He was right, of course. After all, we were all of us keeping some very ugly company in Hitler’s new Germany. And perhaps the Leader was the ugliest of them all.
ROOM 210 WAS ON THE SECOND FLOOR in the Wilhelmstrasse extension. It cost sixteen marks a night, and came with an en-suite bathroom. It was a nice room and a few meters bigger than my apartment.
I got there at long past midday. Hanging on the door was a DO NOT DISTURB card and a pink form informing the room’s occupant that there was a message awaiting him at the front desk. His name was Herr Doctor Heinrich Rubusch, and the chambermaid usually would have left him alone, except that he was supposed to check out of the hotel at eleven. When she knocked at the door there was no reply, at which point she tried to enter the room, and found the key was still in the lock. After a great deal more fruitless knocking, she informed Herr Pieck, the assistant manager, who, fearing the worst, summoned me.
I went to the hotel safe to fetch one of the key turners that we kept in there-a simple piece of metal about the size of tuning fork designed to fit an Adlon keyhole and turn a key from the other side. There were supposed to be six turners, but one was gone, which probably meant Muller, the other hotel detective, had it and had forgotten to put it back. This would have been quite typical. Muller was a bit of a drunk. I took another key turner from the safe and went up to the second floor.
Herr Rubusch was still in bed. I hoped he’d wake up and shout at us to get out and let him get some sleep, but he didn’t. I put my fingers on the big vein on his neck, but there was so much fat on him that I soon gave up and, having opened his pajama jacket, pressed my ear to his cold ham of a chest.
“Shall I call Dr. Kuttner?” asked Pieck.
“Yes. But tell him not to hurry. He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
I shrugged. “Staying in a hotel is a bit like life. At some stage you have to check out.”
“Oh, dear me, are you sure?”
“Baron Frankenstein couldn’t make this character move.”
The chambermaid standing in the doorway started crossing herself gravely. Pieck told her to go and fetch the house doctor at once.
I sniffed the water glass on his bedside table. It had water in it. The dead man’s fingernails were clean and polished as if he’d just had a manicure. There was no blood visible anywhere on his person or on his pillow. “Looks like natural causes, but we’d better wait for Kuttner. I don’t get paid any extra for an on-the-spot diagnosis.”
Pieck walked toward the window and started to open it.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I said. “The police won’t like it.”
“The police?”
“When a dead body’s found, they like it if you tell them. That’s the law. Or at least it used to be. But, considering the number of bodies that turn up dead these days, who knows? In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a strong smell of perfume in the room. Blue Grass by Elizabeth Arden, if I’m not mistaken. Somehow I don’t see this gentleman choosing to wear it himself, which means there might have been someone with him when he stepped off the pavement. And that means the police will prefer things to be left the way they are now. With the window closed.”
I went into the bathroom and glanced over a neat array of men’s toiletries. It was the usual out-of-town crap. One of the hand towels was smeared with makeup. In the wastebasket was a tissue with a lipstick mark. I opened his toilet bag and found a bottle of nitroglycerin pills and a packet of three Fromms. I opened up the packet, saw that one was missing, and took out a little folded slip on which was printed: “Please discreetly hand me a packet of Fromms.” I lifted the lid on the toilet seat and checked the water in the lavatory. There was nothing in the water. In a wastepaper basket by the desk I found an empty Fromm wrapper. I did all the things a real detective would have done except make a tasteless joke. I was going to leave that to Dr. Kuttner.
By the time he came through the door I was about to ready to toss him a probable cause, but professional courtesy made me hang on to it until he’d earned his retainer.
“People in expensive hotels are seldom ever really ill, you know,” he said. “At sixteen marks a night they usually wait until they’re back home to be really ill.”
“This one won’t be going home,” I said.
“Dead, is he?” said Kuttner.
“It’s beginning to look that way, Herr Doctor.”
“Makes a change to be doing something for my fee, I suppose.”
He took out a stethoscope and set about looking for a heartbeat. “I had better go and inform Frau Adlon,” Pieck said, and left the room.
While Kuttner worked his trade, I took another look at the body. Rubusch was a big, heavy man with short, fair hair and a face as fat as a hundred-kilo baby. In bed, from the side, he looked like a foothill in the Harz Mountains. Without his clothes it was hard to place him, but I was sure there was a reason other than the fact that he was staying in the hotel why he seemed familiar to me.
Kuttner leaned back and nodded with what looked like satisfaction. “He’s been dead for several hours I should say.” Looking at his pocket watch, he added, “Sometime between the hours of midnight and six o’clock this morning.”
“There are some nitro pills in the bathroom, Doc,” I said. “I took the liberty of looking through his things.”
“Probably an enlarged heart.”
“An enlarged everything, by the look of him,” I said, and handed the doctor the little slip of folded paper. “And I do mean everything. There’s a packet of three minus one in the bathroom. That, plus some makeup on the towel and the smell of perfume in the air, leads me to suggest that, perhaps, the last few hours of his life may have included a very happy few minutes.”
By now I had noticed a clip of brand-new banknotes on the desk and was liking my theory more and more.
“You don’t think he died in her arms, do you?” asked Kuttner.
“No. The door was locked from the inside.”
“So this poor fellow could have had sex, shown her out, locked the door, gone back to bed, and then expired after all the exertion and excitement.”
“You’ve got me convinced.”
“The useful thing about being a hotel doctor is that people such as yourself don’t ever get to see that my surgery is full of sick people. Consequently, I look like I actually know what I’m doing.”
“Don’t you?”
“Only some of the time. Most medicine comes down to just one prescription, you know. That you’ll feel a lot better in the morning.”
“He won’t.”
“There are worse ways to hit the slab, I suppose,” said Kuttner.
“Not if you are married, there aren’t.”
“Was he? Married?”
I lifted the dead man’s left hand to show off a gold band.
“You don’t miss much, do you, Gunther?”
“Not much, give or take the old Weimar Republic and a proper police force that catches criminals instead of employing them.”
Kuttner was no liberal, but he was no Nazi, either. A month or two earlier I had found him in the men’s room, weeping at the news of Paul von Hindenburg’s death. All the same, he looked alarmed at my remark, and for a moment he glanced down at Heinrich Rubusch’s body as if he might report my conversation to the Gestapo.
“Relax, Doc. Even the Gestapo haven’t yet worked out a way of making an informer out of a dead man.”
I WENT DOWNSTAIRS to the front and picked up the message for Rubusch, which was only from Georg Behlert expressing the hope that he had enjoyed his stay at the Adlon. I was checking the duty roster when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hedda Adlon coming through the entrance hall talking to Pieck. This was my cue to hurry up and find out more before she could talk to me. Hedda Adlon seemed to have a high opinion of my abilities, and I wanted to keep it that way. The passkey to what I did for a living was having snappy answers to the questions other people hadn’t even thought about. An air of omniscience is a very useful quality in a god or, for that matter, a detective. Of course, with a detective, omniscience is just an illusion. Plato knew that. And it’s one of the things that made him a better writer than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Unseen by my employer, I stepped into the elevator car.
“Which floor?” asked the boy. His name was Wolfgang, and he was a boy of about sixty.
“Just drive.”
Smoothly, Wolfgang’s white gloves went into motion, like a magician’s, and I felt my stomach lower inside my torso as we ascended into Lorenz Adlon’s idea of heaven.
“Is there something on your mind, Herr Gunther?”
“Last night, did you see any joy ladies go up to the second floor?”
“A lot of ladies go up and down in this elevator car, Herr Gunther. Doris Duke, Barbara Hutton, the Soviet ambassador, the Queen of Siam, Princess Mafalda. It’s easy to see who and what they are. But some of these actresses, movie stars, showgirls, they all look like joy ladies to me. I guess that’s why I’m the elevator boy and not the house detective.”
“You’re right, of course.”
He grinned back at me. “A smart hotel’s a bit like a jeweler’s shop window. Everything is on show. Now that reminds me. I did see Herr Muller talking to a lady on the stairs at about two a.m. It’s possible she was a joy lady. Except for the fact she was wearing diamonds. Tiara, too. That makes me think she wasn’t a joy lady. I mean, if she could afford to be wearing mints, then why would she be letting people stroke her mouse? At the same time, if she was a little pinkie in the air, then what was she doing speaking to a sow’s bladder like Muller? No offense intended.”
“None taken. He is a sow’s bladder. Was this lady blond or brunette?”
“Blond. And plenty of it, too.”
“I’m relieved to hear it,” I said, mentally eliminating from my list of possible suspects Dora Bauer. She had short brown hair and was hardly the type to afford a tiara.
“ Anything else?”
“She wore a lot of perfume. Smelled real nice. Like she was Aphrodite herself.”
“I get the picture. Did you drive her?”
