A Quiet Flame Page 7

  “Thank you, Sergeant. But tomorrow will be fine.”

  Grund nodded. “Best to get it over with, sir,” he said, nodding. “You’re probably right. And then you can get on with your grieving.”

  “Yes. Thank you, Sergeant.”

  “What was the nature of your daughter’s disability?” I asked.

  “She was a spastic. It affected only the left side of her body. She had trouble walking, of course. There were also occasional seizures, spasms, and other involuntary movements. She couldn’t hear very well, either.”

  Schwarz went over to the sideboard and, ignoring the Bible, laid his hand fondly on the open copy of Hitler’s book, as if his Führer’s warm words about the National Socialist movement might afford him some spiritual and philosophical solace.

  “What about her capacity for understanding?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “There was nothing wrong with her mind, if that’s what you mean?”

  “It was.” I paused. “And I just wondered if you might be able to explain how she came to have five hundred marks on her.”

  “Five hundred marks?”

  “In her coat pocket.”

  He shook his head. “There must be some mistake.”

  “No, sir, there’s no mistake.”

  “Where would Anita get five hundred marks? Someone must have put it there.”

  I nodded. “I suppose that’s possible, sir.”

  “No, really.”

  “Do you have any other children, Herr Schwarz?”

  He looked astonished even to be asked such a thing. “Good God, no. Do you think we would have risked having another child like Anita?” He sighed loudly, and suddenly there was a strong smell of something foul in the air. “No, we had quite enough to do just looking after her. It wasn’t easy, I can tell you. It wasn’t easy at all.”

  Finally, Frau Schwarz returned with several photographs. They were old and rather faded. One was folded down at the edge, as if someone had handled it carelessly. “These are all that I could find,” she announced, still quite dry-eyed.

  “All of them, did you say?”

  “Yes. That’s all of them.”

  “Thank you, Frau Schwarz. Thank you very much.” I nodded curtly. “Well, then. We had better be getting back to the station. Until tomorrow.”

  Schwarz started to move toward the door.

  “It’s all right, sir. We’ll see ourselves out.”

  We went out of the apartment and down the stairs to the street. The Café Kerkau, beneath the apartment, was still open, but I was in the mood for something stronger than coffee. I cranked up the car’s two-cylinder engine and we drove east along Unter den Linden.

  “I need a drink after that,” I said after a few minutes.

  “I suppose it’s lucky you didn’t have a drink before,” observed Grund.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, you were a bit hard on them, sir.” He shook his head. “Christ, you didn’t even rub it with snow. You just gave it to them, grit and all. Right between the eyes.”

  “Let’s go to the Resi,” I said. “Somewhere with lots of people.”

  “And we all know how good you are with people,” Grund said bitterly. “Was it because he was a storm trooper that you treated him and his wife like they had no feelings?”

  “Didn’t you see that collar patch? Twenty-first Battalion. That was the same SA battalion Walter Grabsch belonged to. You remember Walter Grabsch? He murdered Emil Kuhfeld.”

  “That’s not what the local police said. And what about all the polenta the Commies have murdered? Those two police captains, Anlauf and Lenck. Not forgetting Paul Zankert. What about those fellows?”

  “I didn’t know them. But I did know Emil Kuhfeld. He was a good cop.”

  “So were Anlauf and Lenck.”

  “And I hate the bastards who murdered them every bit as much as I hate the man who killed Emil. The only difference between the Reds and the Nazis as far as I’m concerned is that the Reds don’t wear uniforms. If they did, it’d be a lot easier for me to hate them on sight, too, the same way I hated Schwarz, back there.”

  “Well, at least you admit it, you uncaring bastard.”

  “All right. I admit it. I was a bit out of line. But it could have been a lot worse. It’s only out of sympathy for that Nazi sod’s feelings that I didn’t pinch him for wearing the SA uniform.”

  “That was big of you, sir.”

  “Assuming either of them had any feelings. Which I very much doubt. Did you see her?”

  “How do you work that out?”

  “Come on, Heinrich. You know the play as well as I do. Your daughter’s dead. Someone murdered her. Cue handkerchief. ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yes, we’re sure.’ ”

  “She’s a nurse. They can take it.”

  “My eggs. Did you see her? Her tits didn’t even wobble when I told her that her daughter was dead. They were good tits. I liked looking at them. But they didn’t so much as tremble when I gave it to them. Tell me I’m wrong, Heinrich. And tell me I’m wrong that there weren’t any photographs of Anita Schwarz on the sideboard. Tell me I’m wrong that she spent at least ten minutes trying to find one. And tell me I’m wrong that she said she’d given me all the photographs of her daughter.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Wouldn’t you want to keep at least one photograph to remember your dead daughter? Just in case some dumb cop like you lost them?”

  “She knows she’ll get them back. That’s all.”

  “No, no. People aren’t like that, Heinrich. She’d have kept one back. At least one. But she gave me all of them. That’s what she said. I asked her about it. And she confirmed it. You heard her. Not only that, but these pictures aren’t in the best of condition. Like they’ve been kept in an old shoe box. A Commie kills you tonight and someone asks me for a picture of you for the police newspaper, I can give them a nice one, in a frame, in twenty seconds. And I’m not even related to you. Thank God.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  I pulled up close to the Residenz casino. It was well past midnight, but there were still plenty of people going into the place. One or two of them cops, probably. The Resi was popular with KRIPO from the Alex, and not just because of its proximity.

  “I’m saying what you were saying back in the park.”

  “What did I say back in the park?”

  “That maybe they’re both of them glad the kid’s dead. That maybe they think she’s better off. More important, that they’re better off.”

  “How do you work that out?”

  “It’s Nazi policy, isn’t it? That cripples are a waste of all our tax marks. That’s where I assumed you’d got all this racial-purity shit from. Hell, Heinrich, you saw that photograph of Schwarz with Hitler.” I lit a cigarette. “I’ll bet you anything Hitler would probably like Otto Schwarz a whole lot better if it wasn’t for his gimp daughter.”

  We went inside the Resi. The spanner on the door knew our faces and waved us past the ticket booth. None of the clubs made cops pay to get in. They needed us more than we needed them. Especially when, as with the Resi, there were more than a thousand people in the place. We found ourselves a little loge in the balcony and ordered a couple of beers. The club was full of alcoves and booths and private cellars, all of them equipped with telephones that encouraged patrons to flirt at a safe distance. These telephones were also one of the reasons the place was popular with detectives from the Alex. Informers liked them. The whores liked the telephones, too. Everyone liked the telephones at the Resi. The minute we sat down, the phone on our table started to ring. I picked it up.

  “Gunther?” said a man’s voice. “It’s Bruno. Down here by the bar in front of the shooting gallery.” I glanced over the edge of the balcony and saw Stahlecker waving up at me. I waved back.

  “For a man with one eye, you do all right.”

  “We booked that alphonse. Say thanks to Heinrich.”

  “Bruno sa
ys thanks, Heinrich. They booked the alphonse.”

  “Good,” said Grund.

  “On my way out of the Alex I saw Isidor,” Bruno said. “If I saw you he told me to tell you he wants to see you first thing in the morning.”

  Isidor was the name by which everyone called the DPP, Dr. Bernard Weiss. It was also the name by which Der Angriff called him. Der Angriff didn’t mean the name to sound affectionate, just anti-Semitic. It didn’t bother Izzy.

  “Did he say what about?” I asked, although I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

  “No.”

  “What time is first thing for Izzy these days?”

  “Eight o’clock.”

  I looked at my watch and groaned. “There goes my evening.”

  HE WAS A SMALL MAN with a small mustache, a longish nose, and little round glasses. His hair was dark and combed back across a head full of brains. He wore a well-cut three-piece suit, spats, and, in winter, a coat with a fur collar. Easily caricatured, his Jewishness exaggerated by his enemies, Dr. Bernard Weiss cut an odd figure among the rest of Berlin’s policemen. Heimannsberg, who towered over him, was everyone’s idea of what a senior policeman should look like. Izzy’s appearance was more that of a lawyer, and indeed, he had once been a judge in the Berlin courts. But he was no stranger to uniforms, and returned from the Great War with an Iron Cross, First Class. Izzy did his best to seem like a hard-bitten detective, but it didn’t work. For one thing, he never carried a gun, not even after he was beaten up by a right-wing uniformed cop who claimed he’d mistaken the deputy police president for a Communist. Izzy preferred to do his fighting with his tongue, which was a formidable weapon when deployed. His sarcasm was as caustic as battery acid and, as he was surrounded by men of much lesser intellectual abilities than himself, it was frequently splashed around. This did not make him loved. That would hardly have mattered for most men in his elevated position, but since there were no men in his elevated position who were also Jewish, it ought to have mattered more to Izzy. His lack of popularity made him vulnerable. But I liked him and he liked me. More than any other man in Germany, it was Izzy who had been responsible for the modernization of the police force. But much of the impetus for this had come from the assassination of the foreign minister, Walther Rathenau.

  It was said that everyone in Germany could remember exactly where they were on June 24, 1922, when they heard the news that Rathenau, a Jew, had been shot by right-wingers. I had been in the Romanisches Café, staring into a drink and still feeling sorry for myself after my wife’s death three months before. Rathenau’s murder had persuaded me to join the Berlin police. Izzy knew that. It was one of the reasons he liked me, I think.

  His office at the Alex resembled that of a university professor’s. He sat in front of a large bookcase full of legal and forensic tomes, one of which he himself had written. On the wall was a map of Berlin with red and brown pins indicating outbreaks of political violence. The map looked like it had the measles, there were so many pins. On his desk were two telephones, several piles of papers, and an ashtray where he tipped the ash from the Black Wisdom Havanas that were his one apparent luxury.

  He was, I knew, under enormous pressure, because the republic itself was under enormous pressure. In the March elections, the Nazis had doubled their strength in the Reichstag and were now the second-largest party, with eleven and a half million votes. The chancellor, Heinrich Bruning, was trying to turn the economy around, but with unemployment at nearly six million and rising, this was proving almost impossible. Bruning looked unlikely to survive now that the Reichstag had reconvened. Hindenburg remained president of the Weimar Republic and leader of the largest party. But the aristocratic old man had little liking for Bruning. And if Bruning went, what then? Schleicher? Papen? Gröner? Hitler? Germany was running out of strong men who were fit to lead the country.

  Izzy waved me to a chair without looking up from what he was writing with his black Pelikan. From time to time he put down the pen and lifted the cigar to his mouth, and I amused myself with the vague hope that he might put the pen in his mouth and try to write with the cigar.

  “We must continue to do our duty as policemen even though others may make it difficult for us,” he said in a voice that was deep and full-bodied, like a lager darkened by colored malts—a Dunkel or a Bock. He put down the pen and, sitting back on the creaking swivel chair, fixed me with an eye as pointed as the spike on a cuirassier’s Pickelhaube. “Don’t you agree, Bernie?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Berliners still haven’t forgotten or forgiven their police force for what happened in 1918, when the Alex surrendered to anarchy and revolution without a shot.”

  “No, sir. But what else could they do?”

  “They could have upheld the law, Bernie. Instead they saved their own skins. Always we uphold the law.”

  “And if the Nazis take over, what then? They’ll use the law and the police for their own ends.”

  “Which is exactly what the Independent Socialists did in 1918,” he said. “Under Emil Eichhorn. We survived that. We shall survive the Nazis, too.”

  “Maybe.”

  “We must have a little faith, Bernie,” he said. “If the Nazis do get in, we shall have to have faith that, eventually, the parliamentary process will restore Germany to its senses.”

  “I hope you’re right, sir.” Then, just as I was beginning to think Izzy had summoned me for a lesson in political science, he came to the point.

  “An English philosopher named Jeremy Bentham once wrote that publicity is the very soul of justice. That’s especially true in the case of Anita Schwarz. To bowdlerize a phrase from another English jurist, the investigation into her murder must not merely proceed, it must be seen to proceed vigorously. Now let me tell you why. Helga Schwarz, the murdered girl’s mother, is Kurt Daluege’s cousin. That makes this a high-profile case, Bernie. And I just wanted to let you know that the last thing we want right now is Dr. Goebbels arguing in the pages of his tawdry but nonetheless influential newspaper that the investigation is being handled incompetently, or that we’re dragging our feet because we have some anti-Nazi ax to grind. All personal prejudices must be put aside. Do I make myself clear, Bernie?”

  “Very clear, sir.” I might not have had a doctorate in jurisprudence like Bernard Weiss, but I didn’t need to have it spelled out with umlauts and ablauts. Kurt Daluege was a decorated war hero. Currently in the SS, he was an ex-SA leader in Berlin, not to mention Goebbels’s deputy. More important for us, he was an NSDAP member of the Prussian State Parliament, to which the Berlin police owed its first loyalty. Daluege could make political trouble for us. With friends like his, he could make trouble in a hospice for retired Benedictine monks. The smart money in Berlin said that if they ever got into power, the Nazis were planning to put Daluege in charge of the Berlin police force. It wasn’t that he had any experience of policing. He wasn’t even a lawyer. What he did have experience of was doing exactly what Hitler and Goebbels told him to do. And I presumed the same was true of his relation by marriage Otto Schwarz.

  “That’s why I’m organizing a press conference this afternoon,” said Izzy. “So you can tell the newspapers just how seriously we’re taking this case. That we’re pursuing all possible leads. That we won’t rest until the murderer is caught. Well, you know the kind of thing. You’ve handled a press conference many times before. On occasion, you’ve even handled them quite well.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “However, you have a natural wit that sometimes you would do well to restrain. Especially in a political case like this one.”

  “Is that what this is, sir?”

  “Oh, I’d say so, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ernst Gennat and I will attend the conference, of course. But it’s your investigation and your conference. If questioned, Ernst and I will confine ourselves to statements regarding your competence. Commissar Gunther’s impressive reputation, his extraord
inary perseverance, his keen psychological insights, his cleanup record. The usual crap.”

  “Thank you for your confidence, sir.”

  Izzy’s lips puckered, as if savoring the taste of his own intelligence like a freshly made matzoh ball. “Well, what have you come up with so far?”

  “Not much. She wasn’t killed in the park, that’s for sure. We’ll know more about the cause of death later on today. Hard to say if it was a lust murder or not. Maybe that was the point of removing all her sexual organs and everything that was attached to them. On the face of it, you might say that’s the most remarkable feature of the case. But you might just as easily point to the reaction of Herr and Frau Schwarz themselves. Last night, neither of them seemed particularly upset when I told them that their daughter was dead.”

  “God, I hope you’re not suggesting you think they did it?”

  I thought for a moment. “Maybe I’m misjudging them, sir. But the girl was disabled. Somehow I got the feeling that they were glad to be rid of her, that’s all. Maybe.”

  “I trust you won’t be mentioning any of this at the press conference.”

  “You know me better than that.”

  “It’s true, some Nazis do have a few ruthless ideas concerning the treatment of society’s unfortunates. People who are physically and mentally handicapped. However, even the Nazis aren’t stupid enough to think that’s a vote winner. Nobody’s going to vote for a political party that advocates the extermination of the sick and the infirm. Not after a war that left thousands of men disabled.”

  “No, I suppose not, sir.” I lit a cigarette. “There’s one other thing. The murdered girl had five hundred marks on her. That’s a lot more pocket money than I used to get when I was her age.”

  “Yes, you’re right. Did you ask the parents about it?”

  “They suggested there must have been some mistake.”

  “I’ve heard of money disappearing from a dead man’s pockets. But I’ve never heard of money being planted on one.”