“That’s right.” Ritter’s smile returned. “Did we have a revolution? I’ll have to check the film archives.”
Ritter opened the door to a group of eight or nine studio employees sitting in a small anteroom. They turned as one as Hoffner stepped inside.
Ritter said, “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This won’t take long. The chief inspector has a few questions for each of you.” He turned to Hoffner. “You can take them individually through to the office. Give me a ring when you’ve finished. Dial 9. They’ll find me.”
Hoffner studied the faces, all young, all with something and nothing to hide. It would be a waste of time. There was a boy in the corner, clearly intent on the girl next to him. The Kriminalpolizei had just interrupted his best efforts. It was laced across his face.
“That one there,” said Hoffner as Ritter turned to go. Hoffner was pointing to the boy. “He’s not involved in this.”
Ritter turned back. “And why is that?”
“Because he’s my son.”
LISL
THE SECOND OFFICE was no more comfortable than the first, not that Hoffner or the boy was in any mood to sit.
“What do you want me to say, Georgi?” Hoffner was onto his second cigarette. “I’m surprised. That’s all.”
“I thought you knew.” It was a hollow answer. Georg had been doing his best to keep things light, but even he had his doubts about this last one. “Either way, it’s where we are now.”
Hoffner nodded once, twice. He had always liked Georg’s candor. Now it just seemed grating. “You’ve left school, then?”
“For the time being.” Georg was taller than his father. He seemed to grow taller still with this admission. “The last two months.”
“And the money I’ve been sending you for tuition and rooms?”
“Very helpful, thank you. I share a flat with a friend just south of Friedenau.”
“How artistic of you. And this friend—also a filmmaker in the making?”
“He’s a writer.”
“That’s unfortunate.” An ugly thought entered Hoffner’s mind. “Your brother wouldn’t have had anything to do with this, would he?” Georg’s eyes grew momentarily sharper. Hoffner had never seen it in the boy before, that severity that invades the face and leaves no trace of childhood. Georg had found it at only sixteen. Hoffner crushed out his cigarette. “A stupid question. I apologize.”
Georg let it pass. “I haven’t spoken with Sascha in months. I’m not even sure he’s in Berlin.”
These were the tidbits Hoffner was allowed from time to time. He saw Georg only on weekends: Who had time for anything more? The boy’s aunts were no doubt still keeping a close watch. Naturally, they had decided not to tell him about this recent gambit.
“And you make a bit of money running from office to office?” It was the best Hoffner could come up with to sound conciliatory.
“A bit. It helps to be on tuition.”
“Yes, I’m sure it does.” There was always an immense charm with this one. Martha had seen it from the start. “So no fencing.”
“Once in a while. My flatmate’s good with a foil.”
“You’re better with a saber.”
“True. But he’s not.” Georg nodded toward the door. “So what’s this all about?”
“A police matter.”
“And?”
Ever the eager one. Hoffner had always thought it would send the boy into the Kripo, maybe a directorship. The imagination was obviously taking him elsewhere. “One of your executives put a bullet in his chest.”
“Suicide?”
“So they tell me.”
“It’s a high-risk venture, Papi.”
Hoffner was looking for another cigarette; his pockets were empty. “You’re quite familiar with all this, then?” He found a box on the table and pulled one out: they were Luckys, not the easiest brand to find in Berlin. “Tell me, is anything in here not Americano?” He lit up and pocketed two more.
“It depends on the office.”
“Grau?”
“The Herr Major? Strictly a Bergmann smoker. Maybe a few stubs from a Monopol MR in the ashtray, now and then.”
“All this in two months? I’m impressed, Georgi.”
The boy’s face grew more serious. “Was it Thyssen?”
Hoffner was too good to give anything away. Even so, he knew the boy would be told soon enough. “Why do you ask?”
“A lot of late-night meetings. Unfamiliar faces.”
Hoffner weighed his words carefully. “Faces you were meant to see?” Georg said nothing. “Not something you want to play at, Georgi. Leave it alone.”
“I thought it was just a suicide?”
“Good. Then you can put your imagination to rest.”
“It would make for a nice bit of script.”
“I’ll talk to Herr Ritter. See if he’s interested.” Hoffner nodded at the door. “I’ll need forty minutes with that lot. Then I’ll give you a ride back into town. Size up your flat.”
Georg did his best to speak with authority. “I’m on until five-thirty.”
“Not today you’re not.” Hoffner took a pull on the cigarette. “Herr Ritter and I are quite chummy. I’m sure they can do without you for one afternoon.”
NO ONE HAD ANYTHING TO SAY. A trio of teary-eyed young secretaries and copyists spoke through handkerchiefs about the late, and quite marvelous, Herr Thyssen. More restrained, though no less captivated, were a messenger and a mailroom boy. Hoffner counted four crushes among them. “I’ve done a bit of mountain climbing myself,” the fatter of the two boys volunteered. “Herr Thyssen was very accomplished, you know.” At least now Hoffner had an explanation for the calloused fingertips. It was the only information worth jotting down.
Downstairs, Georg was waiting when he stepped from the elevator.
“You’ll have someone keeping an eye out for you now,” Hoffner said as he patted his pockets for a cigarette; the Luckys were long gone. “Good man, Ritter.”
Georg showed only a moment’s irritation as they moved down the hall. “I’ll be fine on my own, Father.”
It was the “Father” that gave it away. Georg rarely felt the need for it. Sascha, on the other hand, had taken it as his stock-in-trade. Funny how contempt could linger in the ears after eight years of silence.
“No reason not to have a few friends,” said Hoffner.
Outside, the old Opel seemed somehow more lumbering squeezed in among the top-flight roadsters and saloons. Even they, however, looked almost brittle under the pale sun, as if the slightest touch might shatter their perfectly sculpted bodies. Hoffner brought his hand up to shade his eyes. “Quite a collection,” he said. He pulled open the door.
Georg pointed to a red Brenabor sports coupe. “Jenny Jugo drives that one. She says she can get it up over a hundred on the circuit back to town.”
“You’ve spoken with Jenny Jugo?”
“Sure.”
Hoffner was beginning to see his son in an entirely new light. “Lovely shoulders on that girl.” Hoffner got in behind the wheel. “And lips.”
“You should see her in the buff,” said Georg as he pulled the passenger door shut.
Hoffner put the car in gear. “Quite a life, your filmmaking.”
. . .
THE FLAT WAS TWO ROOMS, hardly furnished, and with a single-flame stove for meals that were never cooked. Hoffner noticed a few knickknacks from the old place on Friesenstrasse, the most prominent a Japanese fan Martha had kept on the wall by her bed. It stood open on a small side table, with an oval picture of her at its side. Hoffner recalled having the same photo somewhere.
The flatmate had staked out the other table, a large-frame picture of a plump family seated and standing in a garden. The man at center clutched at his lapel with wide little butcher’s fingers, the small black, red, and gold Social Democrat pin proudly on display.
“So, how old does the landlord think you are?” Hoffner glanced through the few
books the boys had stacked by the window: a volume of Möricke, another by Lorca, a few potboilers by Karl May, and of course something thick from Döblin. Georg was in the other room, out of sight, rummaging through something.
“Twenty,” said Georg. “He was very impressed with the letter you wrote, especially with the Kripo seal at the top.”
“Did I vouch for your butcher’s son as well?”
“Sewage inspector, Papi. Albert’s father is a sewage inspector. So you see, you’re both inspectors.”
Hoffner leafed through the Möricke. “And where is the young Herr Sewage now? I was hoping to meet him.”
“His father couldn’t get him out of work.” Georg reappeared at the door with several glossy photos and a few envelopes in hand. “He sets copy at the Nacht-Ausgabe.”
“A Scherl paper?” Hoffner replaced the book. “Bit right-wing. That must be something of a disappointment for Herr Sewage Senior.”
“It’s a job, Papi, not his politics. And it’s Lettinger. Albert’s father is Herr Bernard Lettinger. You might actually have to meet him one day.”
“What a pleasure that would be.”
Georg handed Hoffner the various photos, each with a personal note to Georg. All were convinced of his bright future.
“Very nice,” said Hoffner. “You haven’t seen Veidt naked, have you? That would be distressing.”
Georg ignored him and held out the envelopes. “These came a few months back.” His expression was focused. “You’re welcome to read through them, if you want.”
Hoffner recognized Sascha’s handwriting, the return address Munich. He hesitated, then held up the photos. “I think I’ll take a closer look at these.” He turned, trying to remember where the chair was. There it was. By the window. Hoffner moved to it and sat.
Georg was still by the door. “He mentions you.”
Hoffner peered intently at one of the pictures. “I told you lovely shoulders.” He flipped through a few more, trying to find his own focus. At some point Georg tossed the letters onto the table, headed to the stove, and said, “I can make a coffee, if you like.”
Hoffner heard the muted resignation in the boy’s voice; he continued to glance at the faces as he nodded.
Georg said, “Some of those are up-and-comers. You won’t recognize them. Still, good to have friends, as you say.”
Hoffner wondered when the boy had become this young man. In a single afternoon, it seemed. He continued to leaf through the pictures, mostly unfamiliar, until he came to a monocled figure glaring up from the stack. The thick script was in keeping with the expression:
You have promise, young Hoffner. Learn to be inspired. Fritz
Lang.
From the look in Lang’s good eye, the inspiration was clearly meant to be Fritz Lang. Hoffner was about to say something when the late Herr Thyssen’s body suddenly came to mind.
Georg glanced over. “So you found that one.” He was adjusting the flame under the coffeepot. “Not sure what it means, but if the great Herr Direktor chose to say it, then it must mean something, don’t you think?”
Hoffner continued to stare at the picture. “Naturally.” He hadn’t heard a word. “You wouldn’t have any idea where Lang might be right now, would you?” This is what had struck him out at the studio. He had seen it all before in a file: the angle of the head, the arms, the temperature of the water. “Babelsberg? In town?”
Georg knew the look in his father’s eyes: always best to give the simplest answer. “He’s editing. At the studio. Making a recut of Metropolis. Why?”
“You know this for certain?”
Georg nodded.
Hoffner stood and pulled his coat and hat from the rack. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to miss out on your coffee.”
Georg turned off the flame. He hadn’t wanted any to begin with. “Thyssen?”
Hoffner peered over at the boy. Perhaps Lang had hit on it: promise was so right with this one. “Something to clear up.” He fished through his pockets for his notebook. “I can give you a lift back out. You were planning on taking a tram and who knows how many buses back when I left. This would be a bit easier.”
Georg was two steps behind his father as Hoffner started down the stairs.
THE ALEX—Berlin’s Polizei Presidium—is a mass of red-brown brick and stone on the southern edge of Alexanderplatz, a fifteen-minute ride farther into town from the flat, traffic permitting. A product of the Kaiser’s civic expansion days—those heady times before war and defeat and democracy sent the old man off to the Netherlands—the Alex had once been the third-largest building in the city. The police president had even lived inside, on the first floor at the top of an imposing marble staircase. It might have been a bit awkward having to share his official residence with upward of seven hundred criminals on any given day, but then, the address was probably worth it.
Hoffner slowed for an oncoming livery truck before heading into the square. The newspaper kiosk and soup cart were doing a nice business at the front of the building, taking full advantage of the construction workers, who seemed to be in constant demand at the old place. Today, the green-putty-and-hobnail-boot crew was working on one of the fourth-floor windows, the domain of the Polpo, Berlin’s political police. Hoffner had the image of an interrogation gone terribly wrong, shattered glass, a body flying out and then down, down, down. Then again, maybe that was too much even for the Polpo.
He found a spot at the far end of the square and handed Georg a few pfennigs for a magazine. “Get what you like, then wait in the car.”
Hoffner headed across the cobblestone, glancing up at the few untended nicks high on the building’s façade—half the department had them as remnants of left-wing bullets from ’19, the other of rightwing Kappist grenades from ’20—but either way it was a long time since the Alex had come under attack. Much relieved, the line of entrance archways peered out with neutral sobriety.
Hoffner passed through the central gate and into the entrance atrium, which was part of a cavernous corridor that ran all four sides of the building. It ringed the glassed-over courtyard, where a line of armored trucks—each with a machine-gun turret at top—stood in a neat clump at center. Except for an occasional dustup at one of the slaughterhouse factories, the trucks stood idle. This, so Hoffner had been told, was progress. He cut past them and headed up the stairs.
It was somewhere between the second and third floors that the stink kicked in. At first he thought it was an overcooked egg, but the closer he got, the more chemical it became.
A young detective sergeant appeared at the top of the steps, a bowl of something yellow in his outstretched hands as he made his way down.
“It’s clogged the sink,” the boy said.
Hoffner flattened himself against the wall and brought his handkerchief to his nose. “Egg yolk?” he said.
The boy nearly missed a step. “How did you . . . ?”
“Mix some cream with whiskey and pour it into the sink. That should take care of the stench. And don’t just toss it out. Take it down to the morgue and spill it into the slop drain.”
The boy nodded as he continued to move past Hoffner. “Scheringer was trying to do mildewed clothes.”
“Next time, tell him he’d do better to take a whiff of his own flat on a Friday night.”
The boy laughed as he reached the landing. “You’re the expert.”
It was a fair point. Hoffner had been known to add to the general pong over the years—a few experiments of his own to approximate the smell of a decomposing corpse (sulfur and rotten fruit), or gunfire residue on a man’s suit (damp cigar ash, dog hair, and chicory), or, his most recent, skin scrubbed clean of human blood (an old rag saturated in iodine and dark chocolate). More than a few of the junior detectives had broken cases based on their intimacy with Hoffner’s concoctions, the best a young Kriminal-Assistent named Dönicker, who had cracked a particularly baffling murder case simply by smelling a woman’s panties. The woman, a Molly Dimp, ha
d seemed the perfect innocent—grieving sister and partner in a not terribly promising music-hall act—except for a slight burn mark on her upper thigh, which no one had been able to explain or fully identify. She had claimed to have received it from a man trying to recover payments on her brother’s gambling debts, but it had seemed an odd spot for intimidation. K.A. Dönicker, with nothing much to lose, had asked to sift through the young lady’s laundry, whereupon sifting had become sniffing and the incriminating pair of silk blues had quickly been discovered. The scent of tobacco, Schnauzer, and chicory—so Dönicker described it—had sent Fräulein Dimp to the gallows, her burn mark later identified as the nub end of a Luger pistol placed too soon against the skin after firing. Evidently, she, too, had had enough of her brother’s indiscretions. Dönicker had won promotion and, as thanks, had sent Hoffner a fresh pair of silk blues. Hoffner had had the panties bronzed and now used them as a paperweight.
Chancing the worst, he pocketed his handkerchief and stepped up to the third floor. This was the sole domain of the Kripo—Department IV within police circles—offices, archives, and interrogation rooms where the standard crimes of the republic were investigated: swindlers and drug syndicates, burglars and murderers, and, on occasion, even the most charming of suicides. Anything that hinted at deeper threats went upstairs to the Polpo—the boys of 1A—anything less spectacular to the drones of the Schutzpolizei. Turning toward his office, Hoffner suddenly recalled an image of Bauer sitting at the security desk. He did remember him. There was something comforting in that.
He made his way to the back of the building and to the cramped space that was his office. As always, it was littered with paper: open files covered the desk; casebooks, statutes, and codes—the new SPD editions, of course—lay open across the bookshelves that ran along the far wall; and bits and pieces of old case evidence were shoved in here and there—plaster casts of skulls and the like—giving the whole thing a somewhat macabre feel. The only recent additions were the F, T, and B volumes of Brockhaus’s Konversations-Lexikon. Hoffner had survived for years on the E and S installments of the encyclopedia. For some reason, the new volumes had seemed the logical progression.
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