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

by Richard Wake

  “A knife, dumb shit,” Freddy said.

  “I thought your term of endearment for me was Little Shit,” I said.

  “Times change.”

  “What kind of knife?” I said.

  “A pretty big damn knife. I mean, you can't remove a hand with a butter knife. Dumb shit.”

  Bauer looked over the rim of his glass and said, “I forgot you two argued like an old married couple. And if I had to guess, Freddy, in this relationship, I think you beat your wife.”

  'I could show you the scars,” I said.

  “All mental, none physical,” Freddy said. He held up his hands in the universally recognized “I' m innocent” reflex gesture.

  I liked Bauer. As with Freddy, I tried to keep my mouth shut and listen a lot when I was in his presence. He had plenty of war stories, and they were entertaining in a macabre sort of fashion that played well to an audience of murder detectives. Given the circumstances of this one, he began telling a story about a time in the late '40s when he cracked a case involving a man who had been decapitated and dumped into a building site on Potsdamer Platz. Bauer's examination indicated a left-handed man had wielded the knife: a smooth-bladed knife of at least seven inches that seemed to have a nick in it.

  “How could you tell the nick?” I said.

  “It was a hunch. A serrated cut looks one way, a smooth cut another way. This was, I don't know, a little bit in-between.”

  “Quite a hunch,” I said.

  “It's why people still call him Nick,” Freddy said, and the two of them looked knowingly at each other and raised their glasses.

  Nick, huh? We all took another sip. I turned slightly and addressed Bauer directly.

  “So how about this one — straight or serrated?” I said.

  “Straight.”

  “How about the time of death?”

  “I would say yesterday.”

  “Morning? Night?”

  “You want miracles?” Bauer said. “I mean, it's not as if the specimen was exactly intact when I got him. Still, if I had to guess, I think probably not night, based mostly on the contents of his stomach.”

  “Which were?”

  “Eggs, bread, coffee. So probably breakfast was his last meal.”

  I took a few notes, hoping that something meaningful would come to me. Nothing did. Then again, it rarely did as you were writing down the facts. The revelations came when you did your review — that is, if they ever came.

  I turned back a few degrees to face Freddy Mann a little more directly.

  “And the blood trail?” I said.

  “We looked some more after daylight,” Freddy said. “But it's what I told you. It starts at the bottom of the steps. Your idea about a wheelbarrow, or maybe a body bag of some kind, makes as much sense as any. I'd be willing to testify that he wasn't killed at the memorial.”

  “I guess that's something,” I said.

  “It's not nothing.”

  “It's almost nothing. I mean, we've eliminated one place out of a huge city. And that's it.”

  “Well, aren't you the optimist?” Bauer said.

  “Just a realist,” I said.

  “Mr. Realist, you seem to be forgetting that you have that wallet with the fully intact identification information inside,” Freddy said.

  “I'm not forgetting. But you're assuming that the wallet belonged to the stiff — a fairly big assumption.”

  “The photograph does look like him.”

  “The photograph looks like somebody in a Hitler Aryan wet dream,” I said. “Blond hair, cut short, sharp features, fairly young — which narrows it down to tens of thousands of men in Berlin. And I've been to the apartment and didn't find out crap.”

  I neglected to tell them that I had surmised the apartment had been empty for about a week, a potentially meaningful bit. But I was going for sympathy in this conversation, and I wasn't about to change direction.

  “So, to repeat: Killed someplace else, probably after breakfast yesterday. Other than that, we've got… nothing?” I said.

  “No,” Bauer said. “We've all still got our cocks and balls, which is not nothing. But as for the case,” and here he leaned in and stage-whispered to me, “the truth is that we don't care. You're the one with nothing.”

  The two of them looked at each other again, raised their glasses, and then waited. I could just sense there was something there, something between them, maybe a secret, maybe… I didn't know. They locked eyes and put on stern faces and stared at each other, and I stared back at them, my eyes darting from one to the other, from Freddy to Bauer and back again and back again. Finally, Bauer's face cracked into a smile, and then the two of them burst out laughing.

  “Told you,” Freddy said,

  “Yes, you did,” the doctor said.

  “Told him what?” I said.

  Freddy looked at me for five seconds and then said, “Dumb shit. What I told him was that you wouldn't ask about the cause of death.”

  He was right. It was on the shortlist of the most routine questions that every murder detective had to ask. Who was the victim? Where was he killed? How was he killed?

  “I mean, I just—”

  “I know, you just saw no hands, no feet, no cock, no balls, and you figured that was all that mattered,” Bauer said. “You figured, 'bled to death,' or some such thing.”

  “Dumb shit,” Freddy said.

  I was mortified. I mean, I was used to feeling overmatched in certain situations in my job, but this was beyond embarrassing. Cause of death. Christ. There's a space for it on the form, for God's sake. It is as basic as basic gets.

  I was pretty sure that I was blushing. But I pulled my notebook from my pocket and managed to croak out the word, “So?”

  “Blow to the back of the head,” Bauer said.

  “Weapon?”

  “Maybe a club,” Bauer said. “But the impression is a little wider, flatter. Maybe a piece of lumber, or a bed slat. Maybe a shovel. It's impossible to say exactly, but something bigger than a lead pipe, say.”

  I wrote down what he said and wanted to run, but I took a deep breath and re-read what I had written.

  “Anything else I forgot?” I said.

  “Other than your dignity, no,” Freddy Mann said.

  12

  The sleep had, in fact, been luxurious. Two beers, a bath, and out for 10 and a half hours. There was nothing like it. I had friends who had lost the ability to sleep the length of the bed, whether because of work or children or genetics, but it remained one of my prized talents. It might have been the one thing in the whole world that I was best at.

  I needed every bit of the restorative benefits, too, when I walked into the office at 8:30 the next morning. There was no avoiding the boss this time — nobody could be that lucky.

  “Well,” is all he said to me. Greiner was already in his office when I arrived. I couldn’t tell if he saw me, but within seconds of me sitting behind my desk, I heard his footsteps clomping along, louder and louder, on the stained linoleum.

  “Well,” I said, and then I began a recitation of the facts as we knew them, repeating a few things he already knew — which was always a mistake. You could read it on his face, the impatience, but I still needed to elongate the presentation a little, mostly because it wouldn’t have taken 20 seconds otherwise. I still wasn’t confident enough in my abilities to admit that I didn’t have crap. The only alternative, then, was to embroider the crap, at least a little bit.

  So I did. The eggs in the stiff’s stomach. The smooth-bladed knife. The death blow to the back of the head — maybe a club, maybe a two-by-four, maybe a shovel. The film of dried urine in the toilet. The stale bread. The cock and balls. I think I mentioned the cock and balls twice.

  I noticed I was leaning forward in my chair as I laid out the little I had. When I finished, I reflexively slumped back. Into the silence, Greiner said, “So no theories?”

  I hesitated, trying to come up with a shred of something, even thou
gh a shred had eluded me every time I tried to grasp one — which was to say, pretty much every waking hour since I arrived at the Soviet memorial.

  In the second that I paused, I decided: no more embroidery. Nobody could concoct a decent theory with the facts I possessed, not me, not Kleinschmidt, not any murder detective on the squad. There was no sense in pretending. It was early days, and this is what it was.

  Still, I did manage to eliminate one theory, thanks to Red Rolf.

  “The only thing,” I said, “assuming the ID from the wallet belongs to our victim, that makes him 22 years old. Even if it wasn’t his wallet, physical observation put his age at no more than about 25. So that rules out it being a revenge killing — you know, a Russian soldier being killed because he was a rapist in 1945. The stiff just wasn’t old enough.”

  Greiner stroked his chin for a second.

  “Right,” he said. He did not disagree. I would take that as an atta-boy. “But other than that?”

  “Early days, sir,” I said.

  “But not as early as yesterday,” he said. Then he turned on his heel and clomped back to his own office. All in all, I had survived the encounter. And what did they say about the men tasked with cleaning out minefields? You can’t take the next step until you survive the one before, and I had survived that one. Besides, I had also managed to keep one more theory in my back pocket — the bit about it not likely being a deranged girlfriend. So I had that theory if the boss cornered me again the next day. It would indicate progress — or, at least I hoped it would.

  I placed a call to the police precinct near the Soviet memorial. A desk sergeant told me that his coppers had recanvassed the building where the stiff lived, allegedly, and got a couple of responses. No, they didn’t know him. No, they hadn’t seen him. No, there had been no commotion.

  “Really nothing,” the desk sergeant said.

  “How about the guy who keeps the book? Schultz? I talked to him already, but—”

  “Yeah, we talked to him, too. Schultz. Yeah, nothing unusual, though. We still have a few apartments unaccounted for, and we have men going back today.”

  “How about nearby businesses?”

  “Starting with them today.”

  “You got the photographs, then?” I said. We had ordered copies of the photo from the identification card, and had asked for a rush job. The sergeant said they’d arrived overnight by messenger.

  “I’ll send you the reports we have — we have a messenger at lunchtime,” he said. “And I’ll call you if anything interesting arrives in the next batch.”

  I thanked him, sketched out a few notes from the conversation in my notebook, and updated the incident report with the latest from Dr. Bauer’s post-mortem. Then I decided to go for a coffee over in Alexanderplatz, for the short walk and the fresh air as much as for the coffee itself. As I was leaving headquarters, I ran into Bernie Lott, almost literally. He was headed in.

  “Busy?” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “Coffee?”

  “As long as the murder detective is buying.”

  “They don’t pay you a salary anymore?”

  “How many times have I told you?” Bernie said. His byline was Bernd, but everyone called him Bernie. “Newspaper reporters don’t do it for the money. It’s the goddamned glamour.”

  I had known Bernie since we were about 12. After the war, we were privates in the army made up of the street children of Berlin, scrounging for whatever food or money we could find. We searched the sidewalks and gutters for cigarette butts to resell. We protected girls we knew from Russian soldiers, distracting the soldiers with a few well-thrown paving stones and giving the girls a chance to run one way while we ran the other. We went to Tempelhof together during the airlift when the American flyers threw chocolate candy out of their planes. And we stayed in touch as our ambitions took us in different directions, me to the Vopo, Bernie to Neues Deutschland.

  His paper was the main party mouthpiece, but when it came down to it, the three East Berlin papers were all full of the same stuff, and little of it was newsworthy. Some of it was reprinted speeches from someone or other on the Central Committee or the Council of Ministers — all gray faces to me and to most people. Some of it was man-in-the-street observations on some issue of the day, the responses all shockingly in line with the party’s position. There was a story on the front page that day about the evils of citizens of the East who got on the S-bahn train every morning to work jobs in the West. “Traitorous scum!” according to a housewife from Adlershof, who was interviewed while potting some geraniums.

  Talking to Bernie over the years had made it clear that the reporters knew everything but were not allowed to print any of it — or, almost none.

  A murder like mine would never make the papers because people didn’t get murdered in the workers’ paradise that was the GDR.

  But Bernie knew.

  “You working on the murder at the monument?”

  I told him I was.

  “No cock and balls?”

  “I can’t believe that all anybody cares about is the cock and balls,” I said. “I mean, he had no hands or feet, either.”

  “Of course, that’s all anybody cares about. Try to imagine your life without—”

  “Without hands or feet? No, I can’t.”

  “But you could make do,” Bernie said.

  “You could probably make do without—”

  “But not in the important ways,” he said.

  We agreed to disagree. I told him most of what I knew, and he took it all in. I told him why I thought it wasn’t a deranged girlfriend, and why it wasn’t revenge against a Soviet rapist, and he agreed. I asked him if he had any other theories, and he shook his head quickly.

  “No, you don’t have shit,” Bernie said. “And unless you can flesh out more of his identity, I think you’re out of luck. That identification card is everything.”

  “Unless, of course, it doesn’t belong to my stiff.”

  “In which case, you really don’t have shit,” Bernie said.

  13

  The movie at the Atelier am Zoo was The Misfits. I had to admit that I did not see all that much of it, so any review I might offer would be suspect. I could say that the score of the film was “luscious,” but I really would be describing Elke’s lips, which were the object of most of my attention during the screening. I could say that the dialog and story were “intricate and ultimately fulfilling,” but I really would be describing the clasp holding Elke’s bra in place, which was my other area of focus after the lights went down.

  In all, a splendid second date. Or, really, a first date, although that seemed a little odd to say, seeing as how she had already spent the night in my place.

  “It’s our first date,” Elke said. Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable were in the middle of some American Western thing or another on the big screen, and she was whispering. I was caressing one of her two best friends and had said something about how “I guess the second date’s the charm,” and she had removed my hand.

  “First date,” she said. “I will insist on this. When we tell the story to our children, our first date was to see The Misfits. Got it?”

  I wanted to say, “Children?” I wanted to scream, “Children?” But I went for the path of least resistance and put on my put-upon husband’s voice and sing-songed, “Yes, dear.” And then I promptly returned my lips and my hand to the places where they belonged.

  Children? She was joking, I was sure, just as my “yes dear” had been an in-kind reply. Still, it was jarring. I could barely take care of myself and my career. The last thing I needed was a junior-sized complication in my life.

  After the movie, walking back to my car, the flashing neon signs on the Ku’damm really struck me for some reason. I had seen them a hundred times — the more fun bars, livelier and with better music, were all in the West — and I was used to the contrast. It was just darker in the East. Night really was night on our side.

&nb
sp; Walking on the Ku’damm one night, years earlier, I told Bernie, “You should do some in-depth reporting on why there is such a neon shortage in East Berlin.” He said, “If I pitched it to my boss, he’d have me do man-in-the-street interviews where they’d all say that neon signs were an example of decadence, and how they liked the dark besides.”

  “Even if they didn’t say it,” I said.

  “No, we don’t need to make them up. Once we get to him, the man in the street has become the properly indoctrinated man in the street. The dolts know the answers before I ask the questions.”

  Elke must have read something in my face while we walked. She said, “The lights?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You know what they mean to me? Promise. The future.”

  We walked past a bar I had never seen before, The Zodiac. The Z on the sign was an especially bright pink.

  “That Z,” Elke said. “If my mother walked by, she would say it was garish. But to me, it says risk. It says ambition. It says striving. It says all of the things that nobody says in the East.”

  She was sharp and smart and thoughtful, and I liked her. I didn’t want to debate her or to deflate her idealistic balloon. But I still needed to say — to keep in character as a contrary asshole, as much as anything — “All that from a pink Z. And when the owner goes broke in six months, it will be a nice memory, burned on his retinas.”

  “They don’t all go broke,” she said, either pouting or fake-pouting, I wasn’t sure which.

  “Maybe not. But it will burn your retinas. Seriously, don’t stare at that thing. It’s like looking at an eclipse.”

  As we drove back to my place, she asked me to stop at a small office building about four blocks from the cinema. She used a key to open the door, went inside, and returned with a few files. The whole thing didn’t take three minutes.

  I stared at her and didn’t put the car into gear until I received an explanation. I had suspected, but I wanted her to say it.

  “Yes, yes, I am one of the infamous, traitorous souls who live in the East but work in the West,” she said. “So sue me. Or shoot me. Do you bring your pistol on dates, by the way?”