‘Thanks for the information,’ I said. ‘And in case you didn’t know, it’s summertime up on the surface.’
‘Yes, I noticed that the rain was a little warmer than usual. At least a rotten summer is one thing they can’t blame on the Jews.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ I said.
5
There was chaos back at Alexanderplatz, where a tram had derailed. The clock in the tall, red-brick tower of St George’s was striking three o’clock, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten anything since a bowl of Quaker Quick Flakes (‘For the Youth of the Nation’) since breakfast. I went to the Cafe Stock; it was close by Wertheim’s Department Store, and in the shadow of the S-Bahn railway viaduct.
The Cafe Stock was a modest little restaurant with an even more modest bar in the far corner. Such was the size of the eponymous proprietor’s bibulous belly that there was only just room for him to squeeze behind the bar; and as I came through the door it was there that I found him standing, pouring beers and polishing glasses, while his pretty little wife waited on the tables. These tables were often taken by Kripo officers from the Alex, and this had the effect of obliging Stock to play up his commitment to National Socialism. There was a large picture of the Fuhrer on the wall, as well as a printed sign that said, ‘Always give the Hitler Salute.’
Stock wasn’t always that way, and before March 1933 he had been a bit of a Red. He knew that I knew it, and it always worried him that there were others who would remember it too. So I didn’t blame him for the picture and the sign. Everyone in Germany was somebody different before March 1933. And as I’m always saying, ‘Who isn’t a National Socialist when there’s a gun pointed at his head?’
I sat down at an empty table and surveyed the rest of the clientele. A couple of tables away were two bulls from the Queer Squad, the Department for the Suppression of Homosexuality: a bunch of what are little better than blackmailers. At a table next to them, and sitting on his own, was a young Kriminalassistent from the station at Wedersche Market, whose badly pock-marked face I remembered chiefly for his having once arrested my informer, Neumann, on suspicion of theft.
Frau Stock took my order of pig’s knuckle with sauerkraut briskly and without much in the way of pleasantry. A shrewish woman, she knew and disapproved of my paying Stock for small snippets of interesting gossip about what was going on at the Alex. With so many officers coming in and out of the place, he often heard quite a lot. She moved off to the dumb-waiter and shouted my order down the shaft to the kitchen. Stock squeezed out from behind his bar and ambled over. He had a copy of the Party newspaper, the
‘Hallo, Bernie,’ he said. ‘Lousy weather we’re having, eh?’
‘Wet as a poodle, Max,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a beer when you’re ready.’
‘Coming right up. You want to look at the paper?’
‘Anything in it?’
‘Mr and Mrs Charles Lindbergh are in Berlin. He’s the fellow that flew across the Atlantic.’
‘It sounds fascinating, really it does. I suppose the great aviator will be opening a few bomber factories while he’s here. Maybe even take a test-flight in a shiny new fighter. Perhaps they want him to pilot one all the way to Spain.’
Stock looked nervously over his shoulder and gestured for me to lower my voice. ‘Not so loud, Bernie,’ he said, twitching like a rabbit. ‘You’ll get me shot.’ Muttering unhappily, he went off to get my beer.
I glanced at the newspaper he had left on my table. There was a small paragraph about the ‘investigation of a fire on Ferdinandstrasse, in which two people are known to have lost their lives’, which made no mention of their names, or their relation to my client, or that the police were treating it as a murder investigation. I tossed it contemptuously onto another table. There’s more real news on the back of a matchbox than there is in the
‘A nice sergeant-major on it, like always,’ he said.
‘Thanks.’ I took a long drink and then wiped some of the sergeant-major off my upper lip with the back of my hand. Frau Stock collected my lunch from the dumb-waiter and brought it over. She gave her husband a look that should have burned a hole in his shirt, but he pretended not to have seen it. Then she went to clear the table that was being vacated by the pockmarked Kriminalassistant. Stock sat down and watched me eat.
After a while I said, ‘So what have you heard? Anything?’
‘A man’s body fished out of the Landwehr.’
‘That’s about as unusual as a fat railwayman,’ I told him. ‘The canal is the Gestapo’s toilet, you know that. It’s got so that if someone disappears in this goddamn city, it’s quicker to look for him at the lighterman’s office than police headquarters or the city morgue.’
‘Yes, but this one had a billiard cue – up his nose. It penetrated the bottom of his brain they reckoned.’
I put down my knife and fork. ‘Would you mind laying off the gory details until I’ve finished my food?’ I said.
‘Sorry,’ said Stock. ‘Well, that’s all there is really. But they don’t normally do that sort of thing, do they, the Gestapo?’
‘There’s no telling what is considered normal on Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Perhaps he’d been sticking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted. They might have wanted to do something poetic.’ I wiped my mouth and laid some change on the table which Stock collected up without bothering to count it.
‘Funny to think that it used to be the Art School – Gestapo headquarters, I mean.’
‘Hilarious. I bet the poor bastards they work over up there go to sleep as happy as little snowmen at the notion.’ I stood up and went to the door. ‘Nice about the Lindberghs though.’
I walked back to the office. Frau Protze was polishing the glass on the yellowing print of Tilly that hung on the wall of my waiting room, contemplating with some amusement the predicament of the hapless Burgomeister of Rothenburg. As I came through the door the phone started to ring. Frau Protze smiled at me and then stepped smartly into her little cubicle to answer it, leaving me to look afresh at the clean picture. It was a long time since I’d really looked at it. The Burgomeister, having pleaded with Tilly, the sixteenth-century commander of the Imperial German Army, for his town to be spared destruction, was required by his conqueror to drink six litres of beer without drawing breath. As I remembered the story, the Burgomeister had pulled off this prodigious feat of bibbing and the town had been saved. It was, as I had always thought, so characteristically German. And just the sort of sadistic trick some S A thug would play. Nothing really changes that much.
‘It’s a lady,’ Frau Protze called to me. ‘She won’t give her name, but she insists on speaking to you.’
‘Then put her through,’ I said, stepping into my office. I picked up the candlestick and the earpiece.
‘We met last night,’ said the voice. I cursed, thinking it was Carola, the girl from Dagmarr’s wedding reception. I wanted to forget all about that little episode. But it wasn’t Carola. ‘Or perhaps I should say this morning. It was pretty late. You were on your way out and I was just coming back after a party. Do you remember?’
‘Frau-’ I hesitated, still not quite able to believe it.
‘Please,’ she said, ‘less of the Frau. Lise Rudel, if you don’t mind, Herr Gunther.’
‘I don’t mind at all,’ I said. ‘How could I not remember?’
‘You might,’ she said. ‘You looked very tired.’ Her voice was as sweet as a plate of Kaiser’s pancakes. ‘Hermann and I, we often forget that other people don’t keep such late hours.’
‘If you’ll permit me to say so, you looked pretty good on it.’
‘Well, thank you,’ she cooed, sounding genuinely flattered. In my experience you can never flatter any woman too much, just as you can never give a dog too many biscuits.
‘And how can I be of service?’
‘I’d like to speak to you on a matter of some urgency,’ she said. ‘All the same, I’d rather not talk about it on the telephone.’
‘Come and see me here, in my office?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t. I’m at the studios in Babelsberg right now. Perhaps you would care to come to my
