A Quiet Flame

“I suppose some of that might be right,” he said. “More or less.”

“Which part do you agree with less?” I asked.

Grund didn’t answer. He put Sabine Farber’s card back in her bag and stared down at the dead girl.

“What is it that Hitler says?” I asked. “Strength lies not in defense but in attack?” I lit a cigarette. “I always wondered what that meant.” I let the smoke char my lungs for a moment and then said, “Is this the kind of attack that he means, do you think? Your great leader?”

“Of course not,” muttered Grund. “You know it isn’t.”

“What, then? You tell me. I’d like to know.”

“Give it a rest, why don’t you?”

“Me?” I laughed. “It’s not me who needs to give it a rest, Heinrich. It’s the people who did this. They’re your friends. The National Socialists.”

“You don’t know any of that for a fact.”

“No, you’re right. I don’t. For real vision you need a man like Adolf Hitler. Perhaps he should be the detective here. Not a bad idea-I’m sure I prefer the idea of him as a cop to the idea of him becoming the next chancellor of Germany.” I smiled. “And it’s an even bet he’d have a superior cleanup rate to me. Who better to solve a city’s crimes than the man who instigates most of them?”

“Christ, I wish I didn’t have to listen to you, Gunther.”

Grund spoke through gritted teeth. There was color in his face that ought to have warned me to be careful. He was a boxer, after all.

“You don’t,” I told him. “I’m going back to the Alex to tell the political boys that this is one for them. You stay here and see if you can’t get some better witnesses than those sausage-makers. I du

I suppose it was the sarcastic grin that did it for him. I hardly saw the punch. I hardly even felt it. One second I was standing there, gri

My head cleared and I shifted my jaw against my hand.

“The bastard hit me,” I said.

“He did that,” said the cop, searching my eyes like a referee wondering if he should allow the fight to proceed or not. “We all saw it, sir.”

From his tone I assumed he meant that he took it for granted I was going to press disciplinary charges against Grund. Hitting a superior officer was a serious offense in KRIPO. Almost as bad as hitting a suspect.

I shook my head. “No, you didn’t,” I said.

The cop was older than me. Nearing retirement, probably. His short hair was the color of polished steel. He had a scar in the center of his forehead: it looked as if a bullet had struck him there.

“What’s that you say, sir?”

“You didn’t see anything, Sergeant. Any of you. Got that?”

The sergeant thought about this for a moment and then nodded. “If you say so, sir.”

There was blood in my mouth but I was uncut.

“No harm done,” I said, and spat onto the ground.

“What was it all about?” he asked.

“Politics,” I said. “That’s what everything’s always about in Germany these days. Politics.”

I DIDN’T GO straight back to the Alex. Instead I drove to Kassner’s apartment on Donhoff-Platz, which wasn’t exactly on the way, being at the eastern end of Leipziger Strasse. I stopped on the north side of some ornamental gardens. The bronze statues of two Prussian statesmen stared at me across a low privet hedge. A small boy out for a walk with his mother was looking at the statues and probably wondering who they were. I was thinking about how Dr. Kassner’s home address had come to be on a list of names I had got from Jewface Klein. I knew Kassner would still be at the hospital, so I really haven’t a clue what I was expecting to find out. But I am an optimist like that. When you’re a detective, you have to be. And sometimes you just have to do what your instincts tell you to do.

I walked up to the shiny black front door and took a closer look. There were three bells. One of them was clearly labeled KASSNER. Beside the door were two cast-iron planters filled with geraniums. The whole area oozed respectability. I pulled the bell and waited. After a while I heard the key being turned and the door opened to reveal a man in his early twenties. I lifted my hat i

“Dr. Kassner?”

“No,” said the man. “He’s not here.”

“My name is Hoffma

The young man nodded politely but said nothing.

I glanced quickly at the other two names by the bell pulls. “Herr Kortig?”

“No.”

“Herr Peters, is it?”

“No. I’m a friend of Dr. Kassner’s. And as I said, he’s not here right now.”

“When will the doctor be back do you think, Herr-?”

“You can probably find him at the state hospital. At the urological clinic.” The man gri

“Certainly.”

I stepped aside and watched him descend the front steps onto the square. He was of medium height, good-looking and dark in a Gypsy kind of way, but neat with it. He was wearing a light-colored summer-weight suit, a white shirt, but no tie. At the bottom of the steps he climbed over the door of a little open-topped Opel. It was white with a blue stripe. I hadn’t paid any attention to it before-maybe I was still a little bit punchy-but as he started the engine and drove off, I suddenly realized I needed to take down the license plate. All I got was the characters 11A before the car disappeared around the corner of Jerusalemstrasse. At least I knew that the slippery young man was from Munich.

An hour later, I was back at my desk. I saw Heinrich Grund on the other side of the detectives’ room and was just about to go over and tell him there were no hard feelings on my part when the Full Ernst arrived beside me like a bus reaching its depot. He was wearing a three-piece blue pin-striped suit in a size huge and had a Senior going full-blast in the corner of his mouth. He removed the cigar and I heard what sounded like the bellows on a church organ. An invisible choir of smoke and sweet coffee and something stronger perhaps descended on me as from Mount Sinai, and a lung ailment of a voice commanded my attention.

“Anything in that murder over at the cattle yard?” he asked.

“It looks like an aggravated political killing,” I said.

“Aggravated?”

“They raped her as well.”

Ge

“The DPP wants to see us.” Ge

“What’s it about?” I asked, wondering if Grund had been stupid enough to report himself for striking a senior officer.

“The Schwarz case,” he said.

“What about it?”

But Ge

We went upstairs and along a quieter corridor lined with the pictures of previous Prussian police presidents and their deputies. Ge