Read Online March Violets by Philip Kerr - Free Book Online Page A

their lives’, which made no mention of their names, or their relation to my client, or that the police were treating it as a murder investigation. I tossed it contemptuously onto another table. There’s more real news on the back of a matchbox than there is in the Beobachter. Meanwhile, the detectives from the Queer Squad were leaving; and Stock came back with my beer. He held the glass up for my attention before placing it on the table.
    â€˜A nice sergeant-major on it, like always,’ he said.
    â€˜Thanks.’ I took a long drink and then wiped some of the sergeant-major off my upper lip with the back of my hand. Frau Stock collected my lunch from the dumb-waiter and brought it over. She gave her husband a look that should have burned a hole in his shirt, but he pretended not to have seen it. Then she went to clear the table that was being vacated by the pock-marked Kriminalassistant. Stock sat down and watched me eat.
    After a while I said, ‘So what have you heard? Anything?’
    â€˜A man’s body fished out of the Landwehr.’
    â€˜That’s about as unusual as a fat railwayman,’ I told him. ‘The canal is the Gestapo’s toilet, you know that. It’s got so that if someone disappears in this goddamn city, it’s quicker to look for him at the lighterman’s office than police headquarters or the city morgue.’
    â€˜Yes, but this one had a billiard cue - up his nose. It penetrated the bottom of his brain they reckoned.’
    I put down my knife and fork. ‘Would you mind laying off the gory details until I’ve finished my food?’ I said.
    â€˜Sorry,’ said Stock. ‘Well, that’s all there is really. But they don’t normally do that sort of thing, do they, the Gestapo?’
    â€˜There’s no telling what is considered normal on Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Perhaps he’d been sticking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted. They might have wanted to do something poetic.’ I wiped my mouth and laid some change on the table which Stock collected up without bothering to count it.
    â€˜Funny to think that it used to be the Art School - Gestapo headquarters, I mean.’
    â€˜Hilarious. I bet the poor bastards they work over up there go to sleep as happy as little snowmen at the notion.’ I stood up and went to the door. ‘Nice about the Lindberghs though.’
    Â 
    I walked back to the office. Frau Protze was polishing the glass on the yellowing print of Tilly that hung on the wall of my waiting room, contemplating with some amusement the predicament of the hapless Burgomeister of Rothenburg. As I came through the door the phone started to ring. Frau Protze smiled at me and then stepped smartly into her little cubicle to answer it, leaving me to look afresh at the clean picture. It was a long time since I’d really looked at it. The Burgomeister, having pleaded with Tilly, the sixteenth-century commander of the Imperial German Army, for his town to be spared destruction, was required by his conqueror to drink six litres of beer without drawing breath. As I remembered the story, the Burgomeister had pulled off this prodigious feat of bibbing and the town had been saved. It was, as I had always thought, so characteristically German. And just the sort of sadistic trick some S A thug would play. Nothing really changes that much.
    â€˜It’s a lady,’ Frau Protze called to me. ‘She won’t give her name, but she insists on speaking to you.’
    â€˜Then put her through,’ I said, stepping into my office. I picked up the candlestick and the earpiece.
    â€˜We met last night,’ said the voice. I cursed, thinking it was Carola, the girl from Dagmarr’s wedding reception. I wanted to forget all about that little episode. But it wasn’t Carola. ‘Or perhaps I should say this morning. It was pretty late. You were on your way out and I was just coming back after a party. Do