The Pale Criminal

Table of Contents

Philip Kerr was born in Edinburgh in 1956 and lives in London. As a journalist he has written for a number of newspapers and magazines, including
The Sunday Times
and
The Statesman.
He is the author of the novels
March Violets, The Pale Criminal,
and A
German Requiem
(published together as
Berlin Noir).
He is also the author of
Hitler’s Peace, A Philosophical Investigation, Dead Meat, Gridiron, Esau, A Five-Year Plan, The Shot, The Second Angel,
and
Dark Matter,
and he has edited
The Penguin Book of Lies
and
The Penguin Book of Fights, Feuds, and Heartfelt Hatreds.

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First published in Great Britain by Viking 1990
First published in the United States of America by Penguin Books 2005

Copyright © Philip Kerr, 1990

All rights reserved

ISBN : 978-1-101-57593-2

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To Jane

Much about your good people moves me to disgust, and it is not their evil I mean. How I wish they possessed a madness through which they could perish, like this pale criminal. Truly I wish their madness were called truth or loyalty or justice: but they possess their virtue in order to live long and in a miserable ease.

You tend to notice the strawberry tart in Kranzler’s Café a lot more when your diet forbids you to have any.

Well, lately I’ve begun to feel much the same way about women. Only I’m not on a diet, so much as simply finding myself ignored by the waitress. There are so many pretty ones about too. Women, I mean, although I could as easily fuck a waitress as any other kind of female. There was one woman a couple of years ago. I was in love with her, only she disappeared. Well, that happens to a lot of people in this city. But since then it’s just been casual affairs. And now, to see me on Unter den Linden, head one way and then the other, you would think that I was watching a hypnotist’s pendulum. I don’t know, maybe it’s the heat. This summer, Berlin’s as hot as a baker’s armpit. Or maybe it’s just me, turning forty and going a bit coochie-coo near babies. Whatever the reason, my urge to procreate is nothing short of bestial, which of course women see in your eyes, and then leave you well alone.

Despite that, in the long hot summer of 1938, bestiality was callously enjoying something of an Aryan renaissance.

‘Just like a fucking cuckoo.’

‘What is?’

Bruno Stahlecker looked up from his newspaper.

‘Hitler, who else?’

My stomach sank as it sensed another of my partner’s profound analogies to do with the Nazis. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said firmly, hoping that my show of total comprehension would deter him from a more detailed explanation. But it was not to be.

‘No sooner has he got rid of the Austrian fledgling from the European nest than the Czechoslovakian one starts to look precarious.’ He smacked the newspaper with the back of his hand. ‘Have you seen this, Bernie? German troop movements on the border of the Sudetenland.’

‘Yes, I guessed that’s what you were talking about.’ I picked up the morning mail and, sitting down, started to sort through it. There were several cheques, which helped to take the edge off my irritation with Bruno. It was hard to believe, but clearly he’d already had a drink. Normally a couple of stops away from being monosyllabic (which I prefer being a shade taciturn myself) booze always made Bruno chattier than an Italian waiter.

‘The odd thing is that the parents don’t notice. The cuckoo keeps throwing out the other chicks, and the foster parents keep on feeding it.’

‘Maybe they hope that he’ll shut up and go away,’ I said pointedly, but Bruno’s fur was too thick for him to notice. I glanced over the contents of one of the letters and then read it again, more slowly.

‘They just don’t want to notice. What’s in the post?’

‘Hmm? Oh, some cheques.’

‘Bless the day that brings a cheque. Anything else?’

‘A letter. The anonymous kind. Someone wants me to meet him in the Reichstag at midnight.’

‘Does he say why?’

‘Claims to have information about an old case of mine. A missing person that stayed missing.’

‘Sure, I remember them like I remember dogs with tails. Very unusual. Are you going?’

I shrugged. ‘Lately I’ve been sleeping badly, so why not?’

‘You mean apart from the fact that it’s a burnt-out ruin, and it isn’t safe to go inside? Well, for one, it could be a trap. Someone might be trying to kill you.’

‘Maybe you sent it, then.’

He laughed uncomfortably. ‘Perhaps I should come with you. I could stay out of sight, but within earshot.’

‘Or gunshot?’ I shook my head. ‘If you want to kill a man you don’t ask him to the sort of place where naturally he’ll be on his guard.’ I tugged open the drawer of my desk.

To look at there wasn’t much difference between the Mauser and the Walther, but it was the Mauser that I picked up. The pitch of the grip, the general fit of the pistol made it altogether more substantial than the slightly smaller Walther, and it lacked for nothing in stopping-power. Like a fat cheque, it was a gun that always endowed me with a feeling of quiet confidence when I slipped it into my coat pocket. I waved the gun in Bruno’s direction.

‘And whoever sent me the party invitation will know I’m carrying a lighter.’

‘Supposing there’s more than one of them?’

‘Shit, Bruno, there’s no need to paint the devil on the wall. I can see the risks, but that’s the business we’re in. Newspapermen get bulletins, soldiers get dispatches and detectives get anonymous letters. If I’d wanted sealing-wax on my mail I’d have become a damned lawyer.’

Bruno nodded, tugged a little at his eyepatch and then transferred his nerves to his pipe — the symbol of our partnership’s failure. I hate the paraphernalia of pipe-smoking: the tobacco-pouch, the cleaner, the pocket-knife and the special lighter. Pipe-smokers are the grandmasters of fiddling and fidgeting, and as great a blight on our world as a missionary landing on Tahiti with a boxful of brassieres. It wasn’t Bruno’s fault, for, in spite of his drinking and his irritating little habits, he was still the good detective I’d rescued from the obscurity of an out-of-the-way posting to a Kripo station in Spreewald. No, it was me that was at fault: I had discovered myself to be as temperamentally unsuited to partnership as I would have been to the presidency of the Deutsche Bank.

But looking at him I started to feel guilty.

‘Remember what we used to say in the war? If it’s got your name and address on it, you can be sure it’ll be delivered.’

‘I remember,’ he said, lighting his pipe and returning to his
Völkischer Beobachter.
I watched him reading it with bemusement.

‘You could as well wait for the town-crier as get any real news out of that.’

‘True. But I like to read a paper in the morning, even if it is a crock of shit. I’ve got into the habit.’ We were both silent for a moment or two. ‘There’s another one of those advertisements in here: “Rolf Vogelmann, Private Investigator, Missing Persons a speciality.”’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘Sure you have. There was another ad in last Friday’s classified. I read it out to you. Don’t you remember?’ He took his pipe out of his mouth and pointed the stem at me. ‘You know, maybe we should advertise, Bernie.’

‘Why? We’ve got all the business we can handle, and more. Things have never been better, so who needs the extra expense? Anyway, it’s reputation that counts in this line of business, not column inches in the Party’s newspaper. This Rolf Vogelmann obviously doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. Think of all the Jewish business that we get. None of our clients reads that kind of shit.’

‘Well, if you don’t think we need it, Bernie . . .’

‘Like a third nipple.’

‘Some people used to think that was a sign of luck.’

‘And quite a few who thought it reason enough to burn you at the stake.’

‘The devil’s mark, eh?’ He chuckled. ‘Hey, maybe Hitler’s got one.’

‘Just as surely as Goebbels has a cloven hoof. Shit, they’re all from hell. Every damn one of them.’

I heard my footsteps ringing on a deserted Konigsplatz as I approached what was left of the Reichstag building. Only Bismarck, standing on his plinth, hand on sword, in front of the western doorway, his head turned towards me, seemed prepared to offer some challenge to my being there. But as I recalled he had never been much of an enthusiast for the German parliament — had never even set foot in the place — and so I doubted that he’d have been much inclined to defend the institution on which his statue had, perhaps symbolically, turned its back. Not that there was much about this rather florid, Renaissance-style building that looked worth fighting for now. Its façade blackened by smoke, the Reichstag looked like a volcano which had seen its last and most spectacular eruption. But the fire had been more than merely the burnt offering of the 1918 Republic; it was also the clearest piece of pyromancy that Germany could have been given as to what Adolf Hitler and his third nipple had in store for us.

I walked up to the north side and what had been Portal V, the public entrance, through which I had walked once before, with my mother, more than thirty years ago.

I left my flashlight in my coat pocket. A man with a torch in his hand at night needs only to paint a few coloured circles on his chest to make a better target of himself. And anyway, there was more than enough moonlight shining through what was left of the roof for me to see where I was going. Still, as I stepped through the north vestibule, into what had once been a waiting-room, I worked the Mauser’s slide noisily to let whoever was expecting me know that I was armed. And in the eerie, echoing silence, it sounded louder than a troop of Prussian cavalry.

‘You won’t need that,’ said a voice from the galleried floor above me.

‘All the same, I’ll just hang on to it awhile. There might be rats about.’

The man laughed scornfully. ‘The rats left here a long time ago.’ A torch beam shone in my face. ‘Come on up, Gunther.’

‘Seems like I should know your voice,’ I said, starting up the stairs.

‘I’m the same way. Sometimes I recognize my voice, but I just don’t seem to know the man using it. There’s nothing unusual in that, is there? Not these days.’ I took out my flashlight and pointed it at the man I now saw retreating into the room ahead of me.