The Pale Criminal (26 page)

I let her go on like that for a minute or two.

‘It struck you as perfectly normal that there were so many obvious questions that he didn’t ask?’

She sighed. ‘Like what?’

‘He never mentioned his fee.’

‘I dare say that if he thought we couldn’t have afforded it, then he would have brought it up. And by the way, don’t expect me to take care of the account for this little experiment of yours.’

I told her that Kripo would pay for everything.

Seeing the distinctive dark-yellow of a cigarette-vending van, I pulled up and got out of the car. I bought a couple of packs and threw one in the glove-box. I tapped one out for her, then myself and lit us both.

‘It didn’t seem strange that he also neglected to ask how old Emmeline was, which school she attended, what the name of her dancing teacher was, where I worked, that sort of thing?’

She blew smoke out of both nostrils like an angry bull. ‘Not especially,’ she said. ‘At least, not until you mentioned it.’ She thumped the dashboard and swore. ‘But what if he had asked which school Emmeline goes to? What would you have done if he’d turned up there and found out that my real husband is dead? I’d like to know that.’

‘He wouldn’t have.’

‘You seem very sure of that. How do you know?’

‘Because I know how private detectives operate. They don’t like to walk right in after the police and ask all the same questions. Usually they like to come at a thing from the other side. Walk round it a bit before they see an opening.’

‘So you think that this Rolf Vogelmann is suspicious?’

‘Yes, I do. Enough to warrant detailing a man to keep an eye on his premises.’

She swore again, rather more loudly this time.

‘That’s the second time,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Why should anything be the matter? No indeed. Single ladies never mind people giving out their addresses and telephone numbers to those whom the police believe to be suspicious. That’s what makes living on one’s own so exciting. My daughter is missing, probably murdered, and now I have to worry that that horrible man might drop round one evening for a little chat about her.’ She was so angry she almost sucked the tobacco out of the cigarette paper. But even so, this time when we arrived at her apartment in Lepsius Strasse, she invited me inside.

I sat down on the sofa and listened to the sound of her urinating in the bathroom. It seemed strangely out of character for her not to be at all self-conscious about such a thing. Perhaps she didn’t care if I heard or not. I’m not sure that she even bothered to close the bathroom door.

When she came back into the room she asked me peremptorily for another cigarette. Leaning forwards I waved one at her which she snatched from my fingers. She lit herself with the table lighter, and puffed like a trooper in the trenches. I watched her with interest as she paced up and down in front of me, the very image of parental anxiety. I selected a cigarette myself, and tugged a book of matches from my waistcoat pocket. Hildegard glanced fiercely at me as I bent my head towards the flame.

‘I thought detectives were supposed to be able to light matches with their thumbnails.’

‘Only the careless kind, who don’t pay five marks for a manicure,’ I said yawning.

I guessed that she was working up to something, but had no more idea of what it could be than I had of Hitler’s taste in soft-furnishings. I took another good look at her.

She was tall – taller than the average man, and in her early thirties, but with the knock-knees and turned-in toes of a girl half her age. There wasn’t much of a chest to speak of, and even less behind. The nose was maybe a bit too broad, the lips a shade too thick, and the cornflower-blue eyes rather too close together; and with the possible exception of her temper, there was certainly nothing delicate about her. But there was no doubting her long-limbed beauty which had something in common with the fastest of fillies out at the Hoppegarten. Probably she was just as difficult to hold on the rein; and if you ever managed to climb into the saddle, you could have done no more than hope that you got the trip as far as the winning-post.

‘Can’t you see that I’m scared?’ she said, stamping her foot on the polished wood floor. ‘I don’t want to be on my own now.’

‘Where is your son Paul?’

‘He’s gone back to his boarding-school. Anyway, he’s only ten, so I can’t see him coming to my assistance, can you?’ She dropped on to the sofa beside me.

‘Well I don’t mind sleeping in his room for a few nights,’ I said, ‘if you really are scared.’

‘Would you?’ she said happily.

‘Sure,’ I said, and privately congratulated myself. ‘It would be my pleasure.’

‘I don’t want it to be your pleasure,’ she said, with just a trace of a smile, ‘I want it to be your duty.’

For a moment I almost forgot why I was there. I might even have thought that she had forgotten. It was only when I saw the tear in the corner of her eye that I realized she really was afraid.

‘I don’t get it,’ said Korsch. ‘What about Streicher and his bunch? Are we still investigating them or not?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But until the Gestapo surveillance throws up something of interest to us, there’s not a lot we can do in that direction.’

‘So what do you want us to do while you’re looking after the widow?’ said Becker, who was on the edge of allowing himself a smile I might have found irritating. ‘That is, apart from checking the Gestapo reports.’

I decided not to be too sensitive about the matter. That would have been suspicious in itself.

‘Korsch,’ I said, ‘I want you to keep your eye on the Gestapo inquiry. Incidentally, how’s your man getting on with Vogelmann?’

He shook his head. ‘There’s not a lot to report, sir. This Vogelmann hardly ever leaves his office. Not much of a detective if you ask me.’

‘It certainly doesn’t look like it,’ I said. ‘Becker, I want you to find me a girl.’ He grinned and looked down at the toe of his shoe. ‘That shouldn’t be too difficult for you.’

‘Any particular kind of girl, sir?’

‘Aged about fifteen or sixteen, blonde, blue-eyed, BdM and,’ I said, feeding him the line, ‘preferably a virgin.’

‘That last part might be a bit difficult, sir.’

‘She’ll have to have plenty of nerve.’

‘Are you thinking of staking her out, sir?’

‘I believe it’s always been the best way to hunt tiger.’

‘Sometimes the goat gets killed though, sir,’ said Korsch.

‘As I said, this girl will have to have guts. I want her to know as much as possible. If she is going to risk her life then she ought to know why she’s doing it.’

‘Where exactly are we going to do this, sir?’ said Becker.

‘You tell me. Think about a few places where our man might notice her. A place where we can watch her without being seen ourselves.’ Korsch was frowning. ‘What’s troubling you?’

He shook his head with slow distaste. ‘I don’t like it, sir. Using a young girl as bait. It’s inhuman.’

‘What do you suggest we use? A piece of cheese?’

‘A main road,’ Becker said, thinking out loud. ‘Somewhere like Hohenzollerndamm, but with more cars, to increase our chances of him seeing her.’

‘Honestly, sir, don’t you think it’s just a bit risky?’

‘Of course it is. But what do we really know about this bastard? He drives a car, he wears a uniform, he has an Austrian or Bavarian accent. After that everything is a maybe. I don’t have to remind you both that we are running out of time. That Heydrich has given me less than four weeks to solve this case. Well, we need to get closer, and we need to do it quickly. The only way is to take the initiative, to select his next victim for him.’

‘But we might wait for ever,’ said Korsch.

‘I didn’t say that it would be easy. You hunt tiger and you can end up sleeping in a tree.’

‘What about the girl?’ Korsch continued. ‘You don’t propose to keep her at it night and day, do you?’

‘She can do it in the afternoons,’ said Becker. ‘Afternoons and early evenings. Not in the dark, so we can make sure he sees her, and we see him.’

‘You’re getting the idea.’

‘But where does Vogelmann fit in?’

‘I don’t know. A feeling in my socks, that’s all. Maybe it’s nothing, but I just want to check it out.’

Becker smiled. ‘A bull has to trust a few hunches now and then,’ he said.

I recognized my own uninspired rhetoric. ‘We’ll make a detective out of you yet,’ I told him.

She listened to her Gigli gramophone records with the avidity of someone who is about to go deaf, offering and requiring no more conversation than a railway ticket-collector. By now I had realized that Hildegard Steininger was about as self-contained as a fountain-pen, and I figured that she probably preferred the kind of man who could think of himself as little more than a blank sheet of writing paper. And yet, almost in spite of her, I continued to find her attractive. For my taste she was too much concerned with the shade of her gold-spun hair, the length of her fingernails and the state of her teeth, which she was forever brushing. Too vain by half, and too selfish twice over. Given a choice between pleasing herself and pleasing someone else she would have hoped that pleasing herself would have made everyone happy. That she should have thought that one would almost certainly result from the other was for her as simple a reaction as a knee jerking under a patella-hammer.

It was my sixth night staying at her apartment, and as usual she had cooked a dinner that was nearly inedible.

‘You don’t have to eat it, you know,’ she had said. ‘I was never much of a cook.’

‘I was never much of a dinner guest,’ I had replied, and eaten most of it, not for politeness’ sake, but because I was hungry and had learnt in the trenches not to be too fussy about my food.

Now she closed the gramophone cabinet and yawned.

‘I’m going to bed,’ she said.

I tossed aside the book I was reading and said that I was going to turn in myself.

In Paul’s bedroom I spent a few minutes studying the map of Spain that was pinned to the boy’s wall, documenting the fortunes of the Condor Legions, before turning out the light. It seemed that every German schoolboy these days wanted to be a fighter-pilot. I was just settling down when there was a knock at the door.

‘May I come in?’ she said, hovering naked in the doorway. For a moment or two she just stood there, framed in the light from the hallway like some marvellous madonna, almost as if she were allowing me to assess her proportions. My chest and scrotum tightening, I watched her walk gracefully towards me.

Whereas her head and back were small, her legs were so long that she seemed to have been created by a draughtsman of genius. One hand covered her sex and this small shyness excited me very much. I allowed it for a short time while I looked upon the rounded simple volumes of her breasts. These were lightly, almost invisibly nippled, and the size of perfect nectarines.

I leant forwards, pushed that modest hand away, and then, taking hold of her smooth flanks, I pressed my mouth against the sleek filaments that mantled her sex. Standing up to kiss her I felt her hand reach down urgently for me, and winced as she peeled me back. It was too rough to be polite, to be tender, and so I responded by pushing her face first on to the bed, pulling her cool buttocks towards me and moulding her into a position that pleased me. She cried out at the moment when I plunged into her body, and her long thighs trembled wonderfully as we played out our noisy pantomime to its barnstorming denouement.

We slept until dawn came creeping through the thin material of the curtains. Awake before her, I was struck by her colour, which was every bit as cool as her awakening expression which changed not a bit as she sought to find my penis with her mouth. And then, turning on to her back, she pulled herself up the bed and laid her head on the pillow, her thighs yawning open so that I could see where life begins, and again I licked and kissed her there before acquainting it with the full rank of my ardour, pressing myself into her body until I thought that only my head and shoulders would remain unconsumed.

Finally, when there was nothing left in either of us, she wrapped herself round me and wept until I thought that she would melt.

‘I thought you’d like the idea.’

‘I’m not sure that I don’t. Just give me a second to swill it around my head.’

‘You don’t want her hanging around somewhere just for the hell of it. He’ll smell that shit in minutes and won’t go near her. It’s got to look natural.’

I nodded without a great deal of conviction and tried to smile at the BdM girl Becker had found. She was an extraordinarily pretty adolescent and I wasn’t sure what Becker had been more impressed with, her bravery or her breasts.

‘Come on, sir, you know what it’s like,’ he said. ‘These girls are always hanging around the
Der Stürmer
display cases on street corners. They get a cheap thrill reading about Jewish doctors interfering with mesmerized German virgins. Look at it this way. Not only will it stop her from getting bored, but also, if Streicher or his people are involved, then they’re more than likely going to take notice of her here, in front of one of these Sturmerkasten, than anywhere else.’

I stared uncomfortably at the elaborate, red-painted case, probably built by some loyal readers, with its vivid slogans proclaiming: ‘German Women: The Jews are your Destruction’, and the three double-page spreads from the paper under glass. It was bad enough to ask a girl to act as bait, without having to expose her to this kind of trash as well.

‘I suppose you’re right, Becker.’

‘You know I am. Look at her. She’s reading it already. I swear she likes it.’

‘What’s her name?’