“But you don’t recall his name?”
“No…he just signed, and I gave him the key. I was on the phone when he checked in.”
“What nationality?”
“American. Kellerman!” The manager beamed. “I remember, it was Kellerman!”
No one Heinz questioned had seen anyone entering his room. Heinz and his sergeant took off for the morgue.
The morgue had closed for the night.
Heinz returned early the following morning. Tommy Keller-man’s naked body was even more tragic in death than in life, his stubby palms turned upward, his legs spread-eagled, his pride exposed. It was a wicked freak of nature to give this small, stunted body a penis any man would be proud to boast. The penis dangled virtually down to the kneecaps on his twisted legs.
The bed cover had to be cut away from his head, because the blood had congealed like glue. There was hardly a feature left intact; blood clotted in his eyes, his nose, his ears, and his gaping mouth; the bottom row of false teeth had cut into his upper lip, giving him the look of a Neanderthal man, a chimp, even more so as his thick dark curly hair was spiky with his own blood.
The pathologist was able to ascertain that Kellerman had died close to midnight and had eaten some four hours before he was killed. The pathologist had spent considerable time over the open wound on Kellerman’s left forearm. He could tell that the skin cut away from Kellerman’s arm was probably a tattoo, judging by the faint tinge of blue left along one edge. The pathologist added that whoever murdered Kellerman must have been covered in blood, since the main artery had been severed on the once tattooed wrist.
Kellerman’s clothes were spread out on the lab tables; again they gave a tragic impression of the wearer, so small and childlike. His underpants were disgusting, semen stains mingled with the death throes of his bowels.
His pockets were empty, apart from a rubber band and a Zippo lighter. His clothes were labeled and listed, his body washed and tagged, placed in a child’s morgue bag, and then laid on a drawer and pushed into the freezer.
Kellerman’s terror of being shut in small spaces, his fear of the darkness couldn’t hurt him now: It was all over for him.
Heinz hung around for a while, then returned to the hotel to question the janitor.
The toothless man could not recall anyone entering the hotel during his shift, or at least no one who warranted special attention. He did remember seeing a big man outside the hotel, wearing a black hat. In fact the man could possibly have just come out of the main entrance, he couldn’t be sure, he had simply passed him on the street as he emptied the trash. He could not describe him in any detail, just that he was tall, wore a black hat, and that it was around eleven or perhaps a bit later.
Torsen Heinz sat at his large wooden desk, surrounded by his officers. The station was housed in a baroque-style building in the Potsdam district of East Germany, and for equipment there were a half dozen old typewriters and an obsolete telephone system incapable of connecting with West Berlin without interminable delays and disconnections. The principal piece of modern technology was a microwave oven, recently installed to heat up the officers’ lunches.
Torsen and his men had been unable to keep up with the sharp increase in criminal activity since the fall of the socialist regime. Previously East Berlin’s criminal incidences had been hushed up by the Stasi secret police or played down by the state-controlled media. Now, Polizei Oberrat Heinz and forty-odd uniformed officers had to learn fast to make their own decisions.
Sitting with his microwave-heated breakfast sausages, Heinz felt swamped. There was little to report from any of the officers he had assigned to the Kellerman case, because after their day’s work they had clocked out promptly at six o’clock. No matter how much Torsen argued that they were no longer working from nine to six but if necessary around the clock, they were too used to the old regime to change their working habits. There was not one man on duty yet, and it was half past eight!
Alone, Torsen sifted through the statements and facts he had gathered so far about the dwarf. He thought that Kellerman was probably an American citizen since, according to the hotel manager, he spoke with an American accent. Without a passport or other documents to substantiate this, he decided he should first contact the U.S. embassy to see if they had any record of his arrival in Berlin. The next call would be to the circus which was being heralded as the biggest event of the season. He tried to contact the embassy, but the station’s telephone switchboard was still closed. He finished his breakfast and looked at the photograph of his father on the wall behind his desk. Gunter Heinz’s picture was brown with age. Torsen gave the photograph a small nod and determined that until it was absolutely necessary he would not go hat in hand to the West Berlin police. They had already assisted him on a number of cases, and he had taken a lot of ridicule from his “colleagues” with their high tech computers and fax machines. He wondered how well they would cope without so much as one single telephone connected after 6 p.m. or before 9 a.m.! He swiveled in his chair and looked at the memo taped to the wall under his papa’s severe face. “Accept no coincidence—only facts.” He had put up this admonition after he had been promoted to chief inspector at exactly the same age as his father had before him. The memo had been written when Torsen first made the decision to follow him into the Polizei.
Suffering from senility, Gunter Heinz, Sr., was now residing in a home for the elderly, most of the time happily unaware of his surroundings—or for that matter of who he was. But there were the odd flashes of recall. In these moments Torsen was able to talk with him, even play chess. Torsen had arranged for the nurses to call him whenever his father was lucid. However, the last time he had hurried over for a visit, the old man had glared at him and asked who the hell he was. Torsen had replaced his chessboard in its case.
The nurse had apologized, whispering that she was sorry, but earlier that day his father had asked to speak with his son on an important matter. During Torsen’s conversation with the nurse, his father ripped small pieces of tissue paper from a box, carefully licked each tiny scrap, stuck them on his nose, and blew them off like snowflakes. A spectacle that would have been comic were the man not his father.
♦ ♦ ♦
Torsen called the U.S. embassy. They had no record of a Kellerman in residence in East Berlin, but suggested the border patrols be contacted. The flow of refugees arriving in Germany was causing mayhem, but there was an attempt to record everyone coming in by automobile or train. There was a possibility that Kellerman had landed at the main airport and crossed to the East; the airport authorities, too, should be contacted.
Torsen sent two officers to try and discover Kellerman’s origins, and then set off with Sergeant Volker Rieckert for the circus.
The patrol car labored through the mud, but the attendant would not let them come close to the private trailers and the performers’ parking lot. The long walk to the trailer sections and big tents was hazardous. Their trousers were soaked at the bottom, their hair plastered to their heads as they made their way toward the cashier’s trailer.
The cashier had bright red-dyed hair with a pink comb stuck in the top that matched her pink lipstick. She looked at Torsen’s ID and blew a large pink bubble with her gum, then pointed toward the manager’s building. Torsen swore under his breath as he felt the mud squelch into his hand-knit woolen socks.
♦ ♦ ♦
The circus’s administrator welcomed the men into his office. It was tiny and overheated, in a small building at the side of a massive tent. It was filled with filing cabinets, and the walls were covered with large circus posters. Romy Kelm, the administrator, a balding bespectacled gentleman, introduced himself to the detectives and ordered tea.
The two officers were settled on folding chairs, and Mr. Kelm seated himself behind his pristine desk. He told Torsen the dead man could very well be Tommy Kellerman. Kelm hastened to add that Kellerman was not employed by the circus, but had been
more than twenty years earlier. He knew also that Kellerman had been in jail in the United States, was prone to fighting and drunken brawls, and was a thief. Kellerman had absconded with the company’s wages eight years previously when he was associated with the Kings Circus, a smaller touring company. A circus trade paper had given the details of his theft and subsequent jail sentence. Kelm suggested that there were a number of people who resented Kellerman, because he owed them money.
Torsen was given a list of all the performers who might have known Kellerman. Kelm told him that the dead man’s ex-wife, Ruda, a star performer, was still using the name Kellerman, although she had remarried long ago.
Torsen’s head was reeling. He and his sergeant spent more than two hours in the little office, and the small room became so overheated that they could feel their socks and shoes drying out, along with the bottom of their trousers.
Finally, Torsen was helped into his raincoat and handed a layout of the trailers. The circus did not want any adverse publicity, because their biggest show of the season was to open in a few days’ time. Kelm made it clear that if anyone from his company was involved in the incident he wanted it dealt with as quietly and as quickly as possible.
As he ushered them into the corridor, he said he was sure no one in the company was involved in the murder.
Torsen suggested that surely if many people detested Kellerman, perhaps one could have wanted to kill him. There was no reply, just a cold stare from Kelm, who smiled perfunctorily.
Torsen eased open the exit door and looked at the downpour. He swore, then hunched up his shoulders and stepped out. His sergeant followed, tucking his thick notepad into his pocket, along with the free posters and cards that had been pressed into his hands by Kelm for his children.
“Las Vegas, you see that poster on the high-wire act! How much do you think a setup like this costs?” Rieckert asked. He received no answer from Torsen. “That Kelm was pretty helpful, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, he was, wasn’t he! It’s called get off our backs, schmuck! We’ve got our work cut out for us.”
A herd of horses was led past them, draped in protective covers, led on a single rein by a young sour-faced boy. Rieckert stared with open curiosity, and then looked at four equally sour-faced men wearing dark blue overalls. They carried pitchforks, and one promptly cleared away some horse dung as the others hurried on toward the practice arena. Rieckert’s jaw dropped again as coming up behind him were five massive elephants. He shouted to ask Torsen if he had seen them. Torsen looked at him—it was exceptionally hard to miss five fully grown elephants.
The two men plodded through the mud, heading toward the main trailer park. Torsen had decided he would interview the ex-Mrs. Kellerman first. By the time he discovered they had been reading the trailer route upside down, his hair was dripping wet. After asking for directions from a number of scurrying figures with umbrellas and waterproof capes, they arrived at the Grimaldi trailer. Torsen dragged his shoes across the grids outside the glistening trailer and tapped on the door. Behind him Rieckert looked at the trailer with admiration, wondering how much it had cost. The door opened, and Torsen looked up.
“My name is Detective Chief Inspector Torsen Heinz, and this is Detective Sergeant Rieckert. May we come in?”
As Grimaldi stared, Torsen asked politely if Grimaldi spoke German, and received a curt nod of confirmation.
“We would like to speak to your wife—she was Mrs. Kellerman, yes?”
Grimaldi nodded, and then stepped aside. Torsen moved up the steps to enter.
Grimaldi gestured for the men to follow him. Torsen observed they were both six feet tall. Grimaldi was big, raw-boned, with very broad shoulders, whereas Torsen bordered on being skinny.
Grimaldi sat down on a thick cushioned bench seat and offered them coffee, but both men declined. The officers sat side by side on the padded bench seat opposite him.
“Ruda’s feeding the cats, should be back shortly.”
Rieckert took quick glances around the spacious room, while Torsen looked at the posters and photographs. He then turned to Grimaldi.
“I saw you, many years ago. I was just a kid, but I have never forgotten it, you were fabulous.”
Grimaldi’s dark eyes were suspicious. He hardly acknowledged the compliment, but turned in the direction of the posters. He pointed to Ruda’s, and then looked back.
“This is Ruda, you see, Ruda Kellerman. She still uses his name. What’s that little piece of shit done now?”
Torsen straightened. “He’s been murdered. We are both from the Polizei. He was murdered in East Berlin sometime the night before last.”
Grimaldi smiled, showing big even yellowish teeth, then he laughed out loud and slapped his trousers with his huge hand. “Well, you’ll have a lot of contenders…he was a detestable creature, real vermin, somebody should have smothered him years ago. What was he doing in East Berlin?”
“We don’t know, and as yet we have had no formal identification of the body, but we are led to believe it was Tommy Kellerman. Would you mind telling me where you were last night? I mean the night before last.”
Grimaldi banged his chest. “Me?”
Torsen nodded. “We will have to ask everyone at the circus if they’ve seen him. Did you, by any chance?”
“Me?”
Rieckert’s jaw dropped slightly; he had never come across anyone as large as Grimaldi. The man appeared to be built like an ox, his hands twice the size of any normal man’s.
Grimaldi leaned back and then looked at Torsen Heinz. “You serious? Night before last? Oh, yes. I was here, all night, ask my wife—she couldn’t sleep because of my snoring. As to Kellerman, let me think, I’ve not seen the creep for maybe five, no, more, I thought he was in jail, last saw him—must be eight to ten years ago.”
“You have recently been in Paris? Was he working with you then?”
Grimaldi shrugged his massive shoulders. “No one would employ him, he stole an entire week’s wages, from…can’t remember, but no circus would touch him. Besides, he was in jail! I think he got extra time for beating up some inmate, that’s what I heard.”
The door opened, and Ruda walked in. She leaned against the door frame, looking first to Grimaldi, and then to the two men.
“Kellerman’s been murdered,” Grimaldi said.
Ruda eased off her boots. “What do we do, throw a party?”
Grimaldi grinned, and introduced Torsen Heinz and Rieckert. Ruda shook the officers’ hands as they both stood up to greet her. To Torsen, Ruda’s hand felt like a man’s—rough, callused. She was almost as tall as he was, but judging by the handshake, a hell of a lot stronger. They made quite a pair, Mr. and Mrs. Grimaldi.
“Is this true?” she asked.
Torsen nodded. He had never seen such a total absence of emotion. Kellerman had, after all, once been this woman’s husband.
“Would you mind if I asked you some questions, Mrs. Keller—Grimaldi?”
Ruda placed her boots by the door. “Ask what you need to know! Is there coffee on, Luis?”
Grimaldi eased himself out of his seat, went into the kitchen and poured his wife coffee, again asking if either of the men would care for some. They both replied that they would, and he banged around getting the mugs.
Ruda sat on the seat vacated by her husband, rubbing her hair with a towel. Torsen rested his elbows on his knees. “When did you last see him?”
She closed her eyes and leaned back. “That’s a tough one, let me think…Luis? When did he come to the winter quarters, was it six, eight years ago?—I can’t think!”
Grimaldi put down the mugs of thick black coffee. He didn’t offer any milk, but a large bowl of brown sugar.
As the two policemen spooned in their sugar, Ruda and Grimaldi exchanged a few words about one of the cats. Ruda was worried she was off her food; if it continued she’d change her feed, maybe put her back on meat and stop the meal. They seemed to
tally unconcerned about Kellerman.
“Do you have a photograph?”
Ruda looked at Torsen and raised her eyebrow. “Of the cats?”
“No, of Kellerman.”
“You must be joking. Do you think I would want a reminder that I was ever in any way connected to that piece of shit! No, I do not have a photograph.”
Torsen sipped his coffee. It was odd that neither had asked how Kellerman had died. When asked where she had been at the time of the murder, Ruda lit a cigarette and rubbed her nose.
“The night before last, shit, I dunno. Last night I was here working the act until after twelve.”
“No, the night before.”
Ruda thought for a moment, then frowned. “Guess I was here, worked the routines, then had supper over at the canteen, then came to bed. What time did I come in, Luis?”
Grimaldi took a picture of himself from the wall. He handed it to Torsen. “That was the last time I played Berlin. You said you saw my act, more than fifteen years ago…”
Ruda interrupted. “It would be more than fifteen, let me see ”
Ruda looked over the wall of photographs, and Torsen put his mug down. They were both discussing the exact time they were last in Berlin! Ruda suddenly turned to face him. “You’re sure it is Tommy Kellerman? I think he’s still in prison.”
Torsen stood up, straightened his sodden trousers, the creases no longer in existence.
“We would be sure if you would be so helpful as to identify him. May we ask for your cooperation?”
Ruda hesitated. “Don’t they have fingerprints for that kind of thing? Contact the prison—I don’t want to see him, dead or alive. Get someone else, there’s many around the camp that knew him.”
“But you were his wife.”
Ruda stared hard at Torsen. “Yes, I was his wife, but I am not now, and I haven’t been for a very long time.”
“For me to cable America, and wait for prints, could take a considerable time.”
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