Fichte stood motionless. The KD had never asked his opinion on anything. “Well,” Fichte said with as much certainty as he could find, “any leak might lead back to Luxemburg, Herr Kriminaldirektor. I don’t think they’d want that.”
Präger smiled and turned to Hoffner. “That’s a very good point, Herr Kriminal-Assistent. Don’t you think, Nikolai?”
Hoffner said, “You know I’m going to look into this personally, Edmund. And I’m going to want a note sent out to every Kripo office. A general reminder on discretion.”
Präger knew there would be no fighting Hoffner on this one. “Fine. Just don’t let it get in the way.”
“It won’t.”
Fichte cut in. “The telephone call, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar. We should get back to the office.”
Hoffner turned to Fichte. He tried not to sound too cavalier. “Have you been paying attention, Hans? We’re not going back to the office.”
The switchboard operator stared defiantly at Hoffner, who stood hovering above her. This, he knew, was the surest way to keep the lines of communication as restricted as possible. Fichte agreed: Thursday’s late-night encounter had opened him up to an entirely new world at the Alex. And while Fichte had been strangely intrigued by it at the outset, Hoffner had quickly set him straight: these were uncharted men, the source of speculation and derision from a distance, but far more treacherous up close. Whatever arguments there were to the contrary, Hoffner made it clear that the Polpo never merited the benefit of the doubt. Fichte now understood that.
Electricity had come back to the Alex sometime on Monday. The lights from perhaps ten unattended calls flashed in frantic patterns across the board; Hoffner continued to keep the woman from answering them: she was doing little to hide her disapproval. Fichte stood by the door.
“This is highly unusual, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar,” she said as the board begged for attention. “I really need to take care of these. I can easily forward the call to your office when it comes in.”
Hoffner nodded. “Yes, I know, Frulein. I just feel more comfortable receiving it here.”
“The international line is no difficulty, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar.”
“Well, I don’t want to tie up any more of your wires than are necessary, Frulein.”
The woman insisted, “You wouldn’t be tying up—”
“Let’s just wait for the call, shall we?” Hoffner checked his watch. It was coming up on one o’clock. At eight seconds to, the international line began to flash. Hoffner nodded and the operator made the connection. She confirmed the caller and then handed the earpiece to Hoffner. Without any hesitation, she retrieved a second earpiece and sat back.
“Could you wait outside, Frulein?” said Hoffner.
The woman looked up in disbelief “Excuse me, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar?”
“This won’t take more than a few minutes, Frulein.”
The woman spoke as if to a child. “I can’t leave my post, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar. All of these calls—”
“Can wait.” Hoffner’s tone made sure she understood. “Time for a coffee break, wouldn’t you say, Frulein?” Hoffner nodded to Fichte to open the door. The woman’s gaze grew more hostile until, with a practiced civility, she slowly stood, nodded to both men, and headed for the door.
At the door, she turned back to Hoffner bitterly. “This will be reflected in my report to the Kriminaldirektor, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar.”
“Yes, I’m sure it will, Frulein Telephonistin.”
Fichte shut the door, and Hoffner brought the receiver up to his ear. “Detective Inspector Nikolai Hoffner here,” he said in French.
“One moment, Monsieur.” Hoffner waited through the silence. He nodded to Fichte to stay by the door.
“Inspector Hoffner?” The voice was distant but audible. “This is Chief Inspector van Acker, Bruges police.”
“Chief Inspector. I appreciate the speed of your response.”
“Not at all,” said van Acker. “I do need to ask, is this the same Inspector Hoffner who published a piece titled “The Odor of Death” in Die Polizei, eight, maybe nine years ago?”
For a moment, Hoffner thought he had misheard; he had a hard time believing that anyone still remembered the article, less so that it’s “fame” had ever extended beyond a five-block radius of the Alex. “Yes,” said Hoffner, not quite convinced. “You know it?”
“Of course,” said van Acker. “Pretty standard reading here, Inspector. In Brussels, as well.”
“Really?”
“Truth be told, I probably wouldn’t have set up the telephone call except, well, I thought it might be my only chance to talk with you in person.”
“Really, I’m—flattered,” said Hoffner. Fichte looked over. Hoffner shook him off.
“Nice little feather in my cap,” said van Acker. “Anyway, about your wire, Inspector. I’m not sure how helpful we can be, but we might have a little something.”
“You’ve got a missing girl, then?”
“Your description was a bit vague, but the time frame is about right for a case we’ve been looking into. May I ask how you knew to contact us?”
Hoffner told him about the gloves.
“It might also be Brussels,” said van Acker.
“Yes. I’ve got a call in.”
“Of course. The problem is, I’m not sure the girl we’ve got in mind could have afforded a pair of Troimpel gloves.”
“And why is that?”
“She was an attendant at one of the area hospitals. A scrub girl.”
That seemed a poor excuse. “And Belgian scrub girls aren’t capable of saving their money, Chief Inspector? I find that hard to believe.”
“Well, not for gloves, no. And especially not for these gloves, Inspector.”
“And no well-off boyfriends?” said Hoffner.
“Not this girl,” said van Acker. “There’s something of a stigma attached to—” He stopped. “Look, to be honest, it’s more of an asylum than a hospital. These are girls who can’t get work elsewhere. They also don’t usually spend much time away from home, for rather obvious reasons. And this girl had no family. You understand.”
Sadly, Hoffner did. Insanity as infection, he thought, with its equally despicable maxim: that only the most pitiful, vile, and unprepossessing would be willing to risk contamination by cleaning up the filth produced by a group of lunatics. Berlin’s own Herzberge Asylum was proof that such idiocy was still thriving well beyond the narrow minds of the provinces. Hoffner had often walked along its dingy halls not sure which of the two groups—the patients or the menial staff—deserved to be under lock and key, although with the latter, he did recognize that malice, and not madness, was more often the dominant pathology.
“I see,” said Hoffner. “Then perhaps this isn’t the girl.”
“Not to be blunt, but did she have the look of a—” At least van Acker was trying to be delicate. “—well, of one of these types.”
“Hard to tell, Chief Inspector. The face was . . . gnawed away at.”
“Of course,” said van Acker. “To be expected, I suppose. Any other distinguishing features?” He was doing his best to go through the motions, making sure to touch on everything. “Your wire didn’t specify anything beyond height, weight, coloring. We do have a description of a marking on the left leg and another on the back. Anything there?”
The mention of the leg gave Hoffner a moment’s hope. “Where on the leg?” he said.
“Mid-shin, according to her application file. A scar from childhood.”
Somehow, Hoffner had known it would be too low. “There wasn’t enough of it left to check.”
“Naturally,” said van Acker, moving on. “And nothing on the upper back? There’s supposed to be a very recognizable birthmark there. A strawberry-colored splatter, as if someone threw a bit of paint at her. You’d have seen it immediately.”
Van Acker was picking all the most interesting spots. “The back is more problematic,” said Hoffne
r. “It’s been”—he did his best to find the least troubling word—“disfigured. The entire area between the shoulder blades. It’s impossible to tell what would have been there.”
Hoffner expected to hear a summary “oh well” and then an equally quick wrap-up to the conversation, but the line remained strangely quiet. When van Acker did speak, his tone was far more pointed: “Disfigured?” he said. “What kind of disfigurement?”
The change in tone momentarily threw Hoffner: for the first time in the conversation, van Acker sounded as if he was actually investigating something. Hoffner chose his words carefully. “Just some knife work, Chief Inspector. We’re dealing with something of an artist here.”
Van Acker continued to press. “How do you mean?”
Hoffner remained cautious. “We didn’t find a birthmark.”
When van Acker next spoke, the hesitation in his voice was undeniable: “It’s—not a pattern, is it?”
The word jumped at Hoffner. He took his time in answering. “Yes,” he said. “A pattern.”
Van Acker was now fully committed. “Could you describe it, Inspector?”
Again Hoffner waited. He gazed over at Fichte. These were rare moments: the possibility of a piece falling into place, no matter how disturbing its implications. And, as always, Hoffner forced himself not to look beyond it. He also knew not to give anything away. The information had to come to him. “A few lines, Chief Inspector,” he said. “Not much more.” When the line remained quiet, Hoffner continued, “Suffice it to say someone decided to make a pretty nice mess of it.”
“I see.” Van Acker’s voice was strangely cold; what he said next was no less chilling. “These wouldn’t be ruts, would they, Inspector, with a central strip running down the middle? That’s not the pattern you’re describing, is it?”
Fichte moved closer in when he saw the sudden reaction on Hoffner’s face. Hoffner shook his head as he put up a hand to stop him. With great reserve, Hoffner said, “And why do you ask that, Chief Inspector?”
There was a long silence before van Acker answered: “You wouldn’t need to ask if you’d seen them.”
Fichte was having trouble keeping up as the two men mounted the stairs back to Hoffner’s office: he had yet to hear a word about the conversation with the man from Bruges. Instead he had been told to stand by the door for nearly ten minutes while Hoffner had sat at the switchboard taking notes and asking questions.
Once inside his office, Hoffner told Fichte to shut the door and take a seat. Hoffner began flipping through the pages he had just written, matching them against a second notebook that he now took from inside his desk drawer. Still scanning, Hoffner said, “According to van Acker, the man we’ve been looking for is a Paul Wouters.”
Fichte tried to minimize his reaction. “This Wouters left the same trail in Bruges?”
“He did,” said Hoffner as he jotted down a few words in the first notebook.
“He won’t be easy to trace.”
“Oh, I think he will.” Hoffner looked up from the pages. “He’s been in the Sint-Walburga Insane Asylum, just outside of Bruges, for the past two years.”
Fichte needed a moment. “When did he escape?”
“He didn’t. He’s still there.”
Once again, Fichte was at a loss. “I don’t understand.”
Hoffner nodded and went back to the pages. He began to cross-reference every detail van Acker had been able to give him, most of it from memory: texture of the ruts, quality of the blade, intervals between the killings. As it turned out, van Acker had been the lead inspector on the case, and his recall was remarkable. It was why he had taken such an interest in the girl’s case, and why he had been eager to follow up even the most obscure requests from as far away as Berlin.
The girl had been one of Wouters’s night attendants. There had been rumors of something more than mopping up and scrubbing between them, but nothing had ever been found. In fact, the doctors who had petitioned and won to keep Wouters from the gallows—a lab rat for them to study—had insisted that such intimacy might be an indication of a positive response to the treatment. The intimacy, they reasoned, would have amounted to little more than adolescent groping—about right for the mental age of both—and so they saw no harm in it: as long as offspring could be avoided, or terminated prior to development, the doctors felt it would be beneficial to Wouters’s eventual recovery. Van Acker, of course, had been the sole voice of reason—he had wanted Wouters dead from the moment they had taken him—but science had prevailed. The fact that Wouters had been brutally killing women prior to having received this extraordinary treatment seemed an inconsequential detail to everyone but van Acker. The doctors reminded him that those women—Wouters’s victims—had been older. “Much older, Monsieur Le Chef Inspecteur. That was his purpose in the killings. His desire. The age. Because of his history. This girl poses no such threat.” Somehow, van Acker had been unable to locate pimping in the Hippocratic oath. Having done nothing to stop them, however, he alone now felt responsible for her fate.
The one aspect of the case about which van Acker had been hazy was the placement of the bodies. The Bruges police had caught Wouters in mid-etching, kneeling over his third victim; they had failed to look for a pattern in the discoveries because there had never been enough of a body count to create one.
“At least now we have a name for the girl,” said Hoffner as he continued to flip through the pages. “She was called Mary Koop. She worked at Sint-Walburga. She disappeared about two months ago.”
Fichte said, “So, if Wouters is still in the asylum, what are we dealing with here?”
Hoffner nodded as he scanned his scrawl. “That was the first question I asked myself.”
Fichte decided to take a stab. “Maybe it was someone who read about the case? Someone who was imitating him? Like that fellow who took up where Chertonski left off.”
Hoffner looked up. “Chertonski?” he said in mild disbelief. “You can’t be serious. That was knocking over old women’s flats, Hans, not killing them, and certainly not leaving them with pieces of artwork chiseled into their backs.”
Fichte seemed to shrink ever so slightly into his coat. “No—of course not. You’re right, Herr Kriminal—”
Hoffner put up a hand to stop him. “Whatever it is, Hans, I was trying to say it’s the wrong question.” Hoffner was about to explain, when he stopped. His hand became a single finger as he listened intently; he glanced over at the door and then motioned Fichte over. Fichte stood and, with a nod from Hoffner, quickly opened the door.
There, poised in a knocking position, stood Detective Sergeant Ludwig Groener.
“Herr Kriminal-Bezirkssekretr,” said Hoffner. “Can we help you with something?” On instinct, Fichte took a step back.
Groener stood motionless. He held a stack of papers in his hand as he peered at Fichte, then Hoffner. He remained outside the office. “Herr Kriminal-Kommissar,” he said. “You received a telephone call from abroad. There was no entry in the log.”
Hoffner nodded in agreement. “If there was no entry, how do you know I received it?”
Groener had no answer. Instead he took aim at Fichte. “As his Assistent, Herr Fichte, it’s your job to fill in all appropriate logs. You know this, of course.”
“Of course, Herr Kriminal-Bezirkssekretr,” said Fichte. “When the Herr Kriminal-Kommissar receives a call. Absolutely. I’ll make a note of that.”
The two men stared at each other for several seconds. Realizing that Fichte was going to be of no help, Groener again turned to Hoffner. “It’s my job to know when calls come in, and the like, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar.”
“And to listen at the doors of detective inspectors’ offices?” said Hoffner. “Do you find that equally exciting?”
For an instant Groener looked as if he had gotten a whiff of his own breath. Then, just as quickly, he resumed the taut stare of bureaucratic efficiency. “The telephone call from Belgium, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar. Have your
man make a note of it in the log at the switchboard.” Groener turned and started to go.
Hoffner stopped him by saying, “Would you like me to give him a detailed account of what was said, Herr Groener? Or is the notation of information you already have sufficient?”
Groener kept his back to Hoffner. He turned his head slightly and said, “What was discussed is your business, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar. It’s your case.”
“Yes, Herr Kriminal-Bezirkssekretr,” Hoffner said coldly. “It is.”
Groener offered a clipped nod and then retreated down the hall.
Fichte waited until Groener had moved out of sight before turning back to Hoffner. “God, he makes the place stink.”
“Close the door, Hans.” With a plaintive look from Fichte, Hoffner said, “All right, wave it out a few times.” Fichte opened and closed the door with gusto, and then shut it before returning to his seat. Hoffner said, “So, who else knew about the wire?”
“It was on your desk when I got back from Missing Persons. I assume just one of the boys and the wire operator. That’s it.”
“Evidently not.” Hoffner sat, thinking to himself: Why would anyone else have been looking for it in the first place?
“Why the wrong question?” said Fichte, resuming their previous conversation.
It took Hoffner a moment to refocus; he looked over at Fichte. “Because right now it doesn’t matter who’s doing the killing, or why. What matters is how he got to Berlin.”
Fichte’s all-too-predictable “I don’t understand” was out before Hoffner could explain.
“Look at what we have.” Hoffner settled back in his chair as he spoke: “You’d think the piece out of place would be Wouters—everything in the Bruges case is the same, everything points to him, except he’s locked away in an asylum seven hundred kilometers from here, a fact that is both frightening and astounding—but it’s not. That’s not the piece that doesn’t fit. Imitator or not—it doesn’t matter which—the killings are taking place here by someone who knows the Bruges case. By someone who must have been in Bruges. But not because he can make a few markings on a woman’s back. No, the reason he must have been in Bruges is that, unless he was there, how else would he have been able to bring the girl from Bruges to Berlin? Given her mental state, she clearly couldn’t have made it on her own. So how did anyone get from Bruges to Berlin over two months ago? The only transports would have been military. No one else could have crossed the lines, even after the armistice. How? And how does he bring a girl with him?”
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