A Quiet Flame

I ran up some steps and out onto the back court. It looked like a heavy, gray stone frame for the brilliantly blue sky. Something zipped past my left ear and I heard a bang as loud as a truck backfiring an eight-millimeter rifle bullet. Half a second later, my brain registered the subliminal image of a flash from the third-floor balcony and impelled my body to take cover behind some bedsheets that were flapping on a clothesline. I didn’t stay put. As soon as I had crawled several meters on my hands and knees, I heard another gunshot and something flicked through the sheet I’d been kneeling behind. I scrambled to the end of the line of washing and then sprinted like Georg Lammers into the relative safety of another stairwell. Several ragged-looking men cowering in the shadows stared at me fearfully. Ignoring them, I hared up to the third floor. Of a gunman there was no sign, unless you counted the sound of a pair of stout shoes descending another set of stairs three or four steps at a time. Angry, I went after the sound of the shoes. Some people had come out onto the Roast balconies to see what all the fuss was about. But the sensible ones stayed quietly in their sties.

Reaching the bottom of the stairwell, I paused briefly and then pushed a couple of planks that were leaning against the wall out onto the court, to draw the rifleman’s fire. By now I had a good idea that it was a German rifle. The 7.97 Mauser Gewehr 98. During the war, I’d heard its voice often enough to know its middle name. The 98 was an accurate rifle, but it was unsuited to rapid fire, on account of its peculiar bolt arrangement. And in the several seconds it took for him to put another one up the spout, I was out of the stairwell and shooting. There’s nothing slow about a nine-millimeter Parabellum.

The first shot missed him. The second, too. By the time the Parabellum was ready for a fourth, I was close enough to see the pattern on his bow tie. This matched the pattern on his shirt, and the pattern on his coat. Red spots aren’t normally a favorite of mine, but on him they looked just fine. Especially as their source was the hole I’d made in his face. He was dead before he hit the concrete.

This was unfortunate, for two reasons. One was that I hadn’t killed anyone since August 23, 1918, when I shot an Australian at the Battle of Amiens. Possibly more than one. When the war was over, I promised myself I’d never kill anyone again. The second reason it was unfortunate was that I’d wanted to question the dead man and find out who had put him up to killing me. Instead I had to rifle through his pockets and all, under the curious eyes of a gathering crowd of rent-barracks vultures.

He was tall, thin, and losing his hair. He had already lost his teeth. At the moment of his death, his tongue must have forced one of the plates from his mouth and now it sat on his upper lip like a pink plastic mustache.

I found his wallet. The dead man’s name was Erich Hoppner and he was a member of the Nazi Party since 1930. His membership card stated that his number was 510934. None of that meant he wasn’t also a member of the Always True gang. It wasn’t unusual for gangsters from Berlin’s underworld to be contracted and paid to carry out political murders. The question was, Who had ordered my murder? The Always True, for what I had done to Ricci Kamm? Or the Nazis, for what I hadn’t done for Josef Goebbels?

I took his wallet and his rifle and his watch and his ring and left him there. The vultures were already taking his false teeth as I walked out of the Ochsenhof. False teeth were an expensive luxury for the kind of folk who lived in the Roast.

On Bulowplatz, the PHWM in charge of the SCHUPO troop stationed there denied ever having received a message from a small boy to come to my aid. I told him to take some of his men and go and mount a guard on Hoppner’s body before it was eaten. Reluctantly, he agreed.

I went back to the Alex. First I visited the Record Department of Inspectorate J, where the criminal secretary on duty helped me discover that Erich Hoppner didn’t have a criminal record. This was surprising. Then I went upstairs and handed over Hoppner’s party card to the political boys in DIa. Naturally, they’d never heard of him, either. Then I sat down and typed out a statement and gave it to Gennat. After I’d handed in my report, I was asked into an interview room and questioned by Gennat and two police councilors, Gnade and Fischmann. My statement was then filed for later comparison with the findings of an independent homicide team. More paperwork followed. Then I was interviewed again, by KOK Müller, who was leading the investigating homicide team.

“Sounds like they led you on a nice little trot,” observed Müller. “And you never saw the girl in the green dress again?”

“No. And after the shooting, I didn’t see any point in looking for her.”

“And the boy? Emil? The one who fed you the sugar lump?”

I shook my head.