where Frau Protze was standing. She sniffed and pulled out a handkerchief from the sleeve of her blouse, and blew her nose.
Through the material she said:
'I'm sorry, Herr Gunther, they just barged in here and started ransacking the place. I told them I didn't know where you were, or when you would be back, and they got quite nasty. I never knew that policemen could behave so disgracefully.'
'They're not policemen,' I said. 'More like knuckles with suits. You'd better run along home now. I'll see you tomorrow.
She sniffed some more. 'Thank you, Herr Gunther,' she said. 'But I don't think I'll be coming back. I don't think my nerves are up to this sort of thing. I'm sorry.'
'That's all right. I'll mail what I owe you.' She nodded, and having stepped round me she almost ran out of the office. The haircut snorted with laughter and kicked the door shut behind her. I opened the window.
'There's a bit of a smell in here,' I said. 'What do you fellows do when you're not scaring widows and searching for the petty-cash box?'
Dietz jerked himself off my desk and came over to the window. 'I heard about you, Gunther,' he said, looking out at the traffic. 'You used to be a bull, so I know that you know the official paper on just how far I can go. And that's still a hell of a long way yet. I can stand on your fucking face for the rest of the afternoon, and I don't even have to tell you why. So why don't you cut the shit and tell me what you know about Paul Pfarr, and then we'll be on our way again.'
'I know he wasn't a careless smoker,' I said. 'Look, if you hadn't gone through this place like an earth-tremor, I might have been able to find a letter from the Germania Life Assurance Company engaging me to investigate the fire pending any claim.'
'Oh, we found that letter,' said Dietz. 'We found this, too.' He took my gun out of his jacket pocket and pointed it playfully at my head.
'I've got a licence for it.'
'Sure you have,' he said, smiling. Then he sniffed the muzzle, and spoke to his partner. 'You know, Martins, I'd say this pistol has been cleaned; and recently, too.'
'I'm a clean boy,' I said. 'Take a look at my fingernails if you don't believe me.'
'Walther PPK, 9 mm,' said Martins, lighting a cigarette. 'Just like the gun that killed poor Herr Pfarr and his wife.'
'That's not what I heard.' I went over to the drinks cabinet. I was surprised to see that they hadn't helped themselves to any of my whisky.
'Of course,' said Dietz, 'we were forgetting that you've still got friends over at the Alex, weren't we.' I poured myself a drink. A little too much to swallow in less than three gulps.
'I thought they got rid of all those reactionaries,' said Martins. I surveyed the last mouthful of whisky.
'I'd offer you boys a drink, only I wouldn't want to have to throw away the glasses afterwards.' I tossed the drink back.
Martins flicked away his cigarette and, clenching his fists, he stepped forward a couple of paces. 'This bum specializes in lip like a yid does in nose,' he snarled. Dietz stayed where he was, leaning on the window. But when he turned around there was tabasco in his eyes.
'I'm running out of patience with you, mulemouth.'
'I don't get it,' I said. 'You've seen the letter from the Assurance people. If you think it's a fake, then check it out.'
'We already did.'
'Then why the double act?' Dietz walked over and looked me up and down like I was shit on his shoe. Then he picked up my last bottle of good scotch, weighed it in his hand and threw it against the wall above the desk. It smashed with the sound of a canteen of cutlery dropping down a stairwell, and the air was suddenly redolent with alcohol. Dietz straightened his jacket after the exertion.
'We just wanted to impress you with the need to keep us informed of what you're doing, Gunther. If you find out anything, and I mean anything, then you better speak to us. Because if I find out you've been giving us any fig- leaf, then I'll have you in a K Z so quick, your fucking ears will whistle.' He leaned towards me and I caught the smell of his sweat. 'Understand, mulemouth?'
'Don't stick your jaw too far out, Dietz,' I said, 'or I'll feel obliged to slap it.'
He smiled. 'I'd like that sometime. Really I would.' He turned to his partner.
'Come on,' he said. 'Let's get out of here before I kick him in the eggs.'
I'd just finished clearing up the mess when the phone rang. It was Mnller from the Berliner Morgenpost to say that he was sorry, but beyond the sort of material that the obituaries people collected over the years, there really wasn't much in the files about Hermann Six to interest me.
'Are you giving me the up and down, Eddie? Christ, this fellow is a millionaire.
He owns half the Ruhr. If he stuck his finger up his arse he'd find oil.
Somebody must have got a look through his keyhole at some time.'
'There was a reporter a while back who did quite a bit of spadework on all of those big boys on the Ruhr: Krupp, Voegler, Wolff, Thyssen. She lost her job when the Government solved the unemployment problem. 'I'll see if I can find out where she's living.'
'Thanks, Eddie. What about the Pfarrs? Anything?'
'She was really into spas. Nauheim, Wiesbaden, Bad Homburg, you name it, she'd splashed some there. She even wrote an article about it for Die Frau. And she was keen on quack medicine. There's nothing about him, I'm afraid.'
'Thanks for the gossip, Eddie. Next time I'll read the society page and save you the trouble.'
'Not worth a hundred, huh?'
'Not worth fifty. Find this lady reporter for me and then I'll see what I can do.'
After that I closed the office and returned to the key shop to collect my new set of keys and my tin of clay. I'll admit it sounds a bit theatrical; but honestly, I've carried that tin for several years, and short of stealing the actual key itself, I don't know of a better way of opening locked doors. A delicate mechanism of fine steel with which you can open any kind of lock, I don't have. The truth is that with the best modern locks, you can forget picking: there are no slick, fancy little wonder tools. That stuff is for the film-boys at U F A. More often than not a burglar simply saws off the bolt-head, or drills around it and removes a piece of the goddam door. And that reminded me: sooner or later I was going to have to check out just who there was in the fraternity of nutcrackers with the talent to have opened the Pfarrs' safe. If that was how it was done. Which meant that there was a certain scrofulous little tenor who was long overdue for a singing lesson.
I didn't expect to find Neumann at the dump where he lived in Admiralstrasse, in the Kottbusser Tor district, but I tried there anyway. Kottbusser Tor was the kind of area that had worn about as well as a music-hall poster, and Admiralstrasse, Number 43 was the kind of place where the rats wore ear-plugs and the cockroaches had nasty coughs. Neumann's room was in the basement at the back. It was damp. It was dirty. It was foul. And Neumann wasn't there.
The concierge was a snapper who was over the hill and down a disused mine-shaft.
Her hair was every bit as natural as parade goose-stepping down the Wilhelmstrasse, and she'd evidently been wearing a boxing-glove when she'd applied the crimson lipstick to her paperclip of a mouth. Her breasts were like the rear ends of a pair of dray horses at the end of a long hard day. Maybe she still had a few clients, but I thought it was a better bet that I'd see a Jew at the front of a Nuremberg pork-butcher's queue. She stood in the doorway to her apartment, naked under the grubby towelling robe which she left open, and lit a half-smoked cigarette.
'I'm looking for Neumann,' I said, doing my level best to ignore the two coat-pegs and the Russian boyar's beard that were being displayed for my benefit. You felt the twang and itch of syphilis in your tail just looking at her. 'I'm a friend of his.' The snapper yawned cheesily and, deciding that I'd seen enough for free, she closed her robe and tied the cord.
'You a bull?' she sniffed.
'Like I said, I'm a friend.' She folded her arms and leaned on the doorway.
'Neumann doesn't have any friends,' she said, looking at her dirty fingernails and then back at my face. I had
