The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr

it’s not the Nordhav Foundation that owns this house.”
    “What do you know about the Nordhav Foundation?”
    “Not much. There’s an office upstairs with that name on the door. Apart from that, not much. That’s why I asked.” I shrugged.
    “Where Nordhav is concerned, nothing is always the best thing to know. Take my advice, Bernie. Stick to homicide. It’s a lot safer.” Nebe glanced around as the delegates started to file into the central hall where the speeches were to be given. “Come on. Let’s get it over with.”

Seven
    T he irony of being introduced to the audience at an international crime commission conference by a man who had not long finished murdering forty-five thousand people did not escape me, or indeed Nebe himself. Arthur Nebe, who was ex–political police, when such men had still existed, had never been much of a detective. He colored a little around the ears as he talked, a little, about the Murder Commission, almost as if he recognized that the commission of murder was something in which he was rather more expert. I don’t think there was anyone in that room who could have looked death in the face more often than Arthur Nebe. Not even Himmler and Kaltenbrunner. I still remembered something Nebe had told me back in Minsk, about experimenting with blowing people up in the search for a more efficient and “humane” method of mass killing. I wondered what some of the Swedes and Swiss in our audience would have said if they’d known anything of the crimes that were being committed by German police in Eastern Europe and Russia, even as we spoke. Would they have cared? Maybe not. You could never quite predict how people would react to the so-called Jewish question.
    When he finished his introduction there was a ripple of polite applause and then it was my turn. The bare wooden floorboards creaked like an old leather coat as I walked on jelly legs to the lectern, although that might have been the sound of my nerves pulling at the muscles of my heart and lungs.
    I’ve seen a few tough-looking crowds in my time but this was the toughest. At least five or six of them only had to raise a finger to have me face a firing squad before morning coffee was over. Galileo had an easier job with the Inquisition, trying to persuade them that the algebra in the Bible doesn’t add up to a month of Sundays. The audience at the Café Dalles on Neue Schönhauser Strasse used to throw chairs at the piano player when they were bored. And I once saw a tiger get a bit rough with a clown at the Busch Circus. Now, that was funny. But the faces I was looking at would have given Jack Dempsey pause for thought. Anita Berber was wont to piss on the customers when she decided that she didn’t like them, and much as I should like to have taken a leaf out of her book, I thought it best if I just read what was written on the pages I’d spread on the lectern in front of me, although a lot of what I said had been added onto my speech by Leo Gutterer and stuck in my throat like an S-hook from a burglar’s cigar box.
    “Heil Hitler. Gentlemen, criminologists, distinguished foreign guests, colleagues, if the last ten years have proved anything at all it is that many of the frustrations the German police experienced under the Weimar Republic have diminished to the extent that they no longer exist. Street fights and the threat of communist insurrection that characterized the time before the election of a National Socialist government are a thing of the past. Police manpower has been increased, our equipment modernized, and, as a corollary, the institutions of state security are considerably more efficient.
    “From a time when Germany, and Berlin in particular, was virtually run by criminal gangs and cursed by one ineffective government after another, a strong centralized, classless state now exists where factionalized politics ensured that only anarchy existed before. When the National Socialists came to power, one or two