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

by Richard Wake

  “Not that pistol,” I said.

  We drove back to my place, crossing at Bernauer Straße. I showed the uniform my murder squad identification, and he let us through with a wave. Still, just in case, Elke had hidden the files underneath the floor mat. Back at my place, I opened a bottle of red wine that I had procured that afternoon. Popping the cork, I announced, “The finest that Hungary has to offer. Or, maybe Bulgaria.” And it actually tasted fine.

  “So,” I said, after we were on the couch.

  “It’s nothing more than simple economics,” Elke said. When I half shrugged, she said, “Detective Peter Ritter, are you telling me you don’t know how it works?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” I said.

  “Nothing to tell, really. I get paid every week in West German marks. The official exchange rate is five East marks for one West mark. But you can do better in the, shall we say, unofficial exchange markets. I can almost always get seven-to-one. Sometimes, eight-to-one. So if I change over a quarter of my West marks, I can help my mother, and that still gives me more than enough to live on here—”

  “Because there’s nothing to buy here—”

  “Except bread and pork and shoes that fall apart in a month and dresses that are five years out of style. So, yes. It’s a wonderful life.”

  “And the rest of your salary?” I said.

  “Saved for a rainy day.”

  “A rainy Western day.”

  “Maybe,” Elke said.

  If you read Neues Deutschland, the biggest problem in the GDR was the number of people who were coming to Berlin from all over the country and defecting outright to the West by simply getting on the S-bahn anywhere in the East and riding across town. As long as you were willing to leave pretty much everything behind — even a small suitcase might get you stopped — it was a near-foolproof method of leaving the country. And plenty did.

  “Millions” is what old Harry Heileman once told me. I wasn’t sure if I believed him, but he did see at least some of the Stasi cable traffic. He certainly knew more than I did.

  But if those people were the biggest problem, the illegal West workers were next. The previous few months, the papers had been full of stories excoriating them as the worst kinds of traitors. Sometimes, it was almost like the defectors were unwitting dupes of Western propaganda, while the guest workers were true and unredeemable scum.

  The problem was, as far as the GDR was concerned, that it was almost impossible to catch them. There were tens of thousands of people on those trains every morning and every afternoon, and short of catching you with a pay stub or a briefcase full of company documents, there was no way to tell if you were a scurrilous West worker or just a guy who spent the day having lunch with his aging mother in Kreuzberg.

  Again, she proved pretty good at reading my silences.

  “This bothers you?” Elke said.

  “Not bothers, not exactly. I guess I just need a minute to process it. And besides, I am a Kripo detective.”

  “You’re a murder detective, and I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “But I’m still sworn to uphold the law and defend the nation. I can recite the oath from memory, you know.”

  She folded her arms. I started:

  “I swear, to be loyal to my socialist fatherland, the German Democratic Republic and its government at all times, to keep official and state secrets, and to strictly obey laws and instructions.

  “I will unswervingly strive to fulfill my official duties conscientiously, honestly, courageously, vigilantly, and with discipline.

  “I swear, that I will, without reservation, under risk of my life protect the socialist social, state and legal order, the socialist property, the personality, the rights, and the personal property of the citizens against felonious attacks.

  “If I nevertheless break this, my solemn oath, I shall be confronted with the punishment of the laws of our republic.”

  I finished. She applauded. I bowed.

  “But seriously,” I said. “Aren’t you worried I’m going to tell the Stasi on you?”

  At which point, she said nothing. Instead, she edged closer on the sofa, undid my belt and the top button on my trousers, and reached inside. After about 10 seconds, she said, “Worried? Nope. I’m really not.”

  14

  Martin Strassmann, Am Zirkus 30. Martin Strassmann, Am Zirkus 30. After my little meeting at Cafe Sibylle, I repeated those two items a dozen times, maybe two dozen, until I couldn’t forget them if I wanted to. Just to be sure, though, I swung by the address the next morning, only to imprint it even more permanently on my brain.

  The building was in Mitte — 10 minutes from my apartment, less than that from headquarters. It was old and substantial, which fit the oldest and one of the more prosperous neighborhoods in the city, at least before the war. It still wasn’t bad, though, even if the bombing had left more than a small remembrance. I pulled up along the curb, left the motor running, hopped up the front steps of the building, and looked at the names on the buzzers.

  Strassmann, 3B. Not bad, Marty — whoever he was, whatever he did for a living. Not bad at all. Third floor in the back. He likely had an unobstructed view of the Spree.

  The job was to follow him on Saturday night. I found a spot along the curb at 5:30 p.m., about a hundred feet down from No. 30, and settled in with a liverwurst sandwich, a bottle of cola, and a jug to piss in. I figured I was too early, but it beat the alternative. Karl Grimm, Central Committee member in good standing, was not much for graciously dealing with disappointment, and even less with incompetence. To miss our Mr. Strassmann because I figured he wouldn’t be going out until later would not have played well, and I just didn’t need that aggravation.

  So, I was more than two hours waiting in my car. The sandwich was gone, the cola was gone, the jug was half-full. At about 7:30, I took a small chance, opening the door a crack and dumping the piss in the gutter. Just as I was closing the door, the baldest head I had ever seen — it almost seemed to glow in the darkness — emerged from No. 30 and bounded down the steps.

  He took a left turn — toward me. Great. I thought about leaning down to tie my shoe but settled instead for leaning over and rooting around in the glove box. It was a known fact that no one ever found anything in their glove box in less than 30 seconds of searching. But as I pretended to look, poking through the maps and receipts for oil changes and whatever, I kept one eye on the passenger side window to see when Strassmann walked past. But he didn’t, and then I heard a motor turning over and roaring to life.

  Thirty feet in front of me, a black and silver Horch — significantly nicer than the puke green Wartburg I was driving — pulled out from the curb. The bald head behind the wheel was like a beacon in the night. I counted to five and pulled away from the curb myself.

  Traffic was light, as always. It seemed to me that Strassmann drove like he couldn’t decide where he was going, a series of lefts and rights that ultimately led us along the Spree and to the east. Then it was a pretty straight shot into Friedrichshain, and then a couple of more lefts and right amid the ruins. It was 16 years later, but the neighborhood had barely been rebuilt. Friedrichshain got some of the worst of the bombing when the Soviets came and almost none of the money for redevelopment. There weren’t any half-bombed, half-leaning buildings anymore, but there were still plenty of lots consisting of nothing more than an enormous pile of rubble. They sheltered rats during the day and prostitutes in their shadows at night. It made me sick, just driving through it, even after all of those years. It just reminded me too much of the bomb that killed my mother and brother.

  Tailing Strassmann, I kept an extra distance between us as we navigated through the neighborhood because there was so little traffic, so few signs of life. We got to a street — there was no sign, so I had no idea where we were — and Strassmann made a right turn. There were only two buildings standing on the block, one near the middle, one on the corner. The rest of the block was empty, with all of the rubble
taken away. The skinny little buildings, standing there in the darkness, looked like what you saw when an old beggar opened his mouth, the last two teeth remaining.

  Strassmann parked in front of the building on the corner. I shut off my lights and eased along the curb, maybe 500 feet away. He got out of the car and looked both ways before crossing, although I couldn’t figure why, except maybe out of habit. I didn’t imagine a dozen cars went by there in a day.

  He crossed and knocked on the door of the building. It looked like a bar, although there was no sign above the door. And if it was a bar, the knock didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Mine was not to reason why, though. Within seconds, the door was opened, and my bald-headed friend went in.

  I settled in for a long wait. Just another Saturday night, completely shot in the ass, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. My father-in-law and I had an agreement, and there was no getting out of it — not unless I was to take the S-bahn one day and get off at Friedrichstrasse and not come back. Even then, I wasn’t sure I would be entirely out of his reach.

  When my blushing bride was found on her knees under her old boyfriend’s desk — at least that’s the way I always liked to picture it — Grimm called me in for our first chat at Cafe Sibylle. What began was not a negotiation as much as a dictation of terms, with him doing the dictating.

  “You keep the job, even though you’re—”

  “Still learning,” I said, trying to hang on to at least a half a shred of my dignity.

  “Okay, put it that way. Still learning. You keep the job, and you keep the apartment.”

  “And everything in it,” I said.

  “Yes, and everything in it.”

  “Fine,” I said. I pushed my chair back and began to leave. Grimm said, “Sit down, Sherlock. We’re not done.”

  At which point, Grimm offered a dissertation on how generous he was being, and how a single word from him could get me busted back down to sergeant and put back into uniform. The fact that his slut of a daughter had caused all of this went unmentioned but not unacknowledged. After all, the job and the apartment were not nothing.

  But then, Grimm said, “There is one thing you have to do for me in return.”

  “What?”

  “Be available for odd jobs,” he said.

  “What kind of odd jobs.”

  “Odd jobs suited for a detective.”

  “Like?”

  “Perhaps some surveillance. Maybe a check of police records. The occasional pickup or delivery. That kind of thing.”

  I knew virtually nothing about how the members of the Central Committee operated, but I just assumed that it was a typical bureaucratic cesspool filled with rivalries and backstabbing and that kind of thing. Grimm wanted me to be an instrument in his pursuit of leverage.

  “Information is power,” he said. “That’s what you will be helping me with, information.”

  “That’s it, nothing more,” I said, as if I possessed even an ounce of control in this relationship.

  “That’s it, just information gathering,” Grimm said.

  And that — information gathering — was what was shooting my Saturday night in the ass. Sitting in the dark, on a street that was equal parts creepy and crappy, a half hour became an hour, and then an hour became two hours. The door opened three times in that span, and different men walked out of the building, but not my bald pal. I was starting to fall asleep when the door opened again. This time, it was Strassmann, along with another man.

  They crossed the street and got into his Horch — but they never drove off. After about 15 minutes, the other man got out of the car and walked back toward the building on the corner. Strassmann started the car and pulled away from the curb, and I began to follow. I didn’t turn on my lights.

  As I passed the bar, or whatever it was, the door opened to let the other guy back in again. The light from inside was bright enough to bathe the sidewalk for a second, and for some reason, I fixated on the pitiful shape of the pavement, which looked as if a bomb had hit it the day before. But then I looked up, just as I passed the door. It was just beginning to close, but I still could see, very clearly, two men kissing in the vestibule just inside. Full embrace, full kiss.

  15

  The office was particularly raucous on Monday morning. What is typically a time for arriving late and easing into the workday even more slowly than usual was instead the scene of a one-man comedy show. Kleinschmidt was up, telling one of his Kleinschmidt stories, and most everyone rolled on their desk chair out to the doorway of their office to witness his performance. Even the boss watched as the squad's senior murder detective filled the long hallway with his personality.

  All of which was fine with me. Anything to keep the attention off me, my case, and the lack of real progress thereof.

  “Three hundred pounds, easy,” Kleinschmidt said, no shouted. “There wasn't a bathroom scale that could hold the slob.”

  He was talking about a collar he had made in 1950. What brought up the story in the first place was beyond me — I was barricaded in my office early, with the door closed, updating the incident report and doodling on a pad of paper, trying to coax my mind into some creative thinking. The first roar of laughter was when I opened my door. And that was the thing about Kleinschmidt — not only could he tell a story, but he had a knack for retelling the key portions, in the midst of adding new details, so that each newcomer to the audience could still follow along.

  Anyway, the 300-pound slob was, of all things, a burglar. I mean, you thought burglar, and you normally pictured a wiry little guy who could squeeze himself through half-open windows and hide in skinny shadows until a random passerby was gone.

  But, as Kleinschmidt said, “He couldn't fit through a window at Red City Hall. And he couldn't hide in the shadow of the memorial in Treptower Park.”

  Asshole. There were a thousand big things in Berlin that cast a shadow, and he picked my crime scene. He did it on purpose, too, because he looked right at me when he said it. At the same time, I looked up at Greiner, despite myself, but he seemed engrossed in the story. At least I didn't see him looking at me, wondering what progress I might have made over the weekend. The truth was that I had made none. Between my date with Elke on Friday night, and my off-the-books surveillance for my father-in-law on Saturday night, and my pretty much sleeping through Sunday, I hadn't done any actual investigating. All I did was think. And the more I thought, the worse I felt.

  “So here was the thing,” Kleinschmidt said, continuing. The 300-pound burglar was a known thief, caught and imprisoned more than once, neither rehabilitated nor particularly interested in rehabilitation.

  “But he was hopeless,” Kleinschmidt said. “The previous time we had caught him, he did six months. And the only reason we caught him was because, after he broke into the house, he stopped after collecting the silverware to make himself a sandwich at their kitchen table.

  “Anyway, in this case, the big man was caught hiding between a couple of trash cans in an alley behind a jeweler's store near Frankfurter Tor. The jeweler saw him out the window as he was checking the lock on the back door and called the police. Since he hadn't stolen anything, despite his intentions, there really was nothing to hold him on other than maybe loitering. So after a few hours, they released him.

  “So we let him out, and he sits on the bench in the lobby of the precinct,” Kleinschmidt said. “He's waiting for somebody to pick him up. It was an old wooden bench, too, and a couple of us were taking bets on whether it would be able to hold him. After about 20 minutes, a car pulls up and out jumps this tiny, tiny woman — too small even for Grosser,” he said.

  Detective John Grosser was 5-foot-maybe and quite sensitive about it, which made Kleinschmidt an equal-opportunity asshole. Whatever — at least the attention wasn't on me.

  “But she was beautiful,” Kleinschmidt said. “And she was stacked — you wondered how she didn't topple over. You should excuse the expression,” he said, looking at
Gretchen. She had joined the audience midway through. She smiled and shook her head.

  “She comes into the station,” he said. “And our big fellow manages to get to his feet — the bench actually groaned a little as he put his weight on the arm to help lift himself. He leans down to kiss her, and it's a real goddamned kiss, not just a peck on the cheek. His tongue was all the way down her throat. It was really quite a performance.

  “And three or four of us — the desk sergeant, a couple of others — were watching every bit of it, and we actually broke into applause when their lips unlocked.

  “So our fat man bowed, quite pleased with himself,” Kleinschmidt said. “The woman turned to us, and between our laughs and our clapping, she sensed our desire for an explanation. I mean, it must have happened all the time, whenever anybody saw them together.”

  Then he paused, the famous Kleinschmidt pause, before the punchline.

  “So she turns and says, 'Either me on top or bent over a kitchen chair. I'm a religious woman, fellas, and I've always believed — whatever hardships or handicaps or obstacles we might encounter — that the Lord provides.'“

  The circle of detectives laughed and applauded for Kleinschmidt, who replied with a theatrical bow of his own. And then, one by one, we backed our rolling desk chairs into our offices. I was inside mine, but not fully maneuvered back behind my desk, when I was joined by a man I did not recognize.

  “He's quite a show,” the guy said. He sat down without asking and did not introduce himself. He was waiting for me to ask, but I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction, mostly because I was pretty sure he was Stasi. He was about 50, and he just smelled like Stasi.

  “So, you've come to take the case?” I said.

  “You wish, don't you?” he said.

  The Stasi and the Kripo. We all hated them, and they all hated us, which actually made for a fine relationship. They only dirtied their hands with our crap when it was particularly embarrassing crap — usually politically embarrassing crap. And when that happened, they just patted us on the head and took the case and sent us, in the immortal words of one of their officers, “back to the world of belligerent husbands and dead prostitutes.”