Reinhardt slept a few hours, sleep that did little to refresh him, waking to hear the big clock in the house eating away the hours with every tick. He lay in bed, smoking, letting the smoke dull the taste of too little sleep from his mouth. Downstairs he found Brauer staring outside where Mrs. Meissner was pottering around, tending the rows of plants and vegetables that grew thickly along the length of the garden. There was mint tea and honey, which Reinhardt spooned thickly into his mug, relishing the sweetness, feeling more awake for it. Meissner had boiled the eggs, and he ate one slowly with a slice of the ham.
Brauer sat with him, embarrassed, like he always was after nights like that. Reinhardt knew that what had happened at the end of the war was still haunting him. Brauer’s wife had been killed in a bombing raid that had injured him, rendering him unfit for front-line service but not unfit for being drafted into the Volksstürm, the citizen army of old men, cripples, and boys that the Nazis had cobbled together at the very end to defend Berlin to the death. The way Brauer told it, he had been given a rocket-propelled grenade and a pistol older than he was, lined up with a dozen other men, then put under the command of a boy in the Hitler Youth and told to go out and hunt Soviet tanks.
“I’ve caught a case.”
Brauer spluttered into his tea. “You?”
Reinhardt smiled, happy for that momentary spark of life in Brauer. He remembered Brauer as so much more than this: a wiry, upright man, a strong but simple sense of right and wrong, but he left soon after Reinhardt came down. Brauer had done something at the end of the war, but he would not say what. It was not that he had survived, nor that he had survived by running away like, as he said, a beaten dog. Reinhardt knew there was more, but Brauer would say nothing, changing the subject instead to ask about Reinhardt’s work.
He glanced at the newspaper Mrs. Meissner had left on the table, folded open to a story about looted art. A former director of Berlin’s Museum of Decorative Arts, Hilde Meissner had resigned in horror at the Nazis’ continent-wide theft of artworks. Only her husband’s position in the Foreign Ministry had protected her from the repercussions of her resignation, and she now avidly followed news of the attempts to find and restore plundered art. Reinhardt scanned the article, a story about various commissions—French, Belgian, Dutch, Italian, Polish, even a Yugoslavian one—being formed to try and track down what the Nazis had stolen. He read it desultorily, leaving it to stand and watch the old lady at her digging and weeding.
On his way out of the house, Reinhardt paused, then walked quietly into the living room. All its old, heavy furniture was gone, stolen at the end of the war or smashed or broken up for firewood. The fireplace was cold, but he remembered how it had been that last time, before the war. He had sat just there on the floor by the fire, and Meissner, his former colonel, had sat just there in his leather armchair, that night Reinhardt had finally decided to abandon the police and return to the army.
“Will you go back in?” Meissner had asked.
“I’ll do it for you, sir. For nothing else.”
Meissner had sighed softly, then nodded, the fire playing across his white hair. “Thank you.”
The chair was gone, although his mind’s eye could still see it angled toward the fireplace. Tomas Meissner was gone, too. He had not survived the war, he and the other members of his resistance group, swept up by the Gestapo in the aftermath of the July plot against Hitler in 1944. They found out later he had been executed just a day before the Americans would have liberated the prison he was held in.
The warders had executed a dozen men that day. One might have put it down to a paroxysm of violence and vengeance; the last throes of a dying system that simply could not let things go. But no, it was far more mundane than that. It was simply that those prisoners had been scheduled for execution on that day, and so on that day they were executed, and the next day the Americans had come and everything had changed. So sharp and fine are the lines that divide us from one state to another, Reinhardt knew. He made to go, but found Mrs. Meissner standing behind him, a pair of gardening gloves in her hand. Her eyes were very calm in the porcelain of her face.
“I remember you and him, in there. You miss him.”
Reinhardt blinked, uncomfortable, so used to the woman’s reticence. “I somehow feel . . . somehow feel like I failed him. Like I was not there for him. At the end.”
“You must not think that. Tomas loved you,” she said. Her eyes were very calm, but she threaded the gloves through her hands. “Come and sit with me in the kitchen. Just a moment. We’ve only talked a little since you came back. You’ve told me so little of what happened to you.”
“I told you . . . I told you of Bosnia.”
“Yes. Tomas told me he saw you there. And you have told me of the end.”
“‘The end’,” Reinhardt snorted. “My pièce de résistance.”
“Why so cynical, Gregor?”
“I am sorry. It’s just . . . I look at what happened here. I think of what happened everywhere. And I wonder whether what I did amounted to anything.”
“You acted. You fought back. You found respect, and love.” Reinhardt’s lips clenched as he shook his head. “Respect and love in the ranks of the enemy. That is not such a small thing. Why are you back, Gregor?” she asked, suddenly.
“Where else . . . ? What else could I do?” Reinhardt replied, flustered.
“Times change. This is not the place you knew. You could have gone elsewhere.”
“Who I am . . . What I do . . . It’s what I know.”
“Be someone else. If not for you, for someone else.” Reinhardt frowned, confused, at a loss for what to say. Mrs. Meissner seemed to sense it, and she gave a little smile and a shake of her head. “You know, I am happy you are here. I was happy when you arrived, out of nowhere. You saved me. You and Rudi. I don’t think I could have managed another winter alone.”
“You survived the fall of the city well enough,” he interrupted, gently.
“I escaped what happened to most women, yes. But you mustn’t feel that you owe me, Gregor.”
“I do. I owe you both. So much.”
“Don’t listen to me, Gregor. I’m just an old lady, lost in her dreams and her weeding. And you must go. I shall see you later.”
Outside, even though he knew Brauer would have done it, Reinhardt made a tour of the house to check that the fences and barbed wire he had installed were intact. He’d put them up after the last time Mrs. Meissner’s vegetable patch had been raided. He thought again about Tomas Meissner’s fate.
Life from death.
Good luck from bad.
Friends from enemies.
At Gothaerstrasse, hoping that Berthold might have finished his report, Reinhardt went upstairs to his desk. Late morning, and the squad room was largely empty, much to his relief. Only Weber and Schmidt were there, Weber glancing up from his work as Reinhardt passed across the room. Their gazes slid across each other, no words exchanged, but a latent antagonism was there between them. Berthold’s report was waiting for him, as promised, but there was no address for Kessel, the man from whom Noell had been subletting. Reinhardt gathered up the file and made to leave, but as he reached the door, running the gauntlet of Weber’s hostility, the detective spoke.
“Off somewhere interesting?”
Reinhardt ignored him.
“Just in case anyone asks. You know. I’m only looking out for you.”
He heard the pair of them laugh as he headed back downstairs. The bodies had been taken to the main police mortuary in the Charité hospital complex on Hannoversche Strasse, in Mitte. But aside from the fact it was in the Soviet sector, it was a long and sometimes halting journey on the U-bahn to get there.
The Charité had been badly damaged at the end of the war and, despite extensive repairs by the Soviets, was still not completely functional. Professor Endres ran the police pathology facilities in the morgue. Whereas Reinhardt had jumped before he was pushed out of the police by the Nazis, Endres had clung tenaciously to his position in the medical services until he was fired, and had spent the last two years of the war in a concentration camp following his arrest for allegedly treasonous activities. Liberated by the British, he had turned up back at the mortuary, looking, as one man said, like he belonged on a slab, not standing over one, and wishing to resume work as if nothing had ever happened. With the morgue bombed out and not liking what he saw going on, Endres had made his opinions clear as to what he thought of the new Berlin police force’s levels of professionalism, but he had put his heart and soul into getting the facilities back up and functioning, and somehow the new police administration and the Soviets had left him to it. Together with Berthold and a handful of other men, including, Reinhardt liked to sometimes think, himself, Endres had brought a much-needed sense of calm and professionalism back to police work.
“I’ve been waiting for you, Reinhardt,” Endres said, when Reinhardt found him in his small office belowground, next door to the autopsy facilities. Endres was tall and cadaverous, an impression worsened by his austere black suit and white doctor’s overcoat. He had never stood on ceremony and he did not now, rising out from behind his desk. “I must tell you that your superior has been looking for you.”
“Tanneberger?”
“He called and left a message you were to report to him.”
“When?”
“Momentarily.”
Reinhardt’s mouth tightened as he quietly cursed Weber, but he was here now, and he might as well finish, as he said to Endres.
Endres nodded, ushering Reinhardt back down a corridor and into the autopsy room where two bodies lay on tables under bright light. The hospital was a priority for electricity, so the power was usually on, and the refrigeration units still worked, although they had taken a battering during the war and were badly in need of repair and spare parts. Reinhardt recognized Noell and the still unidentified second man, the scars left by the autopsies riding livid up and across the bodies, which seemed strangely sunken in on themselves. Reinhardt shivered, drawing himself tighter, feeling, as he always did, how the air felt colder than it actually was in places like this, and was reminded how much he detested hospitals.
“I should thank you, Reinhardt. This was interesting. The first real case I’ve had in quite some time.”
“You’re most welcome, Professor,” said Reinhardt, not at all flippantly. Endres was infamous for having no sense of humor at all, only a blade-bright understanding of professionalism that time and his experiences had not dulled. Reinhardt shook a couple of Luckies from his packet and offered them to the professor, who tucked them into the breast of his white coat. “May I ask a question before you begin? Thank you. The time of death?”
“I would say sometime between midnight and one o’clock in the morning. For both of them. Shall we look at the unidentified body first?” Endres asked. Reinhardt nodded politely, knowing the professor had not really asked a question. Endres stood at the body’s head. Under the harsh light, his scalp shone pinkly through the thin weave of his silver hair. “Observe,” he said, “a very serious blow to the sternum. Extremely powerful. Observe further,” pointing to the body’s left eye, down across the nose to the collarbone. “You see the discoloration? It forms a line. Eye, nose, shoulder. A second blow, here, across the throat, that crushed and damaged his cartilage.” Endres’s finger pointed to a bruised line of flesh, as if someone had laid an iron bar across the man’s throat and pushed.
“Then, his assailant tried to break his neck. He did break it, in fact, except that the spinal cord was not quite severed. Breaking someone’s neck is always difficult to do, or in any case, much harder than people think, and in this case the man survived, just. Perhaps it was luck. Perhaps it was because he was incapacitated, and he seemed dead.” Endres spoke in a calm, measured voice, toasted and caked by decades of cigarettes, his eyes steady on the body laid out in front of him. “In any case, his attacker knew that to break a neck, you do so by whipping it from one side to the other, fast, and applying precise force. You can see the bruising on his jaw, there,” he pointed, “and there’s some discoloration of the scalp on the opposite side. A push, and a pull,” he mimed, his hands coming up, spiderlike, one hand resting on Reinhardt’s jaw, the other behind his head. “Push,” he murmured, tilting Reinhardt’s head to one side, “pull,” his hands moving Reinhardt’s head back the other way with the slightest of jerks, fingers coming away and spread into the air. “Done fast. Done precisely. The tissue, muscle, and tendon damage is quite conclusive. His spinal cord was ruptured at the C2 vertebra, up here, then it finally broke in his last fall.”
Reinhardt shivered. Endres had a way of demonstrating his findings on you, and although he had never liked it, it was always instructive. He opened Berthold’s file to the photographs showing where they thought the man had lain after being attacked. “The evidence suggests an attacker who used a lot of force, and knew how to use it.”
“Yes. From the wounds, I suspect the attacker used his forearms to strike.” Endres raised his right arm as if it were a club, and swung it down slowly at Reinhardt’s head. The professor’s hand rested lightly on Reinhardt’s brow, the length of his forearm along Reinhardt’s face. He pushed, lightly, drawing his arm down, his hand rasping softly across Reinhardt’s skin. He stepped back, and then mimed swinging his arm back across Reinhardt’s throat. “All blows were extremely forceful and precise. They would have caused severe pain and disorientation, probably even loss of consciousness. He would have been in terrible pain when he awoke. The blow to his sternum would have made it difficult to breathe. His neck was broken, his balance would have been off, and his voice box was crushed. He would have been disoriented and confused, so not surprising he fell down the stairs, where the fall finished off what the blows had not.”
“His blood work?”
“It was O positive.”
“The same as the blood found upstairs in Noell’s apartment,” said Reinhardt, reading from Berthold’s report. He looked up. “Alcohol level?”
“Low. Certainly not enough to have him falling down the stairs. And no sign of drugs. There was more alcohol on his clothes than in his system.”
“And no sign of defensive wounds,” said Reinhardt, his eyes on the man’s jaw, and he shivered again, imagining the killer’s hands closing on him. Whoever he had been, he had been a fairly young man, well-built, clean-shaven, and with dark hair cut short.
“None.”
“And the other one?”
“Mr. Noell. Yes. Quite interesting. Observe again,” he said, pointing out the huge bruise that purpled Noell’s sternum and then the bruising on each arm above the elbows. “Whoever attacked Noell, it was very fast, and very precise, leaving him no time to defend himself. Whoever did it, again, the person knew how to incapacitate someone fast and efficiently.”
“The same man?”
“In my opinion?” Reinhardt nodded. “Undoubtedly.”
“Cause of death?”
“Asphyxiation. The signs are clear, around the nose and mouth, a hand clasped tight, fitting like the tightest of lids.” Lifting the back of Noell’s head, he showed Reinhardt where the scalp was bruised and bloodied from the head being pressed into the floor by the weight of the assailant, and presumably the victim shaking his head from side to side in a vain attempt to throw the attacker off. The bruising on the arms was from the weight of the assailant bearing down on Noell, holding him to the floor. Both of them were silenced by the mental images this threw up, until Endres cleared his throat. “But I have not shown you the most interesting thing yet.”
He showed Reinhardt a jar, filled with a cloudy fluid.
“It is water,” Endres said.
“You took it from Noell’s lungs,” Reinhardt guessed, remembering what he had seen and felt under his feet as he moved around Noell’s head.
“Yes. This,” Endres continued in his elegant, throaty voice, “would have been poured down Noell’s throat while he was still alive. It was ingested into the stomach, and it was in the lungs. The killer held him down to choke and suffocate. To drown, in essence. I would think—indeed, I would hope—that Noell was all but unconscious when it started, due to the blow to his sternum. But the act of suffocating—of drowning—would have roused him, thus the signs of restraint around his mouth, the bruising to the back of the head, and the bruising on the arms. I found bruising to the back of the throat and the esophagus consistent with something like a funnel being pushed in. Without that, I don’t think the killer would have been able to force Noell to ingest as much as he did, and there would have been far more of a mess around the body than you say you found.”
“My God,” Reinhardt murmured. “So the attack was fast, but his death was not.”
“Most definitely.”
With that, Endres seemed to lapse in on himself. Reinhardt recognized it as a sign he was finished talking. The professor lit one of the cigarettes Reinhardt had given him, leaning back against the autopsy table with a long, satisfied sigh. Another of his little habits, to smoke when he was finished talking. Reinhardt felt momentarily and absurdly comforted by the gesture, as if it were a firm anchor to the past, to a different, a better, time.
Reinhardt, leaving Endres to smoke, looked from body to body and to Berthold’s report. “Professor, is it just me, or is one of Noell’s legs thinner than the other?”
“It is. It’s polio, a mild case of it.”
Precision, Reinhardt thought. “And intimacy,” he said, aloud. Endres turned his head, the light running up and over the thin strands of his hair. “Apart from the precision of the blows, with Noell there is the intimacy of the act. The killer would have had to have knelt over the body, holding it down, coming close to Noell’s face as he suffocated him . . . Professor, have you ever heard of anything like this?”
“Before the war, never,” Endres answered eventually, his eyes on the tip of his cigarette. “Since then, anything is possible. The difficulty would be in finding anything in this city anymore that could pass for records. I can check for you, if you would like.”
“I very much would, Professor. I have a feeling that something similar has indeed happened, but I cannot seem to remember what, or when. Or even where. There is one last thing. This photograph was found at the scene. Balled up and thrown down the back of a sofa. It looks like the victim. Like Noell. Wearing what I think’s an air force uniform. The rest, I can’t make out . . .”
Reinhardt offered the file to Endres, who leaned over to look, and something strange happened. The cigarette stopped halfway to his mouth, and he did not breathe for a long moment. “You found this at Noell’s apartment?”
Reinhardt nodded. Endres looked at Noell’s body, then slowly put the cigarette in his mouth and finished it in one long drag.
“Berthold’s report says Noell’s prints were on it, as were others. Not his,” Reinhardt said, gesturing at the other body. “Do you know what it is?”
“No, but that is a man in the water, inside that . . . thing. That suit.” Endres looked at the photograph a long moment, his eyes roving to Noell’s body, then lit another cigarette. “There were rumors in the camps,” he said, finally, “of things done during the war. Terrible things. To prisoners. Rumors of human experimentation. I never saw anything like the rumors, so I don’t know if they were true or not, but I believe them, nonetheless. If only half of what we hear, and what the Allies tell us, is true, then anything could have happened. And probably did,” he finished. He looked away, taking another deep draw of his cigarette.
“How would one follow up on this?” Reinhardt asked.
Endres shook his head, breathing smoke up and away. “You could try the Berlin Document Center,” he said, referring to the location where the Allies had stored all the Nazi party and SS materials they had captured at the end of the war. “That photograph shows something that looks like it could have been linked to party-sanctioned activities. Legal, then, illegal now. But they don’t let just anyone into the Center. However,” he said, pausing, his mouth moving. “I think I know someone who might be able to help. Give me a day or so, will you?”
An attendant put his head into the room. “Professor, there is someone . . .”
“Not now, Gerd.”
“Yes, now, Professor.” Ganz pushed his way into the room, a second man on his heels. Ganz’s eyes fixed Reinhardt where he stood. “You. Did you or did you not receive messages we were looking for you?”
“Only recently. From the professor,” Reinhardt answered, hating the tone and wishing the words back as soon as he had said them.
“Who is that?” Endres asked, pointing at the man who had come in with Ganz. He was a compact man in a dark overcoat belted around his waist, a head of black, closely cropped hair runneled with gray. He walked with a rolling limp to stand over the body of Noell, then over to the unidentified man, tilting his head to look down at him. The man’s mouth twisted, then he nodded at Ganz.
“Professor, your records for these autopsies. Reinhardt, you are coming with me back to Gothaerstrasse.”
“What is going on, Ganz?” Endres demanded.
“Nothing to concern you, Professor. Reinhardt, if you’ve quite finished playing forensics, you’ve got friends waiting,” said Ganz, his eyes narrowing at the other man, who was still looking at the body of the man found on the stairs. “The Allies have arrived.”