The Pale Criminal (2 page)

‘I’m interested to hear it. I’d like to hear you say that sort of thing over at Prinz Albrecht Strasse.’ He laughed again.

‘So you do recognize me after all.’

I caught up with him beside a great marble statue of the Emperor Wilhelm I that stood in the centre of a great, octagonally-shaped hall, where my torch finally picked out his features. There was something cosmopolitan about these, although he spoke with a Berlin accent. Some might even have said that he looked more than a little Jewish, if the size of his nose was anything to go by. This dominated the centre of his face like the arm on a sundial, and tugged the upper lip into a thin sneer of a smile. His greying, fair hair he wore closely cropped, which had the effect of accentuating the height of his forehead. It was a cunning, wily sort of face, and suited him perfectly.

‘Surprised?’ he said.

‘That the head of Berlin’s Criminal Police should send me an anonymous note? No, that happens to me all the time.’

‘Would you have come if I had signed it?’

‘Probably not.’

‘And if I had suggested that you come to Prinz Albrecht Strasse instead of this place? Admit you were curious.’

‘Since when has Kripo had to rely on suggestion to get people down to headquarters?’

‘You’ve got a point.’ His smirk broadening, Arthur Nebe produced a hip flask from his coat pocket. ‘Drink?’

‘Thanks. I don’t mind if I do.’ I swigged a cheekful of the clear grain alcohol thoughtfully provided by the Reichskriminaldirektor, and then took out my cigarettes. After I had lit us both I held the match aloft for a couple of seconds.

‘Not an easy place to torch,’ I said. ‘One man, acting on his own: he’d have to have been a fairly agile sort of bugger. And even then I reckon it would have taken Van der Lubbe all night to get this little campfire blazing.’ I sucked at my cigarette and added: ‘The word is that Fat Hermann had a hand in it. A hand holding a piece of burning tinder, that is.’

‘I’m shocked, shocked to hear you make such a scandalous suggestion about our beloved prime minister.’ But Nebe was laughing as he said it. ‘Poor old Hermann, getting the unofficial blame like that. Oh, he went along with the arson, but it wasn’t his party.’

‘Whose was it, then?’

‘Joey the Cripp. That poor fucking Dutchman was an added bonus for him. Van der Lubbe had the misfortune to have decided to set fire to this place on the same night as Goebbels and his lads. Joey thought it was his birthday, especially as Lubbe turned out to be a Bolshie. Only he forgot that the arrest of a culprit meant a trial, which meant that there would have to be the irritating formality of producing evidence. And of course right from the start it was obvious to a man with his head in a bag that Lubbe couldn’t have acted on his own.’

‘So why didn’t he say something at the trial?’

‘They pumped him full of some shit to keep him quiet, threatened his family. You know the sort of thing.’ Nebe walked round a huge bronze chandelier that lay twisted on the dirty marble floor. ‘Here. I want to show you something.’

He led the way into the great Hall of the Diet, where Germany had last seen some semblance of democracy. Rising high above us was the shell of what had once been the Reichstag’s glass dome. Now all the glass was blown out and, against the moon, the copper girders resembled the web of some gigantic spider. Nebe pointed his torch at the scorched, split beams that surrounded the Hall.

‘They’re badly damaged by the fire, but those half figures supporting the beams — can you see how some of them are also holding up letters of the alphabet?’

‘Just about.’

‘Yes, well, some of them are unrecognizable. But if you look hard you can still see that they spell out a motto.’

‘Not at one o’clock in the morning I can’t.’

Nebe ignored me. ‘It says “Country before Party”.’ He repeated the motto almost reverently, and then looked at me with what I supposed to be a meaning.

I sighed and shook my head. ‘Oh, that really knocks over the heap. You? Arthur Nebe? The Reichskriminaldirektor? A beefsteak Nazi? Well, I’ll eat my broom.’

‘Brown on the outside, yes,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what colour I am on the inside, but it’s not red — I’m no Bolshevik. But then it’s not brown either. I am no longer a Nazi.’

‘Shit, you’re one hell of a mimic, then.’

‘I am now. I have to be to stay alive. Of course, it wasn’t always that way. The police force is my life, Gunther. I love it. When I saw it corroded by liberalism during the Weimar years I thought that National Socialism would restore some respect for law and order in this country. Instead, it’s worse than ever. I was the one who helped get the Gestapo away from the control of Diels, only to find him replaced with Himmler and Heydrich, and . . .’

‘. . . and then the rain really started to come in at the eaves. I get the picture.’

‘The time is coming when everyone will have to do the same. There’s no room for agnosticism in the Germany that Himmler and Heydrich have got planned for us. It’ll be stand up and be counted or take the consequences. But it’s still possible to change things from the inside. And when the time is right we’ll need men like you. Men on the force who can be trusted. That’s why I’ve asked you here — to try and persuade you to come back.’

‘Me? Back in Kripo? You must be joking. Listen, Arthur, I’ve built up a good business, I make a very good living now. Why should I chuck all that away for the pleasure of being on the force again?’

‘You might not have much choice in the matter. Heydrich thinks that you might be useful to him if you were back in Kripo.’

‘I see. Any particular reason?’

‘There’s a case he wants you to handle. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that Heydrich takes his Fascism very personally. He generally gets what he wants.’

‘What’s this case about?’

‘I don’t know what he’s got in mind; Heydrich doesn’t confide in me. I just wanted to warn you, so that you’d be prepared, so that you didn’t do anything stupid like tell him to go to hell, which might be your first reaction. We both have great respect for your abilities as a detective. It just happens that I also want somebody in Kripo that I can trust.’

‘Well, what it is to be popular.’

‘You’ll give it some thought.’

‘I don’t see how I can avoid it. It’ll make a change from the crossword, I suppose. Anyway, thanks for the red light, Arthur, I appreciate it.’ I wiped my dry mouth nervously. ‘You got any more of that lemonade? I could use a drink now. It’s not every day you get such good news.’

Nebe handed me his flask and I went for it like a baby after its mother’s tit. Less attractive, but damn near as comforting.

‘In your love letter you mentioned you had some information about an old case. Or was that your equivalent of the child-molester’s puppy?’

‘There was a woman you were looking for a while back. A journalist.’

‘That’s quite a while back. Nearly two years. I never found her. One of my all too frequent failures. Perhaps you ought to let Heydrich know that. It might persuade him to let me off the hook.’

‘Do you want this or not?’

‘Well, don’t make me straighten my tie for it, Arthur.’

‘There’s not much, but here it is. A couple of months ago, the landlord of the place where your client used to live decided to redecorate some of the apartments, including hers.’

‘Big-hearted of him.’

‘In her toilet, behind some kind of false panel, he found a doper’s kit. No drugs, but everything you’d need to service a habit — needles, syringes, the works. Now, the tenant who took over the place from your client when she disappeared was a priest, so it didn’t seem likely that these needles were his, right? And if the lady was using dope, then that might explain a lot, wouldn’t you say? I mean, you never can predict what a doper will do.’

I shook my head. ‘She wasn’t the type. I’d have noticed something, wouldn’t I?’

‘Not always. Not if she was trying to wean herself off the stuff. Not if she were a strong sort of character. Well then, it was reported and I thought you’d like to know. So now you can close that file. With that sort of secret there’s no telling what else she might have kept from you.’

‘No, it’s all right. I got a good look at her nipples.’

Nebe smiled nervously, not quite sure if I was telling him a dirty joke or not.

‘Good were they — her nipples?’

‘Just the two of them, Arthur. But they were beautiful.’

The houses on Herbertstrasse, in any other city but Berlin, would each have been surrounded by a couple of hectares of shrub-lined lawn. But as it was they filled their individual plots of land with little or no space for grass and paving. Some of them were no more than the front-gate’s width from the sidewalk. Architecturally they were a mixture of styles, ranging from the Palladian to the neo-Gothic, the Wilhelmine and some that were so vernacular as to be impossible to describe. Judged as a whole, Herbertstrasse was like an assemblage of old field-marshals and grand-admirals in full-dress-uniforms obliged to sit on extremely small and inadequate camp stools.

The great wedding-cake of a house to which I had been summoned belonged properly on a Mississippi plantation, an impression enhanced by the black cauldron of a maid who answered the door. I showed her my ID and told her that I was expected. She stared doubtfully at my identification, as if she were Himmler himself.

‘Frau Lange didn’t say nothing to me about you.’

‘I expect she forgot,’ I said. ‘Look, she only called my office half an hour ago.’

‘All right,’ she said reluctantly. ‘You’d better come in.’

She showed me into a drawing-room that you could have called elegant but for the large and only partially chewed dogbone that was lying on the carpet. I looked around for the owner but there was no sign of one.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ said the black cauldron. ‘I’ll tell her you’re here.’ Then, muttering and grumbling like I’d got her out of the bath, she waddled off to find her mistress. I sat down on a mahogany sofa with dolphins carved on the armrests. Next to it was a matching table, the top resting on dolphin-tails. Dolphins were a comic effect always popular with German cabinet-makers, but, personally, I’d seen a better sense of humour in a three-pfennig stamp. I was there about five minutes before the cauldron rolled back in and said that Frau Lange would see me now.

We went along a long, gloomy hallway that was home to a lot of stuffed fish, one of which, a fine salmon, I stopped to admire.

‘Nice fish,’ I said. ‘Who’s the fisherman?’ She turned impatiently.

‘No fisherman here,’ she said. ‘Just fish. What a house this is for fish, and cats, and dogs. Only the cats is the worst. At least the fish is dead. You can’t dust them cats and dogs.’

Almost automatically I ran my finger along the salmon’s cabinet. There didn’t seem to be a great deal of evidence that any kind of dusting took place; and even on my comparatively short introduction to the Lange household, it was easy to see that the carpets were rarely, if ever, vacuumed. After the mud of the trenches a bit of dust and a few crumbs on the floor don’t offend me that much. But all the same, I’d seen plenty of homes in the worst slums of Neukölln and Wedding that were kept cleaner than this one.

The cauldron opened some glass doors and stood aside. I went into an untidy sitting-room which also seemed to be part office, and the doors closed behind me.

She was a large, fleshy orchid of a woman. Fat hung pendulously on her peach-coloured face and arms, making her look like one of those stupid dogs that is bred to have a coat several sizes too large for it. Her own stupid dog was altogether more shapeless than the ill-fitting Sharpei she resembled.

‘It’s very good of you to come and see me at such short notice,’ she said. I uttered a few deferential noises, but she had the sort of clout you can only get from living in a fancy address like Herbertstrasse.

Frau Lange sat down on a green-coloured chaise longue and spread her dog’s fur on her generous lap like a piece of knitting she intended to work on while explaining her problem to me. I supposed her to be in her middle fifties. Not that it mattered. When women get beyond fifty their age ceases to be of interest to anyone other than themselves. With men the situation is entirely the opposite.

She produced a cigarette case and invited me to smoke, adding as a proviso: ‘They’re menthol.’

I thought it was curiosity that made me take one, but as I sucked my first lungful I winced, realizing that I had merely forgotten how disgusting a menthol tastes. She chuckled at my obvious discomfort.

‘Oh, put it out man, for God’s sake. They taste horrible. I don’t know why I smoke them, really I don’t. Have one of your own or I’ll never get your attention.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, stubbing it out in a hub-cap of an ashtray, ‘I think I will.’

‘And while you’re at it, you can pour us both a drink. I don’t know about you but I could certainly do with one.’ She pointed to a great Biedermeier secretaire, the top section of which, with its bronze Ionic columns, was an ancient Greek temple in miniature.

‘There’s a bottle of gin in that thing,’ she said. ‘I can’t offer you anything but lime juice to put in it. I’m afraid it’s the only thing I ever drink.’

It was a little early for me, but I mixed two anyway. I liked her for trying to put me at my ease, even though that was supposed to be one of my own professional accomplishments. Except that Frau Lange wasn’t in the least bit nervous. She looked like the kind of lady who had quite a few professional accomplishments of her own. I handed her the drink and sat down on a creaking leather chair that was next to the chaise.

‘Are you an observant man, Herr Gunther?’

‘I can see what’s happening in Germany, if that’s what you mean.’

‘It wasn’t, but I’m glad to hear it anyway. No, what I meant was, how good are you at seeing things?’