A Quiet Flame (15 page)

“Tell me, Gerda. Did you ever see a snapper with a caliper, age about fifteen? Blond, boyish, carried a stick. Name of Anita. She had cerebral palsy. A spastic. We know she was selling it, because we found a bedroll in her pocket and because the neighbors said she was selling it.”

“Neet? Yeah, I heard she was dead, poor kid.” Gerda poured herself a drink from the bottle and swallowed it in one, like it was cold coffee. “Came in here sometimes. Nicely spoken girl, considering.”

“Considering what?” asked Grund. His eyes remained on the stripper’s teats, which were altogether larger than would have seemed probable.

“Considering she couldn’t speak very well.” Gerda made a noise that came mostly out of her nose. “Talked like that, you know?”

“What else can you tell us about her?” I refilled Gerda’s glass and poured one for myself, just to look sociable.

“From what I gathered, she didn’t get on with her parents. They didn’t like her being a gimp, you know? And of course they didn’t like her being on the sledge. She didn’t do it all the time, mind. Just when she wanted to irritate them, I think. Her dad was something in the Nazi Party, and it used to piss him off that she’d come out and sell it sometimes.”

“Hard to believe,” murmured Grund. “That anyone would. You know. With a disabled kid.”

Gerda laughed. “Oh no, darling. It’s not hard to believe at all. Lots of men do it with disabled girls. In fact, it’s quite the thing these days. I expect it’s something to do with the war. All those terrible injuries some of the men came home with. Left a lot of them feeling quite inadequate, in all sorts of ways. I think that doing it with gravel helps them find the confidence to get it up. Makes them feel superior to the gimp they’re with. It’s cheaper, too, of course. Cheaper than the regular. People don’t have the money for that kind of thing. Not like they used to.” She shot Grund an amused, pitying look. “Oh no, dearie. I’ve seen girls with half a face find a fritz in here. ’Sides, most fritzes aren’t looking at you anyway. Won’t meet your eye. So what a girl’s shine looks like or whether she’s got all her bits is not as important as the fact that she’s got her mouse.” Gerda laughed. “No, darling, you ask some of your mates at work and they’ll tell you the same thing. You don’t look at the whole house when you’re putting a letter in the box.”

“Coming back to Anita,” I said. “Was there ever anyone in particular you saw her with? A regular fritz? Anything at all.”

Gerda grinned. “How about a name?” She put some raw-looking fingers on the ten. “Make it a gypsy and I’ll give you his Otto Normal.”

I took out my wallet and put another ten on the table.

“As a matter of fact, there was a guy. One guy in particular. Licked his lollipop myself once or twice. But he preferred Anita. Name of Serkin. Rudi Serkin. She went to his apartment once or twice. It was in that big rent barracks on Mulackstrasse. The one with all the entrances and exits.”

“The Ochsenhof?” said Grund.

“That’s the one.”

“But that’s in Always True territory,” he said.

“So take an armored car.”

Gerda wasn’t joking. The Ochsenhof was a big block of slum apartments in the epicenter of the toughest neighborhood in Berlin and a virtual no-go area for the police. The only way cops from the Alex were ever likely to visit the Ochsenhof was with a tank to back them up. They’d tried it before. And failed, beaten back by snipers and petrol bombs. Not for nothing was it known as the Roast.

“What did he look like, this Rudi Serkin?” I asked.

“About thirty. Small. Dark, curly hair. Glasses. Smoked a pipe. Bow tie. Oh, and Jewish.” She chuckled. “At least he didn’t have a wrapper on his lollipop.”

“A Jew,” muttered Grund. “I might have known.”

“Got something against Jews, have you, darling?”

“He’s a Nazi,” I said. “He’s got something against everyone.”

For a moment or two we were all silent. Then a voice said, loudly: “Finished your talking, have you?”

We looked around and saw the striptease dancer staring drill holes through us. Gerda laughed. “Yeah, we’ve finished.”

“Good,” said the dancer, and dropped her drawers in one quick and unerotic movement. She bent over and paused just to make sure everyone got a good view of everything. Then, collecting her underwear off the floor, she straightened up again and stalked crossly off the stage.

I decided it was time we followed her example.

Leaving Gerda to finish her bottle alone, we went upstairs and took a deep breath of clean Berlin air. After the venereal atmosphere of the Blue Stocking, I felt like going home and washing my feet in disinfectant. And planning my next trip to the dentist. The sight of Neumann’s hideous smile as we were leaving was a dreadful warning.

Grund nodded with enthusiasm. “At least now we’ve got a name,” he said.

“You think so?”

“You heard her.”

I smiled. “Rudolf Serkin is the name of a famous concert pianist,” I said.

“All the better. Make a nice splash in
Tempo.
”

“Better still, in
Der Angriff,
” I said, and shook my head. “My dear Heinrich, the real Rudolf Serkin would no more get involved with a crippled whore than he’d play ‘My Parrot Doesn’t Like Hard-boiled Eggs’ at the Bechstein Hall. Whoever it was Gerda met. And whoever it was she saw Anita with. They just gave a false name. That’s all.”

“Maybe there are two Rudolf Serkins.”

“Maybe. But I doubt it. Would you give your real name to a bit of gravel you picked up in the Blue Stocking?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“You suppose right. Gerda knew it, too. Only she had nothing else to give.”

“What about the address?”

“She gave out the one address in Berlin she knows the polenta doesn’t dare set foot in. She was playing us a tune, chum.”

“Then why did you let her keep the gypsy?”

“Why?” I looked up at the sky. “I dunno. Maybe because she’s only got one leg and one arm. Maybe that’s why. Anyway, the next time I see her, she’ll know she owes me.”

Grund grimaced. “You’re too soft to be a cop, do you know that?”

“From a Nazi like you I’ll take that as a compliment.”

 

 

 

THE NEXT MORNING I left my Peek & Cloppenburg suit in the closet and put on my father’s tailcoat and stiff collar. Until his untimely death, he had worked as a clerk for the Bleichröder Bank, on Behrenstrasse. I don’t think I ever saw him wearing a lounge suit. Lounging was not something he did much of. My father was a pretty typical Prussian: deferential, loyal to his emperor, respectful, punctilious. I got all those qualities from him. While he was alive, we never got on as well as we might have done. But things were different now.

I took a good look at myself in the mirror and smiled. I was just like him. Apart from the smile and the cigarette and the extra hair on top of my head. All men come to resemble their fathers. That isn’t a tragedy. But you need a hell of a sense of humor to handle it.

I walked to the Adlon. The hotel car service was run by a Pole named Carl Mirow. Carl had once been Hindenburg’s chauffeur but left the Weimar president’s service when he discovered he could make more money driving for someone important. Like the Adlons. Carl was a member of the German Automobile Club and was very proud of the fact that in all his many years on the roads, he had kept a clean license. Very proud and very grateful, too. In 1922, a raw young Berlin policeman named Bernhard Gunther had stopped Carl for going through a red light. He smelled like he’d gone through quite a bit of schnapps as well, but I decided to let him off. It wasn’t very Prussian of me. Maybe Grund was right. Maybe I was too soft to be a cop. Anyway, ever since Carl and I had been friends.

The Adlons had a huge black Mercedes-Benz 770 Pullman convertible. With headlamps the size of tennis rackets and fenders and running boards as big as the ski jump at Holmenkollen, it was a real plutocrat’s car. The kind of plutocrat who might be a director on the board of the Dyestuff Syndicate. Impersonating Dr. Duisberg wasn’t much of a plan, but I couldn’t figure out another way of getting anything out of Dr. Gerhard Domagk at the state hospital’s jelly clinic. Illmann wasn’t usually wrong about such things. It did seem highly unlikely that any doctor would ever give out the kind of sensitive information that I was after. Unless he thought that, in effect, he was giving out that information to his employer.

Carl Mirow had agreed to drive me to the state hospital. The big Mercedes-Benz made quite an impact as we drove through the hospital’s grounds, especially when I wound down the window and asked a nurse for directions to the urological clinic. Carl got a little cross about that. He said, “Suppose someone sees the license plate and thinks that Mr. Adlon has got a dose of jelly.”

Mr. Adlon was Louis Adlon, the hotel’s owner. He was a man in his sixties, with thinning white hair and a rather neat white mustache. “Do I look anything like Mr. Adlon?”

“No.”

“Besides, if you had a dose of jelly, would you come to the clinic in a car like this? Or with your collar up and your hat pulled down?”

We pulled up outside the red-brick outbuilding that housed the urological clinic. Carl sprang out and opened the door for me. In his driver’s livery he looked like my old company commander. Which was probably the real reason I hadn’t pinched him for running a red light back in 1922. I was always a bit sentimental like that.

I went into the clinic. The entrance doors were double and had frosted-glass windows. The hall inside was bright and cool, and the linoleum floor was wearing so much polish that your shoes squeaked loudly as you tried to tiptoe up to the front desk. Once there, under the vaulted ceiling, your muttered plea for medical care would have sounded like a stage whisper in an opera. A strong smell of ether wasn’t just in the air. The strawberry blonde behind the welcome desk looked like she gargled with the stuff. I placed Dr. Duisberg’s business card on her desk and told her I wanted to see Dr. Domagk.

“He’s not here,” she said.

“I suppose he’s in Leverkusen.”

“No, he’s in Wuppertal.”

That was somewhere else I hadn’t ever heard of. There were times when I hardly recognized the country in which I was living.

“I suppose that’s another new town.”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said.

“Who’s in charge while he’s away?”

“Dr. Kassner.”

“Then he’s the person I want to see.”

“Have you an appointment?”

I smiled, affecting a show of self-important patience. “I think you’ll find I don’t need one. If you give Dr. Kassner that business card. You see, nurse, I fund all of the research in this clinic. So unless you want to join the ranks of the six million unemployed, I suggest you hurry along and tell him I’m here.”

The nurse colored a little, stood up, took Duisberg’s card, and, her feet squeaking like a series of squashed mice, disappeared through a set of swing doors.

A minute passed and a pale, awkward man came through the main entrance of the clinic. He was walking slowly, like someone with a bad leg. He kept his eyes on the linoleum, as if expecting to find a better explanation than an overdose of floor polish for the noise under his shoes. At the desk, he stopped and gave me a sideways sort of look, probably wondering if I was some kind of doctor. I smiled at him.

“Lovely day,” I said breezily.

Then a man in a white coat appeared in the hall, striding powerfully toward me like a founding member of the Wandervögel, one hand outstretched and the other holding Duisberg’s business card. He was big and bald-headed, which made him seem more military than medical. Underneath the white coat, he was dressed much as I was, a professional man with a position in the community.

“Dr. Duisberg, sir,” he said unctuously, with a slight speech impediment that might have been due to some ill-fitting false teeth. “What an honor, sir. What an honor. I’m Dr. Kassner. Dr. Domagk will be so very disappointed to have missed you. He’s in Wuppertal.”

“Yes, so I’ve just been informed.”

The doctor looked pained. “I trust there hasn’t been some kind of a mix-up and that he wasn’t expecting you,” he said.

“No, no,” I said. “I’m only in Berlin for a brief visit. I had a short time to kill between appointments, so I thought I might just drop by and see how the clinical trial is coming along. The Dyestuff Syndicate is very excited by your work, here.” I paused. “Of course, if it’s inconvenient . . .”

“No, no, sir.” He bowed. “If you’re happy to make do with my own inadequate explanations.”

“I’m sure they will be quite sufficient for a layman like me.”

“Then, do, please, come this way, sir.”

We went through the swing doors and into a corridor where a dozen or more rather miserable-looking men were seated along the wall, each of them holding what was either a urine sample or a very poor example of Berlin’s notoriously unpleasant tap water. Kassner ushered me into his office, which was suitably clinical. There was an examination couch, some shelves stuffed with medical textbooks, a couple of chairs, some filing cabinets, and a small desk. On the desk was a portable Bing with a sheet of paper rolled into the carriage, and a telephone. On the walls were some graphic illustrations that had me shrinking into my bladder and were almost enough to persuade me to take a vow of celibacy. I reflected I was probably the first man in a long while who’d walked into that little office and not been asked to drop his trousers.

“How much do you know about our work here?” he asked.

“Only that you’re working on a new magic bullet,” I said. “I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a chemical engineer. Dyestuffs are my forte. Just assume you’re explaining things to an educated layman.”

“Well, as you probably know, sulfa drugs are synthetic antimicrobial agents that contain sulfonamides. One of those drugs—a drug called protonsil—was synthesized by Josef Klarer at Bayer and tested on animals by Dr. Domagk. Successfully, of course. Since then, we’ve been testing it on a small group of outpatients who are suffering from syphilis and gonorrhea. But, in the course of time, we hope to find that protonsil will be effective in treating a whole range of bacterial infections inside the body. Oddly, it has no effect in the test tube. Its antibacterial action only seems to work inside living organisms, which leads us to suspect, and to hope, that the drug is successfully metabolized inside the body.”