“Luis—come on! You’ve been ages, that inspector is waiting!” Ruda banged on his door again. “What are you doing in there?”
Grimaldi came out. He smiled, made her turn around, admiring and flattering her. He had not seen her so well dressed in years. He had also not had a drink for more than twenty-four hours, another good sign. He felt good, and teased Ruda: “How come you dress up for a corpse?”
Ruda wrinkled her nose, and hooked her arm in his. “Maybe I need to give myself some confidence! I’m scared.”
Grimaldi laughed, and helped her down the steps. Then, because of the mud, he held out his arms and carried her to the waiting police car.
By the time Inspector Heinz and his sergeant had returned to their bogged-down patrol car, they were both reeling from all the statements they had heard from all the people who had known Kellerman. Not one had a nice word to say, everyone seemed rather pleased he was dead. None had been helpful, none had seen Kellerman on the day or night of his death, and everyone had a strong alibi. Torsen was grateful the ex-Mrs. Kellerman had agreed to identify the dead man.
Torsen held open the back door, and Grimaldi helped his wife into the car. She looked very different from the woman Torsen had visited in the trailer. She was in a good mood, laughing with her husband, a strange reaction, thought Torsen, considering she was being taken to a morgue to identify her ex-husband’s corpse.
Ruda was determined not to be recognized in the event someone had seen her enter Kellerman’s hotel. She had dressed carefully in a flowered dress and a pale gray coat. She had left her hair loose, hiding her face, and with her high heels, she seemed exceptionally tall. Torsen looked at her in the rearview mirror. It was hard to tell her exact age, but he guessed she must be close to forty, if not more. He felt the direct unnerving stare of her dark, strange, amber-colored eyes boring into the back of his head as he tried to back out of the mud-bound parking area.
Ruda wasn’t looking at the inspector, but past him, about fifty yards in front of him. Mike, one of their boys, was hurrying toward the canteen, a rain cape over his shoulders, but what freaked Ruda was that he was wearing Tommy Kellerman’s leather trilby. She remembered she had forgotten it in the meat trailer. The car suddenly jerked backward free of the mud, turned and headed out of the parking lot. Ruda didn’t turn back, she couldn’t: Her heart was pounding, her face had drained of color. Grimaldi gripped her hand and squeezed it. He murmured that it was all right, he was there, and there was no need for her to be afraid.
The rain continued to pour throughout their journey to East Berlin. The patrol car’s windshield wipers made nerve-wracking screeches on the glass.
Grimaldi and his wife talked quietly to each other, as if they were being chauffeured. They spoke in English, so Torsen could only make out the odd sentence. He wondered what the word “plinth” meant. Rieckert sat next to him in the front seat, thumbing through his notebook in a bored manner.
In an attempt to calm down, Ruda was talking about the new plinths, having tried them out that morning. She was telling Luis she had had a lot of trouble, particularly with Mamon; he seemed loath to go near them, and had acted up badly. Grimaldi said the retrieval of the old plinths was out of the question, they simply couldn’t get them back in time for the act. They would tone down the colors. Ruda snapped at him, saying that the smell of fresh paint would be just as disturbing, and that to skip the pièce de résistance of the act would be insanity. They considered asking for more rehearsal time.
They fell silent for a while as they drove through Kreuzberg, passing refurbished jazz cellars, Turkish shops, bedraggled boutiques, and small art galleries. It was the same route the bus followed the night Ruda had murdered Kellerman. Ruda felt a heavy foreboding.
Torsen looked at them through his rearview mirror.
“It was perhaps naive of us to expect that the freedom would unleash some exciting new era overnight. People who have lived in cages get used to them, people in the East are afraid. Financial insecurity spreads panic. People here have been denied creative and critical expression for so long, they suffer from a deep inferiority complex. Under the old regime many cultural institutions were supported. We had good opera houses, two in fact, but now the West holds our purse strings and a number of our theaters have been closed for lack of funds.”
The inspector felt obliged to talk, as if giving a guided tour.
“We had no unemployment; of course there was much over-staffing, but that was the GDR’s way of disguising unemployment. Everything has doubled in price since the Deutsche mark took over, but I do believe we are on the threshold of a new era.”
Ruda sat tight-lipped, staring from the window, wishing the stupid man would shut up. They crossed into East Berlin. Fear and the thought of seeing Kellerman made Ruda angry. She had to unleash this fury somehow, she was going crazy. As they passed a building with JUDE scrawled over its walls, she found the perfect excuse. Suddenly she snapped, her voice vicious. “Some new beginning! Look what they daub on the walls. He should stop the car and grab those kids by the scruff of their necks, better still, take a machine gun and wipe them out! Those…!”
The inspector and the sergeant exchanged hooded looks. The screech of the windshield wipers was giving Torsen a headache.
Grimaldi stared at the anti-Jewish slogans, and touched Torsen’s shoulder. “How come this kind of thing is allowed?”
Torsen explained that as soon as they washed down the walls, the kids returned. The sergeant turned to Grimaldi. His pale blue eyes and blond crew cut made him look youthful, but there was a chilling arrogance to him. He spoke with obvious distaste, his pale eyes narrowed.
“The city is swamped with immigrants. Romanian Gypsies are flooding in; women and children sit on every street corner, begging. The Poles are not desirable either. They fight like animals in the shops; they park their cars any old way, they steal, they urinate in the entrances to apartment buildings. This new Germany is in chaos. Eastern Europe is poverty stricken, and they come in droves! There are more illegal immigrants than we know what to do with! We have no time to wash down walls.”
They drove on, past peeling buildings, collapsing sewer systems, electricity cables hanging from broken cages on street corners. The car went by acres of grimy nineteenth-century tenements that had withstood the bombing, their occupants staring now from filthy windows. Ruda was tense; she shifted her weight on the seat, crossing and uncrossing her legs. She took out her cigarettes and lit up, her hands shaking. She opened the window. She didn’t care if she got soaked. She needed fresh air. She tossed the cigarette out, breathing in through her nose and exhaling, trying to stay calm.
Aware of her nervousness, Torsen began pointing out sights, a few new art galleries and the like. He tried to lighten the atmosphere. Now there was a gale blowing on his back: To add to his headache, no doubt, he’d have a crick in his neck the following morning.
They went past a gray stone hospital, to a low cement building, with parking places freshly painted in white. There were no other vehicles to be seen. The inspector pulled on the handbrake. “We are here, this is the city morgue.”
Ruda and Grimaldi were led to a small empty waiting room and were asked to wait. Sergeant Rieckert remained with them, his eyes flicking over Grimaldi’s jacket, his shoes, his Russian-style shirt with its high collar. He tried to imagine how he would look in that getup.
Inspector Torsen Heinz walked down a long, dismal corridor into the main refrigerated room. “Can you get Kellerman ready for viewing?” He shut the door again, returned to the waiting room, and gestured for Ruda to follow him down the corridor. Grimaldi asked if he should accompany them, and Torsen said it was entirely up to him.
The three walked in silence, their feet echoing on the tiled floor. They reached a door at the very end, which was opened by a man wearing green overalls. He stood to one side, removing his rubber gloves. They entered the cold room. Three bodies were lying on tables, covere
d in sheets, and Grimaldi tightened his grip on Ruda’s elbow. Her heart was pounding, but she gave no other indication of what she was feeling. Grimaldi looked from one shrouded body to the other, then to the bank of freezers, with their old-fashioned heavy bolted drawers. He wondered how many bodies were kept on ice.
The inspector stood by a fourth table—shrouded like the others, this body seemed tiny in comparison. In a hushed voice he addressed Ruda:
“Be prepared, the dead man had extensive wounds to his face and head.”
Grimaldi moved closer to Ruda, asked if she was all right. She withdrew her arm, nodding. Slowly the inspector lifted the sheet from the naked body, revealing just the head. Grimaldi stepped back aghast, but Ruda moved a fraction closer. She stared down at Kellerman’s distorted face, or what was left of it.
“Is this Kellerman?”
Ruda felt icy cold, and continued to stare.
The inspector lifted the sheet from the side. “The tattoo was on his left wrist; as you can see, the skin was cut away. It would have been quite large.”
Ruda stared at the small hand, the open cleaned wound, but said nothing. Torsen waited, watching her reaction, then saw her turn slowly to Grimaldi.
“Is this Kellerman, Mrs. Grimaldi?” he asked again.
Ruda gave a small, hardly detectable shrug of her shoulders. She showed no emotion. It was difficult for the inspector to guess what she was thinking or feeling. She seemed not to be repelled by the corpse, or disturbed by the grotesque injuries to the dead man’s face.
Grimaldi stepped closer, peered down. He cocked his head to the right, then the left. “I think it’s him.”
Grimaldi returned to Ruda’s side, leaned close and whispered something. She moved away from him, closer to the dead man. She looked at Torsen. “I can’t be sure, I’m sorry. It has been so long since I saw him.”
“It’s him, Ruda. I’m sure even if you’re not!” Grimaldi seemed impatient. Turning to the three shrouded bodies he asked if they too had been murdered. He received no reply.
Again Grimaldi whispered to Ruda, and this time he smiled. The inspector couldn’t believe it, the man was making some kind of joke! Grimaldi caught the look of disapproval on Torsen’s face, and gave a sheepish smile.
“The little fella was very well endowed, I suggested my wife perhaps could remember…” He shut up, realizing the joke was unsuitable and tasteless.
Ruda touched Kellerman’s hair, a light pat with just her fingers to the thick curly gray-and-black hair. She spoke very softly. “He had a mole, on the left shoulder, shaped like a…”
The inspector pulled the sheet down, exposing the left shoulder and a dark brown mole. Ruda nodded her head. She whispered that the dead man was Kellerman, then she turned and strode out of the room—had to get out because she could hear Tommy’s voice, hear him telling her not to switch out the light. He hated the dark, was always afraid of the dark and of confined spaces. She had teased him, calling him a baby, but she had always left the lights on. He didn’t need them now.
♦ ♦ ♦
Back in the waiting room Inspector Heinz thanked Ruda for her identification. Torsen opened his notebook and sat on the edge of the hard bench. He searched his pockets, took out a pencil and looked at Ruda. “We have been unable to find any of Kellerman’s documents, how he entered Germany, and if there are relatives we should contact. Was he an American citizen?”
Ruda nodded, told the inspector that Kellerman obtained his American citizenship in the early sixties, that he had no relatives and there was no one to be contacted.
“Where did he come from originally, Mrs. Grimaldi?”
Ruda hesitated, touched the scar at her temple with her forefinger. “Poland I think, I can’t recall…”
Grimaldi frowned, almost waiting for her to tell the inspector that she had met Kellerman in Berlin, but then she surprised him. She suddenly asked about Kellerman’s burial, suggesting he be buried locally as there would be no relatives to claim the body. Ruda added that she would cover any costs, and asked that a rabbi be called. Although Kellerman had not been a practicing Jew, she felt that he would have wanted a rabbi present.
The inspector wrote down her instructions carefully, and looked up quickly as she said in a low sarcastic tone: “I presume there is a rabbi left in Germany who can perform the funeral rites. He must be buried before sunset.”
Torsen said he would arrange it. He then asked if Kellerman was the deceased’s real name. Ruda looked puzzled, said of course it was. He saw that at last she seemed disturbed.
Ruda lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply before she replied once more to his question, apologizing for her rudeness. As far as she knew it was his name, it was the name she had taken when she married him. Torsen snapped his notebook closed, and offered to have the couple driven back to West Berlin. They refused the offer and asked for a taxi.
Grimaldi asked if they had a suspect, and Torsen shook his head. “No one as yet. We have not found his suitcase, the hotel room was stripped.”
“But didn’t anyone see the killer? That was some beating the little guy took, I mean, someone must have hated his guts, and surely someone must have seen or heard something?”
The inspector shrugged. They had nothing to go on, but for a number of motives. Kellerman was not a well-liked man.
“Well-liked is one thing, but you don’t beat a man’s head in because you don’t like him, it must be something else.”
Torsen nodded. He said that until he went further into his investigation, there was no further information he could give. He excused himself and left his sergeant to arrange their transport.
Rieckert, annoyed at having to walk back to the station, called two taxi companies but there were no available cars. He suggested that they could get a car from the Grand Hotel: It was not too far, if they wished he could walk with them.
Ruda refused his offer to accompany them, and turned to stare out of the grimy window. Grimaldi came to her side, whispered to her that she should have kept her mouth shut—now she would have to fork out for the little bastard even in death. She glared at him and, keeping her voice as low as his, she hissed that what he was pissed off about was her request for a rabbi. Then she whispered: “That little blond-haired Nazi prick will probably send us in the wrong direction anyway, now he knows I’m Jewish!”
Grimaldi gripped her elbow so tightly it hurt. “Shut up. Just keep it shut! Since when have you been a fuckin’ Jew?”
Ruda smirked at him and shook her head. “Scared they may daub us on the way back to the trailer?”
Grimaldi glared back at her; he would never understand her. She was no more Jewish than he was, certainly not a practicing one. She had no religion, and he was a Catholic—not that he’d said a Hail Mary for more than twenty years.
The sergeant handed directions to Grimaldi, and left with a curt nod of his head. He’d heard what she had called him, and he smarted with impotent fury: Foreigners, they were all alike, and Detective Chief Inspector Heinz bowed and scraped like a wimp to that Jewish bitch! What kind of pervert was she to have been married to that animal on the morgue slab? She repelled him.
Ruda and Luis walked together, arm in arm. The walk was a lot longer than the sergeant had suggested. It took them over an hour to arrive at the newly refurbished Grand Hotel, and it was such a sight that Grimaldi decided they should order a taxi and have a martini while they waited. Ruda resisted at first, but then, having been told that the regular taxis were engaged at present and that there would be no taxi for another hour, she relented.
Ruda and Grimaldi walked into the foyer and headed for the comfortable lounge. They made a striking couple. Grimaldi began to enjoy himself. Guiding Ruda by the elbow, he inclined his head.
“Now, this is my style, and I think since we’re here, we might as well order some lunch. The restaurant looks good, what do you say?”
Ruda looked at her wristwatch. She had to get back to r
ehearse and feed the cats, but still they had to wait for a taxi, so she suggested they just have a drink and order a sandwich.
Grimaldi decided this was as good a time as any to have a talk, away from the trailer, away from the circus. In the luxurious surroundings they might have a civilized conversation.
They sat in a small booth with red plush velvet seats and a marble-topped table. Ferns hid them from the rest of the hotel guests, mostly American as far as Grimaldi could tell.
They sipped their martinis in silence, and Ruda ate the entire bowl of peanuts, popping one at a time into her mouth. Grimaldi took an envelope from his pocket and opened it.
“I have been working out our financial situation, how much the act costs, living expenses, and what we will both need to live on. Maybe we should sell the trailer and each buy a smaller one.”
She turned on him. “Your priority is to get back the old plinths! I can’t work with the new ones.”
“We’ve already discussed that, for chrissakes. Just go through this with me, we have to sort it out sometime.”
Ruda snatched the sheet of paper, and looked over his haphazard scrawl. It was quite a shock to her that even after their closeness, he was still intent on leaving her.
“She’s pregnant, Ruda, I want to get a divorce and marry her!” Ruda tore the paper into scraps. “I’ll think about it.” Grimaldi signaled for the waiter to bring more drinks. Ruda’s foot was tapping against the table leg.
“I don’t want to have an argument here, Ruda, okay?” She stared at him, telling herself to keep calm. She had to deal with things one at a time. She had dealt with Kellerman, Grimaldi would be next, but her priority now was to get the act ready for opening night. One thing at a time—this show was to be her biggest, and if she performed well she knew that with live coverage, there would be no more need for second-circuit dates; she would be an international star. Above all she wanted to get to the United States again, and win a contract at New York’s Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey circus.
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