The route these things traveled was up to scientists to determine. Willi was simply on the trail of gut feelings. After listening to the Wurst King these many hours, his had pretty much congealed: Strohmeyer was as willing to add filler to the truth as he was to his sausages.
Time had come to poke at the marrow.
“To trim costs”—he gave the man only the slightest glance—“might your company ever go outside the market and purchase from, say—an unlicensed peddler?”
One of Strohmeyer’s eyebrows dropped, his voice darkening from the enormity of his dismay. “Herr Sergeant-Detektive. This is a family business. Since 1892.”
“Yes, of course.” Willi held up a hand. “I ask only out of duty.”
* * *
Outside it had turned overcast, as if it was going to rain. Or snow. Willi buttoned his coat and looked across the street. Motor trucks and horse-drawn wagons crowded in front of the block-long sheds comprising halls Two and Three of the wholesale meat markets, where Strohmeyer and his competitors purchased their better cuts. To the right, farther south, connected by a tunnel under busy Landsberger Allee, a skyline of smokestacks rose across the horizon. A vast city within a city, kilometers in every direction. Berlin’s great Central Stockyards, the Viehof, with its countless acres of rail yards, feedlots, sales halls, and slaughterhouses. Soon enough he’d have to take his investigation in there. But not today. Today he was going home and helping the boys with their schoolwork, maybe read to them awhile, take a bath.
Make love to his wife.
Inhaling, he pulled up the collar around his neck. Beyond the Viehof, barely half a kilometer to the south, was the construction pit where the burlap sack had washed up. Freksa’d better hurry up and find the bastard who’d filled that bag, he thought, recalling the library report on Total Depravity. Anyone who’d kill five kids would sure as hell kill more.
He turned into the November wind. Reaching the avenue, truck after truck roared passed. A news vendor cried out, “Court upholds sausage ban—two more die!” Unconsciously he quickened his pace. Halfway to the elevated station, though, the hair practically leapt from his neck. What a stink. Its source, clearly, to his left, a long, dark sunken lane between warehouses, packed with people and pushcarts. So there it was … a peddlers’ market. He checked his watch. Not even certain what he was looking for, he entered the stench-filled alley.
In all his years in Berlin he’d been in few more unsavory places than this putrid passage. A visible miasma hung in the air, a dark, steamy mist rising from scores of tubs and barrels brimming with God knew what. Nothing indicated what the reeking contents of these containers were; Willi could only surmise. Those slimy mounds, long and rubbery, some kind of intestines. The barrels brimming with purple liquid … blood. Those crates, overflowing with hairy pink things, ears. And what looked like a pile of glass marbles next to it, eyeballs; whose, he had no idea. Everything was of dubious freshness at best, gotten for a steal, sometimes literally, across the road at the Viehof. As doubtful as the products were, the people looked even worse. Instinctively he reached in his pocket and touched his wallet. The shifty-looking customers were uniformly ill clad, ill smelling. The vendors appeared on the edge of total decrepitude: missing teeth, fingers, arms, legs.
So many children too.
A boy behind an open vat made Willi’s throat dry up. He wasn’t much older than Erich, ten at most. Why wasn’t he at school? Willi’d never considered his own childhood idyllic, his father having died when Willi was nine. But compared to this … my God, how lucky he’d been. Erich and Stefan too. He longed to hold them suddenly. This child, dressed in filthy rags, looked around with dark eyes, hoping for a stroke of luck, it seemed, to sell out his stock so he could escape this miserable damp. But one glance at Willi and he slammed the vat closed, assuming a blank expression, as if he were deaf and blind. How out of place I must look, it occurred to Willi, in this gray serge suit and overcoat Vicki got last year in London. Then too, his peripheral vision took in the waves of interest spreading around him—none of these vendors was legal.
A sudden tightening seized his gut. Right behind the boy … that burlap sack. Clearly stamped across its side: SCHNITZLER AND SON.
He tried smiling. “You don’t want to tell me what you’ve got there, son?”
The kid pretended not to hear him.
“But how can I buy if I don’t know what you’re selling?” Willi acted as if his feelings were hurt.
The answer from the gaunt, little face was too perceptive for comfort: “If you was here to buy, you wouldn’t have to ask, sir.”
Willi swallowed. He considered breaking out his badge and forcing the issue, but a harsh voice suddenly rose behind him, much too close.
“What’re you harassing the kid for?”
Slowly he turned to find himself nose to nose with a massive creature several dimensions larger than himself, and a long, sharp knife flashing at his gut. A cold sweat broke under Willi’s suit. It would not have been impossible to disarm the beast, perhaps. During the war he’d been in one of the most elite forward units, behind enemy lines, received the best training in martial arts, and had to use it. But from the corner of his well-trained eye Willi noticed other flashing blades in the crowd. Naturally it was his own fault—for having entered a place like this alone. On the other hand, if he had an assistant, as regulations called for … but they never seemed to find anyone willing to work with him, they claimed.
“Me, harassing? Not at all. I’m a visitor from Hamburg.” He mustered every atom of affability he could. “A businessman.” He tipped his hat twice. Last thing he wanted was for Stefan and Erich to grow up as he had: fatherless. “Have you ever been to Hamburg?” He smiled, picturing himself all sliced up in one of these barrels. “Wonderful market we have there. Not so great as Berlin’s, of course. Here everything is so much bigger. I certainly didn’t mean to disturb anyone.” He flicked a five-mark piece in the air, which the boy instantly caught. “Buy a nice warm soup for yourself and your friend.”
Backing off, relieved to still have his guts in one piece, he grabbed a look at the brute with the knife. My God. The size of an ox. And as powerful looking. Thickest set of arms Willi’d ever seen. Sometimes, he thought, reaching the street and letting out a sigh of relief, it really did pay to just pay.
Five
’Round and ’round the glass doors spun—but still no Fritz. Not that he ever arrived on time. But for a man who couldn’t live without trying to pay you back for what you’d done in the past—such as saving his life three or four times—you’d think he’d try. Willi checked his watch. What the hell. What’s the rush? He took a deep breath and looked around the glittering Café Josty. The only thing on the schedule today was … nothing.
It’d been nearly a month since his visit to the sausage factory, and inspectors were still scouring suppliers over at the Viehof. Testing, testing—but so far, nichts. At Willi’s urging they’d raided the peddlers’ market on Landsberger Allee, tested everything, then shut the place down. No signs of Listeria anywhere. But no new deaths, either. And the number of cases, dwindling. Perhaps the whole thing was just going to peter out.
He thanked the waiter as his second pot of coffee arrived. At least he’d spoken up to Horthstaler. Told him about the close shave with the peddlers, that it might have been averted if he’d had backup—as he was supposed to. “I didn’t know you felt so strongly about it, Kraus; I’ll make an extra effort to find someone.” The Kommissar had smiled warmly. A small twist of his pudgy lips, though, suggested Willi not hold his breath.
He was tired of waiting. Tired of bacteria, and Dr. Riegler, and how her little kitty cat at home missed her favorite sausages. Sick of the whole damn case. He glanced at the pressed-tin ceiling. Half the time he found his mind wandering back to that bag of bones. Sometimes late at night he lay awake wondering, what would motivate someone to make those designs? A pagan rite? An occult sacrament? There was no shortage of bizarre fix
ations in Berlin. But then again, that Bible. He’d gone so far as to consult his cousin at the Institute for Psychoanalysis.
“The organized manner of these designs,” Kurt said, fascinated, “suggests a highly compulsive personality, driven toward perfection. This kind of compulsion to arrange, to make order, is often fueled by the need to ward off a terrifying inner chaos. I’d say you had one very disturbed individual on your hands, in case you hadn’t realized.”
The problem, of course, was that it wasn’t on Willi’s hands.
Though he couldn’t seem to wash himself of it, either.
Deep-black coffee spewed from the silver spout as he poured another cup.
Absurdly overpriced, but every so often, he glanced around the legendary café, this place was worth it—if only for the spectacle. As he sipped the brew, its bitter sweetness lingered on his lips. Josty on Potsdamer Platz was the spot to meet in the wildly beating heart of this metropolis. Being a true Berliner he found it hard not to feel a little sinful pride at being so at home here.
In summer, the place to be was the terrace. Ensconced in a gentle birch grove, you had a bird’s-eye view of Europe’s busiest intersection. Now that the first winter chills had set in, the upstairs provided an even more feathered perch. This afternoon, the gold leaf–walled room was packed with people nestled in newspapers or chatting over many-layered Baumkuchen, the king of cakes. How swank Vicki would say everyone looked, Willi thought, noting the stylishness, the plumage everywhere: men with wide lapels, colorful neckties, and jeweled studs, oiled hair parted sharply to the side. Women with long strings of pearls, boyish hairdos, and short dresses with sheer stockings showing off their legs.
He could recall a day women wouldn’t dare show so much as an ankle here. He could recall being here with his parents to celebrate the turn of the century when he was five years old … his mother coming up those very steps, holding her skirt off the floor, the ostrich feathers in her hat practically dusting the ceiling. His father with white gloves, gray spats, and a jaunty bowler tilted over one eye. What a different Berlin it had been back then. The Kaiser Reich. Everything so much more proscribed and rigid … yet safer feeling somehow too. If only falsely.
Now Berlin spun like a mad carousel ride. Potsdamer Platz was still the center, and Café Josty still the center of the center. But it all ran at such an accelerating tempo, the city sometimes felt ready to fly right off its axis.
Willi’s eyes roamed out the window. Through the double panes of glass you could take in the whole famous intersection below, in all its turbulent postwar frenzy—and not have to hear a thing. Like a silent movie. A futuristic epic. Amid flashing neon and giant billboards, all the major routes binding Berlin-Center to its western districts converged right here, forming a virtual vortex, sucking in vehicles, throngs of people, tangling them up and then shooting them out again. In the center, a five-sided iron tower bearing Europe’s first electric traffic signals—like a sentinel over the mayhem—streams of cyclists and long, yellow streetcars rushing around it, double-decker buses plastered with advertisements. People pouring in and out of Potsdamer station, one of Berlin’s busiest. Or through the doors of one of the grand hotels: the Esplanade, the Palast, the Furstenhof. Around the corner, the giant Wertheim department store, with its glass-roofed atrium and eighty-three elevators. And down the block, a stunning new office tower rising in glass and steel, curved to follow the shape of the street. Potsdamer Platz was leaping toward tomorrow.
According to the traffic bureau, twenty thousand autos squeezed through this intersection daily, almost all of them German-made: Audis, Opels, BMWs, Horchs, Hansas, Daimler-Benzes, Mercedes. The heart of Berlin pounded perpetually. Not many places on this earth churned with the tempo, the drive, of this one.
Willi’s neck stiffened slightly. A long black sports car like a rocket ship was careening through the traffic below, cutting off cars and trucks alike. Perhaps it should have come as no surprise. As big as this city was, in some respects it was still a small town, and not many Mercedes SSKs were on its streets. Still, he couldn’t help but get a jolt at the unmistakable reflection of Dr. von Hessler’s silver eye patch behind the wheel.
“Looks like you’ve seen the devil.”
Willi jumped.
It was Fritz, finally sitting down across from him in a three-piece suit, with a trilby hat, and walking stick, his thin blond mustache tilted to one side.
“Perhaps I have. You’re forty minutes late, Mensch.”
“Grisly traffic.”
“Your dear old friend managed to barrel his way through. What’d he do, drive a tank in the war?”
“Which dear old friend?” Fritz slumped in the chair and began pulling off his gloves, one finger at a time. “I have so many.”
“Von Hessler.”
“Oh, him. Mad as a hatter. Always has been. Last time I saw him, he was convinced he was on the road to altering the course of human history. I do kind of hope he’s onto something, actually.” Fritz tossed his gloves on the table. “We might need it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Hey … before I forget, I’m instructed to remind you: Vicki really is sorry about New Year’s Eve. We always take the kids out to her parents that night, and, well—”
Fritz smiled regretfully. “Sylvie’s crushed, but she’ll get over it. After all, it’s no ordinary New Year’s Eve.” The corners of his lips twisted. “It’ll be a whole new decade. And from what I gather”—his mustache shifted precipitously—“very likely the last happy days for a while.”
“What’s with all the thunderbolts of doom, Jeremiah?”
“Sorry. Just came from a big press conference at the Ministry of Commerce. It’s pretty damned serious. A number of key foreign loans have been canceled.”
Willi waited for more, but that was all.
He didn’t get it.
It wasn’t simply that he was no genius regarding the mechanisms of economics, but 1929 had been a year of such spectacular growth, such euphoric prosperity almost, it seemed impossible to grasp that something as arcane as foreign loans could cause that look in Fritz’s eyes. After the truly terrible years of the war and the revolution and the Great Inflation, this past half decade was a godsend. The economy booming. Wages skyrocketing. Unemployment down to nothing. What they’d read about the stock market in New York of course was terrible. The days of crazy speculation obviously at an end. But it was hard to believe a few foreign loans …
“You’re quite wrong.” Fritz’s gloom was implacable. “Germany’s as dependant on foreign capital as a junkie, Willi. American capital to be precise. Far more than most Germans have the least inkling. You simply can’t imagine the kind of money that’s been wiped out. This was no garden-variety collapse. The bottom’s given way. Which means no more investments. No more loans. No more orders for goods. Brace yourself, friend. It’s going to be a real downslide.”
* * *
Willi hung on to the pole as the streetcar swayed along busy Leipziger Strasse. Twilight had fallen and the holiday lights cast a golden haze on Berlin’s main shopping drag. Judging from the crowds overflowing the sidewalks, jostling in and out of the shops and department stores, the spectacular show windows brimming with fur coats, fine jewelry, watches, leather goods, the most advanced cameras, the best toys, it seemed hard to believe Fritz hadn’t fallen prey to a bit of ministerial propaganda. There had been real angst in his voice.
Or perhaps he and Sylvie were at it again.
When the streetcar rattled across the river, a near full moon hanging high over the city, the glinting domes of the Police Presidium in the distance brought back the more compelling mystery of those bones. Their grim images seemed to reflect in the rippling water below: femurs tied up like long-stemmed roses. Finger and toe bones, one after the next, linked almost like … sausages. How could he not have heard anything more about it? He didn’t expect to be taken into Freksa’s confidence—but total silence at unit meetings? And what about the new
spapers? This was exactly the sort of thing the Berlin press went haywire over. Bone arrangements! Human thread! Five weeks, though, and not a word. Since when did Freksa shy away from headlines? Perhaps he hadn’t gotten anywhere on the case. Or perhaps he had something up his—
The whole train of thought screeched to a halt.
On the far side of the Spree his attention was derailed by a small sign out front of a church … LECTURE TODAY, FIVE P.M… THE REVEREND H. P. BRAUNSCHWEIG. The topic sent a tremor through him. He checked his watch: just past five now. He shouldn’t, he knew. The case being Freksa’s. But perhaps, as his grandmother used to say, it was beschert—meant to be. Yanking a bell for the tram to stop, he jumped off. What else could he do? Total Depravity.
The Spandauer Strasse Evangelical Church was not much larger than a chapel. A dozen or so people filled its wooden pews, all focused on the tall, gray figure at the pulpit, who watched Willi enter.
“It should not be mistaken”—the reverend’s gray eyes followed as Willi removed his hat and took a seat in the back row—“that Total Depravity, or Total Corruption, or even, as some call it, Total Inability, means that people are completely evil. Oh, no. That would be looking at the issue quite backwards. Total Depravity is not an accusation. On the contrary: it is an affirmation. A spiritual underlining of God’s glory.”
Children of Wrath Page 5