by Philip Kerr
Theo Wolff was almost as powerful, I suppose. As well as founding a political party—the DDP—Wolff had once refused the post of German ambassador to Paris, preferring to remain in journalism, which said a lot for his belief in the importance of newspapers in Germany. He was about sixty, small and pugnacious, and he viewed my arrival in his office with no more enthusiasm than if I’d belonged to the anti-Semitic Hugenberg publishing group. I may have worked for Bernhard Weiss, but the Berlin police wasn’t exactly known for its liberal views.
Also around his editorial table were a number of men whose names were more familiar than their faces: Rudolf Olden, Ernst Feder, Fred Hildebrandt, Kurt Tucholsky, and, most famously, Alfred Kerr.
I shook hands with Wolff, nodded at the others as he made the introductions, and then pointed at the letter, which lay flat on the table in front of him, next to the envelope it had arrived in, the medal it had also contained, and a typewriter that someone had probably already copied it on.
“Is that it?”
“Yes.”
“How many people have handled this, sir?” I asked.
“Three, I should think. The postboy. My secretary. And me. As soon as I saw what it was I called the Alex.”
I put on the surgeon’s rubber gloves I’d brought from the Alex and pulled a pair of tweezers from my pocket. I drew the letter carefully across the table, sat down, and checked that it had been typed on a machine with the capital letter G printed to the right. Then I read it to myself.
Dear Editor,
I am the killer of Walther Frölich over by Oberbaum Bridge. I shot him just once through the forehead with a Browning .25-caliber automatic pistol. To prove this, here is the medal I removed from the dead man’s tunic and a lock of bloodstained hair I cut from the back of his skull. This gives you an excellent indication of how much time I had to carry out this murder and how little I was concerned that I might be apprehended by the police. They can check the blood type on the hair, and the brooch-back Iron Cross first class, and they will know that I am telling the truth. I am the same man who killed the other three parasites, who also called themselves disabled veterans. And I am enjoying myself.
You could easily help put a stop to this, of course. You need only publish an editorial calling on the government to remove these rats and lice from our streets. If they heed your words and do this—might I suggest that these vermin all be arrested and taken somewhere outside the city and disposed of hygienically; or accommodated in special camps or hospitals, perhaps? This would render our capital city’s streets fit for patriotic Germans to walk in. At the present moment it’s impossible to take any pride in a country where there are so many living reminders of our national shame begging for coins on every street corner.
One day Germany will thank me for prompting it to clean up our cities. When I am done with Berlin’s cripples I will perhaps move on to some others I have on my little list; yes, I have a little list—pestilential nuisances we wouldn’t really miss. Gypsies perhaps. Street urchins. Whores. Freemasons. Communists. Or queers—they certainly wouldn’t be missed. I shall certainly enjoy killing them, too.
Meanwhile, the police are not going to catch me, but please understand that this is not arrogance on my part; it isn’t that I am too clever for them, but that they are too stupid. The Murder Commission run by the Jew Bernhard Weiss has a great deal in common with my victims in that it is crippled and has already outlived its usefulness; indeed, you might think that Bernhard Weiss had a hole in his own head the way he goes about running that department. The self-serving article he wrote for your newspaper was as badly written as it was ill-advised. Mark my words: All that his so-called journalism will succeed in doing is giving the police a lot more work as they attempt to deal with those misguided Berliners who wish to take false credit for my work. Take my advice and don’t give him any more space in your paper.
But to prove to you how useless Kripo is I am providing you with a very nice thumbprint—mine!—so that the fingerprint people at the Alex can spend a great deal of time trying to match this with something they already have on file. This will be in vain, of course, for the simple reason that I am not a criminal but a patriot. Long live Germany.
Heil Hitler.
Yours,
Dr. Gnadenschuss
“Where’s the lock of hair?”
“Still in the original envelope,” said Wolff. “Untouched by anyone around this table. The letter was posted in Humboldthain.”
“Are you going to print this?” I asked.
“We’re a newspaper. Not a church magazine. And that’s front-page news.”
“I’ll take that as a yes, shall I, sir?”
“I can see that you don’t think we should print it. But this is Germany. Not Soviet Russia. Unlike the Bolsheviks we don’t practice press censorship in this country. It’s what makes our readers know they can trust the Tageblatt. News is news. The minute we start deciding on what news we choose not to print, then people might as well subscribe to Pravda.”
“That’s a nice speech, sir. And on the whole I agree with it. All I’m asking is that you delay printing the letter until we’ve had a chance to read and digest it. To give us time to check this fingerprint. In case that or something else here gives us a lead.”
“How long would you suggest?”
“Seventy-two hours.”
“Twenty-four.”
“Forty-eight.”
“Thirty-six.”
“Agreed.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. If you don’t mind, maybe you could leave out the make of the gun and the fact that it was an automatic. It’s important for us to know just a little more than your readers. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
“Agreed,” said Wolff. “What about that fingerprint? Think it’s genuine?”
“Oh, it’s a genuine fingerprint, all right. The question is, who does it belong to? Emil Jannings, Gösta Ekman, or Werner Krauss; Hindenburg perhaps. But I’ll stake my life on the fact that it doesn’t belong to the good doctor. I’ve got a feeling this fellow likes wasting police time the way the Nazis like beating drums and waving flags.”
I picked the letter up with the tweezers and carefully slid it into a thin manila file: I repeated the procedure with the enclosing envelope and the medal before glancing around the smoke-filled room and asking myself a question. I knew what I thought about the letter, but I was curious what they thought.
“I’m not often in such illustrious company,” I said. “I wonder if any one of you distinguished gentlemen might care to speculate on why someone would do something as heinous as killing four disabled men? What’s his motive?”
“Seriously?” said a voice.
“Of course.”
“Now?”
“Now, this minute, yes. If you can do it sooner I’d appreciate it. Look, thousands of people already pay attention to your daily opinions. So why not give me the scoop on your thinking. On what you’re going to write in the paper. I’m a reader. But I’m also a listener.”
“He sounds quite intelligent,” said someone.
“He means the killer,” said someone else. “Not you, sergeant.”
I smiled at the general laughter that followed this remark. “I’m not very handsome, either. Next time I’ll comb my hair, brush my teeth, wear a clean shirt, and bring a nice sharp pencil.”
“You’re rather assuming Dr. Gnadenschuss doesn’t actually believe the reasons he provides in his letter,” said Wolff.
“I’m a cop, there’s a lot I don’t believe. I think that letter is just him ringing a few bells at the funfair. That’s right. The ones he thinks people like us want to hear. Frankly, I’m not convinced by any of that monkey talk.”
“Surely you’re just saying that to undermine our resolve to publish it,” said Wolff.
“No, not even i
f I thought I could. But I’ve heard this kind of political testament before. It’s the sort of crap that people write when they’re pulling a stretch in Landsberg Prison.”
“He signs off with Heil Hitler. That’s all we need to know, isn’t it? Surely it’s obvious the murderer’s a Nazi.”
“Exactly,” said another man.
“That’s certainly what he’d like you to believe,” I said. “Only, I do wonder why he sent his letter only to a Jewish-owned newspaper. So far as we know, none of the other papers has received it. And let’s face it, gentlemen, it’s not like he’s preaching to the choir here. I imagine none of you believes in ridding this city of disabled beggars at the barrel of a gun.”
“No, of course not.”
“So I’d say he sent this letter to you because you printed the article by Bernhard Weiss and because you’ll believe this latest letter was written by a Nazi. And because it suits your agenda to print a murdering Nazi letter, doesn’t it? But you should ask yourself this: Do you think the Völkischer Beobachter or Der Angriff would publish this letter? Or any of the newspapers in the Hugenberg publishing empire?”
“That’s a fair question,” said Wolff.
“And what’s the answer?”
“I suspect they would not publish it.”
“You’re not a Nazi yourself, are you, sergeant?” asked Wolff.
“I guess you didn’t understand my joke about Landsberg Prison.”
“It’s only that you seem a little anxious for us to believe it might not be a Nazi who wrote the letter.”
“Anxious, no, sir. I want the truth, that’s all. The first letter contained no references to Bernhard Weiss’s Jewishness. Which for a Nazi shows a degree of restraint that’s hardly typical.”
“He’s got a point.”
“This new letter mentioned his Jewishness only once. And not in any really poisonous words, which would be more usual.”
“What are you saying, sergeant?” asked Wolff.
“I’m not sure, sir. Right now all I have are questions and not enough facts. That kind of journalism might be good enough for Der Angriff, but not for the newspapers I like to read.”
“I’m just the theater critic,” said a bald, horse-faced man with a Charlie Chaplin mustache. This was Alfred Kerr, perhaps the most famous writer working for the Tageblatt. “But in answer to your question about what I’d like to write about this fellow, Shakespeare teaches us that a man like this is probably someone who’s been disappointed in life. Who’s fallen short of his own expectations. Who desperately wants significance and power. Above all I should say this is a man who knows how to hate. Motiveless malignancy, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it when talking about Iago in Othello. Yes, there’s your problem, sergeant. Quite possibly this man has no real motive. It may be that he is someone who simply enjoys wickedness for its own sake. I’m afraid you may be dealing not just with the mystery of whodunit but with the mystery of life itself.”
I scratched my head and nodded. “Thank you, sir. I’m certainly glad I asked.”
* * *
—
ON MY WAY back to the Alex I stopped in at the Berlin Fire Department to see the chief fire commissioner, Walter Gempp. He was a genial, helpful man of about fifty whose modernization of the fire department and public allegiance to the left-leaning German Democratic Party made him a natural ally of men like Grzesinski and Weiss. Gempp was accompanied by Emil Puhle, the senior fire chief at Linienstrasse and, effectively, Gempp’s second-in-command.
“I asked you to come and see me because I heard from Waldemar Klotz that you’d been asking him questions about the Wolfmium factory fire.”
Klotz was the fire chief of Company 7, in Moabit. After what Angerstein had told me about the Wolfmium factory fire, I’d telephoned him to ask if there was any evidence of arson.
“That’s right, sir.” Reluctant to mention that my information about the fire had come from a Berlin gangster, I decided to make less of my interest than there was, especially as I hadn’t yet shared these suspicions with Gennat or Weiss.
“Might I ask why?”
“You might say it was a routine inquiry. With at minimum fifty workers dead, I just wanted to check that there was nothing in it for the Murder Commission. Which there would be if there was any evidence of arson.”
“Yes, of course. Well, we’ve found nothing that raises any cause for suspicion. Nothing at all. Our investigating officers are convinced that the fire started in a faulty electrical switchboard. Once the fire got hold, there was every chance of it becoming a disaster. Osmium, which is used in the production of light bulbs, has an oxide—osmium tetroxide—that is extremely flammable. It also produces a highly toxic gas, which is what killed all those people. Indeed, several of my own officers are still recovering in hospital after sustaining respiratory tract injuries. Thirty years after the Schering company fire in Wedding, this city still does not have enough breathing respirators, despite the fact one of my predecessors, Fire Chief Erich Giersberg, died as result of that fire.
“I will say this, Gunther, as someone who is often publicly associated with the DDP, I care very much about the safety conditions for workers in this country. And the workers at Wolfmium were no exception, in spite of their being mostly Russians and Volga Germans. So anything you yourself discover that gives me cause for believing there was any criminal negligence would be of great interest to me.”
“I understand, sir.”
“For example: I have a relation who’s a broker at the Berlin Bourse. And he tells me that in recent months Wolfmium had lost a large contract to Osram, one of their major competitors. And that, before the fire, the price of shares in Wolfmium had halved. I mention that because the Hamburger Fire Insurance Company has just settled the factory owners’ claim in the amount of more than a million reichsmarks. Which more than compensates for any losses the owners might have sustained on the stock market. Obviously it’s not the sort of thing I’m able to investigate myself, but someone in the police might very well conclude this alone could constitute grounds for further investigation. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes, sir. I would.”
* * *
—
I WASTED THE rest of the day interviewing a few of the men who’d been inspired by Bernhard Weiss’s article in the Tageblatt to claim that they were Dr. Gnadenschuss. It was hard to believe Ernst Gennat had been wrong regarding the wisdom of Weiss in writing a newspaper article about the Gnadenschuss murders. I doubt that the Holy Inquisition would have accepted the confessions that came in, and my instinct was to call the lunatic asylum at Wuhlgarten and have these men taken away in straitjackets so that they might be subjected to the old tried and tested cure, which was a half hour under a fire hose. The only one of these time wasters who struck me as sane was the youngest and probably the strangest.
Just fifteen, Sigmar Gröning was a pupil at the Leibniz Gymnasium on Wrangelstrasse, which was about a ten-minute walk from where Frölich’s crippled body had been found. He was one of a group of schoolboys who’d discovered the body. Gröning had white-gold hair, pitiless gray eyes, a high forehead, a rather self-satisfied, sneering mouth, and a prominent chin. He was wearing a tailored black jacket, black knickerbockers, long lace-up black boots, a stiff white collar and tie, and a naval-style black cap with a small shiny peak that probably resembled his soul. Bloodless, coldhearted, straight-backed—he was likely everyone’s idea of a fallen angel.
Unlike the others I’d questioned, he at least had done his homework and knew all the details of what had been printed in the first letter to the newspapers. In fact, he knew almost as much about the Gnadenschuss killings as I did. But it was immediately obvious to me that he hadn’t killed anyone; just as obvious was the fact that he would have liked to kill someone, probably anyone would do. I’d looked enough murderers in the eye to recognize what was lurking inside thi
s young man’s skull. After half an hour in the company of this ruthless little monster, I wondered where the country might be going if this was a sample of its youth. I tried to envisage Gröning in ten years’ time and concluded that in all probability I was talking to a future lawyer, assuming I didn’t throw the book at him for wasting police time.
His father was the manager at the Luisen Theater on Reichenberger Strasse and his middle-class family lived in a comfortable apartment on Belle-Alliance-Platz. Nice people, probably. I wondered what they might say if I telephoned and told them that their son was being questioned at the Alex.
“Do you own a typewriter, Sigmar?”
“I think my father has one. Why do you ask?”
“Do your parents know you’re here?” I asked. “Confessing to five murders?”
It was four murders, of course, but he didn’t contradict me.
“It’s nothing to do with them,” he insisted. “And I came here of my own accord. I’m the man you’re looking for.”
I shrugged. “Why not keep going? Until your confession we were nowhere near catching you. Why quit now when you’re making such a good job of running rings around the police?”
Gröning shrugged. “I’m bored with it. And I think I’ve made my point.”
“That you have. That you have. You know, I hate to break it to you, sonny, but they’ll probably execute you for this.”
“That’s a matter of small importance to me.”
“To you, maybe. But I would think your mother might be upset to see you sent to the guillotine at Plötzensee.”
“Might wake her up a bit. She’s horribly complacent. I’m actually looking forward to her having to see my death.”