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

by Richard Wake

  “The one I shot?”

  “Yeah. Him. With the black hair.”

  “Another one in the middle of the night, creeping up the steps. They think I can’t see, but I can. I see everything. Creeping up the steps, and so I followed him. He was searching the room for something when I walked in — the money, I assumed.”

  “And you did what exactly?”

  “Let me show you.” Then Schultz stood up, walked over to a sideboard, reached into a drawer, and pulled out a pistol. I fumbled for the gun in my lap, and he said, “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Look how I’m holding it.”

  He was gripping the pistol by the barrel, not the handle, and he gave it to me. It was old and heavy.

  “It’s a Tokarev,” he said. “Semi-automatic. An officer’s weapon. It was given to me by the captain who married my sister. He took care of her. Those stories you hear about those times, and the Russian soldiers — so much Western propaganda. This was a true gentleman. It was his, and now it is mine.”

  Schultz said he walked the guy with the black hair through the streets in the middle of the night, with the pistol pointed at his back, prodding him along. He took him to the Soviet memorial in Treptower Park, he said, along the same route that he had pushed the wheelbarrow. And that’s where he shot the guy, he said.

  “But—” I was going to ask Schultz about the reason for the setting, but he answered without me asking.

  “I love that statue,” he said. “I go almost every Sunday. I could sit and stare at it for hours. The soldier, the child in his arms — that could have been me, had I been a few years younger. I look at the child, and I always felt like it really was me. That’s how I felt. Saved. Protected.”

  He was crying then. He wiped his face on his sleeve.

  “You know how the statue, how the soldier is stepping on the swastika?” Schultz said. “Well, these people, the Brauns, they’re the new evil. They are the great danger — a danger within our very own bosom. They’re ingrates. They lack a sense of community, a sense of common decency. They ignore their neighbors, their friends, the collective ‘we.’ They are traitors, and they are like that swastika — they need to be stepped on, too.”

  Then he cried some more.

  45

  Eight hours later, sitting at my desk in the big red building on Keibelstraße, all I could wonder was, “What would Kleinschmidt have done?”

  First off, I knew he would not have solved his first big murder case — two cases, to be entirely accurate — on a Saturday when nobody was around. There is no way he would have done that. The telling and the re-telling was half the fun — more than half — but there was nobody in the office, nobody but me. Forget the office, the murder squad room — I'm not sure there was anybody in the whole building. I saw a few offices lit up in a row on the second floor when I came in, but that was it.

  A fair reading of my mythical scoresheet for the day would show one checkmark for initiative (for going to Heidelberger Straße with the idea of re-canvassing after the second murder) and about 20 checkmarks for luck (for just about everything else). What if Lottie hadn't led me down the basement? What if I hadn't seen the wheelbarrow before going upstairs to meet Schultz — and I was probably a minute or two away from doing just that? What if Schultz had just denied everything? He could have argued that the basement was never locked, and the entire building had access to it — or, really, anyone off the street, for that matter.

  It was the dumbest of dumb luck. That is what the mythical scoresheet would have shown.

  But the best part was the scoresheet was, indeed, mythical. The reality was that I could massage a lot of the details, to move at least a few of the lucky checkmarks into the initiative column.

  I could, I guess, but I didn't in the end. I played it straight the whole way — well, except for one thing. After the uniforms had come to transport Schultz to the precinct, and before I called the prosecutor's office to have someone meet us there, I went back up to the apartment and scooped up the oilcloth bundle of West marks. If Kurt Braun ever got his ass out of Hohenschonhausen, I would find a way to get it to him. And while it would create a little hiccup in Schultz's story, it was only that, a hiccup. And what did Kleinschmidt always say about hiccups like that? “I never believe a story that doesn't have at least one loose end, because loose ends are the stuff of life.”

  I also told one other little lie. I made it out like I was actively searching the basement while waiting for Schultz, just to be thorough, and that Lottie followed me down the stairs and showed me her dollhouse, and that after that, I continued searching and found the wheelbarrow. It seemed like a harmless enough lie. It didn't affect the timeline in any way, and it wasn't as if I was going to be contradicted by a five-year-old in a pink dress.

  They had found a prosecutor much quicker than I ever imagined. He was stone kid, just pulling up his necktie when he got out of his car, but so what? This one wasn't going to be hard. They had been unable to find Kleinschmidt, through. I got Gretchen on the phone because she had all the phone numbers, and Gretchen got his wife. She said that the grand old man was at a fishing camp near Leipzig with his two oldest friends, and that they went every August, and that the place was remote enough not to have a telephone — “Not even a toilet, I don't think,” Mrs. K said — and that he wouldn't be back until Sunday night.

  So it was just me. I gave the prosecutor a quick verbal summary and then sat at a sergeant's desk and typed up a more detailed account of the interview while the prosecutor — and a stenographer who appeared from I didn't know where — talked to Schultz.

  I was done in 30 minutes. They were done in 45. When the door opened, the prosecutor — whose name I didn't get in the first telling — came out and rolled his eyes. He asked me, “What the hell is the Order of Lenin?” I said it was a big Soviet award, but that while I wasn't exactly sure what you needed to do to qualify for it, committing two homicides in East Berlin probably wasn't on the list.

  The stenographer — I didn't know her name, either, but I wouldn't have minded knowing — said, “He asked Michael here if he could call Ulbricht and tell him. And when Michael said he couldn't, the guy looked at me and asked if I could call Ulbricht.”

  We exchanged phone numbers — not me and the stenographer, but me and Michael — but as he said, “I don't think we'll be talking again, not about this lunatic. I can't imagine this would actually go to trial.” And that was that.

  Hours later, I was alone in the office as day turned to night. The only light in the place was coming from my desk lamp. I typed up the final set of forms and left the originals on Greiner's desk, one set of carbons on Kleinschmidt's desk, and a second set of carbons for my files. And then I read them over one more time before putting them away, me and a glass of Romanian rye from the pint bottle that Looby always kept in his top right drawer. “For emergencies,” he liked to say, the first of which tended to occur at about 3.30 most afternoons.

  I was enjoying the final swallow, as much as you could enjoy a swallow of Romanian rye, when the phone on my desk rang. It was Stasi security at Wandlitz. I was being summoned.

  “When?”

  “Immediately.”

  46

  The drive out there was kind of pleasant, actually — windows open in the car, temperatures cooling but comfortable, barely a car on the roads, Looby's pint of Romanian rye taking the edge off the nervousness that I always managed to feel when I received one of these summonses. Besides, what the hell? I wasn't doing anything else, anyway.

  As I made the final approach to the compound, I was glad that the roads were relatively familiar because there weren't many lights. But there were military vehicles, parked on the shoulder at intervals of about 200 yards. Four, five of them — and then came the warning signs, and the business about wildlife research, and then the first guard shack and gate. There were plenty of lights there. Floodlights.

  I identified myself to the Stasi corporal in the shack, and he found my name on the c
lipboard, and it all seemed the same as the previous time until he said, “You can go ahead, but only as far as the next gate.”

  “What? What does that mean?”

  “They'll tell you,” he said. “Or not.”

  Instead of military vehicles placed at intervals along the next short piece of road, there were military personnel instead — men in helmets and carrying rifles, maybe 25 yards apart. I looked at a couple of them as I drove by and was struck by how bored they seemed. It must have been fairly normal for someone to drive up the road at 10 o'clock on a Saturday night. They didn't even flinch as I went by.

  At the next gate, we went through the same business — but instead of being handed a cardboard pass and sent along, the Stasi guard told me to pull over to the side and park. Within about 30 seconds, Karl Grimm was walking up and motioning for me to get out.

  “You can't come in, and I can't leave,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  The guard was in earshot, and Grimm convinced him to give us a minute by ourselves. But the guard insisted, and not as gently as I might have expected of some kid speaking to a member of the Central Committee, “But in that area and nowhere else. Understood?”

  Grimm was overtly apologetic to the kid — which was something I had never seen before from my ex-father-in-law. He also seemed a touch drunk, which was also at least a little bit unusual.

  “I need you to stop bothering with our friend at Am Zirkus 30. There's no need anymore. You can just forget the whole thing.”

  “You going to explain?”

  Just then, another car pulled up to the gate. When the driver rolled down his window to show his identification, it was the bald guy, Martin Strassmann, the aforementioned friend from Am Zirkus 30.

  I looked at Grimm. “Some timing.”

  “Holy shit,” he said. “Total coincidence.”

  “I bet.”

  “No, really — total coincidence.”

  Except for the way he pronounced “coincidence,” it had about seven syllables. Grimm wasn't just a touch drunk — he was borderline wrecked. And when I mocked his pronunciation right back to him, he knew that I knew. He also didn't seem to care.

  “I'm in a good mood, so I'm going to tell you a story,” he said. “Suppose a low-level member of the Central Committee—”

  “Who, just for the sake of argument, is as bald as a doorknob.”

  “Perhaps. Now suppose he has a moral failing of some significance. And further suppose that his moral failing has resulted in him being blackmailed into providing low-level Central Committee secrets to a West German agent who routinely enters the bald man's car and leaves with not only a mouthful of, well, a mouthful — but also a pocketful of secret papers.”

  Well, then. A peek behind the curtain. I almost felt flattered.

  “And was my work essential in discovering this sordid scheme?” I said, overtly fishing for a compliment. But I should have known better. What were the odds of me solving two murders and receiving a compliment from Karl Grimm on the same day?

  “Your work was competent,” he said. “And your work was less about uncovering the scheme than confirming it. Competent, yes.”

  This was more than he had ever told me about any of the errands he had sent me on before. If there was a lesson for me in all of this, I needed to get him drunk more often.

  “But let me go back to my story,” he said. “Let's just say, we've decided to leave matters as they are for the time being in the hope that we can, shall we say, turn them to our advantage.”

  “By, shall we say, turning the man with the mouthful.”

  “That's one option,” Grimm said. “We could play it a couple of different ways — I haven't decided yet. But you're thinking. You're learning. You're learning. That's good.”

  He stopped and belched unapologetically. Onions.

  “But the thing is, things are about to get more complicated,” he said. “So I wanted to make sure you didn't scare him off — either of them. Especially tonight. That's why I called you here.”

  I just looked at him, bewildered.

  “Why tonight?” I said. “I mean, really?

  Then it was his turn to stare at me. But he wasn't bewildered.

  “It's because I'm about to be very busy for the next few weeks,” Grimm said. “For all I know, you might be, too. There's a chance that there won't be an opportunity for another meeting anytime soon.”

  At that point, I was bewildered to the second power.

  “You've got to give me a little more than that,” I said, surprising even myself at the demand. I enjoyed playing the insolent card with Grimm, and I don't think he hated it, either, but this was a step further. But it worked.

  “You are sworn to secrecy here,” he said. And then he got a little closer and half whispered the way drunks sometimes do. “In a couple of hours, the border between East and West Berlin will be closed.”

  “What? How?”

  “Barbed wire and soldiers to start with, with more of a real wall to follow.”

  “But how? It's so many miles.”

  “It's all planned.”

  “But what about the trains?” I said. “They run right through, back and forth. I mean, how?”

  “Honecker has it all worked out. In fact, he's in your building now on Keibelstraße. That's where he's running the operation from.”

  I thought back to the lights I saw on the second floor, the only lights in the building other than the one on my little desk.

  “Now, go,” Grimm said. “I have to get back to the party. Except it isn't really a party. Well, it is a party — except the guests are not allowed to leave — Ulbricht's orders. It started a while ago, and it's going to be an all-night thing. They don't want the word to leak out ahead of time. I've known for a while, but most everybody just got told a half hour ago. So, just remember. Shhhhh.”

  The “shhhhh” also had at least six syllables, maybe seven, the way Karl Grimm said it.

  47

  I got back in the car, started the motor, and waited for the Stasi guard to allow me to leave my little holding area that was neither inside nor outside the compound. Five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, more — it seemed he was waiting for a telephone call to provide him with some instructions. Finally, it rang, and the gate opened, and the Stasi guard waved me out. I started driving back to the outer gate, and then I shouted louder than I probably should have, “And now it's time to fuck the barbed wire king of Berlin!” But I guess it wasn't too loud — either that or the stone-faced soldier I was driving past had been trained to react to nothing short of lethal force.

  I went through pretty much every conceivable reaction to the news during the drive back before settling on fear. But to be honest, it took most of the 20 miles for me to get there — and that was after I spent the first few miles thinking about Kitty, and her asshole husband, and the weight of the secret she had been carrying.

  Anyway, I started by just marveling at the audacity of the whole thing. Who could possibly think that they had the ability to put up a wall and divide a huge European city? How much nerve did that take? It wasn't just balls, because I figured that most big politicians had plenty of those. It was… brash. It was gall. It was arrogance — that's what it really was. Arrogance. Who could possibly be that confident that they could get away with such a thing?

  From there, I went to skeptical. There was a reason it seemed so audacious — because it was fucking crazy. A wall in Berlin? Come on. I was pretty sure that the two sides, East and West, shared a water supply and an electric infrastructure. How could they possibly cut that in half? And then I just kept coming back to the trains. The U-bahn was more in the West, and the S-bahn was more in the East, but they crisscrossed the borders a dozen times, easily. There were tons of stations where you could transfer from one to the other. What were they going to do, just stop trains in the tunnels and turn them around? It was madness.

  And then there were the streets themselves. There were mil
es and miles of borders between East and West, some of which could be traversed with a wave at a guard, most of which required at least a cursory identification check, especially during periodic crackdowns. But miles and miles and miles — and they were going to build a wall and divide it all?

  So first marveling, then skepticism, then finally to fear. That was my journey, as the dark country near Wandlitz morphed, mile by mile, into the lighter and brighter edges of the city. Fear. It wasn't a physical thing. I carried a police identification card, after all. Compared to most everybody in the country, I had nothing to be afraid of.

  So the fear was different — not imminent, not the kind that raises your heart rate, not like that. I had few illusions about my country and the people who ran it. Clearly, if I was doing nefarious errands for a member of the Central Committee as my side job, there could be little doubt that other members of the Central Committee had their own hired hands, doing their own dirty little tasks. And while I was sure that the West Germans had their own version of a secret police — because every government did, regardless of how they might portray it in public — the Stasi did seem, just maybe, to be a bit more of an aggressive animal than most. I couldn't know for sure, of course, but I had my suspicions. Just watching Karl Grimm drunkenly kissing that Stasi guard's ass told me plenty, maybe more than I ever realized. If he felt vulnerable to them, well, who wouldn't?

  But I basically knew all of that. And if the wall was just the logical extension of that kind of philosophy, well, okay. That wasn't the thing I was afraid of. It was, instead, the thing I had told Red Rolf when he asked me why I hadn't left the country, and I started talking about West Berlin. It was when I said, “I like knowing that it's there.”

  To me, West Berlin was like a short vacation whenever I went, even just for a couple of hours. That was exactly it. Most people looked forward to their holidays because they got them away from their real lives. It wasn't that they hated their real lives — it was just that everybody needed a diversion now and then. It was human nature to crave home and the security of routine on the one hand, and to desire a chance to bust out of that routine every once in a while on the other. So on your holiday, you would go somewhere new, act differently — stay up later, drink more every day, drink earlier every day, chase women every day, whatever — and get away from the rote existence that was your life. And then you would return to your home and to the security that you really craved in the end, but you would be refreshed, rejuvenated, reinvigorated, all of the re- words.