A Slow Death (Max Drescher Book 1)

by James Craig

  By the time he reached the crowd, the Kriminalinspektor was out of breath. Struggling with his jacket, he retrieved his ID and waved it above his head. ‘Police. Stand back please.’ After a little grumbling, most of the people obliged but one, an elderly woman remained standing over the body, the toes of her sturdy brogues hovering by the edge of the pool of congealing blood that was slowing soaking into the concrete.

  ‘American tourist,’ one of the locals muttered, a tired-looking man, tightly gripping a worn leather lead which looped round the neck of a sad-eyed mongrel. ‘She doesn’t understand much German. Her husband went to call for help.’ The sirens were getting louder. ‘It should be here in a minute.’ Right on cue, an ambulance pulled up at the Großbeerenstraße gate. A couple of paramedics jumped out, retrieved their equipment from the back and headed uphill at a sharp pace.

  Manoeuvring the American woman out of the way, Max looked down into the lifeless eyes of Serhat Khedira. ‘It’s a bit late for all that, I’m afraid.’

  18

  Neslihan Kayalar looked up from painting her nails as Max strode through the door, with Michael in tow. The elderly patrons of Kazan’s, who did not seem to have moved a centimetre since the Kriminalinspektor’s last visit, remained hidden behind their newspapers. Resul Keskin, alone at a table towards the back of the café, glanced up nervously as Max called out his name.

  ‘Where are your mates?’

  ‘No idea,’ the youth shrugged, leaning back in his chair. ‘They haven’t been around for a while.’

  ‘We know where Serhat is,’ Michael chipped in, taking up a position in front of Resul, blocking off any possible sprint for the door.

  ‘Oh?’ Resul tried to affect interest and ignorance at the same time.

  ‘He’s on the slab at the morgue.’

  ‘Holy shit.’ Resul slumped forward, scowling. ‘Poor bastard. What happened?’

  ‘Don’t waste our time,’ Max snapped. Reaching forward, he grabbed Resul by the collar of his jacket and dragged him out of the chair. ‘Where’s Volkan?’

  Resul tried to free himself but the Kriminalinspektor’s grip was too strong. ‘I don’t know. Like I said, he hasn’t been here for a few days.’ Max gave him a couple of quick slaps. ‘Ow. Get off me.’

  ‘Where else does he hang out?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Pushing Resul on to the floor, Max gave him a sharp kick in the ribs. Groaning, the kid rolled into a foetal position, trying to get under the table for some protection. Breathing heavily, Max gave him a second kick, harder this time, on the backside. ‘Tell me where he is, or you’ll be going out of here in an ambulance.’

  ‘I don’t know where he is,’ Resul repeated.

  ‘Voklan’s girlfriend has a place in Schöneberg. Somewhere on Hauptstrasse, I think.’ From behind the counter, Neslihan shot a look of irritation at the two cops as Resul retreated further under the table. ‘Maybe you’ll find him there.’

  Max wiped the sweat from his forehead. ‘Thanks,’ he replied, following Michael towards the door. ‘We’ll go and take a look.’

  ‘Next time you want to ask some questions,’ the girl grinned, ‘please do it outside. Uncle Erthan doesn’t like people messing up his place.’

  After a brief debate about the best way to Schöneberg, they took the U-Bahn to Nollendorfplatz. Skipping out of the station, Max lead Michael past the huge, concrete air-raid shelter at Pallasstrasse which had proved impervious to post-war demolition, before ducking into a small shop front next to a kindergarten. Over the door a small sign read Plass Properties. Before the sergeant had even made his way through the doorway, his boss was embracing the owner enthusiastically.

  ‘Lena, this is my colleague Michael Rahn.’

  Escaping from Max’s clutches, the petite brunette woman smiled as she offered the sergeant her hand. ‘Lena Plass.’ Dressed in black jeans and a red jumper, with a pair of tortoiseshell glasses perched on the top of her head, she looked to be somewhere in her early 50s. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘Lena runs a property rental business,’ Max explained, pointing to the large street map of the neighbourhood which dominated the back wall of the room. A selection of red and blue pins were scattered along different streets; near the centre a small silver star signified the location of the office. ‘I thought she might be able to help us out.’

  ‘It’s never a social call with you, is it Max?’ She turned to Michael. ‘I remember Max way back when. He’d just come over from East Berlin and, boy, did he like to party.’

  ‘He still knows how to have a good time,’ Michael confirmed. ‘I didn’t know he came from the GDR though.’ He shot his boss a quizzical look.

  ‘There’s lots you don’t know,’ Max snapped, signaling that particular line of conversation closed.

  Lena pointed to a small poster taped to the window, a poor reproduction of Storm Thorgerson’s illustration of light refracted through a prism, more commonly known as album cover for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. ‘Are you going to the concert, Max? You always were a big Floyd fan, if I remember rightly.’

  Max looked at Michael. ‘I don’t think so. It’s looking like I’ll have a diary clash that night.’

  Lena pushed a strand of hair from her forehead. ‘Ah, that’s too bad. I was thinking of going myself.’

  ‘These things happen,’ Max shrugged. ‘Work and all that.’

  ‘Yes. It must be tough being a cop. I’m surprised you’ve survived all these years.’

  ‘It’s a miracle,’ Max agreed.

  ‘So what can I do for you Max?’

  ‘Michael and I are trying to track down a woman who we think is renting a place on Hauptstrasse. It’s quite urgent.’

  Slipping on her spectacles, Lena retreated behind her desk and began flicking though a large day book. ‘Those Altbau period apartments are very popular nowadays. Everything comes back into fashion eventually. And, of course, David Bowie doesn’t do the place any harm.’

  ‘Huh?’ Max frowned.

  ‘When Bowie lived in Berlin in the ‘70s, he and Iggy Pop rented a place at Hauptstrasse 155 and hung out at the Neues Ufer café.’ Lena looked up from her book. ‘I get a minimum of two or three foreigners a week – Americans mainly – ringing up and asking if they can stay there. Anything on Hauptstrasse that comes on the market gets snapped up immediately.’

  ‘Must be good for business,’ Michael reflected.

  ‘Not bad,’ Lena smiled. ‘As long as landlords don’t think they can cut out the middleman.’

  ‘This woman, her name is Carolina Barbolini. I think she would have moved in round here a year or so ago. Something like that.’

  ‘Okay.’ Picking up a yellow and black striped pencil. Lena resumed flipped through the pages of her book. ‘Let’s see what we can find. Even if I didn’t get the rental, I would know about anything that came on the market.’ She casually tapped the table with the pencil as she stared at her notes. ‘No one knows the neighbourhood as well as I do.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’ Max waited patiently for Lena to conclude her deliberations.

  After a few moments, she looked up. ‘Looks like there were three places rented out on Hauptstrasse – I handled two of them; the third was done privately. Neither of my two tenants was a woman. One was a bloke, a writer. The other was corporate.’

  ‘Corporate?’

  ‘That’s right. The top floor of 161. It was rented out by a business who said they needed it for executives visiting Berlin. A surprising choice of neighbourhood but they would have had their reasons. I assumed that they were just trying to save money.’

  Max looked at Michael. ‘What was the name of the company?’

  ‘I’ll have to check the rental agreement, hold on.’ Three grey filing cabinets were lined up against the back wall, underneath the map. Tossing her pencil on to the desk, Lena strode up to the middle one and pulled open the top drawer. After a few seconds sifting through files, she pulled out a sheet
of paper and waved it in the air. ‘Here you go, 161 is rented out to a company called … Isar Services.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Michael exhaled a deep breath.

  Lena looked at each of the policemen in turn. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Lena,’ Max said gently, trying not to let his excitement show, ‘would you still have a key?’

  A preliminary search of the top floor apartment at Hauptstrasse 161, revealed little other than a fridge full of Bismarck Vodka and an impressive selection of condoms in the drawer of one of the bedside cabinets.

  ‘Someone’s keeping busy,’ Max mused, scanning the dishevelled bedclothes. ‘I bet forensics could turn up some interesting stuff in here.’

  Perched on the end of the bed, Michael yawned. ‘Shame that it’s an illegal search, then.’

  Max gave him a wounded look. ‘When did you become so straight-laced?’

  ‘When I started working with you,’ Michael shot back.

  ‘Ha. Just be grateful Lena was able to scrounge a key from the concierge. I don’t know if I could have managed to have picked the lock any time this decade.’

  Michael shook his head. ‘Imagine spending hours breaking in and then finding bugger all.’

  ‘It hasn’t been a complete waste of time,’ Max observed. ‘At least we know the placed is being lived in.’

  ‘And they’re shagging like rabbits,’ Michael added, with more than a hint of envy in his voice.

  ‘That’s young people for you.’

  For the briefest moment, each man contemplated his long lost youth.

  ‘We don’t even know if this is the right woman,’ Michael said finally. ‘I mean, this hardly looks like the pad of a mafia boss.’

  Max contemplated the large, framed black and white photograph on the wall above the bed. It was a moody black and white print of the Unter Den Linden at night. Very imaginative. ‘Maybe she’s a middle manager on the way up, or a graduate trainee, or something. Anyway, this place is rented. Most of this stuff isn’t going to be hers anyway.’

  ‘I thought that the mafia didn’t like women in management roles.’

  Max laughed. ‘Is that what they taught you in Police College?’

  ‘Organised crime tends to be a fairly male-dominated profession,’ Michael pointed out. ‘We don’t spend a lot of time chasing down women, do we?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Max conceded.

  ‘And the Italians, they’re not the most enlightened bunch to start with, are they?’

  ‘In this case, who knows?’ Max sighed. ‘Generalisations are never that helpful. The world is changing.’

  ‘I suppose.’ With a grunt, Michael struggled to his feet. ‘So what do you want to do? Wait and see who turns up?’ The look on his face suggested that this wasn’t his preferred option. ‘I’m starving.’

  Taking the hint, Max shook his head. ‘Nah. We could be waiting for days. For all we know, Carolina Barbolini has headed out of town. Anyway, I don’t necessarily want to confront her just yet.’

  ‘What about Volkan Cin?’

  ‘That little shit,’ Max growled, ‘is another matter altogether. But he’s not here, is he?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Let’s call it a night. I’ll get Oster to come and keep an eye on the place in the morning.’

  ‘Marin won’t like that.’ Theo Oster was a new arrival from the Police Academy, being fast-tracked through the ranks – with much irritating fanfare – on a ‘stars of the future’ programme. Inevitably, this made the inoffensive Oster about as popular as a dog turd with old hands like Max who made a point of finding a steady stream of crappy jobs for the lad to do. Oster didn’t do himself any favours by complaining about the low-rent errands to Martin Marin. Marin, in turn, complained to Max. Every time the Kriminalkommissar demanded better assignments for his protégé, Max went out of his way to find even worse things for him to do.

  ‘Well don’t tell him then,’ Max muttered. ‘If Oster is going to have any chance of being a proper cop then he has to put in the hours on the street, no?’

  Michael grunted his assent.

  ‘And, frankly, there are a lot worse things he could find himself doing than sitting in Neues Ufer, drinking coffee and flirting with the waiters, while waiting to see if Barbolini or Volkan turn up. Anyway, we’ve got a lot of other ground to cover tomorrow. I want to check out the offices of Isar Services and then there’s Grozer’s house, where Penzler was shot.’ Placing the apartment key safely in his pocket, he headed towards the hallway. ‘C’mon, I’ll buy you a slice of pizza and a beer and then you can get off to your family.’

  19

  By the time they reached a bar called Spizz, a block from the U-Bahn station, Michael had forgotten about his hunger and was happy to settle for a large glass of Gaffel Kolsch.

  ‘Here you go.’ Max handed Michael his Pilsner, lifted his own glass to his lips and drank deeply. ‘Aah. I needed that. Tough day.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Michael took a mouthful of beer and sat back in his chair. ‘So, how do you know Lena?’

  Max looked around the largely empty bar. ‘We were part of the same crowd back in the early ‘70s. I never really knew her that well but she had a really cute boyfriend for a while. He was a French guy called Joachim Legrand.’

  ‘And you can still recall his name,’ Michael teased. ‘It must have been love.’

  ‘Lust,’ Max corrected him. ‘Pure lust. It’s strange the things you remember. I don’t know what happened to him but he had a great ass.’ He grinned sheepishly. ‘Anyway, for some reason, Lena and I stayed in touch. She’s a nice lady and a useful contact. Before landing up in Schöneberg, she worked all over the city. Helped me get the apartment on Segitzdamm.’ He took another drink from his glass. ‘That must have been, I dunno, more than ten years ago now. Easily.’

  Folding his arms, Michael got to his real question. ‘And you came over the wall from East Berlin?’

  ‘Not over the wall exactly. I was on an Interflug flight to Magdeburg to pick up this guy called Joey Ludolf. He’d killed his mother and sister with an axe and then legged it out of Berlin.’ Grinning, he shook his head. ‘I often wonder what became of good old Joey. Anyway, I’m on this crappy Ilyushin plane – you know, one of the old style turboprop things that crashed all the time – and one of the engines caught fire. We had to make an emergency landing at Tegel. After we scrambled off the plane everyone was offered political asylum. So I signed on the dotted line and never went back.’

  ‘Wow. Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that.’ Max drained the last of his beer. ‘One minute we were sitting in a smoke filled cabin saying our prayers, the next we’d won the bloody lottery. It was the weirdest day of my life.’

  ‘Wasn’t it a difficult decision?’

  ‘Hardly. After all, it wasn’t like it was such a big stretch. I had lived in Treptow all my life, my parents were dead and I was on my own. My prospects weren’t great either; as you can imagine, the gay scene in the GDR wasn’t exactly … lively.’

  ‘No,’ Michael mumbled, ‘I suppose not. But you were already a cop?’

  ‘Yes, I had already been in the Volkspolizie for a couple of years. I was doing okay too, but I knew I wasn’t going to cut it as one of Walter Ulbricht’s secret policemen. All in all, it took me less than ten seconds to decide not to go back. After a few months, I got a job in the Schupo and the rest, as they say, is history. It didn’t take that long for me to work my way up to Kriminalinspektor, winning the love and respect of my colleagues wherever I went.’

  ‘You kept all that very quiet.’

  ‘My business is my business.’ Max handed his glass to Michael. ‘After raking up all that history, I need another drink. It’s your round.’

  ‘Sure.’ Michael got to his feet.

  ‘Just remember, my little story is not to go any further. Not many people know about how I came over from the east and I want to keep it that way. I have enough problems as it is, without Marin thinking I’m a Stasi spy.’

&
nbsp; ‘I understand,’ Michael grinned, ‘but surely even the Kriminalkommissar would realise that you’ve gone native by now?’

  ‘Marin would just assume I’m deep undercover.’

  20

  ‘The doctors said I've got six months, maximum,’ Kerem Cin lifted his glass of Altınbaş in a mock toast, ‘but, as far as I can see it's all just guesswork. So I'm just going to keep going; business as usual.’

  From the outside, the old man looked in fine fettle. Tall and trim, his shock of white hair was cut short and his eyes shone brightly under bushy eyebrows. Looking at him, it was impossible to tell that he was terminally ill. ‘I'm almost seventy-four, Kriminalinspektor, I've had a good run. I arrived in Berlin more than thirty-five years ago and I have worked every single day I have been living in this city. Even the day that Volkan was born.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘It was a miracle. I was already past fifty – we thought it would never happen. And then there he was. He arrived at five thirty-two in the morning – I’ll never forget that – and by seven thirty I was on the building site.’

  ‘Incredible.’

  ‘Pah. There’s nothing incredible about hard work,’ the old man protested. ‘It’s the best medicine there is. You are only sick if you think you are sick. I don’t intend to waste my time in hospitals. They are so depressing.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Max, with feeling.

  ‘Makes you want to kill yourself,’ Kerem chuckled.

  ‘Yes.’ Sitting on the opposite side of a dining table that could easily sit a dozen people, Max shifted uneasily in his chair.

  ‘Here's to a slow death.’ Knocking back the raki, Kerem reached for the bottle sitting on the table. ‘Or, rather, a bit more life.’

  ‘What about the pain?’

  ‘I've got all kinds of drugs,’ Kerem said cheerily. ‘The doctors, they'll throw anything and everything at you when you're in this state. So far, the pain hasn't been too bad.’