by Richard Wake
“I like the bars,” I said. “I've enjoyed some of the women. A lot of it — the glamour, I don't know what you want to call it — doesn't have a huge attraction for me. Then again, who am I kidding? I have a better job here than I would in the west. I have a better apartment. I have the same television I've seen on a billboard on the Ku'Damm. I'd be taking a step down in that sense if I left.”
We drank some more. The truth was, I had not ever seriously considered leaving. Even if I was a sergeant in a precinct house somewhere, I thought I would feel the same way. Although how could I know for sure? It hadn't been that long before, but I was miles away from being a sergeant in a precinct house.
“But philosophically?” Red Rolf said. “Forget the creature comforts. Just in a philosophical sense—”
“You know I don't have Lenin's picture tattooed on my ass like you.”
“But, still.”
“I see advantages in their system,” I said. “I see advantages in our system. I see flaws in both. As you well know, I can complain about shit and be cynical with the best of them. But you know and I know that I'm not typical. I'm not working in a mill along the Spree. I'm privileged. I'm honest enough, and I'm self-aware enough — even when I'm drinking — to know that privilege changes things. It makes a difference. It just does.”
More silence.
“You know, I guess I like knowing it's there,” I said. “I guess I like knowing that I can just hop on the S-bahn and visit the hedonistic West pretty much any time I want. But, no, I don't feel the need for anything more than that.”
I got up to leave and wobbled for just a second from the blackberry brandy. Red Rolf stood up and wobbled, too, and then I hugged him. I might not have done that since I was 12, when we were lying on the floor, trying to sleep in the middle of firefights in the streets between Soviet soldiers and the remains of the German army, old men and boys not much older than me.
“I love you, old man,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I always have.”
31
Bernie took less convincing than I had expected. I wanted him to take me to meet his black-market source, and he was all-in before the second beer. He rationalized it by saying, “I mean, what the hell? My life has been pretty dull lately. I could use a little zing.”
“Wait a minute. Ever since we first met — when we really didn't even know what it was — when you said zing, you meant—”
“I know,” he said. Then he put on an especially glum face. I knew it was a put-on, but still.
“Not much zing lately?” I said.
He replied with a wanking motion. “But when I close my eyes, and if my hand is especially warm, I can almost convince myself.”
He asked me for a zing story. I told him about Elke. I did not tell him about Katerina because, well, because to tell him would have been to have been shamed by him forever. It took him six months to stop needling me about allowing myself to be bought off by my cheating wife's father with a furnished apartment. Katerina would be good for a lifetime of needling if I let him.
We went to Friedrichstrasse Station the next night, around dinnertime. It was such a busy place, pretty much at all hours, that surveillance was a cinch. We found a side set of steps to the station, leaned on the railing, and took in the whole entrance area below us. We looked like two nobodies killing a few minutes on a nice night before our train to the Ostbahnhof.
After a minute or two, he pointed.
“The four Americans?” Bernie said. There were four soldiers and, even if I had not recognized the uniforms, I knew they were Americans just by their bearing. They did tend to be a little taller than the rest of us, and a little louder, and a lot more likely to laugh uproariously in public places. There was just, I didn't know, a swagger to them. And there were talking to a little worm of a guy in a black raincoat.
“Talking to the dick with ears?” I said. That had been our shorthand for little skinny guys with short hair since we first met each other, definitely before we knew what zing was.
“That's my guy,” Bernie said.
I watched the transaction play out. It went as Bernie had suggested it would. His source approached the American soldiers. A conversation ensued. It didn't take long for the negotiation — 30 seconds, tops. The Americans were obviously well-practiced in the art of illegal currency transactions in the German Democratic Republic. And after that 30 seconds, the four Americans followed the black raincoat about 200 feet down the street, and then into an alley between two buildings. About 30 seconds after that, the four of them left and headed east, undoubtedly calculating in their heads exactly how drunk they would be able to get for the few West marks they had changed over. About 15 seconds after that, the black raincoat emerged from the alley and began walking back toward the station.
“That's it?” I said. “And he works alone.”
“Alone, but not alone,” Bernie said. “His partner was watching his back, from a couple of hundred feet away.”
Bernie pointed to another guy in a black raincoat. He wasn't far from the bottom of the staircase on which we were standing. And this guy, unlike his partner, might have had the thickest, most luxurious head of coal-black hair that I had ever seen.
We waited a couple of minutes and then walked down the steps and approached Bernie's source. He recognized Bernie right off, but he looked a little alarmed when he saw me. Going in, Bernie said this might be the case and told me just to keep quiet. He quickly explained that I was a detective, and his guy froze up. He warmed only a tiny bit when Bernie said I was a murder detective, and didn't care about the black market. Reluctantly, he agreed to go into the alley for a conversation.
“You have a West mark?” the guy said. I looked in my wallet and was surprised that I did. It must have been change left over from the movie date with Elke.
I gave it to him. He gave me back three of our marks.
“Three?” I said. “What the—”
“Call it a sign of good faith,” he said.
The transaction completed, I showed him the picture of the face of the dead body — I had changed over from carrying the ID card. He looked at it and said, yeah, he knew him.
“He used to work near one of the other exits of the station.” He pointed over toward the Spree. “But it wasn't that often, and they looked like kids who had no idea what they were doing.
“They?”
“Yeah, two of them. I called them The Marks Brothers. Get it? Marks. M-A-R-K-S, not X.”
“Yeah, I get it. Were they really brothers?”
“I have no idea — like I said, I had nothing to do with them. They worked a different corner, but only sometimes.”
“But could they be brothers? I mean, you called them—”
“Not sure, but yeah, they could be. I mean, I guess they could be. They looked enough like it, at least from a distance.”
Which was interesting. I guess I had considered the idea that my dead body and my new friend in Hohenschonhausen were related, but I hadn't pursued it. So there was a potential records search in my future, unless I could convince Gretchen to do it for me. The odds on that were not great, though — which likely meant a long and dusty afternoon in the basement of the Red City Hall.
But something else nagged at me more than a potential familial connection. Because even if they were brothers, well, so what? It would have meant that Kurt Braun had been lying to me about not knowing the victim. And it would have explained the little, indescribable something I saw on his face when I showed him the picture. But it probably wouldn't have moved me any closer to finding the killer — unless Braun was holding some more secrets. I guess that was possible, and an avenue of questioning that should be pursued — but the idea of wangling my way back into Hohenschonhausen for a second visit gave me a headache just thinking about it. And there was no way — absolutely no way — I could ask Greiner to call in another favor with the Stasi. The truth was, at that moment, I wasn't sure Greiner would have been okay with me asking him i
f he wanted cream or sugar in his coffee.
So all of that was meaningful but secondary, at least as I was thinking at that time. Standing there in the alley, the black market was what held most of my attention. I said to Bernie's source, “If they didn't piss you off, could there have been someone else they did piss off? Someone who normally works that corner?”
“Like I said, they weren't around that often,” the dick with ears said. He was starting to become uncomfortable with my questions, both emotionally and physically. He was slowly inching his way toward the opening into the alley.
“But you must have a boss, and he might not have been happy, right?” I said.
The guy looked at Bernie, and then at me, and then at Bernie again. “That's it, we're done here,” he said. He had already turned his back on us and begun walking away before he finished the sentence. And just like that, there were only two of us in the alley.
32
Being the ace detective that I was, I had failed to write down the name of the street from the night in Friedrichshain when I was tailing Martin Strassmann's friend after he left the bar, or whatever it was. It didn't matter, though — I just drove to the spot, turned down the street and was there in about two minutes. No. 17 didn't look any better in the daylight than in the middle of the night — and the two piles of rubble in the vacant lots on either side somehow looked worse.
I went early, 7 a.m., before work. I was beyond anxious about how long it was taking me to make any real progress on the murder. The blessing, though, was that no one else seemed to give even half a crap. Greiner had washed his hands of it, and of me, or so it seemed after he delivered on the Stasi favor. And it wasn't like in West Berlin, where a murder like this one would be splashed all over the newspapers, creating what I imagined would be an oppressive amount of pressure to get a result. Instead, on our side, none of the three daily newspapers had so much as mentioned the dead, mutilated body found at the base of the Soviet memorial. As Bernie said, as far as the papers — and the Party — were concerned, no one got murdered in our socialist paradise. No, this was a private affair. This was my little pile of shit, and only mine. No one else could care less.
Still, I cared enough that I didn't want to be doing Karl Grimm's errands on the Kripo's time. Besides, the early morning was the best for those kinds of things. For many people, without the opportunity to rehearse, a little sleep in the eyes could be better than truth serum. Of course, I didn't even need that. I wasn't there to roust Strassmann's pal. I just needed to get his name from the house book. He didn't even need to know I had been there. Better yet, I hoped he wouldn't find out about my visit.
That was the plan, anyway. I went inside the building and banged on the first door on the first floor. That was almost always the superintendent, and he or she was almost always the one who kept the book. My knocking was calibrated — loud enough to wake the super, but not so loud as to wake the building, and particularly the man living one floor above.
I calibrated well, I thought. The super opened up, and his robe was not quite closed. I showed him my identification and said, “Get the book but first get some fucking pants, man.” He pointed me to the sofa, and I waited about a minute. He handed me the book and offered coffee. I accepted.
When he left to fix it, I flipped the book open to my man in the second-floor front apartment. His name was Franz Koenig. He was 33 years old and had lived in the apartment for three years. His prior address had been in Leipzig. He had had one five-night guest in 1959, identified as his mother, Gertrude, from Dresden. Those were the only notations in the book.
I wrote all of that down, flipped the page in my notebook, and began copying names and apartment numbers for everyone in the five-story building. I wanted the super to see me copying them all, so as not to give him a hint about who or what I was after.
He put down the coffee and said, “Anything or anyone I can help you with?”
“No thanks,” I said. I guess if I had been on an official investigation, that I would have asked him if he knew if Franz Koenig liked the fellas, or more specifically, if he liked the bald-headed fellas. But that wasn't my purpose. Instead, I took a long sip of the coffee so he could sneak a peek at the notebook, name after name, apartment after apartment.
“How long have you been keeping the book?” I said.
“Two years. My father before me. I inherited the job when he died.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Don't be. He was an asshole.”
It always made me feel bad when people talked that way about their parents. I lost my father when I was about eight and my mother when I was 12, and I revered their memories even as their faces faded from my mind's eye. I didn't like to consider the notion that time and togetherness and the complications of growing to adulthood might have fractured our relationship. And when I heard people talk like that, even a stranger, it shook me just a bit.
I went back to writing, paging slowly through the book. It always amazed me that the house book even existed. Every tenant in every apartment in the whole country had an entry. I didn't know who invented ledger books, or where they were invented, but I had to believe that Germans embraced them more than anyone on earth. Names, dates, lists, all neatly in columns — it was a German stereotype that, like most stereotypes, was largely true. And even if they were of dubious value — you could stay two nights in someone's place without getting an entry on their page, but not three nights, as if there was something magic about those last 24 hours — the house book was still the fastest way for a policeman to find out somebody's particulars. Whoever thought of it was clearly a copper.
When I was done, I stood up and left with neither a thank you nor an explanation. Whether the super would tell the tenants was up to him. All I knew was, I had been in and out in about 10 minutes, and I was reasonably hopeful that no one else had seen me, and if the super told anyone, he would honestly say that I took everyone's information. No specific person would necessarily be alarmed.
Then again, did I really care? All Grimm had tasked me with doing was getting Franz Koenig's name, and I had gotten it. The rest was his problem — unless, of course, I found a way to screw up in a significant way, in which case it would be my problem.
I left the apartment and was parked on the sidewalk at Keibelstraße before 8. I thought I would be the first one in the office, but I wasn't. Gretchen was there already, and she pretty much sprinted down the hallway from her desk when she saw me.
“Where have you been?” she said. She was half out of breath.
“Out.”
“Where?”
“What are you, my mother?”
“There's another body,” she said. She still hadn't quite returned to normal breathing, but I understood her just fine.
“What do you mean, another body?”
“Kleinschmidt caught it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Another body, and he's pissed,” she said.
“Kleinschmidt’s pissed.”
“At who?”
“At you, dummy.”
“Why me?”
“Another body,” Gretchen said. Except she said it like, “An-oth-er bo-dy,” slower and louder, as if I were an imbecile. “Another body. It's at the Soviet memorial in Treptower Park. Kleinschmidt wants you. Now. And he's pissed.”
“But why? What did I do?”
“He says it was your call, and when you didn't answer, it became his call, and because of where the body is, it should still be your call. I mean, he was really yelling.”
I stood there, looking around. There was no one else in the office. I specifically looked past Gretchen, over her shoulder, just to make sure — but there was no one in Greiner's fishbowl. It was still my little pile of shit, but now Kleinschmidt had somehow managed to step in it. God. At that point, I was pretty sure that I would have preferred that Ulbricht or Honecker had stepped in it. Kleinschmidt. Christ.
“Where were you?” Gretchen said. The
re was just the hint of a dirty smile on her face.
“I wish,” I said.
She turned and began walking away. Half over her shoulder, she said, “And what are you still doing here?”
33
I drove to Treptower Park and left the car in the same little parking lot as the last time. It wasn't dark like the last time, though, and I didn't need a torch to keep me from tripping over an exposed tree route on the path through the trees. I managed to trip in broad damn daylight, breaking my fall with my palms, skinning the right one, managing to get a dirt mark on my left knee. That was the extent of the damage, though, and I was pretty well brushed off when I emerged from the trees.
There were a half dozen uniforms and a bunch of others, all circled around what I assumed was the body. There also were about 30 gawkers. Given the topography, it was hard to shield them from seeing. The first difference between my body and this body was that this one was at the entrance of the Soviet memorial, and mine had been at the base of the statue. The two sites were hundreds of feet apart.
I showed my identification and was allowed through the circle that was surrounding the body. It was covered by a cloth of some kind, undoubtedly because of the gawkers. I didn't say anything, and Freddy Mann was the first one to see me.
“Ah, the prodigal Little Shit,” he said.
“Very helpful,” I said. Reflexively, I looked around.
“He's over there,” Freddy said, pointing to two men who were maybe 50 feet to our right. One was Kleinschmidt. I didn't know the other one, but Freddy read my mind.
“The other one is the guy who found him,” he said. “Just a good socialist out for his morning constitutional. He's going to have a hell of a story to tell in the bar tonight.”
I leaned over and reached for the corner of the sheet covering the body. Freddy stopped me. “Not yet,” he said. “We really want to get those people back. They say more uniforms will be here any time to deal with it, give us a little more privacy. And somebody from the medical examiner will be here in a minute, too, I think. Let's just wait.”