Cold Angel: Murder in Berlin 1949

by Horst Bosetzky

  Half an hour later, Inspector Steffen and his assistant got off the S-Bahn at Zoo station and were on their way to Kantstrasse.

  “I have a very bad feeling about this,” Helga said. “This is West Berlin and we’re not supposed to be here. If the Stumm Police or the Americans…”

  Steffen laughed. “Child, we are in the British sector and the English are not as uptight about that. If anything should happen, I know some people. Also among the Americans. Ernest Hemingway wasn’t the only one who fought the Fascists in Spain.”

  “If they catch us they’ll throw us in jail.”

  “You should be grateful for that experience too.” Steffen searched for his last cigarette. The he sang softly: We are the soldiers of the swamp and we carry our spades…”

  “They’ll be angry at us at home in the GDR too.”

  “I’ll take full responsibility.”

  They had reached the intersection between Kantstrasse and Fasanenstrasse and were soon standing in front of 154a. They had to walk up two flights of stairs and Steffen, with his smoker’s lungs and a bullet wound in one lung was soon completely out of breath. “To think that even in high class West Berlin they can’t afford an elevator… there’s no counting on the bourgeoisie anymore…” Finally they were looking at the name plate W. Stöhr engraved in black lettering on shining copper and Kusian written in indelible ink on a piece of cardboard paper. It was certainly easy to make out which of the two was the owner and which was the tenant. Steffen wheezed and then said to Helga: “See, there’s no need to go to the zoo to see the rich.” He turned away and coughed up phlegm. The walls shook and a few doors opened below. He signaled to Helga to ring the bell. She did and a few seconds later they heard someone walk to the foyer. The spy hole was pulled open. “Who is this please?”

  Steffen bowed in the most formal way. “Please forgive us for disturbing you Mrs. Stöhr… Forgive me dear lady… We wished to talk to Mrs. Kusian. “Or are you she?”

  “No, I’m not but my tenant is not at home.”

  Steffen now pulled out his shield and held it up to the spy hole. “Police!”

  Mrs. Stöhr took the latch off and opened the door. “Good evening… How can I help you?”

  “Just as I said: We would like to see Mrs. Kusian. She’s a nurse, right…?”

  “Yes she is. But my lodger left around 5 PM – with a man from the Department of Criminal Investigation.”

  “Damm…er, too bad,” Steffen said. Helga wasn’t pleased either that the Western police had beaten them to it.

  Mrs. Stöhr was feeling talkative: “You see, Mrs. Kusian’s friend is Inspector Muschan.”

  “Oh…” Steffen was a sly old fox but it still took him a few seconds to figure out what this meant. “All right then… Please tell Mrs. Kusian that we will be back tomorrow morning.”

  On the way back to the S-Bahn they had time to discuss what they had just learned.

  “At first I thought this Kusian might have done in Mrs. Merten… Jealousy, a love triangle… But if she’s a colleague’s girl friend, then… he wouldn’t protect a murderer.”

  “Who knows…” Steffen was again wracked by a fit of coughing. “Maybe he has no idea that…”

  All of a sudden Helga felt very suspicious. “What if the Western police concocted all this just to make us look like fools?”

  “In the Cold War, everything’s possible but…I still don’t see how they could have delivered Seidelmann and Merten to our door step, so to speak.”

  “The American secret service could have concocted the whole thing.”

  “Na, they’re not that clever. Let’s go to Robert-Koch Hospital and see if Mrs. Kusian is on duty.”

  But she wasn’t. And they were quite surprised when the head nurse told them that Nurse Elisabeth would never again be on duty in Moabit. Even though many of her women patients thought she was an angel.

  “But why…?”

  “Because she quit on December 31, 1949. After we asked her to.”

  “Could we know the reason?”

  “I don’t wish to talk about it.” The Head Nurse walked away.

  “What now?” Helga asked.

  “Let’s find someone who doesn’t have such scruples.”

  They found the right person: the hospital administrator, Max Ramolla. Steffen shuddered when he recognized the man as Retired Lieutenant Colonel Ramolla; he let him talk.

  “Mrs. Kusian sullied the good name of all our nurses because she borrowed money from countless patients and never returned it. Apart from that, she is a notorious liar.”

  Helga Leupahn thanked him for the information. They walked to Bellevue station to get a train home. The big question was whether they could, should or must suspect nurse Kusian of one or maybe even of both murders.

  “A nurse, an angel in a nurse’s uniform…?” Helga found it hard to believe that Elisabeth Kusian could be a serial killer.

  Steffen sighed. “Oh dear, if only life were that simple, child. I have known quite a few people who were angels on Sunday and turned into devils on Monday. It’s there inside us all.”

  “But a woman… and the corpses dismembered in such a fashion. It can’t be!” She couldn’t imagine such a thing. “Just because Mrs. Merten brought her the typewriter doesn’t mean… That’s just like the man who happens to find a corpse and is then automatically suspected of the crime.”

  Steffen put it in more graphic terms: “Yea… if he stinks then it must come out of his own arse… We always tend to prefer the simple solution.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “We say goodbye at the end of the work day, and tomorrow morning we meet again at 7:30 at 154a Kantstrasse.”

  Helga looked at him: “Can I call Mr. Bacheran?”

  “No. And this is an official order.”

  She rode out to Karolinenhof, said a few words to her parents and retired to her bedroom on the pretext that she had her menses and a migraine. For the first time in her life she toyed with the idea of suicide. No, that wasn’t a solution. She swallowed a sleeping pill but it had the contrary effect and she fought sleep and stayed awake. Still, after a while she could no longer fight the drug: she felt as if under some kind of weak anesthetic. Sometime between two and three in the morning she did fall into a deep sleep. At 5:45 AM sharp, her alarm clock rang and her blood pressure shot up so that she felt faint. She tried to revive herself with lots of cold water: in any case there was no hot water. If she didn’t manage to catch the 6:17 streetcar she wouldn’t be in time for the 7:30 meeting at Kantstrasse. She got there in time but with no breakfast.

  Steffen arrived three minutes late and had a terrible fit of coughing. “The only way to fight it is climbing stairs…”

  But Elisabeth Kusian had already got away. “She was called to the Missing Persons’ Bureau West,” the owner told them.

  Steffen was angry and whispered in Helga’s ear that they should at least take a look at Mrs. Kusian’s room since she herself was already being squeezed dry by the Western police. “That’s too bad, Mrs. Stöhr. But would you be so kind as to let us see your lodger’s room?”

  “Why? Mrs. Kusian is not a criminal.”

  “No, of course not, but…” Helga could not find any reason. “We’re not interested in her, but in the visitors she had.”

  “Then please come this way.”

  To Helga, who was accustomed to the small low ceilinged rooms of her parents’ house, this room looked palatial. But the things in it all seemed cheap and worn. The flowery wallpaper had faded, its green color turned a dirty grey. Her grandmother used to call such places ‘flea houses’, yet it was terribly cozy. There were a sofa and a bed against the wall, a closet, a writing desk and a vanity. In a corner by the window the Christmas table still stood with a fir branch in a vase, artificial snow, tinsel and two red candles almost entirely burned down. Next to this were a few small gifts: a box of soap, a bottle of cologne and a Lebkuchen cake.

  “Don’t touch anythi
ng, don’t take anything,” Steffen said.

  Helga nodded. She wouldn’t have done so in any case. She looked around her. But she did more: she let a few coins fall out of her handbag so that she could look for them and inspect the grooves between the floor boards as closely as possible. But there was no blood to be seen. Steffen didn’t find anything either.

  “There’s nothing of any interest to us here,” He said to the widow. She stood in the door and eyed them suspiciously. “Could we make a quick phone call?” She consented and he called the Missing Persons’ Bureau West, introduced himself and asked if Mrs. Kusian had already dropped in. She had not. “Then please tell her, if she does come, to come to us at the People’s Police Department at Alexanderplatz and ask for me.”

  27.

  Bernhard Bacheran had taken his aunt to Anhalter train station and helped her put her suitcase in the luggage rack but he wanted to avoid a big farewell ceremony involving handkerchiefs and emotional flights although he knew his mother’s sister wanted one. She was only going away for a few days to visit her cousin near Dresden, but you never knew what could happen in the Eastern sector. Before you knew it you found yourself in a camp in Siberia.

  The train disappeared in the direction of the Yorkstrasse bridge and Bacheran strolled down to the exit on Askanischer Platz. The train station was still very busy but the rumor was that the Reichsbahn, being operated by the East, wanted to abandon it and that in some senators’ desk drawers in West Berlin there were plans for its destruction. People grumbled: “What the allied bombs didn’t manage to destroy, we will…”

  Bacheran was reminded of the stories his mother used to tell, how long ago she and her husband had taken the train from Anhalter station to Budapest and on to Verona, and he felt strangely elated. Tchaikovsky, Italian Capriccio. He turned up his coat collar. The station had no roof and the rain was freezing. A short man swept the puddles of water onto the tracks with a brushwood broom. A baggage porter hauled two containers of Winsinia Apricot Jam and three crates of kippers tied together to the train to Erfurt. A train had just come in from Dresden and the travelers were rushing to the gate. Most of them looked as if they had just emerged from the bunker. There were very few new shoes and often they were tied with string. Almost all the women wore headscarves and almost all the men’s coats were made of two types of material: Wehrmacht grey and some other material sewn together. Nowadays almost every German wore a uniform, Bacheran thought, the uniform of destitution.

  Outside, across the street from the station, towards Möckernstrasse a row of booths had cropped up like a shopping street in the middle of the rubble. Clever dealers seeking to grab the East Germans’ money as soon as they got off the train in West Berlin. They advertised their wares on big black boards in heavy white chalk: 1a Kippers, five pound case for 2.95 West or 18.50 East. Gas lighters 2.50 East, half a pound margarine 5.15, bar of soap 6.20.

  Bacheran heard a man from Saxony say: “Everything is much cheaper than home at the HO. I’m disabled and I travel for 25% less so I buy for the whole village.”

  “Mama, are these yellow things lemons or apples?” a four year old girl asked.

  A little old lady stood in front of a poultry vendor and put a plucked goose on his shaky stall table. “We’re from Lommatzsch. Of please dear sir, buy this goose from me. 10 pounds for 15 West Mark. I need to buy tires for my husband’s bicycle. All we have is Buna and they’re no good.”

  The vendor refused. “No … Who’s gonna buy himself a whole goose right after Christmas?!”

  The man who had come with her to West Berlin was just as disappointed. He wanted to sell his apples. The vendor he offered them to wouldn’t take them. “No you. They cost 25 pfennig at the store and here I get 20 for them.” Somebody shouted some advice: “Why don’t you go to Kudamm, people usually have money there.”

  Bacheran would have liked to buy something from these poor people but he had to hurry to the Missing Persons Bureau. He set about enquiring about Rudi Merten and his mysterious dark haired girl friend: this was the other reason he had for being at Anhalter Station. But he kept getting the same reply: “Sorry, no idea.”

  It was already so late that he thought of hailing a cab. No. Yes. He wasn’t going to Baghdad on the Orient Express, he could afford a taxi to the Missing Persons’ Bureau. In the car, he felt like a real State Attorney. Too bad Helga wasn’t sitting next to him. She would probably have refused to get in. If there was something she hated it was the decadent bourgeoisie. And for her this car was part of it.

  At the Bureau no one had seen Kusian and she hadn’t called. Bacheran took an empty seat next to the officer on guard at the door. She would be sent here if she did come.

  She did, at 7:30. There was a knock, they heard a quiet “Please, come in.” and a woman dressed in a very fashionable blue coat entered the room.

  “My name is Elisabeth Kusian,” she said. “I’ve been asked to come here in connection with the Merten case.”

  Bacheran’s first impression of Mrs. Kusian was entirely positive. Although she wasn’t wearing a nurse’s uniform, it was plain to see that she belonged to a profession founded on caring and devotion. But there was something else about her. Something in the way she thrust her pelvis forward, the way she showcased her body, reminded him of what his aunt used to describe as ‘whorish’, and Bacheran couldn’t help thinking how it would be to lie on top of her and… Christ, the woman was almost forty and she could have been his mother. Still… Maybe it was because she was a nurse and people always said nurses were sexy man eaters.

  Elisabeth Kusian seemed very concerned. “Do you really think something happened to Mrs. Merten? She was very nice to me, she brought me a typewriter at home, on the second day of Christmas. When she came I stupidly didn’t have the money for the deposit so I gave her a twelve-piece silverware set as security. In the evening she came back again and I gave her the money…”

  “When was that please?” Bacheran felt he should represent Menzel.

  “Around ten.”

  “So… around ten PM?”

  “Yes. Mrs. Merten was on her way to Weissensee. I even walked her to Zoo station. She thought she might be too late for the last streetcar at Alexanderplatz.”

  And that’s probably what happened, Bacheran thought, so she went up and down looking for a taxi … and that’s when she fell into the hands of the killer. Somewhere in the vicinity of Alexanderplatz. Then he carried the corpse into the rubble at Memhardstrasse.

  “That’s all I can say. I hope nothing happened to her,” Mrs. Kusian repeated.

  “Let’s hope for the best,” the attendant said. “Thank you, you can go now… Oh, wait, they’d like to talk to you about this at Police headquarters East. If you don’t mind…”

  “Why should I?”

  “Well, the Eastern sector and so on…”

  “No. I have nothing to hide.”

  Bacheran found that entirely convincing and when he joined Inspector Menzel in his office half an hour later, he would have put his hand in the fire for Elisabeth Kusian. “It’s absolutely unthinkable that this woman could have killed Seidelmann and Merten. The idea is absurd.”

  Menzel was busy cleaning his nails with an opened paper clip. “The idea of a dismembered corpse also sounds absurd … and yet.”

  “I still tend to think it was Rudi Merten,” Bacheran said.

  “I have to disappoint you there, my friend: there are no traces of foul play in the Spandau apartment.”

  “And I have to disappoint you too, Detective Inspector: no one’s heard of Rudi Merten or his dark haired love at Anhalter station.”

  “And yet she exists…” Menzel turned around to make sure they were alone in the room. He lowered his voice. “She’s a Senator’s wife. She confirmed that she was with Rudi Merten at the time of the crime. Now that stays between us. A directive from higher up. And if you ever let the slightest word out about this, particularly to Leupahn, your career will be over, once and for all.
Rudi Merten is not the perpetrator, he is to be excluded. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  When Bacheran called Helga he was careful to be strictly official. There were probably people in West Berlin who listened in on every conversation with the East. The American secret service was also thought to be listening in. “Miss. Leupahn, I am allowed to give you two pieces of information. First that Mrs. Merten’s husband, Mr. Rudolf Merten, is no longer a suspect. First because no traces of blood have been found in the couple’s home in Pichelsdorferstrasse in Spandau. Second because Mr. Merten’s albi is watertight. Also we asked Nurse Elisabeth Kusian when she paid a visit to our Missing Person’s Bureau to make herself available to you at your Police Headquarters as soon as possible, and she agreed. She stated that she walked Dorothea Merten to Zoo station around 10 PM on the second day of Christmas; the saleslady intended to go to her sister’s in Weissensee. As far as we are concerned, we have no reason to suspect Nurse Kusian or her testimony.”

  “Is that all?” The answer was just as dry.

  “Yes. Although it might be advisable that I come directly over to you for any information you might have after you see Mrs. Kusian.”

  “We will be in touch, Mr. Diggermann.”

  “Thank you very much, Mrs. Hardnose.”

  28.

  Helga looked at the calendar. She couldn’t believe it: Friday again. The first Friday of the New Year. Of the new decade. She still found it hard to write 1950 instead of 1949. Even though the 1940’s had been so horrible. At least until 1945. Hitler… She tried to imagine what this day, January 6, 1950, would have been like had there been no Hitler and no Nazis, ever. Berlin wouldn’t be a desert of rubble, Germany wouldn’t be divided, there wouldn’t be 55 million dead throughout Europe. But there also wouldn’t be the opportunity to build Socialism and create a new Germany… Dialectics.