A Quiet Flame (7 page)

“Proves my point, doesn’t it? You living in a Red area like that.”

“All it proves is that the Nazis are always spoiling for a fight.”

I bent down and flicked my flashlight up and down the dead girl’s body. Her upper half looked more or less normal. She was about thirteen or fourteen, blond, with pale blue eyes and a small galaxy of freckles around her pixie nose. It was a tomboyish sort of face, and you could easily have mistaken her for a boy. The matter of her sex was only confirmed by her small, adolescent breasts, the rest of her sexual organs having been removed along with her lower intestines, her womb, and whatever else gets packed in down there when a girl gets born. But it wasn’t her evisceration that caught my eye. In truth, both Heinrich and I had seen this kind of thing many times in the trenches. There was also the caliper on her left leg. I hadn’t noticed it before.

“No walking stick,” I said, tapping it with my pencil. “You’d think she’d have had one.”

“Maybe she didn’t need one. It’s not every cripple that needs a stick.”

“You’re right. Goebbels manages very well without one, doesn’t he? For a cripple. Then again there’s a big stick inside almost everything he says.” I lit a cigarette and let out a big, smoky sigh. “Why do people do this kind of thing?” I said to myself.

“You mean, kill children?”

“I meant, Why kill them like this? It’s monstrous, isn’t it? Depraved.”

“I should have thought it was obvious,” said Grund.

“Oh? How’s that?”

“You’re the one who said he must be depraved. I couldn’t agree more. But is it any wonder? I say is it any wonder we have depraved people doing things like this when you consider the filth and depravity that’s tolerated by this fag end of a government? Look around you, Bernie. Berlin is like a big, slimy rock. Lift it up and you can see everything that crawls. The oilers, stripe men, wall-sliders, boot girls, sugarlickers,
Munzis
, T-girls. The women who are men and the men who are women. Sick. Venal. Corrupt. Depraved. And all of it tolerated by your beloved Weimar Republic.”

“I suppose everything will be different if Adolf Hitler gets into power.” I was laughing as I said it. The Nazis had done well in the most recent elections. But nobody sensible really believed they could run the country. Nobody thought for a minute that President Hindenburg was ever going to ask the man he detested most in the world—a guttersnipe NCO from Austria—to become the next chancellor of Germany.

“Why not? We’re going to need someone to restore order in this country.”

As he spoke, we heard another shot travel through the warm night air.

“And who better than the man who causes all the trouble to put an end to it, eh? I can sort of see the logic behind that, yes.”

One of the uniforms came over. We stood up. It was Sergeant Gollner, better known as Tanker—because of his size and shape.

“While you two were arguing,” he said, “I put a cordon around this part of the park. So as to keep the pot-watchers away. Last thing we want is any details of how she was killed getting into the newspapers. Giving stupid people stupid ideas. Confessing to things they haven’t done. We’ll have a closer look in the morning, eh? When it’s light.”

“Thanks, Tanker,” I said. “I should have—”

“Skip it.” He took a deep breath of a night air made moist by water a light breeze had carried from the fountain. “Nice here, isn’t it? I always liked this place. Used to come here a lot, I did. On account of the fact that my brother is buried over there.” He nodded south, in the direction of the state hospital. “With the revolutionaries of 1848.”

“I didn’t know you were that old,” I said.

Tanker grinned. “No, he got shot by the Freikorps, in December 1918. Proper lefty, so he was. A real troublemaker. But he didn’t deserve that. Not after what he went through in the trenches. Reds or not, none of them deserved to be shot for what happened.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said, nodding at Heinrich Grund. “Tell him.”

“He knows what I think,” said Tanker. He looked down at the girl’s body. “What was wrong with her leg, then?”

“Hardly matters now,” observed Grund.

“She might have had polio,” I said. “Or else she was a spastic.”

“You wouldn’t have thought they’d have let her out on her own, would you?” said Grund.

“She was crippled.” I bent down and went through the pockets of her coat. I came up with a roll of cash, wrapped in a rubber band. It was as thick as the handle of a tennis racket. I tossed it to Grund. “Plenty of disabled people manage perfectly well on their own. Even the kids.”

“Must be several hundred marks here,” he muttered. “Where does a kid like this get money like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Had to manage,” Tanker was saying. “The number of maimed and injured we had after the war. I used to have the beat next to the Charité Hospital. Got quite friendly with some of the lads who were there. A lot of them managed with no legs, or no arms.”

“It’s one thing being crippled for something that happened fighting for the Fatherland,” said Grund, tossing the roll of cash in his hand. “It’s something else when you’re born with it.”

“Meaning what, exactly?” I asked.

“Meaning that life’s difficult enough when you’re a parent without having to look after a disabled child.”

“Maybe they didn’t mind looking after her. Not if they loved her.”

“If you ask me, if she was a spastic she’s better off out of it,” said Grund. “Germany’s better off in general with fewer cripples around.” He caught the look in my eye. “No, really. It’s a simple matter of racial purity. We have to protect our stock.”

“I can think of one cripple we’d all be better off without,” I said.

Tanker laughed and walked away.

“Anyway, it’s only a caliper,” I said. “Lots of kids have calipers.”

“Maybe,” said Grund. He threw the money back. “But it’s not every kid that’s carrying several hundred marks.”

“Right. We’d better have a look around, before the site gets trampled over. See what we can find on our hands and knees with the flashlights.”

I dropped onto all fours and slowly crawled away from the body in the direction of Königs-Thor. Heinrich Grund did the same, a yard or two to my left. The night was warm, and the grass felt dry and smelled sweet under my hands. It was something we had done before. Something Ernst Gennat was keen on. Something that was in the manual he’d given us. How it was small things that solved murders: bullet casings, blood spots, collar buttons, cigarette ends, matchbooks, earrings, hanks of hair, party badges. Things that were large and easy to see were usually carried away from a crime scene. But the small stuff. That was different. It was the small stuff that could send a man to the guillotine. Nobody called them clues. Gennat hated that word.

“Clues are for the clueless,” was what the Full Ernst would tell us. “That’s not what I want from my detectives. Give me little spots of color on a canvas. Like that Frenchie who used to paint in little dots. Georges Seurat. Each dot means shit on its own. But when you take a few steps back and look at all of the dots together, you see a picture. That’s what I want you bastards to do. Learn how to paint me a picture like Georges Seurat.”

So there we were, me and Heinrich Grund, crawling along the grass in Friedrichshain Park, like a couple of dogs. The Berlin polenta trying to paint a picture.

If I had blinked, I might have missed it. As spots of color go, this one was as small as anything you might have seen on an Impressionist’s canvas, but just as colorful. At first glance I mistook it for a cornflower, because it was light blue, like the dead girl’s eyes. It was a pill, lying on top of a few blades of grass. I picked it up and held it up to my eyes and saw that it was as immaculate as a diamond, which meant it couldn’t have been there that long. There had been a brief shower of rain just after lunch, so it had to have fallen on the ground some time after that. A man hurrying back to the road from the fountains where he had dumped a body might easily have taken out a box of pills, fumbled it in his nervous state, and dropped one. Now all I had to do was find out what kind of pill it was.

“What have you got there, boss?”

“A pill,” I said, laying it on his palm.

“Kind of pill?”

“I’m not a chemist.”

“Want me to check it out at the hospital?”

“No. I’ll get Hans Illmann to do it.”

Illmann was professor of forensic medicine at the Institute for Police Science in Charlottenburg, and senior pathologist at the Alex. He was also a prominent member of the Social Democratic Party, the SDP. For this and other alleged character failings he had been frequently denounced by Goebbels in the pages of
Der Angriff,
Berlin’s Nazi newspaper. Illmann wasn’t Jewish, but as far as the Nazis were concerned, he was the next worst thing: a liberal-minded intellectual.

“Illmann?”

“Professor Illmann. Any objections?”

Grund looked up at the moon, as if trying to learn patience. The white light had turned his pale blond head a steely shade of silver, and his blue eyes became almost electric. He looked like some kind of machine-man. Something hard, metallic, and cruel. The head turned, and he stared at me as he might have stared at some poor opponent in the ring—an inadequate subspecies of man who was not fit to enter a contest with one such as him.

“You’re the boss,” he said, and dropped the pill back in my hand.

But for how much longer? I asked myself.

 

 

 

WE DROVE BACK to the Alex, which, with its cupolas and arched entranceways, was as big as a railway station and, behind the four-story brick façade, in the double-height entrance hall, very nearly as busy. All human life was in there. And quite a bit of pond life, too. There was a drunk with a black eye, who was unsteadily awaiting being locked up for the night; a taxi driver making a complaint about a passenger who had run off without paying; an androgynous-looking young man wearing tight white shorts, who was sitting quietly in a corner, checking his makeup in a hand mirror; and a bespectacled man with a briefcase in his hands and a livid red mark across his mouth.

At the bunker-sized front desk, we checked through a file containing a list of missing persons. The desk sergeant who was supposed to be assisting us had a big handlebar mustache and an eleven o’clock shadow that was so blue it made his face look like a housefly’s. This effect was enhanced, because his eyes were bulging out of his head at the sight of two tall boot girls a cop had shooed in off the street. They were wearing thigh-high black leather boots and red leather coats, which, thoughtfully, they had left undone, revealing to anyone who cared to look that they were wearing nothing underneath. One of them was carrying a riding crop that the arresting officer, a man with an eye patch—a man I knew, named Bruno Stahlecker—was having a hard job persuading her to give up. Clearly the girls had had a drink or two and probably quite a bit else besides, and, as I flicked through the missing-persons reports, half of me was listening to what Stahlecker and the girls were saying. It would have been hard not to hear it.

“I like a man in uniform,” said the taller of the leather-booted Amazons. She snapped her riding crop against her boot and then fingered the hair at the base of her belly, provocatively. “Which one of Berlin’s bulls wants to be my slave tonight?”

Boot girls were the city’s outdoor dominatrices. Mostly they worked west of Wittenbergplatz, near the Zoological Gardens, but Stahlecker had picked up this pair of whores in Friedrichstrasse after a man had complained of being beaten and robbed by two women in leather.

“Behave yourself, Brigit,” said Stahlecker. “Or I’ll throw the rules of the medical profession at you as well.” He turned to the man with the red mark on his face. “Are these the two women who robbed you?”

“Yes,” said the man. “One of them hit me across the face with a whip and demanded money or she’d hit me again.”

The girls loudly protested their innocence. Innocence never looked quite so venereal and corrupt.

Finally I found what I’d been looking for. “Anita Schwarz,” I said, showing Heinrich Grund the missing-persons report. “Aged fifteen. Behrenstrasse 8, flat 3. Report filed by her father, Otto. Disappeared yesterday. One meter, sixty centimeters tall, blond hair, blue eyes, caliper on left leg, carries a walking stick. That’s our girl, all right.”

But Grund was hardly paying attention. I thought he was looking at the free nude show. And leaving him to it, I went to one of the other filing cabinets and found a more detailed report. There was a star on the file and, next to it, a letter W. “It would seem that the deputy police president is taking an interest in our case,” I said. Inside the file was a photograph. Quite an old one, I thought. But there could be no doubt: it was the girl in the park. “Perhaps he knows the girl’s father.”

“I know that man,” murmured Grund.

“Who? Schwarz?”

“No. That man there.” Leaning back on the front desk, he flicked his snout at the man with the whip mark on his face. “He’s an alphonse.” “Alphonse” was Berlin criminal underworld slang for a pimp. One of many slang words for a pimp, like “louie,” “oiler,” “stripe man,” “ludwig,” and “garter-handler.” “Runs one of those bogus clinics off the Ku-damm. I think his racket is that he poses as a physician and then ‘prescribes’ an underage girl for his so-called patient.” Grund called out to Stahlecker. “Hey, Bruno? What’s the citizen’s name? The one wearing the spectacles and the extra smile.”

“Him? Dr. Geise.”

“Dr. Geise, my eggs. His real name is Koch, Hans Theodor Koch, and he’s no more a doctor than I am. He’s an alphonse. A medicine man who fixes old perverts up with little girls.”

The man stood up. “That’s a damn lie,” he said indignantly.

“Open his briefcase,” said Grund. “See if I’m wrong.”