by Richard Wake
It peeled off easily, without tearing anything. I flipped through and it was, indeed, the ID card belonging to the late Michael Braun. I had brought Kurt's GDR identification with me and compared the pictures. The two of them really did look a lot alike. I studied the two photos next to each other for differences, and it took a while. But Kurt's ear lobes were a little more separate from his head than Michael's were, and Michael's hairline might have been a fraction higher than Kurt's. It took a real study, though, and even the differences were tiny. There was every reason to believe that no copper on either side of the border was going to tell the difference.
I put the lid back on the tank and walked the few feet over to the bed. Kurt had said that the loose floorboard was near the head, so that was the end of the bed that I pushed over a few feet. The loose floorboard was not obvious to look at, but a few quick probes with my heel revealed it. I leaned over and pried it up easily with a penknife. I brought a little torch, just in case, but I didn't need it. When I reached inside, the bundle was right there, inside a folded oilcloth. I unfolded it and, yes, there was a pile of West marks inside. So Kurt was telling the truth about that, too, really against all of his interests. I argued that it might help me catch his brother's killer, but that really made no sense — and he told me anyway.
I didn't bother to count it, mostly because I had already decided to put it back where I found it. I figured, if the Stasi let him out, Kurt deserved it. I might change my mind if I truly believed that my discovering the money would somehow impress the boss, but I didn't think so. If the West Berlin identification card wasn't enough to buy me more time, the money wasn't going to matter.
So I put it back under the loose floorboard and pushed the bed back where it was. I still had 15 minutes to kill, and I figured I would kill them on the front steps in the sunshine. It was a nice Saturday morning, mid-60s temperature. It could have been a touch warmer in the middle of August, but it was pleasant enough.
Sitting out there, I soon had a companion — a little girl in a pink dress who came out of the apartment building. She said her name was Lottie. She was holding two little dolls — like, really little. Miniature. They even looked small in her little hands. One was a boy in a sailor suit. The other was a girl in a blue gingham dress.
She handed them to me, and I cooed over them. I knew how to do that much. I gave the dolls back to her and then, with two gestures — a finger over her lips followed by a finger pointing inside — she made it clear that she wanted to take me on a little adventure. I looked at my watch — still 10 minutes before Schultz's sign said he would return. So I followed her. What the hell? I liked kids.
Where she led me was the basement of the building — with at least two more warnings with her finger over her mouth along the way. Apparently, my feet on the steps were making too much noise for Lottie's taste. We got down there, and it was dark except for the little bit of light from the hallway outside. But that was enough for Lottie to find an overturned crate, upon which she stood and then jumped just a little bit to reach a string that controlled a single bulb dangling above.
The light revealed a little world that this girl had somehow created. She had built a dollhouse out of this and that — mostly a wooden box into which she had carved rough windows and a door. In the front yard, there were little sticks jabbed into blobs of modeling clay — trees to shade the house.
I marveled at it, and then she took off the lid. There were curtains on the windows, a little table with two benches on either side, even a tiny cup and saucer. It was really quite a production for a five-year-old. I was genuinely impressed, and I made a big fuss about how good it was, and Lottie was so happy. She sat the girl doll on one of the benches, and then she handed the boy doll to me, and I put him on the other bench.
It was fun, seeing how proud Lottie was. I guess that was why it took me almost 10 minutes to notice the wheelbarrow, the one caked either with a lot of rust or a lot of dried blood, sitting about five feet away, just barely illuminated by the single bulb that was still swaying, ever so slightly.
43
I didn't know what to do. For whatever reason, the first thing I did was scan the room, looking for a shovel. I took out my torch and rooted around a little bit — the bulb didn't light up even a third of the basement. Lottie followed me, and then it was my turn to put my finger over my lips. But it was just boxes and luggage and shit. It would have to be searched, but I didn't notice anything right off. I didn't see any garden tools, wood-working tools, or anything like that.
Next, without a thought — again, almost by reflex — I took out my penknife, scraped a bit of the red crud off the wheelbarrow, and deposited the sample into a folded-up 10-mark note. I was pretty sure that Freddy Mann would be able to work his magic on it and come up with an answer, either way.
But then, what?
All logic and common sense dictated that I now needed help. To me, Schultz was probably the guy to look at most closely — but there were five floors of tenants to eliminate, just to be sure. It was not a job for one man. Kleinschmidt could probably handle it — he'd have a confession by sunset and the story of all stories to tell in the bar the same night — but me? There was a much greater chance of me doing a face-plant after tripping over my dick than anything else. If you were taking bets, the dick-trip/face-plant quinella would have had the shortest odds on the board.
But I wanted this. I mean, I really wanted this. My emotion was probably no different than most murder detectives would have felt in the same situation. Of course, most murder detectives weren't still in their 20s and didn't get their job because their father-in-law was on the goddamned Central Committee of the German Democratic Republic's goddamned Socialist Unity Party. I had many advantages in my career, but I also had a similar number of hurdles preventing me from being taken seriously. And maybe that shouldn't have mattered — I had the job, and I had the apartment, and fuck 'em — but it did matter to me.
So I weighed it. Yes, I needed help. It wasn't even worth arguing the point. But on the other side, there was the matter of a delay. Who knew what Schultz, or whoever, might discover in the hours when I was rounding up the posse? And it would be hours on a Saturday morning in August, and not just one or two hours. Half the Kripo murder squad was probably on a lake somewhere with their families. For all I knew, Lottie's father was the killer, and when she told him about the nice police officer who played with her dollhouse in the basement, the wheelbarrow and whatever else might disappear while I was waiting for Kleinschmidt and whoever else to come save my ass.
So time mattered. The clock is not your friend, bucko.
So I decided to start with Schultz. I had come for a real reason — to re-canvass the apartment building after the second body was found at the Soviet memorial. It was a simple, routine task. I would tell him about why I was there. I also would tell him something we did not know the first time we had spoken — that the first dead body was not his tenant, but his tenant's brother. So don't rent out the place just yet. That would be my message — and I would see if anything jumped out at me during the conversation.
So I left Lottie and returned to the front steps and waited. Within about five minutes, I could see Schulz walking up the street. He was carrying a string bag. When he got closer, I could see a loaf of rye bread, and I didn't know what else.
“Mr. Schultz,” I said.
He had trouble placing me for a second, but then he managed. “I'm sorry, I forget your name.”
“Under Lieutenant Peter Ritter, Kripo murder squad.”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“Do you have a minute?”
“I guess,” he said.
“Inside, if it's all right. In your apartment,” I said.
He hesitated for just a beat, but then led me inside.
I was not prepared for his decorating scheme. The whole living room was done up in Early Commie Paradise. There was a picture of Ulbricht on the wall — and not a small picture. There was a sh
elf full of smaller portraits — I recognized Honecker but none of the others. One of them might have been Pieck, but he was dead. And I wasn't sure.
There was a small desk in the corner, and on it was a brass hammer-and-sickle sculpture that Schultz used as a paperweight. There was a leather chair in another corner, with a lamp and a little table that held a book and a newspaper. It also held a spent mortar shell that Schultz used as an ashtray. And did I mention the tapestry hanging behind the sofa, the one with the images of Lenin and Stalin shaking hands?
“This is… something,” I said.
Schultz chuckled but then grew serious. “Maybe I got carried away. But better than the alternative.”
Whatever that meant. He brought me a coffee and we got down to it.
“Do you want to see the house book again? It's meticulous,” he said.
“I remember. But please tell me again about Kurt Braun.”
Schultz said there wasn't much to tell, that Braun kept to himself and paid on time. I asked again about visitors, and he told me again about the book being impeccable.
“But you didn't notice anyone?” I said. “Not even his brother?”
“I didn't know there was a brother. He never stayed over.”
“But never even visited?”
“I didn't know there was a brother.”
That was when I gave Schultz the news — that Kurt Braun, his tenant, was alive but incarcerated, and that the corpse was Michael, the brother. He looked surprised but not shaken when I told him. What that meant, I had no idea. His question was, “Incarcerated? For what?”
“Stasi business,” I said. I whispered it as if I were letting him in on something. He seemed to appreciate the confidence.
Then I told Schultz about the second body and our search for a potential linkage. The topic didn't seem to make him uncomfortable, and I just kept going. It wasn't as if I was expecting him to tell me anything. I was just talking for the sake of talking. I asked if he had seen anyone visit with a memorable head of black hair.
“Like, what's memorable?”
“I don't know. Memorable. A lot of black hair,” I said.
He shook his head, then offered the book again.
“It's meticulous,” he said.
“I know, I know. Meticulous.”
This was going nowhere, and I had a decision to make. I could confront him, or I could make my excuses and find the nearest telephone and summon the cavalry. I made a show of flipping through my notebook while I thought about it, even if I already knew what I was going to do. Schultz sat across from me and sipped his coffee while I fretted.
And then I just blurted it out.
“The wheelbarrow,” I said.
Schultz just looked at me.
“The wheelbarrow in the basement,” I said.
Schultz didn't say a word.
“The wheelbarrow in the basement with the dried blood caked inside,” I said.
Just as I got the words out of my mouth — I was so nervous that I wasn't sure what I sounded like — I pulled my gun, just for effect. What effect, I wasn't sure. I sat there with the pistol in my lap, the weapon not pointing at Schultz but visible and ready. I stared at him as hard as I could manage. I might have been frauding my way through the interview, but I could at least look tough for a minute. Or maybe 30 seconds.
And then, Schultz slumped down into his chair. His eyes dropped. Whatever calculation he made about truth or denial was very quick. I pulled the gun, and I stared at him, and it was only a couple of seconds after that when he looked up from his hands and said, “He deserved it, every bit of it. I acted in defense of the State.”
44
I could have stopped him right there. Maybe I should have stopped him right there. There was a telephone hanging on the wall, not 10 feet away. I could have officers from the precinct in the apartment in a few minutes, just to secure the scene — if nothing else, to take custody of the wheelbarrow and begin the search for the murder weapon.
But I didn’t do any of that. I figured he was ready, and I should just keep Schultz talking. At some point, it might dawn on him that some blood in a wheelbarrow really didn’t prove anything. I had no idea how good Freddy Mann might be with his chemistry set, and if he could match what I had scraped out of it to the body, or what you could even tell after the blood had dried.
I just needed him to keep talking.
“Where did you do it?” I said.
“Right in the basement,” Schultz said. “He was going for another piece of the luggage. It just… infuriated me.”
“Why?”
“Kurt Braun was leaving the country. He was planning. Anybody could see it. What did he think, that I was an idiot? Every time I checked the apartment, there was less in there. He was sneaking it out, all of it.”
“You checked the apartment?”
“Weekly. I considered it my duty.”
I wanted to stop him there and tell him that, no, his duty began and ended with keeping the house book — that maybe the Stasi had the authority, but not the guy whose main job was to have a functioning toilet plunger handy at all times. But I didn’t stop him. I just nodded and scribbled, scribbled and nodded.
“And you saw…”
“The clothes were almost gone,” Schultz said. “A table lamp was gone. Half of the radio was gone. Who takes apart their radio? What did he think, that I was an imbecile?”
I wrote as fast as I could. Schultz actually paused his narration without me asking, as if he wanted to be sure that I got it down properly for posterity. When I stopped writing and looked up, he continued.
“Besides, there was the money.”
I stared at him.
“Do you know about the money?”
I said nothing.
“Under the bed, under the floorboards. West German money, hidden away. Did he think he could hide it from me? Hide what he was doing? Miserable traitor.”
I didn’t know if there was an identifiable line between zealotry and lunacy, but my man was dancing pretty close to it. His eyes weren’t spinning in his head, not exactly, but they were open wider and a little less focused somehow as the telling continued.
“I know what the papers say — that these people are victims somehow, that some of them get brainwashed into doing it, into leaving, that some of them even get kidnapped to go over. Well, Kurt Braun was not getting kidnapped. He was not a victim. He was a traitor to the State. He was plotting treason against the German Democratic Republic, and there is no other way to see it. I acted as a patriot.”
He stopped, pointed at the Ulbricht portrait.
“He would see it.”
He turned and pointed at the Lenin/Stalin tapestry.
“They would see it,” Schultz said. “They would understand. They would applaud. They would give me a medal — not the Order of Lenin, I wouldn’t think. Although, maybe. I mean… maybe. Perhaps.”
The Order of Lenin. Okay, then.
“Tell me about the day,” I said.
“The day?”
“The day when you killed him.”
Schultz said that he had not seen Kurt in days. He said he didn’t think much of it, didn’t think he had fled East Berlin, not yet, because there were still some clothes in the apartment and the money was still under the loose floorboard. It was summertime, and maybe it was a vacation. There was no obligation to tell the super, and he had not missed a rent payment.
“But then he showed up, late,” Schultz said. “He went up to his apartment, but then he creeped down the stairs almost as quickly, and went down to the basement. And then up again, quiet like a cat. He was carrying a suitcase. He couldn’t see me in the dark in here, but I could see him through the glass. I knew what he was doing. This was it, the last move. After all this country had given him — a life, a home, security, freedom from the Nazis. After all of that, and that, that — that traitor.”
He spat the word. Then he sipped the coffee, which must have been cold.
&
nbsp; “He creeped down the stairs again, down to the basement. When I saw him again, that was it for me. He had to be stopped. I was hesitant, I will admit — we all fight our cowardice sometimes, right? But I knew what had to be done. My duty was clear.”
Schultz said that he came upon him bent over a pile of stuff in the basement, lit only by that single lightbulb. He said he was reaching down to the bottom of a stack, trying to pull out another suitcase without toppling the rest of them.
“And I grabbed a shovel,” Schultz said. “He never saw me.”
“But you know now that it wasn’t Kurt.”
“It was the brother. Same thing.”
“Not exactly.”
“The suitcases, the late hour, the secrecy — come on,” Schultz said. “If he wasn’t a traitor himself, he was aiding a traitor, a criminal acting against the interests of the State. Come on. It’s the same thing. And you tell me that the Stasi has Kurt. They know what he was doing. And the brother, it’s the same thing. You know I’m right.”
I wasn’t in the mood to argue. I said, “Tell me about the rest.”
Schultz didn’t get the question.
“The hands?” I said.
“He was trading our money for theirs, stealing from the State. It was a symbol to all in the future.”
“And the feet?”
“He was fleeing from the State, abandoning his people. Another symbol to all in the future.”
“And the…” I pointed at my crotch.
“He was evil incarnate. A crime against the State is a crime against us all. It speaks to innate evil, to something inside of him. He could not be allowed to reproduce.”
“But he was already dead, right?”
“Could not be allowed,” Schultz said. “Could not. Could not.”
He was, at that point, borderline delirious, it seemed — just completely around the bend. But I wasn’t quite finished.
“And the other man?”