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He smiled thinly, and as he showed me to the door he seemed relaxed;
but I hoped I had said enough to put a few ripples on his pond.
‘You must be the sniffer,’ he said. ‘We’ve been waiting to speak to you.’ He had mustard-coloured hair, coiffed by a competition sheepshearer, and a nose like a champagne cork. His moustache was wider than the brim on a Mexican’s hat.
Kottbusser Tor was the kind of area that had worn about as well as a music-hall poster, and Admiralstrasse, Number 43 was the kind of place where the rats wore ear-plugs and the cockroaches had nasty coughs.
The concierge was a snapper who was over the hill and down a disused mine-shaft. Her hair was every bit as natural as parade goose-stepping down the Wilhelmstrasse, and she’d evidently been wearing a boxing-glove when she’d applied the crimson lipstick to her paperclip of a mouth. Her breasts were like the rear ends of a pair of dray horses at the end of a long hard day.
doing my level best to ignore the two coat-pegs and the Russian boyar’s beard that were being displayed for my benefit. You felt the twang and itch of syphilis in your tail just looking at her.
Wearing a stunning black hat that was like a grand piano with the lid up, Ilse Rudel was even more beautiful in mourning than she was in bed.
Neumann was its least attractive specimen. His eyebrows, twitching and curling like two poisoned caterpillars, were joined together by an irregular scribble of poorly matched hair. Behind thick glasses that were almost opaque
greasy thumbprints, his grey eyes were shifty and nervous, searching the floor as if he expected that at any moment he would be lying flat on it. Cigarette smoke poured out from between teeth that were so badly stained with tobacco they looked like two wooden fences.
‘I’d better wear an extra pair of knickers, then,’ she said. ‘The man has hands like he thinks he should have been a midwife.’
jaw-whistler looks bad for business.
On the other hand, maybe they’ll just think that I’m the determined type – you know, the kind who never lets up on a case.’
This summer, Berlin’s as hot as a baker’s armpit.
never met a lawyer yet that wasn’t above stealing his mother’s savings and the mattress she was keeping them under.’
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.’
There are so many ways of escaping from that which one fears, and not the least of these is hatred.
I’d say the umbrella denotes quite a sensible sort of man. Can you really imagine Hitler or Goebbels ever managing to stir up a crowd of men carrying umbrellas? It’s the very absurdity of the British which makes them so impossible to radicalize. And why we should envy them.’
‘Just when you thought that things couldn’t get any worse, you find out that they’ve always been a lot worse than you thought they were. And then they get worse.’
Tanker was an East Fresian from Emsland where, it is said, brains are as rare as fur on fish.
For my taste she was too much concerned with the shade of her gold-spun hair, the length of her fingernails and the state of her teeth, which she was forever brushing. Too vain by half, and too selfish twice over. Given a choice between pleasing herself and pleasing someone else she would have hoped
that pleasing herself would have made everyone happy.
She had a bitter mouth, prominent lower jaw and small sharp teeth. No sooner had I explained the purpose of my visit than she started to chew the air around my ears.
She waved her holder meaningfully at a couple of girls who were dancing with each other. With their gaudy outfits, tight buns and flashing paste necklaces they looked like a pair of circus horses. Catching Veronika’s eye they smiled and then whinnied a little confidence to each other at a coiffure’s distance.
