The Pale Criminal by Philip Kerr Read Free Book Online Page A

predatorily beside the door, above which was the head of yet another dinosaur. Elsewhere, the walls of the Aquarium were covered with murals and stone reliefs that depicted the kind of prehistoric beasts which would have swallowed a shark whole. It was to the Aquarium’s other inhabitants, the reptiles, that these antediluvian decorations were in fact preferable.
    Seeing my man disappear through the front door, and realizing that the Aquarium’s dark interior would make it easy to lose him, I quickened my pace. Once inside I saw how much more probable than possible this actually was, since the sheer number of visitors made it difficult to see where he had gone.
    Assuming the worst, I hurried towards the other door that led out on to the street, and almost collided with the youth as he turned away from a tank that contained a creature that looked more like a floating mine than a fish. For a few seconds he hesitated at the foot of the great marble stairs that led up to the reptiles before walking down to the exit, and out of the Aquarium and the Zoo.
    Outside on Budapester Strasse I fell in behind a group of schoolchildren as far as Ansbacher Strasse, where I got rid of the guidebook, slipped into the raincoat I was carrying, and turned up the brim of my hat. Minor alterations to your appearance are essential when following someone. There’s that, and staying in the open. It’s only when you start to cower in doorways that your man will get suspicious. But this fellow never even looked back as he crossed Wittenberg Platz, and went through the front door of Kaufhaus des Westens, the Ka-De-We, Berlin’s biggest department store.
    I had thought that he had used the other carrier only to throw a tail off, somebody who might have been waiting at one of the exits on the look out for a man carrying a Gerson bag. But now I realized that we were also in for a switch.
    The beer-restaurant on Ka-De-We’s third floor was full of lunchtime drinkers. They sat stolidly facing plates of sausage, and glasses of beer that were the height of table lamps. The youth carrying the money wandered among the tables as if looking for someone, and finally sat down opposite a man wearing a blue suit, sitting alone. He placed the carrier-bag with the money beside another just like it on the floor.
    Finding an empty table I sat down just in sight of them, and picked up a menu which I affected to study. A waiter appeared. I told him I hadn’t made up my mind, and he went away again.
    Now the man in the blue suit stood up, laid some coins on the table and, bending down, picked up the carrier bag with the money. Neither one of them said a word.
    When the blue suit went out of the restaurant I followed him, obeying the cardinal rule of all cases involving ransom: you always go after the money.

    With its massive arched portico and twin, minaret-like towers, there was a monolithic, almost Byzantine quality about the Metropol Theatre on Nollendorfplatz. Appearing on reliefs at the foot of the great buttresses were intertwined as many as twenty naked figures, and it seemed like the ideal kind of place to try your hand at a spot of virgin sacrifice. On the righthand side of the theatre was a big wooden gateway, and through it the car park, as big as a football pitch, which backed on to several tall tenements.
    It was to one of these buildings that I followed Blue Suit and the money. I checked the names on the mailboxes in the downstairs hall, and was pleased to find a K. Hering residing at number nine. Then I called Bruno from a phone box at the U-Bahn station across the road.
    When my partner’s old DKW pulled up at the wooden gate, I got into the passenger seat and pointed across to the other side of the car park, nearest to the tenements, where there were still quite a few spaces left, the ones nearer the theatre itself having been taken by those going to the eight o’clock show.
    ‘That’s our man’s place there,’ I said. ‘On the second floor.