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Cold Angel
Murder in Berlin 1949
Translated by Catherine Dop Miller
Enigma Book
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No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, distributed or transmitted in any printed or electronic form without written permission from Enigma Books. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors' rights. Purchase only authorized editions. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by Enigma Books,
New York
Copyright © 2002 by Jaron Verlag GmbH, Berlin
Copyright © 2012 by Enigma Books
Translated from the German by Catherine Dop Miller
Original German title: Der kalte Engel
First English Edition
e-ISBN 978-1-936274-34-5
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication
Available
Cold Angel
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Part One: It Can Happen To Anyone
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two: A Professional Job
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Three: Me…Me…Me… Elisabeth Kusian
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part Four: Homicide!
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Part Five: A Sensational Trial
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Epilogue
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Final words and acknowledgments
Prologue
1.
Manne threw his school bag into a corner and ran out into the street to meet Jorg and Robert for a game of soccer: to him it was like every other afternoon. But it soon wouldn’t be. He was ten and had known no other world but this one: Berlin was a vast desert of rubble. Same thing in the neighborhoods around Stettiner train station, in Berlin N4. He had grown up on Borsigstrasse. It ran from Elsasstrasse to Ivalidenstrasse and it had 34 buildings. Of these, numbers 6, 11a to 21 and 31b to 34 had been destroyed in the war. Not so bad. His grandfather’s favorite joke was: “Berlin is like a big warehouse: Where’s your house? Where’s my house?” Manne and his friends thought there was no better playground than a complete ruin. Unless you wanted to play soccer. For instance VfR Mannheim against Borussia Dortmund or Unisa Oberschöneweide against BSV 92. Manne had gotten a brand new football from Igelit for his birthday. He always carried it with him.
But where were Jorg and Robert? They had probably run over to the freight depot to see if there were any coal pellets that might have fallen between the tracks. Or they would jump up onto the freight cars and kick some over. Bringing coal home made their parents happier than a report card with a top grade in calculus.
That was mean. Why hadn’t his friends waited for him? Manne walked down the street looking for them. Too bad there weren’t any more rail dumpsters to carry away the rubble. They were perfect for playing D train. His mother had worked as a ruin lady for a long time. Anybody with any strength had been put to work clearing up the mountains of debris. First the streets had been cleared so that the garbage trucks and the streetcars could run. Then all the ruins that still stood and could cave i
n at any moment had to be torn down. That was always very exciting. He loved it when the demolition crews laid a thick cable around some chimney stack that was still standing and pulled it down chanting: “Heave-ho! Heave-ho!” There was such a tremendous dust cloud, when it finally came crashing to the ground!
Beneath the ruins there were still many live explosives and even though it was strictly forbidden to go there, they would climb among the rubble in search of scrap metal: they did it even though they knew that one of these things could blow up any second.
Manne divided the ruins into three basic categories: first, the houses that had been blown to smithereens by mines and aerial bombing: bull’s eye, and there was nothing left but a big pile of rubble. Then there were the buildings that had been struck by firebombing. Inside, there was nothing left, everything, from the basement to the roof, had burned away but the front of the house was intact even if blackened by soot. The third category were the partial wrecks where a house had been half destroyed, cut in two and one half was still lived in. The girders still stuck out and you could see the wallpaper on the walls of what had once been a living room, and now were on the outside.
Where the bomb craters had been filled and fallen houses cleared away, there were now empty spaces. Often a small circus set up its tent there or an amusement park. Maybe this year there would even be a Christmas market.
Still no trace of Jorg and Robert. Manne felt a little unsure. “Don’t go with anybody!” He could hear his mothers’ voice ringing in his ear. What happened to children who went with strangers, nobody among his friends really knew but they believed that they were slaughtered like rabbits and their flesh sold as meat. What if Jorg and Robert…? But no, there they were, standing in front of the church of the Golgotha. Thank God. “Where were you?” he asked. Jorg had been at the center for disinfection. “I had lice.” Robert had been to the doctor’s. “Immunization shot. I missed out at the school immunization. And then, I still had to go home and carry some coal up from the cellar – just like Hennecke, you know.” Adolf Hennecke had surpassed the daily quota for miners by 387 percent and had been named ‘Father of all Workers’ in the GDR.
“What shall we play?” Manne wanted to play soccer, Robert wanted to play Who’s Afraid of the Black Man? Jorg pointed to his head: “Come on, were not enough people for that.” He was for car racing or playing throw a coin against the wall but he didn’t have a majority. In the end they all agreed to play soccer. Jorg against Robert, which meant Union Oberschöneweide (East Berlin) against BSV 92 (West Berlin). The reason for the two teams was that Robert’s father was a ‘border crosser’: he lived in the East and worked in the West. Manne was goal keeper and as such, he had to be absolutely impartial.
They didn’t feel like going all the way to the park, so they stayed on their home turf, Borsigstrasse. Anyway, cars came through once in a lifetime here. The goal posts were the walled up entrance to a ruin of the second category, the firebombed buildings where the façade was intact; it was number 4, Borsigstrasse.
Manne took up his position and kicked the ball into play. It had to go high up and come down as closely as possible in the middle between Jorg and Robert. He yelled: “Start!” The two boys jumped up in the air but missed the ball. It hit the ground behind them, rebounded on the tram rails and rolled into the gutter. Jorg darted off first and had taken possession of the ball, but Robert was ready and they began to jostle and kick furiously. Finally, Jorg saw an opening and made a shot. Manne threw his arms up, driving the ball to the left of the goal posts beyond the door frame. A boy screamed. The precious ball had flown into a window that hadn’t been walled up, on the second floor, landing inside the ruin.
Manne was furious, he shouted at Jorg: “You go get it, you’re the one who kicked it into there!”
Jorg protested: “That’s not true: you’re the one who sent it over in that direction.”
Even Robert was against Manne. “It’s your ball, after all.”
Manne realized that the other boys had won. “Well, at least help me up and stay at the window… in case I get buried in there.”
The two boys promised and they held their hands tightly together to make a step up for Manne. He flew up in the air like a bug, kicked his left foot up, grabbed the window sill with both hands and swung himself up as high as he could; he managed to get his right knee, his lower leg and part of his thigh onto the brickwork. With a few more movements like a swimmer in a swimming belt, he managed to sit on the window sill and looked down into the burned out apartment. Where was his ball?
“Can you see it?” Jorg asked.
“No…” It was getting dark and without a flashlight… Manne bent down lower to look into the depths of the room to see if his ball wasn’t perhaps right under him, in the “blind spot” in a sense.
Then he screamed such a terrible scream that it resonated down Borsigstrasse and he jumped down so suddenly that his friends weren’t able to catch him. He fell on the pavement.
“What happened?”
Inside the ruin, there were the gruesome pieces of a body which had been dismembered. Later, it was discovered that there were two calves, a left thigh and a left arm.
Part One
It Can Happen To Anyone
2.
Every morning, Walter Kusian hoped for one thing: that he wouldn’t have to wake up. That he wouldn’t hear the damn alarm clock anymore. And he wouldn’t have to freeze so much. Or suffer from sciatica. A person whose life isn’t good in the first place should at least be allowed a beautiful death. There will be another miracle…Yea, right. He groped for the switch on the bedside lamp, and turned it on. He wondered if, when you died in your sleep, there was a fraction of a second where you could register what was happening to you. Maybe it was exactly like a man who had survived a head wound. At the hospital he had seen a lot of men who had survived being shot in the head and most of them had felt as if they were swept up in a wave of pleasure. Did the man he had killed feel like that?
Walter Kusian jumped out of bed and walked over to the washstand. The white sink was filled to the top. The enamel had peeled away and the black spots looked like mussels or leeches that had sucked themselves dry and remained stuck. Digusting. The water was so cold that he wouldn’t have been surprised if he had to break through a layer of ice when he first put his fingers in. A few splashes on his face would be enough. So what if he smelled a little: there was no woman he wanted to please. And if he shoveled some refuse again, it was only for the cat, so… He went out to the toilet. It was at the far end of the landing and was used by the Sielaffs and two more people who were subletting. If you happened to be in a hurry, you were in real trouble. So Walter Kusian took bigger steps when he heard Grandpa Pausin closing the door to his room behind him. He reached his goal first and shut himself inside for a long leisurely session. The more he heard Grandpa Pausin and Else Lehman tramping and complaining outside, the better he felt. There was only a weak fifteen watt bulb hanging above the door but his eyes were still good and it was enough to read the paper by. The Telegraf, that Mrs Sielaff cut up in book size sheets and hung on a nail to use as toilet paper was already 14 days old but it was free. Outside, they were complaining and getting angrier. “Is it my fault that I have a hard stool!” Walter Kusian shouted. It was one of the only pleasures he still enjoyed, being able to make the other lodgers angry like this.
“And this man pretends he was a nurse!” said Else Lehman who, during the day, sat behind the counter at the AOK maternity home. “Whoever died in your care was probably better off dead than alive.”
“I can take care of you too; why don’t you come to my room later.”
That was enough. She yanked out the fuse and he sat in the dark. There was nothing left then but to use his reading material for his backside. He walked out and whistled past the other two on his way back to his room and set about having some breakfast. The water for the instant coffee was soon ready on the immersion heater. True, he didn’t hav
e the money for real coffee but he did at least have enough to put yoghurt on his bread. He liked that very much even though his coworker Arthur always joked: “Runny white cheese makes you go but it don’t make you strong.”
Walter Kusian left home at exactly six o’clock. No reason he should be cold. He wore heavy boots and black corduroy pants that a coal delivery man had given him in exchange for a stolen rabbit. Even the old Wehrmacht overcoat he had was a lucky find. It would have been even better if he could have kept the epaulets and the stripes. In any case, it had belonged to a First Lieutenant. As for him he had only made it to private in the medical corps. He never forgave the Führer for that; he was one of the so-called “old warriors”: he had joined the NSDAP Nazi Party early on. He had been a party member since 1926. “I will lead you to a magnificent future…” Walter Kusian had believed in the words of Adolf Hitler. He tramped down the steps.
The Sternstrasse in Wedding was like a gigantic backdrop for a film: all drizzle and ruins. THE KILLERS ARE AMONG US. Cars and swerving headlights were as few and far between as shooting stars in the night sky. He crossed the Nordbahnstrasse to get to the Wollanstrasse station and went up the stairs to the S-Bahn train. The downtown train was just pulling out of the station. But he didn’t have to wait and freeze. It took him less than ten minutes to walk to the Friedrichstrasse station and go up to the train. After just one stop, at Lehrter station, he got off again because he realized it was better to take the streetcar from here directly to the Knie instead of having to walk from the Zoo station.
He hated the long trip to work! What angered Walter Kusian the most was that he had to travel through two cities. The separation of Berlin that had now become a fact of life had started in June 1948 when the Soviet Union had pulled out of the Allied Control. When East Berlin was declared capital city of the GDR in October 1949, West Berlin remained formally a Four Power city and simply but expensively the sacrosanct appendix of Bonn and its Republic. The Social Democrat head of Economic Affairs put it well when he said: “We must face the fact that Berlin will be separated into two parts as if they were two cities.”
Cold Angel: Murder in Berlin 1949 Page 1