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

you remember?’
    â€˜Frau — ’ I hesitated, still not quite able to believe it.
    â€˜Please,’ she said, ‘less of the Frau. Ilse Rudel, if you don’t mind, Herr Gunther.’
    â€˜I don’t mind at all,’ I said. ‘How could I not remember?’
    â€˜You might,’ she said. ‘You looked very tired.’ Her voice was as sweet as a plate of Kaiser’s pancakes. ‘Hermann and I, we often forget that other people don’t keep such late hours.’
    â€˜If you’ll permit me to say so, you looked pretty good on it.’
    â€˜Well, thank you,’ she cooed, sounding genuinely flattered. In my experience you can never flatter any woman too much, just as you can never give a dog too many biscuits.
    â€˜And how can I be of service?’
    â€˜I’d like to speak to you on a matter of some urgency,’ she said. ‘All the same, I’d rather not talk about it on the telephone.’
    â€˜Come and see me here, in my office?’
    â€˜I’m afraid I can’t. I’m at the studios in Babelsberg right now. Perhaps you would care to come to my apartment this evening?’
    â€˜Your apartment?’ I said. ‘Well, yes, I’d be delighted. Where is it?’
    â€˜Badenschestrasse, Number 7. Shall we say nine o’clock?’
    â€˜That would be fine.’ She hung up. I lit a cigarette and smoked it absently. She was probably working on a film, I thought, and imagined her telephoning me from her dressing room wearing only a robe, having just finished a scene in which she’d been required to swim naked in a mountain lake. That took me quite a few minutes. I’ve got a good imagination. Then I got to wondering if Six knew about the apartment. I decided he did. You don’t get to be as rich as Six was without knowing your wife had her own place. She probably kept it on in order to retain a degree of independence. I guessed that there wasn’t much she couldn’t have had if she really put her mind to it. Putting her body to it as well probably got her the moon and a couple of galaxies on top. All the same, I didn’t think it was likely that Six knew or would have approved of her seeing me. Not after what he had said about me not poking into his family affairs. Whatever it was she wanted to talk to me urgently about was certainly not for the gnome’s ears.
    I called Müller, the crime reporter on the Berliner Morgenpost, which was the only half-decent rag left on the news-stand. Müller was a good reporter gone to seed. There wasn’t much call for the old style of crime-reporting; the Ministry of Propaganda had seen to that.
    â€˜Look,’ I said after the preliminaries, ‘I need some biographical information from your library files, as much as you can get and as soon as possible, on Hermann Six.’
    â€˜The steel millionaire? Working on his daughter’s death, eh, Bernie?’
    â€˜I’ve been retained by the insurance company to investigate the fire.’
    â€˜What have you got so far?’
    â€˜You could write what I know on a tram ticket.’
    â€˜Well,’ said Müller, ‘that’s about the size of the piece we’ve got on it for tomorrow’s edition. The Ministry has told us to lay off it. Just to record the facts, and keep it small.’
    â€˜How’s that?’
    â€˜Six has got some powerful friends, Bernie. His sort of money buys an awful lot of silence.’
    â€˜Were you onto anything?’
    â€˜I heard it was arson, that’s about all. When do you need this stuff?’
    â€˜Fifty says tomorrow. And anything you can dig up on the rest of the family.’
    â€˜I can always use a little extra money. Be talking to you.’
    I hung up and shoved some papers inside some old newspapers and then dumped them in one of the desk drawers that still had a bit of space. After that I doodled on the blotter and then picked up