by Chris Petit
‘Get on with it, man. Has anyone got a cigarette?’
When no one else volunteered Morgen got around to offering one of his. Schlegel thought Nebe, usually so impeccable, looked haggard in the match flare.
Lazarenko gave a practised little speech. Bolshevik atrocities committed in northern Ukraine the summer before last overlapped with the current spate of killings. As a result of his latest intelligence he believed a killing gang was at work, and it was part of an internecine civil war among the last of the Jews, in which Russians were also involved.
It was the last thing Nebe wanted to hear. He rounded on Lazarenko.
‘How can you know this? A civil war! Are you saying there is a chance of rebellion among these slaves?’
Gersten had to step in. He drew attention to himself by shining his torch upwards to show his face, unintentionally making himself look grotesque. Stoffel tittered.
Gersten reassured Nebe that there was no chance of any uprising among what remained of the Jews, or the Russians.
‘They are in hand.’
‘He said civil war.’
‘An exaggeration. Think of it more like a Sicilian vendetta. A tiny group killing out of betrayal and revenge. It will soon burn itself out. Such death throes are typical of Jewish behaviour in general. When threatened from outside they fall to squabbling among themselves.’
Stoffel clapped his hands in ironic applause.
Nebe took Morgen aside. Schlegel heard him say Morgen was making the case too political. Then he announced that he didn’t want to hear another word about vendettas or historical connections.
‘Dr Goebbels is a very busy man. He is only interested in headlines.’
Morgen was only interested in the money, and where that took them. If Abbas and this new body were killed in retaliation for something specific, then dressing the bodies was a message.
He speculated the length of Auguststrasse. ‘Hunter and hunted. Hunter uses agents but the hunted is too good. The bodies become trophies.’
‘Is Gersten the hunter?’
‘No names for the moment. We seek only the pattern.’
Morgen stopped, looking suddenly deflated. He took something from his pocket and slipped it in his mouth, a gesture reminiscent of Gersten’s chapstick flourish.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, thinking of Stoffel’s grown-up pill.
Pervitin, Morgen said.
Schlegel knew about it from his mother, in connection with slimming; she spoke of its aphrodisiac qualities. Morgen said it would give him stamina and concentration. It was the official wonder drug.
‘You sound like an advertising salesman. Will I find myself down the rabbit hole?’
They walked on.
Morgen said, ‘For argument’s sake, let’s assume the hunted is the forger.’
‘How do we find him?’
‘Wait to see what bait the hunter sets up next and follow that. Is there anywhere to get a drink round here?’
Schlegel thought it a bit early. That wasn’t what Morgen meant.
‘I am thinking of the dead woman being used as a soft trap, to draw the hunted. You could see, despite her state, she was a looker. A siren.’
Given the whereabouts of the body, he thought it likely they had met locally.
Schlegel said there weren’t many bars left. The dancehall downstairs from him didn’t open until later.
The bars didn’t either and they had to get the owners out of bed. Morgen insisted on inspecting every one and each time he walked away without a thank you, which was left to Schlegel, in return for sour looks. In the last bar the owner was up and changing his barrels. Morgen was more interested. The premises was less of a spit-and-sawdust affair than the rest, with tablecloths and candles stuck in empty bottles.
Outside, Morgen stopped again.
‘You be the hunted and I the hunter. A woman wants to meet you but you can’t be sure. Would you choose that last bar, or any of the rest?’
They were all too small, Schlegel said, with no escape if there was a trap.
‘That can only mean the dancehall.’
It was still officially shut, but the kitchen staff were in. The manager had yet to arrive and the waiters were not in until later. The kitchen staff weren’t any help because there was a second evening shift. Schlegel followed Morgen through to the dancehall where a female cleaner was swabbing the floor. He had been there only a few nights ago. The place had the depressed air of all out-of-hours joints dedicated to false cheer. Quite the little philosopher, he thought, when it came to hackneyed observations.
He couldn’t resist sitting behind the drum kit on the low podium. He worked the bass pedal and flicked the cymbal. It must be the pill, he thought. He would amaze them with a spontaneous drum solo.
Morgen was talking to the cleaner, who said she had been doubling up on the kitchen’s evening shift on Monday night when a well-dressed woman hurried through the kitchen just before the sirens and left by the staff door.
Her appearance matched the dead woman.
Morgen asked when the manager would be in. His name was Herr Valentine and he lived upstairs. Schlegel went to fetch him.
Valentine turned out to be a presentable if threadbare elderly man with silver brilliantined hair that smelled of violets. He said he was about to go down as it was.
He vaguely recognised Schlegel, turning to ask over his shoulder where he knew him from. Before entering the dancehall, he paused on the threshold and shot his cuffs.
‘You’re asking a lot,’ he said after Morgen finished. ‘My memory isn’t what it was.’
He cheerfully admitted most evenings were spent in his office getting sozzled.
‘Not much else to do these days. The clientele is no fun. The girls don’t come in as much. I can’t pay the musicians what Kurt Widmann does. The last man we auditioned for a drummer had a wooden leg.’
Nothing turned out to be wrong with the man’s memory. He remembered the woman being in on the Saturday and the Monday for the obvious reason of her being on her own when her kind usually came escorted. He had spent a long time trying to decide whether she was on the game.
‘Was she?’ asked Morgen.
‘Not obviously. She wasn’t looking to pick up just any man.’
Herr Valentine turned to Schlegel.
‘You were in on Saturday as well. Not for long.’
Schlegel supposed it was his hair again.
‘You’re Kripo, aren’t you?’ Valentine asked. ‘Not the other lot.’
Morgen said yes, criminal police, not Gestapo.
‘The other lot were in on Saturday night.’ He asked if Schlegel had spotted them. ‘They’re not subtle.’
Schlegel shook his head. But the dead woman sounded like the one he had happened to be looking at. It was starting to resemble the sort of trap Morgen was talking about.
‘And on the Monday?’ Morgen asked the manager.
‘I would say she left with the waiter. Perhaps not with the waiter but around the same time.’
‘What waiter?’
‘He was in for a couple of evenings, filling in.’
‘Do you think they’re connected?
‘Human nature. They fuck in the toilets given half a chance, especially the ones coming back from the war. Monday was the night of the bombers so we had to close. I made the announcement when the sirens went and she was gone by then. I know the waiter left early.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Morgen.
‘I settle up each night when the staff go home and he didn’t come for his pay, which is a first during my running of the place.’
‘What was he like?’
‘Tall. Handsome. Dark. Only in for a couple of nights.’
‘Name?’
‘I don’t remember. I doubt if it was real.’
‘You must have a job sheet,’ said Morgen.
‘It doesn’t work like that, not down at this end. Cash on the night, no questions asked. Report me for all I ca
re.’
‘Do you remember hiring him?’
‘I didn’t. He turned up to fill in for someone who was sick. Which was fine. He was presentable, didn’t trip over. I would have kept him and fired the other fellow.’
‘What about the other fellow?’
‘In this evening. Come back and ask him. Have a drink on the house. Crème de menthe. It’s pretty revolting.’
After the dancehall Morgen said they must draw up a list of possible forgers. Jewish professional records would list all printers, graphic designers, anyone with access to etching tools, the ones who had been to art schools before they closed.
‘It will be someone with the right kind of training.’
They had no lead to speak of on Abbas, apart from a dubious Russian connection.
‘But I can’t see that turning up anything about money. To switch for a moment, what do we really know about Metzler, since the money links him to both bodies?’
Schlegel admitted the man was an enigma.
‘He does rather become our enigma. What was his profession?’
‘Teacher, I think.’
‘Do we know where?’
‘No. Some of his files have been mislaid.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Jews have been banned from teaching for years.’
Schlegel remembered the little key from Metzler’s apartment, which he had attached to his own key ring.
‘There’s this. It looks like it belongs to a locker.’ Morgen read the tag.
‘Two-seven-one-six.’
‘He worked in something called shed twenty-seven.’
‘Now no one can complain if we look,’ said Morgen, turning round and walking back up towards Rosenthaler Strasse.
Schlegel pointed out the station was the other way, but Morgen had something in mind. When they reached the scene of crime, Stoffel’s Opel was still parked in the street, with the keys in the ignition.
28
‘Proper meatballs too,’ said Morgen. They came with noodles and a sauce that was hard to identify.
‘Gherkin, maybe. Mustard. Onion. Too much flour. Not bad all the same. They look after their own.’
They were in a large dining hall, full of clerical and secretarial staff and workers in overalls from the slaughterhouse. Food was dished up by kitchen helpers from a stainless-steel counter. Schlegel supposed some enterprising manager worked hard keeping the place supplied with meat sidelined from the wholesale market.
They had been bounced around different offices in search of Metzler’s job record, starting with the downstairs reception where the old girls were now as disobliging as they had been previously jolly.
‘We’re disinclined to help if it involves Jews, after what they did to that body. Try upstairs. You might have better luck there.’ It was the woman who had given Schlegel the map. ‘We’re not a filing cabinet down here.’
Upstairs they visited dull rooms staffed with disagreeable clerks. Metzler’s name could not be traced. Schlegel presumed his work record had been removed after his death. The young, sourly pretty female clerk dealing with them looked washed out and disgruntled.
Schlegel stared, mesmerised by the dandruff in her parting.
He saw her again in the canteen, chatting animatedly.
Both men ate fast and used their fingers to lick their plates clean, after which Morgen lit up and flicked his ash into the tin lid provided.
Outside was sunny for a change, with a rising wind. They walked past empty halls that attested to a lack of business.
‘Odd that none of them upstairs had heard of Metzler,’ said Morgen.
They were on their way to try the rail depot where Metzler was supposed to have worked before his transfer to the shed.
Morgen said, ‘Agatha Christie at least gives you clues and suspects.’
Schlegel’s mother was an avid reader of Christie. The Body in the Library had come out the year before. Morgen had read earlier Christie translations in Russia, where her domestic murders worked well as a counterpoint to battlefield massacre.
‘Almost delicate, you could say.’
Once peace came Morgen would dedicate himself to expanding his waistline. He stuck his hands in his pockets and recited, ‘ “Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look, he thinks too much; such men are dangerous.” Julius Caesar, act one, scene two.’
Turning to Schlegel, he asked, ‘Any relation?’
Not as far as he knew; his namesake was Shakespeare’s first translator.
Morgen said, ‘I bring culture to the slaughterhouse. “Upon what meat does this our Caesar feed that he is grown so great?” ’ He strolled on, saying over his shoulder, ‘And upon what meat do we feed? And such talk of sedition.’
Schlegel again mentioned the idea of Metzler as possible agent for Gersten, thinking how people didn’t repeat themselves in Christie. For all the red herrings, things proceeded along well-oiled lines.
The rail depot stood at the opposite end of the pig district, beyond the S-Bahn with its enormously long elevated walkway that spanned the whole of the estate, down to Eldenaer Strasse.
Metzler was at least remembered at the depot, by the single clerk in a moss-green suit who sat in a hut in the big storage shed. He made a point of having to be prompted before grudgingly conceding that Metzler had not been a bad worker.
‘For a Yid.’
All the same, it must have been a relief when he left, said Morgen.
‘He minded his own business,’ conceded the clerk.
‘What was his job?’ asked Schlegel.
‘Checking deliveries. Dry goods mainly into one warehouse. Imported machinery into the other. For collection.’
‘What’s the strangest item you might get sent here?’ asked Morgen.
‘I have no idea what you could mean,’ said the clerk with suspicion.
‘Do you know why Metzler was transferred to the slaughterhouse?’
‘Where?’
As the man seemed not to know, Schlegel explained.
‘As far as we were concerned, he just left. It didn’t bother us to know where.’
‘Nevertheless, now you know, would you like to speculate why?’
‘He must have crossed someone.’
‘Not you?’
‘I don’t have the power.’
‘Where’s your boss?’
‘On leave.’
‘So there’s only you?’
‘Just me. They bring in labour as and when it’s needed.’
Morgen turned away then back again. ‘Was Metzler in fact your superior?’
‘He was here before me, but once I came he couldn’t be my boss because of what he was.’
‘But he had to teach you the job.’
‘Ticking things on and off lists, you don’t have to be taught that.’
‘These minor functionaries with brains the size of hamsters,’ said Morgen as they walked off, loud enough for the man to hear.
‘Isn’t that being unfair to hamsters?’
‘Why isn’t he in the army? He looks fit enough to be cannon fodder. Why aren’t you, come to that? Not that you look fit.’
‘I have a doctor’s chit to say I am a liability.’
‘In that case they should make you a general. Now, show me this murder room.’
They passed the pig shed. The stench was as bad as before but the eerie silence told Schlegel the animals were gone. Morgen insisted on looking. The enormous space appeared more disturbing for being empty.
‘It looks like the piggies went to market,’ said Morgen.
Upstairs, all Schlegel could think was nothing was as before. The room had been stripped. The sink was smashed. The draining board was gone, as was the improvised shower and paraphernalia. There was no bucket. The knives had been taken. The crude drawing on the wall had been smashed away with a chisel; the plaster remnants lay on the floor. In the middle of the room stood a small pile of ashe
s – what was left of the book, Schlegel presumed – on top of which lay deposited a huge turd. Shit had been smeared over another wall in huge, angry swipes.
Baumgarten, the slaughterhouse foreman, was casual about the destruction of the murder room, saying some of the boys had gone a bit wild, being so disgusted by what the Jews had done. They thought the place evil. He added, what could you expect from Jews and their revolting practices.
Baumgarten recognised Schlegel and called him Whitey.
He had his own hut, on wheels, with steps up, near the porter’s lodge on Thaerstrasse, which marked the start of the pig district. A long cobblestoned street ran in a straight line to the Landsberger Allee gates at the other end.
Baumgarten grudgingly allowed them in, helped himself to tea and offered none.
‘What about Metzler?’ Morgen asked. ‘Did he have anything to do with the Jewish butchers?’
Metzler he hardly knew, Baumgarten said. It was a repeat of his earlier performance. Schlegel, not caring about Baumgarten, told Morgen they were dealing with a classic stonewaller.
Baumgarten glared, hands twitching.
‘Did all the Jewish butchers work in the pig shed?’ asked Morgen.
Baumgarten scoffed. ‘Refused absolutely. Jews and pigs. Probably didn’t like killing in kind. They did sheep and cattle.’ He pointed behind him. ‘Over the road. Cattle and horses at the far end. Sheep in the middle. At this end mutton and pigs.’
‘Yet the old man worked with the pigs,’ said Morgen.
‘It seems so.’
‘What did he do exactly?’
‘No idea. You can go and ask.’
Like Stoffel, Morgen was incredulous that Jews were allowed to work with offensive weapons.
‘What was to stop them running amok?’
‘They were guarded. Strict rules. They didn’t mix with our butchers.’
‘Guarded by?’
‘Hitler Youth.’
‘Fourteen-year-olds?’
‘No. Strapping lads, tough as they come.’
The telephone in the hut rang. After hanging up Baumgarten addressed them with the air of issuing a dare.
‘Two sows. Come and see how it’s done.’
Baumgarten was more forthcoming once he was giving the guided tour. The Zentralviehhof remained one of the world’s most advanced slaughterhouses, with every stage calculated for speed, efficiency and lack of waste.