Willi glanced at the nearest child. The face, it was true, showed no signs of pain, but also little of life, other than breathing and twitching. No apparent comprehension, either, of the insoluble predicament it was in—the top of its head no more.
“And the worlds unveiled beneath those skullcaps, Inspektor. Is there any more mysterious realm on earth?”
Ilse, unable to contain her excitement apparently, snatched the knife from von Hessler’s plate and approached Willi with it.
“All that white and gray matter,” she howled, circling him territorially. “And all the sensuous folds and clefts with all those … how do you call them again, Doktor?”
“Lobes.” Von Hessler munched his apple, amused, keeping his gun aimed.
“Oh, yeah, right.” Ilse touched the blade to Willi’s scalp, sending a tingle to his heart. “There’s a frontal lobe.” She touched a different part of his head, a little harder this time. “And a back lobe. And another that gets messages from the eyes, right, Doc?”
The cold, sharp knife pressed against Willi’s skin as if burning to penetrate.
“Very good, Ilse.”
“He’s training me to be a neurosurgeon.” She leaned right up to Willi’s face, practically touching noses. “But we can never find enough practice material.”
Reflected in her gray eyes, Willi saw not only the infamous child abductor spreading terror across Berlin, but a tortured child herself. All the Köhler siblings—Magda, blood-drenched, a modern Medea, devouring children to protect them; Axel, a vengeful Minotaur, herding them to their deaths in an insane stampede of hatred.
“I think the Inspektor’s had enough anatomy lessons for now.” Von Hessler motioned Ilse to give back the knife. “He’s far more interested in my work. An educated man can appreciate the world-shattering boldness of it. He knows that since time immemorial man’s ached to understand the relationship between body and mind. I don’t claim to have discovered a simple formula. I’m not crazy, Inspektor. But with one eye I have seen where none dared previously look. Deep in the coils of the living brain … the origins of thought itself. The pathways of learning. The basis of all conditioned responses. You don’t believe me? Ilse.”
She leaped, scenting meat.
“A demonstration.”
At some kind of control panel, she rolled up her sleeves and began hitting switches, tilting her head as if she were hearing faraway music.
“Enfolded in the cortex”—von Hessler projected to some imaginary audience of peers—“I have unearthed the very front line of human behavior, a whole chain of command and control centers responsible for motor activity. Infiltrating them with electric pulses, I am now able to create actions normally undertaken only voluntarily. For example, Ilse—Box Two. M-one.”
Licking her lips, Ilse flicked switches until the boys in the nearest glass cage began moving their mouths.
“Mastication!” she yelped.
Triumph flared across the doctor’s face.
The more the boys appeared to enjoy a large, delicious meal, the funnier Ilse found it. She bayed insanely, cruelly, the way her father must have when he brutalized her. Could a child so tortured ever have turned out differently? Willi feared all the doctors on earth could never put her back together again.
“Forget Freud,” von Hessler pronounced to the invisible world press gathered before him. “I have succeeded in discovering not only the origin of neurosis—”
Willi’s eyes darted desperately around.
“—but actually creating and removing it again.”
Willi couldn’t just stand here. A band of electrical wires ran across the floor. To where?
“Brilliant, von Hessler!” Willi tried chucking the words like a diversionary grenade, letting real anger explode. “You’ve surpassed even the great Pavlov himself. The world should kiss your ass. But have you ever healed even one of these kids?”
“Healed?” Von Hessler burst out laughing.
Willi’s eye quickly followed the wires to a large fuse box behind Ilse’s desk.
“Don’t be petty, Kraus. What do you think, I glue their skulls back on? Instead of human waste, these boys are ennobled by me to make the supreme sacrifice. Someday there’ll be monuments to them. And their deaths, believe me, are more humane than their lives. Your pathologist no doubt deduced it was carbon monoxide that killed them, but you never figured out how, did you? All my subjects are alive when I finish with them. Until you messed things up, we simply shuttled them by van over to Magda’s workshop on Bone Alley, the long way. Ran a hose from the exhaust pipe into the rear, made sure it was sealed airtight. By the time they arrived … quick, clean, inexpensive. Axel’s idea. It was a beautiful relationship we had, those Köhlers and I, until—”
Willi dove, landing on his shoulder and rolling hard as von Hessler fired. Bullets hit left and right, then directly into the bank of wires. A surge of sparks flew across the floor, leaping to the fuse box, exploding it into smoke and flame.
Ilse let out a primitive shriek. She jumped from her chair. Willi tackled her and grabbed his gun back. Letting her go, he flung himself behind a desk and began firing at von Hessler, who’d taken cover too and returned the attack shot for shot. Ilse lay frozen, head lifted, eyes fixated on the curtain of fire spreading across the wall.
“Get the extinguisher, you syphilitic whore,” von Hessler ordered her.
She seemed unable to hear, her pockmarked face stiff as a death mask. As the flames grew brighter, drawing across the doorway, she let loose a shriek of such primordial terror Willi felt it in his gut. Then she hurtled in a mad dash to save herself, and he could see her red hair flying, her wiry figure writhing in flame as she tumbled for the staircase.
“Bitch. Bitch!” Von Hessler fired after her.
The flames were rapidly intensifying, striking fear in Willi now too. An alarming stench of burning rubber stung his nose. Looking for a way out, he noticed von Hessler coughing convulsively, then smashing out a nearby window with a chair. Jumping onto the ledge and turning with his pistol aimed, he cursed wildly, “Damn you, Kraus!” then firing twice before taking a flying leap. A bullet sailed just centimeters from Willi’s ear as von Hessler vanished out the window into a whirlwind of smoke.
Willi ran to where he’d leaped, coughing too, thrusting his head out, looking down. A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk, but there was no fallen body. Everyone was staring up—at him. The chain he’d seen earlier whipping in the wind ran directly into the open window below, von Hessler’s obvious escape route. The rear staircase was still free, he saw, but there was no way inside again until the ground floor, and he wasn’t leaving without those boys.
Vaulting onto the ledge, Willi indulged in a quick glance over his shoulder, instantly regretting it. Trapped in their glass chambers, all the little boys were thrashing madly as flames approached.
Thinking of Erich, he jammed the Luger in his jacket and jumped, clutching the chain and using the outside wall to rappel down. Relieved to gain distance from the flames, he was nonetheless alarmed by the intensity of pain in his shoulder, where von Hessler’s bullet had clearly bruised him worse than he’d realized. Focusing on the distance to the window, he fought off the rapidly deepening agony until, just a foot or so above the aperture, it jabbed with such intensity the muscle just gave out, making him lose his footing. He found himself dangling there apelike by one arm, three stories over the pavement, the crowd below shrieking.
Trying to see through the sweat pouring down his forehead, he took a deep breath, telling himself to hold steady, that he’d been in tighter spots, although after a fast glance down he couldn’t quite think of one. That night outside Soissons, he reminded himself as he tried to calibrate the exact angle he needed to reach the window. They’d been caught in the open between friendly and enemy artillery bombardments. Only dumb luck saved them. Here at least he had some say in the matter—he hoped. Swinging as hard as he could, he tried to clasp the brick ledge with his foot. But
it was too far. And too exhausting, his left arm starting to cramp from strain. Worming back and forth he hoped to create enough momentum to propel himself through the opening. He managed one firm push off the wall, which got him out at a pretty good angle, then all too suddenly he was no longer holding the chain.
The next thing he knew he was shaken by a furious bang. Not the sidewalk, but the floor inside the window. He’d swung far enough, he realized, writhing in grateful agony.
Gradually his vision came back, and he saw what looked like a hospital ward—multiple beds filled with silent figures attached to tubes. Overhead the roar of flames was sending wisps of smoke down. With a loud explosion, a bullet hit the wall much too close.
“You’re finished, Kraus,” von Hessler declared from across the room. “You and all the other dinosaurs.”
Willi fired at him, taking a fast glance at the nearest bed. It wasn’t Erich or Heinz, just an innocent kid lying there, close-eyed. Narcotized. The skull intact. The tiniest hope flickered through Willi. Aother bullet came much too close, though, buzzing past his face. The smoke at the ceiling was thickening, dancing through the air. He fired one shot high, then flung himself beneath a row of beds, crawling on his stomach.
“There’s a new age dawning.” Von Hessler sounded drunk from lack of oxygen. He was lecturing again to nameless multitudes. “I don’t know what form it will take. Hitler maybe. Maybe not. He’s a genius—except for that racial crap. It’s nonsense and I can prove it.”
The scientist’s legs appeared in Willi’s vision now, past several more beds. The veil of smoke was faintly drawing downward, making his eyes start to tingle. His throat itched. Inch by inch he had to fight the urge to cough, bringing him back to the Western Front and the fields of chlorine gas they’d had to crawl through in masks. How he wished he had one now as he pulled himself ahead, wondering if Heinz or Erich were above, if they could breath.
“In terms of brain development, there’s no more difference among races than between rich and poor. A child of savages raised by scholars is just as likely to turn out a—”
Willi fired, hitting von Hessler’s hand, making the gun drop, but not stopping him from leaping backward with a yelp. Springing from below the bed, aiming, Willi cried, “Freeze!” But it was too late. Von Hessler, feet away, had grabbed one of the kids from a bed with his bleeding hand.
Erich.
“I’ll snap his neck in a second unless you put your gun on that bed and step back,” the one-eyed doctor swore with vengeance, dripping blood across Erich’s chest. But the boy looked okay otherwise, Willi was thinking. Unconscious. But okay.
“Drop the gun, Inspektor. Or so help me.”
Willi put down the gun.
Upstairs he could hear cracking wood and smashing glass.
“Step away.” Von Hessler’s eye patch reflected black smoke coming in from the windows. Willi thought he heard clanging bells. Was anxiety making his ears ring? It wouldn’t be the first time.
Von Hessler let Erich drop into the bed and with his bleeding hand reached for Willi’s Luger, all the intoxicated madness gone as he aimed at point-blank range.
Willi tried to reason with him. “Give yourself up. They’re sure to be more lenient with you than you were with those kids. Anyway, your Tower’s gone, von Hessler.”
“You’ve no idea what you’ve done, Kraus. Set the development of the human race back a thousand—”
A shrill cry from behind spun von Hessler’s head. From the gathering smoke Fritz landed like an incoming shell, knocking the doctor down with a blow to his jaw.
Willi, too anxious to be amazed, ran to Erich and scooped him up with an unbelievable rush of relief, especially once he felt the gentle breathing in his arms.
“Help with the kids,” he gasped, suddenly swept into the most astonishing whirlwind of faces and motion. Kai. The Red Apaches. Gunther. Security cops. Everyone was swarming in. Von Hessler was being handcuffed and led away. Children lifted from beds.
On the winding staircase down, Willi burst into tears as he clutched Erich to his chest, only half hearing Fritz proclaim Kai to be the hero of the rescue, that he’d noticed Willi’s strange mood earlier and had his Red Apaches trail him, alerting Fritz when Willi had come up here alone. Willi could barely take it in. He only knew that his son was safe. And that upstairs many more boys remained in peril.
Once Erich was down, Willi raced back up again, shouting at everyone to hurry, desperately searching boy after boy as they were carried away. Where the hell was Heinz? The whole room was a pall of smoke now, flames rushing along the ceiling. Willi gulped down as much air as he could, then plunged back into the room.
It was almost impossible to see. The top of his head felt as if it were about to ignite. But in the last still-occupied bed he found the kid he’d practically raised as a third son and frantically unplugged the narcotizing tubes, then grabbed him up, limp as a doll. What joy as he ran down the stairs with him, picturing the gratitude in the Winkelmanns’ faces when they saw their Heinzie safe. Wouldn’t they be ashamed then of the way they’d treated Willi and his family.
Finally, there was no more going inside. Even the fire department was evacuating. On the street, ambulance crews were packing up kids from officers’ arms and speeding off to hospitals, while crowds gathered behind barricades watching the fiery spectacle. As he raced off in one of the ambulances, wedged between Erich and Heinz, Willi looked out the window and saw the entire top of the water tower had exploded into a flaming torch, forever consuming the terrible legacy of Dr. von Hessler.
For the first time in a long time, he began to breathe easier.
Thirty-three
Terraced on a hillside in the city’s oldest park, the Fountain of Fairy Tales was Berlin’s grand monument to childhood. Four levels of cascading pools surrounded by neo-baroque arcades composed an enchanting world filled with travertine statues from the Brothers Grimm—Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood—a civic shrine to youth and fantasy. It had opened with great fanfare not long before the war. Willi clearly remembered visting it for the first time with his sister, Greta. He was eighteen, already done with his university entrance exams, but not yet knowing the results—an unsettling void along life’s path, although nothing compared to what was to come. He and Greta spent hours dawdling, examining statues, dipping fingers into pools, flooding with memories of their father reading to them, Mother’s cakes, long walks in the Tiergarten.
Now, watching his children’s faces, Willi was yanked not to the past but into the sun-filled present. No words could describe the happiness he felt seeing his sons side by side again, laughter bursting from their throats as they played with the squirting frog statues. Von Hessler had at least been right about one thing: Erich recollected nothing of his kidnapping. An ice cream truck pulling over. Some hands reaching out. Then waking up in bed exhausted. It remained to be seen what long-term effects might yet manifest. But after a month, to all appearances, he’d bounced back with remarkable alacrity. If only Willi could say the same for himself.
It was a warm October Sunday. Next to one another on a bench near the splashing fountain, he and Vicki were unconcerned, as they would not have been a month prior, whether they’d be a few minutes late to Grandpa’s birthday party or if the boys might mess up their trousers playing. The ordeal they’d endured had left each with sharpened awareness of the fragility of life, and they sat next to each other breathing rhythmically in the autumn sunshine. Only Willi’s celebrity interrupted.
“Inspector Kraus, aren’t you? How marvelous! Won’t you pose for a photo with my wife and me?”
With von Hessler behind bars and the rest of the case made public, Willi’d become the most famous detective in Germany. His face appeared in newsreels not only in Europe but America. The Berliner Illustrierte had done a cover story on him. More than one big-shot producer had contacted him about starring in a film, the very idea of which struck him as ludicrous; he’d probably put the
audience to sleep. On the other hand, if they wanted Conrad Veidt to star …
After all, Willi gave himself credit, he’d done some good work on this case. Plus he’d come out with a promotion and a damned good assistant to boot, so it had a happy ending. The central gap of course was the Shepherdess. She had never been found. No confirmed sightings, no traces of her remains identified after the fire. But then neither had the remains of any of the boys on the top floor that night, trapped in their glass cages, been identified. The whole tower had collapsed in fiery hell. There’d been countless alleged sightings of the now-infamous redhead: in Frankfurt, in Leipzig, lunching on Potsdamer Platz. But with an old ID photo of hers in as many newspapers as Willi’s, even if she’d survived her descent down that smoke-filled staircase, Willi was confident the last of the Köhlers would never dare show her face in Germany again.
The case of Der Kinderfresser was over. Thank God.
Not that he deserved all the credit.
A day or two after his son returned, Willi’d wandered across Alexanderplatz to where the statue of Berolina had already been removed. Kai and his Red Apaches were still there, hanging around the empty pedestal, laughing and singing to a guitar one of them had somehow procured. Willi’d pulled the kid aside and thanked him from the bottom of his heart.
“Oh, come now, Inspektor.” Kai was not only surprised but touched. “You helped me. I helped you.” The corner of his pink lip trembled. “That’s the way it should be, no?”
Since assuming “chiefdom,” the boy appeared to have grown not only in confidence but in size, an inch or two at least, Willi thought, his shoulders broader, his face fuller. He still wore the makeup, but not as much as before. And for some reason it looked less like a mask now than a mark of distinction.
“What you did took courage, Kai. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be dead. So would my son. And many other boys too.”
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