The Silent Death

by volker Kutscher

  ‘Then the report will have to do.’ Rath returned the file to his briefcase. ‘Now, into the lion’s den.’

  ‘Good luck, Inspector,’ she said compassionately. In all the months they had worked together, Erika Voss had never offered him so much encouragement; he was almost touched.

  Carrying the leather case he at least felt somewhat armed, as he entered the small conference room. The briefing had been going for twenty minutes and the air was thick with smoke. He resisted the temptation to reach for his carton of Overstolz, and met any curious glances with a nod. A few colleagues whispered to each other when they saw him.

  He sat next to Gräf. ‘Good morning,’ he said.

  ‘Gereon, damn it!’ Gräf hissed. There was trouble in the air.

  Up on the podium, Kronberg from ED was going through yesterday’s findings. Böhm stood listening with arms folded, and when he darted a glance at Rath he seemed to gaze right through him.

  ‘…manually removed, so that by now the spotlight is attached to a single bolt, which, itself having been loosened, is being held in place by a cotter pin alone,’ Kronberg droned. The crime scene man was reading aloud from a sheet of paper. One or two colleagues couldn’t help but yawn. ‘Now, if, using the abovementioned lever and the wire cable attached to it, one were to remove the cotter pin from the bolt, the bolt would consequently come loose, causing the spotlight, now deprived of support, to fall. This appears to have occurred on the eighth of February this year, the intention clearly being to cause death or serious injury to the actress Bettina Winter.’

  Rath was continually astonished at the formulations of the Prussian police. It wasn’t just them, however: the whole of the Prussian civil service would have been capable of describing a person’s agonising death as though it were a technical process, a physics experiment in school.

  Kronberg gazed at the assembled company over the rim of his glasses, probably to make sure that every last person in the room had given up trying to follow his report. ‘Based on the positioning of this construction, it seems reasonable to assume that…’

  ‘How about you leave the assumptions to us, my dear Kronberg?!’ Clearly Kronberg hadn’t managed to lull Böhm to sleep. The bulldog had been paying attention. The ED man looked slightly aggrieved, but didn’t dare protest. Instead he cleared the way for the DCI.

  ‘Many thanks, Herr Kronberg.’ Böhm could make a ‘thank you’ sound like an insult. ‘Inspector Rath?’ he continued. ‘I thought I saw you come in just now?’ The room fell silent, like a classroom after the teacher has asked who left the wet sponge on his chair. Everyone turned to look at Rath. ‘Ah, there you are. Would you be so kind as to come to the podium and tell us about your recent work in the Winter case?’

  Rath moved towards the front, taking the report from his leather case as he went. ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Good morning, Detective Chief Inspector.’ He lifted the file in the air. ‘I have taken the liberty of summarising my findings in a report, which I…’

  ‘Get to the point!’

  Böhm was glaring at him, his eyes like two frozen glass marbles. Very well, Rath thought, the whole nine yards it is.

  ‘Herr Kronberg has already told you a thing or two about the device that I discovered yesterday in Terra Studios,’ he said, taking the screenplay and production schedule from the brown case. ‘Here I have the time frame according to which the…saboteur, as I will call him for now, proceeded. The script and production schedule for Liebesgewitter, Betty Winter’s final film.’

  He looked across the group. Curious faces, tense silence. He outlined his theory: that Krempin had devised the wire construction to release the spotlight and destroy the film camera, but had been exposed. He had therefore neutralised the device at the last minute and left the studio in a hurry. Someone else must have reconnected it.

  Böhm actually let him finish. ‘Where did you get such a fanciful idea?’ he asked.

  ‘I thought I made that abundantly clear. Scene forty-nine was filmed just before eleven o’clock in the morning; the effects lever was still working and triggered the thunder. On the afternoon of that same day, however, while shooting scene fifty-three, the same lever loosened the one bolt still holding the spotlight in place – the mechanism that Kronberg just described. It can’t have been Felix Krempin because by eleven o’clock he was no longer in the studio.’

  ‘What gives you that idea?’

  ‘The eyewitnesses Lüdenbach and Krieg. Supported by others who last saw him in the studio around ten.’

  ‘Perhaps you haven’t heard, Inspector. Since there were a number of conflicting witness statements, we decided to question all parties a little more thoroughly. If you had arrived on time you would have heard all this, but I will repeat it once more for your sake: three witnesses now concede that Felix Krempin could still have been in the studio around twelve. That is to say at the time when everything had already been arranged for the afternoon shoot. Where does that leave your little theory?’

  Rath stood there like a star pupil who had just spectacularly failed an important exam, and was now being paraded in front of his gloating classmates by the disappointed teacher.

  Böhm turned to face his assembled colleagues. ‘Gentlemen, you know what you have to do,’ he said. ‘To work!’

  The silence was broken by loud crashes and a low muttering as the room slowly emptied. Rath packed his things and was about to leave too when Böhm held him back. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To work.’

  ‘What work? Have I given you an assignment?’

  Rath looked the bulldog in the eye. He wasn’t about to kowtow to Böhm.

  ‘You can hand me your report,’ Böhm said, ‘and then you are temporarily relieved of all duties on the Winter case.’

  Rath bit his tongue and handed Böhm the file. ‘What should I do instead, Detective Chief Inspector, Sir?’

  ‘Go to your desk. You’ll find everything there.’

  Rath saw what Böhm meant by everything when he entered his office. There was a stack of files on his desk. ‘What am I supposed to do with these?’ he asked his secretary.

  Erika Voss shrugged her shoulders. ‘Fräulein Steiner just brought them. With greetings from DCI Böhm, was all she said.’

  According to Böhm’s instructions he was to prepare the Wessel case, chaotic and disordered as it was, for the public prosecutor. It was the first time Böhm had actually entrusted him with the case – save for the ridiculous order to attend the funeral, and it was exactly the kind of work Rath despised: a mindless chore, painstaking and monotonous. A punishment.

  There was a knock, and Erika Voss poked her nosy head through the door. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ he said. ‘Where’s Gräf got to? He was at the briefing just now.’

  ‘He’s gone to Grunewald with Lange, to scour the allotments. Böhm seems to think Krempin’s hiding there.’

  Böhm had expressly requested that Rath tack on a report about the Wessel funeral, a report that only Gräf could write, since it was he who had been at the cemetery on Saturday.

  ‘If he calls, put him through to me right away. See if you can reach him while he’s out and about.’

  ‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up, Inspector, not if he’s as hard to get hold of as you’ve been in the last few days,’ Erika Voss said, and closed the door.

  Rath sorted the papers into stacks of various heights: witness statements, reports, crime scene descriptions, crime scene photos, medical reports, technical reports, evidence logs, summaries, possible conclusions. At one the telephone rang. He was hoping for Gräf but was disappointed. It was Erika Voss, who once again had been too lazy to leave her desk.

  ‘There’s a Herr Ziehlke here to see you.’

  He had completely forgotten. ‘Send him in,’ he said, and moments later there was a knock.

  Friedhelm Ziehlke had taken off his hat and was kneading it in his hands. ‘Here I am, Inspector,’ he said. ‘Nice pla
ce you’ve got.’

  Rath was about to offer the taxi driver a seat, but there was a pile of statements on the visitor’s chair. ‘Why don’t we go out?’ he said. ‘Fancy a beer at Aschinger?’

  ‘I’m still on duty, but I wouldn’t say no to a Bratwurst.’

  It was noisy at Alex. The steam hammer was still driving supporting irons into the ground, although the underground was supposedly as good as finished. Everywhere you looked construction hoardings blocked the view. Rath had the feeling that they moved every day so that you had to negotiate a new labyrinth each time you wanted to cross the square.

  ‘Haven’t been here for a long time,’ Ziehlke said. ‘Every halfway sensible taxi driver avoids Alexanderplatz.’

  Whatever else was being torn down at Alex, Aschinger remained. The old building was scheduled for demolition, but a number of little placards revealed that the restaurant would find a home in one of the new buildings. An Alex without Aschinger was something Rath couldn’t imagine. Half the station ate their lunch or drank their after-work beer here.

  As always at lunchtime, it was full to bursting. Rath ordered a Bierwurst with potato salad for Ziehlke, and a Sinalco to drink. For himself he ordered Rinderbraten and potato dumplings with a glass of Selters mineral water. At least the man didn’t want fried liver.

  ‘Nice of you to invite me,’ Ziehlke said, and began to cut up his Bierwurst. ‘I’m here to look at photos then?’

  ‘First let’s eat.’ Rath got stuck into his beef. ‘But yes, I’d like you to take a close look at each picture for the man who picked up Vivian Franck.’

  ‘Why are you looking for her anyway?’ Ziehlke asked between mouthfuls of potato salad. ‘You still haven’t told me that.’

  ‘Because she’s missing,’ Rath said.

  After the waiter had cleared their plates, Rath fetched Oppenberg’s envelope from his bag. There were nearly twenty portraits, not just of actors, but of other men Oppenberg deemed capable of meeting with Vivian in secret. Among them was Felix Krempin, though the photo was better than Bellmann’s Christmas party snap. Ziehlke examined each image thoroughly, hesitating on just two occasions, firstly over Krempin, before realising that he recognised him from the paper. ‘He’s the one you’re looking for, isn’t he?’ The second time it was a dark-haired actor, but eventually he ruled him out too. ‘No, that’s not him. A similar type, that’s all.’

  Rath thanked Ziehlke. ‘If you see the man anywhere, be it on a billboard, in your taxi, or on the street, call me immediately. Any time of day.’

  Before returning to the Castle, Rath found a telephone box from which to call Oppenberg, and managed to wangle an invitation to dinner from his secretary.

  Erika Voss still wasn’t back from her break when Rath sat down at his desk and set about the stack of papers. It was a curious case, this Wessel business, and the Nazis had exploited it to the full: a landlady calls in a few Communist friends to give a defaulting tenant a beating. The situation escalates, and the SA Sturmführer gets a bullet in the face at the door. Conveniently enough the killer, Ali Höhler, is the former pimp of the whore with whom this Wessel now resides.

  The bullet had made Wessel a martyr for the Nazi movement, but he was an unlikely saint: a young priest’s son who had jolted the SA in Friedrichshain into action, only to fall in love with a prostitute and start shamefully neglecting his SA. Goebbels didn’t care. For Berlin’s top Nazi, the Sturmführer made the perfect martyr. Nevertheless, it was fortunate that Wessel had finally succumbed to his injuries, otherwise the model Nazi might yet have resigned from the NSDAP. In the last few months, he seemed to have lost all interest in politics. There were even whisperings that he had started playing pimp for his beloved, though such rumours had just as likely come from Communist circles.

  A coarse ringing sound interrupted his thoughts. The telephone on Erika Voss’s desk. Perhaps it was Gräf. Rath took the call on his own line. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Am I speaking with Detective Inspector Rath’s office? A Division?’ a woman’s voice asked.

  ‘You’re speaking with Rath himself. With whom do I have the pleasure?’

  ‘Greulich, Dr Weiss’s office. The deputy commissioner wishes to speak to you in half an hour, Inspector.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Dr Weiss will tell you that himself.’

  Rath was surprised. Until now he had only seen the Vipoprä, as Zörgiebel’s deputy was known in the Castle, from afar, and had barely exchanged a word. What could Dr Weiss, undoubtedly one of the best criminal investigators in Berlin, want with little old Inspector Gereon Rath? Had Böhm lodged a complaint? Rath smelled trouble. He would have preferred it to be Zörgiebel, one of his father’s old friends, but the police commissioner had disappeared to Mainz for the carnival period.

  He spent the next half-hour thinking, before leaving Erika Voss, who still hadn’t returned from her break, a note, and making his way over.

  Frau Greulich was very brightly dressed. ‘Your colleagues are waiting,’ she said, and Rath wondered why she had used the plural. She lifted the receiver and dialled a number. ‘Herr Rath is here,’ she said. And then to Rath: ‘Please go on through.’

  Rath went on through.

  Dr Bernhard Weiss sat behind a large desk covered in files, his eyes alert behind thick spectacles. The man exuded a natural authority that made Rath nervous. He knew how to deal with Zörgiebel, but the deputy seemed to be of a different calibre: definitely nobody’s fool. He was more reassured by the presence of the second man. Ernst Gennat. As long as Buddha was there, things couldn’t get too bad.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said, shaking the men’s hands in order of rank.

  ‘Sit down, please,’ Weiss said, a little chilly. No friendly please take a seat. Sit down sounded more like something a teacher would say.

  Rath sat in an armchair next to Gennat. For a moment silence reigned, as the noise of the typewriter penetrated quietly and somehow soothingly through the padded door. ‘Good that you could come at such short notice, Inspector,’ Weiss began the conversation. ‘It concerns a delicate matter.’

  Almost a year ago someone had accused Rath of murder; back then it was Gennat who had showed up. He had used a similar turn of phrase.

  Weiss looked him in the eye. ‘How would you describe your relationship with Detective Inspector Frank Brenner?’

  So, Brenner had made a big deal of their little quarrel. ‘Not exactly friendly,’ Rath said. ‘More collegial?’

  ‘I have received an internal complaint,’ Weiss continued. ‘Inspector Brenner claims that you struck him several times without cause last Saturday night in the Residenz-Casino. What do you say to that?’

  ‘I did strike Herr Brenner, Sir, but not without cause.’

  ‘What reason can there be to strike a colleague in public? You do know that we should be mindful of our institution’s reputation at all times.’

  ‘No one knew we were police officers,’ Rath said. ‘It was a masked ball and we were both in fancy dress.’

  ‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

  ‘There was a reason, Sir, but a private one. Inspector Brenner violated a woman’s honour.’

  ‘A woman’s honour?’

  ‘A mutual acquaintance.’

  ‘Inspector, the age where one fought a duel over a woman is over, thank God. Don’t you think your reaction was a little over the top?’

  ‘I warned Herr Brenner – I asked him to stop.’

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘He said some very coarse things, revolting in fact. I wouldn’t like to repeat them here, Sir.’

  ‘Who is the woman in question?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that either.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘With respect, it is none of your concern. My quarrel with DI Brenner was a private matter.’

  ‘If a police officer strikes someone, be it a colleague or a civilian, it is anything but a private matter!’


  Weiss was shouting.

  ‘I apologise, Sir, I didn’t mean it like that. Nonetheless, I don’t want to drag the woman in question into this.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to offend you, Inspector,’ said Weiss, more conciliatory. ‘It’s simply a question of naming possible witnesses who in case of doubt might testify on your behalf. Inspector Brenner has named Detective Czerwinski, who appears to have witnessed the incident.’

  ‘What does Czerwinski say?’

  ‘We still haven’t questioned him.’

  ‘It was a minor difference of opinion between colleagues – I’m not sure it needs to be described as an incident.’

  ‘Don’t talk it down, Rath. Inspector Brenner toyed with the idea of bringing charges against you and instituting disciplinary proceedings. Luckily for you, I was able to persuade him that it made more sense for us to deal with it internally. What do you think will happen if the press gets wind of this?’

  ‘So why isn’t Brenner here? We could shake each other by the hand and the matter would be forgotten. That’s how I’d deal with it.’

  ‘Inspector Brenner is currently unable to work on account of his injuries,’ Weiss said, still in his ultra-matter-of-fact tone.

  Rath swallowed hard. There was no way he had beaten the fatty up that badly. Perhaps he had fallen awkwardly? He couldn’t help thinking of the arm in the sling. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said.

  ‘So you should be.’ Weiss gazed at him seriously, making Rath feel like a flagellate under a microscope. ‘Do you often lose your temper?’

  ‘What do you mean, Sir?’

  ‘I think my question was clear. Do you have your temper under control?’

  Was that an allusion to his past? Rath wasn’t sure how much he knew about what had happened in Cologne. Still, that didn’t have anything to do with his temper, he couldn’t mean that.

  ‘Of course, Sir. I am always conscious of my responsibilities as a police officer.’

  ‘Except for this one occasion, clearly.’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘Good, then please see to it that nothing like this happens again. I’d like your report of the incident on my desk tomorrow.’