The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr Read Free Book Online Page B

wants me to make a speech about being a Berlin detective.”
    “That should be easy,” said Gantner. “Since you are a detective.”
    “I suppose so. He’s ordered me to go to Wannsee and tell a lot of important foreign cops what a great detective I was. Bernie Gunther, the Berlin policeman who apprehended Gormann, the strangler.”
    State Secretary Gutterer had exaggerated all that, of course, which was his job, I suppose. I rather doubted that any one man could ever have been the omniscient sleuth my speech now said I was. But you didn’t have to be Charlie Chan to figure out that it was this little speech of mine that was behind much of what happened in the summer of 1942, not to mention the summer of 1943.

Four
    O utside the Kripo offices at the Alex was a giant pigeonhole cabinet where they left your mail, just like in a hotel. The first thing I did whenever I came on duty was check my pigeonhole. Usually it was just Party propaganda, or Prussian Police Union stuff that no one paid any attention to—the more important case correspondence was brought straight to your desk by one of two uniformed policemen, two ferociously ill-tempered old men who were universally known as the Brothers Grimm, for obvious reasons. You wouldn’t have dreamed of having anyone leave something valuable in your pigeonhole, or anywhere else, for that matter—not at police headquarters. A few senior coppers like me still remembered Berlin’s master burglars, Emil and Erich Krauss, who stole back their own tools from our own museum of crime. But it wasn’t just our clients who were long-fingered; some of the coppers around the place were just as bent. You left a cigarette case lying around at your peril, especially if you were lucky enough to have cigarettes in it, and things like soap and toilet paper in the lavatories were always going missing. Once, someone even stole all of the electric lightbulbs in the police canteen, which meant that for several days we had to eat in the dark, although that did at least mean the food tasted better. (There used to be an electrician on Elsasser Strasse who would pay six marks for secondhand bulbs, no questions asked.) Imagine my surprise, then, when late one night, I went to my pigeonhole and opened an envelope to find five new pictures of Albrecht Dürer; I think I even turned them over just to check that the Brandenburg Gate was on the back of them, where it usually was. There was a lawyer’s letter, too, but it was a while before enough of the novelty of having a hundred marks in my pocket had worn off for me to look at it.
    The envelope had a little brown Hitler on the corner. It was odd how he was on the stamps but not on the banknotes. That could have been a precaution against him being associated with another hyper-inflation. Or maybe he wanted people to think he was above things like money, which, in retrospect, was a pretty good reason not to trust him. Anyone who thinks he’s too good for our money is never going to succeed in Germany. The postmark was Berlin and the letter paper was as thick as a starched pillowcase. On the sender’s letterhead was a drawing of Justitia, wearing a blindfold and holding up a set of scales, which almost made me smile. It had been a long time since justice had been quite so objective and impartial as that in Germany. I took the letter—which wasn’t dated—back to my desk to read it in a better light. And as soon as I’d done so I put it in the pocket of my jacket and went out of the Alex. I went across the road to the station to use the pay phones. The author said he suspected his telephone was being monitored and perhaps it was, but I was more concerned about the phone lines at the Alex, which had certainly been tapped since the days when Göring had been in charge of the Prussian State Police.
    Although it was almost ten o’clock, the sky was still light and the station on Alexanderplatz—full of people arriving back after an afternoon stolen on