Reinhardt felt Ganz’s dismissal eddy across the room, something that sloshed his emotions from side to side and brought a sudden clap of shame to his neck. He breathed deep, surprised he could still feel this way about people he cared little to nothing for, then put it aside, walking back to his desk through the pool of officers and detectives organizing themselves to go out into the city, troubled more than ever by the impression he had heard of something like Noell’s murder before. Of something like it, and besides, he felt the need to focus and anchor himself. Suspicion from within, derision from without, all this, he realized suddenly, on his first real investigation since rejoining the police back in October 1946.
There was, he knew, more than just a little truth to Tanneberger’s accusations about American backing for Reinhardt, and to Ganz’s suspicions. And knowing it had been there, that it still was, in a way, made Reinhardt uncomfortable. It was American influence that had gotten him back in, Collingridge’s influence, really, albeit he had come back at a rank lower than the one he used to have. But then, nearly everyone in the police these days owed his position to luck or patronage of some sort, and almost none of them gave it any thought. But Reinhardt had never wanted to be anyone’s man, save for those he himself had chosen. There had been Meissner, long ago, his colonel from the first war, a man to whom he had owed his life and with whom he had trusted it. There had been something close to that with Scheller, his commander in the Feldjäegerkorps. There had been almost no one else, no one for him to look up to, to respect, only those who had had power and authority over him.
His habitual introspection, he realized with a start, coming back to himself in the squad room, quieter of a sudden now that most of the officers had left. Introspection, and more than a hint of arrogance, he knew. Most men never had a chance to choose those to whom they allowed to have power over them, and most men lived well enough regardless. So why would he think himself any different? Some good old-fashioned, solid paperwork was what was needed—and he was thinking how long it had been since he had pursued a case through paper and records.
The records were in a parlous state, he knew. So much had been destroyed in the bombing and during the Soviet assault, and the new records were not up to the standard of what had been kept before the war. One of the secretaries showed him to the newspaper archives. She started to leave after pointing him into the room, at stacks of cases and boxes, newspapers, leaflets, and magazines heaped and piled on tables and on the floor, all yellow under the weak light. He stopped her, told her what he wanted, and she sighed, beckoning in a couple of her friends while he left her to it.
Back up in the almost empty squad room, he checked the time, then allowed himself a mug of coffee from the urn that someone had refilled, picking up the photograph album from Noell’s apartment. The inside cover had a name—Andreas Noell—in a rich hand, and a date—September 1939. The date the war had started. He began to leaf through the photos, slipping one or two out of the folder to see they had notations on the back. Some were simple, like Paris, 1940. Some of them were more complex, a series of numbers and letters, along with dates and places. On a couple, he spotted that the notations on the back corresponded to elements of the photographs themselves. In one, a group of officers posed beneath something like a regimental shield, and in another, Noell stood with a pilot in front of a fighter plane with a series of numbers on its tail. The numbers on the shield, and those scribed on the back of some of the photos corresponded—IV./JG56.
The numbers made no sense to Reinhardt, but he reasoned it might well have been the designation of Noell’s former unit. Musing to himself, he wondered who here could make sense of them, or who he knew that might, and in the middle of all that, an elderly woman walked into the squad room, saw Reinhardt, and strode determinedly through the jumble of chairs and desks to plant herself in front of his desk.
“Inspector,” she said firmly, the light glistening along the curves of her iron-gray hair, drawn tightly into a bun at the back of her head.
“Mrs. Dommes,” he replied, rising to his feet and inclining his head courteously.
“You’ve got my girls sorting through old newspapers.”
“That’s correct.”
“Did you have authorization to have them do this?”
“Authorization, Mrs. Dommes?”
“Yes, Inspector. Authorization. From me. You don’t think that’s all they needed to do, today, do you?”
Schmidt and Frohnau and a couple of the other younger detectives still in the squad room at an adjacent table paused in what they were doing to watch, grins on their faces.
Reinhardt drew a long, slow breath. Dommes was the redoubtable head of Gothaerstrasse’s secretaries and assistants. It did not pay to circumvent her, and Reinhardt had simply forgotten to go through her as he should have done when asking for the records check earlier that day.
“I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Dommes. You are correct, of course. I should have arranged things with you. I simply forgot.”
“You forgot, did you?”
“I did. Shall I accompany you to set things straight?”
Dommes’s mouth pursed as she looked back at him, and she seemed to unbend, perhaps mollified by his admission of error. “No. That is all right. Just see that it does not happen again, Inspector.”
“I will be very sure not to overstep my mark again, Mrs. Dommes.”
“Hey, Reinhardt,” said Frohnau in a stage whisper. “Will you be all right? Do you want some help to take care of things?”
“We’re right behind you, Reinhardt!”
Dommes ignored them as she ignored the flush that rose in Reinhardt’s face. She came round his side of the desk, flattening a piece of paper on the desk. “You asked the girls to check the newspapers and police bulletins for the last six months for references to murders or reports of deaths that involve water. Is that right?”
“That is correct. I am interested in cases of asphyxiation that were reported as suspicious, or as sensationalist. But I’m not interested in drownings in lakes or rivers or the like.”
“Across the country?”
“Not limited to Berlin, in any case.”
“You do realize this may take some time?” Reinhardt nodded. “Very well, then, we’ll see what we can find.”
“Well done! You can handle her, Cappie!”
Dommes drew herself up, turning a withering glare on the detectives. “Gentlemen,” she snapped. “You could do worse—far worse—than to emulate the courtesies of a man such as Inspector Reinhardt. Haven’t you anything better to be doing?”
“What, like solving a murder?” retorted Schmidt, but the man looked more than a little shamefaced at talking so to a woman who could have been his grandmother.
“Just think,” Reinhardt said to them, pulling on his coat, “every minute in here, you could be out there canvassing.”
“Don’t worry, granddad. We’ve got plenty of good guys out there.”
“You’re right. With you in here, there’s a much better chance things don’t get screwed up.”
The harsh caw of a crow followed him out of the squad room. He left Gothaerstrasse and made his way back to Noell’s apartment, taking the U-bahn to Kottbusser Tor, then a southbound D line to Schonleinstrasse, from where he walked.
Neukölln had never been the prettiest of Berlin’s boroughs, and a combination of Allied bombing and the Soviet ground assault that had rolled over it had done nothing for its looks. It had always been resolutely working-class, and before the Nazis came to power, it had been a Communist bastion, so much so that he was often surprised it was now part of the American sector instead of the Soviet.
He exchanged a few words with the elderly policeman who had been stationed in front of Noell’s apartment. All was calm, the policeman reported, only a couple of visitors for Ochs, the superintendent. Upstairs, Reinhardt cracked the police seal, the draft gusting up into his face as he stepped inside Noell’s rooms. He stood in the doorway, looking around at the bloodstain on the wall, the bottle on the table, the books, the piled bedding. He walked into the bedroom, putting his head into the kitchen, smelling the faint trace of Berthold’s powders. He forced open the window in the living room, looking out and down. There was no fire escape, and the window had had to be wrenched open.
He found himself standing in the middle of the room, his mind drifting back to the police station. To the drive and energy that was passing him by, the solidarity that he was not a part of. He went back into the kitchen. He stood in the doorway, looking into the little alcove. The plates still sat by the sink, next to the glass, and the cloth still hung from the tap. Something was bothering him, though, but he could not put his finger on it. Frowning, hoping whatever it was would come back to him, he went back downstairs and knocked at the apartment under Noell’s, then knocked again when there was no answer, calling “police” through the door. He waited, finally hearing the heavy tread of someone inside, and the door opened on a big man, his hair twisted up and around, and sleep heavy in his eyes.