Cold Angel: Murder in Berlin 1949

by Horst Bosetzky

  “Do I go to the Missing Persons’ Bureau by myself, or are you coming?”

  “Please go by yourself, tonight is bowling night.”

  “Okay.” Bacheran couldn’t help using “okay”. Oh well, it wouldn’t be so bad if West Berlin did become the 49th or 50th state of the USA one day, as some people kept hoping.

  It took him a while to find the phone number for the Missing Persons’ Bureau but when he finally did he called immediately. The description of the woman in the telegram differed slightly from the one given by the newspaper so Bacheran built a composite picture from both sources in order to make the search as easy as possible.

  “Yes, that could be a certain Dorothea Merten, aka Doris. She’s been missing since the evening of December 26, 1949. Lives in Spandau. She was on her way to her sister’s in Weissensee, in the Eastern sector to celebrate the second day of Christmas. She never got there.”

  “Can you give me the name and address of the sister so we can go and talk to her?”

  “Yes, please wait…” The information was not straightforward. “Ilse Breitenstein, somewhere in Weissensee, Rennbahnstrasse…”

  “No phone?”

  “No. not at home. But I have the telephone number of her place of work, the Treptow/Elsenstrasse streetcar yard. She’s a streetcar driver.”

  Bacheran thanked and called immediately. Why put off what you can do today. That saying had been impressed on him so much that it had become a reflex.

  “Yes, Mrs. Breitenstein… She’s not here right now she’s working the number 3 line.”

  “The 3…? Then she should be passing by us on Fehrbelliner Platz…?

  “Yup, unless she derails…”

  “Could you tell me at what time she will pass by us on her next round?”

  “You sure want to know a lot!”

  “Her sister has probably been murdered and we need your help to catch the murderer.”

  “That’s something else. I need some time to figure it out. Give me your number, I’ll call you back.”

  The employee from BVB did as she had promised and, at 6:33 sharp, Bacheran was standing at the streetcar stop. It came up, and there was indeed a woman sitting in the driver’s seat. He got on, stood by the driver’s corner and waited until the bell rang. He hesitated a little to talk to the woman, she looked like she was the type that would be played by Grete Weise, Fita Benkhoff or Adele Sandrock in the movies, with a face like a bulldog and a sharp tongue; also, above the windshield, there was a sign that said “Do not talk to the driver” in large letters. After three stops he finally took a chance and introduced himself.

  “Forgive me for talking to you but it’s an urgent matter. My name is Bernhard Bacheran, I’m with the Berlin State Attorney’s office, and right now I’m working with Homicide.”

  Ilse Breitenstein turned the handle so hard it looked as if she were initiating an emergency stop. “I read it in the papers… The dead woman from Alex… and I thought: God, that could be Doris.”

  “Is that because of the description that was given, the woman’s appearance, or…? Or for another reason?”

  “She’s been so depressed these days.”

  “She didn’t say why?”

  “I didn’t ask because I thought it was because of Rudi again. Rudi is her husband. They want to get a divorce but they live in the same apartment. And because Rudi is a butcher by profession.”

  Bacheran could see how it all fit. The husband’s profession and the sister saying that Dorothea had been so sad these days. Obviously, the husband had murdered Seidelmann – and she had found out. She was afraid that he would want to kill her now to silence her. Bacheran thanked the driver and expressed his sympathy. Then he asked her for the address in Spandau: it was 5 Pickelsdorferstrasse. He got off the streetcar at Hermannplatz, looked for a phone booth and called inspector Menzel even though he knew the inspector was going bowling. Naturally Menzel was not too happy about the extra hours of work but he understood that under the circumstances he had to show up in Spandau.

  “I’ll see to it that we get a staff car. The best would be for you to take the U-Bahn to Ruhleben and wait there at the station. I’ll collect you there. Let’s say in 40 minutes.

  It worked out perfectly but when they got to the apartment on Pickelsdorferstrasse, the front door was already locked. There were no buzzers in those days.

  “Which of us is able to climb a façade?” Bacheran asked.

  “You of course,” Menzel laughed. “You’re younger and you’re on your way up in the world.”

  “Right.” Bacheran was still something of a kid: he walked to the gutter pipe and made as if he were going to climb it. He got as high as a meter from the ground and jumped back down and said he preferred to wait until a tenant came. “Even if we have to stay til midnight.”

  They were saved much earlier than that: someone came down the stairs on his way out. A strong man, about fifty years of age, of heavy build.

  Bacheran called to him: “Excuse me sir, could you let us in, we wish to speak to someone, a Mr. Merten. Does he live here?”

  “He’s standing in front of you. Did anything happen to my wife?”

  “Are you the one who declared her missing – or did someone else?” Menzel asked him.

  “I’m the one. But why are you here…? Is this already an interrogation?” Rudi Merten looked like he was gearing for a fight.

  Instinctively, Bacheran took a step back and hastened to tell him who they were in the hope of calming the man down. “And since the murdered woman whose body was found at Alexanderplatz, properly cut up in a way only a butcher would be capable of, is in all probability your wife, I wouldn’t do anything rash if I were you.”

  Rudi Merten gave him such a dirty look, it was clear he was having a hard time controlling himself. “Am I already being arrested?”

  “No,” Menzel answered. “But we would like to speak to you and have a look at your apartment.”

  They went up. Merten opened the door and let them in. He maintained a heavy silence. Bacheran had a strange feeling he couldn’t define: He felt as if he were defiling the place as well as the dead woman. Let the dead rest in peace… he also felt something like the awe one feels inside a temple. Even if this was a home like any other. Dark furniture bought at the beginning of the Nazi years, dark wallpaper, imitation Persian rugs. Everything looked a little dusty, the chairs and the sofa were worn. The only thing out of the ordinary was the typewriter on the desk in the living room. There was a sheet of paper in it. Somebody, probably Mrs. Merten herself had typed a few lines. Bacheran walked over to read them: it was a poem. As long as you’re alive/ The end is a new beginning. / As long as you strive/ There is… Evidently, it was hard to find a word that rhymed and still made some kind of sense.

  He turned to Rudolf Merten. “Your wife wanted to be a writer, a poet?”

  “Yes and since she caught that bug, I’m not good enough for her anymore, she dreams of higher things.”

  Menzel examined the apartment but did not touch anything. “Tell me, Mr. Merten… You had become so estranged from your wife that you didn’t celebrate Christmas together?”

  “No, what do you think…?! On Christmas Eve she went to her sister’s and she wanted to be back in Spandau for the second day of Christmas.”

  “But she wasn’t back?”

  “No. That’s why I reported her missing. On the third day of Christmas.”

  “She could have stayed at her sister’s…,” Menzel suggested.

  “But she wasn’t there. I phoned Ilse at the rail yard.”

  Bacheran thought that was a little surprising. “Why worry so much about your wife when you would have liked to get rid of her?” He suspected that the reason why he had gone to the Missing Persons’ Bureau so fast was that he wanted to forestall any suspicion. Everyone would say: If he was the killer, he would have kept quiet, if…

  But Merten wasn’t flustered. “She’s still my wife. And as long as we are sti
ll married, well…you can hope that you’ll get back together. I didn’t want a divorce.”

  Menzel was the kind of man who liked love triangles and he immediately suggested: “You say you didn’t want a divorce, Mr. Merten, but surely you had a lady friend…?”

  “Yes, a brunette.”

  “Can we know her name?”

  “I don’t know it myself.”

  “You must have talked to each other somehow?”

  “I call her ‘my angel’ and things like that. Her husband is a big shot, a politician. She told me. But he was in the hospital during the Christmas holiday.”

  “And you met here in your apartment?”

  “Yes. My wife wasn’t here.”

  “And where did you first meet your ‘angel’?”

  “At Anhalter station, by the booths. A friend of mine sells soap there. I was helping him out before Christmas.”

  “I thought you worked for Siemens.”

  “I called in sick.”

  Bacheran followed the exchange attentively. It sounded a bit too much like a movie plot: Merten and the brunette kill the lady with the typewriter because they want to be free to love each other. But it was worth investigating the scenario. Menzel seemed to think so too: his eyes kept returning to the floor boards. And the fact that he had a sudden urge to go to the toilet could only mean that he wanted to go and check for blood there.

  Bacheran took over. “Let’s be serious: if the dead woman from Alex really is your wife, then I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. The story about that girl friend of yours whose name you don’t know, go tell that to someone who believes in fairy tales.” He realized he had once again used a turn of phrase that his father used when speaking to ‘simple’ people.

  Menzel returned from the toilet and Bacheran could tell from his face that he had found nothing. But that didn’t mean anything. They could have cut up Dorothea Merten’s body somewhere else entirely. Or they could have cleaned up so thoroughly that you couldn’t see anything without a magnifying glass or a microscope. Was Menzel going to take Merten into temporary custody? Yes, he was.

  “I must ask you to come with us Mr. Merten. The coroner will decide what happens next.”

  26.

  Helga Leupahn was in her office at the Volks Police headquarters thinking how much she dreaded the evening in Karolinenhof. Sitting with her parents at the dinner table, then listening to the radio or reading. Pure Biedermeyer petit bourgeois respectability, cozy and boring. They had longed for it throughout the war… She knew she was being ungrateful. But… there was more to life. Bernhard had just called: he had to go to his cousin Gudrun’s birthday. She wasn’t sure if she believed him. He had never mentioned a Gudrun before. Was it all over before it even started? Maybe that was for the best. No, it wasn’t. To take her mind off the subject she picked up the Tägliche Rundschau. In Zwickau the 500th automobile, a DKWF9 model, had come off the assembly line of the People’s Audi plant. The production at the smelting works near Freiberg in Saxony had increased by 148 percent over the past two years, 1948 and 1949. In the USSR the people’s income had seen an 842.9 percent increase since 1913. Conversely, things were steadily worsening for the 15 million jobless in West Germany. Many lived on stale bread and potatoes.

  “So, we can hope that they’ll all come over to the GDR as refugees,” Steffen said. He had tiptoed in and saw what she was reading. “Clear out the upstairs floor in Karolinenhof. Ah… but you don’t have upstairs and downstairs in your house, you’re for peace and disarmament.”

  Helga was too angry to find anything to answer back. She could not understand how someone like Siegfried Steffen could talk like that. He was a veteran of the Spanish civil war, belonged to the Union of Citizens Persecuted by the National Socialist regime, the VVN, was a member of the SED, and yet he defended the decadent West with such insistence that she should, in fact, be reporting him to her political officer. “Comrade Steffen’s conspicuously ironical stance towards our Workers’ and Farmers’ State can only be characterized as corrosive.” Of course, she did not report him. Steffen was such a nice guy and she was too decent, but still. Oh well, he was going to retire soon and his successor would hopefully be more in tune with the new era.

  Best to talk about work. “Has anything come up about the Memhardstrasse murder?”

  Steffen sat down, lit a cigarette and endured a fit of smokers’ coughing. “Yes… didn’t Bacheran tell you?”

  “No…” If she had been a little girl of four she would have cried, she was so disappointed, she felt so alone.

  Steffen saw her face and understood immediately. He tried to console her. “The phone probably wasn’t working again and so he sent a telegram. It ended up on my desk.”

  She was grateful. “Yes… What does it say?”

  “That the victim is most probably a saleslady from Spandau, a certain Dorothea – Doris Merten. Her sister is going to contact us for the identification.”

  “Imagine if I had to go to the morgue, and my sister was…”

  Steffen’s laughter was raspy and dry and throaty like Ernst Busch’s. “But you don’t have a sister.”

  “I was supposed to have one but then there was the world economic crisis, and joblessness and after that the Nazis. At that point my parents refused to bring any more children into the world.”

  “One less person to build Socialism,” Steffen said. “Your father should have thought of that.” There was a knock at the door. “Yes, come in…”

  A plump woman came in wearing a streetcar uniform that was too large for her, its color somewhere between grey, green and black, somewhat reminiscent of a horse blanket. She introduced herself as Ilse Breitenstein. “I’ve come because of my sister… Dorothea Merten… This is so awful. She survived the war and now this… But maybe it’s not her, maybe she found a man and left.”

  The inspector got up and greeted her. “Steffen… My colleague, Helga Leupahn… Well, Mrs. Breitenstein … What has to be has to be. We don’t have official transportation, socialism hasn’t reached that stage yet and once again, the number 9 bus is not running, but we’ll get to Hannoverschen Strasse somehow.”

  It was less than ten minutes with the S-Bahn from Alexanderplatz to Lehrter Stadt station. As usual during rush hour, the subway cars were overcrowded and they were squeezed together. Ilse Breitenstein tried to relieve her anxiety by talking constantly. She talked of her sister’s childhood and marriage, about what they had endured during the war, about the dead in her family. Even though Helga tried to turn her head away, she couldn’t avoid the spittle. Neither could Steffen, if that was any consolation.

  An icy wind blew across the Lehrter freight yard and Helga couldn’t help imagining herself jumping unto the thin ice of Humboldt harbor and falling in. They passed Charité hospital and reached the morgue. There wasn’t much left to say. Thank God.

  When Ilse Breitenstein saw the dismembered body from Memhardstrasse, she screamed: “She looks as if she had been run over by a streetcar! Yes, it’s her. My God, Doris, no… Make her come back to life! You doctors, you can do anything!” Then she broke down and had to be taken to the hospital nearby.

  A little later Günther Beigang stood with Steffen in front of the corpse and confirmed that the dead woman was his saleslady Dorothea Merten. “Terrible thing… But I had a sort of premonition when I read the news that a corpse had been found at Alex.”

  Steffen pricked up his ears: “A premonition?”

  “Well, she seemed strange lately. She was afraid of something. Probably of her husband. They were separated but they still lived in the same apartment. It’s so hard to find anything these days…”

  Helga looked at her superior. “I’ll check it out.”

  “Good.” Steffen led the little group out to the hall and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. “Tell me Mr. Beigang, when did you see Mrs. Merten for the last time?”

  The dealer didn’t have to think long. “On Christmas Eve, after we closed the store. I drove
her to the S-Bahn. On Potsdammerplatz.”

  “The perfect gentleman…”

  “Yes. No: it was because she had to carry a typewriter, an Erika, a travel typewriter; she was bringing it to a client.”

  “How come?” Helga couldn’t make sense of it.

  Beigang tried to remember. “A nurse… she had bought the typewriter on Christmas Eve at my store as a present for her boyfriend; but she didn’t have the money for the deposit with her, probably didn’t have it at all. So we agreed that Mrs. Merten would bring it to her at her home on the second day of Christmas and would then collect the money.”

  “Such love for one’s neighbor…” Steffen was always doubtful in such cases.

  “Mrs. Merten wanted to go from Spandau to her sister’s in Weissensee and she was going to pass by the house on her way in any case,” the dealer explained a little doubtfully. “Or maybe it was the other way around. She was always a very helpful person.”

  “Mm…” Helga Leupahn could see that Steffen didn’t think that Mr. Beigang was entirely kosher. “Let’s come back to that nurse…”

  “Yes. I think she worked at Robert-Koch Hospital.”

  “But, that’s in Moabit,” Helga said. “And she went all the way out to your store on…”

  “…On Linkstrasse, close to Potsdammerplatz,” Beigang said. “Yes. People know that I have more typewriters in stock than other dealers. And also I had done the rounds in hospitals to see if there was any demand.”

  “All right… Now this nurse… What was her name, is her name… Do you remember by any chance?” Steffen asked and Helga felt sure that he suspected Beigang of murdering Merten and figured the nurse was a figment of his imagination intended to put them on the wrong track.

  Beigang thought a bit. “Something with a KU… Kudrian, Kusanke, Kusan … no. But wait, I must have written it down somewhere.” He opened his briefcase and started rummaging in it. His papers were obviously in a mess. Plus he seemed unable to measure space with one of his eyes. Finally he found the correct folder entitled Outstanding Accounts. “This is it… Here we are: E. Kusian, at Mrs. Stöhr’s, 154a Kantstrasse, Charlottenburg.”