A Quiet Flame

I looked at my watch as I came through the Brandenburg Gate and onto Pariser Platz. There was time for lunch as long as lunch came in a brown bottle. I could have stopped almost anywhere south of Unter den Linden. There were lots of stand-ups around Gendarmen Market, where I might easily have got myself a sausage and a beer. But anywhere wasn’t where I wanted to go. Not when I was right outside the Adlon Hotel. It was true, I’d been there only a day or two before. And a day or two before that. The fact was, I liked the Adlon. Not for its ambience and its gardens and its whispering fountain and its palm court and its fabulous restaurant, which I couldn’t have afforded anyway. I liked it because I liked one of the house detectives. She was called Frieda Bamberger. I liked Frieda a lot.

Frieda was tall and dark, with a full mouth and an even fuller figure and a voluptuous sort of fertility about her that I put down to the fact that she was Jewish, but was actually something rather more indefinable. She was glamorous, too. Had to be. Her job involved hanging around the hotel posing as a guest and keeping an eye out for prostitutes, con artists, and thieves, who liked the Adlon for the rich pickings that were to be had from the even richer guests. I had got to know her in the summer of 1929, when I helped her to arrest a female jewel thief who was armed with a knife. I stopped Frieda getting stuck with it by the simple means of getting stuck myself. Clever Gunther. For that I got a nice letter from Hedda Adlon, the proprietor’s daughter-in-law, and, after I came out of the hospital, a very personal kind of thank-you from Frieda herself. We weren’t sharing an envelope, exactly. Frieda had a semi-detached husband, who lived in Hamburg. But just now and then we’d search an empty bedroom for a lost maharajah or a stolen movie star. Sometimes it could take us a while.

As soon as I walked through the door, Frieda was on my arm like a hawk. “Am I glad to see you,” she said.

“And I thought you weren’t the type who cares.”

“I’m serious, Bernie.”

“And so am I. I keep telling you, only you don’t listen. I’d have brought flowers if I’d known you felt this way.”

“I want you to go into the bar,” she said urgently.

“That’s good. That’s where I was going anyway.”

“I want you to take a look at the guy in the corner. And I mean the fritz in the corner, not the redhead he’s with. He’s wearing a dove-gray suit with a double-breasted waistcoat and a flower in his lapel. I don’t like the look of him.”

“If that’s so, then I hate him already.”

“No, I think he might be dangerous.”

I went into the bar, picked up a matchbook, lit a cigarette, and gave the fritz the quick up-and-down. The girl he was with looked me up and down back. This was bad, because the fritz she was with was worse than bad. He was Ricci Kamm, the boss of the Always True, one of Berlin’s most powerful criminal rings. Normally Ricci stayed put in Friedrichshain, where his gang was based, which was fine, since he tended not to give us any trouble there. But the girl he was with looked like she had an opinion of herself that was as high as the Zugspitze. Probably she figured she was too good for joints like the Zum Nussbaum, which was where the Always True boys usually went for their kicks. Very likely she was right, too. I’ve seen better-looking red-heads, but only on Rita Hayworth. She was wearing good curves, too. I doubt she could have cut a better figure if she’d been wearing Sonja Henie’s favorite ice skates.

Ricci’s eyes were on mine. But my eyes were on her and there was a bottle of Bismarck in front of them both that said this might spell trouble. Ricci was a quiet sort with a small, soft voice and nice manners—until he had one drink too many, and then it was like watching Dr. Jekyll turn into Mr. Hyde. From the level in the bottle, Ricci was about ready to grow an extra set of eyebrows.

I turned on my heel and went back into the lobby.

“You were right not to like him,” I told Frieda. “He’s a dangerous man and I think his timer’s about to go off.”

“What are we going to do?”

I waved Max, the hall porter, toward me. I didn’t do it lightly. Max paid Louis Adlon three thousand marks a month to have that job, because he got a kickback on everything he did for the hotel’s guests, which made him about thirty thousand marks a month. He was holding a dog leash, which was attached to a miniature dachshund. I figured Max was looking for a bellboy to walk the thing. “Max,” I said, “call the Alex and tell them to send the kiddy car. You’d better order up a couple of uniforms as well. There’s going to be some trouble in the bar.”

Max hesitated as if he was expecting a tip.

“Unless you’d rather handle it yourself.”

Max turned and walked quickly to the house phones.

“And while you’re at it, go and check the easy chairs in the library and see if you can’t rustle up one of those overpaid ex-cops who call themselves house bulls.”