“Only that there was some money and correspondence in this box. And now it’s not there.”
“You didn’t mention the contents before, sir.” I shook my head. “Would you like me to inform the police, sir?” That was two “sirs” in a row: maybe it was still possible I could hold down a career in hotel keeping, after all.
He smiled irritably. “It really doesn’t matter, I suppose.”
“Ice?” Dora was standing over a bucket containing a piece of ice with a pick in her hand, looking more than a little like Lady Macbeth.
“Ice? In schnapps?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.”
Dora stabbed the ice a couple of times and placed a few shards in a large tumbler glass, which she handed to Reles.
“American habit,” said Reles. “We put ice in everything. But I kind of like it in schnapps. You should try it sometime.”
Dora handed me a smaller glass of schnapps. I was watching her now for some sign that she might be up to her old whore’s tricks, but there didn’t seem to be anything between them that I could see. She even shied away a little when he came too close. The typewriter looked like it was still as busy as always. The wastepaper basket was overflowing.
I toasted Reles.
“Down the hatch,” he said, and took a large mouthful of ice-cold schnapps.
I sipped mine like a dowager, and we faced each other in awkward silence. I waited a moment, then tossed back the rest.
“Well, if that’s all, Detective,” he said. “We have work to do, don’t we, Fraulein Bauer?”
I handed Dora the glass and headed for the door. Reles was there ahead of me, to open it and speed me on my way.
“And thanks again,” he said, “for recovering my property. I appreciate it. For what it’s worth, you’ve restored my faith in the German people.”
“I’ll be sure to tell them that, sir.”
He chuckled, thought of a retaliatory remark, appeared to think better of it, and then waited patiently for me to make my exit from his suite.
“Thanks for the drink, sir.”
He nodded and closed the door behind me.
I hurried along the landing and down the stairs. Crossing the entrance hall, I went into the switchboard room, where, under a high window, four girls were sitting on high chairs in front of what looked like a double-sized upright piano. Behind them was a desk where Hermine, the switchboard supervisor, sat watching the hotel’s “hello girls” as they went about the voluble business of connecting telephone calls. She was a prim woman, with short red hair and a complexion as pale as milk. Seeing me, Hermine stood up and then frowned.
“That mark on your face,” she said. “It looks very much like a whip mark.”
Several of her girls looked around and laughed.
“I went riding with Hedda Adlon,” I said. “Listen, Hermine, the party in 114. Herr Reles. I want a list of everyone he calls this evening.”
“Does Herr Behlert know you’re asking?”
I shook my head. I went a little closer to the switchboard, and Hermine followed attentively.
“He wouldn’t like you spying on the guests, Herr Gunther. I think you’ll need to get his written permission.”
“It’s not spying, it’s snooping. I’m paid to snoop, remember? To keep you and me and the guests safe, although not necessarily in that order.”
“Maybe. But if he found you listening in on Herr Reles’s calls, he’d have our hides.”
“Putting you through now, Herr Reles,” said Ingrid, who was one of the best-looking of the Adlon’s hello girls.
“Herr Reles? He’s on a call now? To whom?”
Ingrid exchanged a look with Hermine.
“Come on, ladies, this is important. If he’s a crook-and I think he is-we need to know about it.”
Hermine nodded her approval.
“Potsdam 3058,” said Ingrid.
“Who’s that?” I waited for a moment.
Hermine nodded again.
“That’s Count von Helldorf’s number,” said Ingrid. “At the Potsdam Police Praesidium.”
Anywhere else but the Adlon I might have persuaded them to let me eavesdrop on that call, but short of a spot lamp and a set of brass knuckles, I’d had all that I was going to get out of the hello girls: standards might have been compromised in other Berlin institutions such as the police, the courts, and the churches, but not at its best hotel.
So I went back to my office to smoke some cigarettes, have a couple of drinks, and take another look at the papers I had taken from the Chinese box. I had the curious idea these were more important to Max Reles than the box itself. But my mind was elsewhere. A telephone call made by Max Reles to von Helldorf so soon after I had seen the American was disturbing. Was it possible their topic of conversation had been me? And if so, to what effect? There were good reasons why von Helldorf might be useful to a man such as Max Reles, and vice versa.
Formerly the leader of Berlin’s SA, Count Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorf had been the police president of Berlin for just three months when a notorious scandal interrupted his progress to higher office. He had always been an enthusiastic gambler and a rumored pederast with a taste for the flagellation of young boys. He was also a close friend of Erik Hanussen, the famous clairvoyant who, it was supposed, had paid off the count’s very substantial gambling debts in return for an introduction to the Leader.
Much of what happened thereafter was still the subject of speculation and mystery, but it seemed that Hitler was strongly impressed by the man Berlin’s communists called “the people’s stupefier.” As a result of Hitler’s open favor, Hanussen’s influence over senior Party members, including von Helldorf, became even greater. Yet all was not quite what it seemed. Hanussen’s leverage within the Party was, it was to be revealed, the result not of good advice, nor even of mesmeric power, but blackmail. At lavish sex parties he had hosted aboard his yacht, the
It is possible Berlin’s famous clairvoyant might have survived all of this. But when Goebbels’s newspaper,
Rumors persisted that von Helldorf had used some of the material he had obtained from Hanussen to secure himself a new position as police president of Potsdam-an unimportant town about an hour southwest of Berlin, where, it is said, beer goes to turn flat. Von Helldorf now spent most of his time there breeding horses and organizing the continuing persecution of those Social Democrats and German communists who had most offended the Nazis during the last days of the republic. And it was generally supposed that in this respect, von Helldorf was largely motivated by the hope he might eventually manage to restore himself to Hitler’s full favor. I knew von Helldorf was also on the German Olympic Organizing Committee, of course, which said something about the success of his attempt to put himself back in favor with Hitler, although I wasn’t quite sure exactly what he did on the committee. Possibly that was just payback from his old SA pal von Tschammer und Osten. Possibly, since Goering’s departure from the Ministry of the Interior, he was in better odor there, too. In spite of everything, von Helldorf was not a man to be taken anything but seriously.
My attack of nerves lasted only a short while, however. As long as it took for the alcohol to kick in. After a few drinks I persuaded myself that since there was really nothing about the letters and business estimates I had taken from the Chinese box that could prove anything in a court of law, then there was no need for me to feel concerned. There wasn’t anything I had seen that could have harmed a man like Max Reles. Besides, Reles couldn’t know it had been I who had taken these papers, and not Ilse Szrajbman.
So I put the papers and the gun in my desk drawer and decided to head home, thinking, like Noreen, to have an early night myself. I was tired, and I ached in every conceivable part of my body.
Leaving Behlert’s car where I had parked it earlier, I walked south down Hermann-Goering-Strasse to catch a tram on Potsdamer Platz. It was dark and a little windy, and the Nazi banners hanging on the Brandenburg Gate were flapping around like danger flags, as if our imperial past were trying to warn us about something in our Nazi present. Even a stray dog trotting along the pavement ahead of me stopped and turned to look at me dolefully, perhaps to ask if I had a solution to our country’s problems. Then again, he might just have been trying to avoid the open door of the black W that had pulled up a few meters ahead. A man wearing a brown leather coat got out of the car and walked quickly toward me.
Instinctively, I turned to walk in the opposite direction and discovered my retreat blocked by a man wearing a thick, double-breasted overcoat and a low-brimmed hat, although it was the neat little bow tie I noticed most. At least until I noticed the beer token in his paw.
“Come with us, please.”
The other man in the leather coat was right behind me now, so that, sandwiched between them, I couldn’t very well have resisted. Like experienced window dressers moving a tailor’s dummy, they folded me into the car and jumped in the backseat on either side of me. We were moving before they had even slammed the car doors.
“If this is about that cop,” I said. “August Krichbaum, wasn’t it? I thought we’d sorted out that bullshit. I mean, you checked my alibi. I had nothing to do with it. You know that.”
After a few moments I realized we were going west, along Charlottenburger Strasse, in completely the opposite direction from Alexanderplatz. I asked where we were going, but neither of them spoke. The driver’s hat was made of leather. So were his ears, probably. By the time we reached Berlin’s famous radio tower and turned onto the AVUS-Berlin’s fastest road-I had guessed where we were driving. The driver bought a ticket and we sped toward Wannsee Station. A few years before, Fritz von Opel had set a speed record on the AVUS, driving a rocket-powered car at almost 240 kilometers an hour. We weren’t driving anything nearly as fast as that, but neither did I get the impression that we were likely to stop anywhere for coffee and cake. At the end of the AVUS, we drove through some woods onto the Glienecke Bridge and, although it was very dark, I could just make out that we had passed two castles. Shortly after that we entered Potsdam on New Konigstrasse.
Surrounded by the Havel and its lakes, Potsdam wasn’t much more than an island. And I couldn’t have felt more lonely if I’d been marooned on some desert atoll with a solitary palm tree and a parrot. For more than a hundred years the town had been the headquarters of the Prussian army, but it might as well have been the headquarters of the Girl Guides for all the help the army was going to give me. I was about to become the prisoner of Count von Helldorf and there was nothing anyone could do about it. One of the buildings in Potsdam was the palace called Sanssouci, which is French for “without care.” I was a long way from a state of mind like that.
As we drove past another castle and a parade ground, I caught a glimpse of a street sign. We were on Priest Strasse, and I was beginning to think I might have need of one as we turned into the courtyard of the local police praesidium.
Entering the building, we went up several flights of stairs and along a cold, dimly lit corridor to a handsomely appointed office with a nice view of the Havel, which I recognized only because there was an even more handsomely appointed motor yacht floating on it just below the leaded window and lit up like a ride at Luna Park.
In the office, a tree was burning in an open fireplace where you could have roasted a whole ox. There were a big hanging tapestry, a portrait of Hitler, and a suit of armor that looked about as stiff as the man standing beside it. He was wearing the uniform of a police general and an air of aristocratic superiority, as if he should have preferred that my shoes had been removed before I was allowed to walk on his park-sized Persian rug. I suppose he was about the same age as I, but there the similarity ended. When he spoke, his tone was careworn and exasperated, and he gave me the impression I had caused him to miss the beginning of an opera or, more likely in his case, a queerish cabaret turn. On a log cabin of a desk, a backgammon set was laid out for a game, and in his hand was a little leather cup containing a pair of dice that every now and then he would rattle nervously, like some mendicant friar.
“Please sit down,” he said.
The man in the leather coat pushed me into a seat at a meeting table and then pushed a pen and a sheet of paper toward me. He seemed to be good at pushing things. “Sign it,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked
