A Quiet Flame

At the bunker-sized front desk, we checked through a file containing a list of missing persons. The desk sergeant who was supposed to be assisting us had a big handlebar mustache and an eleven o’clock shadow that was so blue it made his face look like a housefly’s. This effect was enhanced, because his eyes were bulging out of his head at the sight of two tall boot girls a cop had shooed in off the street. They were wearing thigh-high black leather boots and red leather coats, which, thoughtfully, they had left undone, revealing to anyone who cared to look that they were wearing nothing underneath. One of them was carrying a riding crop that the arresting officer, a man with an eye patch—a man I knew, named Bruno Stahlecker—was having a hard job persuading her to give up. Clearly the girls had had a drink or two and probably quite a bit else besides, and, as I flicked through the missing-persons reports, half of me was listening to what Stahlecker and the girls were saying. It would have been hard not to hear it.

“I like a man in uniform,” said the taller of the leather-booted Amazons. She snapped her riding crop against her boot and then fingered the hair at the base of her belly, provocatively. “Which one of Berlin’s bulls wants to be my slave tonight?”

Boot girls were the city’s outdoor dominatrices. Mostly they worked west of Wittenbergplatz, near the Zoological Gardens, but Stahlecker had picked up this pair of whores in Friedrichstrasse after a man had complained of being beaten and robbed by two women in leather.

“Behave yourself, Brigit,” said Stahlecker. “Or I’ll throw the rules of the medical profession at you as well.” He turned to the man with the red mark on his face. “Are these the two women who robbed you?”

“Yes,” said the man. “One of them hit me across the face with a whip and demanded money or she’d hit me again.”

The girls loudly protested their innocence. Innocence never looked quite so venereal and corrupt.

Finally I found what I’d been looking for. “Anita Schwarz,” I said, showing Heinrich Grund the missing-persons report. “Aged fifteen. Behrenstrasse 8, flat 3. Report filed by her father, Otto. Disappeared yesterday. One meter, sixty centimeters tall, blond hair, blue eyes, caliper on left leg, carries a walking stick. That’s our girl, all right.”

But Grund was hardly paying attention. I thought he was looking at the free nude show. And leaving him to it, I went to one of the other filing cabinets and found a more detailed report. There was a star on the file and, next to it, a letter W. “It would seem that the deputy police president is taking an interest in our case,” I said. Inside the file was a photograph. Quite an old one, I thought. But there could be no doubt: it was the girl in the park. “Perhaps he knows the girl’s father.”

“I know that man,” murmured Grund.

“Who? Schwarz?”

“No. That man there.” Leaning back on the front desk, he flicked his snout at the man with the whip mark on his face. “He’s an alphonse.” “Alphonse” was Berlin criminal underworld slang for a pimp. One of many slang words for a pimp, like “louie,” “oiler,” “stripe man,” “ludwig,” and “garter-handler.” “Runs one of those bogus clinics off the Ku-damm. I think his racket is that he poses as a physician and then ‘prescribes’ an underage girl for his so-called patient.” Grund called out to Stahlecker. “Hey, Bruno? What’s the citizen’s name? The one wearing the spectacles and the extra smile.”

“Him? Dr. Geise.”

“Dr. Geise, my eggs. His real name is Koch, Hans Theodor Koch, and he’s no more a doctor than I am. He’s an alphonse. A medicine man who fixes old perverts up with little girls.”

The man stood up. “That’s a damn lie,” he said indignantly.

“Open his briefcase,” said Grund. “See if I’m wrong.”

Stahlecker looked at the man, who held the briefcase tightly to his chest as if he really did have something to hide. “Well, sir? How about it?”

Reluctantly, the man allowed Stahlecker to take the briefcase and then to open it. A few seconds later, a pile of pornographic magazines was lying on the desk sergeant’s blotter. The magazine was called Figaro, and on the cover of each copy was a picture of seven naked boys and girls, about ten or eleven years old, sitting in the branches of a dead tree, like a pride of small white lions.

“You old pervert,” snarled one of the boot girls.

“This puts rather a different complexion on things, sir,” Stahlecker told Koch.

“That is a naked-culture magazine,” insisted Koch. “Dedicated to the cause of free life reform. It doesn’t prove anything of what this vile man has alleged.”

“It proves one thing,” said the boot girl with the whip. “It proves you like looking at dirty pictures of little boys and girls.”

We left them all in a heated argument.

“What did I tell you?” said Grund as we went back to the car. “This city is a whore and your beloved republic is her pimp. When are you going to wake up to that fact, Bernie?”