Read Online The Other Side of Silence by Philip Kerr - Free Book Online Page A

Loulou.”
    â€œBoys will be boys, I suppose.”
    â€œQuite.”
    â€œIs he offering you the negative?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œHow much does he want for this?”
    â€œFifty thousand American dollars. In cash. For the negative and the prints.”
    â€œThat’s a lot of money for a holiday snap.”
    â€œWhich is precisely why I want someone trustworthy to handle the matter for me. Someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing. And who’s not going to get too nervous or overexcited. Someone like you. At least that’s what Hebel says. He tells me you have experience of dealing with blackmailers. Is that true?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œIn Berlin?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWould you care to tell me about that, perhaps? Just out of interest, I mean. If I’m going to give you five thousand dollars’commission I think I have a right to know what kind of service I’m buying, don’t you?”
    â€œThat’s the thing about blackmail,” I said. “You’ll soon find that you don’t have any rights at all.” I shrugged. “But sure. I’ll tell you. Not that there’s much to tell. This was quite a few years ago, mind, so unlike that photograph—unfortunately—the story’s a little grainy now. It must have been January nineteen thirty-eight. Long after I’d quit the police, and a year or two after I’d left the Adlon. When I was working as a private investigator in Berlin and before—well, that doesn’t matter. But there’s one detail you know already. The identity of the blackmailer. You see, a leopard doesn’t change its spots. The blackmailer was a man called Harold Heinz Hennig, but I fear you know him rather better as Harold HeinzHebel.”

EIGHT
    BERLIN
    1938
    I ’m being blackmailed.”
    â€œI’m very sorry to hear that, sir.”
    â€œMy old adjutant told me you used to be a policeman and that now you’re a private detective, and I decided that since we were old comrades that I might come to you for help.”
    â€œI’m very glad you did. It’s been a long time, Captain.”
    â€œTwenty years.”
    â€œYou look well, sir.”
    â€œThanks for saying so, Gunther, but we both know that’s not true.”
    Captain Achim von Frisch must have been in his sixties, buthe looked much older, desiccated even; his hair was pewter-colored and his once handsome face looked drawn and poorly shaven. He wore a dark gray coat with a thick fur collar, a monocle, and gray kid gloves, and he carried a silver-handled cane. But even the wax in his imperial-style, eagle’s-wing mustache looked spent and dried up, and there was a strong smell of mothballs around his person. His manner was exactly what you might have expected of an old Prussian cavalry officer, stiff and courteous, but I remembered him as a kind man who’d cared deeply about the welfare of the men under his command of whom, in 1918, I had been one. It might have been twenty years since I’d seen him, but you don’t forget that kind of comradeship. I’d have done anything for my old army captain. Once, he’d grabbed me by the collar of my tunic and pulled me clear as I blundered into a position on the line that was being scoped by an Australian sniper. A second later, a .303 bullet that was meant for my head hit the back wall of the trench.
    We were in my suite of offices on the fourth floor of Alexander Haus. The premises were small but comfortable and I had a pretty good view of my old office window in the Police Praesidium on the opposite side of Alexanderplatz, where I’d spent many years as a detective until my politics obliged me to resign from the force. Thanks to the Nazis, the private investigator business was brisk—mostly missing persons. People were always going missing in Berlin under the Nazis.
    My business partner, Bruno Stahlecker, lit his pipe