“You think that would be useful,” Gunther said. “Who.”
“Don’t you?”
“Usually,” he said, taking a drink. “If this were before. Now? Let me explain something to you. I saved the map.” He cocked his head toward the wall. “But everything else was lost. Fingerprint files. Criminal picture files. General files. We don’t know who anyone is in Berlin. No residency records. Lost. Something is stolen, you can’t look in the hock shops, the usual places. They’re gone. If it’s sold to a soldier, he sends it home. No trace. No policeman in Berlin can solve a crime now. Not even a retired one.”
“It’s not a German crime.”
“Then why come to me?”
“Because you know the black market.”
“You think so?”
“You get a lot of gifts.”
“Yes, I’m so rich,” he said, lifting his hand to the room. “Tins of corned beef. A treasure.”
“You know how it works, or you wouldn’t be eating. You know how Berlin works.”
“How Berlin works,” Gunther said, grunting again.
“Even now. Germans run the market. Probably the same ones who ran things before. You’d know them. So which one did Tully know? He wasn’t making a casual deal. He wasn’t in Berlin, he came to Berlin.”
Gunther slowly took out a cigarette and watched Jake as he lit it. “Good. That’s the first point. You saw that. What else?”
A detective testing a recruit. Jake leaned forward.
“The point is the money. There’s too much.”
Gunther shook his head. “No, you missed the point. The point is that he still had it.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Herr Geismar. A man sells something. The buyer shoots him. Would he not take the money back? Why would he leave it?”
Jake sat back, disconcerted. The obvious question, overlooked by everybody except a bent cop, still on the job behind the brandy haze. “Meaning?”
“Meaning the buyer and the killer are not necessarily the same. In fact, not the same. How could it be? You’re looking for the wrong man.”
Jake got up and walked over to the map. “The one leads to the other. Has to. There’s still the money.”
“Yes, the money,” Gunther said, following him with his eyes. “That interests you. It’s the other point that interests me. Where.”
“Potsdam,” Jake said dully, looking at the map.
“Potsdam,” Gunther repeated. “Which the Russians have closed off. No one has been there for days. Not even the people you think I know.” He took another drink. “For them, a real inconvenience. No market day-a serious loss. But they can’t get in. And your soldier can. How is that?”
“Maybe he was invited.”
Gunther nodded. “The final point. But for you, also the end. A Russian? Children with guns. They don’t need a reason to shoot. You will never find him.”
“The black market doesn’t work by sector. It’s all over the city. This much money-even a Russian-someone will know something. People talk.” Jake went back to his chair and leaned forward again. “They’d talk to you. They know you.”
Gunther lifted his head.
“I can pay,” Jake said.
“I’m not an informer.”
“No. A cop.”
“Retired,” Gunther said sourly. “With a pension.” He raised his glass to the packing cases.
“And how long do you think that will last? Once the MPs get started. An American killed-they have to do something about that. Clean things up. At least for a while. You could use a little insurance.”
“From the Americans,” Gunther said, deadpan. “To find someone they don’t want found.”
“They will. They’ll have to, if somebody makes enough noise.” He paused, holding Gunther’s eyes. “You never know when a favor might come in handy.”
“You are the noisemaker, I take it.” Gunther looked away and took off his glasses again. “And what do I get? For my services. My per-silschein?”
“Persil?” Jake said, confused, trying to translate. “Like the detergent?”
“Persil washes everything clean,” Gunther said, rubbing the glasses on the cardigan. “Remember the advertisements? The per-silschein washes everything too, even sins. An American signs a certificate and”-he snapped his fingers-“the record is clean. No Nazi past. Go back to work.”
“I can’t do that,” Jake said, then hesitated. “Maybe I can talk to Bernie.”
“Herr Geismar, I’m not serious. He won’t persil me. I was in the party. He knows that. Now I’m in-business. My hands are—” He stopped, looking down at them. “Anyway, I don’t want to go back to work. It’s finished here. When you leave, the Russians will take over. Not even a persilschein would make me work for them.”
“Then work for me.”
“Why?” he said, more a dismissal than a question.
Jake glanced around the airless room, a short walk from the old office, all the teletypes and radio calls now just a map on the wall.
“Because you’re not ready to retire. And I’ll miss all the points.” He nodded at the book. “You can’t sit around all day reading Karl May. He isn’t writing any new ones.”
Gunther looked at him for a second, a bleary scowl, then put on his glasses and picked up the book. “Leave me alone,” he said, retreating again behind the haze.
But Jake sat still, waiting him out. For a few minutes there was no sound but the quiet ticking of the wall clock, the silence of a standoff, like the one on the book jacket, six-shooters drawn. Finally Gunther peered over his glasses.
“There is maybe one more point.”
Jake raised his eyebrows, still waiting.
“Did he speak German?”
“Tully? I don’t know. I doubt it.”
“A difficulty, then, for such a transaction,” Gunther said carefully, working through a checklist. “If he was meeting a German. Who run the market. You say.”
“All right. Then who else?”
“This talk-it would be private? I have to protect my pension,” “he said.
“Private as a confessional.”
“You know Ronny’s? On the Ku’damm?”
“I can find it.”
“Try there tonight. Ask for Alford,” he said, pronouncing the English correctly. “He likes Ronny’s.”
“An American?”
“A Tommy. Not German. So maybe he’s heard something. Who knows? It’s a start. Mention my name.”
Jake nodded. “But you’ll be there.”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
Gunther looked down at the page, dismissing him again. “Whether I finish the book.”
He got back to Gelferstrasse to find a crowd halfway down the block from the billet, MPs in jeeps and a whole truckload of soldiers all milling around two women who stood looking at a house, hands to their cheeks, as if they were watching an accident. In the open truck, Ron stood next to some newsreel cameras, deserted by the rest of the press for the sidewalk show. The MPs were trying to get the women to move but without much success, barking in English while the women wailed in German. Plaster dust was floating out of the windows like smoke.
“He speaks German,” Tommy Ottinger said to one of the MPs, waving Jake over.
“Tell them in kraut they can’t go in,” the MP said, frustrated. “One floor’s gone already-the rest of it’s going
