I clamped a cigar between my lips. 'Got a light, Gisela?'
'Here.' Vogel passed me a box of matches. Gisela turned away and smoked off the last of her cigarette.
I lit my cigar. 'Happy birthday, by the way,' I told her.
'My birthday was last week,' she said, grinding the cigarette butt into the cobbles.
'Yeah well, you've got those nice emerald earrings I gave you last year.' She stayed silent as her full lips hovered somewhere between a smile and a sneer. She looked down at my gut. I didn't know how long I'd been rubbing at that scar, but I decided to try distracting her with more earrings talk. Besides which, those little bastards hadn't come cheap. 'Say, where are they anyway? You don't wear them any more?'
'I pawned them. And it was the year before last. I didn't see you last year.'
Under the pale street lights, the lines in her forehead went deeper than I remembered. Blood had soaked through the tissue on my cheek. It dribbled to my chin and I wiped it on my sleeve.
'So,' she said, 'I know you're dying for me to ask what happened to your face.'
'Your husband happened,' I said. 'Right, Vogel?'
Vogel wouldn't meet my gaze. I gave him back his matchbox.
Gisela covered her cleavage with folded arms. I hadn't even been staring at it all that much. 'Didn't happen to get in the way of his Ripper investigation, did you?' she said.
I smiled through a cloud of cigar smoke, shaking my head and trying to block out thoughts of Albermann. 'He always did tell you too much about the office. Did he tell you I arrested the Ripper in your goddamned church? Or that his goons shot up the stonework around the front door? Or that a little girl might be dead because of him?'
Gisela looked right at me, eyes coal black and diamond hard. The hot jabbing needle made me wince, a neat reminder of all we'd gone through.
I leaned in and whispered, 'I don't excuse what we did. But Michael doesn't have to make this so vicious.'
She stood on tiptoe and pulled my ear down to her lips with the hand that held the rosary beads. 'Maybe you should just turn the other cheek,' she said. 'God's judgement is the only kind that matters, and He is watching us. He saw everything we ever did. All of it.'
Not this Catholic abdication-of-responsibility crap again. If Gisela could've nailed herself to a cross she would have. A nailing, she needed. Just not to a cross.
I forced a smile. 'Well I hope he liked the show we gave him, the dirty bastard.'
She slapped my injured cheek, beads catching my flesh and bringing tears to my eyes. That would be another bruise come morning.
Red patches bloomed on her pale skin all the way from forehead to shoulders. She'd always blushed in patches like that. When we'd made love it had been the same. A thousand filthy memories of us filled my mind and this time I couldn't hold them back. This time I didn't really want to.
I seized her wrist as she pulled back for another slap. My dick was getting hard: this was more like the girl I knew.
Vogel stepped between us, a warning for me in his eyes.
I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender. 'All right, all right, I've had enough beatings for one night. Detective.' I nodded at him, then at Gisela. 'Frau Ritter. Thanks for the chat.'
Vogel took a step towards me. I left, the sting of Gisela's slap still warm on my cheek and my stomach muscles aching worse than ever as I headed home.
My own snores shook me awake, air dry-whistling through my nose. Then my bed rocked, and I started thinking maybe something else had awoken me, like someone trying to open my door without realising I'd wedged the bed up against it.
A dark pot-bellied man loomed against the far wall, picked out by the sunlight coming through the open curtains. I blinked a couple of times and the man resolved himself into the shadow of my corner stove. I'd got home close on three am to find the lock broken and my room ransacked by Ritter's mob. Funny though how the mess hadn't dragged me down as much as the realisation that my room was little bigger than the holding cell at Mühlenstrasse.
Plus the fact that somehow, in some way I couldn't understand, I'd felt more at home in that cell than I did in my actual home.
The door crashed against the bed. I sat up, rubbing sleep from my eyes.
'Hold on, for Christ's sake,' I said.
'Klein, wake up.' I recognised Vogel's honeyed tones.
'I'm awake, damn it!'
The door across the landing creaked open. I checked my watch. Just gone eight am. Good Christ, was I never going to get enough sleep?
'What's all this?' That was the voice of my neighbour – and landlady – Effi Schneider. She didn't sound happy.
Vogel stopped pushing at my door and said, 'I'm sorry madam, but we need to take Detective Klein to headquarters.'
'On a Sunday?' Effie said.
I sat as still as I could and held my breath. What did Vogel and Ritter want with me now? I wanted to tell the inspector to go to hell, to submit his request in writing to my precinct house and have to wait days for the response. On the other hand, maybe he wanted me to help find the Albermann kid after all. Or, worse, maybe they'd found her. No, scratch that last one: if they'd found her they wouldn't need me. Not unless Ritter was looking for a scapegoat.
'And I suppose you're the cretins who smashed the place up yesterday?' Effi went on. 'Honestly, you think this is a good use of tax payers' money while there's four million unemployed and people queuing round the block for the soup kitchens?'
'Madam, I really couldn't say. I've been sent down here from Berlin, and I didn't have much say in the matter, I can tell you.'
'Berlin, eh?' Effi made a sound somewhere at the back of her throat. 'Explains a lot.'
I wrapped a cotton sheet around my midriff and I got up. I scraped the bed back and opened the door. 'You found her?'
Vogel put a finger to his lips. There was something different about him today, but I couldn't work out what it was. There was another plainclothesman beside him, a squat man with thin hair draped across a dry scalp. This guy had the nerve to leer at me, revealing missing teeth. Beyond these two, Effi stood at the threshold of her rooms. Hot curlers steamed in glossy dark hair which came down over her ears. A black velvet jacket strained to contain her ample stomach and she was wearing a thin silver chain around her neck. Three dark-haired young girls peered out from behind her skirts.
'So what, it turns out I can help after all?'
'I thought they'd caught the Ripper?' Effi said.
'Well, we have...' Vogel said.
'Heard on the wireless yesterday evening. There's talk they interrupted the opera and the cinema to announce it and everything.'
'Well, yes...'
God bless her for making him squirm like that.
'We need to take him down to headquarters for a word with the chief,' he said. He made a point of looking around and down the stairwell, then he leaned in and stage-whispered: 'DCI Gennat, you know...'
My heart was pounding all the way to the hole in my cheek. Ernst Gennat,
der volle Ernst:
Germany's most famous detective, head of the country's only dedicated murder squad. He'd been brought in to head up the Ripper investigation from Berlin at the insistence of the Prussian interior ministry. Had Ritter dropped me in it with the top brass, or was Gennat looking to grill me for his own reasons? Either way, I was in for a long day and I didn't much fancy it, though I didn't have any choice now. Refusing to see Gennat would be career suicide beyond any of the bad decisions I'd made in the past. I'd have to find out what he wanted and then do my best to appease him.
Effi nodded at me. 'Well, he's not going anywhere in his birthday suit. Coffee?'
Vogel checked his watch. 'I'd like that, madam, but we must be going.'
'Nonsense!' Effi crossed the landing in a couple of steps and wrapped her arm around Vogel's shoulders. 'Give the man time to get some clothes on, eh?' She winked and managed to slap my
arsch
. She steered the two detectives into her kitchen just as my sheet fell around my ankles.
I retreated into my room and wedged the door shut with a chair. My clothes were still strewn across the floor and on top of my battered leather trunk, clean and dirty mingled together where Ritter's men had thrown them the day before. I picked out the cleanest looking underclothes I could find. A film of sweat covered my body at the thought of meeting Gennat.
I dug around in the mess for some suit trousers, found a pair that went with my double-breasted jacket. I'd bought them when my waist had been a size larger, before this damned depression had left us all hungrier and leaner. I fastened my belt on the last notch.
I tried to ignore the roughness of the woollen trousers against my legs while I retrieved the jacket and waistcoat that went with them. I checked myself out in the cracked mirror on the back of the door. Even after buttoning the jacket I looked like a tramp who'd stolen his clothes off a corpse.
I crossed the landing and pushed open Effi's door. Effi and the two policemen broke off from forced laughter at my entrance. The three of them were sitting at her circular dining table in the centre of the room, drinking coffee from her best blue-and-white glazed china cups arranged around a pot of the same manufacture. The good china she didn't like me using.
The girls were standing at the threshold of the second room dropping fruit cake crumbs on the floor. The smallest came over and thrust her nibbled wedge of cake at me, her cheeks pouched like those of a rodent. I waved her away. On her way back, she knocked the family's tin bath from its resting place against the peeling wallpaper and gave a squeal, running into the next room before her mother could shout at her. I didn't want these two cops sharing coffee or jokes with my landlady, much less scaring her daughters.
'Look Effi, I'm sorry about this disturbance. And the mess from yesterday.'
She talked over me: 'Never you mind, Herr Thomas. I'll just add the damages and the cost of the new lock onto your rent at the end of the week.'
Vogel rose from his seat and scratched the side of his nose. A wart nestled in the fleshy fold between cheek and nostril. It suited him. Now I realised what was different. He was wearing a jacket and his shirt sleeves went all the way down to his wrists. He had even oiled his hair, though on him the effect was unfortunate, as though he'd dunked his head in a grease puddle.
'You ready to go?' he asked me, buttoning his jacket.
'Does he look ready?' Effi said. I rubbed the stubble on my chin. I should have shaved, but I didn't relish the thought of negotiating a razor around all those cuts and bruises. Effi passed me a cup of coffee and a bottle of aspirins. On the cup, blue tulips bloomed. I uncapped the bottle and shook three aspirins into my mouth, washing them down with blistering-hot coffee.
'All right, let's go,' I told Vogel. With a little luck Gennat would be done with me before my shift was due to start. Then I could either help find the girl, or I could try and put the Ripper case behind me and move on.
The squat guy with the bad scalp drove us back to Mühlenstrasse in a drab closed-top sedan from the
Schupo
auto pool. Vogel had taken the passenger seat and removed his jacket before getting in, draping the garment across his legs. We didn't talk. I played with my homburg in my lap and watched the city pass by through the window. Vogel even whistled part of the way.
Watch on the Rhine
, I think it was, though I didn't ask.
I sat back, the sting of Gisela's slap still with me from the night before. It had been a shock to see her. The good Frau Ritter. I chuckled. Vogel stopped his whistling to turn and look at me. Well, let him look. The image of Gisela as the dutiful wife, it irritated like a chicken bone stuck in the gullet.
I pictured a meadow in summer, Gisela and me eating a roasted chicken. The bread had gone dry and the Riesling had warmed in the sun, but none of it mattered. We'd eaten until our lips shone with chicken fat and Gisela joked about Ritter having to make do with the leftovers. Then we'd made love in the sun until my back burned bright red and her blonde hair went a shade lighter still.
Funny how people changed: funny/tragic, that is. That Gisela – my Gisela – was gone forever, replaced by a mousy matron clutching at her rosary as though that could save her from her sins.
But then, how much of that change was my fault?
Vogel's redundant, 'We're here,' announced our arrival at headquarters.
We pulled up to the entrance. The front of the building stretched along most of the block, three stories of large, evenly-spaced windows set in pale stone. This neoclassical façade had been one of Schinkel's efforts, or so people liked to think. I wasn't so sure. Why come all the way to Düsseldorf from Berlin in the days when that would take a week in a jittery horse-driven mail coach? My money was on one of the great man's less favoured disciples.
The squat guy drove away and left Vogel and me to enter the place without him. We passed through the high double doors into the first courtyard. Again without a word, Vogel led me diagonally across the cobbles through a smaller door and up the stairs beyond. When we got to the second floor he turned left and we entered the familiar world of two-tone grey brick and overheated hallways. The stuffiness made me shiver after the cool air outside. We passed rooms that clicked and rang with typing. Each face I saw belonged to a man I didn't know even though I'd worked on this floor for over six years. Maybe they were all Berlin Homicide.