Willi’s throat was still afire. He was unable to fully keep his balance. Stumbling for the control panel, he couldn’t focus on all the tiny switch signals. Which had Axel hit?
“For God’s sake!” Axel reached his gigantic arms out.
He was shuttling straight for the jaws of death.
Desperately Willi searched for the main plug.
Axel wept. “No, Daddy. No!”
Willi found it, yanking with all his might.
And the giant saw ground to a halt.
But not before a hideous shriek preceeded the definitive crunching of ribs.
Twenty-four
Vibrations surged through Willi’s body.
He sat up, pushing back his shoulders, trying to concentrate. But the edges of everything were hazy. Those two men across the table had strange ethereal glows, like beings from another world come to assist him. He couldn’t have been more grateful if they actually had been.
Eberhard and Rollmann, both hydraulic engineers, were poring over maps of the infrastructure beneath Bone Alley, the main lines, sewer lines, holding tanks, storm canals. On the far side of the room Gunther’s voice throbbed with barely subdued enthusiasm as he coordinated plans with the assistant from the Viehof Direktor’s office, a gangly brunette named Trudi. Gerd Woerner, of the Abend Zeitung, was pacing back and forth taking notes, every so often glancing outside.
Willi glanced outside too.
From the third-floor office of the Viehof pump house, in one direction you could see the giant Entlandungbahnhof, the complex of disembarkation platforms and inspection ramps where from every corner of Europe livestock arrived hourly by freight car—and on the other, the acres of facilities where they got turned into meat and by-product. Thaer Strasse below was crowded with late-day traffic. Trucks jostling for parking spots. Agents rushing to conclude deals. Everything back to normal, it seemed.
Except Willi. He was still in shock, he knew.
Floating in a strange amniotic-like sac.
Just hours ago, although it felt like months … years … seconds … he’d been rammed by a truck, nearly strangled to death. And witnessed a man sawed in two. Plenty of people would never recover from such a day. He at least had practice. From years at the front he knew the rubbery sensations following such trauma, and how to keep going despite the drag they placed on the soul. How to keep centered on all the other feelings that made the going worth it.
What choice was there? The mission had to be accomplished.
And for that to happen he had to keep pumping as determinedly as those five huge generators below.
“This could be it, then.” Eberhard, who managed the Viehof water system, pointed at the area map. Rollmann, a chief engineer from municipal water, seemed to agree. Woerner, the reporter, leaned over to look where Eberhard was pointing.
Willi looked too. Had they finally found the entrance to this thing?
His mind was reeling through time.
* * *
Seconds after Axel went through the jaws of death, a white light had flashed through Willi’s eyes. Not divine revelation—but a camera bulb. Woerner of all people, from the Abend Zeitung. The one who’d shouted out in front of everyone, “How many more kids have to die, Kraus?” He’d gotten a call about a crazy chase through the Viehof and hurried over. Noticed a van and an Opel all smashed up outside. His eyes had grown huge as he took in Willi covered head to toe in blood, and Axel—hanging there. “God Almighty.”
Willi’d had no choice but to try to enlist him. “Nothing’s to stop you from running straight to press with this, Woerner. But you’d be compromising a major case. And there’s more to the story. A lot more, promise. I’ll give you the scoop, only—you’ve got to help me out first.”
“Bribery aside, Willi, for you—sure.”
Willi had Woerner summon Gunther, schnell—and bring all the men from Bone Alley. Then Willi’d had Woerner find him a place to wash and a set of fresh clothes.
“You’re the only one I’d do this for, Kraus,” the reporter’d said, standing guard while Willi showered in the slaughterhouse locker room. “Freksa, Horthstaler, any of them over in Homicide, I’d have been out of here so fast with those photos they wouldn’t have seen me leave. You have any idea what they’re worth? Death of the Kinderfesser!”
“I keep telling you,” Willi’d gurgled from under the water, sensing it might be wise in the long run to have a journalist record whatever they found down there, “it wasn’t him. Just stick with me, Gerd. This one’s for the history books.”
The reporter’s voice darkened. “I’m almost afraid to know, Willi. Ten years on the beat in Berlin, I never saw such blood.”
Willi watched it swirl down the drain as he scrubbed his hair and ears and between his toes.
Meanwhile, Gunther proved his mettle, leading up a team in getting Slaughterhouse Two sealed off for an alleged “health inspection,” covering up the wrecked vehicles outside, giving a false report about the reasons for the chase through the Viehof, and hiding all traces of Axel’s remains. Willi ordered everything possible done to keep a lid on Axel’s death.
He damn well hadn’t wanted it. He’d needed Axel to help him snare Magda and Ilse. Even without the brother, he had a horrible suspicion those sick sisters could keep their operation going. And who was to say others weren’t involved in this mass-murder-for-money scheme? The Köhler siblings might be mere cogs in a wheel. All the more reason they had to be stopped. Fast.
Once these girls heard what happened to Axel, there’d be no finding them.
Their brother had unfortunately shielded his family even in death. Not a single piece of ID on him: no driver’s license, no address. Nothing with the name he’d taken after killing his father. In his pocket just a wad of blood-drenched bills and some keys. His van, of course—no license plates. Even in a city as controlled as Berlin, somehow, for a decade and a half, these three children of wrath had survived under the floorboards.
“Like rats.” Eberhard sighed, running his finger along the map, tugging Willi’s brain back to the attack plans. “Of course they have more than one entrance to the lair.”
Willi stared at the route Eberhard was showing, and then out the window at the Viehof. For the moment, there was nothing to do about Ilse, he conceded. In all this time he’d had only one real sighting of her. That tall, red-haired “nurse” with the pockmarked face was slippery as an eel. But Magda he’d seen with his own eyes. She was no eel. If cornered, she might well turn dangerous. But she wasn’t slithering away anywhere fast. Tonight, one way or another, they were grabbing her. Hopefully alive.
* * *
It proved a good thing that on their reconnaissance raid the other night Willi’d had Gunther render sketches of the layouts they’d found under Bone Alley. Comparing those now to Viehof blueprints and matching both with the municipal water plans, they’d come up with a rough idea of what was going on beneath that little street in the by-products zone. The distinct outlines of a two-level subterranean bunker. A cold sweat broke out on his forehead when Willi understood—the Köhler children had re-created, enlarged, and enhanced the underground dungeon of their childhood.
How to penetrate it as quickly as possible without giving Magda a chance to escape was the task at hand. Besides an apparent hidden driveway, there was at least one other way in and out, they knew—a connection to the city sewer lines—because several substantial burlap sacks full of bones had washed out through them as far as two kilometers away. If they could determine precisely where those sacks had entered the system, they’d have a back door into the Köhlers’ dark realm.
Berlin had nearly ten thousand kilometers of storm-water drainage, completely distinct from its waste disposal. The main storm canals were fed by subcanals, feeder lines, and thousands of individual surface shafts catching runoff from street gutters. In heavy rains, the system often backed up, Eberhard explained. Last October had been a dilly. Beginning on the twenty-fifth of that month, three
days of storms had caused tree limbs, tires, and other large debris to accumulate at a bend in Sturmwasser Kanal Fünf, as he pointed out on the map, where the canal turned southwest to meet the Spree River. This backed up the entire line all the way from the substation under Frankfurter Allee, where the second set of bags turned up, beneath the construction site where the first bag appeared, right to the feeder lines under the Central-Viehof.
“If we look at this map here”—Eberhard opened up a yellowed plan of the area dating from 1852—“we can see that before the Viehof was even built, a small brewery occupied the site where Bone Alley is today. It’s highly possible that whoever rebuilt the basements of these buildings also opened the brewery cellar, which has entry ducts twenty-seven to twenty-nine directly on Feeder Line J to Sturmwasser Kanal Fünf. Feeder Line J was completely backed up the night of October twenty-eighth and flushed out the following morning.”
Willi could hardly forget that fateful day, seeing that burlap bag for the first time. The bones so neatly arranged. The circled phrase in the waterlogged Bible. He’d never been certain if someone had actually dumped the burlap bags into the sewers or they’d been swept in accidentally. Eberhard’s description of the flood made the latter appear more likely, which is probably why the Köhlers kept right on with their dirty work, never realizing someone had found the evidence and taken up the hunt.
Now at last the pieces were falling into place.
Minute by minute, Willi was inching nearer.
Viehof Direktor Gruber himself, of all people, had just come through with an astonishing tip.
Well aware of the mayhem playing out in the streets of his beloved stockyards, Herr Direktor apparently felt it best to fully cooperate finally in hopes of ending the ordeal. He had personally phoned half an hour ago to mention a seemingly insignificant detail.
“Since you’re so damn relentless about this, Kraus, something did occur to me.”
He’d explained to Willi how various reports had reached his ears over the years, mostly of a casual nature, about an incongruous bit of traffic coming in and out of the Muller-Schlosser Fertilizer plant right outside the Viehof, on Thaer Strasse. An ice-cream truck—the kind that served children near schools and playgrounds—was seen entering and leaving on one side of the dusty factory complex, apparently disappearing into some kind of underground garage. Since it wasn’t his jurisdiction and didn’t seem to be causing any problems, he’d never paid much attention. Until now. And he thought, well, perhaps it might be of help, Gruber said.
Checking the maps, they’d found the address was outside the Viehof wall, all right, but less than thirty yards from Bone Alley. Rollmann and Eberhard both concurred a short vehicular tunnel could easily lead to the Köhlers’ underground lair. A hidden driveway with a disguised entrance.
And an ice cream truck. My God. Willi’d all but gasped when he’d heard. All this time he’d wondered how the Shepherdess lured so many boys off the streets of Berlin and dragged them away without being seen. How fiendishly brilliant, he realized now. He could picture her in a clean white uniform offering a temptation impossible to resist. “Wanna see inside the truck? Right this way, boys.” And bolting the door shut. The last anyone ever saw of those kids … until they turned up as handbags or lampshades.
Plus, no wonder these Köhlers were so difficult to find. They’d furnished their underground lair with an underground passage.
You couldn’t say they weren’t resourceful.
Adrenaline squirted from Willi’s adrenal glands, causing his heart to shoot fire through his veins, incinerating his lethargy. They had it now, two ways in and out.
It was time to move.
* * *
A coordinated raid. Group A, including Willi, Gunther, the water engineers Rollmann and Eberhard, Woerner of the Abend Zeitung, and a four-man team from Schupo—the security police—were going in at 5:45 through the water tunnels. Group B, a full detatchment of security police, were surrounding the perimeter, then entering the underground drive via the fertilizer plant fifteen minutes later, preventing Magda’s escape and providing backup in case of trouble. Willi wanted to make certain he was the first to penetrate the Köhlers’ lair and oversee Magda’s capture. He had a personal stake, he felt, in taking her unharmed.
Down the long, revolving staircase they came to the ground floor of the pump house, passed the five forty-eight-horsepower generators feeding the Viehof hydraulic system, giant turbines whirring, pistons pounding, maximum pressure building for hosing detritus from even the tiniest nooks and crannies.
Through a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, the nine men of Team A descended another longer staircase, Willi modulating his breathing as the air closed in and grew heavy. At the bottom an iron gate blocked their way. While Rollmann opened it, Willi looked at his watch. It was 5:45, precisely.
Right now, he knew, 4 million people in greater Berlin were carrying on as usual. In front of the war memorial on Unter den Linden, goose-stepping soldiers were performing the final changing of the guard to hundreds of clicking cameras. Nearby at the glamorous Hotel Adlon, guests were swigging cocktails at the Grill Room. Along the Spree, coal barges were chugging past the Royal Palace. At Templehof Field, silver planes glided past the semicircular terminal. At Nightclub Resi, maids were polishing the house phones on each table so patrons could call each other and exchange a few whispers tonight. While in the tenements of working-class Wedding, organ-grinders played old chestnuts to housewives who hummed along from courtyard windows. On Koch Strasse, as on every evening, competing newspapers rushed to get out late editions, especially with elections just a week away. And as patrons sat a few blocks north for schnitzel at Lutter and Wegner, worshippers arrived across the street for evening services at the French Cathedral. Or the nearby Hedwigs church. Or the Nikolai church. Or the mosque in Wilmersdorf. Or the great synagogue on Orianienburger Strasse.
But beneath Berlin’s diverse, vibrant streets lurked another, far darker world.
Twenty-five
A dim, low universe of brick.
Sky, horizon, everything, vaulting overhead like a medieval castle, but barely tall enough to stand in. Down the center, flanked by narrow sidewalks, a thin stream of water moving almost imperceptibly. Black, silent. Here and there incandescent bulbs reflecting off slick surfaces. Cold, still. A suffocating catacomb tapering into nothingness.
Sturmwasser Kanal Fünf.
Brick arch after brick arch lured the nine-man team deeper into this claustrophobic netherworld, every step echoing back. Even Willi’s heart, it seemed, reverberated off the curvatures. And weren’t those his fears dripping down through the drain grates? What if Magda’d been tipped off? What if she was already out of Berlin? What if he was wrong altogether about this underground dungeon? Woerner perhaps liked him personally, but a failure such as that would be front-page news.
A large, brown rat scampered across his foot. Back in the trenches he’d learned to endure their slimy tails and harsh claws. But the newsman behind let out a yelp that wouldn’t stop echoing.
A feeder line forking in from the left added more water to the slow-moving flow. It hadn’t rained for a couple of weeks. The flooding last October, Eberhard pointed out with his flashlight, had completely filled this tunnel.
A thin line of mud still clung to the ceiling.
Willi’s rib cage seemed to contract. If it happened again with them down here—he looked around—there’d be no escape.
His mind filled with images: burlap sacks tumbling through rapids, white bones knocking into each other. Axel crying as he hurtled upside down.
Had that really been just hours ago?
A dim nausea shuddered through his heart.
Suddenly, he felt himself pushing back walls. Ceilings. Everything closing in. He had to command his knees not to buckle. They were going rubbery, like poor Reverend Braunschweig’s, may he rest in peace. An irrational fear skidding through his innards, something about to grab his ankle, drag h
im under. Never again to see his wife or children.
He forced his thoughts ahead. He couldn’t stumble now. Magda was somewhere just up ahead. A woman raped and tortured by her father, whose baby by him he’d slaughtered like a lamb—grown into a murderous monster herself. No doubt she’d put up a fine fight with a butcher’s knife. Probably skilled as hell with one, he reminded himself. The Köhler kids had been schooled by a master.
You couldn’t overestimate their determination.
He concentrated on placing one foot in front of the next, ignoring the rats, the walls, the water, his nose seeking out whatever fresh air it could find. For a moment he pictured those three children, alone in the dungeon. Days on end. Dying from stench. Their own father, the man supposed to nuture and protect them, threatening to skin them alive and eat them. What worse could a father do to a child?
And Bruno Köhler, what must his father have done to him?
“In here.” Eberhard pointed with his light. “Feeder Line J, right under the old brewery basement.”
Willi had to suppress an urge to punch this guy in the nose. All those maps he’d shown upstairs gave no indication how tight, how airless, these tunnels were. Storm Canal Five was the Grand Canyon compared to Feeder Line J.
But he took in whatever oxygen he could and stooped.
Hunching all the way over at the waist, he felt like a caveman. After a while he realized his knuckles were scraping the floor, as if they were reverting to chimpanzees. What next? Slugs on the sewer bottom?
“Man, my camera better not get ruined,” Woerner moaned.
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