by Richard Wake
“So you're not taking it? I mean, it doesn't matter to me. Either way.”
“You lie well for a child,” he said. “My name is Beck, by the way. And, no, we are not taking the case. But I do have some information for you.”
The last thing I wanted to do was get in bed with the Stasi, especially when they weren't taking the case. I didn't know much, but I was pretty sure — even as the youngest detective on the murder squad — that they didn't hand out favors for nothing. If this was the quid, I had no idea what the quo might be or when I might have to provide it. It legitimately scared me. Then again, I was feeling pretty desperate right about then. And besides — how do you turn down information on a murder investigation, wherever it might be coming from?
“Okay, I'll bite. What's the information?”
Beck smiled. Just beyond smug. He knew he had me.
“The dead man has been tentatively identified as Kurt Braun, correct,” he said. The fact that he knew the name did not surprise me. I was sure that the incident reports that I was updating every day were shared around the building.
“More than tentatively,” I said.
“You might want to reconsider that,” Beck said, and here the grin was as big as it was annoying.
“And why would I want to do that? I mean, reconsider?”
“Because it seems that a gentleman named Kurt Braun, at the same address, has been in Stasi custody at Hohenschonhausen for the last two weeks.”
Part II
16
In the first few minutes after Beck left my office, I came close to crying. I closed my eyes, and my breath caught for a second before I pulled myself together. The case was pretty high-profile — Kleinschmidt and the rest of them all knew that I'd caught it — but the Stasi didn't want it. The one thing I had going for me — the identification card that the cops found in the trees near the monument — had turned out to be nothing. It didn't belong to my stiff at all. And all I could think about was Bernie, sitting there while we were having coffee on Alexanderplatz, telling me that if the ID card didn't belong to my dead guy, “you really don't have shit.”
I wanted to hide, at least for the remainder of the day. Part of me said the thing to do was get in the car and look busy, maybe go back to the apartment building and re-interview everybody that the locals had already interviewed. I'd probably end up doing that at some point, too, except it seemed a little superfluous at that moment, given that the apartment from the identification card didn't belong to my handless, footless, dickless corpse.
The problem with hiding, though, was Beck. His visit was too big an event to run from. If Greiner found out second-hand that the Stasi had unbuttoned its trousers and left a mark on his territory, his fury would have been genuine and justified. I didn't know if he would have had my back in the middle of some kind of big controversy, but I worked for the man, and there were universally understood rules to that kind of relationship. And the first of those rules was not to keep the boss in the dark about something that could end up embarrassing him. It didn't matter if you crapped all over yourself, but if there was a chance the splatter might reach the boss's shoes, you had to warm him. Every flatfoot learned this at the very beginning and had that kind of relationship with his sergeant, and so it went up the line. It was like that in the Vopo, and I'm sure it was like that in every police department.
So I straightened my necktie and made sure my shirttail was tucked in, and I walked down the linoleum hallway and poked my head into the big glass fishbowl at the end.
“Got a minute, boss? “I said. Part of me hoped he was too busy to talk, but that was the cowardly part of my personality. The rational part knew I had to get it over with and was happy when Greiner pointed to the chair across from his desk. His head was down for about 15 seconds after I sat, signing a series of forms. Then he was done.
“Well?”
“I just had a visitor.”
Greiner looked at me without expression.
“Name of Beck.”
Same expression.
“Stasi guy.”
“And? Are they taking the case?”
“No.”
“Damn it,” Greiner said. You never heard him curse, and damn was about as bad as he got. Damn meant he was mad. Damn meant he was damn mad.
“It's worse than that,” I said. And then I explained about the identification card not belonging to my stiff, but to some schmuck who had spent the previous two weeks vacationing in Hohenschonhausen.
“Goddamn,” Greiner said.
Oh, man.
“Goddamn,” he said again. And then we were both quiet, me because I was afraid to say anything, the boss because he was thinking. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and half turned away from me. His right hand massaged his forehead, and he sighed a few times, each exhale seemingly louder than the one before.
After a little while, maybe 30 seconds, maybe 45, he looked at me again and said, “Okay, remind me what you have.”
It didn't take long — mutilated corpse, now unidentified, likely killed somewhere else in the morning and dumped at the Soviet monument the same night. Cause of death was a blow to the head. Eggs in the stomach. Smooth-bladed knife did the carving.
That was it. Greiner just sighed again when I finished and went back to closing his eyes and massaging his forehead.
“Take the rest of the day,” is what he said after another long silence.
“Take it and—”
“Just take the afternoon. You're off. You're free. Just go. I need some time to think about this — and I'm out of the office tomorrow, too. So, you know what? Today and tomorrow are officially sick days for you. I can't let you make another move on this until I've had a chance to think, so don't.”
“Don't what?”
“Don't make a damn move,” Greiner said. “Not a phone call. Not an interview. No banter with the smiling criminalist. Just get out of the office.”
“But the trail—”
“The trail is cold as hell, and it's led you nowhere so far, and two days colder isn't going to make a damn bit of difference at this point. I need to think and get through some meetings tomorrow morning. Wednesday morning, first thing, in here. You know, and make it extra early — like, 7:30. I'd just as soon do it without any spectators.”
I looked over my shoulder. Three heads were casually peeking out of office doors along the row, including Kleinschmidt's.
“Okay, 7:30 Wednesday,” I said.
I didn't even stop to sit when I got back to my office. I just picked up my jacket from the back of my chair and shucked my arms into it as I walked to the stairs. The heads peeking out of the small offices likely thought I was chasing a tip on my case, maybe a tip supplied by the boss himself. None of them probably suspected that I was chasing an 11 a.m. beer instead.
17
Even before I knew that I would be footloose, fancy-free, and drunk by 2 p.m., I had made a late-afternoon date with Elke. Rather, she had made it with me. She had a half-day, for some reason, and suggested I swing by her family's apartment to pick her up and meet her family. First, the joke about telling our children about our first date at the cinema, now meeting her family. On second thought, I figured, maybe it wasn't a joke.
But, well, whatever. Beck was who was on my mind, not Elke, as I plowed through a half dozen Pilsators and then made my way to the train. Beck, but also my now-unnamed stiff in the morgue, my now-named inmate at the Stasi's home for wayward souls, my perplexed boss who needed a day to consider the options, my tenuous career as a murder detective — really, everything and everyone except Elke. Which suggested something, I guess.
When she told me where she lived, my reaction was, “Ohhh, Pankow!” Because I had been to Pankow before, and it was lush. But there were two different train lines that ran into what was a pretty big neighborhood, and she told me to take the train I had never taken before. And as for my “Ohhh, Pankow!”, Elke said, “The only people who say that are the people who
don't live in Pankow — the real people.”
She was essentially snarling when she said it. And then she said, “Because, you know, just because I walk past a few embassies on the way to the train doesn't mean I don't live in a shitty apartment. Because embassies and shitty apartments can exist in the same neighborhood. It's not like there's some law of physics that prevents it — trust me on that.”
I saw, almost as soon as I stepped off the train, that she wasn't wrong. It's not that it was a bad neighborhood because it certainly wasn't. But the station was in the middle of a shopping district in Pankow that I had never seen before, and it looked like one of a hundred shopping districts in Berlin — stores, restaurants, bars, with apartments on top of them. There was no ohhh about it. It was just, well, fine.
There were little side streets off the main streets, little side streets filled with apartment buildings — five stories, mostly. And those buildings, depending upon the construction date and the level of upkeep over the years, were likely filled, for the most part, with the shitty little apartments to which Elke had referred.
The directions she had given me were simple enough: “Right out of the station, first left, first right after that, then a quick left onto Eintrachtstraße. No. 9.” The walk was maybe 10 minutes. No. 9 looked fine on the outside. Inside, it was as expected: two rooms with a kitchen and a bathroom for six people. Her mother and Elke, her brother Werner and his wife Kat, and two little kids, ages six and four. The apartment was only kind of shitty, but the crowding was the intolerable part. I wasn't used to dodging a wooden block with the letter C on it, a block being tossed over my head by the six-year-old to the four-year-old, and back again, and again, and again, while trying to make polite conversation with my new girlfriend's mother.
“Ah, children, what can you do?” Greta said. That was her mother's name. I couldn't tell if she was an indulgent grandmother or if she was beyond caring — although my money was on the latter. Werner and Kat stopped the game of catch when they arrived back from shopping with a string bag containing two turnips, two potatoes, a pound of pork, and what appeared to be a small bit of some kind of fruitcake.
Werner worked in the steel plant in Friedrichshain and was still wearing his work overalls. They had been trying to get their own place for six years, he said.
“The answer from the apartment people is always, 'just six more months,' he said. At which point, the four-year-old — also named Greta, it seemed — got a laugh out of everyone when she repeated the words she undoubtedly had heard before in a singsong. “Six more months,” she sang. “Six more months.” Then she ran off, laughing along with everyone, to help her mother with the pork and the rest.
“Good to see her laugh,” Werner said. It was just me, Elke and the older Greta now. “It's school.”
“Not going well?” I said. I mean, it was what polite people did — pretended to be interested in others’ kids. Of course, it had never dawned on me that a four-year-old might be in school. I hadn't started until I was six.
“It's the bathroom thing,” Werner said, and when it was clear from my face that I didn't know what he was talking about, he said, “Oh, right, you must not have kids. The way they do it now is, when it's time for the potty, the four-year-olds all go together and sit in a row on a long toilet. The potty bench. They all sit together, and they go. And they all wait until the last kid is finished — only then can they leave. They say it teaches a feeling of caring for each other. You know, a sense of community.”
“But the problem is, if your kid is a little slow getting started, like little Greta, and she's almost always the last one…” Elke said.
“It can create, well, some shame,” Werner said. “I mean, she's only four.”
I looked at Elke, wondering if this was real. She read my mind and gave me a little nod. Yes. Real. Christ.
Then the six-year-old came in — Berta. She was wearing a blue neckerchief. I knew enough about kids to know what that was. She was in the Young Pioneers, and Berta was insisting on singing a song for me. I was company, after all, a new audience. I recognized the tune almost immediately, an old song called “The Little Trumpeter.” But it sounded quite odd coming from the lips of a six-year-old, seeing as how it was a ballad about a dead soldier in World War I and all.
Then there was the ending, which I didn't recognize. They must have written it special in the previous few years:
You did not fall in vain, we have now completed your work.
We built the state that brought freedom and peace to all of us.
Let our reputation proudly ring out:
Long live the workers' power!
I applauded when she was done and simultaneously raised an eyebrow in Elke's direction. All she could do was shake her head behind her clapping hands.
The whole childhood indoctrination thing seemed overwhelming, or maybe it was just the number of people in the crowded living room. Werner had not bathed after work, and I could smell him distinctly. The pork was frying about 10 feet away, but it did not cover the body odor of a steelworker.
Where they all slept was beyond me. Maybe Werner and Kat took turns on the couch, or maybe the kids took it and the adults slept on the floor. All I knew for sure was that the older Greta and Elke shared the bedroom and the only bed. It was Greta's apartment, after all. And as Elke had already told me, when I asked about how she explained her nights away from home, “My mother has been a widow for 18 years. She lives in an overcrowded tomb. She raised me to be independent. The last thing she cares about is who I'm screwing. Truth is, she probably likes having the bed to herself now and then.”
The plan had never been for me to stay for dinner, and when I started to make my excuses, I could tell that Werner and Kat's insistence that I stay was halfhearted. They hadn't known that I was coming, and hadn't shopped accordingly, and, well, kids have to eat, and steelworkers have to eat.
And there was another thing. Elke didn't even pretend to insist that I stay. If she was looking out the window to watch me leave, she might have seen me running. At least, that's how I felt.
18
The next day, it was Pankow again for me. I had been sleeping in when the phone rang with the summons. I asked Kitty how she knew I was at home, and she said, “I called your office. They said you were off. Not fired, I trust.”
“Not yet, anyway,” I said. “Well, not as far as I know.”
I took the other train this time, the one I had taken so many times before. Different day, different station, different life. I walked along the tracks and then turned into the park. I ended up on the bridle path that ran along the perimeter of the park, a hard-packed dirt track that never seemed to be used by any horses. There was a school on my right, and the little boys and girls were chasing a half dozen footballs without any obvious purpose. They didn’t look any older than little Greta. On the left, deep in the middle of the park, there was a petting zoo that seemed closed to visitors. There wasn’t much to see, other than a single haggard goat. The beer garden that adjoined it was closed, too. It was hardly surprising, given that it was a Tuesday at noon.
At the end of the bridle path, there was an elaborate gate that led back out to the city. I crossed Kreuzstrasse, which ran parallel to the parkland, and stopped at a cafe with no name, the same cafe where I almost always stopped. I ordered a lager and sat out front in the sunshine. I calmed my nerves and entertained myself watching people trip on the uneven cobblestones that protruded from the sidewalk. I ordered a second lager, just because, and considered the concurrent rivers of shit that I was attempting to ford. Four rivers, specifically: The stiff in Treptower Park, the latest errand for my father-in-law, Elke, and now Kitty. But it was too much to think about all at once. I settled on Kitty, my thoughts occasionally interrupted by another tripping yahoo on the sidewalk.
Kitty. Full name, Katerina Grimm. Daughter of Karl. Former wife of mine, before she decided that there were better places to scratch her various itches than in the bed we shar
ed in Prenzlauer Berg. We had been divorced for over a year. She and her new husband/itch-scratcher, one Norbert J. Hartz, lived in her family home in Pankow, which became vacant after the Central Committee members decided that Pankow was just a little too close to the people, and relocated en masse to a well-guarded compound of apparently swell houses about 20 miles away. That’s where I was headed, to the old house.
I finished my beer and walked. I felt like you sometimes do when you’re driving home, and you arrive at your front door and don’t remember the trip, as if the car was driving by itself, steering by itself, making the lefts and rights by itself. That’s how it was with Kitty and me. She called, I came, and when I would think back on it later, I could remember almost none of the details.
From the cafe, it was about a 10-minute walk along Grabbeallee before I reached Majakowskiring. Kitty told me it was named after a Russian poet, Majakowski, but the place was all about power, not poetry. There was no guard at the gate anymore, but there had been when I first met Kitty, back when the biggest of the big political names in East Germany all lived along the long, circular street. There were gates on either end of the long, flat circle, but I was going through the only one I had ever used, and I had no idea where the other one led. Kitty’s house was to the left, but I went to the right when I got inside, just because I wanted to see how many of the villas I could remember.
I didn’t do badly, as it turned out. Ulbricht, who ran things even if he didn’t always have the biggest title, lived in the villa at No. 28. Pieck, who did have the big title before he died — president — lived at No. 29. Grotewohl was at No. 46. And Honecker, who was a big something if you went by the number of times his picture was on the front page of Neues Deutschland, lived at No. 58.