‘Lighten up Herr Riedel. You’ll have to get used to all this stuff while working here.’
‘What exactly do you want me to do here?’ Riedel asked as his eyes wandered over the shop.
‘There is a link between this shop and the two men killed on film. They both used this place for their kicks. Whoever did them in probably knew that. Maybe he has been here too. I just want you to look out for anyone suspicious.’
Riedel looked at Peters as if he had lost his mind. Suspicous? Everyone, Riedel and Peters both knew, who came into the shop, would probably look suspicious. Furtiveness was an unspoken code in sex shops across the world, gay or straight and especially in any establishment belonging to Lothar Blucher.
‘Just keep me posted on this place.’ Peters added as he twirled his car keys around his fingers relieved to be leaving the shop to Riedel and his paranoid imagination.
Eight
There was something there. She was sure of it. Something engraved on the blade. Slowed down on the screen in normal size it was just a dark grey blur.
She fiddled with the touch pad, the mouse icon whirring around the sword until she clicked on that part of the cold steel where the word was to become enlarged.
She recognised the style of writing instantly. Cyrillic. One word. A message carved out in the second language of her childhood.
Angelika had spent the morning in Kotbusser Strasse rewinding the brief horror shows depicting the death of two of Lothar Blucher’s clients on her computer. The first thing she noticed was that both men had indents on the bridges of their noses. Whoever had captured them, bound them up and prepared them for their final ordeal had removed their spectacles. She wondered if either of them could see properly when the camera lens was pointed directly at them.
She pushed the enlargement from the sword to its limit and then copied and pasted the word onto a blank file. She knew she had recognised it almost right away. But Angelika was nothing but meticulous. She had to be certain before she took it to Peters.
‘Tavarich’.
‘Comrade.’
After printing it out she crossed the murder room floor, making her way to Peters’ desk just outside Stannheim’s office. She waited until she was sure the superintendent was out of earshot and laid the picture she printed off in front of the Englishman.
‘What’s this?’ he said looking up from his laptop.
‘Something I spotted on the blade that killed number 2, sir.’
Peters lifted it up and read the enlarged letters marking the word of solidarity on the sword.
‘Comrade! Mmmm. Not another Russian angle, Angi.’
‘I can’t say sir. But I’m sure it’s a Russian blade. I think I’ve seen one before.’
‘Where?’
‘In my father’s house.’
Peters knew that Angi’s father had been a colonel in the old communist National People’s Army. This had been the reason for all the jibes and the cheap shots levelled at her in Kotbusser Strasse. A loyal and faithful servant of the regime who had remained trapped inside his Pankow apartment since the Turn, the old man raging against the changes all around him, while surrounded and kept warm by the souvenirs from where the past was literally another country.
‘I’d like to see that sword.’
‘I’ll call him, sir. Ask him to see us.’
‘Us? You want me to come with you.’
‘I think he might enjoy the experience besides he’s not likely to hand over such a prized possession even to me.’
They took the U-Bahn from Alexanderplatz to Viner Strasse and then by two S-bahn stops to Pankow, alighting at Borkhum Strasse and taking a right past the abandoned prison down Bornholmer Strasse. The roads were still pitted with cobble stones, the walls of the grey apartment blocks still peeling and pockmarked with wartime bullet holes. Mid way down was the Domath family’s block; a flat accessed via an inner courtyard with reeking bins and rusting chained up bikes. Impenetrable graffiti, Arabic-like, curled and swirled around the exterior walls and also inside around the stairwells leading to the apartments; Lt Colonel Hans Domath (retired) lived on the fourth floor.
Angelika used an old rusting key to unlock the door into a small, narrow hallway surrounded on either side by bookcases, each end of the four shelves shored up by iron busts of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Thalmann. Underneath his feet Peters felt the squeak, squeak of cheap oil cloth. Angelika gestured to him to shake off his shoes and take a right.
The main living room, even during daytime, was illuminated by a low level orange light. Peters surveyed the shelves and the tops of the wooden cabinets on which sat toy T54’s, plastic tiny troop carriers, a model of a Soyuz rocket, a perfectly clipped together MiG 16 fighter. The sight of the miniature tank reminded him of those lines of rotting and rusting Iraqi fighting vehicles strewn across the Kuwaiti desert. He remembered at the time thinking as if he was in the junk yard of Soviet communism surrounded by the system that had so ingloriously failed. The system that his ‘betters’ in military int once told him in Berlin only a few years before the ‘91 Gulf War was likely to survive the upheavals elsewhere in Central Europe. Remembering how wrong they had been as he recalled the wreckage of Saddam’s Soviet armour, sitting now in Angi’s father’s living room, he felt that exact same emotion.
On the walls there were pennants of F.C. Berlin and the Felix Derzinshky Regiment; a poster demonstrating support for the MPLA in Angola; a black and white picture of Sigmund Jahn, the first German in space. There were bottles too, empty ones all sitting atop white doilies strategically positioned across shelves, record player lids and tables. All of them beers that were no longer brewed in the city. And above them hanging on the wall nearest the window, a sword in its sheath. Peters thought how remarkably similar it all this was to his own apartment several miles away in the far, far west.
Angi’s father sat up bolt upright in a battered, moth eaten chair. He was breathing heavily through a thick, angular nose. The colonel’s sonorous inhaling and exhaling created the impression in Peter’s mind that he was inside the belly of some rumbling, latent beast.
He was a tall man, about six foot three, thin, free from any excess weight. He had blue, watery eyes and a colony of wiry red hair on his head.
‘You will have a beer, then?’ he asked without even looking at Peters.
‘Yes please, a Kindl would be great.’
The colonel instantly rose to Peters’ bait.
‘We don’t drink that shit here. We drink our own beer.’
He stormed off to the kitchen and then returned with three bottles under his arm and a tin opener clamped between his teeth; the top of it revealing the colours of the German flag and the familiar DDR icons of the hammer of the workers and the dividers representing the ‘progressive intelligentsia.’
As he popped off the beer tops the colonel launched into a tirade.
‘We only drink Vernesgruner. We keep to our own. It’s all we have left, Herr Peters.’
After handing the bottles out and ignoring the protests of his daughter who reminded him that she was on duty, the colonel fixed his glare on Peters.
‘My daughter tells me that you used to be a British soldier.’
‘Yes, sir here in Berlin just before the Wall fell.’
‘Then you were in that nest of spies over near the Olympic stadium?’
‘If that’s what you want to call it. Yes. I was there right up until it all fell apart across here.’
The colonel laughed and slapped Peters on the back.
‘You speak German like a Swabian. I take it your teacher was from Stuttgart.’
Peters remembered that summer of 1980 in the capital of Baden Wurtemberg, camping in the Black Forest, drinking apple beer and his first awkward sexual experience as a 14 year old virgin lying about his age to an older girl in purple dungarees and a Nuclear Power-No Thanks badge clipped near one of her breasts; the two of them fondling and pulling each other furtively in the university residence halls.
&nb
sp; ‘You are very perceptive Colonel Domath,’ Peters said also remembering the exact same comment from another member of the NVA when there was still such a thing as the Warsaw Pact and a wall that defined all of their lives.
‘Know thine enemy. Now how can I help you Herr Peters? My daughter said you need my help.’
Angelika interrupted and explained to her father about the two murders on film, the second one with the sword and the strange Cyrillic message engraved on the steel. The colonel marched over to the wall and with both hands took down the sword. He unsheathed it and moved back across the floor, his right hand gripped on the handle, the sword pointing straight into the direction towards Peters’ stomach.
He could run this right through me now and he wouldn’t flinch. No, not now,. But back then, when the Wall was up and the Cold War was running. If Domath had captured Peters he would have not hesitated for a second in dispatching the English spy and all the ‘traitors’ he once controlled. Peters swigged back the beer and then handed the colonel’s bottle back to him. The ex-NVA colonel took a sip and sat down, balancing the sword on his knees.
‘Sir, there was a word engraved into the blade used to kill our second man.’
‘The word was Tavarich. Or ‘Comrade’ as any linguist-spy in the British Army would have known,’ Colonel Domath said impatiently.
‘Yes, Comrade. What is the significance of that, sir?’
The colonel held up the sword to the light and pointed to an engraving on the side. Peters leaned forward and read.
‘Tavarich.’
The old man collapsed back into the decaying seat and again sipped at his beer. Then he bent forward, clasping his bony hands together as if in prayer.
‘I was not like the rest of the jackals. You must understand that Herr Peters. Unlike the others I didn’t cross the line once the anti-fascist protection barrier came down to offer my services. Oh I know. That was your job. You must have interviewed all those ex NVA and Stasi officers willing to offer up our most closely guarded secrets. Well I wasn’t one of them.’
‘I don’t quite follow how this is connected to our investigation.’
Angelika again interrupted: ‘What we want to know, what Herr Peters needs to know, is who would have access to such a sword?’
‘Oh come my Angi. I think you already know the answer to that question.’
His daughter blushed; Peters looked up and spotted a framed coloured photo, fading now, blurred slightly, almost ghost-like, of a young Angelika, bedecked in the royal blue shirt of the Free German Youth, a bunch of flowers in her arms, beside the humongous tonsured outline of Ernst Thalmann, the adopted home grown communist hero of the DDR who had died in Buchenwald concentration camp.
The colonel was staring longingly at the sword, gently shaking and twirling the blade around by his hand.
‘What Angi knows is that such a sword is quite a collector’s item, Herr Peters. That there are, that there were, only a limited number in existence.’
‘How come?’ Peters was bewildered.
‘They were only given out to specialist units. Units in the NVA that worked alongside our Soviet comrades. Hence Tavarich.’
‘So they were only given to Germans.’
‘Of course. Only to special forces. Men who had fought in Afghanistan against the medievalist fascists. You know those people that your British Army is still fighting today. Or men who had trained the freedom fighters in Angola and Mozambique.’
Peters realised this was potentially worse than he could ever have imagined. He was reading his thoughts out loud.
‘So, our man is, was, a soldier?’
‘No, not just an ordinary soldier. Someone with experience in Special Forces. Someone who is very good at killing people.’ The Colonel seemed delighted to be relaying this.
They sat there in the indeterminate orange glow in silence for about thirty seconds before Peters interrupted with a banal hope.
‘But surely this could just be someone who bought such a sword in an antique shop. Or of one of the stalls at Checkpoint Charlie.’
The colonel dismissed Peters’ desperate theory with supreme confidence.
‘Not a chance. No soldier from that unit would hand over such an honour. They were not mercenaries.’
‘So we should be worried then, colonel?’
The old man suppressed a smile.
‘I would say that that is a fair assumption my British comrade.’
Again silence. They sat draining the dregs of their beer. Peters and Angelika taking in what her father had just told them. A sword for a special forces’ soldier. Now a trained, efficient assassin loose on the streets of Berlin. Still on a roll.
‘Colonel, your advice has been invaluable.’
‘I would say it’s been a double-edged sword,’ the old boy said barely able to silence his sniggering. Even now, 16 years after all that was dear to him had collapsed in ignominy, Angi’s father was still at war.
Nine
Armed Germans prowled outside the synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse and around the corner up Tucholvsky Strasse in front of the Beth Café. Their presence was a small, daily act of atonement.
The middle age cops bulging out of their olive green overcoats, their Heckler and Koch machine guns pointed away from pavements and passers-by, were there to ward off old threats and new. They were there not only to protect the small Jewish quarter wedged between Friedrichstrasse and the Hackesher Markt from the emulators of Nazism, but also from other smouldering avengers from the dust, the dirt, the heat of thousands of miles away.
Peters nodded to the two officers patrolling outside the café with a curt ‘Tag’ before going inside. In their sitting smoking, reading a Hebrew language newspaper, legs crossed, fiddling with her straight shiny black hair was Irit Weissman, cultural officer at the Israeli embassy in Berlin with a husband allegedly still back at home in Tel Aviv. She was here at the table only because she owed Peters.
‘You look as if you haven’t slept in weeks, Martin. You’re having too much of a good time.’
‘That’s Berlin for you. You ought to get out more, Irit. You’re looking far too healthy.’
They embraced, Peters landing kisses on either of her cheeks, he caught a whiff of her scent, a new perfume, the aroma of chocolate and spices.
Irit clasped her hands together, the cigarette clamped between her lips and stared into Peters’ eyes who half expected this woman to shoot up from her seat, place her hand on her hips and bark out orders. He instantly recalled flying to Israel via El Al from Heathrow and those sharp minded, bright eyed young women, the security officers who gazed into your pupils to detect minute signs of fear or evasion when they asked: ‘Are you bringing a bomb onto this plane?’
She took the cigarette from her mouth and crushed it into the ashtray, blowing a jet of smoke into the air above their table.
‘So why does the Berlin Polizei’s finest want to see me?’
‘I have a favour to ask you. Or rather to call in.’
‘Go on,’ Irit prompted.
He took a sip from the coffee cup just laid down on their table.
‘Do you know a man called Avi Yanaev?’
Peters studied her for a reaction but the force-field Irit Weissman was always able to erect ‘was as impenetrable as ever.
‘What? No response?’ he asked.
Irit lit another cigarette, again blowing a jet of smoke in a straight column towards the ceiling before returning to her coffee.
‘Avi Yanaev? Of course we do. Why would the Berlin Polizei be interested in such a fine pillar of the city’s Jewish community?’
‘A pillar of salt or a pillar of fire?’ Peters asked. She jolted backwards in her seat, smiled and then laughed.
‘Herr Yanaev finances a number of projects in the city including the Berlin Jewish film festival. It starts this weekend,’ Irit was now surveying Peters coldly.
‘You haven’t told me yet why you are interested in him. Why? What’s he don
e?’
He didn’t need to remind Irit about the Palestinian taxi drivers operating along the Ku-damm just a couple of years ago, especially the one Peters’ station had picked up drunk late one evening near the Schifferbauerdamm, boasting about the Zionists they had fooled from the Embassy, one of whom had left his ID card in the Arab’s car. Peters later unravelled a plot to kidnap the diplomat, which Stannheim’s Cold War comrades in the BND prevented with a deportation order and a one-way ticket for the loose talking taxi-man all the way back permanently to Amman.
‘At long last I can ask you out on a date,’ Peters said before hesitating and adding.
‘As long as your husband is back working in Tel Aviv.’
Peters remembered a tall, blonde man with flawless German, speaking refined nord-deutsch. In reality, Irit’s spouse was probably acting out a part somewhere east of The Jordan, marooned in some stinkhole, playing the role of the affable businessman from Hamburg or Bremen for his Arab hosts.
‘The launch party for the film festival is at the Maritim hotel this Saturday, Martin. Formal wear. You have to dress like that so I can buy a new frock.’ Irit was flirting, strategically, ignoring his remark about her husband’s possible true whereabouts.
Saturday, thought Peters. He had no one on Saturday. This was going to be a perfectly fulfilled weekend and there was always ‘Der Zug’ later if Irit Weissman was still preoccupied with her man on a mission far beyond the borders of their homeland.
The Swinging Detective Page 5