‘Look, it’s just something to help tide you over, at least until you get paid for your overtime.’ She looked doubtful.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t seem right somehow. This is as much as I make in a week. It’ll do a lot more than just tide me over.’
‘Marianne,’ I said, ‘it’s nice to make ends meet, but it’s even nicer if you can tie a bow.’
4
Monday, 5 September
‘The doctor told me that the electrotherapy has the temporary side-effect of disturbing the memory. Otherwise I feel great.’
Bruno looked at me anxiously. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Never felt better.’
‘Well, rather you than me, being plugged in like that.’ He snorted. ‘So whatever you managed to find out while you were in Kindermann’s place is temporarily mislaid inside your head, is that it?’
‘It’s not quite that bad. I managed to take a look around his office. And there was a very attractive nurse who told me all about him. Kindermann is a lecturer at the Luftwaffe Medical School, and a consultant at the Party’s private clinic in Bleibtreustrasse. Not to mention his membership of the Nazi Doctors Association, and the Herrenklub.’
Bruno shrugged. ‘The man is gold-plated. So what?’
‘Gold-plated, but not exactly treasured. He isn’t very popular with his staff. I found out the name of someone who he sacked and who might be the type to bear him a grudge.’
‘It’s not much of a reason, is it? Being sacked?’
‘According to my nurse, Marianne, it was common knowledge that he got the push for stealing drugs from the clinic dispensary. That he was probably selling them on the street. So he wasn’t exactly the Salvation Army type, was he?’
‘This fellow have a name?’
I thought hard for a moment, and then produced my notebook from my pocket. ‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘I wrote it down.’
‘A detective with a crippled memory. That’s just great.’
‘Slow your blood down, I’ve got it. His name is Klaus Hering.’
‘I’ll see if the Alex has anything on him.’ He picked up the telephone and made the call. It only took a couple of minutes. We paid a bull fifty marks a month for the service. But Klaus Hering was clean.
‘So where is the money supposed to go?’
He handed me the anonymous note which Frau Lange had received the previous day and which had prompted Bruno to telephone me at the clinic.
‘The lady’s chauffeur brought it round here himself,’ he explained, as I read over the blackmailer’s latest composition of threats and instructions. ‘A thousand marks to be placed in a Gerson carrier-bag and left in a wastepaper basket outside the Chicken House at the Zoo, this afternoon.’
I glanced out of the window. It was another warm day, and without a doubt there would be plenty of people at the Zoo.
‘It’s a good place,’ I said. ‘He’ll be hard to spot and even harder to tail. There are, as far as I remember, four exits to the Zoo.’ I found a map of Berlin in my drawer and spread it out on the desk. Bruno came and stood over my shoulder.
‘So how do we play it?’ he asked.
‘You handle the drop, I’ll play the sightseer.’
‘Want me to wait by one of the exits afterwards?’
‘You’ve got a four-to-one chance. Which way would you choose?’
He studied the map for a minute and then pointed to the canal exit. ‘Lichtenstein Bridge. I’d have a car waiting on the other side in Rauch Strasse.’
‘Then you’d better have a car there yourself.’
‘How long do I wait? I mean, the Zoo’s open until nine o’clock at night, for Christ’s sake.’
‘The Aquarium exit shuts at six, so my guess is that he’ll show up before then, if only to keep his options open. If you haven’t seen us by then, go home and wait for my call.’
I stepped out of the airship-sized glass shed that is the Zoo Station, and walked across Hardenbergplatz to Berlin Zoo’s main entrance, which is just a short way south of the Planetarium. I bought a ticket that included the Aquarium, and a guidebook to make myself look more plausibly a tourist, and made my way first to the Elephant House. A strange man sketching there covered his pad secretively and shied away at my approach. Leaning on the rail of the enclosure I watched this curious behaviour repeated again and again as other visitors came over, until by and by the man found himself standing next to me again. Irritated at the presumption that I should be at all interested in his miserable sketch, I craned my neck over his shoulder, waving my camera close to his face.
‘Perhaps you should take up photography,’ I said brightly. He snarled something and cowered away. One for Dr Kindermann, I thought. A real spinner. At any kind of show or exhibition, it is always the people that present you with the most interesting spectacle.
It was another fifteen minutes before I saw Bruno. He hardly seemed to see me or the elephants as he walked by, holding the small Gerson store carrier-bag that contained the money under his arm. I let him get well in front, and then followed.
Outside the Chicken House a small red-brick, half-timbered building covered in ivy, which looked more like a village beer-cellar than a home to wild fowl, Bruno stopped, glanced around him, and then dropped the bag into a wastepaper basket that was beside a garden-seat. He walked quickly away, east, and in the direction of his chosen station at the exit on the Landwehr Canal.
A high crag of sandstone, the habitat of a herd of Barbary sheep, was situated opposite the Chicken House. According to the guidebook it was one of the Zoo’s landmarks, but I thought it looked too theatrical to be a good imitation of the sort of place that would have been inhabited by these trotting rags in the wild. It was more like something you would have found on the stage of some grossly overblown production of Parsifal, if such a thing were humanly possible. I hovered there awhile, reading about the sheep and finally taking several photographs of these supremely uninteresting creatures.
Behind Sheep Rock was a high viewing tower from which it was possible to see the front of the Chicken House, indeed the whole of the Zoo, and I thought it looked like ten pfennigs well-spent for anyone wanting to make sure that he wasn’t about to walk into a trap. With this thought in mind I was meandering away from the Chicken House, and towards the lake when a youth of about eighteen, with dark hair and a grey sports jacket, appeared from the far side of the Chicken House. Without even looking around he quickly picked the Gerson bag out of the wastepaper basket and dropped it into another carrier, this one from the Ka-De-We store. Then he walked briskly past me and, after a decent interval, I followed.
Outside the Moorish-style Antelope House the youth paused briefly beside the group of bronze centaurs that stood there, and, giving the appearance of one engrossed in his guidebook, I walked straight on to the Chinese Temple, where, hidden by several people, I stopped to watch him out of the corner of my eye. He came on again, and I guessed that he was making for the Aquarium and the south exit.
Fish were the last thing that you expected to see in the great green building that connects the Zoo with Budapester Strasse. A life-sized stone Iguanadon towered predatorily beside the door, above which was the head of yet another dinosaur. Elsewhere, the walls of the Aquarium were covered with murals and stone reliefs that depicted the kind of prehistoric beasts which would have swallowed a shark whole. It was to the Aquarium’s other inhabitants, the reptiles, that these antediluvian decorations were in fact preferable.
Seeing my man disappear through the front door, and realizing that the Aquarium’s dark interior would make it easy to lose him, I quickened my pace. Once inside I saw how much more probable than possible this actually was, since the sheer number of visitors made it difficult to see where he had gone.