looking at it again. 'Not with these overheads.'
Chapter 16
Tuesday, 18 October.
It was her, all right. There was no mistaking that golden head and those well-sculpted legs. I watched her struggle out of Ka-De- We's revolving door, laden with parcels and carrier-bags, looking like she was doing her last-minute Christmas shopping. She waved for a taxi, dropped a bag, bent down to retrieve it and looked up to find that the driver had missed her. It was difficult to see how. You'd have noticed Hildegard Steininger with a sack over your head. She looked as though she lived in a beauty parlour.
From inside my car I heard her swear and, drawing up at the curb, I wound down the passenger window.
'Need a lift somewhere?'
She was still looking around for another taxi when she answered. 'No, it's all right,' she said, as if I had cornered her at a cocktail party and she had been glancing over my shoulder to see if there might be someone more interesting coming along. There wasn't, so she remembered to smile, briefly, and then added:
'Well, if you're sure it's no trouble.'
I jumped out to help her load the shopping. Millinery stores, shoe shops, a perfumers, a fancy Friedrichstrasse dress-designer, and Ka-De-We's famous food hall: I figured she was the type for whom a cheque- book provided the best kind of panacea for what was troubling her. But then, there are lots of women like that.
'It's no trouble at all,' I said, my eyes following her legs as they swung into the car, briefly enjoying a view of her stocking tops and garters. Forget it, I told myself. This one was too pricey. Besides, she had other things on her mind.
Like whether the shoes matched the handbag, and what had happened to her missing daughter.
'Where to?' I said. 'Home?'
She sighed like I'd suggested the Palme doss-house on Frobelstrasse, and then, smiling a brave little smile, she nodded. We drove east towards Bnlowstrasse.
'I'm afraid that I don't have any news for you,' I said, fixing a serious expression to my features and trying to concentrate on the road rather than the memory of her thighs.
'No, I didn't think you did,' she said dully. 'It's been almost four weeks now, hasn't it?'
'Don't give up hope.'
Another sigh, rather more impatient. 'You're not going to find her. She's dead, isn't she? Why doesn't somebody just admit it?'
'She's alive until I find out different, Frau Steininger.' I turned south down Potsdamerstrasse and for a while we were both silent. Then I became aware of her shaking her head and breathing like she had walked up a flight of stairs.
'Whatever must you think of me, Kommissar?' she said. 'My daughter missing, probably murdered, and here I am spending money as if I hadn't a care in the world. You must think me a heartless sort of woman.'
'I don't think anything of the kind,' I said, and started telling her how people dealt with these things in different ways, and that if a bit of shopping helped to take her mind off her daughter's disappearance for a couple of hours then that was perfectly all right, and that nobody would blame her. I thought I made a convincing case, but by the time we reached her apartment in Steglitz, Hildegard Steininger was in tears.
I took hold of her shoulder and just squeezed it, letting her go a bit before I said, 'I'd offer you my handkerchief if I hadn't wrapped my sandwiches in it.'
Through her tears she tried a smile. 'I have one,' she said, and tugged a square of lace from out of her sleeve. Then she glanced over at my own handkerchief and laughed. 'It does look as if you'd wrapped your sandwiches in it.'
After I'd helped to carry her purchases upstairs, I stood outside her door while she found her key. Opening it, she turned and smiled gracefully.
'Thank you for helping, Kommissar,' she said. 'It really was very kind of you.'
'It was nothing,' I said, thinking nothing of the sort.
Not even an invitation in for a cup of coffee, I thought when I was sitting in the car once more. Lets me drive her all this way and not even invited inside.
But then there are lots of women like that, for whom men are just taxi-drivers they don't have to tip.
The heavy scent of the lady's Bajadi perfume was pulling quite a few funny faces at me. Some men aren't affected by it at all, but a woman's perfume smacks me right in the leather shorts. Arriving back at the Alex some twenty minutes later, I think I must have sniffed down every molecule of that woman's fragrance like a vacuum cleaner.
I called a friend of mine who worked at Dorlands, the advertising agency. Alex Sievers was someone I knew from the war.
'Alex. Are you still buying advertising space?'
'For as long as the job doesn't require one to have a brain.'
'It's always nice to talk to a man who enjoys his work.'
'Fortunately I enjoy the money a whole lot better.'
It went on like that for another couple of minutes until I asked Alex if he had a copy of that morning's Beobachter. I referred him to the page with Vogelmann's ad.
'What's this?' he said. 'I can't believe that there are people in your line of work who have finally staggered into the twentieth century.'
'That advertisement has appeared at least twice a week for quite a few weeks now,' I explained. 'What's a campaign like that cost?'
'With that many insertions there's bound to be some sort of discount. Listen, leave it with me. I know a couple of people on the Beobachter. I can probably find out for you.'
'I'd appreciate it, Alex.'
'You want to advertise yourself, maybe?'
'Sorry, Alex, but this is a case.'
'I get it. Spying on the competition, eh?'
'Something like that.'
I spent the rest of that afternoon reading Gestapo reports on Streicher and his Der Sturmerassociates: of the Gauleiter's affair with one Anni Seitz, and others, which he conducted in secret from his wife Kunigunde; of his son Lothar's affair with an English girl called Mitford who was of noble birth; of Stnrmer editor Ernst Hiemer's homosexuality; of Stnrmer cartoonist Philippe Rupprecht's illegal activities after the war in Argentina; and of how the Stnrmer team of writers included a man called Fritz Brand, who was really a Jew by the name of Jonas Wolk.
These reports made fascinating, salacious reading, of the sort that would no doubt have appealed to Der Stnrmer's own following, but they didn't bring me any nearer to establishing a connection between Streicher and the murders.
Sievers called back at around five, and said that Vogelmann's advertising was costing something like three or four hundred marks a month.
'When did he start spending that kind of mouse?'
'Since the beginning of July. Only he's not spending it, Bernie.'
'Don't tell me he's getting it for nothing.'
'No, somebody else is picking up the bill.'
'Oh? Who?'
'Well that's the funny thing, Bernie. Can you think of any reason why the Lange Publishing Company should be paying for a private investigator's advertising campaign?'
'Are you sure about that?'
'Absolutely.'
That's very interesting, Alex. I owe you one.'
'Just make sure that if you ever decide to do some advertising it's me you speak to first, all right?'
'You bet.'
