Reinhardt hitched a ride with the morgue’s ambulance again, all the way out to an apartment building in Wilmersdorf, in the US Sector. The body had been found at an address not dissimilar to where Noell’s body had been found, a building with a pocked façade of exposed brickwork within rosettes of chipped plaster. There was a policeman waiting outside who escorted Reinhardt up through a darkened and hushed building, past the worried and curious gazes of residents, up several flights of stairs right to the top, to a narrow landing just under the roof. There was a second uniformed officer standing outside a door, together with a younger man in plainclothes.
“Detective Lorenz, you’re Reinhardt? I’ve heard of you. All good, don’t worry,” the young man said with a flash of a smile. Reinhardt glanced at the uniformed officers, a pair of middle-aged men with imperturbable expressions on their faces. “I read the briefing summary from earlier today that was circulated, the one about last night’s murders.”
“What do you have, Lorenz?”
“It’s a man named Conrad Zuleger.”
“There were identity papers?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.” Lorenz handed Reinhardt a Berlin identity card, a work permit, and a ration card. “Go on.”
“According to the building’s super, Zuleger hadn’t been seen in a few days. He was usually out and about, and usually dropped in on the super for a drink. The super decided to check on him as he had not been seen since Friday.”
“That was the last time anyone saw him?”
“Yes.”
That was the night before Noell and his friend had gone somewhere, it seemed, to celebrate something.
“Anything else?”
“Strange men in the neighborhood?” Lorenz grinned. “One of the tenants says he saw someone he’d never seen before on the Friday evening.”
“Have the Americans been informed?”
“Yes. We notified the MPs. They’ve been and gone. They’re happy to leave it to us.”
“Go on,” Reinhardt said again.
“The super opened the room, and then . . . well. Why don’t you see for yourself?”
Reinhardt raised an eyebrow at Lorenz, then shrugged. “Lead on, then.”
Lorenz pushed open one of the doors and stepped back for Reinhardt, who walked into a garret, a small apartment right under the roof, and into a stench like a wall. Despite himself, despite what he knew was coming, he stopped, but refused to recoil or to gag, only shoving his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth and breathing shallowly around it.
—
The smell found him long before he saw what made it. The company emerged from the woods, picking its cautious way through the widening spaces between the trees where the forest began to peter out. The sun shone down through the branches in splintered columns; light daubed vividly across the greenery, across fronds and branches that waved and snapped in the wake of the men’s passing.
Up ahead, the ranks were bunching up, men coming to a stop, craning over the heads and shoulders of those in front of them. A murmuring ran through the column, the whispered susurration of voices pitched low. A man ahead dropped to his knees. Another doubled over and vomited.
“It had to happen sometime,” a grizzled old sergeant muttered, as if to himself. He raised his voice. “Welcome to the butcher’s yard, lads. Come on, boys, move it on. Be thankful t’ain’t you. It’s only Russkies. Come on, boys. By your leave, sir, you too.”
Reinhardt had not realized he had stopped. His head felt as if it had swelled up, the strap of his helmet like an assassin’s garrote beneath his chin. The field ahead was mazed with bodies, gunned and shelled, a tangled spread of limbs, strewn like rag dolls left by an impatient child . . . Reinhardt’s mind stammered across the field. There were no words for it. There were no words for what he saw. Bodies in repose, as if they lay in sleep. Bodies in pieces. Bodies with their rumps in the air, faces ground into the dirt. Flesh blackened and swelled, bloated through and around the constriction of belts and clothing, buttons and belts burst asunder.
But, dear God, the stench. It had stolen up on him, all but unannounced. His nostrils flared wide at the fetid ripeness of it, as if to welcome it, even as his mind shied back like a startled horse. It entered him, lying thickly across his mouth, papering his tongue, a patina of rot. He wanted to recoil from the presence of the dead in the air, but could not. He was rooted to the spot as his body rippled with its kinship, its connection, on a level he had not known existed, with the remnants of men out across the field.
This, too, his body seemed to be saying to him. This, too, you will come to be.
—
He blinked, and the memory was gone. The smell of the dead. He had almost forgotten what it was like, he realized, surveying the angles of the room. Yet once he had lived among it in the trenches, and not more than two years ago, it had been a commonplace part of his life. He had only ever found two ways to deal with it. You could try to ignore it, but it would find a way of coming back at you when you least expected or needed it, or you could just accept it, make it part of who you were and where you were.
Before going any farther in, he noted the key in the lock, and that the door and doorjamb were undamaged. Whoever had come in, he had not forced his way in, just like at Noell’s. The apartment was little more than one room, with two tall windows, both of them open and framed in folds of tattered curtains billowing from the wind, both of them giving onto the façade opposite, and down onto the street, several floors below. There was a bed, a table, a cupboard, and a small kitchen in a little alcove, smaller than the one at Noell’s. The body lay spread-eagled on the bed, there being no room on the floor or anywhere else for it, and it had the ghastly aspect of a body well into decomposition, the skin beginning to slump back from the bone beneath.
“What made you call it in?”
If Lorenz had wanted to make or prove some kind of point by sending Reinhardt in first, perhaps to see how he might react, he himself did not have the same wherewithal. The detective had a handkerchief clasped tight to his face, his voice coming muffled through it.
“Three things.” Lorenz pointed at the body, at the shirt open down the front. A huge bruise purpled Zuleger’s torso. He pointed again, at Zuleger’s wrist. “Ligature marks. He was held down.” Lorenz paused, gagging. “Cupboard, there,” he managed, before bolting over to the windows.
The stench was pinching hard at the back of Reinhardt’s throat as he opened the cupboard, looking at a Luftwaffe uniform hanging from one of the doors. Checking the pockets, he found a Wehrpass, flicking it open to see Zuleger’s photograph inside. The clothes in the cupboard were old, prewar quality. In a box on the floor of the cupboard, he found a collection of women’s clothing, carefully folded, a set of hairbrushes, and a framed photograph of Zuleger and a woman, taken on what looked like their wedding day. Reinhardt looked at it a moment, then put the picture back and carefully closed the box, pushing it back into the cupboard.
The smell clawed its way that little bit farther down his throat, cramping hard at his guts. He felt his bile rise, fought it, mastered it, and walked to the table, which, he saw, was more of a writing desk. There were books and newspapers stacked along the side against the wall, and a folder with dozens of sheets of loose paper. He leafed through the top ones, pausing as he spotted something. Some kind of manifesto, outlining the grievances of veteran soldiers in postwar Germany. Beneath it there was more, some of it printed, some of it handwritten: pamphlets and notices, and what looked like minutes from a meeting.
From the windows, he heard Lorenz coughing, and the stench was starting to get to him as well, but he picked up the file, forcing himself to walk slowly round the bedroom. Zuleger was in pajamas, and the bedclothes were folded back underneath his body. A dressing gown was draped across the end of the bed. All so very normal and comfortable, but the slippers lay tumbled into the middle of the room, as if they had fallen or been kicked off.
“Did you check the body?”
Lorenz looked over his shoulder, shook his head, his brows creasing. “What do you mean?”
The body’s skin was ghostly white, the bruise on the sternum mottled and disfiguring across the bloated swell of the torso. Gritting himself and steeling his nerves, Reinhardt opened Zuleger’s mouth, pushing his finger in, imagining, feeling even, through the leather of his glove, the cold and clammy skin of the corpse. Something, he felt . . . Something that rasped, a faint feeling of roughness, something that should not be there . . . but the body, disturbed, gave off a sudden, dreadful burst of flatulence. Lorenz gaped, gagged, and ran from the room; even Reinhardt reeled away and stumbled to the window, leaning out to breathe deep of the fresh air. In the space of time between one heaving intake and another, something twitched down on the darkened street, a glimpse—a sense, rather—of paleness that flashed away, as if someone had been looking up and suddenly looked away.
Reinhardt looked at his finger. A bobbled smear of viscous fluids coated the glove, but studded within it were flecks and clumps of what looked like dust or sand. He took a deep breath of fresh air, held it as he walked quickly back through the room and into the corridor, closing the door behind him.
“You again, Reinhardt?” Berthold came stumping up the stairs, filling the space with his rotund bulk, a pair of stretcher bearers just behind. “What is it this time?”
“Same thing, it would seem.”
“You got my report on the other one?” Reinhardt nodded. “There were plenty of Noell’s prints all over the rooms. There were other prints, too, but without records worth the name, they’re useless for comparison.”
“Right. Room’s all yours, Berthold. Be warned. He’s ripe.”
“Ripe, is he?” Berthold said with some relish as he pulled on a pair of gloves. “Let’s have a look, then.”
One of the uniformed officers pulled the door shut on the forensics technician, his face blanching at the smell. The stretcher bearers stood their poles into a corner of the landing and made themselves comfortable with cigarettes.
“The canvassing report, Lorenz?” Reinhardt asked, as he peeled off his gloves, folding the one he had put inside Zuleger’s mouth inside out. “What do you have?”
“Zuleger had been living here about a year. He was quite well known to everyone,” he reported, “and seems to have been a decent man, a good neighbor, putting up shelves for one family, unblocking another’s plumbing. The apartments to either side of his: one’s empty, the occupant’s away, the other is an old widow. A bit hard of hearing, but she knew him quite well and she’s waiting for you downstairs. Zuleger had a job at a metalworks,” he continued, glancing at his notes. Reinhardt noted down the address, in Charlottenburg-Nord in the British sector. “According to his neighbors, he was quite outspoken in his opinions as to the state of Germany’s veterans. Apparently he would get into arguments very often with others in the building over it, especially with the widow and a disabled veteran. He’s also waiting for you downstairs. Other than that one tenant, no one saw or heard anything suspicious these last two or three days. No one on the stairs, no sounds of arguments. Nothing.”
The widow and veteran were, as Lorenz had promised, waiting for him in the superintendent’s small set of rooms. The widow was well into her sixties, and the veteran missing his lower left leg; otherwise they were a pair of forgettable-looking people. Forgettable insofar as Germany’s present-day population made them. Both of them repeated the impression of Zuleger as a good neighbor, a kind enough and considerate man but, the widow said, when he had had a few drinks, he opened up a lot more.
“And theeeen, he would go on and oooon about the bloody war, about the army and the humiliations that officers in particular had to put up with.”
“Zuleger was an officer?”
“He was a proper Emil,” said the veteran, using the army slang for pilots. “Always going on about it. Looping the loop, round and round the clouds like a carousel,” he muttered.
“You?” asked Reinhardt, flicking open Zuleger’s Wehrpass.
“Infantry. Sergeant in the engineers.”
“You said you saw someone on Friday?”
The veteran shrugged. “I was coming out of the bog. There’s a toilet on the second floor. I came out and walked into this bloke. Never seen him before. Opened the door right into him. There was one of them moments, you know, when you want to get past someone. You both go the same way, you both go back the other way. You grin, you apologize. So he stops, looks right at me, then says, ‘What’s the password, mate?’”
“‘What’s the password’?” Reinhardt repeated. Then he understood.
“Latrine passwords,” said the veteran. The super and the widow looked on blankly. The veteran grinned. “Gossip. The kind soldiers would exchange on the thunderbeam.”
“He means on the toilet,” explained Reinhardt.
“You served, did you? Where was that then?”
“What did you say?” asked Reinhardt, ignoring the question.
“I said, ‘No gossip, just the aches and the runs.’ Like we always had, right?”
“Then?”
“I lean on the wall for him to go past, and I’m hopping, see, ’cos of my leg, I didn’t have it on, and he sees it, and says, ‘You’re proper k.v.h, mate.’ That was it. He went past me and upstairs.”
K.v.h, thought Reinhardt. It was army slang. It meant “fit for use in war at home,” but soldiers used it as a pun for “can convincingly hobble.” For a shirker or a malingerer. The Feldjäegers had used it a lot, he remembered, toward the end, when the front was coming apart and men scattered every which way they could, going anywhere, doing anything to get away. The Feldjäegers would catch them, or stop them. Turn and herd them back.
“K.v.h is it? Pull the other one. And it’s back you go.”
“You reckon he was an old hare, then?” Reinhardt asked. Something clicked inside. Something to do with hobbling, but he had no idea what, or why.
“He was a veteran, yes.”
By itself, it did not mean much. Most German men were veterans of one war or another. Reinhardt and this ex-sergeant were. Zuleger was another. His Wehrpass had him demobilized as a lieutenant in the air force, released from a POW camp in December 1945, near Bremen. “Describe this man.”
“Not tall. Sort of square. Blocky. Couldn’t see much of his face, it was dark, and he had a flat cap. Like a worker would wear. He had a mustache and quite a bit of stubble, like he hadn’t shaved much.”
“His accent?”
“Berlin. No doubt.”
“Zuleger had been here a year, you said to the detective?” Reinhardt asked the superintendent.
“About a year, I’d say. Bit less. He said he was released from a POW camp sometime at the end of ’45. Came back to Berlin.”
“His Wehrpass says he lived in Treptow.”
“I think he mentioned that, yes,” said the superintendent. “I know it was somewhere in the Soviet sector for sure.”
“Why would he come back to Berlin?” Reinhardt wondered, half to himself.
“Man’s got to come back to somewhere, hasn’t he?” muttered the sergeant, half to himself as well.
“He told me he had family here,” the superintendent said. “A wife. But I think she died in the winter of ’45, ’46. He didn’t talk about her much. Their old place in Treptow had been destroyed during the war, and when she died, wherever they were living, the city authorities must have considered it too big for one man. He can’t have been priority for housing. He was a veteran, and he wasn’t injured. So they moved him out and put him up there, in that garret. But he was a fairly upbeat fellow. Never let things get him down, except the death of his wife. He’d get all maudlin about that. And he found work, at last, a few months ago.”
“The detective said you and he would drink sometimes.” The superintendent nodded. “Did he talk about the war? Did you hear the same things from Zuleger?”
“That and more.” The superintendent’s mouth worked. “Look, Zuleger, he was a good enough bloke. He took care of people. Helped out. But we differed on all that wartime stuff. Far as I can tell, and far as I’m concerned, there was an officer clique who helped Hitler take power, who maintained him there, and who then lost the bloody war. Zuleger was emblematic of that clique, obsessed with the wrongs done him and the rights he was owed. He was a good enough bloke, but he wasn’t half-obsessed with how bad he thought he had it.”
The superintendent nodded to himself as he finished, folding his arms across his chest as if to hold himself back from more. It sounded trite, somehow formulaic. It sounded like some of the propaganda you would hear the Soviets expostulating, that filled the pages of the East Berlin press. Like most propaganda, there was enough truth in it to make its messages stick, but Reinhardt knew there was more than just enough truth in it. The widow nodded vigorously at what the superintendent said, the former sergeant a bit less so, but both were keen to assure Reinhardt they had nothing to do with his death, and no idea who might have done it. Reinhardt heard them out, then left, glad that none of the other detectives were there to offer any pithy remarks about the officer class.
And then whatever it was that had clicked inside clicked again, and became clear. Hobbling. K.v.h. The old army joke. Can convincingly hobble. Noell had had polio. He had had it as a child. So how did he ever pass the fitness requirements to join the armed forces, let alone as a pilot, and rise to the rank of colonel . . . ?