‘It means I’m a cop. From the Police Praesidium at Alexanderplatz.’
The smile dried on her face like I’d poured poison in her ears. She sat there for a moment, stunned, immobile, as if a doctor had told her she had six months to live.
I was used to her reaction and I didn’t blame her for it. There wasn’t anyone in Berlin who wasn’t deeply afraid of the police, including the police, because when you said ‘police’ everyone thought about the Gestapo and when you started to think about the Gestapo it was soon hard to think of anything else.
‘You could have mentioned that earlier,’ she said, stiffly. ‘Or is that how it works? You let someone talk themselves into trouble. Give them enough rope so that they can hang themselves, like my friend.’
‘It’s not like that at all. I’m a detective. Not Gestapo.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘The difference is that I hate the Nazis. The difference is that I don’t care if you say Hitler is the son of Beelzebub. The difference is that if I was Gestapo you would already be in a police van and on your way to number eight.’
‘Number eight? What’s that?’
‘You’re not from Berlin, are you? Not originally.’
She shook her head.
‘Number eight Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Gestapo headquarters.’
I wasn’t exaggerating. Not in the least. If Sachse and Wandel had heard even half of her story, Arianne Tauber would have been sitting in a chair with her skirt up and a hot cigarette in her panties. I knew how those bastards questioned people and I wasn’t about to condemn her to that. Not without being damned sure she was guilty. As it happened, I believed at least half of her story, and that was enough to prevent me from handing her over to the Gestapo. I thought she was probably a prostitute. An occasional one. To make ends meet a lot of single women were. You could hardly blame them for that. Any kind of a living was hard to come by in Berlin. But I didn’t think she was a spy for the Czechs. No spy would have volunteered so much to a man in a club she hardly knew well.
‘So, what happens now? Are you going to arrest me?’
‘Didn’t I already tell you to forget all about what happened? Didn’t I tell you that? There never was an envelope. And there was no Gustav.’
She nodded silently, but still I could see she was unable to grasp what I was telling her.
‘Listen to me, Arianne, provided you take my advice, you’re in the clear. Well, almost. There are only three people who could possibly connect you with what happened. One of them is this fellow Gustav. And one of them is Paul. The man who attacked you. Only he’s dead.’
‘What? You didn’t tell me that. How?’
‘His body turned up in Kleist Park a day or so after that taxi hit him on Nolli. He must have crawled there in the blackout and died. The third person who knows about this is me. And I’m not about to tell anyone.’
‘Oh, I get it. I suppose you want to sleep with me. Before you hand me over to your pals in the Gestapo you want to have me yourself. Is that it?’
‘No. It’s not like that at all.’
‘Then what is it like? And don’t tell me it’s because you think I’m special, Parsifal. Because I won’t believe you.’
‘I’m going to tell you why, angel. But not here. Not now. Until then you think about everything I’ve said and then ask yourself why I said it. I’ll be waiting outside at two. I can still walk you home if you want. Or you can walk home by yourself and I give you my word you won’t be woken up at five a.m. by men in leather coats. You won’t ever see me again. All right?’
I went back to the Alex for a while and sat at my desk and wondered if there might be a way of finding Gustav without involving Arianne Tauber. She and only she could have identified him and, for that reason alone, it seemed unlikely that he would ever go back to the Jockey and risk seeing her again. Especially if he was what it seemed he was – almost certainly a spy. More than likely he’d lost his nerve about meeting his Czech contact on Nolli. Possibly, he thought he was already being shadowed by the Gestapo, but if they had been tailing him, then surely they’d have picked her up when she met Gustav at the Romanisches Café. If he was under surveillance then the Gestapo would never have risked allowing him to pass information to her. It seemed more likely that Gustav had lost his nerve. In which case, who better than a joy-lady to deliver something to his Czech contact? Most of the prostitutes I’d ever known were resourceful, courageous, and, above all, greedy. For a hundred marks there wasn’t a silk in Berlin who wouldn’t have agreed to what Gustav had asked. Handing over an envelope in the dark was a lot easier and quicker and, on the face of it, safer than sucking someone’s pipe.
‘Working late?’
It was Lehnhoff.
‘Victor Keil, aka Franz Koci,’ I said.
‘The Kleist Park case. Yeah. What about it?’
‘The uniformed fairy that found him under the bushes. Sergeant Otto Macher. Do you know him well?’
‘Well enough.’
‘Do you think he’s honest?’
‘Meaning what?’
