apartment this evening?’
‘Your apartment?’ I said. ‘Well, yes, I’d be delighted. Where is it?’
‘Badenschestrasse, Number 7. Shall we say nine o’clock?’
‘That would be fine.’ She hung up. I lit a cigarette and smoked it absently. She was probably working on a film, I thought, and imagined her telephoning me from her dressing room wearing only a robe, having just finished a scene in which she’d been required to swim naked in a mountain lake. That took me quite a few minutes. I’ve got a good imagination. Then I got to wondering if Six knew about the apartment. I decided he did. You don’t get to be as rich as Six was without knowing your wife had her own place. She probably kept it on in order to retain a degree of independence. I guessed that there wasn’t much she couldn’t have had if she really put her mind to it. Putting her body to it as well probably got her the moon and a couple of galaxies on top. All the same, I didn’t think it was likely that Six knew or would have approved of her seeing me. Not after what he had said about me not poking into his family affairs. Whatever it was she wanted to talk to me urgently about was certainly not for the gnome’s ears.
I called Muller, the crime reporter on the
‘Look,’ I said after the preliminaries, ‘I need some biographical information from your library files, as much as you can get and as soon as possible, on Hermann Six.’
‘The steel millionaire? Working on his daughter’s death, eh, Bernie?’
‘I’ve been retained by the insurance company to investigate the fire.’
‘What have you got so far?’
‘You could write what I know on a tram ticket.’
‘Well,’ said Muller, ‘that’s about the size of the piece we’ve got on it for tomorrow’s edition. The Ministry has told us to lay off it. Just to record the facts, and keep it small.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Six has got some powerful friends, Bernie. His sort of money buys an awful lot of silence.’
‘Were you onto anything?’
‘I heard it was arson, that’s about all. When do you need this stuff?’
‘Fifty says tomorrow. And anything you can dig up on the rest of the family.’
‘I can always use a little extra money. Be talking to you.’
I hung up and shoved some papers inside some old newspapers and then dumped them in one of the desk drawers that still had a bit of space. After that I doodled on the blotter and then picked up one of the several paperweights that were lying on the desk. I was rolling its cold bulk around my hands when there was a knock at the door. Frau Protze edged into the room.
‘I wondered if there was any filing that needed to be done.’ I pointed at the untidy stacks of files that lay on the floor behind my desk.
‘That’s my filing system there,’ I said. ‘Believe it or not, they are in some sort of order.’ She smiled, humouring me no doubt, and nodded attentively as if I was explaining something that would change her life.
‘And are they all work in progress?’
I laughed. ‘This isn’t a lawyer’s office,’ I said. ‘With quite a few of them, I don’t know whether they are in progress or not. Investigation isn’t a fast business with quick results. You have to have a lot of patience.’
‘Yes, I can see that,’ she said. There was only one photograph on my desk. She turned it round to get a better look at it. ‘She’s very beautiful. Your wife?’
‘She was. Died on the day of the Kapp Putsch.’ I must have made that remark a hundred times. Allying her death to another event like that, well, it plays down how much I still miss her, even after sixteen years. Never successfully however. ‘It was Spanish influenza,’ I explained. ‘We were together for only ten months.’ Frau Protze nodded sympathetically.
We were both silent for a moment. Then I looked at my watch.
‘You can go home if you like,’ I told her.
When she had gone I stood at my high window a long time and watched the wet streets below, glistening like patent leather in the late afternoon sunlight. The rain had stopped and it looked as though it would be a fine evening. Already the office workers were making their ways home, streaming out of Berolina Haus opposite, and down into the labyrinth of underground tunnels and walkways that led to the Alexanderplatz U-Bahn station.
Berlin. I used to love this old city. But that was before it had caught sight of its own reflection and taken to wearing corsets laced so tight that it could hardly breathe. I loved the easy, carefree philosophies, the cheap jazz, the vulgar cabarets and all of the other cultural excesses that characterized the Weimar years and made Berlin seem like one of the most exciting cities in the world.
Behind my office, to the southeast, was Police Headquarters, and I imagined all the good hard work that was being done there to crack down on Berlin’s crime. Villainies like speaking disrespectfully of the Fuhrer, displaying a ‘Sold Out’ sign in your butcher’s shop window, not giving the Hitler Salute, and homosexuality. That was Berlin under the National Socialist Government: a big, haunted house with dark corners, gloomy staircases, sinister cellars, locked rooms and a whole attic full of poltergeists on the loose, throwing books, banging doors, breaking glass, shouting in the night and generally scaring the owners so badly that there were times when they were ready to sell up and get out. But most of the time they just stopped up their ears, covered their blackened eyes and tried to pretend that there was nothing wrong. Cowed with fear, they spoke very little, ignoring the carpet moving underneath their feet, and their laughter was the thin, nervous kind that always accompanies the boss’s little joke.
Policing, like autobahn construction and informing, is one of the new Germany’s growth industries; and so the Alex is always busy. Even though it was past closing time for most of the departments that had dealings with the public, there were still a great many people milling about the various entrances to the building when I got there. Entrance Four, for the Passport Office, was especially busy. Berliners, many of them Jewish, who had queued all day for an exit visa, were even now emerging from this part of the Alex, their faces happy or sad according to the success of their enterprise. I walked on down Alexanderstrasse and passed Entrance Three, in front of which a couple of traffic police, nicknamed ‘white mice’ because of their distinctive short white coats, were climbing off their powder-blue BMW motorcycles. A Green Minna, a police-van, came racing down the street, Martin-horn blaring, in the direction of Jannowitz Bridge. Oblivious to the noise, the two white mice swaggered in through Entrance Three to make their reports.
I went in by Entrance Two, knowing the place well enough to have chosen the entrance where I was least likely to be challenged by someone. If I was stopped, I was on my way to Room 323, the Lost Property Office. But Entrance Two also serves the police morgue.
I walked nonchalantly along a corridor and down into the basement, past a small canteen to a fire exit. I pushed the bar on the door down and found myself in a large cobbled courtyard where several police cars were parked. One of these was being washed by a man wearing gumboots who paid me no attention as I crossed the yard and ducked into another doorway. This led to the boiler room, and I stopped there for a moment while I made a mental check of my bearings. I hadn’t worked at the Alex for ten years not to know my way around. My only concern was that I might meet someone who knew me. I opened the only other door that led out of the boiler room and ascended a short staircase into a corridor, at the end of which was the morgue.
When I entered the morgue’s outer office I encountered a sour smell that was reminiscent of warm, wet poultry flesh. It mixed with the formaldehyde to make a sickly cocktail that I felt in my stomach at the same time as I drew it into my nostrils. The office, barely furnished with a couple of chairs and a table, contained nothing to warn the unwary of what lay beyond the two glass doors, except the smell and a sign which simply read ‘Morgue: Entrance Forbidden’. I opened the doors a crack and looked inside.
In the centre of a grim, damp room was an operating-table that was also part trough. On opposite sides of a stained ceramic gulley were two marble slabs, set slightly at an angle so that fluids from a corpse could drain into the centre and be washed down a drain by water from one of the two tall murmuring taps that were situated at each end. The table was big enough for two corpses laid head-to-toe, one on each side of the drain; but there was only one cadaver, that of a male, which lay under the knife and the surgical saw. These were wielded by a bent, slight man with thin dark hair, a high forehead, glasses, a long hooked nose, a neat moustache and a small
