Blood on Their Hands

by Lawrence Block

  Thus reassured, I made my way to the city of Dresden and presented myself at the address where he had apparently already rented a room for himself. The landlady greeted me with deference, and hoped that Herr Hofmeister would have an agreeable stay in her city.

  The room was spacious and well-furnished and looked out over the old town. I decided immediately that I should enjoy living here. A letter had already come for me. The landlady pointed to it lying on my dresser.

  It requested that Herr Hofmeister should report to the above address as soon as was convenient to meet with Herr Fischer and discuss his assignment. I put on the dark suit, which fit me perfectly, and reported that very afternoon, anxious to be at work.

  The building was close to the city center, a faceless block of gray stone among other similar buildings. There was no name plate on the outside, but I went up the steps and in through the front door. As I stood in the tiled central foyer, looking around at the various doors and staircases and wondering which to choose, a young woman came out and started in surprise at my standing there.

  I gave her my name and asked to see Herr Fischer. She ran up the flight of stairs to my left, then returned with a smile on her face. Herr Fischer welcomed me to Dresden. He would be delighted to see me, if I would just take a seat for a moment.

  There were polished wood benches around the walls. I sat on one of these. After a couple of minutes the front door opened again and a man came in. He was shabbily dressed, mid-forties or maybe even older. He stood, looking around him, before taking a seat on a bench well away from me. He had removed his hat and clutched it in his hands, squeezing it out of shape as he played with it. Every time a door opened or footsteps were heard upstairs, he started nervously. At last he caught my eye.

  “Who are you here to see?” he asked.

  “Herr Fischer.”

  “You too.” He dropped his eyes back to the battered hat in his hands. “I should never have waited. It was Hannah, you know. She was sick. And now it’s too late, of course.”

  I wanted to ask him what he meant, and was phrasing the question in my head when footsteps came down the stairs. A young man this time, with close-cropped blond hair and wearing a black shirt and well-cut black trousers. “Herr Adler?”

  The man sprang to his feet.

  “This way. Room 224.”

  The older man shot me a despairing glance as he followed the black shirt up the stairs.

  Now I was really confused. Why was this man so downcast at the thought of meeting with Herr Fischer? Perhaps, I decided, he was no good at his job and about to be fired. There was something disquieting about this place. It was gloomy and cold for a research facility, as faceless inside as it had been out. No pictures on the walls, except for the obligatory portrait of the Führer on one wall. No notice board, no buzz of conversation. Too quiet.

  I shifted uneasily on the hard bench. Would I enjoy working in these conditions? Or maybe this was just the head office and the research facilities were somewhere else all together. Somewhere bright, out in the country. This thought cheered me. Then suddenly there was activity on the floor above. A door opening, running feet, a shout, and a single brief despairing cry. The young man in the black shirt came running down the stairs. As he passed me, he gave me a grin. It was not a friendly smile, but a smile of triumph. I had seen it before when windows had been smashed and beards set on fire. A smile of cruelty.

  Then a cold sweat crept over me as I realized where I was. This building had nothing to do with aircraft design. Of course the black shirt had looked strangely familiar. I was in Gestapo headquarters.

  Hofmeister had done his best to warn me. Their spies are everywhere, he had told me. I had scoffed at this idea, but he knew what he was talking about. He had been one of them. He had been planted at the institute, and now he was to be their plant at the aircraft engineering facility.

  My mouth had gone dry. I couldn’t swallow. Even if Hofmeister had never met Herr Fischer before, it was only a matter of time before I ran into someone he knew, and then it would be all over. I couldn’t imagine what they would do to someone who dared to impersonate a Gestapo spy.

  I looked around desperately, just as the man had done, and actually got to my feet. There was nobody down here. I could make a run for it. By the time they came looking for me, I could be across a border...

  That’s when it hit me—I had nowhere to run.

  The female receptionist appeared at the top of the stairs. “You can come up now, Herr Hofmeister,” she said brightly. “Herr Fischer is ready to receive you.”

  Bloody Victims

  Mat Coward

  “That’s her!” Mrs. Rayner’s stick slipped from her hands and rattled on the floor. “That’s the little madam who had my bag!”

  “Right you are, love.” PC Blick gave the van driver a little wink, and the driver drove on.

  “That’s her,” said Mrs. Rayner. She leaned over the back of Blick’s seat and prodded a finger between his shoulders. “Aren’t you going to stop?”

  Blick helped her back to her seat, picked up her walking stick along the way. “Yeah, don’t you worry, love. We’ll send a patrol car after her. We’ll have the little madam.”

  One of the old men sitting at the back didn’t bother to stifle a snorted laugh. Blick shot him a warning look.

  “Yes, well, you mind you do,” said Mrs. Rayner. “Because that is her, I’m telling you.”

  Blick yawned, settled himself back in his seat at the front. This was Mrs. Rayner’s sixth trip on the Victim Bus. It was the ninth time she had identified the teenager who had mugged her outside the Oak Lane Post Office just after Christmas. Blick had taken the first three identifications seriously. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again. He knew why the poor old girl kept signing up for the tour: it was a day out. Nothing old folk like better than being driven around in a minibus all afternoon, even if it was only on a trip around the borough’s most notorious Youth Assembly Points.

  He hadn’t thought it would be like this. He’d thought it was the big, bright idea that would free him from a uniform tunic that never quite fit around the waist, and uniform trousers that were always two inches too long at the ankle. He’d thought this was his ticket into plainclothes.

  He’d told his inspector: “Robbers get arrogant, they get cocky, they think they’re safe once they’ve got away with it, they don’t think we’re going to keep coming after them. So, a week, two weeks after the offense, we drive the victims around in a minibus, take ’em ’round all the usual gathering places, get them to ID their attackers. We’ve got a car following up, as soon as the vic spots a suspect, the car pulls up, does the arrest. We’ll clean up. Can’t lose.”

  One arrest in seven months. And he was too young to be charged.

  “Where to next, chief?”

  “Go up by the car park,” Blick told the civilian driver. “We’ll have some refreshments.”

  The driver chuckled. “Only reason they come, that is. Free tea and biccies.”

  “Piss off,” said Blick.

  “Language!” said a ninety-year-old Jamaican woman who’d had her mobile phone snatched by four twelve-year- olds at the taxi rank outside the bus station.

  “Piss off,” said Blick. Silently.

  The driver was an irritating berk, to put it bluntly. Bad breath, a sarcastic nature, and a lousy driver.

  “You ever think you’re in the wrong job?” he asked Blick as they leaned against the side of the bus drinking tepid tea from paper cups.

  “What are you on about?”

  “Well, you’re supposed to be a copper, yeah? You do all that training, you wear a fancy uniform—even if it was made for a slightly smaller man—you swear an oath to uphold the Queen’s peace. Yeah? Twelve years in the job, and here you are, a bloody social worker, spending every Wednesday afternoon taking half a dozen old buzzards on a mystery tour round the shopping centers of suburban London.”

  “They’re not all old.” It wasn�
�t a complete rebuttal, he knew that, but it was how policemen went about things: find the first mistake, and chip away at it.

  “They’re all blind, though,” said the driver, chucking the dregs of his tea over the tarmac and tossing the cup in the general direction of a litter bin. “Or might as well be. They never bloody see anything, do they?”

  “Pick that up,” said Blick, pointing at the cup, “or I’ll nick you for littering.” He finished his own tea, crumpled up his cup, and pressed it into the irritating berk’s hand.

  The driver subvocalized energetically as he carried the two paper cups over to the litter bin. Just before he got there, Blick shouted his name.

  The timing’s the last thing to go, he thought as the irritating berk, distracted for a vital second, walked straight into the litter bin, and then doubled over clutching his groin. It was bad enough being a laughingstock back at the station without the bloody civilian staff joining in.

  True, though; one arrest in seven months. No convictions. It had got to the stage now that he didn’t fear management declaring the project a failure, closing it down—he longed for it.

  PC Blick dragged himself back onto the Victim Bus and announced that they would be moving off in five minutes. There were a few clucks and groans from the older passengers. Driver’s right, he thought. They are only here for the free biscuits.

  The one who wasn’t old was a fat, shy girl of seventeen who d been cornered by a gang of girls in an alley a couple of weeks earlier, on her way home from the cinema. They’d made her take her contact lenses out, and the smallest of the girls had then crushed them underfoot. Della’s replacement lenses hadn’t arrived yet, which made her presence on the Victim Bus a little academic.

  How you doing, Della?” Blick sat down next to her and treated her to what he hoped was an avuncular smile.

  “Okay, Mr. Blick.”

  She didn’t seem too scared by the smile, so he gave her another one. “I expect this seems like a waste of time to you, yeah?”

  “No, not at all, Mr. Blick,” said Della, her voice and face earnest. “You got to have a go, haven’t you? You can’t just let them get away with it.”

  He wished he could pat her on the knee without it seeming like he was...well, patting her on the knee. “You’re a good citizen, Della,” he said. “I’m glad you—”

  “Little bastard!’’

  Blick looked up in time to see Mr. Holt, a retired local government officer, and Victim Bus first-timer, leap out of his seat, run down the bus, jump out of the door, and rush across the road. He was almost run over by two cars and one van, and actually collided with a courier on a racing bike. Mr. Holt picked himself up, gave the prone bicycle a kick, gained the far pavement, and threw himself at a short, thin youth with blue hair.

  “Oh my God,” said Della, squinting out of the window. “What’s happening?”

  “It’s all right,” said PC Blick. “It’s just one of the victims murdering a child.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s any chance whatsoever that the boy Mr. Holt attacked is actually the boy that attacked Mr. Holt?”

  The inspector had a private office, but when he needed to bawl out a junior officer, he preferred to do it in the open-plan area. It was little touches like that which convinced Blick, on his darker days, that he would never be management himself. It would just never have occurred to him to do that. He didn’t have the imagination. Or the inner rage.

  “No connection has so far come to light, sir, no. Not at this time.”

  “He wasn’t armed?”

  “He had an umbrella, sir.”

  “What?”

  “Mr. Holt struck Dean Stubbs with a telescopic umbrella which—”

  “Not Holt, the boy. Was the boy armed?”

  “No, sir. Regrettably not.”

  The inspector, an ovoid man with an absurd amount of hair on top of his head, but none at all at the sides, crossed his arms and hissed. “Not even a penknife?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Was he carrying drugs?”

  If he had been, it’d have been in the initial report, wouldn’t it? “No, sir. Not so much as an ancient roach.”

  “And he has no record?”

  “Not known to police, sir, no.”

  “God Almighty, Blick.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The inspector kicked a swivel chair and hissed some more. The swivel chair was empty, but only—Blick suspected—by chance. “He’s conscious, at least? The boy?”

  “He has a broken finger—classic defense wound—but other than that he seems to be sound. They’re keeping him in overnight just to be sure.”

  “Right. Well, your precious bloody Victim Bus is off the road until further notice—that goes without saying, I trust.”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  “Meanwhile, you’d better sit in on the interview with Holt. Seeing as how he’s one of your precious bloody victims.”

  “The problem we’ve got here, Mr. Holt—”

  “The problem you’ve got,” said Mr. Holt, “is that you’re in here harassing me, the bloody victim, when you should be sorting out chummy. The bloody criminal.”

  “The problem is,” Blick continued, not bothering to argue with the prisoner and definitely not bothering to seek support from, or even to glance at, the ostentatiously bored woman who sat by his side, representing CID, “that the description you gave us of your mugger at the time was—and I’m quoting from your original statement here—‘a tall, well-built white male, aged early twenties, with dark hair, pockmarked skin, and a goatee beard.’ Yes? Whereas, the lad you attacked by the car park earlier today is a short, thin fourteen-year-old with blue hair, no beard, and an enviably clear complexion. That, you see, is our problem.”

  Mr. Holt, a round man of high pink complexion, bald except for his ears, drummed his fingers on the table and made faces of incredulity at his lawyer. His lawyer—a young, solemn-faced Indian woman—tried to persuade her jaw muscles that she had not just seen the CID officer yawning. The ensuing struggle between reflex and professionalism caused her eyes to bulge and her nostrils to flare. Mr. Holt interpreted this as full-on support for his brave battle against police stupidity.

  “He could have shaved it.”

  “Pardon?” said Blick.

  “Could have shaved the beard. Dyed his hair. And I said he was white, didn’t I?”

  PC Blick sighed the sigh of a martyr. He rubbed his hands over his five o’clock shadow. “Mr. Holt,” he said. “It’s not the same bloke. Is it? I mean, come on—what’s he done? Had surgery to reduce the length of his legs? Is he a basketball player who always dreamt of being a jockey, do you suppose?”

  “Could have been crouching,” said Holt.

  “It-is-not-the-same-man,” said Blick. “Be reasonable. This child is nothing like the young man who attacked you. You have beaten up, and seriously injured, an entirely innocent young boy.”

  “Innocent? I’ll tell you what, Constable, I’d love to meet an innocent youth in this neighbourhood. Ha! Even one.”

  “I’m sure your solicitor has explained to you the extremely serious nature of your situation. Now what I am going to ask you to do is to talk to her again, and to think hard, and to see if you can’t come up with some way of explaining today’s rather bizarre events to my satisfaction.”

  “Surely that is no great mystery, Constable?” said the lawyer, who had learned in the very earliest days of her legal career that talking is often an efficacious cure for yawning. “My client simply made a mistake of identification. We all make mistakes.”

  “That boy made one,” said Holt, “when he decided it was all right to kick people in the crotch outside the snooker hall and run off with their wallets.”

  This time, Blick’s sigh was unfeigned. “Mr. Holt—it was a different boy. It was, in actual fact, a very different boy. Yes?”

  The lawyer held up her hands, palms out. “Constable, I think I should like to consult with my client
.”

  “Interview suspended because solicitor needs a pee,” said PC Blick. Silently.

  Most people are not muggers. This piece of knowledge—as well as explaining why cops are often less cynical about human nature than their civilian neighbors—is crucial to the functioning of law enforcement.

  There are three broad categories of crime. Crimes that almost everyone commits at least once (mostly motoring offenses and dope smoking); crimes that almost no one commits (such as terrorism or serial killing); and crimes that the same, small group of offenders commit over and over again—like indecent exposure or joyriding. Or mugging.

  In an area the size of that policed by PC Blick and his colleagues, there was a core of between twenty and thirty young people, most of them drug abusers, which was responsible for almost all street robberies. This was one of the main theoretical planks of Operation Victim Bus: when Blick took his victims out on their tours, they weren’t looking for a needle in a haystack. They were looking for a needle in a haberdasher’s.

  One look at Dean Stubbs in his hospital bed was enough to tell Blick that the boy wasn’t a member of the local muggers corps. Of course, he could be a new face, but Blick didn’t think so. Blick reckoned there was something else going on. Mr. Holt was lying—that was what was going on.

  “I hope you’ve got the bastard pervert that did this,” said the middle-aged blonde woman at Dean’s bedside. “I hope you’ve got him safe behind bars, because if you haven’t, my son’ll have him. And that’s not an idle threat, believe me. My son knows Tae Kwon Do.”

  “I know him, and all,” said Blick, pulling up a chair. “Runs the Chinese chippy down by the leisure center?”

  “Oh, that’s right—have a laugh!”