by Philip Kerr
—Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang from a screenplay by Thea von Harbou
BERLIN’S SUMMER FINALLY arrived in earnest and the city bloomed with light and shrugged off its greasy loden overcoat. Lovers sat on five-penny benches in the Tiergarten not far from Apollo, who stared at his stringless stone lyre and wondered impotently what to play for them. On Sundays, workers in their thousands took an S-Bahn train to the white sandy beaches of Wannsee. One day I went myself and you couldn’t see the beach for the people, so that it was hard to make out where the sand ended and the water began; they paddled their dirty feet in the warm shallow water before returning home to the gray eastern slums, their faces pink from the sun, their sweating bellies full of sausage and sauerkraut and beer. Pleasure steamers headed noisily down the Spree to Grünau and Heidesee, and the statue of Victoria at the top of Berlin’s victory column blazed in the bright sunlight like a fiery angel as if it had come to announce some new apocalypse.
At the Alex, we paid lip service to summer by calling in the painters and plasterers, by hosing down the basement cells and leaving the upper-floor windows ajar all day, allowing the air to blow away some of the gloom and the stink of tobacco smoke and perspiration. But it never lasted very long. A cage is still a cage however wide open you leave the doors, and it always stinks of the animals who’ve been kept there: murderers, thieves, gartersnappers, queers, grasshoppers, control girls, drug addicts, alcoholics, wife beaters, and gangsters. But mostly just cops. No one smells worse than us.
There’s something about a big Police Praesidium on a broiling summer’s night; it’s easy to think that crime kicks off its tight shoes and takes a holiday like the rest of Berlin, but that would be a mistake. It’s never the cold that brings out the worst in people, it’s the heat. If you can call them people: the sick, venal, lowlife that lies oozing at the bottom of the strata we are wont to call Berlin society. Sometimes I had the strong idea that George Grosz was right and I was wrong; that he was only recording what was already there: the indifferent fat bankers, the crippled veterans, the mutilated beggars, and the dead prostitutes—that this was how we really were, ugly and obscene, hypocritical and callous.
But there’s always something new in this job that surprises you. Something that throws you off guard, such as the kind of murder you never expected to see because naïvely you thought you’d seen everything. That’s what happened in the long hot summer of 1928.
It was on a day when public interest in Winnetou was at its highest that everything changed abruptly and, almost overnight, a very different sort of killer took his place in the febrile imagination of the metropolis. One moment the Kripo’s Murder Commission was investigating Eva Angerstein’s killing, and the next it seemed as if she and Winnetou’s other unfortunate victims had never existed. For a while I tried to keep a discreet handle on the case but it was to no avail. The orders came from the very top.
One day Bernhard Weiss found himself summoned to a meeting at the Ministry of Justice on the Wilhelmstrasse, where he was told, in no uncertain terms, that the Murder Commission was to lay off the Winnetou murders and devote all its energies to catching the man the press had dubbed “Dr. Gnadenschuss,” which was how he had represented himself in the letter he’d sent to all the city’s newspapers. In it, he had claimed responsibility for these latest murders while also mocking the Berlin police and, in particular, the Murder Commission. And since those present at the meeting included the minister of justice, Hermann Schmidt; the minister of the interior, Albert Grzesinski; and the ViPoPra, Karl Zörgiebel, Weiss had little choice but to bite his lip and comply with his orders. It was as if someone had overheard my conversation at dinner with Thea von Harbou. The word from the Wilhelmstrasse was that almost nobody in government gave a damn about a few dead grasshoppers—not when there was a killer at large deemed to be of much greater political importance. Our government and politicians had deemed what Dr. Gnadenschuss was doing to be a disgrace to the Republic, and catching him was now to be the Murder Commission’s top priority. Meanwhile, Police Colonel Magnus Heimannsberg, who was also briefed in the same meeting, had his uniformed boys in Schupo advise Berlin’s prostitutes to stay off the streets or to sell it at their own risk.
As it happened, Magnus Heimannsberg knew a lot more about risk than he did about prostitutes, at least the female ones. According to Gennat, he lived with a handsome police major called Walther Encke, in an apartment on Apostel-Paulus-Strasse, in Berlin Schöneberg. Which probably also explained why he was not one of the Republic’s great police reformers. But he was very popular with the common patrolmen by virtue of the fact he’d started his career at the bottom of the ladder and also was totally apolitical, which is to say he was a staunch republican, like me. Neither a communist nor a Nazi, he was interested only in the welfare of the men whom he commanded and he suffered a lot of fools gladly in a way that Weiss would never have countenanced. There was no love lost between these two senior officers but they both agreed on the importance of avoiding any further national scandal, and of avenging the published insult to the Berlin police by capturing this Dr. Gnadenschuss as soon as possible.
* * *
—
WHAT OTHER NATIONS called the coup de grâce, we Germans called the Gnadenschuss: a single shot to the head that puts a badly injured man out of his misery. Except that the men to whom this dubious mercy was accorded on the streets of Berlin in broad daylight in 1928 had been severely injured more than a decade before. All these new murder victims were disabled war veterans, half-men on cripple-carts who for years had been begging for coins in front of the city’s S-Bahn stations. The victims were men who couldn’t run away. The first three were shot through the head at point-blank range with a .25-caliber pistol in less than a week; the small-caliber shot was barely heard above the noise of the trains in the station overhead. And in the case of two of the victims, it took several hours before anyone noticed they were dead, such was the commonplace status of these disabled veterans and the almost silent method by which they had been dispatched.
We case-reviewed these three killings in Gennat’s office: Weiss, Heller, Gennat, Otto Trettin, and me, with Frau Künstler typing up the transcript of what was said. Trettin had just returned after a length of time at a local sanatorium, which meant we were at last back to full strength.
“Take Otto through the facts as we know them, Bernie,” said Weiss. “He can read the files later.”
“The first victim was Werner Schlichter,” I said. “Age thirty-six, with no family that we know of. Formerly a sergeant with the 180th Infantry. Took a bullet in the spine in 1916 at the Battle of the Somme, which left him paralyzed from the waist down. A Berliner, he’d been a gardener at the Botanical Garden in Dahlem before the war. More recently he lived in the Salvation Army hostel on Müllerstrasse. His body was found near the railway station at Wedding, just south of Nettelbeckplatz, on June 6. He’d been shot once through the forehead in broad daylight at close range with a .25-caliber automatic. There was no used brass found at the scene, which means the killer felt confident enough to pick it up and take it away with him. The body was found by a schoolteacher from the Lessing Gymnasium on Pankstrasse—a Herr Kesten. A veteran himself, he’d spoken to Schlichter on previous occasions, when he put a few coins in the man’s cap. Except that on this occasion, the cap was on the dead man’s head, covering the bullet wound, instead of lying on his thigh, where it could more usefully collect coins. Again, it’s assumed that it was the killer who put the man’s cap on his head. Still on Schlichter’s army tunic were the Honor Cross with Swords and a German Imperial Wound Badge, black grade, and in his pockets were several marks. The Salvation Army commander at the hostel is a man called Harfensteller, also an army veteran, who said that Schlichter kept to himself and had no particular friends or enemies that he could think of. Before going on the streets to beg he had worked at the Oskar-Helene Home here in Berlin but apparently he didn’t care for
the regime there and left.”
“Nobody saw anything?” asked Trettin.
“Not a thing,” I said, and handed Trettin the photograph taken by Hans Gross. From the picture it was easy to see why the murder had gone unnoticed for several hours; Schlichter was seated on his klutz cart and looked to all the world as if he was asleep; the entry wound resembled nothing more than a small carbuncle on his forehead.
“Why didn’t he like the Oskar-Helene?” asked Trettin.
“I’ll come back to that in a minute.”
Otto Trettin was a good detective but, like Kurt Reichenbach, he was at times a little bit heavy-handed; he’d once been attacked by two thugs from a criminal ring called Apache Blood and had put both men in hospital, with one losing an eye. He was not a man to tangle with. He’d also been rapped over the knuckles by Gennat for fiddling his expenses. He was said to be working with another detective on a book about famous Berlin murder cases. A moneymaker, perhaps; all of us were interested in making a little extra money, of course. Even Bernhard Weiss had recently published a book, Police and Politics. Somewhat dull, it didn’t have much appeal to the general public and it was bruited that one or two Berlin coppers hadn’t liked what he had to say about them in print. Gennat was also rumored to be working on a book. Sometimes I thought I was the only detective in the Commission who wasn’t planning a separate career as a writer.
“Thirty-six hours later,” I said, “we found the second victim: Oskar Heyde, age forty. The body was underneath the Friedrichstrasse station bridge. He’d been shot twice through the head at close range. Originally a businessman from Silesia, he joined the Fiftieth Reserve Division as an infantry lieutenant and was badly injured at the Third Battle of Ypres in September 1917, when he was blown up by a British mine, which cost him both legs and the sight in his left eye. For which he was awarded the Iron Cross. After the war he went to live with his brother Gustav in Potsdam, but the brother lost everything in the inflation and killed himself. Heyde then went to the Oskar-Helene Home, but he didn’t care for the regime either, and left soon afterward, since when he was on the street. Again, the body was undisturbed for several hours before anyone noticed anything suspicious.”
“So what is it with the Oskar-Helene?” asked Trettin.
I looked at Weiss. “Boss? Perhaps you’d like to take that question.”
Weiss removed his pince-nez, relit his cigar, and leaned back in his chair. “Gunther and I visited the home, which is in Berlin-Zehlendorf, the day before yesterday,” he said. “It was most informative. And utterly depressing. Quite the most depressing experience I’ve had in a long time. It’s my opinion that those who run it represent everything that’s wrong with modern Germany. The place is under the control of two doctors, Konrad Biesalski and Hans Wurtz, who have very definite, not to say inflexible, ideas on rehabilitation and social integration. They believe hard work is the only true cure for an injured man’s maladies; that a man who remains work-shy and dependent on society demonstrates ‘a crippled soul’ and is constitutionally deficient to the extent of being degenerate. Frankly, they leave nothing for a man’s pride, even half a man, with half a face, as was the case with several of the men we encountered.
“I don’t doubt that their intentions are good. But it seems to me that not every man who was badly injured is capable of work. If you submit to their regime and become a morally healthy, curable cripple, then you agree to be retrained and to become a useful member of society, or at least society as it is perceived by these two doctors. If you don’t, you find yourself classed as a feeble-minded, morally unhealthy, incurable invalid; more important, you put yourself beyond any financial compensation for war-related suffering.”
“Jesus,” muttered Trettin.
“Effectively, they’re both eugenicists, which is to say that the logical conclusion of their theories is nothing short of euthanasia, according to which, men who won’t work are not only a burden on society, but are psychopathic, unpatriotic, and unworthy of life. They are war neurotics deserving only of extermination.” Weiss replaced his pince-nez on his nose. “Now, tell him about the third victim, Bernie, if you would.”
“Boss. Age forty-two, Werner Jugo lived with his wife in a basement in Meyerheimstrasse. Before the war he was a bus driver with the Berlin Transport Company. Joined the Twenty-Seventh Field Artillery Division in 1914. In 1918, he was hit by mortar fire at the Battle of Amiens.”
“The blackest day of the German Army,” muttered Weiss, quoting Ludendorff.
“Lost an arm and both legs. After the war, he spent several years at Spandau Hospital. Then served a year in Fühlsbuttel Penitentiary in Hamburg for an assault on a prostitute.”
“It’s an occupational hazard,” said Trettin. “That is, if you’re a gartersnapper.”
“We don’t know why he attacked her. He then spent a year in St. Joseph’s Sanatorium.”
I paused for a second, acutely aware that this was the same place from which Otto Trettin had just returned. St. Joseph’s was a monastery near the lake in Weissensee where Berliners were treated for cocaine addiction.
“It’s all right,” he said. His face was a thick-lipped rictus with a broken nose and large, cold dark eyes, a bit like a totem pole with piles. “I don’t mind talking about it. I had a little habit that got out of hand, that’s all. Well, you know how the hours are on a job like this. Up and down. Sometimes I needed a lift just to function. Anyway, all that’s behind me now. Thanks to the boss here.”
“We’re glad to see you back in harness, Otto,” said Weiss. “That’s what matters. And especially now.”
Gennat grunted and got up to adjust the clock on the wall of his office, which he did several times a day; it was an old railway clock and more decorative than useful. Every time I looked at it, it was wrong and there was a general suspicion that Gennat liked it that way, that it gave him an excuse to interrupt a meeting he wanted to end, and the fact was, he didn’t like Otto Trettin very much. He didn’t trust anyone who’d been addicted to drugs. While Gennat corrected and then rewound the clock, I carried on with my exposition of the case.
“He may have been a beggar, but Werner Jugo was strongly suspected of having been a coke dealer. We found several grams of the stuff on his body. His wife, Magda, is an attendant in the ladies’ lavatory at the Excelsior, and it’s possible she also sells drugs. But given the two previous cases, we are of the opinion that the murder was not drug related. Like the two previous victims, Jugo was shot through the forehead at close range. The body was found under the station on Schönhauser Allee, still on his cripple-cart. This was just twenty-four hours after victim two was found dead. Again, no one saw or heard anything, with the noise of the train concealing the gunshot.
“The day after Jugo’s murder, four Berlin newspapers—the Morgenpost, the Vossische Zeitung, the Lokal-Anzeiger, and the Tageblatt—received an identical typewritten letter that claimed to have been written by the murderer. The letter to the Morgenpost was accompanied by an army cap on which was written Oskar Heyde’s name. It also contained his army number, which we have since checked with the Bendlerblock, and the Reichswehr have confirmed that the number is genuine.”
“Which would seem to make the letter genuine also,” said Weiss. “Incidentally, Gottfried Hanke, Kripo’s in-house typewriter and graphology expert, believes the letters were typed on an Orga Privat Bingwerke machine. Not only that, but he says the machine displays a defect in the horizontal alignment: the capital letter G prints to the right. I’ve asked Hanke to check out office-supply companies in Berlin to see if they have a record of sales of that particular machine. The postmark on the envelope was Friedrichshain, but I doubt there’s any significance in that. I live in Friedrichshain. Anyway, read the letter, Bernie.”
“Dear Editor, This is the killer of the three disabled war veterans. But you can call me Dr. Gnadenschuss. To prove I killed these men: I used a .25-cali
ber pistol and shot them through the forehead at close range. Close enough to burn the skin. I didn’t leave any spent rounds on the ground near the bodies. I shot the first man once, the second, twice, and the third three times. But the next man I shall shoot just once; and I will also take one of his medals, if he’s wearing any. Also in one previous case, I took a souvenir—a soldier’s forage cap—which I have enclosed in my letter to the Morgenpost. No exclusives here; sorry, gentlemen. His name was Heyde. The reason I have killed these three men should be obvious to anyone who calls himself a patriotic German. The men I shot were dead already and I was merely putting them out of their very obvious misery; while they existed they were not only a disgrace to the uniform, they also reminded everyone of the shame of Germany’s defeat. You’ve heard of the stab-in-the-back theory; well, these men represent a stab in the front. For everyone who sees them crawling around the sidewalks like rats and lice, they represent an affront to the human eye and to the very idea of civic decency. In short, I have only done what needs to be done if Germany is to begin to rebuild itself, to put the past behind it. The fact is, a new Germany cannot emerge from the ashes of the old while ragged, degenerate, crippled reminders of its ignominious past continue to haunt our streets like so many ghosts and ghouls. They are a burden on the state. A future in which the German Army assumes its rightful place in the nation’s destiny cannot begin until these obscene blots on the national landscape are wiped out. We all know that I am only stating what has been apparent for a long time. Besides, everyone knows that many of these malingering beggar veterans are fakes and frauds; I myself saw one get up and walk away from his cripple-cart as if his middle name had been Lazarus.
“No need to thank me, so hold the applause. Anyway, you have been warned. I will kill more war cripples than the cops can count, so you can expect more blood on the streets of Berlin before very long. Not that the police can do anything. The cops, and more especially Berlin’s famous Murder Commission, know that they stand little or no chance of stopping me from carrying out these random attacks. Even if they were not the bunch of incompetent idiots that they are—did they ever catch Winnetou? No, of course not—they couldn’t stop me now. Real detective work is not what it once was in this city. Most of Kripo couldn’t catch a cold. You had better print this letter if you know what’s good for you. Heil Hitler. Yours, Dr. Gnadenschuss.”