Free If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr

things turned out, Ley didn’t show, and the DAF delegates behaved themselves more or less impeccably, with only one of them being sick on the carpet. I ought to have been pleased by that, I suppose. As a hotel worker I was a member of the Labor Front myself. I wasn’t exactly sure what I got for my fifty pfennigs a week, but it was impossible to get any kind of job in Germany without being a member. I was looking forward to the day when I could parade proudly at Nuremburg with a brightly polished shovel over my shoulder and, in front of the Leader, dedicate myself and my hotel work to the concept of labor, if not the reality. No doubt the Adlon’s other house detective, Fritz Muller, felt much the same way. When he was around, it was impossible not to consider the true importance of work in German society. Or for that matter when he wasn’t around, because Muller seldom did any work himself. He had been tasked by me with keeping an eye on the Raphael Room, which looked like the easier detail, but when trouble broke out he was nowhere to be found, and it was to me that Behlert came seeking assistance.
    “There’s trouble in Raphael,” he said, breathlessly.
    As we swiftly walked through the hotel—no member of the staff was ever permitted to run in the Adlon—I tried to get Behlert to paint a picture of exactly who all these men were and what their meeting had been about. Some of the names on the Olympic Organizing Committee were not the sort of men you went up against without first reading the life of Metternich. But Behlert’s picture came out as poorly painted as von Menzel’s copy of a Raphael mural that had given the function room its name.
    “I believe there may have been one or two members of the organizing committee who were present earlier on in the evening,” he said, mopping his brow with a napkin-sized handkerchief. Perhaps it was a napkin. “Funk from Propaganda, Conti from the Ministry of the Interior, Hans von Tschammer und Osten, the sports leader. But now it’s mostly businessmen from all over Germany. And Max Reles.”
    “Reles?”
    “He’s the host.”
    “Well, that’s all right,” I said. “For a moment there, I thought one of them might try to give us some trouble.”
    As we neared the Raphael Room we heard shouts. Then the double doors were flung open and two men stormed out. You can call me a Bolshevik if you like, but from the size of their stomachs I knew they were German businessmen. One of them had a black bow tie that had been twisted halfway around what was laughably called his neck. Above his neck was a face as red as the little paper Nazi flags that were pinned among several paper Olympic flags to an easel beside the doors. For a moment I considered asking him what had happened, but that would only have resulted in my being trampled, like a tea plantation trying to resist a rampaging bull elephant.
    Behlert followed me through the doors and, as my eyes caught those of Max Reles, I heard him say something about Laurel and Hardy before his tough face opened into a smile and his thick body took on an apologetic, placating, almost diplomatic aspect that would hardly have disgraced Prince Metternich himself.
    “It was all a big misunderstanding,” he said. “Wouldn’t you agree, gentlemen?”
    But for the fact that his hair was messed up and there was some blood on his mouth, I might have believed him.
    Reles looked around the dinner table for support. Somewhere under a cumulonimbus cloud of cigar smoke, several voices murmured wearily like a papal conclave that had neglected to pay the Sistine Chapel’s chimney sweep.
    “You see?” Reles lifted his big hands in the air, as if I’d pointed a gun at him, and for some reason I got the feeling that if I had, he’d hardly have reacted differently. He’d have kept his nerve under the drill of a drunken dentist. “Storm in a teacup.” It didn’t sound right in German and, snapping his thick, stubby fingers, he added, “I