by Ben Pastor
When he returned to the car – parked in the shade, Grimm standing next to it with the knot of his tie loosened and a lit Trommler in his mouth – Bora was once more master of his nerves, and had made up his mind about the next step.
“Did you get through, Colonel?”
“I did, thank you.”
“Roadblock’s been cleared.”
“Good.”
Before they resumed their way, Bora stored the briefcase he so seldom parted with in the boot of the car.
At the intersection with Braunauer soon thereafter, he prevented Grimm from asking where they should be heading. “You know,” he said in a conversational tone, all too aware that his aggression longed to find a target, “I am re-evaluating some of my ideas about the case. You and I may still have some doubts about Glantz’s guilt, but the fact remains that he confessed.”
“That’s what I think, too.”
“But there’s a possibility we’ve disregarded so far.”
Grimm looked over at him. “Are you thinking of the watchmaker?”
“No.”
Emmy is travelling away from Berlin. Before nightfall, we could all be hanged. How many times had he chosen to keep colleagues and co-workers (or prisoners being interrogated) in suspense, with his way of hinting and not telling?
Grimm was too shrewd to fall for it. “Well, Colonel, if you have someone in mind, out with it. We’ve been at this for a while.”
“I was thinking that we’ve kept Gustav Kugler out of the list of suspects.”
“Kugler? What does Kugler have to do with it?”
“I’m not sure. I’m simply considering the possibility of his involvement, that’s all.”
“Excuse me, but I fail to see how he could be involved. Aside from Glantz, remember that Kupinsky disappeared from circulation. Considering that he breached his probation, the queer must have had a good motive for scampering off.”
“I agree.”
“And if he didn’t jump into the river, Colonel, then he’s holing up somewhere. As a matter of fact, if he’s hiding, for whatever reason, I think I know where to find him.”
“You do? Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Because I thought Kupinsky was the drowned fellow.”
As far as Bora was concerned, the best thing would be for Kupinsky not to surface at all. Once in the hands of justice, he could prattle nearly as dangerously as Salomon. It might be wise to follow Grimm’s lead.
“Enlighten me.”
Grimm spoke of a once famous hideaway used during the chaos at the end of the Republic. “Reactionaries and communists kept visiting it off and on even afterwards, and later it became an occasional shelter for Jews and other kinds of criminals.”
“Why don’t you tear it down, then?”
“It stands on the grounds of an old imperial estate; folks from the art school or whatever kept us from demolishing it. We nailed the entrances shut, but you know how these things go. You can’t control every inch of the territory.”
“Let’s go, then.”
“I should tell you it’s a ways out of Berlin.”
“Do we have enough fuel?”
“As for that, we do, plus an extra can in the back.”
The Köpenick area, enclosed by long lakes and the meandering river, had long been a mecca for vacationers. Before her marriage, whenever she was in Berlin Dikta used to come boating here with Willy from Hamburg. Puschkin Allee had kept its charm; the villas and summer bungalows deep in their green gardens, thus far spared by war, belonged to a different planet. But Bora’s was a soldier’s view of the world. In this or that large house, he anticipated the setting up of a German (or enemy) command post; in the monuments – one the solemn and ugly Bismarck Keep – he saw landmarks to dismantle before Russian infantrymen used them to orientate themselves. The peaceful vistas only spoke to him of war.
As for the Reds’ hideaway that had galvanized Grimm’s interest, it was in fact an eighteenth-century observatory at the edge of the old Köpenick forest. The place was appropriately (and literally) called Sternwarte, a lookout for the stars. Generally, Grimm said, they called it the Tower, because such was its aspect. More than anything, it resembled a stubby belfry with ornate and pointless late baroque string courses.
How many constellations the amateur astronomers of two centuries earlier had hoped to survey in the foggy climate of Brandenburg, it was hard to fathom. Perhaps the building had merely been an Italian-style capriccio, allowing its visitors to gaze at the horizon, at the red-roofed, tall-domed skyline of old Berlin.
It sat isolated in a deforested area, bordering a property of the type broken up into smaller estates at the end of the eighteenth century, and possibly turned into public space after the Great War.
It belonged to a hunting lodge, rather than a chateau, on which an enemy bomber – back from a raid with one of his engines on fire – had randomly dropped the load still stored in the belly of his plane. This, Grimm explained with some satisfaction, had not saved the pilot. He pointed the skeleton of its fuselage out to Bora, already half-buried in wild creepers. At the far end of a long patch of cleared land, from here it seemed an elongated, humpbacked ridge.
Of the hunting lodge, only the ruined walls remained. Neatly cut ashlar and other architectural fragments had been hurled more than half a mile all around the crash site. Bora did not doubt that the observatory, long abandoned, served all kinds of rendezvous. The political ones were probably not in the majority. Given its nearness to the shore of the lake and the moorings for leisure boats, it’d been – and most likely still was – a haven for quickies, not necessarily between members of the opposite sex.
“The entrance seems to be barred,” Bora said, preceding Grimm towards the construction. “There’s a window in the rear we could climb through.”
As it turned out, the window, too, was nailed shut. Bora, who out of habit didn’t like having someone standing behind him, stepped aside so that he could watch the policeman’s shoulders.
“Kupinsky would never be able to scale the structure to the second-floor opening, and the grid wouldn’t let him through.”
Standing knee-high in tall weeds which had evidently not been disturbed in days, Grimm grumbled, “Waste of time.”
In the ruins of the hunting lodge, they did find traces of recent occupation: the ash of small fires lit in the nooks of the walls, discarded prophylactics and human excrement. Grimm looked around with his nose to the ground, flipping this or that rock with his toe, as if someone could be hiding underneath it. The sole object of any interest – but useless to their search – was a handsome metal plaque with the Köpenick municipality’s seal on it: two fish facing right and left of the key of St Peter, with the seven stars of the Pleiades. Whatever it’d been nailed to once, bombs had yanked it out without destroying it.
11
As above, so below.
SAYING ATTRIBUTED TO HERMES TRISMEGISTUS
1:45 P.M.
It was close to two in the afternoon by the time they resumed the trip towards Berlin, after a stop in Marienhain to have a bite and secure some bottled water. Then Grimm remembered that they had recently caught runaways and other undesirables in a raid in nearby Rotberg. It turned out to be another wild goose chase; and that’s how they found themselves on a lonely gravel road under a pitiless, vertical sun, still outside Berlin, with only a railway crossing for company.
Grimm was pouring water into the radiator. On both sides of the road stretched rapeseed fields just past their bloom, which must have seemed like a pale golden sea two months ago. Bora didn’t know where they were, or how far out of the city. He forced himself to control his breathing, slowing it down to calm himself as he used to do before school tests and horse trials. As he relaxed he grew hot, but strangely not hot enough to break out in a sweat. It seemed centuries since he’d sat across from his mother at the Adlon, and since Willy Osterloh had insulted him (though not nearly as much as Duckie had, later). Emmy woul
d soon be far away from him, and not only physically. The Italian front seemed furthest away of all, in time as well as space.
When Grimm had ensconced himself once more behind the wheel, Bora casually said, “Honestly, Inspector, if we weren’t colleagues in this investigation I’d begin to suspect that you’ve taken me far away from Berlin in order to get rid of me.”
Grimm had been busy blotting the sweat from his face before starting the car. He must have heard Bora, because his eyelids flickered. But for a moment he didn’t look at the officer.
“Is this a joke?” he said then, neither turning towards Bora nor addressing him by his rank. “If this is a joke …” But he remained sitting there, without starting the motor.
Bora smiled, giving the impression of half-joking camaraderie. “Well, I sensed that my mentioning Kugler offended you. I understand, we all feel a certain esprit de corps. Of course, I would be well advised to fall into line with the idea of Glantz’s guilt. We have his weapon and his signed confession, and he’s destined to lose his head anyway. Between you and me, though, I believe that your ancient colleague could be the real culprit.”
“Now that’s a joke.”
“Why? He was watching the victim for some time, and knew his routine, and given his profession I imagine that he knew how to pick a lock without anyone seeing him.”
Even without closing his eyes, Bora could imagine Emmy’s clean scent of sweet almonds.
“Last night, things became clear to me. Kugler could definitely have killed Niemeyer. Not with the Drilling rifle we recovered, of course, but with a comparable weapon, of the same calibre – say, a Mauser G98 of the GeCa or GeHo type, modified into a twelve-gauge, common in the Weimar days – but one which we may never find. Unfortunately, his death leads us into a blind alley, which we can only get out of by going back the way we came.”
As Grimm listened, a thick odour of sweat rose from his body; its sourness, however, was different from the one it’d had on previous days, or even that very morning, and it had nothing to do with the exertion of changing a tyre. Insecurity and fear give sweat an acrid quality. Whatever his thoughts were, he brooded on them as he tapped the steering wheel. Bora remained on this side of friendliness but kept an eye on the glove compartment, where he knew the policeman stored a second gun.
“I don’t know about that,” Grimm said all of a sudden, after sitting there for a while like a volcano about to explode. “Come to think of it, it is a possibility. As you say, we have Glantz’s confession, though in a way it would make sense if the Rüdiger woman were behind it. She hired Gustl Kugler, and even if he lost his life in an accident, we’ve got her. The thing is, what with her friends in high places and good lawyers and all, she may be untouchable. I see why you’d go with Glantz. But I thought you said you would not present the chief with a merely convenient solution.”
“Sometimes we have to say things we don’t mean.”
That was the extent of Bora’s reply. Grimm, who had expected specifics and received none, leaned back in the driver’s seat as far as his frame allowed. Bora watched him attentively as he took a pack of Trommler from the glove compartment, pulled out a cigarette and put it in his mouth. With a nod, he asked Bora if he would care for one, and Bora said yes.
Outside, the daylight was blinding, yet at the same time washed out; it was too hot for birds or insects to chirp in the rapeseed fields. There was a solitude that both men remembered from Russia. They smoked in a leisurely way, looking away from each other like two people who find themselves in a confined space without having anything to talk about. Grimm stared at a spot somewhere between himself and the fly-spattered windscreen. Bora gazed out of the window without taking in any landmarks or other details. It was like looking into an oven, yet he felt something like a vein of ice forming inside him. He remembered a quarter in the outskirts of Kharkov, inhabited by artists after the October Revolution; his father’s old lover spying on him from behind a silk screen. It was in her garden that he had stopped to chat with her Russian maid, the young widow whose upper lip was so prettily beaded with perspiration. It was in her garden that he had killed in cold blood.
Even with the windows open, he could smell the reek coming from the whale-bodied Grimm; but he didn’t hold his breath. He had a hunter’s instinct, even if he had never hunted animals. Or perhaps not, he told himself. I have a predator’s instinct. The fact that I am occasionally mistaken for prey does not change things.
Tossing the still burning cigarette butt out of the window, Grimm took up the conversation again. “I don’t know how you could ever prove Kugler’s involvement, Colonel. If it really happened as you say, I’d be curious to hear how you came to such a conclusion.”
Bora leaned forwards to extinguish what remained of his cigarette under the sole of his boot.
“I’m suggesting that it wasn’t Ida Rüdiger who hired Kugler – or, rather, that she did not hire him to do what he did.”
That was all the explanation he gave.
Grimm was losing patience. “Well?” he snapped, “Christ, I’ve been driving you around for days all over Berlin, looking for a solution. I believe I have a right —”
“I will present a complete report only to the chief.”
“But I don’t get it. Any one of the four suspects, the queer included, is a better candidate than Kugler!” Grimm cleared his throat, and kept frowning at that spot somewhere between himself and the windscreen. “Anyhow, Kugler is dead. Without a motive, a weapon or a murderer who can be prosecuted, you have nothing. An expert policeman like SS Group Leader Nebe will never accept that.”
“Somehow I’m convinced that Chief Nebe will hear out my hypothesis.”
“Whatever makes you think that?”
“Let’s just say that I am further along in this investigation than you think, Inspector. It is a known fact,” Bora added, though it was something of an exaggeration, “that in the Weimar days Gustav Kugler did the quick-and-dirty work for the establishment.”
Grimm forced a laugh. “Is that what you meant by ‘moonlighting’? I don’t know where you dug up that story, but you still lack a motive – the ABC of police work!”
“As for that, I believe the motive was unknown to Kugler and to the man sent after Kugler to clean things up. Selbstreinigungsaktion – ‘cleaning up after oneself’ – isn’t that what they call it?”
“This is pure nonsense. With great respect, Colonel, I can’t begin to think why the chief chose an outsider like you for this job … You’re just scrambling for ideas.”
It seemed to Bora as if he could touch death if he reached out his hand, and he felt unspeakably serene. “Why didn’t you tell me that there was another version of the post-mortem? I know there was, I read it.”
“So what? You read that Niemeyer had the Jewish cut done on his dick? Glantz told us that too. It was decided to omit the detail because he’d been so popular in political circles – there’d be a scandal if word got round.”
“That was the one point that got my attention, actually.” The friendly expression on Bora’s face remained unchanged. “I should have paid more attention to the other omitted detail: the cut on Niemeyer’s face. I don’t believe that he struck his jaw on that tacky brass elephant when he fell. I think he was surprised in his own home, defended himself, and his assailant punched him. When he staggered back, he was shot at close range with a twelve-gauge slug capable of slaying big game. The second round was unnecessary – he was already lying dead on the floor.”
“Surely you read in the post-mortem that his blood was found on the brass elephant?”
“Please! You’re a professional. A practised killer only needed to dip two fingers in the blood and smear the sharp angle of an object to account for the injury.” Bora took a deep breath. “If, as you said, Gustl Kugler’s moonlighting days were over, that is not to say that yours are. What if I tell General Nebe that Kugler did it and you cleaned up after him, like in the old days?”
“Wh
at? You can’t be serious! You forget I’m an official in the Criminal Police. I never even met Ida Rüdiger before this investigation!”
“It’s interesting that you should point this out, instead of denying that you killed Gustav Kugler.”
“Enough is enough. If this is not just idle talk, I won’t stand for it, Colonel von Bora!”
“Which is not a denial.”
Grimm flushed angrily and blasphemed, something that never failed to annoy Bora. “What’s got into your army head? I did not kill Kugler. Kugler was a has-been, killed by some whoring husband in a back alley. Admit it, Colonel, you’re at your wits’ end and haven’t the faintest idea of who killed Niemeyer.”
“But I do.”
“Of course – Kugler.”
“No. I said he could have done it. His guilt is plausible; his death points to there being an organizing mind behind it all. The alternative is that you did it. Either way, from my point of view the only snag is that you cannot provide me with any useful details. You were simply following orders.”
“Now you’ve overstepped the mark.”
“And what will you do – shoot me? That’ll take some explaining to General Nebe!”
Lightning-quick for a fat man, Grimm swept out the gun from under his coat, only to feel, by its weight, that it must have been emptied – including the round in the chamber – while he changed the tyre. He then reached for the reserve Mauser HSc in the glove compartment; discovering that this, too, was empty, he dug into his pocket for his PPK. Bora let him.
“Inspector, isn’t it enough that you had to play the role of the man who sweeps up after the horse parade? I’ve done it myself, and it’s no fun even when you’re told why. That’s how things stand. That is the low opinion they have of you. You could shoot me and toss me in a ditch, but I am not exactly a Russian peasant, or a former pal, or an illusionist who once pretended to be a Jew. If you shoot me, you’ll have no excuse for your superior, who entrusted me to you. You could run, hide, kill yourself. But you could never go back to Alexanderplatz.”