The boy shrinking into Peter’s old Parka emitted the faintest of sounds in reply which lifted the heart of the Englishman watching over him, ‘Up the Hammers.’
Two
The wind howled all the way from the east up all the Allee’s and Damms and Strasses right to the western edge of the city, it whipped through the forests and the pathways of the Grunewald and raced along one of the main approaches west into the centre, it came unchallenged, barking mad, down Heer Strasse where Martin Peters’ two bedroom fifth floor apartment overlooked the local S-Bahn station on the other side of the road.
It was approaching eleven o’clock on Sunday morning– Peters’ favourite time of the weekend – and most of his three and a half million fellow citizens were seemingly still asleep. Normally woken by the roar of traffic and the clatter of the S-Bahn trains coursing eastwards towards the Mitte, Peters noticed that Heer Strasse today was completely deserted, barring the odd jogger heading for Berlin’s most expansive green space.
He poured his third cup of Earl Grey from the Regimental tea pot he had liberated from his old home base back in England and stepped outside the living room and onto the narrow balcony above the road. Shivering in the cold, Peters wondered when winter would finally give up. The trees remained bare, puddles were cracked and frozen, sleet blessed the pavements below. He remembered a particularly un-seasonal Easter in Berlin when it snowed for almost the entire duration of Holy Week. The memory of it depressed him.
Peters was determined to put off the journey to Friedrichstrasse and Blucher’s mystery package for as long as he could. He wanted to enjoy those few hours in the week when he was totally alone, surrounded only by all the mementoes of service and the memories of half a life spent in uniform, under orders. The high-ceilinged room inside contained trophies from campaigns in the Gulf: the captured, deactivated AK47 above the main wall incongruous amid the framed contemporary art miniatures he bought in the bohemian market near the Landwehr canal every Saturday morning; the photographs of his class at Sandhurst; a picture of himself atop of a captured Iraqi T-54; the shields of various units he had liaised with in Berlin before the Wall fell; and the East German General’s hat on top of the only wardrobe in the living area, a present from one of the Intelligence Corps’ most valuable sources, who had crossed over in ‘88, just a year before the sudden collapse of ‘89. The hat had come later, a present to Peters from the General after German reunification; a token, perhaps, of his atonement for getting it all wrong: he’d insisted all along there would be a bloodbath before the regime packed its bags and retired.
The sleet was transmuting into snow and Peters shivered, sliding back the balcony window and returning to the living room. On this way into the kitchen to deposit the tea and root out the leaves for the compost bin, Peters looked up at the poster. His father had cherished it from the day he bought it in June 1966, the England team including the old man’s favourite player Martin Peters. His son had come into world the following July on the very day of England’s most famous sporting triumph. Watching Moore lift the trophy in a bar not far from St. Barts where his son had just been born, Kurt Peters, a leftwing refugee from Hitler, was determined his only child would be called after one of the heroes from the team he had long adopted as his own. Peters Junior would take on the same name as the West Ham midfielder. In later life his mother would tell her son that this was Kurt’s last revenge on the Fatherland.
The razor-thin mobile trilled and vibrated along Peters’ kitchen worktop. The flashing number on the LCD showed that Blucher was clearly getting impatient.
‘It’s Sunday morning, Lothar. Am I not allowed a day off for good behaviour?’
‘When have you ever been guilty of good behaviour, Herr Peters?’ Blucher asked breathlessly.
‘Have you fished out my present to you, yet?’
Peters dreaded the thought of Blucher’s ‘surprise’ secreted in a locker in the old border station where he first saw that other apparition for the first time, when he was transferred from Belfast to Berlin after the shooting, when he was detailed to pose as the western tourist attending the 40th birthday party of the DDR, when he had to descend into the U-bahn below the earth and first stirred up the spectre of the woman he had killed.
Peters pretended to be indifferent towards Blucher’s latest offering.
‘No. I went for a run in the Grunewald, then I’m having lunch, maybe a little drink and then a siesta. I’ll come and collect it in the morning.’
‘Make sure you do as you bloody…...’ Blucher then disconnected.
Was he out of coverage or simply throwing a strop? Wondered Peters. Blucher wasn’t like the majority of his informers and sources. Usually they were nervous, haunted, weak men with secrets desperate to bury, dead men on leave who clung onto Peters like he was some flotsam after a wreck, their only means of not going under. Blucher normally played up the Prussian bearing, exuding confidence in deference to his alleged aristocratic roots.
He immediately felt guilty for stringing Blucher out: after all, the day was yet to be filled by Peter’s mental filing system. At work they had a nickname for the former soldier-turned-cop – Filofaxhead. Because he ordered his work, no, his entire life, into neat, methodical segments. Like in his old undercover life Peters still religiously kept to schedules and time constraints. He organised others around him in much the same way. The former spy constructed patterns that suited his planning. Unknown to the gossips at Kotbusser Strasse, he even timetabled his sex life.
On Sunday nights he would take the U-Bahn west to Halensee and make the short journey to the little bar on Westfalische Strasse. The tiny liquor store was run by a widow in her mid 60s who loved to flirt with the virtually all-male clientele of Hertha supporters and Formula 1 fans. She was a glamorous grandmother in leather trousers pouring Kindl and snap shots amid a forest of Mullets, puffed up jackets and swollen stomachs. Peters, unable to sleep, had stumbled into her bar one wet autumn evening 18 months earlier, took her flirtation as a direct invitation to bed and promptly proposition the patron.
The widow Schuster was flattered at the attention she was receiving from the fit, neatly turned out younger Englishman still with his own hair and teeth; so much so that on their first night together she revealed that she and her late husband had been doyens of Berlin’s dungeon scene.
Where most widows and widowers were inclined to keep a suit or a dress belonging to their late loved one neatly pressed, in pristine condition, mothballed in a cupboard of a bedroom, Frau Schuster told Peters that she couldn’t bear disposing of hers and her husband’s S&M garments and toys. So they remained locked in a stout seventies-style dark blue suit case beneath her bed. On their second Sunday night together back at her Charlottenberg home, Peters persuaded her to unlock the case and model for him. Thus began his dalliance with sub-dom games played out with an experienced mistress who started her routine back in the pub by turning Peters into her evening busboy who wiped down the tables, emptied the ashtrays, swept the floor and on command lit the widow Schuster’s cigarette or poured her favourite tipple, bone dry white wine from the Saar-Mosel, into her glass. All tasks completed without pay.
The only reward was the widow’s genuine flattery and her modest bewilderment over the attention he was giving her. Privately he took comfort from her re-assuring him that he was handsomely furtive with Slavic features, sharp cheekbones and china blue eyes despite being small for a policeman (five foot five) and at least one of flab now around the midriff Peters toiled in vain to shed. He was grateful to her for restoring his confidence in between the episodes of the spectre’s appearances. The widow was non-judgemental shelter. She could sense the haunting around Peters but soothed him with her only verbal order in their evenings together ,’Keep it shallow Martin my dear, keep it shallow.’
A night of tasks and rewards at the Pub and later Haus Schuster lay ahead of him but there were still hours and hours to eat up before he set off by S and U-Bahn to his older lover. He tho
ught about the two other women he was involved with and the strictly allocated quantity of time he allotted to each of them. ‘Ms Thursday’ was Miriam, a married Turkish born woman from Kreuzberg who was shunned by her increasingly devout husband because she believed she could never bare him a son. She was in her late 30s and in contrast to the dumpy, busty widow Schuster was long legged, slim and carried herself with benighted elegance.
Between Monday to Wednesday Peters punched in 12, sometimes 14 hours at the station daily in Kreuzberg where he worked. He built up enough hours by midweek to knock off earlier on Thursdays, giving him time to visit the Turkish food stores in search of spices and fresh food, for the meal he always cooked for Miriam. Peters would steal menus from restaurants, invade kitchens to catch a word with an Indian or Iranian chef, download recipes online, anything to impress his married lover with his culinary skills.
Whatever he and Miriam did not finish, Peters would put in the fridge to be wolfed down the next Friday evening before his night out with Karen, the youngest of the women of his week.. She was a 22 year-old architecture student at the Free University whom he met a year before while investigating the deaths of three young men on campus who had been mired in a gothic triple suicide pact. Karen had dated one of the students for a short while and broke down while being questioned by Peters in the university bar. He bought her a drink and then passed on his business card. Peters was astonished when this dark haired girl with Italianate looks and olive skin nearly half his age from Stuttgart rang his mobile a month after the suicide’s funerals and asked HIM for a date. It was not so much a lack of self belief but a conviction that he didn’t really deserve the interest any of the three of them showed in him. They certainly wouldn’t have if they had known what he had done back in Belfast.
Karen was also his key to unlock the doors to alternative Berlin: the hyper all night parties in Friedrichshain thrown by one of her boho-class mates; the clubs in Prenzlauer Berg that blared out chest thumping techno from midnight to dawn and the seedy eastern basement bars where students, artists and wannabee rock stars mixed with spaced out hookers and their paranoid pimps.
Siberia was rattling again at all the windows of Heer Strasse, sleet and rain streaked across the panes making Peters blink momentarily as he stared out over the desolate cityscape. Back in Kreuzberg they wondered and whispered about why Peters had never married. If only they knew, he thought slyly. No, he often panicked inwardly, far better that they never knew. It was already too much for some of them that Peters, a foreigner, had risen through the ranks relatively quickly to become second-in-command of the station’s murder squad, one of the most revered of all the homicide units in Berlin.
Peters took out the key Blucher had handed over in the ‘Der Zug’ the previous night and yawned.
Three
The screaming stopped for a few seconds when the hood was pulled off and his face was revealed. He sucked in the air before the pleading started but no one could hear him.
The ordeal had left him unable to express any horror through his facial muscles or eyes. All he could do was stare directly into the camera, a blank, doomed expression of someone who had given up the fight.
For about ten to fifteen minutes his naked body had sustained blow after blow from a baseball bat. He had been tied to a chair, unable to escape the relentless battering. All he could do was sway back and forth trying in vain to dodge the assault. A helpless bruised body being knocked to and fro, a ticking metronome of terror whose flesh was growing increasingly dark with every new swing.
The volume had been turned down to zero. Even when his visage was exposed there was no sound, or even an expression, no tic nor twitch, of any kind of fear or pain. Just that blank stare down the lens, hopeless, pathetic, resigned but an image held long enough to make sure that he would be identified. Then came the final blow, the figure in black standing behind the subject of his torture game, swinging the bat and then bringing it crashing onto the back of his victim’s head and the object of that ordeal falling to the ground.
At first Peters had thought he was watching some ghoulish kidnap and murder DVD from Iraq. Perhaps even a recording from Abu Grahib. It was only when Peters saw the face that he realised that Lothar Blucher might have known this man.
The detective continued to rewind and freeze frame the penultimate scene, the hapless picture of a man who has been battered to the point of absolute surrender.
Why Blucher? Why was the film sent to him? Peters wondered. The woman beside him seemed to sense his thoughts exactly.
‘He must have known him. Your contact must have known the victim.’
Angelika Domath put one of her perfectly manicured, purple painted finger nails onto the screen, the noise of its impact made Peter’s teeth chatter.
Angelika was diplomatic enough never to ask her boss as to who the identities of his sources were because everyone in the station knew that Martin Peters kept all their secrets closely guarded. She was eleven years younger than Peters but an inch or two taller, swarthy skin and china blue eyes, a synthesis of the Steppes and the North German plain. Her blonde hair, accentuated by so much dyeing that it appeared as brittle as glass, when at work was always combed back and held in place by a series of multi coloured hair-clips. Peters’ favourite thing about her however was her lower lip which was fatter than the upper one, ripe red and plumped up only by nature.
The men underneath her in the unit’s pecking order ran a guerrilla war against Angelika. Hostilities were opened on her first day in the office, with graffiti scraped onto the wall of the female toilets. ‘Angi-Stasi’. Quite a welcome.
Her father had been a colonel in the East German National People’s Army, which once afforded Angelika the privileged perks of a family loyal to the old regime. Her mother had been Russian. Angi had just joined the Communist youth movement, the FDJ, when ‘The Turn’ began and the dictatorship crumbled amid mass protests, Gorbachev’s removal of the Red Army crutch and the panic of the party leaders offering far too little, far too late. Although she was only 12 in that pivotal year Angelika eventually moved West first to the Free University’s Science department, then to police college and finally her posting in the homicide division of Kotbusser Strasse, where open season was declared on the uppity ‘Ossi’ who had vaulted over the older, more experienced men in the unit.
Her promotion had won her several enemies inside the station, the chief of whom was Gunther Riedel, the division’s very own Iago who had first spread the rumour of Stasi-connections. Riedel came over with the legions of those other ambitious westerners seeking to cultivate blooming landscapes in the east after the fall. A native of Stuttgart, he constantly dreamt of promotion, a Porsche in the driveway, a second home in Majorca, a season ticket for Bayern, a clatter of kids and a submissive stay-at-home wife.
Peters looked at Angelika and admired the way she was fixated at the image freeze-framed on the television; she exuded dedication and seriousness; unlike Riedel and his mid-week five-a-side companions in the unit, she would never have made light or cracked a joke about such a vision of horror. To Peters Angi appeared to have a calling more than just a career; she cared about catching the killers, the rapists, the abusers, the traffickers. In Angelika Domath, Peters knew, the victims had a true ally.
‘So tell me, Angie: if my contact knows him, then why not tell me straight away’? Peters asked.
She tapped another nail against the glass.
‘Whatever the reason I’m sure of it. Your contact knows this man or at least has come across him.’
‘Right then, I’ll call the contact and arrange another meeting. If you’re right then there’s a game going on here’
Peters hesitated and drew breath.
‘You don’t suppose the whole thing is a set-up, a joke maybe?’
‘Absolutely not. I can tell from the injuries that this is, sorry was, for real. I recognise the colouring and wounds from my post-mortem studies, Angelika added.
10 A.M Mon
day morning and the unsolved murder count had just clicked up to 3.
‘Shit. I’d better go and tell Stannheim we have another stiff on our hands.’
Every Monday morning Mannfred Stannheim posed the exact same question to Martin Peters: ‘When are you going to take over and let me retire?’ And every Monday morning Peters would refuse to answer.
Stannheim was old enough to remember the privations of the Berlin Air Luft when Stalin sought to starve West Berliners into submission. He had stood on a mound of earth close to the flats in working class Wedding as the RAF planes swooped low towards Templehof carrying the food and fuel that kept the free western sector out of Soviet hands. For Stannheim that bravery and ingenuity in keeping his city fed and warm erased the memory of the blitz Berlin received during the War. For the rest of his life he remained an Anglophile and so was delighted to learn than an ambitious young German-speaking British soldier had applied to join his division.
Martin Peters was also the son Stannheim wished he and his late wife had had. His real son had drifted from secondary school into the arms of a gaggle of junkies. Graduating from hash to heroin and ending up on the crack pipe, Paul Stannheim spent his days begging, cadging cigarettes, committing the odd petty theft around the Zoo Station and (according at least to Riedel and his cabal) renting his ass to friendless or abandoned old queens who often frequented places like ‘Boyz R Us.’ Just as he had done on Sunday morning Peters regularly stopped off more often in the late afternoons on the way back to Heer Strasse at the Zoo, his pockets bulging with Euro coins intended to keep Paul Stannheim from the more humiliating means of funding his habit.
The Swinging Detective Page 2