The Pale Criminal (4 page)

‘For a detective being a cynic is like green fingers in a gardener, Frau Lange. Sometimes it gets me into trouble, but mostly it stops me from underestimating people. So you’ll forgive me I hope if I suggest that this could be the best reason of all for not involving him in this investigation, and that you’ve already thought of it.’ I saw her smile a little, and added: ‘You see how I don’t underestimate you, Frau Lange.’ She nodded. ‘Could he be short of money, do you think?’

‘No. As a board director of the Lange Publishing Company he draws a substantial salary. He also has income from a large trust that was set up for him by his father. It’s true, he likes to gamble. But worse than that, for me, is that he is the owner of a perfectly useless title called
Urania.’

‘Title?’

‘A magazine. About astrology, or some such rubbish. It’s done nothing but lose money since the day he bought it.’ She lit another cigarette and sucked at it with lips puckered like she was going to whistle a tune. ‘And he knows that if he were ever really short of money, then he would only have to come and ask me.’

I smiled ruefully. ‘I know I’m not what you might call cute, but have you ever thought of adopting someone like me?’ She laughed at that, and I added: ‘He sounds like a very fortunate young man.’

‘He’s very spoiled, that’s what he is. And he’s not so young any more.’ She stared into space, her eyes apparently following her cigarette smoke. ‘For a rich widow like myself, Reinhard is what people in business call “a loss leader”. There is no disappointment in life that begins to compare with one’s disappointment in one’s only son.’

‘Really? I’ve heard it said that children are a blessing as one gets older.’

‘You know, for a cynic you’re beginning to sound quite sentimental. I can tell you’ve no children of your own. So let me put you right about one thing, Herr Gunther. Children are the reflection of one’s old age. They’re the quickest way of growing old I know. The mirror of one’s decline. Mine most of all.’

The dog yawned and jumped off her lap as if having heard it many times before. On the floor it stretched and ran towards the door where it turned and looked back expectantly at its mistress. Unperturbed at this display of canine hubris, she got up to let the brute out of the room.

‘So what happens now?’ she said, coming back to her chaise longue.

‘We wait for another note. I’ll handle the next cash delivery. But until then I think it might be a good idea if I were to check into Kindermann’s clinic for a few days. I’d like to know a little more about your son’s friend.’

‘I suppose that’s what you mean by expenses, is it?’

‘I’ll try to make it a short stay.’

‘See that you do,’ she said, affecting a schoolmistressy sort of tone. ‘The Kindermann Clinic is a hundred marks a day.’

I whistled. ‘Very respectable.’

‘And now I must excuse myself, Herr Gunther,’ she said. ‘I have a meeting to prepare for.’ I pocketed my cash and then we shook hands, after which I picked up the folder she had given me and pointed my suit at the door.

I walked back along the dusty corridor and through the hall. A voice barked: ‘You just hang on there. I got to let you out. Frau Lange don’t like it if I don’t see her guests out myself.’

I put my hand on the doorknob and found something sticky there. ‘Your warm personality, no doubt.’ I jerked the door open irritatedly as the black cauldron waddled across the hall. ‘Don’t trouble,’ I said inspecting my hand. ‘You just get on back to whatever it is that you do around this dustbowl.’

‘Been a long time with Frau Lange,’ she growled. ‘She never had no complaints.’

I wondered if blackmail came into it at all. After all, you have to have a good reason to keep a guard-dog that doesn’t bark. I couldn’t see where affection might possibly fit into it either — not with this woman. It was more probable that you could grow attached to a river crocodile. We stared at each other for a moment, after which I said, ‘Does the lady always smoke that much?’

The black thought for a moment, wondering whether or not it was a trick question. Eventually she decided that it wasn’t. ‘She always has a nail in her mouth, and that’s a fact.’

‘Well, that must be the explanation,’ I said. ‘With all that cigarette smoke around her, I bet she doesn’t even know you’re there.’ She swore under her searing breath and slammed the door in my face.

I had lots to think about as I drove back along Kurfürsten-damm towards the city centre. I thought about Frau Lange’s case and then her thousand marks in my pocket. I thought about a short break in a nice comfortable sanitarium at her expense, and the opportunity it offered me, temporarily at least, to escape Bruno and his pipe; not to mention Arthur Nebe and Heydrich. Maybe I’d even sort out my insomnia and my depression.

But most of all I thought of how I could ever have given my business card and home telephone number to some Austrian flower I’d never even heard of.

The area south of Königstrasse, in Wannsee, is home to all sorts of private clinics and hospitals — the smart shiny kind, where they use as much ether on the floors and windows as they do on the patients themselves. As far as treatment is concerned they are inclined to be egalitarian. A man could be possessed of the constitution of an African bull elephant and still they would be happy to treat him like he was shell-shocked, with a couple of lipsticked nurses to help him with the heavier brands of toothbrush and lavatory paper, always provided he could pay for it. In Wannsee, your bank balance matters more than your blood pressure.

Kindermann’s clinic stood off a quiet road in a large but well-behaved sort of garden that sloped down to a small backwater off the main lake and included, among the many elm and chestnut trees, a colonnaded pier, a boathouse and a Gothic folly that was so neatly built as to take on a rather more sensible air. It looked like a medieval telephone kiosk.

The clinic itself was such a mixture of gable, half-timber, mullion, crenellated tower and turret as to be more Rhine castle than sanitarium. Looking at it I half expected to see a couple of gibbets on the rooftop, or hear a scream from a distant cellar. But things were quiet, with no sign of anyone about. There was only the distant sound of a four-man crew on the lake beyond the trees to provoke the rooks to raucous comment.

As I walked through the front door I decided that there would probably be more chance of finding a few inmates creeping around outside about the time when the bats were thinking of launching themselves into the twilight.

My room was on the third floor, with an excellent view of the kitchens. At eighty marks a day it was the cheapest they had, and skipping around it I couldn’t help but wonder if for an extra fifty marks a day I wouldn’t have rated something a little bigger, like a laundry-basket. But the clinic was full. My room was all they had available, said the nurse who showed me up there.

She was a cute one. Like a Baltic fishwife but without the quaint country conversation. By the time she had turned down my bed and told me to get undressed I was almost breathless with excitement. First Frau Lange’s maid, and then this one, as much a stranger to lipstick as a pterodactyl. It wasn’t as if there weren’t prettier nurses about. I’d seen plenty downstairs. They must have figured that with a very small room the least they could do would be to give me a very large nurse in compensation.

‘What time does the bar open?’ I said. Her sense of humour was no less pleasing than her beauty.

‘There’s no alcohol allowed in here,’ she said, snatching the unlit cigarette from my lips. ‘And strictly no smoking. Dr Meyer will be along to see you presently.’

‘So what’s he, the second-class deck? Where’s Dr Kindermann?’

‘The doctor is at a conference in Bad Neuheim.’

‘What’s he doing there, staying at a sanitarium? When does he come back here?’

‘The end of the week. Are you a patient of Dr Kindermann, Herr Strauss?’

‘No, no I’m not. But for eighty marks a day I had hoped I would be.’

‘Dr Meyer is a very capable physician, I can assure you.’ She frowned at me impatiently, as she realized that I hadn’t yet made a move to get undressed, and started to make a tutting noise that sounded like she was trying to be nice to a cockatoo. Clapping her hands sharply, she told me to hurry up and get into bed as Dr Meyer would wish to examine me. Judging that she was quite capable of doing it for me, I decided not to resist. Not only was my nurse ugly, but she was also possessed of a bedside manner that must have been acquired in a market garden.

When she’d gone I settled down to read in bed. Not the kind of read you would describe as gripping, so much as incredible. Yes, that was the word: incredible. There had always been weird, occult magazines in Berlin, like
Zenit
and
Hagal,
but from the shores of the Maas to the banks of the Memel there was nothing to compare with the grabbers that were writing for Reinhard Lange’s magazine,
Urania.
Leafing through it for just fifteen minutes was enough to convince me that Lange was probably a complete spinner. There were articles entitled ‘Wotanism and the Real Origins of Christianity’, ‘The Superhuman Powers of the Lost Citizens of Atlantis’, ‘The World Ice Theory Explained’, ‘Esoteric Breathing Exercises for Beginners’, ‘Spiritualism and Race Memory’, ‘The Hollow-Earth Doctrine’, ‘Anti-Semitism as Theocratic Legacy’, etc. For a man who could publish this sort of nonsense, the blackmail of a parent, I thought, was probably the sort of mundane activity that occupied him between ario-sophical revelations.

Even Dr Meyer, himself no obvious testament to the ordinary, was moved to remark upon my choice of reading matter.

‘Do you often read this kind of thing?’ he asked, turning the magazine over in his hands as if it had been a variety of curious artefact dug from some Trojan ruin by Heinrich Schliemann.

‘No, not really. It was curiosity that made me buy it.’

‘Good. An abnormal interest in the occult is often an indication of an unstable personality.’

‘You know, I was just thinking the same thing myself.’

‘Not everyone would agree with me in that, of course. But the visions of many modern religious figures — St Augustine, Luther — are most probably neurotic in their origins.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘What does Dr Kindermann think?’

‘Oh, Kindermann holds some very unusual theories. I’m not sure I understand his work, but he’s a very brilliant man.’ He picked up my wrist. ‘Yes indeed, a very brilliant man.’

The doctor, who was Swiss, wore a three-piece suit of green tweed, a great moth of a bow-tie, glasses and the long white chin-beard of an Indian holy man. He pushed up my pyjama sleeve and hung a little pendulum above the underside of my wrist. He watched it swing and revolve for a while before pronouncing that the amount of electricity I was giving off indicated that I was feeling abnormally depressed and anxious about something. It was an impressive little performance, but none the less bullet-proof, given that most of the folk who checked into the clinic were probably depressed or anxious about something, even if it was only their bill.

‘How are you sleeping?’ he said.

‘Badly. Couple of hours a night.’

‘Do you ever have nightmares?’

‘Yes, and I don’t even like cheese.’

‘Any recurring dreams?’

‘Nothing specific.’

‘And what about your appetite?’

‘I don’t have one to speak of.’

‘Your sex life?’

‘Same as my appetite. Not worth mentioning.’

‘Do you think much about women?’

‘All the time.’

He scribbled a few notes, stroked his beard, and said: ‘I’m prescribing extra vitamins and minerals, especially magnesium. I’m also going to put you on a sugar-free diet, lots of raw vegetables and kelp. We’ll help get rid of some of the toxins in you with a course of blood-purification tablets. I also recommend that you exercise. There’s an excellent swimming-pool here, and you may even care to try a rainwater bath, which you’ll find to be most invigorating. Do you smoke?’ I nodded. ‘Try giving up for a while.’ He snapped his notebook shut.

‘Well, that should all help with your physical well-being. Along the way we’ll see if we can’t effect some improvement in your mental state with psychotherapeutic treatment.’

‘Exactly what is psychotherapy, Doctor? Forgive me, but I thought that the Nazis had branded it as decadent.’

‘Oh no, no. Psychotherapy is not psychoanalysis. It places no reliance on the unconscious mind. That sort of thing is all right for Jews, but it has no relevance to Germans. As you yourself will now appreciate, no psychotherapeutic treatment is ever pursued in isolation from the body. Here we aim to relieve the symptoms of mental disorder by adjusting the attitudes that have led to their occurrence. Attitudes are conditioned by personality, and the relation of a personality to its environment. Your dreams are only of interest to me to the extent that you are having them at all. To treat you by attempting to interpret your dreams, and to discover their sexual significance is, quite frankly, nonsensical. Now that is decadent.’ He chuckled warmly. ‘But that’s a problem for Jews, and not you, Herr Strauss. Right now, the most important thing is that you enjoy a good night’s sleep.’ So saying he picked up his medical bag and took out a syringe and a small bottle which he placed on the bedside table.

‘What’s that?’ I said uncertainly.

‘Hyoscine,’ he said, rubbing my arm with a pad of surgical spirit.

The injection felt cold as it crept up my arm, like embalming fluid. Seconds after recognizing that I would have to find another night on which to snoop around Kindermann’s clinic, I felt the ropes mooring me to consciousness slacken, and I was adrift, moving slowly away from the shore, Meyer’s voice already too far away for me to hear what he was saying.