Helga Leupahn was in her office at the Volks Police headquarters thinking how much she dreaded the evening in Karolinenhof. Sitting with her parents at the dinner table, then listening to the radio or reading. Pure Biedermeyer petit bourgeois respectability, cozy and boring. They had longed for it throughout the war… She knew she was being ungrateful. But… there was more to life. Bernhard had just called: he had to go to his cousin Gudrun’s birthday. She wasn’t sure if she believed him. He had never mentioned a Gudrun before. Was it all over before it even started? Maybe that was for the best. No, it wasn’t. To take her mind off the subject she picked up the Tägliche Rundschau. In Zwickau the 500th automobile, a DKWF9 model, had come off the assembly line of the People’s Audi plant. The production at the smelting works near Freiberg in Saxony had increased by 148 percent over the past two years, 1948 and 1949. In the USSR the people’s income had seen an 842.9 percent increase since 1913. Conversely, things were steadily worsening for the 15 million jobless in West Germany. Many lived on stale bread and potatoes.
“So, we can hope that they’ll all come over to the GDR as refugees,” Steffen said. He had tiptoed in and saw what she was reading. “Clear out the upstairs floor in Karolinenhof. Ah… but you don’t have upstairs and downstairs in your house, you’re for peace and disarmament.”
Helga was too angry to find anything to answer back. She could not understand how someone like Siegfried Steffen could talk like that. He was a veteran of the Spanish civil war, belonged to the Union of Citizens Persecuted by the National Socialist regime, the VVN, was a member of the SED, and yet he defended the decadent West with such insistence that she should, in fact, be reporting him to her political officer. “Comrade Steffen’s conspicuously ironical stance towards our Workers’ and Farmers’ State can only be characterized as corrosive.” Of course, she did not report him. Steffen was such a nice guy and she was too decent, but still. Oh well, he was going to retire soon and his successor would hopefully be more in tune with the new era.
Best to talk about work. “Has anything come up about the Memhardstrasse murder?”
Steffen sat down, lit a cigarette and endured a fit of smokers’ coughing. “Yes… didn’t Bacheran tell you?”
“No…” If she had been a little girl of four she would have cried, she was so disappointed, she felt so alone.
Steffen saw her face and understood immediately. He tried to console her. “The phone probably wasn’t working again and so he sent a telegram. It ended up on my desk.”
She was grateful. “Yes… What does it say?”
“That the victim is most probably a saleslady from Spandau, a certain Dorothea – Doris Merten. Her sister is going to contact us for the identification.”
“Imagine if I had to go to the morgue, and my sister was…”
Steffen’s laughter was raspy and dry and throaty like Ernst Busch’s. “But you don’t have a sister.”
“I was supposed to have one but then there was the world economic crisis, and joblessness and after that the Nazis. At that point my parents refused to bring any more children into the world.”
“One less person to build Socialism,” Steffen said. “Your father should have thought of that.” There was a knock at the door. “Yes, come in…”
A plump woman came in wearing a streetcar uniform that was too large for her, its color somewhere between grey, green and black, somewhat reminiscent of a horse blanket. She introduced herself as Ilse Breitenstein. “I’ve come because of my sister… Dorothea Merten… This is so awful. She survived the war and now this… But maybe it’s not her, maybe she found a man and left.”
The inspector got up and greeted her. “Steffen… My colleague, Helga Leupahn… Well, Mrs. Breitenstein … What has to be has to be. We don’t have official transportation, socialism hasn’t reached that stage yet and once again, the number 9 bus is not running, but we’ll get to Hannoverschen Strasse somehow.”
It was less than ten minutes with the S-Bahn from Alexanderplatz to Lehrter Stadt station. As usual during rush hour, the subway cars were overcrowded and they were squeezed together. Ilse Breitenstein tried to relieve her anxiety by talking constantly. She talked of her sister’s childhood and marriage, about what they had endured during the war, about the dead in her family. Even though Helga tried to turn her head away, she couldn’t avoid the spittle. Neither could Steffen, if that was any consolation.
An icy wind blew across the Lehrter freight yard and Helga couldn’t help imagining herself jumping unto the thin ice of Humboldt harbor and falling in. They passed Charité hospital and reached the morgue. There wasn’t much left to say. Thank God.
When Ilse Breitenstein saw the dismembered body from Memhardstrasse, she screamed: “She looks as if she had been run over by a streetcar! Yes, it’s her. My God, Doris, no… Make her come back to life! You doctors, you can do anything!” Then she broke down and had to be taken to the hospital nearby.
A little later Günther Beigang stood with Steffen in front of the corpse and confirmed that the dead woman was his saleslady Dorothea Merten. “Terrible thing… But I had a sort of premonition when I read the news that a corpse had been found at Alex.”
Steffen pricked up his ears: “A premonition?”
“Well, she seemed strange lately. She was afraid of something. Probably of her husband. They were separated but they still lived in the same apartment. It’s so hard to find anything these days…”
Helga looked at her superior. “I’ll check it out.”
“Good.” Steffen led the little group out to the hall and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. “Tell me Mr. Beigang, when did you see Mrs. Merten for the last time?”
The dealer didn’t have to think long. “On Christmas Eve, after we closed the store. I drove her to the S-Bahn. On Potsdammerplatz.”
“The perfect gentleman…”
“Yes. No: it was because she had to carry a typewriter, an Erika, a travel typewriter; she was bringing it to a client.”
“How come?” Helga couldn’t make sense of it.
Beigang tried to remember. “A nurse… she had bought the typewriter on Christmas Eve at my store as a present for her boyfriend; but she didn’t have the money for the deposit with her, probably didn’t have it at all. So we agreed that Mrs. Merten would bring it to her at her home on the second day of Christmas and would then collect the money.”
“Such love for one’s neighbor…” Steffen was always doubtful in such cases.
“Mrs. Merten wanted to go from Spandau to her sister’s in Weissensee and she was going to pass by the house on her way in any case,” the dealer explained a little doubtfully. “Or maybe it was the other way around. She was always a very helpful person.”
“Mm…” Helga Leupahn could see that Steffen didn’t think that Mr. Beigang was entirely kosher. “Let’s come back to that nurse…”
“Yes. I think she worked at Robert-Koch Hospital.”
“But, that’s in Moabit,” Helga said. “And she went all the way out to your store on…”
“…On Linkstrasse, close to Potsdammerplatz,” Beigang said. “Yes. People know that I have more typewriters in stock than other dealers. And also I had done the rounds in hospitals to see if there was any demand.”
“All right… Now this nurse… What was her name, is her name… Do you remember by any chance?” Steffen asked and Helga felt sure that he suspected Beigang of murdering Merten and figured the nurse was a figment of his imagination intended to put them on the wrong track.
Beigang thought a bit. “Something with a KU… Kudrian, Kusanke, Kusan … no. But wait, I must have written it down somewhere.” He opened his briefcase and started rummaging in it. His papers were obviously in a mess. Plus he seemed unable to measure space with one of his eyes. Finally he found the correct folder entitled Outstanding Accounts. “This is it… Here we are: E. Kusian, at Mrs. Stöhr’s, 154a Kantstrasse, Charlottenburg.”
Half an hour later, Inspector Steffen and his assistant got off the S-Bahn at Zoo station and were on their way to Kantstrasse.
“I have a very bad feeling about this,” Helga said. “This is West Berlin and we’re not supposed to be here. If the Stumm Police or the Americans…”
Steffen laughed. “Child, we are in the British sector and the English are not as uptight about that. If anything should happen, I know some people. Also among the Americans. Ernest Hemingway wasn’t the only one who fought the Fascists in Spain.”
“If they catch us they’ll throw us in jail.”
“You should be grateful for that experience too.” Steffen searched for his last cigarette. The he sang softly: We are the soldiers of the swamp and we carry our spades…”
“They’ll be angry at us at home in the GDR too.”
“I’ll take full responsibility.”
They had reached the intersection between Kantstrasse and Fasanenstrasse and were soon standing in front of 154a. They had to walk up two flights of stairs and Steffen, with his smoker’s lungs and a bullet wound in one lung was soon completely out of breath. “To think that even in high class West Berlin they can’t afford an elevator… there’s no counting on the bourgeoisie anymore…” Finally they were looking at the name plate W. Stöhr engraved in black lettering on shining copper and Kusian written in indelible ink on a piece of cardboard paper. It was certainly easy to make out which of the two was the owner and which was the tenant. Steffen wheezed and then said to Helga: “See, there’s no need to go to the zoo to see the rich.” He turned away and coughed up phlegm. The walls shook and a few doors opened below. He signaled to Helga to ring the bell. She did and a few seconds later they heard someone walk to the foyer. The spy hole was pulled open. “Who is this please?”
Steffen bowed in the most formal way. “Please forgive us for disturbing you Mrs. Stöhr… Forgive me dear lady… We wished to talk to Mrs. Kusian. “Or are you she?”
“No, I’m not but my tenant is not at home.”
Steffen now pulled out his shield and held it up to the spy hole. “Police!”
Mrs. Stöhr took the latch off and opened the door. “Good evening… How can I help you?”
“Just as I said: We would like to see Mrs. Kusian. She’s a nurse, right…?”
“Yes she is. But my lodger left around 5 PM – with a man from the Department of Criminal Investigation.”
“Damm…er, too bad,” Steffen said. Helga wasn’t pleased either that the Western police had beaten them to it.
Mrs. Stöhr was feeling talkative: “You see, Mrs. Kusian’s friend is Inspector Muschan.”
“Oh…” Steffen was a sly old fox but it still took him a few seconds to figure out what this meant. “All right then… Please tell Mrs. Kusian that we will be back tomorrow morning.”
On the way back to the S-Bahn they had time to discuss what they had just learned.
“At first I thought this Kusian might have done in Mrs. Merten… Jealousy, a love triangle… But if she’s a colleague’s girl friend, then… he wouldn’t protect a murderer.”
“Who knows…” Steffen was again wracked by a fit of coughing. “Maybe he has no idea that…”
All of a sudden Helga felt very suspicious. “What if the Western police concocted all this just to make us look like fools?”
“In the Cold War, everything’s possible but…I still don’t see how they could have delivered Seidelmann and Merten to our door step, so to speak.”
“The American secret service could have concocted the whole thing.”
“Na, they’re not that clever. Let’s go to Robert-Koch Hospital and see if Mrs. Kusian is on duty.”
But she wasn’t. And they were quite surprised when the head nurse told them that Nurse Elisabeth would never again be on duty in Moabit. Even though many of her women patients thought she was an angel.
“But why…?”
“Because she quit on December 31, 1949. After we asked her to.”
“Could we know the reason?”
“I don’t wish to talk about it.” The Head Nurse walked away.
“What now?” Helga asked.
“Let’s find someone who doesn’t have such scruples.”
They found the right person: the hospital administrator, Max Ramolla. Steffen shuddered when he recognized the man as Retired Lieutenant Colonel Ramolla; he let him talk.
“Mrs. Kusian sullied the good name of all our nurses because she borrowed money from countless patients and never returned it. Apart from that, she is a notorious liar.”
Helga Leupahn thanked him for the information. They walked to Bellevue station to get a train home. The big question was whether they could, should or must suspect nurse Kusian of one or maybe even of both murders.
“A nurse, an angel in a nurse’s uniform…?” Helga found it hard to believe that Elisabeth Kusian could be a serial killer.
Steffen sighed. “Oh dear, if only life were that simple, child. I have known quite a few people who were angels on Sunday and turned into devils on Monday. It’s there inside us all.”
“But a woman… and the corpses dismembered in such a fashion. It can’t be!” She couldn’t imagine such a thing. “Just because Mrs. Merten brought her the typewriter doesn’t mean… That’s just like the man who happens to find a corpse and is then automatically suspected of the crime.”
Steffen put it in more graphic terms: “Yea… if he stinks then it must come out of his own arse… We always tend to prefer the simple solution.”
“What do we do now?”
“We say goodbye at the end of the work day, and tomorrow morning we meet again at 7:30 at 154a Kantstrasse.”
Helga looked at him: “Can I call Mr. Bacheran?”
“No. And this is an official order.”
She rode out to Karolinenhof, said a few words to her parents and retired to her bedroom on the pretext that she had her menses and a migraine. For the first time in her life she toyed with the idea of suicide. No, that wasn’t a solution. She swallowed a sleeping pill but it had the contrary effect and she fought sleep and stayed awake. Still, after a while she could no longer fight the drug: she felt as if under some kind of weak anesthetic. Sometime between two and three in the morning she did fall into a deep sleep. At 5:45 AM sharp, her alarm clock rang and her blood pressure shot up so that she felt faint. She tried to revive herself with lots of cold water: in any case there was no hot water. If she didn’t manage to catch the 6:17 streetcar she wouldn’t be in time for the 7:30 meeting at Kantstrasse. She got there in time but with no breakfast.
Steffen arrived three minutes late and had a terrible fit of coughing. “The only way to fight it is climbing stairs…”
But Elisabeth Kusian had already got away. “She was called to the Missing Persons’ Bureau West,” the owner told them.
Steffen was angry and whispered in Helga’s ear that they should at least take a look at Mrs. Kusian’s room since she herself was already being squeezed dry by the Western police. “That’s too bad, Mrs. Stöhr. But would you be so kind as to let us see your lodger’s room?”
“Why? Mrs. Kusian is not a criminal.”
“No, of course not, but…” Helga could not find any reason. “We’re not interested in her, but in the visitors she had.”
“Then please come this way.”
To Helga, who was accustomed to the small low ceilinged rooms of her parents’ house, this room looked palatial. But the things in it all seemed cheap and worn. The flowery wallpaper had faded, its green color turned a dirty grey. Her grandmother used to call such places ‘flea houses’, yet it was terribly cozy. There were a sofa and a bed against the wall, a closet, a writing desk and a vanity. In a corner by the window the Christmas table still stood with a fir branch in a vase, artificial snow, tinsel and two red candles almost entirely burned down. Next to this were a few small gifts: a box of soap, a bottle of cologne and a Lebkuchen cake.
“Don’t touch anything, don’t take anything,” Steffen said.
Helga nodded. She wouldn’t have done so in any case. She looked around her. But she did more: she let a few coins fall out of her handbag so that she could look for them and inspect the grooves between the floor boards as closely as possible. But there was no blood to be seen. Steffen didn’t find anything either.
“There’s nothing of any interest to us here,” He said to the widow. She stood in the door and eyed them suspiciously. “Could we make a quick phone call?” She consented and he called the Missing Persons’ Bureau West, introduced himself and asked if Mrs. Kusian had already dropped in. She had not. “Then please tell her, if she does come, to come to us at the People’s Police Department at Alexanderplatz and ask for me.”