Armed with two reels of film and a screenplay, Rath arrived at Alex at quarter to eleven. He parked the car by the railway arches and took the public entrance, where there were scarcely any officers, only civilians. In the stairwell, the unmistakeable mix of sweat, ink, blood, leather and paper, fused now and then with a little gun smoke from the range, soon returned him to the daily grind. The closer he came to the custody cells in the southern wing the greater the smell of sweat, now mixed with the stench of urine and fear. The Castle, that hulking, formidable building, that vast, complex police apparatus, had swallowed him again, suffocating the feeling of freedom he enjoyed on the streets. Böhm must still be out in Marienfelde with Gräf, but securing the evidence at the lighting bridges would take time. Rath doubted whether they would find much more than the wire and the eyelets, but at least Böhm would be kept occupied, and it wouldn’t hurt to get a few clear photographs. Perhaps the technical experts would manage a reconstruction of the device that had cost Betty Winter her life.
He no longer had any doubt that it was Krempin’s construction, or that the technical whizz had built it to sabotage Bellmann’s shoot. He had known the moment he heard the thunder, but had asked for another explanation from Dressler and his cameraman all the same.
On Friday morning, the main camera had stood exactly where Betty Winter would die only hours later. An ‘X’ marked the spot on the parquet. ‘That’s where we positioned the camera for scene forty-nine,’ Dressler had said. ‘The mark was the same for Betty in scene fifty-three.’
Scene fifty-three was the one they hadn’t been able to finish, and that Victor Meisner had to reshoot with Eva Kröger.
The actor was due at the station for eleven, still ten minutes away. Rath had instructed the porter to send Meisner straight to interrogation room B, which he had reserved moments before. Not the usual surroundings for a routine witness interview – the rooms were normally reserved for breaking down the real hard cases – but Rath didn’t want to show his face in the corridors of A Division.
After his telephone conversation with Gräf, he had given some thought to how he might take the edge off his inevitable meeting with Böhm. The best way was with results: a comprehensive report of his findings thus far in the Winter case. That way he could let Böhm’s reprimand wash over him while he pressed the file silently into the bulldog’s hands. He thought about taking a typewriter home that evening, sticking a few records on and dealing with the paperwork over a glass or two of cognac, uninterrupted by colleagues and superiors.
He reached the interrogation room without meeting a single officer from A Division, or anyone else who knew him. Brenner, for example.
The rat! Using two simple blows against him like that, playing the innocent victim roughed up by a colleague. Rath really shouldn’t have let himself be dragged into it. But…the way that arsehole had spoken about Charly – Brenner was lucky to get off so lightly.
Rath spread the items he had brought with him across the table. He sat down, reached for an ashtray and lit a cigarette. In truth, he was only interested in two or three pages: scenes fifty-three and forty-nine, the two sequences he also had on celluloid. The thunder effect was heavily marked in both, indicating exactly when it should sound. Anyone familiar with the production schedule would know who was due to be standing where and at what time.
Had Krempin made use of that knowledge and, if so, why had his construction failed in the morning but worked in the afternoon? In scene forty-nine the effects lever had triggered the thunder, meaning the wire could only have been connected with the spotlight after this scene. When had Krempin left the studio? The statements Plisch and Plum had gathered didn’t tally. No one, at any rate, had seen him after ten, about the time Dressler filmed scene forty-nine. At that stage, the thunder had still worked; thus Krempin’s construction could only have been activated after this point. So, either the technician was still in the studio and had connected the wire to the spotlight – because, despite his protests, he did have it in for Betty Winter – or someone else had discovered it and used it for their own purposes following his departure. Heinrich Bellmann, for instance. The producer had got over Winter’s death quickly; indeed, it seemed to have brought him more advantages than disadvantages.
Rath would have liked to have Krempin here now, as there were any number of questions he could have asked. For Victor Meisner, on the other hand, who would arrive any minute, he couldn’t think of a single one. That wasn’t quite true. There was one question preying on his mind, but it had nothing to do with the investigation: how could anyone be so unconscionable as to reshoot with the double, the scene in which they had been forced to watch their wife die only two days before? A scene that was frivolous and funny, and completely devoid of tragedy. How could you perform a scene like that after such a calamity?
There was a knock on the door. Rath glanced at the time: five past eleven.
‘Enter,’ he said, and a woman poked her head through the door. It was the grey mouse who had been looking after Meisner on Friday.
‘Good morning. Are you Inspector Rath?’ She didn’t seem to have much of a memory for faces. At least not for his. Rath nodded, and the door opened to reveal Victor Meisner, who seemed even paler than before. Dark glasses made his face appear almost white. The woman led him in by the hand as if he was a blind man being shown to his chair.
‘Good morning, Herr Meisner,’ Rath said. ‘Good morning, Frau…’
‘Bellmann, Cora Bellmann,’ the woman said. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to be here for Herr Meisner during this difficult conversation.’
‘That is a rather unusual request,’ Rath said. ‘But in view of the circumstances I am happy to make an exception. Perhaps I can take the opportunity to ask you a few more questions too. You’re the daughter…’
‘…of Heinrich Bellmann. That’s correct.’
‘Your father never told me…’
‘He says I’m to learn the trade by working my way up from the bottom. He doesn’t treat me any differently from the rest of his employees. Worse, if anything.’
‘Please take a seat.’
She pushed a chair over to Meisner, who was gazing into thin air through his glasses, before finding a second chair for herself.
‘Herr Meisner,’ Rath began. ‘It’s very kind of you to make the effort to come here. Now, if you could please remove your glasses. I like to look the people I’m talking to in the eye.’
‘As you wish.’ Meisner’s voice had a cracked hoarseness, as if he needed to accustom himself to speaking again. He took off the sunglasses and revealed two red-rimmed eyes with heavy bags, no longer bearing the slightest resemblance to a youthful hero. It seemed scarcely credible that he had stood before the camera with Eva Kröger in this state. In a comedy! Were actors really able to deny themselves to such an extent? Perhaps they had to, if they wanted to be successful? Or if they had an unscrupulous boss like Heinrich Bellmann?
‘I would like, once more, to offer my condolences on the death of your wife, Herr Meisner…’ Meisner looked through him as if he were made of glass. ‘…I know this isn’t easy for you, but I need to ask you a few questions.’
Meisner nodded.
‘How did the accident happen? Can you outline the order of events?’
The actor’s eyes grew larger. The memory seemed to terrify him.
‘We did the scene again,’ he said at last, ‘and I had the feeling that this time Dressler would go for it. It went off without a hitch, Betty was marvellous. We were already through when there was this technical issue, the thunder didn’t work. I thought: it doesn’t matter. Just add it later, you can do that.’
Rath was as sympathetic as a priest in the confessional.
‘That’s when it happened,’ Meisner continued. ‘The light came loose somehow, and then…’ He broke off. ‘My God! At first I didn’t even know what was wrong. Only when I saw her lying there…’
‘Why didn’t you pull her away? Why did you fetch the bucket?’
‘Pull her away? Impossible. And what can I say about the bucket? I don’t know myself why I fetched it. At that moment, I wasn’t thinking about anything save for perhaps, my God, Betty is burning! When I think about how she screamed! The bucket was backstage. There’s one every few metres. The boss always stressed how important they are; we have a fire drill once a month. I just grabbed the nearest one. My God, her screams! I only have to close my eyes and I hear them again.’
Meisner closed his eyes and, gradually, Rath began to sense that the grieving widower was just another role for him; that his whole life was comprised of a series of different roles.
‘How was it with Eva Kröger?’ he asked.
‘Pardon me?’ Meisner opened his eyes again.
‘You filmed the scene again with her. How was that for you?’
Cora Bellmann interjected. ‘How dare you?’ she said, rising from her chair. ‘Do you have any idea what Victor’s been through in the past few days? What he’s still going through, and here you are reproaching him for his professionalism? He’s an actor. Actors are expected to block out their private lives when they play a role.’
Meisner pulled her down onto her chair. ‘Leave it, Cora. The inspector’s right. I don’t know who it was in front of the camera yesterday, some robot reciting a text, but it certainly wasn’t me.’
A robot reciting a text. Business as usual, Rath thought, remembering Meisner’s last adventure film. ‘How are you coping with the death of your wife?’
‘Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I could turn back time, the way you rewind a film, and bring her back to life.’ He faltered. ‘My God, how I miss her.’ He grimaced and began weeping silently.
Rath looked at him helplessly.
‘I’m a murderer, Inspector!’ Meisner screamed suddenly, his chair clattering against the floor as he rose. ‘I killed my own wife!’ He pressed his wrists together and held them out towards Rath. ‘I killed Betty, I’m responsible for her death, I alone. Arrest me!’
‘Calm down! No one here’s blaming you for anything, nor should you be blaming yourself. Someone manipulated the spotlight so that it fell on her, and that same someone intended for her to die, or at the very least entertained the possibility of her death.’
‘What does that change? Without me, she’d still be alive!’
‘…and lying in the Charité with life-threatening injuries. If you’re to be charged with anything,’ Rath said, receiving an angry glare from Cora Bellmann, ‘then it’ll be for causing death by negligence. But no judge in Berlin is going to convict a grieving widower for that.’
‘She’s dead,’ Meisner screamed. ‘Don’t you understand? She’s dead and I killed her. I don’t give a damn what any judge says!’
He buried his face in his hands and turned towards Cora Bellmann, who took him in her arms. She petted him and whispered something in his ear, as if comforting a nervous racehorse. At that moment Rath was glad he wasn’t alone with Meisner: anything was preferable to a despairing widower on the verge of breakdown.
Meisner sobbed silently into his hands, and from time to time his body shook violently. Cora Bellmann looked at Rath as if to say: nice job, Inspector!
‘I think it’s better if you leave now,’ Rath said. In the doorway Cora Bellmann cast him a final, reproachful glance. She had put the actor’s sunglasses back on, probably so that no one on Alexanderplatz would recognise him, and for a moment Rath thought that if the pair of them were just a little more shabbily dressed they could earn a heap of money on Weidendammer Bridge, selling matchsticks or shoelaces, or by simply holding out a hat. He shook his head. These film types were hard as nails in front of the camera, and soft as putty in real life.
There was a telephone on the wall, and Rath asked to be put through to Erika Voss. She started on the same theme as Gräf.
‘Inspector, what luck! Where are you? DCI Böhm has asked after you a hundred ti…’
‘Erika, would you be so kind as to bring the Betty Winter file up to date by this afternoon, I’d like to…’
‘The file is with DCI Böhm. Inspector, I…’
‘Then get it back.’
‘DCI Böhm is leading the investigation now, Inspector. You need to come to the station urgently. Superintendent Gennat has also been asking for you, Fräulein Steiner was even here in person and…’
‘Hello? Hello?’ said Rath.
‘Inspector?’
‘What’s that? The connection’s terrible. Can you hear me? Hello?’ He hammered the cradle with his index finger and hung up.
The vultures were circling overhead, and their orbit was growing smaller. He couldn’t show his face in the office for the moment, typewriter or not, and it was only a matter of time before someone found out who had booked interrogation room B until one o’clock.
Rath packed his things and decided to consider any further matters at Aschinger, in the branch at Leipziger Strasse. The risk of running into a colleague there was considerably lower than at Alex.
He didn’t encounter anyone in the corridors, but almost collided with Brenner in the atrium, managing to duck behind a police vehicle in the nick of time. A few uniformed officers he didn’t know gazed curiously in his direction and he made a placatory gesture with his hands. Brenner was limping and wore his arm in a sling. Rath was already intrigued by the certificates he was planning to use against him. Brenner often skived off, which suggested the man had an unusually easy-going doctor.
Rath waited until Brenner had disappeared into the stairwell, then took the quickest route outside, got in his car and drove off.
The clientele in the Aschinger on Leipziger Strasse was different from Alex. No small-time criminals, no policemen: mostly office workers and a few journalists from the nearby newspaper quarter, and shoppers taking a break between stores. Rath felt happier knowing there was no chance of being recognised, and ordered goulash soup as he leafed through the script. The thunder effect appeared on twelve separate occasions. He compared the scene numbers with the production schedule. All thunder scenes had already been shot and there had been no incidents, save for the last one.
‘You’re Inspector Rath, aren’t you?’ A small, familiar-looking man stood beside his table. Instinctively Rath was on guard.
‘Who’s asking?’
The little man placed a card next to Rath’s bowl. ‘Fink, B.Z. am Mittag. May I?’
Without waiting for a response, the man pulled up a chair and sat down. Rath continued eating his soup, now remembering him as one of those firing questions at Bellmann’s press conference.
‘I’m surprised,’ Fink said, ‘that there has been no news on the Winter case. Has it been confirmed as sabotage? Your colleagues have been pretty tight-lipped. I was referred to Inspector Böhm, but all he did was shout at me.’
‘Chief inspector,’ Rath corrected, wiping up the last remains of soup with half a bread roll.
‘He’s the one leading the investigation?’
‘There’s always someone in charge,’ Rath said, ‘it’s the others who do the work.’
‘I knew I was talking to the right man.’ Fink seemed genuinely pleased. ‘You’ve issued a warrant. Does that mean you know who the murderer is?’
‘Let’s not rush to condemn. We’re looking for an important witness. I can tell you one thing for sure: Betty Winter’s death was no accident. Anything else would be speculation, and I’d sooner leave that to you.’
‘I’d sooner have facts.’
‘I’m afraid there’s nothing new.’
‘Does Betty’s death have anything to do with the script in your hand?’ Fink pointed to the screenplay. ‘Liebesgewitter. That’s the name of her final film, isn’t it? Does it contain the key to her murder?’
‘Just routine.’ It was the only cliché Rath could think of.
Fink looked Rath in the eye a moment too long and a shade too aggressively, before standing up. ‘You have my card,’ he said. ‘Call me when you know more. You won’t regret it.’
Rath had heard that phrase suspiciously often recently, and couldn’t help thinking that someday he just might. He pocketed the card, even though he knew he wouldn’t be calling Stefan Fink.
The clock in the dark, smoky restaurant showed shortly before one. Rath lit a cigarette and ordered a coffee. Now all he needed was a typewriter. It was too loud in Aschinger, so he gathered a few coins once he had finished his coffee and started looking for a public telephone. He found one on Dönhoffplatz, just next to Tietz. He knew the number of his old digs by heart. The operator put him through.
‘Behnke,’ a woman’s voice said.
‘Herr Weinert, please,’ said Rath.
‘Who’s there, please?’
‘A friend of Herr Weinert’s.’
There was a click, and Rath could just see the receiver being placed on the little telephone table. He wondered if Elisabeth Behnke had recognised his voice, but it didn’t matter. The main thing was that she fetched Weinert to the telephone.
The journalist came on the line with a careful ‘Yes?’
‘Gereon here.’
‘Oh, so it’s you who’s acting so mysteriously. I might have known. Old Behnke’s dying of curiosity. I told her something about anonymous sources.’
‘That’s kind of true. At least sometimes.’
‘Have you got something then? I could use a big story, preferably an exclusive. The rent’s already due.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Aren’t you on this Betty Winter story? That would be something.’
‘Are you interested in that?’
‘I’m interested in anything people are talking about.’
‘I don’t have much for you. Actually, I’m calling about something else.’
‘Do you want to move back in?’
‘Nit för Kooche.’
‘Pardon me?’
‘That was Cologne dialect. Not if you paid me.’ Before Rath could continue, a heavy CLICK-CLACK by his ear made him start. Someone was pounding on the glass pane, not Böhm, not Brenner, but a woman. A grim-looking Fury, who might, perhaps, have been young and beautiful during the Kaiser’s reign, was banging on the cabin glass with the point of her umbrella, gesturing to the sign above the telephone that stated unequivocally: Keep it brief, be considerate of those waiting. Rath gave the dragon a nod and a placatory wave of the hand.
‘Gereon?’
‘Let me cut to the chase: I need your typewriter.’
‘Is there anything of mine you don’t want? I need that typewriter for work. Without it, I’ll starve.’
‘I don’t want to buy it. Just to borrow it for a day.’
‘When?’
‘Today.’
‘Don’t you have any typewriters at Alex? Or have you been barred from the station?’
‘Something like that.’
Weinert considered for a moment. ‘I’ll make a suggestion,’ he said finally. ‘My typewriter for your car.’
He could manage without the Buick for the rest of the day. True, he had been intending to drive out to Westhafen to visit the Ford plant, but that could wait so long as they hadn’t sent him the list of names from Cologne. Outside, the woman knocked on the glass once more. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘but I need it back early tomorrow morning.’
‘Wonderful! Then at least I’ve got a security against the typewriter.’
‘I’ll pick you up at Wittenbergplatz.’
‘And I’m supposed to just tuck the typewriter under my arm, am I?’
‘It’s only one station with the train.’
Weinert laughed. ‘Might be better anyway. Old Behnke’s in such a good mood at the moment. I don’t want to jeopardise that by your coming here.’
The dragon knocked again. He hung up before opening the door with a jolt and showing the woman his badge. ‘Do you know what it means to obstruct a criminal investigation?’ he shouted, without warning. ‘I could take you down to the station!’
She gave a start. ‘But officer! I had no way of knowing. If you need to make another call, please go ahead.’
Rath made a serious face and said: ‘Fine, let’s leave it at that. But in future, you should treat the work of police with a little more respect.’
‘Of course! Of course!’ The woman clasped her umbrella and handbag to her breast and made an immediate about-turn, no doubt glad to have narrowly escaped arrest.