‘Nasty,’ I said.
‘You understand, I am merely the distributor,’ Helmut said, blowing his nose on a filthy handkerchief, ‘not the manufacturer.’
One photograph was particularly interesting. In it the naked girl was bound hand and foot, and lying on a church altar like a human sacrifice. Her vagina had been penetrated with an enormous cucumber. Becker looked fiercely at Helmut.
‘But you know who produced it, don’t you?’ Helmut remained silent only until Becker grabbed him by the throat and started to slap him across the mouth.
‘Please don’t hit me.’
‘You’re probably enjoying it, you ugly little pervert,’ he snarled, warming to his work. ‘Come on, talk to me, or you’ll talk to this.’ He snatched a short rubber truncheon from his pocket, and pressed it against Helmut’s face.
‘It was Poliza,’ shouted Helmut. Becker squeezed his face.
‘Say again?’
‘Theodor Poliza. He’s a photographer. He has a studio on Schiffbauerdamm, next to the Comedy Theatre. He’s the one you want.’
‘If you’re lying to us, Helmut,’ said Becker, grinding the rubber against Helmut’s cheek, ‘we’ll be back. And we’ll not only set fire to your stock, but you with it. I hope you’ve got that.’ He pushed him away.
Helmut dabbed at his bleeding mouth with the handkerchief, ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, ‘I understand.’
When we were outside again I spat into the gutter.
‘Gives you a nasty taste in the mouth, doesn’t it, sir? Makes me glad I didn’t have a daughter, really it does.’
I’d like to have said that I agreed with him there. Only I didn’t.
We drove north.
What a city it was for its public buildings, as immense as grey granite mountains. They built them big just to remind you of the importance of the state and the comparative insignificance of the individual. That just shows you how this whole business of National Socialism got started. It’s hard not to be overawed by a government, any government, that is accommodated in such grand buildings. And the long wide avenues that ran straight from one district to another seemed to have been made for nothing else but columns of marching soldiers.
Quickly recovering my stomach I told Becker to stop the car at a cooked-meat shop on Friedrichstrasse and bought us both a plate of lentil soup. Standing at one of the little counters, we watched Berlin housewives lining up to buy their sausage, which lay coiled on the long marble counter like the rusted springs from some enormous motor car, or grew off the tiled walls in great bunches, like overripe bananas.
Becker may have been married, but he hadn’t lost his eye for the ladies, passing some sort of nearly obscene comment about most of the women who came into the shop while we were there. And it hadn’t escaped my attention that he’d helped himself to a couple of pornographic magazines. How could it have? He didn’t try to hide them. Slap a man’s face, make his mouth bleed, threaten him with an india rubber, call him a filthy degenerate and then help yourself to some of his dirty books — that’s what being in Kripo was all about.
We went back to the car.
‘Do you know this Poliza character?’ I said.
‘We’ve met,’ he said. ‘What can I tell you about him except that he’s shit on your shoe?’
The Comedy Theatre on Schiffbauerdamm was on the north side of the Spree, a tower-topped relic ornamented with alabaster tritons, dolphins and assorted naked nymphs, and Poliza’s studio was in a basement nearby.
We went down some stairs and into a long alleyway. Outside the door to Poliza’s studio we were met by a man wearing a cream-coloured blazer, a pair of green trousers, a cravat of lime silk and a red carnation. No amount of care or expense had been spared with his appearance, but the overall effect was so lacking in taste that he looked like a gypsy grave.
Poliza took one look at us and decided that we weren’t there selling vacuum-cleaners. He wasn’t much of a runner. His bottom was too big, his legs were too short and his lungs were probably too hard. But by the time we realized what was happening he was nearly ten metres down the alley.
‘You bastard,’ muttered Becker.
The voice of logic must have told Poliza he was being stupid, that Becker and I were easily capable of catching him, but it was probably so hoarsened by fear that it sounded as disquietingly unattractive as we ourselves must have appeared.
There was no such voice for Becker, hoarse or otherwise. Yelling at Poliza to stop, he broke into a smooth and powerful running action. I struggled to keep up with him, but after only a few strides he was well ahead of me. Another few seconds and he would have caught the man.
Then I saw the gun in his hand, a long-barrelled Parabellum, and yelled at both men to stop.
Almost immediately Poliza came to a halt. He began to raise his arms as if to cover his ears against the noise of the gunshot, turning as he collapsed, blood and aqueous humour spilling gelatinously from the bullet’s exit wound in his eye, or what was left of it.
We stood over Poliza’s dead body.
‘What is it with you?’ I said breathlessly. ‘Have you got corns? Are your shoes too tight? Or maybe you didn’t think your lungs were up to it? Listen, Becker, I’ve got ten years on you and I could have caught this man if I’d been wearing a deep-sea-diver’s suit.’
Becker sighed and shook his head.
‘Christ, I’m sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘I only meant to wing him.’ He glanced awkwardly at his pistol, almost as if he didn’t quite believe it could have just killed a man.
‘Wing him? What were you aiming at, his earlobe? Listen, Becker, when you try and wing a man, unless you’re Buffalo Bill you aim at his legs, not try and give him a fucking haircut.’ I looked around, embarrassed, almost expecting a crowd to have gathered, but the alley stayed empty. I nodded down at his pistol. ‘What is that cannon, anyway?’
Becker raised the gun. ‘Artillery Parabellum, sir.’
‘Shit, haven’t you ever heard of the Geneva Convention? That’s enough gun to drill for oil.’
I told him to go and telephone the canned-meat wagon, and while he was away I took a look around Poliza’s studio.
There wasn’t much to see. An assortment of open-crotch shots drying on a line in the darkroom. A collection of whips, chains, manacles and an altar complete with candlesticks, of the sort that I had seen in the photographed series of the girl with the cucumber. A couple of piles of magazines like the ones we had found back at Helmut’s office. Nothing to indicate that Poliza might have murdered five schoolgirls.
When I went outside again I found that Becker had returned with a uniformed policeman, a sergeant. The pair of them stood looking at Poliza’s body like two small boys regarding a dead cat in the gutter, the sergeant even poking at Poliza’s side with the toe of his boot.
‘Right through the window,’ I heard the man say, with what sounded like admiration. ‘I never realized there was so much jelly in there.’
‘It’s a mess, isn’t it?’ said Becker without much enthusiasm.
They looked up as I walked towards them.
‘Wagon coming?’ Becker nodded. ‘Good. You can make your report later.’ I spoke to the sergeant. ‘Until it arrives, you’ll stay here with the body, sergeant?’
He straightened up. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘You finished admiring your handiwork?’
‘Sir,’ said Becker.
‘Then let’s go.’
We walked back to the car.
‘Where are we going?’
‘I’d like to check on a couple of these massage parlours.’
‘Evona Wylezynska’s the one to talk to. She owns several places. Takes 25 per cent of everything the girls make. Most likely she’ll be at her place on Richard Wagner Strasse.’