsdam, then take Zeppelin Strasse. After about forty kilometres you pick up the A-Bahn at Lehnin.’