Free If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr Page A

mean, a storm in a water glass. Right?”
    Behlert nodded eagerly. “Yes, that’s right, Herr Reles,” he said. “And may I say, your German is excellent.”
    Reles looked uncharacteristically sheepish. “Well, it’s a hell of a language to speak well,” he said. “Considering it must have been invented to let trains know when it’s time to leave a station.”
    Behlert smiled unctuously.
    “All the same,” I said, picking one of several broken wineglasses off the tablecloth, “it does look like there was a storm. A Bohemian one, I think. This stuff is fifty pfennigs a time.”
    “Naturally I’ll pay for any breakages.” Reles pointed at me and grinned at his complacent-looking guests. “Can you believe this guy? He wants me to pay for the breakages.”
    There’s nothing that looks as pleased with itself as a German businessman with a cigar.
    “Oh, there’s no question of that, Herr Reles,” Behlert said, and looked at me critically as if I had mud on my shoes, or something worse. “Gunther. If Herr Reles says it was an accident, then there’s no need to take this any further.”
    “He didn’t say it was an accident. He said it was a misunderstanding. Which is how a mistake often falls just short of being a crime.”
    “Is that out of this week’s Berlin Police Gazette ?” Reles found a cigar and lit up.
    “Maybe it ought to be. Then again, if it was, I might still be a Berlin policeman.”
    “But you’re not. You’re working here in this hotel, in which I am a guest. And, I might add, a big-spending guest. Herr Behlert, tell the sommelier to bring us six bottles of your finest champagne.”
    Around the table there was a loud murmur of approval. But none of them wanted to meet my eye. Just a lot of well-fed and -watered faces intent on getting back to the trough. A Rembrandt group portrait with everyone looking the other way: The Syndics of the Clothmakers Guild . It was then that I saw him, seated at the far end of the room, like Mephisto waiting patiently for a quiet word with Faust. Like the others, he was wearing a tuxedo and, but for his satirically grotesque saddlebag of a face, and the fact that he was cleaning his fingernails with a switch-blade, he looked almost respectable. Like the wolf dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.
    I never forget a face. Especially the face on a man who’d once led a group of SA to carry out a gun attack against the members of a workers’ social club who were holding a dance party at the Eden Palace in Charlottenburg. Four dead, including a friend from my old school. Probably there were other killings for which he was responsible, but it was that one, on November 23, 1930, that I particularly recalled. And then I had his name: Gerhard Krempel. He’d served some time for that murder, at least until the Nazis got into government.
    “Come to think of it, make it a dozen bottles.”
    Ordinarily I might have said something to Krempel—a witty epithet, perhaps, or something worse—but Behlert wouldn’t have liked that. Punching a guest in the throat wasn’t the kind of hotel-keeping that read well in Baedeker. And, for all either of us knew, Krempel was the new minister for level playing fields and good sportsmanship. Besides, Behlert was already steering me out of the Raphael Room. That is, when he wasn’t bowing and apologizing to Max Reles.
    At the Adlon, a guest is always given an apology rather than an excuse. That was another of Hedda Adlon’s maxims. But it was the first time I’d seen anyone in the hotel apologizing for interrupting a fight. Because I didn’t doubt that the man who had left earlier had been hit by Max Reles. And that he had hit Reles back. I certainly hoped that was the case. I wouldn’t have minded punching him myself.
    Outside the Raphael Room, Behlert faced me irritably. “Please, Herr Gunther, I know you think you are doing your job, but do try to remember that Herr Reles occupies the Ducal suite. As such he