A Death in East Berlin (Peter Ritter thriller series Book 1)

by Richard Wake

  “Might he take you with him?”

  “Only if he needs a janitor,” I said.

  “You can't be that bad.”

  “I guess I'm not. And I'm getting better — I will admit that. Most of my cases are crap, though, and I haven't really solved a tough one yet. But I guess I don't trip over myself on the easy ones anymore. I mean, if the wife is murdered in her bed and the husband is sitting at the kitchen table drinking a bottle of Pilsner and covered in blood, with the knife on the table, I'm your man. I figure out the ones like that at least eight times out of ten.”

  “You're being modest,” Rolf said.

  “I will assure you that my detective skills are the only modest part of this conversation,” I said.

  He changed the subject and asked about my love life, and I told him about the lovely Elke from the night before. His advice to me on that subject was the same as it had always been. I could repeat it, word for word — and I did mimic him this time as we said it together: “Just don't get caught sniffing your fingers at the office or they'll take you for an amateur.”

  We both laughed. Rolf said, “Words to live by,” and he poured himself another two fingers. I was able to hold him off from giving me another refill by saying, “Don't get caught sniffing your fingers or throwing up on your boss's shoes, or they'll take you for a drunken amateur.”

  Rolf shrugged and raised his glass as a toast.

  “More words to live by,” he said.

  9

  The way the office was set up, the boss could see everything from his glass-walled space at the far end of the room. From his desk chair, there was a clear line of sight up the long hallway between the eight, small detectives’ offices and the row of filing cabinets. Anybody who came in, Frederick Greiner could see them and either make a mental note or deliver a summons by means of a shout or a request delivered by Gretchen. The shouts were the worst because then everybody knew.

  I was fully prepared for a shout when I arrived back in the office — after first stopping in the lobby store for more breath mints. I bit into the last bit of the mint and chewed it as I finished my climb up the stairs and reached the top of the landing. Then it was a deep breath in preparation, followed by a purposeful stride toward my office. I kept my head down, determined not to look toward the boss’s office. But as I reached my door, still not having heard a shout, I glanced up and saw that Greiner was leaning over Gretchen’s desk, his back to the rest of the room. He was pointing to a spot on some document, maybe identifying an important error that needed correcting, maybe just dawdling so as to sniff her perfume, or perhaps to sneak an illicit peek down her blouse. Whatever. He was occupied, and I managed to get into my office without being seen. It was a major victory, in my mind — and given that I had no idea what to tell him about my dead body, I was prepared to accept my victories from wherever they might come.

  After sitting for a minute and catching my breath, I reached into my desk for a blank incident report and loaded it into my typewriter. I had few theories of the detective business, but the one to which I clung most tightly was that when in doubt, do the paperwork. The minutiae tended to get my mind off the fact that I was usually bewildered about what to do next. In addition, doing the paperwork — “neat and complete,” was Greiner’s mantra — was the only way I could demonstrate a level of competence to the boss. Given that the rest of my coworkers tended to delay their paperwork endlessly — and appeared to type with their elbows, besides — it wasn’t hard for me to stand out.

  Of course, the typing might attract the boss’s attention — but I was willing to take the risk. There wasn’t any way for him to tell which office was producing the clattering, first off. And if he came down to look, well, I might be able to put him off for a little while by saying that I was almost done with the incident report, and our conversation would be more fruitful if I finished it and then we went over it together.

  Whatever. I filled in the bare facts as I knew them. After a few seconds of debate, I went with “severed hands, feet, and likely genitalia” when filling out the section on “description of the deceased.” I put in the name and the address of the stiff and noted that the post-mortem examination was still pending, and then yanked the sheet out of the typewriter, the distinctive sound made by the spinning rubber platen providing the satisfying punctuation.

  I was reading over the report, looking for mistakes, when a shadow filled my doorway. Damn. But when I looked up, it wasn’t the boss filling the space. Instead, it was Harry. He plopped into the chair next to my desk without so much as a hello.

  “Here,” he said. He handed me a copy of the previous day’s Bild, a West Berlin tabloid newspaper that featured, among other items, a daily photograph of a local beauty engaged in some task or another around which they wrote a short story. However, everyone knew that the task wasn’t the thing — the beauty in the photo was. On this day, it was a splendid brunette leaning over a pulling some weeds out of her garden.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “I liked the one yesterday better.”

  “Remind me.”

  “Short blonde, reaching way up on her tip-toes to grab a can of peaches from a grocery shelf.”

  “I must have missed that one.”

  “Very ripe peaches,” Harry said.

  Harald Heileman was proud to tell anyone and everyone that he was 68 years old, the oldest copper on Keibelstrasse. He went back to the time before the war, even to the time before the Nazis, when the police headquarters was a big red-brick building a few blocks away on Alexanderplatz that was known, not surprisingly, as The Alex. He had stories about serial killers in the ‘20s, and brawls between Nazis and Commies in the ‘30s, and mostly trying to keep his head down in the decades after that. His very presence in the building in the summer of 1961 was a demonstration of his effectiveness.

  Of course, given his age, and his habit of plopping himself into the next available chair and gabbing without taking a breath, no one took him very seriously anymore. Everybody made fun of him behind his back, and more than a few did it to his face, too. I liked him, though, and I liked that his experience could occasionally prove to be valuable, and I needed all the help I could get. Besides, he would sometimes allow me a look at a confiscated, quite illegal newspaper famous for its ripe peaches — before taking it back and slipping it into a pocket on the mail cart that he pushed around the building.

  Because that was the other thing that people tended to overlook about Harry — he saw everything. He was the mailman for the entire building, including the Stasi unit in the building. He lugged all of the stupid, pointless paperwork around from floor to floor, but he also delivered Stasi files to the room on the first floor where they would be picked up every evening and taken to the headquarters building in Normannenstrasse. Sometimes he sneaked a look. Sometimes he offered me a look, too — especially since I often allowed him to use my office as his reading room.

  After secreting the newspaper back on his cart — it was undoubtedly part of a Stasi case involving some poor dope who forgot the paper was in the backseat of his car when he drove home to Friedrichshain from his mother-in-law’s house in Charlottenburg — Harry leaned over and said, “So, the Soviet memorial, huh?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Heard your name mentioned in passing.”

  “Where?”

  Harry pointed at the ceiling. “All the way up,” he said, which was shorthand for the Stasi unit.

  “Did you hear anything else?”

  “Like I said, I was just passing through.”

  “Come on, you must have heard something else.”

  “Just your name said by one guy, and then the other guy laughed.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “Well, you wanted to know,” Harry said.

  What that all meant, other than that the Stasi thought I was a joke, was unclear. Freddy Mann was right, though — the Stasi would be involved sooner or later, and likely sooner.


  As Harry got up to leave, Gretchen squeezed past him and handed me a pink phone message slip. She didn’t say anything and, after she turned to leave, I said, “And a pleasant good morning to you, too.”

  She never broke stride. The message was short and simple:

  “Cafe Sibylle, 4 p.m.”

  10

  I thought about walking, but then I stood up and remembered my sore foot. There was nothing broken, I was pretty sure, and rest would likely be the only prescription if I bothered with the doctor. So, the mile or so along Stalinallee would have been a little more than prudence called for. As it was, the drive didn’t take me five minutes.

  Cafe Sybille was either half-empty or half-full, depending upon your perspective. I usually went with half-empty when I went there. The big windows that opened on the avenue always made it bright inside, even on gray days. The ceilings were high enough that the fog of cigarette smoke was well above my head, another plus.

  But then there was the company. My appointment was sitting where he always sat, on the far right after you walked in, his back toward the wall. He faced both the door and the big windows. He could see every person at every table in the place, as well as everyone who walked by.

  Still, he acted as if he did not see me approaching the table. Same as ever. I sat down with neither a hello nor an acknowledgment of any kind. Same as ever.

  “Did you see the Stalin memorial?” I said. It was in the next block, just across Koppenstraße. The statue was a typical bronze bit of idolatry, the old man standing atop a pile of some kind of stone, his left hand holding a scroll, and his right hand shoved between the buttons of his tunic. It wasn’t so big as to be grossly offensive, but big enough that you couldn’t miss it.

  “I’ve seen it a thousand times,” Karl Grimm said.

  “It seems the birds see it every hour, and their aim is true. Those guys who clean off the bird shit, is that their full-time job?”

  “It’s honest work.”

  “But so unnecessary. If the Stasi is supposed to be in charge of internal security, I mean, shouldn’t they have a Stalin anti-defecation squad by now? If they can’t protect the great Josef Stalin from a few birds with the runs, what chance do they have against the real enemies of the state.”

  Grimm sighed. I always cherished his sighs. Even if they were meant to be dismissive — of me, my intellect, and my seriousness — I took them as victories because they were actual human reactions. They were the only victories I ever chalked up in our encounters.

  “Are you finished?” he said.

  “At your command,” I said.

  With that, my ex-father-in-law raised his hand, and the waiter came over to take my order. “Just coffee, thanks,” I said.

  I used to be married to Grimm’s daughter. Seeing as how he was on the Central Committee of the East German Socialist Unity Party, Grimm was the reason that we moved into the fabulous apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. He was such a bigwig that I bypassed several hundred other cops, was permitted to sit for the detective’s exam a month after our marriage, and was promoted to the murder commission at the age of 26.

  Yes, I passed the test legitimately. That was a requirement, and Grimm had insisted there would be no way around it. “I can pull strings, but there are limits,” he told me. “Let’s not test those limits so early in our relationship.”

  So, I really did pass. But, still, there was no reason for me to have been allowed to jump the queue of sergeants in precincts all over Berlin except for the man sipping coffee on the other side of the table.

  Anyway, the happy union ended up being measured in months, not years. Soon after I turned 27, my wife, his daughter, decided that a marriage to a common cop — even a detective on the murder squad — wasn’t quite right after all for the daughter of a man on the Central Committee. She came to this conclusion while regularly sharing a bed with her childhood friend, the man she was supposed to have married all along — screwing him usually while I was at work, investigating the latest suspicious death of a prostitute. I never caught my wandering bride, never even suspected — Peter Ritter, Ace Detective — but Daddy found out and confronted her.

  Katerina rinsed off the stink of illicit sex and came clean — that was her name, Katerina — and the divorce was quickly arranged, followed almost immediately by her remarriage. As it turned out, a decent interval for Central Committee types was three-and-a-half weeks. For my trouble and humiliation, I was permitted to keep the apartment and the job.

  But there was a catch.

  It was why I was at Cafe Sybille.

  The order came — coffee for me, coffee and a cinnamon roll for him. When the waiter was putting it down, I realized that Grimm had never placed an order, that the waiter just knew what to bring. Café Sibylle was often where we met. It was just down the street from the Rose Theater — or, rather, what once had been the Rose Theater, before the Allied bombers came. I knew of the theater only because my mother used to talk about it, about what must have been the greatest night out she ever had with my father. “It was all so… shiny,” she said, which was odd, seeing as how the reputation of the place was that of a theater for the working class.

  Anyway, I stirred my coffee and kept my mouth shut. I had learned not to rush the anal probe that was likely headed my way.

  “There’s a man,” Grimm said after he was almost done with the roll in about three bites. He was on the Central Committee, but he ate like a steelworker in a hurry.

  “Remember this name: Martin Strassmann.”

  I repeated it back to him. It was what he expected.

  “Address is Am Zirkus 30.”

  I repeated the name and address back to him.

  “Good,” he said. “Find out where he goes.”

  “That’s a little bit of a broad request. I’m only one person, and I have a job—”

  “Just this Saturday night,” he said. His mouth was full of the last bit of cinnamon roll.

  “What does he look like?”

  “The best part — you can’t miss him. He’s bald as a doorknob,” he said.

  “Just the one night.”

  “Yes. And only follow him — no contact, nothing like that. I don’t want him to know. I don’t want his routine to be disturbed. He can be permitted no suspicions in this regard. Just follow — and from a safe distance. Got it?”

  “And when do I report back?”

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  There were never written reports, and there were almost never telephone conversations. Grimm called me at work and left messages containing times and places for meetings, but nothing else. And whatever information I gathered was delivered verbally. If there were documents, they were handed to him discretely. As often as not, that meant leaving them on an empty restaurant chair between us.

  With that, the meeting was over — no hello, no goodbye. Grimm stood and threw a few coins on the table — literally tossed them. I had to corral them to keep them from falling on the floor. I looked at the coins, did a little mental calculation in my head, and knew there was too much. So I signaled the waiter for another coffee. As per the customary instructions, I was supposed to wait at least five minutes before leaving, anyway.

  11

  The medical examiner was in the basement of the big brick headquarters on Keibelstraße. The rest of the building was always dark, either by design or happenstance. If not for the identical lamp on every desk, adjustable with a kind of gooseneck, it would be impossible to do any close reading after about 2 p.m. But walking into the medical examiner's office was like the feeling when you left a cinema after a matinee or a bar after a bout of day-drinking. The light was so bright, it took a few seconds for your eyes to adjust. It came from several massive fixtures on the ceiling, which took some kind of special light bulbs, and it was reflected by the white floors, the white wall tiles, the white ceiling, the white everything.

  I always greeted the medical examiner with a jocular “Doc,” mostly becau
se, while I knew his last name was Bauer, I never quite got his first name and was, after all of that time, too embarrassed to ask. I had spent hours trying to decipher it from his paperwork but ultimately gave up, such was the signature's spectacular illegibility. This day, Bauer was seated with his feet on his desk. Freddy Mann was there, too, his feet also propped up. A bottle of something dark was open on the desktop. They each held a nearly-full glass.

  On the examination table, about 20 feet away, there was a body covered by a sheet — presumably my stiff. The channel on the floor, which led to a big drain, had been rinsed of whatever fluids and excrement that the body had given up. The room smelled of disinfectant, not death.

  “Is all the disgusting business over? Because if it isn't, I'll come back,” I said.

  “You sell yourself short,” Bauer said. “You haven't fainted or thrown up yet, which puts you ahead of the rest of the dead-asses in your department.”

  “That doesn't mean I want to see it,” I said. “I mean, no cock and balls? Were you right?”

  “I was,” Freddy said. “Every appendage was, indeed, removed.”

  “Except his nose,” Bauer said.

  “Not much of an appendage.”

  “For all we know, his dick wasn't much of an appendage, either. Normally, you would say, big hands, big feet, big—”

  “But we have no hands, no feet, no clue,” Freddy said.

  These two enjoyed each other's company. A dead body, a bottle of whatever, and they were clearly in their own perverted heaven.

  Bauer poured me a glass. This was turning into quite a social day for me. Drinking till 1 a.m. with Elke. A big vodka, and then another, with Red Rolf before lunch — which, come to think of it, I never had. Coffee with the father-in-law at 4. A tumbler of what appeared to be some kind of brandy at 5. At this rate, and after the two beers I had in my apartment, I'd be asleep by 9, which would be just fine with my dragging ass.

  “So, anything else I need to know? Weapon?”