Whatever Brandt's significance to the Gross case, I was edging closer. I just had to hope that wherever this lead took me, the green man wouldn't be there with another gun-shaped piece of metal in his fist.
25
The St Rochus hostel was located behind the church where I'd captured Kürten. By contrast with the pretence of the church's domed neo-Byzantine architecture, the hostel was a brick building that looked its age, which was late Kaiserreich.
Drug addicts, the diseased, the widowed, the mentally ill, prostitutes trying to go straight, these hostels were their last port of call on the journey to starvation or begging on the streets, or back to walking the streets. I'd tried the St Gertrude women's hostel and come up empty. If Brandt wasn't at St Rochus then I'd have to try something else. My vision was getting grainy and sluggish, just like the last time I was in the vicinity. Maybe God was trying to tell me something.
The hostel's high arched gateway faced onto a street encircling the small public park behind the church. A few lonely pedestrians crossed the park. Auto engines rumbled from the busy square on the other side of the church. I approached the hostel gate, one door of which stood open. The brass plaque set into the brickwork next to the gate read:
You once cared for sufferers of the plague and were always ready to help others by kind service and fervent prayers. You had no home and you died in a dungeon. Please grant us the cure we seek and help us become healthier in spirit.
Some would've found that uplifting, I supposed.
I knocked on the open door. A youngish priest in his middle twenties drew near. He wore a black buttoned-up robe, or cassock, or whatever the he...heck they were called, that reached down to the ankles. He touched his white collar with thin, pale fingers. His hair was short and dark and well-combed and it shone in the morning sunlight. He angled his head and he didn't say anything.
'Oh shit, you haven't taken a vow of silence have you?'
He smiled. 'No, my son. I'm a priest, not a monk.'
My son. The guy was ten years my junior. Five, at the very least, if he was older than he looked. I held the photograph of Freida Brandt in one hand and my Kripo ID in the other. The priest pursed his lips, glancing at both items in turn with steady grey eyes. His lips formed a perfect, feminine cupid's bow.
'I'm looking for this woman. A former nurse named Frau Brandt, though she may be registered under another name.'
'Has she done something terrible?'
'I'm not sure.'
'Well then why did you ask if she registered under a false name?'
'Is anyone registered here by that name?'
'We don't take names here, my son. We offer refuge.' He steepled his fingers in front of his lips. 'Sometimes that may include refuge from oneself.'
That sounded more like the French Foreign Legion than anything else. 'It's a little early in the morning for theology, father,' I said.
'It's never too early for a little theology, my son. Or too late.'
'It is for me. May I ask around inside?'
He considered this for a moment and nodded. 'If the lady is unwilling to go with you then we will of course have to step in.'
'She is here, then?'
'Ah.' He smiled again. 'You misunderstand me, but then I was not clear. I meant that, in the event that she is sheltering here, and, if so, in the event that she prefers not to accompany you, we would, hypothetically, feel compelled to respect such wishes.' He cast his eyes skyward. So did I, though for different reasons, I suspect.
'You just out of seminary, by any chance?'
'Why yes my son. How did you know?'
'Divine inspiration.'
I left him and strode into the building over floorboards that had been polished to a wicked sheen. Perhaps that was how those in receipt of the hostel's charity repaid its kindness.
A sign for the dormitories pointed to the right. The sounds of bubbling liquid and hissing steam assaulted my ears. I passed an open door to the kitchens, got a flash of pots and pans and women wearing white coats beneath rose-red cheeks and sweating foreheads. I kept going.
The hallway ended at a T junction. Right to the men's dormitory, left to the women's. I turned left. Ten metres further, the hallway opened up into a large, wood-panelled room.
Narrow single beds lined the walls, the beds arranged so close together that they resembled a military barracks more than a hospital. A double row of beds, each row facing out towards the walls, ran up the centre of the room, a small metal chest nestling at the foot of each bed. Women of differing ages crowded the room while a gaggle of nuns helped the older and less physically able to dress themselves.
Voices echoed beneath the high ceiling: a whole room full of garrulous females. If I got any sense out of this lot, it'd be a miracle.
I stopped at the nearest bed. A young girl paused with her arm halfway through the sleeve of her blouse. I avoided gaping at her partially exposed breasts. Tried to, that is. I wasn't successful, but I did feel bad about that. I showed her the photo and ID in combination, as I had with the priest.
'Do you recognise this woman?' I asked.
The girl shook her head. I moved from bed to bed, first checking the occupant for any resemblance to the picture, then asking them if they knew Brandt, then looking around the room to see if I could see her. After a minute or so, the room quietened and each pair of eyes tracked my progress. None of the women, once dressed, tried to leave. Each waited her turn, no doubt eager to discover what this dumb bull might want from her.
It took me fifteen minutes to cover the whole room. None of the down-at-heel hostellers recognised Brandt from my photo, and nor did the nuns, though I had been offered a few hard luck stories and some scraps of useless gossip about feckless husbands and lovers and the like. I thanked them all through gritted teeth and left the dormitory. I walked back past the kitchen to the gate.
The young priest laid a hand on my arm as I was about to step through to the outside world.
'Will you not stay for breakfast, detective? You look as though you could do with some.'
My belly betrayed me by rumbling. I was forced to concede my hunger and it felt like a defeat. In a way it was. How was I going to track Frieda Brandt now? By asking at various post offices whether she'd left a forwarding address? By looking to see if she'd rented a post box somewhere in the city? By checking to see if she had an account at one of the city's banks? By staking out Altstadt night clubs in the hope she might perambulate past arm-in-arm with a beinl? This was shaping into a job that would take a whole detective squad several days to accomplish. I had to be back on my shift in a day or so. Maybe some food would help me think.
The priest took me to the dining room, another large space filled this time with rows of wooden benches and trestle tables worn smooth by the passage of time and the caresses of thousands of destitute buttocks. The room was half full of men and women both who sat in same-sex clumps under the watchful eyes of the white-haired priests at the top table.
I chose an emptier table and sat down. The young priest served me porridge, ladling the stuff from a large pot into an enamel bowl laid out on the table. I got a wedge of dark bread to go with it, then the priest floated off.
I set to, my hunger so deep that it pained me to fill my stomach. The porridge tasted of oats and smoked bacon, a strange combination that tested the boundaries of what I defined as 'food'. Although it wasn't much, I couldn't manage more than half my bowl and a couple of bites of bread before I felt full. The meal dried my mouth, though I was able to wet it again with a cup of weak coffee dispensed by another priest. The coffee had a strange nutty aroma. Nor did it taste much like coffee. Ersatz stuff, probably.
If ever a breakfast was designed to motivate one out of poverty, this was it.
I got an itch at my temple and looked up. A young woman with dark hair and acne-scarred skin was glaring at me from a nearby table. I must've spoken to her in the dormitory, but I'd spoken to so many. She certainly hadn't told me anythi
ng useful, else I'd have remembered her. I ignored her and finished my pretend coffee. When I looked again, she'd gone.
I got up, feeling sick from the porridge, or from the too-sudden abating of my hunger, and I waddled to the exit. This time the young priest wasn't there. I stepped into the street and lit one of my cigars. I was taking a puff when someone tapped my shoulder.
I jumped and swallowed a great gob-full of smoke. I choked and dropped the cigar on the cobbles. I spun around, hand clasping the Luger in my pocket, but whoever had been there had gone.
I turned back to my cigar. The acne-scarred, dark-haired girl crouched on the pavement, cradling the smoking cigar in her hand and suckling on the end. I leaned over and took it from her.
'I suppose that was you tapping me on the bloody shoulder,' I said.
'Yes sir.' Her voice sounded hoarse, like she'd been ill. Or maybe she was a drug addict of some kind too, like Brandt.
'You had a reason, I take it?'
'Yes sir.'
'You can say something other than “yes sir”, can you?'
'Yes sir.'
'Glad to hear it. I'm going to go in this direction now,' I pointed past the church, 'though you're quite welcome to follow me until you decide to speak up.'
'It was that woman, sir,' the girl said. 'The nurse you were looking for?'
'Yes?'
'I know her. Or, that is, I did know her. Or, I don't know, maybe met her is a better way of saying it.'
'How?'
The girl took my hand and led me into the park. She sat on a wooden bench beneath the shade of a tree and she pulled me down next to her. She was thin, a loose skirt and sweater doing nothing to hide the sharp edges of her shoulder blades. She looked around before leaning in and whispering.
'She helped me with a problem.'
'What sort of problem?' I couldn't bring myself to whisper, but I pitched my voice low nevertheless.
'I was pregnant. I was ill, and I couldn't support a kid. So I found out about her and she sorted it for me.' I opened my mouth to ask a question but she put a finger to her lips. 'You won't tell them at the hostel, will you?' she said. 'I wouldn't want them to know. They've been all nice to me and everything, letting me stay there for nothing and all, but I know what I did is against the Lord's teachings.'
Not to mention the law, I thought, though I didn't say it. I was in no position to judge. Exactly the opposite, in fact.
I took her hand and squeezed it. 'Don't worry. I understand. But tell me how you got in touch with her, would you?'
'There's a shop, out in Flingern. A pharmacy. It's on a corner. You go there and say you have a menstrual irreg...well, a menstrual problem but that you heard there's a woman there who works miracles and can take away the problem. They ask you who told you about the miracle cure and you tell them. Then they ask you to go away and come back in half an hour. If they like the look of you then she comes and leads you up to a room in the building above the shop. You have to pay, like. She doesn't do it for free.'
'How much?'
'She did mine at a discount, she said. Fifty Reichsmark.'
'Where'd you get that kind of money?'
She shrugged. No point pushing it and making her clam up, so I dropped it.
'How long ago was this?' I said.
'Couple of weeks.'
'What's the name of the pharmacy?'
'Oh, I can't remember. But it's on the corner of Hermanstrasse and Lindenstrasse.'
I patted her hand. 'I know it. What's your name?'
'Why?'
I held my hands up, palms out. 'I need to know so I can tell them at the pharmacy.'
'Oh yeah,' she said.
'And I want to thank you properly.'
'Well...' She trailed off and I turned to look at her. She took the cigar from me, leaned over and latched her lips onto mine. My mouth opened in surprise and she stuck her tongue into it. Her tongue plunged to the back of my throat as though searching for any lingering morsels of breakfast, or trying to make me throw my breakfast back up, perhaps.
I seized her hips and threw her off. She landed on the grass at my feet. She rubbed her bony rump and screwed her face up at me. I didn't know if she was going to shout or cry.
'Don't you want me?' She pouted, or tried to. Her lips were in no state to carry off a pout.
'Well, no.'
'Oh.' She thought about this. The thin skin of her forehead creased with the effort. 'Then why did you stroke my hand?'
I pulled her up by her arm and sat her back on the bench. 'Well, I...didn't realise you'd take it that way.'
'How else is a girl in my station supposed to take it? You were the one wanted to know how I'd made that money, weren't you?'
I plucked the squashed remnants of my cigar from the grass, puffed on the end a couple of times to get it going again, and held it out to the girl. She smiled and went to take the cigar from me. I pulled back.
'So, what is your name?' I said.
She eyed the cigar. 'Sophie Ackerman.'
'Thank you, Sophie.'
I gave her the cigar and then I stood up. Across the park, a dark-haired woman ripe with curves was looking right at me. Took me a few seconds to work out who it was, and then my heart cringed. Gisela. No doubt on her way to morning mass. A couple of months after Lilli's death it had started, Gisela's attending mass every day.
The old hot needle back to resume its jabbing, I set off in her direction. That galvanised her. She turned and rushed off, heading for the tower entrance at the front of the building. Damn it, had she seen that girl canoodling with me? Had she, in fact, interpreted it as my canoodling with the girl?
I sped up and called her name. That stopped her. She hunched over as though I'd go away if she didn't look at me, but she waited all the same. When I got close I reached out to touch her, but I couldn't. She wasn't mine any more. Of course, she never had been, but she wasn't the woman I'd loved is what I meant, though I loved her still despite that. Was it only thoughts of Lilli that made me feel this way? I was chewing the inside of my cheek now.
'You don't have to explain yourself to me,' Gisela said, her voice soft but unwavering.
'Gisela, I'm sorry – '
'No,' she cut me off. 'You think you can apologise for what we did?' She backed away, closing the gap with the church wall. 'There is no apologising for what we did!' She lowered her voice. 'All we can do is beg the Lord for forgiveness and hope that He is listening. It's the only path to salvation, Thomas.'
She turned her back on me and headed off once again.
'Don't you remember that summer, Gisela?'
She stopped.
'The time you locked me in the wardrobe when Michael came home early? You remember that? How we laughed for hours the next morning once he'd gone back out to work, and you sneaking food in to me overnight. How you managed to persuade him you'd lost the key I'll never know.'
'Don't,' she said.
'Or the time we went swimming in the lake and ended up covered in mud, getting funny looks from the people we passed all the way back to the city? We were always laughing, Gisela, don't you remember?'
She rustled in her purse and turned back to me with her rosary beads in her hand. Her eyes were dry and she held the beads out as though to ward me off.
'There is no space left in my heart for laughter, Thomas. Is there really any in yours?'
'I'm sorry Gisela.'
'That's not enough, Thomas, don't you see?' And she turned away again, hunching her shoulders against me. 'I'll pray for you,' she said as she went.
'I gave her a name, after,' I called, but Gisela began to walk faster. 'Don't you want to know what I called her?'
But she'd turned the corner of the building and gone. I could have caught up with her, but where would that get me? She'd been lost to me a long time ago. There was nothing I could do about it now, and there was no point getting sidetracked. I left Gisela to her praying in the church and I left the acne-scarred girl to her cigar in
the park while I headed east to a pharmacy in Flingern. The jabbing in my guts was making my knees wobble, but I didn't care. I kept on chewing my cheek, not to cover the pain now but to add to it, to mingle with it, and I welcomed it as I kept on walking.
26
Sunlight sparkled in the windows in the corner building across from me. Behind one of those windows Brandt helped women with their menstrual 'irregularities'. Was I really up to it, to speaking to her, knowing what she did to fund her morphine addiction? The killing of unborn innocents, of countless Lillis like my own?
A couple of autos trundled past as I crossed the street. The pharmacy took up all of the ground floor, the plate glass windows either side of the door displaying seasonal allergy remedies. Beneath the painted sign of the green cross and above the door was the name Mahler's Pharmacy. Flingern was my district, my precinct, and I'd had no idea this place had existed as anything other than a pharmacy. What kind of detective did that make me?
I pushed on the glass panel of the door. It didn't budge. I scanned the opening times: Mon-Fri, 09.00-18.00; Sat 09.00-13.00; closed Sun. I checked my watch. It was only eight am, and a 'closed' sign quivered on a chain on the inside of the door.
I pushed again. This door was definitely locked. I backed up to look through the windows, but the sun shone off the glass, making it difficult to see inside. I shielded my eyes and leaned closer. No one stood at the counter. Behind the counter were shelves of herbal teas and cold remedies, racks of skin lotions and ointments and hair products, a cash register, and a thick curtain hanging in a doorway. Surely someone should have been in the shop getting ready to open? I knocked on the door. Then I caught sight of a bell push. I pressed it, twice.
A couple of minutes went by, and still no one entered.
An auto backfired in the road behind me. I jumped. Down the street, some men in shirt sleeves unlocked the back of their dray cart and began unloading beer barrels. Across the way a grocer bellowed his best prices at passers by. Apparently, the asparagus was good. Given the lateness of the season, I doubted that. Next door to the grocer, a lady newsagent smoked a cigar and held a kaffeeklatch with customers who flicked through their morning papers.
The Killing Of Emma Gross Page 19