Free A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr Page A

under the circumstances, I’ll overlook it.”
    Schwarz colored a little and then squeezed his fists, one after the other. These made a noise like a noose tightening. I imagine he was wishing there was one around my neck. He bit his lip. It was easier to reach than my face. He pushed open the apartment door. Stiffly, he said, “Please. Come in, gentlemen.”
    The apartment was a shrine to Adolf Hitler. There was a portrait of him in an oval frame in the hall, and another, different portrait of him inside a square frame in the sitting room. A copy of Mein Kampf lay open on a book stand that was on the sideboard, next to a family Bible, and behind these was a framed photograph of Otto Schwarz and Adolf Hitler. They were wearing leather flying helmets and sitting in the front seat of an enormous open-top Mercedes with cheesy grins on their faces, as if they had just won the ADAC Eifelrennen, and in record time. By one of the armchairs on the floor lay a dozen or so copies of Der Stürmer, the vehemently anti-Semitic newspaper. I’d seen election posters for Adolf Hitler that were less obviously Nazi than the Schwarz family home.
    In her own sweet, big-breasted, blond, and blue-eyed way, Frau Schwarz looked no less of a Nazi than her storm trooper of a husband. When she put her arm through her husband’s arm, I half expected them both to shout “Germany, awake!” and “Death to the Jews” before breaking up the furniture and then singing the “Horst Wessel Song.” Sometimes it was only these daydreaming little fantasies that made my job at all bearable. It certainly wasn’t two hundred fifty marks a month. Frau Schwarz wore a full, gathered dirndl skirt with traditional embroidery, a tight-laced-up blouse, an apron, and an expression that was a combination of fear and hostility.
    Schwarz put his hand on top of the hand his wife had threaded through his ham hock of an arm, and then she put her other hand on his. But for their grim and resolute faces, they reminded me of a couple getting married.
    At last they looked like they were ready to hear what they knew I was going to tell them. I’d like to say I admired their courage and that I felt sorry for them. The truth is, I didn’t, very much. The sight of Schwarz’s illegal uniform and the battalion number on his collar patch made me almost indifferent to their feelings. Assuming they had any. A very good friend of mine, POWM Emil Kuhfeld, a first sergeant with the SCHUPO, had been shot dead at the head of the detachment of riot police trying to disperse a large group of Communists in Frankfurter Allee. A Nazi commissar at Police Station 85, who had investigated the case, had managed to pin the murder on a Communist. But nearly everyone at the Alex knew he had suppressed the evidence of a witness who had seen Kuhfeld shot by an SA man with a rifle. The day after Kuhfeld’s murder, this SA man, one Walter Grabsch, was discovered dead in his Kadinerstrasse flat, having conveniently committed suicide. Kuhfeld’s funeral had been the biggest ever given to a Berlin policeman. I had helped carry the coffin. Which was how I knew that the battalion number on Schwarz’s blue collar patch was the same battalion to which Walter Grabsch had belonged.
    I gave Herr and Frau Schwarz all of the hard words of grief straight from the holster. I didn’t even try to rub them in the snow first.
    “We think we’ve found the body of your daughter, Anita. We believe she was murdered. Obviously I’ll have to ask you to come down to the station to identify her. Shall we say tomorrow morning, ten o’clock, at the Police Praesidium, on Alexanderplatz?”
    Otto Schwarz nodded silently.
    I had retailed bad news before, of course. Just the previous week I’d had to tell a mother in Moabit that her seventeen-year-old son, a schoolboy at the local Gymnasium, had been murdered by Communists who’d mistaken him for a brown shirt. “Are you sure it’s him, Commissar?” she asked me more than