Where the Bones are Buried

by Jeanne Matthews

  “Not today. Please tell me why you sounded so accusing last night. It seemed almost as if you had some reason to suspect my mother of the murder.”

  “Our club has been meeting for ten years. The only new person was Frau Calms. I feel responsible. I invited her. She is a hexenspruch. A jinx.”

  “Please. You’re far too intelligent and practical to believe in jinxes. My mother is innocent and no one could possibly hold you responsible for what happened.”

  He said, “No one knows what to think.”

  “Tell me about Herr Pohl. I understand that he was new to the club.”

  “Alwin came only a few months ago. He had lived for some years in America. He had visited several reservations in your Dakotas and in Arizona.”

  “And what about Reiner Hess? You said that he was a longtime member.”

  “Yes. Like me, one of the original founders.”

  “Why was he expelled?”

  “His legal situation made it impossible to attend meetings. Also, some members did not wish to associate with an individual who avoided his duty as a citizen to pay taxes.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “Six months, perhaps seven. I don’t understand your interest.”

  She upped the wattage of her smile. “He and my mother are old friends from his days in America. Do you have any idea where he is now or how I could get in touch with him?”

  “If I knew where he was, it would be my duty to tell the police.”

  She took a different tack. “I’m intrigued by your mask collection. Did Alwin Pohl acquire them for you when he was in Arizona?”

  Before he could answer, she wandered over to look at one of the masks up close. Crafted from wood, leather, and horsehair, the blue and yellow face imparted an almost spectral aura. She was no expert, but it looked like an authentic katsinam, which the Hopi people regarded as living souls. To sell one would be a sacrilege. “What’s the provenance of this one?” she asked, reaching her hand out.

  “Don’t touch!” He started forward.

  She withdrew her hand. “Sorry.”

  “As someone versed in Native American cultures, I’m sure you know it is from the Hopi, a one-of-a-kind mask and quite fragile. I would be happy to sell it if you are interested.”

  “I’m sure I couldn’t afford it,” she said, and moved on to study a red gourd mask replete with turquoise, wood, and horn beads. But by not volunteering a single detail about the chain of ownership, he had ignited her suspicions. She could feel his eyes drilling into her back. She couldn’t tell whether his wariness was because of her questions about the masks or Reiner Hess. She returned to him with a smile. “Is your assistant, Herr Bischoff, here today?”

  “No.”

  “His wife Lena seemed especially upset by Herr Pohl’s death. Did you know that she had planned to travel to Barcelona with him today.”

  “It is not my business.”

  “But you knew?”

  “It was obvious that they were involved. Lena is too young for Viktor. She would rather spend her time in the nightclubs than listening to him drum and talk about his spiritual journey.”

  “Do you think he knew about the affair?”

  “He has been depressed over the last weeks. He looked sad in the photographs from last night.”

  “You took photographs at the powwow?”

  “Yes. I showed them to Inspector Lohendorf and he downloaded them onto his computer.”

  “Will you show them to me?”

  “If you wish.”

  Surprised but grateful, she followed him to his desk. He sat down, opened his laptop, and set up a slideshow. She leaned over his shoulder, careful not to get too close to his spider-veined cheek.

  The first few slides showed Viktor Bischoff in his Drumming Man wig as he arranged the glow logs for the faux bonfire. He appeared not so much sad as stoic. Lena stood with her back to the camera tying the silk streamers.

  “Does your camera time-stamp the photos?”

  “No. It shows only the date.”

  That would have made it too easy, she thought. The show continued. She pointed to a group gathered next to the makeshift bar. “Who are these people?”

  “The man with the brown trade blanket around his shoulders is Kicking Horse.”

  “What’s his name in the real world?”

  “Hans Oostrum. Next to him is Luther Wurttemberg, whose Indian name is Quidel, which means Burning Torch. He brought the schnapps. And behind him—”

  “Herr Amsel,” she said. “Inspector Lohendorf questioned him at the same time as you last night.”

  “Yes. Stefan Amsel. He calls himself Doba, which is from the Navajo. He is a senior executive at the Adlon Hotel.”

  Dinah’s ears pricked up. “Did he arrive at the same time you did?”

  “Within a few minutes, yes. Baer Eichen, the Bischoffs, and I came early to set up the barbecue grill, build the bonfire, and place the LED lanterns. There are rules about fire in the park and we can’t be as faithful to the old ways as we would like.”

  “What time did the four of you arrive?”

  “Between four-thirty and a quarter to five. Stefan and Luther arrived just after with the beer keg and the schnapps. The others arrived together at about half-past six. There, that is Baer in the ghost shirt with the bird in his hair. We were all assembled except for Alwin when you and the Inspector arrived.”

  “Seven-thirty,” she said, thinking out loud.

  It was odd that Baer had chosen a shirt that symbolized so much disillusionment and death. The Ghost Dance religion was the brainchild of a Paiute medicine man named Wovoka who claimed that Jesus Christ had returned to earth as an Indian to reunite the spirits of the dead. Wearing what he called a “ghost shirt,” Wovoka performed a magic trick whereby he appeared to “catch” a bullet fired at him by a shotgun. Believing their shirts could repel bullets, the Lakota Sioux rebelled against the white settlers at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1890 and the U.S. Cavalry mowed them down. The ghost shirt had become emblematic of the massacre, which any student of Indian culture would know.

  Farber went through the rest of his slideshow. She couldn’t keep the names or their Indian get-ups straight. They merged in a hodgepodge of feathers and painted faces, indistinguishable, like the homogenized Indians in old Western movies. With each slide, her hopes of spotting a telltale clue dwindled. Wegener had said that there were twenty-six attendees packing God only knew what lethal weapons under their tunics and buckskins. And with all the drumming and dancing and chanting, nobody would have noticed if one of them had slipped off into the forest to answer a call of nature, or shoot and scalp Alwin Pohl. Adding to the confusion, there was Hess, who lurked “off camera,” like a figment of everyone’s imagination.

  What was the actual time of the murder? Swan said she had gotten to the ferry dock at about five-thirty, later than Lena claimed to have taken her photo. Margaret was already there, waiting for Swan. They argued for a few minutes, then Swan walked to the tower, which would have taken her a good half-hour. When she reached the tower, she found Pohl already dead so the murder must have occurred before six, while it was still daylight and before the dancing and the drumming revved up. The hiker who reported the body must have come along shortly after Swan left, and the Rahnsdorf police arrived before Lohendorf and Dinah got to the tower a little past seven-thirty.

  It dawned on her that the prime suspects were the early birds—Florian Farber, Viktor and Lena Bischoff, Luther Wurttemberg, Stefan Amsel, and Baer Eichen. In spite of his seeming intoxication last night, Amsel warranted special scrutiny because of his connection to the Adlon. “Did you or any of the others hear gunshots?”

  “No. Luther thought he heard fireworks down by the lake around six.”

  Nobody expects gunfire, s
he thought—at least not in Germany, and it isn’t always clear where the sound has come from, depending on the distance and caliber and the physical terrain. It was possible that the murderer used a silencer and what Luther heard was, in fact, fireworks.

  “Other than Viktor, did any of the other club members have a bone to pick with Pohl?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “A grudge. Some reason to hate him or fear him?”

  Farber’s forehead puckered and he closed the laptop. “I am not a priest. I do not take confession.” He closed his laptop and stood up. “It is past my closing hour now.”

  “I won’t keep you. Thanks so much for showing me the photographs. If you’ll be so kind as to give me the Bischoffs’ address, I’ll be on my way.”

  He looked doubtful.

  She smiled. “Lena popped by my apartment last night. She was all torn up and I want to check on her. To make sure she’s all right.”

  “You had better be careful, Frau Pelerin. Lena is a volatile woman and she thinks your mother killed Alwin.”

  “I intend to convince her she’s wrong.”

  “Then I wish you good luck.” He took a business card from a holder on the desk, wrote an address on the back, and put the card in her hand. “She and Viktor quarreled last night after the police questioned them. I doubt you will find them at home together.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Kurfürstenstrasse swarmed with evening shoppers, making their way west to the retail mecca of the Ku’damm or maybe the vast and luxurious KaDeWe, short for Kaufhaus des Westens—the department store of the West. Dinah glimpsed the KaDeWe sign a block away over the roofs of other buildings. She thought about the array of fantastic desserts in its seventh-floor café and her mouth watered. The tiramisu törtchen with the chocolate frosting seemed to cry out to her. She held out against temptation, afraid that if she stopped even briefly, she would talk herself out of a visit with Viktor and Lena.

  She waited on the corner for the red traffic light man to change to green. The jaunty little man in the hat had been a popular icon in East Germany and, despite efforts to replace the Ampelmännchen with standardized traffic signals, he remained as a sentimental relic. He was by far and away the most innocent reminder of the German Democratic Republic’s oppressive communist regime.

  Green Ampelmann appeared and she crossed to BudapesterStrasse and hailed a taxi. She showed the driver the address on the card and he assured her he could get her there in twenty minutes. For some reason, she had a feeling of urgency and a raft of second thoughts about blackmail as the motive for murder. More often than not, the simplest explanation was the correct one and sex was as simple as it got. Viktor fit a profile common in the States—depressed man, unable to cope with his wife’s infidelity, flips out, buys a gun and kills his rival. Some head cases went on to kill the wife, the children, and the in-laws before killing themselves. It occurred to her that Lena might be in danger. This line of thinking led her to recall stories of third parties caught in the line of fire between feuding couples. She envisioned her obituary.

  Dinah Pelerin, 34, long known for her habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, was shot dead in the Berlin suburbs by a make-believe Kiowa brave named Drumming Man. Her mother, exonerated of murder, wore kitten heels to the funeral.

  The taxi cut through the Tiergarten to the intersection of Strasse des 17 Juni, the former Nazi triumphal boulevard renamed in 1953 in tribute of the East Berlin protesters gunned down on that day by the Red Army and the East German Volkspolizei. Straight ahead, on a small traffic island at the hub of six avenues through the park, stood the memorial column commemorating the Prussian victory over the French in 1870. The Soviet troops who captured Berlin in 1945 referred to the golden angel who sat atop the column as “the tall woman.” Berliners called her Golden Lizzy. Geert called her the chick on a stick. The chick had looked down on a lot of history in her time. Some thought her pedestal was a place where angels congregate. Some thought ghosts. Keeping her secrets, she glimmered noncommittally as a light rain began to fall. The taxi skirted around her island and headed toward the River Spree.

  This driver liked classical music. The radio played a soothing serenade by Brahms and her thoughts reverted to Thor. He would think of something sensible and incisive that would never have occurred to her. But Thor was tied up with an international crisis and how could she possibly explain her mother’s situation?

  They crossed the River Spree and after a couple of miles, the driver turned right onto Otto-Dix-Strasse. She recognized the name. She had seen a few of his paintings exhibited in the New National Gallery. The Nazis had deemed him a degenerate and burned some of his work. Two of his canvases had been recently discovered among a trove of masterpieces stolen by the Nazis and hoarded in the home of an elderly art dealer’s son in Munich. Come to think of it, those paintings remained in legal limbo because the art dealer, like Reiner Hess, was under investigation for tax evasion.

  The taxi slowed and came to a stop in front of a row of modest townhomes, each painted a different color. The driver consulted Farber’s card and pointed. “That one. The house with the blue door.”

  She pushed a fifty Euro note into his hand. “Will you wait please? I shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.”

  He pocketed the note. “Take your time.”

  She pushed open a low gate and followed a brick path through a well-tended small garden. In the rainy dusk, it was hard to see what the Bischoffs grew other than cauliflower and kohlrabi. A sensor light came on when she stepped up onto the stoop. The doorknocker was the bronze head of an Indian chief. No question this was the right place. She rapped the knocker against the door with force several times. No one answered. She looked back at the taxi driver, who lolled against the seat enjoying his music.

  She rapped again.

  “Wer ist da?” answered a sullen male voice.

  “Dinah Pelerin.”

  The door swung open and Viktor appeared, disheveled and unsteady on his feet, but dressed in normal Western clothes and without his braids. “Was willst du?”

  She assumed it was the same question that had greeted her when she strolled into Farber’s gallery. “I’d like to speak with your wife.”

  “Geh zur Hölle.”

  “I don’t speak German, Herr Bischoff.”

  “Go to hell.” He turned and staggered down the hall, thumping a drumstick against the wall as he went.

  She caught the door and held it open. A wave of heat rolled over her. The house was like an oven. “Lena? Are you in there?”

  Leaving the door ajar, she tiptoed inside and followed Viktor down the hall into a scorching-hot wreck of a room. Cowhide armchairs had been overturned; shards of Hopi, Zuni, and Navajo pottery littered the floor; a large oil painting of a warrior astride a galloping horse had been slashed and thrown against a wall; and the hilt of a knife stuck out of a large rawhide drumhead.

  A fire blazed and crackled in the fireplace. There was no screen, and cinders spat out onto the stone hearth. Viktor appeared immune to the heat. He sank down cross-legged in front of the fire and tipped a bottle of Magic Horse Scotch to his mouth.

  “Did you and Lena have a fight?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “She’s not injured, is she?”

  “I am the one who is injured.”

  Something crunched under Dinah’s foot. She picked up a clay fragment of a frog, a Zuni motif. A dustpan containing black-on-orange fragments, probably Hopi, had been set on a tray table. She picked up the frog’s severed head and a piece of a reddish-brown bowl. The bowl looked antique. “You must feel awful losing so many beautiful pots. They look valuable.”

  “They were. But not to my wife.”

  Dinah wondered if these treasures had come from Farber’s Happy Hunting Ground. Maybe Viktor received an employee’s discount. She
said, “Lena visited me last night. She was extremely emotional over the death of Alwin Pohl.”

  “He was die Viper. Nature and the sacredness of life that we value, he treated with contempt.”

  “Did you know that Lena planned to go away with him?”

  “Water seeks its level. In the nightclubs they met in secret. The Berghain, the White Noise, Cookies. I am not a fool.”

  “You must have hated him.”

  “Ja, sicher. I hated him.” He turned the bottle up to his mouth. He wiped his lips and glared, daring her to ask the obvious question.

  She dashed a drop of salty sweat out of her eye, judged the distance to the door, and asked it. “Did you kill him?”

  “I hate killing.” He maundered something else in German and seemed to lose his train of thought. “My wife says I am not man enough to kill.”

  Under the windows opposite the fire stood an undamaged étagère with a few framed photos and a collection of books sandwiched between a pair of antique binoculars and what looked like a gas mask and canister. She walked over and looked at the books. Several were by Karl May, but a few carried English titles like Native American Spirituality, Listen to the Drum, and The Wind Is My Mother. She picked up a black-and-white photo of a man in uniform posed in front of a swastika. “Did your father fight in the war?”

  “That is my grandfather. He was a Nazi. A war criminal and a coward. He killed himself to avoid capture, but my father revered his memory. He remained a Nazi until he died. I hated them both.”

  “If you feel that way, why do you keep the photograph?”

  “It is das Büßerhemd. My hair shirt.” He picked up a shard of pottery and scratched a swastika on the wood floor. “Did you know that was a symbol of peace for the Hopi? It is a symbol of healing in Navajo rugs and baskets.” He pulled a baggie out of his pocket and began to roll a joint. Sweat trickled out of his hair and ran down his long face as he licked the paper and lit up. “I should have been born a pagan in another century.”