There still being time and light, Reinhardt decided to go to the address where Stucker’s body was found. He had to go back across town, all the way to Rüdesheimerplatz on the A line as it arrowed out into the southwest of the city, and reminded himself, again, to ask for a driver. To go over Ganz’s head if he had to. The transportation around the city was not what it used to be, although he mentally tipped his hand to the engineers like Uthmann who, somehow, were keeping it all running through, around, under, and over the ruins. But he could not take the walking anymore, despite the thrill in his step as he felt facts and theories beginning to coalesce into a shape, a form. There was more out there, much more.
The address in Wilmersdorf where Stucker’s body was found—not, Reinhardt mentally reminded himself, necessarily where he was murdered—was a bombed-out apartment building in a street lined with them, the whole neighborhood a sagged ruin, the site of fierce street fighting during the Soviet assault. Telephone poles leaned haphazardly down the length of the street, wires looped and skeined like tangles of wool. Moss and weeds grew thickly across the slides of rubble, and the smell of human waste was strong. Tin cans or scraps of fabric hung from bent and rusted poles thrust into the rubble, makeshift markers that bodies or unexploded ordnance lay below, but it was not enough to discourage the life that still managed to exist, even in such conditions. Here and there, metal chimneys poked up out of the debris, signs that some people eked out a troglodyte existence down below the ruins.
Reinhardt picked his careful way into the rubble, consulting the police report so as to find the exact spot. He found it, his knee a taut line of pain as he went gingerly down a mounded glacis of rubble that fanned down into the basement from the street. Amid heaps of detritus, pressed in by a stench of damp and the pulverized remains of stone and concrete, he wondered what could have brought Stucker down here. He stood where the roof had collapsed, looking all the way up the interior of the building through a haze of dust that spiraled the cavity, tracing the mazed lines of water, gas, and electricity pipes and wires, all the way up, over the pastiche of colors and fabrics that marked the walls where different rooms had once stood on different floors, and traced the lines down again, all the way down, seeing without realizing at first that down in the basement with him was a junction box. All the wires led into it.
All the electric wires.
Reinhardt felt cold, as if something had reached out and touched him, realizing that Stucker had not been dragged or forced here, but had come of his own free will. For a job, most likely, or some kind of consultation. Stucker had been an electrician. Someone got him out here for an electrician’s job, down here and out of the way. Stucker would have had no fears, no apprehensions. No stealthy midnight meetings. No running from some nameless figure seeking shelter down here. Something had indeed spooked him in the last days of his life, but it was not that fear that had driven him here. It was something much more mundane.
An appointment.
An appointment with his own murderer, Reinhardt thought, shivering again and wondering at the patience, calm, and confidence of this killer.
He was consumed by what he thought he had found, hence the crack of rubble against rubble did not at first register, but when it came again, when there was the rasp of leather across stone, he looked up and around.
Fischer and another man were slipping down into the basement, iron bars in their hands.
Reinhardt moved fast, pushing himself past the snarl of pain from his knee as he whipped his baton out. Fischer and the other man were both still coming down the slide of wreckage, their footing unsure. Fischer tried to back up against the rake of debris, but his footing lurched away, and Reinhardt slashed the baton into his ankle. Fischer yelped in pain, and his feet slid further back, down toward Reinhardt, who slashed the baton across his knees and thighs. The other man tried to jump down the slope, his feet scattering detritus as he heaved himself up, but he only succeeded in losing his footing completely, and the bar he carried clanged away into the basement’s gloom. Reinhardt hit him across his knees and ankles, blows that would incapacitate rather than maim, or kill. The man cried out, folding up and over the pain in his legs, and Reinhardt crashed his batoned fist onto the back of his neck, turning back to Fischer as the man foundered to stillness.
Fischer was climbing to his feet, one hand on the rubble. Reinhardt hit that wrist with the baton, flicking it out like a whip so that the ball on its tip flayed into Fischer’s hand. Fischer crashed back down, his other hand raised up.
“Enough! Enough!”
“What the hell are you doing, Fischer?” Reinhardt yelled. He clamped his voice shut, feeling the edge of his words beginning to quaver with his stress, not wanting to give Fischer any way back at him.
“Hoping to give you a bloody good seeing-to, what’s it look like?” Fischer’s face creased up around the pain of his hand as he hugged it to his chest, folded into his other fist.
“Why, for God’s sake?”
“I told you, you shouldn’t have brought them coppers to my door.”
“I didn’t.”
“Can’t believe anything a copper says, Reinhardt,” growled Fischer, rubbing his good palm over his fist. “’sides, you were marked out for us.”
“Marked out? Marked out by whom? What are you talking about?”
“Just some bloke, said he was nicked for the same things they brought me in for. Says you were behind it.”
Reinhardt shook his head, standing back. “Fischer, I don’t know what you’re talking about, I really don’t. Who was this man? Who was he?”
Fischer shook his head up at Reinhardt, a pitying gesture, as if he heard the strained crack to Reinhardt’s words, the stress that weighed them down.
“I’ll tell you. You won’t know him, though. Poor bastard’s just one of dozens you coppers roughed up in the cells. But he knows you. Knows you very well. He knew the coppers’d never have found him if it weren’t for you. They’re all piss and no bull in the Kripo these days. Not like in our day, right? You’re the brains of that outfit now, I’ll give you that, Reinhardt. But what’s it feel like? What’s it feel like to know you’re watched, without knowing it? Oh, he’s a smart one, Reinhardt. He hides it well, but he’s a smart little bugger, got your number, told us where to look for you . . .”
Maybe it was what Fischer was not saying, as much as the stream of verbiage. Maybe it was the stress. God knew, in times past, stress and danger had given Reinhardt a heightened sense of his surroundings because the chink of rubble somewhere up behind him sounded like the ringing of a china cup when a spoon tapped it. Something in the way he stood must have been obvious to Fischer, something must have told him that his game was up, because his words trailed off, and he grinned. He had time to blink before Reinhardt tightened his grip on the baton and smashed his fist into Fischer’s jaw, a short jab, swinging hard from his hips. Fischer slumped back onto the rubble, and Reinhardt was climbing past him, as quickly as he could go, back up the shattered glacis of broken bricks. He slipped, banged his knees, gritted his teeth against the pain, and his baton clattered away back down the slope. He heard the scrabble of feet behind him, a frustrated shout, and then he was up and on the street, and he was running, the pain in his knee something distant, as if it belonged to someone else.