“It’s not that I’m not flattered, Mrs. Stucker . . .”
“. . . and I’m clean. I mean, they got me too. The Russians. Not more than once or twice. Oh,” she replied, as Reinhardt’s words caught up with her, and a slight blush rose into her cheeks. “Flattery’s got nothing to do with it. It’s not that kind of world, is it? But there, I asked.”
“Thank you. I appreciate what it must have taken to do so.” He felt terribly prim as he said it, wishing the words back but she seemed not to have noticed. At the entrance of the building she paused.
“Is . . . is it true? Is it true what I thought? Was he murdered?”
Reinhardt nodded, slowly. “I think so, Mrs. Stucker. I can’t be sure, but I think so. And I think whoever did it is still killing.”
“Well . . . ” She hesitated, then firmed her mouth. “Good luck. Finding him. And thank you.”
“For what?”
“For believing me,” she said. There was a slight moistness in her eyes, probably a memory, and then she was gone. Reinhardt watched her go, a woman alone raising a child in a city like this.
22
There still being time and light, Reinhardt decided to go to the address where Stucker’s body was found. He had to go back across town, all the way to Rüdesheimerplatz on the A line as it arrowed out into the southwest of the city, and reminded himself, again, to ask for a driver. To go over Ganz’s head if he had to. The transportation around the city was not what it used to be, although he mentally tipped his hand to the engineers like Uthmann who, somehow, were keeping it all running through, around, under, and over the ruins. But he could not take the walking anymore, despite the thrill in his step as he felt facts and theories beginning to coalesce into a shape, a form. There was more out there, much more.
The address in Wilmersdorf where Stucker’s body was found—not, Reinhardt mentally reminded himself, necessarily where he was murdered—was a bombed-out apartment building in a street lined with them, the whole neighborhood a sagged ruin, the site of fierce street fighting during the Soviet assault. Telephone poles leaned haphazardly down the length of the street, wires looped and skeined like tangles of wool. Moss and weeds grew thickly across the slides of rubble, and the smell of human waste was strong. Tin cans or scraps of fabric hung from bent and rusted poles thrust into the rubble, makeshift markers that bodies or unexploded ordnance lay below, but it was not enough to discourage the life that still managed to exist, even in such conditions. Here and there, metal chimneys poked up out of the debris, signs that some people eked out a troglodyte existence down below the ruins.
Reinhardt picked his careful way into the rubble, consulting the police report so as to find the exact spot. He found it, his knee a taut line of pain as he went gingerly down a mounded glacis of rubble that fanned down into the basement from the street. Amid heaps of detritus, pressed in by a stench of damp and the pulverized remains of stone and concrete, he wondered what could have brought Stucker down here. He stood where the roof had collapsed, looking all the way up the interior of the building through a haze of dust that spiraled the cavity, tracing the mazed lines of water, gas, and electricity pipes and wires, all the way up, over the pastiche of colors and fabrics that marked the walls where different rooms had once stood on different floors, and traced the lines down again, all the way down, seeing without realizing at first that down in the basement with him was a junction box. All the wires led into it.
All the electric wires.
Reinhardt felt cold, as if something had reached out and touched him, realizing that Stucker had not been dragged or forced here, but had come of his own free will. For a job, most likely, or some kind of consultation. Stucker had been an electrician. Someone got him out here for an electrician’s job, down here and out of the way. Stucker would have had no fears, no apprehensions. No stealthy midnight meetings. No running from some nameless figure seeking shelter down here. Something had indeed spooked him in the last days of his life, but it was not that fear that had driven him here. It was something much more mundane.
An appointment.
An appointment with his own murderer, Reinhardt thought, shivering again and wondering at the patience, calm, and confidence of this killer.
He was consumed by what he thought he had found, hence the crack of rubble against rubble did not at first register, but when it came again, when there was the rasp of leather across stone, he looked up and around.
Fischer and another man were slipping down into the basement, iron bars in their hands.
Reinhardt moved fast, pushing himself past the snarl of pain from his knee as he whipped his baton out. Fischer and the other man were both still coming down the slide of wreckage, their footing unsure. Fischer tried to back up against the rake of debris, but his footing lurched away, and Reinhardt slashed the baton into his ankle. Fischer yelped in pain, and his feet slid further back, down toward Reinhardt, who slashed the baton across his knees and thighs. The other man tried to jump down the slope, his feet scattering detritus as he heaved himself up, but he only succeeded in losing his footing completely, and the bar he carried clanged away into the basement’s gloom. Reinhardt hit him across his knees and ankles, blows that would incapacitate rather than maim, or kill. The man cried out, folding up and over the pain in his legs, and Reinhardt crashed his batoned fist onto the back of his neck, turning back to Fischer as the man foundered to stillness.
Fischer was climbing to his feet, one hand on the rubble. Reinhardt hit that wrist with the baton, flicking it out like a whip so that the ball on its tip flayed into Fischer’s hand. Fischer crashed back down, his other hand raised up.
“Enough! Enough!”
“What the hell are you doing, Fischer?” Reinhardt yelled. He clamped his voice shut, feeling the edge of his words beginning to quaver with his stress, not wanting to give Fischer any way back at him.
“Hoping to give you a bloody good seeing-to, what’s it look like?” Fischer’s face creased up around the pain of his hand as he hugged it to his chest, folded into his other fist.
“Why, for God’s sake?”
“I told you, you shouldn’t have brought them coppers to my door.”
“I didn’t.”
“Can’t believe anything a copper says, Reinhardt,” growled Fischer, rubbing his good palm over his fist. “’sides, you were marked out for us.”
“Marked out? Marked out by whom? What are you talking about?”
“Just some bloke, said he was nicked for the same things they brought me in for. Says you were behind it.”
Reinhardt shook his head, standing back. “Fischer, I don’t know what you’re talking about, I really don’t. Who was this man? Who was he?”
Fischer shook his head up at Reinhardt, a pitying gesture, as if he heard the strained crack to Reinhardt’s words, the stress that weighed them down.
“I’ll tell you. You won’t know him, though. Poor bastard’s just one of dozens you coppers roughed up in the cells. But he knows you. Knows you very well. He knew the coppers’d never have found him if it weren’t for you. They’re all piss and no bull in the Kripo these days. Not like in our day, right? You’re the brains of that outfit now, I’ll give you that, Reinhardt. But what’s it feel like? What’s it feel like to know you’re watched, without knowing it? Oh, he’s a smart one, Reinhardt. He hides it well, but he’s a smart little bugger, got your number, told us where to look for you . . .”
Maybe it was what Fischer was not saying, as much as the stream of verbiage. Maybe it was the stress. God knew, in times past, stress and danger had given Reinhardt a heightened sense of his surroundings because the chink of rubble somewhere up behind him sounded like the ringing of a china cup when a spoon tapped it. Something in the way he stood must have been obvious to Fischer, something must have told him that his game was up, because his words trailed off, and he grinned. He had time to blink before Rei
nhardt tightened his grip on the baton and smashed his fist into Fischer’s jaw, a short jab, swinging hard from his hips. Fischer slumped back onto the rubble, and Reinhardt was climbing past him, as quickly as he could go, back up the shattered glacis of broken bricks. He slipped, banged his knees, gritted his teeth against the pain, and his baton clattered away back down the slope. He heard the scrabble of feet behind him, a frustrated shout, and then he was up and on the street, and he was running, the pain in his knee something distant, as if it belonged to someone else.
23
Reinhardt struggled home on the trains, a slow and lurching journey on the S-bahn from Schmargendorf to Templehof, and the U-bahn one stop north to Paradestrasse. The illuminated airport was visible to his right as he went north, a wide arc that parceled the huge crescent of the landing apron into splintered islands of light. When he came up out of the U-bahn, he could hear the hum and drone of an aircraft in the darkness somewhere behind him as he paced out his long, hesitant walk through streets lit and lined by a furtive sliver of moon, each step paced out to the slow burn of his knee. The power was out in the district, and there were only drifts of light from window frames, ripples from candles and open flames. It was very cold, and he was so caught up in measuring his steps, in the slow roll of the day through his mind, that he saw the car parked outside his house too late.
He hesitated when he saw it, and he stopped when he saw the Red Army plates. The doors opened and men slipped out. He felt a gelid stab of fear, thought to step backward, froze again at the whisper of a footstep behind him. A man was there, a man he had not seen or heard. His face was blank, the low brim of a cap tracing a flowing line of shadow across his brows.
“Ti, idi siuda.” The words were Russian, the voice lazy, as if it knew no circumstance under which it might be disobeyed. All German men knew what those words meant, and what it might mean to disobey them, and so Reinhardt walked slowly over to the car where two men waited for him, removing his hat as he went. It felt right to do it, but it felt wrong, and he squirmed around a momentary hitch of loathing, but whether of himself or these men he did not know. He refused himself the opportunity to wonder. He needed to concentrate.
“Rukhi verkh,” one of them ordered, and Reinhardt raised his hands and was frisked by the man behind him, feeling the man’s breath intimate on his neck, fetid with the stench of makhorka, that tobacco the Russians all seemed to smoke and, for just a second, the faintest scrape of an unshaven chin across his nape. It jolted him, then froze him still. Only his eyes could move, and so he ran them over what he could see, trying to make himself think.
The men wore dark uniforms, dull gleams of metal on epaulettes and collars. Belts slanted across their chests, big pistols were holstered at their hips, their tunics flared out over the tops of their wide trousers, which were tucked into knee-high boots. Rules and regulations tumbled through Reinhardt’s mind, were swept away, but he knew any member of the Allied occupation forces had access to any sector at any time, so long as they were in uniform. As these men were.
The man searching him found his warrant disc and handed it to one of the others who looked at it with vague disinterest. The man turned the disk in his hands, showed it to the other who shrugged.
“Nu ladno,” the man behind him said.
The man who had his disk pointed at the house.
“Zaxhodi,” he said. “Inside,” he repeated, in German. “Go inside.”
Reinhardt felt the chill as soon as he stepped inside the house. The man prodded him in the back, and he walked forward through the muffled quiet into the kitchen. It was empty, but there were cups and a pot of honey on the table, and a uniform cap, lying upside down. A stir of wind pointed to the door to the garden. It was ajar, but suddenly washed open in a ripple of reflected light. Mrs. Meissner walked straight-backed into the kitchen, followed by another Soviet, an officer with a major’s insignia on his epaulettes.
“It is wonderful work, the way you have sheltered them from the winter,” the officer was saying, as he shut the door. “My grandmother would keep her bees by . . .” He stopped as he saw Reinhardt.
The soldier behind Reinhardt put a heavy hand on his shoulder, stopping him, then he leaned past and placed Reinhardt’s warrant disc on the table. He spoke briefly, a few words in Russian. The officer nodded, the faintest movement of his head, then gestured the man out with his eyes.
Under the buttery glow of the lantern that hung over the table, Mrs. Meissner sat very still and stiff in her chair. The officer was not a young man. He had a face creased and lined with wrinkles, webs of them to either side of his eyes, deep channels that grooved both sides of his nose, down to the corners of his lips. One side of his mouth was ridged by scars, as if he had been wounded and never properly healed, and the skin seemed to sag inward, just a little. From the look of the pale lines across his high forehead, he frowned often, and his hair was little more than a gray fringe around his ears and round the back of his head. He spun Reinhardt’s disc around with one finger, looking at it, then his mouth firmed and he lifted his head. He looked at Reinhardt a moment, then smiled, but a smile that spread no further than a tautening of his lips. He turned courteously to Meissner. He was not a tall man, at least a head shorter than Reinhardt, but he had a deep breadth of chest.
“Mrs. Meissner, thank you for the tea. And for the honey. It was delicious. It reminds me of the honey my grandmother would serve from the hives she kept.” Meissner inclined her head, graciously. “I congratulate you for keeping your bees alive through this terrible winter. I wonder, though, if you would be so kind as to give me and the captain some privacy.”
She nodded, the light rippling over the silver of her hair, and she took the hand he offered her to rise stiffly to her feet. Reinhardt watched her go, saw the blankness in her expression as she fixed him momentarily with her eyes when she passed behind the officer. Then she was gone, her steps slow and halting up the wooden stairs, and in the silence she left behind, Reinhardt suddenly heard the clock in the front room ticking heavily.
The officer watched Meissner leave, and then smiled at Reinhardt, a stretch of his lips with no glimpse of his teeth, but it changed his face, as if a younger man had parted the lines and creases life had left on it to peer out. “You have to admire people like her. Ladies of a certain generation and class. You would think nothing could ruffle them or cause them to break stride. They take what life gives them, and adapt. I had a look outside, in her garden. She is remarkably self-sufficient. Some vegetables. Which I see you have protected like a World War One trench! Beehives. Herbs. The mint tea is particularly good,” he said, lifting his mug and taking a sip. “Truly, she reminds me of my own grandmother. Nothing ever stopped her.
“She told me she used to be a director at the Decorative Arts. An amazing place. I preferred the Pergamon, myself. Or the Tell Halaf! It made me want to be an archaeologist and go running off to Syria to dig through the sands.” The officer’s voice was low, quite deep, and his German was smooth, almost unaccented, and somehow archaic, as if he had learned it a long time ago, in a different time and place.
“You are probably wondering what’s going on, Captain. Let me put you at ease, first. I am not here to take you away. My name is Skokov. I am a major with the Soviet MGB. You are, of course, familiar with the MGB.”
“Soviet intelligence,” Reinhardt said around a dry tongue.
“‘State security,’ rather,” corrected Skokov, with another tight smile. Reinhardt said nothing as the major enjoyed another sip of his mint tea, but he could not help but note the man’s manners. Somewhat anachronistic in what he knew of Soviet political policemen, and either a show or real, but in both cases, disconcerting.
“Tell me, Captain, why did you go to Friedrichshain today?”
Reinhardt blinked, swallowed. “It was part of a murder investigation.”
Skokov smiled, sipped from his tea, the scars shining a
long his lips. “I have heard about your investigation, but I want to hear it from you too. It always sounds better coming from one closely involved, and I never tire of hearing a good story.” His eyes glittered, and they seemed to be saying “don’t bother hiding anything; I’ll know.”
“I think . . . I think that the man I am pursuing has been killing for some time. One of his victims may have been a man who lived in the Soviet sector.”
“This ‘Stucker,’ correct? A former air force pilot.”
“Yes,” said Reinhardt, shaken at how fast information had percolated up to this man. “That is why I was there today.”
“The others? All pilots as well? All from the same squadron?”
“The same Group,” Reinhardt corrected him. Skokov’s eyebrows rose, guttering the skin across his forehead, and Reinhardt cursed himself, covering his fear up with an air of perplexity. “I am confused, Major. What would a Soviet state security officer want with a murder investigation?”
Skokov did not immediately answer, instead lifting a small leather satchel onto the table, and taking from it a package wrapped in greaseproof paper and a bottle of clear fluid. “A good story requires good food. And good food requires good drink. Do you have two glasses, Captain?” Reinhardt brought two mismatched glasses to the table, as Skokov unwrapped the paper exposing a length of sausage, and half a loaf of black bread. “You pour, please,” he said, as he began to slice the sausage, and then two slices of the bread. Reinhardt twisted the cork out of the bottle, and then poured two measures into the glasses. It was vodka, he smelled. Skokov lifted his glass.
“To our meeting and our mutual understanding. Za vstrechu i vzaimnoye ponimaniye.” Skokov inclined his head, a light of expectation in his eyes beneath the furrows across his brows.
The Divided City Page 17