The Jewish Candidate

by David Crossland

  A crunch on the tiles above made him flinch. His phone was in his back pocket, unreachable. He dared not move a hand from the gutter. In the rain, the beam of a powerful torch swept left and right above him. They were on the roof, just a few metres above him. Could they see his fingers? Would they have the guts to climb down and kick him off? He heard low voices. The bastards must suspect he’d called the police by now. The longer they waited, the greater the risk to them. The torch went off. Minutes passed. Then he heard tiles crunching under heavy boots. The sounds of the night enveloped him. A train screeched into Bahnhof Zoo station. A diesel taxi growled its way down Kurfürstendamm. An air conditioning vent gave out a low hum. The pain in his arms was becoming unbearable. There was no point screaming for help. Carver knew he couldn’t hold on long enough for it to arrive. The vertical drain pipe was less than two metres away. The brackets holding it to the facade looked thick enough to stand on. It was his only chance. He inched to the right and gritted his teeth, bracing himself to leave the ledge.

  He swung free again, shifting his bleeding hands along the gutter as fast as he could. His foot reached a clamp. He reached the drainpipe with a final, desperate lunge. It shifted slightly, but held. He clung to it, gasping with relief. The brackets gave enough purchase to climb up. After a couple of minutes he summoned the strength to clamber back onto the roof. His fingers grasped a tile. He paused. The dread of slipping again was almost overpowering. He grabbed another tile, then another, hauling himself forward until he was on the roof enough to push with his feet. The top was gradually coming closer. He finally reached it, clamping himself onto the ridge with his elbow and swinging his leg over. He felt reborn. His breathing and heart rate started to return to normal. There was no movement on the terrace. Were they waiting in his flat? He called the police emergency line. “There are burglars in my flat. I’m hiding near the terrace. Please hurry.” He lay forward and waited, soaking wet and shivering with cold. His hands were blue and bloody.

  He rang Renner.

  “Shit. Shall I come over?”

  “No thanks. The police are on their way. Just watch out. Push a wardrobe in front of your door or check into a hotel again. We’re dealing with murderers.”

  After 20 minutes, a police car pulled into his street. It took another 10 minutes before the light in his bedroom went on and two officers stepped on the terrace.

  The lock was hanging out of the front door. “Why don’t you find a hotel until the door is fixed,” said one policeman. “We can’t assign anyone to stay here with you.”

  “I’m not asking for protection,” Carver replied.

  When they had left, he poured himself a brandy, grabbed a kitchen knife, turned all the lights off and sat at his office desk in the pre-dawn gloom, watching the front door. What had Wischnewski found out? Tonight a man had died, and he had almost been killed. For Tietjen to have taken such desperate measures, they must be getting close. But it didn’t feel that way. He gulped down the brandy. The warmth swept down his chest. The front door creaked open. He leapt to his feet. A breeze from the corridor had blown it ajar. It was time to find a hotel and get a few hours’ kip. His muscles ached. While he was packing a bag in his bedroom, he heard something fall onto the floor downstairs. He ran out onto the landing and listened. Silence. He slunk down the stairs. His mobile phone had been vibrating and had fallen off the desk. He had just missed two calls. He didn’t recognize the mobile number. He rang it back. It went to voicemail.

  “Sven Schwartz.” Carver cursed himself for switching the phone to silent. He checked the Internet, then called Wendt, the head of Escape.

  “Schwartz may be in trouble. I need to see him, or at least get his fixed number,” Carver said. “But I can’t find him listed in Wünsdorf. Can you help?”

  “He doesn’t live in Wünsdorf or anywhere near there,” Wendt replied. “He’s a careful man. I’ve got his number, I’ll try it now.”

  Wendt rang back after two minutes. “No answer.”

  “I’d better go and check this out,” said Carver. “Can you give me the address?” Wendt hesitated.

  “I’m serious, Herr Wendt, I think he may be in trouble.”

  Wendt gave him an address in Dresden.

  Carver rang Renner. “Can you be here in half an hour? Let’s drive down there.”

  While he waited, his mobile phone rang again. It was Schwartz’s number. He answered. “Hallo. Schwartz?” There was a long silence on the line. The caller rang off without saying anything.

  They set off at 6.00 a.m. It would take them less than three hours to drive to Dresden at this hour. The eastern sky was brightening as they headed towards the motorway.

  “I think they’ve got to him, what do you reckon?” said Carver.

  Renner was asleep. The motorway was empty save for occasional convoys of trucks in the slow lane. The east had the best autobahns in Germany. Carver remembered the potholed roads of 20 years ago. They stopped for breakfast at a service station and ate in silence, watching the lorries roar past. The place was empty apart from a couple of truckers wedged into plastic seats a few tables down, shovelling in fried eggs and ham rolls.

  “How are you feeling?” Renner asked.

  Carver shrugged. “Coffee’s helping.”

  “What the hell were you doing getting some Stasi bastard involved?”

  Carver glared at him and didn’t answer.

  “And what about the police, Frank? Did you tell them about our investigation?”

  “No. What’s the point anyway? We’ve got fuck-all proof.”

  “I heard something strange,” said Renner. “I was in the Blick newsroom yesterday. There’s an odd rumour going round. About the Israeli ambassador complaining to the German government, saying Gutman isn’t being protected well enough.”

  Carver raised an eyebrow.

  “Something about a wine festival a few weeks ago in St. Goar. Gutman was there.”

  “What about it?”

  “Apparently something suspicious was found in St. Goar after the festival. That’s all I know, and all they know at Blick.”

  “A bomb?”

  “No idea. But that would surely have come out. I rang round but couldn’t get anyone to comment. The Israeli embassy spokesman said he didn’t know what I was talking about. I’ve got no contacts there. So I thought I’d check the police statements for that day. Turns out a woman was murdered in a hotel just across the river. On the day of the festival.”

  “Strange,” said Carver.

  “So I rang the police there. The victim was the hotel receptionist. Knifed in a third floor room. Throat cut, almost severed her head. They’ve got no idea who did it, or why. No idea who had been staying in the room. The page was torn out of the guest registry.”

  Carver stirred sugar into his coffee.

  “Apparently, that was the first murder in St. Goarshausen since 1964,” said Renner. “And on the day Gutman’s next door. I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  “Neither do I,” said Carver. “Was the room facing the river?”

  “Good question. I’ll check.”

  Dresden was bathed in crisp sunshine. They got lost driving through the old town centre, which was back to its old baroque glory after being rebuilt from the rubble left by the February 13, 1945 Allied air raid. The bombing and the subsequent fire storm killed more than 20,000 people. It was Germany’s Hiroshima. Neo-Nazis, always eager to portray Germans as victims of the war, gathered in Dresden each year to mark the anniversary of what they called the Allied “Bombing Holocaust.” Tietjen had stayed away in the past because he didn’t want to be seen associating with right-wing extremists. He would probably go along next year, thought Carver. No reason to stay away now.

  They drove across the Elbe river and pulled up in front of a grey old tenement building. There was no answer when they rang the bell downstairs, but a man was leaving and held the front door open for them. They climbed a dingy staircase to Schwartz’s top floor flat.<
br />
  There were only two flats on this floor. Carver rang the bell. Still no answer. They could hear a TV on inside the apartment. He thumped on the door. “We’ve got to get in. Let’s kick it down.”

  “Wait.” Renner took out an old credit card and slid it into the side of the door by the lock. It took him seconds to open it. “Hasn’t locked it.”

  They entered the flat and were hit by a stench of vomit and excrement. They exchanged glances and inched down the corridor towards the sound of the television in the living room. Renner pushed open the door. “Oh God.” Schwartz lay face down in front of the TV, naked. There was vomit on the carpet and he had defecated. They walked around the corpse, avoiding a large pool of blood that had seeped into the rug from his groin and his slashed neck. His eyes were swollen shut from punches. His jaw looked broken and he had something red in his mouth. A knife lay beside him.

  “Poor sod,” said Carver, his voice quivering.

  Renner stood motionless, staring down at the corpse. He took a sharp breath. “They cut off his cock. He’s got his cock in his mouth … My God!”

  Carver bent down to look. Renner retched and covered his mouth with a handkerchief. “Who would do such a thing?” he stammered. He was starting to shake. Carver grabbed his arm. “Don’t go into shock on me, Wolfgang.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” said Renner. “We know him, we’re in danger too! We’ve got to call the police.”

  “Wait,” said Carver. “Let’s look around. Just for a minute. He was in trouble. But he bothered to ring me. He had something to say. He found something out.”

  The apartment wasn’t ransacked. It was a bachelor pad, with black leather and chrome furniture, a wide-screen TV and a library of DVDs, mainly war films, on the shelves. The other rooms were tidy. The PC in the bedroom was on. Carver wrapped his fingers in a paper handkerchief and searched the hard drive for the words Gutman, Gutman Aktions Komitee, GAK. Nothing. The browsing history contained far-right and porno websites. They went into the kitchen. There was a deep dent in the door and the bottom hinge was torn out of the frame. The window was open. Carver looked down. There was a narrow shelf and a lethal drop. It reminded him of last night. He pulled back. “The guy must have been terrified if he tried to escape out of here,” he remarked. He felt something under his shoe and lifted his foot. It was a tooth. The floor by the window was spattered with drops of blood. A pencil lay under the radiator.

  “He locked himself in here, tried to climb out the window, they got him in time, punched him in the face, hard, dragged him into the sitting room, tortured and killed him,” said Carver.

  A postcard-sized, framed black and white photo of some soldiers hung on the wall by the window.

  “I’m not staying here any longer,” Renner trembled. “I can’t stand the smell.” He walked towards the door.

  Carver followed him. He was on the threshold when he turned to look down the hall one last time. “Renner,” he whispered. “Come back in.”

  The hall was lined with black-and-white photos of Wehrmacht soldiers and Second World War military hardware. One showed a group of Panzergrenadiers standing on a charred Soviet T-34 battle tank. One of the men was holding up a bazooka.

  Another showed two Tiger tanks churning up a field. In a third, two soldiers were squatting in a foxhole in a dense forest. Using a handkerchief, Carver took them off them off the wall and opened the frames. There were captions on the back of the photos written in pencil. “Charkow, März 1943.” “Urlaub im Hürtgenwald, Oktober 1944.”

  “Forget it, Frank. We’ve got to call the police,” Renner hissed. “We won’t find anything here.”

  Carver walked back into the kitchen. The photo on the wall there showed a bull-like SS general sharing a joke with a young soldier who was standing to attention and beaming.

  “That looks like Sepp Dietrich, the SS general Schwartz had the hots for,” said Renner.

  “And the young guy might be Schwartz’s grandfather,” said Carver.

  The frame was hanging slightly crooked. He nudged it straight and heard a scrape behind it. He lifted it off the hook. A folded post-it note was stuck to the back.

  Carver peeled it off. The words had been hurriedly scribbled in pencil:

  Gutman AK =

  Tietjen

  Sven Wuttke

  Stefan Kunz

  Roland Bein

  Bec

  RA=GAI ´

  Carver gave a whistle. He turned to Renner. “What’s RA? RA equals GAI?”

  Renner shrugged.

  Carver wrote the names down and photographed the note with his phone.

  “I’m calling the police. Now!” Renner said.

  “Ok, Ok,” said Carver. “What do we tell them?”

  “The truth,” said Renner. “He’s a neo-Nazi contact. We couldn’t reach him so we came down here and found him. I’m waiting outside. I’m going to throw up if I stay here another second.”

  As they waited on the landing, Renner lit a cigarette. “Are we going to tell them about the list?”

  “Don’t know yet,” Carver replied. “Depends how seriously they take us. I’m worried they’re going to arrest me after Wischnewski. Guys around me keep dying.”

  “Hope I make it,” said Renner. “How do you think they got to Schwartz?”

  “Maybe he asked too many questions.”

  They spent the next seven hours at Dresden’s main police station. They were questioned separately, fingerprinted and had to give saliva for a DNA sample.

  Their press cards and identities were checked. Luckily, Carver had paid for petrol by credit card on the outskirts of Berlin at 6.23 a.m. It was an alibi because the murder was committed around that time.

  They provided as precise a description as they could of the man who opened the downstairs door for them. Medium height, stocky build, dark brown hair, angular, hard face. In his mid-to-late forties. All the neighbours and their visitors were accounted for. None fitted that description.

  Finally, they were taken together to an office to be interviewed by a Hauptkommissar, a chief inspector in his mid-50s who had started his career in the communist East German police, and was now counting the days to retirement.

  “Who do you think did this?” he asked.

  “We think there’s an FNP plot to kill Gutman, the chancellor candidate,” Renner answered. “He was going to tell us something about it. We’re pretty sure he was found out and killed by people in the far-right scene.”

  The inspector gave him a thin smile. “You worked for Blick, right?”

  “So what?”

  “Well you know what they say. Blick’s always first to interview the corpse.”

  “You think this is a joke? The guy had his cock cut off!”

  The detective frowned. “Was he homosexual? A crime of passion maybe?”

  Carver stared at him in disbelief. He took out his camera and showed him the photo of Schwartz’s post-it note. “Your officers will find this behind a photograph in his kitchen. We think Schwartz wanted to pass this information on to us.”

  The inspector studied the camera screen.

  “We think Gutman AK means Gutman Aktions Komitee,“ Carver explained. “We think that’s a secret group formed to organize the assassination of Gutman. And those appear to be the members, or some of them, according to Schwartz. We don’t know what RA = GAI means.”

  The policeman shot an angry look at Carver. “Did you touch the note? Do you know the penalties for obstructing the police? Tampering with evidence? You’ve contaminated the scene of a crime!”

  “I’m helping you!” Carver retorted.

  “Schwartz was obviously killed to silence him!” said Renner. “By Nazis!”

  “You leave that up to us,” said the inspector. He stood up. “You may leave now. We’ll need to contact you again, obviously.”