A Quiet Flame (26 page)

The station was in the west end of the central part of Munich. The Police Praesidium was a ten-minute walk to the east, on Ettstrasse, between Saint Michael’s Church and the Cathedral of Our Lady. It was a newish, handsome building on the site of a former monastery. Outside the main entrance were several stone lions. Inside, I found only rats.

The desk sergeant was as big as a wrecking ball, and just as helpful. He had a bald head and a waxed mustache like a small German eagle. Every time he moved, his leather belt creaked against his belly like a ship straining on its hawsers. From time to time, he lifted his hand to his mouth and burped. You could smell his breakfast from the front door.

I tipped my hat politely and showed him my warrant disc.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Good morning.”

“I’m Commissar Gunther, from Berlin Alexanderplatz. To see Commissar Herzefelde. I just arrived at the station. I thought he’d be there to meet me.”

“Did you now?” He said it in a way that made me want to punch him in the nose. You get a lot of that in Munich.

“Yes,” I said patiently. “But since he wasn’t, I assumed he’d been delayed and that I’d better come and find him here.”

“Spoken like a Berlin detective,” he said, without a trace of a smile.

I nodded patiently and waited for some good manners to kick in. They didn’t.

“Spare me the sweet talk and tell him I’m here.”

The sergeant nodded at a polished wooden bench by the front door. “Have a seat,” he said coolly. “Sir. I’ll deal with you in a minute.”

I went over to the bench and sat down. “I’ll be sure to mention your red-carpet treatment when I see your commissar,” I said.

“You do that, sir,” he said. “I’ll look forward to it.”

He wrote something on a piece of paper, rubbed his ham hock of a nose, scratched his ass with his pencil, and then used it to pick his ear. Then he got up, slowly, and put something in a filing cabinet. The telephone rang. He let it ring a couple of times before answering it, listened, took down some details, and then put a sheet of paper into a tray. When the call ended, he looked at the clock above the door. Then he yawned.

“If this is how you look after the polenta in this town, I’d hate to be a criminal.” I lit a cigarette.

He didn’t like that. He pointed at a No Smoking sign with his pencil. I stubbed it out. I didn’t want to wait there all morning. After a while, he picked up the phone and spoke, in a lowered voice. Once or twice he flicked his eyes my way, so I got the idea he was probably talking about me. So when he finished the call, I lit another cigarette. He tapped the pencil on the desk in front of his belly and, having received my attention, pointed at the No Smoking sign again. This time I ignored him. He didn’t like that, either.

“No smoking,” he growled.

“No kidding.”

“You know what the trouble is with you Berlin cops?”

“If you could point to Berlin on a map, I might be interested, fat boy.”

“You’re all Jew-lovers.”

“Ah, now we’re getting to it.” I blew some smoke his way and grinned. “We’re not all Jew-lovers, in the Berlin police, as a matter of fact. Some of us are a bit like you, Sergeant. Ignorant. Bigoted. And a disgrace to the uniform.”

He tried to outstare me for minute or two. Then he said, “The Jews are our misfortune. It’s time the polenta in Berlin woke up to that fact.”

“Well, that’s an interesting sentiment. Did you just think of it yourself, or was it written on the skin of the banana you ate for breakfast?”

A detective arrived. I knew he must be a detective because he wasn’t dragging his knuckles on the floor. He glanced at the ape on the desk, who jerked his head my way. The detective came over and stood in front of me, looking sheepish. It might have worked, too, if his face hadn’t looked so peculiarly wolflike. His eyes were blue and his nose was more of a muzzle, but mostly it was because of his eyebrows, which met in the middle, and his canine teeth, which seemed slightly longer than was normal. But you get a lot of that in Munich as well.

“Commissar Gunther?”

“Yes. Is something wrong?”

“I’m Criminal Secretary Christian Schramma.” We shook hands. “I’m afraid I have some bad news. Commissar Herzefelde is dead. He was murdered last night. Shot three times in the back as he left a bar in Sendling.”

“Do you know who did it?”

“No, as you may know, he’d had several death threats.”

“Because he was Jewish. Of course.” I glanced the desk sergeant’s way. “There’s hatred and stupidity everywhere. Even in the police force.”

Schramma remained silent.

“I’m very sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know him for very long, but Paul was a good man.”

We went up to the detectives’ room. It was a warm day, and through the open windows you could hear the sound of children playing in the yard of the nearby Gymnasium. Human life never sounded so lively.

“I saw your name in his police diary,” said Schramma. “But he didn’t think to write down a telephone number or where you were from, otherwise I would have called you.”

“That’s all right. He was about to share some information on a murder he’d been working on. Elizabeth Bremer?”

Schramma nodded.

“We had a similar case in Berlin,” I explained. “I came down here to read the files and find out just how similar they were.”

He bit his lip uncomfortably, which did little to alter my first impression of him. He looked like a werewolf.

“Look, I’m really sorry to tell you this after you’ve come all the way from Berlin. But all Paul’s case files have been sent upstairs. To the government counselor’s office. When a police officer gets killed, it’s standard procedure to assume it might have something to do with a case he was working on. I seriously doubt that you’re going to be able to see those files for a while. Maybe as long as a couple of weeks.”

It was my turn to bite my lip. “I see. Tell me, did you work with Paul?”

“A while ago. I’m not up to date with his current cases. Of late, he mostly worked on his own. He preferred it that way.”

“He preferred it or other detectives preferred it?”

“I think that’s a little unfair, sir.”

“Is it?”

Schramma didn’t answer. He lit a cigarette, flicked the match out of the open window, and sat on the corner of a desk that I assumed must be his own. On the opposite side of the big room, a detective with a face like Schmeling’s was questioning a suspect. Every time he got an answer, he looked pained, as if Jack Sharkey had hit him below the belt. It was a nice technique. I felt the cop was going to win on a disqualification, the same way Schmeling did. Other detectives came and went. A few of them had loud laughs, and louder suits. You get a lot of that in Munich. In Berlin, we all wore black armbands when a cop got killed. But not in Munich. A different kind of armband—a red one with a black Sanskrit cross in the middle—looked a lot more probable. It didn’t look like anyone was about to shed any tears over the death of Paul Herzefelde.

“Could I see his desk?”

Schramma got up slowly and we walked over to a gray steel desk in a far-flung corner of the office, which was surrounded with a wall of files and bookcases, like a one-man ghetto. The desktop was clear, but his photographs were still on the wall. I bent over to take a closer look at them. Herzefelde’s wife and family in one. Him wearing a military uniform and decoration in the other. On the wall, next to this photograph, was the faint outline of a graffito that had been rubbed out: the Star of David and the words “Jews Out.” I traced the outline with my finger just to make sure Schramma knew I’d seen it.

“That’s a hell of a way to honor a man who got himself a First Class Iron Cross,” I said loudly, and glanced around the detectives’ room. “Three bullets and some cave art.”

Silence descended on the room. Typing stopped. Voices quietened. Even the children playing outside seemed to cease their noise for a moment. Everyone was now looking at me, like I was the ghost of Walther Rathenau.

“So who did it? Who murdered Paul Herzefelde? Does anyone know?” I paused. “Can anyone guess? After all, you’re supposed to be detectives.” More silence. “Doesn’t anyone care who killed Paul Herzefelde?” I walked over to the center of the room and, facing down Munich’s KRIPO, waited for someone to say something. I looked at my watch. “Hell, I’ve been here for less than half an hour and I could tell you who killed him. It was the Nazis killed him, that’s who. It was the bloody Nazis who shot him in the back. Maybe even the same Nazis who wrote ‘Jews Out’ on the wall beside his desk.”

“Go home, you Prussian pig,” someone shouted.

“Yes, clear off back to Berlin, you stupid Pifke.”

They were right, of course. It was time to go home. After a short while among Munich’s Neanderthals, the men of Berlin were already looking like a real advance in human evolution. By all accounts, Munich was Hitler’s favorite town. It was easy to see why.

I went out of the Police Praesidium by a different set of stairs, which led into the central courtyard, where several police cars and vans were parked. As I was making my way under the arches to the street, I encountered the burly desk sergeant, who was now coming off duty. I knew this because he wasn’t wearing his leather belt or his duty epaulettes. Also, he was carrying a Thermos. Moving to block my way out, he said, “Sure it’s always a shame when a cop goes down in the line of duty.” He chuckled. “Except when it’s a Jew, of course. The fellows who shot that yid bastard, Herzefelde. They deserve a medal, so they do.” He spat onto the ground ahead of me for good measure. “Have a nice trip back to Berlin, you Jew-loving prick.”

“One more word from you, you worthless Nazi gorilla, and I’m going to pull the tongue out of your thick Bavarian head and scrape the shit off it with the heel of my shoe.”

The sergeant put his Thermos on a windowsill and bent his ugly mug toward me. “Who the hell do you think you are, coming to my city and threatening me? You’re lucky I don’t run you in just for the fun of it. One more word out of you, sonny, and I’ll have your eggs hanging from our flagpole in the morning.”

“If I threaten you, you’ll stay threatened and write me a thank-you letter on nice notepaper in your best writing.”

“This is a man with a broken jaw who’s talking to me,” said the sergeant, before throwing a punch at my head.

He was tall and strong, with shoulders like the yoke on a Frisian milkmaid and a fist as big as a fire bucket. But his first mistake was to miss. His tunic was still buttoned and this slowed him down, so I was already ducking the blow by the time it arrived. His second mistake was to miss again. And to lead with his chin. By now, I was ready to take a swing myself, as if I’d been taking a swing at the very man who had shot Paul Herzefelde. And I let him have it hard, very hard, right under the chin. This, as von Clausewitz would probably have agreed, is the best part of the chin with which to make decisive contact. I saw his legs go the minute I struck him. But I punched him again, this time in the belly, and when he doubled up, I hammered him in each kidney with a heavyweight contender’s high ambition and strength of will. He fell back against the wall of the archway. And I was still hitting him when three SCHUPO men pulled me off and pinned me against the wrought-iron gate.

Slowly, the sergeant picked himself off the cobbles. It took him a while to straighten up, but eventually he managed it. I’ll say one thing for him: he could take a punch. He wiped his mouth and, panting hard, came toward me with a look in his eyes that told me he wasn’t about to invite me to stay for the Oktoberfest.

“Hold him up,” he told the other cops, taking his time about it. And then he hit me. A short right hook that went up to his elbow in my stomach. Then another, and another until his knuckles were tickling my backbone. Except it wasn’t funny. And I wasn’t laughing. They let me go when I started throwing up. But they hadn’t finished. In fact, they’d only just started.

They dragged me back into the building and down into the cells, where they went at me again—good, expert blows from cops who knew what they were doing and who clearly enjoyed their work. After an hour or so, I heard a voice from a long way off, reminding them that I was a cop, and that was when they left me alone. I had an idea it was Schramma who got them to lay off, but I never found out for sure. I stayed on the floor of that cell for a long time. No one was kicking me, and it felt like the most comfortable place in the world. All I wanted to do was stay there and sleep for twenty years. Then the floor slid to one side and I fell into a deep, dark place where a group of dwarfs were playing a game of ninepins. For a while, I joined the game, but then one of the dwarfs gave me a magic drink, and I slept the sleep of Jacob on Mount Moriah. Something Jewish, anyway.

 

 

 

THE CELLS in the prison below the Munich Police Praesidium were once occupied by Augustine monks. They must have been tough men, those Augustine monks. My cell had a hard bunk and a straw pallet on top, which was about as thick as a blanket. The blanket was made of thin air. Job or Saint Jerome would have been very comfortable down there. There was an open toilet without a seat, and no window in the smooth, porcelain tile wall. The cell was hot and smelly, and so was I. “Love the sinner and hate the sin,” said Saint Augustine. That was easy for him to say. He never had to spend the night in a cell beneath the Munich Police Praesidium.

They left the lights on all the time, and it wasn’t in case you were scared of the dark. I had no idea what time of the day or night it was. A few days of that, and you’re ready to do more or less whatever they tell you, just to see the sky again. That’s the theory, anyway. And after what seemed like a week but was probably only two or three days, a doctor came to look at me—a real Schweitzer type, with a mustache as big as an octopus and more white hair than Liszt’s grandmother. He examined the bruises on my ribs and asked me how I’d come by them. I told him I’d fallen off my bunk when I’d been asleep.