The Lunacy Commission by Lavie Tidhar

Author:Lavie Tidhar [Tidhar, Lavie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-625675-11-8
Publisher: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

7.

‘Kiss?’ Herman Wirth said. ‘The man was a fool but I didn’t kill him. If I went around blithely murdering every idiot who called himself an archaeologist there’d be no one left at the Ahnenerbe.’ He grimaced a smile at me and helped himself to some nuts on the bar.

‘What did you disagree about?’

‘What didn’t we,’ he said, chewing loudly. The man was a pig. ‘You can come hear my talk on ancient Atlantis and make up your own mind. It is most illuminating.’

‘I’m sure it is.’

‘Listen, my friend,’ he said, leaning close and spitting bits of nuts in my face. ‘Cherchez la femme, do you get my meaning?’

‘I’m not sure that I do.’

‘Kiss had a thing for the Trautmann woman. Well, you saw her. She’s quite the piece. My colleagues all f—k each other like dogs in heat, you know.’

‘I didn’t. Are you suggesting Kiss and Trautmann had an affair?’

‘I’m sure I couldn’t say.’

‘Why would she kill him?’

‘Listen, man,’ he said. ‘What does it matter who killed him, when you don’t even know how it was done? I understand the room was locked from the inside.’

‘It’s a mystery,’ I admitted. I hated mysteries.

‘Must have killed himself, then,’ Wirth said. ‘And good riddance.’

‘You just suggested Trautmann killed him.’

‘Did I?’ He wiped his lips with a napkin and stood up. ‘Well, you’re the detective, Herr Wolf. You figure it out. Pip-pip, tra la la!’ He saluted me and sauntered off.

I tried to figure out my next move when the man from IG Farben—the one who looked like he married his cousin—came up to me. Today he was in a conservative grey suit. He shook my hand and looked at me gravely.

‘Wilhelm Rudolf Mann,’ he said. ‘International sales. At your service.’

‘Are you?’ I said. ‘At my service?’

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Herr Wolf, we at IG Farben do not like a spectacle. Slow and steady and respectable, that’s more us. So as regrettable as Herr… Kiss, was it? Kiss’ death is, the case’s closed. There is no investigation. And we’d much rather you just… moved on. Do you get my meaning?’

‘Scram?’ I said.

He looked at me dubiously. ‘Yes, that,’ he said.

‘I’m afraid I cannot. I still have principles.’

‘You are a buffoon!’ he said. ‘I know who you are, who you once were, at any rate. I believed in the cause. I’d joined the Party back in ’31, you know. I was a Brownshirt, too. I was as good a Nazi as anyone here.’

‘Mazel tov,’ I said.

He looked at me in anger. ‘But you are being bad for business,’ he said. ‘Walk away, Herr… Wolf. Go back to your office in Berwick Street—’

He made a point of telling me he knew where I lived—

‘And find some other employment. A juicy divorce, perhaps?’

‘I don’t work divorces,’ I told him, angry. Though of course he was right. You had to pay the rent somehow.

‘Word to the wise, Herr Wolf. Walk away.’

And with that he turned and left me there, full of thought.

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