Frieda was tall and dark, with a full mouth and an even fuller figure and a voluptuous sort of fertility about her that I put down to the fact that she was Jewish, but was actually something rather more indefinable. She was glamorous, too. Had to be. Her job involved hanging around the hotel posing as a guest and keeping an eye out for prostitutes, con artists, and thieves, who liked the Adlon for the rich pickings that were to be had from the even richer guests. I had got to know her in the summer of 1929, when I helped her to arrest a female jewel thief who was armed with a knife. I stopped Frieda getting stuck with it by the simple means of getting stuck myself. Clever Gunther. For that I got a nice letter from Hedda Adlon, the proprietor’s daughter-in-law, and, after I came out of the hospital, a very personal kind of thank-you from Frieda herself. We weren’t sharing an envelope, exactly. Frieda had a semi-detached husband, who lived in Hamburg. But just now and then we’d search an empty bedroom for a lost maharajah or a stolen movie star. Sometimes it could take us a while.
As soon as I walked through the door, Frieda was on my arm like a hawk. “Am I glad to see you,” she said.
“And I thought you weren’t the type who cares.”
“I’m serious, Bernie.”
“And so am I. I keep telling you, only you don’t listen. I’d have brought flowers if I’d known you felt this way.”
“I want you to go into the bar,” she said urgently.
“That’s good. That’s where I was going anyway.”
“I want you to take a look at the guy in the corner. And I mean the fritz in the corner, not the redhead he’s with. He’s wearing a dove-gray suit with a double-breasted waistcoat and a flower in his lapel. I don’t like the look of him.”
“If that’s so, then I hate him already.”
“No, I think he might be dangerous.”
I went into the bar, picked up a matchbook, lit a cigarette, and gave the fritz the quick up-and-down. The girl he was with looked me up and down back. This was bad, because the fritz she was with was worse than bad. He was Ricci Kamm, the boss of the Always True, one of Berlin’s most powerful criminal rings. Normally Ricci stayed put in Friedrichshain, where his gang was based, which was fine, since he tended not to give us any trouble there. But the girl he was with looked like she had an opinion of herself that was as high as the Zugspitze. Probably she figured she was too good for joints like the Zum Nussbaum, which was where the Always True boys usually went for their kicks. Very likely she was right, too. I’ve seen better-looking red-heads, but only on Rita Hayworth. She was wearing good curves, too. I doubt she could have cut a better figure if she’d been wearing Sonja Henie’s favorite ice skates.
Ricci’s eyes were on mine. But my eyes were on her and there was a bottle of Bismarck in front of them both that said this might spell trouble. Ricci was a quiet sort with a small, soft voice and nice manners-until he had one drink too many, and then it was like watching Dr. Jekyll turn into Mr. Hyde. From the level in the bottle, Ricci was about ready to grow an extra set of eyebrows.
I turned on my heel and went back into the lobby.
“You were right not to like him,” I told Frieda. “He’s a dangerous man and I think his timer’s about to go off.”
“What are we going to do?”
I waved Max, the hall porter, toward me. I didn’t do it lightly. Max paid Louis Adlon three thousand marks a month to have that job, because he got a kickback on everything he did for the hotel’s guests, which made him about thirty thousand marks a month. He was holding a dog leash, which was attached to a miniature dachshund. I figured Max was looking for a bellboy to walk the thing. “Max,” I said, “call the Alex and tell them to send the kiddy car. You’d better order up a couple of uniforms as well. There’s going to be some trouble in the bar.”
Max hesitated as if he was expecting a tip.
“Unless you’d rather handle it yourself.”
Max turned and walked quickly to the house phones.
“And while you’re at it, go and check the easy chairs in the library and see if you can’t rustle up one of those overpaid ex-cops who call themselves house bulls.”
Frieda had never been a cop, so she didn’t take offense at my remark about ex-cops. But I knew she could look after herself. Adlon had hired her on the strength of her having been in the German women’s Olympic fencing team in Paris in 1924, when she’d narrowly missed a medal.
I took her by the arm and walked her to the bar. “When we sit down,” I said, “I want you all over me like ivy. That way I’m not a threat to him.”
We sat down at the table right beside Ricci. The Bismarck had kicked in and he was sneering a series of swear words at a terrified bar waiter. The redhead looked like she’d seen it before. Most of the bar’s other customers were wondering if they could make it as far as the door without crossing Ricci’s line of sight. But one of them was made of sterner stuff. A businessman wearing a frock coat and a meat slicer of a shirt collar, and a look of indignation at the kind of low German that was spilling out of Ricci’s mouth, stood up and seemed inclined to take on the gangster. I caught his eye and shook my head and, for a moment, he seemed to heed my warning. The moment he sat down, Frieda let me have it. On the ears and the neck and the back of my head and on my cheek and finally on my mouth, which was where I liked it best of all.
“You’re cute,” she said, with some understatement.
Ricci looked at her and then at the redhead beside him. “Why can’t you be more like that?” he asked her, jerking a thumb Frieda’s way. “Friendly, like.”
“Because you’re drunk.” The redhead took out a powder compact and started to touch up her makeup. A futile effort in my estimation: like trying to touch up the Mona Lisa. “And when you’re drunk, you’re a pig.”
She had a point, but Ricci didn’t care for it. He stood up, but the table stayed on his lap. The bottle and the glasses and the ashtray went to the floor. Ricci swore and the redhead started to laugh.
“A clumsy drunken pig,” she added, for good measure, and started to laugh again. I liked the effect it had on the redhead’s mantrap of a mouth. I liked the way her sharp white teeth shucked off her red lips like cherry skins. But Ricci didn’t like it at all and let her have it hard with the flat of his hand. In the Adlon’s plush bar, the slap went off like New Year’s Eve. This was too much for the man wearing the meat-slicer shirt collar. He looked like a real Prussian gentleman-the kind who cares what happens to a lady, even a lady who was probably a hundred-mark whore.
“Uh-oh,” Frieda murmured in my ear. “The man from I. G. Farben is about to play Sir Lancelot.”
“Did you say I. G. Farben?”
I. G. Farben was Europe’s largest dyestuff syndicate. The company’s headquarters were in Frankfurt but they had an office in Berlin that was opposite the Adlon, on the other side of Unter den Linden. That was what I’d been trying to remember in Illmann’s office.
“I’m sorry,” said the man from I. G. Farben. His tone was as stiff as a washboard, and just as square. “But I really must protest at your loutish behavior and your treatment of that lady.”
The redhead picked herself off the floor and uttered a few short words that were common enough in the engine rooms of German naval vessels. She was probably wondering if the fritz with the high collar was referring to her. Collecting the now empty Bismarck bottle in her hand, she swung it at Ricci’s head. The Always True leader caught it neatly in his palm, wrested it from her, tossed it in the air like a juggler’s club, grabbed it by the neck, and then swung it down hard against the edge of the upturned table-all in one easy, practiced, and delinquent gesture. The bottle came up again, glistening, meaningfully triangular, like a shard of razor-sharp ice. Ricci took hold of the IGF man’s frock coat, fisted him a foot closer, and seemed on the point of acquainting him with a more fundamental rebuttal when I interrupted their conversation.