by Ben Pastor
Bora remembered something. “I thought there was another world-famous clairvoyant murdered in town years ago?”
“Steinschneider the Jew, who went by ‘Hanussen’?” Grimm shook his head. “He wasn’t killed in Berlin. And when we found him near Zossen days later, you could hardly tell what had happened to him. The case remains unsolved.”
“Two victims in the same line of work: could we not be facing the same killer?”
“Begging pardon, Colonel. I don’t know what kind of experience you have with criminal investigations” – I shouldn’t even be here was on the tip of Bora’s tongue – “but it’s always tricky if one starts with a ready-made idea.”
“I believe I was given a ready-made list of four suspects,” Bora pointed out. Just then, something in the set of clippings relating to Niemeyer’s career drew his undivided attention, and he went quiet. What he singled out was a lengthy article signed “Kolo”. The night before, he’d noticed an “M. K.” listed among the highbrows who frequented Niemeyer between the wars; in both cases, it was likely to be Max Kolowrat, who often wrote under that pen name. Bora folded the cutting and pocketed it.
The bulk of the press material, filling a number of albums and folders, would take hours to sift through, adding to the dimension of his task. The articles he had in hand dated back to the 1920s and 1930s and were in no particular order, but showed just how many people had come in contact with the Weimar Prophet. Photographs accompanied written testimonials from celebrities (“Rosa Valetti and Gussy Hall, fresh from their successful cabaret shows”); others portrayed a tuxedoed Niemeyer at the Coq d’Or, at the Allaverdi and other Russian émigré haunts, with Ernst Kerek of “Jonny spielt auf” fame, and Duke Ellington at the time of his “Chocolate Kiddies” show. Even “HRH the former King of Albania” figured among those who, as Nebe put it, believed in the stars.
Every time Bora glanced up from the papers, his eyes met demolition, ruins and makeshift buildings, long queues and shabbily dressed girls. Weeds growing along the kerb. He obstinately kept to his reading until they reached Grünewald.
“Well,” he said then, “let’s have it. Ready-made or not, bring me up to date with the profiles of the four possible suspects.”
“With famous people, Colonel, there’s a queue of loonies who want them dead for some reason.” Grimm loosened the knot of his tie. “It was that way with the Jew Steinschneider, and it’s the same in this case. Most loonies would never act out their spite, or couldn’t if they wanted to. Three out of the four on your list, however, three at least, had access to the house.”
“Are you suggesting they could have let themselves in any time they pleased?”
“Two of them, definitely. A former lover – Ida Rüdiger, a hairdresser by trade, who kept a set of keys to the villa – and a well-heeled watchmaker named Eppner, whose wife spent more time with the victim than with him. She was apparently in the habit of slipping in through a back door conveniently left unlocked for her … but for my money, she had a key to it. Then there’s Kupinsky, a queer with a shady past who did the gardening for the magician. The last person of interest is Roland Glantz, publisher and proprietor of Sternuhr Verlag, whose business went under thanks to Niemeyer reneging on a deal he’d already been paid for.”
“But did the four of them have access to a hunting piece?”
“Let’s just say they all know how to shoot.”
“It’s not the same. I find it difficult to imagine a hairdresser or a book publisher —”
“Consider the fact that before the war the hairdresser habitually went hunting with her husband. The watchmaker belonged to a shooting club for years and served as fusilier in the Great War. Kupinsky’s communist father kept an arsenal for the Spartacists, in the old days, and as far as the book-man, when he had money he spent it on African safaris.” Aglow with perspiration, Grimm’s pink face looked like he was saying Well, how about that?
“Have they been brought in for questioning?”
“Not yet.”
“Who then collected enough material about Niemeyer to fill two boxes?”
“Those come from the villa. A good thing, too, that we took them along, because the library went up in smoke with the rest.”
“But the victim had a police record, correct?”
“Under his three aliases, correct.” When Grimm reached for a folder in the back seat, he revealed a glimpse of a concealed holster and the a sweat-stained shirt front. “Here it is.”
Bora looked through it. “It’s very slim. Some of the items are copies of the dossier I read overnight.”
“Not everything goes on file, Colonel.” Grimm’s expression suddenly precluded further questions.
But a scowl could only intimidate civilians under interrogation. Bora frowned back. “Not everyone goes on file, you mean. In the dossier I saw initials used in lieu of full names.”
“During the Republic, people with enough influence succeeded in never having their surnames entered in, or extracted from, police files. The file is as it was.”
Bora slipped the folder inside his briefcase. Great. I’ll have to work with a censored file. And I’m willing to bet that if Niemeyer had Party representatives among his recent clients, their names do not appear anywhere in these papers; they appear somewhere else, in dossiers out of my reach.
Aside from bomb damage to a church and the local post office, in Dahlem the war seemed to be far away. In order to reach their destination they had to drive past the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, where Uncle Alfred’s funeral had taken place; Bora had read in the morning paper that a physics lecture by Professor Heisenberg, entitled “What are the stars?”, was scheduled for the following day. Somehow the topic seemed singularly appropriate to his task. Grimm drove on until they reached a shady lane. Despite its name, there were no cedar trees along Lebanonzederpfad, it was just one of those labels applied to affluent residential developments; signs at street corners recalled exotic flora that ranged from sumac to date palms. The chain that usually denied cars access to the lane hung limply at the side. When Bora rolled down the Opel’s window, a balmy air wafted into the car from among the trees. The season seemed mute compared to the Italian summer – without that endless song of the cicadas, which across the southern wilds gave the almost painful impression of a whistling in one’s ears. He listened closely but could only hear crickets, and swallows chirping as they swept low over the fastidiously trimmed hedges.
“You’ll see, there’s nothing left,” Grimm insisted.
According to a Junggeselle article Bora had read overnight, Niemeyer’s villa had been built nearly fifteen years earlier, in expensive Polish lumber from the Białowieża forest. The exterior, constructed with utmost precision, was devoid of nails. Iron had been proscribed inside, too, if the woman columnist was telling the truth: “As was done in the temples of the ancient gods,” she wrote, quoting the proprietor’s boast. Instead, bronze, copper and silver took the place of iron.
All else was wood – perfect for a blaze. And it was true, there was nothing left. Through the windscreen, Bora saw a building razed to its concrete foundations. Rather isolated from the other residences, the layout of the grounds indicated that a driveway had once led behind the structure; tall shrubs and a garage at the rear would have ensured complete privacy for the owner and his guests.
Grimm opened the car door and hauled his bulk out from behind the wheel. The fire, he said, had devastated eighty per cent, at least, of the building; the rest had been demolished and carted off for reuse or landfill. With the photos of the scene of the crime in his hand, Bora walked up the footpath and looked around. Judging from the scorched greenery skirting the perimeter of the walls, the blaze had been impossible to quench. Not surprisingly, perhaps: the Junggeselle article described furnishings of highly perishable materials: rattan chairs and Tibetan prayer flags made of paper, and everywhere silk hangings, wooden prayer wheels, straw mats and gauzy curtains. Still, an entire mansion had gone. Had he no
t known how difficult it was to secure fuel of any kind, Bora would have suspected foul play.
“Is there a thorough report by the fire service?” he asked.
“The flames started in a pipe in the gas fireplace, Colonel. All you need is a spark. With air raids every other day, damaged pipes frequently cause conflagrations. It’s routine.”
“Of course, phosphorus dissolved in carbon disulphide would do the trick too.”
“Why? If the killer wanted to, he could have burned the place down right after the murder. The house was empty.”
“The Reichstag was empty, too, when it caught fire, Inspector. Please secure a copy of the fire sergeant’s report.”
Bora crossed what had once been the threshold, and was soon straddling a collapsed granite pillar, roughly hewn to represent a troll or other misshapen giant. In the images illustrating the Junggeselle article, it originally shouldered the vaulted roof of a vast, fern-filled hall. A cartouche reading “A POSSE AD ESSE”, which used to be visible over the pillar, had gone along with the rest. The floor surface was the size of at least three tennis courts. No wonder that Niemeyer’s motto was “From ‘it is possible’ to ‘it is’”. Drops of molten lead and glass were all that remained of what, according to Bora’s sources, had been three large Jugendstil windows. Transferred here from a Viennese hotel Aryanized in 1938, they had once faced the mystical east.
The scene of the crime could not teach him much, Grimm was right. He stood there watching Bora, elbows out, his thumbs in his waistband and that brash tie of his looking like the last night’s dinner puked up.
“In five days’ time,” he called out, “with the authorities’ blessing, our zealous Berliners picked the place clean. They’d removed the still useable stone and tile flooring as late as yesterday. See how they swept the ground afterwards: you can eat off it. Down there,” he added, pointing to a small heap of rubble, “there was a hearth you could fit a dinner table in. On the mantel, the magician kept an urn with his mother’s ashes. As I said, it was a gas fireplace, so when it blew up it caused the whole upstairs to cave in. Went up like a match. I arrived after the fire engine, and such flames were shooting out of the windows, the men couldn’t even get close. There, see? That spot over there is more or less where the corpse lay when I saw it. If you look at the photos, you’ll see the hall was a cross-beamed space in the middle of the villa, from which you could climb upstairs. The bathroom used to be there, where you see pipes sticking out. The tub was half-filled with soapy water when I found the victim.” Grimm gestured to the screen of leafy garden plants, still coated in powdery grey. “By now Mama’s ashes must be scattered all over the neighbourhood.”
“So the bathroom was on the ground floor. If the victim heard a noise, he only had to step out of the tub to meet his killer. The garage was in the back?”
“Yes, separate from the house. It was rickety and they had to tear it down, along with a small storage shed. Luckily the cars inside the garage survived, and have been requisitioned. Because of the limitations on fuel, three of them hadn’t been driven for some time. There were five in all.”
The back of the grounds, beyond the driveway and the garage, overlooked a small artificial lake surrounded by birches. Its surface was overgrown with water hyacinths – they may have purposely let them spread these days, to hide the shimmering water from the planes.
Bora walked over to it. Grimm followed.
“We dredged it in search of weapons, but no results. Well, not exactly no results. We found the wreck of a Duesenberg Model J car, with the remains of two greyhounds inside it. Ah, and those of a Negro as well. American licence plate, under water for the past ten years at least.” He squinted in the sunlight. “The detail seemed odd, until we learned that in the old days some Negros had rented a place down the street, during the tour of their revue A Bird in the Bush. So raunchy, the show was, that we eventually shut it down. I read about that Duesenberg. It cost a fortune, more than a plot of land with a house on it and everything. And a Negro owner was driving it!”
“And the neighbours? Didn’t anyone hear the shots?”
“No. You’ve seen how large these places are. The other houses are made of brick and stone – they have thick walls and proprietors who love their privacy. They certainly can afford it. Cash is so plentiful in these parts, the premises are still occupied by single families.”
They had retraced their steps to the middle of the ground floor when a silver-haired woman, in elegant linen trousers and blazer, interrupted her constitutional to stare at them from the edge of Niemeyer’s garden.
“Do you have permission to be there?” she demanded to know.
When Grimm pulled back his coat to show the police badge, she raised a jewelled hand, hunched over a little and turned her head as she walked away, to signal that it was all right then, and no longer of interest.
“Lives next door,” the policeman told Bora in an undertone. “Name’s Wirth. Her husband’s an administrative bigwig at the Charité lunatic ward.”
The surname was not new to Bora. Under Max de Crinis, Gero Wirth led the cadre of politically engaged hospital administrators who had allied against his uncle and embittered his final years. “Wait here,” he told Grimm, and caught up with the old woman as she strolled to a sprawling house buried among tree roses.
“A word with you, Frau Wirth.”
She ignored Bora, and carried on walking until she’d reached her garden gate. Only when her hand was on the latch did she glance back. “I’ve spoken to the police. I have nothing to add.”
Typical. War and hardship hadn’t affected this area enough to make these professionals, Party upstarts and commercial parvenus any less arrogant. No evacuees huddled in these attics and basements! Bora could have imposed himself on her by taking Grimm along. Instead, he decided to follow Frau Wirth across the lawn; as she let herself into the house, he inserted his cavalryman’s build into the doorway so that she couldn’t shut the door on him.
Not that he gained much from the tetchy answers he received. The neighbours had seen little of Professor Magnusson lately – “But doesn’t everyone mind his own business these days?”; before the end of 1942, during the days of his grand parties, countless luxury cars with distinguished plates would be parked up and down the street. “We were always invited. But you understand – my husband is an eminent scientist, and has a reputation to uphold.”
“Do you mean you continued to receive invitations from him, despite the fact that you always turned them down?”
“Until the end of ’42, yes. After Stalingrad fell, the lavish parties became scarce, and then ceased altogether. I’m sure he saw clients and friends, women especially. At least three of them committed suicide because of him. Professor Magnusson was a fascinating man.”
Fascinating? Perhaps Frau Wirth had been tempted to attend the gatherings, and only her husband’s position at the Charité had kept her from it. Though clearly annoyed by the interview, she was enough of a gossip to tell a colonel what she might have kept from a Party minion.
“As everyone knows, he was deeply cultured: only not very scientific. He was Swedish, and a Swedenborgian scholar, you see. If you’ve read his books on mysticism you can’t help but appreciate the depth of his understanding.”
She was surprised by Bora’s lack of reaction. Why, wasn’t he familiar with them? Where had he been? Everyone across Germany had devoured the essays. “Especially the treatise on the runic symbolism of the Round Table.”
“That has nothing to do with Swedenborg.”
Her dismissive tutting was meant to put him in his place. “How can you know, if you haven’t read Magnusson?”
“I’ve read Swedenborg.”
“Anyway, as I told the police, neither Dr Wirth nor I heard anything unusual on the night of the crime. With all those horrible Russians and Poles and Italians creeping around in the dark, we don’t stay away from the windows. When the blaze started in the dead of night, two days later, we
saw the glare through the shutters. Dr Wirth phoned the fire station … but not immediately.”
“Why not?”
“Because every day this spring a car would linger for hours on end in different shaded spots in our neighbourhood, so naturally we assumed that Professor Magnusson was under government protection.”
Or surveillance, Bora thought.
“Still, to be on the safe side Dr Wirth decided to do his duty and give the alarm anyway. After all, the breeze was blowing in our direction. That is all.”
Judging from the annoyance in her voice, she was about to give him a terse Will you go now? However, what she said instead, eyeing him up and down, was: “Are you from around here? You look as though you might be from around here.”
Bora did not care to be accepted as a suitable member of this exclusive neighbourhood. “I’m not,” he answered drily. “But I knew Dr Reinhardt-Thoma, over on Dohnenstieg.”
A pause, then a reticent little smile. “Ah. The doctor with a son in America.” Her tone was colder now, which Bora had fully expected. “He passed away.”
Those bourgeois euphemisms. Only privileged civilians could indulge in them these days. “Yes, he died last week. Your husband must have known him.”
All at once, reticence became defensiveness. “Well, not really. They were colleagues; it’s not the same thing.” Guessing from Bora’s straight face where he stood, politically, she added, “No religious funeral,” with a virtuous shake of the head. “Not even his adopted daughter was present. Dr Wirth only attended because he and the others had to. The last thing anyone would expect was for the authorities to give him such a send-off, given the bed that Reinhardt-Thoma had made himself and slept in for years.”
“I’m sure my uncle preferred it to sleeping in bad company, Frau Wirth.”
Bora watched her blush. He stepped back enough for her to think that she could shut the door in his face, so when his steel-capped boot blocked the door she panicked.