Berlin: A Novel
Page 1
Praise for Berlin:
"As the blasted city is being carved up by conquerors. a killer on a motorbike is carving up blue-eyed blondes in the American sector. As the victims fall, their lives untold before our eyes ... a panoramic portrait of a nation seduced and raped by Hitler and his Reich."
-Bookli.ct
"A winding and gripping whodunit . .. intricately woven and fantastically plotted ... It is engrossing, addictive."
-Buzz (UK)
"Heinz G. Konsalik is dead. Long live his far more intelligent heir Pierre Frei."
-Osterreichische Zeitung
"Riveting."
-Jake Kerridge, The Dailr Telegraph
"In this winning mix of mystery and history set in 1945 Berlin, Frei personalizes the horrors of war.... [He] maintains the suspense of whether the killer will claim another victim to the final pages. . . . Fine storytelling."
-Library Journal (starred re), iew)
"Pierre Frei adopts the approach taken by Graham Greene in The Third Man, using a postwar setting made more difficult by divided military occupation. Berlin struggles to adapt to the uneasy peace. Rapacious victors possess the place physically (the Russians, with their policy of looting and rape) or by psychological means (the Americans with the superior rations and subtle fraternization), resulting in what the filmmaker Wim Wenders called the colonization of the German unconscious.... A jittery. feral sexuality adds to the [book's] foreboding.... Entirely readable."
-The Guardian
"It's a serial-killer whodunit, but it's also a very funny tale of a young man's coming-of-age in postwar Germany, and a series of stories about life in the Third Reich told through the lives of women who lived-and died-there. What's most surprising is that Frei . . . manages to pull all this complicated plotting and character development together.... I found Berlin very engaging and liked the slow pace and careful characterization. Plus there's a neat twist. . . . Let's hope Frei decides to bring the Dietrichs back for another round."
-The Globe and Mail
"A gratifyingly original and surprisingly affecting crime novel ... I'd he hard pressed to name a better researched and more readable crime novel this year."
-Nottingham Evening Post
"Enormously exciting--your best plan is to keep a whole weekend free to read it all at once."
-Berliner Zeitung
"Berlin by Pierre Frei begins a month after the Second World War has ended. The Allies have divided Germany's ruined capital, and in the American sector young blondes are being savagely murdered. At first it seems that this is going to be another police procedural, with a German detective teamed up with an American military policeman to hunt for the killer. But as the life story of each is told in a series of flashbacks, what emerges is a vivid picture of Germany as Hitler's followers tighten their grip on the country. It's an ambitious novel, filled with brilliantly drawn characters, mesmerizingly readable and disturbingly convincing."
-Sunday Telegraph (UK)
"The stories of the murder victims, described in flashbacks, are fascinating, and the lively picture of the period, enriched with many details, rings true."
Blick (Z(irich)
"Berlin takes us back to a very different capital in the aftermath of a very different apocalypse. In 1946 Berlin is under occupation by rival powers and hardened to killing, rape, and atrocity. Or so you would think. But when the killing resumes on an individual scale, there is a wholly different climate of horror. The victims are all young, beautiful, blue-eyed, blonde-haired women strangled with a chain and submitted to horrific sexual abuse. It is up to a German police inspector working with a group of American GIs to stop the serial killer. . . . In the end it is Berlin itself, the city and its inhabitants, meticulously observed and depicted, that emerges as the true star of the story, flawed, cruel, seductively engaging and all too human. This is its best evocation since Len Deighton's Winter."
-The Times (London)
"Frei's real strength lies in the presentation of his characters. After each young woman's murder, her life story is described. The result is a fine novel of Berlin, set against the background of German political history." -
-Das Echo
"[Berlin is] set in occupied Berlin, where a serial killer targeting young women is on the loose.... With each woman's death we spiral back in time, learning about her life and the journey that led her to a lonely railway station or back street. The women's compelling stories run through the book, giving readers a sense of life before and during the war, and their struggles to face the ruin around them, until the killer snuffs out their lives."
-Publishing News (UK)
"Life is anything but peaceful in postwar Berlin when a serial killer is on the loose. Young, blonde, and beautiful women are at risk as the killer lurks in the vicinity of Uncle Tom's Cabin underground station.... Each victim has a story to tell: Karin, a small-town girl turned film star was wooed by Hitler propagandist Joseph Goebbels; Helga fought to protect her handicapped child from the Nazis; Henrietta was an aristocratic diplomat; and Marlene was a high-class prostitute who got married to a high-ranking Gestapo officer. The fifth target, Jutta, has already escaped one attack. Will the authorities stop the killer in time to save her?"
-The Good Book Guide
BERLIN
A Novel
Translated from the German by Anthea Bell
Pierre Frei
GROVE PRESS
New York
Copyright (0 2003 by Karl Blessing Verlag, a division of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH, Munchen, Germany Translation copyright Cc°© 2005 by Anthea Bell All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003. First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
Originally published in Germany in 2003 by Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich, as Onkel Toms Hutte, Berlin. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental. Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frei, Pierre, 1930- [Onkel Toms Hiitte, Berlin. English] Berlin : a novel / Pierre Frei ; translated from the German by Anthea Bell. p. cm. ISBN- 10: 0-8021-4329-6 ISBN- 13: 978-0-8021-4329-7 1. Bell, Anthea. II. Title PT2666.R359205513 2006 833'.92-dc22 2006043433
Grove Press an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 841 Broadway New York, NY 10003 Distributed by Publishers Group West www.groveatlantic.com 080910 1098765432
For Catherine-Helene
CHAPTER ONE
THE BOY NEVER took his eyes off the soldier. The American removed the last Lucky Strike from its packet and tossed the empty wrappings on the tracks. He lit the cigarette and waited for the U-Bahn train coming in from Krumme Lanke station to stop. If the Yank was going only one station up the line to Oskar-Helene-Heim, he'd throw the half-smoked cigarette away as he got out, it would fly through the air in a wide arc, and the boy could retrieve it.
A dozen cigarette butts of that length, once the burnt end had been neatly trimmed away with a razor blade, would earn him forty marks. But if the Yank was travelling further the prospects weren't so good, because then he'd probably tread out that coveted cigarette on the floor of
the car or chuck it out of the window, which was open in the summer weather. Yanks were entirely indifferent to such things.
With equal indifference, the US Army quartermaster had ordered that a square mile around the Onkel Toms Hiitte U-Bahn station was to be fenced in with barbed wire, leaving only one narrow passage available to German passengers for access. The shopping streets on both the longer sides of the station were off limits too, and had become a centre for the soldiers billeted in the requisitioned apartment buildings around it.
Decades before, the landlord of an inn frequented by people going on excursions to the nearby Grunewald had called his establishment after Harriet Beecher Stowe's affecting novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the Berlin Transport Company adopted the name for the new U-Bahn station built in late 1929. 'Uncle Tom' soon became familiar to the American occupying forces when they arrived in 1945.
The U-Bahn train stopped. The Yank boarded it, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and slouched against one of the upright poles you could hold on to. Another passenger followed him in and closed the door. The railwayman in the middle of the platform raised his signal disc. The conductor at the front of the train knocked on the window of the driver's cab to pass the message on, and swung himself up into the car as it started moving.
The boy watched the train leave. He had decided not to pursue the cigarette end. As soon as the stationmaster with the signal disc turned his back, he jumped down on the tracks to salvage the empty cigarette packet.
The stationmaster's head appeared above him. 'What d'you think you're doing down there?' he barked.
'Looking for cigarette ends.'
'Found any?' The man was thinking of his own empty pipe.
'No cigarette ends. Only a dead woman.' The boy pointed casually to something beside the tracks.
The stationmaster sat on the edge of the platform, put his disc down and lowered himself, grunting. Two slender legs in torn, pale nylon stockings were sticking out of one of the side bays which, if you bent double, enabled you to reach the cables below the platform. The feet were shod in brown, high-heeled pumps with white leather inserts, currently the latest fashion in the USA. The white inserts bore dark-red splashes of blood.
'She's American. Go get the Yanks.' The man clambered back up on the platform and hurried to his booth, where he took the receiver off its rest and cranked up the phone. 'Krumme Lanke? Onkel Tom stationmaster here. We got a dead woman under platform one. Stop the trains coming through from your end. Message over.'
The boy's name was Benjamin, but everyone called him Ben. He was fifteen, dark-blond, and showed no ill effects of the events of the last few months - the British and American air raids, the chaos of the final days of the war, the havoc as the Red Army marched in. He had filed these experiences away in his head, making room for new impressions. New impressions included Glenn Miller, chewing gum, Hershey chocolate bars and automobiles a mile long, first and foremost the Buick Eight, closely followed by the De Soto, the Dodge and the Chevrolet. New impressions included brightly coloured ties, narrow, ankle-length trousers, Old Spice and Pepsi Cola. All these items arrived overnight when, in line with the agreement between the Allies, the Russians vacated half of Berlin and Western troops moved into the ruined capital.
Ben climbed the broad steps to the ticket windows and walked away down the barbed-wire passage and into the dusty summer heat, which instantly made him thirsty. In his mind he pictured a cold sparkling drink. woodruff flavour. When you took the top off there was a promising pop, and the fizz rose into the air like a djinn from its bottle. But there was no woodruff-flavour sparkling drink available, just the dusty heat and a lingering aroma of DDT insecticide and spearmint chewing gum. Even the smells were different now the Yanks were here.
Ben strolled over to the guard on duty at the entrance to the prohibited area. Haste would have suggested dismay. 'Dead woman on the U-Bahn,' he said.
'OK, buddy. It better be true.' The man on duty reached for the phone.
The call came from the Military Police. Inspector Klaus Dietrich took it. 'Thanks, yes, we're on our way.' He hung up and called, 'The car. Franke.'
'Just heating up. It'll take a good half-hour.' Detective Sergeant Franke pointed through the window at an old Opel by the roadside. It had a kind of sawn-off bathroom geyser fitted at the back, into which a policeman was feeding scraps of wood. When they were burning hard enough they would generate the wood gas needed to drive the engine. There was no gasoline available for the Berlin Zehlendorf CID.
'We'll take the bikes,' Dietrich decided. He was a tall man of forty-five, with grey hair and the prominent cheekbones of those who were living on starvation rations. His grey, double-breasted suit, the only one Inge had managed to retrieve from their bombed-out apartment on the Kaiserdamm, hung loose on him. He dragged his left leg a little. The prosthesis, fitted at the auxiliary military hospital in the Zinnowald School where he'd spent the end of the war, chafed in hot weather. His wound had saved him from imprisonment. and he'd been able to go home in May. Inge and the boys were living with her parents in Riemeister Strasse. Inge's father, Dr Bruno Hellbich, had survived the Hitler years in compulsory retirement but otherwise unharmed. He'd returned to his old position as a Social Democrat district councillor at Zehlendorf Town Hall, and he had been able to get his son-in-law a job as a police inspector. The Zehlendorf CID needed a temporary head, and Klaus Dietrich's pre-war work as deputy managing director of a security services firm and his lack of political baggage, compensated for the loss of his left leg below the knee and his absence of criminological training. In any case, he had soon found out that a sound understanding of human nature was perfectly adequate for dealing with black marketeers, thieves and burglars.
It took them fifteen minutes to reach the U-Bahn station, where their police passes got them past the gathering crowd.
'Oh shit, here comes my old man,' muttered Ben, making off.
An American officer was standing on the tracks with a military policeman and the stationmaster. They had laid the dead woman down on her back. She was blonde, with a beautiful face and regular features. Her blue eyes stared into space. Strangulation marks suffused with blood were notched in her delicate neck. Klaus Dietrich pointed to her nylon stockings, her nearly new pumps, and her fashionable, pale summer dress. An American,' he said, gloomily. 'If a German did this there'll be trouble.'
Sergeant Franke scratched his head. 'I feel as if I've seen her before.'
The American officer straightened up. 'Which of you guys is in charge?'
Klaus Dietrich answered. 'Inspector Dietrich and Sergeant Franke, Zehlendorf CID.'
'Captain Ashburner, Military Police.' The American was tall and lean, with smooth, fair hair. His alert, intelligent gaze rested on the inspector. And this is Sergeant Donovan.' The sergeant was a stocky man with broad, powerful shoulders and a crew cut.
Dietrich raised the dead woman's left arm. The glass of her watch was shattered; the hands stood at ten forty-two. 'Probably the time of death,' he commented, beckoning to the stationmaster. 'Who was on duty here yesterday evening, about quarter to eleven?'
'Me, of course,' said the man in injured tones. 'Until the last train, at 22.48 hours, and then again from six in the morning. They hardly give us time for a wink of sleep.'
'Were there many passengers waiting for the last train?'
'Couple of Yanks with their girls, two or three Germans.'
'Was the dead woman among them?'
'Maybe, maybe not. I had to clear the 22.34 to Krumme Lanke for departure. You don't look at the passengers separately. Nobody kind of caught my eye. Only that weirdo with goggles and a leather cap. Like a sky-pilot off on a tobogganing trip, I thought.'
'Goggles and a leather cap?'
'Well, kind of motorcycling gear, I'd say. But I didn't really look close. The lights at the far end of the platform have been a write-off for weeks.'
'So he was standing in semi-darkness.'
'The only one
who was, now you mention it. The other passengers were waiting where the lights still work.'
'Did you see him get in?'
'Nope. I have to be up at the front of the train to give the guard the signal to leave. Now excuse me, here's the eleven-ten.'
'Hey, Kraut, take a look.' The MP sergeant handed Dietrich a shoulder bag. 'Not an American, one of yours. Karin Rembach, aged twenty-five. Works in our dry cleaners' shop over there.' He pointed to the shopping centre on the far side of the fence. 'I guess her boyfriend bought her the shoes and nylons in the PX. Man called Dennis Morgan, stationed with the Signal Corps in Lichterfelde.'
Klaus Dietrich opened the bag. Her ID, with a pass for a German employee of the US Army, indicated where the sergeant had gathered his information. He also found a note bearing the soldier's name and his barracks address. 'I'd like to ask this Morgan some questions.'
A Kraut wants to interrogate an American? Don't you know who won the war?' barked the sergeant.
'I know the war's over and murder's a crime again,' Klaus Dietrich replied calmly.
For a moment it looked as if the beefy Donovan might take a swing at him, but the captain intervened. 'I'll question Morgan and send you the statement. In return you can let me have the results of the autopsy. A Medical Corps ambulance will take her wherever you like. Goodbye, Inspector.'
Sergeant Franke watched the Americans leave. 'Not very friendly, that bunch.'
'Privilege of the victors. Franke, what do you think about this man in the goggles?'
'Either a nutcase, like the stationmaster says, or someone who doesn't want to be recognized. Inspector, why do they keep calling us Krauts?'
Klaus Dietrich laughed. 'Our transatlantic liberators believe we Germans live on nothing but sauerkraut.'