If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr Read Free Book Online Page A

you’re another March violet.”
    “I came to report a crime at the Adlon.”
    “The biggest crime at the Adlon is what they charge for a plate of sausage, eh, Max?”
    “Too right, Herr Trettin.”
    “But after that,” I said, “I was planning to buy you a beer.”
    “Beer first,” said Otto. “Then report the crime.”
    Otto and I went across the road to the Zum, in the arches of the local S-Bahn station. Cops liked it there because with a train passing overhead every few minutes it was hard to be overheard. And I imagined this was especially important in Otto Trettin’s case, since it was generally known that he fiddled his expenses and, probably, was not averse to having his bread spread with some very dodgy butter. He was still a good cop, however, one of the Alex’s best from the days before the police purge, and although he wasn’t a Party member, the Nazis seemed to like him. Otto had always been a bit heavy-handed: he had famously handed out a beating to the Sass brothers, which, at that time, was a serious breach of police ethics, although they had certainly deserved it, and, doubtless, this was one of the reasons that had helped him to find favor with the new government. The Nazis liked a bit of rough justice. To that extent it was perhaps surprising I wasn’t working there myself.
    “I’ll have a Landwehr Top,” said Trettin.
    “Make that two,” I told the barman.
    Named after Berlin’s famous canal in which the water’s surface was often polluted with a layer of oil or gasoline, a Landwehr Top was a beer with a brandy in it. We hurried them down and ordered two more.
    “You’re a bastard, Gunther,” said Otto. “Now that you’ve left, I’ve got no one to talk to. No one I can trust, that is.”
    “What about your beloved coauthor, Erich?”
    Trettin and Erich Liebermann von Sonnenberg had published a book together the previous year. Criminal Cases was little more than a series of stories cobbled together from a trawl through KRIPO’s oldest files. But no one doubted that the two had made money from it. Fiddling his expenses, ramping up the overtime, taking the odd back-hander, and now with a book already translated into English, Otto Trettin always seemed to know how to make money.
    “Erich? We don’t see much of each other now that he’s head of Berlin KRIPO. Head’s up his arse with his own self-importance these days. You left me sitting in the ink, do you know that?”
    “I can’t feel sorry for you. Not after I read your lousy book. You wrote up one of my cases and you didn’t even give me the credit. You gave the bracelets on that one to von Bachman. I could have understood it if he was a Nazi. But he’s not.”
    “He paid me to write him up. A hundred marks, to make him look good.”
    “You’re joking.”
    “No, I’m not. Not that it matters now. He’s dead.”
    “I didn’t know.”
    “Sure you did. You’ve just forgotten, that’s all. Berlin’s like that these days. All sorts of people are dead and we forget about it. Fatty Arbuckle. Stefan George. Hindenburg. The Alex is no different. Take that cop who got murdered the other day. We’ve already forgotten his name.”
    “August Krichbaum.”
    “Everyone except you.” He shook his head. “See what I mean? You’re a good copper. You shouldn’t ever have left.” He raised his glass. “To the dead. Where would we be without them?”
    “Steady on,” I said as he drained his glass a second time.
    “I’ve had a hell of a morning. I’ve been to Plötzensee Prison with a load of Berlin’s top polenta, and the Leader. Now ask me why.”
    “Why?”
    “Because his nibs wanted to see the falling ax in action.”
    The falling ax was what we Germans quaintly called the guillotine.
    Otto waved the barman back a third time.
    “You’ve seen an execution, with Hitler?”
    “That’s right.”
    “There wasn’t anything about an execution in the newspaper. Who was it?”
    “Some poor communist. Just a kid,