by Richard Wake
39
It was a warm night, dinnertime turning into about 8 p.m. I wore a hat that was just a little bit too big for my head, and a pair of eyeglasses with plain glass as the lenses. That was the total of my disguise repertoire, but it tended to work. I once sat three bar stools away from Bernie for a half hour wearing them, and he never noticed me. I took that as my disguise seal of approval — and in the summertime, when it was impossible to bundle up any more, it was the best I could manage.
From the side staircase at Friedrichstrasse Station, the dick with ears was in his usual position, doing his usual thing. He had just escorted two Brits in uniform into the same alley where he had talked to Bernie and me, and then he was out again in literally a minute. When he went into the alley, I scanned the area looking for the man who might be his new partner, seeing as how the most luxurious head of coal-black hair that I had ever seen was, at the moment, indisposed. But I didn’t see anyone. I watched two more transactions, and I still didn’t see anyone. It had only been two days, and I guessed that my man had just decided to take the chance and just go it alone.
Then, at a little bit after 8:30, it seemed that his night was done. My man walked toward the station steps, and I had to hustle to follow him. Hustle tends to get noticed, especially at a time of day when the station was running at less than its rush-hour frenzy, but I didn’t have a choice. The dick with ears never saw me, though, and I was able to follow him down one set of steps, onto a train platform, and then on to an eastbound S-bahn train. I was in the same car, at the other end, with about 10 people standing or sitting between us — but the whole time, my guy never looked up from his shoes.
Five stops later, he was out at Warschauer Straße. He got off quickly, but I waited until the last possible second, barely squeezing through the closing doors. Again, he never saw me, never looked back, never sensed a thing as he walked toward the Spree and, on the other side, the Schlesiches Tor, an ornate old gate that used to mark the entrance to the city but now sat pretty close — like, within feet — to the east-west border. After a five-minute walk, my man ducked into a bar without a sign above the door. I found a bench a half-block away, sat down, and watched the door. My operating theory was that the dick with ears worked for somebody bigger — and the fact that he got so squirrely when I brought it up during our chat in the alley just made me think it even more. And that’s who I wanted to find out more about — the boss.
Twenty minutes later, give or take, my man was out the door and walking back in the direction of Warschauer Straße. I figured the bar was where he dropped off his money every day, or whatever cut the boss received. Five minutes after that, I was inside.
It was just a bar, but there was a backroom area behind a curtain. I guessed that behind the curtain was where the business was transacted, seeing as how he saw two other guys go in, one at a time, and then go out. It was as if they were waiting for their turn in the bar, knowing where they all were in the queue and drinking until it was their turn.
I was hoping to wait long enough for the boss to come out, if only to use the bathroom, just to get a look at him — not that I knew what he looked like. I just figured I would be able to tell. It might not have been true, but it was all I had. But then, out of nowhere, I had a problem. The door swung open, and the dick with ears had come back inside.
I played it cool and sipped my beer. There was nothing showing on my face, and I was wearing the glasses and the hat. I actually felt pretty good about the whole thing until my man shouted to two others, “Grab him,” while he barged past the curtain. Then a different guy poked his head out and motioned for them to drag me back behind the curtain, too.
The boss was sitting behind a table. A man with a ledger book and a pile of marks in front of him shared the space, doing some ciphering. He had everything but the green eyeshade, and he didn’t look up when the boss said, “Speak. Someone speak.”
“I followed him from the station,” I said.
The dick with ears, after an embarrassed fumfer, filled in his employer, telling the truth — that I was a murder detective, not interested in the black market except as part of a murder case, that one of the Marks Brothers was dead. The boss spat, literally spat on the floor, when their names were mentioned, even as an alias.
“Amateur shitheads,” he said. “A nuisance.”
“Not worth killing?” I said. A courtroom observer would say I was leading the witness. Mostly, I was just trying to plot a way out of there.
“Hardly,” the boss said. “That isn’t even my business.”
“Murder?”
“Not my business. In fact, bad for business.”
He looked at me, and I looked at him.
“This is your show, copper.”
I could tell he wasn’t going to kill me, and that the dick with ears obviously wasn’t that worried, either, even though he had led an infidel into the inner sanctum. He must have been a benevolent boss. It emboldened me, just a touch.
“If you didn’t—”
“Then who did?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Guess. If they weren’t stepping on your toes, was there someone else?”
“Not in this part of town,” he said. “Besides, they were nothing. Really. Babies. I’m not sure they ever cost me a pfenning.”
I found it odd that no one had brought up my man’s missing partner. I mean, I was a Kripo murder detective. And seeing as how I felt as if I was about to be excused — I was sure there was more money to be counted — I brought it up myself.
“What about your partner?” I said, looking directly at the dick with ears. At which point, he looked directly at his boss, and then they both turned to me.
“You know, the guy with all of that black hair?” I said.
“How did you know?” It was the boss.
“I have eyes. I see things.”
“Well, what about him?”
“You don’t know, do you?” I said, and the two of them looked at each other again, and then back at me.
“Don’t know what?” the boss said.
“That he’s dead.”
“How?”
“One shot to the belly, one to the head. At the Soviet memorial in Treptower Park.”
“Like the other guy, the Marks Brother.” It was my small-time, partnerless friend.
“Yes, like the other guy. Can you give me his name?”
Neither of them answered, which was their answer. Suddenly, the backroom behind the curtain seemed very crowded. The dick with ears looked stunned, the boss pensive. He rubbed his chin, like a guy in a bad movie who was contemplating a puzzle. Meanwhile, the guy writing in the ledger still had not looked up, not even once.
Nobody said anything else, and then, in less than a minute, it seemed that the boss was done with me. I was put out on the street, politely enough, and I decided to walk back along the Spree rather than take the train. It was a nice August night, and I needed to think. Because while I couldn’t be sure, it really did seem as if I had surprised the two of them with the news of the sudden demise of their black-haired business partner. And if they didn’t know, exactly where the hell did that leave me?
Part IV
40
I slept in and avoided the office all day Friday. If they weren't calling me, and they weren't, then I was going to keep my distance. The second body was discovered on Wednesday morning. Kleinschmidt undoubtedly spent the rest of Wednesday doing his arm-waving thing around the office. Late Thursday afternoon, before I began tailing the dick with ears, I made a call to Gretchen, hoping to get a hush-hush reading of the temperature of the office.
“Other than Kleinschmidt, pretty cool,” she said.
“How about Greiner?”
“The boss?” she said. “Absent, again. Twice last week. Twice more this week. You know the promotion thing?”
“I've heard. No details, just that he might be promoted. Is it, like, a bigger Kripo job?
”
“I don't know if it's interviews, or what,” she said, ignoring my question. “But he's checked out. Kind of like you.”
“Don't ask.”
“I might ask next time. No, I'll definitely ask next time. You know, like her name?”
“There's no her. My God, you have a dirtier mind than most of my guy friends. No, all of my guy friends.”
“And that's your problem,” Gretchen said.
“What?”
“You don't realize that all women have dirtier minds than pretty much all guys.”
“Well, that's something to ponder—”
“With your right hand or your left hand?”
When I hung up, she was cackling — actually cackling. With that sound in my ear, I figured I had until Monday before the cavalry came searching. I had a long weekend to solve a murder or get myself embarrassingly yanked from the case — unless, of course, Greiner got promoted to wherever, and the move was immediate, and he just left the question for the next guy.
Anyway, I went out for a sandwich on Schoenhauser Allee and bought a newspaper, something I almost never did — partly because there was always one lying around the office if I was really interested, but mostly because I just wasn't very interested most days. It wasn't as if Neues Deutschland was required reading if you weren't a Party member or hadn't been the subject of one of their man-in-the-street interviews. Or, I guess, if you needed the television listings. Of course, they only printed the East television listings. The highlight that night was a discussion about an exciting breakthrough in calf milking techniques at 9 p.m.
I was leafing through, trying to clear my head — just a few minutes might be enough to reset my fried brain. The story I ended up focusing on was another in the endless run of screeds about the evil people leaving the GDR for the decadent West. Bernie didn't have a byline, and it was just where my eyes fell.
As I read it, I noticed something. For months, maybe years, when they wrote about this business, they always used the term “desertion of the Republic.” It was a reflex, automatic. But this story was different. There was no “desertion of the Republic.” Instead, the people who left were “victims of Western trade in human beings.” A few paragraphs later, they were said to be “victims of head-hunting.” A few paragraphs after that, the term was “effectively kidnapped.”
This was different. What the hell it meant, I had no idea. Bernie would know, but I didn't feel like talking to him right then. After all, I had effectively burned his source on all things black market, and he was going to be pissed off when he found out.
Of course, none of that much mattered when I heard the knock on the door. It woke me. I had fallen asleep reading the paper — for how long, I didn't know. But it was nearly dark, so it was probably just before eight. I figured it was someone from Keibelstraße assigned to bring me in to be yelled at, or officially relieved of the case, or something else bad that I hadn't figured on. But it wasn't any of those things. I opened the door and it was Kitty.
“Not even a phone call?” I said. “How did you know I would be home? And if I was home, how did you know I would be alone?”
“I left two messages at your office, so I knew you weren't there. And the alone part, it seemed worth the gamble.”
She started undressing without saying a word. I followed along, button for button, garment for garment. I didn't comment. I didn't argue. I never did.
Afterward, we shared a bottle of beer, still naked in bed.
“I love what you've done with the place,” she said.
“I don't think I've changed anything.”
“Other than the pile of shirts and underwear in the corner.”
“I go to the laundry on Saturday.”
We sipped and admired each other's nakedness. Well, I admired hers. I told myself that she admired mine.
“How's the barbed-wire king of Berlin?” I said. Once we were finished, I figured it was okay to talk about him.
Kitty stopped for a second and actually looked a little serious, which was not typical — unless she was talking about some new drapes that were hung incorrectly or something as pressing. It was clear to me from her reaction that she had forgotten she’d told me about the barbed wire. And this woman, who did not give a shit about anything — that wasn't drapes or some such thing — clearly gave a shit about this.
“You haven't repeated that to anybody, have you?”
“Of course not,” I said. “But, you know, I just got a lot more curious.”
“Don't be.”
“So, where is the old man on a Friday night? Working?”
“All weekend,” she said. Again, she looked more nervous than angry or sad.
I just looked at her again, my face screwed up in a question.
“All in due time,” she said. “By Sunday, it will all make sense.” At which point, her head disappeared below the covers, and I chugged down the last of the beer.
41
I figured the office was safe early on Saturday morning, and I was right. The only pressure to do a good job came from the top down, or from innate ambition. And if the boss was an absentee, as the Kripo murder squad's was at the moment, and if you were a 50-year-old detective, as most everyone on the squad was, there was no boss looking down, and there was no ambition to push you up. So Saturdays were off-days, almost always.
For some reason, Kleinschmidt was in my head. I was afraid of the asshole, but I also admired him more than I would ever admit out loud. He had the confidence that I would never have — the confidence, and the comedic timing, and the instincts. That he was still on the squad, still humping cases, never promoted, apparently never even considered, spoke to something — and maybe it was as simple as the bosses being afraid of his brilliance, or him being afraid of the paperwork, or a combination of the two fears. All I knew was that he was still alive, still working, and simultaneously disliked and admired by just about everyone. What did they call it? A legend in his own time.
So the stories that he'd told a dozen times stuck with me. So did the simple bits of wisdom and the aphorisms. Look at things from unexpected angles. Time is not your friend, bucko. Proximity is primary.
Proximity is primary.
I went back to the file, looking for I didn't know what. It had grown thicker since the beginning, as you would expect, mostly because there had been a dump of interview reports along the way from the precinct near Treptower Park. I had leafed through them once, but I opened the coffee that I had bought in the lobby and determined to dig in for a good hour before I left again.
It was just normal neighbor interview shit. Nobody had heard anything. I paged through and looked at the dates and realized that there had not been a re-canvass of the building on Heidelberger Straße after the second body was found. So that was something I could do.
There was a new body, so there were new questions. The superintendent — Schultz — could go through the house book again for me, just for laughs. Although I wasn't sure the old boy did a whole lot of giggling in his spare time. The stick up his ass was likely a yardstick. He told me — and I looked at the interview sheet from the precinct, and he told them — that he had not seen any visitors to Braun's apartment. In hindsight, that seemed a little odd to me. As we knew, the stiff was the occupant's younger brother, after all. You would have thought that he would have visited at some point. Then again, the Braun bothers did have a pretty careful GDR exit plan mapped out, and maybe that included Michael never visiting Kurt's apartment. Or maybe it was just a coincidence that Schultz never saw him. Based on my one experience, it wasn't hard to elude the guy, even if he did have the glass panel in his door that most of the supers had, allowing him to see into the hallway leading to the stairs at all hours.
I had nothing else, so I figured the re-canvass was the way to go. If I discovered anything, even something tiny, it might make Kleinschmidt look bad — which would make my life. And even if I didn't learn anything, I would scoop up the West Berlin identi
ty card that Kurt said was hidden under the lid of the toilet tank. I also would look for the loose floorboard and collect the 212 West marks that were supposed to be hidden there. If nothing else, the identity card and the money would indicate a certain level of progress when the boss finally got around to emasculating me. Maybe they would buy me a few more days with the case, and with my dignity.
42
Again, Schultz wasn't there. He had hung up one of those signs that you sometimes see in neighborhood shops, the kind with the hands on a clock that can be set to whatever time and the message, “I'll be back at:” The hands on the clock said 10:15, which meant I had a half hour to kill.
So I went up to Braun's apartment, praying that the door had not yet been repaired. Walking up the stairs, I realized that nobody had told Schultz that Kurt Braun, the tenant, was not dead but rather incarcerated in Hohenschonhausen — which might have been the same thing. I didn't think black market currency speculation was a capital crime, but I honestly didn't know for sure. The point was that it wouldn't be right to rent the place out from under Kurt — not yet, anyway. At that point, he hadn't even missed a rent payment. I made a note to remind Schultz when I saw him.
Thankfully, the door had not been fixed. It was closed over carefully, but a loud sneeze would have blown it open. Inside, the pieces from the shattered door frame were collected and piled nearly against the wall — for what purpose, I couldn't imagine. It seemed good for kindling and little else.
First, I went to the disgusting corner of the room where the toilet was — and it had gotten even worse. It had not been flushed, and the water seemed even more discolored than before. It smelled worse, too. But, whatever. I looked in the kitchen area for a dish towel and found one in a drawer. With that as protection against the filth, I lifted the lid off the toilet tank and there it was. Kurt had been honest. The green West Berlin identification card was taped to the underside of the lid.