Reinhardt collapsed his baton, ordering Frunze to send for the MPs, given two bodies had been found in their sector, and to wait for Berthold downstairs. Ochs waited quietly in the little hallway, the old man seemingly unperturbed, and why not, Reinhardt thought as he stepped carefully into the bedroom. Ochs had probably seen plenty of deaths, many worse than this, if he had been living in Berlin these past few years.
“What exactly is it you do, Mr. Ochs?” Reinhardt asked as, unbuttoning his overcoat and kneeling by Noell’s body, he checked for a pulse.
“I used to be a building superintendent, until my place got destroyed in a bombing raid. I could fix a pipe, change wiring, collect mail, bit of this, bit of that. So they put me in downstairs and asked me to keep an eye on the place.”
“When was that?”
“The municipality moved me in here in, oh, June ’45. Right after the war.”
“The Russians put you here?”
“Well. Yes. But I’m not an informer! Not like those, those people in the Russian sector. Those wardens. Or whatever you call them. Spying on their neighbors and all that and reporting it to the police.”
“I never thought it, Mr. Ochs,” Reinhardt replied.
“And nor should you. You should see my place. I could sneeze across it. If that’s what informing gets you, I’d hardly think it worth the effort,” Ochs subsided sulkily.
Noell’s body was cold, but not quite the tombstone cold of the long dead. He had been murdered in the last few hours, for sure. He was dressed in trousers, a shirt, and a woolen cardigan, a pair of worn slippers near his feet. Reinhardt squirmed around the body on his haunches, and as he did so, his knee dipped into something wet. He ran a finger across the floor, noting the rippled line it left, and inspected his glove for what looked like water. It lay around Noell’s head and shoulders. He looked up at the roof, to see if perhaps it had cracked, perhaps a pipe had leaked and it had come from the ceiling, but saw nothing.
He moved the body slightly onto its side, seeing the purplish dappling of hypostasis under the neck, and that the neck was not broken. He lowered the body back, began checking the limbs. Noell had been a very slight man, made almost certainly slighter by the short rations most Berliners lived on these days.
None of the limbs seemed broken. There was no wound evident, no blood. The only thing Reinhardt could find wrong was a mottled bruising around Noell’s mouth and nose. He looked at it, cocking his head to the side. On impulse, being careful not to touch the skin, he lowered his right hand over Noell’s mouth, fingers to one side of his nose, thumb to the other. He paused, considering, as the place his hand would have come down on seemed to match the mottling. While he was dying, Noell’s mouth had clenched tight shut, and Reinhardt drew back, preferring to leave it for the autopsy.
Reinhardt did not want to disturb the body any more than he had to. He pushed himself to his feet, his knee a tight knot of pain as he did so.
“What did Noell do?”
“I don’t think he did anything,” Ochs answered stiffly, his pride still hurt. “At least, nothing I ever saw.”
“His mail?”
“Hardly anything.”
“How long had he been here?”
Ochs hesitated. “About, oh, six months. Yes. Six months.”
Reinhardt stared at him. Building superintendents, or concierges, call them what you will, they invariably knew everything about their tenants comings and goings. Ochs colored under Reinhardt’s gaze, his hands tightening in the pockets of his dressing gown.
“That’s to say, he’s not actually here. If you see what I mean.”
“I don’t.”
“He’s subletting. From another man. The two of them were friends during the war, or something like that, and when this other man left . . .”
“This man’s name?” Reinhardt interrupted.
“Yes, of course. It’s a ‘K’ something. Kassel. Kessel! It’s downstairs, I’ll get it for you. So when this man left, he asked if we could arrange for his old comrade to move in, as a favor. Keeping his name on the lease.”
“A favor,” said Reinhardt. “With a touch of remuneration.”
Ochs nodded. “It’s hard for people to get a place. You must know that. Doubly hard for them.”
“Them?”
“War veterans.”
“Noell was a veteran?”
“Yes. Ex–air force, I believe.”
A noise at the door announced Diechle, with the news that Berthold had arrived and was examining the body downstairs. The officer had a bruise on the side of his face, and a trail of blood down the angle of his jaw. Reinhardt refrained from mentioning it, only thanking him and telling him to let Frunze know he could start escorting people back into their apartments, family by family, but for them to steer clear of any of the evidence on the stairs. Ochs made to leave as well, but Reinhardt motioned him to stay put.
He opened the cupboard, seeing a few pairs of trousers and shirts, and a couple of jackets on hangers, all of it well-worn. Socks and underwear. One pair of shoes. The only item of note was an air force jacket. The jacket had no decorations, nothing except a pair of colonel’s epaulettes. There was nothing else in the bedroom apart from the bed. No shelves, no table, no books. It was a bare room, almost ascetic, and Reinhardt was struck, suddenly, by how ritualistic Noell’s body seemed, spread-eagled in the middle of the floor.
“So you’ve been here just about two years, Mr. Ochs. How well do you know the tenants?”
“Well enough.”
“Noell?”
Ochs thought a moment, his mouth moving against his teeth. “He kept to himself, mostly. He was civil enough, but I know of one or two times he had an argument with the man downstairs about noise, or something like that. And once I saw him on the stairs, and he barely gave me the time of day. Just brushed right past me. Head in the clouds, or something like that, I thought.”
Reinhardt moved past Ochs back to the living room. It was a different place from the bedroom. It felt lived-in for one thing, which, Reinhardt supposed, was normal for a place like a living room. But there was something else: an ordered disorder, with books and newspapers, clothes draped over the back of a ladder-back chair, the pile of bedding in the corner next to the sofa. His eyes were drawn again to the bottle and glass on the table. Some kind of schnapps, he sniffed. The glass was full, and he took note of that incongruous touch in this room where at least one man had been killed, and yet what had happened had not disturbed that liquid.
“Head in the clouds, you say? Fitting, for a pilot.”
“I suppose so,” said Ochs, a weak chuckle at Reinhardt’s weak attempt at humor.
“Friends?”
“I never saw any. That is, until the other day. He received a letter that seemed to cheer him up immensely. This would have been about, oh, a week ago. Two or three days ago, someone came to visit him. I don’t know who it was, but the two of them had quite the party up here until the early evening, then they left together, all dressed up. Or as dressed up as they could manage, I suppose.”
“This was when?”
“Saturday evening. He came back somewhat the worse for wear on Sunday morning. That was the last time I saw him, poor man.”
There was a heavy tramping on the stairs, the timbre of foreign voices, and a pair of American military policemen breasted into the room, followed by a female interpreter, a narrow old lady of middle age. They were big, blocky men, filling the room with their size and their apparent disinterest and disdain for where they found themselves. Reinhardt answered their questions through the interpreter, who kept her head down. Although he found he could follow just about all they said, he made no sign he understood English, wanting them gone as soon as possible, insisting gently through the interpreter that there was no overt Allied connection to the deaths, no evidence of black marketeering, no sign of fraternization.
The MPs seemed only too happy to agree, muttering back and forth between themselves, banter concerning the goings-on in their unit, the uselessness of being called out to such scenes, and their anticipation of getting off duty. The only question Reinhardt asked of them was if they recognized the body downstairs, to which he got a grunted negative from one of the MPs, translated as a polite and apologetic no by the interpreter. They photographed Noell’s body, took Reinhardt’s details, pronounced themselves satisfied this was an affair the German authorities could handle, but to make damn sure they were informed if it turned out there was Allied involvement, and were gone, a veritable backwash of collapsed, displaced air following them out, the interpreter scudding in their wake.
Reinhardt sighed in relief, echoed by Ochs, who had been all but plastered against the wall as the MPs had filled just about all the space. He scanned the rooms quickly, satisfied the Americans had not disturbed anything, and resumed his careful search of the apartment. He went back to the impression he had had, that this room felt lived in where the other did not. The clothes drew his eyes, draped over the back of a chair. There was a cupboard next door, so why were they here . . . ?
“Noell lived here alone? You’re sure?” Ochs nodded, a yawn pulling his mouth down. “Very well, Mr. Ochs. Thank you for your help. You may go, but please give the name of the man who has the lease on this apartment to the sergeant downstairs.”
Alone in the rooms, the only sounds a faint whisper of voices from the lower floors, Reinhardt leaned against a wall. His knee ached, terribly. It was getting worse, he knew. All the walking he was doing around Berlin, the cold and damp, the lack of food, was making the knee feel as bad as it did twenty years ago.
When he had caught his breath, he closed the door. It shut quietly, the door fitting quite well to its frame. He pulled it, pushed on it, shaking the door, but it stayed shut. He opened it again, bending to the lock, running his fingers up the door frame, inside and out. There was a key in the lock, and a bolt drawn back and open. There was no sign of damage, no sign of a forced entry.
From downstairs, Reinhardt heard the distinctive bull bellow of Berthold’s voice berating someone for something, and let a grin flash across his face. There was no sign of a struggle in the apartment either. Noell’s body bore no defensive wounds that he could see, and neither had the man downstairs, although he would have to check with Berthold for that. Nothing in this room looked disturbed or out of place. Nothing broken, or overturned. It was not that big a room. If two men had been assaulted in here, there ought to have been some sign of it, unless the assault had been of devastating speed and surprise, Reinhardt thought, as he went into the kitchen.
The cupboards were bare, or might as well have been. A collection of mismatched plates, cups, glasses, and cutlery, a battered frying pan and an even more battered army cook pot, all of it probably salvaged from some wrecked building, or given out at municipal shelters. There was a half-empty sack of coffee, a bottle of oil that glistened greasily, and an empty cardboard CARE package. A couple of bottles of schnapps that had a homemade feel to them—these few things were all the kitchen contained.
It was clean, though, Reinhardt noticed. A couple of plates were stacked upside down by the sink, together with a glass; a cloth hung from the single tap. The surfaces were clean and dry, although the sink was pearled with water. There was a dustbin under the counter. Reinhardt hooked it out, peering inside at the inevitable slew of potato peelings that made up the staple diet of any German lucky enough to afford vegetables these days. Beneath the peelings was Friday’s newspaper. He flicked out his baton, lifting the paper out to have a look through, in case Noell had made any notations, perhaps in the help-wanted section. That said, he thought to himself, poking the baton farther down into the rubbish, most of the content of the papers these days was either want ads or obituaries, unless you read one of the Allied publications, which were full of upbeat stories about the benefits of Occupation policies or pieces about Nazis and the harm they had done.
His stirring of the rubbish pulled up several thin sheets of paper covered in typing with handwritten notes jotted into the margin. The papers were stained by being in the dustbin, but there was enough of the writing intact that Reinhardt could read most of it. He straightened, his knee a tight knot of pain as he did so.