In the busiest part of Berlin-West, around the towering Kaiser Wilhelm Church, night seemed to turn into day, everything in motion. Women in helmetlike hats walked with skirts flipping side to side. Men in double-breasted suits waved fedoras, trying to grab cabs. Advertising zipped across billboards: Crème Mouson, for the Lady of Today; Audi, Type M: for the Gentleman in You. In every direction, chic modernity. Stainless-steel doorways. Long, curved windows. The best boutiques. The place-to-be restaurants. The nation’s premier cinemas lined up like chorus girls: the Gloria-Palast, the Capital, UFA am Zoo. Everything swank. Glittering. Frenetic.
On Kurfürstendamm, Berlin’s Great White Way, the show windows reflected traffic like an avant-garde movie, full of incongruent angles and rushing rivers of light.
“So you see, this respectability the baroness was raving about is all romantic nonsense.” Von Hessler honked insanely, nearly hitting a couple clutching each other for dear life as they tried to ford the mayhem. “The more we learn, the more we realize what people call order in this universe is actually just conditioning. What street did you say you lived on again?”
Far from crowds and flashing lights, the quiet avenues around Prussian Park ran past ornamented five-story apartment blocks with attics peaking from high-pitched roofs, plaster gargoyles and Valkyries still reigning over all. On Beckmann Strasse, in front of their solidly respectable building, Willi and Vicki practically flung themselves from von Hessler’s race car, thanking him profusely. “We really ought to do this again,” the doctor shouted after them, his silver eye patch fading.
“Absolutely.”
Vicki waved.
Inside the lobby, with its carpeting and glass chandeliers, she threw her arms around Willi and kissed him hard, penetrating her warm, soft tongue into his mouth.
“Wow,” he whispered.
Up the staircase, she slipped from her blue shoes and made him unfasten her dress hooks, all the little beads jingling wildly. What if one of the neighbors should see? he wondered. They’d never live it down. They’d have to move. He’d have to resign from the police force. But so late on a work night … the kids at a slumber party …
It really was one for the history books.
Next morning she was humming, kissing him sweetly on the lips when he came in for breakfast. While sausages sizzled, she held up bananas and started swaying her hips in a little hula dance, running her fingers through his waves of dark hair. What a holiday, not having the kids around. If only Heinz Winkelmann had more birthdays. Except for that damned party at four … and today half a workday … no escape.
Vicki dropped the bananas. “What’s this?” She grabbed the newspaper out of his hands. TAINTED SAUSAGES! HUNDREDS SICKENED! Off went the flame under the Wurst. “Even during the war I never heard of such a thing.” She squinted intensely under her dark fringe of hair. “Infected meat—here in Berlin? With all the controls we have?”
“Anything can happen in this world, sweetheart.” Willi calmly took the paper back. “Even with the best controls.” Another story had caught his eye, a smaller one at the bottom of the page. Apparently, the stock exchange in New York had had a bad day.
Two
They were tearing up the Alex—big-time. After two centuries of hodgepodge growth, order was being imposed on the jumble of streets that comprised the old commercial hub just east of the city center. Alexanderplatz, with all its hotels and grand department stores, famous restaurants and nightmarish traffic, was going to become an “architecturally coherent” square, with multilayers of unimpeded traffic and bright modern buildings. In the meantime, all was chaos. Jackhammers. Steam shovels. Pile drivers slamming relentlessly. Willi had to hold his ears. Pedestrians were being forced down narrow gangplanks onto convoluted courses that had them all but colliding with the convoluted courses forced on cyclists, cars, trucks. The path to paradise evidently ran through purgatory. Even on Saturday morning.
When he reached the end of Königs Strasse, the air itself shook from pounding wrecking balls. The Grand Hotel, where his grandfather had his eightieth birthday party in 1911, was on its last legs. Already felled was Haus zum Hirschen, with its dining hall boasting ninety-nine deer heads. His cousin Kurt had his wedding dinner there. A storied yesterday was being hammered to dust for a drawing-board tomorrow. Pity the Police Presidium hadn’t been consigned to the hit list, Willi thought, making his way toward it through the swarms of early shoppers. Its menacing façade and sullen cupolas loomed over the whole southeast side of the Alex like a dead whale. Six floors, 605 rooms, third-largest building in Berlin after the royal palace and Reichstag, its real bloodred color barely discernible under decades of soot. As he reached the massive iron doors at Entrance Six, though, how grateful he felt to have made it here. Not many officers ever did. Even the best. Even after years of service.
Riding the brass-caged elevator up, crushed with a dozen others trying to make the eight o’clock shift, Willi acknowledged he wasn’t the most likely candidate for the Berlin police. His parents, may they rest in peace, certainly never imagined it. A Jewish detective? Who ever heard of such a thing? For centuries Jews had stood on the wrong end of a billy club. But those days were gone, Willi was certain. And he truly loved his work. Believed in justice and the law. Which was very Jewish, as he understood it. Not that it made a huge difference.
He certainly wasn’t ashamed of his ethnicity, but he hardly considered it the keystone of his identity. He enjoyed celebrating traditional holidays with the children: lighting candles at Hanukkah. The Passover seder, liberal as theirs were. He loved reading about the towering achievements of his people and its long trails of tears. But in everyday life in modern Berlin, being Jewish held little more significance to him than his wavy, dark hair, dark eyes, or his circumcised prick.
The Homicide Commission was on the top floor. Willi’s desk was right up against a window. From his chair you could see half of the Alexanderplatz. When you stood, you could see the whole thing, the whole master plan being overlaid on it. The new subway station that would connect to the elevated station, under the new traffic island, which would distribute the flow from five major streets.
“Guten Morgen, Herr Sergeant-Detektiv.”
Frau Garber, the unit secretary, had come around with her wooden cart. A slender, sexy grandma in her forties, she was one of the few people on the floor who didn’t give him a cold shoulder. More than two years after Willi’s promotion from Local 157 in Wilmersdorf, he remained the department pariah. In numerous ways, his colleagues had made it clear that was exactly how it was going to remain.
Because of the dark hair and dark eyes and the circumcised prick.
“Oh, Dr. Hoffnung called.” She poured from a steaming pot, smiling. “Says he’s ready whenever you are.” A cup came toward him the way he liked it, black with a touch of sugar. “New beans, from Brazil.”
“Your coffee’s always best, Frau Garber.”
“By now it’s quite permissible to call me Ruta, Herr Sergeant.”
Hoffnung, the pathologist, was among the most competent specialists Willi’d come across at headquarters. Smart. Straightforward. Cool as a cucumber, normally. But this morning, Willi could see, the doctor was perturbed.
“One of the more peculiar and, I’d even go so far as to say, heinous cases I’ve come across in twenty years.” Hoffnung stuck a black pipe in his mouth. Grunting, he yanked aside a bedsheet. Willi’s throat constricted. Laid out in a row on a stainless-steel counter were the burlap sack and multiple bone arrangements.
“It’s no joy to report my initial assessment was correct.” The doctor’s pipe hung from his jaw, his eyes fixed darkly on the clean white remains. “These are boys’ bones, all right. Five boys in all. Ages approximately nine to fourteen. Impossible to determine an exact time of death. But”—he slipped on a pair of cotton gloves—“one telling detail.” Gently opening the ruined Bible, he used his pipe stem to point out a still-legible publication date. Berlin. 1929. “This ‘burial
,’ therefore”—he shrugged theoretically—“if that’s what the contents of the sack may be termed, took place within the last nine months.
“The sack, as you can see, is manufactured by a firm called Schnitzler and Son. The burlap fibers still contain bits of animal feed. Probably for cattle, maybe goats, swine; I don’t know. I’m no farmer. This is what it looks like.” Hoffnung used a tweezer to pick up some grain for Willi’s inspection. But Willi was no farmer either.
“What about that material binding these bones?”
“Muscle, all right.” Hoffnung pulled a leather pouch from his lab coat. “But … not animal. That, I’m guessing”—he sighed, dipping his pipe in, carefully filling the bowl with tobacco—“is the same muscle once attached to those bones. Dried out. Hand spun. Woven almost like a thread. Whoever did this is quite a craftsman.”
Willi felt a shiver of dread. Human muscle, rolled into thread?
“There’s more.” Hoffnung anxiously rifled his pockets. “These bones, for lack of a better word”—he looked relieved to find his matches—“have been … cooked.”
Willi’s throat closed. Like during the war, when the gas shells came.
“I couldn’t find so much as a microscopic shred of tissue on them.” The orange flame trembled as the doctor lit his pipe. “And there’s only one way bones get that clean, Herr Sergeant-Detektiv.” Hoffnung’s eyes blackened as he puffed. “You would have to boil them.” His face disappeared behind a cloud of smoke. “For many hours.”
* * *
The pile driver below knocked beams into the soggy Berlin subsoil as if into Willi’s skull. From his desk, he could see to the open cut across the street where the underground station was beginning to take shape. Eventually, all the layers of traffic in Alexanderplatz would be so intricately organized that not one line would cross another on the same level. How much less complex could the mind of a person be who’d boil the flesh off children’s bones?
He tilted all the way back in his chair, a dangerous habit since childhood.
Not just boil flesh, but dry the muscles, then hand-roll it into “thread.” Use this thread to weave the bones together into arrangements. Place the arrangements into a burlap sack … with a Bible. What would drive such behavior? What kind of person would conceive it? Could it even be called a person?
Sitting back up, he fingered the black receiver. He’d just gotten off the phone with Schnitzler and Son … no lead there. Feed for any type of animal could be put in their sacks, they said. They had customers all over north Germany.
The buzzer startled him. “Don’t forget lunch, Herr Sergeant.” It was Frau Garber … Ruta … on the intercom. “Noon downstairs.”
“Thanks, Ruta.”
He broke apart a paper clip.
Kriminal-Kommissar Horthstaler was fond of capping off the week with a unit meeting in the basement cafeteria, one flight above the labyrinth of holding cells known as the Dungeons. Willi wished they’d meet like all the other units, in a regular room, and to hell with lunch. Not for any religious reasons or even, as Vicki suggested, the pull of the “collective unconscious”—but really because he couldn’t stand the taste—he avoided eating pork, which in Germany rendered him completely outlandish. And it never failed to come up at these damned lunches.
“What, Kraus, no pig’s knuckles today?” Mueller’d throw an arm around him. “I hear they’re especially tender.”
“Perhaps for dinner,” Willi’d reply.
He’d long ago trained himself not to get hooked by these baits. In the army they’d come thick and fast. Not only about his diet, but about his nose. His hair. His “Turkish” complexion. His strangely naked prick. After the first year it pretty much wore off, once the real steel started coming down. But here, at police headquarters, the Jew stuff didn’t want to quit.
The cafeteria was full. Horthstaler had reserved their Stammtisch, their regular table, far in the back. Everyone was in attendance. Mueller. Meyer. Hiller. Stoss. And, of course, Freksa. Dear Freksa.
Willi nodded to them all, got chicken cutlets, and paid no attention to what anyone else was eating. After a while Horthstaler belched, wiped his pudgy lips, and looked ready to begin. With Horthstaler, it was always food first. Not that he was fat. He managed to distribute it.
“So.” He pulled out a folder, licking his fingers before searching inside it. “Let me start by congratulating you. Our unit once again has ranked number one in the least number of missed days. I have always maintained this is the hardest-working, most conscientious team in Homicide. And you, Detectives, continue to prove me right.”
For half an hour Willi did his best to make it look as if he were paying attention to Horthstaler. But he couldn’t tear his mind from the burlap bag. First thing, he figured, was try to determine what that passage from Ephesians might mean … children of wrath. Hopefully the query he’d put into the library yesterday would turn up something. If in fact it was a “burial,” as Dr. Hoffnung suggested, whoever had committed it might be trying to communicate something.
The second thing would be to trace that sewer line.
“Now to the assignments,” Willi vaguely heard, his mind deep underground. The overflow line that had carried that bag might well lead back to its origins. Or not, if someone had dumped it in trying to cover his tracks.
“Kraus”—he jumped. Horthstaler was looking directly at everyone but him—“did the intake the other day on that most unusual burlap bag in Lichtenberg. But the investigation will now pass into the capable hands of Hans Freksa.”
Willi blinked, then looked across the table. Freksa’s grin told him Willi hadn’t misunderstood. They were taking away his case.
News of the burlap bag and its bizarre bone arrangements had been all over the Police Presidium before Willi’d even gotten back from Lichtenberg. Berlin had no shortage of headline-grabbing crime, but this was clearly a showstopper. And Hans Freksa, besides being a damned good detective, could never get enough of his name in the papers. Why were police on the track so fast? One name is worth remembering—Hans Freksa.… Using advanced police methods, Freksa has scored success after success.… Hans Freksa may be Berlin’s most accomplished detective.…
Berlin police were Germany’s best. Eighty-five percent of the city’s homicides were solved last year, as opposed to 75 percent in the rest of the nation. Freksa beat the city average, solving 90 percent of his cases; it was true. So was the fact that Willi tied him. And that several others in Homicide beat them both. But because Freksa was so personable, and Freksa looked so great in photographs, and Freksa was single, and Freksa dished himself out so shamelessly, journalists ate him up. He’d become a real celebrity. People in the street asked for Freksa’s autograph. But Willi wasn’t giving in to the star so easily. This was his case.
“Herr Kommissar. Naturally I accept any duty and gladly take on any new assignment you have in mind. But I’d like to request that, in addition, I be allowed to stay on the Lichtenberg find.”
A moment’s silence. Then Freksa’s clownish mask of horror: “Ach, nein, Kommissar. You mustn’t overwork Isidore’s protégé.” Freksa pretended to beg for Willi’s life. “You know how frail these people are … from all their years of money counting.”
A quick burst of violent laughter, joined in by Horthstaler himself.
Willi’d survived minefields. Machine-gun fire. Did these morons really think they could wound him? Dragging Weiss into it, though, in such an obscene manner, made him want to take his chair and clobber Freksa over the head. Good thing he had a highly developed, perhaps overfunctioning, superego, as Dr. Freud had named it.
Bernhard Weiss was not only their superior, but one of the few people in life Willi actually looked up to. Deputy president of the Berlin police, he was the first Jew since Jews had come to Germany eighteen hundred years ago to reach top-ranking law enforcement. Weiss had created the nation’s first modern crime lab. Spearheaded the transformation of the Berlin police after the 1919 revolut
ion. Fostered the spirit of democratic policing. Extremists of all stripes hated him because he was vigorously evenhanded in his defense of the republic. Omnipresent in Berlin, he was always poking about crime scenes, overseeing demonstrations, safeguarding visiting dignitaries. With his large dark eyes behind wire glasses exuding openness and confidence, he’d become the face of the modern “people’s” police. And a lightning rod for all who hated what he stood for. Lately one of the city’s most vicious far-right rabble-rousers had cast him as a symbol of how “Jewified” Germany had become under the republic, repeatedly demeaning Weiss with the contemptuous Yiddish name Isidore.
“Well”—Freksa shrugged—“it’s no secret you people look out for each other.”
Clearly Freksa read the hate-filled rants of this Dr. Joseph Goebbels.
Weiss was responsible for Willi’s career, all right. But not the way Freksa imagined. Willi’d already been twenty-four, finishing his second year at Berlin University, when he met the doctor in 1920 at a dinner honoring Jewish war veterans. Willi’d met his wife at a similar event a year before. Weiss never said a word about joining the police. Never had to. Ever since Willi was a kid, since his weak-hearted father was robbed at knifepoint and taunted with anti-Semitic slurs, he’d burned to hunt evildoers. To bring them to justice. He’d just never heard of anyone Jewish actually doing it. Until Weiss, who by then was already deputy head of Kripo. But Weiss knew nothing of Willi’s application to the police academy, nor did he have anything to do with Willi’s acceptance into it. An Iron Cross, First Class, accomplished that. And Weiss certainly did not help Willi earn top graduate in his year.
Not until Foreign Minister Rathenau was murdered in June 1922 did Willi even met Dr. Weiss a second time. This notorious political assassination occurred in Grunewald Forest, which was in the Wilmersdorf precinct, where Willi was a first-year assistant detective. He was assigned to work on the team with Weiss, who’d come in from the Alex to head the investigation. The skill and tenacity and the energy with which this top sleuth led the pursuit was awe-inspiring. By the time the killers were cornered, Willi was a true admirer, and he and the doctor had made a connection.
Children of Wrath Page 2