If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr Page B

could probably live with the disappointment if this turned out not to be the case.
    He was asleep in the chair. There was a half bottle of Bismarck on the floor beside his foot and an empty glass in his hand. He hadn’t shaved, and the sound of a heavy chest of drawers being rolled across a wooden floor was coming out of his nose and throat. He looked like an uninvited guest at a Brueghel peasant wedding. I slipped my hand into his coat pocket and took out his wallet. Inside were four new five-mark notes with a serial number that matched the notes I’d found on the desk in Rubusch’s room. I figured Muller had either procured the joy lady for him or taken a bribe off her afterward. Perhaps both, but it hardly mattered. I put the leaves back in the wallet, returned it to his pocket, and then kicked him on the ankle.
    “Hey. Sigmund Romberg. Wake up.”
    Muller stirred, took a sniff of air, and then let out a deep breath that smelled like a wet malting floor. Wiping his sandpaper chin with the back of his hand, he looked around thirstily.
    “It’s by your left foot,” I said.
    He glanced down at the bottle and pretended to ignore it, only he wasn’t very convincing. He could have pretended he was Frederick the Great and he would have looked more persuasive.
    “What do you want?”
    “Thanks, but it’s a little early for me. But you go right ahead and have one if it makes thinking any easier. I’ll just stand here and watch and have fun imagining what your liver must look like. You know, I’ll bet it’s an interesting shape. Maybe I should paint it. I do a little abstract painting now and then. Let’s see, now. How about Still Life with Liver and Onions ? We can use your brains for the onions, okay?”
    “What do you want?”
    His tone was darker now, as if he were getting ready to hit me. But I was on my toes, moving around the room like a dancing master just in case I had to slug him. I almost wanted him to try it so I could. A solid right to the jaw might have helped sober him up.
    “Since we’re talking of interesting shapes, why don’t we talk about that joy lady who was in here last night? The one wearing the tiara. The one visiting the man in 210. Name of Rubusch, Heinrich Rubusch. Did he give you the four leaves, or did you take it off the pussycat in the corridor? Incidentally, if you’re wondering why it’s any of my damn business, it’s because Rubusch is dead.”
    “Who says I took four leaves off anyone?”
    “Your concern for the welfare of the hotel’s guests is most touching, Muller. The serial numbers on those four new bills in your wallet match the numbers on a fold of notes lying on a table in the dead man’s room.”
    “You’ve been in my wallet?”
    “You might ask yourself why I’m telling you that I’ve been in your wallet. The fact is I could have brought Behlert or Pieck or even one of the Adlons along here and found those leaves in front of an audience. But I haven’t. Now ask me why.”
    “All right. I’ll take a card from your pack. Why?”
    “I don’t want to see you fired, Muller. I just want you out of this hotel. I’m offering you a chance to leave under your own steam. Who knows? That way, you might even leave with a reference.”
    “Suppose I don’t want to leave.”
    “Then I’ll go and fetch them anyway. Of course, by the time we get back, you’ll have got rid of the leaves. But that won’t matter, because that’s not why they’ll fire you. They’ll fire you because you’re stinking drunk. In fact, you stink of it so bad, the city’s thinking of sending a gas sniffer here to check it out.”
    “Drunk, he says.” Muller picked up the bottle and then drained it. “What do you expect, in a job like this, with so much hanging around? What’s a man to do with himself all day if he doesn’t drink?”
    I was almost ready to agree with him there. The job was boring. I was bored myself. I felt like a calf’s foot in aspic jelly.
    Muller looked at the