A Quiet Flame

“Joey the Crip lives at number three Reichskanzlerplatz. Corner apartment, ground floor, eastern end. A bunch of SA men sit out front, so you’ll have to be careful. But they can’t see around the corner to where Joey’s bathroom faces the side street. There’s a rat’s-tail casement stay on the bathroom window that’s broken. You can be in and out in no time. Bread and butter to a man like you, Jewface. I did it myself just an hour or two ago. The man is a fanatic, Jewface. Do you know he’s got a photograph of Hitler on the side of the bath? Anyway, the apartment is owned by his wife, Magda. She used to be married to a rich industrialist called Gunther Quandt, who was very generous with the divorce settlement. He let her keep all her mints. You know? The ones you like. The ones you can sell at Margraf’s? Of course, with an election coming, Goebbels is out a lot. Making speeches, that kind of thing. In fact, I happen to know that Joey’s making a speech tonight, at Nazi Party headquarters on Hedemannstrasse. It will be an important speech. They’re all important between now and the end of July. But maybe this one is more important than most. Hitler will be there. Afterward, Magda’s throwing a little soirée for him at the Adlon Hotel. Which would give a man plenty of time.” I sipped some more beer and thought about ordering some sausage. It had been a busy morning. “So. What do you say? Do we have a deal? Will you copy out these names for me, like I asked?”

“Like I told you already, Gunther. I’m a reformed character. I’m trying to lead an honest life.” Jewface smiled and offered me his hand. “But that’s the thing about the Nazis. They bring out the worst in people.”

THE NEXT MORNING I had a handwritten list of names and addresses from all over the city and beyond. Not as good as a list of suspects, but perhaps the next best thing. Now all I had to do was check them out.

The Residents Registrations Office was on the railway-station side of the Alex, in room 359. From this third-floor office, the address of any resident of Berlin might be obtained, quite legally, by any other resident of the city. The Prussian authorities had meant well: the knowledge that information in the state was freely available was supposed to help buttress faith in our fragile democracy. In practice, however, it just meant that Nazi storm troopers and Communists alike were able to find out where their opponents lived and take appropriately belligerent action. Democracy has its disadvantages, too.

Not available to the general public at the Registration Office, but available to police, was the Devil’s Directory, so called because it worked backward. All you had to do was look up a street name and a house number, and the Devil’s Directory told you the name of the person or people living there. So it was the work of a morning to put a real name alongside each of the addresses and bogus patient names that Jewface Klein had copied from the summary file in Dr. Kassner’s office. This was a mundane task I might normally have ordered one of my sergeants to attend to. But I never was very good at giving orders—no more than I was any good at taking them. Besides, if I’d given the job to a sergeant, I might have ended up having to explain where and how I’d gotten hold of the list in the first place. KRIPO could be very unforgiving of bent coppers. Even coppers who were bent not for themselves but for the job.

For the same reason, another mundane task I was going to have to perform myself was check out every name on that list. There was, however, nothing mundane about one name in particular I had found using the Devil’s Directory. This was Dr. Kassner’s own name. And I was looking forward to finding out why his home address should have been on a list of patients involved in Bayer’s clinical trial of protonsil.

When I got back to my desk, Grund was there, typing something on my ancient Carmen, one ponderous finger at a time, as if he had been killing ants or playing the opening notes of some tuneless Russian piano concerto.

“Where the hell have you been?” he asked.

“Where the hell have you been, sir?” I said.

“Illmann called. The Schwarz girl tested negative for jelly. And Gennat wants us to go and check out some girl found dead in the municipal cattle market. Looks like she was shot, but we’re to give it a quick sketch anyway, just in case.”

“Makes sense, I suppose. The cattle market is only a few hundred yards from where we found the Schwarz girl in Friedrichshain Park.”