I might have agreed with that but for something I’d seen on the desk that didn’t look as if it belonged anywhere except in an ashtray. It was a half-chewed cigar projecting at a right angle from the edge of the desk like the leg of the Barberini Faun.
TWELVE
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What should I have done? Told Detective Inspector Seehofer that a cop I knew who’d murdered two people had broken into Munich’s oldest museum and stolen—nothing? A cop he would probably know, too? So I said—nothing. A lot of the time nothing is the best thing to say. Especially in a new job when you’re still trying to make an impression. An acquaintance with murderers and crooked policemen doesn’t inspire the confidence of any insurance company. All the same I did wonder what Detective Schramma had been up to. Of course, it might have been someone else who was the true culprit. But deep in my gut I knew it was he who’d broken into the Glyptothek, just as I’d known with absolute certainty that the Barberini Faun was a man. If I’d been a detective myself and not a claims adjustor I might have taken the cigar butt for analysis and possibly matched it to the one found in the dead general’s house in Bogenhausen: The cops had found those bodies now and, according to the newspapers, they weren’t saying very much, which was the same thing as saying they hadn’t a clue who was responsible. Which suited me fine. The last thing I wanted was to see Schramma any time soon. Whatever he was up to now wasn’t any of my business. And helping the cops wasn’t part of my new job description.
In truth, however, the job was very boring and seemed to involve a lot of staring out the window. Most days I did a lot of that. Frankly I couldn’t have felt more bored at Munich RE if I’d spent a couple of hours trying to guess the speed of the grass growing in the office back garden.
A week or two passed in this way. A pile of claims files started to accumulate on my desk. I was supposed to read these, looking out for anything suspicious before passing them on to Dietrich with recommendations. Car fires that might have been arson, burst water pipes that had been deliberately sabotaged—we got a lot of those in the early spring—family heirlooms lost or damaged on purpose, bogus personal injuries, fraudulent loss-of-earnings claims. But there was nothing that raised so much as an eyebrow, really. After Dietrich’s explanation of his opinion of some of our clients, I felt disappointed to say the least. I prayed I might find something suspicious just to alleviate the boredom. And then Ares, the Greek god of war, violence, bloodshed, and the insurance industry, answered my prayer with a juicy life claim.
Now this was how life insurance worked: An insurance company and the policy holder made a simple contract where, in exchange for an annual premium, the insurer promised to pay a designated beneficiary a sum of money upon the death or serious injury of the insured person. But after many years with Kripo in Berlin, the whole idea of one person profiting from another person’s death just looked suspicious to me. It was ignorant of me, really—life insurance was one of the most profitable parts of Munich RE’s business—but old habits die hard. I guess it’s true what they say: Detectives are simple people who persist in asking obvious or even stupid questions, but I figured that was what I was being paid for and, like I say, I was very bored. Besides, a substantial amount of money was involved.
The facts were that a thirty-nine-year-old man had fallen to his death under the train to Rosenheim at Holzkirchen Station. He’d had a three-star policy with MRE since July of the previous year for which he’d been paying four marks a month: death, personal injury, and loss of earnings. The widow’s name was Ursula Dorpmüller, age thirty-one, and she was our claimant; she lived in Nymphenburg, at Loristrasse number 11, top flat. The husband was Theo Dorpmüller; he’d owned a cabaret bar on Dachauerstrasse and the police said he’d fallen off the railway platform because he was drunk. In other words, they were perfectly satisfied that his death had been accidental; then again, they weren’t facing a large insurance claim. There was a receipt in the dead man’s coat pocket for a five-deutschmark dinner for two at the Walterspiel, which ruled out suicide in my mind. You don’t normally eat and drink so well when you’re planning to kill yourself. Frankly, that was the only real reason the cops thought he was drunk in the first place: On the bill were two bottles of champagne and a bottle of the best burgundy. Maybe he was drunk, I don’t know, but if the policy paid out, Ursula Dorpmüller was set to make twenty thousand deutschmarks, which would have made her the original merry widow. Twenty thousand buys an awful lot of handkerchiefs and a whole ocean of deepest sympathy. Ursula worked as an air hostess for Trans World Airlines on Briennerstrasse and made an excellent salary. Before that she’d been a nurse. She was away in America, visiting her sick mother, when her husband, Theo, was killed. She played the church organ every Sunday at St. Benno’s just up the street from her apartment and was on the committee of the Magnolia Ball—a charity event arranged by the German-American Women’s Club. She also did a lot of work with another charity, which helped East German and Hungarian refugees, and she sounded like a thoroughly decent woman. I might never have raised her case with
