Rosa

by Jonathan Rabb

  Revolution, however, matters only when the soldiers decide to take sides. In early December Prince Max von Baden and the General Staff chose Ebert, and while there were brief moments of hope for Spartakus after that—Christmas Day on the Schloss Bridge, cannons at the ready, hundreds of armed civilians forcing the government troops into retreat; January sixth, thousands more marching along the broad Siegesallee toward the War Ministry—they were only moments. Karl and Rosa made speeches and printed articles and convoked meetings, but in the end they were left to live on the run and on borrowed time. Troops had been spilling in from the front like so much dirty scrub water since late November. They were hungry for a fight, and needed someone to blame for their recent defeat. Who better than the Soviet-styled Spartakus? Oddly enough, it was Police President Emil Eichorn who was the one to give Ebert his opportunity to mop everything up. Eichorn’s allegiance to the Spartakus movement had never been much of a secret. The new government could ill afford that kind of official opposition, and so, on the eleventh of January, it was Eichorn’s politics that ultimately turned the police buildings on Alexanderplatz into the last battleground of the revolution. Refusing to leave his desk after receiving his dismissal papers—and with a group of Spartacists on hand to defend him—Eichorn gave Ebert no choice but to send in a battalion. It was only yesterday morning that the morgue had removed the last of the corpses.

  The men of the Kripo had been elsewhere on the fateful day: they had known what was coming and had left Eichorn alone with his revolutionaries. Even so, there was still bad blood between the government soldiers and the men of police headquarters. It was why Hoffner now chose not to meet them head-on.

  He sidestepped his way through several clumps of fallen brick and, turning right with the building, headed down Alexanderstrasse. Hoffner pulled open the outer gate and then made his way to the third door down. The building had lost power on the twelfth, the corridors once again lit by gas lamps. Hoffner followed his shadow to the back stairwell and headed up.

  It was on the third floor that he finally ran across another human being. As it turned out, first contact came in the form of Ludwig Groener, distant nephew or cousin or something of the great General Wilhelm Groener, who had played so pivotal a role in December by placing the army in Ebert’s hands. Unlike his epic forebear, however, Groener the lesser marched to the rear, still a detective sergeant at fifty-one, with fewer and fewer cases coming his way. He had become quite proficient with paperwork, and now rarely left the building. Not that he was unpleasant, or embittered by his place in the grand scheme: he was, but that wasn’t the problem. Groener simply had the most notoriously foul breath. It seemed almost inconceivable that such a small man could produce so overwhelming a stench. Hoffner kept to his side of the hall as they passed.

  “I hear you’ve found another one.” Groener’s voice trailed after him.

  Hoffner stopped and turned around. Groener had gotten the hint over the years: he kept at a healthy distance during these conversations. “Really?” said Hoffner. “And who’d you hear that from?”

  “The KD wants to see you.”

  “The KD? Dropping off some files, were you, Groener? Overheard a little something?”

  Groener ignored the comment. “He’s waiting in his office.”

  Hoffner turned and headed down the corridor. “Then it’s lucky I ran into you,” he said over his shoulder. “Otherwise I would have been completely at a loss.”

  The men of the Kripo—known within police circles as Department IV—worked entirely out of the third floor, all four sides around the great courtyard given over to their offices, examination rooms, and archives. Hoffner’s office was along the back of the building, tucked safely away within the one spot that had managed to avoid the two-day battle for headquarters.

  Stepping into the cramped space now, it was as if the first weeks of January had never taken place at all. Everything was as it had been, as it would be: open files littered the desk; bound casebooks, along with assorted editions of statutes and codes, stood in high columns along the bookshelves that ran the length of the far wall; two plaster casts of battered human skulls—evidence for upcoming court appearances—nestled between a stack of newspapers and two odd volumes of Brockhaus’s Konversations-Lexikon, for some reason Hoffner having taken a specific liking to the encyclopedia’s E and S installments; and, rounding it all out, a cup of something stale and cold—coffee was his best guess, but the color was wrong—sat at the center of his desk. Hoffner would have loved to have blamed his office on the revolution; he just couldn’t.

  The one piece of perfect coherence in the room stretched the length of the wall across from his desk. It was a map of Berlin, clean, crisp, its few markings penned in a surprisingly neat hand. This was a custom with Hoffner: a new map for each new case. In that way he could allow the city to assert herself, fresh each time, her moods invariably the single most important clues to any crime. Each district had its own temper, a personality. It was simply his task to watch for the variations, find what did not belong, and allow those idiosyncrasies to guide him. Berlin called for deviation, not patterning. It was something so few in the Kripo understood. To his credit, young Hans Fichte was slowly not becoming one of them.

  Hoffner stood in the doorway, as yet unable to see the incongruity in the four pins sticking out from the map: the Mnz Strasse roadwork, the sewer entrance at Oranienburger Strasse, the Prenzlauer underpass, and the grotto off Blowplatz. And now another in the Rosenthaler Platz station. There was something odd to that one—as he had known there would be—the feel of it forced as he drove the pin through the paper. He stared at it for nearly a minute before moving to the desk.

  The place was still an icebox as he pulled his notebook from his pocket: someone had promised a delivery of coal by the end of the week, but Hoffner knew better. Picking up the cup on his desk, he sniffed at the contents and then took a sip: something to mask the brandy. With a wince, he swallowed and headed for the corridor.

  The KD was behind his desk and on the phone when Hoffner pulled up and knocked at the open door. Kriminaldirektor Edmund Präger looked up and motioned Hoffner inside. Like his own appearance, Präger kept his large office sparse: a long wooden desk—phone, blotter, and lamp—with two filing cabinets at either end, and nothing more. More striking, though, was the absence of anything that might have indicated that a battle had been fought on these floors in the last week. Whatever remnants might still be in piles of debris around the rest of the offices, here there were none. Präger had insisted on it. If the revolution was over, it was over. He had no desire to be reminded of it.

  Hoffner watched as Präger continued to nod into the receiver, an occasional “Yes, yes, of course,” or “Quite right,” poking its way into the conversation. Another half-minute and Präger again motioned to Hoffner. Not knowing what to do, Hoffner moved over to the window and gazed out, his eyes wandering across the wreckage in the square below.

  Willingly or not, Hoffner now saw the Alex as if through a sheet of fine gauze, all of it familiar, real, yet profoundly not. In a single moment it had changed forever. Whether over hours, days, weeks, Hoffner had discovered that, in revolution, the passage of time is instantaneous, the reality of the sequence irrelevant and irrevocable: perspective made the sensation only more acute. He had felt something similar to this once before, the same distortion, the same jarring disbelief. Then, he had not thought himself capable of striking Martha—he wasn’t—and yet, in that one infinite moment, he had sent her to the ground, his oldest boy watching in horror, the reality of it now lost, only its shame lived over and over: one moment, all as it was, as it had been; the next, fine gauze, and with it a sense of helplessness so deep as to make it almost illusory.

  “She has the same markings?” said Präger.

  Hoffner turned. The KD was off the phone and was busy writing on a pad as he spoke. “Yes,” Hoffner answered. “Identical.”

  A nod.

  “You’ve heard t
he rumor, of course,” said Hoffner. “We’re due for another new chief, any day.” He moved toward the desk. “What does that make—four, five in the last month?”

  Still preoccupied, Präger said, “And when were you planning on starting this rumor?”

  Hoffner smiled quietly to himself. “As soon as all the bets were in.” He thought he saw the hint of a grin.

  “So this makes five,” said Präger as he flipped through the papers.

  “Yes.”

  “And that makes your maniac rather special, doesn’t it?” Präger stacked the pages, then placed them in perfect alignment along the top right-hand corner of his desk.

  “Yes.” Hoffner waited for Präger to look up. “This one looks to be his first. She might even have had a personal connection with our friend.”

  “Personal?”

  “He’s preserved her. My guess is at least six weeks. That makes her different.”

  “Different is good. And how’s Fichte working out?”

  “Fine. He’s with the body.”

  “Yes, I know. Allowing someone else to take care of your evidence. How far we’ve come, Nikolai.”

  “A brave new world, Herr Kriminaldirektor.”

  Präger motioned to the chair by the desk. “I need you to finish this one up.”

  Hoffner sat. “I don’t think he meant for us to find this woman,” he said, as if not having heard the request. “The others, yes. This one, no.” Hoffner pulled open his notebook and flipped to a dog-eared page. “Preliminary guess is that she was asphyxiated like the others, then—”

  “How close are we, here?”

  Hoffner looked up. That wasn’t a question one asked in cases like these. In cases like these, one had to let it play itself out, each one unique, like the men and women who committed the crimes: degree was never an issue, and Präger knew that. Hoffner did his best to let the question pass. “As I said, we might have someplace to go with this one—”

  “I need this finished,” Präger cut in. He waited. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Nikolai?”

  Hoffner remained silent. “No, Herr Kriminaldirektor, I do not.”

  Präger began to chew on the inside of his cheek: it was the one lapse in composure he permitted himself. “Almost half a dozen mutilated women in just over a month and a half,” he said, his tone more direct. “I’m not sure how long we can keep this out of the press. The distractions of revolution are beginning to fade.”

  “They’re also not going to be getting in the way of an investigation anymore. And,” Hoffner continued, “correct me if I’m wrong, Herr Kriminaldirektor, but we’ve always been very good at using the newspapers to our advantage.”

  “As you said, Nikolai, a brave new world.”

  For the first time today, Hoffner was genuinely confused. “You’re going to have to make that a little clearer, Herr Kriminaldirektor.”

  Präger’s tone softened. “Once in a while, Nikolai, you need to consider the world outside of homicide. You need to consider the repercussions.”

  Hoffner had no idea where Präger was going with this, when the KD suddenly stood, his gaze on the door. “Ah.” Präger moved out from behind his desk. “Herr Kriminal-Oberkommissar,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you quite so—promptly.”

  Hoffner turned to see a tall, angular man in an expensive suit stepping into the office: a chief inspector with a thin coating of meticulously combed jet-black hair atop a narrow head. Hoffner stood. He had never seen the man before.

  Präger made the introductions. “Kriminal-Oberkommissar Gustav Braun, this is—”

  “Kriminal-Kommissar Nikolai Hoffner,” said the man, a strangely inviting smile on his lips. “Yes, I know your work well, Inspector. A most impressive rsum.”

  With a slight hesitation, Hoffner nodded his acknowledgment. “I wish I could say the same of you, Chief Inspector.” Hoffner then added, “I mean, that I know your work well. I don’t.”

  Still coldly affable, Braun said, “No, no, of course not. We tend to keep ourselves to ourselves, upstairs.”

  And there it was, thought Hoffner. “Upstairs.” Of course.

  A step up from the Kriminalpolizei, both by floor and autonomy, were the detectives of Department IA, the political police. Hoffner had never figured out whether they had been created to combat or augment domestic espionage. Whichever it was, he had learned to keep his distance from the men on the fourth floor. Their influence, never lacking under the Kaisers, had grown by leaps and bounds during the last few months. It was simply a question of how far it would ultimately take them. Why they should be showing any interest in his case, however, was not at all clear. The first four bodies had been those of a sales clerk, two seamstresses, and a nurse, no connections among them—except perhaps that they had all lived solitary, isolated lives—but nothing to pique the curiosity of the Polpo: unless the boys upstairs knew something about number five that Hoffner had failed to see, which meant that Präger was obviously in on the secret.

  “Yes, well,” said Präger, predictably less poised: seniority of rank never seemed to matter when IA was involved. “I can assure you that the Chief Inspector has an equally impressive record, Herr Detective Inspector. Although, of course, one never knows how much more has been left out of the file that would be even more impressive had it been in the file”—Hoffner enjoyed watching Präger flounder—“but, of course, it couldn’t be—coming from upstairs.” Präger nodded once, briskly, as if to say he had finished whatever he had been trying to say, and that, whatever he had been trying to say, it had been good. Very good.

  Unnerved still further by the ensuing silence, Präger awkwardly motioned toward the door. “We’ll go down, then. At once.” Präger nodded to Braun, who headed out. He then turned to Hoffner and, with a strained smile, indicated for him to follow. No less confused—though rather enjoying it all—Hoffner moved out into the corridor.

  The morgue at police headquarters—more of an examination room, and nowhere near as extensive as the real thing across town—sat in the sub-basement of the southwest corner of the building, in better days a quick jaunt across the large glass-covered courtyard, and then down two flights. For the trio of Präger, Hoffner, and Braun, however, it was more of a trek, the courtyard having taken the brunt of the recent fighting. Mortar fire had shattered several sections of the glass dome, allowing individual columns of rain to pour down at will, the echo, in spots, overpowering. Cobblestone, where it remained, was perilously slick; elsewhere, one was left to navigate through tiny rivulets of mud. Herr Department IA seemed little inclined to get his boots dirty.

  “I could always carry you,” said Hoffner, under his breath.

  “Pardon?” said Braun as he hopped gingerly from one spot to the next.

  “What?” said Hoffner innocently.

  “I thought you said something.”

  “No, nothing, Herr Kriminal-Oberkommissar.” Hoffner looked at Präger. “Did you say something, Herr Kriminaldirektor?”

  Präger quickened his pace and, still a good ten meters from the door to the lower levels, stuck out his arm. “Ah, here we are,” he said. “That wasn’t so bad.”

  Three minutes later, all three stepped into the morgue’s outer hallway, the air thick with the smell of formaldehyde. An officer sat at a desk. He nodded them on.

  Visible through the glass on the far doors were six tables in a perpendicular row along the back wall. Sheeted bodies occupied the two tables at the far ends; the four inner ones remained empty. Along the other walls, bookcases displayed a wide array of instruments and bottles, the latter filled with various liquids and creams. Above, the old gas lamps had once again been called into service. Hans Fichte was by one of the shelves, holding an open bottle in his hands—sniffing at its contents—as the three men pushed through the doors and stepped into the room. Momentarily startled, Fichte tried to get the lid back on as quickly as possible. “Ah, Herr Kriminaldirektor,” said Fichte, “I didn’t expect—”

 
“You’ve been down here alone?” asked Präger.

  “Yes, sir,” answered Fichte, still having trouble with the lid. “Except for the medic. But he left once the body . . . 0A0; Yes, sir. As you directed. Alone.”

  “Good.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Hoffner leaned into Fichte as he passed by him. “Hand in the cookie jar?” It was enough to stem any further fidgeting.

  Präger led Hoffner and Braun toward the body on the far right table. He was about to pull back the sheet when Fichte interrupted. “No, no, Herr Kriminaldirektor.” All three looked over at him. For a moment Fichte seemed somewhat overwhelmed, as if he had forgotten why he had stopped them. Then, moving toward the table on the left—bottle still sheepishly in hand—he said more quietly, “Ours is this one here.”

  Präger continued to stare at Fichte. “No,” said Präger, his tone almost apologetic. “It’s not, Herr Kriminal-Assistent.” He then turned to Hoffner. “The repercussions, Nikolai. Fished from the Landwehr Canal this morning.” Präger pulled back the sheet.

  There, lying facedown on the table—with the all-too-familiar markings chiseled into her back—was the lifeless body of Rosa Luxemburg.

  THE DIAMETER-CUT

  It was a good hour and a half before Fichte placed the bottle back on the shelf, and then wiped his hands on his pants. His nose had gone a nice pink from the chill in the room.

  “You were holding it the whole time they were here,” said Hoffner, who was peering over Rosa’s body. He was in shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, with thick rubber gloves extending halfway up his forearm.

  Fichte sniffed at his fingers as he walked back to the examining table. “Well, I couldn’t have stepped away.”

  “With the lid open.” Hoffner continued to trace the incisions on her back with what looked to be a thin steel pointer.

  Fichte took a moment to answer. “Yes.”

  Not looking up, Hoffner added, “Feeling a bit faint, are you?”

  “No. Why?”

  “You might want to read a label now and then, Hans. Sniffing isn’t actually a science.”