TWENTY-FOUR

BERLIN

KARL-HEINZ BUCHBODEN WATCHED THE FIRST DEMONSTRATION, WHICH began at ten o’clock in the evening outside the Palast der Republik on the Marx-Engels-Platz. It was an unexpectedly muted gathering of about five thousand people intent on expressing their frustration and disappointment and fear. Muffled in scarves and heavy overcoats, a few of them masked to avoid identification on account of the fear of some vague retribution – a hangover from their conditioned pasts, from the days of the STASI and the Wall – the demonstrators saw themselves as the victims of reunification. The point behind the march was evident from the placards and posters they carried. They’d lost their homes, their jobs, and the security once afforded them by the socialist State had dissipated. They were third-class citizens in a new Germany they’d at first embraced with enthusiasm, because it promised freedom and opportunity, but it had become a country in which they were misfits, a place they didn’t understand and where they were misunderstood.

Lost souls, Karl-Heinz Buchboden thought. Their leader, Heinrich Gebhart, a fierce white-haired figure whose bearing suggested that of a prophet coming out of the wilderness, walked in front of the procession. Buchboden followed at some distance.

The marchers moved in a rather eerie silence along Unter den Linden. Some carried flashlights, others held candles aloft, flames fluttering in the chill breeze. A police helicopter, blades slicing the night, hovered above them. A motorcade of police cars followed the marchers warily: any form of demonstration had the potential to turn sour and violent. Buchboden noticed how some onlookers shook their fists in derision, how some jeered, while others watched warily, the oldest among them perhaps remembering different kinds of parade along Unter den Linden in the 1930s.

The Ossis, the former East Germans, paid no attention to their detractors. It was as if the five thousand or so individuals had a single will, a blind purpose they shared. Traffic snarled around them, horns blaring, headlights flashing angrily. Now and then the marchers broke ranks whenever a car or truck threatened to run them over, but for the most part they managed to maintain a semblance of order. They were dissatisfied, but Gebhart’s key word was dignity. Dignity at all times.

Karl-Heinz Buchboden continued to follow. Every now and then he beat his gloved hands together against the cold. He passed the stand of a vendor selling frankfurters and a faint wave of heat embraced him momentarily.

The vendor, a man of Turkish extraction, remarked, ‘Lazy fuckers. Always looking for a handout from the State. That’s all they’ve ever been used to, I suppose. But why should we support them? Why should we support the Ossis? Let them work.’

Buchboden gestured in agreement, but without any enthusiasm.

The vendor commented, ‘I never thought I’d hear myself saying this. But the Wall served a purpose. They should have left the damn thing in place.’ He looked angrily at Buchboden, who merely nodded his head. All the euphoria of the Wende had long since evaporated, hot air rushing from a balloon. Now there was discontent and resentment; the initial joy of a united Germany had disintegrated in a series of grudges and raw resentment. Buchboden knew that when you had resentment, you had at least one of the ingredients for turmoil, because it had a way of festering, spreading bitterness.

He kept moving. The marchers reached the junction of Friedrichstrasse and headed towards the Brandenburg Gate, by which time traffic had become chaotic around them, and the number of spectators, many of them howling in a hostile way, a few amused, had grown along the pavements. Ossis would always be Ossis. Who needed these people and their problems? They’d lived under a different system all their lives, and that system had collapsed, and if they couldn’t adapt, too bad.

The march came to a stop at the Brandenburg Gate. From somewhere a small platform was produced and Heinrich Gebhart clambered up on it, loudspeaker in hand. His message was lost in the sound of traffic horns from buses and taxicabs. Its gist was direct, though, for those close enough to hear him: Germany reunified was nothing more than a shoddy piece of political carpentry. Politicians had made wondrous promises, none of which had come to pass. Property had been seized from the East Germans by pre-war claimants from the West. There were no jobs. There was no future. The Ossis were as much misfits as any guestworkers, any Gastarbeiter. Gebhart had an orator’s flair, an actor’s presence.

Standing at the rear of the crowd, Buchboden looked at his watch. Gebhart was still ranting, waving his arms, even if his words weren’t carrying far. Buchboden moved away from the crowd. He gazed up at the helicopter that hovered now directly over the Brandenburg Gate before it swung toward the Tiergarten and came back again, droning.

Buchboden stopped near a parked police car occupied by two grim-faced uniformed cops. Across the back seat lay assault rifles, riot visors, bullet-proof shields.

Nobody knew who fired the first bullet. Nobody knew from which direction it came. It struck Gebhart in the neck and he fell back from the small platform, still clutching his loudspeaker. The automatic gunfire that followed was short and intense and appeared to originate from a place beyond the Brandenburg Gate, perhaps from the edges of the Tiergarten.

‘Jesus Christ!’ A young cop jumped out of the car and grabbed his rifle. With less speed his overweight partner, who was chewing gum, also got out. Buchboden watched the demonstrators spread in sudden chaos, throwing themselves to the ground, covering their heads with their hands. Police, pouring from their cars all over the place, had their passage toward the source of gunfire blocked by the mob.

Screaming, confusion, bewilderment; it was impossible to know how many had been struck by bullets, how many were dead. The gunfire stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The police who managed to make their way beyond the Gate were too late to apprehend the gunmen, who had vanished into darkness. The officers in the helicopter, scouring the sky over the Tiergarten, later reported that they’d seen nothing.

Karl-Heinz Buchboden walked away. He’d parked his car earlier in a street behind the Russian Embassy. He unlocked it, got in and drove in the direction of Kreuzberg, a district inhabited by Turkish immigrants where the air smelled of Eastern spices and the windows of small kebab restaurants were lit long into the night.

He listened to police bulletins as he drove. The coded messages were urgent, panicky. Every patrol car within a three-mile radius was being despatched to the Brandenburg Gate.

He tuned the radio to a local news station. Already there were reports of the night’s events, most of them garbled, exaggerated, poorly informed. Broadcasters liked that heightened sense of reality, they enjoyed tragic immediacy, the speedy communication of unexpected occurrences. Reporters, cameramen, the whole jabbering squadron of media would be rushing toward the Brandenburg Gate.

He parked in a sidestreet off the Oranienstrasse, beyond Moritzplatz. He locked the car, then began to walk. He went inside a small Turkish café, drank two cups of sweet thick coffee, smoked a couple of cigarettes. He studied the waitress for a while, a girl whose mix of Turkish and Nordic appealed to him. She wore her dark hair plaited, and she bustled around the place, cleaning tables, emptying ashtrays. Buchboden looked at the clock on the wall. It was more than an hour since Gebhart had been shot. In another fifteen minutes he’d get up, leave the café and stroll slowly in the direction of the Kotbusser Tor.

From the kitchen somebody spoke in Turkish. The girl vanished for a while inside the kitchen. When she came back she propped her elbows on the counter of the bar and looked at Buchboden. ‘Have you heard?’

‘Heard?’ he asked.

‘They say twenty-five people are dead at the Brandenburg Gate. There was gunfire. Nobody knows who did it. Nobody knows why.’

Buchboden shook his head. ‘I hadn’t heard.’

‘They were marchers. Some kind of demonstration. I don’t know. Then they started shooting. This city …’ She shrugged, turned from the counter, poured herself a glass of orange juice.

Buchboden said, ‘What is the world coming to.’

He got up, left some coins on the table, said good night. He stepped into the street. He walked toward the Kotbusser Tor. This was an exotic, uneasy vicinity, filled with kebab vendors, nightclubs that had a certain seedy quality, gay bars, Yugoslavian restaurants, a few Greek joints. Buchboden had always been intrigued by this part of Kreuzberg because it had a nefarious quality, an air of criminality: you knew that drug deals were going down behind closed doors.

Clothing stores were open late, funky little places selling cut-price jeans, Doc Martens, punk gear. A scent of spices and roasting lamb floated from doorways. In spite of the bitter night the streets were thronged, people window-gazing, studying menus, hurrying to assignations. Buchboden enjoyed all this hustle, the life of the place, the swarm. He looked at his watch. He was all at once tense.

He heard them before he saw them, the sound of chanting, of boots clattering on concrete, the noise of glass being smashed, of baseball bats struck against walls and cars. He slipped into a narrow sidestreet. He heard angry voices raised, more chanting.

They came seemingly out of nowhere, three, maybe four hundred of them, as if brought together by a command only they could hear. They wore the insignia of their prejudices, swastika armbands on their leather jackets, swastika headbands across their brows. There were skinheads, tattoo freaks, black-booted, chain-carrying, knife-flashing, and they were compelled by rage beyond reason. They strutted down the street, breaking shop windows, tearing down signs, chanting as they moved.

Then somebody threw a Molotov cocktail into a kebab joint, which seemed to be the signal for the mob to step up their activities. More fiery bottles were thrown into restaurants, bars, through the windows of apartments or cars. Whenever they encountered resistance from store owners, who had armed themselves during the years of ethnic tensions, they responded with knives, chains, sharpened steel combs, spiked leather belts, baseball bats. Shotguns, revolvers, semi-automatic weapons. Buchboden, concealed in darkness, held his breath. He watched them work through the neighbourhood in their apocalyptic fashion, leaving behind a maze of flame and death. They worked thoroughly, too, as if whatever urge drove them was of no random nature. A few buildings began to burn in the night, rafters collapsing in flame, cars exploding; the neighbourhood might have been kindling. The air was rich with the stench of burning rubber, blackened meat, cinders. The whole business took maybe five or six minutes.

And then, as if in response to an order from an unknown source, the mob dispersed, some disappearing in the direction of the Görlitzer Bahnhof Station, others hurrying toward the Reichenberger Strasse or vanishing along sidestreets off the Oranienstrasse. They split into small groups, discarding their swastika accoutrements as they went.

Buchboden stepped out of the alley. All around him in the reflections of fire people lay on the pavements, women clutched each other and wept, a child went screaming past, clothes aflame. The scene was chaotic, insane: all sense of order had disintegrated for a few frenzied minutes, as if some mass craziness had possessed those young men and women briefly, a collective hallucination of savage brevity. Buchboden wandered across the street, avoiding a burning car, seeing three men gathered around a woman who was clearly dead, hearing cries, angry curses, noticing firelight glisten from broken shards of plate glass. He gazed at sparks rising from the roof of a building, a swift orange lick of flame whipping up into the wintry sky.

They had done their job well.

Buchboden walked to a corner, stepping past the injured, the dead. A Greek woman lay against a wall, the side of her face bloodied, her skull battered. A man, presumably her husband, hovered around her in panicky concern and helplessness. He looked at Buchboden imploringly. Help me, do something, help me. Buchboden continued to move. He couldn’t help. He couldn’t do anything. He made a gesture of sympathy – what more was expected of him? He heard sirens, ambulances, fire engines. The night was filled with noise. The sounds of law and order and sanity: too late. Too late again.

Buchboden saw a patrol car draw up a few yards away. Three uniformed cops came out, armed with rifles. Buchboden stepped toward them. He recognized none of them. He showed them his ID and they were immediately deferential.

‘Skinheads,’ Buchboden said. ‘Our young Nazi friends. They scattered all over the place. You’ll probably round up a few if you can get through this mess,’ and he gestured along the street, where another car suddenly exploded, blowing out the window of a bookshop. Somebody screamed.

The cops hurried away on foot even as more patrol cars arrived. A fire engine rumbled along the street, men unravelling hoses hurriedly. Two ambulances appeared, medics emerged, stretchers ready. Nurses and doctors wandered along the pavements, wondering where to start. Buchboden lit a cigarette in his gloved hand. Madness on a cold night; an asylum might have released its incurable in this part of the city. Fires raged. The street was an inferno.

There had to be twenty cop cars on the scene now. Another fire engine appeared, more ambulances. Somebody strolled toward Buchboden. It was Grunwald, who worked out of the same office as Buchboden at the Platz der Luftbrücke. Grunwald was young, naïve, one of life’s optimists.

‘It’s hard to grasp,’ he said. He shook his head slowly. It was the gesture of a man whose basic nature was generous, an incorruptible man. ‘I just don’t see any point to this …’ He gazed the length of the street. ‘When did you get here?’

‘I just arrived,’ Buchboden said.

‘You heard about the other business with the Ossis?’

Buchboden said he hadn’t.

‘Twenty-three dead at the Brandenburg Gate. For what? For what?’ Grunwald looked bewildered, as if he’d just seen a rampaging beast that defied any zoological category.

‘That’s a mystery a little too profound for me to unravel,’ Buchboden answered. ‘The human savage.’

‘The human savage,’ said Grunwald, whose clean-shaven face was illuminated by flame and looked glossy. ‘It’s fucking satanic.’

Buchboden pondered this description a moment. Satanic: no, it wasn’t quite right. He laid a hand on Grunwald’s sleeve. Grunwald looked despairingly at him. ‘First the killings at the Brandenburg Gate. And now this. I’d call that satanic,’ he said.

Buchboden said, ‘I don’t believe in supernatural agencies, Gerhardt. Only human ones.’

Grunwald seemed not to have heard. He said, ‘What’s going on? What the fuck is going on?’

Buchboden shrugged. He could already see the next day’s newspapers, the analyses of events. Columnists, editorial writers, would be speculating on whether the second demonstration of the night had been planned in advance or if it had spawned itself out of the violence around the Brandenburg Gate. They would contemplate the possibility of a connection between the two outrages and wonder if it were some mad coincidence of rage and destruction. There would be laments, the beating of breasts, deep concerns expressed over the state of the German nation: since the Second World War, Germans had become accustomed to analysing their collective psyche in print. Buchboden could see it all. He wouldn’t even have to read the goddam papers. A nation at war with itself. The primitive animal rises again. The spectre over the land. All that and more.

His attention was drawn by the appearance of two uniformed policemen who were dragging a young man along the pavement. The kid, maybe eighteen, wore a black leather jacket, the customary boots, and on the back of his hand was a gothic tattoo, perhaps a bat, Buchboden couldn’t tell. The kid had blood running from a wound on his forehead. He blinked at Buchboden. He had a glazed, druggy expression.

‘We caught him in an alley,’ one of the uniforms said. ‘Trying to hide. The fucker.’

‘I had nothing to do with this,’ the kid said. He was all defiance and hardness. ‘Go ahead. Got any eyewitnesses?’

Buchboden pushed the kid against the wall. ‘How come you’re bleeding?’

‘I don’t know. Somebody hit me. I was minding my own fucking business. Walking along. That’s all.’

‘Sing me another song,’ Buchboden said. He turned to one of the uniforms. ‘Take him to my office. I’ll talk to him there. And anybody else you might round up. Bring them along. It might be quite a party.’

Buchboden released the kid, who raised a hand to his wound. ‘I wasn’t involved in any of this,’ he said.

Buchboden turned away. He knew there would be a long night ahead of him, interrogations, taciturn kids with nothing much to say, nothing much to offer by way of explanation. They’d regard the incident as some kind of happening, as if that were justification enough. Part of the Szene, nothing else. Beyond that, they’d be sullen and indifferent. Even Karl-Heinz Buchboden, notorious for his interrogative expertise, wouldn’t get anything out of them. As Nightshade, he wouldn’t be trying too hard in any event.