March Violets (23 page)

‘What are you doing, Bernie?' Her voice seemed stronger now.

‘Just stay where you are,' I told her. ‘I won't be very long. I just want to see if I can find out who our friend is.' I heard her take a deep breath, and the scrape of a match as she lit a cigarette. I found a pair of kitchen scissors and went back to the dumb-waiter, where I cut the arm of the jacket lengthways up the man's forearm. Against the skin's greenish, purplish hue and marbled veining, the tattoo was still clearly visible, clinging to his forearm like a large, black insect which, rather than feast on the head with the smaller flies and worms, had chosen to dine alone, on a bigger piece of carrion. I've never understood why men get themselves tattooed. You would have thought there were better things to do than deface your own body. Still, it makes identifying someone relatively straightforward, and it occurred to me that it wouldn't be very long before every German citizen was the subject of compulsory tattooing. But right now, the imperial German eagle identified Gerhard Von Greis just as certainly as if I had been handed his Party card and passport.

Inge looked round the doorway. ‘Do you have any idea who it is?' I rolled up my sleeve and put my arm into the incinerator. ‘Yes, I do,' I said, feeling around in the cold ash. My fingers touched something hard and long. I drew it out, and regarded it objectively. It was hardly burnt at all. Not the sort of wood that burns easily. At the thicker end it was split, revealing another lead weight, and an empty socket for the one I had found on the carpet in the dining room upstairs. ‘His name was Gerhard Von Greis, and he was a high-class squeeze-artist. Looks like he was paid off, permanently. Someone combed his hair with this.'

‘What is it?'

‘A length of broken billiard cue,' I said, and thrust it back into the stove.

‘Shouldn't we tell the police?'

‘We don't have the time to help them feel their way around. Not right now, anyway. We'd just spend the rest of the weekend answering stupid questions.' I was also thinking that a couple of days' more fees from Goering wouldn't go amiss, but I kept that one to myself.

‘What about him - the dead man?'

I looked back at Von Greis's maggoty body, and then shrugged. ‘He's in no hurry,' I said. ‘Besides, you wouldn't want to spoil the picnic, would you?'

 

We collected up the scraps of paper that Inge had managed to salvage from the inside of the stove, and caught a cab back to the office. I poured us both large cognacs. Inge drank it gratefully, holding the glass with both hands like a small child who is greedy for lemonade. I sat down on the side of her chair and put my arm around her trembling shoulders, drawing her to me, Von Greis's death accelerating our growing need to be close.

‘I'm afraid I'm not used to dead bodies,' she said with an embarrassed smile. ‘Least of all badly decomposed bodies that appear unexpectedly in service-lifts.'

‘Yes, it must have been quite a shock to you. I'm sorry you had to see that. I have to admit he'd let himself go a bit.'

She gave a slight shudder. ‘It's hard to credit that it was ever human at all. It looked so . . . so vegetable; like a sack of rotten potatoes.' I resisted the temptation to make another tasteless remark. Instead I went over to my desk, laid out the scraps of paper from Tillessen's kitchen stove and glanced over them. Mostly they were bills, but there was one, almost untouched by the flames, that interested me a good deal.

‘What is it?' said Inge.

I picked up the scrap of paper between finger and thumb. ‘A pay-slip.' She stood up and looked at it more closely. ‘From a pay-packet made up by the Gesellschaft Reichsautobahnen for one of its motorway-construction workers.'

‘Whose?'

‘A fellow by the name of Hans Jurgen Bock. Until recently, he was in the cement with somebody by the name of Kurt Mutschmann, a nutcracker.'

‘And you think that this Mutschmann might have been the one who opened the Pfarrs' safe, right?'

‘Both he and Bock are members of the same ring, as was the owner of the excuse for a hotel we just visited.'

‘But if Bock is in a ring with Mutschmann and Tillessen, what's he doing working in motorway construction?'

‘That's a good question.' I shrugged and added, ‘Who knows, maybe he's trying to go straight? Whatever he's doing, we ought to speak to him.'

‘Perhaps he can tell us where to find Mutschmann.'

‘It's possible.'

‘And Tillessen.'

I shook my head. ‘Tillessen's dead,' I explained. ‘Von Greis was killed, beaten with a broken billiard cue. A few days ago, in the police morgue, I saw what happened to the other half of that billiard cue. It was pushed up Tillessen's nose, into his brain.'

Inge grimaced uncomfortably. ‘But how do you know it was Tillessen?'

‘I don't for sure,' I admitted. ‘But I know that Mutschmann is hiding, and that it was Tillessen who he went to stay with when he got out of prison. I don't think Tillessen would have left a body lying around his own pension if he could possibly have avoided it. The last I heard, the police still hadn't made a positive ID on the corpse, so I'm assuming that it must be Tillessen.'

‘But why couldn't it be Mutschmann?'

‘I don't see it that way. A couple of days ago my informer told me that there was a contract out on Mutschmann, by which time the body with the cue up its nose had already been fished out of the Landwehr. No, it could only be Tillessen.'

‘And Von Greis? Was he a member of this ring too?'

‘Not this ring, but another one, and far more powerful. He worked for Goering. All the same, I can't explain why he should have been there.' I swilled some brandy around my mouth like a mouthwash, and when I had swallowed it, I picked up the telephone and called the Reichsbahn. I spoke to a clerk in the payroll department.

‘My name is Rienacker,' I said. ‘Kriminalinspecktor Rienacker of the Gestapo. We are anxious to trace the whereabouts of an autobahn-construction worker by the name of Hans Jurgen Bock, pay reference 30 — 4 — 232564. He may be able to help us in apprehending an enemy of the Reich.'

‘Yes,' said the clerk meekly. ‘What is it that you wish to know?'

‘Obviously, the section of the autobahn on which he is working, and whether or not he'll be there today.'

‘If you will please wait one minute, I shall go and check the records.' Several minutes elapsed.

‘That's quite a nice little act you have there,' said Inge.

I covered the mouthpiece. ‘It's a brave man who refuses to cooperate with a caller claiming to be in the Gestapo.'

The clerk came back to the telephone and told me that Bock was on a work detail beyond the edge of Greater Berlin, on the Berlin-to-Hanover stretch. ‘Specifically, the section between Brandenburg and Lehnin. I suggest that you contact the site-office a couple of kilometres this side of Brandenburg. It's about seventy kilometres. You drive to Potsdam, then take Zeppelin Strasse. After about forty kilometres you pick up the A-Bahn at Lehnin.'

‘Thank you,' I said. ‘And is he likely to be working today?'

‘I'm afraid I don't know,' said the clerk. ‘Many of them do work Saturdays. But even if he's not working, you'll probably find him in the workers' barracks. They live on site, you see.'

‘You've been most helpful,' I said, and added with the pomposity that is typical of all Gestapo officers, ‘I shall report your efficiency to your superior.'

‘It's just typical of the bloody Nazis,' said Inge, ‘to build the People's roads before the People's car.'

We were driving towards Potsdam on the Avus Speedway, and Inge was referring to the much delayed Strength Through Joy car, the KdF-Wagen. It was a subject she evidently felt strongly about.

‘If you ask me, it's putting the cart before the horse. I mean, who needs these gigantic highways? It's not as if there's anything wrong with the roads we have now. It's not as if there are that many cars in Germany.' She turned sideways in her seat the better to see me as she continued speaking. ‘I have this friend, an engineer, who tells me that they're building an autobahn right across the Polish Corridor, and that one is projected across Czechoslovakia. Now why else would that be but to move an army about?'

I cleared my throat before answering; it gave me a couple more seconds to think about it. ‘I can't see the autobahns are of much military value, and there are none west of the Rhine, towards France. Anyway, on a long straight stretch of road, a convoy of trucks makes an easy target for an air attack.'

This last remark drew a short, mocking laugh from my companion. ‘That's precisely why they're building up the Luftwaffe - to protect the convoys.'

I shrugged. ‘Maybe. But if you're looking for the real reason why Hitler has built these roads, then it's much more simple. It's an easy way of cutting the unemployment figures. A man receiving state relief risks losing it if he refuses the offer of a job on the autobahns. So he takes it. Who knows, that may be what happened to Bock.'

‘You should take a look at Wedding and Neukölln sometime,' she said, referring to Berlin's remaining strongholds of KPD sympathy.

‘Well, of course, there are those who know all about the rotten pay and conditions on the autobahns. I suppose a lot of them think that it's better not to sign on for relief at all rather than risk being sent to work on the roads.' We were coming into Potsdam on the Neue Königstrasse. Potsdam. A shrine where the older residents of the town light the candles to the glorious, bygone days of the Fatherland, and to their youth; the silent, discarded shell of Imperial Prussia. More French-looking than German, it's a museum of a place, where the old ways of speech and sentiment are reverently preserved, where conservatism is absolute and where the windows are as well polished as the glass on the pictures of the Kaiser.

A couple of kilometres down the road to Lehnin, the picturesque gave way abruptly to the chaotic. Where once had been some of the most beautiful countryside outside Berlin, there was now the earth-moving machinery and the torn brown valley that was the half built Lehnin — Brandenburg stretch of autobahn. Closer to Brandenburg, at a collection of wooden huts and idle excavating equipment, I pulled up and asked a worker to direct me to the foreman's hut. He pointed at a man standing only a few metres away.

‘If you want him, that's the foreman there.' I thanked him, and parked the car. We got out.

The foreman was a stocky, red-faced man of medium height, and with a belly that was bigger than a woman who has reached the full term of her pregnancy: it hung over the edge of his trousers like a climber's rucksack. He turned to face us as we approached, and almost as if he had been preparing to square up to me, he hitched up his trousers, wiped his stubbly jaw with the back of his shovel-sized hand and transferred most of his weight on to his back foot.

‘Hallo there,' I called, before we were quite next to him. ‘Are you the foreman?' He said nothing. ‘My name is Gunther, Bernhard Gunther. I'm a private investigator, and this is my assistant, Fraulein Inge Lorenz.' I handed him my identification. The foreman nodded at Inge and then returned his gaze back to my licence. There was a literalness about his conduct that seemed almost simian.

‘Peter Welser,' he said. ‘What can I do for you people?'

‘I'd like to speak to Herr Bock. I'm hoping he can help us. We're looking for a missing person.'

Welser chuckled and hitched up his trousers again. ‘Christ, that's a funny one.' He shook his head and then spat onto the earth. ‘This week alone I've had three workers disappear. Perhaps I should hire you to try and find them, eh?' He laughed again.

‘Was Bock one of them?'

‘Good God, no,' said Welser. ‘He's a damn good worker. Ex-convict trying to live an honest life. I hope you're not going to spoil that for him.'

‘Herr Welser, I just want to ask him one or two questions, not rubber him and take him back to Tegel Prison in my trunk. Is he here now?'

‘Yes, he's here. He's very probably in his hut. I'll take you over there.' We followed him to one of several long, single-storey wooden huts that had been built at the side of what had once been forest, and was now destined to be the autobahn. At the bottom of the hut steps the foreman turned and said, ‘They're a bit rough-and-ready, these fellows. Maybe it would be better if the lady didn't come in. You have to take these men as you find them. Some of them might not be dressed.'

‘I'll wait in the car, Bernie,' said Inge. I looked at her and shrugged apologetically, before following Welser up the steps. He raised the wooden latch and we went through the door.

Inside, the walls and floor were painted a washed-out shade of yellow. Against the walls were bunks for twelve workers, three of them without mattresses and three of them occupied by men wearing just their underwear. In the middle of the hut was a pot-bellied stove made of black cast-iron, its stove-pipe going straight through the ceiling, and next to it a big wooden table at which four men were seated, playing skat for a few pfennigs. Welser spoke to one of the card players.

‘This fellow is from Berlin,' he explained. ‘He'd like to ask you a few questions.'

A solid slab of man with a head the size of a tree stump studied the palm of his big hand carefully, looked up at the foreman, and then suspiciously at me. Another man got up off his bunk and started to sweep the floor nonchalantly with a broom.

I've had better introductions in my time, and I wasn't surprised to see that it didn't exactly put Bock at his ease. I was about to utter my own codicil to Welser's inadequate reference when Bock sprang out of his chair, and my jaw, blocking his exit, was duly hooked aside. Not much of a punch, but enough to set off a small steam kettle between my ears and knock me sideways. A second or two later I heard a short, dull clang, like someone striking a tin tray with a soup ladle. When I had recovered my senses, I looked around and saw Welser standing over Bock's half-conscious body. In his hand he held a coal shovel, with which he had evidently struck the big man's head. There was the scrape of chairs and table legs as Bock's card-playing friends jumped to their feet.