“What else do we know?” the Tiergarten chief asked.
“A lot more, but…” Steffen gestured that he was sorry. “You know, don’t you, dear colleague, that I have to keep that to myself.”
The colleague from the West smiled. “Of course. But if we don’t strike a deal together, then neither side gets anything.”
“What do you mean, a deal?”
“Come now: obviously you came over to our side because you want to talk to Seidelmann’s brother. If you attempt to do that without us or against us, I’ll have you arrested. And if you try to be sneaky and quiet and covert, and see him, you run another risk: he’ll clam up and he’ll call our colleagues in the Stumm Police.”
Steffen nodded. “You could be right.”
“Thank you. So here is what I propose we do: your young colleague here takes a little nap at the precinct and she talks in her sleep and of course there are no laws against that; then you go to Wiclefstrasse and you talk to Hannes Seidelmann … with our young State Attorney intern, Mr. Bacheran.”
“Steffen agreed. “OK. It is of course outrageous that you should blackmail me in such a way but as long as Socialism isn’t victorious everywhere we have to make compromises with the class enemy. So shut your eyes and speak, Miss Leupahn.”
Bacheran took down what Miss Leupahn now revealed about the Seidelmann case: he was a fairground exhibitor and traveling salesman from Saxony. He had come to Berlin in November to bury his old mother. Stayed at his brother’s and sister’s. Besides Hannes there is also a Gerda Seidelmann. Hermann had brought 3,200 Marks East to exchange in Berlin for Western currency and also to buy spare parts. On the night of December 3rd, he had not come home. He didn’t return the following days, which was when the brother and sister had gone to the missing persons’ bureau.
Inspector Steffen got up. “Thank you very much for the hospitality, honored colleagues, ladies. You don’t know anything, I don’t know anything, and if Mr. Bacheran comes with us now, the only reason is that he is attracted to Miss Leupahn’s charms; he is not present in any official capacity.”
The criminal assistant from East Berlin blushed and Bacheran was suddenly struck by her beauty. They made their way on foot from Wilsnackerstrasse to Wiclefstrasse. They didn’t have a car and it wasn’t worth taking the streetcar for just four stops. There were no duty transport vouchers for colleagues from the East and they wouldn’t be able to ask for expenses since technically they were not here. Bacheran wanted to treat them to a trip on the nr. 2 but Miss Leupahn declared that walking was healthy. In those days two kilometers on foot was nothing.
“When the 86 stopped running after the war I walked 4 kms every morning to Grünau to catch the subway.”
Bacheran was quick. “You must live in Karolinenhof…?”
“Clever deduction.”
“It’s not a deduction at all. So you walked all the way down the lake.”
“No, I went through the woods.”
“We used to take walks along Langen See lake, and on the banks of the Dahme river. From Grünau to Schmöckwitz.” Bacheran could see himself renewing those walks … with Miss Leupahn at his side.
“We… Are you married?”
Bacheran laughed. “If this is an interrogation – I won’t say another word without my attorney. But let me reassure you: no, I go for walks every Sunday with my dear little mama. Which is bad enough. Aunt Erna is always there too. For you it must be much more pleasant… with your husband.”
“He has yet to be created.”
“If he comes to life now that will make him 20 years younger than you are. Do you really want to wait that long…?”
Steffen didn’t let her answer: as they were crossing at the corner of Turmstrasse and Stromstrasse, he moved in between them to talk soccer with Bacheran. Since the young State Attorney lived in NeuKölln he was of course a fan of Tasmania 1900 whereas the inspector from the East rooted for the Hertha team. Neither of them liked Tennis Borussia. Still, they forgot about soccer when a Fiat Topolino turned into the street.
“16.5 HP, 90 km an hour, top speed!” Stephen raved.
“What I need is a new bicycle.” Bacheran said.
When they turned back Miss Leupahn was no longer with them. She was standing in front of a shop window. Underwear and corsetry. A blond manikin lounged somewhat lasciviously in the window and Bacheran read the advertisement: ‘A beautiful figure with Felina!’ The brassiere – made of the best quality satin with lace cups and adjustable for the best fit - was 6.50 DM; the matching garter belt – with elastic back – 13.75 DM.
“Ah… Are you looking for something Father Christmas could bring you?” Bacheran asked.
“I’d like to meet that Father Christmas.”
“Turn around, you’ll see him.”
“Well, you are pretty straightforward, aren’t you…?”
“It’s an act of pure desperation. I need to escape from my mother and Aunt Erna.”
She turned to go. “Thanks for the compliment.”
Bacheran hesitated: should he go on flirting with her wherever it may lead? She came from the East, he from the West – that meant nothing but trouble. And… he’d always dreamed of a soft, compliant type of girl, the Lilian Harvey type whereas Miss Leupahn was more like a stern governess. On the other hand… when she smiled she looked a little like Hildegard Knef. But he didn’t even know her first name. Brunnhilde probably.
They passed Emdenerstrasse and reached the apartment building at 19 Wiclefstrasse; the doorman immediately confirmed that a Mr. Seidelmann did live there. Down the hall, up two flights of stairs, center left. They went up. They hoped Hannes Seidelmann and his sister would already be at home. Bacheran rang the bell and it was opened after a very short interval. As if they had been expected. They introduced themselves and were shown in. “Please sit down. May we offer you something?”
Bacheran thanked the brother and sister and answered for the three of them: “No thank you…”
“You already know the sad truth… That your brother was murdered,” Bacheran spoke first. “And we wish to extend our deepest sympathies to you.”
Brother and sister thanked him. “It’s all so horrible,” Hannes added. “He managed to survive the war… and now, at home in Germany he is thro…, murdered.”
Bacheran jumped. If he heard correctly, Seidelmann was about to say something different before he said ‘murdered’. ‘Throttled’ maybe. And that was something he could not have known. Or was he injecting something that was not in fact there? Mm…it was not difficult to imagine that a man would kill his own brother, not since Cain and Abel. Maybe he hated his brother since they were children, maybe he had an affair with his sister in law, or maybe he wanted his brother’s money. All this was going through his head as Hannes and Gerda Seidelmann talked about their brother. As he listened, Bacheran’s eyes fell on a prospectus lying on the coffee table. An ad for the Gregor Gölztsch furniture store at the corner of Uhland and Kantstrasse. He knew the ad: ‘G.G. Furniture, a Great Idea.’ He looked around him discreetly. The Seidelmanns’ furniture looked more like it dated back to the days of the Kaiser, something new was badly needed here. Especially if he wanted to bring a woman into the nest. But it was so expensive!
“…and then we went around everywhere and showed people the note saying ‘Beautiful woman at the Zoo’ and we asked about him, in vain.”
“Was he interested in other women?” Steffen asked.
“Our brother had four children and he was a good family man.”
As if the one excluded the other, Bacheran thought to himself and he looked at Seidlemann’s hands. They were certainly strong enough. And then, as he had just explained, he used to work laying cables for the telegraph and he had done that for half of his life. Cables and wires. Cords, ropes, in a sense. And you didn’t need a rope or a clothes line to throttle a man, a telephone cord would do.
At that point, Bacheran felt pretty sure that Seidelmann was the perpetrator.
“No, no.” Seidelmann protested. A bit too insistently, in Bacheran’s view. “My brother brought this prospectus here.”
Inspector Steffen got up. “Well, all this looks pretty murky…”
That’s true, Bacheran thought. The dismembered city, the dismembered corpse. The whole East-West puzzle.
Miss Leupahn didn’t let the general moodiness infect her and spoke matter-of-factly. “What we may conclude is this: we still have no trace of the perpetrator and as to the scene of the crime, we are fully in the dark. But a reward will be offered for the apprehension of the culprit.”
12.
It was the third day of Advent. In the Fuldastrasse apartment, the inhabitants were also sitting at the breakfast table, at precisely eight o’clock in the morning. “You need order in your life.” Had the Bacheran family descended from ancient nobility these words would surely have stood in gold lettering on their coat of arms. Bernhard’s father would have taken the words to refer to God and the cosmos, to the precisely measured trajectory of the planets and comets; his mother would have seen in them the expression of a well regulated human organism. No wonder their son had decided to study law: wasn’t a comprehensive system of justice humankind’s only chance to impose order on chaos? At the same time, he had always been aware that order was only one half of being alive, not the entire thing. And he was hungry for the other half. As long as it didn’t mean the impulse to kill and dismember human bodies.
“You’re so quiet son…” His mother gave him a searching look. “You intended to take it a little easy, after you passed the state exam…”
“Not before I become Justice Minister,” he grumbled.
“Here, have some salted ham.”
“Yes, I will. Maybe biting into some raw meat will give me an idea of who killed Hermann Seidelmann.”
When he said that, the two women were silent; then Anne-Marie Bacheran turned to her favorite topic: the first few months after the end of the war. “Imagine, in Neukölln alone eight school buildings were destroyed. Sometimes we had more than forty students in a class and we taught in two or three shifts a day. At our school, the roof and the technical materiel were badly hit. I read yesterday that removing everything that was destroyed is going to cost 113,600 Reichsmark. And to this day we don’t really have a serviceable gymnasium.”
Her son found it difficult not to be rude. “I know mother, I worked towards the Abitur in your school for continuing education when I came out of POW camp.”
Erna Nostiz, his mother’s younger sister had helped bring NeuKölln’s People’s College back to life and suffered some injuries doing it so she also started off the day with a report on her health. “My sciatica left me in peace all night but my gall bladder gave me some trouble. Ami, please don’t make us anything heavy today.”
“You poor thing, that business with Schröder made you sick.” Karl Schröder had offered his services to the People’s College and his program had been on every body’s lips: ‘Clear the rubble, care for the land, plant healthy new seeds.’ But then he had to make a choice: either he remained a member of the SED or he kept his office. He couldn’t do both. So, after he unequivocally stated: “I will remain a member of the SED,” there was nothing left but to fire him. The mayor had fired him on grounds of ill health.
Annemarie Bacheran returned to the subject of her sister’s gall balder. “Don’t worry. Today we’re having meatloaf. And we start with a soup.”
“Cherry soup with floor flour, then,” Bernhardt added. This was an allusion to his mother’s experience at Friedland’s department store, the one that became Hertie on Karl-Marx-Strasse: the store had housed the sector’s main food depot at the end of the war. One of her former students had worked there and had been allowed to collect whatever flour had seeped out of the sacks off the floor. So they started referring to it as “floor flour”.
“In a way, it’s just like it’s always been, but in another way, it’s as if all this happened eons ago,” Erna pondered: “I can still see the Tiergarten, like an oasis of green… now it’s an empty steppe.”
“The Tiergarten will come back to life, don’t worry,” Anne Marie said. “Bremen donated thirty thousand young trees. And when they’re grown…”
Afterwards, the conversation turned to the week’s news: everything that had happened was repeated and thoroughly examined. The Soviet administration in the Eastern sector had forced Sauerbruch to give up his position at the head of Charité Hospital in East Berlin. He had worked there for thirty years. The SED was increasingly united against West Berlin and it vowed to Crush the imperialist U.S. bridgehead. The Javanese dancer Laya Raki was appearing at the theater Monte Carlo near the Zoo. And there were still people who swore they had spotted Marlene Dietrich in Berlin. “Maybe she’ll show up at the Christmas matinée today,” Bernhardt said. The matinée was scheduled for 10:45 AM at the theater on Kurfürstendamm; it was organized by the Telegraf and the motto was ’Berlin’s Artists for Poor Children.’ Everybody who was anybody would be there: even Curth Flatow, Victor de Kowa, O.F. Hasse, Brigitte Mira, Walter Gross, Sonia Ziemann and the Schöneberg boys’ choir.
“I would love to hear them,” Erna sighed. “When they sing I feel as though my soul is lifted from my body and floats in the heavenly spheres.”
Bernhardt could not help saying, as he looked at his aunt: “I see you have attended one of your own classes: ‘Existentialism and new philosophical trends.’”
She took his words seriously and was hurt. “We can be proud of what we have achieved. Some clear away the ruins of the Third Reich – and others like us, the ideological rubbish. What they sing on the other side is true after all: ‘Rising from the ruins…’ ”
“For me the song should go: ‘Found in the ruins…’ You know what I mean, the various body parts that were found.” He was intent on steering the conversation in that direction so he would be able to tell his mother as gently as possible that he wouldn’t be having the meatloaf with them that day. “I’m sorry but we have a meeting with our colleagues from East Berlin at twelve…” That was a half truth, but since it wasn’t entirely a lie, he didn’t have to blush too deeply.
“On a Sunday?”
“Lots of people have to work on Sundays: S-Bahn motormen, nurses, radio announcers…”
“A lot has happened to us but whatever it was the motto in our family was ‘Even if the whole world is falling apart…we never miss Sunday meals’. We never did. Human beings need points of reference to anchor them in life.”
“Yes Mother, but they don’t have to be the same forever.”
Without another word, he got up and left the room. As he was standing in the entrance hall slipping on his coat he knew that the two women were sitting at the table dumbfounded and crying. Should he go back in and tell them why he didn’t want to have lunch with them and why he couldn’t today? Yes…No…
His mother made the decision for him. She stood in the living room doorway and looked at him full of worry and reproach: “I suppose you’re going out to play billiards and you’ll come home drunk.”
“No, Mother, I’m going to the bordello. I want to find a daughter in law for you.” He slammed the door behind him and ran down the stairs. He hated to hurt her but on the other hand life must take its course. At the same time he had to stop and consider the words he had just used. He didn’t know much about Sigmund Freud but he felt his unconscious had somehow played a part. The bordello must betray his desire for sexual love and the mention of a daughter in law must mean that Miss. Leupahn had become more than just a colleague to him. Interesting. When he reached the street he said what he was thinking out loud and he used the words his father would have used: “If our Lord wishes it to be, then so be it. Thy will be done.”
He decided not to take the BVG and save the money; he walked to the Neukölln S-Bahn station al
l the way down Karl-Marx-Strasse. Every time he walked down that street he was curious to see what had changed. All around the last of the rubble was being cleared. At the corner of Erkstrasse where the beautiful old Customs House had once stood, the work had just been finished. As a child he always thought it was a castle and he tried to build a copy with his Anker building blocks. He walked on. On his left Pogade’s camera store and the post office, on his right the impressive façade of the former Jewish department store, H. Joseph and Co. That was also a landmark of his youth. “Mommy I’d like to go to Joseph and Elevator.” The building itself was fairly intact but the windows were shuttered or walled up and the place looked empty and desolate. Still, the store was scheduled to reopen the following year. Everywhere stores had made an effort to decorate their windows as best they could because there was a big competition going on. As he passed it he thought the drugstore had a chance: the store keeper had managed to turn two hundred pounds of soap into a magical fountain of soap strung with a violin string. And with a purchase of over 5 Dmark you got a free ticket for a drawing. The big prize was a ten day trip to West Germany. They had seven tickets at home.
He walked across the intersection of Ganghofer and Richardstrasse and reached the Passage, the true center of Neukölln. “Where should we meet?” “At the Passage.” The Passage didn’t just mean the intersection between Karl-Marx-Strasse and Richardstrasse, it also designated the entire building complex in the shape of an H, the bar in the letter being a bridge section five floors above ground. There were dance halls and music halls and also a movie house. Bacheran had spent countless hours there. Koffer Panneck on Uthmannstrasse was another landmark of his youth and also the Bickhardt bookstore just opposite, and Uhren-Kampfer, Bading Music, Kiessling’s (hardware, tools, household appliances) where you could find the rarest type of screws to fix old appliances. You always found what you were looking for and never left empty handed from Kiessling’s; people came here from the farthest corners of Brandenburg. The church of the Magdalene was of no interest to Bacheran, his family had always attended service at the Martin-Luther church next to it. Kajot’s clothing store, just south of the Ringbahn was dearer to his heart. That was where his mother and sometimes also Aunt Erna bought him the clothes he needed during the entire length of his studies. He was grateful for their generosity but he also found being ‘kept’ by the two women somewhat demeaning. “It’s been hard to endure,” he said more than once. Still, as the ad said: ‘Wear Kajot, wear the best.’ He hoped Miss. Leupahn would think so too. He was thinking of her so hard that he almost walked into the oncoming 15 streetcar on Thüringerstrasse. The angry driver hit the warning bell.
Cold Angel: Murder in Berlin 1949 Page 9