Werewolf (Commander Shaw Book 16)

by Philip McCutchan

  He said, “This Herr Kunze … he enquired for Hans Hagen, and when he was told what had happened in the bar, he left quickly.”

  I said, “I’m not surprised. Didn’t he see you? Your likeness — ”

  “No. The bar was very full and there was much smoke, as there was on the day my brother was there, and you. He was not there for long. I am quite certain he did not see me. There would have been a reaction, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said. “So what did you do, Herr Ublick? Follow him?”

  He shook his head. “No. I intended to if he had no car, but he had a car. I saw him get into it. A Volkswagen estate car, blue, a very ordinary car, but I was able to take its number, and here it is.” He produced a scrap of paper from his pocket, his hand shaking as he handed it over. “It will help, perhaps?”

  “It’ll be a big help, Herr Ublick. It gives me a contact and it’s all I’ve got. I’m very grateful.”

  He made a deprecatory gesture. “It is nothing. If it helps to rid Germany of filth, then I am delighted.” I asked about his brother and he told me he had been buried already; speed had been necessary on account of the time elapsed and he had been given police approval. I was annoyed about that; I should have been consulted but it was too late now. Ublick said there had been trouble at the funeral from a bunch of Werewolves, who had forced their way to the service and the committal and clicked their booted heels and given Nazi salutes. The brother would have liked that, but the living Ublick had not. I felt sorry for him; he had been much upset. After he had gone I rang up to Felicity’s room and said I was going to police headquarters but wouldn’t be all that long, so far as I could tell, and would call her in her room when I got back.

  The police computer took no time at all to turn up the details. The Volkswagen was not registered in the name of Klaus Kunze, which didn’t particularly surprise me, but in the name of a Fraulein Emma Stocke who inhabited a schloss in Bavaria. It was not far from Regensburg, which was a long way south of Berlin. The obliging computer also dished up the information that Emma Stocke was on record for dangerous driving. I asked for a further check, this time on criminal records, just in case, and was rewarded: Fraulein Stocke, wealthy daughter of a beef baron, a German who had made his money in the Argentine, had added to father’s money by living off the rich proceeds of prostitution; high-class prostitution — call girls. Her racket had been bust now and she was living a respectable life, having paid her debt to society. She was worth a visit if she could be found; on the other hand it would be a mistake to alert her, and through her Klaus Kunze, that we were on to anything.

  I said, “She’d be better put under surveillance. See where she goes, and who visits her. If Kunze is using her car, we can assume he’s in touch.”

  “Whatever you wish will be done,” the police chief said. I put a call through to Felicity, re-assuring her that I was all right, then I waited in police headquarters until word came back that the coppers from Regensburg had Fraulein Stocke’s schloss under surveillance and that she had been seen driving in, alone, in a Mercedes. After that I went out into the Berlin night and the brilliant neons to get the feel of things, of forthcoming events. I felt something very strange in the atmosphere, the kind of stirring of the pot that the police chief had spoken of earlier. A real sense that something big was about to happen, a kind of holding of the breath until it did. I walked towards the Wall, lingering for a while by Checkpoint Charlie. Everything was quiet, but I wondered for how long it would remain so. There would be trouble with East Berlin when the Nazi upsurge came. The actions of the East German government, and of their masters in the Kremlin, were as ever incalculable in advance.

  Moving away from the checkpoint and walking the streets I came to a multi-storey car park. I used the lift to the topmost of the enclosed layers. Below me was brilliance and life, away to the east there was mostly darkness and a feeling of death, a feeling of utter stultification. How soon now, when that dreadful brain began its overt work, could a similar deadness strike the West — the heavy, smothering hand of dictatorship! I was about to turn my back on the profitless eastern sector when I became aware of a man not far away from me, a mere shadow alongside a concrete pillar, now sliding back into cover.

  From the corner of my eye I saw the shadow emerge again and I saw an arm come up. I dropped at once, and the silenced revolver sent its bullet winging away towards the Wall. I remained where I was and pulled out my own gun. I reckoned I couldn’t be seen in the shadow of the parapet: the lights were out on this level. After a couple of minutes the man came round the pillar again and I fired. Chips flew from the concrete but I didn’t think I’d got the man. I shifted fast along the rough surface, keeping well below the parapet, knowing that my gun-flash would have given my position away. There was another shot from the pillar, the bullet going where I had just been. From my new position, I couldn’t see my target; he kept to the other side of his pillar cover. My shot had sounded out like thunder, but it didn’t appear to have been heard down below. Anyway, no-one came up to see.

  I decided to outflank the man.

  I moved away below the parapet, helped by the parked cars, though there wore not many of them. Gradually I worked round to the rear until once again I had a sight of the gunman, this time with his back to me as though he was convinced I was still round the other side. Moving very silently I made my approach, with the hammer of my revolver drawn back. I didn’t want to use it, wouldn’t unless I had to: each time I had found a villain who might have helped, he’d died before any progress had been made. This one was going to be taken alive.

  I was within some half-dozen yards of the man when suddenly he turned. I couldn’t see his face in the darkness but I knew he was going to fire so I nipped aside and at the same time fired myself to wing him. I missed; I heard the bullet smash more concrete in the same instant as I felt the wind of his bullet past my right cheek. He fired again, lower, and missed again; this time the bullet went through the windscreen of an old Volkswagen Beetle and there was a yell of fright, two yells in fact, one deep male, the other a woman. Snogging had been taking place and the couple had been too intent, or too frightened, to take notice earlier. Now they were in the front line. And the gunman didn’t like it at all. There was no more shooting, but I just caught sight of a body moving at speed for the lifts. As I ran across a light came on in a window of a skyscraper office block close by, and I had a glimpse of whirling underwear as the couple in the Volkswagen started dressing. My next bullet thudded as uselessly as its predecessors into the lift doors as they shut and I saw the indicator moving down. It might go to the bottom, or it might not. My man could decide to confuse the issue. He did. The indicator stopped at the third level up from the ground, and I ran like lightning for the stairway and went down scarcely touching the steps. I saw the man, in the light now, waiting by the lift as though uncertain what he should do next; he would be assuming, I imagined, that I would be beating it for the ground floor in the second lift. But I wasn’t and he soon became aware of the fact. He sent a very wild shot in my direction and then ran fast towards the parapet, got onto it, and jumped.

  I ran for the same spot and saw him scrambling up from a corrugated-iron roof, around ten feet below my level, across something like a six-foot gap. I jumped and landed safely and the man, jumping again, took the ground by way of a heap of refuse climbing the wall of the building, which was an outhouse of some kind. I followed, keeping in his footsteps; the heap was a mass of rotting vegetable matter, and its origins became clear when the man, not finding a better way out from a shut-in back area, went at the run through a door from which light streamed and scared faces could be seen briefly beneath chefs’ white caps.

  The door banged shut, but it opened again as I went through in chase. Amid a stench of frying oil, I charged through a kitchen and into a restaurant. Women were

  screaming as the man in front ran out through the entrance. No-one interfered; guns were dangerous things and we were best left to it
. In the street the man turned right, running past shop-fronts still lit up. I had a first-class view of him, and saw that I was gaining on him. He was short and stocky and his legs were no match for mine. In the end I got him by a rugger tackle and brought him down with a squelch of nose on the pavement. There was a lot of blood and a crowd gathered now that it seemed safe to do so; I had put away my revolver and his was out of sight somewhere beneath him till I lifted him to his feet. His eyes glittered at me with fury from above the squashed nose. I didn’t recognise him. Then, motivated I believe by sheer vicious anger, he showed his colours.

  His right hand came up at an angle of forty-five degrees and he shouted out, “Heil, Hitler!”

  That did it. I had grabbed his saluting arm and got it in a lock arrestwise, and was meaning to get someone to go for the police, when the crowd erupted into a mob. Some were for the man, some were against. Most, I believe, were for. He shouted out that I was English and they didn’t like that at all; my very Englishness could have put them on his side and it may not all have been for the memory of Hitler. Whatever it was, blood flowed and the fighting escalated — just as I knew it would all over Germany the moment the brain was out of its container. Blows were rained on me but I managed to keep my grip on my victim and just about in time to save my life the scream of the police sirens was heard and what looked like about a hundred policemen butted their way into the mob.

  *

  I was sent through to headquarters and the man, who had given his name as Gunther Pizzen, false or not we didn’t yet know, was brought with me and held for interrogation. Before I started in on that, by courtesy of the West German police, I took a message from Max, relayed by the 6D2 agency. Scotland Yard were unable to confirm or deny that the demo venue was Portsmouth. They had simply failed to get any further information on it. They were not impressed by my football theories, but believed, definitely, that the demo was on still — somewhere or other along the south coast. All police leave had been cancelled in the southern counties. I felt that the Yard had simply picked up a straw in the wind and were hoping for a haystack — just like me. Neither of us was having much luck.

  I went along to talk to Gunther Pizzen and I went in at the deep end, right to the point.

  “Which is it?” I asked.

  I got a blank look, but not totally blank. There was a flicker in the eyes that made me think he knew what I was talking about, but he said, “I do not understand — which is it?”

  I said, “Television set, Dewar’s whisky, or plain square box?”

  “I know nothing. I say nothing.”

  “Think again,” I suggested, facing him squarely across a wooden table. The official police don’t go in for the third degree, the dark room with the bright light full in the eyes while the disembodied voice comes at you from behind. “You shot at me with intent to kill. That’s a serious charge and you’ll go down for a nice long time.”

  “I do not mind. It does not worry me.”

  I nodded and said sardonically, “Quite. Oh, I do understand, Herr Pizzen, none better. When the Werewolves rule, all will be overset. You’ll be free again.”

  He didn’t respond but the eyes went on glittering and I took that and his silence to be assent. I doubted if I was going to break him down but I had to try even if I wasted valuable time. I spoke of Hans Hagen, now dead. I let him see we knew quite a lot already. I spoke of Klaus Kunze and of the schloss down by Regensburg and he glittered at me right through the lot. But he didn’t utter. I made reference to Brigadier Trotton’s discovery of the gas chambers in Neckarburg and I could have sworn I noticed a slight start of surprise. Or it could have been fear. He still didn’t utter but I believed I might have struck a raw spot. I didn’t press on it for the simple reason that I had nothing to press with. But after I had been holding that one-way conversation for around a quarter of an hour, a plain-clothes man came in to say there was some news. The look on his face said it would be better imparted in privacy, so I went outside with him.

  His news was interesting.

  Gunther Pizzen, he said, had been checked on: his given address confirmed the name. His name was not on any police records. But his wife’s was — Maria Pizzen, who had three convictions for shoplifting. Maria Pizzen had left Gunther a few months before and had been living near Regensburg. To be precise, in Emma Stocke’s schloss, where she was employed as a maid. That seemed to tie Gunther in, to some extent, with the Kunze outfit, but to my mind he was tied in already. The really interesting part, however, was to come. The plain-clothes man said that a report had come through from the police in Regensburg that a woman’s body had been found not far from the Stocke estates. Some men had been surprised in the act of conveying it to a stream that vanished underground and would have carried it to oblivion within a short time. The men had dropped the body and scarpered, killing two policemen in the process. Three of the men had made it away, the fourth hadn’t. He had been taken by a long shot and died. The murder, which had been by strangulation, was fairly conclusively linked with the schloss because a search of the dead man’s body had yielded a household bill from the local butcher for a month’s supply of deep freeze pork sausages for the kitchens of Fraulein Stocke. Subsequently, the identities of the man and the woman had been established by the butcher himself: the man was the factotum from the schloss and often did the shopping. The woman was Maria Pizzen.

  I said, “Now’s the time to be cruel. Or it could work the other way if we’re dead unlucky. After all, she did leave him.”

  I went back in, hopefully well-armed now.

  I let Pizzen have it straight, after the one preliminary question: “I understand your wife left you. Right?”

  “If you know, why ask?”

  “Okay,” I said. “She’s left you for good now.”

  I sensed shock. “What is this?” Pizzen asked in a sharp tone.

  “She’s dead,” I said.

  “I do not believe this!”

  “It’s true, Pizzen. She was murdered by someone from the Stocke household.”

  He wouldn’t believe it; he was adamant that this was a police ploy. It became absolutely evident that Pizzen was still in love with his wife, deserted or not. I had to convince him positively that it was much too late now. I turned to the West German detective and asked if the body could be flown up. It could; I said, “Then do that thing at once, please. And we may as well have a sight of the butcher’s bill too, just so Herr Pizzen’s not left in any doubt as to where the killer came from.”

  *

  It was well into the early hours by the time Maria Pizzen’s body was reported at Tegel airport and began its journey by hearse into the city and police headquarters. During this time Pizzen had grown more and more restless, had become tearful, and, though still not wholly believing, had begun to soften up with the onset of searing grief. He told me that after the shop-lifting business Maria had changed and seemed to have no more time for him; she had got the job in the schloss via the good offices of an under-gardener whose parents lived in West Berlin and who was a friend of a friend. I made a mental reservation that this might not be true and that the real benefactor, if such was now the word, could have been Klaus Kunze, known to be a friend of Emma Stocke, but Pizzen wasn’t saying anything about Kunze at all. If Kunze had been involved then clearly he had not known one thing, which Pizzen proceeded to tell me: Maria had been a Communist, which her employer was not. I grinned to myself at that: the thought of Kunze under the same roof as a Com held its funny side. Pizzen had indeed seen possible trouble there but Maria wasn’t taking a

  blind bit of notice of him by this time.

  “And no doubt,” I suggested, “there was trouble between you and her — over Hitler?”

  “I do not know what you mean,” he said.

  He was admitting nothing positive — yet. I had a feeling he might, soon. I found his wife’s communism interesting; that could have been the basic reason behind the split marriage, and it could have been the
reason for her murder. She might have learned too much, by sheerest accident. A few minutes after three a.m. the hearse and the butcher’s bill came in from Tegel and after an interval for unloading, Pizzen was taken to the police mortuary. Women who have been strangled are not pretty sights. Pizzen burst into tears, went to the side of his wife and buried his head in her breast. After a few moments he was lifted away and was sat in a chair in a gloomy passageway outside the mortuary. He was crying still. He had to believe now. He lifted both fists and waved them in the air. There was no attempt at a Hitler salute. A stream of invective came out and he began talking.

  I seemed to grow colder as I listened. We were still in that grim passageway and the surroundings didn’t help. Death seemed to be all around us, shutting us all in.

  *

  I had a lot of telephoning to do now, and I did it from police headquarters. One of the people I contacted was Brigadier Trotton outside Bonn. I said, “That place you took me to. Neckarburg. It’s to be used, all right. By this time tomorrow, the gas will be reconnected from cylinders.”

  There was some blasphemy from Trotton. I said, “There’s going to be a token round-up of some Communists in Karlsruhe. They’re for the ovens, at the same time as the brain goes into orbit.”

  “Orbit?” Trotton sounded as though he had been roused from very deep slumber.

  “A figure of speech. When it’s first revealed to the adoring masses.”

  “Which is to be where? Neckarburg?”

  “No,” I said. “Berlin. I don’t know precisely where. My informant wasn’t able to say. Once it’s put on public show, the word’ll spread like greased lightning. But what I’m asking you for is this: can you fix some troops, say of battalion strength, to be held somewhere handy for that gas chamber?”

  “Out of sight, presumably?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The idea being to save the Corns from Karlsruhe and at the same time get the other buggers in the bag. All right?”